HARLES DARWIN found peace among the plant pots. He knew his likes and dislikes well enough by now. A visit to the hothouse for a talk with his gardeners and then a stroll around the Sandwalk with a dog at his heels were an essential part of his day. All through the writing years he had devotedly kept up a variety of small botanical investigations, telling Emma that these served as his best form of relaxation.
Nevertheless his experimental ambitions had been sidetracked by writing The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions. Now that he was free of writing, another round of bookish duties had crept in. He produced a revised edition of Descent in 1874 and a second edition of Variation in 1875, and made minor changes to the sixth edition of the Origin of Species (the same edition that had been issued in 1872), the last changes to be incorporated in his lifetime. Darwin paid Henrietta £20 for correcting the proofs of Variation. Murray released the amended sixth edition of the Origin in 1876 with a title page indicating that 18,000 copies had been printed in England alone since 1859.1 In the year of Darwin’s death the number had increased to 24,000. In these revised books Darwin eased into a more adaptationist frame of mind, suggesting that there was a role in evolutionary theory for the inheritance of some acquired characteristics—the result of his pondering the mechanisms underlying pangenesis, sexual selection, and the expression of emotions. Although he had never categorically excluded behaviourally or environmentally induced adaptations from his writings, he now felt they should play a larger part, telling Wallace that “I think I have underrated … the effects of the direct action of the external conditions in producing varieties.” As usual, John Murray, and Murray’s new business partner Robert Cooke, produced the volumes. Each one sold relatively well.
At the same time, the firm of Smith & Elder, which still held the copyright to his early geological books, encouraged Darwin in 1874 to bring out a revised version of Coral Reefs, taking account of James Dana’s theories of reef formation and Alexander Agassiz’s remarks. They also wished to produce an updated version of Geological Observations on the Volcanic Islands and Parts of South America in 1876. These books had been his first scientific writings in the post-Beagle years. To him it seemed as if he was turning a full circle. Without hesitation, he agreed. He had been proud of them once, and was still.
If he had paused to consider the matter, Darwin might have quailed at such a punishing self-imposed schedule. Every year from 1860 onwards he had published at least one book, sometimes two, either a new title or a revised edition, and since that date a total of some fifty-five articles serious enough to be listed in the Royal Society Catalogue of Scientific Papers. He persisted in this regime until his death, except for five individual years when he was either too ill or too busy collecting facts. Folder after folder of notes piled up as he worked his way through these publishing obligations. “I have no news about myself, as I am merely slaving over the sickening work of preparing new editions,” he moaned gently. “I wish I could get a touch of poor Lyell’s feelings, that it was delightful to improve a sentence, like a painter improving a picture.”2
In between he rewarded himself with a remarkable array of botanical projects. Where he had once used plants simply to explore evolutionary theory and as a pleasant mental diversion, he now reversed the process and made the theory serve as a powerful engine to break into the secrets of physiology. He shifted gears. He desired the real work of day-to-day experimental investigation, not so much the search for so-called “crucial” experiments to which individuals might give their name but the patient probing of nature’s mechanisms with no particular way of telling where any line of exploration would end up, the unsung feature of a scientist’s life that all researchers know to be authentic. He wanted to pick up problems as he went along, to use the techniques he understood best, to out-think the ingenuity of living organisms.
He was at long last able to give insectivorous plants his full attention, asking Hooker and Gray, and then an army of correspondents, to send specimens to Down so that he could feed them increasingly unusual diets and observe their cellular activities under his microscope. No project in this sense was ever finished. Darwin had waited for ten years or more for this treat. He spent hours studying the leaves and trap mechanisms, still unsure exactly how the plants could digest insects. With Francis, well versed in the new physiology, at his side, he started a major research programme limited only by the ad hoc nature of his household resources. He had to write apologetically to Hooker to say that Lettington had destroyed a prime specimen from Kew. “I am very much vexed.… I am sure it was an oversight of Lettington’s & not carelessness, as he was very proud of the state of D. capensis.”
He bought himself a bigger and better microscope, a Smith and Beck compound-lens apparatus, so that he could study the movements of protoplasm inside cells. Hooker surprised him by saying that the accepted wisdom of the day was that plant leaves could not absorb any substances. Absorption was a function confined to roots alone. “Have you tried Begonia leaves?” Hooker asked. “Shall I look out for you some plants with hyaline bladdery epidermal cells for you to operate on?” Puzzled, the two old friends consulted William Thiselton Dyer, a younger man who had trained as a physiologist with Foster and Huxley and was assistant director at Kew (soon to become Hooker’s son-in-law, too), much closer to the cutting edge of physiological science than either of them could pretend to be. In his spare time Dyer was translating Julius Sachs’s important work on plant physiology from German into English. Dyer “would be up to the latest discoveries,” Hooker assured Darwin.3
And he enjoyed the macabre ingenuity of the plants themselves: the traps, lures, and snares that they devised to capture their prey. The sticky-leaved sundew “is a wonderful plant, or rather a most sagacious animal.” A deep-seated appreciation of the sundew’s murderous course in life formed the central theme of his inquiries. In this he was helped immeasurably by Edward Frankland of the Royal College of Chemistry, in London, and John Burdon Sanderson, the new professor of physiology at University College London, who both answered his inquiries patiently. When one of Darwin’s homespun experiments proved too tricky to handle in his kitchen, Frankland volunteered to macerate Drosera leaves in his laboratory and analyse the juices for traces of pepsin and hydrochloric acid, the principal digestive acids of animals.
John Burdon Sanderson had studied under Claude Bernard and then succeeded Michael Foster in London University in 1870.4 At this point he was beginning his life’s work on the fundamental properties of living tissue, and his particular concern was the way muscles work. To that end he specialised in identifying the small electrical changes that took place during contraction and relaxation. He also interested himself in histology and cellular pathology, especially the structure of blood corpuscles. All this was music to Darwin’s ears. In June 1873 he contacted Burdon Sanderson (through George Romanes, who worked in the same laboratory) to ask if he would look over his investigations into the cellular activities of Drosera. Darwin was still bothered by the process he called protoplasmic “clumping” or “aggregation” inside the hair cells when the leaves were stimulated into feeding. Hooker told him that chlorophyll in plant cells did the same thing when exposed to sunlight. Darwin’s new microscope, with the better magnification, told him only that the process remained incomprehensible.
Burdon Sanderson was not at first convinced that the plants could even move—Darwin could tell that he thought he was imagining the whole thing. So Darwin set out to demonstrate the sensitiveness of Drosera to both Burdon Sanderson and Huxley, asking them to visit Down House. They peered at one of Darwin’s Drosera specimens until “Mr. Huxley cried out, ‘It is moving!’ ”5 Burdon Sanderson agreed to make the experiments. Within the month Darwin also persuaded him to investigate the movements of a Venus’s fly-trap. Could it be possible, he asked, that the leaves might possess some botanical equivalent to nerves and muscles? So Burdon Sanderson attached his electric probes to individual fly-trap leaves and stimulated them with minute bursts of current. The leaves responded “like animal muscle,” he reported at a meeting of the British Association in 1873. It had been a stunning example of laboratory dexterity. Moreover, this announcement was a revelation to the experimental physiologists in the audience who scarcely gave a thought to plants. “Not merely then are the phenomena of digestion in this wonderful plant like those of animals,” Hooker said admiringly, “but the phenomena of contractility agree with those of animals also.”6
Before long, Darwin told Thiselton Dyer he was “in that state in which I would sacrifice friend or foe.”
I fear that you will think me a great bore, but I cannot resist telling you that I have just found out that the leaves of Pinguicula possess a beautifully adapted power of movement. Last night I put on a row of little flies near one edge of two youngish leaves; and after 14 hours these edges are beautifully folded over so as to clasp the flies.… I have ascertained that bits of certain leaves, for instance spinach, excites so much secretion in Pinguicula, and that the glands absorb matter from the leaves.7
The whole business was a sensational story of surface innocence and hidden guile, just the kind of thing Darwin enjoyed in his recreational reading. Who could believe that the pretty common butterwort, with its golden star of leaves, had such a sinister nature? Or that under the quiet surface of a pond there were plants casting sticky nets, like Dictynna in Greek mythology, to trap their prey? Some plants specialised in drownings, others in knocking out victims with anaesthetics, still more in smothering or gluey entanglement.
Intrigued by his evident excitement, Darwin’s botanical friends rallied round. Lady Dorothy Nevill sent him an unusual bladderwort from her conservatory, a specimen water-plant that usually drifted on the surface of rivers in South America. Darwin had seen it only in dried form. When he and Francis opened up the bladders they found plenty of animal remains inside. A specimen of Genilisea ornata animated them even more. Nothing could escape from the trap it set, for the fly’s route to the death chamber was lined with a grid of spikes. Once inside, the victim could not retreat.
The great solid bladder-like swellings almost on the surface are wonderful objects, but are not the true bladders. These I found on the roots near the surface, and down to a depth of two inches in the sand.… I felt confident I should find captured prey. And so I have to my delight in two bladders, with clear proof that they had absorbed food from the decaying mass. For Utricularia is a carrion-feeder, and not strictly carnivorous like Drosera.… I have hardly ever enjoyed a day more in my life than I have this day’s work; and this I owe to your Ladyship’s great kindness.8
Messages across the globe rang with the same delighted claims. “Your magnificent present of Aldrovanda has arrived quite safe.… You are a good man to give me such pleasure.”
Amused by Darwin’s enthusiasms, Asa Gray sent a practical joke in the post—an article describing a carnivorous plant in Madagascar that subsisted on humans. Darwin confessed that he “began reading … quite gravely.” He did not perceive it was a hoax until he came to the woman who was lunch.
Early in 1875, Darwin felt ready to dispatch a manuscript on insectivorous plants to Murray. Inevitably he kept finding new things to observe. “You ask about my book,” he said to Hooker in February that year. “All I can say is that I am ready to commit suicide; I thought it was decently written but find so much wants rewriting that it will not be ready to go to printers for two months.” In May he was still covering his proof sheets with an inky forest of alterations. Faced with the crisis of placing actual words on paper, he decided that insectivorous plants must possess what he could only call “nervous matter,” analogous to animal nerves. He felt unable to describe this nervous matter further without the authority of hundreds of detailed experiments.
