CHAPTER 3

Publication

Despite Darwin’s measured calm, his book was actually born in crisis. The story has often been told. For more than two years he carefully composed a long manuscript, a big book that he planned to call ‘Natural Selection’. Few of his friends knew what he was doing, although his web of correspondents circled the globe, feeding his insatiable appetite for facts. Picking up a thin well-wrapped package one morning in June 1858, he wondered who could be writing to him from Ternate, an island in the Dutch East Indies halfway between Celebes and New Guinea. He hoped it might contain some news about exotic species. However, here in a short handwritten essay, the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace set out his own account of evolution by natural selection. The date that the essay arrived will never be known for sure. But late in the evening of 18 June 1858 Darwin wrote to Lyell to express his despair at being well and truly forestalled. ‘I never saw a more striking coincidence… if Wallace had my MS sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract!’

Deeply surprised that someone else had come up with the same theory, he consulted his two closest friends, Lyell and Hooker, about what he should do next. Scientific convention and gentlemanly honour indicated that he should bow out and let Wallace take the credit. None the less Lyell and Hooker felt that Darwin should not lose his claim to be the originator of the theory. They were aware of the lengthy manuscript that Darwin was working on. There was room for manoeuvre, they insisted. They therefore proposed that they should send Wallace’s essay forward for publication along with a short account of Darwin’s own findings. There would be a double announcement and priority would be shared. Doubtfully, Darwin agreed. ‘I cannot tell whether to publish now would not be base & paltry; this was my first impression, and I shd. have certainly acted on it, had it not been for your letter.’¹

This double announcement took place as suggested on 1 July 1858 at a meeting of the Linnean Society of London, the leading scientific society for natural history in Great Britain. As it happened, Lyell and Hooker were influential in the Society’s administration. They managed to rush the double paper on to the programme of an unexpected extra meeting that was taking place at the end of the season, rescheduled because of the death of the botanist and former president of the society, Robert Brown.

Oddly enough, considering the content, there was little excitement among the small audience when the papers were read out loud by the secretary, although when they were published in the Society’s journal a few months afterwards several people recognized their likely impact. Neither Darwin nor Wallace was at the Linnean Society meeting itself. Darwin’s tenth child, still just a baby, was dangerously ill with scarlet fever and died on 28 June 1858, only two days before the announcement. As a loving father Darwin felt too wretched with grief to attend. Wallace was miles away in the Far East. Indeed, he knew nothing about it. With postal services to the opposite side of the globe taking three or four months, he had yet to receive the letter that told him that his essay duplicated another man’s work and was being made public in a twosome. When he did find out, he admitted that he was astonished. Courteous and mild by nature, he immediately wrote to Darwin and the others to say that he thought the publication arrangements were entirely satisfactory. Even though Darwin is usually characterized by biographers as generous and gentlemanly during this incident, the real generosity surely rests with Wallace, the unwitting catalyst for the commotion. Historians have often wondered subsequently if Wallace was short-changed, or even exploited, by the arrangements made by Lyell and Hooker and agreed by Darwin.

For there is no disguising the fact that Wallace came from the other end of the Victorian social scale. Self-educated, and with no private income, he made an unsteady living by collecting natural history specimens to sell to museums and collectors. His first collecting trip had been to Brazil with his friend, the naturalist Henry Walter Bates, to comb the Amazonian rainforest for rare birds and insects. Then, in 1853, he struck out independently to the Malay Archipelago, where he stayed for eight years, travelling some 14,000 miles within the region. It was the possibility of acquiring some Malaysian fowl that originally brought him into Darwin’s network, and they had occasionally corresponded about specimens. When Lyell had drawn Darwin’s attention to Wallace’s earlier article in April 1856, Darwin wrote to Wallace to praise it and, in passing, mentioned his current work on definitions of species and varieties, a topic of great practical interest to naturalists at the time. It was probably this polite expression of interest that encouraged Wallace to send his evolutionary essay to Darwin in 1858.

