DARWIN

‘Desmond and Moore have produced a tour de force which, like a good novel, invites the reader to press on from one chapter to the next. Pick it up and you are hooked, by the racy writing, the memorable turns of phrase, the historical insights and the sheer bravado of their performance’ – William Bynum in the New Scientist

‘Their approach is brilliantly successful. Darwin is a rich, entertaining and always convincing portrait’ – Stephen Young in the Guardian

‘A sprawling tome which combines scholarship with compulsive readability and goes right to the heart of the mystery of why Darwin hesitated so long before publishing his theory of evolution’ – John Naughton in the Observer

‘The author of The Origin of Species deserves a major biography and Darwin fully matches the man’ – David Owen in The Sunday Times

‘Certainly the most ambitious biography of Darwin yet seen… The conflict between his intellectual daring and his need to live a life of intense respectability is the strange and terrible thing about Darwin, and it is rightly at the centre of this book’ – Fiona McCarthy in The Times

‘An exhilarating biography and a social history of much of the nineteenth century. A full, fat work setting one of our indisputable men of genius in the fullest context’ – Melvyn Bragg in The Sunday Times

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Adrian Desmond studied at London University and Harvard, has higher degrees in vertebrate palaeontology and the history of science, and a Ph.D. for his work on Victorian evolution. He has written a companion volume to Darwin , a biography of Darwin’s ‘bulldog’ Huxley (Penguin, 1997), which was voted by the New York Times one of the best books of the year. His other books include Archetypes and Ancestors (1982) and The Politics of Evolution (1989), which received the Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society in America. In 1993 the Society for the History of Natural History awarded him its Founders’ Medal. He is currently publishing (with Angela Darwin) a four volume edition of The T. H ., Huxley Family Correspondence . He is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Biology Department at University College London.

James Moore holds degrees in science, divinity and history, with a Ph.D. from Manchester University. He has studied Darwin’s life and times for thirty years. In The Post – Darwinian Controversies (1979) he detailed Protestant responses to evolution, and his Darwin Legend (1994) analysed Darwin’s posthumous reputation. He has edited a source book, Religion in Victorian Britain (1988), and a series of essays, History, Humanity and Evolution (1989). Now Reader in History of Science and Technology at the Open University, he was Landon Clay Visiting Associate Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University in 1992-3, Visiting Messecar Professor of History at McMaster University in 1998, and Affiliated Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University in 1997-9. He is currently researching a biography of Alfred Russel Wallace.

Desmond and Moore’s Darwin won the 1991 James Tait Black Memorial Prize in Britain, the 1993 Comisso grand prize in Italy and the 1993 Watson Davis Prize from the History of Science Society in America. In 1997 the British Society for the History of Science awarded it the first Dingle Prize for the best book communicating the history of science to a wide audience.

DARWIN

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Illustrations

1. Robert Darwin, Charles’s father. (The Library, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London)

2. The Mount, where Charles grew up. (Order of the Proceedings at the Darwin Celebration held at Cambridge, 22–24 June 1909. Cambridge U.P., 1909)

6. Darwin’s Edinburgh mentor, Robert E. Grant. (By courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London)

8. Christ’s College, Cambridge. (Cambridgeshire Collection, Central Library, Cambridge)

9. William Darwin Fox. (Darwin Archive, by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

10. Robert Taylor, the ‘Devil’s Chaplain’. (National Portrait Gallery, London)

12. The botanist John Stevens Henslow. (University Archives, by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

13. Fuegian savages. (University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge)

14. The devastated cathedral at Concepción. (R. FitzRoy, Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty’s Ships ‘Adventure’ and ‘Beagle’. Vol. 2, Proceedings of the Second Expedition, 1831–1836. Colburn, 1839)

17. Troops marching to Euston Station. (Illustrated London News Picture Library)

18. Charles and his son William in 1842. (The Library, University College London)

19. Darwin’s old study. (Darwin Archive, by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

20. Annie Darwin. (Darwin Archive, by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

22. Emma aged about fifty. (Darwin Archive, by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

23. The Revd John Brodie Innes, Darwin’s vicar. (Kirsteen Mitcalfe, Milton Brodie, Forres, Scotland)

29. A gorilla skull, pictured by Owen. (Transactions of the Zoological Society [London], 3 [1849], pl. 62)

31. T. H. Huxley, lecturing on the gorilla. (The Library, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London)

32. Pope Darwin, a sketch by T. H. Huxley. (Charles Darwin Museum, Down House, by courtesy of The Royal College of Surgeons of England)

