The Amazing Dr. Darwin

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.

If most of the people other than Darwin and the members of the Lunar Society are inventions, the backgrounds to the stories are not.

After the Rebellion of 1745-46 in Scotland, and the defeat at Culloden of Bonnie Prince Charlie (Prince Charles Edward, the Young Pretender), the Scots were forbidden by the Disarming Act to carry weapons. A first offense carried a fine of fifteen pounds sterling, a second offense meant transportation. The Scots were also forbidden to wear the kilt and other Highland dress until that ban was lifted in 1782.

Prince Charles Edward supposedly died in Rome in January 1788, still in exile. However, there had been in the 1750s and 1760s many rumors of his visits to England and to Scotland, in disguise and perhaps with a double to front for him in Europe. If the Prince had suffered a fatal accident while in Scotland, would the double have continued the royal imposture? I am willing to admit that possibility, and I assumed it in “The Devil of Malkirk.”

Given the universally inquisitive and worldly nature of both men, it is hardly surprising that Erasmus Darwin and Benjamin Franklin would also be good friends. Darwin was twenty-five years younger, and admired the older man enormously both as scientist and politician. They met sometime before 1760, probably in 1758, and kept in touch up to Franklin’s death in 1790. Naturally, Darwin followed closely Franklin’s researches into electricity, which stands him in good stead in unraveling the mystery of “The Heart of Ahura Mazda.”

The “lost rivers” of London, which the men follow in this story, are accurate both as to names and locations. The character of Joseph Faulkner resembles Franklin in age, nationality, and appearance, all the way to the bald head and fur hat. However, it seemed better to restrict the allusion to physical resemblance; just like Erasmus Darwin and Samuel Johnson in a single city, Darwin and Franklin would offer each other too much competition to be the lead character in a single story.

“The Phantom of Dunwell Cove” invented little. Joseph Priestley was working with dephlogisticated air—his name for oxygen—in the 1770s, and Darwin would indeed have been keen to attend the Lunar Society meeting and hear of the latest progress. The influence of the Gulf Stream in tempering the climate of Devon and Cornwall was well known, and many an Englishman looked forward to an early spring journey to England’s southwestern peninsula. The only explicit change to history is in timing. Humphry Davy learned of the anesthetic properties of nitrous oxide only in 1799. He reported becoming “absolutely intoxicated” after breathing sixteen quarts of it. Richard Dunwell is presumed to have discovered and used the gas twenty-some years earlier. That is unlikely, but certainly not impossible in an age of reduced communication.

Although the general setting of this story is real, Lambeth is an invented village. It lies near the north coast of Norfolk, midway between The Wash and Cromer. Since the villages of Blakeney and Stiffkey are still there to this day, the interested reader can locate Alderton Manor with fair precision. “The Blues,” cockles from Stiffkey, used to be famous, and the locals around Cromer still tell the story of Black Shuck, the giant hound who haunts the seacoast.

It would be quite plausible for Darwin to visit Norwich Hospital. As one of the first hospitals to be built outside London, it had been opened only in the early 1770s. At the time Norwich was the third largest city in the country, inferior in size only to London and to Bristol.

The lack of hospitals may have been a good thing since the death rate in them was terrifyingly high. As Darwin remarked to Ledyard in “The Lambeth Immortal,” a book, De Contagione, by Girolamo Fracastoro had as early as 1546 proposed a germ theory of disease, but the hospital authorities remained blissfully ignorant of any such ideas; or of simpler ones, such as cleanliness. Sir John Floyer wrote a book, Inquiry into the Right Use of the Hot, Cold and Temperate Baths, which ran to six editions between 1697 and 1722. It does not mention anywhere the idea of bathing for the sake of cleanliness.

“The Solborne Vampire” mingles three important themes of Darwin’s life. James Watt and Matthew Boulton excited Darwin’s interests as engineer, though he probably recognized Watt as his eternal superior in that field. No one, however, was Darwin’s superior when it came to medical diagnosis, or the skeptical evaluation of “supernatural” phenomena. Darwin was an ardent believer in the freedom of mankind, and welcomed both the American Revolution, and, in its less bloody phase, the French Revolution.

On the question of dates: the “chess automaton” of Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen was first exhibited in 1769. Emperor Joseph II of Austria, Empress Catherine of Russia, and Napoleon Bonaparte were all taken in by it, and persuaded that it was a real automaton. The centrifugal governor, which uses the speed of rotation of a steam engine to control the steam input, is attributed to James Watt and was produced around 1784. The relationship between Darwin and James Watt, the father of the steam engine, is neither invented nor exaggerated. They were close friends for 25 years. Watt said, after Darwin’s death, “It will be my pride, while I live, that I have enjoyed the friendship of such a man.”

This story called for little background invention or supposition. Cross Fell is real. It is the highest point of the Pennines, the chain of hills that runs from the English Midlands to the Scottish Border. At one time Cross Fell was indeed known as Fiend’s Fell, and according to legend St. Augustine drove the fiends away with a cross. Since then it has been called Cross Fell. Lead mines abound there, and have since Roman times.

The Helm is also real. It is a bank of cloud that sits on or just above the summit of Cross Fell when the “helm wind” is blowing. As a natural but a puzzling meteorological phenomenon, the Helm has attracted a good deal of scientific attention. The reasons for the existence and persistence of the Helm are discussed in Manley’s book Climate and the British Scene, published in 1952.

As for the botany, the medications used by Darwin are pretty much those available to the practitioner of eighteenth-century medicine. The plants used by the red fiend are consistent with the botany of the high fells, but so far as I know the medical value of most of them has not been established.

The eighteenth century is hard to see through twenty-first-century eyes, and when we meet someone who thinks with a modern mind it is surprising. Like Franklin, Darwin was centuries ahead of his time. If in these stories I have emphasized his more colorful and flamboyant side, that should not obscure the real man. The true Darwin is not to be judged by his pockmarked face or his overweight body. He is to be judged by his mind, and on that basis he carries off the highest honors.

The man to remember is the one described in The Torch Bearers, by Alfred Noyes:

Erasmus Darwin makes us look around and ask a question: Who, two hundred years from now, will serve as an emblem for the best of our own times?