Wallace’s personal circumstances and aspirations were very different from Darwin’s. Nevertheless, he read many of the same books, encountered many of the same biological problems during his overseas travels and shared much the same forward-looking Victorian milieu. Inspired by Vestiges’ world of constant progressive development, he eagerly adopted the concept of transmutation. He hoped to find in Sumatra or Borneo evidence that humanity had formerly emerged from the great apes of the region. Fine observational skills had already led him to match the geographical distribution of butterflies in the Amazon river basin with their variation, an observation that served the same function in his intellectual development as Darwin’s Galápagos finches. He read Lyell and saw, like Darwin, that gradual geological change might indicate equally gradual changes in species. He read Darwin’s account of the Beagle voyage. He read Malthus, and took from him the same notion of differential survival. Wallace even had a ‘Malthusian moment’ akin to Darwin’s flash of inspiration. Suffering from malarial fever, Wallace was resting one day from an attack of the ‘chills’, pondering the human demography of the islands around Papua New Guinea, when he suddenly realized that the Papuan population was being gradually exterminated by invasions of Malays. As for Darwin, so for Wallace: everything fell into place. He wrote, using the same vocabulary as Darwin, of a ‘war’ in nature, competition between individuals and the triumph of the more successful form.

Sitting alone in his study, always working, always concentrating on the job in hand, Darwin had allowed himself to feel that he was in no danger of being pre-empted, no need to hurry, until the letter came from Wallace. Yet as Lyell hinted, there were plenty of proponents for advanced schemes of thought if one had eyes to see.

Great currents of change were making their presence felt in Britain. High-level critical thought about the Bible was spreading as the biblical scholars of Europe investigated sacred texts as if they were solely historical documents. Inside the secluded quadrangles of Oxford colleges, the Reverend Baden Powell frankly discounted miracles, while John Henry Newman converted to Catholicism and initiated the Tractarian movement. George Eliot’s translation of Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1846) presented the Son of God to English readers as if he were an ordinary man. One by one, Victorian thinkers claimed the right to investigate the world around them without recourse to either God’s miraculous powers, or the Bible’s word, or the church’s doctrinal authority. Some, like Tennyson or Matthew Arnold, began seriously to doubt the religious system in which they had been raised. In the elite world of British literature and letters this movement ultimately manifested itself in the book entitled Essays and Reviews (1860), in which seven eminent theologians challenged traditional interpretations of scripture. Anxious doubts, secular inclinations and dissatisfaction with conventional doctrines were launched among intellectuals long before Darwin came on the scene.

The men and women of the influential liberal magazine, the Westminster Review, led by the charismatic editor John Chapman, and Mary Ann Evans (the novelist George Eliot), for example, were fascinated by the idea of inbuilt natural laws and steady advance in human society. Their friends, the historian Henry Buckle (1821–62) and philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), extolled development in society and nature. Buckle considered the history of nations, telling his readers that civilized societies will always overcome the less developed. From the barbarism of Ancient Rome to Victorian parliamentary democracy, Buckle’s history books argued for progressive improvement. In Spencer’s writings, the same ideas took the form of a law of development that he applied to animals and plants as readily as to politics, economics, technology and human society. In 1852 he published ‘The development hypothesis’ in which he supported a general Lamarckian theory of animal transmutation, followed by a Malthusian-style essay on the ‘Theory of Population’ in the Westminster Review, where he wrote about population pressure driving the weakest to the wall. His anti-theological Principles of Psychology (1855) followed shortly afterwards, and by the end of the decade he had begun an ambitious, lifelong re-evaluation of metaphysics, the first part of which was published in 1862. Spencer believed that biological and social progress formed one broad evolutionary continuum – that they were governed by the same immutable laws and controlled by the same forces of nature. Darwin had never taken any of his writings seriously.

Spencer was not the only one to think like this. George Henry Lewes, the editor of the forward-looking Leader, regular contributor to the Westminster, and George Eliot’s lifelong partner, delved into anatomy and physiology, proposing that human thought was merely a by-product of the brain’s physiological activity rather than a gift from God. Supported by William Benjamin Carpenter, another physiologist, Lewes pushed divine agencies right to the background. Harriet Martineau shocked pious readers by declaring her religious doubts. Charles Kingsley, the author and radical clergyman, brought his social-realist novel Alton Locke (1850) to a climax with the hero’s nightmarish dream of a metamorphosis from jellyfish to man. These lively modernist thinkers rejected natural theology, the system of explanation entrenched in the old universities, and opted for something more flexible and personal, a god who reigned unobtrusively in the background, who did not need the rigmarole of church doctrine.

