charles_darwin

The Life of Charles Darwin
a man of science or Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s detailed picture
of Darwin as a man of the nineteenth century or Janet Browne’s
evocation of sailing as a metaphor for his life, there is no shortage of
biographies of Darwin. 2 Add to these biographies the numerous
books written for the anniversaries of Darwin’s birth and death, and
the anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species, and the
material becomes mountainous, literally.
Because Darwin is a symbol, almost shorthand, for the theory
of evolution, there is almost no end to the number of books written
about his ideas, the reasons why he wrote them, and why his theories
are good or bad (both in a scientific and moral sense). This kind
of writing started while Darwin was alive and has proliferated since
his death. The books dealing with ‘‘Darwin’’ and ‘‘evolution’’ run into
the thousands—and that is just in the English language. 3
Perhaps it is possible to limit a description of Darwin’s life to
his scientific work, a person new to his story might say. This is
impossible. Ignoring the fact that Darwin’s theory of descent by modification,
the origin of species, is such a big idea that Darwin himself
worked on it for most of his life, the man and the scientist cannot
be separated. Darwin was an amateur scientist in the sense that he
did not teach at a university or work for a scientific institution: his
house and garden were his laboratory. His home life was his scientific
life and vice versa. Furthermore, Darwin’s writing was definitely
a reflection of the character of the man. His tentativeness and unwillingness
to be combative, the large amount of evidence he used to
support his ideas, the numerous authorities he quoted, and the wideranging
nature of his syntheses are as much descriptions of Darwin’s
personality as his work as a scientist. It is a difficult task to encapsulate
such a life and such a body of work.
17
The Family Background of Charles Darwin
What should a first-time reader know about Darwin? Apart
from the obvious details such as when and where he was born, the
first significant detail someone new to his story should know is that
the Darwin family and the Darwin name were famous before Charles
Darwin was born. Robert Waring Darwin (1766–1848), Darwin’s
father, had married Susannah (1765–1817), the daughter of Josiah
Wedgwood, the famous pottery magnate, in 1796. Darwin had four
sisters and one brother: Marianne (1798–1858), Caroline (1800–
1888), Susan (1803–1866), Erasmus (1804–1881), and Catherine
(1810–1866). Darwin was the fifth child of the six. Because the