The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times [1 ed.] 1472419545, 9781472419545

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1 Dr Darwin, the Everything
2 Enlightened Spaces: Darwin’s Visual Poetics
3 Texts and Gardens
4 Plants
5 Machinery
6 Matter (1): Evolution
7 Matter (2): Bodies and Minds
8 Myths
9 Aesthetics, Sex, Myths and History: Darwin and Richard Payne Knight
10 Politics
11 Romantic Times (1): Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth
12 Romantic Times (2): Later Romantics and Women Poets
Conclusion
Appendix A: The Progress of Society, or the Temple of Nature By Erasmus Darwin
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin While historians of science have focused significant attention on Erasmus Darwin’s scientific ideas and milieu, relatively little attention has been paid to Darwin as a literary writer. In The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times, Martin Priestman situates Darwin’s three major poems – The Loves of the Plants (1789), The Economy of Vegetation (1791) and The Temple of Nature (1803) – and Darwin himself within a large, polymathic late-Enlightenment network of other scientists, writers, thinkers and social movers and shakers. Interpreting Darwin’s poetry in terms of Darwin’s broader sense of the poetic text as a material space, he posits a significant shift from the Enlightenment’s emphases on conceptual spaces to the Romantic period’s emphases on historical time. He shows how Darwin’s poetry illuminates his stance toward all the major physical sciences and his well-formulated theories of evolution and materially based psychology. Priestman’s study also offers the first substantial accounts of Darwin’s mythological theories and their links to Enlightenment Rosicrucianism and Freemansonry, and of the reading of history that emerges from the fragmentpoem The Progress of Society, a first-ever printed edition of which is included in an appendix. Ultimately, Priestman’s book offers readers a sustained account of Darwin’s polymathic Enlightenment worldview and cognate poetics in a period when texts are too often judged by their adherence to a retrospectively constructed ‘Romanticism’.

This page has been left blank intentionally

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times

marTin PriesTman University of Roehampton, UK

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Martin Priestman 2013 Martin Priestman has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Priestman, Martin, 1949– The poetry of Erasmus Darwin: enlightened spaces, romantic times / by Martin Priestman. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4724-1954-5 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Darwin, Erasmus, 1731–1802—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR3396.P75 2013 821.6—dc23 2013020331 ISBN: 9781472419545 (hbk)

Contents List of Illustrations   Acknowledgements   List of Abbreviations  

vii ix xi

Introduction  

1

1 Dr Darwin, the Everything  

9

2 Enlightened Spaces: Darwin’s Visual Poetics  

29

3 Texts and Gardens  

45

4 Plants  

69

5 Machinery  

93

6 Matter (1): Evolution  

103

7 Matter (2): Bodies and Minds  

123

8 Myths  

139

9 Aesthetics, Sex, Myths and History: Darwin and Richard Payne Knight   

169

10 Politics  

193

11 Romantic Times (1): Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth  

217

12 Romantic Times (2): Later Romantics and Women Poets  

239

Conclusion  

257

Appendix A: The Progress of Society, or the Temple of Nature By Erasmus Darwin  

259

Bibliography   Index  

283 301

This page has been left blank intentionally

List of Illustrations I.1

From Erasmus Darwin’s manuscript for The Progress of Society (see Appendix A), DAR 227.2.23, the Darwin Archive, reproduced by kind permission of Cambridge University Library. xiv

1.1

Erasmus Darwin’s networks: diagram.

16

Emma Crewe, ‘Flora at play with Cupid’. Frontispiece to Erasmus 3.1 Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants (London: J. Johnson, 1789). In the author’s possession.

47

3.2

John Haynes, ‘Map of Chelsea Physic Garden’ (1751). Chelsea Print Room, reproduced by kind permission of Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, Family and Children’s service.

67

4.1

Georg Ehret, diagram from Carl Linnaeus, Systema Naturae (Leyden: Haak, 1736). Reproduced by kind permission of the Natural History Museum, London.

76

4.2

F. Nodder, ‘Gloriosa Superba’, opp. p. 6 of Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden, Part Two: The Loves of the Plants (London: J. Johnson, 1791). In the author’s possession.

80

4.3

J. Webber, engraved J. K . Sherwin, ‘A Dance in Otaheite’. G. Nichol and T. Cadell, 1785, reproduced by kind permission of the British Museum.

82

6.1

William Herschel, Outline of the Galaxy. Plate 8 figure 4 from his paper ‘On the construction of the heavens’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 75 (1785): 213–66. Reproduced by kind permission of the Royal Society.

109

7.1 Henry Fuseli, ‘The Creation of Eve’, opposite p. 55 of Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature (Joseph Johnson, 1803). Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library.

125

7.2

Henry Fuseli, ‘Nightmare’, opposite p. 126 of Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, Part Two: The Loves of the Plants, 4th ed. (1799). Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library.

130

8.1

Henry Fuseli, engraved by William Blake, ‘Fertilization of Egypt’, opp. p. 127 of Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden, Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation (London: J. Johnson, 1791). In the author’s possession.

147

viii

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

8.2 Picture of ‘The Temple of the Rosy Cross’, in Theophilus Schweighardt, Speculum sophicum Rhodo-stauroticum (Frankfurt am Main, 1618). Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library.

152

8.3 Henry Fuseli, ‘The Temple of Nature, frontispiece of Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature (Joseph Johnson, 1803). Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library.

155

8.4

P. J. de Loutherbourg, ‘Reflections for the companions’ (c. 1787), watercolour on paper. Reproduced by kind permission of Torre Abbey, Devon, and the Bridgeman Art Library.

161

8.5

P. J. de Loutherbourg, ‘Painting for the Lodge of the Companions’ (c. 1787), watercolour on paper. Reproduced by kind permission of Torre Abbey, Devon, and the Bridgeman Art Library. 166

9.1

From Plate 2 of Richard Payne Knight’s A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus and its Connexion with the Mystic Theology of the Ancients [1786]. In Two Essays on the Worship of Priapus, ed. Anon (London: privately printed, 1865). In the author’s possession.

174

9.2 ‘The Second Compartment’ of the Portland Vase, engraved by William Blake, opp. Additional Notes p. 127 of Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden, Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation, (London: J. Johnson, 1791). In the author’s possession.

176

10.1

200

William Wynne Ryland after a painting by Angelica Kauffman, ‘Nymphs Adorning the Statue of Pan [Priapus]’ (1776), stipple engraving. Reproduced by kind permission of the Science Museum/Science and Society Picture Gallery.

10.2 Concluding image of A Sketch, from The Landscape: A Didactic Poem, addressed to R. P. K., attrib. John Matthews (London: R. Faulder, 1794). Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library.

202

10.3

211

Charles Monnet and I. S. Helman, ‘The Fountain of Regeneration on the Ruins of the Bastille, 10th August, 1793’, from Les principales journées de la révolution (Paris, 1838). Reproduced by kind permission of the British Museum.

Acknowledgements This book would not have been possible without help and support from a great many sources. I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the University of Roehampton for generously funding the study leave where I really got to grips with this project throughout 2008, and the Leverhulme Trust for earlier leave in 2001–2002, when some important groundwork was laid. My thanks to Cambridge University Library for permission to publish Erasmus Darwin’s draft-poem, The Progress of Society, from manuscripts held there, and to reproduce a page from it; also to Neil Fraistat of Romantic Circles for permission to present a revision of my earlier version of this poem in my online edition of Darwin’s The Temple of Nature. A short passage in Chapter 10 is reworked from my essay on ‘Visions of Matter’ in Pan tra i filosofi (Padova: Il Poligrafo, 2008): for this I would like to convey my thanks to Paola Zanardi, and my sadness that her co-editor Giancarlo Carabelli is no longer with us. I have hugely benefited from discussions with many other scholars, of whom Desmond King-Hele, the doyen of Erasmus Darwin studies, comes first in the list. Great thanks also to Patricia Fara, Molly Mahood, Duncan Wu, Marilyn Butler, Stuart Harris, Tristram Stuart, Lydia Syson, Mike Jay, Ronald Paulson, Jon Mee, Nigel Leask, Anne Janowitz, Rowan Boyson, Sharon Ruston, Stuart Gillespie, David Hopkins, Noah Heringman, Dahlia Porter, Tim Fulford, Irwin Primer and Julia List. I also thank all my colleagues in the University of Roehampton’s Department of English and Creative Writing, but particularly Ian Haywood, Susan Matthews, Zachary Leader, Simon Edwards and John Seed of the Centre for Research in Romanticism, and Laura Peters for much moral and practical support in the later stages. For their indispensable help in getting the manuscript, images and permissions together on time, my thanks to Jenny Watt and, particularly, Charlotte Stroud. Great thanks too to Seth F. Hibbert of Ashgate Publishing for his expert guidance of my text through its last stages, and even greater thanks to Ann Donahue, whose speed and thoughtfulness of response to every question have made Ashgate a complete pleasure to work with. Last and above all, I could not have got this book right without the constant support and wise advice of my wife, Nicola Humble; and its existence is impossible to imagine without the probing questions of our son Luke, who has grown up knowing – and caring – a good deal more about Erasmus Darwin than is quite normal.

This page has been left blank intentionally

List of Abbreviations AN

Followed by the relevant number and page(s) (e.g. Economy, AN 22.56–7), this refers to the Additional Notes of Loves, Economy or Temple. These are paginated separately from the verse texts.

Anti-Jacobin

The Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner. 2 vols. 4th ed. London: J. Wright, 1799.

Civil Society

Richard Payne Knight. The Progress of Civil Society: A Didactic Poem in Six Books. London: G. Nicol, 1796.

DAR

Manuscripts in the Darwin Archive in Cambridge University Library. The most important group for Erasmus Darwin is DAR 227.

DRN

Lucretius. De Rerum Natura. Loeb edition, trans. W.H.D. Rouse, ed. M. F. Smith. Loeb Classical Library. London: William Heinemann, 1982.

Economy

Erasmus Darwin. The Economy of Vegetation in The Botanic Garden. London: J. Johnson, 1791.

Female Education

Erasmus Darwin. A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools. Derby and London: J. Drewry and J. Johnson, 1797.

Genius

The Genius of Erasmus Darwin, ed. C.U.M. Smith and Robert Arnott. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.

Landscape

Richard Payne Knight. The Landscape, A Didactic Poem in Three Books. 2nd ed. London: G. Nicol, 1795.

LB Preface

William Wordsworth. Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802). In The Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth, ed. S. Gill, 595–615. Oxford University Press, 1986.

Lichfield and Derby

Erasmus Darwin. Poems of Lichfield and Derby, ed. Desmond King-Hele and Stuart Harris. Sheffield: Stuart Harris, 2011.

xii

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

Loves

Erasmus Darwin. The Loves of the Plants in The Botanic Garden. London: J. Johnson, 1791.

Loves (1789)

Erasmus Darwin. The Loves of the Plants. London: J. Johnson, 1789.

Memoirs

Anna Seward. Memoirs of Dr Darwin, Chiefly During his Residence at Lichfield. London: J. Johnson, 1804.

n

Indicates the note to the preceding verse-line number, e.g. Loves 4.468n.

Phytologia

Erasmus Darwin. Phytologia, or The Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening. London: J. Johnson, 1800.

Priapus

Richard Payne Knight. A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus and its Connexion with the Mystic Theology of the Ancients [1786]. In Anon, ed., Two Essays on the Worship of Priapus. London: privately printed, 1865.

Progress

Erasmus Darwin. The Progress of Society, or The Temple of Nature. Unpublished draft poem: see Appendix A of this book.

Prog. Man

George Canning, George Ellis and John Hookham Frere. The Progress of Man: A Didactic Poem. In The Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner. 2 vols. 4th ed. London: J. Wright, 1799.

Romantic Poets

Desmond King-Hele. Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic Poets. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986.

School and University

Erasmus Darwin. Poems of School and University, ed. Desmond King-Hele and Stuart Harris. Sheffield: Stuart Harris, 2012.

Temple

Erasmus Darwin. The Temple of Nature, or The Origin of Society. London: J. Johnson, 1803.

Three Elegies

Erasmus Darwin. The Prince; My Son; Our Hero: Three Elegies, ed. Stuart Harris. Sheffield: Stuart Harris, 2009.

List of Abbreviations

xiii

To Elizabeth

Erasmus Darwin. To Elizabeth, with Love. Shorter Poems of Erasmus Darwin, ed. Desmond King-Hele. Sheffield: Stuart Harris, 2008.

Triangles

George Canning, George Ellis and John Hookham Frere. The Loves of the Triangles: A Mathematical and Philosophical Poem. In The Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner. 2 vols. 4th ed. London: J. Wright, 1799.

Unequalled Achievement

Desmond King-Hele. Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement. London: Giles de la Mare, 1999.

‘Verses’

Anna Seward. ‘Verses Written in Dr Darwin’s Botanic Garden’. In Memoirs of Dr Darwin, Chiefly During his Residence at Lichfield, 128–130. London: J. Johnson, 1804.

Zoonomia

Erasmus Darwin. Zoonomia, or The Laws of Organic Life. 3rd ed. London: J. Johnson, 1801.

Fig. I.1

From Erasmus Darwin’s manuscript for The Progress of Society (see Appendix A), DAR 227.2.23, the Darwin Archive, reproduced by kind permission of Cambridge University Library.

Introduction Sometime in the late 1790s, while travelling some of the 10,000 miles he averaged every year on his medical rounds, an elderly doctor began to pencil down ideas for a new poem. It would be set in a vast allegorical temple and describe the history of man and his myths from the primitive age of hunting to the future golden age of philosophy and nature, to which the current advances in science and politics were so clearly pointing the way. Though now we still practised war and slavery in the name of commerce and religious superstition, advances like his friend James Watt’s harnessing of steam power, or his own new grasp of the sources of life, were already making the present dire age one where science could begin to ‘unlock the future with her golden key’ - as he quickly scrawled down as well as the bouncing of the carriage would let him. The carriage had better steering and suspension than most: the doctor’s previous experiment substituting springs for spokes had not worked quite as well as he hoped, but this new system – allowing the front wheels to turn separately at each end of a fixed axle – gave relatively jolt-free stability on corners, and would in fact later be used as the Ackerman steering system in automobiles. All the same, while being ‘joggled, and jostled, and bump’d and bruised along the King’s high road, to make war upon a pox or a fever!’ – as he once wrote to his great friend, the industrial giant Matthew Boulton – the best his pencil could manage was an enormous, shaky script which only took a few lines to fill a page of the small, school-style exercise book he was using. Arrived home, and perhaps seated at the table from which a semicircle had been cut out to make room for his enormous stomach, he moved on to smaller, neater revisions in ink, inscribed palimpsest-style over the pencilled scrawls from the carriage, and themselves repeatedly revised from one notebook to the next. Nonetheless, there were problems with the poem. Though very effective as one of the hunting-age myths celebrating the then-new technology of the bow and arrow, the massacre of Niobe’s children by Apollo and Diana was coming across too mechanically to be really harrowing; also, he could still not decide whether Pasturage went in the temple’s eastern or southern hall, and the velvet-winged genies of each age were being given too much to do. Furthermore, what would the reactionary critics who had torn his previous works apart for their impious science and radical politics have to say about his future golden age, when all traces of religion would be reduced to rubble along with those of crime and slavery? The massacre (with its sad subliminal memories of his first wife Polly’s dying opium delusion that invisible spirits were planning to kill their children) was lovingly extended, with more thought for the victims’ feelings, on the back of a loose page explaining the psycho-physical connections between mumps, hydrophobia and involuntary erections, which happened to have been left over from an earlier medical treatise. But the poem’s other problems were finally decisive.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

2

He salvaged as much as he could – 180 lines on the mysterious temple of nature where the truths and myths of society were to have been taught – but replaced the rest of his poem on the five ages with a completely different one, expanding instead on the medical treatise’s arguments about the evolution of all living species from a single submarine micro-organism, formed in the wake of the primal explosion which had created the universe. Published soon after the doctor’s death in 1802, this new poem would attract a certain degree of respect, since he had of course been by far the most celebrated poet of the preceding decade. But its science – deriving men from microbes thanks to a series of environmental adaptations over a vast stretch of time – was derided as not only blasphemous but embarrassingly absurd.1 The multitasking doctor was Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802). He was a foundermember of the Birmingham Lunar Society which nurtured the seeds of the Industrial Revolution, a prolific inventor and one of the country’s most celebrated physicians, who had turned down a request to attend the increasingly deranged King George III. He invented artesian wells, horizontal windmills, mechanical birds, hydrogen-powered rocket-engines and machines for copying human speech and handwriting. He was also a speculative scientist whose powerfully argued ideas about the evolution of species mapped out much of the ground to be explored by his grandson Charles; and on top of all this he was the most acclaimed poet of the 1790s. A supporter of both the American and French revolutions, a strong opponent of slavery and a notorious atheist, he attracted rising criticism through the later 1790s, after which his reputation steeply declined in ways which now make his cultural significance for one of literary history’s most turbulent decades exceptionally hard to assess. For many people (who have heard of him at all), there is still something rather funny about the whole idea of ‘Erasmus Darwin’. Perhaps it starts with the name: few writers can be so burdened with a surname which so clearly belongs to someone else. There is clearly only one ‘Darwin’, and any efforts to write about Charles Darwin’s grandfather under that surname alone are haunted with a strange sense of putting the cart before the horse.2 This is not helped by the 1

The works mentioned in this thumbnail sketch are Erasmus Darwin’s medical treatise Zoonomia, or The Laws of Organic Life (1794–1796), whose evolutionary ideas were expanded in his densely annotated posthumous poem The Temple of Nature, or the Origin of Society (1803). The abandoned draft poem I picture Darwin writing is reproduced in Appendix A as The Progress of Society, or The Temple of Nature: for the treatment of Niobe, see lines 1.294–319, notes 52–4. For the points on jolting carriages, see Erasmus Darwin, letter to Matthew Boulton, 5 April 1778, Collected Letters, 150; and Desmond King-Hele, ‘Designing Better Steering for Carriages (and Cars), with a Glance at Other Inventions’ in The Genius of Erasmus Darwin, ed. C.U.M. Smith and R. Arnott (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 197–216. 2 As David M. Knight elegantly puts it, ‘To be thought of as one’s grandson’s grandfather is not perhaps the worst of posthumous fates, but there might seem no good reason why Charles Darwin … should have eclipsed a man of such various talents’ (‘Epilogue: “And One Great Slaughter-House the Warring World”: Living in Revolutionary Times’, Genius, 358).

Introduction

3

showy forename ‘Erasmus’, also apparently taken from someone more famous and put in front of the real Darwin’s sober Victorian surname, as if to deliberately upstage it. Furthermore, one of the few things many people used to learn about this Darwin was that his most successful poem, The Loves of the Plants, was blasted from the literary firmament by one of the funniest literary parodies in the English language: the Anti-Jacobin magazine’s The Loves of the Triangles. The story is often told in connection with the irresistible rise of the Romantic Movement, with Erasmus Darwin’s absurd efforts the prime specimen of the artificial lumber of ‘poetic diction’ mercifully cleared away for good by Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads and its Preface. The above sketch probably travesties the actual attitudes of anyone likely to read this book, but parts of it are based on my own ‘first acquaintance’ with this particular poet, and would have had at least some resonance, fully conscious or not, through most of the twentieth century and much of the nineteenth. And one reason for Darwin’s continuing aura of comedy is that some of his writing is funny, its deliberate teetering on the brink of absurdity being part of the charm well understood by its first readers.3 His three long scientific poems – The Loves of the Plants (1789), The Economy of Vegetation (1791) and The Temple of Nature (1803) – reached out to their audience through a battery of techniques, including a kind of comic excessiveness, for lending enjoyment to some very advanced science. This is no longer something poets try to do; but in digging back into both what Darwin’s poems are saying and into how they say it, this book will try to open up some new ways of discussing a range of now-perceived divisions: between arts and sciences, verse and prose, Romanticism and Enlightenment. The sketch of Darwin in full multitask which began this introduction had two aims. The first was to put some initial emphasis onto an event in his creative life which is not much known about, but which was my initial spur for writing this book: the writing and abandonment of the substantial fragment-poem on The Progress of Society, my attempt to decipher whose much-scrawled-and-overwritten drafts appears as Appendix A. The second, broader aim was to bring out something of the constant circulation of Darwin’s thoughts between social usefulness, poetic mythmaking and dangerously cutting-edge science which infuses his poetry from beginning to end. It is this polymathic circulation of concerns that makes Darwin’s poetry so richly fascinating, but also that makes it so hard to talk about purely ‘as poetry’. It is fair to say that the old perception of him as a figure of fun has now been largely swept away, and a great deal has been written about him in the last 40 years or so which gives him a much more respectable place on the cultural map. He features substantially in studies of science history, while in literary studies an evergrowing number of articles and book-chapters have discussed him as a significant background figure to one or more of the major Romantic writers, with far fewer And by later ones. See Donald M. Hassler, The Comedian as the Letter D: Erasmus Darwin’s Comic Materialism (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973). 3

4

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

of the traditional knee-jerk sarcasms at his expense than used to be thought mandatory.4 However, despite passing respectful nods to his verse, the focus of such literary studies is usually on one particular aspect of the subject matter also treated in his prose, most commonly industrialism, botany or psycho-physiology. The challenge in writing in the round about Darwin’s poetry is that discussing it under any one of these headings simply does not do it justice – it really does cover almost everything at the same time, from botany, physics, chemistry, geology and astronomy to art, psychology, mythology, history and the growth and future of human society – and that it only really works as poetry if the reader is lured into becoming interested in all of these things too. It is only after following the lures into all these fields that one can really step back and consider its aesthetic achievement, or otherwise; and this is something which literary studies, aesthetically oriented to the Romantic writers to whom Darwin is being presented as useful ‘background’, have not quite yet managed to do. As with other long-undervalued writers on the cusp of being rediscovered, there is a particular difficulty of audience. For some readers Darwin is already a known quantity, and the main job of a study like this is primarily to engage with the recent scholarship just mentioned. For other readers, he is a surprising new discovery, whose anticipations of many later scientific, political and freethinking trends create a ‘Wow! factor’ which a book like this should never lose sight of. In trying to square this difficult circle, I have tried to engage with as much of the ever-increasing flood of chapters and articles as I could before going to press, while sometimes fighting clear of their more specific arguments in the interests of the bigger picture I am also trying to give: of a Darwin deeply embedded in the culture of his time, but epitomizing this culture so fully as to actually be completely extraordinary. Important parts of this bigger picture are excellently conveyed in a small number of books where he is the central figure. The most academically arranged of these is Maureen McNeil’s trenchant science-historical critique, Under the Banner of Science: Erasmus Darwin and his Age (1987); but a possibly more engaging way of conveying Darwin’s overlapping multiplicity of interests has been through full-blown biographical narrative. Right at the forefront here are Desmond KingHele’s three biographies – culminating in the magnificent Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement (1999) – which along with a flood of other studies by King-Hele (such as Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic Poets, 1986) have done more than anything else to revive interest in the depth as well as the breadth of Darwin’s concerns, and to which this book is far more indebted than in the somewhat token number of acknowledgements I have given. A more socially contextualized approach 4 An introduction is not the place for too many detailed references, but for some of the best of such articles, chapters or part-chapters see especially the following writers in my bibliography: in science history, Roy Porter, David M. Knight, Janet Browne, Londa Schiebinger; in literary studies, Alan Bewell, Tim Fulford, Noah Heringman, Theresa M. Kelley, M. M. Mahood, Dahlia Porter and Alan Richardson.

Introduction

5

is marked by Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future (2002), which deftly interweaves Darwin’s life with those of the other future-makers of the Birmingham-based Lunar Society. More recently, Patricia Fara’s Erasmus Darwin: Sex, Science, and Serendipity (2012) has taken the idea of biographical narrative to yet another level, by tracing the adventures of the author’s own quest for what makes Darwin tick, from her first stumbling on the Anti-Jacobin’s parody The Loves of the Triangles, through various serendipitous discoveries of other musty documents, towards a final linking of Darwin’s evolutionary science with his hatred of slavery and his political radicalism. While frankly owning up to a certain faux-naϊf quality in this tale of her own journey from ignorance – Darwin has long cut a significant figure in her many excellent examinations of Romanticperiod science – Fara very engagingly conveys something of the ‘Wow!’ experience which most voyagers into the oceanic, intertextual realm of ‘Erasmus Darwin’ will at one time have shared. However, though all these narratives include perceptive analyses of aspects of Darwin’s poetry, none really follows these through into a sustained account of his poetics. Two older, shorter books – J. V. Logan’s The Poetry and Aesthetics of Erasmus Darwin (1936) and Donald M. Hassler’s Erasmus Darwin (1973) – land some palpable hits in this area, but necessarily skimp somewhat on the science and broader cultural reference. What has been missing is a full-length examination of Darwin’s poems as poems, which also tries to take something like full account of the ideas they embody on subjects ranging from chemistry, geology and biological evolution to psychology, mythology and aesthetics. Understanding these ideas is not simply an add-on to enjoying his poetry: in almost his first published words, Darwin announced his intention to lead Imagination’s votaries ‘from the looser analogies, which dress out the imagery of poetry, to the stricter ones, which form the ratiocination of philosophy’.5 His poems are carefully constructed around various devices for ‘leading’ us from poetic imagination to science, and if we do not follow these leads, we have not read him properly. This may not seem important but in fact it is vital: both the imagination and the science had a strong effect on the major Romantics, and, I would maintain, also open important alleyways into our understanding of the polymathic, pre-specialist mindset of the British Enlightenment. Accordingly, this book tries to explore Darwin in a wide range of disciplinary contexts, while keeping the primary focus on his work as a writer. There are difficulties with this project. Those interested in Erasmus Darwin as a Romantic influence have tended to be more interested in the politics, botany or physio-psychology than in the chemistry and astronomy; those interested in his anticipation of his grandson Charles’s evolutionism may be rather less concerned about his Egypt-centred mythography.6 But one of Darwin’s most important traits Erasmus Darwin, ‘Advertisement’ to The Botanic Garden (1791), v, and earlier to The Loves of the Plants (1789). 6 Some of the best recent work by literary scholars (Alan Bewell, Tim Fulford, Theresa M. Kelley, Dahlia Porter and Alan Richardson) focuses chiefly on overlaps between botany 5

6

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

is his complete refusal of such divisions: a refusal which is absolutely as much a part of his ‘science’ as of his theory of poetry, art and culture. In fact, the word ‘science’, with its limiting, specializing implications, is an anachronistic term for what Darwin’s own age called ‘natural philosophy’: the word ‘scientist’ was not coined until 1833, and its more specialist divisions – such as ‘physicist’ and ‘biologist’ – at around the same time. In the eighteenth century the ‘arts’ were mainly seen as skills or crafts – from shoemaking to oil-painting – while ‘science’ itself covered the whole field of knowledge and was only half-disentangled from what has since become specialized as ‘philosophy’. Perhaps it is somewhat perverse that, after making this point, my book does in fact rely on a range of such anachronistic terms, from physics to psychology to science itself, rather than consistently grouping them under the more historically accurate umbrella of ‘natural philosophy’; a practice compounded by my wrenching apart and filleting of two of Darwin’s three major poems (The Economy of Vegetation and The Temple of Nature) in order to arrange aspects of their content under similar anachronistic subheadings. My justification for this practice is simply that this is the way we think now, and that Darwin’s astonishing multiplicity of interests is rather better conveyed by clearly noting the now-discrete disciplines he straddles, than by quietly taking that straddling for granted, in the way implied by his own talk of ‘the ratiocination of philosophy’. However, that polymathic taking-for-granted and its subsequent replacement by other models of philosophy and science is one of this book’s major underlying motifs. ‘Literature’ was undergoing a similar transformation to ‘science’. Coleridge once called Darwin ‘the first literary character in Europe’,7 with the strangely emphatic underlining bringing out a sense that although the word contained a growing internal tension, ‘literature’ still covered the whole field of ‘letters’, as in that widespread eighteenth-century sharing of polymathic ideas known as ‘the republic of letters’. It was only in the Romantic nineteenth century that literature cut itself off from other writing, and science became designated as the specialist skill-set for which enjoyers of the arts need to care little. It is, then, as a leading ‘literary character’, in the expanded sense still understood by the young Coleridge, that this book will attempt to tour round Erasmus Darwin.

and human psychophysiology; while the broader scientific coverage given by Desmond King-Hele, Roy Porter, Maureen McNeil and Patricia Fara says little about Darwin’s use of classical mythology, and none of the above delve deeply into the Rosicrucian-Masonic imagery I explore in chapters 8 and 10. 7 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, letter to John Thelwall, 6 February 1797, in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966– 1971), 1. 305.

