DARWIN CALCULATED THAT it took him two years to write The Descent of Man—three or maybe four if he included all his preliminary work on sexual selection and facial expressions. Inexorably, the number of pages kept increasing. In the end, the book was published in two thick volumes by John Murray in February 1871. “I shall be well abused,” its author murmured in uneasy anticipation.
The book had, in fact, taken Darwin a lifetime to produce. He did much more than simply flesh out his old conviction that humans had evolved from animals. He brought all his accumulated natural history knowledge to bear on the question of human ancestry, all his experience of the human condition as learned from the Beagle voyage and from his life as a naturalist, husband, father, and friend. He was at last dealing with what he once called “the highest and most interesting problem for the naturalist.”1 From the start, he perceived his “Man book” as a necessary counterpart to the Origin of Species. In it he would deliberately cross the last frontier of the evolutionary doctrine that he and Wallace had set out to establish.
II
As was customary, he did not work in isolation. What was new and useful, however, was that he was able to take advantage of the shifts in scientific focus brought about in part by his own Origin of Species and call extensively on the researches of naturalists and anatomists already operating within the Darwinian scheme, consulting Huxley, Haeckel, Broca, Quatrefages, Claparède, Vogt, Wallace, Galton, Lubbock, and Tylor on many different points. He found specialists to guide him through areas relatively unfamiliar to him, such as the study of insanity or the history of slavery, and was able again to exploit his system of correspondents across the globe, his reviewers, and members of his family circle.
His fame as an author helped. Nearly everyone was willing to assist him. “I read your last letter with very great pleasure,” wrote a government agent, William Winwood Reade, from Accra, on the west coast of Africa. “I should consider a letter from Darwin a treat anywhere—how much more so out here! I need scarcely say that anything I write to you is fully at your disposal. My only fear is that I cannot send you anything worth having.”2 Reade proved a useful source of anthropological information. And Darwin gave himself time to think about the work of his contemporaries in philosophy, language theory, and cultural history.
Sometimes it was relatively easy to pin down the facts that he wanted. Thomas Woolner, the sculptor, was one source who received a questioning letter. Darwin said he had noticed that Woolner’s statue Puck, displayed in the Royal Academy’s galleries, sported a fine pair of pointed ears and asked if Woolner had ever encountered such in real life. Woolner was sufficiently intrigued to spend a Sunday or two examining monkeys at the zoo and then (more discreetly) studying his human portrait commissions as they sat to him in profile. He sent Darwin a drawing of a human ear which showed a small inward projection on the upper rim, and suggested that this might be the folded remains of a pointed animal-like tip.3 Darwin was pleased. “The Woolnerian tip is worth anything to me,” he replied, and put it in his book straight away.4 Even a trifle like this, Darwin wrote, indicated close structural links between animals and humans. The time will come, he declared, when it will be thought absurd to believe that the human race and each species of animal were “the work of a separate act of creation.”5
He was less successful elsewhere. Fired by his research on plant and animal inbreeding for Variation Under Domestication, Darwin investigated the issue of cousin marriages through 1869 and 1870, hoping to establish the life expectancy of any children from such marriages. Admittedly, he aimed high. His ambitions for the “Man book” encouraged him to try to get a question about cousin marriages inserted into the 1871 population census, writing increasingly urgent letters to his political friends, John Lubbock, William Farr (at the registrar-general’s office), and Thomas Henry Farrer, among others, as the date for printing the census forms drew closer. “I am endeavouring to persuade Mr. Bruce to have inserted in Census [a] query whether in each household the parents are cousins,” he told Farrer in May 1870. “I am deeply convinced that this is an important subject: if you can influence any member of government, pray do so. Some few M.P.s will take up the question.—I have given my reasons in a Chapt in 2d. Vol. of my Domestic animals.”6
Darwin’s interest hung on the supposed dangers of long-continued inbreeding among humans. He envisaged that a simple question on the national census—whether the householder was married to his cousin—would allow a correlation between the number of cousin marriages and the number of living offspring. These figures would provide a rough estimate of fertility between close relatives. Over the next few months he managed to persuade Lubbock to put a motion before the House of Commons and sought the backing of William Farr, the medical statistician who had done so much to bring the data collected by the registrar-general’s office into useful form. Darwin had previously corresponded with Farr about medical statistics and received from him on loan large volumes of printed reports on the diseases of the nation. Farr indicated that he might agree to Darwin’s request. One Sunday in the summer of 1870, said Emma, “the bell rang after lunch & in came Dr Farr about the census. Ch. had been rather done up thinking it was Snow [Julia Wedgwood], but it was wonderful how he revived & enjoyed talking & settling with him.”
Darwin could scarcely have hoped to achieve this aim without friends in high places—an aim that reflected his standing in Victorian England. There was at that time no explicit tradition of medical questions on British census forms, or even religious affiliation, although information on the age, occupations, and marital status of every occupant of every household was required. From 1851 the forms had, however, included a question about physical disabilities of sight, hearing, and speech. As it happened, Darwin’s request was part of an escalating medical trend, and the 1871 census was due to be extended by Parliament to incorporate a question about “lunatics, imbeciles and idiots,” introduced by Farr at the request of eminent doctors. This question lasted for only one census and would be dropped in 1881. Householders were not willing to supply the information. Boldly, Darwin approached the Liberal home secretary, Henry Austin Bruce, afterwards Lord Aberdare, with his own proposal.
Lubbock put the motion on the agenda in July 1870 and read out to the House of Commons a letter from Darwin on the issue, possibly the first time that a biologist’s opinions were formally announced in that company. “As you are aware, I have made experiments on the subject during several years,” the letter began.
It is my clear conviction that there is now ample evidence of the existence of a great physiological law, rendering an enquiry with reference to mankind of much importance. In England & many parts of Europe the marriages of cousins are objected to from their supposed injurious consequences; but this belief rests on no direct evidence. It is therefore manifestly desirable that the belief should either be proved false, or should be confirmed, so that in this latter case the marriages of cousins might be discouraged. If the proper queries are inserted, the returns would show whether married cousins have in their households on the night of the census as many children, as have parents who are not related; & should the number prove fewer, we might safely infer either lessened fertility in the parents, or which is more probable, lessened vitality in the offspring. It is moreover much to be wished that the truth of the often repeated assertion that consanguineous marriages lead to deafness & dumbness, blindness &c, should be ascertained; & all such assertions could be easily tested by the returns from a single census.7
The request was turned down, with at least two members of Parliament intimating that that it would be a dangerous precedent to satisfy the curiosity of “speculative philosophers.” It is entirely possible that several members of Parliament were themselves married to cousins, as indeed Queen Victoria had been married to hers, and the proposal may well have looked like unnecessary personal intrusion. Darwin’s influence had its limits. Lubbock felt personally responsible for the failure. “Do not you think you might get most of what you want by an enquiry at one or two of the largest idiot asylums?” he forlornly ventured.
In actual fact, Darwin did make a stab at contacting the physician John Langdon Down, who worked at the Royal Earlswood Asylum for Idiots in Redhill. Langdon Down (whose career focused on congenital mental disorders and who gave his name to Down’s syndrome) had written a short article for Nature in 1870 suggesting that inbreeding might be harmful. “A methodical and judicious selection in the marriage of close relations would be of enormous value to the community in the improved race of man that would by that means be obtained,” Langdon Down claimed.8 This was precisely the point that Darwin was attempting to verify with the authority of numbers. The result of his contact with Langdon Down is unknown.
He discovered an unexpected ally in his son George. Ever since Galton’s book Hereditary Genius, George had been intrigued by Galton’s proposals about inherited ability. Such proposals meshed with George’s interest in genealogy, and he had been happy to prepare family pedigree charts for Galton. Taking his father’s part, George complained bitterly about the unfavourable verdict of the House of Commons. “The tone taken by many members of the House shows how little they are permeated with the idea of the importance of inheritance to the human race.”9
Nothing came of Darwin’s plan, and he was obliged to let his book on mankind go ahead without the statistical data for which he had hoped.
When the principles of breeding and inheritance are better understood, we shall not hear ignorant members of our legislature rejecting with scorn a plan for ascertaining by an easy method whether or not consanguineous marriages are injurious to man.10
Pensively, he continued living out his own life with his cousin Emma, unsure of the burden of heredity he might have imposed on his own children.
III
His theory and his personal life were by now so closely intertwined that it was becoming difficult for him to maintain scholarly detachment. While preparing The Descent of Man he quarrelled irrevocably with a young naturalist of his acquaintance, St. George Mivart.
Mivart was a talented evolutionary biologist who had quickly become a favourite of Huxley’s despite the potential for discord that lay in Mivart’s unwavering commitment to Catholicism. At first Mivart ignored Huxley’s theological taunts, believing they represented, in this instance, a form of rough-and-tumble affection. But in 1869 or so, Mivart parted company with Huxley and the close-knit band of Darwinians, coming to view the group as a dictatorial, self-regarding clique, a powerful brotherhood of older men at the summit of their careers who insisted that acolytes ought to adopt their position and advance the new biology in toto. In many ways Mivart read the situation accurately. The inner ring of private clubs and societies which ran scientific London—the X Club, the teaching laboratories and museums in South Kensington, the philosophers and parliamentarians in the Metaphysical Society and Athenaeum Club—were closed to outsiders. The members were influential people who kept a firm grasp on the tiller of scientific progress. Huxley enjoyed his cliques and believed that small groups of “right-minded men” were by far the most effective way to get things done.11
Mivart wanted none of this. All through 1869 he published renegade evolutionary articles in the Catholic periodical the Month on “difficulties of the theory of natural selection,” maintaining that Darwin’s ideas could not explain the whole of nature. He dwelled on awkward anatomical cases such as the close resemblance between Australian marsupial “wolves” and European wolves, or the similarities between the eyes of cephalopods and vertebrates. It was hard to explain these similarities as coincidence. “To have been brought about in two independent instances by merely indefinite and minute accidental variations, is an improbability which amounts practically to impossibility,” Mivart stated. Like Asa Gray he opted for theological compromise, arguing that there must be some higher guidance in the process of variation that provided an element of design or direction in the evolutionary process. Underneath ran scarcely veiled contempt for the inflexible position of the Darwinians.
Darwin liked Mivart when first introduced to him and welcomed the young man’s obvious ability as a natural scientist. He felt bewildered, and then betrayed, by these critical articles, for it seemed to him that Mivart deliberately ignored anatomical points when they did not suit, and that he twisted Darwin’s words solely to make the older man look foolish. With sinking spirits, Darwin wondered if Mivart might become another thorn in his side, another Owen. Intemperately, he let his feelings show. He accused Mivart (behind his back) of too much Catholicism, of being overly clever with words as if he were a Jesuit priest in training. When Mivart pointed out the unlikelihood of any intermediate steps in evolution, Darwin snapped back, “If a few fish were extinct, who on earth would have ventured even to conjecture that lungs had originated in a swim-bladder?”12 From time to time, Mivart wrote conciliatory letters to Darwin stating the high regard he felt for the Origin of Species. Darwin regarded the letters as two-faced.
When Mivart pulled his articles together in 1870 for a book called The Genesis of Species, published just before Darwin’s Descent of Man, Darwin felt the facts were being distorted for religious benefit. He covered his copy with bitter remarks. “I utterly deny,” “What does this mean,” “You cd. not make a greyhound & pug, pouter or fantail thus—it is selection & survival of the fittest.” The last straw came when Mivart claimed in print that Darwin had shifted his ground on blending inheritance in the previous edition of the Origin of Species merely in order not to lose face. “Not fair,” Darwin moaned in the margin.13
He found it astonishing that Mivart could still write letters to him. Blindly crashing onwards, Mivart rashly explained, “My first object was to show that the Darwinian theory is untenable, and that natural selection is not the origin of species,” a point of view that was unlikely to improve relations.14 Exasperated, Darwin confided in Wallace.
