James R.Moore
Each age fashions nature in its own image. In the nineteenth century, the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–82) recast the living world in the image of competitive, industrial Britain. He abandoned the Bible as a scientific authority and explained the origin of living things by divinely ordained natural laws. Once destined for the church, he became the high priest of a new secular order, proclaiming a struggling, progressive, and law-bound nature to a struggling, improving, and law-abiding society. For his devotion to science and his exemplary life, he received England’s highest religious honor when scientists joined churchmen and politicians of all parties to inter his mortal remains in Westminster Abbey.
Darwin was born at Shrewsbury in 1809, the second son of a wealthy Whig household. His father was a freethinking physician; his mother, a conservative Unitarian. Upright and respectable, they had Charles christened in the local Anglican Church. As a boy, he attended chapel with his mother and was first educated by the minister. After her death in 1817, he sat under a future bishop at Shrewsbury School and learned to despise the classics. Chemistry was more to his taste, and his first experiments were conducted in a garden shed with his brother, Erasmus. Five years older, Erasmus followed their father into medicine at Edinburgh University, leaving Charles in the care of his sisters. He fretted and his lessons suffered, so, in 1825, his father sent him to study medicine with Erasmus.
Edinburgh was liberal and cosmopolitan, full of brash freethinkers. Charles struck up a friendship with one of them, Dr. Robert E.Grant (1793–1874), Britain’s leading invertebrate zoologist. Together they scoured the coast for exotic sea life and attended the university’s Plinian Society, in which students and staff debated hot topics in natural history. Grant was an atheist and evolutionist, following the French naturalist Jean Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck (1744–1829); the Plinian served as a platform for his and other members’ radical, materialist ideas. Here Charles first saw scientific heresy punished when a fellow student’s remarks on the identity of mind and brain were struck from the minutes.
Charles dropped out of medicine, unable to stomach surgery. To cure his indirection, his father prescribed a stint at Cambridge University to train for the Church of England. A country parish would make few demands on his son’s faith; he would have a respectable social role, a guaranteed income, and, above all, the leisure to indulge his Edinburgh interest in natural history. Charles read a few divinity books and decided there was nothing in them he could not say he believed. In 1828, he went up to Christ’s College to study for the B.A. and ordination.
Cambridge was strict and feudal, a market town dominated by a medieval university. Here the professors were untainted by French radicalism. They included clergymen like John Stevens Henslow (1796–1861), who taught Charles botany, and Adam Sedgwick (1785– 1873), who introduced him to geology. These men believed that living species had been created miraculously and that species and society alike were kept stable by God’s will. This was the reigning orthodoxy, enshrined in required textbooks by the Rev. William Paley (1743–1805). Everyone conformed to it, more or less. Unbelievers were unwelcome. In 1829, when a
renegade Cambridge graduate, the Rev. Robert Taylor, attempted an “infidel mission” to the university, he was hounded out of town. Charles never forgot the example of this apostate priest, dubbed “the Devil’s Chaplain.”
In August 1831, after a geological fieldtrip with Sedgwick, Darwin found a letter at home from Henslow offering him a place as captains companion aboard H.M.S. Beagle. This was the turning point of his life. The Church could wait. His path to a country parish was now diverted via a voyage around the world. For five years, Darwin collected specimens, kept a diary, and made countless notes. He dreamed of becoming a parson-naturalist, and his religious beliefs and practices remained conventional. Like his professors, he did not take Genesis to be a literal account of creation, but he quoted Scripture as a supreme moral authority. He carried a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost with him and, on Henslow’s recommendation, the first volume of Charles Lyell’s (1797–1875) Principles of Geology (1830–33). Lyell, a Unitarian, argued that the earth’s crust had been laid down over countless ages according to natural law. Darwin was convinced. More and more, he saw himself as a geologist, and he began to theorize about the formation of islands and continents and the causes of extinction. The Beagle’s aristocratic captain, Robert FitzRoy (1805–
65), disagreed. He held to the literal interpretation of Genesis, and his faith became a foil for Darwin’s developing science. Equally, it was a reminder of Tory-Anglican prejudice. FitzRoy’s defense of slave-owning colonial Catholics outraged Darwin’s Whig abolitionist morals, although in 1836 they jointly published an article vindicating the moral influence of missionaries in Tahiti.