33. The haggard paterfamilias in the 1860s. (The Library, University College London)

34. The family at home in about 1863. (Darwin Archive, by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

35. Down House from the rear in the 1860s. (Darwin Archive, by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

36. The Down House staff. (Darwin Archive, by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

37. Darwin with his finger on the pulse of femininity. (Darwin Archive, by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

39. Darwin on the verandah at Down House, about 1880. (Darwin Archive, by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

42. A saintly Darwin icon. (The Library, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London)

Acknowledgements

WE ARE ESPECIALLY grateful to friends and colleagues who interrupted busy lives to help us meet our deadlines: to Fred Burkhardt, Nellie Flexner, Elisabeth Leedham-Green, David Kohn, Mike Petty, Jim and Anne Secord, and Steven Shapin for reading draft chapters; to Alison Winter for listening to extracts; to John Thackray, Jim Secord, and David Stanbury for providing information; to Fiona Erskine, Marsha Richmond, and Godfrey Waller for supplying manuscript material (and the late Dov Ospovat for a transcription of Darwin’s notes on his 1856 meeting with Huxley, Hooker, and Wollaston); to Richard Milner for sharing his unpublished research on Darwin and Wallace; to Stephen Pocock, Anne Secord, and the Darwin letters project team at Cambridge University Library for supplying advance proofs of volumes of the Darwin correspondence; to Peter Gautrey and Simon Schaffer for assisting with transcriptions and a translation; to Jane Clark, Tony Coulson, Kirsteen Mitcalfe, Solene Morris, and Mike Petty for supplying illustrations; and to the Revd Geoffrey Evans for a tour of Shrewsbury and the High Street Unitarian Church.

Personal debts can never be adequately acknowledged. John and Ellen Greene gave unstinting support in more ways than one; their detailed commentary on the manuscript was a labour of love. Ralph Colp, Jr, was a constant inspiration and resource for his insight into the details of Darwin’s private life; we thank him heartily for sharing Darwin’s health diary, reading our chapters, and discussing them on a transatlantic phone. Nick Furbank and Dick Aulie also perused our pages and gave expert advice.

Gordon Moore and Robert Tollemache kept half the project going when all else seemed to fail. Similar timely help came from Simon Schaffer and Anita Herle, Alison Winter, Iwan Morus, and Nigel Leask. Gill Knott and Marcus offered escapes to Ilkley and other regions, while Chris and Barrie Vincent at the White Hart kept a snuggery nearer home. Jessica Drader and Harry Flexner Desmond will now see more of their dads. We thank them most of all, for their patience and love.

We would like to thank George Pember Darwin who graciously consented to our publishing extracts of Darwin’s letters and manuscripts. We are indebted to the Syndics of Cambridge University Library for allowing us to quote from unpublished material held in the Darwin Archive and in other collections. And we express our gratitude to the Syndics of Cambridge University Press, whose magnificent Correspondence of Charles Darwin provides such a rich source of material.

For allowing us to study, and in instances quote from, manuscript material, we also wish to thank the following institutions and individuals: American Philosophical Society Library; Avon County library, Bath Central library for the Leonard Jenyns correspondence; British Museum (Natural History) for the Richard Owen papers; British Library, Department of Manuscripts; Charles Darwin Museum, Down House, by courtesy of the Royal College of Surgeons of England; Christ’s College Library, Cambridge, for the Darwin-Fox letters; County of Hereford and Worcester Record Office; Dr Williams’s Library, London; Edinburgh University Library; Ernst-Haeckel Haus, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität, Jena; General Register Office, London; Harvard University Library for the University Archives; Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, for the Huxley Papers, Ramsay Papers, and College Archives; R. G. Jenyns, Bottisham Hall, Bottisham, Cambridgeshire, for the Leonard Jenyns papers; Keele University Library for the Wedgwood-Mosley Collection by courtesy of the Wedgwood Museum Trustees, Barlaston, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire; Kent County Archives Office for the Downe parish papers; Public Record Office, Kew and Quality Court, London; Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; Royal Institution, London, for the Tyndall Papers; University College London Library for the Brougham Papers and Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge correspondence; University of British Columbia Library, Vancouver; Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine Library, London; and the Zoological Society of London Library.

What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!

A Devil’s Chaplain?

