HE BISHOP STORY ran and ran. When Darwin’s son William went back to Cambridge in the holidays for some extra mathematics coaching, his tutor told him an anecdote going the rounds. Two Cambridge dons had happened to be standing near Wilberforce just after the exchange with Huxley. One of them was the blind economist Henry Fawcett. Fawcett was asked whether he thought the bishop had actually read the Origin of Species and said in a loud voice, “Oh no, I would swear he has never read a word of it.” Wilberforce bounced round with an awful scowl ready to lash into him, but noticed at the last moment that Fawcett was blind. For the sake of politeness, the bishop had to bite his tongue. Darwin enjoyed the story, repeating it to Huxley and Hooker vebatim.1
Another story came direct from Huxley, who said he felt no personal animosity towards Wilberforce at all. A guest at the Oxford house where Huxley had been staying thought he must be the bishop’s son—with their strong, square, belligerent faces there was a striking physical similarity later brought out by matching Vanity Fair cartoons.2 “Was the argument a family spat?” innocently inquired the guest.
Other entertaining reports trickled in. Darwin’s friend John Brodie Innes, the vicar of Downe, met Wilberforce at an ecclesiastical house party. Innes showed the bishop a letter from Darwin about the clash. “I am very glad he takes it in that way, he is such a capital fellow,” Wilberforce said.3 In London Erasmus snickered that Wilberforce probably “had no idea he would catch such a tartar.”4 And a little later on, Prince Albert amused himself by appointing Huxley and Wilberforce as joint vice-presidents of the Zoological Society for a concurrent period of office. Altogether, something of an air of boyish contest prevailed among these respectable men of parts, almost as if they were standing on the perimeter of a schoolboy scrap, cheering on rival sides before they all went off to lunch. Given the small social circle in which they operated and the pervasive cultural norms derived from common educational and political institutional structures, the singularity is not perhaps unexpected. The two main protagonists were never estranged—though never intimate friends either—and both came to treat their Oxford collision with nonchalant satisfaction.
So when the bishop’s review in the Quarterly reached Down House, Darwin was prepared to be amused. As he read, he scribbled casually in the margin, “What a quibble,” “Rubbish,” “All a blunder.” Only the last part gave him pause for serious thought, and that not for his own sake but for Lyell’s. Darwin was well aware how hard it was for Lyell to go even as far as he was going, and he handled Lyell’s religious hesitations about evolution sympathetically. Wilberforce’s closing words deliberately confronted Lyell with the full enormity of what he was doing. “No man has been more distinct and more logical in the denial of the transmutation of species than Sir C. Lyell,” Wilberforce thundered. “We trust that he still abides by these truly philosophical principles; and that with his help and with that of his brethren this flimsy speculation may be as completely put down as was what we may venture to call its twin though less instructed brother, the Vestiges of Creation.”5 The bishop knew exactly what he was doing. Lyell’s public support gave Darwin’s theory a great deal of credibility. Darwin told Hooker, “The concluding pages will make Lyell shake in his shoes.… By Jove if he sticks to us he will be a real Hero.”6
Generally speaking, the whole affair continued to entertain. Richard Owen was inevitably drawn in, not only because of the anatomical information he fed Wilberforce for his review and the speech at Oxford, but also because Darwin and Huxley now considered him a villain of the highest order. Hugh Falconer sent Darwin a lively description of Huxley snarling around Owen’s heels and basting the “Saponaceous Bishop.” Darwin rubbed his hands. “I must say I do heartily enjoy Owen having had a good setting down—his arrogance and malignity are too bad,” he responded.7
Shortly afterwards, Lyell made a humorous slip, misreading a word in one of Darwin’s letters. Where Darwin wrote “natural preservation,” Lyell thought it read “natural persecution.”8 Persecution caught the current mood to a hair, said Darwin jovially. Yet Owen’s review still throbbed painfully in his mind, associated with what he now considered all the black arts of religious prejudice as represented by the Athenaeum and Bishop Wilberforce. “Owen will not prove right when he said that the whole subject would be forgotten in ten years,” he remarked defiantly to Asa Gray.
My book has stirred up the mud with a vengeance; & it will be a blessing to me if all my friends do not get to hate me. But I look at it as certain, if I had not stirred up the mud some one else would very soon; so that the sooner the battle is fought the sooner it will be settled,—not that the subject will be settled in our lives’ times. It will be an immense gain, if the question becomes a fairly open one; so that each man may try his new facts on it pro & contra.9
He was grateful for everything his friends were doing. “From all that I hear from several quarters, it seems that Oxford did the subject great good.—It is of enormous importance, the showing the world that a few first-rate men are not afraid of expressing their opinion. I see daily more & more plainly that my unaided book would have done absolutely nothing,” he told Huxley.10 “I shd have been utterly smashed had it not been for you & three others.”11
Going public in this fashion helped Darwin and his book immeasurably. John Murray was right to believe that controversy was good for business. The general attention ensured that Darwin’s views—as well as those of his supporters and critics—were far more widely broadcast than many other scientific concepts of the era, circulating first among members of the literate reading public and then progressively reaching most sections of society before the end of the 1870s. “Darwin’s book is in everybody’s hands,” said George Henry Lewes in the Cornhill in 1860.
Of course, Lewes did not literally mean everybody. He meant the educated reading classes.12 The first visible responses to Darwin, for the most part, were emerging from the upper reaches of British society, the community to which Darwin belonged and to whose members he implicitly addressed his words.13 Lewes understood perfectly the manner in which a handful of leading figures shaped cultural points of view. He, like others, assumed that the majority of important new ideas would originate in the university-educated sections of society and diffuse outwards and downwards along the social, geographic, and economic scale. And Darwin’s effect can indeed be tracked through Victorian audiences in such a fashion, making waves like a pebble thrown into a pool. On the other hand, Lewes merely reiterated the views of his time and place. There was no single British culture. To see the nineteenth century in terms of high learning alone was to give priority to a set of values that obscured other moral codes, other political commitments, as well as disguising the backbreaking labour of the masses. People from all walks of life were reading and thinking seriously about Darwin. Moreover, Darwin’s work did not generally lose its theoretical content as it percolated through the nation’s consciousness.14 Quite the reverse. Readers outside the elite community confronted many of the issues ignored by its author and integrated them into systems of thought that, on occasion, included resistance to dominant authority. An anonymous writer in the Saturday Review put his finger on the people’s pulse more accurately than Lewes when he remarked that the controversy “passed beyond the bounds of the study and lecture room into the drawing-room and the public street.”15
Nevertheless, it was to Darwin’s friends that the first wave of positive responses must be attributed. For it was obvious that Darwin’s theories were as useful to them as they were to his theories. Over the following decades, Darwin’s defenders came to occupy influential niches in British and American intellectual life. Together, these men would also control the scientific media of the day, especially the important journals, and channel their other writings through a series of carefully chosen publishers—Murray, Macmillan, Youmans, and Appleton. Towards the end they were everywhere, in the Houses of Parliament, the Anglican Church, the universities, government offices, colonial service, the aristocracy, the navy, the law, and medical practice; in Britain and overseas. As a group that worked as a group, they were impressive. Their ascendancy proved decisive, both for themselves and for Darwin.
Darwin’s opponents failed to achieve anything like the same command of the media or penetration of significant institutions. Opponents did not unite with the same esprit de corps. In fact the community that grew up around Darwin in the wake of the Origin of Species was a notable feature of the period. Within a year after publication, it was nearly impossible to break into Darwin’s tightly integrated group without some expressed homage to evolution.
This circle turned the sociable aspects of nineteenth-century life to good use. They became intimate. Huxley, Hooker, Busk, Tyndall, Lubbock, and the rest, even including Falconer, despite his never taking to evolutionary theory, were warm-hearted, garrulous beings who talked and dined together, exchanged letters, swopped natural history specimens, asked for photographs to display on each other’s walls, stood godfather to rounds of children, established supper clubs so that they could keep in touch, exerted patronage, read proofs, discussed each other’s work, and commiserated, supported, and congratulated one another in turn. Their wives paid each other morning calls; the men toured the Alps or rented summer houses in the Lake District near enough to walk over for a late breakfast. As the years went by, deaths or an occasional marriage knitted them more closely. Not quite an intellectual aristocracy as seen in other kinship networks of the United Kingdom, these intimacies bound a very small group of scientific Victorians as securely as any tribe in the rain forest—a tribe that constantly adjusted its complex web of relationships both inside and outside, and with adjacent and overlapping groups.16
Likewise, the maturing personal relationships between four figures in particular were crucial to the dissemination and acceptance of natural selection. Lyell, Hooker, Huxley, and Gray instinctively moved together. Their combined effect was formidable. To be sure, the adrenaline of pursuing a mutual goal and attacking a common enemy occasionally masked their differences. Despite their shared commitment to Darwin, they were sometimes poles apart in their individual points of view. Where Lyell allowed himself to be flattered by the attention of society, Hooker preferred to exert influence behind the scenes. Asa Gray believed in God, America, and design, while Huxley was alternately witty and bullying.
