How Charles Darwin Became a 19th-Century Scientific Rock Star

“Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of science, like Darwin… has been able to isolate himself, to keep himself out of the clamorous claims of others, to stand “under the shelter of the wall,” as Plato puts it, and so to realize the perfection of what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world.”
–Oscar Wilde, 1891
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“There are two sides to every question; there are often half a dozen.”
–Vyvyan Holland (Oscar Wilde’s younger son), 1954
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On the bright summer morning of June 30, 1860, a crowd congregated outside Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History. The occasion was the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), one of the world’s leading scientific societies. The attendees queued up early to secure their seats for a special plenary session discussing Charles Darwin’s new book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The author—­a simultaneously reclusive and intellectually audacious squire from Kent—­claimed to have solved “that mystery of mysteries,” how species originated, adapted, and modified into new ones. Without fear of exaggeration, the 490 pages comprising Darwin’s thesis forever changed our understanding of the life sciences and the natural world.

The expectant throng could hardly have found a better place for their Darwinian deliberations. Inspired by the Victorian polymath John Ruskin’s dictum of “truth to nature,” the new museum—­a neo-­Gothic pile of granite and limestone, trimmed with sandstone—­was designed to impress and instruct. Four years earlier, in 1856, an Oxford professor named Charles Daubeny told the BAAS membership that when completed, the museum’s central court would serve as “the Sanctuary of the Temple of Science, intended to include all those wonderful contrivances by which the Author of the Universe manifests himself to His creatures.” The rooms comprising the periphery of this grand space were for “lectures and researches connected with all branches of Physical Science, [and] may represent the chambers of the ministering Priests, engaged in worshipping at her altar, and in expounding her mysteries.”

The completed exhibition hall was illuminated by natural sunlight, thanks to a heavy glass and iron roof—­which, in its first iteration, almost crashed to the ground. Learning from their structural miscalculations, the architects made sure the second version was fully supported by a battalion of cast-­iron pillars and and arches. The columns were ornamented with wrought iron leaves, representing a metallic arboretum of trees found across the British Isles—­from bushy holly to the mighty oak. Aside from their weight-­bearing nature, the pillars cloistered the main gallery into three wide aisles, accommodating the reassembled remains of woolly mammoths, whales, and dinosaurs, along with rows of oak-­trimmed glass display cases filled with fossils, rocks, taxidermized animals, and that rare bird, the dodo.

The two-­story Main Court was bounded by a rectangle of 126 columns, each one composed of a different British rock, labeled with its identity and source. Sculpted into their capitals and corbels was a Pre-­Raphaelite wonderland of plants, demonstrating all the botanical orders. For accuracy, the stonemasons used specimens clipped from the university’s botanical garden. Interspersed between the rocky columns and arches was a parade of marble statues lined up like Latter-­Day Saints—­including Aristotle, Galileo, Bacon, Newton, and Linnaeus—­with a few empty niches that would eventually be filled with sculptures of some of the most eminent scientists expected to be present that morning.

At the pinnacle of the Museum’s arched entrance was a bas-­relief of an angel. In one hand, she holds a Bible turned to Genesis; in the other, a culture plate depicting a cell in the act of division and reproduction. Even Darwin—­a Cambridge man to his core—­contributed unwittingly to the building’s facade. To the right of the portal is a capital adorning a first-­floor window. Instead of a heraldic seal or a gargoyle, the masons carved a pair of four-­legged sea monsters with voracious mouths and long tails, affectionately known to this day as “bear-­whales.” This stony statement was a humorous reference to page 184 of the Origin of Species, in which Darwin playfully proposed what might happen if “a race of bears” ever took to living in the sea: “I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.”  No work of revisionist history, the “bear-whales” assumed their petrified position as the museum’s facade was being completed in early 1860—­a few months after the initial publication of Origin.

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At noon, an eminent physiologist from New York University named John William Draper was scheduled to deliver a lecture on “The Intellectual Development of Europe, Considered with Reference to the Views of Mr. Darwin and Others, That the Progression of Organisms Is Determined by Law.” His argument was that “man in civilization does not occur accidentally, or in a fortuitous manner, but is determined by immutable law.”  Draper’s turn at the podium was originally slotted for a later day in the program. But his talk was moved up after a verbal dustup on June 28 between Thomas Huxley, a comparative anatomist who was Darwin’s most energetic advocate, and Richard Owen, a paleontologist who despised everything about Darwin and his theories. Although Darwin had not yet publicly committed to details concerning the descent of man, Huxley was already arguing that man’s closest relatives in the “tree of life” were apes. Owen, who “had probably dissected more apes than any man,” maintained that such notions diminished the Judeo-­Christian belief in the ultimate authority of human origins, Genesis 1:26–­27—­which proclaimed that God created men and women “in His own image.”  Slamming the lectern with clenched fists, Owen remonstrated that his research had “definitively” shown that the genus Homo, or man, was not merely “a distinct order, but of a distinct subclass of the Mammalia.” Humans, he decreed in print only a few years earlier, were “as different from a chimp as the ape was from a platypus.”  To which Darwin once quipped, “I cannot swallow Man making a division as distinct from a Chimpanzee, as [a platypus] from a Horse: I wonder what a Chimpanzee [would] say to this.”

