The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  The Sikhs don’t love us one bit but hate sepoys like poison … Moreover, they are the lastly conquered of the Indian races and have not forgotten what British Pluck can do. They like the cause now, for the sepoys have mutilated and tortured their men … and their blood is up on our side at the present – but, this business over [i.e. the Mutiny] they may play us the same trick as the sepoy ruffians anyday – there is no sympathy between us – we despise niggers, they hate us.56

  He was wrong about the Sikhs, who became the mainstay of the new Indian army, but his picture of the mutual distrust as the 1850s came to a close has an uncomfortable authenticity.

  Ninety years passed before ‘midnight’s children’ reclaimed the subcontinent from the British. It is not a long time sub specie aeternitatis, or even when measured by the duration of the Moghul empire or the Mahratta kingdoms. The ambivalence of Indian attitudes to this vivid phase in their country’s history can be caught by what happened in two of the legendary shrines of the Raj on Independence Day 1947. In Lucknow, a crowd flocked to the Residency, intent on raising the Indian flag in the very place where the British flag had fluttered bravely throughout the siege, and for the next ninety years without interruption. They were prevented from doing so by ‘Dedhu’ Pant, the grand old man of United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh), politics, who spent a lifetime in anti-British struggle. As prime minister of the newly formed state, he told the crowds to disperse and go home, ‘and leave in peace a spot sacred to the British dead’.

  At Kanpur, however, things were, and are, very different. Until Independence Day all Indians (except Christians) had been barred from entering the shrine garden which contained the dry well where the ‘angels of Albion’ perished. On Independence Day the crowd surged into the forbidden garden and the nose of the white marble angel was damaged. The European Well Committee agreed to remove the angel to the cemetery of the Memorial Chapel. A bronze effigy of Tatya Tope, the initiator of the massacre, was placed to look down gloatingly on the slaughtered innocents, and one cannot but sympathize with the great colonial historian who saw this as ‘a singularly tasteless and vicious reprisal against the hapless dead’.57

  fn1 With great prescience the monarch had instituted the Victoria Cross for gallantry on 29 January 1856.

  fn2 Modern Indians spell this Kanpur, the spelling followed here except when quoting Victorian sources.

  fn3 i.e. went before.

  16

  Clinging to Life

  IN FEBRUARY 1858, lying sick of a fever at Ternate in the Moluccas, Alfred Russel Wallace, an amateur naturalist, began to think of Malthus’s Essay on Population. Unlike Charles Darwin, who was always rich, thanks to the Wedgwood inheritance, Wallace had had to work his way through the world – as a schoolmaster, self-taught railway architect, and explorer. Like Darwin he had made a trip to South America, and been awestruck by the equatorial forests, the beauty and strangeness of the flora and fauna, and by the native population. Financing his travels by the sale of specimens, he had also spent eight years exploring the Malay Archipelago. Like Darwin, Lyell, Chambers, and indeed most scientists of the day, Wallace was preoccupied by the problem of the origins of life on Earth, what Goethe called ‘The mystery of mysteries’. Since the time of Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who wrote Zoonomia (1794–6), a work which anticipated the opinions of Lamarck, scientists had believed in the evolution of species. It was Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck (1744–1829), who finally put paid to the notion of the immutability of species, but the question remained – how did such changes take place? The caricature of the question is, how did the giraffe acquire a neck long enough to reach the tree? The secondary question is, what happened in the meanwhile to all the generations of short-necked giraffes whose mouths never came near the foliage?

