Darwin's Origin of Species Read online

  That this did not happen was substantially due to the dramatic industrial development that we think of as characteristically Victorian. From the 1850s a new and varied economy soaked up excess capital and diversified the labour force. Only three years after the Chartist demonstrations, people poured into London to visit the Great Exhibition of All Nations housed in the Crystal Palace designed by Joseph Paxton. Factories boomed. Steam technology and carboniferous investment generated unprecedented feats of engineering, and advances in transport systems brought the possibility of progress to nearly every corner of the nation. Railways were ‘the ringing grooves of change’ to Alfred Lord Tennnyson. By the time Darwin published Origin of Species, everywhere there was diversification, specialization and improvement.

  This early fear of revolution is hard to recapture nowadays. There was widespread unease about any social or political activities that threatened the status quo. Prime among these were evolutionary notions: publicly to adopt trans- formist ideas was at that time to brand oneself as a dangerous political radical. Most notorious of all were the two men Darwin had already read, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) and his own grandfather Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802). Between the years 1798 and 1809, Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin had independently proposed that animals and plants were not directly controlled by a divine creator but spontaneously generated out of inorganic materials. Organisms then progressively advanced and diversified, they suggested, by adapting themselves to different environments. Both men believed that animals (and to some extent plants) became adapted by the use or disuse of various parts of their bodies and that these adaptations were passed on to the offspring – the inheritance of acquired characteristics, as it became known. They included humans in their schemes, and declared that humans would improve over time. Even the structure of society would be transformed. Other writers of the day played with the same idea, including the wit Thomas Love Peacock who made an orang-utan the gentlemanly hero of his comedy, Headlong Hall (1816).

  Generally speaking, Erasmus Darwin’s views were more accessible to the educated reading public than Lamarck’s closely argued academic tomes because they were published in vigorous rhyming poems glorifying fecundity, human ingenuity and invention. Twenty years later, with the atheistic doctrines of French philosophes still ringing in British ears, and the revolution and Napoleonic wars fresh in the memory, such opinions were frequently associated with anti-theological activism, public protest by the workers and subversive exhortations to overthrow a useless British aristocracy. Ideas like these circulated more or less underground in the medical circles that Charles Darwin briefly encountered at Edinburgh University. By contrast, Cambridge University, a training ground for the political establishment, took the lead in promoting an alternative: the clockwork universe of natural theology, the doctrine that Darwin had enjoyed as a young man but was ultimately to overthrow.

  The world to which Darwin returned seethed with change and ideas about change. He felt that he was changing too. The years that he lived in London were the most intellectually creative that he ever experienced.

  Naturally enough, he worked hard distributing his Beagle specimens to appropriate experts. Connections blossomed, publications were arranged. With Henslow’s help, Darwin obtained a Treasury grant to publish formal descriptions by experts of his animal collection in The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle (five parts, 1839–43). This handsome set of volumes was lavishly illustrated with hand-coloured plates and is one of the most attractive of Darwin’s publications. He simultaneously composed a lively travel narrative drawing on the daily diary he had kept throughout the five years of the voyage. Published in 1839, under the title Journal of Researches, now usually called The Voyage of the Beagle, this brought him renown as an author. The great Alexander von Humboldt wrote to him to call it ‘happily inspired’, an ‘admirable book… You have an excellent future ahead of you’. Such words from the man whom Darwin had idolized in his Cambridge days, and whose writings were generally regarded as the height of literary style, were praise indeed. The Journal of Researches remains the best-loved of all his writings.

  Darwin also joined the Geological Society of London, where he delivered three short papers describing some of his geological results and met Charles Lyell for the first time. Lyell was overjoyed to find someone who was so appreciative of his Principles of Geology and the two became close friends. Everything about Lyell’s personality chimed with Darwin’s. ‘I saw more of Lyell than of any other man both before and after my marriage… His delight in science was ardent, and he felt the keenest interest in the future progress of mankind. He was very kind-hearted and thoroughly liberal in his religious beliefs or rather disbeliefs; but he was a strong theist. His candour was highly remarkable.’1 The two men spontaneously began to see each other nearly every day. Within a few months of his return, Darwin had achieved his ambition of joining the elite world of metropolitan science as an equal: he was elected to the Royal Society, the Athenaeum Club (the influential gentlemen’s club in London) and the councils of the Geological Society of London and Royal Geographical Society. He ‘went a little into society’.

  All that was missing was a wife. Towards the end of 1838 Darwin felt established enough to propose to his cousin Emma Wedgwood whom he had known since he was a boy. She was the youngest daughter of the same uncle Wedgwood who smoothed his path on to the Beagle in the face of Dr Darwin’s objections a warm-hearted, good-natured and supportive woman who married him for love and cared for him through thick and thin ever afterwards. They made a close and contented couple, united by affection and an interrelated gang of cousins, sisters, brothers, parents, aunts and uncles, and eventually a large brood of children of their own. They were married quietly at the Wedgwoods’ home in Staffordshire in January 1839. Private income derived from mutual family investments enabled the couple first to live in London, and then, with the addition of a young family, in 1842 to purchase Down House and some twenty acres of land in the village of Downe, near Bromley in Kent. Darwin lived and worked at Down House for the rest of his days, a respectable and respected member of the village community.