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Among those waiting outside the museum were the crème de la crème of British science. These men were attired in black morning coats, gray-­striped trousers, and tall silk hats. Off to one side gathered a group of long-­robed clergymen—­their necks wrapped in white chokers and their fingers already flapping against a theory they deemed as heresy. Assembled nearby was a herd of old nags—­self-­styled natural philosophers, scholars, and armchair scientists who bridled, stomped, and shied at the mere mention of Darwin’s name. The creepy dons were reported to have escorted a bevy of lasses, forming “the union under the same roof of grave octogenarian professors with ladies not out of their teens, of deep and learned discussions with the frothiest of small talk, of the natural magic which experimental philosophy can display with the still more wondrous witchery of bright eyes, graceful forms, and becoming dresses—­provocative of that feeling of the ridiculous, which has so close a connection with contrast and ‘the unexpected.’” Indeed, the commentator, whose name is lost to history, found it difficult to maintain his composure, let alone a straight face, when spying “the fair fingers which have rarely turned the leaves of anything more serious than one of Mr. James’s novels or Mozart’s Symphony in D employed upon pages where the simplest and most intelligible terms are such as organic compounds…and the isomers of cumole.”

A pack of college boys milled about the museum’s lush lawn. They sported straw boaters, jackets of many collegiate colors, a spectrum of opinions, and a love for good (and bad)-­natured raillery. One was John Richard Green, who hailed from a high Anglican church, Tory family and attended Jesus College. Later that year, he completed his bachelor’s degree and joined the diaconate. Assigned to several curates in London until hanging up his cassock in 1869, Green would become one of Great Britain’s most distinguished historians before his premature death at forty-­five. In 1885, the journal Nature eulogized him as “the first historian who appreciated the function of science in a State.” A few days after Draper’s lecture, Green wrote a letter to his friend “Dax”—­the future geologist and archaeologist W. Boyd Dawkins.

Green described walking to the Museum with John David Jenkins, a fellow at Jesus College. The Welsh-­born Jenkins served as a missionary in South Africa for six years until ill health sent him back to Oxford in 1858, where he studied the hidebound history of Christianity and ministered to railway workers. During breakfast at hall that morning, Jenkins “proposed going ‘to hear the Bishop of Oxford smash Darwin.’” Jenkins was referring to the same bishop who ordained him in 1851—­the Right Reverend Samuel Wilberforce, an accomplished theologian, member of the House of Lords, fellow of the Royal Society, and one of the most facile and popular orators of his day. “Smash Darwin! Smash the Pyramids,” Green replied, “in great wrath, and muttering something about ‘impertinence.’” To which Jenkins patiently explained that “‘the bishop was a first-­class in mathematics, you know, and so has a right to treat on scientific matters,’ which of course silenced [Green’s] cavils.”

Wilberforce made his star turn at the meeting primarily because it was held on his ecclesiastical turf; but as an amateur naturalist and ornithologist, he was also an active member of the BAAS and a patron of the new museum. A few months earlier, the bishop blessed the new Oxford museum as a pantheon of natural theology—­a thick British brew of biblical lore and empirical observations of plants, trees, animals, and rocks that explained a Creator-­planned world, with man and woman being God’s greatest, and most perfect, works. This concept was most famously articulated by a Christian philosopher, clergyman, and Cambridge alumnus named William Paley. In 1802, he published an influential book entitled Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity from the Appearances of Nature. Bishop Wilberforce was hardly the only enthusiastic reader of Paley’s popular tome. On November 22, 1859—­two days before Origin hit the booksellers’ shelves—Charles Darwin admitted his fondness for Paley’s book when he was still a student at Cambridge University: “I do not think I hardly ever admired a book more than Paley’s Natural Theology. I could almost formerly have said it by heart.”

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The museum’s heavy oak doors swung open at about a quarter to noon. The spectators rushed inside. As they made their way up the steps to the long, narrow library, there was a clatter of high button shoes and heavy leather boots, the rustling of velvet trousers, and the hollow clinks of crinoline hoop skirts. Many of the chairs provided an obstructed view of the hastily outfitted speakers’ stage. Above them was a freshly painted, hammer beam roof with curved, arched, and specially cut timbers that appeared to hold up the ceiling at acute angles. The quarter-­sawn oak bookshelves lining the chamber were newly varnished and still sticky. As a result, tens of thousands of books remained boxed and placed at one end of the room instead of being put out for perusal. Such arrangements were of little consequence, as geologist Charles Lyell reported a few days later, for “the excitement was tremendous.”

Hardly a debate in the tradition of politicians who spout off sound bites and search for “gotcha” moments, the deliberations held after Draper’s lecture were typical of many academic symposiums: the professor’s equivalent of a blood sport, where facts, figures, and experiments were the weapons of choice. Although Darwin referred to it as “the Battle of Oxford,” historians are quick—­and correct—­to remind that this event was not “the Galileo moment of the 19th century.”  Nonetheless, most of the men and women present knew that the gathering represented a confrontation between the faith and future of the Christian church and the origin and nature of modern biology.

Darwin’s deputies—­Thomas H. Huxley and the botanist Joseph D. Hooker—­had already taken their seats and were anxious to begin. So, too, was the speaker, John W. Draper, and John Stevens Henslow, the president, or chairman, of the session. Finally, the portly, smug Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, made a purposefully delayed entrance—­slowly walking down the aisle and shaking the hands of his supporters before settling into a place up front. At this point, the audience craned their collective necks, many murmuring the same question: Where was Darwin?

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From Origin Story: The Trials of Charles Darwin by Howard Markel. Copyright © 2024. Available from W.W. Norton & Company.