by Janet Browne
Huxley’s view has come to prevail. At the time, however, his argument with Owen raged through the popular press bringing the shocking possibility of ape ancestry home to the masses. Charles Kingsley found the clash a rich source of satire when writing his children’s book The Water Babies in 1863. He included caricatures of Huxley and Owen quar relling over the definition of a water baby, and joked that ‘apes have hippopotamus majors in their brains just as men have… Nothing is to be depended on but the great hippopotamus test’. Edward Linley Sambourne, the artist, illustrated the two men quarrelling over a baby in bottle.
All the while apes were pushing noisily to the fore. Most remarkably, the gorilla suddenly became front-page news through the exploits of Paul Du Chaillu, an explorer who in 1861 brought specimens and skins to Europe. At least one of those skins (perhaps as many as three) was stuffed and trav elled about with Du Chaillu as he gave public lectures about the gorilla’s ferocity and the dangers he escaped during his West African travels. Few had ever seen or heard anything like it before – gorillas were almost entirely unknown in the West until 1854 when bones were despatched from Africa to Harvard University for identification. Victorians were horrified to think that these reputedly violent animals – distorted men in shape and size, representing the brutish, dark side of humanity – were possible ancestors. Museum curators competed shamelessly for the carcasses, until Owen persuaded the trustees of the British Museum to pay a fortune to acquire six skins from Du Chaillu. Elsewhere, humorous journals such as Punch seized on the idea of apish grandfathers and printed a wide variety of cartoons and satires depicting humanized gorillas. ‘Am I a Man and a Brother?’ asked an ape in one famous illustration in Punch, May 1861, playing simultaneously on Du Chaillu’s stuffed gorilla and the antislavery movement. In truth, the furore generated by evolutionary ideas pulled apes, anatomy, polemic, fear, disgust and sensationalism into a single debate. Benjamin Disraeli, the future Conservative prime minister, exposed the unease of his contemporaries in 1864 when he asked ‘Is man an ape or an angel?’ He went on to assure his audience that he was on the side of the angels.
Others engaged with the Origin’s arguments with philosophical curiosity. While John Herschel complained that natural selection was the law of ‘higgledy-piggledy’, and that Darwin was not following traditional procedures of demonstration and proof, Henry Fawcett at Cambridge University and the philosopher John Stuart Mill compared the new style of reasoning favourably against the old. Mill endorsed Darwin’s work in the 1862 edition of his System of Logic, saying that although Darwin had not proved the truth of his doctrine, he had shown that it might be true, an ‘unimpeachable example of a legitimate hypothesis… He has opened a path of inquiry full of promise, the results of which none can foresee’.5 Ernest Renan, the noted theological writer, whose Life of Jesus deliberately left out the divine, said much the same thing. So did George Henry Lewes when discussing natural selection in his Animal Life (1862): ‘it may be true but we cannot say that it is true’. These thoughtful authors saw the argument’s explanatory value and were not prepared to dismiss it out of hand simply for religious reasons.
Even those who disagreed with Darwin were mostly able to concede the merits of his case. The great philologist Friedrich Max Müller addressed Darwin’s theories in lectures about the origin of speech during the winter lecture season in London, 1861–2. Müller forced his audience of fashionable swells to think carefully about what it was to be human. Had our gift of language developed from animal sounds? He thought not. Words could only exist with thoughts, and thoughts were the special preserve of humans. Animals did not have anything like human concepts, he claimed. Müller vigorously opposed evolutionary theory. Yet he praised the notion of natural selection and applied it enthusiastically to the descent and historical relationships of Indo-European languages, as the other great language scholar of the day, August Schleicher, was to appreciate.