Almost immediately, these four musketeers divided up the intellectual world between them. Lyell took on the geological history of mankind and energetically visited the gravel beds of the Somme and Abbeville to examine flints and animal bones and to question palaeontologists such as Falconer, William Pengelley, and Joseph Prestwich, who were more familiar with the sites than he was. He was to make this subject his special contribution to the evolutionary story. The human beings who had used those flint tools had presumably lived at the same time as cave bears and mammoths. That startling possibility had first been floated by Boucher de Perthes some fifteen years before, but was not then accepted because of the uncertain nature of the evidence and the way it contradicted conventional views about the arrival of mankind on earth. While few geologists at that time believed seriously in a literal biblical flood that separated the realm of Genesis from that of modern mankind, they nevertheless found it convenient to consider the watery remains of the glacial period as a dividing line between past and present. In his Principles of Geology, Lyell had described just such a cold watery period separating the ancient world from the modern—the period later known as the Ice Age. On that point of view, humankind appeared on the earth only after the cold and ice had gone, when conditions were assumed to be more suitable for humans. Moreover, most people (even geologists) found it acceptable to believe that the first humans had appeared perfectly formed, as the biblical story declared. Whereas Lyell and others intellectualised the issue and equivocated as to how exactly humans might first have risen from the ground, the traditions of religious art fixed the point in Western culture more literally, moving from the earliest depictions of Adam and Eve in the Garden, through images of wildmen and so-called primitives, to the remarkable scenes portrayed in Franz Unger’s geological treatise Die Urwelt in ihren verschiedenen Bildungsperioden of 1851 (“The Primitive World in Its Different Periods of Formation”), in which Unger’s artist depicted a perfectly formed first family. Lyell’s attention to flint tools and the likely barbarism of early humanity caused a perceptible stir. Such a major reassessment of human antiquity, with all its implications for overturning conventional thought, opened the door to fundamental religious difficulties.
These conundrums haunted Lyell. They were the start of his longlasting engagement with the subject of human antiquity that finally turned him into a reluctant evolutionist.17 Still wavering privately over the implications of Darwin’s scheme, Lyell dedicated himself to a wholly engrossing new area of research. He put aside his aging Principles of Geology and began working on a major new tome, the Antiquity of Man, published in 1863, one of the notable milestones in his own evolutionary journey and an important landmark in Darwinian affairs.
While Lyell grappled with antiquity, Hooker aimed at the empire of botany. At Kew Gardens in London, Hooker occupied a position in institutional science that allowed him, in his own sphere, to make as much of an agitation as Huxley. In his day botany was one of the strongest imperial sciences, rivalling only astronomy in its perceived importance to the British economy, and operating through an increasingly integrated system of colonial gardens and overseas university departments, all held together by the growing authority of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, itself a formal wing of the British government. The extent to which government botanists underpinned the economic growth of the developing empire is often forgotten today. Tea, coffee, rubber, sisal, sugar, teak, mahogany, cinchona, cotton, and flax—all these were brought into commercial operation through the colonial botanic garden system. At the autocratic, metropolitan hub sat the Hookers of Kew, father and son, the two most powerful botanists in the world in the nineteenth century.18
Hooker made good use of this institutional base to distribute and defend Darwin’s views. He persuaded the editors of botanical magazines in Britain and Europe to run favourable reviews of the Origin of Species (writing them himself if necessary), encouraged the staff of colonial gardens to discuss the Origin in their local scientific societies (again offering them a piece for their journals should they need it), ensured that Darwin was studied as closely in Calcutta, Sydney, and Cape Town as he was in Britain, added remarks about Darwin’s work to numerous official letters spinning out across the globe, and took it upon himself to convince his most distinguished botanical friends, including George Bentham, William Henry Harvey, Alphonse de Candolle, and Charles Naudin, each of whom hesitated to go the whole way with Darwin. His correspondence with these figures probed many of the difficulties that naturalists then felt about the practical mechanics of evolutionary theory, and Hooker showed several of these letters to Darwin for his information. Hooker further turned his position in London’s administrative circles to good purpose by mingling regularly with museum trustees, members of Parliament, and colonial governors. At Kew, he began directing a small programme of botanical investigations that would ultimately document many of the adaptive strategies of plants that substantiated Darwin’s theories. Although his role was not as likely to attract public attention as either Lyell’s or Huxley’s, he provided the strength of purpose, patronage, solid government contact, bureaucratic status, and geographical breadth essential for consolidating a lasting transformation in science. He was Darwin’s rock; and Darwin depended on him with an intensity he hardly showed for any other man. Much later on, he said warmly, “There never was such a good man for telling me things which I like to hear.” In a letter to Jean Louis Quatrefages written on 5 December 1859, he called Hooker “our best & most philosophical botanist.”
Asa Gray became gatekeeper for North America. He ensured that everything from Darwin’s pen that was destined for the Americas passed through his own capable hands, a privilege he guarded zealously. Like Hooker, Gray was captivated by the insights offered by the Origin of Species and promoted the book at every opportunity. There was perhaps little else that Gray could do: he could hardly back out now that Darwin’s 1857 letter to him had been published in full evolutionary context in the Linnean Society Journal. Like Huxley, he had previously disliked transmutation and had vehemently rejected Vestiges when it was published in 1845 in the United States. Now, come what may, he found himself thoroughly caught up in the evolutionary camp. Yet Gray had never been comfortable with the dry intellectual tools of his trade and was independently coming to see plant species as disconcertingly fluid units, not easy to define at the boundaries. He was a confirmed empiricist, one of the few hardline empiricists in the transcendental mist of Emerson’s, Thoreau’s, Agassiz’s, and Lowell’s America, rejecting idealist ideas about “abstract types,” scorning Romanticism in the sciences while appreciating the transcendentalists’ adherence to the divine in mankind.19 To him, the Origin represented the first serious alternative to Agassiz’s metaphysical biology.
So he volunteered to arrange an American edition of the Origin of Species to be published as soon as possible, opening negotiations on Darwin’s behalf with Ticknor & Fields, the Boston house with which Gray had good relations. A number of pirate copies were already circulating in New York, rushed out in bulk by the firm of Appleton’s in the first few months of 1860 without Darwin’s knowledge. In actual fact, the house of Appleton was doing nothing illegal. The firm, founded by Daniel Appleton and then run by his sons, published hundreds of books of an educational nature and many local versions of overseas titles. In those days of cut-throat commercial markets, publishers were unhampered by overseas copyright agreements and authors were not protected by legislation enforcing foreign contracts or royalty earnings. The firm that got the book on the shelves was the one to make the profit. These unauthorised reprints of Darwin’s Origin (evidently printed from a single copy purchased in London and rushed across the ocean) had their own bibliographic idiosyncrasies. The first had two quotations facing the title-page, the second had three. A third issue, whose status is uncertain, bears the words “Revised edition.”20 All were published by Appleton’s before June 1860 and bound in a greyish-brown pimpled cloth.
Darwin clearly needed a friend like Gray there on the ground to protect his interests. Gray abruptly prevented any further entrepreneurial reprints of the Origin by negotiating with William Henry Appleton in person, promising that in exchange for a proper publishing contract and token fee he would supply a fully authorised text, complete with Darwin’s endorsement. William Appleton agreed, and the first edition that Darwin approved was published later in 1860, carrying on the title the words “New edition, revised and augmented by the Author.”21 For this Darwin shared with Gray a cheque for £50 (“pin-money for Mrs. Darwin”) and received a solitary copy of the volume. He cared far more about producing a supervised version than for the lucre. “Most sincerely do I thank you from my heart for all your generous kindness & interest about my book,” he wrote to Gray. After this shaky start his relationship with Appleton’s prospered.22 The firm became the primary agent for bringing Darwin’s writings and Darwinism in general to American shores.
Gray smoothed the path for all subsequent editions of the Origin of Species in America, several of which put American readers well in advance of details not yet published in Europe. With Gray’s encouragement, Darwin added an important historical introduction (“Preface”) as well as a supplement indicating his additions and alterations. In this preface Darwin answered his earliest critics and attempted to provide some of the absent acknowledgements that British reviewers had cynically noted. He assessed the evolutionary work of his immediate precursors, cautiously referring to Lamarck as “this justly celebrated naturalist” and mentioning “how completely my grandfather Dr. Erasmus Darwin anticipated these erroneous views in his Zoonomia … published in 1794.” He made sure to praise Spencer and a number of other authors, including Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and finished with a quotation on the persistent types of animal life from Huxley’s Royal Institution lecture. This historical sketch was not published in England until 1861.23
Moreover, Gray stoutly defended Darwin against American attacks and wrote three important reviews in as many months for leading North American journals. He pushed himself forward as a major intellectual rival to Louis Agassiz, tussling with Agassiz over the definition of species in a series of well-attended public meetings in Boston during 1860 and 1861, questioning whether species were metaphysical constructs, created by God according to a transcendent plan, as Agassiz declared, or whether they arose by natural means from the processes of variation and adaptation, as Darwin propounded. Gray shamelessly enjoyed these fights, a continuing contest inextricably bound up with his power struggle with Agassiz; and he found an authoritative ally in William Barton Rogers, the geologist later to become first president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These two readily understood that Agassiz was the only man in America to possess the stature and influence to crush theories that did not meet his approval; and the resulting controversy in Massachusetts rivalled anything that Huxley and Wilberforce could provide in Britain. Rogers argued violently with Agassiz in a series of four evening meetings at the Boston Society of Natural History, showing that Darwin’s views would not collapse like a pack of cards under Agassiz’s wrath as had other transmutationary theories like Vestiges. Gray harassed Francis Bowen, who opposed Darwin on philosophical grounds, at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Gray launched his reviews in the American Journal of Science and Arts in March 1860. This journal was run by James Dwight Dana and Benjamin Silliman, Jr., two clever brothers-in-law at Yale, whom Gray, Darwin, and Agassiz knew well. Agassiz retaliated by writing a bitter commentary on species, also published in the American Journal, and reiterated his definition of divine creation in various natural history periodicals. Gray responded with another, this time in the form of a dialogue, which included a measured response to Agassiz. Every one of Gray’s words “tells like a 32-pound shot,” said Darwin appreciatively.
Gray plagued Agassiz privately as well, hounding him at Harvard University seminars, and pursued him through the scientific journals of the East Coast. His aggressive mood was strengthened by the admiration for the Origin of Species expressed by Jeffries Wyman, the Harvard professor of anatomy whom Gray thought “the best of judges.” Dawdling around the log fire in Wyman’s college rooms at Christmastime in 1859, a group of friends had grown “warm discussing the new book of Mr. Darwin’s.” James Russell Lowell, Henry Torrey, and Charles Eliot Norton were there with Wyman and Gray.24 They knew that their Harvard colleague Louis Agassiz would be up in arms. The Origin of Species, Agassiz had said dismissively during those first weeks, was “poor—very poor.”25 Eagerly Gray set about using Darwin’s work to attack Agassiz’s absolute monarchy. Month by month, he sent Darwin copies of local reviews, clippings from Boston newspapers, and verbal reports about his progress with natural selection in the New World.