It is 1839. England is tumbling towards anarchy, with countrywide unrest and riots. The gutter presses are fizzing, fire-bombs flying. The shout on the streets is for revolution. Red evolutionists – visionaries who see life marching inexorably upward, powered from below – denounce the props of an old static society: priestly privilege, wage exploitation, and the workhouses. A million socialists are castigating marriage, capitalism, and the fat, corrupt Established Church. Radical Christians join them, hymn-singing Dissenters who condemn the ‘fornicating’ Church as a ‘harlot,’ in bed with the State.

Even science must be purged: for the gutter atheists, material atoms are all that exist, and like the ‘social atoms’ – people – they are self-organizing. Spirits and souls are a delusion, part of the gentry’s cruel deceit to subjugate working people. The science of life – biology – lies ruined, prostituted, turned into a Creationist citadel by the clergy. Britain now stands teetering on the brink of collapse – or so it seems to the gentry, who close ranks to protect their privileges.

At this moment, how could an ambitious thirty-year-old gentleman open a secret notebook and, with a devil-may-care sweep, suggest that headless hermaphrodite molluscs were the ancestors of mankind? A squire’s son, moreover, Cambridge-trained and once destined for the cloth. A man whose whole family hated the ‘fierce & licentious’ radical hooligans.

The gentleman was Charles Darwin: well heeled, imperturbably Whig, a privately financed world traveller who had spent five years aboard HMS Beagle as a dining companion to the aristocratic captain. He had a private fortune in prospect and a reputation as an up-and-coming geologist. He also had an enduring wish to escape ‘abominable murky’ London, to live in a rustic parish like his clerical friends, so vilified by the mob.

And this was not the worst part. He embraced a terrifying materialism. Only months before he had concluded in his covert notebooks that the human mind, morality, and even belief in God were artefacts of the brain: ‘love of the deity [is the] effect of organization, oh you Materialist!’ he upbraided himself. Working through the implications gave him migraines, left him writhing on his sick bed, fearing persecution. Wasn’t it treachery? Didn’t it threaten the last scientific safeguards of the old social order? Weren’t these incendiary beliefs perfect weapons for the loutish hordes, already at the gates? He peered into the future. The ‘whole fabric totters & falls,’ he prophesied of the unreformed Creationist cosmos.

Tormented, he finally fled London’s ‘dirt, noise vice & misery’ to lead a clergyman’s life in rural Kent. He sought sanctuary, emulating the man most ‘respectable and happy,’ the country curate. Idyllic and isolated it might have been, living in an old parsonage, but a third of his working life was spent doubled up, trembling, vomiting, and dowsing himself in icy water. He sat on his theory of evolution for twenty years, scarcely mooting his innermost thoughts about ‘monkey-men’ and apes evolving morality, castigating himself as a ‘Devil’s Chaplain.’ Even in 1859 he had to be prodded into publishing the Origin of Species, and then he let it go with barely a hint about human origins.

The full enigma of Darwin’s life has never been grasped. Indeed, previous biographies have been curiously bloodless affairs.¹ They have broken little new ground and made no contact with the inflammatory issues and events of his day.

Our Darwin sets out to be different – to pose the awkward questions, to probe interests and motivations, to portray the scientific expert as a product of his time; to depict a man grappling with immensities in a society undergoing reform.

When Darwin did come out of his closet and bare his soul to a friend, he used a telling expression. He said it was ‘like confessing a murder.’ Nothing captures better the idea of evolution as a social crime in early Victorian Britain. Anglicans damned it as false, foul, French, atheistic, materialistic, and immoral. It was dangerous knowledge, and tempting. Darwin had known this for years, hence his ruminations were confined to secret notebooks. He cut himself off, ducked parties and declined engagements; he even installed a mirror outside his study window to spy on visitors as they came up his drive. Day after day, week after week, his stomach plagued him, and for years after reaching his rural retreat he refused to sleep anywhere else, unless it was a safe house, a close relative’s home. This was a worried man.

How then did such a wealthy Whig gentleman break the impasse and make evolution acceptable? How did he present it as underpinning middle-class values? Did he ever resolve the antitheses? – failed ordinand and pillar of the parish, reformer of nature and friend of the unreformed clergy, upright citizen who wrote of ‘monkey-men.’ Understand Darwin’s scientific status, his social obligations, his Dissenting heritage, the political context, and the contradictions start to resolve themselves.

In building this new picture of Darwin, we have exploited a spate of new material. Darwin was a hoarder; he destroyed precious little. Notebooks, old manuscripts, torn-out pages, annotated offprints, and letters were all salted away. Gradually these sources have been tapped by a generation of transcribers.² But only in the last few years has the trickle of published material turned into a torrent.

