HEART OF DARWIN

By Richard Conniff

        In paintings and sculptures from the last years of his life, the great naturalist Charles Darwin gives the impression of a man deeply wishing he could be somewhere else. At the National Portrait Gallery in London, he keeps his rumpled hat clutched in one hand, ready to bolt for the door^[1]. At the Natural History Museum, he has his coat folded across his lap, as if yearning to shed the burden of fame and slip quietly into oblivion^[2]. On the ten-pound note, his eyes are haunted beneath a vast furrowed brow, and there’s dismay behind that Biblical white beard^[3].

        This image of Darwin is everywhere, and that seemed to me, on a recent trip to London, to be a pity. Even the founding father of evolutionary theory was not born a gloomy old man. I began to wonder if it might be possible to walk Darwin’s London^[4] and get a sense of him when he was still young and caught up in the fray.  The landmarks of his life turned out to be all around.  One day, for instance, I ducked into the Burlington Arcade, a handsome 1819 predecessor of the enclosed luxury shopping mall, where the bon ton of Darwin’s day shopped, and then via another arcade, out onto Albemarle Street.   To the right was the Royal Institution, where Darwin attended lectures. Brown’s Hotel, where a pro-Darwin group called the “X Club” used to meet in the 1860s, stood in mid-block.  And though Darwin’s publishing company got sold off a few years ago to a conglomerate, the seventh generation of John Murrays still presided over the company’s old house just down the street.  Murray^[5] said he was already being inundated with visitors anticipating next year’s big anniversaries of Darwin’s birth (1809) and of the publication of his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859).

        London had of course also changed.  I went to visit 36 Great Marlborough Street, where Darwin was living in a bachelor flat when he got his first tentative inkling of natural selection, in September 1838^[6], and found the site occupied by a fast food joint (slogan: “Scream if you want it faster”). I had better luck just below Trafalgar Square, where the Old Admiralty Building stands intact, screened off behind a handsome neoclassical colonnade from the broad avenue of government buildings called Whitehall. The modest u-shaped brick structure within served for centuries as headquarters of the Royal Navy and home ground to such storied mariners as Cook, Bligh, and Nelson.  In September 1831, the 23-year-old Darwin came here for his first meeting with Capt. Robert FitzRoy, who was seeking a gentleman naturalist to accompany him on a long expedition on HMS Beagle.

        The meeting went well: “Gloria in excelsis is the most moderate beginning I can think of,” Darwin wrote later that day.  Darwin was so eager to get started that he took lodgings around the corner on Spring Gardens, practically tucking himself in at night under the Admiralty’s left earlobe.

People are of course still talking about the consequences of the five years Darwin spent circumnavigating the globe aboard the Beagle. But he had hardly begun to think about evolution when the voyage ended, in 1836, as I was reminded at a lecture I attended one evening at the Linnean Society.  The “world’s oldest active biological society^[7]” occupies a wing of Burlington House on Piccadilly, and Darwin was of course a member (he complained, soon after the Beagle’s return, about an evening that featured “a couple of intensely stupid papers”). The meeting room was atmospheric, with oak window trim, a coffered plasterwork ceiling, and portraits of Darwin (gloomy) and his collaborator Alfred Russel Wallace on one wall. The audience, mostly elderly naturalists, sat on pew-like benches pushed close together, pleased to have the speaker^[8] toss them the sort of biological bonbons Darwin himself liked to collect: The mice on St. Kilda, for instance, are twice the size of those on the Scottish mainland, possibly because there are no weasels to send them fleeing down narrow boltholes. About Darwin, the tone was affectionate deprecation: By the time the Beagle reached the Galapagos, the speaker said, the young explorer was so homesick or bored that he didn’t bother going ashore on some islands. He also failed to recognize that the finches he collected were all finches, until the ornithologist John Gould pointed it out^[9] to him back in London. Then, though, he began to brood about beaks, islands, and the origin of species.

        Darwin did not need evolution to make his name. His South American fossils were an immediate sensation, and he won high praise for a talk to the Geological Society arguing that the coast of Chile had been formed from uplifted sea floor^[10]. (The scholarly acclaim left him feeling, he said, “like a peacock admiring its own tail.”) He gained admission to the prestigious Athenaeum Club on Pall Mall, a few minutes’ stroll from Trafalgar Square, and he confessed that the first time “I sat in that great drawing room, all on a sofa by myself, I felt just like a duke.”  

Along with career-building, the Darwin of the post-Beagle years was considering the pros and cons of marriage. As an object “to be beloved & played with,” he thought that a wife would be “better than a dog anyhow.^[11]” One afternoon I went out walking with Joe Cain, a senior lecturer in the history of biology at University College London. We headed to 2 Bedford Place, a few minutes from the college, where the geologist Leonard Horner used to live with his five highly educated daughters. Darwin was a frequent visitor. But his father steered him instead toward Emma Wedgwood, a first cousin, good-natured and with a handsome dowry. The two  were soon looking for their own first home in the same Bloomsbury neighborhood, though Emma prudently advised against living too close to  “the Horneritas.”

        They moved to a rented brick rowhouse on Upper Gower Street, which they nicknamed “Macaw Cottage” for the gaudy décor. The house was destroyed during World War II, Cain said, pointing out similar houses across the street that had survived. But what really interested him was the location. From his back garden, Darwin would have looked out on the college’s main building, where his old mentor Robert Grant had become professor of zoology. Grant had taught him basic field biology. But Darwin managed to avoid him for the three years he lived on Gower Street, apparently because he didn’t want his career tainted by Grant’s radical beliefs—including an early brand of evolutionary thinking.

