SOON THE WARMER weather brought out the wild flowers around Downe—a mass of bluebells in the Sandwalk followed by ox-eye daisies in the home meadow and other species a little further away in the woods and fields towards the village of Cudham, where Darwin and Emma liked to walk in the afternoons to a place they called Orchis Bank. Resting on that grassy bank, idly listening to bees humming round the flowerheads, was far nicer than worrying about reviews. “Observing is much better sport than writing,” Darwin admitted.1 The location carried a special place in Darwin’s and Emma’s affections, for these walks were mentioned time after time in their respective memories of each other, and it may well have been the same sweetly tangled bank, “clothed with many plants of many kinds,” that Darwin had in mind when bringing the Origin of Species to its close. “Larks abound here & their songs sound most agreeably on all sides; nightingales are common,” he recorded appreciatively soon after their move to Down.2
He had always found the study of plants to be a pleasant combination of relaxation and interest. Whenever he felt over-stretched or ill, a few botanical investigations usually soothed his troubled mind. After the Origin of Species was published they helped him forget how haggard he was becoming: how much he was turning into a letter-writing machine, forever defending his pitch, incessantly chipping away at the walls of resistance, always courting approval, nudging, or explaining. Rambling about the garden or along the Kentish lanes took him away from the ferment whipped up by Huxley and others in London.
He would usually laugh at these placid interests of his and claim he was no botanist, saying he was “a man who hardly knows a daisy from a dandelion.” Certainly, he rarely ventured into what he thought of as real botany, the herbarium-based sciences of taxonomy and morphology at which Hooker and Gray excelled. His friends were much better at these than he was. Yet he loved to puzzle over the quietly complicated lives of plants. Ever since coming to Downe, with its fields and lawns set in the chalky countryside, he took daily interest in the green activity going on around him.
But even Darwin was surprised by the ardour for orchids that coursed over him in the middle of 1861, something like an unexpected love affair late in life. Attracted by their beauty and diversity, he pushed his book on variation aside and launched himself into a complete reevaluation of the anatomy and reproduction of these complicated plants, in the end publishing a small monograph on the subject in 1862, his first theoretical work after the Origin of Species. In the process, he came to admire orchids with the single-minded devotion that he had once given to barnacles; and he sometimes wondered if his addiction was turning into “another barnacle job.” Even he, the most attentive of strategists, could see the incongruity of following the magisterial pace of the Origin with a little book on flowers.
The endeavour, as it happened, did turn into another barnacle project, for many reasons and at many levels. First and foremost was the feeling that he was being introduced to something new and beautiful. Everywhere he spoke of his curiosity about orchids, his appreciation, and how “very lucky” he was in his “beautiful facts.”
Furthermore, he probably longed to get away from his dull writing work on variation for Murray. He said he felt tired, sometimes bored, with the evolutionary controversy, irked by wrenching answers to critics out of his churning brain. He had written or dealt with three English editions, two American editions, and two translations of his Origin in three years. He sensed that his friends would probably carry on promoting evolution without his constant personal intervention, for a while at least, more effectively than he in most cases. He lacked the energy for confronting difficult public situations. This, coupled with an apparent disinclination to expose himself to intense emotion, encouraged a temporary retreat. His greenhouse or his study was a good place to be when the intellectual wind howled around his ankles. “I am got intensely interested,” he confided. “I cannot fancy anything more perfect than the many curious contrivances.”
Practical investigations therefore seemed particularly alluring. He wanted to pit his wits once again against the native ingenuity of animals and plants, to be able to follow a lucky hunch, and use all his guile and skill to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion. He liked to win—no doubt about that. More than that, he loved the spirit of the game itself. Inside every practical scientist the same pleasure in competing against nature lurks below the surface, the same enthusiasm for experiment, the same satisfaction in dreaming up new gambits and twists that can trick or tease the natural world into revealing its secrets. The sense of personal enjoyment that Darwin derived from research was strong. He relished the creative opportunities that lay in identifying significant and subtle problems that were not amenable to traditional approaches, and felt his theory gave him a way of looking at the world that helped unlock doors. “I am like a gambler, & love a wild experiment,” he declared.3 To the end of his days he said, “I cannot bear to be beaten.” Perhaps without really understanding why, he needed to confront the raw material of nature again. His barnacle work had made him feel focussed and purposeful during a difficult time in his life. Orchids looked set to supply a similar mental release. Writing the Origin, the book by which he was becoming known to posterity, could almost be thought of as a personal ordeal sandwiched in between.
Not everything came to a peak together. When other plants stirred in the garden, Darwin began a multitude of small experiments that he had been saving up over the dull winter months. He looked briefly at sundews again and investigated a Venus’s fly-trap which Hooker sent to him from the Kew glasshouses. Darwin greeted the fly-trap with cries of delight, because this species closed its hinged and spiky leaves over the flies like a mantrap. “How curious it is to see a fly caught & how beautiful are the adaptations compared with Drosera.” He speculated about possible connections between sundew hairs and the spines lining the fly-trap’s outer edges.
As soon as he could get outside in the weak spring sunshine, he also repeated some observations on garden plants that had been rained off the previous summer. Assiduously, he reactivated his correspondence with Daniel Oliver, the senior curator at Kew Gardens. Oliver was an ideal contact for him, interested in the same kind of living plant functions as Darwin, willing to follow up research topics, and soon to become professor of botany at University College London, where he took many of Darwin’s ideas into the world of academic botany. Hooker had introduced them a few months earlier, which proved to be an inspired move. “He must be astonished at not having a string of questions,” Darwin cheerily remarked to Hooker. “I fear he will get out of practice!”
Primroses and cowslips bloomed early that year and Darwin went to work cross-pollinating the different kinds. On his instructions, Brooks and Lettington, the Down House gardeners, transplanted a number of wild primroses into an experimental bed in the kitchen garden. Darwin intended to discover whether the two separate forms of flowers—the long-styled (pin-headed) and short-styled (thrum)—were specially adapted to fertilise each other. Although each form of flower was self-fertile, he thought pin-to-thrum matings were more likely, on his theories, to succeed better than pin-to-pin or thrum-to-thrum. A discrepancy in the size of pollen grains suggested that this might be the case. “I do not know whether I shall suceed in making out the meaning of the dimorphism,” he told Oliver in April 1861, “but I have not been idle, for I have made much above 100 crosses with the pollen of the different sizes.”
He crouched in the flowerbeds transferring pollen grains with a fine paintbrush from primrose to primrose. Then he waited for the fertilised plants to set seed. In May he counted the number of seedpods on each plant. A week or two later, he collected the pods, unzipped them, and weighed the seeds from different batches, using his old apothecary’s balance from the Shrewsbury days, having decided that the weight of the seeds would be the best way to establish each plant’s relative fertility. By June he had confirmed his expectations. If the two forms were crossed, they were at their most productive. If they were allowed to fertilise their own kind, much less so. Darwin concluded that the flowers were physically adapted to facilitate outbreeding, almost as if the original hermaphroditic condition was gradually differentiating into two sexes. “I think that you will think that I have made out the meaning of dimorphism in Primula satisfactorily, & a very odd case it is & has caused me much labour in artificial crossing,” he reported to Hooker. He sent a long, original paper on this subject to the Linnean Society in November 1861. He had created something meaningful out of apparently insignificant researches.
In practical terms, Darwin’s experiment in this area was perhaps neither more nor less than any other natural historian or amateur botanist might have pursued for amusement during the early summer months. Yet he brought to it an over-riding preoccupation with the consequences of the results. This feature of his practical work remained constant throughout a long life. Every experiment he was to devise in future years was performed with its ultimate relevance for evolution by natural selection in mind. He rarely tried things out merely to see what might happen—or at least, even his most improbable inquiries were executed with some hypothesis or “wild speculation” to explore.4 “He often said that no one could be a good observer unless he was an active theoriser,” remarked his son Francis much later on.