Emma despaired of getting him away for the customary break in London.
F. jibbs a good deal & I am afraid I shall not get him to move, at least not more than for 2 days at Q.A. [Queen Anne Street, Erasmus’s house] which he thinks might rest him, & so I dare say it would for a few days. However the proof sheets are coming in at a great rate.… F. has had prosperous news today from Dr B. Sanderson.… Lady Dorothy Nevill is coming to lunch on Tuesday! It is rather serious. F. will have to be so friendly & adoring (if possible).9
The book was nicely illustrated with diagrams by George and Francis and published by Murray in July 1875 under the title Insectivorous Plants. It proved far too specialised for a general audience and was not printed again while he lived. To a public accustomed to reading about apes and religious dissent, this Darwin seemed a very different author from the Darwin discussed in the newspapers.
At the same time, Darwin initiated another burst of investigation into orchids. “They are wonderful creatures, these Orchids,” he told Bentham. “I sometimes think with a glow of pleasure, when I remember making out some little point in their method of fertilisation.”10
And he plunged again into a full reevaluation and extension of his earlier work on cross-fertilisation and self-fertilisation in plants. This was perhaps something more than his usual urge to complete projects left dangling many years before. “I cannot endure doing nothing,” he told Jenyns in 1877. It was almost as if he feared the moment when his mind might be empty, when his work might be done; and to stave off this abyss constantly found old and new topics to pursue. If not dread of idleness, then dread of decrepitude. He often said that his work made him feel alive, helped his mind sing, was the one thing that blotted out his cares. Although he called himself a “a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of a large collection of facts,” the truth was he only felt himself when immersed in some demanding new project.
Francis Darwin helped with the researches. Later, Francis explained that his father had been driven by the idea that cross-fertilised plants would produce offspring that would be more successful in the competition for survival, and any mechanisms developed for ensuring the transfer of pollen from flower to flower therefore gave the species a significant adaptive advantage. This conviction had formed part of Darwin’s belief in evolution by natural selection for more than thirty years. The whole of the living kingdom, as he regarded it, was dedicated to ensuring sexual reproduction—man and woman, flower, and beast. Now, in particular, he wished to probe more deeply into aspects of plant fertilisation, heredity, and sterility.
Underneath, it seems entirely possible that Darwin was also becoming anxious about his own family’s reproductive future and that his botanical experiments echoed this concern. His seven children were grown up. William, the oldest, was thirty-five in 1874. Horace, the youngest, was twenty-three. Five of these children were as yet unmarried, and the two that were married, Henrietta and Francis, were childless. Even leaving aside any worries he might have felt over hereditary malaise, he probably wondered whether his own family was to prove a biological cul-de-sac. For a man whose intellectual life was structured around reproductive success, it must have been disturbing to consider the possibility of having no issue. His children were not doing what came naturally to most living beings. In biological terms, after all, he was convinced that reproduction kept species actively evolving. Self-fertilising organisms were probably on the road to extinction. Francis Darwin recorded that his father “once remarked to Dr. Norman Moore that one of the things that made him wish to live a few thousand years, was his desire to see the extinction of the Bee-orchis—an end to which he believed its self-fertilising habit was leading.”11 To muse about grandchildren and to investigate the origins of incipient sterility in plants or the advantages of cross-fertilisation were topics likely to resonate at a fundamental level with his private existence.
Once more, he lay in wait in the flower beds to observe bees pushing their way into a nectary, in search of the co-adaptations that had grown up between flowers and their insect pollinators. Once more, he isolated experimental plants under billowing nets of gauze and delicately pollinated them by hand with a camel-hair brush. As the summers passed, he sowed trays of compost with the seeds of particular crosses and counted seedlings. “I have taken every kind of precaution,” he assured Gray, telling him how he germinated plants in a pot on his chimney-piece to avoid contamination. Throughout, he intended to demonstrate that the offspring of out-crossing individuals were more vigorous, and more numerous, than the offspring of self-fertilised plants. “Nothing in my life has ever interested me more than the fertilisation of such plants as Primula and Lythrum, or again Anacamptis or Listera,” he told Hermann Muller in 1878.12
Actually, the investigation was tedious in the extreme and revealed Darwin at his most patient, foot-slogging best. “It is remarkable,” reminisced Francis, that this work “owed its origin to a chance observation.”
My father had raised two beds of Linaria vulgaris—one set being the offspring of cross- and the other of self-fertilisation. These plants were grown for the sake of some observations on inheritance, and not with any view to cross-breeding, and he was astonished to observe that the offspring of self-fertilisation were clearly less vigorous than the others. It seemed incredible to him that this result could be due to a single act of self-fertilisation, and it was only in the following year, when precisely the same result occurred in the case of a similar experiment on inheritance in Carnations, that his attention was “throughly aroused,” and that he determined to make a series of experiments specially directed to the question.13
“I am experimenting on a very large scale,” he confessed to Bentham on another occasion. “I always supposed until lately that no evil effects would be visible until after several generations of self-fertilisation; but now I see that one generation sometimes suffices.” If vigour could be lost in the course of one generation, the chances of survival were correspondingly reduced.
Principally he recorded “vigour” by measuring the height of the seedlings. “Lyell, Huxley and Hooker have seen some of my plants, and have been astonished.” But Wallace told him, too late, that weight would be a much better criterion than height—the total weight of seed produced by a plant was probably a better indicator of productivity, he said. So Darwin repeated the experiments the following year, this time calculating weights. He germinated the seedlings all over again, he labelled ripening seed-heads and then weighed the seeds in packets, one for each plant, on his old chemical balance. For a change, he tried planting some of the seedlings outside in the autumn (a tough test for the greenhouse varieties) and counted the ones that made it through the winter. After a good hard frost one Christmas morning, he was there in the garden with his notebook taking a roll-call of the survivors. As he hoped, he did ultimately substantiate his point. The crossed offspring were more vigorous than the self-fertilised.
Father and son found these days together rewarding. They sat side by side with their microscopes and plant trays, exchanging comments as necessary. Francis said that Darwin’s manner was bright and animated.
His love of each particular experiment, and his eager zeal not to lose the fruit of it, came out markedly in these crossing experiments—in the elaborate care he took not to make any confusion in putting capsules into wrong trays, &c. &c. I can recall his appearance as he counted seeds under the simple microscope with an alertness not usually characterising such mechanical work as counting. I think he personified each seed as a small demon trying to elude him by getting into the wrong heap, or jumping away altogether; and this gave to the work the excitement of a game.14
In the evenings Darwin relaxed with books about orchids. He stoked up an enjoyable correspondence with tropical experts like Fritz Müller and William Ogle, the latter a medical statistician at the registrar-general’s office whom he had met through William Farr. All this he regarded as restful and eminently useful. Friends appreciated the self-effacing manner he showed at these times. They felt able to tease him. Once, when Darwin was wandering about the garden at Down House in the company of William Ogle, he paused to pick a flower and said that it was staggering to have to believe that the beautiful adaptations which it showed were the result of natural selection. To this Dr. Ogle replied, “My dear sir, allow me to advise you to read a book called the Origin of Species.”
Thomas Henry Farrer, the husband of Effie Wedgwood (Darwin’s niece), became a close colleague in these botanical matters, being well read and sufficiently leisured to participate in some of Darwin’s inquiries. Darwin enjoyed his company and started accepting invitations to stay at Abinger Hall, Farrer’s estate near Dorking, in Surrey. It was nearly the only place he would visit outside his customary circuit of Henrietta, Erasmus, William, and his sister Caroline at Leith Hill Place. This “pleasant, friendly house was now added to the very few places where my father felt enough at ease to pay visits,” noted Henrietta. Effie made them welcome, and as often as not Erasmus would run down for a day or two as well, for Effie was his special favourite among Fanny and Hensleigh’s adult daughters. She would sing in the evenings for family parties, as “admirable as any concert,” said the Darwin brothers enthusiastically. At Abinger, Emma knew her husband would eat, talk, and rest. He “ran riot rather—bribery tart, peaches, grapes &c. He has promised to reform. He has much botanical talk with THF.”15
Darwin and Farrer’s routine was simple enough. They would call at the greenhouses, then walk out onto the “Rough,” a patch of wild commonland. Farrer liked these companionable rambles.
His tall figure, with his broad-brimmed Panama hat and long stick like an alpenstock, sauntering solitary and slow over our favourite walks, is one of the pleasantest of the many associations I have with the place.16
Underneath the pleasantries, Farrer also served as a useful foil for some of Darwin’s botanical ideas. He helped Darwin understand the complicated adaptations for fertilisation in Passiflora, the climbing passion-flower, then a rarity in English gardens. During one summer visit to Abinger, the two men sat pensively in the dusk beside Farrer’s specimen, in full flower, waiting to see if any local insect might serve as a fertilising emissary in the absence of humming-birds. They saw “neither humble-bees, nor butterflies, nor any other large insects.” On other occasions, they watched the bees on Farrer’s summer bedding schemes, noting how the bees concentrated on the yellow nursery varieties and ignored pink or white. At these times, Farrer’s admiration for Darwin was limitless. He seemed never to be irritated by Darwin’s habit of following one of Farrer’s remarks by saying, “Yes; but at one time I made some observations myself on this particular point; and I think you will find, &c. &c.”17
They also discussed Darwin’s theories about climbing plants. Farrer reported to him how the passifloras “seek & find & hold on & pull up like an animal.” Living in the Kent countryside, with hop-fields all around, Darwin could not help but notice the twining tendrils that hitched the plants up their wires in the late-spring sunshine. The ornamental climbers on the veranda at Down House caught his attention. Sweet peas and runner beans scrambling over netting were an amusement. “I kept a potted plant, during the night and day, in a well-warmed room to which I was confined by illness,” Darwin said, and observed the growing points move with the light, like the hand of a watch. The local countryside was a constant source of inquiry to him. “The number of different kinds of bushes in the Hedge Rows, entwined by traveller’s joy & the bryonies, is conspicuous, compared with the hedges of the northern counties,” he had noted in anticipation when he first arrived at Down.18
Many odd facts emerged. Rather absurdly carrying his wooden measuring stick with him on strolls around the Down House flower beds, Darwin discovered that wisteria could move faster than morning glory. Some species, he saw, climbed using their leaves, others with hooks and latches. Most preferred to move anti-clockwise, except for Loasa eurantiaca, which moved first one way and then the other, until it hit something to act as a support. His walking stick even participated in this private source of interest, for it was cut from a hardened, twisted rope of native honeysuckle, a daily reminder of the strange byways along which his theory was taking him. Thereafter, he obtained sensitive species from Farrer, or from the glasshouses at Kew, and set them to work in his greenhouse or study, either climbing or twining or sleeping. He regarded them as tenderly as he did Polly the dog. “F. is much absorbed in Desmodium gyrans and went to see it asleep last night. It was dead asleep—all but its little ears which were having most lively games such as he never saw in the daytime,” wrote Emma.
