Biography: We moderns, as we like to style ourselves, derive a lot of fun from sneering at the Victorians. Everything from their prudery to their stovepipe hats strikes us as irresistibly quaint.
Certainly, the 19th century was contemptible for its cant and hypocrisy - the Londoners who wept at the death of Dickens's Little Nell could also countenance appalling levels of child prostitution - yet the more one reads of the period the more admirable seem the Victorian virtues of curiosity, open-mindedness and willingness to entertain radical ideas. The world in which we grew up may have seen more rapid changes than did that of the Victorians, but the new scientific theories and discoveries about nature and humanity's place in it with which they had to grapple were just as profound as anything that we have been required to absorb.
And grapple they did. When Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was published in 1859 it sold out on the first day. True, the print run was a modest 1,250 copies, but the publisher, John Murray, had immediate orders for 250 more; these were large sales for the time. Most significantly, as Darwin's biographer Janet Browne points out, the highly popular Mudie's Circulating Library took 500 copies, an unprecedented number for a scientific work, and an assurance of many more thousands of readers for Darwin's truly subversive text. In the year before his death, Darwin possessed capital of £282,000, nearly £13 million at present-day values, the bulk of it earned by his writings. The only comparable example from our own time is Stephen Hawking, whose A Brief History of Time earned many millions. The comparison is valid only in monetary terms, however; Hawking's book, bought by many and read by few, raised no controversy, except among some specialists, whereas The Origin of Species set the Victorian public ababble.
Darwin's success was not achieved overnight. He was already known for his work as a naturalist, especially the Journal of Researches, his account of the voyage he made in the 1830s on HMS Beagle to South America, the South Seas and New Zealand and Australia. During those years at sea he acquired a deep and extensive knowledge of the flora and fauna of the vast territories that he visited, a store that was to sustain him through a lifetime of unremitting investigation of nature and of man.
He was born in 1809, in Shrewsbury, into a distinguished family that included his two grandfathers, the physician, poet and evolutionist Erasmus Darwin, and Josiah Wedgwood, founder of the great ceramics firm. Charles Darwin studied medicine at Edinburgh, then entered Cambridge university as a divinity student. At Cambridge, however, he was diverted into the natural sciences, and began the serious study of biology, zoology and geology. After he returned from the Beagle voyage he decided to devote himself exclusively to science, and in the following decade, up to 1846, published a number of important works, notably on the formation of coral reefs, that were to place him in the first rank of natural scientists. In 1839 he married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood - throughout his life he was to worry away at the possibility that the illnesses and deaths suffered by more than one of his offspring might have been the result of this consanguineous union - and in 1842 he settled at Downe, in Kent, to live on his private means the life of a country gentleman and scholar.
It was at Downe that he began the laborious task of organising his thoughts and findings for an assault on the question of the origin of species. Always a dilatory, though untiring, worker, he would not publish the results of his research until many years had passed, and then only because he was forced to it. Downe, as Janet Browne's subtitle attests, was a place of great importance for him. Here he found the peace and expansive tranquillity in which to tame what Browne calls the "tumble of ideas that had characterised the first half of his existence". Routine was vital, and "He manipulated his household and daily routines in order to allow the production of his book and the other volumes that were to follow". Which makes Emma one of the unsung heroines of Victorian science.
Like so many Great Men, Darwin was good at getting others to help him. He appealed for information to a myriad of correspondents. Janet Browne tells us that of the letters he wrote or received in his lifetime, some 14,000 survive, and there were probably as many again that have since been lost. He
hunted down anyone who could help him on specific issues, from civil servants, army officers, diplomats, fur-trappers, horse-breeders, society ladies, Welsh hill-farmers, zookeepers, pigeon-fanciers, gardeners, asylum owners, and kennel hands, through to his own elderly aunts or energetic nieces and nephews. Many of his letters went to residents of far-flung regions - India, Jamaica, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, China, Borneo, the Hawaiian Islands . . .
And then, on a June morning in 1858, a missive from one of those far-flung correspondents exploded in his face like a letter-bomb. The slim, wax-wrapped package was postmarked Ternate, an island in the Dutch East Indies, and had been sent by Alfred Russel Wallace, an English scientist travelling in the region collecting rare natural history specimens. "What the package enclosed," writes Browne, "was a short handwritten essay which, line by line, spelled out virtually the same theory of evolution by natural selection that Darwin believed was his alone." For an experimental scientist, vitally concerned with priority of discovery, it was a potentially devastating blow.
The blow could not have been delivered at a worse time. The Darwins' daughter Henrietta, aged 15, fell ill, and her parents feared she might have contracted diphtheria, a deadly disease new to Britain. Then little Charles, the baby of the family, Emma's tenth and last child, came down with fever, and died on June 28th. Emma was 48 at his birth, and as Henrietta later wrote, it is possible that he was born without his "full share of intelligence". Janet Browne grimly speculates that "If \ had any inclination to think about his theory of natural selection at this time, he might easily have reflected on the melancholy fact that his ideas of struggle required the death of the weakest individuals, even of his own babies. His theory was a bleak theory of elimination".
