The Reluctant Mr. Darwin

by David Quammen

  He wouldn’t have seen that if he hadn’t assigned himself the tricky job of drawing lines between one species and another. He wouldn’t have seen it if he hadn’t used his network of contacts and his good reputation as a naturalist to gather barnacle specimens, in quantity, from all over the world. The truth of variation only reveals itself in crowds. He wouldn’t have seen it if he hadn’t examined multiple individuals, not just single representatives, of as many species as possible. “I have been struck,” he wrote Hooker, who had asked for a barnacle update, “with the variability of every part in some slight degree of every species.” This individual had a bigger penis, or shorter legs; that individual had a longer stalk, or a wider thorax. The project involved more nuances and judgment calls than he had expected. How much variation is too much to lump within a single species? What distinguishes the species category itself from the category of varieties (such as breeds of dog) within a species? A person could go blind and crazy. “Systematic work wd be easy were it not for this confounded variation,” he told Hooker, then admitted it was “pleasant to me as a speculatist though odious to me as a systematist.” The speculatist in him was thinking about transmutation, not just looking for taxonomic order. Abundant variation among barnacles filled a crucial role in his theory. Here they were, the minor differences on which natural selection works.

  But all this gathering and examining, dissecting and describing, consumed month after month when he was well enough to work, and oppressed him even more when he wasn’t. In March 1850, almost four years into the effort, he grumped to Lyell: “My cirripedial task is an eternal one; I make no perceptible progress.” That was weary exaggeration but it reveals how he felt. So does the comment several months later, to Hooker, that at last he was sending to the printer “a small, poor first fruit of my confounded cirripedia.” By then he’d decided that his monograph would be a four-volume work, two volumes on the stalked barnacles (one for the fossil forms in Britain, one for the living forms worldwide) and a corresponding pair (fossil forms, living) on all the others. The “small, poor first fruit” was his little volume on the stalked fossil forms, an arcane work for a limited audience, published by the Palaeontographical Society in 1851. The volume on living species followed later that year, also released quietly by a specialty publisher. Immediately he went on to the sessile barnacles. A year later he reported to his old friend W. D. Fox that he was still at work on the Cirripedia, “of which creatures I am wonderfully tired: I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a Sailor in a slow-sailing ship.” The barnacle project was now mirroring his Beagle experience: a long lonely voyage, which might or might not pay off.

  It did pay, to some degree anyway—not just in private scientific insights but also in public acclaim. Two years after the publication of his stalked-barnacle volumes, the Royal Society awarded him their Royal Medal for Natural Science in recognition of that work. Hooker sent him the news, describing the decisive Society meeting at which Darwin’s name was put in nomination, followed by “a shout of paeans for the Barnacles” that would have made the barnacle man smile. Several weeks later, Darwin actually went up to London to receive the award. Maybe he did smile. If so, it was just for a few minutes in public, before the excitement brought back his vomiting.

  The Royal Medal was “quite a nugget,” he mused privately. Bestowed for such a dry, conventional enterprise as barnacle taxonomy, it gave him a big new measure of scientific esteem and stodgy credibility. He had been garlanded by the establishment. With what was coming, he knew, he would need every leaf.

  17

  But the smile and the gold medal were unimaginable back in early 1849, as he tried to resume work on the stalked barnacles after his father’s death. His symptoms had returned. “Health very bad with much sickness & failure of power,” he told his diary. He limped along until March, then took desperate action. He packed up Emma, the children, the butler, the governess, and several maids, and went off to a water-cure establishment run by Dr. James Gully in the town of Malvern, in Worcestershire, near the Welsh border. It was a two-day journey by train and coach, a major logistical operation for such a group, including five young kids and a screeching infant (the latest little son, Francis). You had to be genuinely sick to think that this might help. Darwin had heard about Gully from friends and read the doctor’s book full of quackish ideas, The Water Cure in Chronic Disease. For lack of other options, he was ready to take the plunge.

  The theory behind Gully’s so-called cure was that excess blood, congested in vessels servicing the stomach, caused “nervous dyspepsia” such as Darwin’s. The solution to that, Gully thought, lay in drawing blood away from the stomach to the skin and extremities by means of cold water and friction, generating just enough chilly irritation to produce a rash. Wrapping the body in wet sheets had the additional benefit of lowering brain function, which also helped ease the stomach. Darwin was put on a daily regimen that included scrubbings with a cold wet towel, soaking his feet in cold water, drinking tumblers of cold water, wearing a wet compress against his stomach all day, heating himself into a sweat with an alcohol lamp before being rubbed again with cold towels, taking walks and naps between these torments, swallowing homeopathic medicines, and subsisting on a bland diet that excluded, as Darwin said, “sugar, butter, spices tea bacon or anything good.” At first Gully allowed him a little snuff, six pinches per day, then made him quit that habit altogether.

  Darwin grumbled about the diet and the snuff deprivation, and was skeptical of Gully’s belief in homeopathy (not to mention Mesmerism and clairvoyance, two of the doctor’s other enthusiasms). But he persuaded himself that the water-torture was working. Within the first eight days he was pleased to see an eruption of some sort broken out all over his legs. He went a month without vomiting, a notable stretch, and gained some weight. One day he even walked seven miles. “I am turned into a mere walking & eating machine,” he told Fox. A side effect of the treatment, he reported cheerily to another friend, was “that it induces in most people, and eminently in my case, the most complete stagnation of mind: I have ceased to think even of Barnacles!” Gully led him along with guarded assurances that Darwin could be cured, but that it would take time. How much time? Always a little more. After three and a half months at Malvern, the family returned to Downe, but Darwin brought some of Gully’s regimen with him. He ordered a showering hut built in the garden, with a raised cistern that could be filled from the well, and took a cold shower there around noon every day. Hours before that, first thing in the morning, he did a sweat session with the alcohol lamp, jumped into a cold bath, and then endured cold-towel scrubbing by Parslow, the faithful butler, who saw things during his thirty-five years with the Darwins that were almost as odd as barnacle sex.

  Darwin felt much better. He went back to his dissecting scope. For exercise, he bought a horse and started riding. He made plans to go to Birmingham for the annual meeting of the British Association, nearly inescapable since he was now a vice president. The problem with Gully’s cure, though, was its impermanence. At the Birmingham gathering, away from his alcohol lamp and cold showers, surrounded by social excitement and loud, pompous colleagues, he felt queasy again. Instead of going on a scheduled field trip, he skittered down to Malvern for a tune-up with Gully. Back home, he continued the water treatments and, to avoid overexertion, gave up all reading except newspapers. He allowed himself just two and a half hours each day on barnacles, spending much of his time cold and wet. No wonder the work went slowly.

  Within the next couple of years he returned to Malvern twice more. The first trip was another refresher visit for himself, a nice week in June, during which he divided his attention between wet towels and barnacles, and claimed that he’d gotten to like his own “aquatic life,” except for the incessant dressing and undressing. This time he didn’t congratulate himself for mental stagnation. His brain was alert, the monograph seemed to be progressing, people told him he looked well, and in an upbeat letter to Hooker he mad
e that comment about the mixed thrill of finding so much “confounded variation” within species of Cirripedia. The second trip was very different. He brought his oldest daughter, who was now mysteriously ill herself.

  Annie Darwin was ten, a bright and generous-hearted little girl with a special bond to her father. He loved her joyousness, he admired her goodness, he treasured her company. He confided to Fox that she was his favorite child. He would indulge her sometimes to spend half an hour arranging his hair—making it beautiful, she said—or fussing with his collar or cuffs. She would sneak him pinches of snuff when he was supposedly abstaining. She would dance along when he strolled the Sandwalk. “Her whole mind was pure & transparent,” Darwin wrote later.