Francis came closest to understanding his father’s dedication. It was “a kind of gratitude to the flower itself, and a personal love for its delicate form & colour. I seem to remember him gently touching a flower he delighted in.”
It ran through all his relation to natural things—a most keen feeling of their aliveness. Sometimes it came out in abuse & not praise, eg. of some seedlings—“the little beggars are doing just what I don’t want them to.”—Or the half-provoked, half-admiring way he spoke of the ingenuity of a Mimosa leaf in screwing itself out of a basin of water in which he tried to plunge it.19
His volume on climbing plants was issued in 1875, an expanded version of the paper he had published in the Linnean Society Journal ten years before. Despite the attention that Darwin lavished on his twitchers, twiners, climbers, and scramblers, these adaptive devices did not catch the public fancy any more than the digestive powers of Drosera. The book was one of his slowest sellers.
The old order began to pass. Hooker’s wife, Frances, died in 1874, the year after he accepted the presidency of the Royal Society. He told Huxley that he still thought of her as the young girl who he had dreamed about when plant-hunting in the Himalayas. Twenty-five years on, the gap her passing left in his life was enormous. He turned to Darwin for solace, visiting Down for a few days after the funeral, bringing his children with him. “I cannot tell you how depressed I feel at times.” Two years later he married Hyacinth Symonds, the widow of Sir William Jardine, a marriage that brought companionship, a mutual enjoyment in science, and then the birth of a baby. The couple caused an unprecedented stir by leaving “the president’s baby” with the porter at the Royal Society apartments when Hooker was called to London for scientific engagements.
Lyell died on 22 February 1875, aged seventy-eight. “How completely he revolutionised geology: for I can remember something of pre-Lyellian days,” mused Darwin. “I never forget that almost everything which I have done in science I owe to the study of his great works.” To Hooker he admitted that the death did not catch him unprepared. Lyell had been fading away ever since Mary Lyell’s death from typhoid fever in 1873, and Darwin was glad that his friend went out with his faculties intact. “I dreaded nothing so much as his surviving with impaired mental powers.” Among the memories Darwin most wished to keep secure were Lyell’s “freedom from all religious bigotry” and his eager interest in political and social advance.
He was, indeed, a noble man in very many ways; perhaps in none more than in his warm sympathy with the work of others. How vividly I can recall my first conversation with him, and how he astonished me by his interest in what I told him. How grand also was his candour and pure love of truth. Well he is gone, and I feel as if we were all soon to go.20
As president of the Royal Society, Hooker arranged for Lyell to be buried in Westminster Abbey, as much a tribute to the man himself as any propaganda for the new order of things. Katherine Lyell, Lyell’s sister-in-law, asked if Darwin would join Hooker, Huxley, and others as a pallbearer. Darwin refused. He said he “dared not,” for he would “so likely fail in the midst of ceremony and have my head whirling off my shoulders.” Nor did he attend the funeral. According to Emma’s diary, he sent Bessy, Francis, and Francis’s wife, Amy. It was a sorry end to a remarkable friendship, at root surely reflecting the same form of selfishness, the same self-indulgence, that had tainted his response to John Stevens Henslow’s death, the other man who had made him who he was and who had given him just as much dedicated assistance as Lyell. Darwin could be ruthless in cutting himself off from those to whom he owed the greatest debts. Perhaps he thought that to go to Lyell’s funeral—to make himself ill for Lyell’s sake—would serve no useful purpose. No wonder he suddenly felt “old & helpless.”
A passing problem lay in finding appropriate words for the Abbey tombstone. Katherine Lyell drafted two proposals that Hooker thought were far too religious (“I have fainted away twice,” he said cynically). Darwin agreed. “They sound to me like truckling to the parsons or to Westminster Abbey.”21 Together they devised a form of words that played to Lyell’s strengths rather than what they secretly had come to regard as his private failings. Yet the epitaph was not as fulsome as it might have been. To them he had perhaps outlived his usefulness.
Throughout a long and laborious life he sought the means of deciphering the fragmentary records of the earth’s history in the patient investigation of the present order of Nature, enlarging the boundaries of knowledge and leaving on scientific thought an enduring influence.
These ruminative gardening days were interrupted by the political problems of science. Darwin’s position as a biologist, as a national figure, and as a man increasingly engaged in physiological researches pulled him into the last great medical controversy of the century—vivisection.
Always a delicate problem, and fairly well regulated in Britain through a code of practice set out in 1871, the issue of vivisection raised fundamental social, moral, and professional issues that collided with public opinion during the 1870s and 1880s.22 Fears about cruelty to animals were only a part of it. British experimental physiologists faced extreme hostility, not just from the public, but also from practical medical men and clinicians who at that point saw no need to adjust their finely honed diagnostic skills to accommodate laboratory knowledge. Only a few hospitals at that time provided facilities for medical research. The great public institutions were primarily charities for the relief of the sick, run by a board of governors who considered it no part of their business to establish expensive laboratories for the academic investigation of disease. In Britain, University College Hospital, St. Bartholomew’s, Guy’s, and St. Thomas’s hospitals were the exception. Similarly, the universities found it difficult to understand the new desire for laboratories to study blood, muscles, or nerves, although Huxley had made a promising start in South Kensington. A doctor with experimental leanings would therefore tend to equip a room in his house as a small laboratory oriented toward microscopy or chemistry according to his tastes. As a result, physiologists in Britain struggled to establish the value of their researches in the slipstream of spectacular advances made elsewhere in Europe. Furthermore, well-publicised appointments to university chairs of men like Burdon Sanderson, Edward Sharpey-Schafer, and Michael Foster called into question matters of medical authority—why should medicine, hitherto dominated by the Royal Colleges, take seriously university professors whose appointments and research interests lay outside the clinical system? Barely hidden questions of power and authority fuelled the debate, fanned by the political activities of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) and public outrage against the use of living animals for research.
When Burdon Sanderson published a Handbook for the Physiological Laboratory for students in 1873, his readers were made uncomfortably aware of the methods adopted by rising young experimentalists. The following year, at a medical meeting in Norwich, the British Medical Association allowed a particularly ill-chosen experimental demonstration of the effects of absinthe on a dog. The session ended in uproar and criminal proceedings were brought against the French neurologist Valentin Magnan for cruelty.23
Victorians were alternately stirred, chastised, annoyed, and appalled by reports of such practices that appeared in the press. Led by Frances Power Cobbe, on the one hand, the founder in 1875 of the Victoria Street Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection, and Richard Holt Hutton, editor of the Spectator, on the other, public revulsion against laboratory experiments on living animals gathered pace. But there was also accumulating unease about what was claimed to be science’s heartless, value-free agenda of inquiry, fears that were displayed in Wilkie Collins’s unusual novel Heart and Science, in which the villain’s callous behaviour was attributed to his vivisectionist researches. The main argument of the antivivisectionists was that experiments on living animals were cruel, useless, and immoral. Cobbe called them “tortures.” Human beings, she argued, had moral duties towards other creatures, creatures that also possessed the capacity to suffer. Perhaps she felt that the wanton exploitation of animals reflected something of the political and social vacuum in which women then existed. The link with feminist history has always been strong. Beyond that, antivivisectionists freely expressed their misgivings about the growing ascendancy of science and medicine. It seemed to many that experimentalists pursued their researches without any legal or moral obligations to society or to the higher world of the divine. The campaign groups that emerged were steadfast in their opposition. When Darwin tried to describe Hutton’s inflexibility over the issue of animal experiments, he said in awe, “He seems to be a kind of female Miss Cobbe.”
The issue involved Darwin directly as a figurehead for advanced modes of thought. At the same time, however, he was disgusted by cruelty to animals of any kind. As a local magistrate he sometimes came across cases of cruelty to farm animals and was inexorable in imposing fines and punishment. In 1853 he had waged a private vendetta against a Mr. Ainslie in the village for cruelty to his carthorses, sending for an officer of the RSPCA and threatening to “have him up before a magistrate & his ploughman also.” From time to time, he would jump out of his carriage to remonstrate with coach drivers using whips or spurs excessively.24 He sacked a Down House employee who had left the family horse standing in its harness for hours. This was more than mere sentiment. Darwin dimly remembered the screams of Brazilian slaves during his voyaging days. A profound dislike of inhumane treatment of any vulnerable being strongly coloured his perspective, and he said that the thought of laboratory animals being made to feel pain simply in order to satisfy human curiosity was “abhorrent” to him. In a little-noted passage in The Descent of Man he wrote that “every one has heard of the dog suffering under vivisection who licked the hand of the operator; this man, unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorse to the last hour of his life.”25
In these views Darwin was supported by Emma and Henrietta. Some ten years beforehand, in 1863, Darwin and Emma had written a joint letter to the Bromley Record, the local newspaper, protesting about the use of steel traps for vermin. This letter was accompanied by a line drawing made at Darwin’s request of a rabbit’s paw fractured by a sprung trap. The letter was republished, minus the picture, in the Gardeners’ Chronicle under Darwin’s initials alone, and again as a separate pamphlet that Emma sent around to friends and relatives in order to raise funds for the RSPCA to investigate humane traps. Darwin recorded payment for the cost of distributing the “cruelty pamphlet,” and his name was listed for several years beside an announcement in the RSPCA magazine Animal World of his intention to give a monetary prize to the inventor of an alternative, more humane, device. The prize was still listed in 1876. With the antivivisection debate in full flood, Emma drew on that published text for another letter that she apparently sent under her own name to the Times or Spectator, although it seems not to have been published.26
So at home, antipathy to vivisection ran high. When George Romanes came for a visit, Darwin warned him, “When in the presence of my ladies do not talk about experiments on animals.” Yet Darwin also believed physiology to be “one of the greatest of sciences, sure … greatly to benefit mankind.” His devotion to science—his belief in it as the way forward—ensured that he pledged wholehearted support to the ideals of pure research. His personal solution to the dilemma was less clear. He believed that experimental animals should be rendered completely “insensible.” Then again, as early as 1871, he told Edwin Ray Lankester that although he felt vivisection was essential for the progress of knowledge it should not be performed for “mere damnable and detestable curiosity. It is a subject which makes me sick with horror, so I will not say another word about it, else I shall not sleep tonight.”