Nothing on the voyage prepared Charles for the political sea change at home. The ferment was palpable in March 1837, when he took lodgings in London near Erasmus to seek expert help with his Beagle collections. Successive Whig governments had tackled corruption, extended the franchise, and opened public offices to non-Anglicans. Angry radicals and nonconformists, unappeased, demanded further concessions, including the disestablishment of the Church of England. A national movement was already under way, leading to a general strike in August 1842. For Britain, these were the century’s most turbulent years; for Darwin, they were the most formative.
He entered scientific society, his fame as the Beagle’s naturalist preceding him. Here materialism and evolution were debated as in Edinburgh, though, again, he had little to prepare him—only his copy of Lyell’s Principles, with its refutation of Lamarck. Evolution had been taken up by radical naturalists and medical men, not just as a true theory of life but as a political weapon for attacking miracle-mongering creationists—Oxbridge professors and Tory placemen—who kept scientific institutions in a stranglehold.
To the radicals, evolution meant material atoms moving themselves to ever higher states of organization, just as social atoms—humans— could. It was nature’s legitimation of democracy in science and society alike.
Darwin himself was rising fast. Within months he had a huge government grant to publish his Beagle research. Lyell became his patron at the elite Geological Society and saw him on to the governing council.
Here Darwin read papers before the Oxbridge dons, and one of them, the Rev. William Whewell (1794–
1866), the president, asked him to become a secretary. All in all, the young man was a paragon of public respectability. But, in private, the voyage, the political ferment, and specialist reports on his collections had shattered his orthodoxy; he became a closet evolutionist. In a series of pocket notebooks, started in 1837, Darwin began working out a theory that would transform the study of life. His aim was to explain the origin of all plant and animal species, including the human mind and body, by divinely ordained natural laws.
Such a theory was dangerous— “oh you Materialist!” he jotted half in jest (C.Darwin 1987, 291)—and it was sure to be damned as atheistic by those he least wished to offend. So secrecy was vital.
About this time, Darwin became unwell, with headaches and stomach troubles. Insomnia and nightmares plagued him, and once he even dreamed of public execution. He felt like a prisoner in London, tied down by
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his Beagle work, theorizing about evolution, and dreading the consequences. In his notebooks, he devised protective strategies lest he should ever publish. He would pitch his theory to Anglican creationists by emphasizing its superior theology. A world populated by natural law was “far grander” than one in which the Creator interferes with himself, “warring against those very laws he established in all organic nature.”
Just think— Almighty God personally lavishing on earth the “long succession of vile Molluscous animals!”
“How beneath the dignity of him, who is supposed to have said let there be light & there was light”
(C.Darwin 1987, 343).
In mid-1842, Darwin took up the theme again in a pencil sketch of his theory, which he now called
“natural selection.” It seemed so obvious: Nature alone “selects” the best-adapted organisms, those celebrated in Paley’s Natural Theology (1802) as proofs of a designing Providence. They survive the constant struggle for food described in the Rev. Thomas Malthus’s (1766–1834) Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), passing on their adaptive advantage to offspring. In this way, Darwin believed, the laws governing “death, famine, rapine, and the concealed war of nature” bring about “the highest good, which we can conceive, the creation of the higher animals.” Good from evil, progress from pain: This was a boost for God. “The existence of such laws should exalt our notion of the power of the omniscient Creator”
(C.Darwin 1909, 51–2).
