He promised Emma that he felt “earnest on the subject.” But a look in his notebook at the time would have shown he was not being entirely honest. He was wondering if religion was more a matter of instinct than of any love of a real God. It was his love for Emma that kept him from telling her all his thoughts.
After they were married, Charles brought Emma to London, and they settled into comfortable monotony. Emma’s anxiety about her husband’s soul continued, and she wrote him more letters. In one that she wrote in 1839, she worried that Charles was so consumed with finding the truth in nature that he shut out any other sort of truth—the sort that only religion could reveal. Believing only what could be proved would keep him from accepting “other things which cannot be proved in the same way & which if true are likely to be above our comprehension.” She begged Charles not to forget what Jesus had done for him and the rest of the world. Darwin put away her letter without a reply, although he would remember it for the rest of his life.
In 1839 Darwin published Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of HMS Beagle Round the World, Under the Command of Captn. FitzRoy, R.N. It was a huge success in Britain and cemented Darwin’s fame as a naturalist. By then Charles and Emma had been married three years and had two children, and they decided it was time to leave London. They were tired of the crime, the coal dust that blackened their clothes, the horse dung that clung to their shoes. They wanted to raise their children in the countryside, where they had grown up. They picked out an estate called Down House, an 18-acre farm in Kent, 16 miles from London. Darwin became a gentleman farmer, planting flowers, buying a horse and a cow. He stopped mingling in the scientific societies altogether. He got whatever information he needed by letter or from carefully selected weekend guests. (Erasmus hated leaving London to visit his brother; he called their house “Down at the Mouth.”)
All the while, Darwin continued mulling his theory of evolution in secret. He wrote down an argument for natural selection, and when he finished it, in 1844, he had no idea what to do next. He didn’t even know how to talk to anyone about it. To support his theory he had been extracting information from dozens of people, but he had never let any of them know what it was for. The boy who was frightened of telling his father he couldn’t become a doctor now had become a man frightened of telling anyone of his dangerous ideas.
But in the end Darwin had to tell someone. He had to find a scientist who could give him a qualified judgment, who might see some fatal flaw he had overlooked. He chose Joseph Hooker, a young botanist who had studied the plants from Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle, and whom Darwin thought might be open-minded enough not to call him a blasphemer. He wrote to Hooker:
I have been now ever since my return engaged in a very presumptuous work, and I know no one individual who would not say a very foolish one. I was so struck with the distribution of the Galápagos organisms, etc., that I determined to collect blindly every sort of fact which could bear any way on what are species. I have read heaps of agricultural and horticultural books, and have never ceased collecting facts. At last gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable… I think I have found out (here’s presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends. You will groan, and think to yourself, “on what a man have I been wasting my time and writing to.” I should, five years ago, have thought so.
Hooker turned out to be as open-minded as Darwin had hoped. “I shall be delighted to hear how you think this change may have taken place,” he wrote back, “as no presently conceived opinions satisfy me on the subject.”
Hooker’s response gave Darwin enough nerve to show his essay to Emma a few months later. He knew that she might be disturbed, but he wanted her to have the essay published posthumously if he should die too soon. Emma read it. She did not weep or faint. She merely pointed out where the writing got murky. When Darwin wrote that he could imagine natural selection producing something even as complex as an eye, she wrote, “a great assumption.”
With two people privy to his secret, Darwin was slowly gaining confidence about publishing his essay. But it vanished completely a month later. In October 1844 a book rolled off the presses called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Its author, a Scottish journalist named Robert Chambers, chose to be anonymous—going so far as to hide the trail by which his publisher paid him royalties. He was wise to be so cautious.
Vestiges started harmlessly enough, describing the solar system and the neighboring stars, surveying how the laws of physics and chemistry explained Earth’s formation out of a gaseous disk. Chambers worked through the geological record as it was then understood, noting the rise of fossils through history. The simple appeared first, and then the complex. As time went by, higher and higher forms of life left their mark. And then Chambers made a scandalizing claim. If people could accept that God assembled the heavenly bodies by natural laws, “what is to hinder our supposing that the organic creation is also a result of natural laws, which are in like manner an expression of his will?” That would make more sense than God stepping in to create every species of shrimp or skink. “Surely this idea is too ridiculous to be for a moment entertained.”
As for how those natural laws worked, Chambers offered a mishmash of secondhand chemistry and embryology. He thought that a spark of electricity might turn inanimate matter into simple microbes. After that, life would evolve by altering its development. Chambers relied here on the outdated ideas of German biologists. He pointed out that birth defects often consisted of a failure to carry out all the steps of development—a baby might be born with a heart, for instance, that had only two chambers, like a fish, instead of four. Presumably these defects were the result of “a failure of the power of development in the system of the mother, occasioned by weak health or misery.” But if the opposite were the case, a mother might give birth to a child who had passed through a new stage of development. A goose might give birth to a gosling with the body of a rat—producing the first duck-billed platypus. “Thus the new production of new forms, as shown in the pages of the geological record, has never been anything more than a new stage of progress in gestation.”
Chambers didn’t think his readers should be scandalized that they had descended from fishes. The sequences of events he was proposing were “wonders of the highest kind, for in each of them we have to trace the effect of an Almighty Will, which had arranged the whole in such harmony with external physical circumstances.” The middle-class British reader of Vestiges could go on with his life as he had before, still guided by the same moral compass. “Thus we give, as is meet, a respectful reception to what is revealed through the medium of nature, at the same time that we fully reserve our reverence for all we have been accustomed to hold sacred, not one tittle of which it may ultimately be found necessary to alter.”
Vestiges was a huge hit, selling tens of thousands of copies. For the first time a broad English audience was introduced to the concept of evolution. But the leading scientists of Britain attacked it bitterly. “I believe some woman is the author,” wrote Adam Sedgwick, “partly from the utter ignorance the book displays of all sound physical logic.” Sedgwick was even more horrified by how such a view of life could undermine decency. If the book were true, he declared, “religion is a lie; human law a mass of folly and a base injustice; morality is moonshine.”