Appendix:
Erasmus Darwin, Fact and Fiction
The facts about the life of the man who was arguably the greatest Englishman of the eighteenth century are straightforward enough.
Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, was born on December 12th, 1731. He spent his childhood in Nottinghamshire, went up to St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1750, and took his BA degree in 1754. Next he moved to Edinburgh and studied medicine there for two years. Following a very brief attempt to set up a practice in Nottingham, Darwin after only two months moved to Lichfield, a town about fifteen miles north of Birmingham. There he gradually built up a huge reputation as a physician, which followed him to Derby when he moved to that town in the 1780s.
He married twice: in 1757 to Mary Howard, who bore him five children and died in 1770; and in 1781 to Elizabeth Pole, the widow of Colonel Pole of Radburn Hall in Derby (more on this later) who bore him seven children. Between his two marriages he consoled himself with the company of a lady who may or may not have been called Parker. At any rate, she bore him two children who were known as the Misses Parker and who when adult ran a boarding school for girls in Derbyshire.
Through the 1780s and 1790s Darwin became steadily more and more famous, to the point where he endured constant persuasion to move to London from his would-be patients—including King George III, who would gladly have appointed Darwin as Court Physician. He resisted all attempts, and at age 70 died in Derby on April 18th, 1802.
So far this seems like the typical life of a middle-class English gentleman, more successful than most in his chosen career but certainly not the stuff of legends. It is only when we look closer that Darwin begins to surprise us. He was the most famous doctor of his day and the last resort for difficult cases, particularly where mental problems were involved. His treatments were original, sometimes daring, and throughout his career he had a very high proportion of “miracle” cures.
In addition to his main profession, Darwin was also a best-selling poet. In that field he attempted and succeeded in the apparently impossible: the complete exposition of contemporary ideas in geology, botany, biology, technology, and the history of the natural world—in rhymed couplets. His two major poetic works were lengthy, The Botanic Garden and The Temple of Nature, and in the latter he presented his own theory of evolution. Two generations before Charles Darwin, Erasmus understood perfectly well the idea of the survival of the fittest, and he knew the importance of mutations in modifying a species. However, he also believed that acquired characteristics might be inherited, a discredited idea that found its most famous expression in the nineteenth century work of Lamarck.
Samuel Johnson, 21 years older than Erasmus Darwin, was also born in Lichfield but chose to make his home in London. Perhaps that was just as well. Like Dr. Johnson he did not welcome rivals, and Lichfield was scarcely big enough for both of them. If we suspect that the intellectual company and competition in the English Midlands was less than in London, we must also note that Darwin founded the Lunar Society, which drew into it an incredible array of talented people—albeit more concerned generally with the sciences than the arts.
The Lunar Society met once a month, on the night of the full moon so that members could ride home by moonlight. Its attendees, most of them regulars, sound like a catalog of the most influential figures of the time:
—James Watt, the key figure in the development of steam power;
—Josiah Wedgewood, whose pottery in the second half of the eighteenth century became world-famous, a reputation it enjoys to this day;
—Matthew Boulton, England’s leading industrialist of the time, whose metal works at Soho near Birmingham were also world-famous;
—Joseph Priestley, one of the founders of modern chemistry, whose move away from Birmingham upset him more for the loss of his colleagues at the Lunar Society than for any other reason;
—Samuel Galton, another wealthy industrialist whose grandson was Francis Galton, the pioneer of genetics and statistics;
—John Baskerville, the printer and typographer who created the wonderful Baskerville Bibles;
—Thomas Day, the author of the famous (but unspeakably sermonizing) The History of Sandford and Merton, a book which was still being inflicted on English youth as school prizes a hundred years later;
—William Murdock, the inventor of coal gas generation, gas lighting, and steam locomotives.
And of course there was Darwin himself. This whole group of men enjoyed fame in their own time, and helped to launch the Industrial Revolution in England.
Darwin was more than a founder, organizer, and stimulant to the Lunar Society. He was mechanically ingenious and a prolific inventor, scribbling out his endless stream of ideas as his carriage bore him on the extended medical rounds of Derbyshire. He had an original approach to everything, from the mechanics of human speech to windmills to water closets to a hydrogen/oxygen rocket motor. He wrote extensively on medicine, biology, physics, technology, gardening, agriculture, and the education of the young.
On the personal side, Darwin’s appearance—even as told by his friends—does not sound too attractive. He became very fat by early middle age, to the point where by 1776 a semicircular section had been removed from his dinner table to make room for his belly. His face was badly marked by early smallpox, and he lost his front teeth while still a young man. The defense of his appearance by his good friend Anna Seward tells us more perhaps than it intended. Even though Darwin had lost his teeth, she says, and he did look like a butcher, it was untrue to claim, as others had done, that his tongue hung out like a dog’s when he walked.
Looks aside, Darwin generally enjoyed good health and had an excellent appetite (“Eat or be eaten” was one of his mottoes). He suffered somewhat from gout, which he treated himself by abstinence from alcohol. He broke his kneecap in 1768, when he was thrown out of a carriage of his own design, and was after that always slightly lame. That he was able at the age of fifty to woo and win a rich and attractive widow, against the competition of handsome young rivals, suggests that Darwin’s appearance was no hindrance to his enjoyment of life.
There are six biographies of Darwin that I suggest as good reading: Anna Seward’s contemporary account, published in 1804; Charles Darwin’s account of his grandfather’s life, drawn mainly from family documents and published in 1887; Hesketh Pearson’s 1930 biography; Maureen McNeil’s 1987 book, Under the Banner of Science, which sets Darwin in the context of the politics and science of his time; and two highly readable biographies by Desmond King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin (1964) and Doctor of Revolution (1977), which offer the most rounded picture of the whole man. In drawing from these and other sources, I have tried to provide a fictional picture of Darwin that is consistent with the real man, in both his habits and his attitudes. For example, Darwin was not religious, and also not afraid to say so—something not common in his time. But his attitude to his fellow humans was always one of unusual benevolence and sympathy, regardless of differences in viewpoint.
Having followed the facts with Darwin in these stories, I must now say that the other characters presented here are largely fabrication. Darwin did know a Colonel Pole (Sacheverel, not Jacob), and following the Colonel’s death married his widow; but there is no evidence that the two men were good friends—and some evidence to the contrary. Since the actions of these stories takes place in the second half of the 1770s I also found it convenient to transport Pole’s house at Derby over to Lichfield, so as to make him a closer neighbor to Darwin. There is no evidence at all that the good colonel was an inveterate treasure hunter.