You will think me a bigot when I say, after studying Mivart, I was never before in my life so convinced of the general (ie. not in detail) truth of the views in the Origin. . . . I complained to Mivart that in two cases he quotes only the commencement of sentences by me, and thus modifies my meaning; but I never supposed he would have omitted words. There are other cases of what I consider unfair treatment. I conclude with sorrow that though he means to be honourable, he is so bigoted that he cannot act fairly.15
Irritated by Mivart’s defection, Darwin then came to dislike him. Catholicism was a convenient enemy here, representing to Darwin every outmoded tradition, superstition, and ritual that he felt should be forcibly expelled from modern life. While perfectly prepared to tolerate the low-key formulae of the Church of England, and an admirer of the social values of several of the clergymen he came across, such as Henslow, Innes, and Kingsley, he easily reverted to the unthinking anti-Catholic prejudice of the English middle classes. Nearly everyone Darwin knew regarded Roman Catholicism with distaste or horror. His friends and family could sympathise with him about Mivart’s supposedly outrageous Jesuit tricks. In his mind’s eye he saw Mivart opposing him not with the arguments of science but with bells and incense.
Faced with Darwin’s disapproval, Mivart tried to retain some dignity.
I herewith close this correspondence & will say nothing even in this letter calculated to annoy you in the least. I am exceedingly sorry to have caused you mortification & I protest, in spite of all you may think, I have, do and shall feel more than “friendly” towards you.16
For a moment Darwin seemed to be losing his grip. He lost patience with Frances Power Cobbe as well when their paths briefly crossed in Wales during that same summer of 1869. The Darwins and London Wedgwoods went as a family party to stay in Caerdeon in the Barmouth estuary. On the way home after this holiday, Darwin went to Shrewsbury for a last look at the old house and gardens, an occasion he experienced with relative equanimity. At Caerdeon he felt miserable. Hampered by a bad leg, he could scarcely get out on the hills or enjoy the clear Welsh air. “I have been as yet in a very poor way; it seems as soon as the stimulus of mental work stops, my whole strength gives way. As yet I have hardly crawled half a mile from the house, and then have felt fearfully fatigued. It is enough to make one wish oneself quiet in a comfortable tomb.”17
It was on one of those half-mile crawls that Darwin encountered Miss Cobbe. He was peacefully alone on a hillside when he was spotted. Without any preliminaries, Cobbe bellowed at him over the turf a question about John Stuart Mill’s theories on inherited instincts. Startled, but polite, Darwin began a recondite discussion about Mill at the top of his voice, stopping short in embarrassment when a friend came by. Cobbe laughed about “words flying in the air which assuredly those valleys and rocks never heard before” and dubbed the track the “Philosopher’s Path.”18 Unnerved, Darwin chose his walks more carefully in future. Privately he asked William to read up on Mill and tell him what to think.
Cobbe soon afterwards offended him by publishing extracts from one of his letters in the Echo, the campaigning newspaper with which she was associated.19 Darwin had written to Cobbe telling her about his interest in a particular case of miscarried justice in the Bromley region, and mentioning that he had also written a letter in his capacity as a local magistrate to the home secretary (Henry Bruce, Lord Aberdare). Clever editing made him look as if he were publicly criticising the Kent magistrates and offering to set up a subscription fund to “ensure even-handed justice,” a situation he hotly denied. Darwin never trusted her again. This odd pair were afterwards permanently estranged over the antivivisection movement when Cobbe attacked Darwin’s defence of the use of animals in scientific experiments. After Darwin’s death, Emma felt obliged to refuse Cobbe permission to reprint the magistrates’ correspondence in her Autobiography. She published it anyway.20
If Mivart and Cobbe were not enough, there was Wallace still claiming that natural selection did not apply to humans, urging his scientific friends to attend seances, devotedly chasing the spirit world with photographs, heat detectors, and electric recording devices. “I must add that I have just re-read yr article in the Anthropol. Rev. & I defy you to upset yr own doctrine,” Darwin groaned.21
He felt the pressure of alternative stories mounting. The Duke of Argyll’s creative evolutionism was gaining ground. Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Biology and his Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative integrated evolutionary concepts with political, social, and religious ideas already attractive to contemporaries. Galton’s critiques of pangenesis were published. Between 1869 and 1870, Darwin’s work was reviewed in fifty-two significant journals, some 15 percent of all the reviews he received in his lifetime,22 and scores of other evolutionary books and pamphlets had been published in the twelve years since the Origin had first been issued. Mudie’s Circulating Library made a point of distributing many of these, indirectly making it possible for even the most geographically isolated readers to have an opportunity to acquaint themselves with issues of the day.23
There was a lot for Darwin to keep in mind, a lot to reformulate and squeeze into shape. Above all, there was the endless problem of propriety. In his “Man book” he was tackling Adam and Eve directly. For twelve years, Victorians had debated whether natural selection could—or should—explain human origins. Many reviewers thought that such matters were not a legitimate area of study. The dawn of humanity was a matter for theologians, they said, not for naturalists. In order to counter this view, Darwin needed to demonstrate beyond doubt that humans were as much a part of nature as any animal.
He began to feel sick with effort and worry. “Pins and needles” kept him from working, he explained to Henry Bence Jones. “Everything has been of late at a stand still with me, for I have not had strength to do hardly anything,” he told Hooker. “With respect to my own book, the subject grows so, that I really cannot say when I shall go to press.”24 Perhaps out of desperation, he bought cigars in 1870 as well as snuff and cigarettes, paying nearly £5 to his London tobacconist.25
Still, he felt it was time to be frank. “Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamps of his lowly origin,” he wrote in his “Man” manuscript.
The early progenitors of Man were no doubt once covered with hair, both sexes having beards; their ears were pointed and capable of movement; and their bodies were provided with a tail, having the proper muscles. . . . The foot, judging from the condition of the great toe in the foetus, was then prehensile; and our progenitors, no doubt, were arboreal in their habits, frequenting some warm, forest-clad spot. The males were provided with great canine teeth, which served them as formidable weapons.26
IV
While he wrote and worried, his younger children were making their separate ways. Francis (Frank) had followed George to Trinity College Cambridge, first reading mathematics and then turning to natural sciences and graduating in this subject in 1870. The natural science tripos, dating from 1851, had been reformulated in 1861, and it was to be completely restructured in 1871 in tandem with the opening of laboratory and museum facilities, an indication of the gathering pace of high Victorian scientific concerns.27 At Cambridge, Francis made friends with a number of young evolutionists and physiologists who admired his father’s work. After his degree he came into contact with Michael Foster, the charismatic new lecturer in physiology, and turned to medicine. He went to St. George’s Medical School in London, taking an M.B. in 1875, but never practised as a doctor.
Next in the family, Leonard had joined the army straight from school and went to Woolwich Military Academy to train as a military engineer. He interested himself particularly in photography and became a useful member of surveying expeditions. Horace, the youngest, whose schooling was constantly interrupted by illness, had gone to a private tutor before entering Trinity like his brothers. He began in 1868 but did not take up his place immediately because of ill health and spent six years acquiring a degree rather than the customary four, graduating in 1874. Leonard’s and Horace’s entries into these institutions was poignant. Leonard chose the army because he thought himself the stupidest of the children, at one point inquiring of Darwin if a man could hope to develop into a genius after the age of twenty.28 Horace similarly underestimated himself by thinking he was good only for mechanical occupations. Darwin wrote to Horace’s university tutors to say how physically frail the boy was and how cautiously his education must procede. Their father’s doubtful attitude probably did little to encourage confidence. “I have been speculating last night what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things,” Darwin told Horace in 1871, after he passed his first examination at Cambridge. “Many men who are very clever—much cleverer than the discoverers—never originate anything.”29
Darwin’s second daughter, Elizabeth (Bessy), was rather more of a silent entity. She had been an unusual child, given to what Darwin referred to as strange “shivers & makes as many extraordinary grimaces as ever.” Her speech was sometimes confused, according to Emma, and her pronunciation peculiar, although the letters she wrote from school and during visits abroad show little sign of this. “She was not good at practical things,” said a member of the following generation who was very fond of her, “and she could not have managed her own life without a little help and direction now and then.”30 In her early twenties at this point, she looked likely to remain at home with her parents.
In any case, the children interested and pleased Darwin. “When all or most of you are at home (as, thank Heavens, happens pretty frequently) no party can be, according to my taste, more agreeable, and I wish for no other society,” he was to write in his Autobiography.31 The feeling was evidently reciprocated. When the boys came to visit in large sociable parties, accompanied by university friends, with dances, horses, billiards, and bicycle excursions on their united minds, they brought welcome noise and dash to the old house.
Nevertheless, they discovered Darwin’s growing fame could be an imposition at times. George, Francis, and Horace mixed with a number of university people who were coming to base their professional trajectories on Darwin’s theories. They learned to bow graciously to the pressures of celebrity life at one remove and must sometimes have wondered whether they received social invitations because they were called Darwin, never quite certain if they could make a career on their own, often speculating that colleagues were fishing for an invitation to dine at Down House. Their father’s writings shadowed every conversation. Francis met the Origin of Species in his university curriculum, for example, as a practical result of Alfred Newton’s and Henry Fawcett’s enthusiasm for evolution by natural selection. In the natural science tripos examination in 1871, the year after Francis graduated, Newton asked biology candidates: “What are the objections to the Cuvierian subdivisions of the class Aves? What progress has been made towards a more natural and satisfactory arrangement of the class?” The best answers would include some discussion of Darwin’s proposals. Fawcett was explicit (and rather more testing) in the moral sciences exam: “How do you consider that the leading principles of the Darwinian theory stand in relation to the doctrine of Final Causes?”32
At Down House, these younger members of the family were obliged to share their Sunday lunch with Darwin’s followers. Visitors were sometimes an unintentional source of amusement. Henrietta always found Ernst Haeckel’s eccentric turn of phrase funny, especially the time when he commended London banquets with the words “I like a good bit of flesh at a restoration.” Emma regarded the guests with a mix of resignation and good humour. “Today we had a thorough Yankee,” she remarked in 1871. “He is a sort of jackal of Appleton the publisher, and so amusing we all had great difficulty in avoiding laughing, and did not dare look at each other.” At other times, visitors were an encumbrance. Each son and daughter appeared to accept Darwin’s theories unquestioningly and was able to contribute to the conversation. Even Emma, who may never have really accepted his views although managing to live with them comfortably enough, was a willing and polite hostess to dedicated evolutionists. As is often the case with the families of the famous, his wife and children became swallowed up in his renown. Deep down, Darwin’s sons and daughters were forced to accept that he was not just their father. He belonged to everybody.
Up to a point, Darwin’s children were hardly conscious of the consequences of their involvement until they began making their own progress in life. They were, of course, used to assisting Darwin in any number of minor tasks at home. As they became adult, however, Darwin’s growing fame transformed what would otherwise be small family chores into useful contributions of which each could be proud. Gradually Darwin drew them into his tactics for the public dissemination of his views.
When George took Bessy to Paris to meet a gang of Wedgwoods for a holiday in 1869, for example, Darwin asked him to make social calls on some of his evolutionary correspondents. Of these, Jean Louis Quatrefages was by far the most helpful to him, although never accepting Darwin’s doctrines.33 “Vous êtes incontestablement le chef de toutes les théories transformistes,” he wrote to Darwin in 1869. “J’ai été heureux d’exprimer, publiquement tout l’estime que je porte en vous à l’homme et un savant.” Darwin was keen that his French friends should understand the depth of his gratitude. Obediently George sent up his card to Quatrefages (“a tall good looking man with grey whiskers & a kind of beard”), who paid him so much attention that George began to think that “it must have been me after all who wrote the Origin.”34
Then in May 1870, when Darwin and Emma visited Cambridge to see Francis in his final year as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Darwin discovered that he could mingle easily with the young naturalists of the future. He and Emma stayed in the Bull Hotel, admired the spring greenery along the Backs, and lunched in Francis’s college rooms. Darwin paid a scientific call on the Cambridge ornithologist Alfred Newton, who had adopted Darwinian theory, and he made sure to talk with the embryologist Frank Balfour, brother of Arthur Balfour, the future prime minister, and already a noted experimentalist. Francis afterwards invited Frank Balfour to Down House for a weekend visit, and Darwin liked him enormously. “A young Mr. Balfour, a friend of my son’s, is staying here,” he wrote to Galton later that year. “He is very clever & full of zeal for Nat. Hist.—He has been transplanting bits of skin between brown & white Rats, in relation to Pangenesis!35 Darwin warmed to him as a friend of his son’s and as a good biologist. Family feeling was easily translated into scientific respect and vice versa.