It was as if he were charged with theorising power ready to flow into any channel on the slightest disturbance, so that no fact, however small, could avoid releasing a stream of theory, and thus the fact became magnified into importance. In this way it naturally happened that many untenable theories occurred to him; but fortunately his richness of imagination was equalled by his power of judging and condemning the thoughts that occurred to him. He was just to his theories, and did not condemn them unheard; and so it happened that he was willing to test what would seem to most people not at all worth testing.… The love of experiment was very strong in him, and I can remember the way he would say, “I shan’t be easy till I have tried it,” as if an outside force were driving him.5
That “outside force” was the notion of natural selection. Furthermore, Darwin must have had a firm belief—or a naïve belief—in the possibility of getting answers from his work. As often as not, experimental science goes nowhere. It either runs into a dead end or provides results that cannot be used in the way that was intended. Experiments frequently fail and a new route into the problem has to be devised. Small-scale investigations like Darwin’s carried the additional hazard of being so small as to be insignificant to the larger scheme of things, barely a drop in the intellectual ocean. Nonetheless, Darwin seems to have convinced himself that the hours of work that he dedicated to counting seeds or measuring seedlings would be pertinent. “Another quality which was shown in his experimental work, was his power of sticking to a subject; he used almost to apologise for his patience, saying that he could not bear to be beaten, as if this were a sign of weakness on his part,” continued Francis. “Perseverance seems hardly to express his almost fierce desire to force the truth to reveal itself.”
This faith in the power of practical work showed Darwin at his most pragmatic. He evidently believed that the best kind of biological science, the science that was taking shape as a discipline during the middle years of the nineteenth century, ought to be based on a culture of tangible experience. He felt confident that the solutions he wanted resided somewhere in his raw materials. His self-appointed task was to find them.
After this encouraging start, Darwin eased into a happy summer of orchids. For it was the existence of even more complicated reproductive adaptations in orchids that so fascinated him. Orchid flowers, which normally contain both male and female reproductive organs, do not usually fertilise themselves, he insisted, despite the proximity of the sexual parts. Instead, he thought the internal anatomy was arranged to ensure that the male pollen must be carried by an insect to another plant or flower, and that the female organs always received pollen from another source. In British and European orchids the process almost always involved bees, first described by Conrad Sprengel in 1793. Darwin thought Sprengel’s book was “wonderful,” and liked to praise the neglected merits of its author.6 Long ago Darwin too had noticed the internal structure of wild orchids and surmised that bees and moths carried pollen from one flower to the next.
But this was only the half of it. In his garden or thereabouts he could find several native kinds. The unobtrusive green-winged orchid (Orchis morio) came up with the cowslips in the field, and the common orchid, Orchis mascula, usually known as Shakespeare’s long purples, arrived later, in the wooded area by the Sandwalk, the copse at the end of the Down House estate. There were other sorts on banks and ditches within a short walk; “no British county excels Kent in the number of its orchids,” he said appreciatively. The lower lip of the flowers, on which the insects landed, was either lobed or frilled, ornamented with coloured spots and patches, and sported any number of hairs, ridges, keels, wings, or spurs. The thought that these were lures for insects was unavoidable. Further inside, the male pollen masses were attached to thin, flexible stalks, like a pair of fragile, movable antennae, and, just below, what appeared to be the top of the female organs expanded out into a flat sticky plate or rostellum. The size, shape, and positioning of these male and female parts were different in every species. Darwin wondered about their origins, and how the flowers could possibly function. His intention was to show that even the most complex structures and life cycles, even those that depended on completely different organisms such as insects for their fulfillment, could be explained by natural selection. Where most people tended to regard plants like orchids as the handiwork of God, Darwin saw the flowers as a marvellous collection of ad hoc evolutionary adaptations.
Armed with an array of tin cans and biscuit boxes to serve as containers, Darwin tramped the countryside in search of orchids, getting Brooks and Lettington to pot up the specimens he brought back. These employees had to stretch their traditional vegetable-garden repertoire to cope with a variety of demanding species that eventually included Epipactis latifolia, a woodland orchid which changes shape according to soil conditions, and Goodyera repens, a native of Scotland, which requires special bedding-out in peat all on its own. Darwin discovered it was best for his experiments if he dug up the whole plant, roots and all. He needed a ready supply of flowering spikes and access for observations in situ. The difficulties of germination (he did not know that many required the presence of a special fungus) and the long wait for the flowers to appear on mature plants made them an additional challenge.
Inevitably, too, he began corresponding with field naturalists, horticulturists, botanists, and country gentlefolk who might be able to help. These contacts—especially Alexander More, who lived on the Isle of Wight, a site of special botanical interest—sent him native orchids from various parts of the British Isles. Alexander More often put fresh plants on the overnight train to Farnborough, and Parslow, the butler, would ride down to the station to collect whichever carefully sealed package had arrived that day.
Darwin also began manoeuvring among a new group of correspondents, this time botanical women. As a subject, botany then enjoyed enormous popularity with nonprofessionals and was often associated in the public mind with respectable middle-class activities such as gardening and flower-painting. It was also particularly popular with women.7 On John Lindley’s advice, Darwin approached Lady Dorothy Nevill, the political hostess, to ask if she might be able to send him a few hothouse orchids from her collection. Lady Dorothy was an avid reader, writer, and gardener who became very much interested in the Origin of Species. Her hothouses—as Darwin hoped—contained unusual plants sent to her by friends from several parts of the world. In his first letter to her, he was beguilingly candid about his exotic desires, saying he would very much like “Limodoridae, Vanillidae &c, especially Mormodes & Cycnoches, Bonatea, Masdevillia, and any Bolbopyllum with its lower lip or labellum irritable.”
Lady Dorothy collected famous botanists rather as she collected plants. She evidently considered Darwin a good catch. “I am so pleased to help in any way the labours of such a man—it is quite an excitement for me in my quiet life, my intercourse with him. He promises to pay me a visit when in London. I am sure he will find I am the missing link between man and apes,” she told Lady Airlie.8 In return, Darwin was willing to be caught if it meant that he got his specimens. Over the years Lady Dorothy sent him several rare plants. She also asked for his photograph to hang, as she said, in her private sitting room opposite Sir William Hooker, a trophy gallery to which Darwin assigned himself with a sigh. His other lady acquaintances were usually less demanding.
Through Hooker, Darwin also acquired introductions to a series of highly competent garden directors in the colonies, and to the botanical brothers Roland and Henry Trimen, working in South Africa and Ceylon respectively, each of them a mine of useful information.
Family outings contributed to the cause. During one long and energetic morning while staying at Elizabeth Wedgwood’s house, Darwin transplanted Malaxis paludosa, the marsh orchid, from one boggy patch to another to see if insects were prepared to visit an intruder. Covered in mud, he returned to say that the insects did. At another time, his son George remembered being sent out to Cudham on a balmy summer night to catch and count the moths visiting plants on Orchis Bank, followed by an evening spent sitting at his father’s table surrounded by printed catalogues identifying the species. Once or twice Parslow put on leather gaiters to gather flower spikes from a ditch. When his master’s supply ran low, he took the London train to collect choice government specimens from Hooker.
Darwin’s neighbours were similarly obliging—his was a passion that could be understood and indulged. George Turnbull, of the Rookery on the other side of the village, let Darwin use his heated greenhouse for the more delicate specimens that came into his hands, and tolerantly watched as his own gardener, John Horwood, was swept into Darwin’s voracious information system.9 Horwood was more knowledgeable than Darwin’s own gardeners and had experience with hothouse cultivation techniques. On one occasion, he was the only person able to identify plants that arrived from Kew without their labels. Probably gratified at being able to display his professional expertise, Horwood went on to fertilise Vinca rosea for Darwin, a demonstration of technical virtuosity that he undertook only when several contributors to the Gardeners’ Chronicle recorded constant failure.
