The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (8 page)

For all he knew, the gut-heaving, head-blurring symptoms of his chronic illness might turn acute at any time, and he could be dead of some unknown ailment within a year. In fact, that may have been his subliminal wish. Dying now and publishing the theory posthumously would save him a lot of discomfort.

12

But he was getting closer, it seemed, to making the leap as a living author. He was getting bolder and more impatient. One day in July he made an unusual trip, by two-wheeled horse cart, all the way over to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, southwest of London, to reacquaint himself with Joseph Hooker face-to-face.

Sickly and sedentary as Darwin generally felt, he wouldn't have gone if he hadn't badly wanted to cement his friendship with this young fellow. Hooker had several attractions. He was a rigorous botanist, well traveled, trained as a surgeon (not as a clergyman, like so many of Darwin's friends), and neither too scared nor too pious to contemplate transmutation. That's the person Darwin needed: a botanical geographer with the cold mind of a man who could cut human flesh. Through late summer and autumn he and Hooker continued trading letters, in which they discussed the distribution of species and why certain places—especially islands—contain an inordinate diversity of unique forms. Isolation is the crucial factor, Darwin suggested. The isolation of islands somehow leads to the “creation or production” (he was still waffling in his terminology) of new species. Darwin didn't explain what he had in mind, but he wanted Hooker's help in exploring this line of thought with botanical data.

Darwin also wrote to Leonard Jenyns, one of his parson-naturalist friends from student days, who styled himself after Gilbert White, keeping a diary of nature observations from the hedgerows and woodlands around his little parish. When they first met, back at Cambridge, Jenyns was a young fogey of thirty, recently established as vicar of a place called Swaffham Bulbeck and snugly ensconced in the tradition of natural theology. More recently he had edited a new edition of White's little classic,
The Natural History of Selborne
. Jenyns's next project would be a book of nature lore as collected by himself, including a natural history calendar, again in the manner of White. Swaffham Bulbeck was his own Selborne. Darwin flattered him about the importance of such localized, season-by-season observations, and then dangled a question that he hoped Jenyns might answer. How severely do struggle and early death limit population increase for any given species? For a species of bird, say, in the English countryside. He didn't mention Malthus, but of course it was Malthusian pressures and checks that Darwin had in mind.

There was more in the letter than just flattery and trolling for data. Jenyns had written to him first, a newsy note inviting news in return, so Darwin offered a glimpse of his present life and work at Downe. What with writing books about geology, he said, and looking after his garden and trees, and taking afternoon walks around the grounds with his brain in a fog, he hadn't lately done much field observation himself. No beetle collecting, like in the old days. He couldn't speak as an expert on local birds. Couldn't offer a single new fact about English zoology. On the other hand, that wasn't to say he'd lost interest in flora and fauna. “I have continued steadily reading & collecting facts on variation of domestic animals & plants & on the question of what are species; I have a grand body of facts & I think I can draw some sound conclusions.” Uh, but wait—did he really want to confide this to Reverend Jenyns? Evidently so. He was tired of
cuidado
. He was tired of keeping his secret. It poured out.

“The general conclusion at which I have slowly been driven from a directly opposite conviction,” Darwin told Jenyns, “is that species are mutable & that allied species are co-descendants from common stocks.” How about
that
, old pal? Evolution happens, and natural theology has missed the big story. I know this opens me to reproach, Darwin conceded, but I've been brought to it by honest and careful deliberation. “I shall not publish on this subject for several years,” he added. His closing comment to Jenyns, sounding friendly, was almost a tease: Maybe your little local book will contribute something to my trove of supporting facts.

And then bad luck hit, in a form antic and unexpected as a rain of frogs. The same month as Darwin's letter to Jenyns, October 1844, a respectable London publisher released
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
, a volume of popularized science and theory-mongering that rampageously surveyed cosmology, geology, the origins of life, paleontology, and the transmutation of species, touching along the way such subjects as spontaneous generation, the rings of Saturn, the production of insects using electricity, the occurrence of measles in pigs, the origins of human races and languages, phrenology, six-fingered people, the germination of rye from planted oats, the birth of a platypus from a goose parent, the number of neck bones in a giraffe, plus many other interesting facts and astonishing factoids, all mixed and baked into a literary fruitcake by an author who wrote smooth, easy prose and who chose to remain anonymous. What curious reader could resist?