During the same Cambridge visit, Darwin plodded off to see his old professor of geology, Adam Sedgwick, in Trinity College. Sedgwick had lost none of his animation. Well into his eighties, he walked and talked Darwin into the ground while disclosing that he had found it impossible to forgive his former pupil when the Origin of Species was published.36
On Monday I saw Sedgwick who was most cordial & kind: in the morning I thought that his mind was enfeebled; in the evening he was brilliant & quite himself. His affection & kindness charmed us all. My visit to him was in one way unfortunate; for after a long sit he proposed to take me to the Museum; & I could not refuse, & in consequence he utterly prostrated me; so that we left Cambridge next morning, & I have not recovered the exhaustion yet. Is it not humiliating to be thus killed by a man of 86, who evidently never dreamed that he was killing me.—As he said to me “Oh I consider you as a mere baby to me.”37
The two made their peace over the Origin. But “Cambridge without dear Henslow was not itself.”
The inevitability of these work-based family connections was to emerge similarly in the summer of 1871. Darwin sent George and Francis to the United States for a vacation tour accompanied by a number of introductions to all his American correspondents. The boys established valuable personal contacts for him among the transatlantic Darwinians. Furthermore, in a hotel in San Francisco, two guests saw the name Darwin in the registration book and called on them. One of the men had lunched with Darwin a year or two beforehand at Erasmus’s house in London.38
V
While he was writing The Descent of Man, Darwin’s growing celebrity took a fresh turn. In 1870 he received a letter from Lord Salisbury, the chancellor of Oxford University, awarding him an honorary degree, the D.C.L. (Doctor of Civil Law), the highest public honour that the university could bestow.
He was taken aback. Oxford was the last place from which he might have expected to hear. The university was renowned for its high church religiosity and conservatism in all matters scientific. It, after all, had been the setting for Huxley and Wilberforce’s duel. Darwin’s old opponent John Phillips still ran the Museum with careful attention. Holman Hunt was about to install his painting called Light of the World in Keble College chapel, and Burne-Jones his stained-glass window of Saint Catherine in Christ Church Cathedral. Hunt had “a holy horror of Darwin,” exclaimed his friend Edward Lear.39 At the same time, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, mathematics tutor at Christ Church and author of Alice in Wonderland, was drawing on the dons and internal politics of university life for inspiration. The Duchess in Alice in Wonderland was the very image of Bishop Wilberforce. “If everybody minded their own business,” she growled, “the world would go round a deal faster than it does.”40 In short, Darwin could not imagine an institution less likely to appreciate the cool rationalism of his work. Nevertheless he did have acquaintances in some of the new science departments, including Henry Acland, professor of medicine, George Rolleston in anatomy, and the younger Benjamin Brodie, professor of chemistry, a freethinker who refused to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles.
It turned out that the honour came directly from Lord Salisbury, a well-known doctrinal reactionary. Yet Salisbury was also a cultivated man of the old school, widely read in the humanities, soon to become leader of the Conservative party and ultimately (after Disraeli’s death) Queen Victoria’s favourite prime minister. In more incidental fashion, he was the uncle of the biologist Frank Balfour at Cambridge and a distant relation by marriage to the Allen side of the Wedgwood family. (“Will George be back for the Hatfield ball?” asked an Allen aunt after hearing of an invitation to the Salisburys’ mansion. “Lady Salisbury is recollecting her cousinhood very graciously.”) Trying to put Oxford science more firmly on the map, even though he felt that the universities should teach nothing contrary to scripture, Salisbury nominated Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall for his first batch of honorary degrees. In retrospect, it seems clear that the new rationalism was by now acceptable even to Lord Salisbury.
But the Hebdomadal council—the ruling body of dons—erupted. Edward Pusey, the high church ritualist, took Salisbury’s proposal as an outright attack on faith. Angrily, he put forward three alternative nominees. When Benjamin Jowett opposed Pusey’s nominees solely to spite him, Henry Acland and Henry Liddon attempted to talk Pusey into accepting the original nominees. “I wish to keep clear of the question whether Darwin’s inferences are correct,” Acland told Pusey. “It is Darwin’s exceeding eminence and his character as a working man that justify and require me to beg you respectfully to pause before bringing about his rejection here.”41
As it turned out, Pusey said he was not “against Darwin” or even science as such. He occasionally discussed evolutionary matters with Rolleston, the university professor of anatomy, and later delivered a thoughtful sermon reconciling science and revelation. It was Huxley who irritated him. He allowed himself to be persuaded about Darwin as long as Huxley’s name was dropped. The whole business was probably a fair reflection of how Huxley and Darwin were individually regarded by the theological establishment of the day—one acceptable at a pinch, the other emphatically not.42
Huxley took mischievous delight in his rejection.
There seems to have been a tremendous shindy in the Hebdomadal board about certain persons who were proposed; and I am told that Pusey came to London to ascertain from a trustworthy friend who were the blackest heretics out of the list proposed—and that he was glad to assent to your being doctored, when he got back—in order to keep out seven devils worse than that first!43
Darwin’s degree was never awarded. Even though it was announced in the Daily News on 20 June 1870, Darwin wrote back to Salisbury saying that he was too ill to make the journey to Oxford for the ceremony. Since honorary degrees were awarded only in person, Darwin seemingly took a conscious decision to refuse the honour. After he received Huxley’s letter, the circumstances were probably now so fraught in his mind that his immediate reaction was to withdraw, despite Huxley’s declaration that “I wish you could have gone to Oxford, not for your sake, but for theirs.” Darwin apparently did not wish to be used as a political tool. Altogether more buoyant, Huxley took advantage of the changed situation and slipped a paragraph into Nature gloating that Darwin “declined the compliment” from Oxford.
Some of the Oxford dons were not prepared to let Darwin get away so easily. In a previously unnoticed Hebdomadal motion, Liddon proposed that Darwin’s degree be conferred in absentia, a concession that would require a separate resolution and another vote of council. This took place. The vote was a tie, and according to the rules, not passed. In effect, Darwin’s degree was withdrawn and Salisbury was defeated.
Darwin never expressed any regrets about turning the Oxford degree down. But he was at a loss to explain himself. When Bartholomew Sulivan, his old friend from the Beagle, wrote to congratulate him on the honour, he could only say, “I shall this autumn publish another book partly on Man, which I daresay many will decry as very wicked.—I could have travelled to Oxford, but could no more have withstood the excitement of a commemoration than I could a ball at Buckingham Palace.”44
Huxley, on the other hand, relished rejecting the university’s Linacre professorship of anatomy when it was offered to him in 1881, and then refused the mastership of University College Oxford, because, as he patronisingly said, of his being “too busy.” But he caved in when offered an honorary degree in his own right in 1885. He accepted this with alacrity. “I begin to think I may yet be a bishop,” he purred in gratification.
VI
Meanwhile Darwin struggled onwards with his book. “Many interruptions,” he noted in his diary. Judging from the final product, he was trying to do too many different things. In order to show that humans were incontrovertibly members of the animal kingdom, he presented a barrage of information about the natural history of mankind drawn from a wide variety of sources. He also worked his way through the links between the mental faculties of animals and humans. He then discussed language, morals, and music. Most significantly, he gave his views on “sexual selection,” an important development in his schemes that accounted, as he thought, for the diverging physiques and behaviour patterns of males and females, animal or human. Towards the end, he argued that this notion of sexual selection could explain the origin of human geographical diversity, perhaps even the foundations of human civilisation itself.45 The result was a book packed with details that more or less obscured the important points he was trying to make.
He opened the attack by stating that “there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.” He substantiated this with a series of cameo observations of animal behaviour, ranging from horses that knew the way home to ants that defended their property, chimpanzees that used twigs as implements, bower-birds that admired the beauty of their nests, and cats that dreamed of rabbits in their sleep.46 The domestic nature of Darwin’s observations in this area, the large doses of willing anthropomorphism, his evident delight in traditional country pursuits, and the glimpses he provided of the congenial home life of a Victorian gentleman, “these fairy tales of science,” as Frances Power Cobbe was to call them, probably went some of the way towards softening readers before he confronted them with the shock of apes in the family tree.
A large part of his book was dedicated to discussing the animal origins of the faculties that make humans feel fully human—language, reasoning ability, morality, self-consciousness, the religious sense, memory, and imagination. “No one supposes that one of the lower animals reflects whence he comes or whither he goes—what is death or what is life, and so forth. But can we feel sure that an old dog with an excellent memory and some power of imagination, as shewn by his dreams, never reflects on his past pleasures in the chase? and this would be a form of self-consciousness.”47
Explaining the power of human speech was obviously critical for him, not only because the gift of language was intrinsic to the definition of being human, but also because linguistics and comparative philology then held a leading position in academic scholarship. By the 1870s, there had developed something of an evolutionary swing in the specialist study of linguistics, where ideas about the “descent” of words were generating fruitful insights into the histories of languages.48 The imagery moved both ways. Lyell had illustrated the value of parallels between languages and the fossil record in his Antiquity of Man, and Darwin also mentioned them in various editions of the Origin of Species, praising his cousin Hensleigh Wedgwood, F. W. Farrar, and the German philologist August Schleicher for their identification of the telltale vestiges of ancient languages in words of the modern day. Groups of languages could be classified by relationship, just like species, and the presence of rudiments both in languages and species “is remarkable.” Darwin was interested to hear by letter that Haeckel had given a copy of the German translation of the Origin of Species to Schleicher in 1860, and that Schleicher reconstructed the genealogy of Indo-European languages partly in imitation of Haeckel’s evolutionary trees.49 Schleicher joked to Haeckel that philologists were much better at tracing ancestral connections between words than evolutionists were with animals.
But the genealogy of tongues was somewhat different from the emergence of human speech. Darwin particularly wished to contest Friedrich Max Müller’s view that the faculty of language presented an insuperable barrier between animals and humans. Müller had said as much when reviewing a translation of Schleicher’s pamphlet on “Darwinism tested by the science of language” for Nature in 1870.50 Darwin had come to believe that the ability to speak must have emerged quite differently, in a gradual fashion from the social vocalisations of apes, and was developed further in early human societies through the imitation of natural sounds.
As monkeys certainly understand much that is said to them by man, and as in a state of nature they utter signal-cries of danger to their fellows, it does not appear altogether incredible, that some unusually wise ape-like animal should have thought of imitating the growl of a beast of prey, so as to indicate to his fellow monkeys the nature of the expected danger. And this would have been a first step in the formation of language.51
Darwin was similarly daring when dealing with religion. Taking his cue from the cultural anthropologist Edward Tylor, he mapped out a comparative evolution of the religious sense, proposing that religious belief was ultimately nothing more than a primitive urge to bestow a cause on otherwise inexplicable natural events. At first, dreams might have given rise to the idea of spirits, as Tylor suggested, or to animism, where plants and animals seem as if they are imbued with spirits. Darwin suggested that these beliefs could easily grow into a conviction about the existence of one or more gods who directed human affairs. As societies advanced in civilisation, ethical values would became attached to such ideas. Polytheism would turn into monotheism. “Strange superstitions and customs” would give way to the “improvement of reason, to science, and our accumulated knowledge.” Darwin was careful to separate this instinctive urge to believe from any developing moral feelings. By keeping the two separate he could show the biological roots of both, circumventing critics who might argue that higher moral feelings were bestowed by a single omnipotent deity. In short, he made no secret of his view that he did not believe religion to have any rational foundations at all. Human beings have a biological need to believe, he suggested. Audaciously, he compared religious devotion to the “love of a dog for its master.”