Since 1985 alone a staggering amount has come out, capped by the meticulously edited Correspondence of Charles Darwin (which has reached volume seven by 1991). The Victorian Life and Letters, censored, shorn, and stitched, is covered in dusty cobwebs. It served a purpose a century ago in securing Darwin’s immortality. But today’s needs are different. We want to know about his personality, his business acumen, his domestic life, and his science. We want to understand how his theories and strategies were embedded in a reforming Whig society.

A second injection for the so-called ‘Darwin Industry’ came with the definitive 750-page transcription of Charles Darwin’s Notebooks in 1987. Painstaking research by an international team, hacking through the intractable jungle of Darwin’s illegible and cryptic script, has revealed unimaginable treasures. We now know more about the piecemeal, day-by-day development of Darwin’s evolutionary views than about any other scientific theory in history. But then we need to; no other has been so shattering.

We also have a Calendar (1985) of the fourteen thousand known letters to and from him. At a stroke the biographer is faced by a fivefold increase in correspondence. The harvest is enormously rich. It gives insights into how he sealed and severed friendships, cajoled and equivocated, courted champions, dispensed patronage, and winkled out scientific tidbits. It opens up a new world, showing us his social circle – his neighbours, house-guests, extended family, and colleagues.³

In the last few years, too, historians have revolutionized our understanding of Darwin’s dogged, jogging path to the theory of natural selection – the central plank of biology today. The path was riddled with dead-ends and littered with half truths. We see his persistence, like a terrier shaking a rat, teasing at the evolutionary mechanism from every side, trying for any new angle. We can trace the political roots of his key ideas, following his reading on population, the poor laws, and charity.⁴ But we cannot stop at mere reading of books. We have to see him as part of an active Whig circle, in an age when the Whig government was building the workhouses and the poor were burning them down. Appreciate Darwin’s attitude to the workhouse culture, and his science acquires a deeper political meaning.

So far this wider context has been largely ignored. The textual analysts and historians of disembodied ideas – of intellectual ghosts – have carried the day. Social historians have consistently failed to follow up, to re-locate Darwin in his age.⁵ As a result we have lost sight of the larger world that made Darwin’s evolution possible.

Any new biography must take account of the recent upheaval in the history of science, and its new emphasis on the cultural conditioning of knowledge. Gone is the day when Darwin could be depicted as a seer, a genius out of time. Ours is a defiantly social portrait. We make contact with the public events and institutions of Victorian England, with reform bills, poor law riots, learned societies, industrial innovation, radical medicine, Church debates – and, not least, with the new views of creation among reforming naturalists, and the old practices of museum keepers. We see Darwin on the streets, sitting in with apes at the zoo, picking up pigeon lore in gin palaces, conniving with his heterodox dining circle, living a squire’s life, investing in factories, worrying about religion and confronting death. Viewed in this light, his fears and foibles become intelligible and his evolutionary achievements make sense.⁶

Irony and ambiguity shrouded Darwin as no other eminent Victorian. He hunted with the clergy and ran with the radical hounds; he was a paternalist full of noblesse oblige, sensitive, mollycoddled, cut off from wage-labour and competition, who unleashed a bloody struggle for existence; a hard-core scientist addicted to quackery, who strapped ‘electric chains’ to his stomach and settled for weeks at fashionable hydropathic spas; a man of clockwork routine, his days alike as ‘two peas,’ who infused natural history with contingency and chance.

What of Darwin’s own latter-day prejudices? He thought blacks inferior but was sickened by slavery; he subordinated women but was totally dependent on his redoubtable wife. How did his views on sex, race, and empire reflect the late-Victorian ethos? Was he still remaking the world in the image of his times in the Descent of Man (1871)? Did he see society, like nature, progress by culling its unfit members? ‘Social Darwinism’ is often taken to be something extraneous, an ugly concretion added to the pure Darwinian corpus after the event, tarnishing Darwin’s image. But his notebooks make plain that competition, free trade, imperialism, racial extermination, and sexual inequality were written into the equation from the start – ‘Darwinism’ was always intended to explain human society.

And how did grave Victorians observe the observer? – this man who, Ruskin rudely noted, felt ‘a deep and tender interest about the brightly coloured hinder half of certain monkeys.’ The butt of jokes, yes. The godsend to cartoonists, of course. Yet his science became a pillar of late-Victorian liberalism. How else to explain the earl and two dukes, representing Gladstone’s government, acting as pallbearers in his Westminster Abbey funeral? How, indeed, to explain the body ending up there at all? Or The Times’s comment that ‘the Abbey needed it more than it needed the Abbey’?

