Numéro 66-67, spring–fall 2016 The Two Darwins Sous la direction de Martin Priestman et Louise Lee

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Would Charles Darwin have developed the concept of natural selection if he had been born into a different family? Although Darwinian natural selection is situated within the context of Victorian capitalism, there is also clear evidence that Charles studied the evolutionary ideas of his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. In this essay, I examine the evidence testifying to connections between them. Familial and broader contextual effects are inevitably intertwined, but I divide influences into two major strands: those passed down directly through family interactions, and those more closely tied to particular books. Charles’s family history inclined him towards thinking about inheritance, and while it is impossible to pin down a causal relationship for the similarities in their religious views, it does seem certain that Charles acquired his abhorrence of slavery from his family. Annotations confirm that Charles read his grandfather’s books closely, notably Zoonomia (1794-6) and The Temple of Nature (1803). Both Darwins shocked their critics by denying divine direction, yet by presenting evolution through natural selection as the only viable alternative to repeated miraculous creation, Charles effectively concealed his grandfather’s suggestion that life had stemmed from a single event of spontaneous generation. Death, argued Erasmus, is essential for preventing a population explosion that would outrun the world’s resources, a Malthusian concept that was crucial for Charles’s development of natural selection. The extent of Erasmus Darwin’s influence on his grandson must remain speculative, but it cannot be dismissed.

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This essay explores the Darwinian imagination – an approach to exploring the basic ontology of nature that was shared by both Erasmus Darwin and his grandson, Charles Darwin. It focuses on Erasmus and Charles’s respective theories of generation, especially as laid out in Zoonomia (1794) and The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868), and their derivation from the longstanding opposition between theories of epigenesis and panspermia. Erasmus Darwin’s thinking, in particular, was torn between relatively closed and open conceptions of how organic structures assemble and reproduce. Charles, by contrast, worked hard to fashion his theory of pangenesis into a capacious model that would account for interactions of inheritance and development across all levels of physical and temporal scale. Yet beneath disagreements over the distribution of agency between matter and different sexual partners, both argued for an anti-holist, anti-organic ontology that consistently cleared space for more open, more contingent, and ultimately more ecological theories of nature. Ultimately this required a rejection both of the Romantic conception of organic life and Romantic aesthetics, in particular, the notion that the unity of aesthetic experience communicated something about the unity of natural systems. Finally, I will argue that Charles Darwin’s pangenic model – which relies upon the functional assemblage of elements derived from different lineages, on different timescales, and with distinct, non-overlapping, and incompletely integrated capacities – offers a unique way of understanding the problem of intellectual inheritance and the relation between the Darwins themselves. If most approaches to this problem have posited either a lineal genealogy of intellectual inheritance, or situated their work as reflections of a larger historical context, pangenesis can help to imagine intellectual history beyond our typically lineal or atmospheric models of influence.

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This article addresses the family and intellectual relationship between Charles Darwin and his grandfather Dr Erasmus Darwin. After establishing the publishing history of Charles’s ‘sketch’ of his grandfather’s life, the article shows how Charles approaches his subject by a characteristic biological route: the inheritance of family characteristics. His examination of Erasmus’s life and work establishes inherited talents, especially that for poetry.

The biography’s sub-text is to hint at what Charles himself inherited from his grandfather, especially an interest in natural history. However, Charles throughout his earlier life had been very reticent about any impact Erasmus’s writings on biology might have had on his own work. The reticence persists in this sketch and Charles’s focus shifts to Erasmus’s reputation as a poet, and to certain well-known ‘calumnies’ of Erasmus’s character. Charles’s discussion of the poetry reveals as much about himself as it does of Erasmus and the paper concludes with an analysis of Charles’s own poetic taste and literary-critical judgments. The article presents evidence for Charles himself being a highly cultivated reader of poetry and a defender of his grandfather’s reputation as a poet.

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In this article I will examine how Erasmus and Charles Darwin responded to the epic tradition in their writings, and how the legacy of epic was worked into their respective evolutionary visions. Erasmus Darwin formulated a brief sketch of his evolutionary theory in prose in his medical textbook Zoonomia, but when he came to flesh out his conception of evolution in imaginative and empirical detail he turned to verse. His poem The Temple of Nature, published posthumously in 1803, self-consciously evokes epic conventions and engages intertextually with Milton, Lucretius and Ovid in particular. One of the poems that Erasmus Darwin replied to in his verse – Paradise Lost – was by Charles Darwin’s account his constant companion during his voyage on the Beagle. Through exploring how both Darwins responded to Milton’s vision of Creation, and to the counter-visions offered by other epic poets and by Satan within Milton’s own poem, it is possible to see how fundamental epic poetry was to the generation of evolutionary theory and the forms it came to take.