Introduction

7

The Scope of this Book The main paradigm I use to open up this discussion is one suggested in different ways by Michel Foucault and Martin Bernal: that the turn of the nineteenth century saw an epistemic shift from spatial models of knowledge and feeling to historicizing, time-driven ones. Their more detailed arguments will be rehearsed in my second chapter, but an Introduction is perhaps a good place to say that mine will not be a consistently Foucauldian, ‘plague on all your houses’ reading of the various ways we have ordered and oppressed knowledge, nor a relentlessly Bernalian outing of the racism supposedly implicit in all Romantic and nineteenthcentury thought. Nonetheless, these two very different cultural theorists’ shared paradigm of a broad shift from space to time is, I think, robust, and exemplified in the shift from the model Darwin represents in the extraordinarily turbulent decade of the 1790s, to that upheld by many of the Romantic works which began to overlap with his in the same decade. Hence this book situates Erasmus Darwin’s three major poems – The Loves of the Plants (1789), The Economy of Vegetation (1791) and The Temple of Nature (1803) – within a number of contexts. The first chapter situates Darwin himself within a large, polymathic network of other scientists, writers, radical thinkers and social movers-and-shakers, as a way of setting up the second chapter’s argument that the British Enlightenment was alive and well in the later eighteenth century. Drawing on Foucault and Bernal, this second chapter contrasts Romantic emphases on historical time with Enlightened emphases on conceptual (and other) spaces; and then the third chapter considers the various ways in which this spatial quality is emphasized by the ‘paratexts’ surrounding the first two of Darwin’s major poems, as incorporated together in Darwin’s most successful work, the portmanteau-volume The Botanic Garden. Beginning to move from external form to specific content, Chapter 4 explores Loves’ comedic use of personification to popularize Linnaeus’s ‘sexual system’ of classifying plants, and then the next three chapters deal with Darwin’s handling of the non-botanical sciences in Economy and then in Temple, moving from the politics and poetics of his descriptions of industrial machinery to the genuinely cutting-edge science of his well-formulated theories of evolution and materially based psychology. The last five chapters cross over from science to human culture and the arts, offering the first substantial accounts of Darwin’s mythological theories and their links to Enlightenment Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, and of the reading of history which emerges from the fragment-poem The Progress of Society, my edition of which appears in Appendix A. The utopian themes of Progress are linked to the genuine political radicalism which made Darwin a prime target for anti-Jacobin attacks in the 1790s, and this context of attacks on his reputation – poetic as well as political – leads into two final chapters which both link and contrast his ‘spatializing’ poetic practice to the historicizing of thought, knowledge, feeling and (perhaps) imperial growth which emerges with poets we normally designate as Romantic. Overall, my study aims to give Darwin’s

8

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

polymathic Enlightenment world-view and cognate poetics their own weight and heft, in a period whose texts are still too often thought to stand or fall by their adherence to a (retrospectively constructed) ‘Romanticism’. This is not, then, simply the study of a single author, but of the literaryscientific culture in which he worked. Apart from the major Romantic poets, three writers are especially important: Darwin’s Lichfield friend Anna Seward, whose work intertwines intriguingly with his and whose technical critique of his work remains the most penetrating yet written; the Roman poet Lucretius, whose great scientific-materialist poem De Rerum Natura was an Enlightenment cornerstone and massively influenced Darwin; and Darwin’s fellow-Lucretian Richard Payne Knight, whose lack of personal contact with him makes the parallels between their work all the more indicative of the overlapping concerns of the Enlightenment mind-set, in which their differences also indicate some significant splits. Further reference points are offered by briefer glances at Horace Walpole and William Cowper, two admirers of Darwin’s work from very different ends of the literary spectrum; at Charlotte Smith, Eleanor Anne Porden and a number of other women poets who used Darwin as a partial model; and also at some fierce critics of Darwin, his appeal to women readers and/or his whole cultural sphere: the grumpy T. J. Mathias, the conflicted Richard Polwhele, the anti-Masonic conspiracy theorists John Robison and Abbé de Barruel, and above all the gifted Anti-Jacobin team of George Canning, George Ellis and John Hookham Frere. The book also contextualizes Darwin’s work in relation to such scientists as Linnaeus, Buffon, Herschel, Hutton and Joseph Banks, as well as to his own scientific-industrial circle including James Watt, Matthew Boulton, Josiah Wedgwood, James Keir, John Whitehurst, William Withering, Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley. And there are further links with artists such as Henry Fuseli, Joseph Wright of Derby, Angelica Kauffman and Mary Delany; aestheticians such as William Hogarth and Edmund Burke; linguists such as John Wilkins and John Horne Tooke; and philosophers such as David Hume and Adam Smith who – alongside the scientists Watt, Hutton, Keir, William Cullen, Joseph Black and the brothers John and William Hunter – represent a significant ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ dimension to Darwin’s life and thought. Finally, there is a spectrum where antiquarianism slowly shades into radical Freemasonry, from Pope, Joseph Spence and William Warburton to Thomas Paine, Charles Dupuis and Constantin de Volney. In summary, then, I try to take Darwin seriously, as a representative figure, a mover and shaker in many spheres, and especially as a significant writer and poet. My hope is that in trying to do these things, I do not quite lose touch with the fact that – in ways which he himself would be enormously pleased to hear – there is still plenty that is funny about him.

Chapter 1

Dr Darwin, the Everything For Roy Porter, Erasmus Darwin’s account of the evolution of life ‘provided the British Enlightenment’s most sublime theory of boundless improvement’, while for Coleridge he was ‘the most original-minded man’ in Europe.1 These are big claims, which get bigger when we realize that Darwin conveyed his evolutionism, and most other sides of his original-mindedness, in elaborate, carefully worked verse, which for William Cowper ‘could not have been more highly finished, sweeter in the flow of its numbers, more exquisite in the expression, more diversified in the matter, or richer in every species of embellishment’; while for the inventor of Gothic, Horace Walpole, it was ‘all, all, the most lovely poetry’ and included ‘the most sublime passage in any [language] with which I am acquainted’.2 Despite such plaudits, Darwin’s poetry is little read nowadays. Some reasons for this are explored in my last two chapters, but one simple reason is that it has never been easy to anthologize. This is in turn because it is hard to take extracts from: not because it lacks separable sections – in fact it is highly modular – but because each of these sections (and often each few words) is either a fanciful allegory for something else or describes something real but unfamiliar, which needs more explanation. These explanations appear in prose notes which, rather than just being supplements, are absolutely essential to the poems’ purposes. As Walpole put it, Darwin’s whole method depends on ‘describing in verse what nobody can understand without a long prosaic explanation of every article’.3 Rather than simply wanting to sweep us along, the poems’ energies are directed instead towards this constant movement between verse and prose. Understandably, this experience is particularly hard to anthologize and, without the notes, what Walpole called the series of ‘short enchanting poems’ we are left with can seem too stranded or dependent on something else to be easily extracted. As we shall see in later chapters, the verse itself is doing a great deal. But what this opening chapter aims to do is to explore that other world, the world of ‘original-minded’ but constantly intersecting ideas and inquiries we are taken into by the notes. Of the enormous number of contemporary writers, artists, scientists Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2001), 443; letter to John Thelwall, 6 February 1797, in Letters of Coleridge, 1.305. 2 William Cowper, reviewing Darwin’s The Botanic Garden Part One: The Economy of Vegetation, Analytical Review 15 (Jan–May 1793): 289; Horace Walpole, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis et al., 48 vols. (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press and Oxford University Press, 1937–83), 42:363. 3 Walpole, Correspondence, 31.292. 1

10

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

and other experts mentioned in these notes, the majority were either personally known by Darwin or had some correspondence with him through ‘the republic of letters’. This epistolary-literary republic was one of the driving forces of the eighteenth-century phenomenon known as the Enlightenment.4 Since the British branch of this Enlightenment is one of the main underlying subjects of this book, a few general points need to be made about it before we move on to considering how it finds one of its most archetypal manifestations in Darwin’s life and work. The British Enlightenment Starting in the later seventeenth century, after the exhaustions of the religionfuelled Thirty Years’ War in Europe and Civil War in Britain, a growing amount of interest centred on the idea of finding things out before coming to judgment on them. At one level this involved an embrace of the scientific goals earlier spelled out in Britain by Sir Francis Bacon and incarnated in the Royal Society; at another level it could involve challenges to various cultural shibboleths, from monarchy to Christianity itself. Though most agree that British science – particularly the work of Newton – was inspirational throughout Europe, there is more divergence on what happened next. By one account, the real bearers of Enlightenment were continental Europeans and particularly the French philosophes such as Voltaire and Diderot, whose pugnacious opposition to religion was hardened by the repressive practices of the Catholic French state. According to this account, Britain’s devotion to (limited) notions of religious toleration ensured that dissent was kept within bounds – sometimes in the form of ‘Dissenting’ churches which remained Christian – so that the Enlightenment this country may have helped to trigger never really took hold here.5 I disagree with this notion. This book is devoted throughout to the idea that there was a British Enlightenment, of which Erasmus Darwin was not only a representative but a key figure. I would maintain that whatever precise words were used, this was perfectly clear at the time, and the strange absence of a British 4 In their introduction to This Is Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 1, 12–15, Clifford Siskin and William Warner argue that in fact ‘Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation’ tout court; this mediation is divided under the four headings of: infrastructure (postal service, etc.), new genres (periodicals, etc.), new associational practices (clubs, etc.), and new protocols (agreements re: copyright etc.). A useful placing of Darwin’s own Birmingham circle within such broad ideas is provided by Peter M. Jones (Industrial Enlightenment: Science, Technology and Culture in Birmingham and the West Midlands, 1760–1820, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008), 71, who uses its diverse mediations to explore ‘how the imagined “Republic of Letters” … actually functioned in reality’. 5 See Porter, Enlightenment, 1, 4 and 488 for a considerable list of BritishEnlightenment deniers, including Perry Anderson, Ernst Cassirer, Leonard Marsak, Christopher Hill, Henry Steele Commager and Alfred Cobban.

Dr Darwin, the Everything

11

Enlightenment has been a retrospective discovery, with two main possible causes. The first was an airbrushing which began in the 1790s in the wake of the French Revolution, when a whole range of cultural assumptions came to be seen as ‘Jacobinical’. When things settled down enough for us to conclude that some of that period’s best new writers had been ‘Romantics’, the previous century was divided up between sensibilitous ‘Pre-Romanticism’ and a staunchly conservative ‘Augustanism’ before that. Neither of these traditional terms designates the robust scepticism and, often, radicalism of the British Enlightenment; although oddly, a ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ has long been allowed for. In what follows I shall give much attention to the strong Scottish dimension of Darwin’s Enlightenment world; nonetheless, the Enlightenment spreads a lot further through England than a few tentacles from Edinburgh and Glasgow. A more speculative reason for the British Enlightenment’s comparatively low profile in cultural discourse might arguably be that, from the mid-twentieth century, that discourse has been led by France and the United States. For both countries, the Enlightenment was not only real but foundational, through the twin revolutions of the late eighteenth century. Since both were opposed by Britain, Britain must have been counter-Enlightenment. Furthermore, precisely because it was foundational, the Enlightenment became the thing it was most interesting to challenge through various deconstructionist formulations: a quasi-Oedipal exercise in which British critics have tried to join, but with the rather forlorn sense of not having a British Enlightenment to deconstruct, however well-equipped we might be with a Romanticism largely constituted as having already carried out this challenge for us. This argument may involve a certain degree of caricature: there is a growing recognition that there was a British or English Enlightenment. But it often comes over as a comparatively recent discovery: in book titles like John Gascoigne’s Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment (1994) it was being brandished as something of a new idea, and Roy Porter still felt the need to make a case for it as recently as 2001: his groundbreaking Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World starts by identifying Britain’s strange absence from many influential accounts of the Enlightenment as a continuing ‘blind spot’. Another step in the Enlightenment debate has been marked by two studies by Margaret C. Jacob (1981) and Jonathan I. Israel (2001) with the same name: Radical Enlightenment. Both make the important case that the Enlightenment was a radical movement, at least at its sharp end, and both certainly include Britain: though Israel’s focus is largely continental European with Spinoza at the centre, Jacob gives Britain a more central place by relating her Radical Enlightenment to British Freemasonry. This link, along with the links explored by Frances A. Yates’s The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, will be considered much later in this book; but the presence of ‘Enlightenment’ in both titles is a useful reminder that this movement had its symbols and rituals alongside its dry reason. It might be argued that we all know there was an ‘Age of Reason’ – sometimes expanded as an ‘Age of Prose and Reason’ – between the seventeenth and

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

12

nineteenth centuries, even in Britain, so why is it important to fight so hard for the word ‘Enlightenment’? The argument is one of cultural valency. Literary and artistic works tend to be relentlessly absorbed and colonized by certain ‘big’ words, if they occupy anything like the same time-frame. Alongside ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Modernism’, ‘Romanticism’ is one of these big words, if not the biggest. Erasmus Darwin’s work precisely coincides with the time-frame of early Romanticism, which has only been able to absorb it negatively, as a dreadful example of how not to write. Because our instinctive ways of thinking tend to be binary, I would simply argue that to recapture much that is crucial to his work, and to the later eighteenth century more generally, we need to restore the big word ‘Enlightenment’ as a counterbalance, or binary other, to the all-absorbent powers of ‘Romanticism’. Dr Darwin, the Everything As well as Europe’s most original thinker, Coleridge called Erasmus Darwin ‘the everything, except the Christian’.6 In aiming to be a reasonably full study of Darwin’s polymathic ‘everythingness’, this book necessarily opens out into examining a large swathe of late Enlightenment culture. Like him, many of this culture’s representatives move easily across boundaries we might now take to be fixed: while few quite equal Darwin’s own diversity of interests and expertise, most are well able to follow the kinds of connection he is habitually making. A guide to Darwin’s polymathic life and work is thus a guide to an artistic-scientific culture which is itself polymathic in outlook. Accordingly, what follows is a survey of Darwin’s life which partly reverses the usual process of only mentioning other connections and acquaintances as background to a narrative focused on a single individual. Instead I use the individual’s life as an introduction to a world of different but overlapping mental/ social spaces, his ‘everything’-like participation in which is the main point of the narrative. Rather than his world being a background to his story, his story is being used as background to an initial sketch of the polymathic culture which it epitomizes. For the details of Darwin’s life readers should turn to Desmond KingHele’s excellent triad of biographies culminating in Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement (1999), and also – as deftly interwoven with the lives of Darwin’s colleagues in the Birmingham Lunar Society – to Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future (2002). The aim of the following brief outline is less to offer a digest of that life than to trace its construction by the series of circles whose intricate interlockings I have also tried to sketch in the accompanying diagram (Figure 1). The point of this diagrammatic approach is to bring out how a life – but perhaps particularly an Enlightenment life – can be seen in spatial terms, as the synchronic superimposition of circles on circles, Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Josiah Wade, 27 January 1796, Collected Letters,

6

1.177.

Dr Darwin, the Everything

13

disciplines on disciplines, interests on interests, rather than simply diachronically, as the ‘story’ of one individual’s progress through the world. A gentleman-lawyer, Erasmus’s father Robert Darwin was introduced around 1720 to both the Spalding Gentleman’s Society in Lincolnshire and the Royal Society in London, on the strength of some bones discovered on his lands, which were at first thought to be human remains from a medieval battle, but then established as those of a single gigantic creature now recognized as a plesiosaurus.7 At different times the modest-sounding Spalding Society included Newton, Pope, Sir Hans Sloane and Joseph Banks; Robert Darwin’s introducer to both this and the Royal Society was the physician and Druidic scholar William Stukeley, who also helped to establish the Egyptian Society and Society of Antiquaries and was – like Pope, Banks and many if not most Royal Society members – a Freemason.8 The Royal Society itself, to which Erasmus later belonged under Banks’s presidency, opened up a vast number of contacts across the range of the sciences. At school in Chesterfield from 1741 to 1750, Erasmus Darwin conducted gunpowder experiments with Lord George Cavendish, for whose niece-in-law Georgiana, the famous Duchess of Devonshire, he later prescribed electric shock treatment.9 As a student at Cambridge (1750–1753) he got to know the first theorist of black holes, the geologist/astronomer John Michell; and at Edinburgh (1753–1756) he imbibed from his fellow medical student Albert Reimarus what he humorously called the ‘Religion’ of freethinking deism from the latter’s father Hermann Reimarus, a leading German deconstructor of Christian revelation. Perhaps in line with this Deism, at Edinburgh Darwin also joined the Freemasons with his fellow-student, the chemist James Keir,10 and imbibed much of the atmosphere of the Scottish Enlightenment led by such diverse but overlapping thinkers as the philosophers David Hume and Thomas Reid, the economist Adam Smith and the doctor-discoverer of latent heat Joseph Black – all substantially referenced in his works. The influential theory of mind-body interplay which Darwin later expounded in his Zoonomia drew on Scottish medical teachers with wide European contacts such as Black, Robert Whytt, William Cullen and William Hunter, whose anatomical lectures he had attended in London in 1753. Having set up as a doctor in Nottingham he soon moved to Lichfield near Birmingham (1756–1781). Here he married Mary Howard in 1757; joined literary 7 Desmond King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement (London: Giles de la Mare, 1999), 2. To avoid over-dense annotation, in the biographical account which follows I only cite sources for information not easily traceable through the index or chapter-headings of the above book, or of Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future (London: Faber & Faber, 2002). 8 Stuart Piggott, William Stukeley, An Eighteenth-Century Antiquary (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 15, 34–5, 79–109, 118. 9 Amanda Foreman, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (London, Flamingo, 1999), 339. 10 Rev. Neville B. Cryer, ‘Erasmus Darwin: A Little Known Mason of Derby’ (lecture delivered at Tyrian Lodge, No. 253, Derby, 2000), 5.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

14

forces with the significant poet Anna Seward; formed a botanical society with Brooke Boothby, the friend and translator of Rousseau; and co-founded the most celebrated of his polymathic circles, the Lunar Society – itself perhaps just as significant for the number of other circles it radiated to and from as for the worldtransforming stature of its individual members. As well as Darwin’s Edinburgh friend James Keir the industrial chemist, a significant Scottish element included the father of steam power James Watt (also a Freemason and protégé of Black) and the latter’s employee William Murdoch, the inventor of gas-lighting and a prototype steam locomotive, although the latter’s artisan status excluded him from full Lunar membership. Another Scot was the society’s co-founder William Small, the philosophy tutor of Thomas Jefferson and friend of Benjamin Franklin; and Franklin was himself an honorary Lunar member, Freemason and key link both to the new electrical science and to revolutionary simmerings in America. Of other members, the clockmaker-geologist John Whitehurst’s studies of the earth’s formation interacted with those of James Hutton – another Scot put in touch with the Lunar Circle through Watt – to help form the radical geology which underlay Darwin’s evolutionary thinking. The powerful industrialists Matthew Boulton and Josiah Wedgwood connected the society to national and international trading networks involving such figures as Richard Arkwright, Thomas Brindley and (again) Joseph Banks; Banks also cross-connects with the enthusiasm for Linnaean botany Darwin partly picked up from his Lunar sparring partner William Withering, and also with the neoclassical antiquarianism of Wedgwood, as represented by the Portland Vase – brought to England under the aegis of Banks’s presidency of the Dilettanti Society – around which Darwin constructed some major mythological speculations. Together with the poet-novelist Thomas Day and Darwin himself, Wedgwood also represented a major Lunar plank in the anti-slavery movement, and a link to the progressive Unitarian circle whose many other spokes included: the political radical and discoverer of oxygen Joseph Priestley, who himself joined the Lunar Society after Darwin’s departure for Derby; Darwin’s London publisher Joseph Johnson, who set Henry Fuseli and William Blake to illustrating his work and whose other authors included William Cowper, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft; and rather more diffusely a number of Unitarian translators and editors of Darwin’s prime poetic model Lucretius – such as William Hamilton Drummond, John Mason Good and Gilbert Wakefield – in a traditional linkage between the notoriously infidel Roman poet and radical religious dissent going back to Lucy Hutchinson’s first English translation in the Civil War period.11 After the death of his wife in 1770 Darwin began a relationship with his eldest son’s governess Mary Parker, with whom he had two daughters whom he cared for after an amicable parting. In 1775 he fell in love with the married Elizabeth Pole, See Martin Priestman, ‘Lucretius in Romantic and Victorian Britain’, in A Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, ed. S. Gillespie and P. Hardie. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 290. 11

Dr Darwin, the Everything

15

who after the death of her husband married Darwin in 1780 on condition he moved to Derby, where he spent the rest of his life from 1781 to 1802. Here he became the late-flowering but extremely successful author of all his major poems and prose works, and it is from here that his involvement with the Johnson/Fuseli/Blake circle becomes active; it was also here that the decision to set his illegitimate daughters Susan and Mary Parker up as schoolteachers inspired his A Plan for Female Education (1797), which reflected the Rousseauvian educational interests of his Lunar friends Thomas Day and Richard Lovell Edgeworth (soon to be taken up by the latter’s daughter, the novelist Maria Edgeworth). In Derby Darwin also founded a new Philosophical Society and co-founded a Society for Political Information, whose radical support for universal male suffrage brought its contacts in danger of prosecution for treason. Another radical overlap is with the polymathic Bristol grouping around his scientific disciple Thomas Beddoes, which included Josiah’s son Tom Wedgwood, the young Humphry Davy – whose electro-chemical researches inspired Temple’s longest Additional Note – and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the latter of whom paid Darwin an extended visit and described him as the most knowledgeable man in Europe and as ‘the everything’. Though this praise was qualified by the addition ‘except the Christian!’, Darwin exerted a strong influence – positive as well as negative – on the Coleridge-Wordsworth axis at the heart of English Romanticism; and also on its next ‘generation’, particularly via the Shelleys. If Darwin was indeed even close to being ‘the everything’, then, it is in large part thanks to the immensely various but mutually reinforcing series of alreadypolymathic groupings from which what might be called his own meta-polymathy was constructed. Of course this quasi-universalism has its limits. Though Coleridge’s headshaking ‘except the Christian!’ by no means characterises the whole network – many of whose members were devout and some clergymen – a general readiness to speculate on such matters as the real age of the earth and the origins of human belief-systems excluded it from much overlap with the ‘enthusiastic’ Methodist/Evangelical revival, except over anti-slavery issues; on the other hand, there was considerable overlap with Rational Dissenting groupings such as the young Coleridge’s own Unitarians and the Quakers (including the polymathic scientist/Egyptologist Thomas Young and the gunsmith Samuel Galton, a later Lunar member whose family would intermarry with Darwin’s to produce the notorious eugenicist Francis Galton). Many members of Darwin’s circle had attended Oxford or Cambridge but there was no enormous overlap with these universities either, their classics-centred Anglican torpor making the focused modern curricula of the Dissenting academies and Scottish universities far more significant. While a classical education was widely assumed, it was not brandished as the only path to learning, and the translation of Latin-writing European authors such as Linnaeus for the wider expansion of knowledge was felt as an urgent need. Despite this broadly democratizing tendency the network also largely excluded artisans: apart from the not-quite Lunar member William Murdoch, most of its industrialists were a generation or more away from this status, and we note Blake

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

16

Freemasonry S.C.l/L.C.S.

Thelwall

Franklin Wott

Pope

Radicals

Erskine

Thoby Philosophical

StuJceley Took£

Derby Society for Political

Spalding Society

htfonnation

Society

8"""' E.D.'s father

"""'

Royal Society (toomanytolist)

Newton

Derbyshire

Heberden

Geology/Cosmology

Arkwright

Delaney

Cambridge Michell

Herschel

Duchess of Devonshire

ERASMUS DARWIN

Wright

Cavendish Circle Henry C. George C.

Whitehurst

Steam Power Boulton

Duchess of?.

Black Watt

Medicine

Edinburgh Hume, Srrf,th, Reid

"""'

Whitehurst

Portland Vase

Progressive Hun"' Cullen Reimarus

Hutton

Sma11

America

Wedgwood

Hamilton

Greville Banks

Jefferson

Lunar Society

Sandwich

Franklin

Dilettanti Priestley Knight

Rowden

Withering Wakefield

Lucretians

Wedgwood

Unitarians

Linnaean

Doy Barbauld Davy

Coleridge

Beddoes

Botany

Edgeworths

Good

J. Johnson

AntiSlavery Cowpcr

H. More

Bristol Circle J. Johnson Circle FuseliBlak:e

Wollstonecraft

Fig. 1.1 Erasmus Darwin’s networks: diagram.

