The Reluctant Mr. Darwin
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Darwin had read all this and agreed. Lamarck was nonsense. A dozen years later he still claimed to feel that way, with some coy stipulations: wrong answer, right question. But then how does transmutation occur? I think I know, he whispered to Hooker.
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After confessing his transmutationist thinking and his murderer’s sense of guilt, in that letter of January 11, 1844, Darwin waited for Hooker’s response. None came. Two weeks passed. It’s a safe guess that Darwin felt some nervous impatience. Had he scandalized the new pen pal? Had he kaboshed their friendship before it got going? Finally he sent another note, nudging Hooker to reply. And now Hooker did, with a long, cordial letter full of information on botanical geography and the cheerful news that he was studying Darwin’s Galápagos plants. He chattered on about his pet subject, the native vegetation of remote islands, and mentioned a remarkable species of cabbage endemic to Kerguelen, in the far southern Indian Ocean. That Kerguelen cabbage, Hooker reckoned, was the weirdest cruciferous vegetable in the whole southern hemisphere. How did it get where it was? And why didn’t it exist anywhere else? Pondering the cabbage, plus some other strange island creatures, led him to admit a heterodox opinion of his own: that there may have been a series of such unusual productions in isolated spots, “& also a gradual change of species.” Whoa, change of species? That was a big concession. Sounding open-minded but sensible, Hooker added, “I shall be delighted to hear how you think that this change may have taken place, as no presently conceived opinions satisfy me on the subject.” You’re not crazy and you’re not in danger of denouncement, not from me, he was telling Darwin, but…well, let’s see what you’ve got.
Darwin went back to the sketchy outline he had tucked away two years before. He began writing again, articulating arguments and inserting evidence within the structure he had already arranged. This time he tried to produce something readable by others—and not just readable, persuasive. Again he started with the topic of variation among domesticated species, and how breeders select and amplify those small differences, the first leg of his cardinal analogy. Then he turned to species in the wild. He was still under the impression that wild populations vary little, except when unsettled by environmental changes. Never mind; a little was enough. Even tiny amounts of variation arising infrequently would allow natural selection, operating over great stretches of time, to produce new species of animal and plant.
Having explained his hypothetical mechanism—that is, the logic of how evolution could occur—he marched again through the categories of evidence showing that evolution, by some mechanism or another, has occurred. The pages piled up. Through late winter and spring of 1844, Darwin interrupted himself with a few minor distractions (seeing a short paper into print, commuting to London for Geological Society meetings, a family visit to Shrewsbury) but stayed focused and highly productive, as he could when his juices were hot and his health allowed. By early July he had finished a 189-page manuscript. This time he did what he hadn’t done with the sketch: sent it off to a local schoolmaster to be copied in legible handwriting. The rationale for a clean copy was that it could be read by others. But by whom? Select friends like Hooker or Lyell? Typesetters at a publishing house? No…nobody, not for now. Instead he tucked it away in his office, along with a letter to his wife intended for reading “in case of my sudden death.” The letter was his informal literary will.
Here’s the draft of my species theory, the letter said. If the theory is correct, and if even one competent judge of the subject is converted, “it will be a considerable step in science.” So please get this manuscript published, he told Emma, and he gave instructions on how he wanted that done. She should enlist an appropriate person to finish, improve, and edit the work. As enticement, she should offer that person £400, plus all Darwin’s natural history books, plus any profits that might come from publication. She should also pass along to the editor all of Darwin’s notes—his six years’ accumulation of facts and quotes—written on scraps of paper and sorted by subject into eight or ten brown portfolios kept on shelves in his study. “Many of the scraps in the Portfolios contain mere rude suggestions & early views now useless,” he explained, “& many of the facts will probably turn out as having no bearing on my theory.” But he wanted his editor to sift through them. Some might be preciously relevant.
Who should this editor be? He mentioned a short list of scientific colleagues, including Charles Lyell, gentle old John Henslow in Cambridge, a brilliant paleontologist named Edward Forbes, and the congenial new acquaintance he’d been cultivating by letter, Joseph Hooker. The name of Robert Grant, Darwin’s mentor from the Edinburgh days, now a hot-fire radical teaching anatomy and preaching Lamarckism in London, didn’t appear. Grant was a transmutationist, as Darwin well knew, but a transmutationist who embraced the wrong theory and belonged to the wrong political camp. Darwin wanted to modernize natural history, making it law-based and materialistic in its view of causes and effects; he did not want to foment class warfare. If none from his list agreed to take on such an onerous job, Darwin told Emma in the testamentary letter, she should please raise the offer to £500. And if that didn’t suffice, he wrote, just publish the thing as it is.
For all he knew, the gut-heaving, head-blurring symptoms of his chronic illness might turn acute at any time, and he could be dead of some unknown ailment within a year. In fact, that may have been his subliminal wish. Dying now and publishing the theory posthumously would save him a lot of discomfort.