        One Sunday I traveled by train and then bus to Downe Village, 15 miles away, where the young Darwins moved to escape the filth of the city. Their new home was known rather unpromisingly as Down House. But for a visitor still stuck on Darwin as éminence grise, the really startling thing about the house is the pervasive air of playfulness. He and Emma filled the place with 10 children. While Darwin struggled with an eight-year-long study of barnacle taxonomy, his offspring happily raided his supplies and sometimes lit out with his microscope seat, a burled wood stool on brass wheels. They used it, with a cane for an oar, to go punting around the first floor of the house.

        Darwin also seems to have engaged in a form of punting. In photographs of the study, his chair looks a little severe, high-backed and narrow. But in person, what catches the eye are the long bird-like iron legs borrowed from a bedstead, with wheels for scooting from bookshelf to table, or for checking out visitors from the window. Darwin also regularly went roaming from his study on foot, to dip snuff from a jug in the hall, or to check the mail delivered five times a day then. (The Darwin Correspondence Project counts 14,000 letters sent or received during his years there.) He sometimes played billiards with his butler, Joseph Parslow, and wrote, “I find it does me a deal of good, & drives the horrid species out of my head.”    

        This routine clearly suited Darwin. He and Emma enjoyed a remarkably compatible marriage (maybe it was that first cousin thing). She was relaxed and tolerant, even when Charles was studying earthworms and put a box of them on her prize Broadwood grand piano to see how they responded to the vibrations.  He in turn listened to her religious concern that his evolutionary thinking would keep them from being together for eternity. The first draft of the natural selection idea got put away in the game closet under the stairs, where it remained with the tennis racquets and croquet mallets for more than a decade. But the horrid species would in time come creeping back.

        From the house, I went out to a wooded path, called the Sandwalk, where Darwin used to stroll at midday. Some of the hazel, alder, and birch trees he planted still stand, and a scattering of bluebells were in flower. But for me the best thing about the walk was the point early on where Darwin sometimes veered off to dawdle among the botanical experiments in his hothouse. His dog, trotting contentedly along toward the farther reaches of the Sandwalk, would then collapse instantly into a state of utter dejection known to all as “the hot-house face.” That face would turn up in Darwin’s 1872 book On the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

         So would the faces of his children, who served as examples of the unity of expressive behavior in the human and animal worlds. Upstairs at Down House, photographs survive from around the time On the Origin of Species was published: One son goofily squashes his nose over to the side with a finger.  Another son, slightly younger, struggles to look more mature than his age. There’s a photo of Darwin on horseback, with a scribbled note that says, “Hurrah -- no letters to day. C.D.”  You get the feeling that at Down House, Darwin was taking notes on the natural history of his own family—and also basking in it.        

        In the end, Emma was right: they would not be together for eternity. He would suffer the fate of other great men and women, being buried in Westminster Abbey. She lies with one of their children in the churchyard in the middle of Downe Village. And if the Darwin of the old paintings and sculptures visibly yearns to be somewhere else, this is surely the place, back with Emma in their own private world, before he became a creature of his admirers and his antagonists, back before his science told him more perhaps than even he really wanted to know about the nature of life.

Richard Conniff has a book of his wildlife encounters due out from W.W. Norton next year.

THE TRAVEL ADVISORY

        Brown’s Hotel (brownshotel.com), on Albemarle Street in the Mayfair neighborhood, is conveniently located and steeped in history. In the 1860s, it was the meeting place of the “X Club,” including T.H. Huxley and others who lobbied for Darwinian ideas. Rudyard Kipling wrote “Jungle Book” there, and Winston Churchill came frequently to drink lunch.

        Bentley’s Oyster Bar & Grill (bentleys.org), a few minutes away on Swallow Street, is a comfortable spot to get dinner after a meeting at the Linnean Society. The Wolseley (thewolseley.com), at 160 Piccadilly, is a fashionable lunch place for spotting celebrities (or overhearing 20-something internet millionaires lament the dissipated night life in Shanghai), in a handsome setting of high vaulted ceilings, black lacquer walls with gold detailing, and bright light from the huge front windows.

        It’s a short walk to Maggs Brothers (maggs.com), in an unrestored Georgian townhouse on Berkeley Square. If you’re lucky, you might pick up a Darwin first edition (On the Origin of Species goes for about UK 89,000) or vintage anti-Darwinian propaganda (his face on a monkey’s body, for as little as UK350). Sotheran’s of Sackville Street  (sotherans.co.uk) also sells Darwiniana.

        In Downe Village, at the foot of the street where Darwin lived, stands the handsome Queens Head pub. The story passed down in one local family is that Darwin used to nip into the “snug” bar on the right, where he could enjoy a beer without being observed by the general public.  Along with decent food and drink, the pub has a rich history as the World War II local for American Eagle Squadron volunteers flying with the RAF out of nearby Biggin Hill airfield.

        Darwin certainly spent time across the street at the George and Dragon, but mainly in the course of fulfilling his duties as a village father. (Among other things, he was treasurer of the local Coal and Clothing Club.)

        The standard biography is Darwin by Adrian Desmond and James Moore.  And to sample Darwin’s words at first hand, consult the Darwin Correspondence Project’s excellent web site, www.darwinproject.ac.uk/ Finally, events will be taking place throughout Britain in 2009 to celebrate Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species. For details, check www.darwin200.org