By 1850 or so transmutation seemed less threatening to forward-looking thinkers such as these. Freshly sanitized by the mid-Victorian gloss of industry and commercial confidence, the dangerous, volatile air of the 1830s and 1840s lifted. Prosperity and progress appeared as motifs of the age. Middle-class liberals advocated self-improvement, literacy and education on the one hand, and public lectures and museums on the other. Medical men wondered about the possibility of the spontaneous generation of the smallest cellular beings and discussed Louis Pasteur’s experiments with interest. Darwin’s old acquaintance Robert Grant moved to London to become professor of zoology at University College London and lectured on the evolutionary scale of nature, until too old to continue. A fair number of leading intellectuals embraced doctrines of self-advancement, economic progress and the onward thrust of civilization to a greater or lesser degree, without necessarily overstepping the divide between faith and disbelief, and unknown numbers of less public figures, such as Alfred Russel Wallace, were contemplating the world through newly secular eyes. Obvious technological advances and economic expansion reinforced the point. Samuel Smiles’s book Self-Help – the bible of the improving middle classes – highlighted the belief in entrepreneurial improvement sweeping into every arena of mid- century existence.

Darwin’s unexpected collision with Wallace had one immediate effect. He was catapulted into writing Origin of Species. Immediately after the double Linnean Society paper had been read, he took his wife and family away for a brief holiday to recover from the death of baby Charles. Then, in the space of thirteen months, he produced a compact, tightly argued book.

In essence, Darwin drastically compressed the long manuscript he had already written. Afterwards he regretted losing so much of the solid scientific evidence he had struggled to collect and always regarded Origin as an enforced ‘abstract’. For many years afterwards he still planned to publish the original long manuscript that had been interrupted by Wallace’s letter.

Darwin called this shorter book ‘one long argument’. And what an argument it was. Few scientific texts have been so closely woven, so packed with factual information and studded with richly inventive metaphor. Darwin’s literary technique has long been noted for its resemblance to Great Expectations or Middlemarch in the complexity of its interlacing themes and his ability to handle so many continuous threads at the same time. Hardly daring to hope that he might initiate a transformation in scientific thought, he nevertheless rose magnificently to the occasion. His voice was in turn dazzling, persuasive, friendly, humble and dark. His imagination soared beyond the confines of his house and garden, beyond his debilitating illnesses and the fragile health of his children. At his most determined, he questioned everything his contemporaries believed about living nature, calling forth a picture of origins completely shorn of the Garden of Eden and dispensing with the image of a heavenly clock- maker patiently constructing living beings to occupy the earth below. He abandoned what John Herschel devoutly called the ‘mystery of mysteries’ and replaced Paley’s vision of perfect adaptation with imperfection and chance. Animals and plants should not be regarded as the product of a special design or special creation. ‘I am fully convinced that species are not immutable,’ he stated in the opening pages.

Further than this, Darwin’s underlying theme was gradualism. Everything happened little by little, just as Lyell claimed. Everything was linked by one and the same explanation. Time, chance and reproduction ruled the earth. Struggle, too. Those who sought a radically new manifesto for the living world were sure to find it in his words: no one could afterwards regard organic beings and their natural setting with anything like the same eyes as before; nor could anyone fail to notice the way that Darwin’s biology mirrored the British nation in all its competitive, entrepreneurial, factory spirit; or that his appeal to natural law unmistakably contributed to the general push towards secularization and supported contemporary claims of science to understand the world in its own terms.

Another kind of narrative emerged as well, often mentioned by reviewers. Darwin wrote as he always wrote, in the same likeable, autobiographical style he had developed during the Beagle voyage and brought alive in his Journal of Researches. Much later on, his son Francis Darwin said this pleasant style of writing was characteristic of his father in ‘its simplicity, bordering on naiveté, and in its absence of pretence… His courteous and conciliatory tone towards his reader is remarkable, and it must be partly this quality which revealed his personal sweetness of character to so many who had never seen him.’² Although his theories might frighten, his style was thoroughly sympathetic and genial, creating a distinctive magic between author and reader. He appeared in his book just as he appeared in life: as a reputable scientific gentleman, courteous, trustworthy and friendly, a man who did not speak lightly of the momentous questions coming under his gaze, a champion of common sense, honest to his data, and scornful of ‘mere conjecture’. This humane style of writing was one of his greatest gifts, immensely appealing to British readers who saw in it all the best qualities of their ancient literary tradition and contemporary Victorian values. It served him well during the controversial years to come, defusing personal animosity and allowing even the harshest of critics at least to acknowledge his sincerity and meticulous investigation.