Moreover, Darwin was fortunate in being able to tap the horticultural vigour of the times. He benefitted greatly from the surge in botanical expertise that characterised the Victorian temper of life, the new clubs, societies, training schemes, glasshouses, heating systems, illustrated magazines, and libraries. He obtained easy access to an abundance of specialist nurserymen and seedsmen, plant breeders, gardening authors, and skilled practical men, all of whom contributed in one way or another to the great fervour for plants that marked the middle years of the nineteenth century. Rapid developments in glasshouse technology were benefitting amateurs and professionals alike, at the same time as new trade routes and overseas connections made the importation of fancy species more feasible, and the restless urges of the middle classes were spilling into natural history fashions and crazes as never before. Botany, with all its ramifications into colonial enterprise, the plantation system, horticulture, herbarium research, agriculture, recreation, and fashion, was the “big science” of its day as well as a rising popular phenomenon. Plant breeding became an absorbing hobby for some, the backbone of a prime business concern for others. Horticulture diversified into profitable commercial propositions as new forms of stoves, plate glass, iron girders, mechanical ventilation systems, pipework, and the park-keeper’s urge for gaily coloured bedding-out schemes in leisure gardens all came into being in the middle years of the century. Although Britons have historically always considered themselves a nation of gardeners, there was something unique about this particular combination of plants, business acumen, public attention, and technology that generated unprecedented attention.
There could hardly have been a better time to take up the study of orchids either. The Royal Botanic Garden at Kew naturally involved itself with the tropical species, making full use of Britain’s ascendency overseas to collect a wide variety of species. These were essentially plants for research and colonial display. At the same time, the Horticultural Society in London (soon to add “Royal” to its name) encouraged its members to grow show specimens, building an orchid house in the society’s public gardens at Chiswick and stimulating the growth of commercial firms such as James Veitch & Sons, which built up a successful business in breeding new blooms. In 1859 the Horticultural Society awarded its first Certificate of Outstanding Merit at a show to a cattleya bred by James and John Veitch. This previously rather specialised taste for orchids developed into a vogue during the 1860s and 1870s, rather as tulipomania had gripped Europeans in the seventeenth century and pinks and auriculas excited pre-war gardeners in the early twentieth.10 Reputations soared with the development of a single exceptional bloom. Incomes improved; botanical skill, determination, and personal endeavour were rewarded.
Few enthusiasts succeeded in keeping their orchids alive for very long. Early misunderstandings about potting techniques and temperatures defeated nearly everyone, and fresh specimens were constantly imported to replace the old. Looking around the stalls at one horticultural show, Hooker sadly remarked that England was the “grave of tropical orchids.” He referred to the depredations around Rio de Janeiro, an area where Darwin had collected only thirty years before, which was subsequently stripped of all its native orchids, never to reappear.
Still, Darwin had a ready-made resource at his fingertips.11
He had noticed one of the more unusual adaptations before. Standing in his study one day he was tinkering with an orchid flower when the pollen masses suddenly shot out and hit the window: “about a yard’s distance,” he said in surprise. He tried to detonate other orchids by inserting thin paintbrushes and pencils into the mouth of the flowers. Few of them possessed similar high-velocity devices. But if he looked carefully, the pollen masses all displayed an ability to move on their stalks—a feature which had previously been mentioned in print by William Herbert, Henslow’s botanical friend, and some other authors. Even so, Darwin seems to have been one of the first naturalists to ask what this movement might mean in terms of insect visitors. He decided that the pollen masses must bend or shoot themselves into the right position to stick onto an insect’s back or head (usually the proboscis) for transfer to another flower. He had inquired about this possibility in the letter column of the Gardeners’ Chronicle in 1860, and received a number of replies. One answer arrived at Down House only as an empty envelope. Just before he threw it away, Darwin investigated further. Tucked away at the bottom he found a number of insect mouthparts laden with tiny parcels of pollen.
He also noticed a secondary reflex movement of the pollen masses (pollinia) after they were detached from the flower. He timed these movements with his pocket watch, finding they usually took around thirty seconds, just long enough for the bee to which they would usually be attached to push into another flower. His fancy ran away with him.
A poet might imagine that whilst the pollinia were borne through the air from flower to flower, adhering to an insect’s body, they voluntarily and eagerly placed themselves in that exact position in which alone they could hope to gain their wish and perpetuate their race.12
More to the point, adaptive evolution, proceeding blindly and without any foresight or plan, could explain an exquisite feature of natural life that would otherwise be regarded as convincing evidence for God-given design.
His work on orchids thereafter deliberately addressed the issue of design. To account for the apparent design of the living world, after all, had been the central plank of his argument in the Origin of Species and these plants gave him an opportunity to demonstrate the actual adaptive ingenuity of nature, his answer to William Paley’s natural theology, the secular alternative to divine craftsmanship. When he came to publish this work he told Asa Gray decisively that his orchid studies represented “a flank movement on the enemy.”13
The issue rode particularly high in his mind at this time because of Gray. In a series of letters to Darwin stretching from 1860 to 1862, and emerging out of his reading of the Origin of Species, Gray interrogated Darwin about the origin of design in nature. Gray believed that the apparently perfect adaptions that the natural world exhibited—as in the mutual co-adaptations between insect and plant—reflected the thought and intent of a Creator, however such a deity might be understood. But he also recognised the efficacy of Darwin’s notion of natural selection. In letters and reviews he volunteered a compromise solution in which favourable variations were perhaps produced by the hand of God. Natural selection would then pick or select these in the competition for life. Gray, in effect, wanted to have it both ways. God would carry on supervising nature, for it was the Almighty who introduced favourable variants. And natural selection would act just as Darwin had proposed, as an objective, mechanical, winnowing force which tailored organisms to their surroundings. In making this suggestion, Gray was to differ markedly from other creative evolutionists or those who advocated providential evolution. He gave Darwin his due and did not make God the selecting agent.
Darwin understood the dilemma. Gray was not advocating traditional forms of divine creation. The botanist William Harvey, Hooker’s friend, had written to Darwin in an altogether stricter manner, saying that “the Divine Creator” could call up “without seed, from the dust of the ground a new organism, by the power of his omnipotent word.” Gray was suggesting something much subtler, a form of divinely directed evolution. The threat was not lost on Darwin. If established, it would have destroyed the meaning of natural selection and any hope of a positivistic biology.
But he was frank. “I grieve to say that I cannot honestly go as far as you do about design.” His Origin had meant to demolish just such a view. By showing how blind and gradual adaptation could produce the same results as the apparently purposeful design that William Paley glorified, and the perfect adaptations in the natural world that the Bridgewater Treatises displayed in all their ramifications, Darwin had intended to challenge the argument that design necessarily indicated the presence of a designer.14 This inference, in which divine purpose was identified with human intent, had been used for centuries as one of the strongest proofs of the existence of an infinite deity. In natural selection Darwin substituted an alternative hypothesis that was both logically adequate, he thought, to produce the results seen and philosophically more secure.
Nevertheless, his respect for Gray—and, it must be said, his dependence on him—persuaded him to delve further into his own beliefs than he was accustomed to go, one of the few times that he turned his cool analytic gaze onto himself. He was perplexed, he told Gray. “I cannot think that the world, as we see it, is the result of chance; & yet I cannot look at each separate thing as the result of design.”15 In letter after letter they exchanged opinions, each trying to be as honest about himself as he believed the other deserved.
Neither was a trained theologian, and their views changed as they grew older. Certainly Darwin ended up as a nonbeliever. It seemed to Darwin that Gray merely reiterated the age-old claim that the creator can preordain events. What of “necessity & Free-will,” and the “Origin of evil”? he inquired, subjects “quite beyond the scope of the human intellect.”16
With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.—I am bewildered.—I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd. wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.17
Gray gave him a sympathetic ear. Darwin wrote to Lyell too, an indication of the seriousness with which he regarded the question. Stones fall without God’s intervention, he told Lyell. Sparrows die. Every scientist, he said, can accept the idea of gravity as a mathematical law operating according to natural rules. “I cannot believe that there is a bit more interference by the Creator in the construction of each species, than in the course of the planets.”18
The actual existence, or not, of an Almighty was in this regard irrelevant, Darwin remarked, although he was prepared to let Gray, and doubtless Lyell, carry on believing that a divine authority could at one point have made the laws.