  This was not all. Early in 1837, some four or five months after arriving back in Britain, Darwin became convinced that species originated without divine agency. Oddly enough, for all the historical research into Darwin’s breakthrough, it is not known precisely how or when this conviction came about. Of course, in some sense the genesis of any original insight is something of a mystery – all the greatest scientists have spoken of the unexpected way that a new thought or shift in perspective has dropped into his or her awareness. The words they use to describe this process, often akin to a revelation, or ‘new eyes’, seem to them inadequate for the effects that it precipitates. Mostly they agree that their minds were well prepared, often from years of thought, and that a multitude of factors brought them to that particular point, some personal, some intellectual, some circumstantial, some impossible to articulate, others deeply social and political. And of course historians have picked over Darwin’s manuscripts to identify crucial passages in his Beagle notes and his early London publications that hint at the way his mind was going. In a small notebook written round about then, he struggled to put embryonic ideas into words. The origin of species ought to be just as comprehensible as the birth of individuals, he wrote: ‘They die without they change, like Golden Pippins, it is a generation of species like generation of individuals… If species generate other species, the race is not utterly cut off.’2

  A sense of uncertainty emerged primarily from the Galápagos birds. These birds were classified in March 1837 by John Gould, a taxonomist from the Zoological Society, who also helped Darwin with his large illustrated book, the Zoology of the Beagle. Gould identified several species of ground finch, with beaks differently adapted to eat insects, cactus or seeds, and put the mocking birds into three separate species. These species probably lived one to each islet, but Gould could not be sure because Darwin had not labell
ed them with their location. Surprised, Darwin mulled this information over. If each island had its own birds, as Gould suggested, his shipboard speculations about the instability of species were truer than he thought. Perhaps the similarities could be explained if the finches had diversified from a common ancestor?

  He began recording a flurry of ideas in a series of private notebooks that he labelled A to E, and then M and N, now known as the Transmutation Notebooks. From the moment of opening Notebook B, around July 1837, he expressed the belief that some kind of evolution had taken place, not just among the Galápagos Island birds but involving everything, including humans. Entries in the notebooks tumbled over each other. Page after page, he built theories that stretched as far as his imagination would take him. Little of this would have occurred to the Cambridge undergraduate six or seven years before. The Beagle expedition naturally was the baseline for many of his speculations. Yet he also revisited Dr Erasmus Darwin’s theories, and pondered Lamarck’s writings. All the time he read voraciously and questioned knowledgeable contemporaries. Even before he devised the theory that ultimately appeared in Origin of Species, he saw important parallels between domestic breeds and wild species. That analogy was to remain at the heart of his work.

  From the very first, he regarded human beings as members of the animal kingdom and hoped to explain our origins without any reference to God’s creation, a theme that took him far into ‘metaphysics on morals’, as he called it. ‘Man from monkeys?’ he asked himself. ‘Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a deity. More humble and I believe true to consider him created from animals.’3 Some of these ‘mental riotings’, as he dubbed them, took him very far along the road of materialism, the philosophical doctrine of believing that there were no spiritual or divine forces in nature, only matter. If he denied the createdness of everything, where did that leave human beings and our hopes of salvation? Our thoughts are merely secretions of the brain, he alleged. ‘Oh you materialist!’ he exclaimed, half in admiration at his boldness.

  All along he sought an explanation for the way that animals and plants might actually change. This was dramatically brought into focus after he read in September 1838 An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) by the British economist Thomas Robert Malthus.

  Malthus’s intention was to explain how human populations remain in balance with the means to feed them – his essay was an important contribution to the social and political economy of Britain in the 1790s, presented as a rational examination of the natural laws of society. By the 1830s, his impact on British life had deepened far beyond what even he may have hoped, for Malthusian doctrines had come to dominate government policy. The argument was starkly simple. The natural tendency of mankind, Malthus said, was always to increase. Food production could not keep up. Yet there was an approximate balance, he claimed, because the number of individuals is kept in check by natural limitations such as death by famine and disease, or human actions such as war, sexual abstention and sinful practices such as infanticide. These checks, he claimed, were a necessary part of human existence. Malthus went on to say that such checks usually fell on the weakest – the poorest and sickest – members of society. It was God’s will that this should happen. One consequence, Malthus warned, was that giving charity to the poor would simply encourage more reproduction and greater food shortages. In decades to come, these opinions were reflected in food riots, controversy over the Poor Laws and public reaction against the Corn Laws. The passing of the Poor Law Amendment Bill in 1834 introduced the Victorian response to this social and economic issue in the shape of the workhouse, where local parish charity was replaced with people having to work for their bread.