Beetle-browed, scowling physiognomy: everyone knows the image – it is one of the totems of the twentieth century. To some he was the founder of a new biology, to one outraged Welshman just ‘an old Ape with a hairy face.’ But for everyone his gentleness was overwhelming. Leslie Stephen felt that there was ‘something almost pathetic in his simplicity and friendliness.’⁷ Darwin is arguably the best known scientist in history. More than any modern thinker – even Freud or Marx – this affable old-world naturalist from the minor Shropshire gentry has transformed the way we see ourselves on the planet.

The time is ripe for a richer portrait of a troubled man at a turning point of history.

1809–1831

1
Catching a Falling Christian

CHARLES DARWIN’S grandfather Erasmus had a lacerating wit and a loathing of meddling gods. Scurrility and whimsy wrapped themselves up in his rotund frame, and no one was spared. He could roast a goose-brained king, or kick the crutch from a friend’s faith. ‘A featherbed to catch a falling Christian’ he called the Unitarian beliefs of Charles’s other grandfather, the pottery patriarch Josiah Wedgwood.¹

Josiah had dropped so much supernatural paraphernalia that he had lost sight of the Christian heights. Fall any further and he would land with an atheistic bump. Josiah’s was Christianity stripped naked: the Trinity had been discarded, along with Jesus’s divinity.

The featherbed had broken Josiah’s fall; but there was no such soft landing for Erasmus. ‘Horrid wretches’ like him had already crashed resoundingly to earth.² What need of Christianity when men can sup ‘the milk of science’? Did not the priestess of Nature explain all things? – even Creation itself?

Nurs’d by warm sun-beams in primeval caves
Organic Life began beneath the waves…
Hence without parent by spontaneous birth
Rise the first specks of animated earth.³

There spoke Erasmus, a hard-headed freethinker, like so many in the sun-lit years of the Enlightenment. He adored in the Temple of Nature; for him Reason was divine, and Progress its prophet. The two grandfathers agreed on much, but on religion they parted company, bequeathing a mixture of freethought and radical Christianity to their grandchildren.

Charles Darwin mused on this twin inheritance in 1879 as he put the finishing touches to a sketch of old Erasmus’s life. He had just turned seventy himself and felt as though he were already communing ‘with the dead.’ It was time to take stock of his life. How much of Erasmus’s make-up had he inherited, and how much was he passing on? There was Josiah’s blood in him too, and his wife Emma was a Wedgwood. So what future for their offspring if traits run in families?⁴ Which grandfather would they take after?

Dr Erasmus Darwin was a giant, a brilliant bon viveur whose shadow stretched across the generations. Blasted by smallpox, crippled and corpulent, he was a renowned physician with a fatal attraction for women. He sired a dozen children by a pair of wives and two more by a governess. He prescribed sex for hypochondria and composed lush erotic verse. With his close friend Josiah Wedgwood, he helped to foment England’s industrial revolution in the eighteenth century. He rhapsodized about England’s great inventors – Matthew Boulton and James Watt – dreamt up mechanical marvels of his own, and maintained a deep commitment to evolution.⁵

Charles caught glimpses of himself here. Erasmus admitted the natural ascent of life and the kinship of all creatures; he ‘abhorred slavery,’ ‘admired philanthropy,’ and ‘insisted on humanity to the lower animals.’ He believed in a distant Deity – a ‘Potent-power, all-great, all-good’ – and prayed, ‘Teach me, Creation, teach me how / T’adore the vast Unknown.’ Yet ‘he was unorthodox,’ and for this he was ‘grossly calumniated.’ No sooner had he died in 1802 than he was attacked for doubting the Bible. A story was even started that he had called for Jesus on his deathbed. ‘Such was the state of Christian feeling in this country at the beginning of the present century,’ Charles wryly closed; ‘we may at least hope that nothing of the kind now prevails.’

He sent the biography in proof to his daughter Henrietta. She had long hovered at his elbow, an able critic, fussy about the family reputation – the in-house editor to touch up his lack-lustre prose. She was her mother’s watchdog, eight years married but still wedded to Emma’s welfare. They saw eye-to-eye on most things, and Henrietta had a nose for trouble. She sniffed through the proofs. Unitarianism a ‘featherbed’ – old Josiah and her mother ‘falling Christians’! Was this how Emma was to be portrayed for her Wedgwood faith? And as for advertising Erasmus’s debauchery, let alone his religious infidelity! It was permissible a hundred years ago, perhaps, but unbecoming a Darwin now. Alluding to his foibles was sheer folly; it could cost the family dear. The proofs needed pruning, not polishing.

