Darwin's Origin of Species Read online

  This disorder, or constellation of disorders, has naturally intrigued historians. All seem to agree that Darwin’s ill- health in some way must have reflected pressures generated by the subversive theories he was developing in private. Scholars with psychoanalytic leanings tend to explore the motif of a creative malady or the ‘madness’ of genius. They call on the notion built into literary and artistic studies that works of great originality are usually produced in a state of intense mental turmoil – that creativity emerges from extreme emotion, often at the edge of sanity, or brings about the physical wreckage of the human frame as it gives birth to an artistic masterpiece. Yet it should also be acknowledged that Darwin’s letters during those years of thinking and writing never expressed any outright mental torment. Perhaps Freudians would propose that these feelings were sublimated. Darwin certainly experienced the fear of rejection mingled with a high anxiety that his life’s work might be damned or ridiculed, and that his evolutionary theory was, in effect, murdering the God of the ancients. If such feelings were tightly controlled in the Victorian domestic context then it seems entirely possible that Darwin should find the only possible way to express his alarm was through undiagnosed, sub-clinical disorders. Alternatively, a growing number of historians argue that Darwin suffered from some real bodily ailment and try to match modern illnesses to the symptoms he described so piteously in letters and diaries. Few agree on what it might be. There are consequently marked factions in scholarly circles, one group arguing for psychological reasons for Darwin’s illness, the other for physical causes. At root, they diverge over the definition of creativity and the role ill-health might play in inspiration and imagination.

  As time went by, Darwin cautiously described some of his evolutionary views to close scientific friends, gauging their reaction. In June 1842 he felt he had the shape of the theory sufficiently well formulated to write a short private sketch, which he expanded into a longer essay in 1844. One notable thing about these manuscripts was the absence of any reference to the origin of mankind and the creator. Possibly his talks with Emma about religion had motivated him to avoid discussion of human beings. Or he might have decided that he needed to know a great deal more before he could argue convincingly about mankind’s origins. Whatever the reasons, he systematically drained the manuscript of human beings, ensuring they did not return until long after Origin of Species was published.

  This essay of 1844 could easily have been published as it stood. Indeed, that was partly Darwin’s intention. He entrusted it to his wife with a letter to be opened in the event of his sudden death, stating that she should engage an editor to publish it posthumously. ‘If it be accepted even by one competent judge, it will be a considerable step in science,’ he said.7 Puzzlingly, however, he then put it to one side. It was never published in his lifetime. Was this a deliberate delay? Was he scared of publishing? Many people think so. And yet, in a sense, he was not in any hurry. Nowadays, in the light of all that is known about his personality and correspondence, it seems feasible to suggest that a strong commitment to scientific accuracy and a proper sense of scientific caution were at least as high in his mind as any fear of the consequences of publication. He did not feel ready. The scale and scope of his musings in the Transmutation Notebooks indicate the very wide range of investigations and topics that he thought were relevant. He had barely started to chip away at the surface of them.

  One striking event, however, gave him reason to pause. This was the publication in 1844 of an anonymous evolutionary book, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. This book dramatically changed the texture of debate on evolution – firing up the theologians, pushing secular thought uncomfortably into Victorian drawing rooms, inspiring violent criticism on the one hand, and fascinated attention on the other. Vestiges became a popular publishing phenomenon on a scale similar to Tom Paine’s Rights of Man. It raced across the English-speaking world in cheap editions and made a splash in other countries in translation. The unknown author wrote fluently of the self-generated development of the living world from specks of animate matter to men and women. Although the scientific content was on the whole weak, and the proposed mechanisms of change at times laughable, its general evolutionary thrust was clear. It was a book that tapped into the progressive aspirations of the age. One satirical cartoon published in Melbourne, Australia, caught the nub of the issue by showing the local Chinese workforce transmuting into Western gentlemen.

