by Paul Johnson
On the other hand, he spent many years working on small or minute creatures or on other species that caught his fancy—orchids, for instance, for which he built a special heated greenhouse, and pigeons and spiders. He loved minute things. He wrote: “The brain of an ant is one of the most marvellous atoms of matter in the world.” He was prodigal of the time he devoted to watching ants at work. He particularly admired their system of slavery: why they adopted it, the types of slaves they sought and how they were managed, the way in which ant slaves became so accustomed to the system that they helped the master ants to uphold it, and many other aspects. It was one of his many contradictions that he took objective delight in slavery practiced by ants, as an illustration of natural selection at work, while bitterly deploring it among humans. He spent eight years working on barnacles, longer than on any other subject in his whole life. He had first found them interesting on the Beagle. His close friend Dr. Hooker told Darwin’s son Francis, who eventually wrote his life, “Your father had barnacles on the brain from Chile onwards.” He referred to them as “my beloved barnacles.” He sent for specimens from all over the world and bought a special compound microscope to help in dissecting them. For the first and perhaps only time, he became expert in the work of dissection. The movements of his hands became quick and neat and were a pleasure to watch. In a letter to his old chief, FitzRoy, he said he had been “for the last half-month daily hard at work in dissecting a little animal about the size of a pin’s-head, from the Chonos archipelago, and I could spend another month, and daily see more beautiful structure.” This barnacle study was the most thorough piece of scientific investigation Darwin ever carried through to completion—in four stout volumes published over the years 1851–54—and he convinced himself it was vital to his evolutionary work. The letter to Hooker in which he justified this is worth quoting:
I have lately got a bisexual cirripede [barnacle], the male being microscopically small & parasitic within the sac of the female. I tell you this to boast of my species theory, for the nearest & closely allied genus to it is, as usual, hermaphrodite, but I had observed some minute parasites adhering to it, & these parasites, I now can show, are supplemental males, the male organs in the hermaphrodite being unusually small, though perfect and containing zoosperms: so we have almost a polygamous animal, simple females alone being wanting. I never should have made this out, had not my species theory convinced me, that an hermaphrodite species must pass into a bisexual species by insensible small stages, and here we have it.
The work on barnacles brought him the medal of the Royal Society in 1853, but the eight years spent on it made no sense in terms of the work structure of Origin. Again, there were his “beloved orchids.” He wrote defensively to Hooker: “I have found the study of orchids eminently useful in showing me how nearly all parts of the flower are coadapted for fertilization by insects, & therefore the results of natural selection.” This work on orchids was relevant to Origin, though the manuscript, under the title On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, was not actually published till three years after the masterwork to which its details (filling 140 large folio pages in Darwin’s small handwriting) were supposedly preliminary. It was the same with pigeons. He wrote to one of his sons: “I am getting on splendidly with my pigeons and the other day had a present of Trumpeters, Nuns and Turbits, and when last in London I visited a jolly old brewer, who keeps 300 or 400 most beautiful pigeons and he gave me a pair of pale brown, quite small German Pouters. I am building a new House for my Tumblers, so as to fly them in summer.” These birds gave him delight, but their contribution to Origin clearly did not justify the time he spent on them. The truth is, he pursued these lines of research for their own sake but also because they inevitably delayed the day when he would have to “go public” with his general theory of evolution and natural selection and thus detonate the crisis of his personal, professional, religious, and, indeed, marital life.
Meanwhile, as Darwin delayed by over-research and the years went by, other scientists and writers were pressing on and publishing, and evolution itself was becoming almost a hackneyed subject. The most important event came in 1844, when an anonymous work appeared called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. It caused an uproar, was a bestseller, and was in its twelfth edition by 1884 when its author, long dead, was at last officially identified. He was the Edinburgh publisher Robert Chambers, a polymath seven years Darwin’s senior, who had spent two years collecting scientific facts to show (among other things) that the Genesis account of creation could not be taken literally. Chambers went to elaborate lengths to maintain secrecy, not wishing to get involved in religious quarrels (he remained a stalwart Christian till his death in 1871) or damage his business. The effect of his book was to make evolution appear almost “normal” among the educated and to act as a lightning rod to deflect any real chance of combustion by the time Origin was published fifteen years later (by then over two hundred thousand copies of Vestiges were circulating). Darwin himself wrote of it: “In my opinion it has done excellent service in this country in calling attention to the subject, in removing prejudice, and in thus preparing the ground for the reception of analogous views.” By the mid-1840s, the idea that species “evolved” or “developed,” as opposed to being created in an instant by God, was so common that Disraeli, always smart and quick to pounce on a fashionable fad, was happy to satirize it in his novel Tancred (1847) and have his heroine say, “You know, all is development. The principle is perpetually going on. First there was nothing. Then there was something. Then—I forget the next—I think there were shells, then fishes. Then we came—let me see—did we come next? Never mind that—we came at last.” This, one suspects, is more or less how a good many society ladies felt about the matter. Disraeli returned to the subject, again in ironic mood, in Lothair (1870).
