ORIGIN STORY: The Trials of Charles Darwin, by Howard Markel
Charles Darwin was not a well man. He spent most of his adult life as a recluse, suffering from a whole host of symptoms: boils, rashes, ulcers, headaches, and bouts of vomiting and gas so painful that they often prostrated him. Modern doctors have retroactively diagnosed him with more than a dozen different ailments — lupus, narcolepsy, gout, pigeon allergies, etc. — without reaching any consensus. But one thing is clear: Darwin’s ups and downs correlated strongly with the stresses and joys of his scientific work, especially “On the Origin of Species,” which at different times proved both a soothing panacea and a veritable poison.
In “Origin Story: The Trials of Charles Darwin,” Howard Markel, a medical historian (he favors a diagnosis of lactose intolerance as Darwin’s primary ailment), details how the scientist came to write his magnum opus, as well as the many trying days he endured on its behalf.
Markel’s first section recounts the familiar story of how Darwin nearly got scooped. He opened his mail one day in 1858 to find a draft of a paper from the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. To Darwin’s horror, the paper duplicated his own, then-unpublished theory of natural selection. Rather than risk losing credit, Darwin slyly dispatched two friends to approach a journal and pressure it to solicit a paper from him to run alongside Wallace’s. The two friends also insisted that Darwin’s name — and his many professional honorifics — appear first in all publicity for the pieces. Generously, Wallace never raised a fuss over these machinations, but here we see Darwin the operator, shrewdly working levers of power.
Later, though, Darwin got worked over himself. The most entertaining section of Markel’s book dives into the composition of “On the Origin of Species” and the toll it took on Darwin. He secured a publishing deal in just four days, but even those mild negotiations clobbered his health. He then had to rally and finish the thing, penning each page on a long board propped in his lap, with sheets of fool’s cap clipped to it. He nearly lost one chapter when a colleague’s children scribbled all over it. Darwin nevertheless churned out 513 pages in 13 months, then more or less keeled over and spent nine weeks in a hospital.
His publisher toyed with changing the book’s title (he preferred “The Origin: Natural Selection”), and one peer reviewer suggested that Darwin drop all the evolution stuff and expand the chapter on raising pigeons. (“Everybody is interested in pigeons,” the reviewer explained.) Darwin demurred.
Sales of “Origin” were brisk, especially considering that a copy cost the equivalent of $105 today. It helped that Darwin secured a coveted slot in Mudie’s Lending Library program, a sort of Victorian-era Oprah’s Book Club for working, middle-class folk. But initial reviews were mixed. Darwin admired George Eliot’s novels, but she didn’t return the favor, privately calling “Origin” “ill-written.” Published assessments were harsher still. After reading one screed, Darwin moaned, “I am thrashed,” and his health yo-yoed up and down depending on the tenor of the clippings in each day’s post. Incredibly, Markel suggests that Darwin’s own publisher arranged for one nasty review, hoping to gin up controversy and therefore sales. Friends like these!
The final section of “Origin Story” recounts the legendary debate on the merits of Darwin’s theory in June 1860, with the biologist Thomas Huxley — “Darwin’s Bulldog” — squaring off against Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, known as “Soapy Sam” for his unctuous ways. (Darwin, inevitably, was too sick to attend.) This is another well-trod tale, and at times Markel’s account descends into a sort of scientific period drama, with parades of silk hats and velvet trousers and lavish descriptions of the décor.
That said, he does capture the pathos and passion of the debate. At one point Robert FitzRoy — the captain of the Beagle, the ship in which Darwin sailed to the Galápagos and other lands — stood up and apologized to the crowd for having taken Darwin along and thus enabling his blasphemous book. Darwin’s stomach couldn’t have taken that very well when word trickled back.
Markel also clears up popular misconceptions about the debate, including the notion that Huxley walked away triumphant. In truth, many people present, including some scientists, thought Soapy Sam waxed him. Indeed, it wasn’t the debate that won people over, Markel argues, but the decades of labor that followed, as scientists worldwide — many of them anonymous, poorly paid assistants — trudged out and gathered evidence for evolution. Public acceptance, then, was as painstaking and slow as evolution itself.
The public’s attitude toward evolution has (mostly) softened since. And while few people read “Origin” nowadays, it remains revered. “Darwin was far too close to his book,” Markel says, and swore at times that he hated the damn thing. But the trials he endured for it defined his life. All heroes have an origin story, and Darwin’s nearly finished him off.
ORIGIN STORY: The Trials of Charles Darwin | By Howard Markel | Norton | 352 pp. | $35