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But he was getting closer, it seemed, to making the leap as a living author. He was getting bolder and more impatient. One day in July he made an unusual trip, by two-wheeled horse cart, all the way over to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, southwest of London, to reacquaint himself with Joseph Hooker face-to-face.
Sickly and sedentary as Darwin generally felt, he wouldn’t have gone if he hadn’t badly wanted to cement his friendship with this young fellow. Hooker had several attractions. He was a rigorous botanist, well traveled, trained as a surgeon (not as a clergyman, like so many of Darwin’s friends), and neither too scared nor too pious to contemplate transmutation. That’s the person Darwin needed: a botanical geographer with the cold mind of a man who could cut human flesh. Through late summer and autumn he and Hooker continued trading letters, in which they discussed the distribution of species and why certain places—especially islands—contain an inordinate diversity of unique forms. Isolation is the crucial factor, Darwin suggested. The isolation of islands somehow leads to the “creation or production” (he was still waffling in his terminology) of new species. Darwin didn’t explain what he had in mind, but he wanted Hooker’s help in exploring this line of thought with botanical data.
Darwin also wrote to Leonard Jenyns, one of his parson-naturalist friends from student days, who styled himself after Gilbert White, keeping a diary of nature observations from the hedgerows and woodlands around his little parish. When they first met, back at Cambridge, Jenyns was a young fogey of thirty, recently established as vicar of a place called Swaffham Bulbeck and snugly ensconced in the tradition of natural theology. More recently he had edited a new edition of White’s little classic, The Natural History of Selborne. Jenyns’s next project would be a book of nature lore as collected by himself, including a natural history calendar, again in the manner of White. Swaffham Bulbeck was his own Selborne. Darwin flattered him about the importance of such localized, season-by-season observations, and then dangled a question that he hoped Jenyns might answer. How severely do struggle and early death limit population increase for any given species? For a species of bird, say, in the English countryside. He didn’t mention Malthus, but of course it was Malthusian pressures and checks that Darwin had in mind.
There was more in the letter than just flattery and trolling for data. Jenyns had written to him first, a newsy note inviting news in return, so Darwin offered a glimpse of his present life and work at Downe. What with writing books about geology, he said, and lookin
g after his garden and trees, and taking afternoon walks around the grounds with his brain in a fog, he hadn’t lately done much field observation himself. No beetle collecting, like in the old days. He couldn’t speak as an expert on local birds. Couldn’t offer a single new fact about English zoology. On the other hand, that wasn’t to say he’d lost interest in flora and fauna. “I have continued steadily reading & collecting facts on variation of domestic animals & plants & on the question of what are species; I have a grand body of facts & I think I can draw some sound conclusions.” Uh, but wait—did he really want to confide this to Reverend Jenyns? Evidently so. He was tired of cuidado. He was tired of keeping his secret. It poured out.
“The general conclusion at which I have slowly been driven from a directly opposite conviction,” Darwin told Jenyns, “is that species are mutable & that allied species are co-descendants from common stocks.” How about that, old pal? Evolution happens, and natural theology has missed the big story. I know this opens me to reproach, Darwin conceded, but I’ve been brought to it by honest and careful deliberation. “I shall not publish on this subject for several years,” he added. His closing comment to Jenyns, sounding friendly, was almost a tease: Maybe your little local book will contribute something to my trove of supporting facts.
And then bad luck hit, in a form antic and unexpected as a rain of frogs. The same month as Darwin’s letter to Jenyns, October 1844, a respectable London publisher released Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a volume of popularized science and theory-mongering that rampageously surveyed cosmology, geology, the origins of life, paleontology, and the transmutation of species, touching along the way such subjects as spontaneous generation, the rings of Saturn, the production of insects using electricity, the occurrence of measles in pigs, the origins of human races and languages, phrenology, six-fingered people, the germination of rye from planted oats, the birth of a platypus from a goose parent, the number of neck bones in a giraffe, plus many other interesting facts and astonishing factoids, all mixed and baked into a literary fruitcake by an author who wrote smooth, easy prose and who chose to remain anonymous. What curious reader could resist?
Thanks to its content and the mystery of its authorship, Vestiges became a hit. It raised eyebrows, stimulated thought, provoked annoyance, caused talk, and sold well. The scathing reviews it suffered from hardheaded scientists (including the great Cambridge geologist Adam Sedgwick, another of Darwin’s early teachers) only added to its notoriety and spurred sales. An American edition appeared quickly, a German translation later. In Britain alone, Vestiges went into a second edition almost immediately, then a third, then seven more editions within a decade, totaling almost 21,000 copies. By the numbers of the day, that made it a blockbuster. It was read by middle-class gentlemen and ladies with no scientific or philosophical expertise, but also by Queen Victoria, John Stuart Mill, Abraham Lincoln, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alfred Tennyson, Benjamin Disraeli, and Florence Nightingale. The fact that its author continued to guard his anonymity, not just during the early commercial success but throughout later editions, testified to the genuine riskiness of espousing transmutationism—even a godly version—if the chain of transmutated animals included humanity.
