Charles Darwin: Voyaging
By Janet Browne
Knopf, 605 pages, $35
Janet Browne originally intended to call this first of a two-volume life “Darwin: Another Biography.” Indeed. No intellectual giant of the modern era has received as much biographical attention as Charles Robert Darwin (1809-82). Yet he has long remained enigmatic, viewed by scientists in the light of science and by many others as a kindly, avuncular, semi-invalid Victorian who set the world on its ear with “The Origin of Species” in 1859.
According to paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, explanations of the origin of “Origin” generally divided students of Darwin between “inductivists” and “eureka-ists”: The former saw his theory of evolution born from the cumulative effect of incremental work begun during the world-circling voyage of H.M.S. Beagle (1831-36); the latter evoked a mysterious “leap” of genius.
For Gould, neither view is accurate. Instead, like most great creative figures, Darwin followed the middle road of prolonged, tenacious preparation combined with a gift for theory and a philosophic mind. Browne thoroughly confirms this view, reminding us that Darwin didn’t have a cogent theory of evolution until several years after the Beagle’s return. Even then, he came to it obliquely, after omnivorous reading and prompted by Thomas Malthus’ studies of human population. We know this now thanks to prodigious recent scholarship, including the publication of Darwin’s post-Beagle notebooks and eight superbly edited volumes of his correspondence.
An associate editor of those letters, Browne commands material essential to narrating Darwin’s scientific career and revealing a complexity of mind commensurate with the man’s achievement. With quiet authority and meticulous detail, she plots his trajectory: A wealthy young gentleman seemingly destined for a rural parsonage sails off for five years as a globe-trotting naturalist. Then, back in England, soon married and burdened with professional responsibilities, this “man of enlarged curiosity” becomes a driven polymath who, in the closing chapter, is about to publish the most radical book of the century.
Enjoying the privilege of hindsight, biographers often see their subject’s early life in the light of what he or she would later become. So conceived, the story seems a foregone conclusion, a tale of destiny, and the teller’s task simply to find-or perhaps make up-the facts that fit the picture. Not so with this biography, where we see the contingencies-the alternative lives even-that swirled round the young Charles. Out of that welter of possibilities gradually emerges a very credible, psychologically nuanced Darwin, neither the mythical titan of science nor the gentle, reclusive scholar coming in isolation upon his great discovery.
Browne deftly places Darwin in the whirlwind of mid-century scientific inquiry, but she also gives us the scion of the wealthy Darwin-Wedgewood clan, to which he bound himself even closer by marrying his cousin Emma in 1839. Vocation and family, science and personal life-these overlapping spheres, Browne suggests, had much to do with Darwin’s blend of intellectual radicalism and thoughtful reticence (the latter in response to his wife’s religious sensibility).
Browne knows a great deal about the cultural and institutional webs of Victorian science and the social world that encompassed it, and her narrative includes fascinating sketches of Cambridge undergraduate life, the British Admiralty (responsible for the H.M.S. Beagle expedition), the clubs and learned societies of Darwin’s London and the roil of debate over the place of mankind in heaven and on earth.
Much of this same material was marshaled by Adrian Desmond and James Moore for their “Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist” (1992). But Browne’s plainer subtitle suggests the difference between these two excellent biographies. Desmond and Moore’s book is knowledgeable, spirited and eminently readable, but their vision of Darwin is overcharged by a determination to rescue him from the generally bloodless and simplistic treatment of many earlier biographies. Until Browne, theirs was clearly the best, finally placing the man in the social and cultural contexts that formed him. While Browne does so too, her pacing is more leisurely (as befits a two-volume work likely to reach 1,000 pages) and her narrative grasp steadier.
Instead of plunging us into the moral and social ferment of the early Victorian period, as Desmond and Moore do, Browne begins, “He was born into Jane Austen’s England.” Indeed, little in Darwin’s leisurely youth as the son of a wealthy physician prepares us for the extraordinary vocation of his mature years.
Reared in the “sleepy market town” of Shrewsbury, young Charles early learned to ride and hunt and to botanize and poke about the countryside, collecting shells, stones and local flora. At Cambridge, he halfheartedly studied medicine a while, describing himself as “an idle sporting man.” But he was ever more attracted to natural history and began passionately collecting beetles. When, at age 19, he shifted to the study of Divinity, he began to fancy himself a country clergyman after the model of the 18th Century naturalist Gilbert White, whose “Natural History of Selborne” he had early loved.
Such a cozy prospect was still before him when he signed on as ship’s naturalist for the Beagle, sent out to gather navigational and other scientific data vital to the British overseas trade empire. In the ship’s five-year circumnavigation of the globe, Darwin, comfortably supported by his wealthy physician father’s fortune, spent long periods ashore in South America, Australia and New Zealand, swelling his research journal and gathering fossil and living specimens of native fauna. Fascinated by the exotic terrain and its fauna, he gradually relinquished any notion of a clerical calling; he was to be a “naturalist” for life.
Yet, full awareness of what he was seeing as he traveled-evidence of continuing geological evolution and of the mutability of species-did not occur during the journey. Only back in England, surrounded by learned peers and immersed in his huge collection of specimens and notations, did he come to white heat in seeking a theory for what he had intuited during the years at sea. Between 1836 and 1844, Darwin traced his mind’s movement in private notebooks labeled “Geology,” “Transmutation of Species” and “Metaphysical Inquiries.” Published as one volume in 1987, these are a thrilling record of intellectual quest.
Browne conveys memorably the passion of those seminal years. Realizing that his emergent theory could shake church and school and family to the foundations, he persevered unswervingly. The key idea of natural selection-his distinct contribution to evolutionary theory-took shape in the “Transmutation” journal, although another 15 years of corroborative inquiry would precede the publication of his magnum opus in 1859. Browne’s story of “voyaging” concludes just before that point.
Because so much of what we now know about Darwin has become available only recently, and because earlier studies have looked more to his ideas and their effect than to his life, much Darwin biography has been thin and repetitious, often taking his own autobiography of 1876 at face value. Written largely for his family, and protective of his wife’s religious faith, the autobiography employed a spare, modestly forthright voice that veiled his emotional complexity and oversimplified the story of his search for a thoroughly naturalistic version of human phylogeny. It was first published-with the omission of some 6,000 words on religious questions-as part of his son Francis’ three-volume “Life and Letters of Charles Darwin” (1887). This frankly sympathetic picture of the man, together with selected scientific correspondence, dominated Darwin biography into the late 1950s, when two broad critical studies by Loren Eiseley (1958) and Gertrude Himmelfarb (1959) signaled a shift in assessment of the man and his impact.
But, appearing just at the start of a revolution in Darwin scholarship, those books could not be the new biography needed. In the years since, a prodigious “Darwin industry,” to which Browne has variously contributed, has made it credible to call her treatment “definitive.”
That term is always slippery, of course, for each generation reconceives the masters whose work has shaped its intellectual discourse. Even so, all biographical thinking about Darwin in coming decades will be in debt to this beautifully encompassing, superbly informed account.
Despite the excesses and vulgarities of so much modern biography-overwritten and fact-happy amongst scholars, sentimental and sensational for the wider public-certain books persuade us that we live in a Golden Age of the genre. Janet Browne’s, happily, belongs to that select company.
