The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H.G. Wells

Science, Evolution, and Ecology

Michael R. Page

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138110403
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317025269
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

At the close of the eighteenth century, Erasmus Darwin declared that he would 'enlist the imagination under the banner of science,' beginning, Michael Page argues, a literary narrative on questions of evolution, ecology, and technological progress that would extend from the Romantic through the Victorian periods. Examining the interchange between emerging scientific ideas-specifically evolution and ecology-new technologies, and literature in nineteenth-century Britain, Page shows how British writers from Darwin to H.G. Wells confronted the burgeoning expansion of scientific knowledge that was radically redefining human understanding and experience of the natural world, of human species, and of the self. The wide range of authors covered in Page's ambitious study permits him to explore an impressive array of topics that include the role of the Romantic era in the molding of scientific and cultural perspectives; the engagement of William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley with questions raised by contemporary science; Mary Shelley's conflicted views on the unfolding prospects of modernity; and how Victorian writers like Charles Kingsley, Samuel Butler, and W.H. Hudson responded to the implications of evolutionary theory. Page concludes with the scientific romances of H.G. Wells, to demonstrate how evolutionary fantasies reached the pinnacle of synthesis between evolutionary science and the imagination at the close of the century.

Chapter 1
“Beautiful and Sublime Images of the Operations of Nature”: Erasmus Darwin

Following his visit to Erasmus Darwin’s home in Derby in 1796, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, “Dr. Darwin possesses, perhaps, a greater knowledge than any other man in Europe, and is the most inventive of philosophical men. He thinks in a new train on all subjects except religion” (177). Coleridge’s recognition that Darwin was a new thinker is appropriate, as Darwin was, perhaps, Britain’s most innovative and daring speculative thinker at the dawn of the modern scientific-technological era. Darwin’s accomplishments in many intellectual arenas—from the practice and theory of medicine, to mechanical and theoretical invention, to progressive social and political ideas, to poetry and evolutionary philosophy—reveal a man of many dimensions who has rarely been matched since. He was a synthetic thinker, able to draw inferences from an array of new data and ideas, and come to sometimes immediately practical and sometimes extraordinarily futuristic conclusions that helped drive intellectual, scientific, and technological development in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Erasmus Darwin is the natural starting point for this inquiry into the connections between literature, science, and evolutionary ideas in the nineteenth century, because of his accomplishments in both literature and science. In literature, Darwin’s long didactic poems, The Loves of the Plants, The Economy of Vegetation, and The Temple of Nature, initiated the dialogue between modern science and literature in Britain and were important to the development of Romanticism and evolutionary theory. In science, Darwin made many major contributions: his translations of Linnaeus into English in 1782 and 1787 introduced rigorous scientific classification to a wider public; his scientific treatises Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life (1794, 1796) and Phytologia: or the Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening (1800) were some of the most complete works of contemporary scientific knowledge available, helping lay the foundation for the institutional scientific practice of today; as a member of the Lunar Society where he shared ideas with many of the elite inventors and manufacturers of the Industrial Revolution, he helped initiate what has become today’s technologically driven society; and, finally, the voluminous notes at the end of each of the poems introduced a wide-range of scientific topics to the general reader, sparking an enthusiasm for science parallel to that of the space age of recent memory when popular science (and science fiction) writers like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke made science accessible to a wider reading public.1 As Roy Porter has noted, “Uniting arts and sciences, medicine, physics and technology, the corpulent Darwin was not only a man of the broadest interests but the very embodiment of enlightened values” (Creation 437).

Darwin was one of the leading physicians of his day and his keen scientific approach helped improve the medical practices of the time. Consulted by fellow doctors throughout England, his presence as the leading authority of medicine home-based in the Midlands helped define the region as the place of innovation and industry in a changing England. It was his reputation as “the best doctor of his day” (Reiman vi) that introduced him to many of his colleagues in the Lunar Society. One of the most interesting anecdotes about Darwin’s medical practice is found in a notice from the Birmingham newspaper:

October 23rd, 1762—The body of the Malefactor, who is order’d to be executed at Lichfield on Monday the 25th instant, will be afterwards conveyed to the house of Dr. Darwin, who will begin a Course of Anatomical Lectures at Four o’clock on Tuesday evening, and continue them every Day as Long as the Body can be preserved, and shall be glad to be favoured with the Company of any who profess Medicine or Surgery, or who the Love of Science may induce (Hassler 14).