He did not follow his own advice. He refused to sign the antivivisection petition that Henrietta presented to him in January 1875 and wrote her a long letter explaining his reasons. These were mainly pragmatic. The proposed licensing system seemed to him likely to be overly restrictive. Furthermore, “I do not see who is to determine whether any particular man should receive one.” The traditional country sports of English gentlemen, he added, were far crueller than a properly executed experiment. Most of all, he feared a deleterious effect on research.
If stringent laws are passed … the result will assuredly be that physiology, which has been until within the last few years at a standstill in England, will languish or quite cease. It will then be carried on solely on the Continent; and there will be so many the fewer workers on this grand subject, and this I should greatly regret.… No doubt the names of doctors will have great weight with the House of Commons; but very many practitioners neither know nor care anything about the progress of knowledge. I cannot at present see my way to sign any petition, without hearing what physiologists thought would be its effect, and then judging for myself. I certainly could not sign the paper sent me by Miss Cobbe, with its monstrous (as it seems to me) attack on Virchow.27
A few months later, Lord Hartismere was persuaded by Cobbe and other antivivisectionists to put a bill forward to Parliament to regulate physiological laboratories. Hartismere’s bill proposed that vivisection be confined to premises that were annually registered with the home secretary, and that animals be properly anaesthetised. Curare was singled out as not suitable for the purpose.
Darwin was dismayed by the terms of this bill, not least that private scholars would need a personal license to work in their own homes. With deadly efficiency, he set about drawing up a counter-petition to protect “the science of physiology as well as animals.” His physiological friends were astonished to see him roused to such intense political action. Astonished and gratified. Perhaps only someone with Darwin’s Olympian presence could have united such a disparate band at this juncture. His petition hit his friends’ letterboxes and they signed it in droves.
The activity increased during his customary visit to London. Although the response to his petition was gratifying, Darwin decided that he would be better advised to get a blocking bill presented in Parliament. He lobbied all his senior political acquaintances. Richard Litchfield drafted a proposed bill for him, which Darwin sent for approval to Burdon Sanderson and other leading physiologists, each and every one personally known to him. Hooker signed as president of the Royal Society, and Darwin wrote to advise Lord Derby that the bill would be introduced to Parliament by Lyon Playfair (as Lubbock recommended). Darwin made sure to secure prestigious backing in both houses, including Lord Cardwell and the Earl of Shaftesbury. With a turn of speed and purpose that may have surprised even himself, he deliberately used his status to advance his cause.
He did the work well. The opposing bills from science and the public (with more common ground between them than might be at first be supposed) caused such a stir that a Royal Commission was appointed to investigate the entire issue. The commission was put under the direction of Lord Cardwell, a senior Liberal statesman who was often brought in by Gladstone for seemingly impossible problems of arbitration. Not surprisingly, Darwin was called to give evidence to this commission. “F. went to the Vivisection Commission at two,” wrote Emma.
Lord Cardwell came to the door to receive him and he was treated like a duke. They only wanted him to repeat what he had said in his letter (a sort of confession of faith about the claims of physiology and the duty of humanity) and he had hardly a word to add, so that it was over in ten minutes, Lord C. coming to the door and thanking him. It was a great compliment to his opinion, wanting to have it put upon the minutes.28
Darwin was involved again and again until the year of his death. The authority of his presence in this debate and his unimpeachable qualities as a witness made him more visible than he had been for years. He felt fighting spirit flood back into his aging veins. Fame was not always a burden.
At last his son William persuaded him to sit for an oil portrait. The process of persuasion had taken ages. William first made the suggestion in 1872 after the family had visited Southampton, confiding to Henrietta, “I mean to have a portrait done of Father by Watts, unless anybody can persuade me that it will be a failure probably either from Watts not taking to this kind of subject, or being ill, &c. &c. &c. The expense will not be more than £500 and if F. jibbs, I am game to pay it.… Please keep quite dark.”29
Darwin kept finding objections. “He often talked laughingly of the small worth of portraits,” remembered Francis with regret, “and said that a photograph was worth any number of pictures, as if he were blind to the artistic quality in a painted portrait. But this was generally said in his attempts to persuade us to give up the idea of having his portrait painted, an operation very irksome to him.”30 The root cause of these objections was probably the feeling that many people share about portraiture—anxiety about being thought vain, and the time that it would take. Underneath, he may have sensed that the process of having a portrait painted was a form of intense personal appraisal. He really did not like the idea of anyone penetrating too closely. He had placed Woolner’s bust in an unobtrusive corner of the dining room and routinely deflected any comments by laughing about it in a dismissive fashion. “He used to point with scorn at the conventional way in which the head in a great many busts such as the one in the dining room was attached at the neck,” said William, a trifle sadly.31
Patiently William parried all his father’s objections. At the end of 1874, Darwin agreed. For unknown reasons, the artist Frederick Watts was not approached, even though he was then working on his “Hall of Fame,” the portraits of eminent figures that he ultimately presented to the National Portrait Gallery. Instead, the commission went to Walter William Ouless. The portrait was completed in March 1875. William intended it to remain in the family. As it happened, the picture was distributed rather more widely than this. Ouless exhibited it at the Royal Academy in 1875. It was subsequently engraved by Paul Rajon and published in the Illustrated London News in 1877. A little while later Ouless made a copy in oils for Christ’s College Cambridge, Darwin’s old college.
Ouless stayed at Down House for the sittings for a few days in February 1875, Darwin grumbling about time that could better have been spent in his hothouse and Emma wondering how to entertain the artist between his painting engagements. Eventually, she hit on an idea which she revealed to Leonard, away with the army in New Zealand.
Mr Ouless is painting F. and me! He cannot nearly fill up his time with F. so it was a convenient time for me to sit. Both portraits are unutterable as yet; but he puts in the youth and beauty at the very last.32
She never liked the results. Despite Francis’s and William’s praising the painting of Darwin, with Francis regarding it “the finest representation of my father that has been produced,” Emma felt it did not depict the man she knew. No trace of Ouless’s portrait of Emma has ever been found. When Rajon came down in 1877 to show his engraving, she said, “We expect M. Rajon today with the picture & a proof sheet of etching, which I expect will exaggerate the faults of the picture viz. roughness & dismality.” Three days later she was still cantankerous.
M. Rajon came down on Thursday bringing the picture & a proof sheet of the etching. They all admired it but I rather dislike etchings & don’t like the picture; so it was not likely to please me.33
Darwin felt ambivalent too. Writing to Hooker after the painting was completed, he reflected, “I look a very venerable, acute melancholy old dog,—whether I really look so I do not know.”34
Silently, he and Emma removed this painting from their immediate surroundings. When their friend and neighbour Alice Bonham Carter wondered if it might be displayed at the Bromley School of Science during an evening conversazione to encourage local naturalists and scientists, they withheld consent. “Alice wanted us to send Ouless’ picture,” Emma told William, “but F. cd not stand exhibiting himself in that way.”35
The following spring he and Emma went to London to visit Henrietta as usual. This time Darwin stated a wish to see Hooker sitting in the presidential chair at the Royal Society. The two Cambridge sons, George and Horace, came up to London to join him.
G. and Horace came on Wed. to go to the Royal Soc. soirée and F. went with them! There was such a crowd he only cd. behave like a crowned head shake hands & before he cd. enter on any talk somebody else came up. Many of them he did not know, & one was so affectionate he was ashamed to ask & parted from him with the greatest effusion. I don’t think it will be worth while his going again. However it did him no harm.36
Darwin took a different view. “Tell Hooker I feel greatly aggrieved by him. I went to the Royal Society to see him for once in the chair of the Royal to admire his dignity and enjoy it, and lo and behold, he was not there.”
As time went by, Darwin occasionally thought about writing down a few recollections of his life. There was no pressure to do so, he said; no ambition to seal his past in aspic; and, as he saw it, no particular need to search for self-justificatory causes and effects. Others might regard him as a hero, or, as Emma said, a crowned head of science, but he felt no such conviction.
Yet there were many things that encouraged him to dwell on long-gone days. A little while previously, in the autumn of 1875, he had been asked for some biographical reminiscences by Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg, a German exile in Paris. Hesse-Wartegg had been one of the few reviewers who spoke favourably about Insectivorous Plants, and Darwin consequently felt kindly towards him. Hesse-Wartegg inquired if Darwin might supply information about the development of his mind and character for an article in a Leipzig journal called the Pioneer, which would then be syndicated to the German encyclopedias.37 The older man usually disliked dealing with these requests. Still, Hesse-Wartegg’s letter sparked his imagination. Like Huxley, he fell into the understandable trap of thinking that the most accurate account would be the one written by himself.38
Odd details of the past also teased his memory. He sympathised with Katherine Lyell, doing her utmost to memorialise Lyell in a volume of life and letters. Pensively, he gathered up the letters he had received from his geological friend over the decades and sent them to Katherine to use in her book, an enduring friendship now ignominiously reduced to two brown paper packages. “I hope that I may die before my mind fails to a sensible extent,” he caught himself thinking. He reminded William Darwin Fox of their longstanding intimacy. Every morning, as he turned over his botanical notes, many of them written at Maer Hall or Shrewsbury when he was just married, others during long-forgotten holidays at Elizabeth’s and Charlotte’s homes in Hartfield, he contemplated his past and sensed time slipping away. So many loved ones dead, so many changes in science.
