Darwin’s “Delay”
Most people interested in the literature on Darwin are aware that he alighted on his theory of natural selection a short time after returning from his five-year Beagle voyage in 1836 (Sulloway 1982). It is rather less well-known that during the first decade following his return he produced a large body of work not directly related to his evolutionary theory: Journal of Researches of the Voyage of H. M. S. Beagle (1839 and revised in 1845); five volumes of Zoology of the Voyage of H. M. S. Beagle (1840‑1843), which he edited; three volumes of the Geology of the Voyage of the Beagle (1842‑1846); and numerous papers and reviews (Richards 1983, pp. 46-47).
Darwin started jotting down notes on the “transmutation of species” in 1837, and, following his encounter with Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population in September in that year, realised he now had “a theory by which to work” (Sulloway 2006, p. 118). Having completed the bulk of his immediate writing commitments and researches in geology, in 1842 he wrote a brief sketch of his evolutionary theory which he developed substantially and completed in 1844. As Rebecca Stott observes, at that stage this amounted to no more than “a hypothesis; an idea in embryo” (2003, p. 81). However, Darwin set this aside for another decade, giving rise to much speculation about the delay in publishing his evolutionary ideas. Joseph Carroll writes:
Virtually every commentator on Darwin’s career broaches the question, ‘Why the delay?’ If Darwin had a book-length ms. prepared in 1844, why did he wait another fifteen years before publishing his book? One common answer to the question is that he delayed because he was afraid to publish – afraid to offend the public, afraid to endanger his social and professional position, afraid even to upset his wife. (Carroll 2003, p. 45)
Carroll goes on to note that this view appears in its most extreme form in the highly influential biography Darwin (1991) by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, who also attribute severe bouts of Darwin’s chronic gastrointestinal disorder to anxieties about the potential public reception of his evolutionary theory. Carroll proceeds to dispute the now widely-held view, noting that
It fails to register the difference in the quality of argument between a lightly and not very coherently sketched outline, on the one side, and a dense, comprehensive, tightly woven fabric of argument on the other… Darwin [in 1844] did not yet know enough, and had not thought enough, to produce the definitive work his theory had the potential to produce. From 1844 to 1859, the efforts that went into Darwin’s studies on geology and natural history, and particularly his work on barnacles, enabled him to master entire fields of information in respect to which, in 1844, he was but a novice. In addition to his published work, over those years he collected an immense quantity of information – of facts accompanied by analytic reflection – that were slated for publication in the big species book… There was no “delay,” only a protracted preparation. (pp. 45-46)
Implicit in Carroll’s comments is that Darwin was well aware that if his theory was to have any hope of convincing a wide range of people it had to be buttressed by a huge array of corroborating factual information and woven into a cohesive overall argument. He could have added that few people realise the full extent that Darwin’s illness hampered his work. After a few hours on his writings in the morning, he customarily had to rest for the remainder of the day, and there were periods when he had to cease working altogether for weeks on end, occasionally undertaking “water cures” at health resorts. His diaries and letters show the deleterious effect this had on his work, e.g.:
I will give you statistics of time spent on my Coral volume, not including all the work on board the Beagle. I commenced it 3 years and 7 months ago, and have done scarcely anything besides. I have actually spent 20 months out of this period on it! and nearly all the remainder sickness and visiting!!! (Darwin to Emma Darwin, May 1842).
Again, during the years he worked on his major barnacles study he reported:
I have lost for the last 4 or 5 months at least 4⁄5 of my time, & I have resolved to go this early summer & spend two months at Malvern & see whether there is any truth in Gully & the water cure: regular Doctors cannot check my incessant vomiting at all.— It will cause a sad delay in my Barnacle work, but if once half-well I cd do more in 6 months than I now do in two years. (Letter to Richard Owen, 24 February 1849.)