  Lamarck’s answer to the first question is that species inherited acquired characteristics. The parent acquires some useful survival technique and is enabled thereby to pass this on to the offspring. Lamarckian evolution was popularized in England by Herbert Spencer – a self-taught philosopher, pioneer sociologist and universal wiseacre – and later in the century by Samuel Butler, grandson of Darwin’s headmaster at Shrewsbury School. Although it can now be demonstrated that Lamarck was wrong about acquired characteristics being inheritable, it was in fact the metaphor in which most Victorians believed. Darwin, interestingly, adapted his own theories after the publication of his most famous book, adding mistakes to subsequent printings of The Origin of Species in order to conform more nearly to the Lamarckian theory he actually set out to disprove. This alerts us to the truth that two things are always going on during scientific research, even in the case of scrupulous scientists such as Wallace and Darwin: on the one hand there is a painstaking search for objective reality, on the other there is the medium in which this search is conducted – language, a metaphor-encrusted tool which dates as easily as clothes. Thus, while we can see the Victorian evolutionary biologists as making truly world-changing ‘discoveries’ of verifiable (in Popper’s terms) phenomena, likewise we can see their ideas as shaped by their times: the ‘origin of species’ question being to this extent as much a phenomenon of the 1850s as stovepipe hats, steam railways and Pre-Raphaelite art. It is in this sense and context that we see how Lamarckian evolution is the perfect metaphor for the self-made rentier class, such as the Wedgwoods and Darwins. Owd Wooden Leg Wedgwood lived and slept in his ‘works’ in Stoke-on-Trent, cheek by jowl with his workers. He made a fortune and was enabled thereby to acquire the houses and lands of a country gentleman. It was Josiah II at Maer Hall who had inherited so many of Jos the First’s acquired gentilities that he left ‘the works’ entirely in the hands of managers. It was at his uncle’s house at Maer that Charles Darwin learnt to shoot – and ‘my zeal was so great that I used to place my shooting-boots open by my bedside when I went to bed, so as not to lose half-a-minute in putting them on in the morning’.

  But – back to Wallace in 1858, sweating through his fever and thinking of Malthus. Within two hours, he suddenly thought out the whole theory of natural selection. Three days later he had finished his essay.

  It is very typical of the difference between the two men that Wallace worked out in a couple of hours what it took Darwin twenty years to decide to publish. Like Wallace, Darwin had been inspired by Malthus – only in 1838. He had sat on his theory, mulled it over, concealed it from himself and his wife, agonized about it. Then, when Wallace sent him his own essay on natural selection, he decided to act. The Wallace–Darwin theory was duly read out at the Linnaean Society in London on 1 July 1858, and the first person to apply it, and to publish it, was Canon H.B. Tristram a clergyman–ornithologist who, in an article in Ibis, October 1859, used it to explain the colours of desert birds. Charles Darwin, who had written and rewritten several drafts of his essay, expanded it to On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. It was published by John Murray, himself an amateur geologist. Murray was in fact unconvinced by the theory, but when the whole edition of 1,250 copies sold out in one day he saw its commercial potential. It was to be one of the bestsellers of the age. The number of pamphlets, debates, books, speeches, sermons, quarrels it generated is numberless. It was a book which grew out of pure observation of Nature, but which on another level seemed to define the age to itself. Its primary discovery, that an impersonal process of selection is at work in nature, comparable to the process by which pedigree dogs or hybrid roses are ‘improved’ by breeders, was seen by the Victorians themselves as a picture of a competitive world. Perhaps it was only in the late twentieth century that some of its other implications – the need to be a Friend of the Earth, since we are all descended from the same roots and sources – were worked out.

  Wallace and Darwin had been working on the same material for twenty years quite independently. It was twenty years since a rough version of the theory had been penned by Wallace. Graciou
sly, however, Wallace allowed Darwin to publish and resigned himself, for a lifetime, to being ‘the moon to Darwin’s sun’.1 Since he was still in Malaya when Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared, Wallace did not read the book until 1860. He read it five or six times, ‘each time with increasing admiration’. He later said he was glad that it had been Darwin, fourteen years his senior, and not himself who had been called upon to set forward the theory in detail. Later he did publish his own Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (1870), which confirmed that his mind and Darwin’s had been working towards the same conclusions by completely independent means.2