Vestiges wasn’t atheistic. “It has pleased Providence to arrange that one species should give birth to another,” the book said, “until the second highest gave birth to man, who is the very highest.” Providence here was a law-making, non-intervening deity who established the physical universe and let it run. The author of Vestiges, a Scottish publisher named Robert Chambers, likewise saw the wisdom of creating something and then staying out of sight.
Within two months of its publication, Hooker and Darwin had both read the book. Hooker breezily told Darwin that he’d found Vestiges delightful, not aware how that might make his friend cringe with the envy of a competitor. Of course he didn’t swallow the book’s conclusions, Hooker said, but the assemblage of material was impressive. As for the anonymous author, he seemed to be (Hooker didn’t mean this as a compliment about wittiness) a “funny fellow.”
Darwin saw nothing delightful or funny in any sense. He wrote drily from Downe that he’d been “somewhat less amused” by Vestiges than Hooker had. Okay, the organization was clever and the unidentified author could certainly write. But “his geology strikes me as bad,” Darwin complained, “& his zoology far worse.” This was a fair judgment, on scientific grounds, with a tincture of sour grapes. Darwin realized that “Mr. Vestiges” had just made his own position more difficult in ways that were both maddening and confusing. With its cockeyed pastiche of theory and its factual mistakes, the book gave credulous readers a misleading set of unsupported notions; it gave skeptical scientists another reason to dismiss transmutationism as bunk. Which was too bad for Darwin, and too bad again. Now the intellectual marketplace was glutted, the whole question was blurred, and the serious critics had their blood up.
Darwin may have hoped that the success of Vestiges could help open people’s minds about transmutation; that it might prepare them to accept, in the long run, a real theory grounded in evidence and meticulous inductive thought. But that time frame—the long run—was speculative and remote. For now, the moment for revealing his ideas seemed to have passed. He turned back to other projects. He had a third volume of Beagle geology to finish. He had a small Beagle-related task in zoological description, involving barnacles, to polish off. And he planned to revise his Journal for a new edition. Given a decent contract (unlike the one FitzRoy had arranged) with a different publisher, the book might actually earn him some money. If there was a best time for publishing his transmutation theory, this wasn’t it.
Point of Attachment
1846–1851
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If you view Darwin from a distance rather than close up, something peculiar happens now. He seems to stop. He seems to turn away. The idea of evolution by natural selection has been clear in his mind and in his notebooks since 1838. The extended essay of 1844 rests on a shelf in his office, unpublished. The Origin of Species will not see print until 1859. Meanwhile, as the years pass, he continues fathering children, pottering around the house, acting like a hypochondriac; he dissects barnacles through a microscope and raises pigeons in a coop. He publishes little papers in the Gardeners’ Chronicle on subjects such as salt, bucket ropes for wells, fruit trees, a mouse-colored breed of ponies. Nothing on transmutation. He spends months at water-cure spas, allowing himself to be tortured with cold showers and wrapped in wet towels. It’s the period of unexpected behavior that has been called “Darwin’s Delay.”
Scholars disagree about this period, and there’s enough ambiguous evidence to nurture a whole range of possible explanations. Was he afraid to publish his theory because he knew it would outrage Victorian society? That’s a lame generality, a first-draft cliché that ignores the diversity of Victorian society. Victoria herself had read Vestiges, after all, and though the author chose to preserve his anonymity, nobody was trying to find him and put him in jail. Robert Grant had been ranting about roughly the same stuff, in his lectures to medical students, for years. Was Darwin afraid to publish because of the political climate, in which the established Church and the government had reason to be wary of populist demagogues, Chartist mobs, maybe outright insurrection, as bolstered by Lamarckism and other subversive French ideas? It’s true that Darwin had no love for extreme democratic ferment. He was a wealthy landowner himself, and a gentleman, a mildly progressive Whig with money and status to lose; he didn’t want to sew any flag that political radicals might wave. Was he reluctant to publish because he came from the Oxbridge tradition of natural theology, within which many of his old friends and teachers were pious Anglican clergy? Was he just too polite to toss transmutation in their faces? Or was he hesitant because his wife, deeply pious, worried that his materialistic ideas would cost Charles his soul? Another alternative: Was he less anxious about transmutation per se than about the theory’s logical e
xtreme, human descent from a lineage of other animals? And then there’s his undiagnosable bad health. Was he afflicted by some genuine disease or disability, with days of nauseated inertness on the sofa adding up into months of lost productivity? Or was the illness at least partly psychosomatic, his body’s way of excreting the queasiness in his mind? Still another possibility: Maybe he proceeded slowly, deliberately, for good scientific reasons. Gathering data the whole time. Exploring complex implications of an idea that’s not nearly so simple as it looks. Refining his arguments, running experimental tests, educating himself in unfamiliar areas of knowledge (taxonomy, embryology, animal husbandry) that would be crucial to making his case. Given the huge task of justifying a huge theory, was his rate of progress actually pretty respectable? Or, then again, was he just too busy for twenty-one years, diverted by all the various chores, projects, and human responsibilities that life brought him?