Biography and the Changing Representations of Charles Darwin Many Branches Of

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xl:3 (Winter, 2010), 347–373.

MAKING DARWIN Janet Browne Making Darwin: Biography and the Changing Representations of Charles Darwin Many branches of the intellectual world apparently feel that biography is a slightly problematical academic genre. Even though the heyday of con- struing history as the lives of “great ªgures” has passed, and life Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 writings have in recent years arrived at a much more sociological perspective, we still tend to consider biographical studies as liable to adopt lesser professional standards than monographs—playing to a popular audience rather than to academic peers. Important issues relating to matters of construction and interpretation con- tinue to be debated, such as the application of narrative structures like “quest” or “tragedy” to a life story, the permissible extent of imaginative reconstruction, and the purpose and place of an individual life in modern critical analysis. In the last few years, the genre has also been applied to nonliving subjects (salt, the pencil, artworks) or nonhuman life stories (rhinoceros, ant, salmon), gen- erating an interesting discussion about agency in historical accounts. Above and beyond are longstanding problems of subjec- tivity. Is it legitimate for one person to believe that he or she can recreate the mind of another? Faced with these questions in 1938, Sartre asked, “Is biography even possible?”1 Such questions have added punch when applied to scientiªc

Janet Browne is Aramont Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. She is the author of a biography of Charles Darwin in two volumes—Voyaging (New York, 1995); The Power of Place (New York, 2002). © 2009 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc. 1 Thomas Söderqvist, “A New Look at the Genre of Scientiªc Biography” and “No Genre of History Fell under More Odium than That of Biography: The Delicate Relations between Scientiªc Biography and the Historiography of Science,” in idem (ed.), The History and Poetics of Scientiªc Biography (Burlington, 2007), 1–15, 241–262. See also Thomas L. Hankins’ early call for more biographical research, “In Defence of Biography: The Use of Biography in the History of Science,” History of Science, XVII (1979), 1–16. From a large literature about biography in general, see Peter France and William St. Clair (eds.), Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biog- raphy (New York, 2002); Anthony M. Friedson (ed.), New Directions in Biography (Honolulu, 1981); Joe Law and Linda K. Hughes (eds.), Biographical Passages: Essays in Victorian and Mod- ernist Biography (Columbia, Mo., 2000). For nonhuman subjects, see Lorraine Daston (ed.), Biographies of Scientiªc Objects (Chicago, 2000), and the series of animal histories issued by Reaktion Press, London. Jean Paul Sartre, quoted in David Ellis, Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding (New York, 2000), 137. 348 | JANET BROWNE biography, but two others become pressing when matters of science are involved: How should a writer deal with those parts of a person’s mental life that may be hard to understand or too abstract for the projected audience? Should a book be written with the science left out? This kind of biography—a life without the difªcult details—has a long, and often distinguished, history but hardly

does justice to the commitment and emotional investment of Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 those men or women whose lives will thus be only partially represented. Another signiªcant feature of scientiªc biography is the deªnition of science that comes into play. Historians of science are alert to the manner in which these deªnitions have changed over time, though not all authors working in biography may be. Until very recently, science was thought to advance through a sequence of discoveries, whether great or small; such discoveries were what made a scientist worth writing or reading about. Many biographical accounts are accordingly framed around a “discovery” moment and possess strong narrative sweep, offering readers plenty of op- portunities to engage with the creative impetus that drives scien- tiªc research. The authors of these accounts work at the interface between science and the human imagination. They investigate the creative processes of an individual intellect, the metaphors that stimulate fresh insight, the long haul at the lab bench, and the struggle to capture thoughts in words, diagrams, and numbers. In- sightful studies of the imaginative mind of scientists such as Lavoi- sier, Krebs, Franklin, and Oppenheimer have materially enhanced our understanding of the way in which these men and women ap- proached major turning points in their lives. This interpretive style is familiar through the writings of literary biographers like Michael Holroyd and Richard Holmes.2 Since the 1970s, science has also been regarded as a social process. Suddenly an individual life—and collective lives—assume

2 Frederic L Holmes, Lavoisier and the Chemistry Of Life: An Exploration Of Scientiªc Creativity (Madison, 1985); idem, Hans Krebs (New York, 1991–1993) 2v.; Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (London, 2002); Robert Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago, 2008); Söderqvist, Science as Autobiography: The Troubled Life of Niels Jerne (New Haven, 2003). The case of Robert Oppenheimer is rich ground for writers, as explored by Silvan S. Schweber, Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius (Cambridge, Mass, 2008); Abraham Pais, J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life (New York, 2006); Charles Thorpe, Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect (Chicago, 2006); Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Trag- edy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York, 2005). MAKING DARWIN | 349 fresh consequence. Biography from this standpoint can illuminate the networks that unite individual ªgures with larger groups of scientiªc practitioners, the journals and other publications that broadcast their work, the circulation of ideas through overlapping circles of friendship or correspondence, the reward systems in play, and the emergence of self-identiªcation as a “scientist.” Such an

approach invites reºection about the relationship between local- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 ized knowledge—for example, a key experiment or observation— and its transformation into products for a wider audience who will eventually judge it. Smith and Wise’s joint biography of William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, is one such pioneering study. When knowledge creation is treated as a process, the social, intellectual, and biographical characteristics of the people concerned are re- vealed as closely interwoven with the larger professional setting in which they operate. Such forms of scientiªc biography can therefore provide historiographically signiªcant space in which to explore institutional norms and the social expectations demanded of science.3 Studies of groups of co-workers and research schools are a valuable way forward along this front, as demonstrated by Kohler in his account of Thomas Hunt Morgan’s “ºy room” at Columbia University in the early years of the twentieth century. Focusing on otherwise relatively disparate people united by a speciªc scientiªc problem is another, as explored in Rudwick’s Great Devonian Con- troversy, and Morrell and Thackray’s Gentlemen of Science. Scientiªc partnership through marriage is discussed in Pycior, Slack, and Abir-Am’s Creative Couples in the Sciences. When scientiªc biographers pay attention to the many intersecting domains in which individuals operate, they open the door to a robust historical analysis

3 For a review of early work on science as a social process, see Everett Mendelsohn et al., The Social Production Of Scientiªc Knowledge (Dordrecht, 1977); Andrew Pickering, Ian Hacking, et al., Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago, 1992). Key works on the study of scientiªc biography are Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo (eds.), Telling Lives in Science: Es- says on Scientiªc Biography (New York, 1996), and Söderqvist (ed.), The History and Poetics of Scientiªc Biography (Burlington, 2007). On scientiªc identity, see the essays in Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin (eds.), Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowl- edge (Chicago, 1998). A classic study of the kind is Alan J. Friedman and Carol C. Donley, Einstein as Myth and Muse (New York, 1985). See also Freeman J. Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel (New York, 2006). Noted scientiªc biographies that address these points are Crosbie Smith and M. Norton Wise, Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin (New York, 1989); Georgina Ferry, Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life (London, 1998); Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge Mass., 2000); Giuliano Pancaldi, Volta: Science and Culture in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton, 2003). 350 | JANET BROWNE of the nature of science itself. To study a person’s success or fail- ure, celebrity or notoriety, recognition or humiliation is to explore the consolidation of ideas around what it meant to be a scientist at any particular time.4 These studies are also signiªcant in that they broach the question of the abstract nature of science. One of the qualifying fea-

tures of modern science is that facts and theories are held to be ob- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 jective and universal—or, putting it around another way, that each item of current knowledge can be successfully divorced from the people who ªrst made the inferences or presented the proposals. A biography can explore this process of separation and try to catch the process of objectiªcation in action.5 Indeed, biographers hold all the strings. They are free to em- phasize either the personal or the contextual elements. They can acknowledge that the things that an individual considered most important may not be the things that a historian chooses to remember. Biographers can suggest that the meaning of science is