  Whether intrigued or disturbed, people discussed Vestiges intently in journals, parlours and meeting halls. Venomous scorn poured from Adam Sedgwick, Darwin’s old geology professor. Sedgwick accused ‘Mr Vestiges’ of making philosophy out of moonshine. The book was so uninformed, so inaccurate, so contentious and unsupported by proven facts, he ranted, that it could have been written by a woman. The real issue at stake, continued Sedgwick, was the origin of human beings and the moral status of mankind. Vestiges ignored the Garden of Eden, the creation of Adam and Eve, the expulsion from the garden and eventual covenant with God, and suggested that we came from orangutans.

  In fact, the author was not a woman, but Robert Chambers, a successful Scottish journalist who founded, with his brother, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, a weekly magazine containing numerous short articles on literature, science and industry, manners and morals, all interspersed with poems and stories. Robert Chambers was an enthusiastic proponent of self-education and the doctrine of phrenology, in which it was believed that an individual’s character could be read from the shape of the skull and that various faculties of the mind could be enhanced or reduced by willpower and training. Beyond this Chambers was deeply interested in the science of the day. His book deliberately discussed the things avoided by more conventional scientists, for example the possibility of insects being created by electricity. It was published anonymously because he knew the storm that would follow. When people afterwards said that evolution was in the air, Vestiges was what they meant.

  Darwin was stunned. Reading Vestiges in November 1844, so soon after completing his own essay on evolution, was a shock from which he took years to recover. In very broad terms, the general thesis in Vestiges was startlingly similar. Admittedly, Chambers set his proposals within a vast panorama of the cosmos, which Darwin did not plan to do. Admittedly, he included mankind, which Darwin studiously avoided. And many of Vestiges’s facts were incorrect. But the book grasped the essential principle of gradual, natural origins. Vestiges formed the closest to a rival that Darwin had as yet met. He was forced to acknowledge its influence, take account of its arguments, and show where he differed. Yet he must also have winced at the abuse raining down on the anonymous author. Was he in for the same treatment? One new friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker, chattered away in letters, saying that he was delighted by the multiplicity of themes that Vestiges brought together. Darwin was stung. ‘I have also read the Vestiges, but have been somewhat less amused at it, than you appear to have been,’ he said stiffly. ‘The writing and arrangement are certainly admirable, but his geology strikes me as bad, and his zoology far worse.’8 Obsessively, he began to build up his own edifice of dependable factual information that would be so much admired when he eventually published Origin of Species, and which lifted his book far above the ordinary.

  Over the next fifteen years or so, Darwin worked relentlessly to find support for his theory. Energetically he tackled a programme of experiments in his garden, especially taking up the hobby of breeding pigeons with the advice of a noted fancier, William Tegetmeier. Pigeons were his ‘current love’ he told Hooker enthusiastically, and a hit with the young family. In them Darwin sought direct observational evidence of the inheritance of traits such as black wing feathers or the reversion of fancy breeds back to an ancestral type. In a manner of speaking he tried the same thing with plants in the greenhouse, but here he was looking for evidence of variability and how incipient species became mutually sterile. Many of these experimental questions were raised by him in brief notices and arti
cles in popular natural history magazines. There was never a final conclusive experiment, evolution was not that sort of theory. Instead, Darwin continued to research and formulate new questions, consult printed literature and correspond across the globe with a vigour that would, with hindsight, amaze him when he came to write his Autobiography.

  As part of this extensive programme, Darwin studied barnacles. Nearly a barnacle himself by now, hunched in his study writing letters or compulsively making experiments in the garden, he hardly liked to leave home at all. He threw himself into a systematic inquiry into every known species of barnacle, living and fossil, an unusual initiative on his part that took him eight years to complete. Historians tend to smile at so much time spent on insignificant organisms and call it a sideline, a delaying tactic in order that Darwin might avoid confronting the furore that would arise out of publishing his other more wide-ranging evolutionary views.