  At age eight, Annie had suffered through scarlet fever, a life-threatening disease, but seemed to recover. Or maybe not quite. Six months later, her mother started noticing that she wasn’t right. Something came over Annie’s buoyancy like a cold afternoon shadow. She was fretful and intermittently feverish; she cried often, especially at night. They sent her to the resort town of Ramsgate, with the governess and her little sister Henrietta (known as Etty), for sea air and shell-collecting on the beach. They sent her to an eminent doctor in London. They bought her a canary. Nothing helped. Around Christmas, she started to cough. Darwin worried that she had inherited his “wretched digestion,” not knowing it was worse than that. On the misguided guess that nervous dyspepsia was troubling her girlish tummy, early in 1851 they put her on Dr. Gully’s water-cure regimen. With cold water from the household well, Annie got the same treatment as her father: wrapping, rubbing, foot-soaking, and frigid baths. She caught influenza, seemed to recover from her flu, but still wasn’t well. The cough lingered. Some days were better than others. In late March, Darwin packed her off to Malvern for the full Gully experience.

  Unidentifiable fevers were common in those years before the discovery of pathogenic microbes, when educated people still thought malaria was caused by miasmal vapors from swampy land and no one knew a virus from a hangover. Annie Darwin’s illness resembled her father’s in one sense: It was never conclusively diagnosed. A modern scholar named Randal Keynes (with a good feel for the family history and special access to some sources, being himself a great-grandson of Annie’s brother George) has made a compelling try at solving the riddle in retrospect. Keynes presented all the available evidence to four medical historians and asked for informed speculation. Their consensus was that Annie probably suffered from tuberculosis, which sometimes attacks the brain, the intestines, or other organs as well as the lungs. It was a dreaded killer in the nineteenth century, familiar as “consumption” or “phthisis” but not well understood, a bacterial disease that seemed to move like the angel of death. There was no cure (until antibiotics were developed), and if there had been a cure, dousing the patient in cold showers and wrapping her with wet towels wouldn’t have been it.

  But they didn’t know. Darwin escorted his cherished daughter to Malvern and left her there, with the children’s nurse, the governess, and little Etty for company, to Gully’s drenching care. After two weeks, Annie started to vomit, then fell into another fever and grew weak. Gully thought that she had passed through a modest crisis and would improve. She didn’t. Darwin was back home at Down House, probably hunched over his barnacles, when word arrived from Malvern that he’d better come quick. Emma was pregnant again, eight months along, so he went by himself, immediately.

  Annie’s condition over the following week is vividly documented in Charles’s letters to Emma, which reached Down House by overnight delivery. On Thursday, the little girl looked poor but “her face lighted up” at sight of her father. On Friday, her pulse steadied but she vomited badly, and “from hour to hour” she seemed to be tangled in “a struggle between life & death.” Emma’s own return note that morning, whatever it said, made Charles cry. Next day, Annie’s “hard, sharp pinched features” left her almost unrecognizable, but the fever was gone, and she sipped some gruel. Sunday was Easter, a fact of small interest or importance to Darwin, who didn’t mention it in his account of Annie’s continual retching. She hadn’t lost her sweet spirit, he reported; given a gulp of water, she said weakly, “I quite thank you.” And so on. It was a week of grim pathos. She died at noon on Wednesday.

  The scene around Annie’s deathbed, in the hours following, was chaotic as well as doleful. The governess immediately had “one of her attacks,” according to Charles and Emma’s sister-in-law, Fanny Wedgwood, who had come to Malvern to lend some support. The nurse was desolate and useless, too. As for Charles, “I am in bed not very well with my stomach,” he told Emma, at the end of his short note announcing Annie’s death. “When I shall return I cannot yet say.” He was confused and exhausted and depressed, as well as sick again, and in some small degree also relieved that Annie’s suffering had ended. “She went to her final sleep most tranquilly, most sweetly,” he wrote, trying to offer Emma some consolation. He mentioned God three times within the space of a page, allowing himself the rhetoric of conventional piety. “I pray God,” so he claimed, that an earlier note from Fanny had prepared Emma for the bad news. It’s unlikely that, in a literal sense, he had prayed God on any such point. “God only knows” what uglier miseries Annie might have suffered during a longer life. “God bless her,” he said simply. These comments are curious in light of his own disbelief (which solidified around this time) in a benevolent Christian deity. Annie’s funeral was set for Friday.