Women Poets

Seward

C.Srmth

Boothby

B•mb

Rousseauvians

Cook Solander

Empire Building Sandwich

Dr Darwin, the Everything

17

Erasmus Darwin’s Networks: Key (Regular print indicates Darwin’s direct acquaintances, or those with whom he had significant contact. Those in italics are significant other members of the groups indicated: most of these mentioned Darwin at some time, or were mentioned by him. Family members are generally omitted.) Arkwright, Richard. Derbyshire industrialist, praised by ED. Banks, Sir Joseph. Royal Society, Spalding Society, Linnaean botany, Empire-building, exploration, Freemasonry, Dilettanti Society, etc. etc. Ubiquitous scientific fixer. Barbauld, Anna Laetitia. Unitarian author and abolitionist, friend of Priestley. Beddoes, Thomas. Radical scientist/physician based in Bristol. Black, Joseph. Scottish scientist, discoverer of latent heat. Blake, William. London poet, artist, engraver for Joseph Johnson. Boothby, Brooke. Linnaean and Rousseauvian, based in Lichfield. Boulton, Matthew. Birmingham industrialist, founding member of Lunar Society. Cavendish, George. ED’s school friend from powerful Whig family. Cavendish, Henry. Scientist, established weight of Earth and constitution of water. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Poet who visited ED when in Unitarian/radical Bristolian circles. Cook, Capt. James. Explorer accompanied by Banks on first voyage. Cowper, William. Poet, anti-slavery agitator, published by Joseph Johnson. Cullen, William. Progressive physician, taught ED in Edinburgh. Davy, Humphry. Famous chemist/physicist, at first in Bristol circle. Day, Thomas. Lunar member, Rousseauvian educationalist, anti-slavery agitator. Delany, Mary. Friend of Duchess of Portland, Linnaean paper-artist praised by ED. Derby Philosophical Society. Founded by ED, later included Herbert Spencer. Derby Society for Political Information. Co-founded by ED; narrowly escaped prosecution for ‘Jacobinism’. Devonshire, Georgiana, Duchess of. Treated by ED partly thanks to Cavendish connection. Edgeworth, Richard Lovell. Lunar member, Rousseauvian educationalist, inventor. Edgeworth, Maria. Daughter of above, novelist, educationalist, botanical writer. Erskine, Thomas. Leading Whig lawyer who defended members of Derby Soc. for Political Information. Franklin, Benjamin. Honorary Lunar member, electrical scientist, American founding father. Fuseli, Henry. Artist, illustrated ED’s poems for Joseph Johnson. Good, John Mason. Unitarian translator of Lucretius. Greville, Charles. Friend of ED, nephew of Sir William Hamilton, mineralogist, Dilettante. Hamilton, Sir William. Dilettante, vulcanologist, FRS, purchaser of Portland Vase. Heberden, William. Leading physician, Taught ED at Cambridge. Herschel, William. FRS, Astronomer who influenced ED’s Big Bang theories. Hume, David. Scottish Philosopher often mentioned by ED.

18

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

Hunter, William and John. Leading Scottish physicians; Wm taught ED in London. Hutton, James. Edinburgh geologist who challenged Mosaic dating of the Earth. Jefferson, Thomas. American founding father, tutored by Lunar member William Small. Johnson, Joseph. Unitarian, progressive publisher of ED and many others on the diagram. Keir, James. Lunar member, chemist, ED’s friend in Edinburgh. Knight, Richard Payne. Dilettante, mythographer, admirer of Lucretius, friend of Hamilton. Michell, John. Geologist, astronomer who envisaged Black Holes, ED’s Cambridge mentor. More, Hannah. Author, polemicist and abolitionist. Newton, Sir Isaac. An early member of Spalding Gentleman’s Society. Pope, Alexander. Early member of Spalding Society, Freemason. Portland, 2nd Duchess of. Cavendish, purchaser of Portland Vase, friend of Mary Delaney. Priestley, Joseph. Lunar member, discoverer of oxygen, Unitarian, political radical. Reid, Thomas. Scottish founder of ‘Common Sense’ philosophy. Reimarus, Albert. ED’s Edinburgh friend, progressive doctor, son of leading German deist. Rowden, Arabella. Botanical poet, influenced by ED. Sandwich, 4th Earl of. Dilettante, friend of Banks, sponsor of Cook’s voyages. SCI/LCS. The Society for Constitutional Information and London Corresponding Society, several of whose members were successfully defended by Thomas Erskine in the notorious 1794 Treason Trials, an event for which the trial of Darwin’s Derby Society for Political Information was a precursor. Seward, Anna. ED’s Lichfield friend and fellow-poet, interested in Linnaean botany. Smith, Adam. Scottish philosopher and economist. Smith, Charlotte. Major poet, influenced by ED’s botanical verse. Solander, Daniel. Linnaean botanist who accompanied Banks on Cook’s first voyage. Spalding Society. The Spalding Gentleman’s Society: extraordinarily influential Lincolnshire scientific circle, whose members included Newton, Pope, Darwin’s father and, later, Sir Joseph Banks. Stukeley, William. Antiquarian, FRS, leading member of Spalding Society. Thelwall, John. Radical acquitted in 1794 Treason Trials. Friend of Coleridge; admirer of ED. Tooke, John Horne. Also acquitted in 1794 Treason Trials. While imprisoned, wrote that ED’s praise of his linguistic theories made him ‘a bold man, to praise me at this time’. Wakefield, Gilbert. Unitarian, editor of Lucretius, political radical; corresponded with ED from prison. Watt, James. Edinburgh developer of steam-power, Freemason. Wedgwood, Josiah. Potter, Lunar member, Unitarian, anti-slavery, copied Portland Vase. Whitehurst, John. Lunar member, geologist. Withering, William. Lunar member, botanist and physician. Wollstonecraft, Mary. Feminist, radical, mother of Mary Shelley. Wright, Joseph (‘Wright of Derby’). Leading artist, friend of ED.

Dr Darwin, the Everything

19

because of his posthumous fame, not for any substantial impact he made on those for whom he so tirelessly worked. And it broadly excluded women, although this is relative: not admitted to universities, masonic lodges or even Dissenting academies, women family members such as Anna Barbauld or Maria Edgeworth could nonetheless work actively on the fringes of such groups, and in his writings Darwin reaches out to women writers, artists and educationalists, perhaps paternalistically, but with great definiteness. This book will place particular emphasis on one woman writer whose role in his poetic development is generally recognized but still somewhat undervalued: Anna Seward. Despite some links with the grander aristocracy – Darwin’s schoolboy friendship with a Cavendish, the Lunar involvements with entrepreneurs like the Duke of Bridgewater or collectors like the Duchess of Portland, even George III’s (politely declined) request for Darwin as his doctor – the network has its centre of gravity in the male professional middle class with a leavening of landed gentry, combining the work ethic of the former with the latter’s assumption of leisure for study and ‘virtuoso’ collecting habits. Darwin’s fascination with mythology – a major subject of this book – may seem far removed from the scientific and practical concerns described above; but it was by no means rare in his circle. In the poem-notes which convey this fascination, he often downplays literary treatments of ancient myths in favour of his own interpretations of visual ones: most dramatically from the Portland Vase, whose white-on-black reliefs his friend Wedgwood was in the process of copying, but often also from Graeco-Roman miniatures and cameos in his own collection. In having such a collection he was by no means alone: many of the acquaintances listed above also collected these along with plants, shells or mineral samples. As John Gascoigne points out, the idea of the virtuoso – which derived from Renaissance ideas about the displaying of the fruits of leisured acquisition appropriate to courtiers – traditionally linked the collection of antiquities and of scientific, particularly botanical, specimens. The eighteenth-century accumulation of antiquities as a mark of gentility was firmly bedded into the institution of the European Grand Tour (which in the case of virtuoso explorers like Joseph Banks became expanded to the world tour); but even at home the display of finds from one’s own landed estates, whether vegetable, animal, mineral or what we would now call archaeological, was seen as part of the same essential activity.12 Something of John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 60–61. With the massive expansion of overseas trade, in which the gentry were enthusiastically involved, the Grand Tour could extend, as it did with Joseph Banks, to the whole world, whose curiosities could come in any form from new plants to the native skulls on which much of the nascent science of anthropology was based (151). As a global Grand Tourist, Banks was satirized in one cartoon as ‘The Fly-Catching Macaroni’, balancing on both the world’s hemispheres to catch a butterfly (64). The term ‘macaroni’ is just one of several used to give this kind of leisured fanaticism a foreign air, as if it was itself something one picked up in one’s travels: ‘dilettante’, ‘amateur’ and ‘connoisseur’ all being nearly synonymous with ‘virtuoso’. 12

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

20

this sense of easy transition is conveyed in the seventeenth-century polymath Robert Hooke’s description of shells and fossils as ‘the Medals, Urnes, or Monuments of Nature’.13 This approach was eventually passed on to public museums, many of which were built up around private collections from this period. Darwin’s Poems Darwin’s ‘everythingness’ pours out of the three major poems which are the subject of this book: The Loves of the Plants (1789) and The Economy of Vegetation (which were published together as The Botanic Garden, 1791) and the posthumous The Temple of Nature (1803). While very various in subject-matter, these three vast edifices are very similar in form: each having four massively annotated cantos of tightly endstopped heroic couplets, deploying all the resources of the eighteenthcentury ‘poetic diction’ which Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads Preface has taught us to see as artificial. Their elaborate personifications ensure that nothing is apparently said from the poet’s own feelings or experience, and any humour they contain (there is in fact plenty) is put over with an apparently straight face. Before approaching these giant structures it is important to realise that their form is a matter of deliberate choice, and that Darwin was quite capable of writing with both direct feeling and more obvious humour, and even sometimes outside the heroic-couplet mode, in some shorter poems only collected in any very accessible form between 2008 and 2012.14 Shorter Poems My dearest Sue Of lovely hue No sugar can be sweeter; You do as far Excel Su-gar As sugar does saltpetre.15

Written at the age of 12, this address to his sister is only the first-known of Darwin’s many humorous verses to family and friends, which would later include an invitation to joint mayhem from his cat to Anna Seward’s, and a hymn to Quoted in Gascoigne, Banks and Enlightenment, 120. Erasmus Darwin, To Elizabeth, with Love. Shorter Poems, ed. Desmond King-Hele

13 14

(Sheffield: Stuart Harris, 2008); Erasmus Darwin, The Prince; My Son; Our Hero: Three Elegies. Shorter Poems, ed. Stuart Harris (Sheffield: Stuart Harris, 2009); Erasmus Darwin, Poems of Lichfield and Derby. Shorter Poems, ed. Desmond King-Hele and Stuart Harris (Sheffield: Stuart Harris, 2011); Erasmus Darwin, Poems of School and University. Shorter Poems, ed. Desmond King-Hele and Stuart Harris (Sheffield: Stuart Harris, 2012). 15 Darwin, School and University, 7.

Dr Darwin, the Everything

21

Burton Ale. More serious-minded minor works include accomplished imitations of satirists from Persius to Pope, and set college exercises on such respectable themes as the Gunpowder Plot, the death of the Prince of Wales and the folly of atheism. He also apostrophised plants from oak trees to broccoli, and composed or contributed to elegies (strongly felt if somewhat too personification-laden for modern ears) on his Lunar friend William Small, General Wolfe, Captain Cook and his own son Charles, who had followed his footsteps to Edinburgh Medical College and died there from an infection caught from a cut while dissecting a child’s brain. Along with many other short pieces collected by Desmond King-Hele and Stuart Harris, these works show Darwin as a poet of frequent wit and a fair variety of register. His lightly resourceful touch is well brought out by a sequence from his time as a widowed Lichfield doctor from 1775 to 1781, inspired by his increasingly passionate feelings for a married patient, Elizabeth Pole, who would eventually become his second wife.16 Unpublished as a sequence until 2008, Darwin’s short poems to or about Elizabeth are full of personality, and show his ability to function in a range of different modes. Mostly written before the death of her first husband, these poems range from the despairing to the cheekily sexy. The first, ‘Speech of a Wood-Nymph’, throws a long thematic shadow over Darwin’s later work. His first ‘return to the long neglected art of verse-making’ for many years, it was written in 1775 as a mock plea to spare a grove of trees in his own garden which Elizabeth had suggested he remove. Speaking as the eponymous wood-nymph, he begs her to recall her ‘dread commands’ because Know, in this grove there sleeps in every tree A Nymph, embalm’d by some poetic spell, Who once had beauty, wit and life like thee. Oh, spare the mansions where thy sisters dwell!17

From here it is only a short step to the Loves of the Plants’ central conceit of reversing the ‘necromancer’ Ovid’s metamorphoses of nymphs into plants, to be considered in Chapter 3.18 And it is significant that Darwin’s first verse flirtation with Elizabeth is intertwined with a gardening dispute: according to King-Hele, it was above all to pique her horticultural interest that he constructed his Lichfield botanic garden.19 For all its humour, this little poem puts into lightly personal form the conservationist sense that every plant ‘enjoys the air it breathes’, which Darwin arguably passed on to William Wordsworth and other Romantics.20 Uglow, Lunar Men, 272. ‘Speech of a Wood-Nymph’ ll. 5–8; To Elizabeth, 21. 18 See Loves, viii. Throughout this book I shall refer to the most accessible version, in 16 17

The Botanic Garden (1791), unless otherwise indicated. 19 King-Hele, Introduction to To Elizabeth, 6–7. 20 See William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’, 12.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

22

In a more libertine vein, a sequence of short riddle-poems written later in the relationship allows the poet to fondle Eliza’s charms vicariously by identifying himself with intimate objects such as her toilette mirror, her stockings or the whalebone stays which punningly ‘hold a heart, that pants and beats within’ while their ‘folding arms are press’d/ Round your fine waist, and clasp your snowy breast’.21 In ‘Fashionable Love’, a satire in Hudibrastic tetrameters, the ‘artless’ blaze of Eliza’s beauty is used to offset the artifice of modern courtship with its flint-hearted, money-grabbing beaux and belles who conceal their native charms with cosmetics or hairpieces clogged with ‘rancid meal and grease of Hog’.22 The newly ‘fashionable’, calculating Cupid behind all this is upbraided by his Arcadian mother Venus in a libertine critique of legalistic marriage, with some bathetic rhymes worthy of Byron’s Don Juan: Beneath a rose, without her bodice, In pure undress lay Beauty’s Goddess, Such as she once was seen by Titian. ‘Stay, my sweet young Arithmetician! … In Arcady your country-cousins Can pierce their pairs of hearts by dozens. What, sign’d and seal’d – the frolic Cupid Turn’d to a lawyer grave and stupid?’23

This anti-marital satire may refer obliquely to the widower Darwin’s anguish over Elizabeth’s marriage, albeit to a man he respected. In more serious mode, the heroic couplet ‘Platonic Epistle to a Married Lady’ explores the miseries of such ‘Platonic’ love for a friend’s wife: a topic made sentimentally negotiable by Rousseau’s massively successful La Nouvelle Héloїse (1761): Oh, read these lines, Eliza! May they move Thy breast to pity whom it must not love. … Bear them, soft gales! To chaste Eliza’s ear; Herself may read them – or her husband hear.24

Darwin describes his pleasure at curing her children – the event which first brought them together – while unable to heal himself: ‘Vain are the arts of medicine to secure/ Life’s crimson stream from Love’s malignant power’.25 Eliza’s power over him and others is likened to the new electric-shock treatment: ‘where’er Eliza treads,/ To circling crowds the electric passion spreads’, and ‘I have it! – here the

23 24 25 21 22

‘Riddle 4’ 6–8; To Elizabeth, p. 50 ‘Fashionable Love’ 3; To Elizabeth, p. 45. ‘Fashionable Love’ 15–18; To Elizabeth, pp. 21–4. ‘Platonic Epistle to a Married Lady’ 1–2, 7–8; To Elizabeth, p 27. ‘Platonic Epistle’, 63–4.

Dr Darwin, the Everything

23

dear delirium reigns,/ Clings round my heart, and eddies in my veins!’26 ‘Edward and Eleonora’ similarly explores the ironies of a physician smitten with love for his patient in the act of tending her. As she recovers, her healer in turn feels ‘the quick contagion thrill/ Through my fond breast, and burn, and chill’. With ‘moping step and slow’, he wanders into the ‘echoing night’ where Led by Despair to this dank shade, I rest on the pillowing moss my head; And tug in vain the barbed dart, While Death’s cold hand congeals my heart.27

It is arguably because of their opportunistic energy in paying court to Elizabeth from a range of unexpected angles that these poems are effective. Although personifications like ‘Despair’ do a good deal of the emotional work once Darwin tries to get serious, the sharp doctorly sense of the psycho-physical – the intimacy of clothes and bodies; the eddying, burning, congealing, electrifying effects of passion on the bloodstream – does give these little poems a strongly distinctive personal stamp. With their animated plants and personified sciences, they also lay some of the imaginative groundwork for the three major poems which he completed after the move from Lichfield to Derby on which the successfully wooed Elizabeth insisted. The Major Poems Darwin’s most celebrated ‘poem’ is The Botanic Garden: A Poem, in Two Parts (1791, though not actually brought out until 1792). However, the two parts are so different that it makes more sense to call each a poem in its own right, and consider them in the sequence of their actual publication: Part Two: The Loves of the Plants (1789) and then Part One: The Economy of Vegetation (1791). The latter, more important and ambitious poem was published in the complete Botanic Garden and never separately, and is hence often cited simply as The Botanic Garden in preference to its own rather peculiar title. Apart from one or two occasional verses, Darwin’s only other published poem was the posthumous The Temple of Nature, or The Origin of Society (1803). However, the discarded drafts for the latter constitute in effect a different poem, substantial though incomplete, which this book publishes for the first time as The Progress of Society, or The Temple of Nature. For brevity throughout this book, I shall normally reduce these four poems’ names to Loves, Economy, Temple and Progress. A comprehensive lesson in the Linnaean ‘sexual system’ of plant classification, The Loves of the Plants starts by introducing us to the ‘Beaux and Beauties’ of plant life and the Muse/Goddess of Botany who presides over them, before settling ‘Platonic Epistle’, 67–8, 71–2. ‘Edward and Leonora’, 41–2, 49–54; To Elizabeth, p. 40.

26 27

24

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

into the pattern which will be firmly adhered to for the rest of the poem. The Muse introduces us to one flower after another by way of the number and relationship of its female pistils and male stamens, each being anthropomorphized as a human lover of those of the opposite sex. As the sequence develops, increasingly elaborate similes compare some aspect of the plant – usually but not always its amorous pistil-stamen arrangements – to some recognizably human situation from mythology, history or modern life. The first two flowers have single male stamens and the next has two, but soon the strict adherence to stamen counting (most of the flowers described have single pistils) gives way to a broader thematic arrangement, with the last half of Canto 2 devoted to medicinal plants, and Canto 3 to those with some connection to tragedy or horror. Canto 4 finds a variety of links and themes, but brings us round firmly to what seems the logical end of the sequence – with the Adonis or pheasant’s eye flower, whose ‘hundred’ pistils as well as stamens are rather shockingly compared to the multiple ‘weddings’ or sex-orgies performed on Tahiti, as recently described by the scientific explorers Captain Cook and Darwin’s friend Sir Joseph Banks. Each canto is sandwiched with brief descriptions of the Muse/Goddess as the day progresses from dawn to dusk, and every flower receives a footnote explaining the science and often expanding into broader botanical issues. The poetic text is further wrapped in a fringe of other materials, including extensive prose notes, a gently comical frontispiece, three very varied kinds of introduction, three inserted prose ‘Interludes’ on aesthetic matters, and three equally varied lists of contents at the end. Published alongside the revised Loves in the Botanic Garden of 1791–1792, The Economy of Vegetation opens with a lengthy passage borrowed – or perhaps stolen – from Anna Seward’s ‘Verses Written in Dr Darwin’s Botanic Garden, Near Lichfield’, dating from 1778. The poem fully gets into its stride with Darwin’s summoning of the Goddess of Botany, who in turn calls on the Salamanders of fire, Gnomes of earth, Nymphs of water and Sylphs of air, who manage the four ‘elements’ of matter. At the end of the last canto she will explain how all four contribute to the successful growing of plants – or ‘economy of vegetation’ – but the bulk of the poem consists of her extended account of each spirit group’s activities in turn, either through her descriptions of their past activities or her commands to them to do more. These mostly have nothing at all to do with vegetation, but instead range from the Salamanders’ creation of the universe in a fiery explosion to the earthy Gnomes’ contribution of clay to Wedgwood’s potteries, and from the Nymphs’ ushering of water through Brindley’s canals to the Sylphs’ whispering of the secrets of oxygen to its discoverer Priestley. A battery of scientific notes makes it even clearer that this poem in fact aims to be a survey of virtually all contemporary scientific and industrial knowledge, as well as launching further daring speculations on these and a far wider range of topics from fossils to mythology. Darwin’s posthumous evolutionary poem The Temple of Nature (1803) opens with a densely allegorical description of the approach of the poet’s Muse to the eponymous temple, and her meeting with the priestess-hierophant and scientific

Dr Darwin, the Everything

25

Muse, Urania. In response to the first Muse’s questions, the bulk of the poem consists of Urania’s explanation of what Douglas Adams memorably called ‘Life, the Universe and Everything’. After expanding on Economy’s account of the Herschelian Big Bang she explains how ‘Organic life began beneath the waves’ after the Earth had cooled, and then gradually evolved into the more complex forms we know today. In the second canto, ‘Reproduction of Life’, she describes the momentous shift from parthenogenesis to sexual reproduction, culminating in a scene where the whole of Nature celebrates the wedding of Cupid and Psyche. The third canto on ‘Progress of the Mind’ stresses the continuity of human psychology with that of other animals, basing its main differences on the ability bestowed by the opposable thumb to form mental as well as solely visual ‘clear ideas’ of objects, leading to the enhanced power of ‘imitation’ on which all social interaction is built. In the final canto, ‘Of Good and Evil’, Darwin’s poetic muse bursts out in a complaint against the cruelty of this ‘warring’ evolutionary world as ‘one great slaughter-house’, and in an attempt to comfort her Urania points to the ever-increasing ‘bliss of being’ it produces and its great humanitarian as well as intellectual advances in the human sphere. The poem climaxes with a hymn of praise to the goddess of Nature, as Urania removes the last of her veils. The Progress of Society – which can be seen as Appendix A of this book – begins very similarly to Temple but soon diverges into a partly written, partly just outlined account of society’s four ages of hunting, pasturage, agriculture and commerce, which are planned to culminate in a future utopian age of philosophy. Explaining each age’s cultural superstructure of art and religion in terms of its technological base, the fragment is somewhat encumbered by a busy machinery of ‘genies’, enacting the Zeitgeist of each age in turn. Since their notes make substantial reference to Darwin’s scientific prose works, often incorporating major passages verbatim, a study of these poems opens out naturally to consider his translations of Linnaeus’s A System of Vegetables (1783) and The Families of Plants (1787), whose gist is incorporated in Loves; and the physiological treatise Zoonomia (1794–1796), which lies behind Temple. More occasional reference will also be made to Darwin’s brief educational guide, A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools (1797), and his weighty agricultural treatise, Phytologia (1800). Nominally the work of ‘a Botanical Society at Lichfield’, the Linnaeus translations demonstrate the serious groundwork in plant observation underlying Loves, and Darwin’s adamant refusal to shy away (as his botanist Lunar friend William Withering did) from the graphic human sexual parallels implied by Linnaeus’s taxonomic language of polygamy, monandry, husbands, wives and beds. From 1757–1789 Darwin also produced a number of articles on medicine and other aspects of science, but his most important prose work by far was Zoonomia (1794–1796), which contextualizes a great deal of doctorly advice about diseases, medicines and cures within a broader set of theories about the ‘laws of animal motion’, mental as well as physical. Radical in many ways, these theories refuse accepted divisions between body and mind or humans, animals and even (to

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

26

some extent) plants: a set of refusals reaching their climax in Section 39, ‘Of Generation’, which argues from good evidence that all warm-blooded creatures (and implicitly all of life) were descended from a single ocean-born ‘filament’. The Plan for … Female Education aligns Darwin with the educational progressivism of his Lunar friends Thomas Day, Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Joseph Priestley, broadly extending their Rousseauvian emphases on modern science and languages to girls’ education, though with some special caveats on the importance of dress and deportment. Phytologia develops Darwin’s botanical interests way beyond Linnaeus, suggesting that his taxonomy is becoming outdated but taking his system’s implicit plant/animal parallels even further in the light of Zoonomia’s evolutionism. Phytologia’s researches into plant reproduction also prompted an important revision in Zoonomia’s second edition (1801), establishing the equal contributions of both parents to their children’s formation, as opposed to the bizarre priority Darwin had earlier given to the father’s imagination at the moment of conception. Genres: Didactic and Epic The major poems underpinned by these prose works belong to the genre of ‘didactic poetry’, which went so completely out of fashion after Darwin (and perhaps partly because of him) that some general contextualization will be useful. ‘Didactic’ means ‘teaching’ or ‘instructive’, and the fact that this description fits key works by some of the greatest Latin poets, from Lucretius to Virgil and Horace, made it natural for the neoclassical eighteenth century to accord didactic poetry a status on a par with epic or lyric. Many of the eighteenth century’s best-known poems are didactic in a broad sense, from Pope’s Horatian Essays to such rural Virgilian ‘English Georgics’ as Thomson’s The Seasons and Cowper’s The Task. However, Darwin’s poems belong to a tradition with a more specialized scientific focus, for which the prime classical model was De Rerum Natura, Lucretius’ relentlessly materialist crashcourse in atomic physics. A strain of didactic ‘anti-Lucretian’ poems – such as Sir Richard Blackmore’s The Creation (1712) and Henry Brooke’s The Universal Beauty (1735) – attempted similar coverage of the whole physical world while decrying their anti-model’s atheism: a tradition which probably assisted the initial warm reception of Economy as a poem of religious sublimity despite the strong debt to Lucretian materialism which becomes even more evident in Temple.28 Other Greek and Latin poems on such things as astronomy, fishing, gardening and poisonous plants offered a further range of models: from this tradition emerged such highly specialized botanical poems as Abraham Cowley’s Plantarum (1662) and Demetrius de la Croix’s Connubia Florum (1723), which are little read now See Julia List, ‘Erasmus Darwin and the Poetry of Science’ (PhD diss., University of Melbourne, 2011). 28

Dr Darwin, the Everything

27

because they were written in Latin, but which may well have influenced Darwin’s Loves of the Plants. Since Darwin’s didactic poems are long, ambitious and full of Homeric similes, Miltonic allusions and supernatural ‘machinery’, it is tempting to also call them epics. Several recent classical studies apply the term ‘didactic epic’ to Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, and Stuart Harris conflates Darwin’s three big poems into a single ‘Enlightenment Epic’.29 Nonetheless, the term is unhelpful: one of the things which distinguish Darwin’s vast poems from others we are more familiar with is their almost complete lack of narrative drive. Rather than a drawback, this is part of their fascination: it is one of the points of this book to argue that they are ‘spaces’, not ‘times’, and time is the essential medium of the epic quest to explain how we got to where we are now. There are partial exceptions: The Temple of Nature, or the Origin of Society comes nearest to telling a story; but we shall see how it only spotlights very discontinuous spaces within this story, after Darwin has despairingly discarded his one attempt at a sustained history, The Progress of Society. The change of title from ‘Progress’ to ‘Origin’ says it all. Nonetheless, Darwin’s poems are bursting with energy. For one thing they contain a plethora of narratives, often introduced by way of Homeric simile and dealing with the myths and legends which are the stuff of ancient epic. But as we shall see, this energy is fed back into the other stories Darwin really wants to tell, about the natural activities – biological, physical, chemical – which constitute our world through processes of seething repetition. The real energy sustaining these poems is Darwin’s, and ours, in finding and connecting diverse mental spaces – rather than moments in a single narrative – within and between which to comprehend this ceaseless movement. It is to these Enlightened spaces that we turn in the next chapter.