However, it was Darwin’s exact contemporary, Tennyson, who glorified and almost sanctified evolution in his great poem In Memoriam (1851), the work that established him as a major poet, indeed the major poet and the natural successor to Wordsworth as poet laureate. Although Tennyson is often superficially regarded as the poet of Arthurian legend, he had the mind of a naturalist and observed natural phenomena not only with admiration but with accurate objectivity: It was he who coined the Darwinian phrase “nature red in tooth and claw.” It might be said that the study of nature was an obsession for literate and clever early Victorians, such as John Ruskin and George Eliot. She, like Darwin, was particularly obsessed by the foreshore and its creatures and spent a holiday at Ilfracombe in Devon investigating barnacles and seaweed. She read Lyell, as well as the Vestiges, and was an evolutionist by the time she was nineteen. She greatly admired the brilliant young polymath Herbert Spencer, another evolutionist (both were a decade younger than Darwin), and actually went so far as to write him a letter proposing marriage, which filled him with terror and put him off matrimony for good. Dickens was another such; he wrote an admiring review in the Examiner of the anonymous The Poetry of Science; or, Studies in the Physical Phenomena of Nature, which was actually by Dr. Robert Hunt of the School of Mines. Dickens’s journalism was spattered with admiring references to Vestiges. Such people came to look up to Tennyson as their poetic oracle, and In Memoriam was exactly in the spirit of the times (next to the decade 1810–20, the 1850s was the most creative period in nineteenth-century England) in its most ardent curiosity and sensitivity to nature, accepting evolution but also soothing doubts. Tennyson wrote:
I held it truth, with him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones.
That men may rise on stepping stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.
He also conjured up the eternal permanence of love between man and man, as with Arthur Hallam (tragic hero of the poem) and the whole process of evolution:
So then were nothing lost to man;
So that still garden
of the souls
In many a figured leaf enrolls
The total world since life began.
He said that “good / Will be the final goal of ill;”
That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroy’d,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;
That not a worm is cloven in vain;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivell’d in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another’s gain.
Tennyson admitted the seeming cruelty of nature—“So careful of the type she seems / So careless of the single life”—and that it was easy to see all creation as an exercise in nihilism, for nature cries, “A thousand types are gone; / I care for nothing, all shall go.” Still, the message of the poem, which might be construed as a hymn to evolution, is that the ultimate phase of evolution will be beneficent. G. M. Young rightly called In Memoriam a “cardinal document of the mid-Victorian mind, with Tennyson ‘speaking like an Archangel’ assuring mankind that it will muddle through.”
Among those who loved In Memoriam and saw the point of its view of evolution was Queen Victoria, for whom Tennyson was the greatest living poet. It was one reason evolution never presented a problem to her. Prince Albert, too, was an evolutionist. In fact rumor had it that he was the author of Vestiges.
An outspoken and vigorous exponent of evolution was the young Herbert Spencer, a former railway engineer and self-made polymath, whose key article in the Leader, on “The Development Hypothesis” (1852) came soon after the appearance of Tennyson’s poem. He took the clerical critics head on. They accused evolutionists of lacking evidence from facts, he wrote, while seeming to forget
that their own theory [Genesis] is supported by no facts at all. Like the majority of men who are born to a given belief, they demand the most rigorous proof of any adverse doctrine, but assume that their own doctrine needs none. . . . From the earliest appearance of life down to the present time, different species have been successively replacing each other [and] we may safely estimate the number of species that have existed, or are existing, on the earth, at not less than ten million. Well, which is the most rational theory? . . . Is it most likely that there have been ten million of special creations? Or is it most likely that, by continual modifications, due to change of circumstances, ten millions of varieties may have been produced, as varieties are being produced still?
Spencer is largely forgotten now and certainly little read. But at the time, he was regarded as the great and coming panjandrum. Darwin thought he would eventually be looked on “as by far the greatest living philosopher in England; perhaps equal to any that have lived.” In his Principles of Biology, he coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” which Darwin eventually adopted in his fifth edition of the Origin.
Spencer was a great gobbler-up, appropriator, and popularizer of others’ ideas. By the mid-1850s, he was the best-known exponent of evolution and might easily have gobbled up natural selection, if he had been aware of it. Lyell, whom Darwin treated as his closest confidant and who was kept fully aware of his growing conviction that natural selection was the why of evolution, became perturbed at Darwin’s continual delay in publishing his thesis. He wrote to him, warning him strongly that there was a danger he would be “forestalled” and lose all the credit for his work and originality. And it is a fact that others had been moving in precisely this train of thought. As far back as January 1831, before Darwin set out on the Beagle, Patrick Matthew had published a book, Naval Timber and Arboriculture, which set out the theory of the selection of the fittest by nature, in the reproductive process, quite clearly, in a ten-line paragraph. This was widely reviewed, though Darwin had never nor had, as he claimed, “any other naturalist,” ever heard of Matthew’s views. This was not quite true. John Claudius Loudon, the famous horticulturalist, had reviewed the book in the Gardeners’ Chronicle. Nor was Matthew, as Darwin claimed, an obscure writer on forest trees. He was a large-scale commercial grower of fruit trees in Scotland, who ran a ten-thousand-tree orchard and knew all about the highly relevant subject of hybridizing. Fortunately for Darwin, he was a modest man who was ready to claim his priority when Origin came out but did not make a fuss. He wrote that natural selection “to me did not appear a discovery . . . I estimated this select production of species as an a priori recognizable fact—an axiom, requiring only to be pointed out to be admitted by unprejudiced minds of sufficient grasp.”