Poets and authors were not far behind. Alfred Lord Tennyson never accepted Darwin’s proposals but was keen to meet him in 1868 when they both coincided on holiday in the Isle of Wight. Tennyson had been deeply affected by Chambers’s Vestiges and did not trouble to distinguish the two books from each other. ‘Darwinism, man from ape, would that really make any difference? Time is nothing, are we not all part of deity?’ he remarked to William Allingham in 1863. Tennyson’s gloom about the void after death, although not generated by Darwinism, nevertheless moved him broadly in the same direction as Origin of Species. Robert Browning similarly questioned whether there was any purpose in human existence. But perhaps Matthew Arnold spoke clearest of all for Victorians beset by religious doubt. In his poem ‘Dover Beach’ (1851) the sea of faith that once supported spirituality was now nothing more than a ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’.
And Karl Marx was famously intrigued by Darwin’s thesis, saying on several different occasions that he saw in its workings the capitalist system of competition and laissez- faire. At one time it was thought that Marx wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin but this was based on a misunderstanding. Marx certainly mentioned Origin in his text and sent a presentation copy of his third edition of Das Kapital to Darwin as a mark of respect. It remains in Darwin’s book collection with an inscription from Marx inside. The confusion emerged from a misidentification of a letter to Darwin. The letter was actually from Edward Aveling, the political philosopher and Marx’s son-in-law, who enthusiastically adopted Darwin’s secular insights. Aveling asked if Darwin would accept a dedication in one of Aveling’s books. Not wishing to be publicly associated with Aveling’s atheism, Darwin rejected the request.
Running alongside these intense debates over apes and angels were two main scientific objections to Origin of Species. The first cut to the heart of Darwin’s proposal and queried the origin and preservation of favourable variations. The theme was picked up in 1867 by Fleeming Jenkin, a Scottish engineer and friend of Robert Louis Stevenson. Jenkin asked how could advantageous individuals survive and reproduce in sufficient numbers to shift the whole population in the same favourable direction? Jenkin was hampered, like many of his contemporaries, by believing in what was then known as ‘blending inheritance’, where the characteristics of any two parents were thought to mix and blend in the offspring. If this was so, then any favourable new traits would be blended out in future generations. It was only later, with Moritz Wagner’s insistence on geographical isolation in the evolutionary process (a notion itself developed from Darwin’s work), that the blending problem looked as if it was solved.
Darwin was very perplexed to answer the point satisfactorily. He recognized – indeed the majority of reviewers told him – that the major gap in his book was that he did not explain the origin of variations nor the process of heredity. He tried to do so in his next significant book, On the Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868). He devised a theory of inheritance that he called ‘pangenesis’ in which each part of the parent’s body was thought to throw off minute particles, or ‘gemmules’, which accumulated in the sexual organs to be transmitted in reproduction. Parental gemmules did not blend, he claimed. Instead they were reorganized.
The scheme was roundly criticized, first by Huxley, and then most tellingly by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (1822–1911), an enthusiast for evolution who was interested in inheritance and the ‘fitness’ of the human race, and took Darwin’s theories into the human domain under the label of eugenics. Galton hoped to prove Darwin’s pangenesis by making blood transfusions between rabbits and then breeding from them, but, to his dismay, ended up showing that gemmules were not present in the blood. The two cousins never saw eye to eye over the business. Late in life Darwin was gratified when the pioneer geneticist August Weismann (1834–1914) took up the notion of gemmules (pangenes) as a vehicle for the transmission of information from parent to offspring.
Commonly disregarded by historians of genetics, Darwin’s theories should perhaps be placed more in the mainstream of inves
tigations into inheritance. He was one of many others who at that time felt that heredity must hold the key to the question of origins. The problem was under prolonged and intense investigation from the 1860s onwards by Charles Naudin, Karl Wilhelm Nägeli, Karl Friedrich Gärtner and Weismann. Coincidentally, Gregor Mendel (1822–84) was also at work in the monastery in Brno (Moravia, now Czech Republic) where he spent his life as a pastor. Mendel’s crossing procedures with pure lines of peas and other garden species, although later the foundation of the modern science of genetics, were more or less ignored when published in the local natural history journal in 1865, and there is no evidence that Darwin read Mendel’s article or that it would have provided him with the necessary clue if he had done so. Darwin’s theory of inheritance did not convince contemporaries, who continued to point to the gap in his argument.