One word more on “designed laws” & “undesigned results.” I see a bird which I want for food, take my gun & kill it. I do this designedly.—An innocent & good man stands under a tree & is killed by flash of lightning. Do you believe (& I really shd. like to hear) that God designedly killed this man? Many or most persons do believe this; I can’t & don’t.—If you believe so, do you believe that when a swallow snaps up a gnat that God designed that that particular swallow shd. snap up that particular gnat at that particular instant? I believe that the man & the gnat are in same predicament.—If the death of neither man or gnat are designed, I see no good reason to believe that their first birth or production shd. necessarily be designed. Yet, as I said before, I cannot persuade myself that electricity acts, that the tree grows, that man aspires to loftiest conceptions all from blind, brute force.19
Decades afterwards, he said that around this time he probably deserved to be called a theist.20 In truth, Darwin was profoundly conditioned to become the author of a doctrine inimical to religion. But he only gradually rose to understand the depths of his own implications long after the Origin of Species was published. Orchids made him think as hard about his own beliefs as he hoped his future readers would think about theirs.
Over the next few months, Darwin channelled his efforts into understanding the basic anatomy and embryology of each of the major groups of orchids, taking his cue from the evolutionary idea that when an organ arises it is invariably a modification of something else. The task was not especially easy. Orchids were a deceptive group, even with the added benefit of evolutionary theory. He valued Robert Brown’s observations on fertilisation and particularly studied Hooker’s paper on the British orchid, Listera ovata, written in 1854. After several weeks of hard work with his microscope, however, he wondered if even a judicious botanist like Hooker might be wrong about the origin of the spiral vessels inside the stem, and he sent inky diagrams to Hooker for his opinion. Hooker could not work out what his friend meant; he had to dissect a few specimens at Kew to reexamine the parts in a way that an anatomical taxonomist would understand. Not for the first time, Hooker must have wondered what he would be sucked into next. Seeds, barnacles, sundews, species, orchids—Darwin could be a very demanding correspondent. Every postbag brought something different. Hooker’s increasing commitments as assistant director at Kew meant these inquiries were taking more time than he could readily spare.
Darwin sent a raft of similar questions to Asa Gray, asking about Spiranthes, an orchid fairly common in North America but rare in Britain, called lady’s tresses because of the plaited effect of the flowers, and Goodyera, a close relative. He questioned whether the spiral arrangement of flowers helped insects steer as they crawled up and around the spike, fertilising flowers as they went. He had never seen an insect visit Spiranthes. “It is no use watching this,” he wrote to Alexander More on the Isle of Wight. “I watched it last autumn at Eastbourne till I was sick.”21 His friends and aquaintances began to feel amused by the intensity of Darwin’s interest in apparently obscure topics. Yet these precise anatomical investigations helped him reframe what would come to be known as the ecological relationships between species on an explicitly evolutionary basis.
Furthermore, in Darwin’s view, the orchid nectary was a modification of one of the petals and ought to secrete some sweetish juice to attract insects. “Unless the flowers were by some means rendered attractive, most of the species would be cursed with perpetual sterility,” he remarked. The longer the nectary, the longer the insect’s proboscis needed to be—a good example of co-adaptation. Neat as this argument was in principle, Darwin could not establish the existence of nectar. Unwilling to give up his theory, he ate a nectary himself to see if it tasted sugary. A little while later he acquired from the nation’s greatest orchid specialist, James Bateman, a specimen of Angraecum sesquipedale, which possessed an exceptionally long nectary measuring eleven or twelve inches. “What a proboscis the moth that sucks it must have!” he exclaimed.22 No such moth was then known to science. Years after Darwin’s death, a moth with a twelve-inch proboscis was discovered in Madagascar.
He was so gripped by his passion that he did not stop during the holiday season. He took the family to Torquay in 1861 for the sake of Henrietta’s health, bringing with him a selection of potted orchids, and his microscope, all wedged into a wooden crate that had to travel upright. He fussed all the way there. But he said he was glad to get away. “I have been a poor wretch for many months,” he told his cousin Fox, and a large glass of port wine on arrival was “a very necessary restorative.”23 At Torquay Henrietta improved in the seaside air. The family trudged over the sands for picnics in nearby coves, leading Henrietta on a donkey, and rented a sea-bathing machine for her to follow fashionable example. “She gets up twice every day now & can walk one or two hundred yards,” Darwin reported.
Orchids dominated the rest of his time. He sent the younger boys out over the Devon hills searching for specimens, knowing they would be happy enough scrambling around and getting dirty. Darwin directed affairs from the cliff paths with his walking stick. When William arrived from Cambridge University for a few days, hoping to discuss his future prospects, he too was sent off to participate. Darwin got him dissecting and drawing, glad to have his assistance. William had become adept at botany during the last few years and was accustomed to helping his father with his scientific chores. Docile as always, William probably found it hard to refuse.
Father and son evidently talked to each other as well. During this visit it was agreed that William should not read for the law after graduating from Cambridge but should instead cut his university days short and accept an opening in a banking firm in Southampton that John Lubbock had found for him. This would require leaving university without a degree. The two decided that William would merely postpone his B.A. examination and take it a year late, which he did do, returning to Cambridge for a few days in 1862 to sit his papers and complete the university’s residential requirements.
Darwin was grateful for Lubbock’s intervention in this affair. Previously he had not known what to recommend to his oldest son, especially as banking appeared to be closed to outsiders. A potential banker had to be invited to join a firm, invariably through the old boys’ network, as in this instance, and had to pay handsomely for the privilege, almost like buying a commission in the army. Once in, the new partner could expect a relatively secure and respectable occupation. In friendly appreciation, Darwin sent Lubbock a collection of small insects from Devon collected by his sons from damp and smelly places under logs, confident that one naturalist would know best how to show gratitude to the other.
The bank in Southampton proved rather more difficult to please. Those kinds of privately owned banks depended on their partners’ guarantees for the capital reserve, and Darwin was asked to guarantee the sum of £10,000 on his son’s behalf in case there should be a run on deposits. Such guarantees remained the custom until the Joint Stock Banks and Companies Act of 1863 allowed limited liability and some redistribution of risk, a change in legislation brought in after a couple of big financial crashes in 1857 and 1858. Wary of the possible risk involved, and taken aback by the size of the sum expected, Darwin instructed his solicitor to look into the matter so that he would know exactly where he—and William—would stand in case of a crash or fraud (Darwin’s own London bank suffered from a notorious fraud case in 1858). Privately, he wondered at Lubbock’s casual, well-buttressed assumption that such an enormous guarantee was perfectly routine. By writing some hard-headed letters, he bludgeoned the bank’s partners down to £5,000.
Otherwise, he was irrepressible. Hooker received increasingly urgent requests for specimens:
I was really ashamed to bother you about Catasetum; I have now written to Parker & Williams for chance. I shd. be very glad of a Cattleya or Epidendron & specially (from what A. Gray writes) for an Arethusa or one of that section.—Have you Mormodes with some buds that would complete my desiderata for comparison. If the racemes were cut off & packed in tin-cannister with a little slightly damp moss, they might be sent by post, & I would pay postage; possibly Arethusa might come in pot, as that seems most important for me.24
Parcels came and went, tin cans were filled. The pace slackened when Erasmus called by, bringing Hope Wedgwood with him (Fanny and Hensleigh’s youngest, roughly the same age as Henrietta). Darwin sent the ladies off on a scenic tour round Devon, Emma, Henrietta, and Hope together, the only time Emma went anywhere without small boys attached to her skirts and a trip remembered with pleasure for that reason by Henrietta. Left alone, the men discussed science at the dinner table, sticking pieces of ice together in order to understand John Tyndall’s new theory of glacier motion.25
When they returned to Downe, Henrietta was better and Darwin worse. The travelling made him feel older than he was. “I cannot stand such fatigue & am in fact a man of seventy years old.” He was actually fifty-two.
Autumn and winter passed in a haze of family concerns. Emma’s sister Charlotte Langton became ill and died in January 1862, aged sixty-five. Charlotte’s house was to be sold, breaking up the enclave of Wedgwood sisters at Hartfield, and Emma could not imagine how Elizabeth would cope on her own. Sure enough, after a spell living in a London house close to Erasmus and Hensleigh, in 1868 Elizabeth purchased a property in Downe village, called Tromer Lodge, to be near her remaining sister.