However, it was family news that provided the real push. In the spring of 1876, Francis and Amy announced that they were to have a child. Darwin and Emma rejoiced: the baby would be their first grandchild. They had worried a little about Henrietta’s continuing childlessness, and in an unintentionally poignant note written after Francis and Amy’s announcement, Henrietta partly acknowledged the gap herself. “I feel as long as I have Father & you it does instead of our having children & makes our lives quite full, for you are the dearest Father & Mother that ever anyone had.”39 Apart from Francis and Henrietta, none of the others had edged towards marriage, not even William at the advanced age of thirty-seven.
The thought of the impending baby pleased Darwin greatly. He had loved his own children dearly. So when a few peaceful weeks sailed into view during a visit to Hensleigh and Fanny Wedgwood’s country house in May 1876, he began a short autobiographical memoir, opening it with the hope that it would amuse his children and their children. “I know that it would have interested me greatly to have read even so short and dull a sketch of the mind of my grandfather written by himself, and what he thought and did and how he worked,” he confided.40
Over succeeding months he added paragraphs here and there as things occurred to him, and in May 1881 he conscientiously filled up the gap from August 1876. One important addition was fourteen pages of reminiscences of his father, Dr. Robert Darwin of Shrewsbury. Darwin very much wanted to write this section not merely to honour his father and to make sure that successive generations would be put in touch with their history but also to resolve his own relationship with the Shrewsbury past. “I do not think any one could love a father much more than I did mine, and I do not believe three or four days ever pass without my still thinking of him,” he had revealed to Hooker with unaccustomed frankness when Hooker’s father died. There was more than a little self-deception in those words. In his autobiography Darwin turned his father into a bully. He said he owed his father nothing in mental ability. “My father’s mind was not scientific, and he did not try to generalise his knowledge under general laws.… I do not think that I gained much from him intellectually.” Moreover, he evidently thought his father had misjudged him. He still smarted at the outburst that he noted in his autobiography, “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family,” exactly remembering the words and the mortification he had felt but neither the year nor the surrounding context. When Darwin’s sister Caroline read these passages after Darwin’s death she was upset to realise that even in old age he had no idea how much he had been loved by their father.41 Perhaps she failed to see—as Darwin also failed to see—that he was distancing himself from his father by insisting that he had always been independent, standing alone. As for the female side of his ancestry, Darwin ignored it completely. Darwin, seemingly like many Victorian intellectuals, regarded the development of his mind within a predominantly patrilineal descent.42
Once he was into the swing of writing about himself, Darwin found the work an agreeable way to pass the summer, the more especially because he did not need to look anything up in learned journals or check the accuracy of his facts. He made a number of minor slips, as might be expected in an informal family memoir written at the end of a full and varied life. Anecdotes and reminiscences flowed. He included stories about the famous people he had met, just the kind of thing that people were already recording about him, and laughed at Lyell for relishing the same high-society entertainments that he dismissed. He took no care over his style, for the pages were not designed to be read by anyone other than members of the family. He did not bother to pursue episodes that escaped his memory, letting his narrative trot on in a straightforward line toward his achievements. As a result, the work embodied many of the charms and oddities of an English gentleman at home: polite, considerate, shy, and amusingly self-deprecating; and yet unable or unwilling to delve too far below the surface. With a modest smile Darwin deflected every difficult question that a more demanding, self-analytical author might have asked of himself.
He was clear about the piece not being intended for publication. Writing to Julius Carus in 1879, he said, “I have never even dreamed of publishing my own auto-biography.”43 While this remark seems hard fully to accept in retrospect, it seems fair to say that Darwin at the time of writing believed—or wanted to believe—that he was directing his remarks only to friends and family. The skimpy explanations of his actions that he offered, the comfortable expectation that he would be believed, the avoidance of difficult memories or troubling emotions, all suggest that he approached the project informally, in a relaxed frame of mind. Nevertheless, in choosing which memories to record in words, in selecting the anecdotes, he was constructing himself in the shape in which he wished to know himself and to be known by.44
Towards the end, he did try to estimate his character, reflecting on the spread of issues that Galton’s questionnaire and other inquirers had set before him. But he was not introspective by nature. He probably felt a mixture of distaste and apprehension about people rummaging around in his life, even if this should be himself, and unwilling to open up to scrutiny. More important, he evidently felt, were words of support to his sons, whose aptitude, he believed, lay, like his own, in perseverance and nothing else.
Above all he seems to have found it inappropriate or difficult to reveal his innermost feelings. He did not attempt anything like the analysis and score-settling that usually accompany the autobiographical genre. He acknowledged his debts to Lyell and to Henslow with grace but very little fervour. His voice was apologetic, humble, accepting at face value his own and others’ motives, unquestioning, even-tempered, and conversational, an unfolding of the pleasantly unassuming persona that would ultimately lie at the centre of the Darwin legend. This was not just the superficial language of gentlemanly respectability. To him, raw emotions were probably too intense for written words. The only exception was his private writing about his dead daughter Annie, pages that were not meant for any eyes other than his own and Emma’s.
But in many cases the rawness had evidently dissipated with the years. In writing these “recollections” he felt none of the exuberance of his early letters from Cambridge or Shrewsbury, none of the verve of his Beagle correspondence. This does not mean to say that he dismissed the passions he had once experienced, especially the passion for natural history. In general, he looked back on his enthusiasms with indulgent bemusement, full of affability and fondness, almost as if he were another man completely. Perhaps he did believe he was another man. In this memoir he emphasised his intellectual achievements, his books, his contribution to the advance of knowledge, tending to undervalue his creative involvement in the process. He seemed to say that science made him, rather than he made the science. In a disconcerting turn of phrase, he said he wrote “as if I were a dead man in another world looking back at my own life,” and his spare, unadorned sentences did convey something of this bleak neutrality. “Nor have I found this difficult, for life is nearly over with me,” he continued.
He mentioned Emma only to praise her. He scarcely mentioned his children, except for recollecting Anne’s death in 1851 (“we have suffered only one very severe grief”) and the fond memory of childhoods outgrown. “When you were very young, it was my delight to play with you all, and I think with a sigh that such days can never return.”45 He said that his life after his marriage was merely the story of writing his various books. He spoke about himself not as a person, living and growing, but as a series of publications, an author.46
In the one place where he did describe the changes he had noticed in his personality, his children afterwards went to considerable lengths to discount the self-evaluation. Darwin stated that his aesthetic sense had gradually deadened over the years. He did not thrill to beautiful scenery or to a piece of music as he used to.
Formerly, pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But for many years now I cannot endure to read a line of poetry; I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.… My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of a large collection of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend I cannot conceive.47
His honesty about this bothered the rest of the family. It was as if Darwin was denying his sensitivity to nature, almost turning his back on his special gifts. One by one, after his death, members of the next generation pointed out counter-examples, where Darwin had enjoyed a scenic view or an evening of music. “As regards his imagination,” said Leonard Darwin defensively, “I think that scenery, the beauty of flowers, and music and novels were sufficient to satisfy it. I remember he once said to me with a smile that he believed he could write a poem on Drosera, on which he was then working.”48 There was no real need for the family so diligently to readjust the record because the cultural norms of that time were easily able to accommodate a lack of artistic taste in the great and the good. There has always been a place among the English upper classes for philistinism, even among the intelligentsia. More was at stake. Francis evidently felt that Darwin’s disregard for aesthetics was unworthy of the flame of intellect and said so when he came to write his father’s Life and Letters. Unanimously, the children rejected their father’s own view of himself as a deadened, anaesthetic man.49
Despite this occasional bleakness, Darwin’s writing was characteristic. He dwelled sentimentally on his Cambridge days. “My time was wasted, as far as the academical studies were concerned.… we sometimes drank too much, with jolly singing and playing at cards afterwards.” He told his Beagle story with an appreciative understanding of the way it transformed his life. An unpleasant edge crept into his account of FitzRoy. He praised Henslow too much, probably guilty about not having thanked him adequately in life. He took a valedictory swipe at Richard Owen and explained, to his own satisfaction at least, his decision never to engage in controversy. He was silent about his charitable work in the village, remarking only that he wished he had done more. He refrained from describing his income—and made sure to disparage his youthful extravagance.
In particular, he emphasised throughout his own personal effort, presenting himself as a man committed to the ethos of self-help, a part of his identity that evidently drew on the ideals of self-determination, “character,” and enterprise more generally encountered in Samuel Smiles’s books. As he had told Galton, he valued this quality highly. He believed everything he had attained was the result of his own industry. Looking back, he reckoned he learned nothing at school; nothing from his father, who considered him “a very ordinary boy”; nothing from two universities except that which was performed under his own steam. Everything accomplished on the voyage was through his own hard work. He claimed that he had listened to Dr. Robert Grant’s eloquent advocacy of Lamarck “without any effect on my mind.” His grandfather’s views produced “no effect on me.” There was a decidedly self-congratulatory element to this. He could not even believe that the subject of evolution had been “in the air.” The black-and-scarlet beetle he had seen on holiday at Plas Edwards, in Wales, aged ten, was recalled more clearly than his dying mother. All this conveyed—whether intentionally or not—his belief in personal creativity and autonomy. Like all memorialists, he pieced together his own view of himself, remembering only those things that endorsed his particular inner picture, and he moulded his memories to the hidden conventions and assumptions that shape any individual’s manner of thinking about his or her life.50 Rather astutely, he painted himself as developing from a good-hearted numbskull, forever “surprised” and “astonished,” into an unlikely prince.51 This was the unquestioning individuality of the age of laissez-faire, a kind of capitalist autobiography where by skill and personal effort the author’s losses were turned into gains. It was full of masculine assumptions about the world of work and positive intellectual activity.52 His moments of uncertainty and the paths left untaken were discarded.