The regard was mutual. Darwin admired Gray’s tactical successes and valued his philosophical acumen. “I declare that you know my book as well as I do myself; & bring to the question new lines of illustration & argument in a manner which excites my astonishment & almost my envy!” he said as Gray’s reviews of the Origin came out.26 Gray’s talents were wasted on plants, he joked. “You ought to have been a lawyer, & you would have rolled in wealth by perverting the truth, instead of studying the living truths of this world.”27 Later, Darwin made the point again with feeling. “I said in a former letter that you were a lawyer; but I made a gross mistake, I am sure that you are a poet. No by Jove I will tell you what you are, a hybrid, a complex cross of Lawyer, Poet, Naturalist, & Theologian!—Was there ever such a monster seen before?”28 Soon he was convinced that “no other person understands me so thoroughly as Asa Gray. If I ever doubt what I mean myself, I think I shall ask him!”29
And after the Oxford debate, the fourth musketeer, d’Artagnan, found his focus. Huxley opted for apes. Apes and evolution let him channel his gifts into a single, high-blasting campaign, one that simultaneously allowed him to further his work in the biological sciences, criticise theological authority, advance the cause of young professionals like himself, tackle enemies like Owen on their home territory, promote a naturalistic approach to the living kingdom, and feed his lust for life and combat. By becoming the front man for human evolution from apes he could fight hard for all the things he believed in. The others were happy enough to let him blaze away. He reigned supreme over what can only be called the marketing of evolutionary theory—a heady publicity campaign for a reformed, fully scientific, rational England, where power should be wrestled out of the restrictive hands of the church and aristocracy and reestablished on what Huxley regarded as suitably clear-headed principles. Biology played a crucial role in this vision. Huxley considered evolution by natural selection to be the best argument yet for cutting ecclesiastical claptrap away from science. For him, it opened the door to a properly naturalistic consideration of the origins of living beings and mankind. More than this, despite his reservations, he regarded it as a good hypothesis—one that worked and provided explanations.
Huxley intuitively recognised that an open battle over the Origin of Species would be advantageous for all concerned. While it would be going too far to claim that he did not care whom he fought—he was not a complete bully, and it is clear that he mostly opposed those who, in his eyes, were endangering the integrity and rationalism of scientific thought—it must be said that he appreciated a good rival. Darwin knew he was lucky that such a volatile man felt prepared to assist him. If circumstances had been different, Huxley might have been as ready to attack as to defend. “For heaven’s sake don’t write an anti-Darwinian article,” Darwin said at an early stage in their relationship. “You would do it so confoundedly well.” Years later, with scores of Huxley’s destructive essays and articles behind them, he could still say the same. “There is no one who writes like you.… If I were in your shoes, I should tremble for my life.”30
Huxley was lucky in finding Darwin too, for through him he established himself as a leading publicist for science. The Oxford meeting had marked a turning point in his career as surely as it did for evolutionary theory. At Oxford Huxley saw the power of the crowd. He saw the effect of wit and daring. Before that, his scientific work was flashy but diffuse, a series of anatomical studies whose undeniable value was weakened by the lack of any overall direction and whose impact was limited to the domain of scientific experts. The Origin of Species allowed him to reveal his flair.
His fight with Owen was central in this, and the course of evolutionary theory would have taken a far more circuitous path if Huxley had not found such an elevated target to topple. Furthermore, he deliberately chose to use the British Association for the Advancement of Science as a major platform. From year to year much of the Darwinian debate took place in the shape of snarled abuse delivered by either Owen or Huxley in front of delighted British Association audiences.
At first, it did seem as if Huxley was out of control. In September 1860, just after the Oxford clash, his son Noel died of scarlet fever. Huxley raged against the death with such ferocity that Darwin and Hooker exchanged anxious remarks. “I know well how intolerable is the bitterness of such grief,” Darwin wrote consolingly.31 The loss of his daughter Anne was still distressing. “To this day, though so many years have passed away, I cannot think of one child without tears rising in my eyes; but the grief is become tenderer & I can even call up the smile of our lost darling with something like pleasure.”
During this highly charged time, Charles Kingsley emerged as Huxley’s saviour, sending him letters that in the end brought him back from the edge of the abyss. But Kingsley could not rekindle in Huxley any glimmer of traditional religious belief. That was gone forever, evaporated with the last breath of his boy. All through this anguish, however, Huxley wrote like a madman, spewing out venom against Owen and the injustices of the world in the most violent scientific paper he ever composed. Single-handedly (that was the way he liked it), he smashed into the old-fashioned museum regime that Owen represented. He claimed that the laboratory-based, investigative study of living beings that he championed was the only appropriate vehicle for the changing times.
In this paper Huxley fulfilled the threat he made at Oxford that he could prove Owen’s statements about brain anatomy wrong. Not just wrong, Huxley asserted—dishonest. The man was a liar, he said, and produced a list of previously published anatomical observations by other scholars that contradicted every one of Owen’s assertions about the structure of the human brain. Huxley aimed particularly at Owen’s description of the hippocampus minor as a feature unique to mankind. On the contrary, declared Huxley, the hippocampus minor was present in all the higher quadrumana: “anyone who chooses to take the trouble to dissect a monkey’s brain, or even to examine a vertically bisected skull of the true Simiae, may convince himself.” Professional expertise and reputations were at stake here, and both Huxley’s and Owen’s passions ran deep. Although looking like little more than a trivial argument over factual observations, it actually represented a clash of fundamentally opposing systems of thought. Empirical data could not—and would not—resolve the issue about the hippocampus because the disputants did not agree about their relevance.32
Huxley published his article in January 1861 in the first number of his own journal, the relaunched Natural History Review, which he and a group of progressive scientific thinkers had agreed to purchase as a commercial proposition, ostensibly with a view to making money but mostly to provide an uninterrupted outlet for their radical, mainly evolutionary ideas. The co-owners included Lubbock, the botanist Daniel Oliver, and anatomists George Rolleston, George Busk, and William Carpenter, a conspicuously pro-Darwin team. Huxley made a few extravagant, token gestures as editor at the outset, claiming that the Review would be completely impartial, and then immediately turned it into a powerful mouthpiece for his form of biology; and even though the journal died after little more than four years, it was, in its short lifetime, a pungent instrument for naturalism in science. “The tone of the Review will be mildly episcopophagous,” Huxley told Hooker, “and you and Darwin and Lyell will have a fine opportunity if you wish of slaying your adversaries.”33 In its first years, the Natural History Review published all the most important brain and ape articles of the period, as well as essays and reviews promoting Darwinism in general. Darwin contributed a review or two himself and followed the journal’s fortunes.34 “What a complete & awful smasher (& done like a ‘buttered angel’),” he said encouragingly after reading Huxley’s opening shot against Owen. “By Jove how Owen is shown up.… What a canting humbug he is.”35
Egged on by Darwin, Huxley made brains and toes the subject of his lectures to various audiences during the spring of 1861. Cheekily, he told his patrons at the Royal Institution that they were indisputably related to apes, for their big toes were nothing other than poor copies of prehensile apish thumbs. He continued the line in lectures to working men delivered not far away on the other side of Piccadilly. This second batch of lectures was part of a regular series delivered by several old hands at the School of Mines in Jermyn Street, where Huxley taught natural history and purveyed cheap public instruction at sixpence a time. The lectures were notable in content and as a phenomenon. It was striking to see a large number of London working men voluntarily giving up their scant leisure time, after a working day of twelve hours or more, to attend an academic class in the School of Mines, and paying a sixpenny entrance fee out of a weekly wage of some thirty shillings. Huxley’s series ran from February to May 1861 under the title “The Relation of Man to the Rest of the Animal Kingdom.” The lectures were lively and informative, attracting a large clientele. Lyell, who visited in March, was astonished at the magnitude and attentiveness of the crowd.
“My working men stick by me wonderfully, the house being fuller than ever last night,” Huxley said to his wife. “By next Friday evening they will all be convinced they are monkeys.”36
But the man at the hub of this enthusiastic support felt oddly restless. Darwin could not settle at all during the post-publication period. He tried starting the next book, the long disquisition on variation he had promised Murray, but his heart was not in it. He felt chained to the Origin of Species even though it was physically gone from his desk. His days rose and fell with the afterswell, while he dealt with a huge correspondence and the increasing number of reviews that his book evoked. At the same time, he kept up his letters to Lyell, Hooker, Huxley, and all. Were they converts or “perverts” as Lyell engagingly put it? Privately he was beginning to feel what every author experiences after a long project is completed. He was drained.
Four substantial reviews of the Origin of Species appeared in March 1860, eight in April, five in May, and three in June, each with important reservations, criticisms, or misunderstandings to deal with. These writings uncovered minor gaps or flaws which he wished he had spotted earlier. Shocked disapproval began making itself felt; and a raft of scientific objections was floated, sometimes only a disguise for more fundamental religious or metaphysical opposition, at other times exposing genuinely puzzling phenomena that natural selection did not appear to answer. Darwin, after all, was asking a great deal of his audience. He was inviting them to believe in what was then thought to be unbelievable.
Military metaphors peppered his thoughts. He talked of “buckling on my armour” and the long, uphill fight. Sedgwick, he complained, “has been firing broadsides”; Gray was “fighting splendidly”; Lyell “keeps as firm as a tower.” Attacks were “heavy & incessant of late.” “I am getting wearied at the storm of hostile reviews; & hardly any useful.”37
There was good news from Wallace, however. Darwin received a letter from him in May 1860 that eased his mind. The letter itself has been lost, but Darwin, in his reply, expressed his pleasure at Wallace’s “too high approbation of my book.”