Darwin might have sounded like a parson, but the Church was now the last thing on his mind. He knew that his theory undermined the “whole fabric” of Anglican orthodoxy. Let one species alter, he noted tartly, and the whole creationist edifice “totters & falls” (C.Darwin 1987, 263). With such ideas, he was plainly unfit to seek ordination, quite apart from his devotion to geology and his bad health. In 1838, Charles’s father had opened the family purse to endow him as a gentleman naturalist. Months later, Charles married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood and began making plans to escape from London. In September 1842, they moved out fifteen miles to the Kentish village of Downe, where Charles fulfilled his old ambition to be a parish naturalist. His new home was the former parsonage, Down House. Here his clerical camouflage was complete.
Emma became his full-time nurse and the mother of ten. She was a sincere Christian, like all Wedgwoods of her generation: Unitarian by conviction, Anglican in practice. Charles differed from her painfully. Ever since their engagement, when he revealed his evolution heresy to her, she had feared that in death they would be separated, and he would suffer eternal torments. Emma’s anxiety remained a sad undercurrent throughout the marriage, her heartache and prayers increasing with his illness.
Darwin’s own feelings sometimes showed, as on the rare occasions he mooted his theory to friends. It was criminal, “like confessing a murder,” he confided to a colleague, Joseph Hooker. In 1845, when Sedgwick damned the anonymous evolutionary potboiler Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) for being subversive and unscientific, Darwin read his old professor’s review with “fear & trembling.” He had just finished a draft of his own theory and given Emma instructions for publishing it “in case of my sudden death” (Burkhardt et al. 1985–97, 3:2, 43, 258).
Events came to a head when he had a serious breakdown after his father’s death in 1848. For the first time, he felt sure that he himself was about to die. Four months at a spa worked wonders, but he returned home only to see his eldest daughter taken ill. When Annie died tragically in April 1851, at age ten, he found no comfort in Emma’s faith. After years of backsliding, he finally broke with Christianity. His father’s death had spiked the faith; Annie’s clinched the point. Eternal punishment was immoral. He would speak out and be damned.
Down House was now his pulpit; evolution, the new “gospel.” He pressed on through sickness and sorrow, polishing his theory, extending it, finding illustrations everywhere. Finally, in 1856, he was ready to write it up. His confidants—Lyell now, as well as Hooker and Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)—egged
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him on. Huxley, angry and anticlerical, baited him with juicy tidbits, like the “indecency” of jellyfish cross-fertilizing through the mouth. Darwin, about to start the Origin of Species (1859), shared the lewd jest with Hooker: Good grief, he spouted, “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!” (Burkhardt et al. 1985–97, 4:140, 6:178).
But he was the apostate now, touting not treachery but a “grander” theology than Anglican creationism.
His book would be a hymn to the Creator’s immutable laws by which the “higher animals” had evolved.
The Origin of Species did not once use the word “evolution,” but “creation” and its cognate terms appeared more than one hundred times. At the front, opposite the title, stood a quotation from Francis Bacon (1561–
1626) on studying God’s works as well as his Word, and another from Whewell on “general laws” as God’s way of working. On the last page, Darwin rhapsodized about the “grandeur” of viewing nature’s “most beautiful and most wonderful” diversity as the product of the “several powers…originally breathed into a few forms or into one.” From start to finish, the Origin was a pious work, “one long argument” against miraculous creationism but equally a reformer’s case for creation by law (C.Darwin 1959, 719, 759).
There was doublethink in it and a certain subterfuge. The book was the man, after all—ambiguous, even contradictory. In the end, the Origin held multiple meanings; it could become all things to everyone.
Radicals like brother Erasmus loved it, the theology notwithstanding. Anglican diehards loathed it, and some, like Sedgwick, muttered about Darwin’s eternal destiny. Emma now worried more about her husband’s present suffering, his anxiety and illness, as the Origin went into the world. But she still prayed that these pains would make him “look forward…to a future state” in which their love would go on forever (Burkhardt et al. 1985–97, 9:155).
