Charles and Emma (23 page)

 

He went on to delineate and, he hoped, prove his point.

In that chapter he also included other difficult problems. He admitted that one could not see the intermediate stages of a species' development in the fossil record. He also said that he did not know how, exactly, traits were passed down through the generations. Charles never figured this out because to do so he needed to know about genes. Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk and scientist, was working this out in his monastery at about the same time, but Charles was not aware of him. Very few people were. Even though Mendel's paper was published in 1866, it wouldn't be until after both Charles's and Mendel's deaths that Mendel's work
would be rediscovered and the process of heredity through genes would become known and understood.

Charles did not address the origin of the human species in this book. He was not ready for that fight. He had already figured out that humans had a common ancestor with apes (not that people evolved from apes, as many people still misunderstand it). But he held that back—for now.

Even though the book was long, Charles always felt as though it was just an abstract. And it was. He had intended his book to be much longer; he had hundreds more pages written that he had culled from. He had worked hard to make it short. And he worked hard to make it irrefutable.

If the
Not Marry
side of his list had been longer—or stronger—than the
Marry
side, and he had stayed single in London with Erasmus and his crowd, perhaps he would have grown farther away from the church and the established, conservative, religious society. Had he spent more time with free-thinking, liberal intellectuals and less time sitting on the sofa with Emma, who rubbed his stomach when he was ill and put a cool hand on his feverish head, perhaps then he would not have been quite so conciliatory and conservative in his writing of the book. He hoped that even if there was controversy, it wouldn't be personal. He hoped the public, though they might disagree with what he was saying, would still like the person who was saying it. Emma did.

His life at Down informed his work in many ways. Back when he was thinking about getting married, he worried that taking walks with his wife would infringe on his work time. But in the last paragraph of
The Origin,
Charles wrote about a spot near Down House where he and Emma often walked together. He wrote, “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…”

So different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner.
He could have been writing about his marriage.

 

Chapter 27

What the Lord Hath Delivered

 

I hope you are not working too hard. For Heaven's Sake,
think that you may become such a beast as I am.

—C
HARLES TO
T
HOMAS
H
ENRY
H
UXLEY
, S
EPTEMBER
10, 1860

 

T
he day
The Origin of Species
was published, November 24, 1859, Charles was in Ilkley, taking another water cure. Finishing the book had almost done him in. Now he and Emma had to wait for the reaction.

The publisher, John Murray, and Charles had put out advance word about the book, and the first printing sold out in one day. It was not a huge printing, only 1,500 copies, but Mudie's lending library had bought 500 copies, which meant that many more people would read
The Origin.
Mudie's lent books all over Britain and had 25,000 subscribers. Emma was proud of her husband. She wrote to their son William, “It is a wonderful thing the whole edition selling off at once & Mudie taking 500 copies. Your father says he shall never think small beer of himself again & that candidly he does think it
very well written.” The fact that the public wanted more was a satisfaction to Charles, though it didn't sell as quickly as that anonymous book,
Vestiges,
had done.

Charles did his best to help the book along, as any dedicated author will. He sent copies to friends, colleagues, family members—anyone whom he thought could and would be a good advocate. With each copy, he wrote a personal letter, geared to the recipient and to the fears Charles had about the recipient's reaction. He told his cousin Fox, for instance, knowing that he was religious, that he didn't think the book would convert him.

Darwin called the book one long argument, and that's what it was, but the style was accessible and readable. Many people gobbled it up, much as they were gobbling up the novels of Charles Dickens. Although some readers found it hard to get through—especially if they couldn't buy his argument.

The first published review confirmed all Charles's fears. An anonymous review (many reviews then were anonymous—which meant they could be written by close friends, known enemies, sometimes even family members) in the weekly literary magazine the
Athenaeum
declared that the book was too dangerous for most people to read and that it should be read only by theologians who could answer it best. “If a monkey has become a man—what may not a man become?” the reviewer asked. Charles had not written anything about human evolution, but there it was. And it was also incorrect. A monkey did not become a man; monkeys and men had a common ancestor. Charles was furious, and at the same time, he was surprised at how upset he was. He had been expecting a religious uproar, hadn't he? He had been worrying about this ever since those months in 1838 when he contemplated marriage. But the public reaction was very hard for him to take; it
was that avalanche of negative opinion that had always terrified him.

Privately some of his friends also told him they had problems with taking God out of creation. If God could be put back into the equation, then many people would have no trouble reading Charles's book and accepting the scientific argument. It was fine if the exact account of creation in Genesis wasn't exactly true. As long as one could still
believe.
But most of his religious friends were not angry with Charles; they saw very clearly the soundness of his argument. And they knew his lack of enmity against them and their beliefs. These kinds of discussions were similar to talks he and Emma had been having for years; they were much easier for him to handle.

But one friend's reaction upset him terribly. It came in a letter. The post brought many letters in reaction to the book—two hundred in the first six months after publication. His old professor Adam Sedgwick wrote to him, “I have read your book with more pain than pleasure.” He admired parts of it, he said, but he laughed at other parts. Laughed at! And he was angry about others. He felt that Charles had ignored morality, and that to accept the argument of creation by natural selection would “sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history.” He begged Charles to accept God's revelation so the two of them would meet, eventually, in heaven.