Your letter has pleased me very much, & I most completely agree with you on the parts which are strongest & which are weakest.… I think geologists are more converted than simple naturalists because more accustomed to reasoning. Before telling you about progress of opinion on subject, you must let me say how I admire the generous manner in which you speak of my book: most persons would in your position have felt some envy or jealousy. How nobly free you seem to be of this common failing of mankind.—But you speak far too modestly of yourself;—you would, if you had had my leisure, [have] done the work just as well, perhaps better, than I have done it.38
Wallace’s feelings about the Origin can be gleaned more directly from other letters written to Bates and his old school friend George Silk. He told Silk, “I have read it through five or six times, each time with increasing admiration. It will live as long as the ‘Principia’ of Newton.… Mr. Darwin has given the world a new science, and his name should in my opinion, stand above that of every philosopher of ancient and modern times. The force of admiration can no further go!!!”
To Bates he explained, “I know not how, or to whom, to express fully my admiration of Darwin’s book. To him it would seem flattery, to others self-praise; but I do honestly believe that with however much patience I had worked and experimented on the subject, I could never have approached the completeness of his book, its vast accumulation of evidence, its overwhelming argument, and its admirable tone and spirit. I really feel thankful that it has not been left to me to give the theory to the world.”39 Politely, generously, and with an undeniable whiff of relief, the two co-authors took up the positions that they were to hold relative to each other for the rest of their lives.
Still, perhaps Darwin was relieved to have got Wallace off his conscience. Almost immediately he turned to organising translations of the Origin of Species. He very much wanted European naturalists to consider his arguments properly. France and Germany were first in his mind. Six months beforehand, he had distributed presentation copies in both countries with the hope that some eager young naturalist in Berlin or Paris might request permission to translate his volume.
At that time, the initiative for foreign publication usually rested with the translator, who was expected to get permission directly from the author and negotiate a contract with a local publisher. So Darwin welcomed the news that Heinrich Bronn, a distinguished philosophical naturalist, would undertake a German edition. Bronn was a geologist of note who knew Darwin’s geological work of old. He also held a good reputation in the scientific world for his inquiries into the elemental laws of matter, in which he drew parallels between organic and inorganic phenomena and thought about branching trees of fossil development. Though elderly, he was sprightly, and he reviewed the Origin of Species relatively favourably when it came out. “I have had this morning a letter from old Bronn (who to my astonishment seems slightly staggered by Nat. Selection) & he says a publisher in Stuttgart is willing to publish a translation & that he Bronn will to a certain extent superintend,” Darwin informed Huxley.
Nevertheless Bronn had intellectual preoccupations of his own that he hoped to explore through his translation of Darwin’s book. He was fascinated by the controversy emerging in Paris between Louis Pasteur and Felix Pouchet over the possible creation of life in a laboratory test-tube. Could living globules emerge out of disconnected organic materials, as Pouchet’s Heterogenie of 1858 claimed? Or did every living being—even the smallest germ—need to be produced by another living being, as Pasteur tried to demonstrate? The controversy hinged on what kind of experimental evidence would satisfy inquiry on the question. Pouchet’s and Pasteur’s rival experiments pointed in several directions at the same time, and the interwoven religious and political situations in Catholic France were no less complex.40 Pouchet’s close association with philosophical materialism and his disregard for traditional forms of religious belief made his claim for the chemical origin of living beings highly suspect in the eyes of at least some of the general public.
Bronn vividly saw the point at issue. For him, evolution must go hand in hand with spontaneous generation, although he was not inclined to believe in either. But a word-for-word translation of the Origin was not what he had in mind. Instead, he diligently put back into the book the controversial themes that Darwin deliberately left out. Bronn’s translation included many philosophical asides and disquisitions on the first origin of life. Furthermore, he added a final chapter of his own, in which he drew attention to the religious difficulties in fully accepting Darwin’s views. Until Darwin could take purely inorganic matter and make a living creature, Bronn said, readers must consider descent with modification an unproven suggestion.
When it was published in 1860, by the firm of Schweizerbart in Stuttgart, this free-ranging translation consequently alerted German-speaking readers to the most provocative aspects of the book—either to the satisfaction of philosophical radicals or the deep misgivings of more conservatively minded thinkers. The German scientific public, already relatively familiar with notions of metamorphosis and transmutationary ideas, from Goethe’s work through to Vestiges, encountered Darwin’s ideas in a form that diverged considerably from the author’s intention.
Darwin had scarcely expected a translator, however eminent, to adjust the Origin’s argument to suit himself. Armed with some heavy German dictionaries, he struggled through Bronn’s pages to see what had been done. Even the title indicated some of the difficulties inherent in moving ideas and metaphors from one cultural context to another. Darwin’s “favoured races” was translated by Bronn as “perfected races”; his “struggle for existence” was “struggle for survival.”41 Bronn’s final chapter was particularly densely written, and in desperation Darwin finally asked Camilla Ludwig, the new German governess at Down, to turn it into English (“very difficult” Darwin said to Lyell and offered to lend him Miss Ludwig’s version). Gradually, Darwin became aware that Bronn simply left out those sentences of which he did not approve—for example, “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” He fretted about Bronn’s literal translation of the term “natural selection.” Earlier he had written to Bronn, “I cannot help doubting whether ‘Wahl der Lebensweise’ expresses my notion—it leaves the impression on my mind of the Lamarckian doctrine (which I reject) of habits of life being all important.” As Darwin understood it, Wahl der Lebensweise more or less meant “choice of lifestyle.” Bronn took the hint. Darwin was glad to see that he settled on naturliche Zuchtung, meaning natural breeding or cultivation, which caught his intention well enough.
Uneasy about this turn of events, he cast about for another German translator. Within a few months he located Julius Victor Carus, a younger, altogether more compliant naturalist who said he believed in natural selection. In 1862, after Bronn’s death, Carus produced an amended version of Bronn’s translation, working closely with Darwin by correspondence.
France also looked promising at the start with Madame Belloc (grandmother of Hilaire Belloc) offering to translate the Origin of Species soon after publication. Madame Belloc probably contacted Darwin through Mary Butler, his water-cure friend.42 But she retreated when she noticed the weight of the subject matter: “on reading it, she finds it too scientific,” reported Darwin. He then thought he might have found a substitute in Pierre Talandier, an explosive Frenchman whiling away his time as a political exile from the Second Empire by teaching languages at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. Yet Talandier could not get a publisher in France to touch him, a situation probably caused at least as much by his political stance as any perceived dangers in Darwin’s book. “I have had endless bother about French translation, between two stools, which makes me gladder to close with any one for German translation,” Darwin murmured to Huxley.43
In the end, Darwin’s book was put into French by Clemence Royer, a Frenchwoman living in Geneva, and published in 1862.44 It is not entirely clear when Darwin realised that she intended to translate his book, since translators were every bit as opportunist and unregulated as publishers and it seems that she notified him of her forthcoming volume only shortly before publication. His pleasure was short-lived. Royer went much further than Bronn in changing the substance of what Darwin said. When the book came out in 1862, Darwin complained that she turned the Origin of Species into a travesty of his views. Royer, naturally enough, felt she had enhanced what was already there and knew her intellectual ground. She was well acquainted with the work of European political economists, possessed good English, and mixed with many of the naturalists and anthropologists in Geneva who corresponded with Darwin and reviewed the Origin, including Jules Pictet, Édouard Claparède, and Carl Vogt, himself the translator into German of Chambers’s Vestiges. Several members of this circle had left France after the upheavals of 1848. The new conservatism of nineteenth-century Paris made it an uncomfortable place for liberal, politically active, left-wing thinkers like these to live, and Vogt and Royer were among those who moved to Geneva and created a high-minded intellectual coterie in exile. At this time in her life Royer advocated social progression, women’s rights, and advanced views on scientific philosophy, very daring and confrontational in all areas. This included her private life, which involved living openly with a married man, a mirror image of George Eliot’s circumstances in England. Royer was impressed with the Origin’s implications for human society. “One could say that this is the universal synthesis of economic laws, the social science par excellence, the code of living beings for all races and all times.”45
Her translation was arresting. First of all, she added a long anti-clerical preface attacking Catholic and Protestant alike. If she offended Swiss sensibilities, she wrote, an “Oxford bishop has provided me with the example.” She explored eugenics and the perils of nineteenth-century marriage, emphasising the need for choice and good breeding, and making her point by using the emotionally loaded phrase election naturelle for “natural selection.” She added footnotes that over-ruled Darwin’s cautious apologies. She considered Darwin was wrong to speak of a universal war in nature, and referred throughout to concurrance de vie instead of the struggle for existence. She added a quantity of Lamarckian ideas about inbuilt progress and organisms striving to adapt to circumstances. Her title included the non-Darwinian phrase “laws of progress.”
It was the most unusual reconstruction of his work Darwin ever faced. She must be “one of the cleverest and oddest women in Europe,” he exclaimed crossly. “Almost everywhere in the Origin when I express great doubts she appends a note explaining the difficulty or saying there is none whatever!” He could not laugh off these distortions. In 1865 he was still struggling to come to terms with her adjustments. Emma told their daughter Henrietta that he “is at work today on the verdammte Mlle Royer whose blunders are endless.”
Perhaps his predicament was made easier by the fact that Royer was a woman. Darwin’s men friends rallied round, eager to dismiss her as a mere eccentric whose views were too absurd to heed. Édouard Claparède wrote to say that he had tried to prevent Royer from “disfiguring your work more completely.”46 “Mlle. Royer is a singular individual whose attractions are not those of her sex,” he mysteriously explained. The same air of baffled incredulity underpinned Ernest Renan’s aphorism that Royer was “almost a man of genius.” It seems clear that Royer was defying convention. Women in those academic circles were expected mostly to facilitate the unimpeded flow of their menfolk’s scientific ideas by translating, editing, proof-reading, and suchlike. The anticipated norm was a demure willingness to let the male author speak for himself, as Sarah Austin exemplified in her best-selling translations into English of Humboldt’s writings, or as Emma Darwin and Frances Hooker displayed. To rewrite and to politicise was unacceptable—unacceptable whatever the sex of the translator. Nevertheless, any book might quickly turn into a spectacle if a female translator stepped out of place. To be sure, Royer was inaccurate, misinformed, and following a cause. Yet Darwin and his friends may have found it a relatively simple matter to link these faults with her gender and dismiss her evolutionary outbursts as a feminine curiosity.