The other scientific sticking point emerged in 1866 when the experimental physicist William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) announced that the earth was not old enough for evolution to have taken place. Propelled by anti-evolutionary Scottish Presbyterian inclinations, Thomson stated that 100 million years was all that physics could allow for the whole of the earth’s geological history. Uniformitarians like Lyell and Darwin, who believed in slow and gradual changes over vast aeons of time, were dumbfounded. Thomson’s arguments were ‘an odious spectre’. Decades of continuing debate over the age of the earth were resolved only with the discovery of radioactivity early in the twentieth century that provided a different way of counting and let the evolutionists off the hook.
Darwin responded to these criticisms, and others, in the pages of succeeding editions of his book. One of the most important changes has been noted by many commentators. In the closing pages of the first edition Darwin had written of life being breathed into a few primordial forms. For the second edition he altered this to read ‘the breath of the Creator’, a concession that he came to regret. In the second edition he also added a few words (unattributed) from a letter written to him by Charles Kingsley, indicating that it was possible to believe in God as the ultimate author of evolution. These words remained more or less intact until later editions. Historians have also remarked on Darwin’s willingness to include increasing levels of Lamarckian evolution as the years went by.
During his lifetime Darwin published six editions of Origin of Species, 18,000 copies in total. The first edition numbered 1,250 copies. It is worth comparing these figures with two of the most popular scientific books of the century, Vestiges (1844), which sold 24,000 in sixteen years, and nearly 40,000 by 1890, or George Combe’s Constitution of Man (1828), which sold 11,000 in eight years. There were eleven translations of Origin produced before Darwin’s death in 1882, and numerous shortened versions and commentaries, many of which required close cooperation with the authors and editors. It has appeared in a further eighteen languages since.
One area where Darwin’s theory obviously impinged on human society was in the suggestion that there was a struggle for existence among nations and races. After the Origin of Species was published, the notorious doctrine of ‘social Darwinism’ took the idea of success to justify social and economic policies in which struggle was the driving force. Intimately tied up with national economies, embedded in powerful class, racial and gender distinctions, dancing to a variety of political commitments, there was no single form of social Darwinism. Indeed, some scholars argue that it hardly derived from Darwin and Wallace’s scheme of natural selection at all but was more closely connected with Herbert Spencer’s pervasive social evolutionism. Spencer’s nostrum of ‘survival of the fittest’ was well suited to describe economic expansion, rapid adaptation to circumstance and colonization.
Be this as it may, the dominant economic strategy of developed nations during the second half of the nineteenth century took shape in the aftermath of the Origin’s publication. It was common to use the book directly to legitimize the competition that flourished in free-enterprise Victorian capitalism. Darwin was perfectly aware of these activities and may even have approved of them. Early on he noted that a reviewer in Manchester (one of the largest manufacturing cities in Britain) stated that the Origin promoted the notion that ‘might was right’. Darwin’s ideas were welcomed by many industrial magnates and manufacturers. By the end of the century they were being put into action by the businessmen, philanthropists and robber barons who masterminded the development of North American industry, especially J. D. Rockefeller and the railway owner James J. Hill, who used ‘survival of the fittest’ as their catchphrase. In their view the strongest and most efficient company would naturally dominate the market and stimulate economic progress on the wider scale. Others, like Andrew Carnegie, the émigré Scotsman who created a vast fortune and spent the rest of his life giving it away, revered Spencer. These commitments were heavily biased towards the political right. Few such thinkers believed in socialism or state support for the poor. A welfare state or subsidized industry, it was assumed, would encourage idleness and permit an increasing number of ‘unfit’ people or firms to survive, thereby undermining economic and social progress and national health – an obvious resurgence of Malthus’s original ideas, now poured back into economic thought with a fully ‘scientific’ backing provided by Darwin.