At Down House, influenza prostrated the household. Since Parslow was the only one left on his feet, Darwin sent him to Bromley with the horse and cart to get a doctor to minister to them all. As soon as Darwin recovered, he was struck down by eczema. It was a “miserable time.” Even so, decisions were taken. He and Emma decided at last to send Leonard to boarding school, feeling that ill health should not delay his education any longer. Darwin feared that Leonard was “rather slow & backward (in part owing to loss of time from ill-health).” Aged twelve, he followed his brothers to Clapham School at the beginning of 1862. Henrietta felt sufficiently recovered to stay with her London cousins for a few weeks early in the season.
With Leonard and Henrietta gone, Horace emerged as a new source of anxiety. He was the youngest child, then aged ten, and began having what Darwin and Emma described as “fits,” or the shakes. They thought at first he might have developed a neurological disorder caused by a bad knock on the head. Soon Darwin got it into his mind that Horace—like the others—was sinking into a hereditary disorder. However, with hindsight it seems equally probable that Horace may have been consumed with a boyish passion for Camilla Ludwig, the young German governess, who went everywhere with them and was a family favourite. Miss Ludwig arrived from Hamburg in 1860, after Miss Latter left, probably applying to become a governess to an English family only because of unexpectedly reduced circumstances. The little information that can be gathered about her indicates that she was apprehensive about the position. To be a governess was a delicate operation in Victorian England, neither a servant nor an equal, yet more intimate with the employer’s family than with any other people beyond her own relatives or future spouse.26 She supervised the children who remained at home, teaching German to Henrietta and Bessy and helping Darwin with his German language researches. It was Miss Ludwig who soothed Horace after every attack of the shakes.
Darwin recounted his worries to William:
[He] has oddest attacks, many times a day, of shuddering & gasping & hysterical sobbing, semi-convulsive movements, with much distress of feeling. These semi-convulsive movements have been less during these last few days, & are never accompanied by loss of consciousness. Do you remember his being pitched out of the Truck: Mr Headland thinks his brain probably suffered a little concussion; but I cannot help thinking that it is all due to some extreme irritation of stomach. Miss Ludwig is unspeakably kind to him, & he will remain with her all day & night. We shall have no peace in life till the poor dear sweet little man gets better.27
After a while it looked as if the mysterious attacks mostly came on after meals, and Darwin took Horace to London to see the general surgeon Mr. Headland, who prescribed “pepsine” for stomach trouble and an occasional blister to draw out any toxins. By now Darwin blamed himself, convinced that he had transmitted by inheritance his “wretched constitution” to the little boy. “We have Horace failing badly with intermittent weak pulse, like four of our children previously,” he groaned to John Innes. “It is a curious form of inheritance from my poor constitution, though I never failed in exactly that way.”28 He consulted several other doctors, including Henry Holland, who inquired whether the fidgets were caused by intestinal worms (“Does he pick his nose?”). Dr. Engleheart, the village surgeon, was perhaps the most perceptive in recommending that Miss Ludwig should take a short holiday. Emma saw something in the idea. “Horace’s devotion to Miss L. is got to such a pitch that I don’t know what he will come to. He can’t bear to sit on different side of the table at meals so that he often gives up the fire side for the sake of sitting by her.”29
Mr Engleheart is very anxious to get him away from Miss L & he thinks a change or excitement would do him good. I doubt whether it will make much difference about Miss L but I think sometimes his fondness for her agitates him & makes him worse. I think she is very judicious & quick with him.30
Shortly afterwards, Emma decided that Miss Ludwig should pay a visit to her mother in Germany and that she and Horace would go to Southampton, ostensibly to see William in his new situation as a banker but really to give Horace something to occupy his mind. It all had to be tactfully planned. “We think it will break his heart much less to leave her here & come to you, than for her to leave first,” she notified William. The enforced separation apparently did the trick, and Horace was never so bad again. It was a bonus for the adults to discover William placidly settled in his Southampton banking career. In the interim, Frau Ludwig sent another daughter to fill in as governess for Henrietta and Bessy; and after a suitable interval Miss Ludwig herself was allowed to return. She was missed by Darwin, who liked her a great deal and needed her to translate difficult patches of scientific German. He sent a friendly note to her in Hamburg, packed with news about the family. He called her, unlike all the other governesses who came and went, by her given name, Camilla.
Ironically, what kept Darwin going through all this worry was his interest in the sex life of orchids. Round about now, with a jolt of recognition, he saw that the sexual arrangements of orchids were similar to those of barnacles. Like barnacles, orchids were basically hermaphroditic organisms. Like barnacles, they went to enormous lengths to prevent any form of self-fertilisation except as a last resort. They piled up adaptation after adaptation to ensure that no solitary sexual activity took place—either the male and the female parts ripened at different times, or each barricaded itself behind a complex series of structural modifications that required different kinds of triggers. The flowers were anatomically hermaphroditic but functionally male and female—exactly the same phenomenon he had discovered in barnacles. Sex, in Darwin’s theories, always required two.
Furthermore, orchids displayed the same kind of evolutionary sequences he had mapped in barnacles. He did not suspect anything of the kind until he got hold of various species of Catasetum from tropical Central America, “the most remarkable of all orchids.” Then he realised that the plant that botanists called Catasetum was functionally male. The female of the species was mistakenly catalogued as a different plant. A third kind contained both sets of sexual organs in full working order and was probably a direct descendant of the original hermaphroditic organism from which the other two had diverged. What botanists had for years described as three separate genera were reunited by Darwin as the male, female, and hermaphroditic forms of a single species.
He demonstrated the point with a renowned oddity kept in spirits in the museum collection at the Linnean Society, a pickled stem of orchid flowers collected in British Guiana by Sir Robert Schomburgk. On this stem grew three flowers, each apparently from a different genus. “Such cases shake to the very foundations all our ideas of the stability of genera and species,” John Lindley, the great authority on orchids, had remarked. Darwin recognised that by some curious chance the single stem replicated in miniature the real separation of the sexes in the wild. In April 1862, he went to London to deliver a short paper on Catasetum at a meeting of the Linnean Society. “I by no means thought that I produced a tremendous effect on Linn. Soc.,” he told Hooker afterwards, “but by Jove the Linn. Soc. produced a tremendous effect on me for I vomitted all night & could not get out of bed till late next evening, so that I just crawled home.—I fear I must give up trying to read any paper or speak. It is a horrid bore I can do nothing like other people.”31
Sick as he was, this was an achievement for a man who refused to call himself a botanist. “I am sometimes half tempted to give up species & stick to experiments,” he wrote to Hooker after this virtuoso display. “They are much better fun.”32
Meanwhile his Origin of Species was becoming an object with a life of its own.
First of all, it became clear that Darwin was not the only evolutionist. While his book certainly captured much of the general imagination, and Huxley’s publicity machine pumped up a full head of steam, other developmental proposals pushed back into view. The Origin stimulated a market for all kinds of evolutionary books and theories. Old arguments reappeared to mix with the new; subsidiary controversies sprang up; publishers raced to turn a quick profit with similar products; and readers developed an obvious thirst for more. A revised edition of Vestiges published in 1860 sold extremely well, making it difficult to separate the response to Vestiges from that to Darwin.33 Hard on Vestiges’ reprinted heels came a matching theological counterblast, a reissue of Hugh Miller’s Footprints of the Creator brought out by his widow as an “antidote to some of the ill-grounded notions brought forward in other quarters.”34 Mrs. Miller judged her moment well. Flourishing sales brought her the money that had somehow never materialised when her husband was alive.