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Whereas Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots traces the sometimes-indirect impact of Charles Darwin on a number of major Victorian novels, this article proposes to examine the fictions of two writers very directly concerned with evolution, but preferring what they took to be Erasmus Darwin’s version of it. The first of these is Samuel Butler, who progressed from sympathetically spoofing Charles’ evolutionism to bitterly attacking his theory of natural selection, holding up what he believed to be the goal-directed evolutionary model of Erasmus and others instead. Along with a glance at Butler’s polemical evolutionary works, his two major novels Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh are explored both for their critiques of Charles and the ways they may have drawn on Erasmus, particularly his Botanic Garden and Zoonomia.

The other writer with links to Erasmus is George Bernard Shaw, the Preface to whose ambitious five-play cycle Back to Methuselah denounces Charles and explicitly praises both Butler and Erasmus’s Zoonomia, while its plot bears interesting similarities to Erasmus’s final evolutionary poem, The Temple of Nature. Since it is not certain Shaw had read this poem the following comparison runs the unproved possibility of direct influence in parallel with Viktor Shklovsky’s idea of the transmission of literary forms in a series of “knight’s moves,” “discontinuous but teleological” as Fredric Jameson calls them. While the parallels between the two works are striking, including the political contexts to which they are responding, the article finally distances Erasmus’s full-blooded but non-exclusory evolutionism from the hints of “survival of the fittest” Social-Darwinism to be found in Shaw’s (and to a lesser extent Butler’s) works.

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I discuss the culture of accurate and dispassionate mensuration in an Arctic that was, for the first time, predictably attainable—a technologized Arctic near enough to be reached and subjected to experiment. My purpose is to develop, in the context of the discourse of polar exploration and the British responses to that discourse made by poets and fiction writers, recent arguments about the culture of scientific experiment and the so-called rise of “objectivity” that have been made by historians of science. The effect of these arguments has been to suggest that a mutually reinforcing objectification of experiment narrative and establishment of professional institutions set nineteenth century science apart from natural philosophy as practised by amateur eighteenth-century gentlemen—Erasmus Darwin being a typical gentleman of that kind.

Here, I suggest that the extreme regions of the poles not only challenged the authority of accurate observation as a defining virtue of science from within the discourse of science, but also inspired fictional narratives that challenged it—and thus called the new science into question. Thus I reveal the effects, in literary texts and the wider culture as well as in expedition narratives and scientific discourse, when experiments did not produce predictable results, or failed completely to comprehend their subjects. I suggest that because of its simultaneous availability and resistance to investigation, the Arctic became an external representative of the fear and desire buried within scientific objectivity. It has remained fascinating in the European cultural imaginary for this reason, as an Other, embodying fear but also longing for a world that eludes mastery by our technologies of knowledge-production. A consequence of this is that aspects of the Arctic have been used by Europeans to configure alternatives and oppositions to scientific culture as it was practised from the early nineteenth century onwards. Specifically, “The Ancient Mariner” and Frankenstein interrogate the claims of “objective” report and accurate experiment and, in doing so, remodel Erasmus Darwin’s fictionalisation and poeticisation of scientific discourse for a more vexed and hostile literary context than the one in which he wrote

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Critics have often noted Darwin’s enthusiastic curiosity (Beer, Levine, Amigoni, Schmitt, Browne) in the Journal of Researches (1839)—particularly its “intensely libidinous” nature (Beer)—but his “strange antics” and numerous instances of “amusement” have been treated as little more than biographical gloss, or charming digressions on the way to a much larger story. But re-reading these understatedly comic episodes through the interpretive prism of incongruity produces a new set of emphases, and intellectual and affective affinities. For, like Michel Foucault’s laughter at the beginning of The Order of Things (1966), Darwin’s “scientific wit” has distinctly taxonomic implications. Incongruity figures the splicing of two previously un-apprehended interpretive frames, a kink in the logic of expectation. While Darwin later naturalizes (rather than spectacularizes) incongruity into his scientific method, in its first iteration in the Journal, it performs vital cultural and aesthetic work: upturning sublimity and delivering detail and present-ness rather than vastness and transcendental awe. Building on Arthur Koestler’s theory of “bisociation”, I argue that incongruity—a gentlemanly and Enlightenment theory of comedy that is fundamentally horizontal rather than vertical in its purview—operates by making Darwin’s own previous expectations, rather than any object, animal or person, the butt of the joke. The “clash” of comic frames at the point of observation limns incongruity’s usefulness as a form of visually self-stimulating agon. These “shifts of attention” (Koestler), I propose, have significant implications in his early evolutionary theorizing: gesturing towards Darwin’s own “nonsense” aesthetic: one that is highly suggestive of non-essentialist approaches to species thinking.