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Darwin Correspondence Project

Darwin's controversies

Correspondence was itself an important arena of debate, one that Darwin greatly preferred to the public sphere. Often sharp disagreements could be resolved or overcome, and friendship and support sustained in spite of enduring differences. Darwin's correspondence can thus help broaden our understanding of the role of scientific controversy and the ways in which it was conducted in the nineteenth century. For the most part, Darwin himself avoided controvesy but he was drawn into disputes with Richard Owen, St George Jackson Mivart, and Samuel Butler when he thought their attacks were unjust or they became personal.


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St. George Jackson Mivart
http://wellcomeimages.org/
St. George Jackson Mivart, Photograph by Barraud & Jerrard, ICV No 27321
V0026864
Wellcome Library, London

St George Jackson Mivart

In the second half of 1874, Darwin’s peace was disturbed by an anonymous article in the Quarterly Review suggesting that his son George was opposed to the institution of marriage and in favour of ‘unrestrained licentiousness’. Darwin suspected, correctly, that the author was St George Jackson Mivart, who had previously written hostile reviews of his work. Darwin wondered whether to take legal action and, when warned that this was unlikely to be successful, helped George write a letter repudiating Mivart’s accusations. The letter was published in the Quarterly Review with an anonymous rejoinder from Mivart that Darwin found inadequate as an apology. Darwin’s friends Joseph Dalton Hooker and Thomas Henry Huxley joined the fray but the painful episode was not resolved until 1875, and never to Darwin’s satisfaction.

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Monkey suspended at Darwin’s honorary LLD ceremony
Monkey suspended at Darwin’s honorary LLD ceremony
Reproduced from an image held at Christ's College, Cambridge (Darwin Centenary papers) by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of the College

Darwin in letters, 1877: Flowers and honours

Ever since the publication of Expression, Darwin’s research had centred firmly on botany. The year 1877 was no exception. The spring and early summer were spent completing Forms of flowers, his fifth book on a botanical topic. He then turned to the mysterious role of the waxy coating (or ‘bloom’) on leaves and fruit, and to the movement of plants, focusing especially on the response of leaves to changing conditions. He also worked intermittently on earthworms, for the most part gathering observations made by others.

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[Right] Charles Lyell, photograph by Ernest Edwards, 1863, From L. Reeve ed. 1863-6 CUL Ii.4.35

The Lyell–Lubbock dispute

In May 1865 a dispute arose between John Lubbock and Charles Lyell when Lubbock, in his book Prehistoric times, accused Lyell of plagiarism. The dispute caused great dismay among many of their mutual scientific friends, some of whom took immediate action to mediate a solution. Charles Darwin had close ties with both men and both sought his advice, but Darwin’s correspondence during this period reveals his reluctance to become directly involved in the dispute.

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Alfred Russel Wallace
http://enriqueta.man.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/6vu7ve
Alfred Russel Wallace
R8475
Copyright of The University of Manchester

Alfred Russel Wallace

Wallace was a leading Victorian naturalist, with wide-ranging interests from biogeography and evolutionary theory to spiritualism and politics. He was born in 1823 in Usk, a small town in south-east Wales, and attended a grammar school in Hertford. At the age of 13, he was forced to leave school and enter a trade because of financial hardship. He joined an older brother in London as a builder’s apprentice, and the following year started work as a land surveyor with another brother, travelling to different parts of England and Wales and collecting plants.

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Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley, Vanity Fair, Jan 28th 1871
Cambridge University Library

Controversy

The best-known controversies over Darwinian theory took place in public or in printed reviews. Many of these were highly polemical, presenting an over-simplified picture of the disputes. Letters, however, show that the responses to Darwin were extremely variable. Many of his strongest public supporters, such as Thomas Henry Huxley, Joseph Dalton Hooker, and Asa Gray, continued to have sharp theoretical differences with him; on the other hand, a number of his public critics assisted his research privately.

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Charles Robert Darwin
Charles Darwin, engraving from a photograph by O. G. Rejlander, Nature, 4 June 1871
CUL DAR 140.1: 26
Cambridge University Library

Darwin in letters, 1874: A turbulent year

The year 1874 was one of consolidation, reflection, and turmoil for Darwin. He spent the early months working on second editions of Coral reefs and Descent of man; the rest of the year was mostly devoted to further research on insectivorous plants. A vicious dispute over an anonymous review that attacked the work of Darwin’s son George dominated the second half of the year. His children were growing up: Horace began an engineering apprenticeship, Leonard joined the transit of Venus expedition to New Zealand, and Francis married Amy Ruck and became his father's secretary.

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Richard Owen
Richard Owen, photograph by Ernest Edwards, c. 1863. From L. Reeve ed. 1863-6
CUL Ii.4.35
Cambridge University Library

Darwin and Design

At the beginning of the nineteenth century in Britain, religion and the sciences were generally thought to be in harmony. The study of God’s word in the Bible, and of his works in nature, were considered to be part of the same truth. One version of this harmony was presented in William Paley’s Natural theology, or evidences of the existence and attributes of the deity (1802).

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Richard Owen
Richard Owen, photograph by Ernest Edwards, c. 1863. From L. Reeve ed. 1863-6
CUL Ii.4.35
Cambridge University Library

Darwin in letters, 1860: Answering critics

On 7 January 1860, John Murray published the second edition of Darwin’s Origin of species, printing off another 3000 copies to satisfy the demands of an audience that surprised both the publisher and the author. It wasn't long, however, before ‘the stones began to fly’. Members of the scientific community found many difficulties in Origin in the year after its publication and Darwin despaired of making his ideas understood. Among these problems was that arising from the implications it had for human ancestry, hotly debated at the famous meeting of the British Association in Oxford that summer.

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