At the same time, Robert Grant, Darwin’s old acquaintance from Edinburgh, published a synopsis of his University College zoology lectures with commendatory words addressed to Darwin at the front. In this dull little volume Grant mentioned his friendship with Darwin, and his—Grant’s—longstanding commitment to evolution.35 Under the circumstances, it seems fair to say that Grant must have hoped to increase his book’s sale by capitalising on their former relationship. The two men’s positions were pitifully reversed. These lectures were Grant’s first publication in twenty years, his income was meagre, his zest for research was dead. He had reached rock bottom. To harness himself to Darwin’s ideas must have seemed a last chance for personal renaissance.36
Most notably, Herbert Spencer revealed his extreme originality in his First Principles, produced in parts from 1860 to 1862. In this work he redefined his own version of evolution, first outlined in articles published in the 1850s. To this he added views sharpened by his reading of Darwin. Like Chambers, the author of Vestiges, he seems to have believed that his views were vindicated by Darwin’s writings, although he differed from him on several grounds and experienced mixed emotions over the publicity that the Origin of Species generated. Chambers and Spencer would hardly have been human if they had not sometimes thought that Darwin had an advantage over them in being so highly visible. It was not only what one wrote, they surely thought, but also who one was and where one came from. In his autobiography Spencer said dismissively that he could not remember his first impressions of Darwin’s Origin except for annoyance that parts of his own scheme were “wrong.” He recorded “gratification in seeing the theory of organic evolution justified.”37
Cryptic though Spencer’s title might have seemed, his First Principles addressed the underlying laws of the physical universe and human existence. Every aspect of the world is continuously changing, he stated, and the direction of this change is from simple to complex. Matter always moves from a state of chaos to a state of order, from “indefinite incoherent homogeneity” to “definite coherent heterogeneity.” In other words, simplicity becomes complexity, and uniformity becomes variety. He thought this tendency for change occurred everywhere, in physics and astronomy just as much as in biology and human society. Evolution, so to speak, was the opposite of dissolution. Unerringly, Spencer captured the nation’s sense of progressive advance and diversification. Unerringly, he argued that the world of religious thought should be separated from that of science, postulating the existence of an “Unknowable power” behind all knowable phenomena. Both science and religion, he said, should recognise the impossibility of defining that power. He was himself a declared atheist.
In essence, Spencer presented a general view of the world that was to have a pervasive effect on late-nineteenth-century thinking. Much of what was ultimately attributed to Darwin was the result of philosophical shifts expressed in one form or another by Spencer. At the very least, most of what Spencer proposed about directional development and progress, although basically Lamarckian or environmentalist in thrust, was conflated in people’s minds with the Darwinian impetus. His writings, like Darwin’s, turned people’s thoughts towards the human condition and the great issues of the day.38
Yet Spencer was not blessed with the gift of clarity. He was the “most immeasurable ass in Christendom,” objected Carlyle. Huxley and Hooker more or less understood what Spencer meant, and Wallace, too, who sympathetically acknowledged that Spencer sought to get “to the root of everything.”39 Huxley respected Spencer’s powers of thought. Because of this respect, Darwin tried to approach his writings with an open mind. But however much he tried, he found Spencer’s definitions meaningless: “his style is too hard work for me.” Without ever saying it outright, he may have thought Spencer’s philosophy too extravagant.
Herbert Spencer’s conversation seemed to me very interesting, but I did not like him particularly and did not feel that I could easily have become intimate with him.… After reading any of his books, I generally feel enthusiastic admiration for his transcendent talents, and have often wondered whether in the distant future he would rank with such great men as Descartes, Leibnitz, etc. about whom, however, I know very little. Nevertheless I am not conscious of having profited in my own work by Spencer’s writings. His deductive manner of every subject is wholly opposed to my frame of mind. His conclusions never convince me: and over and over again I have said to myself, after reading one of his discussions—“Here would be a fine subject for half-a-dozen years’ work.”40
So he struggled through First Principles and most of Spencer’s subsequent works as they were published, muttering to himself about “unfounded speculation,” unable to suppress a smirk when Huxley quipped that “Spencer’s idea of a tragedy was a deduction killed by a fact.”41 Darwin never made any effort to get to know Spencer. On the contrary, apart from borrowing the expression “survival of the fittest” in later years, he went to some trouble to distance himself from Spencer’s writings.
Second, by now some of the most notable nineteenth-century thinkers were contemplating the inner recesses of Darwin’s theory and pulling out of it some of the threads that would lead them towards the modern world. Whereas theologians naturally continued to take issue with the Origin of Species’ signification for the human soul, and connected the book’s purportedly irreligious position with the growing furore over Essays and Reviews and the perils of atheism, several key intellectuals commended Darwin’s method of scientific reasoning, a style depending more on the accumulation of probabilities, and on analogy, than on the classic form of proof by demonstration. Although John Herschel might have complained about the law of “higgledy-piggledy,” younger men such as Henry Fawcett, the blind economist at Cambridge, and John Stuart Mill compared the new form of reasoning favourably against the old. Mill, who read the Origin of Species at Fawcett’s prompting, sanctioned Darwin’s work in the 1862 edition of his System of Logic, and told Fawcett that “though he cannot be said to have proved the truth of his doctrine, he does seem to have proved that it may be true, which I take to be as great a triumph as knowledge & ingenuity could possibly achieve on such a question.”42
That Mill should take an encouraging line so early in the Origin’s history meant a great deal in the republic of letters. Above all, Mill’s approval showed that the natural history sciences (mostly descriptive and nonpredictive) could be brought into an acceptably rigorous philosophical framework.
Mr. Darwin’s remarkable speculation on the origin of species is another unimpeachable example of a legitimate hypothesis.… It is unreasonable to accuse Mr. Darwin (as has been done) of violating the rules of induction. The rules of induction are concerned with the condition of proof. Mr. Darwin has never pretended that his doctrine was proved. He was not bound by the rules of induction but by those of hypothesis. And these last have seldom been more completely fulfilled. He has opened a path of inquiry full of promise, the results of which none can foresee.43
Fawcett too was to prove an invaluable support in the University of Cambridge. He had reviewed Darwin favourably in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1860 and now began teaching and discussing the wider relevance of the Origin in the mathematical and economic community. “He belonged to that shrewd, hard-headed, North-country type which was so conspicuous at Cambridge,” reminisced Leslie Stephen, who knew him well, “and which, it must be confessed, was apt to be as narrow as it was vigorous intellectually. Fawcett knew Mill’s political economy as a Puritan knew the Bible.”44 Taking Fawcett’s lead, one or two mathematicians, economists, and statisticians also began considering Darwin’s book. In its way, the Origin of Species contributed indirectly to some of the major shifts in ideas about probability and the mathematical rules of chance in the nineteenth century.45 It added weight to an emerging consensus about the value of statistics for tracking random events and indicating hidden trends, shown most noticeably in the growing life assurance market but also supported by the government’s interest in maintaining bills of mortality and stricter financial policies; and generally endorsed the important notion in science that the physical universe is at root fluid, subject to change and contingency. Darwin’s theories contributed to the scientific movements that ultimately led to the taming of chance, replacing the idea of permanence with relativity.
More obviously, social economists seized on parallels between the organic kingdom and political economy. Competition, struggle, adaptation, success, and extinction—all these concepts moved freely between both domains. They were the Malthusian parallels on which Darwin had first drawn when composing his theory.46 While many commentators of the period remained divided on Malthus’s meaning for human society—to those with working-class sympathies Malthus’s principle merely blamed the poor for being poor, a marked contrast to those who applauded it for encouraging responsibility and self-improvement—there could be no denying the concept’s status. In one sense it could be said that Malthus’s images were turning full circle, for Darwin applied political economy to biology, and now these biological ideas were being reintegrated back into political economy, seemingly providing a “natural” account of the way human populations and social economies were thought to work.47 Malthus’s principles were biologised and then reabsorbed into economic thought. In another sense, the social and the biological were scarcely separable. Malthus’s remarks did not so much travel back and forth as exist already embedded in the same cultural context. Either way, Malthus’s doctrines looked like incontrovertible laws of nature to a nation steeped in competitive economic activity, buoyed up with Samuel Smiles’s anthems of self-help, adaptation, struggle, and survival, and as a political body fully engaged in territorial and commercial expansion.
“It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers among beasts and plants the society of England, with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, inventions, and the Malthusian struggle for existence,” remarked Karl Marx in a letter to Engels in 1862.48 Marx read the Origin of Species soon after publication, noting “the clumsy English style.” He understood the Origin’s threat to traditional Victorian standards more clearly than most. “Although developed in the crude English fashion, this is the book which in the field of natural history, provides the basis for our views,” he continued to Engels. He repeated much the same comment to Ferdinand Lassalle. “Darwin’s work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle.”49 Marx laughed at the British fear of apes. “Since Darwin demonstrated that we are all descended from the apes there is scarcely any shock whatever that could shake our ancestral pride.”50
The poets were not far behind. Alfred Tennyson apparently ordered a copy of the Origin of Species in advance so that he might read it as soon as it appeared.51 He had long been interested in transmutation in a general manner, using ideas drawn from Vestiges for some of the most melancholy parts of In Memoriam in which he railed against the heedless forces of nature. And he was well known to have voiced many of the perplexities of the Victorian mind:
There lives more faith in honest doubt
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
Tennyson could not find the God he knew in the Origin, the loving being who directed the world towards beneficent ends. For him, the bleakest aspect of Darwin’s work was the widespread cruelty in nature that he described, the “wasteless fecundity” that must end in death.