Wielding a bright red pencil, Henrietta pitched in. The sex was cut back. Too much talk of illegitimacy, too much ‘wine, women, [and] warmth.’ A quotation from Erasmus with ‘damned’ in it was lopped, and his lines about the ‘vast Unknown’ sounded awfully agnostic. The paragraph on his unorthodoxy was plucked altogether. It reflected ill on Christianity and was too obviously written by the ‘calumniated’ author of the Origin of Species. The deathbed story had to go. Henrietta slashed scarlet down the page, marking the spots where her father should cut and chop.

She returned the proofs, and her father resigned himself to the changes. The biography now contained more than family history; it held hard evidence of heredity. The assertions and deletions spoke for the two sides of the family. Henrietta was like her mother and old Josiah after all. A hundred years of Unitarian piety had marked the Wedgwood mind.⁶ The censor had her way. The world could wait another century to read about the family forces that had shaped Charles’s destiny.

These forces were generated in the age of iron and steam. The blasts of Coalbrookdale and the wheeze and snort of Boulton engines echoed across the English Midlands in the mid-eighteenth century. New money was to be made, new families were on the rise. These calliper-carrying industrialists had faith in a progressive nature, a democracy of intellect, and technological salvation. They were marginal men, but on the make; arrivistes-merchants, standing outside the old, complacent squirearchy.

Typical was Charles’s maternal grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood, who built his pottery business at Burslem, near Stoke-on-Trent. From the 1760s, he was one of the technocrats inside Birmingham’s élite industrial circle, the ‘Lunar Society’ – so called because its members, the ‘Lunaticks,’ met on moonlit nights, when they could see to stumble home afterwards. Birmingham was the centre of the new industrial culture. The Lunar mechanics introduced new technology, a chemical industry, and a factory mentality. Boulton and Watt were turning out steam engines, and employing a thousand men at their Soho works in Birmingham. Here they sold ‘what all the world desires to have – POWER.’ Other Lunar craftsmen specialized in clocks and precision instruments. Wedgwood perfected factory organization on the Soho model. In his ceramics sheds he regimented the workforce and created a division of labour, making ‘such machines of the Men as cannot err.’ His factory’s name, ‘Etruria’ (after the Etruscan painting techniques on his ceramics), was coined by his ‘favorite Asculapius,’ the physician to the group, Charles’s paternal grandfather Erasmus Darwin.

Erasmus was a poetic, inventive physician, a mechanic himself who tinkered with ‘the animal machine.’ His lucrative practice was in the town of Lichfield, fifteen miles north of Birmingham. Lichfield’s other literary son, Dr Johnson, defended the locals as ‘the most sober, decent people in England, the genteelest in proportion to their wealth.’ He could not say the same of Erasmus; their mutual loathing was apparent, and the stammering Darwin dodged Dr Johnson’s stiletto wit and ‘stentor lungs.’ Erasmus’s diagnostic skills were extraordinary and in demand far outside Lichfield’s sober circle. He designed a carriage that could steer at speed without overturning and travelled 10,000 miles a year to minister to the new Midlands élite. He was a polymathic ‘Lunatick,’ a doctor suffering from an ‘Infection of Steam Enginry,’ a poet with an eye to industry. He designed a horizontal windmill for grinding pigments at Wedgwood’s works, and even a speaking-machine ‘capable of pronouncing the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed and Ten Commandments in the Vulgar Tongue,’ for which Boulton promised to pay £1000.⁷

Not that these men of ‘mechanical Fame’ put much store in orthodoxy. Most were self-made Dissenters, outsiders in a world where political and educational opportunities were reserved for members of the Anglican Church. They belonged to a chapel counter-culture, thriving in the growing industrial towns. Erasmus’s freethinking apart, their intellectual avant-garde were Unitarians, like Josiah.⁸ When Joseph Priestley came to Birmingham in 1780 to serve as minister of the New Meeting House, the Lunar Society acquired a powerful ally in the leading Unitarian philosopher, chemist, and theologian of the day.