Not all Anglicans damned Darwin. The “celebrated author and divine” quoted in later editions of the Origin was the Rev. Charles Kingsley (1819–75), novelist, amateur naturalist, and professor of history at Cambridge. His plug for Darwin’s theology—it seemed “just as noble” as miraculous creationism (C.Darwin 1959, 748)—was timely but timid, a mere “yea” to the hearty “amen” from the Oxford geometry professor, the Rev. Baden Powell (1796–1860). Writing in the Broad Church manifesto Essays and Reviews (1860), he declared that the Origin “must soon bring about an entire revolution of opinion in favour of the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature” (Powell 1860, 139). For such remarks, Powell and his fellow authors were hounded for heresy and two of them eventually prosecuted. In 1861, when a private petition was got up in their defense, Darwin rallied to the cause, adding his signature. He welcomed the essayists’ efforts to “establish religious teaching on a firmer and broader foundation” (Burkhardt et al. 1985–
97, 9:419).
Worse heretics embarrassed the Church from without, and, during the 1860s and 1870s, Darwin was repeatedly asked to back them. But although the Origin became all things to everyone, he found this impossible. He steered clear of public support for religious heretics—in Great Britain. Only in the United States did he allow freethinkers to use his name. They called themselves the Free Religious Association, and their creed, printed as Truths for the Times, augured “the extinction of faith in the Christian Confession” and the development of a humanistic “Free Religion” (Abbot 1872, 7). Darwin wrote that he agreed with
“almost every word” and allowed his remark to be published (Desmond and Moore 1991, 591).
Meanwhile, at Downe, his dual life went on. For years he had worked closely with the incumbent, the Rev. John Brodie Innes. Together they started a benefit society for the local laborers, with Darwin as guardian, and Innes made his friend treasurer of the parish charities and the village school. But in 1871, a boorish new vicar took over and soon fell out with the Darwins. Charles cut his ties with the charities; Emma left the church for one a few miles away. The neighbors hardly noticed their absence. The “great folks” in Down House continued to be parish paternalists, tending the social fabric. With Emma’s help, Charles
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started a temperance reading room in an old hall, where, for a penny a week, working-men could smoke, play games, and read “respectable” literature without resorting to the pub.
In 1871, his long-awaited Descent of Man came out bearing the imprimatur of his daughter Henrietta. Parts, he had feared, would read like an infidel sermon—“Who w[oul]d ever have thought I sh[oul]d turn parson”!
(Burkhardt et al. 1994, 7124)—and he asked her to tone them down. Emma, too, had jogged the family censor, reminding her that, however “interesting” the book’s treatment of morals and religion might be, she would still “dislike it very much as again putting God further off” (Litchfield 1915, 2:196). Henrietta dutifully preened the proofs, and the Descent caused few commotions. For her good work, she was given a free hand in Charles’s biographical sketch of his grandfather. These proofs she pruned. Erasmus Darwin appeared in 1879 shorn of everything religiously risqué.
No one curbed Darwin’s candor in his own biography, written between 1876 and 1881. But, then, it was intended for the family, not publication. Here he gave his fullest statement ever on religion (Darwin 1958, 85–96). At first he had been unwilling to abandon Christianity and had even tried to “invent evidence” to confirm the Gospels, which had prolonged his indecision. But just as his clerical career had died a slow
“natural death,” so his faith had withered gradually. There had been no turning back once the deathblow fell. His dithering had crystallized into a moral conviction so strict that he could not see how anyone—even Emma—“ought to wish Christianity to be true.” If it were, “the plain language” of the New Testament
“seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.”
These hard, heartfelt words recalled the bitter months and years after his father’s death. Since then, Darwin’s residual theism had weakened, worn down by controversy. Now as one with “no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward,” he confessed, “I…must be content to remain an Agnostic.” An unbeliever, yes, but still an upright man, living without the threat of divine wrath. “I feel no remorse from having committed any great sin,” he assured Emma and the children. “I believe that I have acted rightly in steadily following and devoting my life to science.”