An omnipotent creator who could make such a painful world is to me sometimes as hard to believe in as to believe in blind matter behind everything. The lavish profusion too in the natural world appals me, from the growths of the tropical forest to the capacity of man to multiply, the torrent of babies.52
Soon afterwards, Tennyson changed one of the biblical allusions in In Memoriam. The line “Since Adam left his garden yet,” was adjusted to a more scientifically accurate “Since our first sun arose and set.”53 Never willing to accept the full panoply of Darwinism, and always vaguely dissatisfied with the new view of nature, Tennyson contented himself with the conclusion that evolution, if it was true, indicated that better things would come in the afterlife. In 1863 he remarked to William Allingham, “Darwinism, man from ape, would that really make any difference? Time is nothing, are we not all part of deity?” Thereafter, in an effort to gain some real insight, Tennyson read pertinent books and questioned the great thinkers of the day. He was to meet Darwin in 1868. And in 1869 he participated in forming the Metaphysical Society (it included Huxley) for the discussion of these and similar topics. He ended up thinking that the Darwinian theory was for the most part true but that mankind probably stood on one of the lowest rungs of the ladder.54
Darwin’s book pushed Robert Browning almost as far. The Origin of Species appeared midway between Browning’s Men and Women and Dramatis Personae, broadly coinciding with the serious spiritual uncertainties he experienced on his wife’s death in 1861. Browning returned to London after Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s death and by chance formed a friendship with Julia Wedgwood, Darwin’s niece. At one point Julia hoped to marry him, a hope never fulfilled.55 Many of Browning’s realignments of faith during this period came out in his “Caliban upon Setebos,” published in Dramatis Personae, in which God constructed the world merely as a plaything, devoid of any meaning. Browning made little distinction between Darwin, Lamarck, Spencer, and Chambers. Late in life he issued a formal explanation of his view. “In reality all that seems proved in Darwin’s scheme was a conception familiar to me from the beginning: see in Paracelsus the progressive development from senseless matter to organised until man’s appearance.… But I do not consider his case as to the changes in organisation, brought about by desire and will in the creature, proved.”56
Others read the Origin of Species attentively. Ernest Renan, author of Vie de Jésus (1863)—the book that with George Eliot’s translation of Strauss raised troubling doubts in orthodox Victorian minds—had something positive to say. His study of Jesus had deliberately left out the divine, a point noted with interest by Darwin when he and Emma read it. He was as naturalistic in his way as Huxley. “It may be that Darwin’s hypotheses on the subject can be judged to be insufficient or inexact; but undoubtedly they are on the road to the great explication of the world and of true philosophy.”57
George Henry Lewes came to much the same conclusion when discussing the theory of natural selection in his Animal Life, published in 1862.58 “It may be true but we cannot say that it is true,” he reported. Lewes and Eliot were familiar with many of the people involved in the evolutionary debate, especially with Herbert Spencer, a close friend, and they both to some degree had adopted Spencer’s doctrines before the Origin was published. Lewes, a good naturalist in his own right, was at this point composing an ambitious account of the principles of animal physiology drawing on several of Spencer’s concepts; and Eliot in her novels dwelled affectingly on the tangled course of human society. Lewes and Eliot had sat up reading the Origin together shortly after it was published. “Though full of interesting matter, it is not impressive, from want of luminous and orderly presentation,” Eliot commented in a letter.59 Yet she drew on Darwin as subtly as any other. She made creative use of her wider understanding of evolutionary development in The Mill on the Floss (1860) and then wove stories around heredity for Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda.60 Lewes assented to the main thrust of Darwin’s arguments, although he explicitly linked them with Spencer’s themes.
It was, however, Friedrich Max Müller, the philologist, who pushed Darwin’s theories beyond the world of the creative imagination into grand questions of human identity. In the winter season of 1861–62 he galvanised high society with lectures at the Royal Institution on the origin of languages. Müller forced his audience to think carefully about what it is to be human. Had the language of primitive mankind developed from imitations of natural sounds? He thought not. Instead, Müller championed the idea that words were inseparably related to mental concepts. Words served as symbols for things, and there could be no thought without the language to express it. He said it was therefore impossible for language to arise by natural development out of the vocalisations of animals precisely because animals did not possess human concepts. “Language is something more palpable than a fold of the brain, or an angle of the skull,” he announced.61
Even so, Müller praised other aspects of Darwin’s theory, applying the idea of natural selection to the genealogy of ancient languages, as the leading German philologist August Schleicher was to appreciate.62 Darwin took Müller seriously. He read the printed version of the lectures and discussed them with Hensleigh Wedgwood, the family philologist. “I quite agree that it is extremely interesting,” he said of Müller’s thesis.63 Hensleigh thought that human speech could only have emerged bit by bit from animal sounds, a point of view that matched Darwin’s ideas. “H. says [Max Müller] is all wrong & has partly converted Papa to that opinion,” said Emma in a letter to William.64
Quietly, the Origin of Species crept into the thoughts of Elizabeth Gaskell. She brooded on what she knew of Darwin’s life story, attracted by the tale of the Beagle voyage and the possibilities of setting a novel around the pleasant trope of a natural history collector unknowingly capturing a woman’s heart. Her meditations carried a personal element. The Gaskell family were distantly related to the Darwins (via the Hollands), and although Mrs. Gaskell did not know Darwin or Emma at all well, probably meeting them only once or twice in as many decades, she was intimate with Hensleigh and Fanny Wedgwood, often sending her daughters Meta and Marianne over to visit the Wedgwood girls. She also knew others in their social circle, like Harriet Martineau and Erasmus Darwin. Meta Gaskell sometimes accompanied the Wedgwood daughters to Down House to stay with their cousins Henrietta and Bessy Darwin. One of those occasions was remembered by Darwin simply because he managed to conquer Meta Gaskell at chess. Julia Wedgwood worked with Elizabeth Gaskell on her biography of Charlotte Brontë.65
It was about now that Mrs. Gaskell created Roger Hamley, the hero of Wives and Daughters, basing him loosely on Darwin. The story was unfinished at her death, although most of it was published as a serial in the Cornhill Magazine from 1864. Darwin’s fictional counterpart was a shyly agreeable character, a naturalist and traveller returned, a man whose heart was given to the loving investigation of nature, an experimenter who respected his subject matter. Science, even of the most unsettling kind, could still present a humane and generous face.
Near and far, people actively engaged with his text. In Boston, Theodore Parker, the Unitarian divine, amusingly presented “A Bumblebee’s Thoughts on the Plan and Purpose of the Universe.” In nearby Concord, Henry David Thoreau experienced the Origin of Species as a revelatory text. Asa Gray had arranged this transatlantic meeting of minds by sending a copy up to Concord with his brother-in-law Charles Brace. “Never had Thoreau been so captivated by a project,” noted William Howarth.66 Thoreau’s early death in 1862 left his views on Darwin’s work tantalisingly unformed.
