At home the next day, Charles focused on getting all the children who were well enough—that is, all but Etty—out of Down and away from the scarlet fever. He had to protect his offspring. He and Emma arranged for her sister Elizabeth to take them into her house in Hartfield, Sussex, south of Down (Elizabeth lived in a house next to their other sister, Charlotte). Etty was too ill to move, so until she was stronger Charles and Emma stayed with her.
When Charles received word of the reaction at the meeting, he was relieved. He would edit and polish his paper, making it ready for publication. And then maybe he would write his book, finally.
Once Etty was well enough to be moved, Charles and Emma took the whole family for a holiday on the Isle of Wight. While there, Charles got his paper ready for the Linnaean Society’s publication of the proceedings; both his and Wallace’s papers would be published at the same time. Meanwhile, Hooker wrote to Wallace and told him what they had done. Charles was seriously worried about Wallace’s reaction. He was worried about the reaction when the papers were printed, as well. But neither reaction was earth-shattering. Wallace was very generous and understanding; he gave Darwin priority. He even later wrote a book about the theory, which he called “Darwinism.”
As to the reaction of the members of the Linnaean Society—only a few who read the papers had any idea what impact the theory would make. The firestorm Charles had long feared had not come to pass.
So by the time he got back home in August, Charles was well into the writing of his book. He would call it not Natural Selection as he once planned, but On the Origin of Species. He was committed, but he was still scared. And sick. He wrote to Hooker how ill writing the book was making him: “My God how I long for my stomach’s sake to wash my hands of it—for at least one long spell.” But he kept working on the book, veering away from it sometimes to help Frank with his beetles. Frank recently had started collecting them, and Charles’s old interest was renewed. He wrote to Fox that his son had “caught the other day Brachinus crepitans… My Blood boiled with old ardour when he caught a Licinus—a prize unknown to me.”
The biggest and most difficult task he had with the book was to make it short enough to be readable. He called the book his “Abstract,” for it was only a fraction of what he had written over the years. He knew that it is often harder to write short than to write long. (Across the ocean, the essayist Henry David Thoreau had written to a friend just the year before, “Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.”)
Charles worked harder than he ever had. He sat not at a desk, but in his armchair, which had been raised high to accommodate his long legs, with a board across his knees to write on. He was surrounded by his years of notes and research. The children ran in and out, as usual, and he took breaks for reading the mail, striding around the Sandwalk, listening to Emma read, playing backgammon, and writing letters. But he made great progress quickly. After all the hesitation, all the delay, he finished the book he had been sitting on for more than fifteen years in just thirteen months and ten days.
Chapter 26
Dependent on Each Other in So Complex a Manner
Then how should I manage all my business if I were
obliged to go every day walking with my wife?
—CHARLES, 1838, CONTEMPLATING WHETHER TO MARRY
In 1859, when Charles finished the manuscript for his book, he gave it to Emma. He also sent it to some of his scientific friends, but he was in many ways most interested in Emma’s reaction. She was a representative of the religious world he was up against—he was sleeping with the enemy! And she told things as she saw them.
He respected Emma’s mind and trusted her implicitly. She was brilliant, had been an avid reader her whole life, and she was a terrific literary critic, editor, and proofreader. Emma helped him with all his papers and books, and this one was the most important. Charles wanted The Origin of Species to be simple enough for a nonscientist to read and understand, as well as accurate and cogently argued enough to convince a scientist. His scientific friends would speak to the latter question. But Emma was his first and most important nonscientific reader.
In fact, Emma was not all that interested in science. She was only interested in Charles’s science because it was his. Once, as they sat together listening to a lecture at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, he turned to her and said, “I am afraid this is very wearisome to you.”
“No more than all the rest,” she answered him quietly.
Charles often told this story; he thought it was funny. He had never wanted a scientific partner. He wanted a constant companion, which he got. He also got a devoted nurse who would not leave him alone for a night because it made him anxious. He got a woman who was, according to an aunt of Emma’s, “an exception to every wife” in her devotion.
But he also got a good—and tough—reader.
Now, sitting in the drawing room, Emma read page after page of The Origin of Species. In the book, Charles was trying to make a strong, coherent, cogent argument for creation by natural selection. It was, in many ways, a response to the argument put forth by William Paley in Natural Theology. Charles modeled his own book after Paley’s, because he wanted The Origin to have the same effect on others that Paley’s had had on him when he first read it at Cambridge. And Charles’s book was, after all, an argument against the concept of God as creator that Paley had espoused.