  So it may have been. What he found in barnacles, however, brought important shifts in his biological understanding, strengthened his belief in evolution and provided an essential backdrop to Origin of Species. Every day, he looked at barnacle structures as the result of evolution. He searched for the tiny adaptations that made one form more successful than another, for the diversification that led to increasingly specialized forms, saw how one organ (such as the ovarian tract) could become adapted to perform an entirely different function (such as the cement gland) and scrutinized the unusual reproductive strategies of the group. Most important of all, this study of barnacles revealed the high rate of variation that occurred in nature. Yet Darwin never mentioned evolution in the barnacle monographs that he published in 1852 and 1854. It is only now that we can see just how heavily his assess- ments depended on concepts that he wished to keep private.

  The Royal Society of London was impressed. This premier society for science awarded Darwin its Royal Medal in 1853 for the barnacle books in conjunction with his publications on the geology of South America. Afterwards he was amused to be lampooned by the novelist Edward Bulwer Lytton as an absurdly preoccupied ‘Professor Long’. The work had taken so many years, indeed, that one of Darwin’s children believed that all fathers spent their days looking at barnacles through a microscope. ‘Where does your father do his barnacles?’ Leonard Darwin innocently asked a young friend.

  Tragedy struck in the midst of this quiet domestic activity. No Victorian was ever immune but death in the family hit Darwin and his wife deeply. Their second child, the daughter they called Annie, died in 1851 of an unidentified fever, aged ten years old. She was the apple of Darwin’s eye. By then the Darwins had had eight children: William (b.1839), Anne (b.1841), Henrietta (b.1843), George (b.1845), Elizabeth

  (b.1847), Francis (b.1848) and Leonard (b.1850). One little girl had died at only three weeks old in 1842; two additional sons would be born later, Horace in 1851 and Charles in 1856. Charles, the last, died from scarlet fever, aged about eighteen months. Annie’s death may have tipped Darwin finally into disbelief. The doctrines of the Bible in which Emma took comfort were hurdles that he could not jump. In a short memoir that he wrote for his and Emma’s eyes only, in which he praised Annie’s sunny nature, the despair can easily be read. How could a caring, beneficent creator extinguish such an innocent child? How could God make a child suffer so? His science told him that Annie was irretrievably gone. After this, Darwin turned back to his work with a new grimness – an edge of determination that helped him carry on where other men might have abandoned their studies.

  Even the keenest grief could not last forever, and Emma produced the next baby and other diversions eased into view, including the Great Exhibition in Joseph Paxton’s glittering Crystal Palace later in the year. During this period of study Darwin devised what he called ‘the principle of divergence’, the only major alteration that he made to the original theory of natural selection that he had formulated some twelve years before. It was an important innovation, for he needed it to explain how natural selection could produce the branches of the tree of life. With a leap of the imagination that might have been stimulated by the family visit to the Great Exhibition, he drew on industrialized England for a metaphor. Natural selection probably favoured those animals and plants that diversify, just as if nature were a factory bench at which production was more efficient if workers performed different tasks. This was an industrial analogy ubiquitous in the decades of specializing workforces, personally familiar to Darwin from the Wedgwood china company. The most successful variant, he said, was the one that could seize on unexploited places or roles in the natural economy. ‘I overlooked one problem of great importance… and I can remember the very spot in the road, whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me; and this was long after I had come to Down.’9

  These adjustments, and the long-term concentrated attention that Darwin gave to his idea, created the circumstances in which his theory could flourish. In his mind it was now robust. It could withstand publication. The long years of private reflection, he came to think, had fulfilled their objective. When a group of friends came for a weekend visit to Down House in April 1856, he felt ready to argue his case with them. All fairly critical of the biology of their day, these friends discussed the failings of current definitions of species with Darwin. They cheekily ‘ran a tilt at species’ said Lyell, hearing about the weekend afterwards. And when Lyell visited a few days later, he too fell into a deep discussion with Darwin about transmutation that he recorded in his diary. Lyell warmly encouraged Darwin to publish. Evolution was in the air, he said. He drew Darwin’s attention, not to Vestiges, although this was probably mentioned, but to an article in a popular natural history magazine by a relatively unknown naturalist called Alfred Russel Wallace (1822– 1913). Wallace discussed the relationships between varieties and species and – if one had the eyes to see – implied a real continuity between them. It was time for Darwin to publish, said Lyell. There were other men, other theories.