There was also the case of Edward Blyth, a naturalist with long experience in India, who was not only known to Darwin but regularly corresponded with him. Blyth wrote a number of articles in the 1830s in the Magazine of Natural History, arguing that the work of breeders was also performed by nature in selecting the best, and suggesting that “a large proportion of what are considered species have descended from a common parentage.” In a number of ways, Blyth’s writings covered the same ground as Darwin’s, who copied Blyth’s arguments in his preliminary treatments of 1842–44. The fact that Blyth believed that natural selection would also tend to conserve species was presumably Darwin’s reason (or excuse) for not giving him any credit in his introduction to the third edition of Origin, in which he mentions earlier workers in the field. Darwin was an honest and generous man in general—there is no doubt about that—but his behavior toward Matthew and Blyth does raise questions about his sense of justice.
In 1856 Lyell again urged Darwin to publish. He had read a paper published the previous September in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History entitled “On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species.” The author was Alfred Russel Wallace, who had become interested in evolution when reading Vestiges and had spent years collecting information in the Amazon and the Malay Archipelago. Other experts, Darwin’s old friend Hooker and two new ones, Thomas Henry Huxley and Thomas Vernon Wollaston, also urged publication. Darwin worked on doggedly—“It’s dogged as does it” was one of his favorite sayings—and the book he planned to be published eventually, but possibly not for many years, was to have been enormous.
However, on June 18, 1859, or possibly on May 18—the point is subject to much debate—he received a letter and manuscript from Wallace that alarmed him. Like Darwin, Wallace had read Malthus, in about 1836. Early in 1858, he had a bout of malaria, and during his delirium, he remembered Malthus’s horror scenario and saw how it fitted into the evolution problem. He called it “a sudden flash of insight.” When he recovered, he set down his view of natural selection in a four-thousand-word paper and sent it to Darwin, rather than to a learned journal, asking him to use it as he judged proper. Darwin was deeply shocked and sent it to Lyell: “Your words have come true with a vengeance—that I should be forestalled.” He said that the Wallace paper might have been a digest of his 1842 sketch or serve as the chapter heads for his current huge tome, so close was the correspondence of the ideas. Lyell was told, “So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed.” His only consolation was that his huge efforts would not be wasted, “as all the labour consists in the application of the theory.” He added, “I would far rather burn my whole book than that Wallace or any other man should think that I have behaved in a paltry spirit.”
Lyell consulted Hooker, and they agreed that the fairest solution was to use a forthcoming meeting of the Linnean Society on July 1 to make public the theory of natural selection by reading out, and later printing in the society’s journal, contributions by both Wallace and Darwin. Three documents were read: Wallace’s essay, Darwin’s 1844 paper, and an 1857 letter outlining his theory to his friend and confidant at Harvard, Professor Asa Gray. Darwin’s friends were eager to publicize the fact that he had priority in the idea, so his main contribution was described as “Extract from a MS. work on Species, by Charles Darwin Esq., FRS, FLS, &c., sketched in 1839 and copied in 1844
.” Darwin could not be present, as his son Charles had just died from scarlet fever, and other members of his family were ill.
As it happened, neither the meeting nor subsequent publication attracted much attention, even in the professional world, let alone among the general public. The multiplicity of the papers was a handicap to understanding, and it was all too complex and technical for listeners to take in. In fact, Wallace’s intervention was an astounding stroke of luck for Darwin, typical of the good fortune that attended him throughout his life. For it did stir him into action of precisely the kind required. He began to write, with all deliberate speed, a general account of evolution by natural selection, that could be understood by the public and contained in one reasonable-sized volume. Instead of an enormous, multivolume work published over a number of years and containing much technical detail as well as a daunting academic apparatus of footnotes, sources, and bibliography, Darwin found himself hustled into producing a popular treatment. In what we have seen to be a remarkably lucky life, this was the greatest stroke of good fortune he enjoyed.
The first edition of Origin was published on November 24, 1859, under the title On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. It was 155,000 words, roughly the same length as Emma, Jane Austen’s longest novel, or Great Expectations, one of Dickens’s shorter ones. Its size was similar to two other highly successful treatments of difficult subjects, J. M. Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, and A. J. Ayers’s Language, Truth and Logic. In proposing it to John Murray, who had published the popular edition of the Beagle voyage, Darwin wrote: