The Reluctant Mr. Darwin

by David Quammen

  As for Darwin, he rebounded quickly from tragedy and despair. On Tuesday of the bad week, with little Charles dead and other household members in danger, he had told Hooker, “I am quite prostrated & can do nothing” beyond sending the excerpts. By the following Monday, he and Emma had packed off their healthy children to stay with her sister in Sussex, getting them clear of the house, while Darwin resumed his scientific correspondence. Work bolstered him if it didn’t (in excess) sicken him. That hadn’t changed.

  Work was his opiate, and science was his religion. He wrote to Asa Gray about bumblebees. He wrote to one of his pigeon contacts, asking for a young turbit he could pickle and measure. Mostly his thoughts were on natural selection: how to salvage his discovery, what to do next. The arrival of Wallace’s paper had jolted him into a new frame of mind. There could be no more procrastination. No more plodding perfectionism and encyclopedic amassment of facts. No more timidity. With nudging from Hooker, he seized the idea of writing a sleek “abstract” of his theory, short enough to be published in a journal. Not just a fragmentary piece of the logic and data, as Lyell had suggested (“pigeons if you please”) two years earlier; no, this would be a small version of the full conceptual edifice. And he’d be sole author, of course, not entangled in a partnership with Wallace. Yes, that’s it, he’d do an abstract. It could go to the Linnean Society Journal, for which Hooker played a guiding role. He set the big book aside and started fresh.

  The new plan, and the Wallace scare, gave him new energy. During a July getaway to the Isle of Wight, complicated by transferring seven children plus servants into a seaside villa, Darwin wrote for several hours each day. His approach in these pages was slightly more brisk, more personal than in the half-written tome. He forced himself to focus on essentials. Choose the key points, hit them clearly, move on. Pick only the strongest and most vivid of his illustrative facts. He tried to construct a beguiling argument that might carry readers along, rather than erecting a mountain of data that would crush them into surrender. He wrote conversably, in the first-person singular and sometimes the first-person plural: “When we look to the individuals of the same variety or sub-variety of our older cultivated plants and animals….” He even found himself enjoying the work, unusual for Darwin as a writer. He was telling a great tale, as he’d told a great tale in his Beagle book—and telling it not so much from his research portfolios as off the top of his head.

  This felt liberating, at least initially. Having resolved to pour his theory into an abstract, he vowed to do nothing else until it was finished. He mentioned as much in a letter to his friend Fox. I’ll send you a copy when it appears in the journal, he added jauntily.

  He tried to be severely concise. That wasn’t easy. Just a month earlier, panicked by Wallace, he had longed for the chance to publish a dozen-page summary of his views. Now he found himself unable to do justice to the subject in twelve pages or even in thirty or forty. There were too many angles. He knew too much. He’d need that many words just to cover variation in domestic species, only one topic among many he meant to include.

  The abstract was growing, he warned Hooker at the end of the month. It would be longer than expected. Returning to Downe in mid-August, he continued to write. He drew on his twenty-year archive of data, his notebooks and reference books and correspondence and portfolios stuffed with bits of loose paper—but he drew selectively now, striking a balance between factual evidence and persuasive discourse. He omitted footnotes and full citations of his sources. He mentioned other researchers and informants only passingly. His little piece on variation among chickens, dogs, ducks, and pigeons grew into a chapter. He finished a chapter on the struggle for existence and another presenting his central idea, natural selection. In autumn he took a week’s rest at a hydropathic spa—not Malvern, with its memories of Annie, but a closer place called Moor Park, in Surrey, with another flaky doctor treating his mystery illness. Then back to work. He wrote chapters on the laws of variation (as best he discerned them, which wasn’t very well), hybridization, instinct, some objections that might be raised against his theory, and other topics. By the end of the year, concentrating fiercely, churning out pages like a hack, calibrating the line between too much and too little, he had produced about half of what would be a 500-page book. He was still calling it his “abstract,” although soon it would be known as On the Origin of Species.

  He relapsed into bad health in February 1859, suffering “the old severe vomiting,” plus a swimming sensation in his head. “My abstract is the cause,” he figured. Probably so. During another visit to Moor Park, where he could forget about species, almost, and amuse himself reading novels, playing billiards, flirting jovially with young women at dinner, he got some relief. He favored junky romantic novels with pretty heroines and happy endings, but he also enjoyed Adam Bede. He liked the billiards so much that he eventually bought himself a table. Back in the traces at Downe, he had only two chapters to write, followed by revising, and then he’d be “a comparatively free man,” he told Fox.

  Free of what? Free of the burden of secrecy? Free of the fear of preemption? Free of the duty to publish? Never mind, it was the casual comment of a tired man. Free of this damn book, anyway. But he was wise to qualify it: comparatively free. He would never escape the responsibilities and tensions that came with his great idea.

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  Wallace got news of the arrangement, by letter, when he returned to his base in Ternate. There wasn’t one letter but two—from Darwin and from Hooker. Darwin’s contained Hooker’s as an enclosure, leaving Hooker to do the main explaining. Darwin was understandably abashed and tried to portray himself as a passive party swept along by events. (Later he would assure Wallace that “I had absolutely nothing whatever to do in leading Lyell & Hooker to what they thought a fair course of action,” a claim that was weaselly at best and arguably untrue, given his strong hints and lamentations to both men. He would also misstate the dating of his own excerpts in the Darwin-Wallace package, telling Wallace that they’d been “written in 1839 now just 20 years ago!” In fact, they’d been written in 1844 and 1857.) Both letters to Wallace have been lost, but Darwin mentioned elsewhere that he considered Hooker’s to be “perfect, quite clear & most courteous” in presenting the fait accompli.

  How did Wallace react? Picture a lonely, long-suffering, self-educated man on a tropical island. Opening his mail, he learns suddenly that his malarial brainstorm of months earlier has yielded a theory that some of Britain’s foremost scientists consider important—so important, even, as to be worth scuffling over. And he finds that, the scuffle having been settled without him, his allotted portion is a lesser half share of intellectual ownership and glory. His name is now famous, at least among the Linnean Society crowd; he has been recognized as a partner (a junior partner) with eminent, unimpeachable Mr. Darwin. His idea is launched, not just on the strength of his own arguments but with the authority of that unexpected co-discoverer. Well. Gracious sakes. It must have taken a few moments to sink in.

  Maybe he spoke aloud to his dried beetles. There was no one around, in Dorey, with whom he could really share the news. He must have reread the letters, once, twice, tasting the words. Possibly he felt a twinge of resentment. So: My brilliant idea is now ours. Then, more wisely and cannily, Alfred Wallace decided that he was delighted.

  The loss of sole credit was outweighed by another consideration: the honor, not to mention the practical advantages, of being welcomed as a colleague by these scientific insiders. To this honor Wallace responded gratefully, and with humility so dignified that in retrospect it seems almost smarmy. On October 6, probably just after receiving the two letters, he wrote to thank Hooker, endorsing the Linnean Society arrangement and declaring that it would have pained him if Mr. Darwin’s “excess of generosity” had resulted in Wallace’s paper being published alone. He was glad to know that Darwin had studied the same subject long and deeply. The more discussion of these facts and questions, the better. Too often a fir
st discoverer gets all the credit, Wallace said, to the exclusion of another researcher who arrives at the same results independently. (He was right about that. Scientists, more competitive than many classes of people, generally race one another to make and announce discoveries, and the politics of priority were already intense in Darwin’s day, even without grant-giving agencies and Nobel prizes. The adjudicated tie decreed by Hooker and Lyell went against standard scientific practice.) Notwithstanding its unusualness, their action had been “strictly just to both parties,” Wallace claimed to believe, but if anything too favorable to him. He also wrote to Darwin, saying roughly the same thing.

  That was his public response, anyway. Wallace’s private response was more revealing. On the same day as his letter to Hooker, October 6, he wrote to his mother, Mary Wallace, also back in Britain. He was bursting. He wanted to share with her his excitement at having just received personal communications from two of England’s most respected naturalists. He told her something (not much) about the circumstances—an essay he’d sent to Mr. Darwin, which was seen and admired by Dr. Hooker and Sir Charles Lyell, “who thought so highly of it that they immediately read it before the Linnean Society.” Actually, they hadn’t read it but only caused it to be read; that detail got lost in the telling to Mrs. Wallace. Anyway, who cared. It was read. And imagine: Darwin, Hooker, Lyell. In case his mother didn’t get the implications, Alfred added: “This assures me the acquaintance and assistance of these eminent men on my return home.” Look, Ma, he was saying proudly, I now have connections. And not only that—chips to play.

  In his autobiography, almost fifty years later, long after Darwin and Lyell were gone, Wallace would tell this part of the story a little differently. With a discreet editing stroke, he deleted his own hardheaded youthful opportunism. Quoting (but misquoting) the letter to his mother, he let himself say: “This insures me the acquaintance of these eminent men on my return home.” By that time he had found and accepted his place, second place, in the pantheon of British evolutionary theorists. He hadn’t had an easy life—no family money, no financial security, no institutional position, ever—but he was proud of his austere independence. That he had once coveted the “assistance,” not just the “acquaintance,” of powerful gentlemen was evidently discomfiting to recall.

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  In early May 1859, after just ten months of feverish work punctuated by short visits to the spa at Moor Park, Darwin finished a draft of his book. Chapter by chapter, it went to his private copyist to be made legible, and then to the printers in London. John Murray, whose publishing house had done Lyell’s books and the successful second edition of Darwin’s Journal of Researches, had agreed to publish it. Darwin began receiving proof sheets for correction at the end of the month and was appalled at how poorly his hasty prose read. The style was “incredibly bad, & most difficult to make clear & smooth.” He’d never claimed to be much of a writer.

  He revised heavily on the proofs, an expensive step in terms of additional typesetting costs, for which he offered to pay from his own pocket. His proposed title was deadly dull: An Abstract of an Essay on the Origin of Species and Varieties through Natural Selection. That reflected his lingering embarrassment at the absence of scholarly citations and the abridged selection of evidence; without full credit to sources and a full panoply of supporting data, Darwin felt, the work shouldn’t be considered—or labeled—anything but an abstract. Fortunately, Murray and Lyell persuaded him otherwise. Murray was in business for profit, after all, not to perform a money-losing public service, and An Abstract of an Essay on whatever, species origins or Chinese bordellos, just didn’t sound robustly commercial. In late September, when Darwin and Fox traded letters full of middle-aged grumping, Darwin reported that his health had been bad again but at least the book work was nearly done. Only an index to add, and then some revisions. “So much for my abominable volume,” he wrote, “which has cost me so much labour that I almost hate it.”

  On October 1, 1859, Darwin finished correcting the proofs. By his calculation the abominable volume had taken thirteen months and ten days of concerted writing effort, not counting time off for rest, travel, billiards, and vomiting. In mid-October he warned Hooker what to expect—that he’d gone to great lengths, positing species transmutation across the whole spectrum of living things because he could see “no possible means of drawing [a] line, & saying here you must stop.” This was a hint about his view of human origins. Although human evolution from other animals wasn’t explicitly asserted in the book itself, it was provocatively suggested. Lyell had already read the proofs and seemed staggered by the implications, Darwin said, but had been helpful with criticisms and supportive overall. Lyell was a brick. Darwin hoped Hooker would give candid feedback in the same vein.

  By now Darwin was getting some rest and hydropathy at another watery resort, Ilkley Wells, at the edge of a moor up in Yorkshire. The place offered billiard tables, like Moor Park, and a few notably good players who dazzled him with their skills at “the American game.” Some of them, he enthused to his son William, could make breaks of thirty or forty balls. The American game would have been one of several variants ancestral to what we call pool. And so, at this point, I suggest an imaginative pause to appreciate the tableau: Charles Darwin, having just completed the most consequential work of his life, seeking respite in the northern boondocks with a cue in his hand. He was known to smoke an occasional cigarette, for relaxation, in lieu of snuff, and maybe Ilkley Wells allowed that vice in the billiards room. Darwin takes a slow drag, holds it pensively, exhales. Squints through the smoke. Lays his smoldering cigarette fastidiously into an ashtray (certainly not on the edge of the table) and leans down. Crooks his index finger, sets his bridge. Six ball, gentlemen, he says; in the corner pocket. Tap…click…plop. “You cannot think how refreshing it is to idle away [a] whole day,” he told Hooker, “& hardly ever think in the least about my confounded Book, which half killed me.”

  That confounded book was now called On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The title wasn’t elegant but at least John Murray had convinced him to drop the word “Abstract.” Optimistically, Murray ordered a first printing of 1,250 copies. The printer’s bill for all those revisions on the proofs came to £72, a sizable chunk of cash, but Murray waived his right to deduct that from Darwin’s royalties, correctly foreseeing that cordial relations with this author would be worth more in the long run. Although the writing process had been torturous to Darwin—an almost hysterical fit of work after so many years’ delay—the blessings of forgetfulness came quickly and like a balm. He was still in Yorkshire when a first copy of the book reached him.

  Holding it in his hands, he felt an irresistible flush of satisfaction, his private reward between the anguish of creation and the anguish that would come with the book’s reception. He wrote immediately to Murray: “My dear Sir, I have received your kind note & the copy: I am infinitely pleased & proud at the appearance of my child.” Abominable or not, it was his offspring, and the pride of parenthood covers a multitude of misgivings. But Darwin had grounds for his satisfaction. Without yet knowing it for certain, without claiming it, without having enjoyed it, he had dashed off a magnificently potent book that would change the world.

  On November 22, several days before its official publication date, Murray offered it to booksellers. Based on what little they had heard about the contents, and on Darwin’s reputation, they snatched the book up, ordering 1,500 copies against the 1,111 copies (first printing minus promotional giveaways) that were available. This is the precise reality behind a loose statement sometimes made—that the first edition sold out on the first day. It more than sold out, yes, at the wholesale level. Trickling into the hands of individual readers took longer. Still, the trade sale was a very strong start. Emma sent the news in a note to William, at Cambridge, adding: “Your father says he shall never think small beer of himself again & that candi
dly he does think it very well written.” Murray promptly asked Darwin to get busy on a new edition, so they could reprint with some value added. Darwin got busy, making small corrections and revisions on the one copy he had in his hands.

  November 22, 1859, was a Tuesday. It’s an interesting day to consider, representing a nexus point between all the private turmoil that went into creating Darwin’s book and all the public turmoil that has followed from it. As of that date, based on Murray’s advance orders, On the Origin of Species was a commercial success, though few people had read it. Among those who had, reactions were mixed. A pre-publication review in one prominent journal, the Athenaeum, was caustically negative in a way that probably helped stimulate interest: “If a monkey has become a man—what may not a man become?” Never mind that nowhere in this work did Darwin say that monkeys had changed into men. He barely alluded to the subject of human origins. Oversimplification and scandal-mongering had begun even before the book hit the stores.

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  It’s safe to say that The Origin of Species (as it became known after Darwin himself dropped the On from a later edition) is one of the most influential books ever written. What printed works surpass it in reach and impact? Maybe the Bible, the Qur’an, the Mahabharata, and a few other scriptural texts that have inspired millions of people to piety and bloodshed. What stands in the same category? Maybe De revolutionibus orbium coelestium by Copernicus, maybe Newton’s Principia, and maybe, if you count journal articles, the two papers of 1905 and 1916 in which Einstein described special and general relativity. Unlike those other great works of science, though, The Origin is a book written in plain everyday language and meant by its author to speak to any attentive reader. Some of its grammatical constructions are a bit sinuous in the Victorian style; much of its writing is clear and crisp. Darwin was inconsistent as a literary stylist, sometimes bad, sometimes good, but even when bad he wasn’t esoteric. Occasionally he just tried to put too much into a single sentence, a run-on construction with syllogistic premises, qualifications, facts, stipulations, and conclusions all linked together by semicolons and dashes like a giant protein molecule folding back on itself. Once in a while he wrote something beautiful and brilliant. Mostly he was an amiable explainer and narrator presenting one of the more astonishing tales ever told.