But why venture on the barnacles studies in 1846 in the first place? The explanation can be found in his response to a comment by his friend Joseph Hooker, directed at another naturalist, which he took personally: “How painfully (to me) true is your remark that no one has hardly a right to examine the question of species who has not minutely described many” (Letter, 19 September 1845). Robert Richards writes:
In 1846 he began an eight‑year study of barnacles, resulting in four volumes completed in 1854. The barnacle project seduced Darwin. He initially planned merely to do a little study of one species and ended up investigating the whole group of Cirripedia. His work on barnacles has been singled out as both a necessary stage in preparation for the Origin of Species and a significant cause of its delay. (Richards 1983, pp. 46-47)
Desmond and Moore acknowledge:
So barnacles were not totally irrelevant to his evolutionary work. In fact, as he proceeded, he began to uncover the most extraordinary proofs of his notebook speculations. […] He called in specimens from far and wide…[…] To be definitive a monograph would have to embrace fossil barnacles as well…It was dogged, grinding work. The modern species had to be dissected, the fossils disarticulated or sectioned. He was inundated with so many species that the labour became exhausting and the smell of spirits nauseating. (Desmond and Moore 1991, pp. 341-343)
In addition to the immense amount of painstaking work required for a comprehensive study of barnacles, there were the lengthy periods lost to illness:
Finished packing up all my cirripedes. preparing Fossil Balanidae distributing copies of my work &c &c.— I have yet a few proofs for Fossil Balanidae for Pal: Soc: to complete, perhaps a week’s more work. Began Oct. 1 1846 On Oct. 1st. it will be 8 years since I began! But then I have lost 1 or 2 years by illness. (Personal Journal, 9 September 1854)
The Darwin specialists John van Wyhe and Frank Sulloway also take the view that there was no “delay” in the sense promoted by Desmond and Moore. In an article devoted to this issue, van Wyhe writes:
By re-examining the historical evidence, without presuming that Darwin avoided publication, it can be shown that there is no reason to introduce such a hypothesis in the first place… A fresh analysis of Darwin’s manuscripts, letters, publications and the writings of those who knew him intimately shows the story to be quite different from one of a lifetime of avoiding publication… In fact, Darwin hardly veered from his original plans for working out and publishing his species theory in due course. Finally, it will be shown that, contrary to common belief, Darwin did not keep his belief in evolution (or transmutation as it was then known) a secret before publication in 1858–59. (van Wyhe 2007, p. 178)
Similarly, Sulloway writes:
Far from being a “closet evolutionist,” as Desmond and Moore claim, Darwin told a dozen of his closest friends about his evolutionary ideas. His twenty-year “delay” in announcing his theory of natural selection was not really a delay. Darwin used this time advantageously to bolster his arguments for evolution, and especially to resolve some of its weakest links. (Sulloway 1996, p. 246)
Carroll expands on this:
The Notebooks reveal that Darwin had gained the essential insights of his work two decades before it was published, and the essays of 1842 and 1844 demonstrate that he was already at that time able to give a coherent exposition of the basic theory of descent with modification by means of natural selection. What then, if anything, did Darwin gain through waiting for fourteen years before writing the final version of his work? There were three main forms of gain: (i) vastly more detail both in apt illustration and in considered inference, (2) an extended compositional process that resulted in an extraordinary density, coherence, and clarity in the exposition; and (3) one new idea, or at least a latent idea rendered explicit and available for development. The process of composition consisted of alternating phases of expansion and condensation, of filling in details and then of abstracting and summarizing. The one new idea is described in Darwin’s Autobiography. He explains that there was one basic problem he had not adequately formulated in I844 – the problem of “divergence” or branching speciation, as opposed to linear descent. (Carroll 2003, p. 38)
I’ll give the last word to Alfred Russel Wallace, who, in a generous tribute to Darwin, recognised the vital importance of Darwin’s having published their theory in a meticulously comprehensive form rather than as an ingenious speculation:
As to the theory of “Natural Selection” itself, I shall always maintain it to be actually yours & your’s only. You had worked it out in details I had never thought of, years before I had a ray of light on the subject, & my paper would never have convinced anybody or been noticed as more than an ingenious speculation, whereas your book has revolutionized the study of Natural History, & carried away captive the best men of the present Age. (Letter to Darwin, 28 May 1864.)
References
Carroll, J. (2003). Introduction. In C. R. Darwin, On the Origin of Species. First edition (1859), edited by J. Carroll. Broadview: Ontario, Canada: pp. 9-87.
Darwin, C. R. The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online. Edited by John van Wyhe.