See Monica R. Gale, Lucretius and the Didactic Epic (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2001); Stuart Harris, Erasmus Darwin’s Enlightenment Epic (Sheffield: Stuart Harris, 2002). 29

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 2

Enlightened Spaces: Darwin’s Visual Poetics Each of Darwin’s major poems has four cantos. Four-way splits also permeate his theorization of a wide range of topics from ancient mysteries to physiology. Economy’s traditional division of matter between the four elements of fire, earth, water and air goes back at least to the Greek philosopher Empedocles and had become little more than a convenient fiction by the later eighteenth century; nonetheless, it deeply structures that poem’s ability to make scientific connections. According to Zoonomia and Temple, organic life arose from a process involving ‘Repulsion, Attraction, Contraction, Life’, after which all animal motions can be relegated to the four ‘faculties of the sensorium’: Irritation, Sensation, Volition and Association.1 Even the ancient Greek Eleusinian Mystery rituals which provide Temple its ‘machinery’ consist of the four ‘scenes’ of death, marriage, torchprocession and celebrations of the famous.2 In the abandoned Progress of Society, the whole of past history belongs to the four ‘ages’ of hunting, pasturage, agriculture and commerce, with a crowning fifth age of philosophy more a hope than a reality.3 Four-way divisions are easy to hold in the mind because they simply double doubleness itself; and as we zoom into the detail of Darwin’s poems, we also find doubles everywhere. A split structure repeatedly juxtaposes a scientific description with an extended epic simile introduced by ‘So’ or ‘Thus’, diverting our attention from progress forwards to a kind of continual comparison of two equal pictures. And within these larger structures, the principle of an underlying dualism in everything is sustained by the tightly end-stopped couplet, balancing each line against its rhymed successor; often with the prose word order contorted to produce further internal symmetries of antithesis or chiasmus. Within all these two- or four-way structures of thought there is an overarching confidence that fixed formal spaces, balanced against others in a clearly graspable quasi-visual symmetry, are the best way to make sense of otherwise inchoate matter. We can relate such symmetries to what Michel Foucault called ‘the primary grid of things’: the Enlightenment belief that all knowledge could be laid out in a ‘tabula’ of firmly differentiated types.4 Such a grid underlies the system which Darwin 1 Temple AN 2, pp. 12–13; Zoonomia (1801) 1.39–41. Though not directly parallel, it could be argued that these ‘four faculties’ replace the ‘four humours’ of traditional, Hippocratic medicine. 2 Temple 1.137n. 3 Progress 1.1–23. 4 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002 [1966]), xxv.

30

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

first entered print to champion: the Linnaean taxonomy which remained content to assign plants and animals to their differentiated niches, rather than trying to explain what we now see as the temporal, evolutionary connections between them. For Linnaeus, visible signs such as the respective numbers of flower-pistils and stamens are an adequate basis for plant differentiations, and Darwin massively expands these visible differences into the little erotic dramas of Loves, with each conformation filling its separate niche in the pictorial table of Linnaean differences included in the poem’s Preface. For some Enlightenment thinkers, a similar grid should ideally be applied to language itself, with every sound indicating a logically different class or subtype, out of which words would be constructed akin to Linnaeus’s binomial naming of all plants first by genus and then by species. Darwin was enthusiastic about the seventeenth-century Bishop John Wilkins’s plan for a new ‘Philosophical Language’, the parts of each of whose words would be arranged in a sequence moving from broader to narrower classifications. As Jorge Luis Borges described it in his riddling essay ‘The Analytical Language of John Wilkins’: Wilkins divided the universe into forty categories or classes, which were then subdivisible into differences, subdivisible in turn into species. To each class he assigned a monosyllable of two letters; to each difference, a consonant; to each species, a vowel.5

For Darwin, Wilkins’s failure to get his ‘Philosophical Language’ accepted was a matter of regret: But we have to lament that the progress of general science is yet too limited … ; and that the science of grammar, and even the number and manner of the pronunciation of the letters of the alphabet, are not yet determined with such accuracy as would be necessary to constitute Bishop Wilkins’s grand design of an universal language, which might facilitate the acquirement of knowledge, and thus add to the power and happiness of mankind.6

Borges’s essay on Wilkins demonstrates that such attempts to divide knowledge into universal categories are bound to fail, and he famously links this to a description of a Chinese encyclopaedia’s absurdly language-determined categorization of animals – according to whether they are sirens, stray dogs, innumerable, drawn with a fine camelhair brush, and so on. With its reductio ad absurdum of the belief that linguistic distinctions can guide us to underlying realities, it is the rich comedy of Borges’ essay which Foucault makes the startingpoint for his study of The Order of Things. Foucault perceives a profound change in the ordering of knowledge around the end of the eighteenth century, away from totalizing structures like universal grammars or the Linnaean taxonomic grid towards new kinds of historicity: 5 Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions 1937–1952, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975), 102. 6 Temple AN 7, p. 22.

Enlightened Spaces

31

language as the spontaneous tabula, the primary grid of things, as an indispensable link between representation and things, is eclipsed ... ; a profound historicity penetrates into the heart of things, isolates and defines them in their own coherence, imposes upon them the forms of order implied by the continuity of time.7

Reflecting or conveying this new temporal orientation, in the nineteenth century Charles Darwin’s theory of the development of the organism ‘takes precedence over the search for taxonomic characteristics, and, above all, language loses its privileged position and becomes, in its turn, a historical form’. Foucault, then, identifies a broad epistemic shift from spatialized grids of universal knowledge – resting on the faith that language can guide us to the necessary analogies and distinctions – towards a focus on the individual object’s development through time, in which language itself is perceived as just one more such object. Aspects of this idea are usefully extended by Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1987); though much criticized for the larger claims implied by its subtitle, this controversial study repays considerable attention for its early, ground-laying account of the Enlightenment, which (without naming either writer) deftly places many of Erasmus Darwin’s concerns and orientations within a broadly Foucauldian perspective. As well as science, Darwin was interested in questions about the ancient world and modern exploration; and Bernal’s study offers an exceptionally pertinent formula for bringing all these diverse interests into a common focus. Describing much the same epistemic shift as Foucault, Bernal translates the latter’s ‘Classical’ and ‘Modern’ ages into those of ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Romanticism’: There is an oversimplified, but useful, contrast to be made between the 18thcentury Enlightenment, with its interest in stability and the ordering of space, and the Romantic passion for movement, time and “progressive” development through history. Outstanding examples of Enlightenment achievement are the accurate mappings of the world’s coasts, Linnaeus’s systematic arrangement of natural species, and the American Constitution, which is supposed to last forever. The Romantic nineteenth century, on the other hand, favours the developmental image of the ‘tree’ … Trees, which are to be found in Darwinian evolution, Indo-European linguistics and most 19th-century histories, provide the ideal Romantic image. They are rooted in their own soils and nourished by their particular climates; at the same time they are alive and grow.8

Foucault, Order of Things, xxv. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume

7 8

1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 3 vols (London: Vintage, 1987), 204–5. On Bernal’s identification of ‘tree’ images with Romanticism, it is important to note how the new stress on continuous growth distinguishes these from the older, conceptual or taxonomic models of the tree or hierarchy of knowledge which go back to Descartes and Aristotle. For a discussion of the replacement of hierarchical ladders by maps and then growing trees in the later eighteenth century, see Giulio Barsanti, La Scala, la mappa, l’albero: Immagini e classificazioni della natura tra Sei e Ottocento (Florence: Sansoni, 1992). See too

32

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

Bernal further links such contrasts to the idea that many Enlightenment thinkers ‘preferred powerful states that lasted over long periods of time, like China, Egypt and Rome’ while ‘Romantics longed for small, virtuous and “pure” communities in remote and cold places’, and ‘unsuitably’ tried to impose these qualities on ancient Greece.9 Though never mentioned specifically by Bernal, most of Erasmus Darwin’s vast range of concerns fit this Enlightenment model very snugly indeed, from its Linnaeanism to its pro-Americanism, its Egyptianism to its systemizing spatialism. And even when addressing ‘progress’ – of society or of species – Darwin seems to stand closer to Bernal’s and Foucault’s pictures of the space-filling Linnaeus than to their pictures of his own time-filling grandson. His fullest account of evolution invites us first into an unchanging Temple of Nature, whose future is already immanent in a centrally placed figure waiting only to be unveiled, and where Time is already frozen to the floor ‘by Sculpture bound’, like the truth-encoding hieroglyphics surrounding it: Unnumber’d ailes connect unnumber’d halls, And sacred symbols crowd the pictur’d walls; ... While chain’d reluctant on the marble ground, Indignant Time reclines, by Sculpture bound.10

We shall return to Foucault’s and Bernal’s pictures of the time-oriented ‘modern’ or ‘Romantic’ period in the final chapter and elsewhere: but my aim in this chapter is to establish that Darwin’s Enlightenment vision is not just a failure to be Romantic, but the achievement, or coming-to-a-head, of something else, deliberately oriented towards space and visuality. Though scientifically poised at the exact midpoint between Linnaeus and his own grandson, aesthetically Darwin has very clear aims which relate far more to Enlightenment spaces than to Romantic times. In the context of English Literature studies, what has above all been lacking in assessing Darwin’s work has been a strong positive evaluation of the Enlightenment vision as something big and confident, to set against the all-absorbent powers of the word ‘Romanticism’, which not only draws all the work contemporary with a few favoured poets into its orbit, but then implicitly finds most of it wanting by comparison. In particular, at various points through this book, Bernal’s disposition to favour the Enlightenment’s broad, generous mappings over Romantic tales of separate development will offer, I argue, the right focus for starting to reassess Erasmus Darwin’s work both as an enormously comprehensive thinker and as a much-criticized poet. Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 28–30, 127–33. 9 Bernal, Black Athena, 209. 10 Temple 1.75–80. Elsewhere, Time appears more apocalyptically, as a giant dashing superstition to the ground although still enchained by the Linnaean floral clock (Loves 2.165–86), or a ‘giant form’ standing statuesquely ‘on Nature’s centre’ until his final overthrow at ‘the last trump’ of cosmic implosion (Temple 3.384–9).

Enlightened Spaces

33

Anna Seward and Darwin’s Picturesque Violently attacked for political reasons but then more carefully pulled apart for aesthetic ones by Wordsworth’s great Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Darwin’s poetic practice has long been held up as a prime example of how not to do it. Though this prejudice is less knee-jerk nowadays, for many readers it remains a groundassumption which this book cannot hope to remove with a single argument; nonetheless, the rest of this chapter will aim to wear some of it away by exploring Darwin’s highly conscious poetics in the context of the Enlightenment emphasis on clearly pictured spaces. If in some ways Darwin simply typified this Enlightenment spatialism, in others he dramatically pushed it to its outermost limits, in an experimental poetic which insisted that the ‘unnumber’d halls’ into which his poems are divided should be filled almost entirely with pictures. He was committed to the idea that – as modern creative-writing students are always taught – poetry should only ‘show, not tell’. In the first of the prose Interludes separating the cantos of The Loves of the Plants, he argues that as our ideas derived from visible objects are more distinct than those derived from the objects of our other senses, the words expressive of these ideas belonging to vision make up the principle part of poetic language. That is, the Poet writes principally to the eye, the Prose-writer uses more abstracted terms. Mr. Pope has written a bad verse in the Windsor Forest: “And Kennet swift for silver eels renown’d.” The word renown’d does not present the idea of a visible object to the mind, and is thence prosaic. But change this line thus, “And Kennet swift, where silver Graylings play.” And it becomes poetry, because the scenery is then brought before the eye.11

Perhaps fortunately, Darwin does not always stick to this exacting standard of non-abstraction. In Temple, for instance, the key-words ‘young’ and ‘nascent’ often derive their poetic force from the triple image of a newborn child, a newly evolved life-form and a still-developing planet: a fertile ambiguity which would be destroyed if we could visualize any of these states completely clearly.12 Nonetheless, his usual prioritizing of the visual keeps his poetry firmly to its purpose of clarifying abstruse science through a series of mental pictures – as in his own image, in the playful Proem to Loves, of ‘diverse little pictures suspended over the chimney of a Lady’s dressing-room, connected only by a slight festoon of ribbons’.13 The ‘slightness’ of the ribbons holding the pictures together can be compared to the temporal, narrative dimension of all writing, which Darwin finds many ways to downplay in favour of the synchronically viewable pictures which – as with the extended epic similes introduced by ‘So’ or ‘Hence’ – he Loves, Interlude 1, p. 48. See (e.g.) Temple 1.256, 272, 261, 389. 13 Loves, pp. viii–ix. 11

12

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

34

repeatedly asks us to juxtapose and compare quasi-spatially rather than merely as diachronically successive. For Robert Southey, no poet ever succeeded more fully ‘in executing a work according to his own standard of excellence. But the theory was false’, depending as it did on ‘making every word picturesque’, and forgetting ‘that poetry, like painting, must have its relief – its shade, as well as its light’.14 This lack of relief within or between pictures is brilliantly pinpointed in one of Coleridge’s jotted notes: Dr Darwin’s Poetry, a succession of Landscapes or Paintings – it arrests the attention too often, and so prevents the rapidity necessary to pathos – it makes the great seem little. – seems to have written his poem as Painters who of beautiful Objects take Studies.15

Coleridge’s idea of the ‘rapidity necessary to pathos’ makes an extraordinary link between empty, attention-free space and mental-emotional time: a rejection of spatio-visual plenitude to which we shall return. But such Romantic critiques of Darwin’s ‘false theory’ – often simply accepted as a complete and adequate writing-off – were superbly taken on by the Lichfield poet Anna Seward, a friend and collaborator of Darwin’s who was also his most perceptive critic. Although she wrote her Memoirs of Darwin before The Temple of Nature’s 1803 publication, Seward uses an image very like that poem’s densely ‘pictur’d walls’ (before which, we may remember, ‘indignant Time reclines, by Sculpture bound’) in describing the mansion of his ‘Muse’: If, devoted to picture, [Darwin’s Muse] covers every inch of the walls of her mansion with landscapes, allegoric groups, and with single figures; if no intersticial space is left to increase the effect of these splendid forms of the imagination; yet be it remembered, that it is always in the reader’s power to draw each picture from the mass, and to insulate it by his attention. It will recompense by its grandeur, its beauty, or its terrific grace, the pains he may take to view it in every light, ere he proceeds to examine other objects in the work, which he will find of equal force and skill in their formation.16

Seward’s missing ‘intersticial space’ between ‘splendid forms’ acknowledges the ‘relief’ missed by Southey and the moments of emptiness Coleridge seems to need for his mind to leap to a full emotional response. But her solution is to ask more of the reader: it is for us to ‘draw each picture from the mass, and to insulate it by [our] attention’. Darwin does ask a lot of the reader, and Seward’s close, insulating attention to the details of his ‘picturesque’ poetics remains the best introduction to what that is. Robert Southey, in ‘Sayers’s Works’, Quarterly Review 35 (1827): 198–201. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection, ed. Seamus Perry

14 15

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), n33, p. 3. 16 Seward, Memoirs, 118.

Enlightened Spaces

35

Seward sometimes criticizes this poetics for its preference of ‘the picturesque’ over qualities pertaining ‘more to the mind, or heart, than to the eye’: The reason why Dr. Darwin’s poetry, while it delights the imagination, leaves the nerves at rest, may be that he seldom mixes with the picturesque ... that quality of the thing mentioned, which pertains more to the mind, or heart, than to the eye, and which, instead of picture, excites sensation.17

Drawing attention to a quatrain from one of his short poems – Stretch’d on her sable bier, the grave beside, A snow white shroud her breathless bosom bound, O’er her wan brow the mimic lace was tied, And Loves, and Virtues, hung their garlands round

– Seward criticizes the ‘petty accuracy’ of ‘the words, “mimic lace,” which allude to the perforated borders of the shroud’ and exemplify ‘Dr Darwin’s too exclusive devotion to distinct picture in poetry’ which ‘sometimes betrayed him into bringing objects so precisely to the eye, as to lose in such precision their power of striking forcibly upon the heart’.18 But despite such reservations, Seward’s overall assessment of his poetry as poetry is generous and penetrating, and extends to what she calls his skilful use of ‘picturesque sound’.19 This phrase covers the generally ‘admirable effect’ of his alliteration, and the ‘exquisite effect of sound echoing sense’ in his fondness 17 Memoirs, 173–4: my italics. The connection Seward makes here between ‘sensation’ and the excited nerves but not the sense-derived visual imagination has links to Wordsworth’s argument that science is only a fit subject for poetry if it provides ‘an atmosphere of sensation’; but both poets’ use of such language is strongly influenced by Darwin’s own psycho-physical distinctions between irritation, sensation, volition and association: see chapters 7 and 11 below. 18 Memoirs, 117–8: Darwin seems later to have revised these words to ‘gather’d folds were tied’, perhaps in response to her criticism; see the note to this poem, ‘Elegy for Elizabeth, after a Dream’, in To Elizabeth, 36. 19 Though for Seward such lines as ‘And tunes to wilder notes the warbling wire’ (Loves 2.2) can make the device ‘pall upon the ear’, Darwin’s strong alliteration generally ‘increases, and sometimes entirely constitutes’ the power of his ‘picturesque sound’ (Memoirs 307–8). However, she argues that his theoretical attempts to merge visual and aural effects go too far when (in the third Loves Interlude where Darwin also discusses the possibility of making ‘luminous music’ with a kind of light-organ translating the tonic scale into the seven colours of the Newtonian spectrum) he not only affirms the right to speak of ‘brilliancy of sounds’ and ‘the tone of a picture’ but tries to extend such aural/ visual affinities into an elaborate theory of versification which Seward finds completely ‘incomprehensible’ (Memoirs 351; see Interlude 3, Loves pp. 136–7, 130–35). Try as I may, I can make no sense of Darwin’s versification theory either. For Seward, such attempts to subordinate musico-poetic effects to those of painting are ‘owing to his total want of knowledge in musical science’ and to his unawareness that ‘Poetry and Music are both

36

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

for double-stressed spondees, as italicized in the lines ‘With paler lustre where Aquarius burns,/ And showers the still snow from his hoary urns’.20 The idea of ‘picturesque sound’ can be extended to other internal dramas of Darwin’s ‘spirited and energetic’ couplets: The Darwinian peculiarity is in part formed by the very frequent use of the imperative mood, generally beginning the couplet either with that, or with the verb active, or the noun personal. Hence the accent lies oftener upon the first syllable of each couplet in his verse than in that of any other rhymist; and it is, in consequence, peculiarly spirited and energetic.21

Though Seward is not specifically discussing them here, The Botanic Garden’s opening four words – ‘Stay your rude steps!’ – fully exemplify all these points, following up the verb-driven energy of the reversed first foot with the spondee of ‘rude steps’ and encasing the whole phrase in alliterative sibilants: a symmetrical or sandwiching effect we shall come to shortly under the heading of ‘chiasmus’. Couplets, chiasmus and synecdoche Seward’s emphasis on Darwin’s ‘energetic’ couplets draws attention to what we might call one of his key ‘Enlightenment spaces’. We might think of the hermetically closed couplet as typically eighteenth century but it was surprisingly rare in his chosen mode of didactic poetry, whose other most celebrated examples are all in blank verse, giving the feeling of a kindly instructor gently leading the reader from one idea to the next and not straying too far from the prose in which those ideas might normally be expressed.22 By contrast to Thomson, Young or Akenside, Darwin hardly wrote a line of blank verse in his life and was unable to

progressive, Painting is stationary, therefore the natural union is between the two first’ (Memoirs 350, 353). 20 Memoirs, 308, 185; see Economy 2.27–8. 21 Memoirs, 181–2. 22 John Philips’ Cyder (1708), David Mallet’s The Excursion (1728), James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730), William Somerville’s The Chace (1735), Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742–5), John Armstrong’s The Art of Preserving Health (1744), Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of Imagination (1744), Christopher Smart’s The Hop Garden (1752), John Dyer’s The Fleece (1757), James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane (1764), Robert Dodsley’s Agriculture (1772), William Mason’s The English Garden (1772–81), Capel Lofft’s Eudosia, or a Poem on the Universe (1781) and William Cowper’s The Task (1785) are all arguably significant precursors of Darwin’s didactic mode but are all written in blank verse. See J. V. Logan, The Poetry and Aesthetics of Erasmus Darwin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1936), 130.

Enlightened Spaces

37

repay Cowper’s admiration of his poetry in kind because of what he saw as the blank verse Task’s ‘prosaicism’ and ‘planless wanderings’.23 Darwin’s fundamental building-block, then, is the rigorously end-stopped Popeian heroic couplet, where whatever was set up at the start of line one is concluded by the end of line two. There are certainly longer sentences and other units of meaning, but these always keep a firmly punctuated break at the end of each pair of lines, with no counterflow of expressive enjambement across the line end permitted. One of the problems with reading a passage by Pope or Darwin is that the slow unfolding of description or argument we might expect from ordinary speech, prose or even blank verse is so speeded up: there is a sense of ‘been there, done that’ at the end of virtually every couplet, even if we haven’t actually ever ‘been there’ before at all. For Cowper, famously, Pope ‘Made poetry a mere mechanic art,/ And every warbler has his tune by heart’.24 Helped on its way by such remarks and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads Preface, the diction-packed couplet did die at some point, and it is very hard for us retrospectively to climb back inside it and work all the machinery. But this does not mean there were not some kinds of poetry it fitted perfectly: hence for Anna Barbauld, Darwin’s description of Arkwright’s cotton-mill is ‘a piece of mechanism as complete in its kind as that which [it] describes’.25 The endstopped couplet’s speed makes it the perfect vehicle for moving rapidly between diverse fields of knowledge: the sense of losing the thread one might have in prose or even blank verse largely disappears because the couplet is so accustomed to packaging information and throwing it quickly into the past. The danger of over-compressing meaning to the point of inaccuracy can be removed by factual notes: a feature long preceding Darwin, but which he developed to unprecedented levels. And the ‘been there, done that’ aspect can be a particular advantage when the science is controversial: Temple’s great first leaps into big bang and evolution are over almost before one has blinked, leaving a general sense of having already swallowed an elephant and so not straining at the gnats of further detail to follow. Few recent commentators take us much further than Seward in understanding how Darwin’s poetry actually works, as a set of expressive techniques. On this front Donald M. Hassler’s Erasmus Darwin (1973) stands up well after 40 years, identifying a kind of interplay between the ‘centre’ of what Darwin wants to say and its ‘circumference’ with the encircling of verbs between nouns, nouns between verbs, or sounds between sounds, known as ‘chiasmus’.26 Hassler’s quest for Darwin’s ‘centre’ may be something of a Romanticist wild-goose chase, but his kind of old-fashioned focus on techniques with Greek names such as ‘chiasmus’ 23 Seward, Memoirs, 385; see also pp. 102–3 for Darwin’s very few recorded lines of blank verse. 24 William Cowper, Table Talk, 654–5; The Complete Poetical Works of William Cowper, ed. H. S. Milford (London: Oxford University Press, 1913), 14. 25 Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Preface to Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of Imagination (London: Cadell and Davies, 1794), 4. 26 Donald M. Hassler, Erasmus Darwin (New York: Twayne, 1973), 86.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

38

and ‘synecdoche’ really is crucial for understanding much of what Darwin is doing as a poet. The very first four words of The Botanic Garden – ‘Stay your rude steps!’ – involve aural chiasmus, and the subsequent command ‘Disperse, ye Lightnings! and, ye Mists, dissolve!’27 exemplifies a very typical kind of chiasmic verb-noun-noun-verb sandwich. The decisive tone of such phrasings often depends on synecdoches using ‘a part for the whole’: the forbidden ‘steps’ standing in for the whole person, and the lightnings and mists for bad weather in general. (As we shall see later, synecdoche also often underlies the fertile ambiguities of Darwin’s accounts of evolution, as when whole ‘nascent’ modes of organic life are almost indistinguishable from the births of individuals: ‘ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny’ in a kind of endlessly repeated synecdoche made flesh.) Darwin’s assured handling of such techniques is already evident in his first published poem, ‘An Elegy on the Death of Prince Frederick’ (1751), mourning the death of George II’s son and intended heir. At the poem’s close, the god Neptune tries to comfort a grieving nation with the assurance that ‘If dies the day upon the weeping lawn,/ Lustres as fair revive the rising dawn’.28 Here the internally rhyming chiasmus of ‘dies the day’ / ‘rising dawn’ reinforces the sunset/ sunrise symmetry of meaning. Neptune goes on to assure us that even after the roughest storms, Again rich India spreads her silken sails, And seeks my harbours borne by spicy gales; Rejoicing nations crowd the banks of Thames, And George and Peace diffuse indulgent beams.29

Anticipating much in Darwin’s later style, this passage is crammed with synecdoches condensing more complex realities: ‘silken sails’ and the spice on the following wind connoting India’s most exportable product as well as the ships importing them, ‘rejoicing nations’ meaning at once foreign crews and willingly sent cargoes rather than whole populations, ‘banks of Thames’ connecting upriver Kew with the London docks, and the conflation (or ‘hendiadys’, to be technical) of ‘George and Peace’ compressing a whole network of pacific free-trade policies and practices, as well as flatteringly implying that the king’s sun-like nurturing of these policies is too well known to need spelling out further. A focus on synecdoche at the expense of other elements helps to explain the worst couplet Darwin – or perhaps anyone – ever wrote. In an early draft of The Progress of Society, a description of the massacre of Niobe’s 20 children by the archer-gods Apollo and Diana climaxes: Ten blooming youths in anguish bite the ground, And ten fair bleeding sisters sleep around.30

29 30 27

28

Economy 1.42. Darwin, ‘Elegy on Prince Frederick’, 79–80; Three Elegies (2009), 13–16. ‘Elegy on Prince Frederick’, 89–92. Progress, see note 53 to 1.306.