This notice brings to mind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, conjuring the image of Victor’s studies in Inglostadt under professors Krempe and Waldman. Unlike Victor Frankenstein, however, Darwin’s medical practice was a very public one, in which Darwin wished to advance the understanding of human physiology for the benefit of all. This civic-minded medical and scientific program is what is lacking in Victor Frankenstein’s hubristic pursuit.

Darwin was more than just a practicing physician, however. He was also one of the leading scientific observers of his day, and he was an active inventor in an age when invention was part of the prevailing zeitgeist of the educated man. Some of his ideas for inventions that weren’t yet realizable at the time rival those of Leonardo Da Vinci as prophetic speculations on future possibility, as will be seen in his poetry.

Darwin was at the center of the ideas and activities that drove the industrial revolution in the late eighteenth century out of which the scientific worldview developed. Two observers have referred to Darwin and his fellow members in the Lunar Society as “a kind of general staff for the industrial revolution” (Klingender 35) and “a pilot project or advanced guard” of the Industrial Revolution (Schofield 439). The core group consisted of Darwin, Dr William Small, Matthew Boulton, John Whitehurst, Josiah Wedgwood, James Watt, James Keir, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and Thomas Day. Subsequent permanent Lunar Society members included Joseph Priestley, Samuel Galton, William Withering, John Baskerville, and William Murdock. Even Benjamin Franklin stood as sort of an honorary member; his influence as inventor, scientific experimenter, and political radical made Franklin a symbolic founding father of the group (King-Hele, Life of Unequalled 80). Thus, most of the leading minds of the era were connected with the society. According to Desmond King-Hele, “the Lunar Society was one of those self-igniting groups whose illuminating ideas stimulate the individual members, and the professional scientists in the Society benefited greatly from the speculations of the others” (Erasmus Darwin 25). These men were driven by a vision of the future in which change and development inevitably fueled ideas and innovation. In his capacity as a synthetic thinker, Darwin’s speculations and diverse observations energized many of the practical industrialists like Boulton, Watt, Wedgwood, and Galton.2 Darwin’s scientific thought was vital to the new scientific spirit of the Lunar Society. By translating this new vision for a wider audience in his poems, along with Franklin, Darwin became a prophet for the scientific worldview that came to dominate the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Francis Klingender observes, “The importance of Erasmus Darwin for the intellectual history of the last decade of the eighteenth century rests on his didactic poems. In them he transmitted to educated readers, wherever the English language was understood, that enthusiasm for science and the belief in the perfectibility of human affairs which inspired the members of the Lunar Society” (35).

Darwin’s translation of Linnaeus also contributed to the growing interest in science and especially botany, making Linnaean classification accessible to an increasingly educated public.3 Darwin’s Linnaean translations appeared in two volumes published in the 1780s: The System of Vegetables (1782) and The Families of Plants (1787). King-Hele credits Darwin with introducing much of our scientific language into common usage, including descriptive words like stamen and pistil, formative terms in any child’s scientific education (Life of Unequalled 182). By translating Linnaeus, Darwin opened up modern botany and biology to many of his English contemporaries. While at work on the translations, Darwin began writing poetry and developing a pedagogical agenda to bring the wonders of science to a wider audience. Curiously, as King-Hele points out, historians of science rarely mention Darwin’s Linnaean translations (Life of Unequalled 183). Yet these translations must have been significant in educating the English public into the practices of the scientific method through empirical observation and introducing the discourse of science into the public sphere. The mammoth encyclopedias of the next generation by J.C. Loudon most certainly owe a debt to Darwin’s popularization of science and botany.4

Of all of Darwin’s contributions, however, it is his evolutionary speculations that are of primary interest here. Darwin began developing his evolutionary ideas as early as 1768 while investigating geological formations in the Midlands with his friend Whitehurst. As he worked through the Linnaean material and furthered his amateur observations, it became increasingly clear to him that the doctrine of creation, and its inherent stasis, did not match the observable evidence he found in rock strata and in his study of plants. Undoubtedly his medical studies and practice also contributed to Darwin’s conjectures, for he witnessed change and transformation in the physical organism on a daily basis while ministering to his patients. From these studies and his keen intuitive sense of natural processes, Darwin became one of the first to articulate the concept of biological evolution, later fully theorized by his grandson Charles.5

