Evolution and Literature: The Two Darwins

It is now a matter of Darwinian mythology that when the 28-year-old Charles Darwin first opened his “evolutionary” notebook in 1837, he deployed the title of his grandfather Erasmus Darwin’s medical treatise, Zoonomia (1794-6). By then, Erasmus—poet, doctor, inventor, evolutionist and leading light of the Midlands Lunar Society—had drifted into comparative obscurity; best remembered as the eccentric genius whose work TheLoves of the Plants (1789) had been notoriously, and brilliantly, burlesqued as The Loves of the Triangles (1798). Almost overnight Erasmus went from being one of the pre-eminent poets in the land to a “laughing stock”: a fate that haunted Charles as he wrestled with his own evolutionary theories in the 1840s and 1850s. (Fara 8). Yet Erasmus was a constant, though often spectral, presence in Charles’s imagination, and his writing and thinking acted as both catalyst and antagonist to his grandson’s theories on heredity, variation and sexual selection. This special edition emerged from a conference held in September 2015 at the University of Roehampton, London, “The Darwins Reconsidered: Evolution, Writing and Inheritance in the Works of Erasmus and Charles Darwin.” This is, to our knowledge, the first conference to formally consider the relationship between these two remarkable speculative thinkers, and to attempt to evaluate the nature of that connection. Does the fact of their being so proximate on many evolutionary ideas —“Such is the condition of organic nature! whose first law might be expressed in the words, “Eat or be eaten!” (E. Darwin Phytologia 556)—a quotation from Erasmus, that could have been written by Charles, count as mere happenstance; as, perhaps, the kind of biological accident honoured by evolutionary theory itself? Or, are there ways in which we can conjoin these thinkers more decisively, either through environmental factors, or more intriguingly, through an imaginative, ideological or even poetic, genealogy? These issues are considered in the first tranche of essays on “Descent.” In “Questions of Inheritance: Erasmus and Charles Darwin,” Patricia Fara presents a reply to an intriguing counter-factual question (Evans n. pag.): “Would Charles Darwin have developed the concept of natural selection if he had been born into a different family?” Admitting the problem of “identifying influences,” particularly amid larger debates about historical change which “raged” during Charles’s lifetime, Fara divides her essay between two main strands: the first, concerning intra-familial interactions; and the second, focusing on Erasmus and his grandson as readers of key texts. Erasmus died in the same year that William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802) was published, but he almost certainly read Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on The Principle of Population (1798), either in the original, or else, in review, which, in the 1790s, would have included lengthy summaries of the work. Yet while the links between the two men must necessarily remain “speculative,” Fara argues, they “cannot be dismissed.” As she suggests, “whether deliberately or unconsciously, authors often reinterpret their memories, and Charles may have leant on his grandfather’s books and ideas more heavily than he was willing to acknowledge. Certainly, he had been enveloped in them since childhood, and who can know to what extent he looked in the mirror (both literally and metaphorically) as he got older, and saw his father and his grandfather staring back at him?” The uncanny feedback loop that Fara describes above reprises, in part, the “anxiety of influence” model of master-disciple relationship famously defined by Harold Bloom in his seminal 1973 work. (Anxiety of Influence, chapter one). While this template is insufficient for obvious reasons—Charles’s status as a man of science, rather than a poet—and also, of course, the fact that Erasmus’s …