4 Robert E. Kohler, Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life (Chicago, 1994). Studies of research schools have been a mainstay of the profession for several decades. See, for example, Gerald L. Geison and Frederic L. Holmes (eds.), Research Schools: Historical Reappraisals (Philadelphia, 1993). For early analysis of groups of practitioners, see Lewis Pyenson, “‘Who the Guys Were’: Prosopography in the History of Science,” History of Sci- ence, XV (1977), 155–188. For disparate groups united by a common problem, see Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientiªc Knowledge among Gentle- manly Specialists (Chicago, 1985); J. B. Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford, 1981). Scientiªc and emotional partnerships are discussed in Helena M. Pycior, Nancy G. Slack, and Pnina G. Abir-Am (eds.), Creative Couples in the Sciences (New Brunswick, N.J., 1996). For people united by place and time, see Deborah R. Coen, Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liber- alism and Private Life (Chicago, 2007). Early work in such consolidation of ideas is well represented by Dorinda Outram, “Scientiªc Biography and the Case of Georges Cuvier: With a Critical Bibliography,” History of Science, XIV (1976), 101–137; L. S. Jacyna, “Images of John Hunter in the Nineteenth Century,” History of Science, XXI (1983), 85–108; Yeo, “Genius, Method and Morality: Images of Newton in Britain, 1760–1860,” Science in Context (1988), 2, 257–284; Shapin, “A Scholar and a Gentleman: The Problematic Identity of the Scientiªc Practitioner in Early Modern England,” History of Science, XXIX (1991), 279–327; Roslynn D. Haynes, From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature (Baltimore, 1994); Geison, The Private Science of Louis Pasteur (Princeton, 1995). More recently, see Patricia Fara, Newton: The Making of Genius (New York, 2002); Paul White, Thomas Huxley: Making the “Man of Science” (New York, 2003); Christopher Frayling, Mad, Bad and Dangerous? The Scientist and the Cinema (London, 2005); Shapin, The Scientiªc Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago, 2008). In the wider academic domain, many take a lead from Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (London, 1990; orig. pub. 1956). See also Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980); Margaret Homans, Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture (Chicago, 1999). 5 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York, 2007). MAKING DARWIN | 351 not rooted exclusively in science itself. Biography is an extremely liberating genre. Hence, treading appreciatively in the footsteps of a number of scholars working on biographical traditions in the sciences, I, in this article, call attention to the manner in which one man has been repeatedly reconstructed in print since the year of his death. Rupke dubs this form of analysis “metabiography.” It is

not a study of the merits or inadequacies of early writings. Nor is it Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 about the self-fashioning or narrative trajectories brought into play by the individuals themselves. It is, instead, concerned with the stories that writers create about people at different times and in different places. Biographies of Charles Darwin have much to tell us about the way in which science has been viewed at different times.6 darwin through victorian eyes Depending on how strictly we deªne biography, there have been around thirty biographical studies of Darwin since his death in 1882, somewhat more than of Isaac Newton but many fewer than of Marie Curie. One of the ªrst biographies to be published after Darwin’s death was in Swed- ish. In fact, as Numbers and others conªrm, by 1900 Darwinism was a global affair, the focus of probably the earliest international scientiªc debate to appear in a worldwide range of geographical and cultural milieus. Figure 1 provides an interim list of Darwin

6 Nicolaas Rupke, Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography (New York, 2005). See also Henry Guerlac, “Lavoisier and His Biographers” Isis, XLV (1954), 51–62; James Moore, “Metabiographical Reºections on Charles Darwin,” in Shortland and Yeo (eds.), Telling Lives in Science, 267–281; Rebekah Higgitt, Recreating Newton: Newtonian Biography and the Making of Nineteenth-Century History of Science (London, 2007); Ludmilla Jordanova, “Remembrance of Science Past,” British Journal for the History of Science, XXXIII (2000), 387–406; Christine MacLeod and Jennifer Tann, “From Engineer to Scientist: Reinventing Invention in the Watt and Faraday Centenaries 1919–31,” British Journal for the History of Science, XL (2007), 389–411; Frank James, “The Janus Face of Modernity: Michael Faraday in the Twentieth Century,” British Journal for the History of Science, LXI (2008), 477–516. For the construction of memory through other forms of commemoration, see the essays in Abir-Am and Clark Elliott (eds.), Commemorative Practices in the Sciences: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Collective Memory (Chicago, 1999). A useful overview of the range of Darwin biographies is given by Peter J. Bowler, Charles Darwin: The Man and His Inºuence (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 1–16. For reºections on the genre, see Antonello La Vergata, “Images of Darwin: A Historiographic Overview,” in David Kohn (ed.), The Darwinian Heritage (Princeton, 1985), 901–972; Robert M. Young, “Darwin and the Genre of Biography,” in George Levine (ed.), One Culture: Es- says in Science and Literature (Madison, 1988); Ralph Colp, Jr., “Charles Darwin’s Past and Fu- ture Biographies,” History of Science, XXVII (1989), 167–197; Marjorie Greene, “Recent Biographies of Darwin: The Complexity of Context,” Perspectives on Science, I (1993), 659– 675. Fig. 1 Darwin(Continued) Biographies in English, 1882–2009 year of publication author title