Even so, a French Origin of Species was appreciated by anthropologists, zoologists, geologists, botanists, and anatomists living in France, Belgium, Russia, and Switzerland, including Charles Brown-Sèquard, Édouard Lartet, and Jean Louis Quatrefages, and was discussed from time to time at meetings of the Société d’Anthropologie in Paris and elsewhere. The experimental botanist Charles Naudin was particularly grateful to have the Origin in his native tongue, for he was not easily able to comprehend Darwin’s letters to him. Letters from Down House presented him with a fatal combination of bad handwriting, the English language, and complicated botanical concepts.
Yet the Origin of Species was not destined to have anything like the impact on French science that it did in Britain or Germany during those first years. French naturalists never took easily to Darwin’s ideas, and if they wished to endorse evolution they usually opted for a generalised form of Lamarckism. In partly Lamarckising Darwin’s work, Royer may ultimately have done Darwin a good turn.47 Her version of the Origin was also distributed among French social scientists.48 Later on Darwin corresponded with Royer in guarded fashion about a second edition, which was published in 1866, and a third in 1870. Each of these later editions troubled him, and the third offended him. He insisted that she change or remove several of her notes—and she grudgingly complied while complaining that the changes weakened the argument.
Taken together, these overseas publications necessarily fell into other cultural contexts and became associated with different issues. In retrospect it seems likely that Darwin was unprepared for the way his writings would be reinterpreted. German, French, and American readers were coming to grips with an Origin of Species different from the one he thought he had written. Bit by bit, these foreign editions and translations may have forced him to acknowledge the independent life of his child.
Last but not least, attention came from family quarters as well. Darwin’s niece Julia Wedgwood was by now an aspiring literary critic, one of a new breed of women in Britain who took up the suffrage cause a little later in the century. Where a female commentator like Royer was perceived by Darwin as unusual, even a nuisance, Julia had the advantage of being a relative. In 1860 Julia wrote a thoughtful analysis of the Origin of Species for Macmillan’s Magazine, following on from Huxley’s review in that journal. The article was too obscure in places for Darwin—Julia was strongly influenced by the charismatic preacher Thomas Erskine, with whose followers she spent part of 1859, and by Frederick Denison Maurice, the founder of Christian Socialism, a friend of her parents, who was striking out on an independent theological path. Julia’s article took the form of a conversation about the proper boundaries of science and religion: “Can you receive as truth something that on the other side of the boundary becomes utter falsehood?” asked one protagonist. In the guise of another speaker, Julia defended her uncle from the charge of atheism. Darwin was touched.
I think that you understand my book perfectly, and that I find a very rare event with my critics.… Owing to several correspondents I have been led lately to think, or rather to try to think over some of the chief points discussed by you. But the result has been with me a maze—something like thinking on the origin of evil, to which you allude. The mind refuses to look at this universe, being what it is, without having been designed; yet where one would most expect design, viz. in the structure of a sentient being, the more I think on the subject, the less I can see proof of design.49
Slowly, it began to dawn on him that no matter what he did, he was doomed to be a public figure.
From the time of the Oxford meeting his home life had not been entirely easy. His oldest daughter, Henrietta, was perpetually unwell, not fully recovered from what had been diagnosed as a typhoid-like fever. These lingering bouts of low-level fever worried Darwin greatly. Such illnesses could easily flare up into killers, as was demonstrated by Prince Albert’s death from typhoid at Windsor Castle in 1861. Less severe forms like Henrietta’s tended to drag on and on, leading to physical weakness, occasional feverish relapses, and poor digestion—a sickly, chronic state that usually drove sufferers into long-term invalidism. He therefore took Emma and the children for an extended summer holiday in 1860 to Emma’s sisters, Elizabeth Wedgwood and Charlotte Langton, whose houses were next to each other in Hartfield, Sussex. Any visit there was comfortably familiar, but this did little to help Henrietta. For a month or more, while he wrote letters and dealt with translators, the family sank into dealing with the ups and downs of convalescence.
Without really realising it, Darwin yearned for something fresh and interesting to do. He needed a distraction. At Elizabeth’s house he embraced the chance to get away from his book and his letters. He wanted to be alone in the country.
Escaping the family one day, he went looking for native orchids in the boggy Sussex hollows, and he stumbled on another kind of plant he had never much noticed before, the tiny insect-eating sundews. Fascinated, he dug one up to take back to the house for a few small experiments, and watched, intrigued, as the sticky leaves curled around a meal of flies. The phenomenon was well known to botanists but not to Darwin. By the end of the afternoon he was caught as surely as any fly. Working on these living plants over the next few months gave him endless, uncomplicated pleasure—the pleasure of working with his hands again, of observation and speculation unhampered by the burden of Henrietta’s ill health or the species problem, of seeing nature in action again after the tedious months of writing.
The first batch of plants (the common Drosera rotundifolia) that he collected from Hartfield amply demonstrated the sundew’s sensitivity. The small, round, reddish leaves were covered in sticky hairs or tentacles, rather like a miniature sea anemone, which flexed and bent to snare any unwary insect that landed. Darwin wondered about Drosera’s ability to sense the presence of an insect and how a flying animal could be trapped by such slow-moving leaves. He wondered how far the hairs were truly sensitive and if they also performed the digestive function. He puzzled over the fact that the plants were evidently adapted to eat meat instead of making their own nutrients out of sunshine and water in the usual manner. Were the sticky hairs acting like misplaced roots, perhaps, adapted to suck nutrition from flies rather than the soil? Or were they really like sea anemones, the reef-building coral polyps that he had loved to think about on the Beagle voyage? All in all, the plants displayed amazingly animal-like functions and responses.
Niggling natural history questions like these were always good for him. His spirits lifted as he commandeered a kitchen shelf for a temporary laboratory and prowled Elizabeth’s house looking for flies; “a little botanical work as amusement,” he told Lyell, making fun of his own enthusiasms. Willingly, he allowed his natural inclination towards anthropomorphism to take over. “At present he is treating Drosera just like a living creature,” Emma wrote to Mary Lyell, “and I suppose he hopes to end in proving it to be an animal.”50 This became evident at mealtimes when Darwin regulated the plants’ feeding regime as if he were a Victorian zoo-keeper. Just before lunch on 17 July 1860, he placed four dead flies on the sundew’s leaves. By suppertime the outer rim of hairs was curving over. At breakfast the next morning he reappeared beside the plant to give it a spider. At 10:00 a.m. he marked individual leaves with different-coloured threads from Emma’s sewing basket, feeding one leaf with a piece of paper, another with dry shavings of wood, another with a bit of feather, the last with shreds of moss. He was back an hour later with a piece of raw meat.
As the days passed, he experimented with other materials, here a bit of bathroom sponge, there a gnat’s wing. Touching the leaves with a sewing needle failed to raise any effect. It looked as if Drosera could identify its proper food and reject inappropriate stimuli. At teatime one afternoon a week later, the leaves with flies were “splendidly curled in.” The insects were “well embraced.”
These plants returned with the family to Downe. They subsequently provided Darwin with hours of indoor amusement while Henrietta continued poorly and the weather was rainy. Appropriately, if rather bizarrely, many of Darwin’s silent fears and preoccupations of recent months seemingly began interlocking. The question of stomachs persistently seeped into his thoughts—Henrietta’s stomach, his own stomach, leaves as stomachs. These Drosera leaves appeared to carry out some of the functions of an animal digestive system, something like human stomachs turned inside out and exposed to view. To investigate his leaves was to search for the essence of the Darwin family weakness, the bane of his life. It seems as if he may have contemplated more than a simple problem in plant physiology.
Drosera did not give up its mysteries lightly. Try as he might, Darwin could not understand how the plants distinguished food from indigestible alternatives. At home at Down House he tested them with everything that came to hand. In August he tried feeding leaves with drops of milk, olive oil, white of egg, and gelatin, then moved on to syrup, white sugar, laundry starch, and gum. In September he plied them with strong tea and sherry. Soon he used himself as a private source of supply, trying human mucus, saliva, and urine.
With the domestic armoury exhausted, he turned to drugs and chemicals. Most of the substances he used were common enough for the period, and several were already in the family medicine chest. At one point he dosed the plants with chloroform, using the drops he kept handy for toothache. Chloroform vapour, he told Hooker excitedly, “paralyses them completely.” Every day brought a fresh experiment, another substance, another way of tempting the sundew’s appetite. Upstairs, Emma laboured at the same task with Henrietta. She ate hardly anything, Emma reported to William.
The story was much the same under the lens of his microscope. He could not work out what was happening inside the sundew’s hairs at the cellular level. Was he perhaps witnessing the absorption of nutritious materials? he asked Henslow.
When the viscid hairs contract or become inflected they pour out much fluid & the contents of the cells in the footstalks, instead of being a thin pink homogenous fluid, becomes a broken mass of dark red, thick fluid.… What has surprised me is that the globules & cylinders of the thick dark red fluid or substance keeps on an incessant slow contracting & expanding movement: they often coalesce & then separate again; they often send out buds, which rapidly increase at the expense of the larger parent mass; in short endless slow changes in form.51
He hoped he was seeing the digestion process. “Is any such phenomenon known?” he inquired. “It may be quite common, as I am so ignorant of vegetable physiology.”