As an argument, Origin of Species was divided into two unequal halves. The first, shorter half set out the apparent facts of nature and led up to Darwin’s presentation of the theory of natural selection in Chapter Four. The remainder of the book showed how the theory could explain or illuminate key biological areas such as embryology, classification, palaeontology and geographical distribution. An evocative conclusion invited readers to consider his point of view without prejudice. Unusually for a scientific book, Darwin also provided a frank discussion of the many stumbling blocks that would probably occur to readers, in a chapter called ‘Difficulties on the Theory’. He admitted, ‘Some of them are so grave that to this day I can never reflect on them without being staggered… I have felt the difficulty far too keenly to be surprised at any degree of hesitation in extending the principle of natural selection to such startling lengths.’³

This structure was carefully thought out. Natural selection is not self-evident in nature nor is it the kind of theory in which one can say ‘look here and see’. Darwin had no crucial experiment that conclusively demonstrated evolution in action. He had no mathematical equations to establish his case. All these were to come a century later. Everything in his book required the reader’s imagination. Like Lyell in his Principles of Geology, he had to rely on an analogy between what was known and what was not known. He depended on probabilities. He used words of persuasion, invited revisualization. Instance after instance was said to be ‘quite inexplicable on the theory of independent acts of creation’.

The sheer variability of organisms came first. Every pig or cow, every blade of corn, as he described it, was in some way slightly variable. No two animals or plants were exactly alike. Farmers and horticulturists made use of these slight variations in individuals to improve a huge range of cultivated stock. Most of his readers would have agreed. The vast agricultural and horticultural wealth of the nation was based on exactly these activities, and large numbers of ordinary men and women possessed direct experience of the commonplace household animals and plants he described: dogs, gooseberries, cattle, garden flowers. ‘Breeders habitually speak of an animal’s organization as something quite plastic, which they can model almost as they please,’ he said, and quoted Sir John Sebright, who claimed with respect to pigeons that ‘he would produce any given feather in three years, but it would take him six years to obtain head and beak’.⁴

The biggest problem here, and one on which future critics alighted, was that Darwin had no knowledge of how the variations arose. He wrote Origin of Species long before the modern science of genetics was developed. The only thing that he could do was to demonstrate that variations indisputably did occur in domestic organisms. So his early pages were crammed full of examples drawn from every branch of natural history – a factual overkill that even reviewers noted. To this he added a matching account of variability in wild animals and plants. All his notes about barnacles’ innards, donkey’s stripes, primroses and oxlips took their place. Privately, he characterized this as a ‘short & dry chapter’.⁵

The real point came next. Too many offspring were born. The living world teemed with deadly competition and slaughter, the same elemental energies, red in tooth and claw, that Tennyson characterized in In Memoriam. ‘What war between insect and insect, between insects, snails, and other animals with birds and beasts of prey – all striving to increase, and all feeding on each other or on the trees or their seeds and seedlings, or on the other plants which first clothed the ground and thus checked the growth of the trees’, wrote Darwin.⁶ God’s harmony was an illusion. Unsure whether he would be believed, he produced another flood of examples. Limited resources, limited places in nature, and continued natural fecundity gave rise to a battle for survival.

This was the point where he proposed the theory of natural selection. Harking back to the earliest and most powerful metaphor he had explored in his transmutation notebooks of the 1830s, Darwin declared that there was an important analogy between what happened in the farmyard and garden and in the natural world. In the same way as mankind can mould and adjust domesticated species to suit passing needs or tastes, so nature can pick the best adapted. The ones ‘selected’ to survive would be the parents of the next generation.

