Charles Darwin’s contribution to science stands virtually without peer. He was a colossus in the field of evolutionary biology. He was also a gentleman, a husband, and an invalid.
Lyn Squire, author of Fatally Inferior (Level Best Books 2024 – Amazon US | Amazon UK), the second book in the Dunston Burnett Trilogy, fills in the gaps.
Charles Darwin with his eldest son William Darwin, circa 1842.
THE WELL-KNOWN
Everyone knows that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution stands as one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of scientific inquiry. Darwin was a prolific writer completing more than a dozen major books in his seventy-three-year lifetime, but none as famous, revolutionary, impactful and enduring as On the Origin of Species published on November 24, 1859.
Darwin had long known how breeders improved their stock of race horses by the careful mating of their fastest animals. This process of human selection could be seen in livestock, birds, fruits, vegetables, all designed to develop the most desired traits in each species. Darwin wanted to know if Mother Nature had a similar mechanism. The writings of economist Thomas Malthus provided a clue. He argued that the innate tendency of humans to breed led to populations expanding beyond their means, necessitating a fight for survival. Darwin had found the springboard for his monumental intellectual leap to the idea of natural selection. Survival of the fittest! One general law governing the evolution of all organic beings – multiply; vary; let the strongest live; let the weakest die.
When it finally appeared in 1859, his theory of evolution was underpinned by a vast array of evidence. Darwin had spent five years aboard HMS Beagle collecting specimens throughout the Galapagos archipelago, and then another twenty-three years compiling observations from around the world and conducting his own experiments before he felt his life’s work was ready for public scrutiny. As Darwin said in his autobiography, “science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.”
THE NOT SO WELL-KNOWN
Many of those aware of Darwin’s contribution to our understanding of evolution may know little else about the man. Other aspects of his life, however, shed light on his research and are of interest in their own right. The three selected here are: the unsparing criticism of his writings; his marriage; and his chronic illness.
Criticism
Publication of On the Origin of Species caused an uproar throughout England. Battle lines were quickly drawn between the new breed of fact-based researchers who readily embraced Darwin’s ground-breaking thesis, and the old guard of religious traditionalists with their unshakeable belief in the Bible’s account of God’s creation of man. This was science pitted against religion in a life and death battle for the minds and souls of mankind. Darwin was bombarded with scathing reviews in academic journals, blistering editorials in the leading newspapers and crude cartoons in the cheaper broadsheets.
The Great Debate held in Oxford barely six months after the book’s appearance, illustrates the ugly nature of the clash between firm-in-their-belief theologians and Darwin’s band of truth-seeking scientists. Both factions behaved in a most unbecoming manner with tasteless taunts and simian slurs from one side answered by childish name-calling and anti-church abuse from the other. The city of dreaming spires was rocked to the core, buzzing with increasingly far-fetched accounts of the opening salvos in what, from then on, was all-out war.
Darwin, though, was a gentleman and a scholar from his time at Christ’s College, Cambridge to his later years at Down House, his home in Kent, and often chose dignified silence over open warfare in press or person. In this he was fortunate in having Thomas Huxley, a brash but brilliant comparative anatomist, lead the charge in Darwin’s defense. Huxley even described himself as Darwin’s “bulldog”. After an offensive question addressed to him by Bishop Wilberforce at the Oxford debate, he famously replied with words to the effect that he, Huxley, would rather be an ape than a bishop.
Even mild-mannered Darwin sometimes expressed his displeasure and disappointment with his academic antagonists. St. George Mivart, a young biologist, was one such. He thoroughly savaged Darwin’s Descent of Man in the prestigious Quarterly Review. Worse still, he ruthlessly criticised an innocuous article on divorce by Darwin’s son. Darwin was furious. As it happened, Mivart was seeking membership of the famous Athenaeum Club and Darwin and his supporters, all prominent members, scuttled his election. A petty response, it might seem, but this was an attack on his family.
Marriage
Darwin had a long and happy marriage. He and his wife, Emma, were, however, first cousins. They had a common grandfather in the person of Josiah Wedgewood. In the nineteenth century, the offspring of marriages between such close relatives were thought to suffer loss of vigour and even infertility, their frailties then passed on to future generations, the yet-to-be-born progeny already burdened by their inheritance.
Darwin was aware from correspondence with stock breeders throughout England that continued inbreeding of domesticated animals affected the general health and fertility of subsequent generations. But did the same law of nature apply to humans as was commonly thought? That was what Darwin desperately wanted to know. It is little wonder, then, that Darwin devoted so much time and effort to studying the effects of crossbreeding and inbreeding in plants and animals, and even canvassed, albeit unsuccessfully, for the inclusion in the 1871 population census of a question on the number of children born to parents who were first cousins. Far from being just an intriguing line of scientific inquiry, this was, for Charles Darwin, something frighteningly personal.
Sadly, the Darwins lost three of their children – Mary, Anne and little Charles – in infancy. Death had indeed been an all-too-frequent visitor to the Darwin household, but this was not uncommon for large families in the nineteenth century, and their remaining seven children reached maturity. Of those, three had offspring, providing the Darwins with ten grandchildren. Their fears had proven unfounded.
Illness
In youth, Darwin was a vigorous, healthy man. For the forty years of his adult existence, however, he suffered from bouts of a never-fully-diagnosed, gastro-intestinal illness. His “accursed stomach” as he called it, caused retching, flatulence, fatigue and vomiting to the point where he was obliged to keep a commode, hidden behind a partition, in his study. (The visitor to Down House, only an hour and a half’s journey from Central London, can view the scientist’s carefully restored study, including the partition.)
Darwin consulted several different doctors and tried every conceivable treatment, some prescribed by respected professionals, others by practitioners little better than quacks. He tried the water therapy offered at the Water Cure Establishment at Malvern which involved him being heated by a spirit lamp and then rubbed down with cold wet towels while his feet were immersed in a cold foot bath. Then he moved on to Dr E.W. Lane’s Moor Park hydropathic establishment which was much closer to Down House. And after that to the Wells House hydropathic establishment in Ilkley, West Yorkshire. At best, these treatments provided temporary relief, but whether that was a direct result of the therapies or simply the passage of time and natural recuperation is difficult to say. Either way, his suffering continued.
His chronic illness weighed on Darwin, as attested by its frequent mention in his autobiography. It is a measure of the man, however, that towards the end of his personal account of his life, he was able to remark, perhaps wryly, that: “Even ill-health, though it has annihilated several years of my life, has saved me from the distractions of society and amusement.”
Other reading
The above not-so-well-known selections barely skim the surface. If you wish to learn more about Darwin, an excellent source is the two-volume biography by Janet Browne, Voyaging and The Power of Place, published by Princeton University Press in 1995 and 2002 respectively. You will find a more personal, fascinating and shorter account of his life in The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, first published by Collins (London) in 1958.
Lyn Squire is the author of Fatally Inferior (Level Best Books, December 2024 - Amazon US | Amazon UK), a story of revenge set against the uproar that greeted publication of On the Origin of Species. Mr. Squire’s first novel in the Dunston Burnett Trilogy, Immortalised to Death (2023), was a First Place Category Winner in the 2023 Chanticleer International Book Awards. His next book, The Séance of Murder, scheduled for publication in 2025 will complete the trilogy.