1885 Allen, Grant Charles Darwin London: Longmans, Green, 1885. 1886 Allen, Grant Charles Darwin London:

Longmans, Green, 1886. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 1887 Bettany, G. T. Life of Charles Darwin London: Walter Scott, 1887. 1887 Darwin, Francis The life and letters of Charles Darwin: Including an autobiographical chapter New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1887. 1887 Darwin, Francis The life and letters of Charles Darwin: Including an autobiographical chapter London: John Murray, 1887. 1888 Allen, Grant Charles Darwin London: Longmans, Green, 1888. 1891 Holder, Charles Charles Darwin: His Life and Work Frederick New York: Putnam, 1891. 1892 Darwin, Francis Charles Darwin: his life told in an autobiographical chapter, and in a selected series of his published letters London: John Murray, 1892. 1893 Allen, Grant Charles Darwin New York: Appleton, 1893. 1903 Darwin, Francis, and More Letters of Charles Darwin: A A.C. Seward record of his work in a series of hitherto unpublished letters London: J. Murray, 1903. 1903 Darwin, Francis, and More Letters of Charles Darwin: A A.C. Seward record of his work in a series of hitherto unpublished letters New York: Appleton, 1903. 1909 Poulton, Edward Bagnall Charles Darwin and the Origin of Species : addresses, etc., in America and England : in the year of the two anniversaries London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1909. 1909 Shipley, Arthur Everett Charles Darwin Cambridge: University Press, 1909. 1909 Geikie, Archibald Charles Darwin as Geologist Cambridge: University Press, 1909. 1921 Huxley, Leonard Charles Darwin London: Watts, 1921. Fig. 1 (Continued) year of publication author title 1926 Bradford, Gamaliel Darwin Boston: Houghton Mifºin, 1926. 1927 Ward, Charles Henshaw Charles Darwin: The Man and His Warfare Indianapolis: Bobbs- Merrill, 1927. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 1927 Ward, Charles Henshaw Charles Darwin: The Man and His Warfare London: J. Murray, 1927. 1927 Dorsey, George Amos The Evolution of Charles Darwin Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, and Co, 1927. 1928 Dorsey, George Amos The Evolution of Charles Darwin London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1928. 1934 Hingston, R. W. G. Darwin London: Duckworth, 1934. 1937 West, Geoffrey Charles Darwin: The Fragmentary Man London: Routledge, 1937. 1938 West, Geoffrey Charles Darwin: A Portrait New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1938. 1948 Clark, Robert Edward Darwin, Before and After: The Story David of Evolution London: Paternoster Press, 1948. 1950 Sears, Paul Bigelow Charles Darwin: The Naturalist as a Cultural Force New York: Scribner and Sons, 1950. 1953 Cheesman, Evelyn Charles Darwin and His Problems London: Bell, 1953. 1955 Irvine, William Apes, angels, and Victorians: The story of Darwin, Huxley, and Evolution New York: McGraw- Hill, 1955. 1955 Cheesman, Evelyn Charles Darwin and His Problems New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1955. 1955 Moore, Ruth E. Charles Darwin, A Great Life in Brief New York: Knopf, 1955. 1955 Keith, Arthur Darwin revalued London: Watts, 1955. 1956 Irvine, William Apes, angels, & Victorians : a joint biography of Darwin and Huxley London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1956. 1959 Himmelfarb, Gertrude Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959. Fig. 1 (Continued) year of publication author title 1962 Moore, Ruth E. Charles Darwin, A Great Life in Brief New York: Knopf, 1962. 1962 Himmelfarb, Gertrude Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 1963 Irvine, William Apes, angels, and Victorians: The story of Darwin, Huxley, and Evolution New York: Time, 1963. 1965 Huxley, Julian and HBD Charles Darwin and His World Kettlewell London: Thames and Hudson, 1965. 1968 Himmelfarb, Gertrude Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution New York: Norton, 1968. 1969 Moorehead, Alan Darwin and the Beagle London: Hamilton, 1969. 1973 Chancellor, John Charles Darwin London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973. 1974 Huxley, Julian and Charles Darwin and His World H.B.D. Kettlewell London: Thames and Hudson, 1974. 1974 Atkins, Hedley Down, the home of the Darwins: The Story of a House and the People Who Lived There London: Royal College of Surgeons of England, 1974. 1978 Stevens, L. Robert Charles Darwin Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978. 1979 Eiseley, Loren C. Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X: New Light on the Evolutionists London: J. M. Dent, 1979. 1980 Brackman, Arnold C. A Delicate Arrangement: The Strange Case of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace New York: Times Books, 1980. 1981 Brent, Peter L. Charles Darwin, A Man of Enlarged Curiosity London: Heineman, 1981. 1982 Jahn, Ilse Charles Darwin Berlin: Urania, 1982. 1982 Howard, Jonathan Darwin Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. 1982 George, Wilma B. Darwin London: Fontana, 1982. 1983 Brent, Peter L. Charles Darwin Feltham: Hamlyn, 1983. Fig. 1 (Continued) year of publication author title 1983 Brent, Peter L. Charles Darwin, A Man of Enlarged Curiosity New York: Norton, 1983. 1983 Irvine, William Apes, angels & Victorians : the story of Darwin, Huxley, and evolution Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 Lanham, MD : University Press of America, 1983. 1984 Clark, Ronald William The Survival of Charles Darwin: A Biography of a Man and an Idea New York: Random House, 1984. 1989 Croft, L. R. The Life and Death of Charles Darwin Lancashire: Elmwood, 1989. 1990 Bowlby, John Charles Darwin: A Biography London: Hutchinson, 1990. 1990 Bowler, Peter J. Charles Darwin: The Man and His Inºuence Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. 1991 Bowlby, John Charles Darwin: A New Life New York: Norton, 1991. 1991 Desmond, Adrian and Darwin London: Michael Joseph, James Moore 1991. 1991 Desmond, Adrian and Darwin New York: Viking James Moore Penguin, 1991. 1992 Desmond, Adrian and Darwin New York: Warner James Moore Books, 1992. 1994 Desmond, Adrian and Darwin New York: Norton, 1994. James Moore 1995 White, Michael Darwin: A Life in Science New York: Dutton, 1995. 1995 White, Michael and Darwin: A Life in Science London: John Gribbin Simon and Schuster, 1995. 1995 Browne, Janet Charles Darwin: A Biography, v. 1 Voyaging New York: Knopf, 1995. 1995 Browne, Janet Charles Darwin: A Biography. I. Voyaging London: Jonathan Cape, 1995. 1996 Bowler, Peter J. Charles Darwin: The Man and His Inºuence Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996. 1996 Browne, Janet Charles Darwin: Voyaging London: Pimlico, 1996. 1996 Browne, Janet Charles Darwin: Voyaging Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Fig. 1 (Continued) year of publication author title 2000 White, Michael and Darwin: A Life in Science London: John Gribbin Touchstone, 2000. 2001 Tort, Patrick Darwin and the Science of Evolution New York: Abrams, 2001. 2001 Keynes, Randal Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin, His Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 Daughter, and Human Evolution London: Fourth Estate, 2001. 2001 Howard, Jonathan Darwin: A Very Short Introduction Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 2002 Keynes, Randal Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution New York: Riverhead Books, 2002. 2002 Browne, Janet Charles Darwin: A Biography. II. The Power of Place New York: Knopf, 2002. 2002 Aydon, Cyril Charles Darwin London: Constable, 2002. 2003 Browne, Janet Charles Darwin: A Biography, 2v. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. 2003 Browne, Janet Charles Darwin, 2v. London: Pimlico, 2003. 2005 Eldredge, Niles Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life New York: Norton, 2005. 2006 Quammen, David The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of his Theory of Evolution New York: Atlas Books, 2006. 2007 Desmond, Adrian, James Charles Darwin Oxford: Oxford Moore, Janet Browne University Press, 2007. 2007 Quammen, David The Kiwi’s Egg: Charles Darwin and Natural Selection London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007. 2008 Van Wyhe, John Darwin: The Story of the Man and his Theories of Evolution London: Andre Deutsch, 2008. 2008 Colp, Ralph Darwin’s Illness Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2008. 2008 Contosta, David R. Rebel Giants: The Revolutionary Lives of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008. MAKING DARWIN | 357 Fig. 1 (Continued) year of publication author title 2008 Boulter, Michael Charles Darwin’s Garden: Down House and The Origin of Species London: Constable, 2008. 2008 Kohn, David Darwin’s Garden: An Evolutionary Adventure Bronx, NY: The New Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 York Botanical Garden, 2008. 2009 Berra, Tim M. Charles Darwin: The Concise Story of an Extraordinary Man Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. 2009 Gopnik, Adam Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life New York: Knopf, 2009. 2009 Jones, Steve Darwin’s Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England London: Little, Brown, 2009. note This interim list covers titles that were published on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as new editions, reprints, and reissues. The list excludes juvenile literature, and commemorative edited volumes that appeared in 1909 and 1982. I am grateful to Ellen Bales, University of California, Berkeley, who compiled the data. biographies published in English since 1882. Though the list runs to seventy-ªve items, by design it includes titles that were sepa- rately published on both sides of the Atlantic since this feature indicates the publisher’s anticipated sales. The list also includes new editions, reissues, and reprints, since these items indicate the changing commercial standing of a book. The list is not complete: It is likely to increase by the close of 2009, the Darwin commemorative year. The number and variety of these writings invites ex- tended historical attention.7 One leading feature that bears special consideration relates to the manner in which Darwin’s character has been presented—an