He cautiously tried out these views first on his more thoughtful friends and relatives, taking a chance visit to the Wedgwoods in London to consult his niece Julia (Snow) Wedgwood. “F is hard at work on the moral question of man,” said Emma in 1870, “& had talks with Snow about defining religious feeling, in which she only admitted love & reverence & left out fear, but owned she was mistaken after all. F is deeply interested in the question & I wish it was over as it absorbs him too much & he had to lie by one day.”52
As for morality, he could not resist pointing out that the concept was only relative. Long observational experience with household pets, and no doubt with his children as well, told him that living beings had to learn the difference between “good” and “bad” behaviour—the knowledge was not innate. Members of “primitive” societies similarly held very diverse ideas about behaviour. In this he cited the way that some tribes adhere to value systems that shocked Europeans. If honey-bees ever became as intelligent as humans, he continued wickedly, unmarried females would think it a “sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering.”53
Of course, Darwin proposed this for effect rather than logical necessity, because he went on to argue that the higher human values emerged and spread only as human civilisation progressed, meaning that duty, self-sacrifice, virtue, altruism, and humanitarianism were acquired fairly late in human history and perhaps not to the same degree by all tribes or groups. Some groups displayed these qualities more than others, he noted; and it is clear that he thought there had been a progressive advance of moral sentiment from ancient societies (such as ancient Rome), which he said were “barbaric,” to the polite world that he personally inhabited. “How little the old Romans knew of [sympathy] is shewn by their abhorrent gladiatorial exhibitions. The very idea of humanity, as far as I could observe, was new to most of the Gauchos of the Pampas.” In this manner, he kept the English gentry to the front of his mind, and the mind of his readers, as representative of all that was best in nineteenth-century culture. The “higher” values were, for him, self-evidently the values of his own class and nation.
Even the sense of duty was for him biologically based in the social instincts. “The highest stage in moral culture at which we can arrive, is when we recognise that we ought to control our thoughts.” To be sure, Darwin praised the intrinsic nobility of this moral feeling, quoting Immanuel Kant. “Duty! Wondrous thought, that workest neither by fond insinuation, flattery nor by any threat . . . whence thy original?”54 Yet he claimed even the feeling of duty might emerge from animal sources. As he described it, a monkey who voluntarily sacrificed herself for her offspring would not only ensure her children’s survival but also supply the next generation with the hereditary “gemmules” that favoured such action again. His social values came into play. Personally, he declared, he would rather be descended from a heroic little monkey that sacrificed her life than from a savage “who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practises infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.”55
Plainly, although he rejected the outward trappings of the established Anglican religion, he subscribed wholeheartedly to its underlying values and the presumed onward march of civilisation. Like Wallace, and so many other contemporaries, he believed in the hierarchy of nations.
Obscure as is the problem of the advance of civilisation, we can at least see that a nation which produced during a lengthened period the greatest number of highly intellectual, energetic, brave, patriotic, and benevolent men, would generally prevail over less favoured nations.56
But in truth, he found it difficult to give an actual biological ancestry to humans. Briefly he tracked humans back as far as the Old World monkeys (Catarrhina), saying that the human species must have diverged from the original monkey stock considerably earlier than anthropoid apes, probably at a point close to now-extinct forms of Lemuridae. He further recognised the great apes as humanity’s nearest relatives. Darwin knew very little about fossil monkeys and could name only Dryopithecus, the largest fossil ape identified in the deposits of Europe at that time. He knew almost as little about fossil mankind, making only a passing reference to the Neanderthal skull, still a disputed fossil. For the second edition of The Descent of Man he asked Huxley to fill this gap with an up-to-date essay about fossil finds. He could only guess at possible reasons for human ancestral forms to have abandoned the trees, to lose their hairy covering, and to become bipedal. Nevertheless, he used Haeckel’s work in this area to push the primate line back through marsupials, monotremes, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes, ending up at the ascidians, grandfathers of them all. Darwin wrote that Aleksandr Kovalevsky had informed him of his researches into vertebrate ancestry at the Zoological Station in Naples.
The larvae of Ascidians are related to the Vertebrata, in their manner of development, in the relative position of the nervous system, and in possessing a structure closely like the chorda dorsalis of vertebrate animals. It thus appears, if we may rely on embryology, which has always proved the safest guide in classification, that we have at last gained a clue to the source whence the Vertebrata have been derived.57
At the end of his discussion of the human family tree he paid tribute to the variety and depth of Haeckel’s learning, declaring that if Haeckel had published earlier his Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (1868, English translation 1870), in which he discussed the genealogy of mankind, Darwin would not have pursued his own volume on the same subject.
This was a startling ancestry to propose. Yet even the most traditionally minded would see something admirable in Darwin’s absolute sincerity. William Darwin Fox regarded his cousin’s work with interest. He was not as surprised as he felt he ought to be. It was a curious situation for him—as a country parson—to have a dangerous author as a friend and relative.
I suppose you are about to prove man is a descendant from Monkeys &c &c. Well, Well!—I shall much enjoy reading it. I have given up that point now. The three main points of difference to my mind—were that Men drink, smoke & thrash their wives—& Beasts do not. . . . I do not think even you will persuade me that my ancestors ever were Apes—but we shall see. I have no religious scruples about any of these matters. I see my own way clearly thro them—but I see many points I cannot get over, which prevent my going “the whole Hog” with you. . . . Why do not you & Mrs. Darwin run over here, when you have finished your Book—& you can study my little Apes & Apesses.58
VII
At the centre lay Darwin’s idea of sexual selection. This was his special contribution to the evolutionary story of mankind, his answer to Wallace, Lyell, and others, and to all the reviewers and critics of the previous twelve years. “I do not intend to assert that sexual selection will account for all the differences between the races,” he wrote in his book. Nonetheless, he felt certain that it was “the main agent in forming the races of man.” Sexual selection was “the most powerful means of changing the races of man that I know.”
In brief, Darwin claimed that human beings were like animals in that they possess many trifling features that are preserved and developed solely because they contribute to reproductive success. Just as peacocks had developed tail feathers to enhance their chances in the mating game, so humans had developed characteristic traits that promoted individual reproductive success. These traits were fluid, changeable, and not directly related to adaptation and survival. But Darwin pushed this claim far beyond the mere acquisition of secondary sexual characteristics. By these means he thought he could also explain the divergent geographical and behavioural attributes of human beings, such as skin colour, hair texture, maternal feelings, bravery, social cohesion, and so forth. Preference for certain skin colours was a good example. Men would chose wives according to localised ideas of beauty, he suggested. The skin colour of a population would gradually shift as a consequence.
Similarly, sexual selection among humans could enhance mental traits such as maternal love, bravery, altruism, obedience, hard work, and the “ingenuity” of any given population; that is, human choice would go to work on the basic animal instincts and push them in particular directions.
The strongest and most vigorous men—those who could best defend and hunt for their families, and during later times the chiefs or headmen—those who were provided with the best weapons and who possessed the most property, such as a larger number of dogs or other animals, would have succeeded in rearing a greater average number of offspring than would the weaker, poorer and lower members of the same tribes. There can also be no doubt that such men would generally have been able to select the more attractive women. . . . If then the several foregoing propositions be admitted, and I cannot see that they are doubtful, it would be an inexplicable circumstance if the selection of the more attractive women by the more powerful men of each tribe, who would rear on average a greater number of children, did not after the lapse of many generations modify to a certain extent the character of the tribe.59
In effect, humanity made itself by producing and preserving differences, a process that broadly mirrored his understanding of artificial selection in which farmers chose traits for “use or ornament,” impressing their own taste or judgement on organisms.
He ventured onto thorny ground when he analysed human societies in this way. His naturalism explicitly cast the notion of race into evolutionary and biological terms, reinforcing contemporary ideas of a racial hierarchy that replicated the ranking of animals. And he had no scruple in using the cultural inequalities between populations to substantiate his evolutionary hypothesis. Darwin certainly believed that the moral and cultural principles of his own people, and of his own day, were by far the highest that had emerged in evolutionary history. He believed that biology supported the marriage bond. He believed in innate male intellectual superiority, honed by the selective pressures of eons of hunting and fighting.
To avoid enemies, or to attack them with success, to capture wild animals, and to invent and fashion weapons, requires the aid of the higher mental faculties, namely, observation, reason, invention, or imagination. These various faculties will thus have been continually put to the test, and selected during manhood. . . . Thus man has ultimately become superior to woman.60
The possibility of female choice among humans hardly ruffled the surface of his argument, although he repeatedly claimed that female choice was the primary motor for sexual selection in animals. Primitive societies, he conceded, may be matriarchal or polygamous. However, he regarded this as an unsophisticated state of affairs, barely one step removed from animals. Advanced human society, to Darwin’s mind, was patriarchal, based on what was then assumed about primate behaviour and the so-called “natural” structure of civilised societies. For Darwin, it was self-evident that in civilised regimes men did the choosing. A limited number of women might sometimes be in a position to choose their mate (he was perhaps thinking of heiresses, or royalty, or beautiful heroines in novels). But his vision of mating behaviour was an explicit expression of his class and gender. His personality was evident too. His description of courting practices in The Descent of Man gave a romanticised picture of “rustics” at a country fair, “courting and quarrelling over a pretty girl, like birds at one of their places of assemblage.” For him, Victorian males set the evolutionary compass.
Try as he might, he could not escape the complications of his work. “I find the man-essay very interesting but very difficult; & the difficulties of the Moral sense have caused me much labour,” he told Asa Gray in 1870.61 He was anxious about breaking new ground in so many different areas. Above all, he wanted to get these notions about sexual selection absolutely right. “Sexual selection has been a tremendous job,” he wrote to Wallace. “Fate has ordained that almost every point on which we differ shd. be crowded into this vol.”62
VIII
At last he finished and dispatched the manuscript to John Murray, his publisher. Murray flinched a little at the subject matter. Despite his familiarity with Darwin’s unorthodox topics and his determination not to let them stand in the way of a successful business relationship, this book on human ancestry rattled his belief in the Bible story rather more than the Origin of Species had done. Gingerly, he asked his friend Whitwell Elwin for his opinion and was not surprised at the blast that came back by return of post. Elwin was no longer editor of Murray’s Quarterly Review but he still possessed the principles of a country clergyman. “It might be intelligible that a man’s tail should waste away when he had no longer occasion to wag it,” he roared, “though I should have thought that savages would still have found it useful in tropical climates to brush away insects. . . . The arguments in the sheets you have sent me appear to me to be little better than drivel.”63
Murray partly agreed. Bit by bit, in his spare time in the evenings, the publisher began piecing together a scientific commentary of his own, a modest criticism of Lyell and his associates that he called Scepticism in Geology, published in 1877 under the nom de plume “Verifyer,” in which he politely, but decisively, disassociated himself from the secular natural history he had successfully placed before the public. Murray was neither a radical nor a conservative in religious affairs, being middle-of-the-road, and his personal dilemma over the age of the earth and “natural development in other branches of natural history” surely reflected at least some of the discomfiture of many of Darwin’s more ordinary readers. Insofar as Murray ever let his personal opinions show, this was it. He answered back.
Henrietta Darwin was evidently made of sterner stuff, for she corrected the proofs of Descent of Man while she was in the south of France with her cousins Edmund and Lena Langton, scarcely turning a hair at her father’s blunt talk about sexual display. In asking her to do this, Darwin relied on her editorial competence. When Thomas Farrer met Henrietta at a social event in London later that winter, he “chastised” her humorously on Darwin’s behalf for being out on the town enjoying herself when The Descent of Man was not yet published.
Henrietta had first read proofs for her father when she was eighteen and he was producing Orchids; and he had increasingly leaned on her during his long illness from 1864 to 1866. All members of the family were accustomed to help with his books in one way or another. Francis remembered how his father would correct proofs first in pencil, and then in ink, getting the younger children to rub out the pencil marks afterwards. Emma sometimes copied manuscripts for him, a point substantiated by one of the few surviving pages of the original manuscript of The Descent of Man being in her handwriting.64 She would read proofs, too, although “chiefly for misprints and to criticise punctuation; & then my father used to dispute with her over commas especially.” Henrietta’s role as editor grew naturally out of the rest. She was good at it. “He often used to say what a good critic Hen. was, & would sometimes laughingly quote her pencil notes, such as ‘this sentence is horrid.’”65 There is little evidence to suggest that Darwin used her merely as a convenient feminine censor, or as a ready-made moral vigilante, helping him to identify in The Descent of Man any hint of nineteenth-century impropriety.