Enlightened Spaces

39

Quite apart from the unfortunate overlaps with modern English slang in ‘blooming, ‘bleeding’ and above all ‘sleep around’, the conventional images of ‘biting the ground’ and ‘sleeping’ might function as workable synecdoches for the larger fact of death in a single instance, but when multiplied to 20 the idea of biting and sleeping with such gender-determined synchronicity robs the massacre of all its chaotic horror. However, it is important to add that Darwin reworked the passage more than once. The last-line revision ‘And ten fair sister beauties bleed around’ adds yet another ‘b’ word to the obtrusive ‘bloom’/ ‘bite’/ ‘bleed’ alliteration which may have led him into this situation, but marks a slight improvement since the comparatively active verb ‘bleed’ mirrors ‘bite’ rather better than ‘sleep’ does. And in what seems Darwin’s final version the couplet is omitted altogether, leaving the closing focus far more powerfully on just two of the archer-gods’ victims and their mother trying desperately to hide the last child in her gown.31 Darwin’s two favourite devices of chiasmus and synecdoche can be seen as ways of prioritizing the pictorial space of his verse over its musical time. Chiasmus contains the onward impetus of language within a structure appealing to the spatial sense of symmetry. And Darwin’s own account of synecdoche – the suggestion of a larger whole by showing only a part – is strikingly pictorial. In the third Loves Interlude, he uses the analogy of a tomb in Lichfield cathedral showing a sculpture of the dead dignitary’s head in one wall-niche with the feet appearing in another about five feet away: ‘though the intermediate space is a solid stone-wall, yet the imagination supplies the deficiency, and the whole figure seems to exist before our eyes’, in what might be described as a kind of visual chiasmus.32 In poetry, a similar effect can be produced by ‘describing a single feature or attitude in picturesque words, [which] produces before the mind an image of the whole’. A typically eighteenth-century way of focusing the synecdochic idea of representing a larger whole or group through a single feature is the typifying use of the definite article ‘the’. As well as often reducing plurals to singulars, this can give the sense that we have already seen and somehow ‘placed’ the objects described, as when in Loves the ‘Harlot-nymphs’ of the climbing Cuscuta conceal their parasitic intentions ‘In the meek garb of modest worth disguised,/ The eye averted, and the smile chastised’.33 By contrast the indefinite article ‘a’ is very rare in Darwin’s verse, suggesting as it does the range of other possibilities in any situation, which it thereby renders unpredictably individual rather than supposedly typical. It could be argued that the break from the typifying ‘the’ to the individuating ‘a’ is as fundamental to the Lyrical Ballads’ poetic revolution as its return to prose sequence and rejection of personification: witness such key first lines as ‘It is an ancyent Marinere’ or ‘A simple child, dear brother Jim’.34 These 33 34

Progress 1.314–9. Loves, Interlude 3.129–30. Loves 3.331–2. The openings of Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ and Wordsworth’s ‘We Are Seven’, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Methuen, 1968), pp. 9, 66. 31 32

40

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

are in a sense pictures too, but the lack of definition in ‘a’ leads us to expect further explanation and development in time. Interestingly, though the vices of poetic diction are often blamed on a misguided use of Latin models, Latin itself uses no articles at all: the frequent eighteenth-century preference for ‘the’ thus expresses a more contemporarily specific urge to pictorialize and typify in space, as opposed to uses of ‘a’ which project us forwards into time and the specific experiences of the observer.35 In Darwin’s own psychological terminology, his leaning towards typification relates more to clumped ‘tribes’ than to flowing ‘trains’ of associated ideas.36 Following Hume and Hartley, Darwin argues in Temple that imagination depends on ‘resemblances’ which may in turn rest either on links encountered in the ‘train’like flow of mental time, or on ‘tribe’-like groupings in mental space. Arguably Darwin’s fondness for extended similes, the synecdochic implying of a group from a single instance, even perhaps his reliance on rhyme and the symmetrical pairings of chiasmus, all rest chiefly on the notion of spatially stable sets or ‘tribes’ of pre-related ideas; whereas the winding self-analyses of Romantic lyrics depend on a more fluid commitment to the links thrown up by ‘trains of thought’ in time. Though once memorably applied to Coleridge’s obsessions by Hazlitt, the Hartleyan phrase ‘tribes of mind’ points more to an Enlightenment spatial presentation of ideas as already somehow ‘there’ – as in the Foucauldian ‘grid’ or the ‘fixities and definites’ of Coleridge’s disparaging view of ‘Fancy’ – than to the time-driven journeys of Romantic lyrics from thought to thought.37 35 Darwin himself describes ‘a’ as an adjective conveying a ‘particular’ quality absent from article-free Latin, but sees its main beauty as the possibility of converting nouns into what sound like ‘general’ personifications by omitting it, as in ‘She let Concealment like a worm i’th’bud/ Feed on her damask cheek’, or ‘Slow rises Worth by Poverty depress’d’ (Temple, AN 14 on ‘The Theory and Structure of Language’, 99–100). 36 Anticipating the metonymy/metaphor distinction established by twentieth-century structuralists such as Roman Jakobson, Temple distinguishes mental processes where ‘contiguous thoughts embrace/ In endless streams’ from those where ‘resemblance’ marshals her ‘sister-thoughts in lucid trains or tribes’. (Temple 4.299–300, 305–6). See Roman Jakobson, ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Distrurbance’, in Fundamentals of Language, ed. R. Jakobson and Morris Halle (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1956), 90–96. Darwin’s influences here are Hume and Hartley, the former basing the association of ideas on either ‘causation’, ‘contiguity’ or ‘resemblance’, and the latter identifying association chiefly with ‘trains of thought’, with less frequent references to generic ‘tribes’ of ideas or passions. (David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 3 vols (London: John Noone, 1739–40) 1.27; David Hartley, Observations on man, his frame, his duty, and his expectations, 2 vols (London: Hitch and Austen, 1749), 1.vi, 78, etc. for ‘trains’; for the rarer ‘tribes’ see 1.397. 37 Foucault, Order of Things, xxv; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions (London: Rest Fenner, 1817), ch. 13, 296. On Coleridge’s Hartleyan interest in ‘tribes of mind’, see William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age: or Contemporary Portraits, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Colburn, 1825), 63.

Enlightened Spaces

41

Picturesque linguistics His contemporaries’ use of ‘picturesque’ to denote persistent features of Darwin’s poetic style is not quite the same as the more specialized usage which applies it purely to the visual arts, and particularly to the landscape-enjoying theories of William Gilpin, Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight in the same period. As we shall see in Chapter 9, Darwin has his own take on such theories, typically placing the Picturesque as the ground-term of which the Burkean ‘Sublime and Beautiful’, and indeed the ‘Romantic’, are merely subsets. But for the present, I should like to take the idea of the picturesque in a different direction, by relating it to Darwin’s theory of language and his almost obsessive fascination with Egyptian hieroglyphics. Darwin’s pictorializing practice fits well with his idea that modern alphabetical writing was preceded by a truer, pictorial writing focused purely on visualizable objects. As the Botanic Garden Apology insists, the Egyptians’ scientific wisdom was most fully embodied in their pictorial hieroglyphics: The Egyptians were possessed of many discoveries in philosophy and chemistry before the invention of letters; these were then expressed in hieroglyphic paintings of men and animals; which after the discovery of the alphabet were described and animated by the poets, and became first the deities of Egypt, and afterwards of Greece and Rome.38

The alphabetical ‘invention of letters’ may have helped to ‘animate’ these truths by turning them into myths but it has also distorted them, making it the task of a ‘philosophical’ poem at once to exploit these animations and to read back to the forgotten truths they embody – often by referring as much to the designs on ancient ‘gems and medallions’ as to the narratives of ancient poets. The broad debts of Darwin’s visually oriented aesthetic to Hogarth, Burke, Hume and Lord Kames are well traced by J. V. Logan and Robert N. Ross, the latter of whom cites a long neoclassical tradition stretching from Aristotle’s instruction that ‘liveliness is got by using … metaphor and by being graphic’ to Lord Kames’s insistence that ‘Abstract or general terms have no good effect … because it is only of particular objects that images can be formed.’39 More specifically related to Darwin’s ‘hieroglyphic’ obsession, Ross cites David Hartley and William Warburton (both of whom influenced Darwin in several other ways): with Hartley suggesting ‘some kind of picture-writing to have been imparted to Adam by God’ and then taken to China by Noah, before being lost in a Western world whose fallen postdiluvian nature no longer corresponded to the truths of Adam’s time; Economy, pp. vii–viii. Robert N. Ross, ‘“To Charm thy Curious Eye”: Erasmus Darwin’s Poetry at the

38 39

Vestibule of Knowledge’, Journal of the History of Ideas 32, no. 3 (1971): 385; see also J. V. Logan, The Poetry and Aesthetics of Erasmus Darwin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1936), 46–92.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

42

and Warburton describing a move from crude picture-writing to hieroglyphics and Chinese ideograms and thence to the alphabetic writing of a modern world which, however, repeatedly shows its need to return to the lost pictorialism through the use of metaphor.40 Metaphorical devices such as simile and personification are fundamental to Darwin’s poetic, and the Warburtonian stress on metaphors as recalling primarily visual pictures is deeply related to Darwin’s views on the origins of language. An extended treatment of this origin in Temple does admit an expressive need to convey such intangibles as ‘Love, pity, war, the shout, the song, the prayer’; but it also firmly insists that from the first such ‘quick concussions of elastic air’ are specifically related to objects: the first utterances already bore ‘in airy rings/ The vocal symbols of ideal things’.41 The long Additional Note to this section on language invokes the arguments of John Horne Tooke’s linguistic treatise Epea pteroenta, or The Diversions of Purley (1786), dividing all language into nouns, verbs and ‘winged words’ or abbreviations of these, but with nouns well to the fore as the basis even of most verbs. Our first speech produces symbolic representations of concrete objects which we wish to name from the moment they impinge on our senses. Abstract terms are metaphorically derived from these concrete nouns; so are adjectives, on the model of words like ‘musky’ or ‘ stormy’, and verbs on the model of words like ‘to whip’.42 As for conjunctions and prepositions, Darwin calls them ‘the wings of Hermes’ in line with Tooke’s insistence that they compress now-forgotten nouns to form instant grammatical connections.43 In his subjection of verbs and other parts of speech to clearly visualizable nouns, Tooke can be seen as continuing the pictorializing Enlightenment linguistics of Warburton and Hartley. But by the mid-1790s such ideas had acquired something of a radical whiff; as exemplified by Tooke’s moving note when imprisoned for high treason in 1794, listing Darwin and two other admirers of Diversions of Purley as ‘Bold men, to praise me at this time’.44 Despite its offputtingly Greek title and stonewalling subtitle, Tooke’s treatise was widely seen as democratizing, putting commonsensical Anglo-Saxon derivations before abstruse, Latin-derived rules and placing the ‘things’ at the root of all language firmly before the common

Ross, ‘“To charm thy curious eye”’, 381–3. Darwin’s poetry is also compared to ‘verbal hieroglyphs’ by Patricia Fara, Erasmus Darwin: Sex, Science, and Serendipity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 218. 41 Temple 3.369–72; my emphasis. 42 Temple, AN 14.98, 101. 43 Temple, AN 14.93. In this lengthy note Darwin develops his earlier praise of Tooke’s ideas in Zoonomia Part 1 (1794; 1801 ed.: 2.323–4). 44 Handwritten between pp. 140 and 141 in Tooke’s own copy of John Horne Tooke, Epea pteroenta. Or, The Diversions of Purley, Part I (London: J. Johnson, 1786), reproduced in Eighteenth Century Collections Online. 40

Enlightened Spaces

43

reader’s eyes.45 In his own way (and hidden under similar elite camouflage), Darwin too tries to make knowledge ‘visible to all’ through graspable analogies and a visual language almost shorn of discursive abstractions. The radical whiff accompanying such ideas comes out clearly in his pleas for a ‘universal language of the eye’, starting from the visual arts but then extending to the others: So the glory, or halo, round the head is a part of the universal language of the eye, designating a holy person; wings on the shoulders denote a good angel; and a tail and hoof denote the figure of an evil demon; to which may be added the cap of liberty and the tiara of popedom. It is to be wished that many other universal characters could be introduced into practice, which might either constitute a more comprehensive language for painters, or for other arts.46

The supplementation of the traditional saint’s halo and devil’s horns with the French liberty-cap and papal tiara invokes the vision of a newly radicalized synecdochic ‘language’ close to that of the political cartoons of Gillray or Cruickshank, whose power to focus political feeling round such symbols was showing an increasing ability to trump more literary discourses. However, as Richard Cronin argues, there is something paradoxical in Darwin’s ‘attempt to frame a universal language ... in which it might be possible to address all of humanity’, with Darwin’s subsequent eclipse suggesting that finally ‘a universal language may be among the more exclusive idioms available to a poet’.47 Cronin relates this eclipse to Darwin’s view that ‘the most powerful of the languages available in the 1790s was the language of science’, and in particular to his omission of the religious reference-points shared by the large majority. However, these specific issues may be less important than the public’s growing inability to follow the fact that Darwin’s real aim is to produce a language beyond language itself. At the very end of Temple’s very last note (and hence among the very last words he wrote for publication), Darwin envisages a coming split between the language of poetry and an ever-more ‘distinct and accurate’ spoken prose, whose reformed alphabet will sacrifice its links with the metaphorical ‘etymologies of words’ in favour of immediate translatability: ultimately, ‘metaphors will cease to be necessary in conversation, and only be used as the ornaments of poetry’.48 Unlike the newly association-purged prose, the language of poetry is to consist For Marilyn Butler, Diversions was a ‘political book’, influencing such radical grammarians as Hazlitt and Cobbett and ‘taking to a polemical extreme those efforts to democratise language which are specially characteristic of the last three decades of the [eighteenth] century’. Marilyn Butler, ed., Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 18–19. 46 Temple, AN 6.21. 47 Richard Cronin, The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of the Pure Commonwealth (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 16–17. 48 Temple, AN 15.120. 45

44

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

of nothing but metaphor, but both will in different ways leave the weight of their historicity behind them. Darwin’s whole poetic career attests to his wish to allow these two languages to say ultimately the same thing: ‘to inlist Imagination under the banner of Science; and to lead her votaries from the looser analogies, which dress out the imagery of poetry, to the stricter ones which form the ratiocination of philosophy’.49 But this will only work if readers do the crucial job of converting his poetic language into pure analogical image, and then ‘seeing’ for themselves the objects and processes being shown to them, as if in an actual laboratory. For that purpose, arguably, this poetic language needed a kind of unaccidental, glasslike consistency in which (as with the liberty-cap and papal tiara) every abstraction is a graceful woman, every couplet interchangeable, every object typified into a ‘the’. Arguably, what destroyed this dream was precisely the muddy associative drag of language’s etymological past, which Darwin aimed to eliminate from both translatable prose and a poetry able to turn words straight into visions. As time poured on, this glasslike poetic language became increasingly stranded on the associative silt of its own specific moment. The transparency became ‘diction’ and the kind of unremitting visual ‘attention’ which both Seward and Coleridge saw Darwin’s verse as demanding from the reader came to seem wearisome, by contrast to a poetry where words – ‘We are seven’, ‘thy skinny hand’, ‘forlorn’, – keep changing their meaning according to their positions in the ‘aye-babbling spring’ of Romantic poetic language.50 None of the above points about Darwin’s poetic style ‘prove’ that he is a good poet; some, to post-Romantic ears, might suggest he is a bad one. My aims in making them have been twofold. First, to supply some needed background to the considerable quantity of verse to be explored in coming chapters, in a way which I hope helps us to understand it. Second, perhaps more in hope than expectation, to move on from some of the easier assumptions of ‘Romantic ideology’, such as that the ‘artifices’ of poetic diction and ‘fanciful’ connections between known phenomena are wrong in themselves; and to suggest that, at least in Darwin’s case, they have an inner coherence with Enlightenment perspectives which have an aesthetic mass and gravity of their own.

49 Virtually Darwin’s first published words (apart from scientific articles), this formulation appears in the ‘Advertisement’ both to Botanic Garden (Economy p.v) and to Loves (1789). 50 Wordsworth, ‘We Are Seven’ 16, 18, 30, 64, 69; Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ (1798) 13, 217, 221; Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ 70, 71; Coleridge, ‘The Eolian Harp’ (1834) 57. The ‘We are’ in the little girl’s family count, and the Mariner’s possibly undead skinny hand, mean different things on each repetition because we understand the context differently. Keats’s ‘faery lands forlorn’ turn on a pinhead between ‘sadly empty’ and ‘lost to us now’, as the nightingale’s song fades into reality.

Chapter 3

Texts and Gardens In Darwin’s own day, most discussion of his poetry centred on what was seen as a single work: The Botanic Garden of 1791. However, as described in Chapter 1, this consisted of two very different poems. The first to appear was The Loves of the Plants (1789), which is essentially a lesson in the Linnaean sexual system of botany, categorizing a long list of flowers in terms of their relative numbers of male stamens and female pistils, whose reproductive activities are playfully allegorized as a series of human love affairs. With a few revisions, Loves was then incorporated into The Botanic Garden (1791), where it was preceded by the more ambitious Economy of Vegetation. Though it begins and ends with a focus on gardens and is largely narrated by the Goddess of Botany, Economy’s essential focus is on non-botanical scientific processes, as supposedly managed by the spirits of the four elements. Combining these two very different works, The Botanic Garden was one of the great hits of the 1790s and the source of Darwin’s poetic reputation, as well as considerable wealth.1 But for all its great success, this composite work raises two puzzling questions, which this chapter will try to explore from a range of angles. First, what is its nature as a text: at whom is it aimed, and how do its two parts and surrounding materials fit together? Second, arising from this, exactly what or where is its ostensible subject, the ‘Garden’ of its title? To answer these questions, it is useful to begin with The Loves of the Plants: not its specific poetic content as yet, but the elaborate paratext or packaging which surrounds it. The first and most exuberantly arrayed of Darwin’s long poems, Loves (1789) sends out an extraordinarily varied set of signals to readers, which are retained wholesale for its reappearance as Part 2 of the final Botanic Garden (1791). Many of the same devices are reworked in the packaging of Part 1, Economy, at a simpler and more restrained level; but Economy also introduces a very different question about packaging once we enter its poetic text, which begins by enwrapping both itself and the whole Botanic Garden inside another piece of framing material: the opening description of the garden itself. Largely the work 1 As noted earlier, The Botanic Garden was actually published in 1792, but its title page says 1791. Since 1791 is always given in bibliographies and it would be confusing to keep referring to two alternative dates, this book sticks to ’1791’ throughout. As Alan Bewell describes it, Darwin received 10 shillings a line for Loves (1789) and something near the then-enormous sum of 1,000 guineas for the full Botanic Garden, which instantly went into repeated further editions and was rapidly translated into French, Portuguese, Italian and German. See Alan Bewell, ‘Erasmus Darwin’s Cosmopolitan Nature’, ELH 76, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 28.

46

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

of another poet – Anna Seward – this opening raises numerous questions about the real identity of the eponymous ‘garden’, and leads to a range of other issues, from the question of Darwin’s profoundly intertextual practice to the question of how gardens function as physical and conceptual spaces in the Enlightenment and beyond. Text and Paratext in The Loves of the Plants Eighteenth-century texts are surrounded with numerous signals of intention, provenance and intended readership. It is true that texts of all periods can be read for such signals, but there is something about this period’s transitional moment between patronage, subscription, specialist appeal and the various readerships of the mass market which makes its texts’ encrustation with such flagging-up signals particularly dense and rich. The Loves of the Plants took the world by storm in 1789, but not simply as a straightforwardly readable poem: its full impact cannot be appreciated without some consideration of the textual signals by which the poetry itself is surrounded. Collectively, such signals constitute what Gerard Genette calls paratext: ‘a zone between text and off-text’, a threshold or ‘fringe of the printed text which in reality controls one’s whole reading’, consisting of an ‘epitext’ outside the confines of the book itself and a ‘peritext’ within it.2 From the moment of our opening the 1789 edition, Loves uses this paratextual fringe as a tease, constantly transgressing boundaries between the classically learned, the scientifically businesslike, the erotic, the feminine and the childishly fanciful. The peritextual artillery enforcing this mixture of emphases starts with Emma Crewe’s frontispiece of a lolling Flora and comically businesslike Cupid exchanging implements, she with his bow and he with her gardening tools. By contrast to the picture’s easily grasped sauciness, a Latin epigraph on the facing title page offers classically educated male readers a more respectable way in to the plants/love conceit. As translated it means: The very leaves live for love and in his season every happy tree experiences love’s power: palm bends down to mate with palm, poplar sighs its passion for poplar, plane whispers to plane, alder to alder.3

The man-to-man effect is aided by the brusque abbreviation of the later Roman poet Claudian’s ‘Epithalamium of Honorius and Maria’ to ‘Claud. Epith’, and not

2 Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2. 3 Claudian, ‘Epithalamium of Honorius and Maria’, Claudian, with an English Translation by Maurice Platnauer, 2 vols, Loeb edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1922), 1.247.

Texts and Gardens

FL

OR

Fig. 3.1

47

ID

A at play with CUP

Emma Crewe, ‘Flora at play with Cupid’. Frontispiece to Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants (London: J. Johnson, 1789). In the author’s possession.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

48

necessarily damaged by a slight misquotation in the first line (‘nemus omne per altum’ for ‘omnisque vicissim’) which suggests that it is dashed off from memory. The sense of address to different audiences is carried forward in three very diverse introductions: the Advertisement, the Preface and the Proem. The ‘Advertisement’ describes Loves as introducing its ‘ingenious’ readers ‘to the vestibule’ of the knowledge of botany by ‘recommending to their attention the immortal works of the celebrated Swedish Naturalist, Linneus’. Borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges, ‘vestibule’ is one of Genette’s terms for paratext,4 and here Darwin’s use of the same image proposes the whole of Loves as a mere preparation – Genette calls such externalized paratext ‘epitext’5 – for the ‘real’ texts of Linnaeus, which themselves might be seen as only further vestibules to the final goal of botanic knowledge. These receding hallways of initiation are extended further when virtually the same Advertisement introduces the whole Botanic Garden in 1791, the image of a ‘vestibule’ to botanic knowledge now seeming to apply more specifically to the way Part 1, Economy, is itself vestibular to Loves’ more full-scale induction to the Linnaean world.6 In both 1789 and 1791, the Advertisement offers to lead the reader ‘from the looser analogies, which dress out the imagery of poetry, to the stricter ones, which form the ratiocination of philosophy’. In Loves, the two poles of this oscillation between feminized, loosely dressed imagination and strict reason are clearly represented in the hard science of the Preface, and then in the skittish fancy of the Proem. Dense with Greek terms, numbered headings and frequent switches to capitals or italics to indicate different classificatory levels, the Preface sets out the main subdivisions of the Linnaean system, concluding with a businesslike epitextual puff for Darwin’s own translations of Linnaeus and two plates illustrating the 24 classes. Apart from the massive sexual metaphor underlying the whole Linnaean taxonomy, the Preface makes apparently no concessions to ‘the looser analogies, which dress out the imagery of poetry’. The Proem which follows seems addressed to someone wholly different: gentle reader!

LO, here a Camera Obscura is presented to thy view, in which are lights and shades dancing on a whited canvas, and magnified into apparent life! – if thou art perfectly at leisure for such trivial amusement, walk in, and view the wonders of my Inchanted Garden. Whereas P. Ovidius Naso, a great Necromancer of the famous Court of Augustus Caesar, did by art poetic transmute Men, Women, and even Gods and Goddesses, into Trees and Flowers; I have undertaken by similar art to restore some of them to their original animality, after having remained prisoners so long in their respective vegetable mansions; and have here exhibited them before

Genette, Paratexts, 2. Genette, Paratexts, 344. 6 See Ross, ‘“To Charm thy Curious Eye”’, 384–6. 4 5

Texts and Gardens

49

thee. Which thou may’st contemplate as diverse little pictures suspended over the chimney of a Lady’s dressing-room, connected only by a slight festoon of ribbons. And which, though thou may’st not be acquainted with the originals, may amuse thee by the beauty of their persons, their graceful attitudes, or the brilliancy of their dress.

FAREWELL.7

The exceptionally large typeface, the familiarization of address through the exclamatory greeting and intimate ‘Farewell’, and the comparison of the poem to ‘diverse little pictures suspended over the chimney of a Lady’s dressing-room’ which may amuse by ‘their graceful attitudes, or the brilliancy of their dress’ all pose the gentle reader as, by a common but suggestive conflation, either a woman or a child. The didactic poem’s expected acknowledgment of a classical model such as Virgil’s Georgics or Horace’s Epistles is by contrast defamiliarized: the poet usually abbreviated as Ovid becomes ‘P. Ovidius Naso, a great Necromancer in the famous court of Augustus Caesar’, the ‘famous’ suggesting fairytale wonder rather than weary recognition of the site most often visited in any well-todo boy’s classical education. The ‘necromancy’ by which Ovid’s Metamorphoses transmutes people into plants is to be reversed in the opposite feat, of restoring the inner lives of plants from their ‘respective vegetable mansions’ to their ‘original animality’. If the epigraph from Claudian earlier offered male Latinists at least a few lines of genuine classical precedent, the Proem suggests that the poem’s only real debt to the classics lies in its reversed outstripping of Ovid’s already crazy level of fantasy. The titling of this delicate confection as ‘Proem’ also carries a certain significance. In its implicit acknowledgement that the more usual terms have been used up by the Advertisement and Preface, it deliberately revels in the paratextual superabundance surrounding Loves. And compared to the other two, ‘Proem’ is a particularly liminal term, defined by the OED as either a preface before the main text or an ‘exordium’ which is already part of it. Though derived from the Greek for ‘song’, in English ‘Proem’ seems to hover between the prose of prior statement and the poem which that statement launches. In thus half-merging itself into the imaginative realm of the poem proper, the Proem implicitly relegates the Linnaean Preface to an ‘outside the poem’ status in alliance with the factual prose notes, and fills out the Advertisement’s promise to maintain a balance between the ‘loose’ claims of poetry and the ‘stricter’ ones of science. Insistently clamouring for a different kind of attention, the 1789 Proem is followed by a mystifying visual image: a rather crudely engraved oval cameo of a motif Darwin later described as ‘Cupid or Love warming a butterfly or the

Loves, vii–ix. Please note that all my Loves references are to the 1791 Botanic Garden edition, simply because it is much more easily available: where I am discussing aspects of the 1789 edition which differ substantially, I shall indicate this specifically. 7

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

50

Soul with his torch’.8 A much better version in the 1791 edition, in the style of Wedgwood’s bisque-on-jasper copy of Portland Vase, seems to have been designed for Darwin by Wedgwood himself, with the insect replaced by a plant.9 Neither edition offers any explanation of the iconography of Cupid and the soul/Psyche as a materialist immortality myth which will be explored at length in Temple, but the presence of the love god and 1791’s plant make the image at least half-readable, and its remaining mystery directs us to the need for close attention to small barely explained details suggested by the Proem’s ‘little pictures [on] a slight festoon of ribbons’. Once we are launched into the poem proper, we will find this kind of detailed attention essential in the constant negotiation between the intensely visual images of the verse and the hard information of the notes, which constitutes the poem’s most significant peritextual tease. In most other didactic poems – including Darwin’s own Economy and Temple – the verse makes its points and the notes expand on them in ways which may be useful but are not essential. In Loves, the verse simply does not work without the notes. As Horace Walpole lamented, its whole system depends on ‘describing in verse what nobody can understand without a long prosaic explanation of every article’.10 This can be illustrated from the single couplet on the double hollyhock, or Alcea: With vain desires the pensive Alcea burns, And, like sad Eloisa, loves and mourns. (Loves 1.69–70)

The note to this couplet runs to three paragraphs of small-print prose, the first of which begins and ends: Alcea. l.69. Flore pleno. Double hollyhock. The double flowers, so much admired by the florists, are termed by the botanist vegetable monsters; in some … the petals become so numerous as totally to exclude the stamens, or males; as Caltha, Peonia, and Alcea; these produce no seeds, and are termed eunuchs. Philos. Botan. No 150.