It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.⁷

Ruminatively, Darwin elsewhere acknowledged the problems that this anthropomorphic language would generate. He often personified natural selection in Origin of Species. While this was perhaps unavoidable in the general sense, he frequently gave the impression that natural selection was an active agent. To some, it might even be thought of as God, a divine gardener in the sky, as it were, who chose the variants that were to succeed. Years afterwards Darwin admitted that this was not his intention and that he ought to have used a more neutral expression like ‘natural preservation’. The same entanglement occurred when he used the word ‘adaptation’, which hinted at some form of purposeful strategy in animals and plants, the exact opposite of what he meant. Later, he used ‘contrivance’ as a partial solution. Over and over, Darwin struggled with his vocabulary. The language he had to hand was the language of Milton and Shakespeare, steeped in teleology and purpose, not the objective, value- free terminology sought by science.

He was not even able to speak of ‘evolution’ as such, because at that time the term was mostly used to describe the unfolding of hidden embryological structures; it was the ensuing debate around his published work that gave the word its modern meaning. In Origin of Species Darwin generally referred to ‘descent with modification’. Equally, he did not at first use what ultimately became the most famous phrase of all, ‘survival of the fittest’. This was coined a few years afterwards, by Herbert Spencer in 1864, after which Wallace suggested Darwin should substitute it for ‘natural selection’. All these verbal ambiguities would lead readers in directions that Darwin did not intend. It is not clear from his remaining manuscripts how far he was even aware of the full extent of the difficulties.

Hard on the heels of natural selection, came one further notion, the new idea he called the ‘principle of divergence’. This principle was quick enough to characterize. He said that it was always advantageous for living beings to diversify: ‘The more diversified the descendants from any one species become in structure, constitution and habits, by so much will they be better enabled to seize on many and widely diversified places in the polity of nature, and so be enabled to increase in numbers.’⁸ Competition for the same ‘places’ in nature (niches) forced animals and plants to specialize, which in turn stimulated a multiplication of places and greater efficiency in the use of resources. In a worryingly brutal phrase he went on to liken individual animals and plants to steel wedges thrusting ever harder into the softly yielding face of nature. Here lay the roots of some of the harshest economic and social doctrines that would take shape from his writings. Darwin shattered all previous images of pastoral harmony. In his world, the urge to succeed was brutal. Individuals needed to kill to survive.

In explaining divergence for his book, Darwin also introduced one of the most powerful and lasting metaphors of his career. He characterized the history of living beings as a tree, describing extinct ancestral forms as if they were the roots and trunk, each main group of organisms as the branches, and all the multitude of species in existence at the present day as the green leaves and buds: a smoothly spreading evolutionary tree that linked nature and history into a single indivisible living whole, spanning the ages. ‘The great tree of life’, he declared, ‘which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.’ His ability to visualize the evolution of life in this way became almost synonymous with understanding it. He made his point with a diagram – the only diagram in the book – which he called ‘an odd looking affair but indispensable to show the nature of the very complex affinities of past and present animals’. This showed how a number of ancestral forms might diverge over time, some becoming extinct and others contributing to the next generation – the stark dotted lines hardly indicating the luscious pictures of trees that would soon cascade from naturalists’ pens. At the deepest, most satisfyingly symbolic level, Darwin replaced the ancient imagery of the tree of knowledge, the tree of life, with something similar. His tree was time. It was history. It was knowledge. It was life. But it was not divine.

With the core of his theory set out, Darwin let the book sweep onward through a wide range of biological topics. Embryology became intelligible: ‘Embryology rises greatly in interest, when we thus look at the embryo as a picture, more or less obscured, of the common parent-form of each great class of animals’. Darwin was proud of this part of his argument and careful to make sure he got it right. He asked his new friend Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95) to read the chapter before publication. ‘The facts seem to me to come out very strong for mutability of species,’ he told Hooker when discussing the same chapter.⁹ Palaeontology, comparative anatomy and taxonomy would also be transformed, he wrote in anticipation. The anatomical affinities and groupings sought by taxonomists were not just abstract notions, he said, nor were they the physical expression of some divine plan drawn up by the creator, as renowned naturalists like Louis Agassiz or Richard Owen suggested. Instead, the resemblances were caused by genuine blood relationships. Vestigial organs like the appendix in human beings were explained as anatomical remnants left over by history. To Darwin it seemed unlikely that a divine architect would deliberately create such wasteful, purposeless features.

Similarly, the geographical patterns and relationships that plants and animals traced over the globe could be explained on the grounds that species for the most part spread and change. The practical naturalist in him emerged and spoke plainly – the barnacle scholar, the pigeon-lover, the plant experimenter and Beagle collector, the traveller at last approaching his goal. Much of the theory’s value, he argued, lay in the way it explained and united so many different aspects of the natural world.