On the contrary, she tightened his prose, wrote comments in the margin, and indicated passages that were hard to understand. These were all tasks he felt unable to ask his men friends to undertake. A friendly appreciation of each other’s intellect began to emerge, a mutual sympathy enjoyed by both of them. Strictly demarcated as their intellectual input was, Darwin evidently valued his women for their advice as well as their labour.
He could not stop himself issuing a slew of fatherly instructions.
My dear H.
Please read the Ch. first right through without a pencil in your hand, that you may judge of general scheme; as, also, I particularly wish to know whether parts are extra tedious; but remember that M.S is always much more tedious than print.—The object of Ch. is simply comparison of mind in men & animals: in the next chapt. I discuss progress of morals & c. . . . I do not send foot-notes, as I have no copy & they are almost wholly mere authorities.—After reading once right through, the more time you can give up for deep criticism or corrections of style, the more grateful I shall be.—Please make any long corrections on separate slips of paper, leaving narrow blank edge, & pin them to margin of each sheet, so that I can turn each back, & read whilst still attached to its proper page.—This will save me a world of troubles. Heaven only knows what you will think of the whole, for I cannot conjecture.—You are a very good girl indeed to undertake the job. . . . (I fear parts are too like a Sermon: who wd. ever have thought that I shd. turn parson?)66
Henrietta must have cut a curious figure abroad, spending the morning correcting her father’s account of sexual selection, then putting on a bonnet and shawl to stroll along the promenade in “wicked Monaco,” the fashionable gambling resort and centre of the European beau monde. This dual experience probably did more to mould her views about human relationships than any other before her marriage. She liked working with her father and felt she understood his arguments. In fact, she surely learned more about men’s biological urges than her parents ever expected her to know. It is clear from the few proof sheets that are still in existence that she read the whole manuscript, ranging from the sexual attractiveness of beards to the numerical proportion of the sexes.
“Your corrections & suggestions are excellent,” Darwin assured her. “I have adopted the greater number, & I am sure that they are very great improvements.—Some of the transpositions are most just. You have done me real good service; but by Jove how hard you must have worked & how thoroughily [sic] you have mastered my M.S. I am pleased with this chapter now that it comes fresh to me.” He signed himself “Your affectionate, admiring & obedient Father.”67 Afterwards he gave her a gift of £30 from the profits as acknowledgement of the help he had received. “Several reviewers speak of the lucid, vigorous style, &c. Now I know how much I owe to you in this respect, which includes arrangement, not to mention still more important aids in the reasoning.”68
Notwithstanding these womanly interventions, Emma Darwin experienced misgivings about the book’s subject matter. “I think it will be very interesting, but that I shall dislike it very much as again putting God further off,” she sighed to Henrietta. These thoughts were not shared with Darwin. Husband and wife were probably too set in their individual ways for any discussion on the point to have made a difference. They each knew the other’s position. Moreover, they both apparently felt easier confiding in Henrietta. Even so, Emma also read the proofs of the Descent of Man with a conscientious desire to be helpful. She warned her husband of the dangers of too much anthropomorphism. “F. is putting Polly into his Man book but I doubt whether I shall let it stand,” she remarked. Only a wife could be so candid about a favoured example. Polly was Henrietta’s dog, a small terrier, as devoted to Darwin as Darwin was to her. “A fond grandfather is not to be trusted,” declared Emma robustly.69
Shortly afterwards Darwin discovered that his publisher was apprehensive about the subject too. Apes, reproductive behaviour patterns, and human beings in the same book struck John Murray as a recipe for disaster.
It is with a view to remove any impediments to its general perusal that I wd. call your attention to the passage respecting the proportion of advances made by the two Sexes in Animals. I wd. suggest that it might be toned down—as well as any other sentences liable to the imputation of indelicacy if there be any.70
Surprised, Darwin inquired which passages Murray found indelicate. When these were disclosed, he changed them into direct quotations from the original authors. A month later, Murray was back with worries about the title. Darwin’s proposal had been simple—“On the Origin of Man.” But Murray wanted something less provocative, something more closely related to the contents, more explanatory for intended purchasers. He rejected Darwin’s next suggestion, feeling that the word “sexual” could not be used on a title page. “The Descent of Man & Selection according to Sex,” would be much better, he proposed, and would “get rid of an objectionable adjective.”71 It was later changed to “in relation to sex.”
This time around, Murray prepared a number of special copies for Darwin to present to his friends. These Darwin signed personally, full of warm regard for the men who had come such a long way with him. “I hear you have gone to press, & I look forward with fear & trembling to being crushed under a mountain of facts!” remarked Wallace with a friendly smile.72
Despite the worries, the Descent of Man was the first of Darwin’s titles to make a handsome publishing profit when it was published in February 1871. “I suppose abuse is as good as praise for selling a book,” remarked its author. Murray sent a cheque to Darwin for £1,470 with an appreciative nod. “You have produced a book wch. will cause men to prick up what little has been left them of ears—& to elevate their eyebrows. . . . it cannot fail, I think, to be much read.”73 For all his misgivings, he was grateful to have this valuable author within his doors. Although other publishing houses were capitalising on the increasingly lucrative evolutionary market, Murray retained the golden goose.
IX
On the face of it, 1871 was not auspicious for any of Darwin’s usual forms of strategic publicity. The Franco-Prussian War, then at its height, seemingly obliterated any prospect of European editions. Even so, he optimistically sent proof sheets to every overseas friend who had expressed a willingness to translate, admitting that “some delay may be advisable.”74
Astonishingly, in view of the political situation in Prussia, crushing defeats for France at Sedan and Metz, and especially during the “terrible year” of the siege of Paris and the dreadful events around the Commune, the Descent of Man went into Dutch, French, German, Russian, and Italian in 1871 and into Swedish, Polish, and Danish shortly thereafter, a testimony to the fortitude of Darwin’s colleagues and general interest in evolutionary affairs.
In Britain, comments were muted. Assuredly, reviewers shrank from closing the obvious gap between animals and mankind and objected to descent from “tadpoles.” How could mankind become “more crafty than the fox, more constructive than the beaver, more organized in society than the ant or bee?” inquired Sir Alexander Grant frostily in the Contemporary Review. Since primitive humans showed no discernible signs of progress it was inconceivable to him that there might be any links between “the backwaters and swamps of the stream of humanity” and cultivated English gentlemen. Harper’s Weekly complained that “Mr. Darwin insists on presenting Jocko as almost one of ourselves.” The Times was more emphatic still. “The earliest known examples of Man’s most essential characteristics exhibit his faculties in the greatest perfection ever attained. No poetry surpasses Homer.”75
Other reviewers in other journals picked on the same points. If Darwin’s ideas were accepted, said the geologist William Boyd Dawkins in the Edinburgh Review, “the constitution of society would be destroyed. . . . Never perhaps in the history of philosophy have such wide generalisations been derived from such a small basis of fact.”76 An anonymous reviewer in the World, a New York literary magazine, passed much the same opinion: “Mr. Darwin, like the rest of his atheistic school, evidently rejects with contempt the idea of a spiritual God who creates and sustains the universe.”77 The Truth Seeker called the book “hasty” and “fanciful.” Another anonymous writer in the Catholic Tablet ponderously explained that human beings possessed rationality, a “perfectly distinct faculty from anything to be found in the brutes.” The Spectator’s reviewer said that “Mr. Darwin has shocked the deepest prejudices and presuppositions” of the English people. A correspondent in the Guardian summed them all up by appealing to the direct evidence of the Bible. “Holy Scripture plainly regards man’s creation as a totally distinct class of operations from that of lower beings.”78 A columnist in the San Francisco Newsletter stooped to a poor joke about Darwin’s imaginary son being “not exactly quadrumanous,” but “just as handy with his feet as he is footy with his hands.”79
Few among these countenanced descent from animals. Yet the authors were exceedingly polite about Darwin himself. A reviewer in the British and Foreign Evangelical Review praised Darwin’s depth of learning. The Daily Telegraph referred to his “graceful and conciliatory” prose and “dignified” tone of voice. The English Independent suggested that “no loyal servant of the truth will fear the issue of such an appeal.” The New York Express noted the author’s “unassailable integrity and candour,” while the Field described his “wonderful thoroughness and honest truthfulness.” The remarks showed that Darwin’s position as a respected man of letters was high. Unknown reviewers in newspapers and periodicals clearly felt that his opinions were worth careful consideration. And the evolutionary debate had by now moved away from the blood-spattered warfare of the early 1860s. Darwin’s reputation as an honest man was enhancing the way his volume was being received. Even a widely distributed newspaper like the Liverpool Leader could close its eyes and think of England, proposing that The Descent of Man was “perfectly consistent with the belief in God the Creator.”80 With a reckless wave, the religious journal the Nonconformist wished Darwin “god-speed in his inquiries.”
Darwin noted all this in amused surprise. “I think you will be glad to hear, as a proof of the increasing liberality of England, that my book has sold wonderfully,” he told Ray Lankester, “and as yet no abuse (though some, no doubt, will come, strong enough), and only contempt even in the poor old Athenaeum.” Darwin rather regretted that the Athenaeum was losing its anti-Darwinian nerve. An anonymous versifier in the Tory periodical Blackwood’s Magazine gave up the attack completely and offered a poem about apes to be sung to the traditional country air of Greensleeves.81
Almost on cue, the Rev. Francis Orpen Morris burst into the open in an offensive little book called All the Articles of the Darwin Faith (1875). Morris parodied the Anglican creed by beginning every sentence with the phrase “I believe . . .” and following it with some remark ostensibly drawn from Darwin’s Descent of Man. Each remark became progressively more insulting.
I believe that although the Mosaic account of creation is borne out by the testimony of the rocks in a most wonderful manner, yet as it does not suit the theory I have taken into my head, it cannot possibly be true, and I do not believe a word of it.
I believe that no one who believes in the Bible has any sense or wisdom compared with me.82
Priced at one shilling, and attractively packaged in illustrated covers, this tract affirmed the vitality of the evolutionary controversy in Britain’s popular marketplace. “Keep as a curiosity of abuse,” wrote Darwin across the top of his copy.
By contrast, Wallace was generous to a fault. “Darwin’s book on the whole is wonderful!” he told a friend. “There are plenty of points open to criticism, but it is a marvellous contribution to the history of the development of the forms of life.”83 He reviewed it, in a signed article, in the Academy. True, he pointed out the places where he disagreed with Darwin, especially their differences over the reasons for protective coloration. He never agreed with sexual selection either. Yet he commented gracefully on Darwin’s view of human evolution. Darwin responded appreciatively. “If I had offended you, it would have grieved me more than you would readily believe.”
Your note has given me very great pleasure, chiefly because I was so anxious not to treat you with the least disrespect, and it is so difficult to speak fairly when differing from any one. . . . I care now very little what others say. As for our not quite agreeing, really in such complex subjects, it is almost impossible for two men who arrive independently at their conclusions to agree fully, it would be unnatural for them to do so.84
It was probably around this time that Erasmus Darwin wrote to his niece Henrietta, “I think the way he [Wallace] carries on controversy is perfectly beautiful and in future histories of science the Wallace-Darwin episode will form one of the few bright points among rival claimants.”85 To the public, however, evolution usually meant Darwin’s theory, not Wallace’s. When Wallace went to the British Association meeting in Edinburgh that year he heard Lord Neaves, a well-known wit and song-writer, recite satirical verses on the “Origin of species a la Darwin.”86
As for himself, Darwin considered that the Saturday Review and Pall Mall Gazette delivered the most perceptive reviews. He never discovered who was the author of the first, but the second was by John Morley, the literary writer and Liberal politician. All in all, he was “much impressed by the general assent with which my views have been received. . . . everybody is talking about it without being shocked.”87 To a large degree this was surely due to his watchful style of writing and high personal status within British cultural life, a status that he had carefully nursed during the previous decade. There may have been a sense of déjà vu for reviewers in rehearsing yet again the controversies that had sprung up when the Origin of Species was first published. Apes and angels had been dealt with ten or twelve years before. Faced with a new book about descent in 1871, journalists seemed to find little more to say. They and their readers had become accustomed to the idea of evolution, although not necessarily comfortable with it. Darwin even alluded to the fact in the introduction to Descent.