Buried among all the hard facts, the key word here is ‘eunuchs’: the double hollyhocks cultivated specially for their flowers are infertile because the petals crowd out the male stamens, in a way the verse compares to the castration of Temple 2.223n: though this note rightly adds that many designs of this motif ‘may be seen in Spence’s Polymetis’. Spence does not in fact include the one in the 1789 Loves, which might have come from Darwin’s own cameo collection (for which see King-Hele, Unequalled Achievement, 288). 9 See Lydia H. Liu, ‘Robinson Crusoe’s Earthenware Pot: Science, Aesthetics and the Metaphysics of True Porcelain’, in Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History, ed. N. Heringman (New York: SUNY Press, 2003), 159–60, quoting a Wedgwood letter of July 1789. 10 Walpole, Correspondence, 31.292. 8

Texts and Gardens

51

Eloisa’s lover Peter Abelard – as best known to most readers through Pope’s poem on Eloisa’s grief. However, the note offers us no help with this cultural reference, leaving such matters entirely to the verse and the reader’s own literary-historical knowledge. Conversely, the verse on its own gives us no clear reason for Alcea’s sex deprivation, so that Darwin’s meaning only fully emerges through the reader’s mental agility in shuttling between ‘the looser analogies, which dress out the imagery of poetry’ – the cultural realm of the verse – and ‘the stricter ones, which form the ratiocination of philosophy’, in the scientific realm of the notes.11 Though on nowhere near the same scale as in Economy or Temple, a further paratextual layer is added to the 1789 Loves by its five Additional Notes at the end of the book, of which the longest – on the poisonous Upas tree of Java – had the greatest impact, seeding the image through Romantic period poetry from Blake’s ‘A Poison Tree’ to Byron’s ‘boundless upas’ of life in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (canto 4, stanza 126). In 1791, all the other 1789 Additional Notes are incorporated into footnotes, to be replaced by yet another layer of new additional notation. But in all three of the major poems, the reader’s constant movement from verse to note to long additional note and back again becomes a regular part of Darwin’s intended progression from ‘loose analogy’ to ‘ratiocination’. On the front papers and title page of its 1789 publication, Loves twice announces itself as The Botanic Garden: Volume the Second or Part II, before its specific title is finally given in much smaller print.12 The playing of a ghostly, garden-centred Part One’s existence over our reading of Loves (1789) has an effect on the poem’s opening or ‘exordium’, which can still be regarded as a kind of paratext leading us from the prose Preface and Proem up to the Linnaean lists of the poem proper. These first 38 lines begin: Descend, ye hovering Sylphs! aerial Quires, And sweep with little hands your silver lyres; With fairy footsteps print your grassy rings, Ye Gnomes! accordant to the tinkling strings;

For Dahlia Porter, the ‘mental gymnastics’ typified by this Alcea note are integral to Loves’ delicate balance between the verse’s ‘umbrella’ sense of nature-culture analogy and the taxonomic differentiations of the notes, which are needed ‘to forestall the collapse of scientific analogy into its literary counterparts of metaphor and simile’. (Dahlia Porter, ‘Scientific Analogy and Literary Taxonomy in Darwin’s Loves of the Plants’, European Romantic Review 18 (2007): 213, 218.) 12 The 1789 Loves Advertisement differs from 1791’s shortened version by teasing us with the presence-in-absence of ‘the first poem’ whose publication ‘is defer’d to another year, for the purpose of repeating some experiments on vegetation, mentioned in the notes’. Darwin does not mention where this ‘mention’ occurs, but the remark prepares us to scan the notes carefully for their seriously engaged science, while obscuring his withholding of the perhaps unfinished Economy to test the water with this less ambitious work (these mixed motives are well explored in Seward’s Memoirs, 168–70). Darwin removes such signs of self-doubt in 1791, but here they work to intrigue the reader with their figure of a still-anonymous author equally self-sacrificing in his quest for scientific and poetic perfection. 11

52

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin While in soft notes I tune to oaten reed Gay hopes, and amorous sorrows of the mead. – (Loves 1.1–6)

The opening call on sylphs to ‘descend’ inscribes a radical ambiguity as to whether readers are reading Loves alone in 1789, or after Part One: Economy in 1791, which attributes the whole of creation to the activity of sylphs, gnomes and other elementals. In the first reading, the sylphs are simply airy spirits being exhorted to come down and aid the poet’s song; in the second, it is Economy’s cosmic Sylphs of air which are besought to ‘descend’ not only from the sky but also in scale, their hands turning ‘little’ in the process. Similarly, the gnomes are either just being addressed as the familiar little people of folklore, or being asked to shrink the giant feet which attended the Earth’s first formation down to fairy size. In the first reading, the conventional phrase ‘oaten reed’ simply promises us rural love poetry; in the second, the sense of ‘descent’ is continued in the suggestion that relief from Economy’s epic seriousness will now be offered by the ‘lower’, less-demanding genre of pastoral. The exordium now ushers us into a somewhat magical rural space, as we prepare to learn, From giant Oaks, that wave their branches dark, To the dwarf Moss, that clings upon their bark, What Beaux and Beauties crowd the gaudy groves, And woo and win their vegetable Loves. (Loves 1.7–10)

In either 1789 or 1791, the previous imagery of descent is nicely woven into this switch from the giant oaks of conventionally seen landscape to the ‘dwarf moss’ of microscopic observation. Meanwhile, a silent audience of insects, spiders and snails prepares the reader to step down through a just-possible empathy with their borderline animality into a fellow-feeling for the emotions of plants. Such lines as ‘Descend, ye Spiders, on your lengthened threads’ and ‘Slide here, ye horned snails, with varnish’d shells’ subliminally encourage this sense of slipping slowly down the chain of being into a floral kingdom, where every botanical detail is about to be swelled up to a gigantic human scale (1.28–9). The 1789 title page makes clear that we are entering one half of a work called ‘The Botanic Garden’, implying a specific setting to which this exordium might be expected to introduce us. Instead, we find ourselves in an indeterminate rural space where even a reference to ‘the Swedish sage’ ducks the chance to invoke Linnaeus’s great ur-botanical garden at Uppsala: we are simply told how he explores botany’s ‘secret haunts’ in the wild, on ‘dewy dell, high wood, and winding shore’ (1.32–4). Hence, brilliant as it is at invoking the imaginative downsizing which Loves will demand of the reader, this exordium combines with the title page to put us in a place whose very status as ‘setting’ shifts uneasily under our feet. Implicitly then, the only garden space we can be sure of is the space of something called The Botanic Garden as a text: the metaphorical ‘inchanted garden’ of the Proem.

Texts and Gardens

53

A poetics of paper In both text and paratext, Loves displays a self-reflexiveness about its material presence which amounts to a kind of poetics of paper. From the Advertisement’s opening phrase, ‘The general design of the following sheets’, to the Proem’s ‘diverse little pictures’, we are made to focus on the white, image-bearing surface which constitutes the poem’s material presence. This is more strikingly handled in the Proem’s opening sentence: ‘LO, here a Camera Obscura is presented to thy view, in which are lights and shades dancing on a whited canvas, and magnified into apparent life! – if thou art perfectly at leisure for such trivial amusement, walk in, and view the wonders of my Inchanted Garden.’

Camera obscura means ‘dark chamber’, and from the Renaissance onwards such rooms were constructed with a small hole projecting outdoor scenery, or even enacted events, onto an internal screen, either inverted or, later, turned the right way up with corrective lenses or mirrors. Thus in Natural Magick (1558), the sixteenth-century entertainer Giambattista Della Porta describes how In a dark Chamber by white sheets objected [sic], one may see as clearly and perspicuously, as if they were before his eyes, Huntings, Banquets, Armies of Enemies, Plays, and all things else that one desireth.13

It was for creating such wonders that Della Porta found himself ‘hauled before the Inquisition [after] a denunciation by some fellow Neapolitans who were scandalized by his growing reputation for magic’.14 By the eighteenth century, Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Essays on Painting (1764) were exhorting all young painters to study the ‘divine pictures’ of the camera obscura, but Della Porta’s wizardly reputation still seems to linger in the ‘necromancy’ with which Darwin promises to use it to invert Ovid. In inviting us to ‘walk in’ to the enchanted garden thus produced, Darwin sets up an oscillation between the real external world and the white sheet onto which it is projected, which will also have echoes in Economy’s welcome of the fiery Salamanders to its pages: So the clear Lens collects with magic power The countless glories of the midnight hour; Stars after stars with quivering lustre fall, And twinkling glide along the whitened wall. (Economy 1.89–92)

The oscillation between three- and two-dimensional worlds continues to the end of Loves, where the contents are listed as a ‘Catalogue of the Poetic Exhibition’ 13 Quoted in David Hockney’s exhaustive study of the camera obscura as a key to the development of visual realism, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001), 209. 14 Hockney, Secret Knowledge, 219.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

54

(pp. 191–2). Picking up the idea of ‘diverse little pictures … exhibited’ from the Proem, this ‘catalogue’ contains pictorializing summaries of the poem’s major ‘scenes’ which appear nowhere else: ‘Autumnal scene’, ‘Lady on a precipice’, ‘Mountain-scene by night’, ‘Lady frozen to a statue’ – the various ‘Lady’ titles indicating the poetic similes used for Draba, Tremella and other plants, in preference to the technical names duly highlighted in the ensuing ‘Contents of the Notes’ and then alphabetized in the ‘Index of the Names of the Plants’. One catalogue title particularly relevant to this discussion is ‘Mrs Delany’s paper-garden’, referring us to a simile used for the Egyptians’ epoch-making invention of writing on papyrus.15 The catalogue title specifically indicates the flower pictures made up from delicately cut slivers of coloured paper by Mary Delany – best friend of the great virtuoso botanical and antiquarian collector, the Duchess of Portland – whose artistic skill and Linnaean accuracy were also highly praised by Joseph Banks, Joshua Reynolds and Horace Walpole.16 But the implications of Darwin’s phrase ‘paper-garden’ reverberate strongly through Loves as a whole. In the indicated section on Delany, the blank page on which her flowers are assembled becomes a snowscape where ‘Cold Winter views amid his realms of snow/ Delany’s vegetable statues blow’ (Loves 2.161–2). This tellingly reworks another paper-to-snowscape image from one of Darwin’s earliest poems, which compares rereading shorthand to unfreezing words ‘When the quick eyeball thaws the letter’d plain’.17 The note on this passage continues to play with the idea of a paper-garden in twice calling Mrs Delany’s collection a hortus siccus. The term really refers to the ‘dry gardens’ in which botanists such as Linnaeus, Banks and Solander kept dried specimens, pressed and stuck on to sheets of paper, in chests of shallow drawers; but hortus siccus is arguably also the most appropriate name for the ‘garden’ entered by the first readers of the 1789 Loves. The only suggestion that we are in a real garden comes in a brief note on the ‘botanic garden about a mile from Lichfield’ (4.11n) which will only properly be introduced with the publication of the complete Botanic Garden in 1791–1792. Otherwise, Loves’ background scenery is simply generically rural, while the range of rapidly changing microclimates implied by the succession of individual plants is pan-global, of a kind only really to be found all together in a system of hothouses well beyond Lichfield’s means; or else in a hortus siccus. Rather than being dried on sheets stored in the shallow drawers of a collector’s chest, the plants of Loves are dried directly Loves 2.105–62. Ruth Hayden, Mrs Delany: Her Life and Her Flowers (London: Colonnade Books,

15 16

1980), 158; Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, ‘Introduction (1)’, Mark Laird and Alicia WeisbergRoberts, eds., Mrs Delany and her Circle (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 13–14. 17 ‘Idyllium: To Mr Gurney, on his Book of Short-Writing, 1751’, 19; School and University, 37. See too Philip C. Rittenbush, ‘Erasmus Darwin’s Second Published Poem’, Review of English Studies 13, no. 50, New Series (May 1962): 158–60. Darwin’s application of this snow image to Delany’s backgrounds ignores the fact that she stuck her flowers on to black paper.

Texts and Gardens

55

onto the page, awaiting their reanimation by the reader – an effect occasionally reinforced by the illustrations of particular plants, divorced from any background context of climate or region. The various forms of paper self-consciousness I have been discussing produce a kind of alienation effect, which is further aided by the three prose ‘Interludes’ interleaving the cantos: lest there were any danger of our being swept away from the material world by the verse, these recurrent dialogues between the Poet and his Bookseller firmly remind us that what we have in our hands is a printed book. In this case the interlocutor is particularly identified with the book’s astute publisher Joseph Johnson, well known for the soirées with his authors from which Darwin’s distance from London debarred him except, as here, by ventriloquizing Johnson for himself. Some of these Interludes’ largely aesthetic content has already been discussed, but the very first point they make stresses the removal of the plants from any familiar context in which we might encounter them, when the Poet answers the Bookseller’s anxiety that his verse is ‘pure description’ by confessing ‘I am only a flower-painter, or occasionally attempt a landskip; and leave the human figure with the portraits of history to abler artists’ (Loves p. 47). Paradoxical in the light of Loves’ apparent abundance of human figures, this underlines the way this ‘human interest’ only subserves the flower pictures illustratively, not the other way round: what we are chiefly looking at is a series of botanical specimens painted or printed onto paper, not an evocation of the role of plants in human life as lived in any particular time or place. In its dance between abstractable meaning and an undercutting materiality, Darwin’s curiously intense focus on the poetics of paper has a postmodern feel, even if only in the sense that other intensely self-conscious eighteenth-century texts such as Tristram Shandy can also be reclaimed as postmodern. Like the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the eighteenth century was a period when texts knew themselves as texts, in ways which post-Romantic attempts to ‘move’ us body and soul into another world seemed determined to forget. Entering The Botanic Garden The elaborate packaging of Loves (1789) was transferred wholesale into the twopoem portmanteau Botanic Garden (1791), with very few changes. The most important of these was the transfer of its Advertisement to the beginning of the volume, reworded to embrace Economy as well. Hence the references to a yetunpublished Part 1 naturally disappear, and the idea of the poem as a ‘vestibule’ to Linnaeus telescopes out to include the idea of Economy as itself simply a vestibule to the vestibule offered by Loves. This structurally subordinate status is borne out in Henry Fuseli’s frontispiece to the whole volume, showing the four elements which structure Economy tending on the Goddess Flora, who represents the botanical content of Loves far more than she does the miscellaneous science of Economy itself. Despite this theoretical subordination, one of Botanic Garden’s paradoxes is that Economy is clearly the more important of its two poems. Its own paratextual

56

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

packaging, as a separate poem, can be briefly summarized as both grander and less elaborate than that of Loves. Going greatly beyond Loves’ careful flower pictures, its illustrations range from a geological cross-section of the earth to William Blake’s engravings of the Portland Vase and the Fertilization of Egypt. Like Loves its footnotes are supplemented with longer Additional Notes at the end, but these are now enormous, several constituting full-length publishable essays in their own right, and together outweighing the actual poem in sheer word count. When first holding the complete, beautifully presented folio in their hands or resting its majestic bulk on their desks, it is likely that The Botanic Garden’s early readers would have absorbed a good deal of the paratextual information discussed above, before plunging into the poetic text itself. But among the numerous signals clamouring for their attention, one of the most insistent would be the simple expectation raised by its title: that somewhere in this mass of words, an actual botanic garden was going to be described. The Botanic Garden does indeed set its scene in an actual botanical garden ‘near Lichfield’ at the start of Economy, and go on to describe a wide range of plants we might expect to find there in the Linnaean lists of Loves. So far, so unproblematic; but if we look a little closer we find that the space of the garden and the space of the poem do not quite match after all, or only do so through some curious sleights of hand. So far, we have focused on the textual space of Loves into which various readings of its ‘inchanted garden’ or hortus siccus ultimately disappear. But a different kind of disappearing act takes place straight after Economy’s garden-centred exordium, when we plunge into a poem about physics and chemistry which completely abandons both gardens and botany until its last 260 lines. The sense of a paradoxical absence is much increased when we realize that The Botanic Garden’s only description of its supposed garden setting is almost entirely borrowed from another writer. Dr Darwin’s Botanic Garden, Near Lichfield O come not here, ye proud, whose breasts enfold Th’ insatiate wish of glory, or of gold; O come not ye, whose branded foreheads wear The eternal frown of envy or of care; For you no Dryad decks her fragrant bowers, For you her sparkling urn no Naiad pours; Unmark’d by you, light Graces skim the green, And hovering Cupids aim their shafts unseen.18

Thus begins Anna Seward’s ‘Verses Written in Dr Darwin’s Botanic Garden, Near Lichfield, July, 1778’. The opening gesture of excluding the unworthy 18 Seward, ‘Verses Written in Dr Darwin’s Botanic Garden’, Memoirs, 128. The poem can also be found in The Poetical Works of Anna Seward, ed. Walter Scott, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Ballantyne, 1810), 2.1–4, but the earlier less exclamatory Memoirs version is preferable on several counts.

Texts and Gardens

57

from a physical space – which is also the space of the poem itself – has classical precedents: notably in Horace’s Ode 3.1, ‘Odi profanum vulgus’, which warns away the profane rabble of success-worshippers from the poet’s Sabine vale, where he sings only for ‘youths and virgins’.19 For Seward, likewise, a certain receptive, open-hearted approach is needed to be deserving of both garden and poem: But thou! whose mind the well-attemper’d ray Of taste and virtue lights with purer day; … For thee my borders name the glowing wreath, My fountains murmur and my zephyrs breathe. 20

If the invited ‘thou’ is the suitable reader/visitor, the speaking ‘I’ seems now to be the garden itself, discreetly eroticized as a fragrant, Cupid-attended female body, offering its (‘my’) murmuring fluids and accentuated breathings to the worthy entrant. It also awards him/her with ‘glowing wreaths’ which, on a rather more literal level, it ‘names’, presumably by way of an appropriate plant-labelling system. But now, by a sudden transition, we learn that the speaker of the foregoing is not the garden itself but another being, very familiar to eighteenth-century garden poetry: Thus spake the Genius, as he stept along, And bade these lawns to Peace and Truth belong; Down the steep slopes he led, with modest skill, The grassy path-way, and the vagrant rill; Stretch’d o’er the marshy vale the willowy mound, Where shines the lake amid the cultur’d ground; Rais’d the young woodland, smooth’d the wavy green, And gave to Beauty all the quiet scene.21

This ‘Genius of the Place’, or genius loci, is a familiar figure in eighteenth-century garden poetry, famously invoked as the guiding spirit of good landscape design in Pope’s Epistle to Burlington,22 and crowned as the ‘sylvan Despot’ of William Mason’s The English Garden (Part 2, 1777) where he becomes

19 Though she did not translate this one, Seward’s familiarity with Horace’s odes is shown in her Original Sonnets on Various Subjects; and Odes Paraphrased from Horace (London: G. Sael,1799). 20 ‘Verses’, Memoirs, 128. 21 ‘Verses’; Memoirs, 129. 22 ‘Consult the Genius of the Place in all’: Epistle to Burlington, 57, in The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text, ed. J. Butt (London: Methuen, 1968), 590.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

58

that sov’reign Genius, Monarch sole Who, from creation’s primal day, derives His right divine to this his rural throne.23

So it seems that the female garden’s offer of her (‘my’) fountains and zephyrs was in fact being made (‘Thus spake’) by her male creator, whom we now see striding about enacting his divine right of re-‘creation’ by leading paths and rills down appropriate slopes, separating the indeterminate marshland into lake and waterbank, ‘culturing’ the ground into smooth greensward and clumps of woodland à la Capability Brown, and offering the result up to the cause of aesthetic beauty. But this idea of the Genius as the spirit or essential nature of the terrain to be worked on is given a further twist by Seward’s note: ‘By the Genius of the place is meant its first cultivator, Dr. Darwin’.24 Suddenly, the word ‘genius’ has slid from meaning ‘abstract spirit’ to its modern meaning of ‘brilliant individual’. Whereas in Pope or Mason the garden owner served the genius loci, here he replaces and becomes it. Dr Darwin also replaced and ‘became’ the poem’s author. Just as the garden’s offer of pleasure and comfort becomes, by Seward’s double twist, the Genius’s and then Darwin’s to give, so her 1778 poem about his garden eventually becomes the introduction or ‘exordium’ to the Botanic Garden with which, fourteen years later and long after leaving Lichfield, he replaced the physical botanic garden itself. As described in her Memoirs of Dr Darwin, Seward’s ‘O come not here’ opening was partly inspired by Darwin’s initial ban on her entering his as-yet unfinished garden ‘till it had assumed its new beauties from cultivation’.25 But it also strangely prophesies his later trespass into her garden poem in order to recycle it in the magnum opus which in fact earned him a great deal ‘of glory’ and ‘of gold’. As she explains, Darwin was delighted with the ‘Verses’ she wrote – once admitted and ‘seated on a flower bank in the midst of that luxuriant retreat’ – and sent it to the Gentleman’s Magazine which published it under her name. The original idea for Loves seems to have arisen from his proposal to extend this poem, in which she declined his offer that she write the verse while he wrote the notes; he also contributed substantial unacknowledged sections of the Elegy on Captain Cook which established her as a poet. 26 Perhaps this background of genial patronage prompted what his grandson Charles would call Darwin’s ‘highway robbery’ of Seward’s verses on his garden, which seems blatantly to defy his own garden-robbing simile for plagiarism in Loves: ‘Perhaps a few common flowers of speech may be gathered as we pass over our neighbour’s ground, but we must

William Mason, The English Garden: A Poem in Four Books (York: A. Ward, 1783), 2.119, 110–12. 24 Memoirs, 129. 25 Memoirs, 127. 26 See King-Hele, Unequalled Achievement, 165–6; Darwin, Three Elegies, 42–4. 23

Texts and Gardens

59

not plunder his cultivated fruit’.27 Whatever his reasons, Seward’s own comment on this last passage was acid: ‘Dr Darwin forgot that just restraint when he took, unacknowledged, forty six entire lines, the published verses of his friend.’28 In any case, Darwin becomes and replaces the poem’s author, and Seward’s unacknowledged contribution to his magnum opus ends with her picture of the Genius as he ‘stept along’ and ‘gave to Beauty all the quiet scene’. In Darwin’s poem this stepping along marks the Genius’s departure, to be instantly followed by the entry of the spokesperson of Darwin’s own poem, the Goddess of Botany: ‘She comes! – the Goddess! – through the whispering air,/ Bright as the Morn, descends her blushing car’ (Economy 1.60). In a sense, the Genius stepping out of the frame is thus Seward herself; and there is an ironic cross-dressing neatness in the way Darwin switches from her male persona – the Genius who has spoken most of her poem – to his female one: the Goddess who is to speak most of his. But it is the departing figures of Seward and her Genius who have given Darwin his needed bridge to the well-established traditions of landscape poetry, and of a nature-loving sensibility often gendered as female. Before saying more about the ‘sensibilitous’ dimension of Seward’s contribution, it is worth noting how some of Darwin’s small but crucial alterations pull in the opposite direction. As she puts it, having already added ‘the nymph of Botany to grace the scene’ to the Gentleman’s Magazine version, he added a further ‘few brilliant lines’ for his Botanic Garden opening.29 The most dramatic of these come at the very start. Seward’s own opening – ‘O come not here, ye proud, whose breasts enfold’ – at once falls into regular iambic metre, its initial ‘O’ bespeaking a certain passionate elevation which is, nonetheless, metrically unstressed. The rhythmic near-repetition of ‘O come not ye’ two lines later leans the beseeching impetus forwards into the rest of the poem. With little change to the basic meaning, Darwin stakes out his opening territory very differently: Stay your rude steps! whose throbbing breasts infold The legion-fiends of Glory, or of Gold! Stay! whose false lips seductive simpers part, While Cunning nestles at the harlot-heart! – (Economy 1.1–4)

The single, carefully foregrounded alliteration of Seward’s ‘of glory, or of gold’ now proliferates wildly, from the mirroring chiasmus of ‘Stay/steps’ onward. In the second line, Seward’s original glory/gold pairing is now itself paired up against the equally emphatic assonance of ‘legion-fiends’. Among the seven ‘s’s in line three, the need to separate those of ‘lips’ and ‘seductive’ actually effects the Charles Darwin, The Life of Erasmus Darwin, ed. Desmond King-Hele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 65. 28 Loves, 139; Seward, Memoirs, 354. 29 Seward, note on ‘Verses’, The Poetical Works of Anna Seward, 3 vols, ed. Walter Scott. (Edinburgh: Ballantyne, 1810), 2:2. 27

60

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

parting of lips described; and line four rounds out the sequence with the alliterative melodrama of ‘harlot-heart’. Starting an iambic line with a trochee or reversed first foot to launch it with an extra swing is a fairly common device, but with the four-syllable stress chiasmus of ‘Stay your rude steps!’, Darwin aims (and I think manages) to startle by apparently stopping as soon as he has begun. The device is essentially that of a ‘motivational’ guru who starts by commanding his startled audience to ‘Get out!’, only relenting after much ferocious eyeballing to concede that one or two may be permitted to stay if they shape up and get with the programme.30 For Darwin (at the point where ‘his’ poem has completely re-merged with Seward’s), this delayed concession is the invitation belatedly extended to the worthy reader on line 9: ‘But THOU! whose mind the well-attemper’d ray/ Of Taste and Virtue lights with purer day …’. But as early as the second line, the repetition of ‘Stay!’ – as an intransitive verb without the object ‘steps’ – subliminally hints at this conversion of prohibition into invitation. The initial gesture of exclusion has a more foundational role in Darwin’s oeuvre than its mere usefulness as a rhetorical motivator. A repetition of the same device builds into the whole imagery of the Eleusinian Mysteries’ exclusion of the profane which gives Darwin’s other major poem, The Temple of Nature, its core ‘machinery’. Here, it establishes a double danger: from the unfeeling visitor to the ethos of the garden/poem, and conversely from garden/poem to unworthy visitor. This sense of danger of course adds rhetorically to the allure, the sense of entering a special space; but might also be a genuine warning against certain motives for reading. As with Seward, the exclusion of the seekers of glory and gold is a fairly standard echoing of Horace, but the second couplet adds a dramatic new element: Stay! whose false lips seductive simpers part, While Cunning nestles at the harlot-heart! –

As well as those (presumably men) who seek worldly success, those debarred now also include (presumably) women who use sexuality as a tool.31 Despite its discreetly sexualized imagery, Seward’s garden-poem had no need of such a warning; but Darwin is clearly looking forward here to Loves. Those who simperingly disguise the fact that they get harlot-like pleasure from descriptions of 30 The device is hilariously parodied in the BBC2 comedy series The Office (Series 2, episode 4, first shown 21 October 2002). 31 In a thoughtful study, Donna Coffey comments wryly on Darwin’s takeover of Seward’s ‘Verses’ as a sign of a ‘quest for improvement’ extending from his reshaping of Sir John Floyer’s previous Lichfield garden to Seward’s poem itself (151) and noting how he overlooks the ‘green’ protective note of her opening: his addition of simpering harlots to her list of dangers ‘missed Seward’s point about the nature of the threats to this garden. … as if this garden needed a lurking Eve to rationalize its eventual destruction’ (152). (Donna Coffey, ‘Protecting the Botanic Garden: Seward, Darwin, and Coalbrookdale’, Women’s Studies 31, no. 2 [2002]: 141–64).