Most important in many eyes was his chapter on difficulties. Including such a chapter was an adroit step. In this Darwin discussed many of the problems that would immediately enter a reader’s mind, such as the absence of intermediary stages in the fossil record or the unknown mechanisms that might allow the inheritance of mental traits like instincts and the difficulty of envisaging the gradual emergence of complex organs like the eye. Darwin himself had worried endlessly over the same problems. ‘The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder,’ he confessed to his close friend, the American botanist Asa Gray in 1860.¹⁰ The lack of intermediate forms in the fossil record, for example, was a real puzzler, only explained by what philosophers call a negative argument. He claimed that such organisms would be so rare and transitory, and geological preservation so infrequent and accidental, that it would be highly unlikely to find specimens. Their absence, he stated, could not legitimately overturn his theory. As it happens, he was correct in this surmise. Even with the discovery of fossils like the Archaeopteryx, a bird-like reptile in the Solnhofen limestones of Germany, now recognized as a genuine intermediary, the incidence of missing links is still very limited.

This chapter on difficulties was welcomed by reviewers for its honesty. Nevertheless, it was also strategically significant. Darwin chose to write only about the ‘difficulties’ that he could answer, however tentatively. The difficulties were all of a biological nature. He expected a barrage of factual challenges and provided his answers straight away.

Deliberately, he omitted the two issues that would have occurred to everybody. He avoided any discussion of what evolutionary theory might have to say about human origins, and he sidestepped any debate about a divine presence in the natural world. He remembered the bitter disputes over Vestiges. No matter how seriously and cautiously he might treat evolutionary questions he knew that anything he said was bound to ignite furious controversy. So in this book, he was completely silent on the subject of human origins, although he did refer in several places to mankind as an example of specific biological details. Not wishing to appear too revolutionary, however, or openly to attack the cherished beliefs of the faithful, he remarked in the conclusion that, if his views were accepted, ‘light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’.¹¹

Similarly he purposefully avoided the first origin of life. He had no systematic history of beginnings to offer, no primeval soup or creative spark. At the end of his book he did mention the likelihood of all ancestral organisms originating in one primordial form. Such ancient origins, he privately believed, were lost in the mists of time and were essentially irreclaimable. When he needed to, he spoke cautiously of the creator, aware that his book might otherwise be labelled subversive. But he was careful not to allow the creator any active role in subsequent biological proceedings. In the first edition of Origin of Species Darwin mentioned the origin of this one primordial form as if it were an entirely natural process. In the second edition he used more obviously religious terminology, including an anonymous comment, in actuality made to him in a letter by the Reverend Charles Kingsley, that it was possible to conceive of a creator who allowed species to ‘make themselves’; and that the first organic forms had acquired life from the ‘breath of the creator’.¹² He evidently did not wish to be perceived as an atheist. For a book that would claim in its title to address the origin of species, Darwin’s text in fact refused to propose any theory of absolute origins.

By the end, he had set out one of the most densely impressive proposals of the century. Although in the first edition he did not compare his work directly with those who had gone before, his theory was none the less distinctive. He differed from Lamarck, and his evolutionary grandfather Dr Erasmus Darwin, in that he steered clear of any doctrine of necessary progression or inner striving towards perfection. While Darwin cautiously made space in his scheme for some direct effect of the environment on organisms – the inheritance of acquired characteristics that was popularly assumed to be the main feature of Lamarck’s system – the chief difference between them was that Darwin did not allow his organisms any future goal, no teleology or divine power pulling them forwards, no internal effort or act of will that might drive the adaptive changes in specific directions. In Darwin’s view organisms shifted randomly. A well-adapted organism might be extremely simple. An insect was as wonderfully adapted as a man.

More significantly he felt sure that he differed from Robert Chambers, the anonymous Mr Vestiges, in the solidity of his information, the tightly organized and well-developed theory of change, and his decision to limit the book’s scope to one restricted problem and not deal with grand questions of the evolution of the universe, the first sparks of life or the future of the human mind. This certainly made his book dull in comparison with Vestiges. But in return it gave him superior standing in scientific circles. Tellingly, he differed most notably from Chambers in putting his name to the text. On the Origin of Species was issued with the name of an author on the title page, an author already established as an accredited expert in the field and whose intellectual standing was made plain by the initials of his Cambridge degree and membership of learned societies. The same factors also went some way towards establishing his social and educational difference from Wallace.