Priestley studied airs and gases, and arguably discovered oxygen (and ammonia, carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide… the list goes on). His researches intrigued Erasmus, who soon had people breathing ‘6 gallons of pure oxygene a day’ from balloon-like bladders to cure their lung diseases. Wedgwood thought Priestley a genius. Josiah supplied the minister with lab-ware, subsidized his experiments, and followed up with industrial trials. Priestley’s works provided clues about clays and colours, which Josiah used to improve the pottery’s output. The Wedgwood firm even honoured their preacher by casting a medallion with his bust in bas-relief.⁹

Priestley’s theology was probably even more influential, for it shaped the outlook of three generations of intermarried Darwins and Wedgwoods. He aimed to restore Christianity to its pristine purity and make it a religion of universal happiness in this life and the next. Anglicans found this dangerous, with God ordaining happiness for everyone impartially, without regard for rank or ritual. It was damnable too. For Priestley immortal souls do not exist any more than immaterial ‘spirits’ in chemistry. Nor were miracles and mysteries like the Trinity and the Incarnation part of his Christianity. God’s benevolence is expressed in a wholly material world, where the laws of nature hold sway and everything has a physical cause. Human flesh is resurrected in the next life, as Jesus’s was, according to some unknown physical law.

This was a robust, hopeful faith, reflecting the self-confidence of the new industrial élite. As in some self-correcting engine, pleasure and pain operate almost mechanically on people to improve them. Those who abide by Christian principles will live this life happily. In the next, any remaining defective parts will be repaired, and everyone will be restored to a perfect existence. Wedgwood remained Priestley’s disciple and appointed a Unitarian minister to teach in his school at Etruria. Erasmus’s young son Robert (Charles’s father) was educated here, as were the ‘Wedgwoodikins’ – as Erasmus called them – Jos Jr and Susannah (Charles’s mother).

Not all Unitarians went so far as to deny a soul. On the other hand freethinkers like Erasmus went much further, discarding the Bible and Jesus as well – and claiming that ‘no particular providence is necessary to roll this Planet round the Sun.’¹⁰ But all shared an optimistic egalitarianism in the long eighteenth-century summer before the French Revolution of 1789.

Erasmus’s wife drank gin and died inebriate, leaving him with five children. A decade’s philandering followed, and then, at forty-nine, Erasmus found himself fat, lame, and in love – to which end he dedicated his devastating pen:

This was to a beautiful married patient, herself unconventional and the illegitimate daughter of an earl. When her rich husband died in 1780, the widowed Erasmus married her, moved in, and shifted his operations to her country mansion outside Derby. They pooled their eight offspring, who lived amid the trappings of wealth (Erasmus commanded ten guineas a day – four months’ wages for a farm hand). Included among the growing brood were his two bastards and her late husband’s one. Such open profligacy was a sign that a fashionable libertinism affected the best families. But then polite society seemed to be cemented by its adulteries and ménages, and Dr Johnson advised sensible wives to turn a blind eye to philandering husbands.¹¹ This wasn’t what Priestley meant by the pleasure-and-pain principle, but sin and sex were peeling apart, and Erasmus prescribed the latter to cure the guilt of the former.

In 1783 his son Robert made room for the first of seven more babies when he left for Edinburgh University. Robert was reluctant to take up medicine at first, and Edinburgh had melancholy associations. His eldest brother, Charles, had died delirious and paralysed as a student there five years earlier, having infected his finger dissecting a child’s brain. But after the death, Erasmus’s medical hopes had transferred to Robert, and the Doctor had to be obeyed.

Erasmus himself was not above pulling strings. Robert switched to the University of Leiden and received his MD in only two years, for a thesis partly written by Erasmus, or based on his work. Erasmus settled his twenty-year-old son into a practice in the quaint old market town of Shrewsbury. It was an ideal spot, the resort of Shropshire’s leading families who came for the ‘balls, suppers,’ and ‘oyster-feasts.’ It was only a day’s journey from Birmingham and Etruria, yet far enough from the family home to ensure his independence. Erasmus’s contacts brought Robert a steady stream of patients, while the Lunaticks inducted him into London’s élite scientific club, the Royal Society, in the hope that it would give him a philosophical bent. Robert not only had his father’s money; he had his shrewdness and sympathy, and an uncanny ability to win patients’ confidence. Business was brisk, and the Darwin name acted as a beacon.¹²

The hysterical aftermath to the French Revolution threatened to dim that beacon. Erasmus was a democrat, who cheered the ‘success of the French against a confederacy of kings’ – indeed, who thought ‘a goose may govern a kingdom’ as well as any ‘idiot… in his royal senses.’ In Britain a period of unprecedented repression set in: radical Dissenters were attacked for believing in the ‘ wrongs of Providence, and rights of Man.’ The Lunaticks’ republicanism was ridiculed, their egalitarian religion denounced. Erasmus had put out feelers for the post of Poet Laureate, but what chance now? The Lord Chamberlain seemed curiously indisposed to offer a royal reward to this supporter of the American and French Revolutions – this poet of love and machines who spreads ‘the happy contagion of Liberty.’