Texts and Gardens

61

sex (but give themselves away by the calculating seductiveness of such simpering) are not the intended readers of that poem; in short, it is not pornography. The double-gendered address noted earlier in this chapter is thus firmly embedded from the start of the poetic text. The hyperactivity of Darwin’s alterations is not necessarily to the disadvantage of Seward. The undertone of pleading in her poem’s repeated ‘O come not’ conveys some very complex issues, particularly in the supposed banning of those branded with the frowns of care. As suggested above, this may partly re-enact Darwin’s banishment of her own ‘steps’ from his actual garden before it was ready; in any case, once inside we learn that the admitted ‘thou’ is allowed to bring a guest: And if with thee some gentle maid should stray, Disastrous love companion of her way, … The sister-woe shall calm her throbbing breast, And softest slumbers steal her cares to rest.32

This ‘gentle maid’ establishes the garden as a site of feeling as well as pleasurable learning. The ‘if’ of shy self-reference is a common feature of sensibilitous poetry, as in the ‘If …/ Some kindred spirit shall enquire thy fate’ by which Thomas Gray contortedly introduces his own self-portrait in his ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’ (1751),33 so it is fair to read a subjective resonance in this wording. ‘Disastrous love’ is a major theme of Seward’s sonnets and fairly describes her passionate feelings at different points for her best friend Honora Sneyd and for the clergyman John Saville, both of whom she felt had mismarried elsewhere; it may also convey her at-least warm feelings for Darwin himself, who was at this time mooning unrequitedly for the still-married Elizabeth Pole.34 It is the strayings of Seward’s careworn maid that lead us into the first and only precise description of one of the Lichfield garden’s specific features, an alder glade where ‘The rills, that gurgle round, shall sooth her ear,/ The weeping rock shall number tear for tear’. In her Poetical Works Seward annotates this ‘weeping rock’ passage thus: ‘in a gloomy recess …, there is a rock that drops about once in every minute, alike in dry and wet seasons’. 35 However, the sensibilitous carehealing quality she finds in the physical topography of his garden is something Darwin simply does not ‘get’ in his rewriting. While faithfully copying out her verse and information, his own attached note goes on to claim cheerfully that since so ‘adapted to love-scenes’, this glade is a particularly fitting home for the goddess of Botany, ‘the easier to introduce the next poem on the Loves of the Plants according to the system of Linneus’ (Economy 1.26n). Darwin’s only other note to the exordium similarly distracts from Seward’s sensibilitous comparison of the ‘finer sense’ to a flower that hides from the storm, 34 35 32 33

Seward, ‘Verses’, Memoirs, 129. Thomas Gray, ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751), 96–7. See Uglow, Lunar Men, 273–4. Seward, Poetical Works, 2.3

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

62

by identifying it with the robustly impervious ‘insensibility to disagreeable sensations’ of Epicureanism.36 By pushing her thought in this direction, he moves us from the sensibililtous realm of shy, wounded retirement – as also exemplified in Cowper’s famous picture of his Olney garden as the refuge long-sought by ‘a stricken deer, that left the herd’37 – to the atheistic garden of Epicurean philosophy, which shrugs at the sufferings of others in the storm-tossed world, in a long tradition of Enlightenment garden writing from Sir William Temple’s essay Upon the Gardens of Epicurus (1685) to the final words of Voltaire’s Candide (1759).38 Seward’s careful exploration of the garden whose physical presence in his own text Darwin so strikingly overlooks, relates interestingly to a distinction drawn by Jacqueline Labbé between the ‘prospect’ – typically seen as male and empowered – and the closer observation of natural landscape often gendered as female. Labbé does not mention Darwin but, like him, devotes considerable attention to Mary Delany’s paper flower-pictures, in relation to which she quotes Seward on what was expected of women artists and writers : Stay in thy vale; – no wild affright Shall cross thy path, nor sullen care But go not to the craggy height, The dark, loud winds are raging there!’39

If the weeping rock grove is not quite a vale, it is hidden from most eyes and, arguably, from its creator Darwin’s own sympathies. Nonetheless, he does not do ‘prospects’ either: by his own account he is ‘only a flower-painter’ who ‘occasionally attempt[s] a landskip’ in a time when, for Labbé, the general consensus relegated ‘flower painting to women’.40 The account of Seward which climaxes Labbé’s book concludes that, though some female writers warily ‘approached the prospect’, others ‘constructed alternative, separate-but-equal (or even superior) domains of literary power, accepting the detail as indicative of a knowledge and experience gained not through abstract disinterest, but through actual living’.41 Darwin’s reworkings of Seward certainly push in the direction of ‘abstract disinterest’; nonetheless, his preference for the tiny, often microscopic detail over the grand prospect is a crucial aspect of the poetic cross-dressing which – as we shall see in Chapter 12 – made The Botanic Garden such an important model for women poets. Economy 1.11, 13n; see Seward, Memoirs, 128 William Cowper, The Task (1785) 3.108. 38 In the tradition of Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum and Zeno’s Stoa, Epicurus 36 37

taught his philosophy of retirement from the world in his garden near Athens. Darwin’s major poetic influence, Lucretius, was a leading Epicurean. 39 Anna Seward, ‘Address to Woman. From the Italian’; qtd in Jacqueline Labbé, Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism (London and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin’s, 1998), xiv. 40 Loves, Interlude 1, p. 47; Labbé, Romantic Visualities, 183. 41 Labbé, Romantic Visualities, 185.

Texts and Gardens

63

Other Gardens The botanic garden which introduces The Botanic Garden is thus in one sense a real one, familiarized through the lens of a range of other garden presentations: the Horatian or Epicurean retreat, the landscaping opportunity of Pope or Mason, Gray’s or Cowper’s site of wounded sensibility. But the fact that these lenses are themselves seen through the further lens of an entirely different author removes this garden so far from the poet’s eye as to make it a purely textual one: a point reinforced by the entire disappearance of ‘this’ garden from the rest of the poem. After her grand entry, the Goddess of Botany turns her entire attention to chemistry and physics by way of the spirits of fire, earth, water and air (who may, however, themselves owe something to Seward’s regretful warning that for the unworthy ‘no Dryad decks her fragrant bowers,/ For you her sparkling urn no Naiad pours’). Hereafter we hear nothing of gardens, or indeed of botany, until the Sylphs of Air do finally lead us to a botanical conclusion in the last canto, and the reader who wonders what has happened to the Botanic Garden of the title is offered a new candidate – in fact the only poetic description of a botanic garden written by Darwin himself: So sits enthron’d in vegetable pride Imperial Kew by Thames’s glittering side; Obedient sails from realms unfurrow’d bring For her the unnam’d progeny of spring; … [Nymphs] fan in glass-built fanes the stranger flowers With milder gales, and steep with warmer showers. Delighted Thames through tropic umbrage glides, And flowers antarctic, bending o’er his tides; Drinks the new tints, the sweets unknown inhales, And calls the sons of science to his vales. In one bright point admiring Nature eyes The fruits and foliage of discordant skies, Twines the gay floret with the fragrant bough, And bends the wreath for George’s royal brow. (Economy 4.561–4, 569–8)

As Darwin’s only self-penned account of a botanical garden, this significant passage is worth placing in a rather fuller historical context. Though not then open to the public, the Royal Gardens at Kew were at the cutting edge of modern botany under the management of the Linnaean enthusiast Sir Joseph Banks, whose collection of hitherto unknown plant species ranged from the Pacific tropics to the ‘Antarctic’ southern tips of America and New Zealand, making it a veritable ‘synecdoche of empire’. As described by Bewell, by 1757 Kew had already planted 50,000 new plants, becoming the main collection and distribution centre for the doubling of the number of cultivated plants in Britain between 1731 and 1768 alone, which ensured that by the end of the century ‘the

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

64

species that made up English nature were fundamentally changed.’42 As we noted in the last chapter, Linnaean taxonomy really came into its own as a way of keeping track of this imperial flood of unfamiliar plants. Darwin’s hymn to the ‘discordant’ wonders of Kew contrasts markedly with Seward’s soothing account of his own Lichfield garden’s antipathy to ‘discorded tones’;43 and with the landscape tradition it shares with Mason’s English Garden. In Book 3 of the latter poem (1779), Mason ponders whether to give detailed descriptions of ‘Vegetation’s verdant brood’, to marshal all whose ‘tribes, in order’d file/ Generic, or specific’ would demand all the science of Linnaeus, the ‘wond’rous Swede!’ 44 But – Skill like this, Which spans a third of Nature’s copious realm, Our art requires not, sedulous alone To note [the] general properties of form, Dimension, growth, duration, strength, and hue 45

– that is to say, only those properties which will assist the overall look of the English Garden along the familiar lines. For Mason, in fact, the craze for exotica is an insult to the English ‘Genius of the Place’, which we see rising up to destroy foreign intruders in the story of a botanizing landowner in the Yorkshire Dales: a deep adept In Nature’s story, well he knew the names Of all her verdant lineage; yet that skill Misled his taste.46

With Indian magnolia replacing European laurel, the tutelary river Swale is – like Darwin’s Thames – at first suitably impressed by his new bankside flora: ‘Pause, rapid Swale! and see thy margin crown’d/ With all the pride of Ganges’. However, come the winter The savage spirit of old Swale is rous’d; He howls amidst his foam. At the dread sight The Aliens stand aghast; they bow their heads. In vain the glassy penthouse is supply’d: The pelting storm with icy bullets breaks Its fragile barrier; see! they fade, and die.47

Bewell, ‘Erasmus Darwin’s Cosmopolitan Nature’, 22. The phrase ‘synecdoche of empire’ comes from Greg Garrard, ‘An Absence of Azaleas: Imperialism, Exoticism and Nativity in Romantic Biogeographical Ideology’, Wordsworth Circle 28, no. 3 (1997): 149. 43 Darwin removed this phrase of Seward’s in his own reworking: see Seward, Memoirs, 128; Economy, 1.12. 44 Mason, The English Garden, 3.87–91. 45 Mason, The English Garden, 3.94–7. 46 Mason, The English Garden, 3.258–60. 47 Mason, The English Garden, 3.282–7. 42

Texts and Gardens

65

By contrast to these profaning Aliens in their hail-shattered Yorkshire greenhouses, Darwin’s ‘stranger flowers’ are tended by his sylphs and nymphs with ‘milder gales’ and ‘warmer showers’ in the ‘glass-built fanes’ of ‘Imperial Kew’ (Economy 4.569–70). The twining of these exotics into a ‘wreath for George’s royal brow’ emphasizes that, pace Mason, the most quintessential ‘English Garden’ of all is now also the most transnationally ‘Imperial’. In the study cited above, Bewell reads the listing of plants in Loves as a buyer’s catalogue of ‘new’ products offered for sale in the same spirit as Wedgwood’s and Boulton’s relentlessly marketed fashionable wares.48 The rapidly growing network of botanic gardens centred on Joseph Banks’s Kew became the conduit of this redistribution, building on the mutual feeding-frenzy between this influx of new plants and the national obsession for gardening which spread from the grand estates to more modest middle-class plots. With his close links to Banks as well as Wedgwood and Boulton, Darwin’s medical interest in ‘novelty’ as a beneficial psycho-physical stimulus49 fed into an aesthetic orientation towards the picturesque advertisement of new products, whether plants or the Lunar wares and inventions put so appetisingly on display in Economy. At the level of style, this urge towards the marketing of novelties emerges in neologism, the coinage of a glittering array of new words such as ‘scintillating’, ‘gauzy’, ‘tesselated’ and ‘irridescent’ – slyly described by Bewell as offering readers their ‘words worth’, in return for the high price of The Botanic Garden.50 Bewell’s suggested contrast with the different kind of value we expect from Wordsworth throws much helpful light on the frequent recourse of Darwin’s Romantic critics to images of briefly fashionable allure, admitting to but then recanting from its transient pleasures, from Wordsworth’s ‘transitory and accidental ornaments’ and ‘gaudiness’, to Byron’s ‘tinsel’’.51 Taken as a catalogue of modern delights, The Botanic Garden is, then, less an impelling single narrative than a space to wander in, granting us some of the power to pick and choose we find in shops as well as gardens; but perhaps denying us the sense of time-haunted urgency we expect from a major Romantic poem. Texts as Gardens as Spaces Each of Darwin’s major poems begins in a garden, establishing the poem as a space to be explored. The Loves of the Plants is introduced as an ‘inchanted garden’; The Economy of Vegetation invites us into a specific botanical garden ‘near Lichfield’; The Temple of Nature begins in the Garden of Eden, and then mingles its indoor scientific instruction with walks through its temple grounds, offering alfresco Bewell, ‘Erasmus Darwin’s Cosmopolitan Nature’, 20–21. See Temple AN 13, pp. 81–4. 50 Bewell, ‘Erasmus Darwin’s Cosmopolitan Nature’, 31–2; see too King-Hele, 48 49

Unequalled Achievement, 182, 266. 51 See chapters 11 and 12 below.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

66

picnics beneath the Tree of Knowledge.52 And as Bewell’s analysis suggests, each of these introductions offers the text as itself a garden space, to be experienced in a certain way. Having summoned the appropriate muses and expelled unworthy trespassers, each work then invites the reader to explore a set of four more specific mental spaces – the cantos – whose expository pathways serve to guide us through an array of scenes or objects, with little sense that the time expended will reveal a final ‘point’, beyond the instructive pleasures of each moment. As well as commenting on the crucial function of its notes, Horace Walpole found Loves ‘excellent’ but ‘disjointed’, and impossible to remember except as ‘a collection of short enchanting poems’.53 Walpole’s disorientation relates to the fact that neither part of The Botanic Garden has a narrative, which might help us to remember where we have got to while journeying through it. Instead, like the real botanic gardens they partly map onto, each breaks down into a square grid of four sections, incorporating four loosely differentiated categories of smaller experiences. The central plot of Linnaeus’s ur-Botanic Garden in Uppsala was based round a similar four-square pattern, and that of the Chelsea Physic Garden in London retains it to this day, with different sub-areas dedicated – for example – to plants with medicinal, poisonous or rope-making potential.54 We shall see later how one of Darwin’s great mythographic influences, Joseph Spence, constructs his mythological disquisition Polymetis round the conceit of a similar four-part garden. But such groupings do not constitute a ‘story’, and therefore have no necessary end-point, except for the centre from which the four areas radiate and to which – to make much sense of them – one must repeatedly return. For Spence, this centre is occupied by the temple of the Olympians, for Linnaeus in Uppsala by a fountain, and in Chelsea by a statue of the garden’s founder, Sir Hans Sloane (surrounded by volcanic Icelandic rocks provided by Sir Joseph Banks). In Darwin’s poems, arguably, this decorative centre is occupied by the thin conceit or supernatural personification holding the poem together: the Goddess or Muse of Botany in Economy and Loves, the Goddess Nature and her hierophant Urania in Temple. But if Darwin’s garden texts offer little in the way of overall narrative drive, there is no lack of other kinds of energy. Instead of the diachronic progress to a final point, there is repeated synchronic interplay between the various elements of the Temple 1.33–52, 2.435–46. Walpole, Correspondence, 11.11. 54 In both cases, the original square formation is near the entrance. For Linnaeus’s 52

53

garden see the Uppsala University website (http://www.botan.uu.se/Historia/History. html, accessed 11 April 2013). The square constituted most of the original garden founded by Linnaeus’s predecessor Olof Rudbeck, a seventeenth-century polymath whose reach of sometimes cranky expertise rivalled Darwin’s: as well as establishing the university’s observatory and anatomical theatre, he discovered the lymphatic system and dragged ships overland to prove that the ancient Greek myths derived from Sweden. See David King, Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World (New York: Harmony Books, 2005).

Texts and Gardens

Fig. 3.2

67

John Haynes, ‘Map of Chelsea Physic Garden’ (1751). Chelsea Print Room, reproduced by kind permission of Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, Family and Children’s service.

text, ranging through all its literary and indeed material dimensions. At any point, a cross-section may reveal a simultaneous layering of ostensible scientific content, hugely extended epic simile, footnote and extended additional note. Beyond these lie such further elements as indexes, content descriptions of both kinds of notes, illustrations, implicit links with the guiding principles set out in prefatory material, and other kinds of links to controlling ‘machineries’ of instructing goddesses, hierophants, interlocutors and elemental spirits. And as we have seen with Darwin’s cheerful incorporation of Anna Seward’s ‘Verses’ and his own translations of Linnaeus, this layering is often so profoundly intertextual that it is hard to tell where Darwin ends and another writer begins. This magpie intertextuality – which in Temple also extends to Milton, Lucretius and his young disciple Dewhurst Bilsborrow as well as his own Zoonomia and numerous scientific sources – might be taken as a genial extension of the method through which any good scientist builds up his own speculative theories, in the spirit which

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

68

Newton implied when he spoke of standing on the shoulders of giants.55 If this does not quite make it ‘literature’ as we understand it, this is because it is more a juxtaposition or superimposition of spaces than the single Romantic ‘story’ of unique individual growth, presupposing a single originating voice. But it is by so often allowing the Enlightenment to write for him that Darwin manages to write the Enlightenment as successfully as he does. This chapter’s discussion of The Botanic Garden’s textual spaces has left two yawning gaps: the actual subject matter of the two poems themselves. This moves to the fore in the next and following chapters, though I shall be handling the two poems’ contents rather differently. The subject matter of Economy is so wide ranging, and has so many overlaps with Darwin’s final poem, The Temple of Nature, that for much of the rest of this book I shall be considering these last two poems’ multiplicity of contents together, ranged under various headings. By contrast, Loves’ subject matter is highly focused on botany, and, despite brief occasional revisitings, the following chapter constitutes most of what I have to say on both the topic and the poem.

Isaac Newton, Letter to Robert Hooke, 15 February 1676.

55

Chapter 4

Plants

As a biologist, Erasmus Darwin stands midway between Linnaeus and his own grandson Charles. For Foucault, we may remember, the former exemplifies the pre-Romantic ‘tabula’ of knowledge; the latter the modern plunge into history. As part of an active pro-Linnaean campaign, Darwin’s first major poem, The Loves of the Plants, is the ‘tabular’ poem par excellence: at the same time, by being a poem rather than a map, it is forced to entertain a temporal dimension as well. While previous chapters have tried to emphasize the weight and solidity of Enlightenment ‘space’ (or at least clear the ground for such an exploration), there is of course no poetry, no writing, outside time. Accordingly I shall begin this chapter by contextualizing the science, language and chief poetic conceits of Loves within the British ‘Linnaean controversy’, and then turn to some of the ways in which Darwin balances its dramatically static, tabular structure against the demands of poetic time. Floral Harems: Linnaeus’s Sexual System In L’Homme plante (1748), the atheistic philosophe Julien Offray de la Mettrie argues – with tongue only half in cheek – that human beings are really ‘plants of the class Diaciae’, meaning that their male and female sexual organs are separated on to different flowers. Although by this analogy ‘Man is here metamorphosed into a plant’, la Mettrie insists that this is not just ‘a fiction in the style of those of Ovid. … If my imagination plays here, it is, so to speak, on the sounding board of truth’. Since we male ‘Sons of Priapus’ have only one stamen rolled up into the ‘cylindrical tube’ of the penis, and women only one pistil-stylus or vagina ‘we are Monandria: women are Monogynia … I use words derived from Greek and imagined by Linnaeus.’1 However accentuated for playful effect, la Mettrie’s wholeheartedly sexual interpretation of pistils and stamens, and words ending in ‘-andria’ or ‘-gynia’ to indicate their respective numbers per flower, accurately enough reflected the ‘sexual system’ with which the Swedish naturalist Carl (or Carolus) Linnaeus revolutionized the classification of plants in a series of works starting with Systema Naturae (1735). Rather than the earlier groupings of plants by a range of debatable traits such as food or medicinal use, Linnaeus went for simplicity, giving every plant the two names of its species and variety, and classing it with Julien Offray de la Mettrie, Machine Man and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Ann Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 77, 80. 1

70

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

other plants under the two headings of its class and order. With no essential claim to actual kinship (since this evolutionary idea was not accepted yet, outside limited variation within species), the class was established by simply counting the number of male stamens in the flower, and the order either by counting the number of female pistils or by some other specific feature. This act of simplification could in theory have been performed without any reference to the idea of plant sexual reproduction, which had only recently started to displace the Aristotelian notion that plants simply copied themselves.2 But Linnaeus used the increasingly accepted evidence that stamens somehow fertilize pistils to superimpose the language of human sex and marriage onto this arrangement. Whatever else this superimposition implied, it had the clear advantage that there were well-established Greek-derived terms for a range of human sexual combinations or identities – monogamy, polyandry, hermaphrodite and so forth – as well as more basic terms (in the Latin which gave Linnaeus international currency, or in vernacular languages) meaning such things as husband, wife, or bed, so that his classes and orders could be easily summed up, grasped and remembered. One of the central points about Linnaeus’s system was thus that the scientific goals of accuracy, clarity and concision were attained through the use of a highly extravagant metaphor, whose saucy comic potential La Mettrie was by no means the last to exploit. Whether or not he had read la Mettrie, similar half-humorous Ovidian parallels were passing through Erasmus Darwin’s mind in the later 1770s. As his friend Anna Seward recalls him exclaiming: The Linnaean system is unexplored poetic ground, and an happy subject for the muse. It affords fine scope for poetic landscape; it suggests metamorphoses of the Ovidian kind, though reversed. Ovid made men and women into flowers, plants and trees. You should make flowers, plants and trees into men and women. I … will write the notes which must be scientific, and you shall write the verse.’3

Seward bowed out of the proposed division of labour, leaving not only the notes but the verse to Darwin, after pointing out that such subjects were ‘not strictly proper for the female pen’. That this was sensible caution rather than horrified prudery is, however, suggested by her remark that, in the finished Loves of the Plants,

2 Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 18–19; see too Alan Bewell, ‘“Jacobin Plants”: Botany as Social Theory in the 1790s’, Wordsworth Circle 20 (1989): 133; and Sam George, Botany, Sexuality and Women’s Writing 1760–1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 12. 3 Seward, Memoirs, 130.

Plants

71

The floral harems do not form an imaginary but a real system, which philosophy has discovered, and with which poetry sports. The impurity is in the imagination of the reader, not on the pages of the poet.4

In his A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education (1797) Darwin conveys his own bewilderment at any charges of impropriety: though ‘some ladies have intimated to me, that the Loves of the Plants are described in too glowing colours’ for use in girls’ education, surely its depictions of ‘female forms in graceful attitudes’ should hold no danger for innocent girls (Female Education 38). Darwin’s amorous plants had poetic precedents in the post-Augustan Roman poet Claudian (who is quoted in the epigraph) and in two English neo-Latin poems: Abraham Cowley’s Plantarum (1662) and Demetrius de la Croix’s Connubia Florum (1723). However, none of these poetic ancestors’ toyings with plant sex had anything like the real-world impact of Linnaeus, whose ‘sexual system’ became the centre of a storm of controversy drawing into its vortex questions about sexuality, the gendering of knowledge, girls’ education, godless materialism, the borderline between science and ‘amusement’ and ultimately – particularly after the French Revolution – the stability of the family and society itself.5 For enthusiastic Linnaeans, the animal/human connection had more than a metaphorical value. Linnaeus himself was not simply a botanist: his interest in classification also extended to animals – controversially including humans – so that eventually a coherent place could be found for every living organism, whether familiar or hitherto unknown. While this taxonomy was founded on differences, it irresistibly summoned up a counter-impulse towards ‘analogy’: as Dahlia Porter points out, the observation of analogy or resemblance across apparently very different kinds of object was an important part of eighteenth-century scientific method, aiming to bring out deeper connections than those explicable by an obviously shared cause. For Porter, Darwin’s use of poetic analogy in The Loves of the Plants presents his ‘solution to the problem naturalists saw in botanical science: analogy provides the connections missing in dictionary-like taxonomic systems’,

Memoirs, 217–18. A range of responses was available to those unhappy about the ramifications of

4 5

Linnaeus’s dependence on sexual metaphor. As late as 1754, the ‘antisexualist’ Charles Alston argued that there was no real evidence that pollen fertilized anything, and for William Smellie the idea of it ‘flying promiscuously’ between flowers only bred images of ‘monstrous productions’ (See Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 30). While accepting that plants did reproduce sexually, many leading French naturalists from Buffon to Cuvier rejected Linnaeus’s taxonomy, arguing that its arbitrary selection of a single characteristic oversimplified and obscured the real relationships and distinctions between different plant species (Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 28; Tim Fulford, ‘Coleridge, Darwin, Linnaeus: The Sexual Politics of Botany’, Wordsworth Circle 28, no. 3 [1997]: 128).

72

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

while at the same time, the ‘tide of unbounded analogy’ which prevails in the verse is partially ‘stemmed’ by the underlining of Linnaean taxonomy in its notes’.6 But the plant/animal/human analogies of Darwin’s verse are to some extent endemic in Linnaeus, and for many people such analogies were particularly intriguing since the laws thus revealed might well be those of life itself. Survival and reproduction were the key functions in both kingdoms and, since the latter’s workings were so strange, complex and still very little understood, any new findings about them in one kingdom might well cast light on the other. Furthermore, far beyond the humdrum necessities of mere survival, reproduction in both kingdoms seemed to involve an intense, focused energy, which might easily be seen as exhibiting the life-force itself in its strongest, most fundamental form. But if this was so, if life at its most intense consisted purely of a certain kind of energy sustaining itself through various formations of matter, what differentiated humans from either plants or other animals and where, for instance, was the God-given soul? On a more basic level, how could we teach our children, and particularly daughters, to stay away from sex in deed and thought, if even the most innocent-seeming parts of that Nature in which God’s purpose is supposedly inscribed are positively bursting with what Goethe described as ‘Eternal nuptials going on and on, with the monogamy basic to our morals, laws and religion disintegrating into loose concupiscence’?7 It is in this context that William Smellie wrote in the first, 1773 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica that ‘obscenity is the very basis of the Linnean system.’8 As Samuel Goodenough exclaimed somewhat later in 1808, how could even virtuous young women avoid being ‘able to make out the similitude of Clitoria’?9 In line with such comments, the ensuing Linnaean controversy was most often a struggle about language. In his translation of Linnaeus’s Elements of Botany (1775), Hugh Rose pulls no punches: ‘The filaments [are] the spermatic vessels, the antherae the testicles, the dust the male sperm, the stigma the extremity of the 6 Porter, ‘Scientific Analogy and Literary Taxonomy in Darwin’s Loves of the Plants’, 219. See also Catherine Packham, ‘The Science and Poetry of Animation: Personification, Analogy and Erasmus Darwin’s Loves of the Plants’, Romanticism 10, no. 2 (2004): 198– 203; Richard C. Sha, ‘Scientific Forms of Sexual Knowledge in Romanticism’, Romanticism on the Net 23 (August 2001). 7 Quoted in Bewell, ‘Jacobin Plants’, 134. 8 As Luisa Calè points out, Smellie’s way of bringing home that obscenity while also trying to shelter innocent Encyclopaedia readers is instructive: quoting selected phrases such as ‘Stigma est vulva’ in Linnaeus’s original Latin and sprinkling them with exclamation marks to clarify the point, but nonetheless using what Calè calls ‘the veil of the author’s Latin’, to debar ‘the young and thoughtless’ from the horrors of a text at which only ‘learned men or philosophers’ can smile unscathed. For Smellie, Linnaeus’s ‘obscene gibberish’ is at once too ‘unintelligible’ and all-too graphically clear for English translation (Luisa Calè, ‘“A Female Band Despising Nature’s Law”: Botany, Gender and Revolution in the 1790s’, Romanticism on the Net 17 [February 2000]: 3–4.) 9 Quoted in Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 30.