7 This count of thirty is based on a relatively restricted deªnition of biography. Darwin’s life story is often included in works that have other intentions, especially books that seek to ex- plain his theories and/or evolution in general. A conservative estimate derived from the Brit- ish uniªed catalogue Copac indicates some 2,000 titles of this nature since 1882. For a recent account of the spread of Darwinism, see Ronald L. Numbers and John Stenhouse (eds.), Dis- seminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender (New York, 1999). For reºections on the history of Darwin scholarship, see Frederick B. Churchill, “Darwin and the Historian,” in R. J. Berry (ed.), Charles Darwin: A Commemoration (London, 1982), 45–68, and La Vergata, “Images of Darwin.” An analysis of conceptual shifts in Darwin scholarship is 358 | JANET BROWNE issue that has always held cultural relevance, no less diminished in the present day. Darwin’s fame and intellectual achievement turned him into an icon of science, even during his own lifetime. Many writers have been eager to explore his route to creativity, his education, his developing self-determination, his reading materials, inner psychology, and those elements within the larger

context of Victorian thought that encouraged him toward the for- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 mulation and expression of his views. The most enduring question that all of these books ultimately address, in one way or another, is, How did Darwin become the man who wrote On the Origin of Species? How did he change from an enthusiastic amateur naturalist to one of the greatest biological thinkers and authors of the modern era? As Churchill once argued, the answers to such questions have varied through the decades according to changes in the prevailing view of science and diversifying cultural concerns.8 The founding document in the Darwin biographical tradition was the Life and Letters (1887) prepared by Darwin’s third son Francis, which was followed by More Letters (1903), edited by Francis Darwin and A. C. Seward. Not long afterward, Francis produced a life of his father in a single volume, drawing on the earlier material, and an edition of Darwin’s ªrst manuscript on species, Foundations of the Origin of Species (1909). He published a number of other useful items as well. Because these publications were closely connected to the family and emphasized private papers and personal correspondence not yet in public repositories, they were naturally assumed to present an authoritative picture of Darwin. Without downplaying the role of many signiªcant obitu- given by Ingemar Bohlin, “Robert M. Young and Darwin Historiography,” Social Studies of Science, XXI (1991), 597–648. 8 Churchill, “Darwin and the Historian,” 45; Browne, “Charles Darwin as a Celebrity,” Science in Context, XVI (2003), 175–194; idem, “Darwin in Caricature: A Study in the Popu- larisation and Dissemination of Evolution,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, CXLV (2001), 496–509; idem, “Presidential Address: Commemorating Darwin,” British Jour- nal for the History of Science, XXXVIII (2005), 251–274. For an overview, see idem, Charles Dar- win: Voyaging (New York, 1995), and, especially, idem, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (New York, 2002). Studies of Darwin’s inner life are well represented by Edward Manier, The Young Darwin and His Cultural Circle: A Study of Inºuences Which Helped Shape The Language and Logic of the First Drafts of the Theory of Natural Selection (Boston, 1978); Howard E. Gruber, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientiªc Creativity together with Darwin’s early and unpublished notebooks, transcribed and annotated by Paul H. Barrett (New York, 1974); Irving Stone, The Origin: A Biographical Novel of Charles Darwin (New York, 1980). MAKING DARWIN | 359 aries written by Darwin’s closest friends and supporters, Francis’ Life and Letters therefore served as the primary resource for other writers for more than a century after Darwin’s death. This enduring representation of Darwin bears some comment.9 Francis Darwin brought personal knowledge, literary ability, and scientiªc understanding to the Life and Letters of Charles Dar-

win. His three volumes, although participating in an entirely con- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 ventional Victorian genre, were unusual in revealing much about the private man. The bulk of this material, in which his father’s letters dominated, as to be expected, offered Victorian readers be- hind-the-scenes insight into Darwin’s work and preoccupations throughout a long lifetime. Introductory chapters included an edited version of Darwin’s theretofore unpublished autobiography, called by him Recollections of the Development of My Mind and Char- acter, a chapter of reminiscences contributed by Darwin’s children and friends, an account by Francis of his father’s working practices, as well as a separate chapter describing his death and a chapter on the reception of the Origin of Species supplied by Thomas Henry Huxley. These features, and others, markedly contributed to the making of a scientiªc hero.10

9 Francis Darwin (ed.), The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (New York, 1887), 3v.; idem and A. C. Seward (eds.), More Letters of Charles Darwin (New York, 1903), 3v.; idem (ed.), Foundations of the Origin of Species (Cambridge, 1909). 10 The Victorian genre has not received the attention that it deserves, but see Trev Lynn Broughton, Men of Letters, Writing Lives: Masculinity and Literary Auto/Biography in the Late Vic- torian Period (London, 1999). More common are studies of literary biography, like Richard D. Altick, Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America (New York, 1965). See also Browne, “The Charles Darwin-Joseph Hooker Correspondence: An Analysis of Manuscript Resources and Their Use in Biography,” Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History, VIII (1978), 340–366. Nora Barlow (ed.), The Autobiography of Charles Dar- win, 1809–1882, with Original Omissions Restored (New York, 1958); Francis Darwin (ed.), Life and Letters, III, 355–361. See also Thomas Henry Huxley, “The Darwin Memorial,” in idem, Darwiniana (London, 1893), 248–252, in which Huxley recounts Fellows of the Royal Society calling for Darwin to be buried in Westminster Abbey. The myth that Darwin converted (or reverted) to Christianity is discussed by J. R. Moore, The Darwin Legend (Grand Rapids, 1994). See also idem, “Charles Darwin Lies in Westminster Abbey,” in Berry (ed.), Charles Darwin, 97–113. There is a large literature about the signiªcance of last words, see Gyles Brandreth, Famous Last Words & Tombstone Humor (New York, 1989). For essays on the process of constructing heroes, see Geoff Cubitt and Allen Warren (eds.), Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives (Manchester, 2000). For heroes in science, see Geoffrey Cantor, “The Scien- tist as Hero: Public Images of Michael Faraday” in Shortland and Yeo (eds.), Telling Lives in Science, 171–193, and Fara, “Isaac Newton Lived Here: Sites of Memory and Scientiªc Heri- tage,” British Journal for the History of Science, XXXIII (2000), 407–426. 360 | JANET BROWNE Also included were the expected lists of publications, portraits, honorary degrees, and an appendix giving the citation for Darwin’s burial in Westminster Abbey. Mechanically reproduced portrait photographs were displayed as frontispieces to each of the volumes, becoming iconic indications of Darwin’s status. More subtly, the arrangement of letters followed the publication se-

quence of Darwin’s main books, expanding or contracting the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 material according to Francis’ estimation of the public fame and impact of each title.11 Darwin was portrayed throughout as a loving father and friend; a courteous correspondent; a socially respectable, intellec- tually honest, and personally humble man, who stood apart from controversy and nobly endured lifelong illness; and a tireless worker, who assiduously accumulated the mountain of evidence presented in the Origin of Species. In his son’s portrait, Darwin’s ªne, simple qualities were crucial factors in his intellectual success. As Francis wrote, “In choosing letters for publication, I have been largely guided by the wish to illustrate my father’s personal character.”12 Nowadays we can understand much of this emphasis on humility and respectability as the Victorian equivalent of the credit- building processes in seventeenth-century science that Shapin recounts. It was important for Victorians to believe that science was carried out by trustworthy, upstanding individuals who did not seek to overthrow either the church or the political establishment. No words can be strong enough, said Woodberry, an American biographer, in 1890, to express the moral beauty of Darwin’s character. He was a marvellously patient and successful revolutionizer of thought, declared Bettany in his 1887 biography. Enough of his character shone forth in his work to indicate his tenderness and