As it happened Darwin was watching a phenomenon not fully understood until the twentieth century in which the wrinkling of the inner cell membrane, special to Drosera, provides a large surface area for the transfer of fluids. Darwin noted that what he called “clumping” happened only when plants were exposed to food substances: “A very weak solution of C. of Ammonia instantly sets the process at work.” Henslow was baffled by Darwin’s terminology of clumps, coalescing globules, and colour changes. Peering down his microscope, Darwin fretted anxiously over the problem, haunted by the notion of digestive processes gone wrong.
The plants accompanied him, too, when the family travelled to Eastbourne in the early autumn for another recuperative holiday for Henrietta. Yet at Eastbourne Henrietta relapsed, so quickly and so completely that Emma and Darwin were frightened she might die. Her stomach pains were “dreadfully fierce.” It was “a fearful attack,” Darwin told Henslow in panic. “What the end will be, we know not.”
Thoroughly alarmed, they summoned Henry Holland from London, who prepared them to expect the worst. For a week they lived on the edge. Then she rallied slightly. “We have had such a week of misery as I did not know man could suffer,” Darwin managed to write to Asa Gray afterwards. “As much misery as man can endure.”
My daughter grew worse and worse, with pitiable suffering, so that all the Doctors thought we should lose her. But the stoppage is over, & she has rallied surprisingly; but whether there is much organic mischief & what the final result will be cannot be known, till the miserable issue is decided. But she is quite easy now, & one comes at last to care only for that; & we have managed to conceal from her, her extreme danger.—You are so kind & sympathetic that I have not resisted telling you our unhappiness.—We shall not be able to remove her home for several weeks even if the case is not worse than the Doctors now hope & believe.52
The experience unsettled him much more than he admitted. Death breathed so close behind. With three children already gone, he said he dreaded the thought of losing Henrietta as a fourth. He could not see what possible prospect lay ahead for her now. Even a long period of convalescence might still leave her as a semi-invalid.
From then onwards, he and Emma viewed Henrietta’s health with anxiety, an understandable response at a time when the nation was ravaged by unmanageable disorders and infectious disease. The fear they experienced at Eastbourne never really left them. Henrietta did make a full recovery in the end and ultimately lived to a great old age. But her parents worried over her smallest infirmity for years to come, solicitously hiring bed-carriages for journeys, keeping her indoors most of the time, consulting different doctors, sending health bulletins around the family, and devising cautious routines that permitted only half an hour downstairs in the evenings, all of which tipped relatives and friends into regarding her as a permanent invalid. Henrietta emerged at the end of this illness not as a healthy young women of seventeen yearning to pick up the threads of the social life she was missing, but as a delicate daughter, prone to unspecified infirmities and relapses. At least she recognised the self-absorbed nature of these preoccupations when, as a mature woman, she said her mother had been “a perfect nurse in illness.” Being ill under Emma’s supervision was an opportunity for a daughter to be cherished, perhaps in contrast to Emma’s normally undemonstrative manner. “We are cool fish, we Darwins,” said Leonard many years later. The same opportunity to be physically close probably also applied to her father. When she was ill, Henrietta received Darwin’s undivided attention. She remembered how Darwin would stop working in his study and come into her room with such an expression of tender sympathy and emotion that she said she could scarcely bear to see it. “Both parents were unwearied in their efforts to soothe and amuse whichever of us was ill; my father played backgammon with me regularly every day, and she [Emma] would read out to me.”53 Although it does seem likely that these early illnesses indicated some lingering internal problem, Henrietta probably saw little incentive to abandon the semi-invalid state. Later on, her own marriage was partly built on giving and receiving the same kind of all-consuming medical attention.
Darwin’s unease about Henrietta merged into unease about sundews. Back at home in Down House, Darwin could no more diagnose the feeding requirements of his insectivorous plants than get to the bottom of his daughter’s illness. While Emma rubbed castor oil onto Henrietta’s abdomen (the latest medical recommendation, Hooker assured him), Darwin calculated and measured and dripped different solutions of chemicals onto his Drosera leaves. Then he moved on to poisons, ordering arsenic, henbane, and strychnine from William Baxter, the Bromley chemist. He made, in his study, weaker and weaker solutions of poison in order to test the detective powers of the leaves: how small a dose would kill them? He began corresponding with a forensic scientist in London who specialised in detecting small doses of arsenic in murder cases and was interested to discover that his plants were much more sensitive to poisons than people. His own stomach deteriorated as if in sympathy. “I sometimes suspect I shall soon entirely fail; my stomach now keeps bad nearly all day & night.” Unaware of these parallels with Victorian detective fiction, he read The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins’s mystery story. “The plot is wonderfully interesting.”54
It might almost be said that focusing on leaves served to displace Darwin’s wretchedness about Henrietta. Teasing and torturing the plants filled his mind. He could not easily contemplate the thought of Henrietta dying, or the thought that through inheritance he might be the cause of her weak stomach. Perhaps these emotions were funnelled into the escape route of natural history, just as he had once escaped the realities of another daughter’s death by immersing himself in the anatomy of barnacles. Perhaps the plants themselves reflected his own fears. Not long after this, he discovered he could kill them.
All his work, however, was called into doubt by a single stray human hair that drifted onto an unprotected leaf. To his surprise, the sundew thought that this too was food and began curling over the hair, sparking a chain of worrying doubts in Darwin’s mind. Were the tentacles stimulated by weight rather than by chemicals? All his results so far indicated that something chemical was going on. Disconcerted, he tried feeding them with pieces of cotton thread, less than 1/50 of an inch long, and then with Emma’s hair, finer than his own. Obligingly, the tentacles curled over. He was nonplussed. “I cannot persuade myself that it is the weight of 1/78,000 of a grain of solid substances which causes such plain movement; nor that it is in most cases the chemical nature; & what it is, stumps me quite,” he complained to Hooker.55 He mentioned the same doubts to Lubbock and Lyell.
I will & must finish my Drosera M.S. which will take me a week, for at this present moment I care more about Drosera than the origin of all the species in the world. But I will not publish on Drosera till next year, for I am frightened & astounded at my results.… All this dreadful illness for last six months (& that wicked dear little Drosera) has made any progress in my larger book almost nothing.56
He brought the project to an end in February 1861 when he went to deliver some remarks on the subject at the Royal Society’s Philosophical Club, a dining club of scientific gentlemen that ate together an hour or two before Royal Society meetings.57 Faced with an intellectual cul-de-sac his attention was temporarily exhausted.
For most men this would perhaps have finished the matter. Yet Darwin’s hobby-horses never really came to a halt in so definite a manner. Every so often, for years afterwards, he would ask botanical friends about insectivorous plants and would beg unusual specimens from Kew to investigate. Eventually, in the 1870s, he was able to make a full study of meat-eating plants. Published in 1875, this was to be one of his most engaging books. “By Jove I sometimes think Drosera is a disguised animal!” he told Hooker.
Even if he had not felt obliged to put sundews aside, other concerns began to crowd in. When he was in London for the Philosophical Club, he heard that Huxley’s wife was still very depressed over the death of their son despite the arrival of a new baby. Huxley asked Hooker and Darwin to stand godfather to the new baby, assuring them he would not care a fig if the words of the church service stuck in their throats. Huxley chose the name Leonard for the baby because, so the story goes, it contained within it the dead child’s name, Noel. Both Hooker and Darwin agreed to be godfathers, telling Huxley they would simply ignore the religious strictures. Leonard Huxley, who grew up an unconcerned atheist in the centre of this scientific circle, later became Hooker’s, Darwin’s, and Huxley’s biographer and edited several collections of letters.
Darwin was concerned about Henrietta Huxley. When he saw Huxley he suggested that she might like to visit Down House with the children for a rest in the country. “Do you not think a little change would be the best thing for Mrs. Huxley, if she could be induced to try it?” Down House was like a sanatorium already, he said, with his own Henrietta sickening upstairs. Mrs. Huxley (Nettie) would feel absolutely at home.
I have been talking with my wife & she joins heartily in asking whether Mrs. Huxley would not come here for a fortnight & bring all the children & nurse. But I must make it clear that this house is dreadfully dull & melancholy. My wife lives upstairs with my girl & she would see little of Mrs. Huxley, except at meal times, & my stomach is so habitually bad that I never spend the whole evening even with our nearest relations. If Mrs. Huxley could be induced to come, she must look at this house, just as if it were a country inn, to which she went for a change of air.58
Nettie Huxley had probably never received such a gloomy invitation before, but to everyone’s surprise she accepted. She wrote to Emma to warn her that she was rarely downstairs much before one o’clock, to which Emma replied that this was the usual state of affairs at Down House. She would only be following suit.
With their timetables so pragmatically agreed, the two wives spent the best part of March 1861 in each other’s company at Downe. Before then they hardly knew each other individually (Emma confessed that “it will be rather serious her coming without Mr H.”). The visit established the basis for a long-lasting family friendship. Emma and Nettie talked comfortably about their children and the usual childhood diseases, read books, and played music together. It may also have been a relief to realise that they were not alone in sharing their married lives with an intrusive third party like science. Best of all, they discovered a shared admiration for Tennyson. Emma had long despaired of Darwin’s dismissive attitude to Tennyson, and smiled to hear Mrs. Huxley’s frank declaration that Darwin had “no poet’s corner in his heart.” Henrietta Darwin enjoyed Tennyson too. So the women spent their evenings round the springtime fire, snugly wrapped in invalid shawls, reading aloud. They embraced the latest instalment of The Idylls of the King, Tennyson’s risqué account of Vivien’s seduction of Merlin. “Only fancy Mr. Darwin does not like poetry,” Nettie wrote in mock horror to her husband. “I fear he has not so good an opinion of you since I mentioned your taste for it. Let us pray for his conversion & glorify ourselves like true believers.”59
In May, Henslow died. For Darwin it was like the death of a parent.