Emma and most of Charles’s religious friends and family did not ascribe to the miracle-creating, vengeance-meting, wrathful-king God of the Hebrew scriptures. They believed in the prevailing concept of God: God as benevolent Father who created every single species as it existed now, unchanged. This God created a world that ran like clockwork, with every plant, animal, and creature a cog in the great machine. This God created a world with people at the top, near the angels, and all the other animals down below, unrelated to human beings. This God had revealed himself through his son, with a promise of everlasting life.
In The Origin, Charles wasn’t trying to murder Emma’s God; he was trying to show how he believed creation really occurred.
He knew he was right; he just had to make his argument clear enough so as to be, as much as was possible, irrefutable. And he wanted to be polite about it. Charles wrote the way he spoke, as an English gentleman. At Down, when he wanted a servant to do something, he did not order him in an imperious way. Instead he said, “Would you be so good” as to light the fire, empty the chamber pot, fix my dinner? There was no doubt that Charles was the master, but he was kind and respectful. Now in his book he was saying, Would you be so good as to listen to what I have to say—and agree with me?
In what was to become one of the most famous passages in the book, he wrote:
It may metaphorically be said, that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, through the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.
“It may metaphorically be said” was a bit of British reserve, but it was clear what Charles was arguing. It may be said that new species are forming all the time. It may be said that God did not create all the species at once, as you have been told to believe. Old species die out; new species are created. It may be said that this is actually beautiful. For Charles this process was beautiful. For Emma death was bearable because there was an afterlife. In Charles’s view of the world, death looked very different, but he found meaning and grandeur in that view.
As Emma read the pages, there were parts that made her cringe; passages that she worried would move people farther away from God. But she only criticized the argument to help Charles spell it out more clearly. Emma rewrote awkward sentences, and if she didn’t understand what he was trying to say, they talked it through so that he could write it in a mo
re lucid fashion. She also helped him with his grammar and his atrocious spelling. She teased him about his misuse of commas—and fixed them for him.
In a brilliantly persuasive move, Charles included a chapter called “Difficulties of the Theory.” He had thought long and hard about what people would object to, and he had worked hard to answer their objections as best he could. “Long before the reader has arrived at this part of my work,” he said in chapter VI, “a crowd of difficulties will have occurred to him. Some of them are so serious that to this day I can hardly reflect on them without being in some degree staggered; but, to the best of my judgment, the greater number are only apparent, and those that are real are not, I think, fatal to the theory.”
In this chapter, he addressed difficulties such as Emma’s concern about the development of the eye. He wrote, “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.” But he went on to compare the reader’s doubt to another long-held assumption that was known now to be wrong: “When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science.” Vox populi, vox Dei: “The voice of the people is the voice of God.” Not true, Charles was saying. Just because everyone thinks so doesn’t mean it is right.
He argued to Emma and to all his readers:
Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive to the theory.
He went on to delineate and, he hoped, prove his point.
In that chapter he also included other difficult problems. He admitted that one could not see the intermediate stages of a species’ development in the fossil record. He also said that he did not know how, exactly, traits were passed down through the generations. Charles never figured this out because to do so he needed to know about genes. Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk and scientist, was working this out in his monastery at about the same time, but Charles was not aware of him. Very few people were. Even though Mendel’s paper was published in 1866, it wouldn’t be until after both Charles’s and Mendel’s deaths that Mendel’s work would be rediscovered and the process of heredity through genes would become known and understood.
Charles did not address the origin of the human species in this book. He was not ready for that fight. He had already figured out that humans had a common ancestor with apes (not that people evolved from apes, as many people still misunderstand it). But he held that back—for now.
Even though the book was long, Charles always felt as though it was just an abstract. And it was. He had intended his book to be much longer; he had hundreds more pages written that he had culled from. He had worked hard to make it short. And he worked hard to make it irrefutable.
If the Not Marry side of his list had been longer—or stronger—than the Marry side, and he had stayed single in London with Erasmus and his crowd, perhaps he would have grown farther away from the church and the established, conservative, religious society. Had he spent more time with free-thinking, liberal intellectuals and less time sitting on the sofa with Emma, who rubbed his stomach when he was ill and put a cool hand on his feverish head, perhaps then he would not have been quite so conciliatory and conservative in his writing of the book. He hoped that even if there was controversy, it wouldn’t be personal. He hoped the public, though they might disagree with what he was saying, would still like the person who was saying it. Emma did.