Furthermore, Darwin smoothed out the turbulent path of his early evolutionary speculations and turned them into a steady march from facts to theory. To omit, or to forget, the intellectual electricity of his London years, his pride and excitement in his theory, his despair on reading Wallace’s letter, and the steady support given to him by others was to rewrite his past. The old Darwin forgot how the young Darwin had returned from the Beagle voyage hard-headed and full of drive. He did not tell his sons about scientific courage or competitiveness, or the ecstasy of ideas.53 He avoided talking about sparks that explode into insights. Even his account of the moment of creative inspiration that had made him into what he was sounded flat and full of future hard work.
Fifteen months after I had begun my systematic enquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on population, and being well-prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence … it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.54
His affable nature, his wish to be kind, his feeling that he had a gilded life, his love for his family: all these obscured the very real shocks he had encountered. As others have remarked about the genre of autobiography, the author depends not so much on the art of recollecting as on the art of forgetting.55 He nowhere acknowledged that competitive steely element that drove him on. Huxley afterwards believed Darwin’s greatest attributes were a “clear rapid intelligence, a great memory, a vivid imagination,” which were subordinated to “his love of truth.”56 Darwin was incapable of seeing himself as others saw him. In an oddly engaging manner, he remained a stranger to himself.
This blurring of the past softened his account of the Origin of Species and the unrelenting dedication with which he had ensured its world-wide consideration. Throwing all memory to the winds, he offered a pleasant encomium on his reviewers.
I have almost always been treated honestly by my reviewers, passing over those without scientific knowledge as not worthy of notice. My views have often been grossly misrepresented, bitterly opposed and ridiculed, but this has generally been done, as I believe, in good faith.57
In this autobiography Darwin expressed startlingly harsh views on Christianity. Like many Victorian thinkers finally coming to terms with their loss of faith, he blamed his increasing doubts on the absence of any rational proof for God’s existence. No “sane man” would believe in miracles, he said; the Gospels were demonstrably not literal accounts of the past; comparative studies of the Hindu, Mohammedan, and Buddhist faiths, along with scholarly descriptions of primitive animism and spirit worship, showed that Christianity could not be regarded as a divine, monotheistic revelation. Formerly, he said, he had believed in a personal deity. He remembered standing in the Brazilian forest and his “conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.” Disbelief had only slowly “crept” over him. In fact, his account is distinctive in the annals of autobiographical writing for its lack of any pivotal moment of loss. Darwin had no epiphany. When he composed the Origin of Species he retained some religious views. But now, as he wrote, he said not even the grandest scenes would cause such feelings to swell.
To him, the God of the Christians was cruel.
I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so, the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.58
Perhaps it was for self-protection that he did not dwell on the moral or ethical dilemmas that had beset his notebooks. He did not mention his conscience. There was little here to guide his sons on the right way to live a moral life in the newly secularised world that he had helped to create, no sense of personal transformation or rebellion either, where one set of views was finally jettisoned in favour of another. He did not struggle to find meaning in his loss of faith, seemingly accepting it as an inevitable feature of the life of a scientist. No other experiences, he implied, not even the loss of faith, could match those he had encountered in science.59
As for the evidence presented by a deep internal conviction that God must exist, he admitted that he could not trust his own mind to reason properly on the issue, knowing that his faculties were “developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal.” A dog might as well reason on the mind of Newton, he had once said. More forcefully, he put the same words into his father’s mouth, recounting Dr. Darwin’s story of an elderly female patient who had remonstrated with him. The old woman believed in God without ever asking herself why she believed. “Doctor, I know that sugar is sweet in my mouth, and I know that my Redeemer liveth.”
All these were opinions that Darwin repeated here and there in letters during the 1870s, sometimes using the same turn of phrase. They were evidently strongly felt. “Science has nothing to do with Christ,” he told Nicolai von Mengden, a Russian biologist, in a letter written in 1879, “except in so far as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence. For myself, I do not believe there has ever been any Revelation.”60 As it turned out, Emma Darwin had once suggested to him that his scientific approach might make him question the validity of religion. Darwin seems to have concurred in the truth of this opinion. His niece Julia Wedgwood recollected that when he was writing The Descent of Man he told her that “the habit of looking for one kind of meaning I suppose deadens the perception of another.” Julia admired Darwin’s reticence.
If he had ever said a word that was either on the side of, or on the side against, what we mean by religion, he could not have taken the place he has done. His books would have been in either case more interesting to a good many people, but no one could have felt, as everyone must feel now, that they are a manifestation of science in its absolute purity. This gives them a coolness & repose, unlike any other written in the last thirty years.61
Living out for himself the archetypal Victorian crisis of faith, Darwin perhaps recognised that he had lost the last vestiges of faith when he discovered that biology provided him with the answers he most desired. In the end, in his autobiography, he asserted that religious belief was little more than inherited instinct, akin to a monkey’s fear of a snake.
Emma Darwin’s position in relation to these views was complex. Her husband probably wrote these words with her in mind, concerned not to offend or disturb, sensitive to her fear that his lack of belief would separate them in the hereafter, while trying to be true to his commitments. Yet he may have been almost too sensitive. Emma’s faith was gradually ebbing as she grew older. “She kept a sorrowful wish to believe more, and I know it was an abiding sadness to her that her faith was less vivid than it had been in her youth,” said Henrietta.62 She had developed a broadminded tolerance for her husband’s opinions. Nevertheless when the family was considering publishing parts of this autobiography after his death, she asked for the sentence about the monkey’s dread of a snake to be omitted, telling Francis that “your father’s opinion that all morality has grown up by evolution is painful to me.” This particular remark, she felt, ran a real risk of offending believers, especially those believers who knew and loved Darwin as a man. “I should wish if possible to avoid giving pain to your father’s religious friends who are deeply attached to him, and I picture to myself the way that sentence would strike them, even those so liberal as Ellen Tollett and Laura [Forster, one of Henrietta’s friends], much more Admiral Sullivan, Aunt Caroline, &c, and even the old servants.” The family politics that accompanied her request, and her wish to omit one or two other religious comments that she felt were “not worthy of his mind,” became a significant episode in sanitising Darwin’s religious beliefs in the years immediately after his death.63 In the event, the whole section was diplomatically omitted from the first printing of Darwin’s autobiography.64
Darwin closed the religious part of his autobiography with a statement of honest ignorance. “I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.”65
As the summer blazed away and the garden wilted, Darwin tended to write during the early afternoon and spent the remains of the day lying on the grass under the lime trees, lazily drifting in and out of his memories. When it was done, Emma said, “F. has finished his Autobiography and I find it very interesting, but another person who did not know beforehand so many of the things would find it more so.”66
All along, he worked quietly to promote his sons’ careers. Each of the boys, in one way or another, displayed particular aspects of Darwin’s own character and abilities. William took after his father’s secret talent for finance, as well as helping Darwin with some of his botanical research. His abiding virtue was reliability. George and Francis opted for science, one theoretical, the other experimental. Leonard travelled the world as a military engineer before standing (unsuccessfully) for Parliament as a Liberal and ultimately becoming president of the Eugenics Society, while Horace eventually satisfied his lifelong fascination with machinery by founding what would become the leading scientific instrument company in Britain, whose fortunes rose with the Cambridge school of physics emerging in the Cavendish Laboratory.67 Horace graduated from Trinity College Cambridge in 1874.
Francis was indispensable to Darwin at home, both as a secretary and as an experimental botanist. A literate, accomplished man, he felt himself wholly unsuited to the profession of medicine in which he had qualified. He was the son that the others thought most understood his father’s feelings for nature—although Henrietta considered George most like Darwin in his power of work and the “warmth and width of his affections.”
Darwin was proud of Francis’s achievements. He was a second pair of hands and eyes to him. At Down House, Darwin identified interesting botanical problems for Francis to solve, monitored his experiments, recommended his researches to editors of scientific journals, eased him into his web of eminent correspondents, and relayed his results to Hooker and other leading botanists. As soon as was decently possible, in 1875, Darwin nominated Francis and George Romanes to become fellows of the Linnean Society, and he encouraged his son to produce his first botanical papers on unresolved questions emerging from his own work on insectivorous plants. He longed to see Francis an established naturalist and did everything he could to help him on his way.
He was consequently outraged when the Royal Society rejected an early paper of Francis’s on the absorptive filaments of the teasel, almost as if the Royal had rejected one of his own investigations. “The wicked R.S. has declined printing Fr’s teazle paper,” Emma reported, “which has vexed F. 10 times more than Fr.”68 Truculently Darwin sent Francis’s paper to a lesser journal for publication, wrote a laudatory notice about it for Nature, and told Ferdinand Cohn, “I have reason to know that some of our leading men of Science disbelieve in my son’s statements & this has mortified me not a little.”69 With an observant sigh, Emma said that Darwin deliberately sent the letter to Nature in order “to spite the Royal Soc.” Guiltily, Darwin began to wonder if his reputation would make it harder for Francis to establish his credentials. Would his old adversaries attack his son, a much more vulnerable target than himself?
Much of the same dedicated paternal push came in his dealings with George. George Darwin’s early work touched on the social sciences, for he advocated marriage reform, and in an important article in 1875 he examined the purported ill effects of cousin marriages. As in Francis’s case, these studies grew out of his father’s theory of evolution, even an unintentionally amusing piece on clothes for Macmillan’s Magazine in 1872 in which he discussed “survivals” in dress, such as hatbands and tailcoats, from the standpoint of continuous adaptation and selection, spiced with a dash of Tylor’s anthropology.