11 Browne, “Looking at Darwin: Portraits and the Making of an Icon,” Isis (forthcoming). For portraits in science, see Ludmilla Jordanova, Deªning Features, Scientiªc and Medical Portraits 1660–2000 (London, 2000); Fara, “Faces of Genius: Images of Isaac Newton in Eighteenth Century England,” in Cubitt and Warren (eds.), Heroic Reputations, 57–81; idem, “Framing the Evidence: Scientiªc Biography and Portraiture,” in Söderqvist (ed.), History and Poetics, 71– 91. Obituary panegyrics are discussed in Moore, “Charles Darwin Lies in Westminster Ab- bey,” 108–110. See also Outram, “The Language of Natural Power: The “Éloges” of Georges Cuvier and the Public Language of 19th-Century Science,” History of Science, XVI (1978), 153–178. 12 Francis Darwin (ed.), Life and Letters, III, iii. MAKING DARWIN | 361 goodness, added Geikie in 1905. Holder held Darwin’s life to be one of singular purity, and Osborn, of the American Museum of Natural History, described it as distinguished by “translucent truthfulness.”13 These ªrst biographers at the end of the nineteenth century put forward Darwin’s virtuous character as an important element

in his moral right to speak about the natural world, which was Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 crucial to science’s claim to uncover truths in nature, no matter how disagreeable they were to those who believed such matters were more properly the domain of theology. Darwin’s personal humility was felt to have contributed materially to the process of convincing contemporaries about the validity of evolutionary views. Most of all, however, Francis Darwin took pains to depict his father as a hard worker. This biographical strategy of showcasing Darwin’s strenuous mental labor took its impetus from the esteem given to the busy, productive, self-made man of nineteenth- century industrial society, as Smiles described him. Earlier ideas of the uniquely inspired individual, as promoted by Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, or the romantic hero, as embodied by Humphry Davy, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Keats, or Lord Byron, were almost completely supplanted in certain sectors of British society during the last third of the century by Smiles’ eu- logies of honorable toil—a shift away from the terminology of “genius” toward that of “exertion.” Perspiration, not inspiration, became the rule of the day. These notions of industriousness contributed to new ways of representing the science that was emerging in Europe and North America at the end of the century. The Christian topoi of saintly self-dedication and austerity were trans- ferred to the idealized man of science. Great thinkers were rewrit- ten as great workers. Looking back over history, Smiles viewed Louis Pasteur as notable for his extraordinary scientiªc persever-

13 George Woodberry, Studies in Letters and Life (Boston, 1890), 253; George T. Bettany, Life of Charles Darwin (London, 1887), 170; Archibald Geikie, “Darwin’s Life and Letters,” in Littell’s Living Age, 5th Series, LXI (Boston, 1888), 3; Charles Frederick Holder, Charles Darwin: His Life and Work (New York, 1891), vi; Henry Fairªeld Osborn, Impressions of Great Natural- ists: Darwin, Huxley, Balfour, Cope and Others (New York, 1924), xiv. See also Grant Allen, Charles Darwin (London, 1888), 80, according to whom, “Both Darwin and Wallace were born superior to the meannesses of jealousy.” Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Sci- ence in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, 1994). See also idem, Scientiªc Life. 362 | JANET BROWNE ance. Tycho Brahe scarcely left his observatory for twenty-one years. William and Caroline Herschel led patient and laborious lives. Even Pliny never relaxed, except in his bath. Such celebrated ªgures, according to Smiles, were careful economists of time.14 In essence, Darwin, too, was presented in his son’s writings, and thence in other Victorian biographies, as an industrious man

for the industrial age. He was revered as an independent and inde- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 fatigable thinker, dedicated to his work and nobly overcoming illness. In his day, Darwin’s life exempliªed effort, achievement, and personal virtue in the face of difªculty. darwin after world war i A very different Darwin appeared in the aftermath of World War I. Hard work and virtue gave way to an emphasis on inner turmoil. The 1920s and 1930s saw those authors who wrote in English turn toward the interior life of men and women, answering a new social and psychoanalytical call to acknowledge the many-sided self and a search for greater authen- ticity in representation. Biographers who experimented with modernism felt that their special focus on human character contributed signiªcantly to the literary restructuring of the period. It was the day of the biographer, wrote Hesketh Pearson in 1930—a proliªc biographer himself, whose ªrst study was a life of Erasmus Darwin. In absolute terms, too, the numbers of biographies in- creased during these decades (Figure 2). A new theoretical consideration of life writing, which took its color from Lytton Strachey, André Maurois, Emil Ludwig, Leslie Stephen, and Edmund Gosse, was evident most obviously in Brit- ain in the writings of Virginia Woolf and Harold Nicolson, and in

14 Samuel Smiles, Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character and Conduct (London, 1859). See also Anne Secord, “‘Be What You Would Seem to Be’: Samuel Smiles, Thomas Edward, and the Making of a Working-Class Scientiªc Hero,” Science in Context, XVI (2003), 147–173; Tim Travers, Samuel Smiles and the Victorian Work Ethic (New York, 1987). More general reºections on Victorian moral imagery can be found in Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (New York, 1991). Francis Galton codiªed the hereditarian view of intellect in Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (London, 1869). Early sources in this ªeld include Meyer H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York, 1953). See also Arthur I. Miller, Insights of Genius: Imagery and Creativity in Science and Art (New York, 1996). Shapin, “The Philoso- pher and the Chicken: On the Dietetics of Disembodied Knowledge,” in Lawrence and idem (eds.), Science Incarnate, 21–50. The quote from Smiles comes from Smiles, Life and Labour; Or, Characteristics of Men of Industry, Culture and Genius (London, 1887). MAKING DARWIN | 363 Fig. 2 Relative Frequency of Darwin Biographies by Decade, 1880– 2000 (Derived from the Titles in Figure 1) Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021

note The chart indicates four main publishing periods that coincide with moments of cultural interest in Darwin: (1) the years immediately after his death through the 1909 celebrations; (2) the interwar period, 1920 to 1930; (3) the 1959 commemorations; (4) and the modern period, including the centenary of Darwin’s death and culminating in the 2009 commemorations. The numbers of books published per decade are not large but show a marked increase in real terms from 1882 to 2009.