Erasmus was versifying about the new French liberties and finishing his medico-evolutionary book Zoonomia when Priestley fell into the ‘sacrilegious hands of the savages of Birmingham.’ His chapel and house were gutted by a mob crying ‘No philosophers – Church and King for ever.’ The riots of 1791 spelled the end of the Lunar Society. Priestley was offered asylum at Etruria but eventually fled to America. Darwin’s erotic botany was denounced as titillating trash; his ‘atheism’ lambasted as the sort of demoralizing philosophy which had spawned the Terror. This backlash finally put an end to the fashionable libertinism of Erasmus’s day. It ushered in a period of respectability and evangelical rectitude, which was to mark the younger generations of Darwin-Wedgwoods.

Wedgwood was now in bad health. He saw his second son Tom – a keen chemical (and opium) experimenter – suffer a nervous breakdown. With England and France at war in 1793, he withdrew from the business and made out his will. He placed the factory in the hands of his eldest son, Jos II, now married to a squire’s daughter, Bessy Allen.¹³

Marriage for the Darwins, like everything else, was managed by old Erasmus. For Robert he picked that Etruscan beauty of the Lunar circle, Josiah’s daughter Susannah. She had been in and out of the Darwins’ Derby house since childhood, and had given Erasmus music lessons. Clever and capable, she was her father’s favourite. Josiah and Erasmus reached an understanding that Robert would marry her when his means permitted. In the event they wed in April 1796, a year after Josiah’s death. Robert was now established, and Susannah’s £25,000 inheritance was an acceptable addition to the family fortune.¹⁴

Robert bought land on the edge of Shrewsbury, on a steep 100-foot bank along the Severn, and built a plain but imposing red-brick residence, The Mount. With five bays adorning the two-and-a-half storeys, and ample lower wings, it emphasized the young doctor’s stature. He was a man of substance, in every way: tall, six feet two inches, with a steadily increasing girth. Their first child was a girl, Marianne; two more daughters followed, Caroline in 1800 and Susan in 1803, the year after Erasmus’s peaceful death. Then came their first son. Susannah delivered him on 29 December 1804, five years to the day after Robert’s elder brother, a rich solicitor with a bank of debts, had drowned himself in the River Derwent.¹⁵ They named the baby after him and his late grandfather – Erasmus.

The second generation Wedgwoods were – like the Darwins – aspiring gentry. Jos was Sheriff of Dorset, and dashed around ‘like Royalty,’ in a velvet-curtained carriage drawn by four white horses. In the war economy the pottery business had slumped; Jos moved back to Staffordshire to take charge of the firm and, unhappy as a manufacturer, sought a second home in the country, a weekend bolthole away from the business grind. Robert Darwin loaned him £30,000 to buy a thousand-acre estate near the Staffordshire village of Maer, an hour’s ride from Etruria and thirty miles from Shrewsbury. The manor had a large Elizabethan house, Maer Hall, set in extensive gardens (designed by Capability Brown) on a hill overlooking a lake, and surrounded by woods full of game. Here Jos and Bessy came to live in 1807 with their six children. On 2 May 1808, when Bessy was forty-four, their last baby, Emma, was born. Jos’s social elevation was reflected in his choice of schools. He sent the two oldest boys to Eton.¹⁶

Susannah Darwin was long-suffering as the Doctor’s wife, amanuensis, and receptionist. He might have been sympathetic to patients, but he had a brusqueness at home that sat incongruously with his ‘high squeaky voice.’ Even trifles riled him, and sometimes Susannah caught the brunt of his temper. Since her difficult second pregnancy, her ‘old life and spirits’ had waned, and she aged quickly. ‘Everybody seems young but me,’ she once sighed to Jos at The Mount.¹⁷

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

DARWIN

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgements

A Devil’s Chaplain?

1809–1831

1
Catching a Falling Christian

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

DARWIN

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgements

A Devil’s Chaplain?

1809–1831

1Catching a Falling Christian

1
Catching a Falling Christian