Yet the community of transcendentalists was well disposed to at least some of the Origin of Species’ proposals. Thoreau apparently discussed theories of development and evolution with Emerson, who was himself inclined to appreciate some form of progression in nature. Before the Origin of Species was published, Emerson had talked with Moncure Daniel Conway, the Protestant theologian, about progressive development in nature, where evolution might represent the gradual freeing of human beings from their animal roots, ultimately leading “to a godly state.” Conway wondered whether the existence of evil might perhaps reside in those animal roots. He preached a sermon in Ohio about Darwin in December 1859. “This formidable man … did not mean to give dogmatic Christianity its deathblow; he meant to utter a simple theory of nature.”67
A trio of Australian museum men, Ferdinand Mueller, Frederick McCoy, and William MacLeay, were less easy to satisfy. Each condemned evolution outright. MacLeay politely acknowledged his acquaintance with Darwin from their London days. Nevertheless, “I am utterly opposed to Darwin’s or rather Lamarck’s theory.” McCoy refused to let Darwin’s books—even his innocuous Journal of a Naturalist—into the National Museum in Melbourne. If any Melbourne resident wished to consult a public copy of the Origin of Species, he or she had to travel to Sydney, where a solitary volume stood on the shelves of the Mechanics’ School of Arts library.68 And in a little-known burst of museum madness McCoy spent several years fruitlessly attempting to get hold of one of Paul Du Chaillu’s gorilla skins in order to stage an exhibit in the Melbourne Museum. One look at the beast, he confidently predicted, would convince anyone that evolution was nonsense. On the other side of the globe, John William Dawson, of McGill University in Montreal, unleashed such a torrent of palaeontological invective that Hooker remarked that “he seems to hate Darwinism.”69
Even royal minds addressed the question of natural selection in the privacy of family apartments. Queen Victoria spoke for thousands of her subjects when she congratulated her eldest daughter on her fortitude in grappling with the Origin of Species. “How many interesting, difficult books you read,” she told Vicky, the crown princess of Prussia, in 1862. “It would and will please beloved Papa.”70
All this for a man who would not—or could not—make a public appearance. In February 1861, John Lubbock stood up in front of Darwin’s friends and neighbours at a meeting of the Bromley Literary Institute to explain the absent author’s theories of evolution by natural selection.71
The orchid book was published in May 1862 under the title On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing. Darwin chose the word “contrivances” specially to indicate that there was no purposeful design in the natural world, although in retrospect it was a word no less imbued with intent than “adaptation.”
When this or that part has been spoken of as adapted for some special purpose, it must not be supposed that it was originally always formed for this sole purpose. The regular course of events seems to be, that a part which originally served for one purpose, becomes adapted by slow changes for widely different purposes.… On the same principle, if a man were to make a machine for some special purpose, but were to use old wheels, springs, and pulleys, only slightly altered, the whole machine, with all its parts, might be said to be specially contrived for its present purpose. Thus throughout nature almost every part of each living being has probably served, in a slightly modified condition, for diverse purposes, and has acted in the living machinery of many ancient and distinct specific forms.72
Murray gave the book a decorative plum binding (the only one of the Murray Darwins not to appear in green) and embellished the cover with a gilt Cycnoches, chosen for its bold outline. Before then Darwin had issued a welter of instructions about the printing and type size, supervising the woodcuts with a sharp eye for detail, hurrying the compositors along, even specifying that “fertilisation” should be spelled with an s, not a z. He told Murray that he hoped the book would appear sufficently modest. He did not wish to deceive readers into thinking they were buying a lavishly illustrated tome on the orchid fancy. This time he thanked his helpers generously in print.
But he felt oddly nervous about publishing, wondering if he was making a fool of himself.
The subject is, I fear, too complex for the public & I fear I have made a great mistake in not keeping to my first intention of sending it to Linnean Soc.; but it is now too late, & I must make the best of a bad job.73
However he ventured to tell Murray that “I think this little volume will do good to the Origin, as it will show that I have worked hard at details.”74
Despite the worries, the results impressed his botanical friends. They noted Darwin’s talent for observation. “It is a very extraordinary book!” declared Oliver. “What a new field for observing the wonderful provisions of nature you have opened up,” said Bentham. “What a skill & genius you have for these researches. I have tonight learned more than I ever knew before,” echoed Gray. From the breezy flatlands of Cambridgeshire, Charles Babington (Darwin’s old beetle-collecting rival and now Cambridge professor of botany after Henslow), who was no friend of natural selection, stiffly relayed the news that he thought the book “exceedingly interesting & valuable.” Hooker practically burst. “You are out of sight the best physiological observer and experimenter that Botany ever saw.” What they recognised, perhaps for the first time, was Darwin’s ability to identify what might be valuable in a wide range of differing phenomena and concentrate intently enough on it to see what could constitute the whole solution to the problem in his head.
This orchid book tipped some of the more traditionally minded botanists onto Darwin’s side. Admittedly, there was something about nineteenth-century science that enabled British botanists to contemplate evolution in plants far more calmly than zoologists regarded evolution in animals. The rooted nature of plants, their lack of feeling, their dependence on the environment, their obvious fluctuations in numbers, perhaps made the possibility of their evolution a little easier to accept. “Bentham and Oliver are quite struck up in a heap with your book & delighted beyond expression,” reported Hooker, glad to see two leading figures capitulate to natural selection.
Bentham made his views known in his 1862 presidential address to the Linnean Society, and again the following year in a valedictory address to the same society. He alluded to John Stuart Mill’s verdict. “Mr Darwin has shown how specific changes may take place,” he remarked. “His is not therefore a theory capable of proof, but ‘an unimpeachable example of a legitimate hypothesis’ requiring verification, as defined by J. S. Mill in his excellent chapter on Hypothesis.”75 This endorsement from the presidential chair made its mark on the Linnean fellows. In turn, Miles Berkeley, Charles Naudin, Alphonse de Candolle, Jean Louis Quatrefages, and Charles Daubeny began to think there might be something in what Darwin proposed after all. Lyell said that next to the Origin of Species, he considered Orchids the most valuable of all Darwin’s works.76
Elsewhere, silence reigned. Darwin’s choice of subject matter baffled Victorian readers panting for gorillas and cavemen. His book looked quaint. While the Times roared against Huxley’s support for “Mr. Darwin’s mischievous theory,” the source of the controversy appeared to have strolled into a greenhouse. Except for a few reviews in gardening magazines, scarcely any learned appraisals appeared. Few zoologists or natural philosophers noticed the volume. It sold rather too slowly for Murray’s comfort.
And in an irritating reversal of Darwin’s intentions, one or two commentators misunderstood his theme and treated the book as a testament to God’s marvellous ingenuity. The Literary Churchman obstinately closed a review with the words “O Lord, how manifold are Thy works.”77 Charles Kingsley said it presented “a most valuable addition to natural theology,” telling Huxley that the wisest God was the one who could make all things make themselves.78
Worst of all, in Darwin’s eyes, the writer and statesman George Douglas Campbell, the eighth Duke of Argyll and lord privy seal, decided to speak out. Argyll was a cultivated man, well versed in the sciences. “I have read Darwin with great interest,” he told his friend Richard Owen.79 Nonetheless he considered Darwin’s explanations for orchids “the vaguest and most unsatisfactory conjectures.” The metaphysical points about adaptive design and perfection that he then made in the Edinburgh Review were too high-flown for Darwin fully to grasp. “The Duke of Argyll has written an article on Supernaturalism in the Ed. rev,” said Emma in November 1862.
He is quite opposed to your father’s views but he praises the Orchids in such an enthusiastic way that he will do it a good turn. The article is so obscure I cd. not understand it. Hensleigh & Snow have written an article in Macmillan on Max Muller & that I suspect is equally obscure.80
Argyll proposed that God made orchid flowers in such a way that humans could explain them in human terms. He went on to develop his thoughts on this kind of creative evolutionism in an influential manner over the next few years, ultimately becoming an important commentator on the ancestry of mankind. Argyll particularly ridiculed Darwin’s description of the long nectary of Angraecum sesquipedale and the missing moth needed to fertilise it. “Contemptuous,” muttered Darwin defensively. “Very clever, but not convincing to me.”81 Darwin recollected that he had once met Argyll at a smart dinner party in London, although he had barely spoken to him.82
So he allowed himself a shiver of satisfaction when an anonymous writer launched a retaliatory attack on the duke in the Saturday Review.83 Emma and he enjoyed the brio of the article and sent it to Hooker, who declared it “perfect.” The shiver swelled into family pride when it turned out that the unknown author was Darwin’s own nephew on the Shrewsbury side, Henry Parker, Marianne’s eldest boy, who had left Oxford University and was trying to establish himself in London as a literary man. What an “odd chance,” Darwin exclaimed. His life was visibly changing when the younger generation of the family started rising in his support.
All in all, he suspected he might have wasted his time on orchids. “It has not been worth, I fear, the 10 months it has cost me: it was a hobby horse & so beguiled me.”84