George began his study of cousin marriages and congenital disorders with Darwin’s Descent of Man very much in mind. A text by Alfred Huth, The Marriage of Near Kin, published in 1875, could well have been the stimulating factor, for Huth examined marriage and incest from an anthropological point of view, calling on Charles Darwin’s book for support and advocating the idea of putting a question about cousin marriages on the population census form. Like many of his generation, George felt disturbed over the apparent weakening, or degeneration, of the human race, a common enough response to his father’s application of the idea of natural selection to mankind, that also reflected longlived trends in social and economic thought. George decided to examine the question of cousin marriages by using statistics. He gathered these statistics from Burke’s Landed Gentry and the announcement columns of the Pall Mall Gazette, and from the records of lunatic asylums, making contact with two of Darwin’s medical correspondents, the psychiatrists James Crichton-Browne and Henry Maudsley. Taking a tip from his father, and Francis Galton before him, he also circulated questionnaires, but discovered too late that people were reluctant to divulge to a stranger their children’s mental problems.
George concluded there was some statistical evidence for slightly lowered vitality among the offspring of first cousins, but no evidence for an excessively high death rate in infancy. How he regarded this information in the knowledge that his own parents were first cousins, and that two other sets of uncles and aunts were first cousins, is unknown. It seems likely that he was here peering into his own heredity, searching for his place in the scheme of nature, and was perhaps relieved to find that his results suggested only a few minor incapacities for himself and his siblings. His Darwinian bad stomach was not going to be the death of him, for example. The dangers of inbreeding could be outweighed, he said in his article, by differing features of upbringing between related parents.
This is in striking accordance with some unpublished experiments of my father, Mr. Charles Darwin, on the in-and-in breeding [sic] of plants; for he has found that in-bred plants, when allowed enough space and good soil, frequently show little or no deterioration, whilst when placed in competition with another plant, they frequently perish or are much stunted.70
These two sons, George and Francis, plainly began their careers by defending and expanding on their father’s principles. In George’s next paper he tackled William Thomson over the age of the earth and its implications for evolutionary theory. He questioned Thomson’s figures, suggesting that the earth’s axis of rotation was subject to fluctuations large enough to cast doubt on Thomson’s conclusions. “It’s rather like a pea meeting a cannon ball to oppose him, but I feel tolerably safe at present, & if I am right it will be so much the greater triumph,” he wrote home in 1876. These fluctuations meant that the earth might be old enough after all for gradual biological evolution to have taken place. The paper was read before the Royal Society in 1876, was published in the society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1877, and was followed by George’s nomination for fellowship. Darwin nearly burst with pride. “Oh Lord what a set of sons I have, all doing wonders.” Thomson acknowledged the accuracy of George’s mathematics. This line of work, and a growing friendship with Thomson, was to occupy George for the greater part of his scientific life.
More than happy with these developments, Darwin and Emma looked forward to the coming grandchild. Tragedy struck in September 1876 when Francis’s wife, Amy, died two days after childbirth, “a most dreadful blow,” said Darwin, who had known her since she was a girl. “I think she was the most gentle & sweet creature I ever knew.” He and Francis were with her when she died, a horrible death of convulsions followed by kidney failure, probably puerperal fever, a kind of septic shock. He told William, “It is the most dreadful thing which has ever happened, worse than poor Annie’s death, though not so grievous to me. I cannot bear to think of the future.”
God knows what will become of poor Frank, his life will be a miserable wreck. He is too young to care for the Baby, which must be brought here, & I trust in God we may persuade him to come here & not to live in his house surrounded by memorials of her. No Father ever had better children than we have & you are one of the best of all.—God bless you.—I hope you keep pretty well. Tell us always about yourself.71
He wrote the same miserable message to Leonard, adding only that “Frank seemed quite bewildered and dazed.” He turned to Hooker. “My dear old Friend I know that you will forgive me pouring out my grief.”
This experience of death and suffering struck hard at the heart of the family. It was not in any sense the good death beloved of sentimental writers. Amy had “suffered greatly.” Paradoxically, Darwin was more familiar than Emma with the physical realities of dying bodies, having been at the deathbeds of all three of his children and now Amy. He bore up under these experiences with a fortitude that belies the common assumption that he usually recoiled from emotional involvement.72 Even though he must surely have preferred to avoid such traumatic personal events, he could face them when necessary. This time, it was he who gave his wife and family the emotional support they craved.
Francis was desperately unhappy, and he and the newborn baby, a boy they called Bernard, moved up the road to Down House, the only sensible step for him to take in such a situation. His wife was buried in Wales, in her father’s village, and Francis spent some weeks there before returning to close up Down Lodge, the marital home. “I felt I couldn’t bear A.’s loss,” said Emma, finding her sympathetic feelings for her son nearly “intolerable.” Emma arranged nurses and cots at Down House while Darwin tried to keep Francis preoccupied with plants. A sympathetic father, he hoped that Francis might be able to work himself out of his distress.
Live and work with them he did. Domestic chaos reigned for a while. Emma opened up the old nursery wing and turned the billiard room into a sitting room for Francis, next door to his father’s study. A girl called Mary Anne (“Nanna”) came up from the village to serve as a nursemaid to Bernard, and an admiring circle of female staff quickly gathered round. Fortunately for all, Bernard was fat, placid, and healthy, little trouble for a large and well-trimmed household despite the sad circumstances of his arrival. As he grew up, he became the natural centre of attention. Darwin was besotted. Emma told Henrietta, “Your father is taking a good deal to the baby. We think he (the baby) is a sort of Grand Lama, he is so solemn.”
This time around Emma knew how to relax and enjoy the experience of another baby in the house. Her husband was equally transformed. He did not catalogue or observe Bernard, as he had done with his own children. He merely adored at the shrine, along with the others. As time softened the blow of Amy’s death, Bernard brought a great deal of simple joy into their lives. “The baby is quite a prize article in point of fat and healthiness and may become handsome, though far from it now,” said Emma. “He has a pretty mouth and expression, and is particularly amused at his grandfather’s face. I am surprised at his making out the expression from such a mass of beard.” The real casualty was Francis. He yearned for physical contact. “How often, when a man, I have wished when my father was behind my chair, that he would pass his hand over my hair, as he used to do when I was a boy.”73
Soon afterwards, Darwin published the results of his work on cross-fertilisation, wistfully accepting the truth of his suspicion that “there are not many persons who are interested about the fertilization of flowers.”74 Then, at the end of the year his second edition of Orchids came out.
Letters continued to roll in, alternately useful or bizarre. A German editor called Otto Zacharias inquired if he could translate George’s article on cousin marriages into German. The resulting pamphlet sold rather well, reported Zacharias a few years later.
Zacharias also asked if he could use Darwin’s name on a new journal he wished to start in Germany, called Darwinia. The plan came to naught, and Zacharias bowed out in 1877 when Ernst Krause founded Kosmos with Darwin’s endorsement. Such journals, as they all recognised, played a fundamental role in distributing evolutionary ideas. The story of Nature’s conception in 1869 was prime evidence of the value of having a tightly controlled, well-distributed mouthpiece, and it seems that first Zacharias and then Krause intended to fill the same broad-based cultural niche in German science. There was a gap in the market, to be sure. One of the first journals to take up Darwin’s views in Germany had been the weekly magazine Ausland (“Abroad”), a heady mix of biology and society, pumped up with a stream of articles from Haeckel and other evolutionists. During the Franco-Prussian War, the editor, Friedrich von Hellwald, claimed Darwinism as proof that warfare between nations was a natural law, a standard view of the time that did not prevent his journal’s expiry a few years afterwards.
Krause’s Kosmos conveniently filled the hole. Krause explicitly based the journal on the “theory of evolution in connection with Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel.” He favoured Haeckel’s theory of monism, and made its columns notable for high-level discussions on heredity. Furthermore, it was in the pages of Kosmos that the bitter argument between Haeckel and Rudolf Virchow over the political meaning of Darwinism in Germany was played out. Virchow—who never liked Darwin’s proposals despite a mild interest in transformism—vehemently attacked natural selection on political grounds at the Munich meeting of German naturalists and physicians in 1877.75 He denounced the ideological roots of Darwin’s theory, calling natural selection a dangerous fantasy of individualistic self-betterment. If this was adopted by democrats, as well as radical socialists, he said, it might contribute to the destabilisation of the German state. Haeckel countered by pointing out that Darwinism (as he saw it) was strictly hierarchical and “aristocratic” because of the driving force of survival of the fittest.76 In Bismarck’s Germany, with north and south forcibly united across widening political and social rifts, the threat of destabilisation was real enough. The journal Kreuz Zeitung blamed the theory of descent for the “treasonable” assassination attempt on Emperor Wilhelm by the social democrat Emil Hodel. Haeckel responded to Virchow with his Freedom in Science and Teaching, translated into English in 1879 with a rousing preface by Huxley. With this fertile context in which to plant a journal, Krause issued nineteen volumes of Kosmos from 1877 to 1886.
Darwin also received letters incongruously revealing his high place in other people’s minds. During a correspondence with a gardener at a lunatic asylum he once discovered, secreted into an envelope, a note from one of the patients, in which the writer claimed he was wrongfully confined and begged to be saved. Like a character out of The Woman in White, Darwin tried to have the man released, only to find that the inmate wrote letters like that all the time. Elsewhere, an unknown child was named in his honour in Hamburg. A correspondent asked his opinion on the possibility of a flying machine powered by birds. A man living in Yorkshire told him, “I have two Alligators now about 3 feet long, which I keep in the mill ponds. I have good opportunity for noting their habits should you wish to know about them.”77
Many of these transactions were a source of gentle amusement. In February 1877, Darwin received as a birthday tribute an enormous album of photographs of German naturalists, sumptuously bound. This, conceived as a mark of respect, had been organised by Haeckel, Otto Zacharias, and William Preyer, and forwarded to Down House by Emil Rade from Munster. More than 150 men of science presented their photographs and signatures. “It is by far the greatest honour which I have ever received,” Darwin wrote gratefully to Haeckel. In the same postbag, a cascade of letters arrived from naturalists who had been omitted from the volume, each hastening to assure Darwin of their undying devotion and modern attitude to biology.
Within the week, another huge parcel arrived from the Netherlands. Emma noted the contents.