America in those of Gamaliel Bradford, who advocated a new genre of “psychography.” Bradford was not overly interested in the content of Darwin’s science except insofar as it advanced him as one of the makers of the modern world. He wrote an excellent short biography of Darwin in 1926, one of the ªrst to ask the modern question, what kind of man was he, so sick and so secular. Creativity featured as an issue, too. Barlow, Darwin’s grand- daughter, one of the new breed of scientiªc women actively conducting research in genetics with William Bateson at Cam- bridge, began in the 1930s to explore the origins of Darwin’s evolutionary ideas, seeking to understand his inspiration and moti- vation. Though she did not write a biography as such, she was instrumental in bringing a number of Darwin’s unpublished manuscripts, especially those relating to the Beagle voyage, to bear on 364 | JANET BROWNE the question of his intellectual development. Barlow is noted for her 1933 edition of Darwin’s Beagle diary. She followed it in 1945 with a selection of letters and notebooks from the voyage. Later, she published the full version of Darwin’s autobiography, with omissions restored, and Darwin’s “Ornithological Notes,” written at sea on the way back to Britain, in which he ªrst pondered the 15

problem of species. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 Because of Barlow’s focus on transcribing manuscripts, she is usually regarded (if at all) as a transparent provider of sources rather than as a historian. Nevertheless, in a number of carefully chosen appendixes to those volumes, she introduced issues of last- ing biographical interest, such as the relationship between Darwin and Robert FitzRoy, the captain of the Beagle, and Darwin’s fraught controversy with Samuel Butler. Barlow also addressed Darwin’s personal relations with his wife, as well as with his teacher John Stevens Henslow. Her commitment to disclosing the inner Darwin through previously unpublished manuscripts—letters, autobiographical recollections, notes, and diaries—marked a turning point in Darwin studies. Though we may now think such a focus on the private records of a great thinker to be unremark- able, this manuscript interest was relatively new in the history of science, reºecting a wider fascination with psychological development and the personal lives of others. Nor should it be forgotten that an additional material factor in this realignment in Darwin studies was the magniªcent bequest of Darwin papers from the family to Cambridge University Library, starting in 1942, with the support of the Pilgrim Trust.16 Importantly, Bradford and Barlow both considered Darwin as one of the secular moderns. To them, the fading of doctrinaire re- ligious opinion was the key to the rise of science, and they set about publicizing Darwin’s loss of faith in order to promote what they saw as the new dawn of secular thought. This goal was a lead-

15 Marsha Richmond, “Women in the Early History of Genetics: William Bateson and the Newnham College Mendelians, 1900–1910,” Isis, XCII (2001), 55–90; idem, “The ‘Domesti- cation’ of Heredity: The Familial Organization of Geneticists at Cambridge University, 1895– 1910,” Journal of the History of Biology, XXXIX (2006), 565–605; Barlow (ed.), Charles Darwin’s Diary of the Voyage of H. M. S. Beagle (New York, 1933); idem, Charles Darwin and the Voyage of the Beagle (London, 1945). 16 Barlow (ed.), Darwin and Henslow: The Growth of an Idea; Letters, 1831–1860 (London, 1967); Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith, “Introduction,” in idem (eds.), A Calendar of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin, 1821–1882 (New York, 1985), 1–3. MAKING DARWIN | 365 ing element in Barlow’s wish to make Darwin’s unexpurgated autobiography public. Louis Trenchard More’s 1934 biography of Newton similarly made use of the Hurstbourne archive to reveal the full extent of Newton’s interests in unorthodox theology. A small anecdote told by Holroyd about Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) illustrates something of this view of Darwin. Strachey’s

original idea was to cover twelve signiªcant people of the Victo- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 rian era, including Ellen Terry, the Duke of Devonshire, Darwin, Benjamin Jowett, and John Stuart Mill. But Strachey came to feel that he should not include those whom he regarded as being on the side of the moderns. He left Darwin out. Had his initial inten- tion been fulªlled, the work would not have had the same de- bunking effect. While the United States reeled under the consequences of the Scopes Trial (1924), Darwinism was celebrated in Great Britain for its place in secular modernity.17 darwin in the shade of world war ii and the centenary celebrations Some twenty years later, after World War II, and in the shadow of the bomb, the image of scientists was less heroic. Schweber’s double biography of Oppenheimer and Hans Bethe tells a story of Prometheus bringing knowledge to a civilization unable to handle its powers. Scientiªc responsibility was an issue of great concern, raised over and over again—as reºected, for example, in the changes made by Berthold Brecht to the original version of his play Galileo. First staged in Germany in 1943, the play was reworked in 1947 for an American production. After Hiroshima, it seemed to Brecht that his earlier scientiªc optimism was unfounded.18 So when the 1959 centenary celebrations of the Origin of Spe- cies came around, the ground was fertile for writers to promote another kind of Darwin. By then, the evolutionary synthesis, as worked out by Ernst Mayr, Ledyard Stebbins, George Gaylord

17 Louis Trenchard More, Isaac Newton (New York, 1934); Strachey, Eminent Victorians (New York, 1918); Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: The New Biography (London, 1994), 149–150, 269. 18 Schweber, In the Shadow of the Bomb: Bethe, Oppenheimer, and the Moral Responsibility of The Scientist (Princeton, 2000). For The Life of Galileo, see Bertolt Brecht (ed. Ralph Manheim and John Willett), Collected Plays (New York, 1971), V. The 1947 version is the one most often staged today and is the basis for the 1975 ªlm. After testifying before the House Un- American Activities Committee in 1947, Brecht returned to Germany and reworked the play for a third time, this ªnal version even more forthright about the dangers of science. 366 | JANET BROWNE Simpson, Julian Huxley, and inºuential others, had taken ªrmer shape. As Smocovitis argues, the Darwin celebratory year was per- ceived as an appropriate moment to afªrm biology’s uniªcation and to make direct links back to Darwin as a magisterial ancestral ªgure who had put the theory of evolution by natural selection on the map. Smocovitis notes the self-validation evident in the bio-

logical works that several of the active participants in the modern Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 synthesis wrote about Darwin under these auspices. These authors, newly conªdent that evolutionary theory was true, went out of their way to remind readers that Darwin’s ideas, although 100 years old, held an active place in current thought.19 Mayr, for one, who proposed the now well-established “biological species concept,” was immensely signiªcant in reappraising Darwin in the light of modern biology, building in the process his own reputation as a biologist-philosopher-historian. An old-style European positivist, Mayr encouraged biologists to regard Darwin as the source of all modern biological ideas. Several scholars have noted Mayr’s tendency to put his own work at the heart of the new Darwinism, perhaps even thinking of himself as a Darwin for the modern era. He certainly rewrote the history of biology to suit his own purposes in such books as The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance and One Long Argu- ment: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought.20 Less didactic writers more oriented toward a nonspecialist audience, like Mellersh and Moorehead, published accessible and well-illustrated studies about Darwin’s observations on the Beagle voyage that also emphasized Darwin as an active biological observer. Another short biography, published before the centenary but maintaining an active circulation through the 1960s and beyond, was Darwin Revalued (1955) by Keith, a celebrated scholar of

19 Mayr and William B. Provine (eds.), The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perpsectives on the Uniªcation of Biology (Cambridge, Mass., 1980); Joe Cain, “Ernst Mayr as Community Archi- tect: Launching the Society for the Study of Evolution and the Journal ‘Evolution,’” Biology and Philosophy, IX (1994), 387–427; Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, “The 1959 Darwin Centennial Celebration in America,” Osiris, XIV (1999), 278–323. 20 Mayr, Systematics and the Origin of Species, from the Viewpoint of a Zoologist (Cambridge, Mass., 1999); idem, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1982). See especially Mary P. Winsor, “The Creation of the Essentialism Story: An Exercise in Metahistory,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, XXVIII (2006), 149– 174. MAKING DARWIN | 367 the human fossil record, who also played a key role in preserving Darwin’s home, Down House in Kent, as a museum. In about 1930, Keith took residence in Downe village, acquiring a special empathy for the historic surroundings: “Darwin became a real man for me: I saw him as he moved about from day to day.”21 The Galápagos ªnches also came into their own, ªrst de-