  Darwin and his beloved cousin-wife Emma moved quite early in their married life to the village of Downe,fn1 near Sevenoaks, Kent. Here he battled with his lifelong mystery illness, which left him breathless and exhausted for half of every day. Here he basked in the love of his wife and children and cousins, here he fulfilled his duties as a local citizen, sitting on the parish council, befriending the vicar, even sitting as a magistrate. Darwin, in his diffidence and self-doubt, is one of the most attractive of all men of genius. Wholly typical is the story told of some quite unimportant discussion at the parish council. Much later that night, the vicar of Downe, the Rev. John Innes, was surprised by a knock at his front door. The tall, bald, troubled figure of Charles Darwin stood there. ‘He came to say that, thinking over the debate, though what he had said was quite accurate, he thought, I might have drawn an erroneous conclusion, and he would not sleep till he had explained it.’3

  Given that this was the nature of the man, it is not surprising that he was so unwilling to test the waters by publishing The Origin of Species. Darwin was acutely aware of the intellectual objections to his theory, and this was his primary reason for anxiety; was it true? In 1844, when Chambers had anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, there had been an outcry. ‘Mr Vestiges’ or ‘The Vestigarian’ was seen as a ‘practical Atheist’.4 The Church had seen, even in Chambers’s generalized transmutationist tract, that such a view disposed of the need for any kind of interventionist God. Scientists had trod very warily since the furore. Figures such as Sir Richard Owen (1804–92), the finest anatomist of his day, first Hunterian professor of anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons, Gold Medallist in the Geological Society, and in his latter days in charge of the natural history departments at the British Museum, provided a good example of the difficulty faced by any Victorian scientist who wished to get on in the world. In private he freely discussed evolutionary theory. In public he offered simple-minded defences of the literal truth of the Old Testament.5 He denounced Vestiges and in time he would denounce Darwin.

  Today we live in an age of scientific triumphalism. It is difficult to recapture the spirit of Victorian England before Darwin published his famous theory. The Church and the clergy still had tremendous power. Not only did they control nearly all university posts, but the convention remained (whatever was said in private) that Parliament and the Press all supported Orthodoxy. For so retiring and shy a man as Darwin to stand up against them all was a formidable challenge. Added to these was the religious distress caused to his wife Emma. Darwin knew that there would be those, including himself, who felt that his theory of natural selection did away with the necessity of believing in a Creator. The Captain of the Beagle, by now a rear admiral married to a pious evangelical lady, had already made furious objections to Darwin’s highly acclaimed journal of the Voyage. Darwin’s observations that there were discernible differences between species from island to island in the Galapagos Archipelago did not, in The Voyage of the Beagle, lead to any particular conclusion, but Captain Fitzroy was not slow to grasp the implications which Darwin later spelt out in Origins. Consider the absence of Batrachians – i.e. frogs, newts and toads – on small oceanic islands. ‘As these animals and their spawn are known to be immediately killed by sea-water, on my view we can see that there would be great difficulty in their transportal across the sea, and therefore why they do not exist on any oceanic island. But why, on the theory of creation, they should not have been created there, it would be very difficult to explain.’6

  It is the gentle way in which the very concept of creation is thrown away in parenthesis which perhaps made The Origin of Species seem so injurious to the faith of certain Christians. For Captain, later Rear Admiral, Robert Fitzroy if you did not believe that each individual frog, newt, finch, butterfly, dandelion had been made, in its present form, immutable, then you were denying the principle of Creation. In the summer of 1860, the rear admiral went along to the meeting of the British Association at Oxford to take part in that celebrated debate on Evolution in which Bishop ‘Soapy Sam’ Wilberforce begged to know whether ‘it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that [T.H. Huxley] claimed his descent from a monkey’: and in which Huxley – Darwin’s St Paul as he has been called, his representative on Earth – replied that ‘If … the question is put to me, would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet who employs these faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.’7