Henslow was aged only sixty-four (a year older than Lyell), and his death was unexpected, at least to his scientific acquaintances. A month beforehand, he had published an animated note in Macmillan’s Magazine correcting a misapprehension about his views on species and defending Darwin. He said he respected Darwin’s right to his opinion, but believed that evolution could never be proved. “God does not set the creation going like a clock, wound up to go by itself,” he told his brother-in-law Leonard Jenyns privately.60 For him to fail so suddenly was a great surprise. But there was time enough for Hooker and his wife, Frances (Henslow’s daughter), to travel from Kew to Ipswich to be at Henslow’s bedside; time enough for Jenyns to get over from Bath to say a fond farewell (Henslow was married to Jenyns’s sister); and time enough for frail and elderly Sedgwick, Henslow’s devoted old university colleague, to arrive by railway train from Cambridge, a long journey across country, to make his adieus. Sedgwick was moved to tears by the occasion and whispered words of faith into Henslow’s ear not knowing if they were heard.61 Hooker asked Darwin if he would come as well.
After an embarrassing misunderstanding in which Darwin thought Henslow was already dead, Darwin made his excuses and declined.
If Henslow … would really like to see me I would of course start at once. The thought had [at] once occurred to me to offer, & the sole reason why I did not was that the journey, with the agitation, would cause me probably to arrive utterly prostrated. I shd be certain to have severe vomiting afterwards, but that would not much signify, but I doubt whether I could stand the agitation at the time. I never felt my weakness a greater evil. I have just had a specimen, for I spoke a few minutes at Linnean Society on Thursday & though extra well, it brought on 23 hours vomiting. I suppose there is some Inn at which I could stay, for I shd not like to be in house (even if you could hold me) as my retching is apt to be extremely loud.62
He felt guilty for months afterwards. He had never before used illness in such an obvious way to avoid personal obligations. By rights, he should have made every conceivable effort to attend Henslow’s deathbed. Henslow had made him what he was, not only by giving him the chance of a lifetime with the invitation for the Beagle voyage, but also by his kindly attentions and support thereafter. The refusal was seemingly grounded in the same inner tightening Darwin had felt on his father’s death in 1849, not as intense as the despair occasioned by the children’s deaths, yet involving other disturbing feelings of emotional debts unpaid. Henslow’s demise ended another chapter in his life. Yet his absence was a poor return for Henslow’s friendship.
The excuse, moreover, put Darwin in an awkward position. Hooker knew he had been well enough to go to a Philosophical Club dinner in London; well enough for a speech at the Linnean Society; and well enough to entertain Mary Butler, his Ilkley water-cure friend, at home in April, with an evening of spirit-rapping and table-turning in the Down House drawing room. “She tried mesmerizing Franky,” Emma reported, “in which I think she would have succeeded but as he is such a nervous subject I did not much encourage it.”
But he was too sick for Henslow. Afterwards, full of remorse and wanting to compensate for his selfish behaviour, he tried to make amends in a brief account of Henslow’s influence on him that he wrote at Jenyns’s request for a memoir that Jenyns was preparing. Darwin’s recollections glowed with affection and respect. He dwelled on the qualities that he most admired in Henslow—modesty, sympathy, and self-effacement. Many years later, it struck George Romanes that Darwin was actually describing himself, an “uncanny description,” said Romanes, of Darwin’s own virtues. The identification between pupil and teacher was indeed close. “Poor dear & honoured Henslow,” Darwin subsequently wrote to Hooker. “He truly is a model to keep always before one’s eyes.”
Guilt, death, ill health, and suffering haunted him. He was taking life much more badly than Emma had seen for some time, and she wondered if she was neglecting him because of her concern about Henrietta. She wished he could find some form of solace in religious belief. Around now, as she had done once or twice before, she wrote him a letter, choosing to write to him rather than to speak, in order to express herself carefully. She felt a letter was the best way to ensure his attention.
I cannot tell you the compassion I have felt for all your sufferings for these weeks past that you have had so many drawbacks. Nor the gratitude I have felt for the cheerful & affectionate looks you have given me when I know you have been miserably uncomfortable.
My heart has often been too full to speak or take any notice. I am sure you know I love you well enough to believe I mind your sufferings nearly as much as I should my own & I find the only relief to my own mind is to take it as from God’s hand, & to try to believe that all suffering & illness is meant to help us exalt our minds & to look forward with hope to a future state. When I see your patience, deep compassion for others, self command & above all gratitude for the smallest thing done to help you I cannot help longing that these precious feelings should be offered to heaven for the sake of your daily happiness. But I find it difficult enough in my own case. I often think of the words ‘Thou shalt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee.’ It is feeling & not reasoning that drives one to prayer. I feel presumptuous in writing thus to you.
I feel in my inmost heart your admirable qualities & feelings & all I would hope is that you might direct them upwards, as well as to one who values them above every thing in the world. I shall keep this by me till I feel cheerful & comfortable again about you, but it has passed through my mind often lately so I thought I would write it partly to relieve my own mind.
“God bless you,” wrote Darwin in the margin. She was asking him to do the impossible. Come what may he was the author of the Origin of Species.
Early in 1861, Murray asked Darwin for a third edition of his book, plainly confident that it would sell. This was published in April in a print run of two thousand copies, a fully revised edition. The title page indicated that this edition brought the total number of copies printed up to seven thousand. The most significant adjustments Darwin made were to include the historical sketch that he had attached to Bronn’s German translation and the authorised American edition of 1860. He added a notice of the forthcoming publication of Asa Gray’s pamphlet Natural Selection Not Inconsistent with Natural Theology.
Arranging publication of Gray’s pamphlet was one of Darwin’s more subtle moves. He had been impressed by Gray’s positive, thoughtful reviews of the Origin of Species in the Atlantic Monthly. Keen to spread the good news, Darwin arranged to have these reviews reprinted and distributed in Britain at his own expense, under the title Natural Selection Not Inconsistent with Natural Theology. A Free Examination of Darwin’s Treatise on the Origin of Species, and of Its American Reviewers (1861). He was a trifle peeved that Murray refused to accept this commission, saying it was hardly a commercial proposition; and instead Darwin got it printed by Trubner’s and distributed it personally from Down House, each copy of the pamphlet accompanied by one of his most beguiling letters. He asked Huxley and Hooker to get it mentioned in Natural History Review and the Gardeners’ Chronicle respectively. By reprinting and distributing a favourable review, Darwin was taking the process of persuasion a step further than he had attempted before, and he was pleased when it appeared to be successful. In years to come he was to make the same move several times again, a relatively unnoticed aspect of his propaganda campaign.
In this pamphlet Gray argued that evolution should not be dismissed as an atheistic horror story. He said that Darwin’s book ought to be given a fair hearing, free from the blasts of religious prejudice. He discussed the other reviews that had appeared in the United States and showed where their criticisms were answered by Darwin. All this was balm to Darwin’s ears. Although Darwin disagreed with Gray’s theological compromises—Gray suggested that God might create favourable variations and thereby still oversee the evolutionary process from a distance—he also believed that Gray showed that faith and natural selection were not mutually exclusive: “far the best theistic essay,” he said, he had ever read.63 Gray’s science was impeccable. His religious integrity was obvious. Darwin persuaded Gray to drop the customary anonymity and to allow his name to go on the pamphlet’s title page (“indispensable”). He went to a great deal of trouble to distribute the pamphlet to the people and journals he felt mattered most in Europe. And he felt particular satisfaction in sending presentation copies to Bishop Wilberforce and the Athenaeum—satisfaction and smug revenge.
As for the Origin of Species itself, Darwin’s financial account with Murray was healthy. The first edition brought him a payment of £180; the second, two instalments of £318 6s. 8d and £275 8s., which probably reflected his sudden notoriety and the increased print runs as much as anything. Murray’s payment for the third edition of 1861 was £372.64 Darwin felt he had done his best for Murray and did not produce another full-scale revision until 1866.
All the while, apes were pushing noisily to the fore. Huxley and Owen’s increasingly accessible arguments made these creatures the topic of the day, a striking instance of the way that a particular species of animal can occasionally make manifest all the concerns of a human community unsettled by new ideas.65 Apes and monkeys (the general public were none too precise about the distinction) soon represented an exotic combination of all the issues involved in the evolutionary debate: fear, disgust, anatomy, theology, mankind’s created status, humour, morality, vulgarity, and sheer sensationalism.
Huxley did not have the debate all his own way. As chance would have it, the African explorer Paul Du Chaillu erupted onto the English lecture circuit early in 1861, full of stories about gorillas, a beast almost unknown to specialists and the public alike. Du Chaillu brought with him skins, skulls, and pickled specimens in barrels—the stuff of nightmares for some, horrified attention for others. He was a French-American who had grown up on the west coast of Africa, only twenty years old, and attractively unconventional, appearing on the London stage as a longhaired showman in buckskins; he was a charlatan whose reputation oscillated as wildly as the truth of his stories.66 On arriving in England he contacted Richard Owen, saying he wished to place his collection of gorilla specimens—the “Man Monkey” as the popular press had it—at the British Museum’s service.
Swiftly, Owen coopted Du Chaillu for his own purposes. These included the hope of silencing Huxley and ramming home the need for a national museum of natural history with himself at its head. Owen arranged for Du Chaillu to speak about gorillas at the Royal Geographical Society on 25 February 1861, one of the most spectacular meetings of the year, attended by cabinet ministers and their wives, as well as scientists and other interested parties.67 Taken aback by the pelts and skulls that Du Chaillu displayed on the platform, this elite audience turned the speaker into an overnight phenomenon. With Owen’s support, Du Chaillu went on to talk at the Royal Institution and the Ethnological Society, and his Explorations and Adventures was published later in the spring by John Murray. No doubt Du Chaillu found his relationship with Owen useful for publicity purposes, and he kept it warm with hints of more specimens to come. He hooked Owen for good by giving him a full-size male gorilla skin for the British Museum, complete with a scattering of bullet holes.
