ABSTRACT
The philosophical spirit of broad-ranging and ambitious enquiry had a strong tradition in the Darwin family. Charles’s paternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), was not only a successful medical doctor and investor, but also a member of the celebrated ‘Lunar Society’, a group of engineers, manufacturers, philosophers and others participant in the enlightenment project of improvement and investigation. The society included James Watt, Joseph Priestley and Josiah Wedgwood. Erasmus was the author of poems, works of science and commentaries on cultural progress: his poetic treatises on technological advancement usually rolled all three genres into one. His book Zoonomia defended an early evolutionary theory according to which all of plant and animal life originated from primitive ‘filaments’, endowed with a tendency to self-improvement over time. Erasmus’ theory has little in common with the evolutionary views later defended by his grandson, and more in common with those of the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829), whose ideas we will meet in a moment. Charles came to distance himself from the ideas of both men. While he may have been drawn to daring theorising by works such as Zoonomia, he eschewed his grandfather’s scientific method on the grounds that it lacked empirical discipline. Recalling his student days he says:
Two other currents that ran strong in the Darwin family were medicine and money. Charles’s father, Robert Waring Darwin (born in 1766), was a physician like Erasmus. He inspired great confidence in his patients, and his practice enjoyed success as a result. But the bulk of Robert Darwin’s income came not from medicine, but from stocks, bonds, rents and mortgages. He had interests in roads, canals, agricultural land and a large part of the Wedgwood china factory. (His weight was formidable, as well as his bank balance; Charles remembered him as ‘very corpulent . . . the largest man whom I ever saw’ [ibid.: 11]). Politically, Robert Darwin was a Whig, strongly anti-Tory, a believer in industry and progress, a materialist, probably an atheist and a critic of aristocratic privilege. Even so, as Charles’s biographer Janet Browne explains, he was no revolutionary: ‘He put his faith in the idea of reform through legislation, and strong private opinions did not stop him encouraging professional relations with local Tory peers and churchgoing squires’ (Browne 2003a: 9).
