Original spin

When Charles Darwin published his most controversial work, four friends took the brunt of the public storm. It is they, argues Janet Browne, who ensured the triumph of evolutionary theory

Original spin


The publication of The Origin of Species, and the ensuing debate, placed the issue of evolution before the Victorian public in a form that could not be ignored. Journalists, men of letters, merchants, businessmen, educators and ordinary men and women added their voices to the throng. Bishops, poets, kennel-hands and governesses read the book. Even Queen Victoria took an interest, although she confided to her daughter that she expected it would be too difficult to understand. Nor was the reaction confined to Britain. In France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Russia and North America, and progressively all over the globe, people discussed the idea of evolution by natural selection and relocated this controversial issue within their own cultural contexts. It was one of the first genuinely public debates about science.

Surprising as it may seem, there was little sustained opposition to Darwin's book on the grounds that it directly challenged the account of creation in Genesis. Learned biblical study since the Enlightenment had encouraged Christians increasingly to regard the early stories as potent metaphors rather than literal accounts. The real challenge of Darwinism for Victorians was that it turned life into an amoral chaos displaying no evidence of a divine authority or any sense of purpose or design.

One of the most well-known aspects of the Origin of Species controversy is that Darwin kept out of the limelight. He never enjoyed public debate, hated confrontations in which his honour or honesty might be called into question, preferred to stay quietly at home in the background, and was content to let others wave the flag more vigorously than he felt able to do himself. Privately, he believed that disagreements between scientists were generally fruitless. The underlying story is more complex. Darwin kept in close touch. Even though he stayed put at Down House, a barrage of correspondence was despatched and received daily. He used letters to persuade and to influence. He used them to get favourable reviews, correct mistakes, arrange translations and produce revised editions. Without this extraordinary correspondence, rising to a peak of some 500 letters a year after Origin of Species was published, his theory would have sunk. He was helped by the rapid development of the Victorian postal system and the expanding infrastructure of empire.

Scholars agree that the course of the Origin controversy was unique in several respects. The book's wide and immediate impact in Britain was greatly enhanced by a growing publishing industry and new review journals. It was greatly enhanced, too, by mid-century peace and prosperity, political stability and imperial expansion. The audience for science was the largest and most appreciative it had ever been, its appetite whetted by the development of local scientific societies, lending libraries, public lectures and exciting practical demonstrations, and reinforced by the broadening availability of manufactured goods and achievements in roads, railways, bridges, ships and canals. Writings such as Chambers's Vestiges and Tennyson's In Memoriam already helped readers explore the big issues of human existence, questions of origin, meaning and purpose.

Four of Darwin's friends carried the brunt of the public storm: each one an acknowledged specialist in his scientific field. They supported Darwin wholeheartedly even while pointing out flaws in his evidence or reasoning. They stood united, engaging in individualised battles on his behalf but also moving the debate further and wider, drawing in other thinkers, other topics, other implications, in an incremental process that ultimately generated major transformations in cultural attitudes and scientific thought.

The existence of this Darwinian alliance was perhaps the single most important feature of the debate and contributed markedly to the ultimate triumph of evolutionary theory. At its core were Charles Lyell, Joseph Hooker, Asa Gray and last, and most famous of all, Thomas Henry Huxley, the brilliant zoologist and comparative anatomist, who cast himself as "Darwin's bulldog".

The furore generated by evolutionary ideas pulled apes, anatomy, polemic, fear, disgust and sensationalism into a single debate. Benjamin Disraeli, the future Conservative prime minister, exposed the unease of his contemporaries in 1864 when he asked: "Is man an ape or an angel?" He went on to assure his audience that he was on the side of the angels. Others engaged with the Origin's arguments with philosophical curiosity. While John Herschel complained that natural selection was the law of "higgledy-piggledy", and that Darwin was not following traditional procedures of demonstration and proof, Henry Fawcett at Cambridge University and the philosopher John Stuart Mill compared the new style of reasoning favourably against the old. George Henry Lewes, when discussing natural selection in his Animal Life (1862), said: "it may be true but we cannot say that it is true". These thoughtful authors saw the argument's explanatory value and were not prepared to dismiss it out of hand simply for religious reasons.