Great discoveries in science are rarely as singular or as sudden as they appear. Notions of heliocentrism were in the air before Copernicus, Rosalind Franklin might have beaten Crick and Watson to DNA, and Poincaré very nearly got to Relativity before Einstein. Indeed, such "discoveries" might more properly be called syntheses. Yet the coincidence between Darwin's and Wallace's formulations on natural selection was remarkable. Darwin felt that Wallace had put the case more cogently than he was managing to do in the still inchoate mass of writings that would eventually become The Origin of Species. Browne writes:
Wallace wrote clearly - so clearly that no one could mistake his meaning. The struggle for survival among animals and plants; competition and extinction; the improvement of domestic races by selection; the divergence of species into different forms: all these were included . . . Wallace demonstrably removed the divine Creator and proposed an entirely natural origin for species. His words indicated that he fully understood the significance of what he was saying. "It is the object of the present paper to show . . . that there is a general principle in nature which will cause many varieties to survive the parent species, and to give rise to successive variations departing further and further from the original type."
A lesser man than Darwin might have quietly ignored Wallace's paper, or even suppressed it - after all, the author was off in the wilds on the other side of the world, and might not be back for years - but the code of the English gentleman is a strong one, and Darwin immediately put the essay into circulation among his scientific colleagues. "So all my originality," he wrote to the geologist Sir Charles Lyell, "whatever it may amount to, will be smashed."
Lyell, however, was a firm supporter of Darwin, and had no intention of allowing his originality to be even dented; along with "Darwin's bulldog" Thomas Huxley, the botanist Joseph Hooker, and Herbert Spencer, initiator of the formula "the survival of the fittest", he set about ensuring the primacy of Darwin's work, an endeavour in which the "Four Musketeers" were to be wholly successful, and the validity of which Wallace himself would fully accept.
Despite the shock of Wallace's paper - "If Wallace had my MS sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract" - or perhaps because of the impetus it provided, Darwin got down seriously to work, and within a year The Origin was published. As he had anticipated, he was more excoriated than praised. The Church, of course, brought out its biggest guns, including such colourful and slightly absurd figures as Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, known as "Soapy Sam" because of his propensity to get into hot water and come out clean, who engaged in a famous debate with Huxley at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held at Oxford in 1860.
The Oxford debate was one of the great turning points in Victorian intellectual life. The occasion had all the excitement and spectacle of a modern-day sporting event or pop music concert. Wilberforce spoke fluently and wittily for 30 minutes, ridiculing Darwin's theory of evolution and insisting that the dividing line between humanity and the natural world was sharp and obvious. "Is it credible that a turnip strives to become a man?" he demanded. He also enquired rhetorically if Huxley was related to an ape on his grandfather's or his grandmother's side. Huxley saw an open goal, and did not miss: "If I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence, and yet who employs those faculties for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion - I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape".
Perhaps the most striking feature of the debate, Janet Browne suggests, was Darwin's absence from it. Throughout his long career he was as masterly as Macavity at not being there, and the more time he spent secluded at Downe the more his fame increased, especially after the publication of The Descent of Man in 1871. However, anyone who imagined that the author of The Origin was above the debate about its contents would be wrong. Behind the scenes he was a master of manipulation, getting his friends to deliver speeches and write papers and generally canvass support on his behalf. It is a common phenomenon; great success rarely comes unbidden, or, indeed, unpushed.
Yet it would be wrong to paint Darwin as any kind of monster. Among the notable figures of history, he was one of the more humble, and one of the most charming. As Janet Browne remarks in her splendidly warm portrait of him, he was the most human of men. Nothing, it seems, repelled him. When he was lying on his couch one day a wasp landed on his face and inserted its proboscis into the moisture of his eye; Darwin's only reaction was to get up carefully and walk across to a mirror to see the insect taking its drink. He was utterly unsentimental about the natural world - "What a book a Devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low & horridly cruel works of nature!" - yet he was tormented by the thought of the sufferings constantly being undergone by even the lowliest of living creatures. Hearing of a dog that licked the hand of its vivisectionist, he expressed the hope that the man would feel remorse for the rest of his life.
Throughout, Darwin retained a schoolboy's inquisitiveness about the world and its inhabitants, animal and vegetable. One of his loveliest works is his last, The Formation of Mould through the Action of Worms. Darwin had a deep respect and admiration for earthworms, considering them to be, in the words of the theologian Moncure Conway, truly the resurrection and the life. The very ground we walk on, in which we grow our food, and into which at the end we shall be laid, is the product of these marvellous little creatures. Who would not treasure Browne's image of this grand old man at the end of his life, still at play in the primordial mud?
Unfailingly curious, he pursued what he called "fool's experiments" by asking Francis [his son\] to play his bassoon close to worms in pots to see if they detected sound. He blew a whistle, breathed tobacco fumes, and waved a red-hot poker over them. Finally, with an embarrassed laugh, he put them (in their pots) on top of the broadwood piano and requested Emma to play the keys loudly. He "has taken to training earthworms," she said resignedly, "but does not make much progress . . ."
Janet Browne's meticulously organised and beautifully written two-volume biography, of which The Power of Place is the conclusion, is as racy and exciting as any Victorian novel, and a fitting tribute to a truly great man, one of the makers, for better or worse, of the modern world.
Charles Darwin: The Power of Place - Volume II of a Biography.
By Janet Browne. Cape, 591pp. £25
John Banville's most recent novel, Shroud, was published last year