Charles Darwin: The power of place by Janet Browne, Knopf, 拢37.50, ISBN 0679429328
GARDENERS feel a sense of satisfaction when they see a climbing plant has reached out and gripped its trellis, but few have the patience to watch the process happen. Charles Darwin, however, spent two whole summers recording the slow dance of pea plants鈥� tendrils.
Compared with his nine years dissecting barnacles it wasn鈥檛 much of a chore, but for a naturalist in poor health this was work: he pursued the mechanisms of nature and its grand theoretical schemes through such tiny observations. Alfred Russel Wallace once cheerily remarked, on hearing that Darwin鈥檚 latest manuscript had gone to press, 鈥淚 look forward with fear and trembling to being crushed under a mountain of facts!鈥� If God had been in the details, Darwin would surely have found him.
Advertisement
Janet Browne鈥檚 Charles Darwin: The power of place takes up where her Voyaging left Darwin, at Downe in Kent. Sharing her subject鈥檚 passion for detail, but presenting her mountain of facts in a buoyant narrative, Browne maps the intricate ecosystem Darwin inhabited, showing clearly the intellectual and social connectedness of this supposedly reclusive man with his extensive network of scientists, scholars and friends.
He had traded circumnavigation and London for a rural life where family and neighbours enthusiastically joined in his research in the hothouses, lanes and gardens around his house. He enrolled nieces, tradesmen and amateurs, as well as scientific colleagues from around the world. And, as his fame grew and spread, so did the network, making Down House a focal point and place of pilgrimage for a growing community of scientists.
As Browne describes it: 鈥淒arwin and Emma regularly met Sir John Lubbock, mathematician and fellow of the Royal Society, and his son John, a young naturalist, who lived a few miles away at High Elms. They enjoyed the company of the Bonham Carters, in a neighbouring village, and George Ward Norman, a director of the Bank of England and country gentleman of Downe. Every so often they invited weekend guests from London, sending a horse and carriage to the nearest railway station to pick up visiting groups.鈥�
Another treasure in this book is its insight into the place of women in scientific life. In addition to their traditional roles, the many women in Darwin鈥檚 world were also observers, collectors, expert advisers and his fiercest critics. And gleaming in the background, away in London, were the agents of both the Darwinian revolution and the changes it powered in scientific life: Thomas Huxley, brilliant, ferocious and tactless; Joseph Dalton Hooker, custodian of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, sending cartloads of plants for Darwin鈥檚 hothouse (we can wonder about the propriety of handing over offshoots of the national collection to one鈥檚 friends); and John Tyndall, agitating clerics from his secular pulpit. Their work in the cause of science would help bring to an end the reign of the scientific gentleman amateur epitomised by their friend and inspiration Charles Darwin.
Darwin lived his last years in his garden, from where he was an active player on the world鈥檚 scientific stage. Browne makes vivid sense of this paradox, bringing the domestic and the global together to show just how one gentle man could rock the world.