[The year 2009 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of “On The Origin of Species.” The University of Cincinnati is marking these anniversaries with a year-long celebration of Darwin’s life and work. This series on the life of Charles Darwin is part of the celebration.]
By September 1842, Charles Darwin was well known in the London scientific community as an adroit naturalist and successful author. While London allowed Darwin to easily stay connected to his scientific colleagues, its environment had become unbearable. After more than a year of house hunting, the young Darwin family moved from “Macaw House” to a two-story house outside Downe village in Kent. Just 16 miles south of London, Down House, was both convenient and rural. It offered Darwin what he needed most: space, clean air, and solitude. Charles and Emma’s third child, Mary Eleanor, was born within two weeks of the move to Downe. The baby, small at birth, contracted scarlet fever and lived for only a month. Daughter Henrietta Emma followed a year later on September 25, 1843.Darwin continued to develop his theory of descent via natural selection through 1843 and 1844. It was during this time that Charles began a friendship with botanist Joseph Hooker, the man who was to become his closest colleague. By June 1844, Darwin had expanded the unpublished “Sketch” into a more comprehensive 189-page “Essay.” The essay was divided into two main sections. In the first section, Darwin spelled out his argument for the mechanism of evolution, while in the second section he described his evidence of common descent. Darwin, although anxious to share his theory with other naturalists, was terrified of the public reaction. In the end he decided not to publish the essay. Instead, he determined to amass as much support for his theory as he could, lengthen the essay, and then publish a fully referenced work later. It would be 12 years before he would commit his “species theory” to paper.
The years from 1844 to 1856 were among the most exciting, arduous, and tragic of Darwin’s life. His periodic illnesses became chronic, as Darwin struggled with intermittent headaches, near-constant nausea, and bouts of vomiting. For several years he dutifully followed a cold-water therapy prescribed by Dr. James Gully, with some success. Simultaneously, Darwin embarked on an extensive study of barnacle anatomy and diversity. The task, initially projected to take six months, would ultimately require eight grueling years. The physical toll of Charles’ barnacle work and his recurrent illness were further compounded by the heartbreaking death of daughter Annie in 1851. Once his barnacle studies ended, Darwin began a wide-ranging series of observations he hoped would shed light on the feasibility of his theory. He bred pigeons to test the limits of artificial selection, immersed seeds in salt water to see how long they remained viable, examined embryos of various species for evidence of common decent, and documented the geographic distribution of closely related species. Meanwhile, Emma gave birth to six more children: George (1845), Elizabeth (1847), Francis (1848), Leonard (1850), Horace (1851), and Charles (1856).
After 12 years of study, experiment, and observation Darwin finally felt that he had accumulated enough support for his species theory to again consider publication. Prompted by pleas from friends Joseph Hooker and Charles Lyell, Darwin finally organized his mountain of notes and put pen to paper on May 14, 1856. The treatise, tentatively titled “Natural Selection,” took shape over the next several years. It was still uncompleted when, on June 18, 1858, Darwin received a manuscript from Alfred Russel Wallace, a naturalist working in the Malay Archipelago. Darwin was shattered by what he read.
[There are several outstanding biographies of Charles Darwin readily available to the public. The definitive biography is a two volume work by E. Janet Browne titled “Charles Darwin: Voyaging” and “Charles Darwin: The Power of Place.” “Darwin: the Life of a Tormented Evolutionist,” by Adrian Desmond and James Moore is also highly regarded. For a shorter biography of Darwin try “The Reluctant Mr. Darwin,” by David Quammen.]