Even those who disagreed with Darwin were mostly able to concede the merits of his case. The great philologist Friedrich Max Müller addressed Darwin's theories in lectures about the origin of speech in London, 1861-62. Müller forced his audience of fashionable swells to think carefully about what it was to be human. Had our gift of language developed from animal sounds? He thought not. Müller vigorously opposed evolutionary theory. Yet he praised the notion of natural selection and applied it enthusiastically to the descent and historical relationships of Indo-European languages.

Poets and authors were not far behind. Tennyson never accepted Darwin's proposals but was keen to meet him in 1868, when they were both on holiday in the Isle of Wight. Tennyson had been deeply affected by Chambers's Vestiges and did not trouble to distinguish the two books from each other. "Darwinism, man from ape, would that really make any difference? Time is nothing, are we not all part of deity?" he remarked to William Allingham in 1863. Tennyson's gloom about the void after death, although not generated by Darwinism, nevertheless moved him broadly in the same direction as Origin of Species. But perhaps Matthew Arnold spoke clearest of all for Victorians beset by religious doubt. In his poem "Dover Beach" (1851) the sea of faith that once supported spirituality was now nothing more than a "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar".

Towards the end of his life, it could almost be said that the Origin of Species devoured Darwin. The constant pressure was draining. Through the 1860s and 1870s he became ill more frequently and for longer periods. In 1866, when he re-emerged from the sickroom, he had become the frail old man with the enormous grey beard that everyone remembers. Yet he managed to write a number of other books following Origin of Species. The first, on orchids (1862), represented a very deliberate exploration of adaptations in nature, what he called "a flank move on the enemy". It was his answer to William Paley's heavenly watchmaker.

Scholars nowadays agree that The Descent of Man offered a far-reaching naturalistic account of human evolution but did not change many minds. The people who already accepted evolution continued to believe. Those who did not continued to disbelieve. Few readers wished to shrink the gap between mankind and animals quite so dramatically, however. If these ideas were accepted, wrote the Edinburgh Review, the constitution of society would be destroyed. Most reviewers noted Darwin's sincerity and depth of learning. Nevertheless there must have been a sense of deja vu. The animal-human boundary, the human soul and the divine origin of human morals had been the main topics of debate for 10 or 12 years. Young rationalist thinkers like Leslie Stephen spoke for many of the coming generation by saying, "What possible difference can it make whether I am sprung from an ape or an angel?"

With The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which appeared a year later, Darwin completed the account of evolution he began with Origin of Species. None of his other later writings had anything like the same public effect, although several of his final pieces, for instance on mental processes in infants, stimulated researchers. His last book was on earthworms (1881), one of the most popular books he ever published.

Towards the end he slowed down, preferring to work on plants and be with his family. In his seventies he enjoyed writing a little autobiography, not intending it for publication. In it he reviewed his life with great charm and modesty. Yet what a life it had been. Few men reach such heights of intellectual power or have their views discussed so widely and with such vigour. Even if people did not think they were descended from apes, they talked about it ceaselessly. For those who did believe, Darwin became a kind of prophet, a secular saint.

From the middle of the 1870s his life took on many of the trappings of celebrity culture. His portrait was circulated in illustrated magazines, he received requests for autographs, free copies of his books and advice, and his home was visited by sightseers. Young scientists increasingly asked to be admitted to his presence for a kind of personal benediction, either to eat lunch with the family or to enter his study, which became in people's minds an inner sanctum, the place where great thought had taken place.

Loved by his family, appreciated and admired by his friends, an intellectual beacon to many, in turn respected and reviled, Darwin came to the end of his life knowing that he had brought about an extraordinary transformation in scientific thought. His identity had become subsumed in that of his book. "If I had been a friend of myself, I should have hated me," he remarked with some humour to Huxley at the height of the controversy. "I wish I could feel all was deserved by me."

· This is an edited extract from Darwin's Origin of Species: A Biography, part of a series called Books That Shook the World published by Atlantic Books