scribed in 1947 by Lack as an exemplary case of evolutionary radi- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 ation. Lack’s book was reissued with a new preface in 1961 and again in 1983. This material supported the view that Darwin’s evolutionary theory was, in its essentials, based on biological observations made on the Galápagos Islands. Sulloway explains that Lack’s writings were the source for the widespread belief that Dar- win experienced a “eureka” moment in the archipelago. Relevant to work of this sort are Barlow’s edition of Darwin’s “Ornitholog- ical Notes” in 1963 and de Beer’s transcripts of Darwin’s species notebooks written soon after his return from the voyage. The possibility of a discovery moment on the Galápagos ªtted well with then-contemporary images of how science advanced. The Darwin emerging around this time was thus very much a biologist—an as- tute observer whose insight was very much alive in the minds of practicing biologists and conªrmed by the new men of the evolutionary synthesis. De Beer’s biographical studies emphasized the natural historical roots of Darwin’s achievement.22 It is likely that the anniversary period was also instrumental in consolidating the notion that science, in the persona of Thomas Henry Huxley, had “conquered” the church. Irvine discussed this theme in a double biography, Apes, Angels, and Victorians: The Story of Darwin, Huxley, and Evolution. In a continuation of family tradition, Julian Huxley—grandchild of T. H. Huxley, the ªrst Director of unesco, and a founding member of the World Wild- life Fund—delivered several lectures in the 1959 anniversary period that publicly associated Darwin with secularized science. At

21 Howard E. L. Mellersh, Charles Darwin, Pioneer in the Theory of Evolution (London, 1964); Alan Moorehead, Darwin and the “Beagle” (London, 1969); Arthur Keith, Darwin Revalued (London, 1955); Keith quoted in Colp, “Charles Darwin’s Past and Future Biographies,”172. 22 David Lack, Darwin’s Finches (New York, 1947); Frank J Sulloway, “Darwin and His Finches: The Evolution of a Legend,” Journal of the History of Biology, XV (1982), 1–53; Barlow (ed.), “Charles Darwin’s Ornithological Notes,” Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History). Historical Series, II, no.7 (1963), 201–278; Gavin de Beer (ed.), “Darwin’s Notebooks on Transmutation of Species,” ibid., no. 2–6; III, no. 5 (1960); idem, Charles Darwin (London, 1958); idem, Charles Darwin: A Scientiªc Biography (Garden City, 1965). 368 | JANET BROWNE the Darwin commemoration in Chicago, Huxley advocated the view that religion was merely a Darwinian adaptation in human- kind. In the magazine Life International, he explained how “Dar- win discover[ed] nature’s plan.”23 Indeed, Julian Huxley seems to have served in 1959 as a visible and literal descendent of the controversies of the 1860s, when

his grandfather had jousted with Samuel Wilberforce at the Ox- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 ford meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Julian Huxley’s Living Thoughts of Darwin, ªrst published in 1939 in a series noted for bringing secular philosophies to those “seeking to educate themselves,” was reissued in 1958 and 1959. This semibiographical study promoted Darwin as a rational, scientiªc ªgure, “the Newton of biology.” The younger Huxley received the Darwin-Wallace medal of the Linnean Society of London in 1958, and was knighted in the same year—100 years after Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace jointly announced the theory of evolution by natural selection. Such honors cast biology as a leading ªeld of secular scientiªc inquiry.24 Interestingly, biographers in this period frequently emphasized Darwin’s personal integrity. Writers invariably referred to the probity with which Darwin responded to the letter in which Wallace had notiªed him of his own idea of evolution by natural selection. Historians acknowledge this letter, which has not sur- vived, as opening up the possibility of a priority dispute and acting as the stimulus for the joint announcement of Darwin’s and Wallace’s theories at the Linnean Society of London in July 1858. This event was followed by Darwin’s rapid composition of the Or- igin of Species for publication in November 1859.25 Darwin had corresponded with Wallace before his fateful letter had arrived, and he had read Wallace’s publications that hinted at natural laws for the relationships between species. But he seems to have had little idea that Wallace might arrive at the same con- 23 William Irvine, Apes, Angels, and Victorians: The Story of Darwin, Huxley, and Evolution (New York, 1955); Smocovitis, “1959 Darwin Centennial,” 302–305; Julian Huxley, Life In- ternational, 21 July 1958, 37–55. 24 Frank A. J. L. James, “An ‘Open Clash between Science and the Church’?: Wilberforce, Huxley and Hooker on Darwin at the British Association, Oxford, 1860,” in David M. Knight and Matthew Eddy (eds.), Science and Beliefs: From Natural Philosophy to Natural Science, 1700–1900 (Aldershot, 2005), 171–193. See also Browne, Power of Place, 114–125. Julian Huxley, assisted by James Fisher, The Living Thoughts of Darwin (Greenwich, Conn., 1959), 1; idem and H. B. D. Kettlewell, Charles Darwin and His World (London, 1965). Huxley remained a dedicated humanist. See his Religion without Revelation (Westport, 1979). 25 For a full account, see Browne, Power of Place, 14–42. MAKING DARWIN | 369 clusions as he did, even though Charles Lyell warned him so. Bi- ographies of Darwin written in the 1950s and beyond usually dis- cuss this incident from Darwin’s point of view, showing him as a principled ªgure, emotionally overwhelmed by the report that Wallace had independently come to the same conclusions and eager to maintain the ethical standards and responsibilities of the

scientiªc world. Yet Darwin had no priority over Wallace, except Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 in manuscript form: He had not published on the topic, and only a few close friends knew of his intentions. Biographers nevertheless wrote of Darwin’s willingness to “compromise,” of his “generos- ity,” and of his “honorable behavior.” In actuality, the joint reading of the two papers in 1858 deprived Wallace of his priority—although it was advantageous to him in several other ways. Only Eiseley, in a centenary volume intended for a popular audience, deliberately placed Darwin in the context of other evolutionary thinkers, showing Darwin to be part of a larger intellectual tradition and allowing discussion of such other thinkers as Wallace and Herbert Spencer. In general, Eiseley thought that the modern scientiªc enterprise had pushed humanity too far away from its sense of responsibility to the natural world. In 1979, he more obviously addressed Darwin’s personal moral code in Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X: New Light on the Evolutionists, in which he claimed that Darwin adopted the concept of natural selection from Edward Blyth, an early correspondent. Wallace biographers began to take a similarly critical approach to Darwin in the 1980s. The earlier, near-godly image of Darwin was breaking down into that of an ordinary mortal who experienced ethical dilemmas and pres- sures, just like any one else. Science was beginning to show feet of clay.26 Nonbiological writers had no such vested interests. Noted for neoconservative attention to issues of virtue, morality, and the promotion of Victorian values, Himmelfarb saw much social de- terminism in Darwin’s writings, arguing in her 1959 biography that he failed to take moral responsibility for his theories when ap-