There could be no mistaking the weight of thought that lay behind every word, the judicious strategies, the powerful, transformative metaphors, the interlocking double-punch of detail and breadth of vision. Although he subsequently complained that he had been rushed into Origin of Species, that it was nothing but an abstract, that his evidence was truncated, and his footnotes and sources were omitted, the book was undeniably Darwin’s masterpiece.

‘When the views entertained in this volume on the origin of species, or when analogous views are generally admitted, we can dimly foresee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history,’ he declared fervently in the closing pages. ‘I look with confidence to the future, to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality.’

When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become!¹³

All his hopes came to a crescendo. One particularly attractive spot that he visited during walks with Emma in the countryside around Down House filled his mind.

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us… There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.¹⁴

He hardly anticipated how austere, tragic, dangerous and supremely beautiful his work would appear to others.

Yet who would publish such a book? Hesitantly, in the early months of 1859, Darwin asked Lyell if John Murray might be interested, the same John Murray who published Lyell’s books and who in 1845 had issued the second edition of Darwin’s Journal of Researches. Murray was ideal for several reasons. He and Darwin had enjoyed a businesslike relationship over the Journal of Researches. Murray was interested in science, especially geology and chemistry, and well accustomed to initiating shrewd publishing moves like the Home and Colonial Library, a series of edifying works for the middle classes, and the famous Handbooks, the first holiday guidebooks for Victorians, predating Baedekers by a few years.

More than this, Murray was rapidly becoming one of the most important scientific publishers of the Victorian era. His doors in Albemarle Street, in the centre of literary London, were open to authors of all shades of opinion. Murray offered a contract and Darwin gratefully accepted, the start of a relationship that lasted for the rest of his life.

The constant writing, however, was eating away at Darwin’s health. ‘My God how I long for my stomach’s sake to wash my hands of it – for at least one long spell,’ he complained. ‘I am becoming as weak as a child,’ he groaned to Hooker, ‘miserably unwell & shattered.’ The summer of 1859 passed in a turmoil of proof-reading. All Darwin’s doubts about his writing style returned with a vengeance. ‘There seems to be a sort of fatality in my mind leading me to put at first my statement and proposition in a wrong or awkward form’, he reflected afterwards.¹⁵ Emma Darwin helped whenever she could. She read the Origin in full during the proof stage and loyally tried to help her husband convey his thoughts accurately to readers. There is no evidence that she tried to censor his text. On the contrary, the two of them discussed awkward sentences in the evenings until they found a form that captured what he was really trying to say, and she would tease him about his poor use of commas. Lyell read the proofs while he travelled around the continent on his summer holidays.

At the last minute Darwin adjusted the title according to Murray’s recommendation. Darwin’s first suggestion was apparently too complicated: ‘An Abstract of an Essay on the Origin of Species and Varieties through Natural Selection’. Common sense suggested to Murray that the words ‘abstract’, ‘essay’ and ‘varieties’ should go, and that ‘natural selection’, a term with which Murray thought the public would not be familiar, ought to be explained. The agreed title was hardly less cumbersome: On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

He was in an absorbed, slavish, overworked state, he told William Darwin Fox in a letter. ‘My abominable volume… has cost me so much labour that I almost hate it.’ Sometimes he recoiled from seeing nature the way his selection theory demanded. ‘What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low & horridly cruel works of nature!’ he once exclaimed to Hooker.¹⁶ ‘I have been so wearied and exhausted of late,’ he complained in September 1859. ‘I have for months doubted whether I have not been throwing away time & labour for nothing.’

Then, on 1 October 1859, he recorded in his diary, ‘Finished proofs’, and calculated that the whole process had taken thirteen months and ten days from start to finish. On 2 October he left Down House, exhausted and sickly, and made his way to a water cure establishment in Ilkley, at the foot of the Yorkshire moors. ‘I am worn out and must have rest… Hydropathy and rest – perhaps that will make a man of me.’¹⁷

His book was published in London on 24 November 1859. Darwin was in Ilkley on the day of publication, returning home a fortnight later.