Janet Browne - Charles Darwin:The Power of Place

F CHARLES DARWIN had spent the first half of his life in the world of Jane Austen, he now stepped forward into the pages of Anthony Trollope.

Victorian Britain seemed to be at peace with itself as political agitation at home and memories of the Crimean War and Indian uprising gave way to relative stability in the late 1850s and early 1860s. Free trade and carboniferous capitalism pushed ahead as the great manufacturing industries of the nation boomed. In the grand houses of London, Viscount Palmerston picked up his silk hat to become prime minister in 1857, followed in short order by Lord Derby in 1858, and then Palmerston again in 1859, while Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone, and Richard Bright stalked the wings impatient to transform the face of party politics. Cathedral cities hummed with religious controversy; books and magazines poured from the presses; the newly affluent took tours and holidays; and a whole army of clerks, civil servants, bureaucrats, bankers, and accountants was called into being to administer the fresh commercial horizons that accompanied the emerging empire, as India, China, Canada, South America, and the Antipodes increasingly fell under British economic domination. Steam technology was the hero of society. At that time Britain possessed two-thirds of the worlds capacity for cotton factory production and accounted for half the worlds output of coal and iron, an unmatched degree of industrial preeminence. The length of railway track snaking across the countryside doubled from 1850 to 1868. Lawnmowers, water-closets, gas lights, iron girders, encaustic tiles, and much, much more were available to those who could afford them. Although Queen Victoria and her ministers were soon to encounter complex foreign Confidence soared. Social boundaries shifted.

Even so, the contradictions at the heart of Victorian life were more obvious than ever. Fraud, filth, overcrowding, poverty, death, and violence were a fact of life in the urban slums. Rural communities had lost in a decade more than 40 percent of the male workforce to industrial, colonial, and military demands and bleakly faced another round of agricultural depression and distress. The nations religious faith, although never coherent, was fracturing into fervour or dissent. While many from the ruling ranks of society turned a blind eye to these issues, a remarkable array of novelists, statisticians, medical men, radical divines, and social activists were starting to reveal the squalor alongside prosperity and discovering the interesting in the ordinary. In time, parliamentary leaders would open their minds to a second round of political reform in the nineteenth century, egged on by the high sense of purpose, moral earnestness, doctrines of self-help, and appreciation of decorum that characterised the emerging middle classes. From real-life Westminster to imaginary Barchester and back again, Trollope easily captured in his novels this sense of the personal and parochial. But life was not simple even for those whom Lord Salisbury called persons of substance. These mid-century years were not so much an age of equipoise as framed by social and political contrasts. It was an age of capital, labour, complacency, and faith; at the same time, an age of cities, misery, change, commerce, deference, and doubt.

In among the contrasts stood the unobtrusive figure of Charles Darwin. Supported by a family fortune derived from the Industrial Revolution, Darwin was content to become a thoroughly respectable Victorian gentleman. He put away his Beagle shotguns, cast a discerning eye over his investments, and began to participate in the growing sense of national prosperity. He had no need to seek employment. Like many others in his circle he was free to pursue his interests, in his case a magnificent obsession with natural history.

In 1858 he was forty-nine years old, a steady and likable individual, one of the kindest and truest men that it was ever my good fortune to know, said Thomas Henry Huxley. His scientific status was already secure, although he had not yet revealed his theories about species to anyone

In fact Darwin was far more sociable than his words allowed. In London, his friends were clever and influential, a cosmopolitan mix of university professors, authors, manufacturers, government officials, landowners, and politicians; here and there a baronet or a literary lady or two, a few old comrades from his time on the Beagle, and a clutch of intelligent nieces ready to discuss the latest concerts or exhibitions. Whenever he went to town, he sought out the company of his older brother Erasmus, pleasantly fixed in his bachelor ways, and his cousins Fanny and Hensleigh Wedgwood, all living close to each other on the outskirts of Bloomsbury and forming the hub of an extended circle of intermarrying Wedgwoods and Darwins. Darwin had married his cousin Emma Wedgwood in 1839. Other cousin marriages among the clan drew the generations together.

Erasmus hosted dinner parties for him, gossiped, and kept parcels until his arrival. If Darwin was alone he would stay overnight and meet his old friend the geologist Sir Charles Lyell or some other scientific colleague for breakfastmeetings which he valued for keeping in touch and maintaining his intellectual momentum. Otherwise, he would bring Emma and the youngest children up for the pantomime or trips to the dentist. They would stay with Fanny and Hensleigh and see their other relatives visiting from the shires.

His country friends were no less pillars of the community. Darwin welcomed the soothing rhythm of local affairs, always willing to discuss the state of the weather or his poor health with neighbours, organise parish charities, and sympathise with John Innes, the resident vicar, over difficult young curates or problems with the village school. Every so often, a little debate about church doctrine with Innes made his strolls around the country lanes agreeably lively. Innes was just the kind of relaxed clergyman that Darwin himself might once have become if the voyage of the