Thanks to its content and the mystery of its authorship,
Vestiges
became a hit. It raised eyebrows, stimulated thought, provoked annoyance, caused talk, and sold well. The scathing reviews it suffered from hardheaded scientists (including the great Cambridge geologist Adam Sedgwick, another of Darwin's early teachers) only added to its notoriety and spurred sales. An American edition appeared quickly, a German translation later. In Britain alone,
Vestiges
went into a second edition almost immediately, then a third, then seven more editions within a decade, totaling almost 21,000 copies. By the numbers of the day, that made it a blockbuster. It was read by middle-class gentlemen and ladies with no scientific or philosophical expertise, but also by Queen Victoria, John Stuart Mill, Abraham Lincoln, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alfred Tennyson, Benjamin Disraeli, and Florence Nightingale. The fact that its author continued to guard his anonymity, not just during the early commercial success but throughout later editions, testified to the genuine riskiness of espousing transmutationism—even a godly version—if the chain of transmutated animals included humanity.

Vestiges
wasn't atheistic. “It has pleased Providence to arrange that one species should give birth to another,” the book said, “until the second highest gave birth to man, who is the very highest.” Providence here was a law-making, non-intervening deity who established the physical universe and let it run. The author of
Vestiges
, a Scottish publisher named Robert Chambers, likewise saw the wisdom of creating something and then staying out of sight.

Within two months of its publication, Hooker and Darwin had both read the book. Hooker breezily told Darwin that he'd found
Vestiges
delightful, not aware how that might make his friend cringe with the envy of a competitor. Of course he didn't swallow the book's conclusions, Hooker said, but the assemblage of material was impressive. As for the anonymous author, he seemed to be (Hooker didn't mean this as a compliment about wittiness) a “funny fellow.”

Darwin saw nothing delightful or funny in any sense. He wrote drily from Downe that he'd been “somewhat less amused” by
Vestiges
than Hooker had. Okay, the organization was clever and the unidentified author could certainly write. But “his geology strikes me as bad,” Darwin complained, “& his zoology far worse.” This was a fair judgment, on scientific grounds, with a tincture of sour grapes. Darwin realized that “Mr. Vestiges” had just made his own position more difficult in ways that were both maddening and confusing. With its cockeyed pastiche of theory and its factual mistakes, the book gave credulous readers a misleading set of unsupported notions; it gave skeptical scientists another reason to dismiss transmutationism as bunk. Which was too bad for Darwin, and too bad again. Now the intellectual marketplace was glutted, the whole question was blurred, and the serious critics had their blood up.

Darwin may have hoped that the success of
Vestiges
could help open people's minds about transmutation; that it might prepare them to accept, in the long run, a
real
theory grounded in evidence and meticulous inductive thought. But that time frame—the long run—was speculative and remote. For now, the moment for revealing his ideas seemed to have passed. He turned back to other projects. He had a third volume of
Beagle
geology to finish. He had a small
Beagle
-related task in zoological description, involving barnacles, to polish off. And he planned to revise his
Journal
for a new edition. Given a decent contract (unlike the one FitzRoy had arranged) with a different publisher, the book might actually earn him some money. If there was a best time for publishing his transmutation theory, this wasn't it.

1846–1851

13

I
f you view Darwin from a distance rather than close up, something peculiar happens now. He seems to stop. He seems to turn away. The idea of evolution by natural selection has been clear in his mind and in his notebooks since 1838. The extended essay of 1844 rests on a shelf in his office, unpublished.
The Origin of Species
will not see print until 1859. Meanwhile, as the years pass, he continues fathering children, pottering around the house, acting like a hypochondriac; he dissects barnacles through a microscope and raises pigeons in a coop. He publishes little papers in the
Gardeners' Chronicle
on subjects such as salt, bucket ropes for wells, fruit trees, a mouse-colored breed of ponies. Nothing on transmutation. He spends months at water-cure spas, allowing himself to be tortured with cold showers and wrapped in wet towels. It's the period of unexpected behavior that has been called “Darwin's Delay.”

Scholars disagree about this period, and there's enough ambiguous evidence to nurture a whole range of possible explanations. Was he afraid to publish his theory because he knew it would outrage Victorian society? That's a lame generality, a first-draft cliché that ignores the diversity of Victorian society. Victoria herself had read
Vestiges
, after all, and though the author chose to preserve his anonymity, nobody was trying to find him and put him in jail. Robert Grant had been ranting about roughly the same stuff, in his lectures to medical students, for years. Was Darwin afraid to publish because of the political climate, in which the established Church and the government had reason to be wary of populist demagogues, Chartist mobs, maybe outright insurrection, as bolstered by Lamarckism and other subversive French ideas? It's true that Darwin had no love for extreme democratic ferment. He was a wealthy landowner himself, and a gentleman, a mildly progressive Whig with money and status to lose; he didn't want to sew any flag that political radicals might wave. Was he reluctant to publish because he came from the Oxbridge tradition of natural theology, within which many of his old friends and teachers were pious Anglican clergy? Was he just too polite to toss transmutation in their faces? Or was he hesitant because his wife, deeply pious, worried that his materialistic ideas would cost Charles his soul? Another alternative: Was he less anxious about transmutation per se than about the theory's logical extreme,
human
descent from a lineage of other animals? And then there's his undiagnosable bad health. Was he afflicted by some genuine disease or disability, with days of nauseated inertness on the sofa adding up into months of lost productivity? Or was the illness at least partly psychosomatic, his body's way of excreting the queasiness in his mind? Still another possibility: Maybe he proceeded slowly, deliberately, for good scientific reasons. Gathering data the whole time. Exploring complex implications of an idea that's not nearly so simple as it looks. Refining his arguments, running experimental tests, educating himself in unfamiliar areas of knowledge (taxonomy, embryology, animal husbandry) that would be crucial to making his case. Given the huge task of justifying a huge theory, was his rate of progress actually pretty respectable? Or, then again, was he just too busy for twenty-one years, diverted by all the various chores, projects, and human responsibilities that life brought him?

