As we covered in some depth during a previous edition of The Business of Pleasure podcast:
(https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/tbop-podcast/episodes/The-Business-Of-Pleasure-Podcast-History-e1hap2o/a-a7p5tv5) it is very easy to underestimate the role that History plays in The Business of Pleasure.
The stories of remarkable characters and events of the past have fueled the entertainment industry, and the arts, since the times of Homer and Herodotus. However, it’s not often that a character emerges from the pages of history, who radically rearranges those pages, from the Dawn of Time onwards ...and before reaching the age of thirty.
One hundred and ninety-three years ago today, on 27 December, 1831, a twenty-two year-old Cambridge graduate set forth from England to see the world before settling down to a quiet life of sermons and services as a country parson.
The Voyage of the HMS Beagle would take Charles Darwin to the furthest regions of the Earth, but five months into the five year journey, the young Ship’s Naturalist still had his sights firmly on a life of respectable ecclesiastical obscurity: “I find I steadily have a distant prospect of a very quiet parsonage, & I see it even through a grove of Palms,” he wrote to his sister Caroline in April 1832.
All Darwin’s sisters were tickled pink that he would be embarking on a career in The Church. Not so his big brother Erasmus, who replied saying: “I am sorry to see in your last letter that you still look forward to the horrid little parsonage in the desert. I was beginning to hope I should have you set up somewhere near the British Museum or some other learned place.”
Entering the Church had initially been Darwin’s Plan B. Like his father and grandfather before him, he’d studied medicine at Edinburgh University, where it had soon become apparent that he was not cut out to be a surgeon. But nothing leads to nothing, and Darwin’s studies at Edinburgh, the UK HQ of non-conformist thinking at the time, had brought him into contact with the works of philosophers and scientists who were asking questions about, well, the origins of just about everything.**
Darwin must have carried a huge bundle of questions and ideas, theories and scientific speculations with him on his travels. And each new landscape The Beagle encountered, from The Tropics to Patagonia, from the Galapagos to Australia, became the subject of Darwin’s own investigations (cartological, geological, botanical and zoological). Until, in time (a very small amount of time) Darwin’s own questions and observations coalesced into theories.
By 1835, three years into the voyage, Darwin had started contemplating a possible, if highly improbable, Plan C, that of becoming a full-time Naturalist, while still not giving up on the idea of becoming a parson. As he wrote to his cousin, the Clergyman and part-time Naturalist (and famed beetle collector) William Darwin Fox in 1835:
“To a person fit to take the office, the life of clergyman is a type of all that is respectable and happy: & if he is a Naturalist and has the “Diamond Beetle”, ave Maria. I do not know what to say. – You tempt me by talking of your fireside, whereas it is a sort of scene I never ought to think about.”
It was later that year that Plan C became a viable alternative to the parsonage, and entirely without Darwin’s involvement. Throughout the voyage of The Beagle, Darwin had been corresponding with his friend and mentor, John Henslow, the man who’d recommended Darwin for the post of Ship’s Naturalist in the first place. An Anglican Priest/ Geologist/ Botanist, himself, Henslow had started publishing extracts from Darwin’s letters and presenting them to the scientific community…and to huge acclaim. Darwin knew nothing of this, until his sister Caroline wrote to tell him, and by that point it was too late to turn back the tide, as his reply makes clear:
“I have been a good deal horrified by a sentence in your letter where you talk of ‘the little books with the extracts from your letters.’ I can only suppose they refer to a few geological details. But I have always written to Henslow in the same careless manner as to you; and to print without care and accuracy, is indeed playing with edge tools. But as the Spaniard says ‘No hay remedio.’"
And he was right. There would be no remedy for the failed doctor, and would-be country parson, whose ideas would deal the biggest hammer blow to Creationist religions since, well… Creation. Because for Charles Darwin, just like the diminutive and myopic Italian-American author who swore he’d never write a Mafia book, but who was nevertheless compelled by force of circumstances to turn in The Godfather, sometimes History makes you an offer you can’t refuse.
And who knows, as we step forward to 2025, with our eyes fixed on the horizon, it might be plotting an entirely new course for you as well.
David Thomas 27 December 2024
* The country he was leaving behind was anything but quiet. England was in a state of turmoil, after nine months of civil unrest and rioting, as the government, tried, and failed, to introduce the First Reform Bill, the first major attempt to increase the franchise and reform the electoral system in four hundred years. The Representation of the People Act (also known as the Great Reform Act or First Reform Act) finally received royal assent on 7 June 1832.
** Not all the ideas he encountered in Edinburgh would not have been entirely new to young Charles. His own grandfather, also called Erasmus, had also published a (poetic) work on the subject of evolution and common ancestry, The Zoonomia, written 1794-1796.
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