  Darwin lived in this world too. He moved in broadly the same circles as Malthus, and was acquainted with some of the people who knew Malthus before his death in 1834, including Fanny Wedgwood (Darwin’s sister-in-law) and the author Harriet Martineau who wrote Malthusian tracts for the respectable classes. It is only to be expected that in the midst of this topical political concern over Malthusian issues that Darwin picked up a copy of the original book and settled down to read it.

  The moment was recorded in Notebook D in an entry dated 28 September 1838. Too many individuals are born, he paraphrased from Malthus. There is a war in nature, a struggle for existence. In the fight to live, the worst or weakest organisms tend to die first, leaving the better forms, the healthiest or better adapted. These survivors would be the ones that generally had offspring. If such actions were repeated over and over again, organisms tend to become ever more appropriately suited to their conditions of existence. He called the process ‘natural selection’, meaning a process in the natural world analogous to the ‘artificial’ selection that he saw farmers and horticulturists applying to domestic animals and plants. Farmers disposed of the worst and saved the best for breeding purposes in order to create a faster greyhound or a woollier sheep. In the wild, Darwin suggested, it was nature itself that did the selecting. In short, he hit upon a way of explaining Paley’s perfectly designed adaptations without any reference to a creator. ‘Being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence… it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.’4

  This was the essence of Darwin’s theory, scarcely to change except in one major point until it was published twenty years later in Origin of Species. He recognized its explanatory power, saying it would revolutionize the biological sciences. He acknowledged its religious implications, not only for the new vistas it opened up for the possible origin of mankind but also for the way it would deny any role for God in nature and challenge the natural theological traditions so firmly embedded in British life and institutions. These were hazardous views. They were the antithesis to the harmonious world of perfect adaptations preached by Darwin’s old friends and teachers like Henslow and Sedgwick. Even brave, forward-looking Lyell might object.

  For the moment, Darwin kept this theory secret. He realized the need to be cautious. It may have struck him as too sudden, too dangerous and unorthodox, too much in need of fuller and further reflection. He saw no need to rush into print. But he told Lyell that he was filling ‘note- book after note-book… with facts which begin to group themselves clearly under sub-laws’. Displaying extraordinary self-discipline he worked intensively on these ideas in private.

  Only his wife Emma was aware of his general notions. She knew Darwin had religious doubts. Even before they married she said. ‘My reason tells me that honest and conscientious doubts cannot be a sin, but I feel it would be a painful void between us.’5 She expressed the fear that science was leading him into ever-greater scepticism. Hesitantly, she suggested that Darwin’s doubts might prevent them meeting in the afterlife or belonging to each other forever. This letter was treasured by its recipient. ‘When I am dead, know that I have many times kissed and cryed over this’, Darwin wrote on the edge.6 There is every indication that by the time he was writing about natural selection in his notebooks – the same year that he married Emma – Darwin had dispensed with most formal religious structures while still believing in some supernatural force beyond human knowledge. He was not an atheist, however. In fact, it seems that he was never an atheist, not even at the height of the controversy that followed publication of Origin of Species. He said in his Autobiography that he thought about religion a good deal during these years, and that the term ‘theist’ was probably closest to what he felt. Later he called himself agnostic, a word coined by his friend Thomas Henry Huxley. Nor did Emma have anything to fear about his behaviour or sense of morality. He was basically a good man, humble and kind, and always did his best to act according to the traditional values that he had learned as a child.

  All this came at a terrible price. Slowly Darwin sank into chronic ill-health. From the time of his marriage, he increasingly felt nauseous and beg
an to suffer from recurrent headaches; occasionally he experienced bouts of actual vomiting, sometimes stretching over several weeks. There were long periods of unaccustomed weakness and debility. Whether this was directly related to his evolutionary ideas is hard to say. Such is usually assumed to be the case. To it might be added his religious qualms, a self-imposed punishing work schedule, the ceaseless publishing activities, duties in London’s learned societies and worries about the future. There is little evidence for physical causes for his ill-health such as arsenic poisoning, allergies, lupus or Chagas disease, a South American disorder transmitted by the black bugs of the pampas that Darwin may have picked up during his travels. Some 150 years later it is probably futile to try to diagnose his condition. For the rest of his life, apart from one or two brief interludes, ill-health was integral to his personality, work and lifestyle.

  Darwin tried the water cure for many years, where he followed a regime of wet-sheet packing, rubs, enemas and douches, mostly attending the famous Dr James Gully in Malvern but also visiting centres in Surrey and Yorkshire. Later he took professional advice for dyspepsia. Modern-day psychiatrists have remarked on the self-attentive, tightly- packaged personality that these medical encounters suggest. One curious consequence can be found in his ‘health diary’, a daily record of how he felt, that he kept for three or four years, marked up with symbols to indicate whether he felt ill, ‘very ill’, or merely ‘poorly’. Perhaps after the robust good health of the Beagle voyage, Darwin could never truly let go. By the time of his death, the whole family were almost professional invalids, plagued by weak pulses, nausea, chronic debilities, headaches and undefined stomach troubles. It seems unfair to lay these disorders solely at the door of a hypochondriacal parent, but this does seem likely.