  How grateful Darwin was, not to be present during these embarrassing displays of fisticuffs, but poor Fitzroy was there, and he spoke in support of the bishop. His own publication, A Very Few Remarks with Reference to the Deluge, had attempted to demonstrate that the geology of South American can best be understood in terms of the volcanic catastrophes which took place at the time of Noah’s Flood in the book of Genesis. (‘Lyell says it beats all the other nonsense he has ever read on the subject,’ said Darwin.) Fitzroy was professionally involved with the weather, being in charge of the meteorology department at the Board of Trade. His disastrously inaccurate weather forecasts were pilloried in the press in the spring of 1865 and he sank into depression. He took the same remedy as his uncle Castlereagh and cut his own throat.

  Darwin could hardly have been blamed, but the suicide was to grieve him. Beneath the rear admiral’s expressions of religious certitudes lay terror. We can never forget this when observing the phenomenon now generally termed ‘fundamentalism’, which is why it so often turns to violence. The real voice of sanity in the Oxford debate was neither Huxley nor Soapy Sam but Darwin’s friend, Sir William Jackson Hooker, director of the Botanic Gardens at Kew. It was, Lyell believed, Hooker who turned the debate against the bishop. The botanist struck to the purely scientific arguments. When Francis Huxley was collecting his father’s letters for a book which was to have included an extensive quotation from T.H. Huxley’s reply to Bishop Wilberforce, it was Hooker who dissuaded him from publishing what he called ‘far too much of a braggart epistle’.8 Yet if, from the beginning, the Theory of Natural Selection was seen as incompatible with religious belief, much of the blame for this must rest with the churchmen who were too timorous to study the scientific, too lazy to work out the theological implications in sufficient depth. No wonder the perception took root that a choice must be made, aut Darwin, aut Christus, Darwin or Christ.

  In his highly readable book Darwin for Beginners (1982), for example, Dr Jonathan Miller stated that ‘for pious Christians, it was an article of faith that the living world was an unaltered replica of the one which God had created at the outset. No species had been lost and none had been altered.’ It would seem as though some Christians, such as Rear Admiral Fitzroy, made this curious notion into an article of their faith, but if so it was not an idea of very ancient or creditable vintage. St Augustine of Hippo (354–430), who was the first great philosopher-theologian of the Latin West, had taught that the original germ of living things came in two forms, one placed by God in animals and plants, the other scattered through the environment, only destined to become active in the right conditions. It wasn’t necessary for God to create each living species. The Creator provided the seeds of life and allowed them to develop in their own
time.9

  The Renaissance was the period during which the doctrine of Special Creation emerged. This was an idea of nature which saw all species as the direct, unchanging creation of God. Milton depicts the Creation in this manner in Paradise Lost. A pioneer of the viewpoint was the Spanish Jesuit Francisco de Suárez (1548–1617), who specifically denied the evolutionary ideas of Augustine and – more importantly, since he was seen as a definitive theologian – of Thomas Aquinas. With the Renaissance obsession with Mutability, and the changeableness of all sublunary things, would go the yearning for God to have created living forms all at one shot:

  The grassie Clods now Calv’d, now half appeer’d

  The Tawnie Lion, pawing to get free

  His hinder parts, then springs as broke from Bonds,

  And Rampant shakes his Brindled main; the Ounce,

  The Libbard, and the Tyger, as The Moale

  Rising, the crumbl’d Earth above them threw

  In Hillocks …

  Paradise Lost VII: 463–9

  Against this is the Wallace–Darwin view that species all emerge, ultimately, from a single life-form. The theory does not suggest, as Bishop Wilberforce mischievously inferred, that we are descended from monkeys, but that the higher primates, human beings among them, share a common ancestry. The monkeys are cousins, not grandmothers. Pooh-Bah in The Mikado is closer to the Wallace–Darwin notion when he boasts, ‘I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule.’10 The Mikado appeared sixteen years after The Origin of Species and five after The Descent of Man. In The Origin Darwin does not directly discuss the question of human origins at all.