Queen Victoria reigned for 64 years, causing two and a half generations to be lumped together as ‘Victorians'. Had she died in 1870, rather than in 1901, it would be easier to see how little those generations had in common. Approaching the mid-point of the reign, in 1864, the historian J.A. Froude noticed that already ‘from the England of Miss Austen to the England of Railways and Free-trade' the change was ‘vast'. ‘The world moves faster and faster … the temper of each new generation is a continual surprise.' By 1901 surprises had included the invention of the telephone, two Boer Wars and the trial of Oscar Wilde. ‘Temper' is an elusive quality, but from the early 1870s it was shifting. The last three Victorian decades were different, more doubtful and more divided, than the vigorous High Victorian years. From the world of Landseer and Dickens to that of Henry James and Whistler, what Charles Darwin elsewhere called the ‘tone' of mind had changed.
Darwin turned 69 in February 1878. He felt that ‘large & difficult subjects' were now beyond him and that ‘considering my age … it will be the more prudent course … to use my remaining strength in studying small special points.' These were chiefly botanical and contributed to his last major publication, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits. Published in 1881 shortly before his death, it was one of Darwin's bestselling works, an illustration of the considerable consequences such ‘small special points' might have. As he wrote in the characteristically self-effacing preface, ‘the subject may appear an insignificant one, but we shall see that it possesses some interest; and the maxim de minimis non curat lex[‘the law does not concern itself with trifles'] does not apply to science.' Nor does it apply to history. In the letters of a single year, both to and from Darwin, edited with consummate scholarship and a nice sense of balance in the footnotes, which illuminate without overwhelming the text, the small points build into a picture. Darwin himself appears in close-up from the intimate angles of everyday life, while through the correspondence the changing temper of the times reverberates. At the humdrum end of things is the typewriter, which becomes a leitmotif as Darwin vents his exasperation as he attempts to get to grips with it. Soon, he and his son Francis make elaborate arrangements to offload the ‘printing machine' on the ecstatically grateful zoologist Carl Gottfried Semper, who then uses it to write back to Darwin entirely in capital letters. But the large questions are never far away. Evolution itself and the working out of evolutionary theory pervade the letters as they pervaded the age.
For most of 1878 Darwin was at home in Down House in Kent, observing his onions, his bean radicles and the ‘seedling plants' that ‘at present are my delight'. He was particularly interested in their response to external stimuli. ‘Should you ever be able to observe a sensitive Mimosa whilst it [is]raining hard & is hot weather,' he told the German naturalist Fritz Müller in a postscript, ‘I shd. be very grateful.' The sleep of plants was another line of inquiry that he shared with Francis, to whom many of these letters were written. ‘Porliera went beautifully to sleep in my study & awoke well early in the back & obscure part of my study,' Darwin reported to him in July. In December he ordered a siren from the Royal Institution to try the effect of sound on the seedlings. Delivery was complicated owing to ‘the bulk [that] arises from the bellows', as John Tyndall, the Institution's professor of natural philosophy, explained.
In such peaceful pursuits, surrounded by his family and struggling, though less than in some years, with the mysterious illnesses that had dogged him for decades, Darwin conformed to the image of the ‘Hermit of Down', or rather ‘der erleuchtete [enlightened] Eremit von Down' as his German admirer Carl Kraus called him. Darwin struggled with German, finding the Gothic script all but impenetrable. He was often obliged to struggle, however, for those whom Kraus described as ‘ihrer stillen Verehrer' – ‘your silent admirers' – were anything but silent. Letters poured into Down House from across the world, expressing in various terms Kraus's opinion that ‘it is a pleasure, a joy, to be a contemporary of Darwin whose name shines radiantly over our century.' The 28-year-old geologist S.B.J. Skertchly confided that he had learned On the Origin of Species by heart at the age of 13. Darwin sent him a signed copy. He was unusual among scientists, as the chemist Raphael Meldola remarked to him, in having seen his ideas ‘take root & flourish in [his] own time'. More than that, he was liked. Among scientists perhaps only Stephen Hawking has given his admirers such a strong feeling that they knew him personally. Strangers wrote with random queries, such as why do pigeons fly in circles, and anecdotes of animal behaviour: R.M. Middleton of West Hartlepool explained how he had managed to house-train his parakeet. Not all the letters were answered, but an impressive number were. Darwin was remarkably patient. Only once, on a letter from the Prague-born astronomer Anton Schobloch, who wanted to know ‘how is it possible, that there are hemaphrodits' [sic] did he go so far as to write ‘fool' at the top in blue crayon.
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