In 1762, the French government ordered the burning of Rousseau’s educational treatise Emile. The argument of Emile was that children could grow up without vice, if they were protected from the evils man had created. This was clearly seditious, and Rousseau fled to Berne, and when the Swiss banished him, he fled to England in 1766.
His English exile had been encouraged and facilitated by David Hume, who asked friends at court to get Rousseau a royal pension and also persuaded a friend to give him an empty mansion, Wooton Hall, to live in.
Despite this support, Rousseau was not the happiest of philosophers at the time, as he had begun to suspect that the English (led by the Scot Hume) were laughing at him. The paranoia led him to write to an astonished Hume saying’ You brought me to England, apparently to procure a refuge for me, and in reality to dishonour me’.
The physician/philosopher Erasmus Darwin desperately wanted to meet Rousseau, but realising that a formal introduction would be tricky, came up with a highly engaging ploy that worked. Knowing that Rousseau liked to sit in a terraced cave by the mansion, engaged in his now customary melancholy brooding, Darwin sauntered up to the cave one morning and began examining a flower in front of the cave. After a while, a curious Rousseau emerged from the darkness, and the two chatted amiably about botany, which was. like education, a shared obsession. Darwin was extremely interested in the sex life of plants, indeed wrote a poem about the subject, ‘The Love of the Plants’, and it is likely that he shared his thoughts on the subject with Rousseau.
The meeting was short, but Darwin had done what no other Brit at this time seems to have managed, and established a friendly relationship – continued through letters – with Rousseau. The correspondence has, sadly, been lost. Rousseau’s cultural influence is undisputed, but Darwin’s influence has only recently been acknowledged, particularly through his founding of the Lunar Society, which had an immense effect on British intellectual life and culture, from industrialisation to the abolition of slavery.
Inspired by Rousseau, Darwin built a small botanic garden (almost the only thing Rousseau liked about England were the gardens) that was praised by Anna Seward thus: ‘not only with trees of various growth did he adorn the borders of the fountain, the brook and the lakes, but with various classes of plants, uniting the Linnean science with the charm of landscape’
What Happened Next
Rousseau returned incognito to France the following year, married his mistress (see 1764: Boswell gets Voltaire out of bed) and continued to inspire and infuriate his contemporaries. Darwin continued networking, producing ideas and some terrible verse. He was of course the grandfather of Charles Darwin and a believer in evolution. He added E conchis omnia (‘Everything from shells’) to the family coat of arms, but was forced to remove it by the Church. Darwin’s propagation of the theory was not helped by his verse: ‘imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd. . . Arose from rudiments of form and sense, /An embryon point or microscopic ens!’ His grandson argued rather better – and in prose. . .