In some ways, Darwin’s evolutionary views are broader in scope than those of his grandson’s generation, even though they are not as comprehensively articulated. He not only speculates on the biological process, but has a keen understanding of cosmic, geological, social, and historical evolutionary processes. Indeed, Darwin’s poetic speculations find echoes in the cosmic visions of many of today’s cosmologists. In his bestselling Cosmos, for example, Carl Sagan writes:

The early universe was filled with radiation and a plenum of matter, originally hydrogen and helium, formed from elementary particles in the dense primeval fireball. There was very little to see, if there had been anyone around to do the seeing. Then little pockets of gas, small nonuniformities, began to grow. Tendrils of vast gossamer gas clouds formed, colonies of great lumbering, slowly spinning things, steadily brightening, each a kind of beast eventually to contain a hundred billion shining points. The largest recognizable structures in the universe had formed. We see them today. We ourselves inhabit some lost corner of one. We call them galaxies. (246)

Steven Weinberg’s evocative groundbreaking description of big bang theory, The First Three Minutes, also resonates with Darwin’s visionary poems:

In the beginning was an explosion. Not an explosion like those familiar on earth, starting from a definite center and spreading out to engulf more and more of the circumambient air, but an explosion which occurred simultaneously everywhere, filling all space from the beginning, with every particle of matter rushing apart from every other particle. “All space” in this context may mean either all of an infinite universe, or all of a finite universe which curves back on itself like the surface of a sphere (5).

Compare these two passages with Darwin’s vision of the evolution of the cosmos from The Economy of Vegetation:

And the mass starts into a million suns;

Earths round each sun with each explosions burst,

And second planets issue from the first;

Bend, as they journey with projectile force,

In bright ellipses their reluctant course;

Orbs wheel in orbs, round centres centres roll,

And form, self-balanced, one revolving Whole.

—Onward they move amid their bright abode,

Space without bound, the bosom of their God! (Canto 1.107–15)

An even more spectacular cosmic vision appears at the end of The Economy of Vegetation, which will be considered in more detail later in this chapter. Apparent from these lines is Darwin’s poetic intuition of modern cosmological theory. For the reader familiar with the fiction of Arthur C. Clarke, a direct line is observable from Darwin through H.G. Wells to Olaf Stapledon to Clarke, and from Clarke to the cosmologists like Sagan and Weinberg.6 In Darwin’s poetry lies the beginning of the English science fiction writer’s quest to imaginatively explore the evolution of the cosmos.

Although the “science” in Darwin’s passages is arguably quite different than that of the modern cosmologists, it is evident that Sagan’s and Weinberg’s prose is fueled by the same visionary temperament that invests Darwin’s poetry. With that said, a small disclaimer is necessary before proceeding with the analysis: this chapter is not an attempt to affirm Darwin’s science as “scientific truth,” but rather what I hope to show, through an analysis of Darwin’s three long poems—The Loves of the Plants, The Economy of Vegetation, and The Temple of Nature—is that it is Darwin’s visionary approach to the scientific questions of his day that is his true legacy for the modern world, not only for science, but also for literature.

The Loves of the Plants

The Loves of the Plants was first published anonymously in 1789, though it was mostly written between 1782 and 1784 when Darwin was at work on his Linnaean translations. It makes up the second part of the combined volume, The Botanic Garden (1792), perhaps a more familiar title, though The Loves of the Plants should be considered first when evaluating Darwin’s poetic development. Darwin’s purpose in The Loves of the Plants is to describe the Linnaean system of sexual reproduction in imaginative terms. Of Darwin’s three poems, The Loves of the Plants is most clearly a product of eighteenth-century neo-classical poetics, relying on the dev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: “The Banner of Science”: Science and the Nineteenth-Century British Literary Imagination
• 1 “Beautiful and Sublime Images of the Operations of Nature”: Erasmus Darwin
• 2 “Mirrors of the Gigantic Shadows of Futurity”: Wordsworth and Shelley
• 3 “A New Species”: Mary Shelley’s Science Fiction Novels
• 4 “A Tangled Bank”: Darwinian Science Fictions
• 5 “Dim Outlines on a Desolate Beach”: H.G. Wells
• Conclusion: “Where Do We Go from Here?”
• Works Cited
• Index