In other areas, too, the times were loosening up. The readership for science was noticeably shifting in focus. In 1872, in an early article written in response to the Descent of Man, “Darwinism and Divinity,” Leslie Stephen spoke for many of the coming generation by asking, “What possible difference can it make to me whether I am sprung from an ape or an angel?”88 Stephen proceeded to “give up Noah’s Ark,” abandoned holy orders, and opted for the genteel life of a well-heeled agnostic, friends with Henry Fawcett, George Meredith, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton.89 These men were rationalists who advocated religious liberty. As Darwin reflected, “on the whole, the reviewers have been highly favourable.”90
All except St. George Mivart. Mivart wrote a fierce article for the Quarterly Review in 1871 (“a most cutting Review of me”), highlighting the hazards of considering any form of human evolution. This review was one of the most important in Darwin’s later career, certainly equal in impact to Wilberforce’s attack on the Origin of Species that had also been published in the Quarterly Review some ten years before. Whitwell Elwin, the Quarterly Review’s former editor, was once again the operative force. He had commissioned Mivart to write with the theological difficulties foremost in mind. Although he never met Darwin, and never wanted to, Elwin’s effect on Darwin’s life through these two reviews was substantial.
Mivart did the job with deadly efficiency. In response, Darwin rolled out his big guns. First, he indulged in a brief but nasty pamphlet war, which satisfied his urge for immediate retaliation. He arranged for the reprinting of an article by Chauncey Wright (already issued in America) that had severely criticised Mivart’s 1870 book Genesis of Species. This indirect defensive technique had served Darwin well in the past and conveniently allowed him to attack with the words of others while maintaining a reputation for nonconfrontation. But in this case only the Darwinians appreciated the esoteric points Chauncey Wright put forward. Under Darwin’s direction, Wright clarified precisely what was, and was not, “Darwinism.” The pamphlet was left unread by those people who would be most swayed by Mivart.
Frustrated, Darwin let off steam with a few sharp ripostes in the next edition of the Origin. To this sixth edition of the Origin, published in 1872, he defiantly added a new chapter expressly directed against Mivart. Here, he seemed to be coming to the end of his tether. He compromised. He defended pangenesis and neutralised natural selection in a manner that allowed considerably more adaptive change in organisms according to use and disuse and the effects of the environment, the most Lamarckian he ever became. It was a cheap edition, intended for mass sales. Darwin had been told how a group of Lancashire workmen were clubbing together to buy a single copy.91 Impressed, he realised there were more markets to penetrate, more audiences to reach. Yet he felt hemmed in, edgy, and forced to stretch a point. Making these changes bothered him more than usual, and he asked his son William to read the proofs for him. Mivart loomed unpleasantly large in his imagination.
Mostly he watched agog as Huxley savaged Mivart in the Contemporary Review. All Huxley’s bulldog propensities poured out, and in “Mr. Darwin’s Critics” he ruthlessly corrected both Mivart’s biology and his interpretation of Catholic doctrine, locating old theological tracts in the university town of St. Andrews (where he was on holiday) to support his cannonade. “How you do smash Mivart’s theology: it is almost equal to your article versus Comte,” Darwin exclaimed.92 “The dogs have been barking at [Darwin’s] heels too much of late,” Huxley explained. Hooker thought Huxley’s attack was too cruel and told Darwin so. Darwin replied that he was obviously not so good a Christian as Hooker, “for I did enjoy my revenge.” Hooker found it slightly surprising to hear Darwin sneer against Mivart’s “bigotry, arrogance, illiberality & many other nice qualities.” Even Huxley and Hooker thought better of Mivart than that.
Perhaps the argument might have ended there—distasteful, unpleasant, but final—if Mivart had not then gone on to criticise one of Darwin’s sons. In 1873, George Darwin published a short article in the Contemporary Review suggesting that divorce should be made easier in cases where cruelty, abuse, or mental disorder became evident. In this George was exploring his developing views on heredity, feeling that quicker and simpler divorce, or easier access to contraception, could prevent traits like criminality or mental deficiency being passed on through the family line. A score of similar papers were published every year in Britain. Yet because it was by a Darwin, George’s paper attracted Mivart’s attention.
Mivart read the article with undisguised horror. He responded violently, accusing George of ignoring all decency (“hideous sexual criminality . . . unrestrained licentiousness”), and veered close to libel, as Darwin indignantly noted. If Mivart’s statements were accepted by readers as true, then George’s reputation as a gentleman would be in tatters, Darwin huffed. Father and son consulted desperately together, with the result that George called for a public apology. Mivart reiterated his charge.
Shaken, Darwin looked into the possibility of a lawsuit. “I care little about myself, but Mr. Mivart . . . accused my son George of encouraging profligacy, and this without the least foundation.” He slapped Mivart’s article in front of all his friends demanding their opinion; and declared to Wallace that “the accusation was a deliberate falsification.” Huxley loyally counter-attacked in the Academy, ignoring Hooker’s warning that it would be much better to send Mivart a private reprimand. The business had, however, gone too far for an apology, even if one was offered, to make any difference. Huxley cut all connections with Mivart, telling Darwin that he was prepared to defend Darwin’s son as if he were his own. “I do not think I shall resist telling him how base a man I think him,” fulminated Darwin. “You have been, my dear Huxley, most generous in this whole affair.”93
Cross and powerful, the two united in dislike of a common enemy. A trivial, spiteful incident sealed the sorry episode. When Mivart tried to join the Athenaeum Club under the rule that permitted men of excellence to avoid the usual waiting period, his election was prevented by the Darwinians, X Clubbers to a man. Huxley cast the harshest blow possible by declaring that Mivart’s scientific work was not “up to the mark of a Committee election,” not as excellent as the rules required. Mivart and his proposer were damned as “brother Jesuits to the backbone.”94
In fact, the Mivart episode has long fascinated historians for the way it exposed unseen cracks in the Darwinian movement and the heavy emotional investment channelled into it by leading figures like Darwin and Huxley. It seems more than probable that Darwin was personally wounded by Mivart’s defection. For Mivart to reject Darwin’s theory, in this regard, was to reject Darwin himself. Darwin never forgave him. On his part, Huxley reacted as if Mivart were criticising the whole of modern science and digging himself ever more deeply into the church’s foundations. Both these men felt betrayed. Mivart did not emerge unscathed from the exchange either. Not only was he excommunicated by the Darwinians as a traitor, he was also excommunicated by his own church for his belief in evolution, a sacrificial lamb for each unforgiving camp. Of all the casualties of the Darwinian movement, his was the most pitiable.
Sympathetically, Darwin’s friends rallied round. “I am very sorry you are so unwell, & that you allow criticisms to worry you so,” wrote Wallace in the summer of 1871. “Remember the noble army of converts you have made! & the hosts of the most talented men living who support you wholly.”95
“Oh Lord, how difficult accuracy is!” Darwin said as letter after letter arrived at Down House disputing his statements.
X
The main turning point for Darwin and Emma that year was their daughter’s marriage in August 1871. Henrietta was the first child of theirs to marry, and the only daughter to do so. Bessy remained a spinster. Henrietta’s parents viewed the event with mixed emotions, apprehensive about the rapidity of her courtship. They depended on Erasmus, much closer to the scene of action in London, to tell them whether Richard Litchfield was suitable. It “feels very odd that Hen shd be so intimate with a person of whom I know so little,” worried Emma. “I feel quite at ease with him & that he is very nice, but I really have not seen much of him.”96 Erasmus assured them that Litchfield, though penniless, was not a “gold-hunter.” The remark was not wasted on her father, who, with George Darwin, was arranging the marriage settlement. George reported that their solicitor recommended a settlement of “£5000 of something of the nature of Debenture stock,” and that Darwin should “make the yearly income up to 400£ or 350£, as Litchfield is not a grasping sort of man.”97
Litchfield was ten years older than Henrietta, trained as a barrister but not practising, who took a minor post in the Ecclesiastical Commission essentially for the pay packet. From 1860 or so he had dedicated his energies to the Working Men’s College in London, a philanthropic educational venture of which he was singing master and then principal. The college promoted a sub-socialist, utopian, self-improving vision in which the men were taught by progressive thinkers such as John Ruskin, F. D. Maurice, Thomas Hughes, and Vernon Lushington, another friend of the Darwins. Henrietta’s brothers considered Litchfield a “cool beast,” yet they came to like him for all that and ultimately respected his opinion. Henrietta tartly informed George that “you must try to like him for my sake. . . . he seems to be friends with all our sort of people, Spottiswoode, Vincent Thompsons, Lushingtons etc.”98
She met him while staying with Erasmus Darwin and the Wedgwoods and was primarily drawn by his musical ability. Litchfield was no flag-waving political reformer, but he held liberal views, especially on education in its widest sense. He organised Sunday-afternoon excursions for his working men, during which a group of thirty or forty people, men and women, would walk out of London for a healthy day in the country, returning by train after tea, often singing madrigals and glees. Henrietta was smitten. With his large brown beard, high moral principles, and dedication to duty, he may have seemed like another version of her father. A new life beckoned. She met him in June, became engaged in July, and was married in August.
Before then she indicated a few hesitations in her diary. She regretted that Litchfield did not sweep her up in his arms. “What exquisite joy” she would feel, she wrote, if he had spontaneously appeared at Down House to seek her out one Sunday. She briefly wondered—as all Darwin’s children must have wondered—whether he loved her for herself. “I think he must care—it can’t be only that he thinks I shd. be a nice sort of person to marry.” She regretted that the conventions of the day required that she must not make the first loving advances, a point rammed home by her father’s Descent of Man as well as the required delicacy of the times. And she recorded her discussions about faith with Hope Wedgwood. She was not very religious, she thought. She said she felt none of Hope’s “transcendental emotions.”
She took a leaf out of Darwin’s book and confided some of these religious shortcomings to Litchfield before her marriage. Arthur J. Munby, a friend of Litchfield’s, said that this “petite young woman of 27, with a face not unlike the photographs of her father but very feminine and tender, with bright hazel eyes, and every feature full of life and expression,” had told Litchfield that she “did not believe in a personal God.”99 It should perhaps be mentioned that Bessie Darwin also disputed conventional faith. In 1866 she had refused to get confirmed, telling her mother that she believed in neither the Trinity nor the catechism. “Lizzy says she shd feel hypocritical to have anything to do with the Cat & that as she does not believe in the Trinity or in Baptism she does not feel much heart for it,” noted Emma. These daughters were not slavish hierophants. Many years later, Henrietta contributed an appreciative word or two about Munby to the Working Men’s College Journal, although it is clear that even then she had no idea about Munby’s unconventional living arrangements with his servant Hannah. Somewhat underestimated by historians, and evidently more thoughtful about her religious position than previously assumed, Henrietta appears in these records as an intelligent, independent, caring young woman. Her parents found it a wrench to let her go.
The impending marriage threw Darwin into “very bad health.” As the day drew nearer he cast a morbid gloom over the proceedings. It was Darwin’s duty to escort Henrietta to the altar and formally “give her away.” But the combination of acknowledging her forthcoming separation from him, the walk up the aisle, and public performance before a God in whom he did not believe was possibly too much. “He could hardly bear the fatigue of being present through the short service,” said Francis.
“It was with much exertion that he came to the village church for the wedding,” recalled Henrietta many years later.