Desmond, A. and Moore, J. (1991). Darwin. London and New York: Michael Joseph
Richards, R. J. (1983). “Why Darwin Delayed, or Interesting Problems and Models in the History of Science”, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, vol. 19 January 1983: 45-53.
Stott, R. (2003). Darwin and the Barnacle: The Story of One Tiny Creature and History’s Most Spectacular Breakthrough. London: Faber & Faber.
Sulloway, F. J. (1982). Darwin’s Conversion: The Beagle Voyage and Its Aftermath. Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 15, no. 3 (Fall 1982): 325-396.
Sulloway, F. J. (1996). Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives. London: Little, Brown and Company.
Sulloway, F. J. (2006). Why Darwin Rejected Intelligent Design. In J. Brockman (ed.), Intelligent Thought: Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement, New York: Vintage Books: pp. 107-125.
Wyhe, J. van (2007). Mind the Gap: Did Darwin Avoid Publishing His Theory for Many Years? Notes & Records of the Royal Society (2007), 61: 177-205.
February 2011
About the Author
Allen Esterson has also written articles on books by Walter Isaacson: Walter Isaacson, Einstein, and Mileva Marić, and Patricia Fara: Scientists Anonymous, and on the PBS co-produced documentary “Einstein’s Wife”: Einstein’s Wife: Mileva Marić. In addition to his book Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud, he has written several journal articles on Freud.
Thanks for posting this. Interesting perspectives on what went into the great work.
Thank you, Allen Esterson. Sounds to me like a brilliant scientist doing brilliantly what a scientist should do: acquiring data and checking his hypothesis. Heart-warming about Wallace.
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I don’t think that D&M can be dismissed so readily. Firstly, Van Wyhe’s (henceforth VW) article is, itself, disingenous. Apart from anything else if fails to acknowledge the simple truth that the 1840s were an incredibly turbulent time, while the 1850s were not. There can be little doubt that someone as socially conservative as Darwin (notwithstanding his Whig origins) would have been very concerned about the radical potential of his materialistic theory. VW’s list is also slightly deceptive as it does not focus upon the exact nature of what Darwin told these individuals, many of whom were quite close family. VW is highly unconvincing in his explanations of why the “myth” of the delay arose, he either bottles it, or doesn’t understand how to do historiography. Secondly, the dismissal of a psychosomatic illness is unreasonable. Two things here: it is necessary to understand how Darwin himself would’ve perceived his illness–and there is no doubt that this would’ve been in terms of a model based upon psychological stress. But also, it is posslbe that he might have been suffering from some form of genetically inherited condition (Hayman suggests Cyclical Vomiting Syndrome), which itself can be triggered by stress. Of course, we can’t say what the stress was, but we can’t rule out that it was concern over the materialist implications of his theory. Of the people you cite, Stott is not an authority on this subject, she is a novelist that has turned to science writing, without much knowledge of either science or writing. Her novel ‘The Coral Thief’, for example, is a particulary poor evocation of French transformism in the pre-Darwinian period. Carroll is a crazy lit crit version of E.O. Wilson, who appears to think that all we need is a spot of neo-Darwinism, and hey-presto we can explain everything we need to know about how writers write and literature functions. No need for any of that theoretical nonsense when we can just apply Darwinism to Dickens and then understand Great Expectations (this doesn’t, of course, negate his views about Darwin, but it does indicate where his interests lie). VW’s work in the archives has been stunning and important, and the way that he has brought Darwin’s work to the wider public demands our admiration. But he ain’t no Janet Browne when it comes to writing about Darwin. I’m not going to say that I believe that D&M are right, but I don’t think their critics have nailed them. Somehow, as well, by insisting that the stakes for Darwin were not high, we undermine the fact that even in 1859 there were considerable risks involved in putting his ideas forward, and they didn’t just relate to Darwin’s scientific standing. Is it a coincidence that in the lead up to the publication of Origin he was as sick as at any time during the previous 20-odd years? If I remember rightly (although I haven’t got the energy to check this out just now), he spent much of the lead up to publication in the dismal setting of Ilkley Moor while being treated at Ben Rhydding Hydropathic.