26 Loren Eiseley, Darwin’s Century (London, 1958); idem, Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X: New Light on the Evolutionists (London, 1979). See also Mary Ellen Pitts, Toward a Dialogue of Understandings; Loren Eiseley and the Critique of Science (Bethlehem, 1995), 101–143. Wallace protagonists are Arnold C. Brackman, A Delicate Arrangement: The Strange Case of Charles Dar- win and Alfred Russel Wallace (New York, 1980); John Langdon Brooks, Just before the Origin: Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Evolution (New York, 1984); Michael Shermer, In Darwin’s Shadow: The Life And Science of Alfred Russel Wallace (New York, 2002); Ross A. Slotten, The Heretic in Darwin’s Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace (New York, 2004). 370 | JANET BROWNE plied to the human domain. A close study of Darwin’s life gave her an opportunity to contend that moral principles were as much a part of public discourse as of private discourse. She was not only criticized by biologists for dethroning an icon but also censored by the developing ªeld of history of science for being too keen to evaluate and moralize. Again, the image of a saintly Darwin was

weakening. Also, at this time, Adler categorized Darwin’s illness as Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 hypochondria, severely denting the imagery of Darwin battling nobly against debilitating sickness, and Fleming described Darwin as an “anaesthetic man,” harking back to West’s 1937 characteriza- tion of him as a “fragmentary man.”27 Historians of science at this time, too, began to turn away from the valorization of heroes in favor of regarding their subjects as real people. Interest deepened in the logic of discovery. A ªrst wave of studies intended to reframe Darwinism in cultural history was published. Eisely’s Darwin’s Century (1958) was joined by Greene’s The Death of Adam (1959); Glass’ collection of essays, Forerunners of Darwin: 1745–1859 (1959); Ellegard’s “Darwin and the General Reader” (1958); and Milhauser’s Just before Darwin, Robert Chambers and Vestiges (1959). These scholarly works did a great deal to relocate Darwin within a longer tradition of evolutionary and progressivist thought. Because this frame of reference is now a commonplace, it is sometimes hard to remember that these works introduced many readers to other evolutionists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.28 the darwin industry Today, biographers work hard to recon- struct the context in which Darwin lived, the problems that he tried to solve, and the resources upon which he drew for answers.

27 Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (London, 1959); Saul Adler, “Darwin’s ‘Illness,’” Nature, 184 (October 10, 1959), 1102–1103. On the matter of illness, see also Browne, “Spas and Sensibilities: Darwin at Malvern,” in Roy Porter (ed.), The Medical History of Waters and Spas (London, 1990), 102–113; idem, “‘I Could Have Retched All Night’: Charles Darwin and His Body,” in Lawrence and Shapin (eds.), Science Incarnate, 240– 287. The many interpretations of Darwin’s illnesses are discussed by Colp, To be an Invalid: The Illness of Charles Darwin (Chicago, 1977). Donald Fleming, “Charles Darwin, the Anaes- thetic Man,” Victorian Studies, IV (1961), 219–236; “Geoffrey West” [Geoffrey Harry Wells], Charles Darwin: The Fragmentary Man (London, 1937). 28 Bentley Glass, Owsei Temkin, and William Strauss, Jr. (eds.), Forerunners of Darwin: 1745– 1859 (Baltimore, 1959); Alvar Ellegärd, Darwin and the General Reader: The Reception of Dar- win’s Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 1859–1872 (Göteborg,1958); John C. Greene, The Death of Adam (Ames, 1959); Milton Millhauser, Just before Darwin, Robert Cham- bers and Vestiges (Middletown, 1959). MAKING DARWIN | 371 In the process, they aim to dismantle both the traditional account of Darwin’s search for a theory and the imagery of Darwin as an isolated thinker who independently revolutionized the Victorian worldview. Undoing these accounts has occupied the professional lives of many scholars from the 1970s to the present day, somewhat unjustly satirized as the Darwin industry. To be sure, there

were moments in the 1980s and 1990s when it seemed as if the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 reiªcation of Darwin’s notebooks could scarcely go any further. But the Darwin industry has demonstrated, at least, that the Dar- winian revolution was neither a revolution nor solely due to Dar- win. The biggest myth is that evolutionary theory is entirely due to Darwin, and that it developed from intellectual criteria alone. Scholars have amply demonstrated that Spencer, Robert Cham- bers, Wallace, and others need to be included, and that long-term factors like secularization, professionalization, industrialization, economic and social change, and the rise of science itself cannot be ignored.29 Coupled to this shift in historiographical perspective is an in- creased appreciation of the wealth of available archival materials documenting Darwin’s life and times—correspondence, private notes, working records, collections of book reviews, reprints of research articles, photographs, and Darwin’s own library, frequently annotated by him, accompanied by extensive family ar- chives. (Notwithstanding the importance of the Darwin archive for historians, its enormity is ironic: Collected because of his celebrity status, it embraces material that assists scholars in uncover- ing the less well-known ªgures and intellectual themes of the period.) Documents abound for studies of Darwin in the round. Brent (1981) and Bowlby (1990) were among the ªrst to use these rich resources for subtle and informative analyses. As the importance of new historiographies became established, and Dar- win’s correspondence became more widely known through the 1980s, scholars also began to pioneer vigorous sociological interpretations. Desmond and Moore’s deservedly acclaimed biography made use of these changes in perspective, and the archival sources, to present a Darwin for the 1990s, fully embedded in his social and cultural context; it offers a well-articulated social-constructivist

29 Timothy Lenoir, “Essay Review: The Darwin Industry,” Journal of the History of Biology, XX (1987), 115–130; Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley, 2003; orig. pub. 1984). See also idem, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore, 1988). 372 | JANET BROWNE approach to the history of science. This work reºects the modern emphasis on actor-oriented historiography, energetically exploring the possibility of writing a social history of a “great man” and the issues involved in merging two apparently conºicting historical traditions. More recently, in panel discussion and review articles, as well as in Desmond’s biography of Thomas Henry Huxley and

their joint study Darwin’s Sacred Cause (2009), both authors con- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 tinue to move the analytical potential of biographical studies forward.30 Keynes’ study takes a more personalized line in blending Dar- win’s scientiªc endeavors with his family life and providing a strong sense of the materiality of Darwin’s domestic situation. In my own biography of Darwin, much of the focus rests on Dar- win’s support system: I present him as a man who constructed and maintained overlapping circles of friends, neighbors, correspon- dents, critics, and defenders—a ªgure embedded in social networks that he deliberately put to use. This structure allows me to address the problem of how knowledge arises and circulates—how private ideas ultimately become public knowledge and the ways in which new and controversial proposals enter the community. More generally, moments of creative epiphany are not as central as they once were to our understanding of a scientist’s development. Biographers today place far more emphasis on the social condi- tions that made a scientist visible and the reward systems that pre- vailed in different cultures—themes that hardly appeared in biographical writings before the 1970s. To some extent, modern biographers are dealing less with the details of the science and more with the cultural features that create a scientist.31

Not surprisingly, biographers since the 1880s have systematically reformulated the central aspects of Darwin’s life and character— from the hardworking, industrious Darwin of the late nineteenth

30 Peter Brent, Charles Darwin, a Man of Enlarged Curiosity (New York, 1981); John Bowlby, Charles Darwin: A Biography (London, 1990); Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (New York, 1991); idem, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Dar- win’s Views on Human Evolution (New York, 2009). See the special issue of Journal of Victorian Culture, III (1998), 123–147, followed by Moore and Desmond, “Transgressing Boundaries,” ibid. (1998), 147–168. 31 Randal Keynes, Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution (Lon- don, 2001), published in the United States as Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution (New York, 2002). MAKING DARWIN | 373 century, through the respectable domestic man of the 1930s, to the biologists’ Darwin of the 1950s. Every generation of historians recasts the past. It is readily apparent—although difªcult to pinpoint—that biographers, in some way, fashion their biographical subjects; the people who wrote about Darwin were recapitu- lating the past partly to think about their present. They all inhab-

ited a different memory world from each other, and from us. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 Science itself is as much under examination in these books as is the man. The discussion of Darwin’s intellectual development in a notable procession of biographies provides considerable insight into the different worlds of their authors. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021