Charles Darwin by A.N. Wilson

Author:A.N. Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

11

A Poker and a Rabbit

SO LYELL AND J. D. Hooker would present the papers of Wallace and of Darwin to the Linnean Society as a joint notion. ‘These gentlemen having independently and unknown to one another, conceived the very same ingenious theory to account for the appearance and perpetuation of varieties and specific forms on our planet, may both fairly claim the merit of being original thinkers in this important line of inquiry . . .’1

Darwin had not sought – yet – to launch his theory. The letter from Wallace had bounced him into it. He was like an actor being pushed on to the stage before he had fully mastered his role. This would have strained nerves more robust than Darwin’s. It is no surprise that the year which followed the meeting at the Linnean Society was marked by tension and anxiety, and all the physical symptoms which made Darwin’s life so difficult. It was also, as it happened, a year marked by family illnesses and deaths. Darwin’s most famous book came to birth prematurely, and in an atmosphere of misery.

Darwin was not a public performer. Speeches and lectures before audiences were never easy for him. As it happened, the summer of 1858 was a time when it would have been all but impossible for him to leave Down in order to make a momentous public utterance in London.

Building work had been in progress at Down House since September 1857. It was finished in June 1858, when, as Darwin wrote to William, his son at Rugby, ‘we entered two days ago into the new Dining Room, & it is charming’.2 The boy had sent him a cutting from The Times in which the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, son of the great Abolitionist, had denounced the Evil Trade. The hour of the great confrontation between Wilberforce and Darwin over matters of science lay two years in the future. Darwin on this occasion pronounced the bishop’s words to be ‘capital’.3

Building works and bishops were less distracting than illness. The beginning of June found Darwin confined to a sofa with a boil.4 Scarlet fever was raging in the village – three children died of it. On 18 June, Etty, now fifteen years old, was struck down with a high fever and a violent sore throat – diagnosed by Emma as a ‘quinsy’. They feared it was diphtheria, a disease which appears to have come from France in 1858 and was sweeping England in an epidemic wave. ‘No actual choking but immense discharge & much pain & inability to speak & very weak and rapid pulse, with a fearful tongue’.5 The doctor who ‘damped us yesterday much’, eventually pronounced the attack to be mild, and Etty would recover. Her baby brother Charles Waring Darwin, however, not yet two years old, the youngest child, developed scarlet fever.

As Darwin sat beside his little son, he was agonizing, in correspondence with Lyell, about the presentation to the Linnean Society. It was to have been on

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