Enthusiasm for free enterprise merged readily into growing ideologies of imperialism and eugenics. The ‘survival of the fittest’ supported notions of inbuilt ‘racial’ difference and appeared to vindicate harsh and continuing fights for territory and political power on the international stage. The success of white Europeans in conquering and settling in Tasmania, for example, seemed to ‘make natural’ the who- lescale extermination of Tasmanian aboriginals. Conquest was deemed a necessary part of progress. A fairly typical view was expressed by Karl Pearson (1857–1936), the committed Darwinian biologist and London statistician. No one should regret, he said in 1900, that ‘a capable and stalwart race of white men should replace a dark-skinned tribe which can neither utilize its land for the full benefit of mankind, nor contribute its quota to the common stock of human knowledge’.6
Social commentators appeared to agree. Eugenics was given its name and leading principles by Francis Galton in the 1880s, drawing on nationalistic, racial and social assumptions already well established but acquiring great social force when attached to evolutionary theory. Galton felt that civilized societies tended generally to prevent natural selection working, in the sense that many of the ‘unfit’ were preserved by medicine, charity, family or religious principles, whereas in a state of nature such people would die. The worst elements of society were the most fecund, he said. The human race would deteriorate, he declared, unless policies were introduced to reduce breeding rates among what he categorized as the poorer, unfit, profligate elements of society and promote higher rates among the worthy middle classes. One of the most pervasive social movements of the early twentieth century, spreading widely through Europe and the Americas, eugenics increasingly became the channel through which anxieties about racial and political decline were projected on to the ‘unfit’ in society. Many eugenicists believed passionately in improving humanity, in political meritocracies, education, birth control and greater freedom for women, were advocates for technological and scientific advance and often committed socialists, and yet also promoted nationalism, chauvinism and prejudice. While Darwin’s Origin of Species can hardly account for all the racial stereotyping, nationalist fervour and harshly expressed prejudice to be found in years to come, there can be no denying the impact of providing a biological backing for human warfare and notions of racial superiority.
Towards the end of his life, it could almost be said that the Origin of Species devoured Darwin. The constant pressure was draining. Through the 1860s and 1870s he became ill more frequently and for longer periods. One unpleasant episode of sickness dominated 1864, during which Darwin was bedridden for much of the time, vomiting and nauseated, unable to see friends or work except at the most sedentary occupations, too weak even
to write his usual cascade of letters. His wife Emma and daughter Henrietta acted as amanuenses. He gave up the water-cure and placed his faith in dietary regimens and resting his ‘nerves’. Under the care of several physicians he also took a variety of Victorian remedies for dyspepsia. In 1866, when he re-emerged from the sickroom, he had become the frail old man with the enormous grey beard that everyone remembers.
Yet he managed to write a number of other books following Origin of Species. The first was on orchids in 1862, that represented a very deliberate exploration of adaptations in nature, what he called ‘a flank move on the enemy’. It was his answer to William Paley’s heavenly watchmaker and stimulated much theological discussion with Asa Gray. ‘I cannot think that the world, as we see it, is the result of chance; and yet I cannot look at each separate thing as the result of design’, he told Gray.
By far the most influential was his Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, published by John Murray in two volumes in 1871. After all the heated discussion about human origins perhaps it was a little overdue. Other voices, other texts had meanwhile put the case both for and against the animal basis of humankind. Indeed, Darwin confessed to a correspondent that he felt ‘taunted with concealing my opinions’. However, he was at last dealing with what he called ‘the highest and most interesting problem for the naturalist’. Some material was too extensive even to include in this new book, so Darwin set it aside for an innovative volume published the following year, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). These two titles represent Darwin’s great anthropological cycle, his ‘man’ books, the final, vital counterpart to Origin of Species.