Charles Darwin's seminal work, “On the Origin of Species,” was not just a triumph of science but of style. He was born on this day in 1809.
“Our descent then, is the origin of our evil passions!!” Darwin wrote. “The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather!”Darwin’s Delay is by now nearly as famous as Hamlet’s, and involves a similar cast of characters: a family ghost, an unhappy lover, and a lot of men digging up old bones.
Charles Darwin was a conventional man from an unconventional background. His grandfathers, Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood, were, as Jenny Uglow shows in her beautiful book “The Lunar Men” , close to the beating heart of the North of England Enlightenment in its most progressive phase. In the reaction that overwhelmed the country after the French Revolution, their circles were persecuted, but the family tradition remained one of plain speech and free thinking.
It was only in the late fifties, when he finally sat down to write “On the Origin of Species,” that he found a way forward. He realized that he had to write a completely new kind of story, in a tone that made it seem arrived at; he had to present dynamite as brick, and build a house, only to explode the old foundations. Long-felt speculation had to be presented as close-watched observation, and a general idea about life had to be presented as a sequence of ideas about dogs.
Instead of entering the argument by the front door of the temple, where people debate the origin of Earth and the destiny of man, Darwin, with an artless shrug, enters through the back door of a barn: Do we really know what happens when animals change? Well, yes, he says, and here’s what we know, very exactly. Nor is this a mere gesture, occupying a page or two and pointing in a general way toward an acknowledged truth.
Darwin’s gambit of beginning with dogs and pigeons was almost too successful; one of the readers employed by his publisher, John Murray, recommended in his report on “The Origin” that the book would sell much better if it were all pigeons, without the weird speculative stuff that came afterward.
But this turns out to be buildup, not letdown. After fourteen chapters of copious detail on the preening of the bronze-winged pigeon of Australia and the song of the European male bustard , the argument once again gets paid out: Gillian Beer, in her influential 1983 study “Darwin’s Plots,” identified basic ideas about variation, purpose, and development that Darwin learned from his philosophical predecessors and shared with the novelists of his day. No one who has read Beer’s book can ever read “Middlemarch” again without seeing it as a kind of mirror of, or practical application of, “The Origin.” Darwin’s writing, as much as Eliot’s, takes speculative argument and makes it look like empirical record-keeping.
Darwin was humble and modest in exactly the way that Inspector Columbo is. He knows from the beginning who the guilty party is, and what the truth is, and would rather let the bad guys hang themselves out of arrogance and overconfidence, while he walks around in his raincoat, scratching his head and saying, “Oh, yeah—just one more thing about that six-thousand-year-old Earth, Reverend Snodgrass . . .
Annie fell sick in 1850, with what seems to have been a form of tuberculosis, and her frantic parents spent months trying all the futile therapies that people had in the nineteenth century, not unlike the delaying actions of many contemporary cancer treatments. In the end, nothing helped, and Annie died at the age of ten, after a long vigil. Heartbroken, Darwin wrote a ten-page memorial and locked it in his desk.
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