Du Chaillu’s colourful accounts were perfectly tailored to the stereotypes of his day. He claimed that gorillas were ferocious beasts, that they attacked without provocation, that their roars shook the woods. This news was apparently confirmed by Du Chaillu’s sketch of a gunman (himself) about to shoot a rampaging male animal. The scene shrieked with explicit Victorian imagery. Mankind versus nature; colonial conquest; civilisation versus the wild; humanity confronting the beast within: all these could be read into the picture, and were read. No amount of learned talk about the anatomy of brains could have framed the essence of the ape or angel question so vividly. It was popularly said that Darwin proposed that Victorian men and women, the presumed flowers of civilised society, were direct descendants of vile beasts like these. Huxley, Owen, Du Chaillu, evolution, monkeys, and gorillas tumbled together in respectable people’s minds.
The satirical journals picked up the conceit immediately. “Am I a Man and a Brother?” asked a gorilla in the May 1861 number of Punch.
Am I satyr or man?
Pray tell me who can,
And settle my place in the scale.
A man in ape’s shape,
An anthropoid ape,
Or monkey deprived of his tail?
Then Huxley and Owen,
With rivalry glowing,
With pen and ink rush to the scratch;
Tis brain versus brain,
Till one of them’s slain;
By Jove! it will be a good match!
On and on the Punch verses went. The anonymous author was Sir Phillip Egerton, a Tory M.P. with a fine collection of fossil fish but not much of a reputation for wit or poetry. Egerton was a trustee of the Royal College of Surgeons and the British Museum, and, in an institutional sense, he acted as Owen’s patron. When Huxley discovered who the author was, he squealed in triumph. For Egerton to defect from the Owenite camp and write such an amusing squib “speaks volumes for Owen’s perfect success in damning himself.”68
Blackwood’s Magazine continued the apish theme with a rhyme set to a drinking tune.
Pouters, tumblers, and fantails are from the same source;
The racer and hack may be traced to one horse:
So Men were developed from Monkeys, of course,
Which nobody can deny.
Which nobody can deny.…69
Irresistibly, Victorian humorists declared that apes were more intelligent than men because they at least knew when to keep silent. Typological satire flooded the pages of Punch, with guest appearances from Mr. O’Rilla and Professor Porpus. Soon a Mr. G-G-G-O-O-O-rilla, beautifully dressed in evening clothes, was pictured arriving as a guest at a high-society party. This was quintessential Punch display, linking obscure trivia with scientific parody.70 Appreciative of the public taste for apes, Punch dedicated its 1861 Christmas Annual to the gorilla and pictured the magazine’s imaginary Mr. Punch playing leapfrog with his alter ego for the year. These popular writings and cartoons not only conveyed the central point under debate and expressed the fears of traditionally minded British readers but also generated a nonspecialist, vernacular idiom for discussing and understanding the question.
Gorillas did not go away. Owen spoke about Du Chaillu’s specimens in a lecture in 1861 at the Royal Institution titled “The Gorilla and the Negro” and crossly responded to Huxley’s cruel post-Oxford article. The brain question, he said, was not one of fact but of interpretation. Owen claimed his “hippocampus minor” applied to humans alone and was not a term that could be used indiscriminately when speaking about animal brains. Though the gorilla was evidently much closer in structure to mankind than any other ape, this skilled anatomist asserted that its behaviour and its brain anatomy indicated an unbridgeable divide.
Owen’s paper made a splash in the pages of the Athenaeum, accompanied by drawings of gorilla skulls, eliciting a sharp reply from Huxley criticising points of pictorial detail. Owen responded in chilly tones in the letter columns on 6 April, to which Huxley retorted in the same columns, “Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once.”71
Darwin and Hooker held their breath. This time Huxley really might have gone too far. He had descended into invective. But when Hooker told Darwin to calm down, the reply came back as smartly as Huxley’s. Darwin said he would never forget Owen’s behaviour over the Edinburgh Review.
In simple truth I am become quite demoniacal about Owen, worse than Huxley, & I told Huxley that I shd. put myself under his care to be rendered milder. But I mean to try to get more angelic in my feelings; yet I shall never forget his cordial shake of the hand when he was writing as spitefully as he possibly could against me.… Oh dear this does not look like becoming more angelic in my temper.72
The apish unpleasantness continued in the next number of Huxley’s Natural History Review, in which George Rolleston, the Oxford professor of comparative anatomy, published a slightly more temperate paper on brains, comparing an orang-utan with a human, but still defending Huxley’s position. In a letter to the Annals and Magazine of Natural History Owen again pointed out that the issue was not a matter of fact but one of definition. Huxley publicly dissected a spider monkey that had recently died in the Zoological Gardens to substantiate his alternative case.
When Du Chaillu’s book was issued early in May, Owen’s camp started to waver. John Edward Gray of the British Museum declared Du Chaillu’s gorilla story must be fantasy. With an incongruous twist of museum expertise, he pointed out that the donated skin displayed no gunshot holes in the chest as Du Chaillu’s picture suggested. The only holes were in the back of the skull, as demonstrated in a diagram he sent to the Athenaeum.73 The implication was that Du Chaillu was a liar, and perhaps a coward as well, for he had evidently shot his specimen in the back. The Westminster Review condemned Du Chaillu and ran through the hippocampus controversy again, this time favoring Huxley’s view—the author was John Chapman, a friend of Herbert Spencer and George Lewes. Huxley’s own journal, the Natural History Review, guardedly mentioned Du Chaillu’s “rather vivid imagination.” In the end, the Athenaeum published letters from all the protagonists, each defending himself to the hilt, even from Du Chaillu’s brother-in-law, who accused his relative of embroidering the facts. The British Museum rushed out a commercial picture postcard showing the skeletons of a man and a gorilla, amicably standing side by side.
Charles Kingsley had the last word. By now Kingsley felt he knew every detail of the controversy, every nuance of the elaborate performances played out on the British Association stage, and every crevice of the personalities involved. The British Association meeting at Cambridge in 1862 provided him with his moment. Coming so soon after the Athenaeum articles and letters, this was an excitable meeting, the summit of Owen and Huxley’s long-running personal encounter. Huxley was president of the section in which Owen presented two anti-Darwinian papers. One was on the aye-aye, a tree-climbing lemur from Madagascar; Owen claimed that the adaptations that suited this animal for an arboreal, insect-eating life disproved evolution. In the second, Owen dwelled defiantly on the brain again and introduced the age-old question of whether apes have toes or thumbs. Owen appeared to be “lying & shuffling,” said Huxley. He made mincemeat out of Owen’s thumbs and toes. One by one, Huxley’s anatomical friends rose in his slipstream to the attack.
Kingsley produced a privately printed skit during the meeting composed in the style of Lord Dundreary, a comic theatrical character of the season, called Speech of Lord Dundreary in section D, on Friday last on the great Hippocampus question. A hippocampus in the human brain was a rum thing, said Dundreary. “I never felt one in mine; but perhaps it’s dead and so didn’t stir.”
The other gentleman who got up last, Mr. Flower, you know, he said that it was all over the ape everywhere—all over hippocampuses, from head to foot, poor beast, like a dog all over ticks!… And Prof. O. said it wasn’t in apes at all; but only in the order Bimana, that’s you and me.… So one must be right, and all the rest wrong, or else one of them wrong, and all the rest right—you see that?74
Not long after, Kingsley dreamed up the storyline of his children’s book The Water Babies. “Such a story” said Alexander Macmillan, the publisher, gratefully. The Water Babies was published in instalments in Macmillan’s Magazine beginning in August 1862 and then as a book by Macmillan in 1863. Alongside the religious cleansing and evolutionary transformations experienced by Kingsley’s young hero, the soot-blackened chimney-sweep Tom, lay Kingsley’s characterisation of contemporary science, in which he brought the thinly disguised figures of Huxley, Owen, and Du Chaillu and the hippocampus debate to a wider Victorian readership. If a water baby existed, wrote Kingsley, it would have to be cut in half, one half for Owen, the other for Huxley. Professor Ptthmllnsprts (Put-them-all-in-spirits) was Huxley. Deftly, Kingsley had Ptthmllnsprts claim nothing was true except for what he could see, hear, taste, or handle.
He had even got up once at the British Association, and declared that apes had hippopotamus majors in their brains just as men have. Which was a shocking thing to say; for, if it were so, what would become of the faith, hope and charity of immortal millions? You may think there are other more important differences between you and an ape, such as being able to speak, and make machines, and know right from wrong, and say your prayers, and other little matters of that kind; but that is a child’s fancy, my dear. Nothing is to be depended on but the great hippopotamus test.75
The Owen-Huxley clash lent itself readily to Kingsley’s mockery. “If a hippopotamus major is ever discovered in one single ape’s brain, nothing will save your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-greater-greatest-grandmother from having been an ape too.” Kingsley also poked fun at the entrenched positions the two men had adopted. Asked to explain why there were no water babies, the Huxley character rudely retorted, “Because there ain’t.” No other commentator so succinctly conveyed Huxley’s bulldog spirit.
When Linley Sambourne came to illustrate the book in 1886, he included caricatures of Huxley and Owen examining a bottled baby.76 Some six years after that, Huxley’s own grandson, the future biologist Julian Huxley, was sufficiently confused by the literary fame of the episode to ask his grandfather whether he could look at this water baby in its bottle.77
In truth Darwin’s proposals needed a well-publicised affray like this. Following hard in the footsteps of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and the Wilberforce-Huxley Oxford debate, the attention generated by apes and the arguments about apes propelled Darwin’s ideas about evolution out of the arcane realms of learned journals and books into the ordinary world of humour, newspapers, and demotic literature. Mr. Punch’s monkeys and gorillas, Du Chaillu’s tall stories, and Huxley and Owen’s battle of wits forced the full implications of Darwin’s densely packed theory to sink in much more quickly and thoroughly than he could ever have expected.
This time George Henry Lewes got it absolutely right for Blackwood’s Magazine in 1861. “The Darwinian hypothesis … is clamorously rejected by the conservative minds, because it is thought to be revolutionary, and not less eagerly accepted by insurgent minds, because it is thought destructive of old doctrines.”78