The answer to each of these questions, I think, is yes. The real uncertainty lies in how all the factors interacted—their relative importance, their intricate synergies—and that isn't likely to be settled by psychobiography or squinty textual analysis at a distance of a century and a half. Charles Darwin was a complicated man, courageous but shy, inspired but troubled, with a brilliant mind and a soft heart and a stomach that jiggled like a paint-mixing machine. If he were more unitary and transparent, he wouldn't be so interesting.

But a bit of tabulation and arithmetic, at this point, might help bring him into closer focus. In autumn of 1846, he was thirty-seven years old. During the decade since leaving the
Beagle
at Falmouth harbor, he had published three books, all dealing with the voyage: two geological treatises (one on coral reefs, one on volcanic islands) and his
Journal
from the
Beagle.
The
Journal
, a popular success, had lately gone into a second edition. His third geological volume (on South America) was in printer's proofs and would appear soon. He had also edited five volumes in his
Zoology of the Beagle
series and published about two dozen scientific papers. Most of the papers were short and slight, but the one on those strange terraces lining the slopes of Scotland's Glen Roy was long and ambitious, covering forty-two pages in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
. In it he argued that the shelves were old sea beaches, formed when ocean levels had risen into the glen during ancient episodes of landscape subsidence; this agreed with his larger view, absorbed from Lyell, that rising and falling land levels play a big part in shaping geological features and placing fossil deposits. The Glen Roy paper, a major contribution to a prestigious journal, containing a bold theoretical assertion, was important to his reputation and self-image at the time, and important in a different way later when it proved embarrassingly wrong. In fact, you could add the Glen Roy embarrassment to the list of possible reasons why he delayed offering his theory of evolution.

The
Journal
was important too, and less ambivalently so, having made him a famous young scientific traveler back in 1839. It had originally been released as volume three of FitzRoy's set, under the dismissive title
Journal and Remarks
. Darwin was cast as a supportive voice to the main authors—FitzRoy himself and an earlier captain—of that
Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of H.M.S. Adventure and Beagle
. (After all, he'd begun the voyage in an unofficial capacity and succeeded to the naturalist's role almost accidentally.) But at publication time Darwin had stepped out toward the footlights and stolen the show because his volume, unlike the other two, was a good read, full of robust adventures amid exotic landscapes as told by an affable narrator. People liked it. Three months later, sensitive to demand, the publisher had reissued Darwin's volume alone, which must have put an additional crook in Robert FitzRoy's imperious snoot. Darwin's revised title was more expansive and confident, in the windy Victorian way:
Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle
. That edition sold well but, since Darwin was still bound by the contract FitzRoy had arranged, it never earned him a penny. Six years later he made a better deal on his own, signing over the copyright to a new publisher for £150, which in 1845 was real money. He did an energetic revision, cutting passages that seemed tedious, adding others that offered more flavor, inserting new results from the experts who had worked on his collections, reversing the order of
Geology
and
Natural History
in the title as a subtle reflection of the fact that geology was no longer his own primary interest.

His most notable changes to the
Journal
appeared in its Galápagos chapter. He added a drawing of four finches, showing the gross differences among their beaks, which John Gould had helped him appreciate. He wrote: “Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.” In the earlier(1839) edition he had muttered a safe, vaguely theistic comment about how “the creative power” had been busy in the Galápagos. In the new (1845) text, he changed that to marveling at “the amount of creative force,” a subtly different formulation, more quantitative than pious, and he admitted feeling “astonished” at the abundance of unique species inhabiting such a small archipelago, especially since the islands were formed by relatively recent volcanic action. “Hence, both in space and time,” he wrote, “we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact—that mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of new beings on this earth.” It was a teaser line. In mentioning “that mystery of mysteries,” Darwin was echoing a phrase coined by the eminent science philosopher John Herschel; the mystery Herschel meant was “the replacement of extinct species by others,” as evidenced in the fossil record but not easily explained by natural theology. Adopting Herschel's phrase gave Darwin a respected authority for viewing the origin of species as an unsettled matter, and it allowed him to hint his interest in solving that mystery. Then he shifted blandly to a discussion of Galápagos rodents.