Any sort of festivity was quite out of the question, and no friends or relations were invited. But a few of Richard’s working men friends managed to find out the day and the hour, and walked the four miles from Orpington Station in order to be present at the ceremony. Great wonder was roused in the mind of our old butler (who was in fact one of the family) as to who these strangers could possibly be, for every face was known in the little village.100
After such a start, it was probably inevitable that both Henrietta and Richard Litchfield became ill on their wedding tour in Europe, a situation echoing her parents’ marriage and one that proved hard for the newly-weds to handle with equanimity so far away from home. Her silence as to the cause of the trouble may indicate some gynaecological problem. As far as is known, Henrietta never became pregnant, although she certainly at the beginning of her marriage expected children. Darwin’s views on the matter were mixed. A year later, when some signs of pregnancy might have been anticipated if all were well, he explained to his cousin William Fox that “Henrietta has no child, & I hope never may; for she is extremely delicate.”101 Henrietta suffered from intermittent collapses in health for the next four or five years, some of which were very disabling, and she and Litchfield moved into a form of relationship that mirrored her previous invalid experiences. “R is a jewel of a nurse,” she wrote from Cannes on her honeymoon. “We feel very married each lying sick in our beds as if we’d been at it 30 years like Father and you.”102
Darwin felt the break dreadfully. “I was a favourite of yours before the time when you can remember,” he reminisced sentimentally.
How well I can call to mind how proud I was when at Shrewsbury, after an absence of a week or fortnight, you would come and sit on my knee, and there you sat for a long time, looking as solemn as a little judge.—Well, it is an awful and astounding fact that you are married; and I shall miss you sadly. But there is no help for that, and I have had my day and a happy life, notwithstanding my stomach; and this I owe almost entirely to our dear old mother, who, as you know well, is as good as twice refined gold. Keep her as an example before your eyes, and then Litchfield will in future years worship and not only love you, as I worship our dear old mother. Farewell my dear Etty. I shall not look at you as a really married woman until you are in your own house. It is the furniture which does the job.103
XI
It was just as well that he had another project to keep him occupied. As soon as The Descent of Man was published, he returned to the intriguing theme of facial expression. The subject appealed to him, and had done so for many decades. Admittedly, he had at first intended to include all of his material on the subject in a single chapter in The Descent of Man, and he had already collected a great deal of it to that purpose. But it became far too bulky to include. “I have resolved to keep my Essay on Expression in Man & animals for subsequent & separate publication.” Now he relished the opportunity to mould his ideas into a separate volume making a sequel to Descent.
His delight was obvious. “I feel an exaggerated degree of interest in the subject of expression,” he said to Franciscus Donders, in Utrecht, before asking him a complicated physiological question. He loved the sensation of breaking new ground, of uniting disparate fields, and the zest of setting out on a fresh line of inquiry.
Friends and family found the topic just as attractive. People from every corner of Darwin’s daily life supplied him with quaint stories about animal expressions. Dr. James Paget knew a terrier that frowned in concentration. Lady Lubbock described the intelligent faces pulled by her pug-dog. Johann Krefft, a museum-keeper in Australia, told him about monkeys throwing temper tantrums like a child, while Alois Humbert saw a hummingbird persistently deceived by flowered wallpaper. On and on the letters flowed, each receiving a place in Darwin’s researches. Charles Spence Bate, the dentist and naturalist whom Darwin recalled from his barnacle days, wrote to him with an interesting, though anthropomorphised, account of a old dog who showed “moral courage” while having his teeth extracted.
In turn, Darwin delved into his own and his family’s experiences. Pain, of course, was more or less a daily accompaniment. He wrote to Donders about vomiting.
I had not thought about irritating substances getting into nose while vomiting; but my clear impression is that mere retching causes tears; I will however try to get this point ascertained. When I reflect that in vomiting (subject to the above doubt), in violent coughing from choking, in yawning, violent laughter, in the violent downward action of the abdominal muscle as during the evacuation of faeces when constipated, & in your very curious case of the spasms, —that in all these cases, the orb-muscles are strongly and unconsciously contracted; & that at the same time tears often certainly flow, I must think that there is a connection of some kind between these phenomena.104
At home, he studied Francis playing the flute, watching his mouth and the muscles straining in his neck.105 “I have got a good deal of information about the pouting of children of savages, & this makes me wish much for precise details about the pouting of English children,” he went on to ask William.
None of you children ever pouted. I am the more interested, as I fully believe that Pouting is a vestige (an embryonic relic during youth) of a very common expression of the adult anthropomorphous apes when excited in many ways.106
Then, after returning from honeymoon, Richard Litchfield tentatively offered his new father-in-law some thoughts on the origins of music and singing. These struck Darwin as “very good.” Eager to find something in common, the two men discovered that this book on the expression of the emotions gave them a mutual topic of interest. Litchfield helped Darwin write a section about song emerging as a courting ritual among animals. The ability of music to stir the emotions was something that Darwin could also evidently discuss with Litchfield, and he confided to him that the expressive beauty of Effie Wedgwood’s (now Farrer’s) voice moved him to tears.107 Together they criticised Herbert Spencer’s theory of the origin of music. Even a son-in-law could be drawn into Darwin’s preoccupations.
Young women in Darwin’s circle of acquaintance revealed themselves as capable anthropological observers. Margaret Vaughan Williams (Jos and Caroline Wedgwood’s middle daughter) helped him with babies’ expressions, first describing her own infants and then those of her friends and other family members. “Mary Owen’s 3½ yr. old child has a habit of sticking out her lips when she feels shy, but as it is not a pout of sulkiness, I do not know if you care about it,” she reported.
She makes no sound. The lips do not seem to become tubular (that is the corners are not drawn together, or hardly). The upper lip is stiffened and projected beyond the lower one, (tho’ both stick out to a certain extent) the lips sometimes not quite closed.108
Topics like these provided him with easy access into the domestic kingdoms primarily run by women. Darwin was remembered by his nieces for this appreciative attention to their babies’ development.
Dogs predictably played a role. Darwin included in his researches his dog Polly, the terrier formerly owned by Henrietta, and Bob, the stable dog. After Henrietta’s marriage, Polly adopted Darwin completely. “She has taken it into her head that F. is a very big puppy. She is perfectly devoted to him. . . . She lies upon him whenever she can, and licks his hands so constantly as to be quite troublesome. I have to drag her away at night,” declared Emma. This was the dog that slept in a basket by the study fire while Darwin wrote. She appeared in his Expression of the Emotions either catching a biscuit on her nose (Darwin thought she was very clever) or as a pictorial example of a “Small dog watching a cat on a table,” a copy-book illustration of alertness and attention. Nor were these her first scientific appearances. Darwin was accustomed to claim, with an admiring pat, that her multicoloured coat proved his hypothesis of pangenesis. After she had a bad burn as a puppy, her hair had grown back red instead of white. “My father used to commend her for this tuft of hair as being in accordance with his theory of pangenesis; her father had been a red bull terrier, thus the red hair appearing after the burn showed the presence of latent red gemmules.”109
Huxley saw the amusing side of this fireside philosophy and scoffed at Polly’s elevated place in Darwinian doctrine. He called her the Ur-hund (ancestor-dog or idealised type of dog) and sent a drawing of her imaginary evolutionary tree in which equal doses of cat and pig appeared.110 She was “more remarkable for the beauty of her character than her form,” retorted Henrietta defensively.
Bob featured here and there as well, a large dog, full of character. He and Parslow used to sit under the cherry trees every summer, Parslow with a gun to scare the birds, Bob waiting to bark at them.111 Darwin used him to explain his principle of emotional antithesis, in which individual expressions were said to develop as opposites to an earlier, more basic, emotion. A dog’s attitude of submission probably emerged as a deliberate reversal of the signs for aggression.
Similarly, the attitude of dejection was the reverse of the expression of pleasure. Bob was the dog who used to put on a “hothouse face,” an attitude of utter despair, when he realised that his master intended visiting the greenhouse rather than striking out on a long country walk.
This consisted in the head drooping much, the whole body sinking a little and remaining motionless; the ears and tail falling suddenly down, but the tail was by no means wagged. With the falling of the ears and of his great chaps, the eyes became much changed in appearance, and I fancied that they looked less bright. His aspect was that of piteous, hopeless dejection; and it was, as I have said, laughable, as the cause was so slight. . . . It cannot be supposed that he knew that I should understand his expression, and that he could thus soften my heart and make me give up visiting the hothouse.112
XII
For his research into expressions, Darwin made extensive use of photographs and line drawings. Previously, he had little need for illustrations in his investigations or in his written texts, except for a few minimally informative charts and diagrams. This is not to say that he had no visual appreciation or that he failed to think in pictorial terms. Quite the reverse. When he did need illustrations, as in his early work on barnacles or the copiously illustrated Zoology of the Beagle, he commissioned good natural history artists and laboured over the accuracy of details. He used diagrams and maps in his geological treatises and happily put pictures of pigeons in Variation and other animals and birds in the Descent of Man. He paid for George Darwin to have lessons in engraving from George Brettingham Sowerby, a noted natural history artist. His two oldest sons, William and George, made many of the original line drawings for his botanical essays and articles.
Significantly for the expression project, however, Darwin interested himself in photography, the growing art form of the century. In his day, Darwin knew or corresponded with several able photographers, including Dr. George Wallich, whose natural history work initially brought them together, Adolphe Kindermann in Hamburg (Camilla Ludwig, the governess, purchased pictures for him in Kindermann’s studio), and Oscar Rejlander, who specialised in photographing emotional expressions. He also acquired a number of portrait images from the Bopp photographic firm in Innsbruck and cabinet cards from Giacomo Brogi in Florence. In the end, his collection ran to around one hundred images. During 1866 he paid out a total of £14 in small sums for photographs, nearly doubling his overall costs for “Science” that year.113
This interest stretched seamlessly across his personal and working life. At home, he liked to exchange portrait photographs with other men of science and regularly sat to photographers for this purpose, although not without stating that “of all things in the world, I hate most the bother of sitting for photograph.” As occasion demanded he also sent Emma and other family members to the London studios. He encouraged William and Leonard to take informal photographs in and around the house, content to see his sons experience the fun of setting up their paraphernalia and messing about with chemicals. The informality did not extend to himself, however. He was never photographed by the boys in his shirtsleeves or at work in his garden or study. Nevertheless, Leonard took several photographs of his father that subsequently became well known, striving for artistic effects in imitation of Cameron’s portraits, and on one occasion depicting Darwin in an armchair on the veranda.
The new medium was an important resource for Darwin. For the first time, visual evidence became helpful for his work in the evolutionary area, contributing in its own way to the transformative moment in the late-nineteenth-century sciences when pictorial representations began to play increasingly exciting (and increasingly problematic) roles in the construction of knowledge. Naturally enough, while working on the Expression volume he studied books of art illustrations. At one point he must have asked for one or two of Landseer’s typically expressive animal scenes to be photographed for him, for he had copies of these and of a number of Madonnas and female saints in his collection. He mostly concentrated on representational photographs, probably thinking that they were somehow more objective in the way they presented reality, more straightforward documents than even nature itself. But he experienced all the usual problems that scientists encounter in turning artefacts into evidence for theories—problems of attribution and authenticity, of understanding the limits of what the material could tell him, of learning photography’s distinctive way of participating in the creative process, much as he had once taught himself how to “see” the geological structures underneath a landscape or the evolutionary connections hidden in pigeon feathers or barnacle valves.114
He soon discovered that relatively primitive nineteenth-century techniques—dependent as they were on long exposure times—were unable to capture fleeting facial expressions as he desired.115 Despite these limitations, he collected a number of photographs from professional portrait studios, from medical and psychiatric institutions, and from individual enthusiasts in England and abroad, including one now attributed to Charles Dodgson, and a series from the Office of the Library of Congress.116 His collection contained few anthropological photographs, undoubtedly a reflection of the difficulties of photographing in the field, the most notable exception being a picture he possessed of members of the von Ambras family, a “hairy family” regarded as medical curiosities.117
Because of the impossibility of recording a flickering expression, Darwin was specially grateful for the research being pursued by Guillaume Duchenne, a French physician who experimented on the activity of muscles. Quite by chance Duchenne had encountered in the Paris hospitals a middle-aged man whose facial nerves were insensitive to pain. Duchenne used him as a human guinea-pig for analysing the contraction and relaxation of different facial muscles. In an unusual series of experiments, he applied electric (galvanic) currents to certain points on this man’s cheeks and forehead, rather as a laboratory worker might make a frog’s leg contract using the same technique, noting as he did so that the process was like “working with a still irritable cadaver.”118 The man’s facial muscles could be galvanised and then kept fixed sufficiently long to take photographs. These pictures were issued in a medical album (not for general circulation) in 1862 as Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine. The photographs were unsettling. The juxtaposition of the man’s forced expressions and the electrical head-dress that created them made for uncomfortable viewing.