Charles entrusted the autobiography to Francis, the son who shared his biological interests. William, the eldest, was asked to tackle a more sensitive matter. He had married a relative of one of the Free Religious Association’s founders, so was well placed to ask in 1880 for his father’s endorsement of Truths for the Times to be stopped. He did not explain why this was necessary, but the Americans complied.
William’s intervention, like Henrietta’s editing, served to conceal Charles’s identity and restore it to the family. As his anxious life drew to a close, he was his own man again, safe at Downe, guarded by loved ones. They knew him in different ways, for he had shown them his separate sides. To the daughters, he was the respectable evolutionist, careful not to offend; to his sons, he was the radical unbeliever whose worst heresies were tucked away in the autobiography (as they once had been in pocket notebooks). Only Emma knew him as he knew his own divided self, and he was desperate that she should survive him. With her guidance, the world would know only the “Darwin” the family chose to reveal.
Not that no one pried. Within weeks of his brother Erasmus’s death in August 1881, Darwin was, it seems, visited by the dowager Lady Hope, an evangelical temperance worker who read the Bible from door to door among the poor, the sick, and the elderly. She later claimed to have found Darwin himself reading the Bible, and this story, first published in 1915, became the basis of a deathbed-conversion legend.
About the same time, Edward Aveling (1851–98), a young medical doctor and militant secularist, came to lunch at Down House. It was he (not Karl Marx, as was long believed) to whom Darwin had written, refusing permission for an atheist primer, The Student’s Darwin (1881), to be dedicated to him. Books like Aveling’s, and current secularist agitation, had, in fact, probably made Darwin cautious about his exposure
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in the United States, and after lunch he remained coy. Aveling tried to extract an atheistic confession.
Darwin insisted on calling himself an agnostic. Only one subject could they agree on, Christianity. Darwin admitted that it was not “supported by evidence” but pointed out that he had reached this conclusion very slowly. “I never gave up Christianity until I was forty years of age” (Aveling 1883, 4–5). It had taken his father’s and Annie’s deaths to make him shake off the last shreds. And even then he had refused to speak out or to assail people’s faith. He never was a comrade at arms.
In this period, Darwin thought much on the eternal questions—chance and design, providence and pain—
and struggled with despondency, feeling worn out. He saw his last book, on earthworms, published and resigned himself to joining them. On April 19, 1882, he succumbed to a massive heart attack. Emma and the daughters were present to hear him whisper, “I am not in the least afraid to die” (F.Darwin 1887, 3:358).
The family had planned for a funeral at Downe, but it was not to be. In London, Darwin’s scientific friends lobbied for a public funeral in Westminster Abbey. Churchmen joined in, heralding the event as a visible sign of “the reconciliation between Faith and Science” (Moore 1982, 103). On April 26, at high noon, Darwin’s body was borne up the nave at Westminster as white-robed choristers sang: “I am the resurrection.” Behind them in the procession came the Darwin children, followed by the elders of science, State, and Church. After the service, the coffin was carried to the north end of the choir screen, where the floor was draped with black cloth that dropped into the grave. Anglican priests rubbed shoulders with agnostic scientists; the Tory leaders closed ranks with Liberal lords. The coffin was lowered, and the choristers sang: “His body is buried in peace, but his name liveth evermore.” Emma stayed at Downe.
See also Evolution; Evolutionary Ethics
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Browne, Janet. “Missionaries and the Human Mind: Charles Darwin and Robert FitzRoy.” In Darwin’s Laboratory:
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——. Charles Darwin. Vol. 1: Voyaging. London: Cape, 1995.
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——. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882, with Original Omissions Restored. Ed. by Nora Barlow.
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——. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: A Variorum Text. Ed. by Morse Peckham. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959.
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