F. was expecting about this time (his birthday today) an album containing photos of German men of science, when yesterday arrived a most gorgeous purple velvet & silver Dutch album of the same sort with 219 portraits—some of youths, some girls & some fat women, I suppose any one who subscribed. However it shews a v. different state of feeling about him. You wd. not get boys & fat women in England to subscribe & send him their photos as a mark of respect.78
Fame manifested itself in other ways as well. William Gladstone, leader of the Liberal party, came to call with a group of John Lubbock’s weekend guests in March 1877. The male members of Lubbock’s house party, comprising Gladstone, Huxley, Lyon Playfair, and John Morley, walked over to see Darwin at Down House on Sunday 11 March.79 Morley had reviewed The Descent of Man in the Pall Mall Gazette and was as keen as the rest to meet its author.
Lubbock knew the visit would be acceptable. Darwin quite plainly regarded it as “an honour,” and mentioned it subsequently with considerable awe. Gladstone was less overcome but interested to meet the naturalist nonetheless. He wrote in his diary, “Called on & saw Mr Darwin, whose appearance is pleasing and remarkable.… conversation with Mr Morley, Prof Huxley & others.”80 John Morley cynically recorded an alternative view. He said Gladstone settled down in a chair at Down House and for two hours bored them by reading out loud the proofs of his latest Turkish pamphlet. Darwin told Charles Eliot Norton about it with barely suppressed excitement.
Our quiet, however, was broken a couple of days ago by Gladstone calling here.—I never saw him before & was much pleased with him: I expected a stern, overwhelming sort of man, but found him as soft & smooth as butter, & very pleasant. He asked me whether I thought that the United States would hereafter play a much greater part in the history of the world than Europe. I said that I thought it would, but why he asked me, I cannot conceive & I said that he ought to be able to form a far better opinion,—but what that was he did not at all let out.81
Darwin and Gladstone exchanged a few letters on colour perception in infants after this, a topic that wisely avoided theological matters but one that intrigued them as a possible clue to what the primal state of the human senses might be.82 Gladstone never swerved from the strictest possible line of orthodox Christianity. A few years later he sent Darwin one of his essays on Homer, pointing out Homer’s accurate observations of expressive movements. Darwin replied obsequiously, “Although you are so kind as to tell me not to acknowledge the receipt of your Essay, in which you show how wonderfully Homer distinguished different kinds of movement, yet I must beg permission to thank you for this honour.”83
Ever afterwards, Darwin and Emma felt they had experienced high-level politics at first hand. Lifelong liberals, they were predisposed towards Gladstone’s policies and followed his and Lubbock’s speeches conscientiously, discussing the newspapers and pamphlets in the evenings by the fire until Gladstone’s position on the Home Rule for Ireland question drew their ire. But to have entertained him in their drawing room made all the difference. After Darwin’s death, Emma became an ardent Unionist.
Inevitably, with a baby in the house, Darwin’s mind also turned back to his old notes on infant behaviour. In April 1877, when Bernard was six or seven months old (“such a little duck,” said Francis indulgently), Darwin published extracts from his diary of observations on child development as a “Biographical Sketch of an Infant” in the new psychological journal Mind. Hippolyte Taine had put forward an essay in a previous number in which Taine described his daughter’s development during the first eighteen months of her life, attending particularly to language acquisition. Darwin thought his own observations extended some of the remarks Taine made. He sent the notes to the editor, George Croom Robertson. “If you do not think fit, as is very likely, will you please return it to me.”84
Once published, Darwin’s observations were perceived as a valuable contribution to the emerging field of developmental psychology. Like Taine, and like Tiedemann a century before him, the material provided data for contemporary theories of individuality, consciousness, and the will, as well as contributing to the understanding of emerging language skills and intellect. Darwin’s methodology—his careful watching and recording—was a sensitive research instrument.85 That the observations were made by such a renowned naturalist no doubt helped. William Preyer’s book-length study, The Soul of a Child (1882), drew on Darwin’s and Taine’s researches and was widely regarded as an important early work in modern child psychology. Yet Darwin was baffled that a study of a baby, bereft of any obvious interpretative remarks, should be so popular when his plant books were such slow sellers. His Mind article was soon translated into German and French and generated a substantial postbag.
Without pausing for breath, Darwin and Francis pushed on with a volume called The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species, published in July 1877. The book was dedicated to Asa Gray, “as a small tribute of respect and affection.”
This book on flowers was another highly technical treatise in which Darwin juxtaposed his previously published thoughts on the question with new researches. “Plants are splendid for making one believe in Natural Selection,” he told Huxley around now, “as will and consciousness are excluded.” His achievement was to reveal the results of different “marriages” in plants, for example the primrose with its thrum and pin-headed flowers. If two flowers of exactly the same kind mated, the offspring were fewer in number and often displayed reduced fertility. “No little discovery of mine ever gave me so much pleasure as the making out the meaning of heterostyled flowers. The results of crossing such flowers in an illegitimate manner, I believe to be very important as bearing on the sterility of hybrids; although these results have been noticed by only a few persons.”
The metaphor of marriage was very real to him, as to Linnaeus before him.86 Darwin viewed the sexual lives of these plants as if they were flesh-and-blood humans, prone to all the marital mistakes and inappropriate yearnings of romantic fiction. He wrote of “illegitimate unions” between flowers, and of the poor quality of the offspring, reflecting in his imagery all the undercurrents of his own and George’s work on first-cousin marriages. Working away in his greenhouse forcibly creating trays of bastards and infertile degenerates, he initiated a wide variety of plant matings that would have made any visiting clergyman blush. He harangued his botanical friends on the question, blind to the fact that only experts would be able to understand the complex issues involved. He read the newest books on plant crossing, hybridisation, and inheritance, taking up some of August Weismann’s work on heredity with enthusiasm. Here, he thought, were functional causes for the incipient sterility sometimes observed between varieties of the same species. Here, in fact, was divergence in action, an answer at last to Huxley’s complaint that natural selection could never select for sterility. Putting it at its simplest, Darwin thought “illegitimate” seedlings were almost like hybrids between members of a single species.
A frisson of scandal briefly fluttered on the horizon. For a moment he got embroiled in the notorious obscenity trial of Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant, the first a prominent atheist and author, the second popularly thought to be a freethinker in sexual matters. The impending trial alternately thrilled and agitated the nation, a Victorian counterpart to the legal commotion nearly a hundred years later surrounding D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In a sixpenny pamphlet issued early in 1877, Besant and Bradlaugh had described the perils of over-population and recommended various methods of contraception. The pamphlet was a revised version of Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy or the Private Companion of Young Married Couples, a book that had already been available for several decades. This time around, in Besant and Bradlaugh’s hands, the pamphlet addressed a completely new audience, issuing dire Malthusian warnings about degeneration, dissipation, and “unrestrained gratification of the reproductive instinct.” By explaining the means of contraception to the masses they hoped to avert these calamities.
The resulting scandal brought together the most learned minds of the Victorian legal system. In April 1877, Besant and Bradlaugh were arrested and charged with obscenity for their “dirty filthy book.”87 In June, Bradlaugh wrote from gaol to Darwin asking if he would testify in their support. Bradlaugh had every reason to believe that Darwin—who was a well-known secular thinker, author of The Descent of Man, and a prominent advocate for Malthusian views in nature—would be likely to defend the rational application of natural selection to mankind and verify the pamphlet’s views on overcrowding.88 He did not know Darwin except by repute, although he may have hoped that Annie Besant’s connection with Moncure Conway, an acquaintance of Darwin’s, might help his request along.
Bradlaugh hoped in vain. Darwin responded immediately, declaring he would have nothing to do with either a subpoena or an obscenity trial. If called to court, he would vigorously testify against Bradlaugh and Besant’s case.
I have not seen the book in question but for notices in the newspaper. I suppose that it refers to means to prevent conception. If so I should be forced to express in court a very decided opinion in opposition to you & Mrs. Besant.… I believe that any such practices would in time lead to unsound women & would destroy chastity, on which the family bond depends; & the weakening of this bond would be the greatest of all possible evils to mankind.89
Here, Darwin made it plain that he believed that civilised societies best advanced by childbirth taking place only within the respectable boundaries of marriage—a point of view that had also been the gist of Malthus’s original remarks. Like Malthus, Darwin disparaged contraception, which he regarded as an impediment to natural processes. He thought easy access to contraception would lead to unfettered sexual activity outside marriage, which in turn would introduce licentiousness and vice, inadequate care of children, financial insecurity, death, and disease. “If it were universally known that the birth of children could be prevented, and this were not thought immoral by married persons, would there not be great danger of extreme profligacy amongst unmarried women?” he wrote in a concerned manner to George Arthur Gaskell, an advocate of birth control.
Like Malthus, too, he seemingly believed contraception should not be used within marriage either. His ten children were proof of this view. “I am strongly opposed to all such views & plans,” he reiterated in 1878 when asked to defend another contraceptive publication.90 He was humane enough, however, to feel something of a dilemma over how far society might be justified in intervening in the human reproductive process—he did not wish for humans to exist in a complete state of nature and undoubtedly remained aware that fertility has social consequences. From time to time, he queried the rationale for charitable measures to relieve the sick and the poor, saying that such intervention tended to preserve the unfit. But he also stated that civilised human beings were civilised precisely because they looked after their weak and needy. “The evil which would follow by checking benevolence and sympathy in not fostering the weak and diseased would be greater than by allowing them to survive and then to procreate.”91
After such a reply, it was hard for Bradlaugh to continue to ask for Darwin’s presence in court. As expected, Bradlaugh and Besant were found guilty, although the sentence was relatively light, just a fine and a pledge to withdraw the book from circulation. But the personal damage was done. Annie Besant’s life spiralled rapidly downwards thereafter. Her estranged husband initiated a court case to remove their daughter from her care, itself a turning point in legal history. She converted to Madame Blavatsky’s mystical doctrines of reincarnation and theosophy and became involved with Edward Aveling on the National Reformer. Towards the end, she turned her eyes to India. Bradlaugh won a seat in Parliament that he never occupied because he refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the monarch.
Coming straight from his work on “legitimate” and “illegitimate” unions among plants, his private life a tranquil pool of liberal-conservative social principles accompanied by a vision of an advancing British society built on moral and financial rectitude, Darwin’s response to Bradlaugh made it clear that he had never believed more strongly in family values.