  He skipped it. Early on Thursday morning he grabbed some books, left behind his extra clothes, and caught a train for London. Making good connections, he was in Downe by evening. His excuse for this hasty getaway was that Emma needed him now more than Annie did, and that it would be soothing to his wife, in her delicate condition, if they could weep together. Maybe that was indeed the driving reason, and maybe not. Emma, for her part, had written back that he shouldn’t feel a need to hurry. But she’d agreed on one point: “We shall be much less miserable together.” Despite the theological disagreement, they were now deeply connected as lovers, partners, parents, and each other’s main source of emotional support in hard times. The only other human quite so dear to him had been Anne Elizabeth Darwin.

  On Friday, April 25, 1851, Fanny Wedgwood and her husband (Emma’s brother), along with the governess and the nurse, rode to the Malvern churchyard behind a hearse carrying Annie’s coffin. The nurse was so dispirited she had to be lifted into the carriage; the governess was more composed now, crying only intermittently. It was a small party of mourners. The younger sister, Etty, had long since been shipped away to other relatives. Dr. Gully didn’t attend. Darwin himself sat at home that day, writing Fanny a letter of thanks for encouraging him to leave Malvern and for handling the funeral arrangements. “Sometime,” he added, he would like to know in which area of the church graveyard Annie’s body was buried.

  The bare facts make him sound callous. He wasn’t. His emotions were dark and deep. But apart from his devotion to Emma, and his dependence on her, he had a strong instinct of self-protection. And he was now closing himself up like a barnacle.

  18

  The death of Annie in 1851, following the death of his father three years earlier, marks an important point in Darwin’s long, quiet disengagement from religious belief and spirituality. He avoided both funerals and left the requiescats to be spoken by others, not just because some physical or emotional weakness made him think he was unable to stand in black beside a coffin; he also seems to have considered those Anglican burial rites, with their assurances of resurrection into eternal life, false and pointless. Years later he told a pair of radical philosophers, who had begged an audience with him while they were in London for a freethinkers’ convention, and who were accommodatingly invited down for lunch, “I never gave up Christianity until I was forty years of age.” His fortieth birthday had fallen between the two deaths.

  What caused his loss of conventional religious faith, and how far he eventually shifted t
oward atheistic materialism, are complicated questions. To the two freethinkers, he said drily that Christianity was “not supported by evidence.” In his autobiography, he wrote that “disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete.” It crept so slowly, in fact, that he “felt no distress,” and had “never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct.” One contributing factor to his apostasy was the careful reading he’d done on philosophical and scriptural topics, ranging from Hume, Locke, and Adam Smith to James Martineau’s Rationale of Religious Enquiry, and from Paley, Herschel, and Ray to John Abercrombie’s Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers and the Investigation of Truth. He took some interest in the works of Francis Newman, a Latin professor whose elder brother, John Henry, had turned Catholic and would eventually become Cardinal Newman; Francis Newman’s spiritual journey went in the opposite direction, toward austere and skeptical Unitarianism. Darwin read Newman’s History of the Hebrew Monarchy, which critiqued the Old Testament for its dubious historicity, as well as his autobiography, Phases of Faith, and still another Newman book, The Soul, Her Sorrows and Her Aspirations, billed provocatively in its subtitle as a “natural history.” Such influences complemented Darwin’s own empirical disposition. He rejected the Gospels as revealed truth, the notion of eternal punishment for unbelievers (such as his own father and grandfather), the immortality of the human soul, Christian theology in general, and Paley’s old argument for the existence of an immanent personal deity from the evidence of clockwork nature. Special creation? Divine providence? Godly design? Darwin had found no support for those notions in biogeography, the taxonomy of barnacles, or the fates of certain innocent children. “Everything in nature,” he concluded coldly, “is the result of fixed laws.” Had an impersonal First Cause of some sort, a Supreme Being in the fuzziest sense, given rise to the universe and set it in motion according to the mechanics of those fixed laws? Maybe. For much of his adult life, including the period when he wrote The Origin of Species, that’s what Darwin felt inclined to believe. Later, “with many fluctuations,” he grew gradually more doubtful. It was impossible to know. The best way of describing his spiritual convictions or lack of them, Darwin declared in the autobiography, was to label him an agnostic.