Charles showed Sedgwick's letter to Emma. She agreed with much of what Sedgwick said but was upset at his tone. She comforted her husband. Etty knew about this letter, for it caused much excitement and discussion at Down. But Emma refused to show it to her, even though she was sixteen. Perhaps Emma wanted to keep the pointed criticism away from her so
as not to diminish the daughter's respect for the father. But Etty's doubts after Annie's death could not have been forgotten; perhaps Emma felt there was no need to fan the flames of religious doubt by showing her what some thought of her father's “heresy.” Emma clearly was upset by the letter, too, and about the religious controversy around the book. No matter how open-minded she was, Emma was not comfortable at all with Charles's role as heretic.

There were many other reviews very soon after that first one, and a great number of them were positive, including a review by Julia “Snow” Wedgwood, Hensleigh and Fanny's daughter. She was a novelist and literary critic. Not surprisingly, she gave the book a positive review. Charles kept every-thing—all the reviews, mentions, and notices. Over the years there were close to two thousand reviews, notices, and articles about the book. He put the magazines and journals on his shelves; he put the newspaper articles in a drawer and Parslow or the children glued them into leather-bound albums when they had the time. But he didn't just save the reviews, he made notes of interesting criticisms and ideas for changes in further revisions. As usual he was organized, forward-thinking, and self-critical.

Charles said there were so many reviews and notices that he got sick of reading about himself. He didn't get sick of his theory, though. He never stopped thinking about his argument, honing it, and figuring out how to put it across better in future editions of the book.

He still puzzled over the question of God's role in nature and about his own faith. He listened to what people said, and he and Emma continued to think, read, and talk about the subject. But whether it was Sedgwick's letter or the negative reviews or whether he had always known he would handle it
this way, Charles came to the conclusion fairly quickly that he wanted to stay out of the controversy as much as possible. He wanted to stay home with Emma. Fortunately, she wanted him to.

Also fortunately for him, he had friends who were able and eager to do battle for him out in the world. Although Charles guided the offense and defense from his sanctuary at Down, it was Charles Lyell, Joseph Hooker, Asa Gray, and especially a man named Thomas Henry Huxley who fought his battles in person. Huxley was the most vocal and pugnacious of them all, and earned the nickname of Darwin's bulldog. When he first read Charles's book, he cried, “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!” And to Charles he wrote, “I trust you will not allow yourself to be in any way disgusted or annoyed by the considerable abuse & misrepresentation which unless I greatly mistake is in store for you” and declared, “I am sharpening up my claws & beak in readiness.” Darwin was fortunate that the regular reviewer for the London
Times
passed off the book to Huxley to review, which meant
The Origin
got a rave review in that most important of papers.

Joseph Hooker took the botany side of natural selection and showed how Charles's theory seemed to work among plants. Asa Gray, in America, also argued for him, although he believed that God created the good variations in species. Charles liked Gray and thought that in many ways he understood the theory best; Charles called Gray's reviews good natural theological commentary. Charles Lyell took the geological side, and he wrote a book a few years later called
The Antiquity of Man,
which argued against the biblical story of the creation and the flood. But he was never able to believe that human beings had no divine genesis, and he always
believed that humans possessed a soul. He once joked to Huxley that he could not “go the whole orang.” Like Emma, Lyell and Gray were willing to support Charles, even with their differences. But it was Thomas Henry Huxley who was Charles's biggest proponent. Huxley's role was established during the summer of 1860.

In June 1860 there was a weeklong conference of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Oxford University. The meeting was an annual gathering place for most of the preeminent scientists of the day. Charles and Emma had thought about going; they had enjoyed the meeting a previous year. But not long before the meeting began, Charles became too ill to attend. He went for yet another water cure instead. So although it became one of the most famous scientific meetings in history, one in which evolution and religion fought on center stage, Charles Darwin was not there. Afterward he heard all about it, first in a letter from Huxley and later from all his friends who attended.

This year many of the scientists had gone to Oxford specifically to discuss Charles's book. Richard Owen, formerly a friend and colleague of Charles's, one who had analyzed many of his specimens from the voyage, was there not as a supporter but as an enemy. He came armed. He was furious about
The Origin of Species
and hated Charles's theory of natural selection. He argued with Huxley and others about anatomy, claiming that the brains of apes and of people were vastly different. Part of Owen's reaction was due to professional jealousy and jockeying for position in the scientific world. He had been upstaged by the younger man. But he also truly disagreed with Charles's theory on both scientific and religious grounds.

The religious world also was represented at the conference,
most notably by the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce. He had written a critical review of
The Origin
in the
Quarterly Review,
using some arguments supplied to him by Owen. He claimed that Charles said that human beings had developed from oysters. It was with Wilberforce that Huxley had the biggest battle and the most fun.

Wilberforce addressed the crowd first. He was happy to have an audience so he could argue for the divine creation of human beings. At one point during his speech he turned to Huxley and asked him if he was related to an ape on his grandfather's side or on his grandmother's. Even though Charles had not written about human beings in his book, it was front and center, as he had feared. But Huxley was not scared. He believed Charles was right, and he loved a fight. He is reported to have whispered to the man next to him after Wilberforce's speech, “The Lord hath delivered him into mine hand.”

The people in the audience waited; the atmosphere was tense and charged. What would Huxley say? The audience was made up not only of Charles's critics, but also of his friends—in addition to Huxley there were Hooker, Henslow, and Sir John Lubbock, the famous astronomer (and the Darwins' neighbor, who did not do barnacles). Huxley began with a well-reasoned argument about anatomical structure and how Charles had compiled his theory using such data as had never been used before. What everyone later remembered was not so much Huxley's long scientific argument but how he ended his speech. He concluded by saying he would rather have an ape for a grandfather than be descended from a man who introduced ridicule into a serious scientific discussion.