Readers of the revised
Journal
, in 1845, were left to admire the finch drawing and wonder what the hell it meant. Maybe these islands did bring Darwin “somewhat near” the big question; but he wouldn't go nearer, not in print, for another thirteen years.

Despite his detachment from society and his devotion to science, Darwin liked earning money, and not just as an author. He kept a birdwatcher's eye on his investments, one of which was a 324-acre farm near a village called Beesby, in Lincolnshire, bought with inheritance money advanced by his father and eventually yielding profit as a rental property. Owning the farm made him a landlord, “a Lincolnshire squire,” as he mockingly called himself. He also held shares in canals and, later, in railroads. At the start of their married life, he and Emma had received about £1,200 annually, mostly in interest on those gift trusts from their fathers. Of that amount, despite running a big household, they managed to save a little. Their income rose gradually for a decade and then, after Dr. Darwin's death in 1848, abruptly. The doctor's estate, split in unknown ways among the two brothers and their sisters, seems to have brought Charles a lump of about £45,000. That was a fortune. During the years immediately afterward, Charles and Emma's joint income went above £3,700 annually, of which they managed to reinvest half. Their wealth continued adding up. Compared to the revenues from family legacies and savvy investments, his profits from book publications were small, though not too small to figure in his meticulous financial accounting. The
Journal
, after its unremunerative first edition, had brought him that modest but gratifying payment for the second. Suddenly he was not just a published author but a paid professional. He stuck with this new publisher, John Murray.
The Origin of Species
, fourteen years later, would be a financial success for both of them, as well as a towering scientific milestone. From just the first two editions of
The Origin
(released in late 1859 and early 1860), Darwin would make £616 13
s
. 4
d
. And that was only a start.

He wasn't miserly, just a bean-counter by habit. Details mattered. There are account books in Darwin's hand that show all his income and expenditures for forty-three years, from his marriage to his death, including such particulars as the £25 annual wages paid in 1842 to his butler, Parslow, and the 18 shillings he spent on snuff for himself in 1863. His outlay for shoes in 1863 also came to 18 shillings; shoes might be expensive but they lasted, even for a walking man, and snuff was his main vice. After five years at Down House, he put £58 into improving the garden and grounds. The beer bill for the household that year totaled £32. No tally exists of who drank how much.

In 1846, he had four surviving children—two boys, two girls—with another on the way. There would always be, until Emma was almost fifty, another on the way. She delivered ten children in all, of whom three would die young. Neither her rate of recurrent pregnancy nor the mortality among her offspring was unusual for the times. Darwin eventually became tormented, though, by concern over the health of his children (besides the three lost, several others were sickly) and a guilty sense that maybe they had inherited his bad constitution. He even entertained the dark notion that inbreeding—because he and Emma were cousins—might be part of the problem.

In the village, he was a pillar. He befriended the local curate, a young fellow who had just arrived during the mid-1840s, and played a helpful role in business affairs of the parish, though he stopped attending services, leaving that to Emma and the kids. Slightly later, he consented to be treasurer of the church's Coal and Clothing Club, and eventually also of a cooperative benefit society for the working folk, the Downe Friendly Society, founded at his suggestion. Expanding his own domain, he leased an additional strip of land along the back edge of the property, west of the big meadow, and planted it with birches, hornbeams, dogwoods, and other trees, plus a hedge of holly. Circled with a gravel path, it became known as “the Sandwalk,” his daily route for cogitative strolls. The loop wasn't long, roughly a quarter mile, so sometimes he made a number of circuits, keeping track of his distance by kicking rocks onto the path like abacus beads each time he passed a certain point. He watched his children at play. He noticed birds' nests. He liked the tranquility and the balm of routine. He disliked provocation and upheaval. “My life goes on like Clockwork,” he confided to FitzRoy, when they communicated for the first time in years, “and I am fixed on the spot where I shall end it.”

FitzRoy was just back from New Zealand, having been sacked from his governorship there by the Colonial Office. Darwin's letter was written on October 1, 1846, one day short of ten years since he had jumped impatiently off the
Beagle
. If he was feeling a surge of nostalgia, plus some sympathy and lingering gratitude toward this man he had never found likable, he was also feeling something else: years passing quickly relative to his own pace of accomplishment. In his diary he noted the decade mark, and that he had just finished correcting the last page proofs of his
Geological Observations on South America
. The geology trilogy, by his reckoning, had cost him four and a half years. “How much time lost by illness!” he groused.