James: You write that the 1840s were turbulent times, and that there can be “little doubt” that someone as socially conservative as Darwin (although a Whig) would have been concerned about the radical potential of his materialist theory. This is only a hypothesis (though presented as fact by Desmond and Moore); it is equally possible that Darwin was so totally wrapped up in his labours (he didn’t finish his arduous work relating to the Beagle voyage and his geological writings until 1846) that political events largely passed him by. I searched all Darwin’s letters (now online) for mention of concurrent political events in the 1840s and found nothing beyond a disparaging remark about a reactionary newspaper. (So little did contemporary political upheavals impinge on him that in May 1848 he wrote to his geologist friend Edward Cresy that he was probably going to Paris next summer concerning barnacles.) In their comprehensive reviews of Desmond and Moore’s Darwin, historians George Levine and Marjorie Green arrived at similar conclusions: “As far as I can see, there isn’t a single reference in his published correspondence to those Chartist uprisings that play so important a role in Desmond and Moore’s narrative” (Levine 1994, pp. 198-199); “Desmond and Moore… are inventing a politicized Darwin, and very cleverly they do it. […] In short, one can only conclude that when it comes to their strictly political context Desmond and Moore are having us on” (Grene 1993, p. 673).
Likewise, Helena Cronin, head of Darwin@LSE, also sought evidence for such political concerns on Darwin’s part in Desmond and Moore’s footnotes, but “again and again my hopes were dashed; references to recent historians a-plenty but to the sage himself, none” (TES, 29 November 1991).
It is an assumption by people for whom the political context looms large that it must have been the case that Darwin was concerned about potential radical consequences of his theory. He himself dismissed the notion: “What a foolish idea seems to prevail in Germany on the connection between Socialism and Evolution through Natural Selection” (Darwin, F. 1887, vol. 3, p. 237).
On Darwin’s illness, I doubt you’ll find anyone who doesn’t include a psychosomatic (stress induced) element; certainly Hayman does so in his proposed solution. You write it cannot be ruled out that the illness related to concern over the materialistic implications of his theory, though this of course falls far short of evidence in favour of the notion that Desmond and Moore repeatedly assert as a fact. What one can do is test the hypothesis. I searched all Darwin’s letters and notebooks and noted dates for periods of severe bouts of illness, and also noted what topics he had been working on leading up to these bouts. Not only was there almost no correlation between his working on his ideas on the transformation of species and severe bouts, if anything the opposite was the case: there were occasions when he writes that he turned to his transformation notes when he could do nothing else. The fact is that even moderately arduous work tended to exacerbate his chronic illness, as did ordinary socialising from the early 1840s onward. You ask if it is a coincidence that he had one of his heavy bouts of illness in the lead up to the publication of Origin (with the implication it is not). This period was one of arduous work; as he wrote to William Fox on 23 September 1859, he had been in “an absorbed, slavish, overworked state”, precisely the conditions that always led to severe bouts of illness regardless of what he was working on.
Rebecca Stott’s book Darwin and the Barnacle is an excellent account of Darwin’s work leading to his definitive volumes on that creature, regardless of any limitations of her other writings that you cite, but I’ll acknowledge she is not an authority on Darwin’s lifework. But in relation to the brief quotation of hers that I gave, Darwin’s “sketch” (his own description) in 1844 was in his own eyes only an outline of his theory, a long way from a fully argued and substantiated publishable work on such a controversial subject, and I could have quoted elsewhere for a comment in similar vein, e.g., Ronald Clark: “it was nowhere near ready for publication”, for reasons he gives (1984, p. 87). In this same context Robert J. Richards writes of “the kind stumbling block – conceptual failure at the heart of his theory – that would cause him to hesitate in publishing his views” in 1844 (Richards 1983, p. 52).
I don’t believe it suffices to dismiss Carroll’s writings relating to Darwin’s work on the basis of something entirely different, his extension of Darwinian theory to literature. The paragraphs of his that I quote above should be judged on their own merits, and are supported elsewhere in my article, and more specifically by John van Wyhe. True, van Wye, an expert on Darwin as you acknowledge, is disparaged by you in comparison to Janet Browne – which only tells us you prefer Browne to van Wyhe, though they have not written comparable publications.
Great discussion. I hope it continues!
If it does I’ll probably point it out via the blog, so that others will read too.