  The warning took root. ‘Began by Lyell’s advice writing Species Sketch,’ Darwin recorded solemnly in his diary on 14 May 1856. ‘I am like Croesus overwhelmed with my riches in facts,’ he went on to tell his cousin Fox, now a clergyman, ‘and I mean to make my Book as perfect as ever I can.’10

  CHAPTER 3

  Publication

  Despite Darwin’s measured calm, his book was actually born in crisis. The story has often been told. For more than two years he carefully composed a long manuscript, a big book that he planned to call ‘Natural Selection’. Few of his friends knew what he was doing, although his web of correspondents circled the globe, feeding his insatiable appetite for facts. Picking up a thin well-wrapped package one morning in June 1858, he wondered who could be writing to him from Ternate, an island in the Dutch East Indies halfway between Celebes and New Guinea. He hoped it might contain some news about exotic species. However, here in a short handwritten essay, the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace set out his own account of evolution by natural selection. The date that the essay arrived will never be known for sure. But late in the evening of 18 June 1858 Darwin wrote to Lyell to express his despair at being well and truly forestalled. ‘I never saw a more striking coincidence… if Wallace had my MS sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract!’

  Deeply surprised that someone else had come up with the same theory, he consulted his two closest friends, Lyell and Hooker, about what he should do next. Scientific convention and gentlemanly honour indicated that he should bow out and let Wallace take the credit. None the less Lyell and Hooker felt that Darwin should not lose his claim to be the originator of the theory. They were aware of the lengthy manuscript that Darwin was working on. There was room for manoeuvre, they insisted. They therefore proposed that they should send Wallace’s essay forward for publication along with a short account of Darwin’s own findings. There would be a double announcement and priority would be shared. Doubtfully, Darwin agreed. ‘I cannot tell whether to publish now would not
be base & paltry; this was my first impression, and I shd. have certainly acted on it, had it not been for your letter.’1

  This double announcement took place as suggested on 1 July 1858 at a meeting of the Linnean Society of London, the leading scientific society for natural history in Great Britain. As it happened, Lyell and Hooker were influential in the Society’s administration. They managed to rush the double paper on to the programme of an unexpected extra meeting that was taking place at the end of the season, rescheduled because of the death of the botanist and former president of the society, Robert Brown.

  Oddly enough, considering the content, there was little excitement among the small audience when the papers were read out loud by the secretary, although when they were published in the Society’s journal a few months afterwards several people recognized their likely impact. Neither Darwin nor Wallace was at the Linnean Society meeting itself. Darwin’s tenth child, still just a baby, was dangerously ill with scarlet fever and died on 28 June 1858, only two days before the announcement. As a loving father Darwin felt too wretched with grief to attend. Wallace was miles away in the Far East. Indeed, he knew nothing about it. With postal services to the opposite side of the globe taking three or four months, he had yet to receive the letter that told him that his essay duplicated another man’s work and was being made public in a twosome. When he did find out, he admitted that he was astonished. Courteous and mild by nature, he immediately wrote to Darwin and the others to say that he thought the publication arrangements were entirely satisfactory. Even though Darwin is usually characterized by biographers as generous and gentlemanly during this incident, the real generosity surely rests with Wallace, the unwitting catalyst for the commotion. Historians have often wondered subsequently if Wallace was short-changed, or even exploited, by the arrangements made by Lyell and Hooker and agreed by Darwin.