His life at Down informed his work in many ways. Back when he was thinking about getting married, he worried that taking walks with his wife would infringe on his work time. But in the last paragraph of The Origin, Charles wrote about a spot near Down House where he and Emma often walked together. He wrote, “It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us…”
So different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner. He could have been writing about his marriage.
Chapter 27
What the Lord Hath Delivered
I hope you are not working too hard. For Heaven’s Sake,
think that you may become such a beast as I am.
—CHARLES TO THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1860
The day The Origin of Species was published, November 24, 1859, Charles was in Ilkley, taking another water cure. Finishing the book had almost done him in. Now he and Emma had to wait for the reaction.
The publisher, John Murray, and Charles had put out advance word about the book, and the first printing sold out in one day. It was not a huge printing, only 1,500 copies, but Mudie’s lending library had bought 500 copies, which meant that many more people would read The Origin. Mudie’s lent books all over Britain and had 25,000 subscribers. Emma was proud of her husband. She wrote to their son William, “It is a wonderful thing the whole edition selling off at once & Mudie taking 500 copies. Your father says he shall never think small beer of himself again & that candidly he does think it very well written.” The fact that the public wanted more was a satisfaction to Charles, though it didn’t sell as quickly as that anonymous book, Vestiges, had done.
Charles did his best to help the book along, as any dedicated author will. He sent copies to friends, colleagues, family members—anyone whom he thought could and would be a good advocate. With each copy, he wrote a personal letter, geared to the recipient and to the fears Charles had about the recipient’s reaction. He told his cousin Fox, for instance, knowing that he was religious, that he didn’t think the book would convert him.
Darwin called the book one long argument, and that’s what it was, but the style was accessible and readable. Many people gobbled it up, much as they were gobbling up the novels of Charles Dickens. Although some readers found it hard to get through—especially if they couldn’t buy his argument.
The first published review confirmed all Charles’s fears. An anonymous review (many reviews then were anonymous—which meant they could be written by close friends, known enemies, sometimes even family members) in the weekly literary magazine the Athenaeum declared that the book was too dangerous for most people to read and that it should be read only by theologians who could answer it best. “If a monkey has become a man—what may not a man become?” the reviewer asked. Charles had not written anything about human evolution, but there it was. And it was also incorrect. A monkey did not become a man; monkeys and men had a common ancestor. Charles was furious, and at the same time, he was surprised at how upset he was. He had been expecting a religious uproar, hadn’t he? He had been worrying about this ever since those months in 1838 when he contemplated marriage. But the public reaction was very hard for him to take; it was that avalanche of negative opinion that had always terrified him.
Privately some of his friends also told him they had problems with taking God out of creation. If God could be put back into the equation, then many people would have no trouble reading Charles’s book and accepting the scientific argument. It was fine if the exact account of creation in Genesis wasn’t exactly true. As long as one co
uld still believe. But most of his religious friends were not angry with Charles; they saw very clearly the soundness of his argument. And they knew his lack of enmity against them and their beliefs. These kinds of discussions were similar to talks he and Emma had been having for years; they were much easier for him to handle.
But one friend’s reaction upset him terribly. It came in a letter. The post brought many letters in reaction to the book—two hundred in the first six months after publication. His old professor Adam Sedgwick wrote to him, “I have read your book with more pain than pleasure.” He admired parts of it, he said, but he laughed at other parts. Laughed at! And he was angry about others. He felt that Charles had ignored morality, and that to accept the argument of creation by natural selection would “sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history.” He begged Charles to accept God’s revelation so the two of them would meet, eventually, in heaven.
Charles showed Sedgwick’s letter to Emma. She agreed with much of what Sedgwick said but was upset at his tone. She comforted her husband. Etty knew about this letter, for it caused much excitement and discussion at Down. But Emma refused to show it to her, even though she was sixteen. Perhaps Emma wanted to keep the pointed criticism away from her so as not to diminish the daughter’s respect for the father. But Etty’s doubts after Annie’s death could not have been forgotten; perhaps Emma felt there was no need to fan the flames of religious doubt by showing her what some thought of her father’s “heresy.” Emma clearly was upset by the letter, too, and about the religious controversy around the book. No matter how open-minded she was, Emma was not comfortable at all with Charles’s role as heretic.
Charles and Emma Page 16