Darwin did not mind. He was impressed by Duchenne’s analysis, exactly what he was trying to do himself with less satisfactory results. Duchenne demonstrated that there were no special muscles in human faces dedicated to the higher human emotions, overturning the traditional view established by Charles Bell in 1806. Bell’s account had been definitive for much of the century. In that account Bell arranged the “passions” in a system based on pain and pleasure, exertion and relaxation, a system that served as his manifesto for understanding the nervous system, and also exemplified the natural theological view that human expressions were designed by God for the purpose of communicating feelings.119 There were muscles in the human face, Bell claimed, specially designed for the display of God-given emotions such as morality, shame, and spirituality. Darwin—and others like Pierre Gratiolet—had come to reject such a viewpoint completely.
Darwin then went a step further. When he obtained Duchenne’s album, possibly a personal gift from Duchenne (with whom he corresponded in 1871), he showed several of the photographs to people of various ages and sexes to find out what emotion they thought was being expressed. As he hoped, most of the expressions were identified and described in more or less the same terms. Fear, anger, and sorrow were immediately spotted, a point that Darwin would mention in his book to vindicate his opinion that some expressions were universal, recognised the world over. Other photographs were more perplexing. Duchenne’s picture of an electrically induced smile confused almost all of Darwin’s helpers, most of whom identified the expression as unnatural, possibly malicious. A genuine smile from the same patient was easily recognised as such. Darwin reproduced several of these pictures in Expression but not before having his printers mask the galvanic probes in all but one illustration (a photograph of simulated mental distress).
From this and other instances of confusion or misidentification Darwin drew valuable conclusions. The human eye was very discerning, even quixotic. He showed an old picture of religious ecstasy to his cousin Hensleigh and recorded that “Hensleigh W. thinks one side more seraphic than the other.”120 His survey revealed that people recognised expressions only if all the muscular details were exactly right—without crinkled eyelids, a laughing mouth meant nothing. So the eye learns to read faces and stumbles over errors in their syntax.121
Fascinated, he hunted out Dr. James Crichton-Browne at Wakefield Asylum, in Yorkshire, for access to photographic records of asylum inmates. Darwin thought that the insane would probably have little control over their mental processes and hence display emotions in a clear, uncomplicated way. By matching the patients’ faces to their medical records he could inquire into human rationality and consciousness, issues he had left relatively untouched in The Descent of Man. He wondered how consciousness might relate to the emergence of what he called “civilised” behaviour. Was rationality lost by the insane in the same way as it was presumed to be gained by early societies?
James Crichton-Browne was one of the most distinguished psychiatrists of the later nineteenth century, admired for his work on neurological pathology and the classification of mental disorders. Like many of his contemporaries, Crichton-Browne believed there were characteristic “faces” of madness, and, as a keen photographer, he photographed (or arranged to have photographed) all his inmates, labelling each image with the patient’s medical diagnosis, invariably one of the “manias” that formed an integral part of Victorian psychiatric classification. Crichton-Browne labelled and sent forty or more photographs of otherwise unidentified asylum patients to Down House, and discussed these and many other points about facial expression with Darwin in letters. His input helped Darwin enormously. “I have been making immense use almost every day of your manuscript,” Darwin claimed extravagantly.122 Tactfully, Darwin did not reproduce any of these psychiatric photographs in his volume except for a single woodcut of a woman’s hair bristling like an angry animal. And he made sure to consult other knowledgeable asylum-keepers, such as Patrick Nicol at the Sussex Lunatic Asylum in Haywards Heath. While he hesitated to link mentally disturbed patients directly with primitives, children, or subhuman groups on the evolutionary scale, there can be no denying that he regarded mental activity in all its manifestations as a sure route for mapping the distinguishing biological traits of humanity and the development of nations.
Most usefully of all, Darwin established contact with Oscar Rejlander, the art photographer from Sweden who opened studios in Wolverhampton and then in London, and whose genre studies were appreciated by Prince Albert, Julia Cameron, and Charles Dodgson. This lucky contact lifted Darwin’s researches well out of the ordinary and set a precedent for decades of investigation to come. Rejlander’s breezy and engaging personality, his enthusiasm for stimulating new projects, and his passion for expressive photography were just the thing to catch Darwin’s attention. Irrepressibly, Rejlander threw himself into assisting Darwin in this scientific project.
Rejlander tended to specialise in child character studies. His Perception, The Young Philosopher, and Early Contemplation were considered uniquely expressive by those in search of unambiguous moral meaning (though overly emphatic for modern taste), and his images of grimy street urchins and a vast composite photograph exhibited in 1857 called The Two Ways of Life brought him a degree of fame. Voluble, comically theatrical in his behaviour, and wildly gesticulating, Rejlander would cajole or tease his models until the expression he sought blossomed naturally. The technical difficulties of capturing these in photographs were formidable. Money was always short.
It was Rejlander’s genre picture of a vigorously screaming baby that alerted Darwin. This photograph was dubbed Ginx’s Baby after the title of a popular novel published in 1870 by John Edward Jenkins. In the book the baby interrupted every juncture with screams and yells.123 Rejlander objected, but the name stuck and soon he was innundated with requests for copies. Sixty thousand prints and 250,000 cartes de visite were produced. As he acknowledged, it was not high art but it paid the bills.124 He hardly liked to say that he had extensively manipulated the image, first of all retouching it, then copying it by hand in chalk in order to rephotograph the chalk drawing alone.125 It was the rephotographed image that Darwin saw.
To Darwin’s eyes, this picture exactly illustrated the information about babies’ faces he had tried to elicit from his women friends. He was convinced that very young children cried without tears, and that the characteristic expression of grief gave a square outline to the mouth and created furrows in the cheeks. All he needed was a photograph to demonstrate the point. He approached Rejlander to ask if he could reproduce Ginx’s Baby in Expression. Over the weeks that followed, Rejlander supplied him with a number of other pictures of expressions in children and adults.
The best of it was that Rejlander volunteered to pose himself. Clad in a bohemian dark velvet costume, he struck histrionic attitudes—grief, pleasure, disgust, and so on—and either photographed himself with a time-lapse device or got his wife to aid him. The resulting pictures depended as much on comically exaggerated gesture and body position as on facial expression. On the back of one picture he scribbled in pencil, “My wife insists upon me sending this for you, that your ladies may see that I can put on a more amiable expression.” Rejlander’s wife posed for a photograph of a sneer (Darwin thought that sneering evolved from the expression of disgust). Gamely, she allowed herself to be reproduced thus in Darwin’s volume.
These photographs suited Darwin’s purpose. He visited Rejlander in his London studio and maintained friendly contact with him for several years afterwards, glad enough to get him to photograph Polly the dog for Expression (reproduced as a line drawing), and personally sitting to Rejlander for a portrait photograph in 1871 that was afterwards reproduced as a line engraving in several magazines. He may have sat to Rejlander again in 1874 when he recorded paying two guineas for a photograph from him. That same year Darwin gave Rejlander a gift of £10 to bolster his declining business—though to little effect.126 Rejlander died in near penury in 1875.
For all his entertaining histrionics, Rejlander pushed one line of research further than Darwin envisaged. When he learned that Darwin was finding it hard to pinpoint the minute physical differences between laughter and crying—the visual signs were difficult to distinguish—he set about photographing himself sitting next to an enlargement of Ginx’s Baby, first emulating laughter and then sadness. Using composite techniques, Rejlander printed the two photographs on a single plate for comparison. He had done similar tricks many times before, both as a private joke, in one of which he appeared twice, introducing himself to himself, or in his large composite photograph Two Ways of Life.127 On the back he explained, “Fun only—Here I laughed—ha, ha, ha, violently. In the other I cried e e e. Yet how similar the expression.”128 Darwin found the comparison useful and kept the photograph safely in his collection, perhaps the only copy made and certainly the only one to survive.
“I must have the pleasure of expressing my obligations to Mr. Rejlander for the trouble which he has taken in photographing for me various expressions and gestures,” Darwin generously reported in the eventual book.
XIII
The volume was called On the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals and was published in November 1872. Ill again, Darwin had to push himself hard to get it written. “I have had a poor time of it of late: rarely having an hour of comfort, except when asleep or immersed in work; & then when that is over I feel dead with fatigue,” he told Wallace. “I am now correcting my little book on Expression; but it will not be published till November, when of course a copy will be sent to you. I shall now try whether I can occupy myself, without writing anything more on so difficult a subject, as evolution.”129
It turned out the most successful and readable book he had produced up to that point, selling some nine thousand copies in the first four months, many more than the Origin of Species had done in a similar span. “I don’t think it is a book to affront anybody,” said Emma with obvious satisfaction. “I think it will be generally interesting.”
One contributory factor was surely that Darwin included illustrations. The book was notable for presenting some of the first mechanically reproduced photographs of the period as well as a number of line drawings by the zoological illustrators Josef Wolf, Briton Rivière, and Thomas Wood. These helped the book’s general interest and popular appeal. Photographic reproductions of Ginx’s Baby joined pictures of Duchenne’s electrified middle-aged man, sulky children, and a number of domestic cats and dogs in action. The illustrations graphically conveyed Darwin’s point. Yet even while generating the appearance of technical excellence they had given him untold trouble. Before publication most of the pictures had to be enhanced by hand, or simulated in some way, to show what Darwin required. “The hair is generally smooth on the loins, & this makes the roughness on the back & neck more apparent,” he commented on Wolf’s drawing of an angry dog. His letters to the artists, in which he naggingly asked for tiny details to be changed, revealed much about the theory of emotional expression that he was trying to establish.
Notwithstanding Emma’s comment, Darwin regarded the book as a crucial part of his lifelong evolutionary project. The subject of expression brought his anthropological cycle to a conclusion, seeking to demonstrate a continuum between the mental life of humans and animals. In it, Darwin accepted the commonsensical view that facial expressions and bodily gestures were a primary indication of internal emotional states—that they were the innate and uncontrollable manifestation of what was going on inside. Pain was accompanied by a grimace. Pleasure was accompanied by a smile. Darwin suggested that such expressions must have arisen through the same evolutionary mechanisms throughout the human and animal kingdom. The expressions that pass over human faces were, to him, a daily, living proof of animal ancestry.
Furthermore, in Expression he proposed that some habits and learned behaviours could, if advantageous to an animal, be preserved and eventually rendered innate. Gazing into the heart of his original hypothesis of adaptation by natural selection he discovered he must partly concede the environmentalist point in respect to behaviour.130 Behaviour and biology were inextricably interwoven in ways that natural selection—the anvil on which he tested every theory—was insufficient to explain. Quietly, and without any fanfare, Darwin modified his views, accepting that the inheritance of acquired characteristics needed to be part of his system.
Robert Cooke, the new manager at John Murray’s, provided an oasis of calm before publication. He anticipated large sales and was not disappointed. “It may be advisable to get police to defend the house,” Cooke sportively declared on 25 November 1872. Murray was astonished. “Your modesty about Expression misled me to underestimate its sale.”
Darwin was content. His series of evolutionary works was complete. Within the week, the magazine Fun issued a cartoon in which a well-dressed, buxom young lady was clasped at the wrist by an apish-looking Darwin who was taking her pulse. “Really, Mr. Darwin,” she exclaimed, “say what you like about Man; but I wish you would leave my emotions alone!”