Plants

73

female organ, the style the vagina.’10 By contrast, while accepting the Linnaean taxonomy, William Withering’s A Botanical Arrangement of All the Vegetables Naturally Growing in Great Britain (1776) devised new, neutral terms for the much-debated organs: ‘chives’ for stamens and ‘pointals’ for stigmas. The declared aim was to simplify botanical language, decluttering it of Latin and Greek for native speakers; but also, ‘From an apprehension that Botany in an English dress would become a favourite amusement with the Ladies …; it was thought proper to drop the sexual distinctions.’11 It was partly in reaction to his erstwhile protégé Withering (whom he had recruited to the Lunar Society in 1775) that Erasmus Darwin formed the Lichfield Botanical Society – with only two other members – to produce what were essentially his own translations of Linnaeus’s A System of Vegetables (1783) and The Families of Plants (1787). Translating many terms into frankly sexual English and leaving others in the original Greek or Latin, these versions shaped what Ann B. Shteir calls ‘a language for English botany that built bridges’ between Latinists and those confined to English.12 In defending the need for such linguistic bridges, Darwin calls on all true botanists ‘to discourage every attempt to introduce an English botanic nomenclature’ by ‘Pseudo-botanists’ such as Withering.13 Darwin argues that the latter’s long-winded substitutions for Linnaeus’s concision, such as “chives and pointals distinct” for dioecia, or two beds, “various dispositions on one plant” for polygamia, and the like [will] totally prevent the general communication of botanic knowledge

between English-only speakers and the classically educated.14 Darwin’s translation had powerful friends: Dr Johnson advised on some of the terms, and the whole project was dedicated to Sir Joseph Banks, by now president of the Royal Society, botanical adviser to ‘Farmer’ George III and reorganizer 10 Quoted in Janet Browne, ‘Botany for Gentlemen: Erasmus Darwin and “The Loves of the Plants”’, Isis 80, no. 4 (December 1989): 600. 11 William Withering, A Botanical Arrangement of All the Vegetables Naturally Growing in Great Britain, 2 vols (Birmingham: M. Swinney, 1776), v. Withering’s sense of the need to combine accuracy with decency is conveyed in the rather flustered tone of his accurately Linnaean account of plant reproduction. Conceding rather testily that it is ‘natural to ask the uses’ of chives and pointals but insisting that a full reply would be ‘quite improper in this place’, he speeds through a perfectly accurate account of the process whereby chives pollinate pointals, but concludes that ‘the Botanist takes advantage of the different number, figure, size and situation of these parts, and assumes them as the foundation of a systematic arrangement’, quite independently of their functions (Withering, xxii). 12 Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England 1760 to 1860 (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 24; Shteir’s otherwise helpful account overlooks the importance of Greek. 13 Erasmus Darwin, The Families of Plants ... translated from ... Linnaeus ... by a Botanical Society at Lichfield (Lichfield: J. Jackson, 1787), x. 14 Darwin, Families of Plants, vi–vii (Darwin’s italics).

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

74

of Kew Gardens on Linnaean lines. On Captain Cook’s first world voyage in Endeavour, Banks and Linnaeus’s pupil Daniel Solander had collected and named thousands of new species, preserving them under Linnaean descriptions in Banks’s hortus siccus in New Burlington Street and then Soho Square, and Solander’s at the British Museum (then devoted mainly to natural history). Banks did not collect plants simply from enthusiasm but with a keen eye to their potential usefulness, either when transplanted to Britain or as an economic motive for colonization abroad. A coherent method of listing new plants was therefore essential for the growth of empire; and arguably the point of Linnaeus’s taxonomy was not simply to list known plants but to enable the rapid classification of the growing numbers of new ones discovered by the great imperial ventures of the eighteenth century. As one recent study puts it: ‘because it divided flora into species and genus and allotted names to each plant, the Linnaean system was a microcosm of the political order that was the British empire.’15 Begun in 1778 directly alongside the translations, and compressing their key terms into its no-nonsense Preface, The Loves of the Plants extended Darwin’s pro-Linnaean campaign into the cultural arena with phenomenal success. Finally published in the year of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and the French Revolution, Darwin’s massively popular poem expressed some of the guileless libertarianism of this moment before Experience, terror and reaction set in. At first adored by readers as diverse as the worldly Horace Walpole and the devout William Cowper and Reverend Richard Polwhele, it was soon to be singled out as a destroyer of family life and female purity by anti-Jacobins from George Canning to T. J. Mathias and the same Richard Polwhele, in ways we shall return to in Chapter 9.16 The Gendering of Loves Despite the onslaught Loves was hugely influential, particularly on the botanical writing by women which began to flourish from this time, by such poets as Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Moody, Arabella Rowden and Sarah Hoare, and such prose writers as Priscilla Wakefield, Maria Jacson and Maria Edgeworth.17 However, the exact nature of its influence has been contested in a flow of studies which has increased greatly since Desmond King-Hele lamented in his 1999 biography that the poem had received too little critical attention in its own right.18 Loves is now firmly at the centre of Erasmus Darwin studies, featuring as often in works on gender, politics or science history as on literature. In the Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee and Peter Kitson, Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 77; see too Patricia Fara, Sex, Botany and Empire: The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks (Cambridge: Icon, 2003), 17–18. 16 See Bewell, ‘Jacobin Plants’, 137–8; Calè, ‘“A Female Band Despising Nature’s Law”’, 6–8. 17 See Chapter 12. 18 King-Hele, Unequalled Achievement, 239. 15

Plants

75

more adversarial corner Londa Schiebinger, Janet Browne, Tim Fulford and Ann B. Shteir have focused on the masculinist assumptions underlying Loves: the phallocentric primacy given to the stamen,19 the virgin/whore stereotyping of its pistil-heroines,20 the implicit libertinism of its bid to share the intimacy of ladies’ dressing-rooms.21 For the defence, Alan Bewell, Luisa Calè and Fredrika J. Teute argue strongly for the actual – as well as feared – liberating effects of Darwin’s ‘Jacobin Plants’, and for the formation of a proto-feminist ‘reading community’ around his works.22 Some of the critiques go back to the question of whether Linnaean botany itself is inherently sexist. As we have seen, Linnaeus established the class of every plant by counting the number of male stamens in the flower, and the order either by counting the number of female pistils or by some other specific feature. From this, some commentators have deduced a strong masculine bias at the very heart of Linnaean taxonomy: why are stamens more important than pistils? Conversely, Linnaeans might argue that pistils are usually far less abundant – and in fact very commonly single – and hence do not offer enough variation to be the basis of more than a few classes. In Darwin’s Loves, most flowers are themselves named as female, their identity closely tied to the single pistil surrounded by a varying number of admiring beaux or swains – the class-defining stamens. Whether this arrangement subordinates women to men or vice versa is an open question. The flower’s identification with the pistil and its surrounding sexual aura could be said to implicitly relegate women to the purely sexual sphere; on the other hand, these plants/pistils are often individuated as dominant figures such as priestesses or female philosophes, while the stamens do little but stand around admiringly, waiting to be called on when required. The question of Loves’ approach to gender and sexuality is often seen to hinge on the first and last of its four-canto list of plants: the ‘monogamous’ Canna lily (identified as a wife-protecting male, unlike most later plants which are identified as female) and the ‘polygamous’ Adonis (or pheasant’s eye) which the poem’s climax dramatically compares to the multiple ‘weddings’ recently encountered on Tahiti. For Alan Bewell, the ‘erect’, wife-sheltering Canna slyly satirizes the ‘heroic idealization of monogamy’ which the poem will progressively undermine, and to which the coup de grace is given by the Tahitian orgies’ demonstration that ‘the patriarchal family was not a universal human institution, that other 21 22

Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 13. Browne, ‘Botany for Gentlemen’, 618–9; Shteir, Cultivating Women, 27. Fulford, ‘Coleridge, Darwin, Linnaeus’, 125. Bewell, ‘Jacobin Plants’, passim; Calè, ‘“A Female Band Despising Nature’s Laws”’, 3, 6; Fredrika J. Teute, ‘The Loves of the Plants; or, the Cross-Fertilization of Science and Desire at the End of the Eighteenth Century’, Huntington Library Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2000): 328. In her Botany, Sexuality and Women’s Writing, George takes fair account of the above reservations about Loves, but sides more strongly with the defenders of its radical edge. 19 20

76

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

Doct : LINNAEI

METHODUS plantarum SEXUALIS in SYSTEMATE NATURAE deferipta

G.D. EHRET

FECIT & EDIDIT

Lugd:bal:1756.

Fig. 4.1

Georg Ehret, diagram from Carl Linnaeus, Systema Naturae (Leyden: Haak, 1736). Reproduced by kind permission of the Natural History Museum, London.

Plants

77

societies had developed alternate arrangements’.23 Less certain of Darwin’s gender progressivism – though conceding that his ‘lusty flowers’ often transcend the late-eighteenth-century projection of ‘patient modesty’ on to ‘females throughout nature’ – Londa Schiebinger links Canna’s well-foregrounded monogamy to the phallocentric, marriage-based ideology inscribed throughout Linnaeus’s system: ‘In the uproar that surrounded the introduction of notions of sexuality into botany, no one noticed that Linnaeus’s taxonomy, built as it was on sexual difference, imported into botany traditional notions about sexual hierarchy.’24 Himself a religious and sexual conservative, Linnaeus arbitrarily founded his taxonomy primarily on ‘classes’ determined by number of male stamens, with only the subordinate ‘orders’ determined by pistil count and other details. Despite their apparently libertine overtones, these classifications are themselves firmly founded on the notion of marriage as the only possible reproductive arrangement, suppressing the fact that most flowers are in fact hermaphrodite, and representing the non-sexual parthenogenesis of fungi and other plants as resulting from ‘clandestine’ – rather than non-existent – marriage. Thomas Laqueur uses the term ‘Making Sex’ to describe a late-eighteenth-century break from the Aristotelian notion that female sexual organs and responses – including orgasm – are simply internalized versions of male ones; a break which enabled both a new, safely non-orgasmic ideal of femininity and a fuller gender separation into active and domestic spheres.25 In line with this idea, Schiebinger sees Linnaeus’s importation of fundamental, albeit apparently empowering, gender distinctions into science as ‘an important supplement’ to the bourgeois domestic ideal, making inequalities seem natural while satisfying the needs of European society for a continued sexual division of labor. This ideology appealed especially to middle-class women because it presented a positive, caring image of the newly domesticated woman.26

Related arguments about Darwin’s underscoring of Linnaean gender differences are made by Janet Browne, whose article on his ‘Botany for Gentlemen’ offers a valuable breakdown of the types of women Loves presents in relation to the stamen-pistil arrangements they stand for. Browne rightly stresses that while its amorous males tend to have ‘empty labels’ such as ‘swain’ or ‘beau’, the poem is ‘focused largely on the sexual and social behaviour of women’.27 Though the monogamous Canna represents the supposed ideal, a proportion of up to four males to one female is generally presented as acceptably companionate rather than sexual, while, if accompanied by five or more males, the female is presented as Bewell, ‘Jacobin Plants’, 134. See too Browne, ‘Botany for Gentlemen’, 613–4. Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 13. 25 Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud 23 24

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 3–6. 26 Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 39. 27 Browne, ‘Botany for Gentlemen’, 607.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

78

wanton or, less often, in need of protection by them; and with eight or more males the female ‘takes on unambiguous metaphors of power and command’.28 Since the commonest number of stamens is five, there are numerous predatory women such as Maedia, who bows to her ‘five suppliant beaux’ ‘with wanton air,/ Rolls her dark eye, and waves her golden hair’ (1.62–5).29 It is true that Loves does often rely on conventionalized female stereotypes, across a fairly narrow spectrum from submissive bride to saucy wanton to stately power figure. But the moral assumptions underlying such stereotypes are often questioned by Darwin’s unjudgemental application of a language of real love and caring compassion across a very wide range of cases. For instance, the ‘sweet concern’ of the Collinsonia pistil for her two stamen-swains is neither that of blushing bride nor whore, though she could easily be read as the latter: Two brother swains, of Collin’s gentle name, The same their features, and their forms the same, With rival love for fair Collinia sigh, Knit the dark brow, and roll the unsteady eye. With sweet concern the pitying beauty mourns, And sooths with smiles the jealous pair by turns. (1.51–6)

In this early part of the poem, where the conventions are still being established, there is no seizing of moral high ground over the pistil Collinia’s sexually proactive role, as clarified by the note: ‘I have lately observed a very singular circumstance in this flower; the two males stand widely diverging from each other, and the female bends herself into contact first with one of them, and after some time leaves this and applies herself to the other’ (1.51n). By contrast that close reader of Darwin, Richard Polwhele, uses this shockingly proactive ‘bending’ as the key evidence of the links between Mary Wollstonecraft’s botanical enthusiasms and her ‘licentious love’ for both Fuseli and Imlay:

Browne, ‘Botany for Gentlemen’, 612. This evidence is skilfully amassed but Browne extends it in some questionable

28 29

directions, at one point tying herself to the assertion that ‘there are no intellectual women in Darwin’s verses’ (Browne, 616). At the time of my writing this (March 2013), a similar claim stands unqualified in the far more widely read Wikipedia entry for Loves, which extensively acknowledges Browne. In fact, in her essay Browne is too scrupulous not to qualify it, to the point where one wonders why it was left in: conceding the notes’ and interludes’ references to Angelica Kauffman, Mary Delany and others (though not to the botanist Elisabeth Christina Linnaeus or to Anna Seward, whom Browne denies he mentions), her point seems to come down to the exclusion of women from the verse alone, despite her belated concession that this mentions few intellectual men either (618), and despite Darwin’s substantial verse-accounts of the accurately Linnaean artist Mary Delany and the Epicurean philosophe Ninon de l’Enclos.

Plants

79

Thrill’d with fine ardors Collinsonias glow, And, bending, breathe their loose desires below. Each gentle air a swelling anther heaves, Wafts its full sweets, and shivers thro’ the leaves.30

For Polwhele, the Collinsonia pistil’s proactive attention to her stamens’ ‘swelling anthers’ mirrors that of Wollstonecraft, both to such flowers and to her two lovers: ‘Bath’d in new bliss, the Fair-one greets the bower,/ And ravishes a flame from every flower.’31 In concluding the passage with Wollstonecraft’s attempted suicide, Polwhele restores the expected bad ending for fallen womanhood which is completely absent from Darwin’s own account of the Collinsonia. Another example of the way simple angel/whore divisions break down in the presence of more complex emotions is provided by Darwin’s 1791 revisions to his 1789 description of Ninon de l’Enclos. An Epicurean playwright, wit, salonière and patron of both Molière and the very young Voltaire in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Ninon had a series of lovers into her sixties, at which age she was courted by the young Chevalier de Villiers, who killed himself after she eventually revealed that she was his mother.32 Darwin uses the ageing Ninon’s interest in young lovers to illustrate the Gloriosa Superba pistil’s fertilization by stamens of two generations, but the substantial changes he made to this passage between 1789 and 1791 throw an interesting, complicating light on the claim of some critics (Browne, Schiebinger, Shteir) that the women in Loves are strictly divided between shrinking virtue and promiscuous vice. The 1789 version broadly confirms such ideas: ‘So Ninon pruned her wither’d charms, and won / With harlot-smiles her gay unconscious son’ (1.125–6). However, in 1791, her smiles are only ‘fatal’ and she does her best to discourage him: ‘Clasp’d in his arms she owned a mother’s name, – / “Desist, rash youth! restrain your impious flame’ (1.127–8). The 1789 harlot’s deceitful self-pruning and tittering mockery make her one of Loves’ most archetypally wicked women; but in 1791, with a new engraving of Gloriosa emphasising its proactively bending pistil (opposite p. 14), Darwin recasts the story as a high Oedipal tragedy in which Ninon’s smiles of suppressed maternal concern are ‘fatally’ misread by the son whose father’s secret she is loyally trying to preserve. As Sam George points out, Anna Seward (who in ‘Lichfield: An Elegy’ (1781) refers approvingly to ‘Ninon’s gay spirit’) strongly objected to Darwin’s 1789 version of this story, and his revision was probably prompted by her defence of

30 Richard Polwhele, The Unsex’d Females (London: Cadell and Davies, 1798), 156, 147–50. 31 Polwhele, Unsex’d Females, 151–2. 32 Ninon de L’Enclos, Life, Letters and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L’Enclos, the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century, ed. and trans. C. H. Robinson and W. H. Overton (Chicago: Lion Publishing Co., 1903), chapter 14. Ninon’s translated Memoirs were published by Charles Dibdin in 1761.

80

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

Gloriosa Superba

Fig. 4.2

F. Nodder, ‘Gloriosa Superba’, opp. p. 6 of Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden, Part Two: The Loves of the Plants (London: J. Johnson, 1791). In the author’s possession.

Plants

81

‘this extraordinary woman’.33 But whatever the immediate reason, the change betrays a readiness to move past the crude equation of female libertinism with stereotyped ‘harlotry’. Our sense of what Loves says about gender will to some extent depend on how we read its enigmatic ending. In four lines – the last spoken by the botanic muse before the poem draws swiftly to a close – we are given what seems like a wholly positive description of a promiscuous Tahitian (or ‘Otaheitian’) sex-orgy. It is true that ‘polygamia’ (numerous pistils as well as numerous stamens) is a natural place to conclude the Linnaean sequence, and that Darwin expresses jocular disapproval of the polygamous Adonis flower’s ‘faithless’ vows. But when he turns to Otaheitian ‘promiscuous marriages’ as a simile for these, the disapproval seems to evaporate: Thus where pleased Venus, in the southern main, Sheds all her smiles on Otaheite’s plain, Wide o’er the isle her silken net she draws, And the Loves laugh at all, but Nature’s laws. (Loves 4.487–90)

In his brief note, Darwin explains that ‘The society, called the Areoi, in the island of Otaheite, consists of about 100 males and 100 females, who form one promiscuous marriage.’34 Alan Bewell may be right that this passage’s ‘promiscuous marriage’ brings the whole poem’s implicit satire of patriarchal monogamy to a head; but there is a great deal else lurking behind this sprightly four-line celebration of ‘Nature’s laws’, chiefly in what it leaves unsaid. First, the reference to Venus as Otaheite’s presiding deity doubles the sexual theme with the fact that it was the chance to observe the ‘transit of Venus’ across the face of the sun that had sent Captain James Cook and his botanist-sponsor Joseph Banks to Tahiti in 1769, as the main scientific justification of Cook’s first world-voyage on Endeavour. Clear though they are in what they do say, the above lines are heavily freighted with what they do not say, about which many contemporary readers are likely to have known at least something in 1789. Darwin’s brief note makes clear that the polygamous marriages were practised by ‘a society, called the Areoi’ rather than the whole population; and a large underswell of debate about the significance of this group (normally spelled ‘Arreoy’) had built up around Cook’s and Banks’s 1769 accounts. These accounts – and those derived from them – placed great emphasis on the lascivious dances that went on at Arreoy celebrations, but also on the infanticides of any children born within the group. Exact emphases varied: Banks is shocked but tries to find excuses for the women, some of whom voluntarily left the society rather than lose their children, while John Hawkesworth’s official account of the voyage, cobbled together from Cook’s and Banks’s journals, mixes Seward, Memoirs, 286–91; George, Botany, Sexuality and Women’s Writing, 112. Loves 4.468n.

33 34

Fig. 4.3

J. Webber, engraved J. K . Sherwin, ‘A Dance in Otaheite’. G. Nichol and T. Cadell, 1785, reproduced by kind permission of the British Museum.

ADANCE in OTAHEITE

Plants

83

a general tone of leering innuendo with extreme moral outrage when he comes to the infanticides of ‘this accursed society’.35 However, accounts of the Arreoy customs from later voyages are much more positive: for Johann Forster, the fact that women seemed to have equal status in the Arreoy marked an impressively high level of civilization, while his radical son Georg Forster read the group as theoretically celibate, with the occasional infanticides motivated by the worthy social purpose of ensuring that they did not turn into an aristocratic birth-elite. Infanticide was far more common among European prostitutes, and the report that the Arreoy went in for wholesale orgies was – in a dig at Banks’s dilettante upper-class status – largely the product of ‘a traveller’s gay fancy’.36 Other reports, such as William Bligh’s, emphasized the Arreoy’s artistic and cultural concerns, and their resemblance to Freemasons;37 while a poem Darwin had a large hand in – Anna Seward’s ‘Elegy for Captain Cook’ (1780) – approvingly notes that on Cook’s second visit the infanticides seem to have stopped: ‘See! with new fires parental duty glows.’38 Accounts of Cook’s voyages were very popular (one thinks of Cowper’s description of how ‘I tread his deck, / Ascend his topmast’, while reading about them on his sofa),39 and so much of this debate would have been quite widely known, though perhaps no more so than Banks’s 1769 image as a youthful libertine who had himself had numerous affairs with Otaheitian women.40 In 1789, 35 Joseph Banks, Banks’s Descriptions in the Journal of Places and Peoples encountered during the Endeavour Voyage, in South Seas: Voyaging and Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Pacific (1760–1800) (http://southseas.nla.gov.au/journals/banks_ remarks/122.html, accessed 19 March 2013), 120–22. John Hawkesworth, Account of the Voyages … in the Southern Hemisphere (London, 1773), in South Seas: Voyaging and Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Pacific (1760–1800) (http://southseas.nla.gov.au/index. html, accessed 7 February 2009), 2.207. 36 George Forster, A Voyage round the World [1777], ed. Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof, assisted by Jennifer Newell, 2 vols (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), 1.390, 389; see too J. R. Forster, Observations Made during a Voyage round the World [1778], ed. Nicholas Thomas, Harriet Guest and Michael Dettelbach (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996), 1.260. 37 See William Bligh, A Voyage to the South Sea (London: George Nicol, 1792), entry for 2 November 1788; E. Tregear, ‘Hina’s Voyage to the Sacred Isle’, Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand 18 (1886): 498. 38 Anna Seward, ‘An Elegy on Captain Cook’, 17n, Poetical Works, 2.43. 39 Cowper, The Task, 4.114–5. 40 Though Banks had an affair with her attendant rather than with her, the powerful landowner Purea or ‘Obereah’ was the focus of many obscene satires of his Tahitian exploits, such as John Scott-Waring’s An epistle from Oberea, Queen of Otaheite, to Joseph Banks, Esq. (Dublin 1774) and James Perry’s Mimosa, or the Sensitive Plant: A Poem dedicated to Mr Banks (London, 1779). Obereah was also the focus of a re-enactment of a scene of Otaheitian open-air sex described by Banks, as staged by the London madam Charlotte Hayes in her select brothel. See Nicholas Thomas, Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook (London: Penguin, 2004), 157–9.

84

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

as the respectably married president of the Royal Society and the chief dedicatee of all Darwin’s botanical writings from the Linnaeus translations to Loves, Banks had all that behind him: nonetheless, Darwin’s take on Otaheitian promiscuity as fundamentally ‘alright’ can be read as a coded signal of alliance with Banks, for whom the infanticides were deplorable but essentially only an unfortunate offshoot of a carefree Otaheitian sensuality he had clearly witnessed and enjoyed.41 With all its hidden intricacies, Loves’ Otaheitian climax sets the seal on the vein of eroticism running through the poem, and perhaps – in the equal proactivity given to pistils and stamens – envisages a world where the sexes really are equal. Hence the attempt to ‘gender’ Loves is harder than it looks. Feminist arguments that it corroborates Linnaeus’s phallocentrism land some weighty hits but do not fully account for its subversive playfulness or strong focus on female agency; while claims for its feminist ‘Jacobinism’ overlook a good deal of stereotyping and sometimes mistake a libertinism favouring men for a liberationism favouring women. In seeming to invite such opposed responses Loves arguably aims not only to please both sexes alike, but to tease each with what it is saying to the other: we saw in the last chapter how its cross-dressing frontispiece and Janus-faced doubling of Prefatory materials prepare us for this situation. But there is more to Loves than gender or even sex: the rest of this chapter will consider the strong tensions it reveals between the ‘space’ of the Linnaean tabula and the ‘time’ of effective poetry. Space and Time in Loves Horace Walpole found Loves ‘the most delicious poem on earth ... all, all, is the most lovely poetry’, but also half-complained that ‘I can read this over and over again forever, for though it is so excellent, it is impossible to remember anything 41 It is arguable that Darwin’s note hints at special inside knowledge, not dependent on the obvious written sources. In most of the accounts mentioned above, what he calls the Areoi are spelled ‘Arreoy’; nor does any other (as far as my reading goes) set their numbers at a hundred of each sex. The quiet insistence on these two details suggests some kind of knowledge not in the public domain, for which one possible explanation might be Darwin’s personal conversations with Banks when he visited him in London in 1781 (see King-Hele, Unequalled Achievement, 172–3). A certain unbuttoned rapport with Banks also seems to be evident in the comic verses inscribed in Banks’s copy of Darwin’s translation of A System of Vegetables, now in the British Library, allotting the current ‘administration’ of the goddess Flora’s affairs to ‘Some scholars of Lichfield that came recommended/ By the Muses who there on Miss Seward attended’ (see Fara, Sex, Botany and Empire, 19, and M. M. Mahood, The Poet as Botanist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 53. A full transcription can be found in George, Botany, Sexuality and Women’s Writing, 189–93, although George’s attribution of these verses to Anna Seward is highly questionable. A general tone of indecency, culminating in the image of Jove using a chamber pot, aligns it much more with the blokeish matiness between Darwin and Banks which, I would argue, also underlies Darwin’s description of Otaheite.

Plants

85

so disjointed, except you consider it as a collection of short enchanting poems.’42 And it is true that – after its scene-setting opening lines – Loves operates more as a ‘poetic exhibition’ or botanical garden in which to get lost than as a narrative timespan. Though its four cantos are loosely described as moving through a single day, this fact makes no real impact on their specific content, which lacks even The Economy of Vegetation’s progression from one element to the next, let alone the evolutionary story structuring The Temple of Nature. Once the Linnaean stamencounting of the first few flowers is abandoned, and before the Tahitian orgies bring this tally to its (apparently) logical endpoint, there is very little to dictate which ‘picture’ should come where. But if the poem’s ‘disjointedness’ fractures any sense of overall thrust or narrative purpose, a glance at the progress of this disjointing starts to reveal more local shifts and continuities of theme, which throw interesting light on Darwin’s handling of poetic time as well as poetic space. The apparently strict Linnaean logic set up by the move from the monogamous Canna to the one-stamen two-pistil Callitriche and then the one-pistil two-stamen Collinsonia rapidly breaks down: most flowers have one pistil and a number of stamens, and the laborious counting of the latter soon gives way to other peculiarities of the flowers involved. A note of marital satire is introduced with Cupressus, in a different flower or ‘bed’ from his wife, and the even more ‘fashionable’ Osyris in a different plant or ‘house’ (1.73–6). Slowly, references to specific literary/historical figures start to creep in: the hothouse double hollyhock Alcea ‘mourns’ like Eloisa because her stamenless ‘eunuch’ flowers recall Abelard’s castration, the dark green Plantago resembles the ‘sooty’ Othello, and so forth. A significant further step is taken with Ilex, or holly, where the emphasis shifts away from floral details to the curious observation that in a local wood the holly leaves only resemble ‘a thousand steely points’ up to the height where animals might eat them: at ‘unwrong’d’ higher levels they wave ‘as gentle as the breeze’. In the note, this leads to some of Darwin’s earliest hints about adaptive evolution, and in verse (at least in the 1791 edition) to a compliment on the versatility of his friend, the artist Joseph Wright of Derby, in alternating peaceful scenes with those such as the violent Vesuvian eruption whose ‘red lava’ subliminally echoes both the holly’s berries and its propensity to violent self-defence.43 From here, the poem’s ability to diverge from pistil-stamen arrangements into plants’ more general properties steadily increases, and leads eventually to a theme-based structure, with medicinal uses dominating the end of Canto Two, and associations with ‘horror’ dominating Canto Three. Between the Linnaean start and this new structure, however, an often quite surreal, almost freely associative transitional section offers some fascinating insights into Darwin’s self-discovery as a poet, learning – and half-failing – to Walpole, Correspondence, 11.10–11. Loves 1.175–9; see 1.161n’s argument that in a local forest the holly trees ‘are

42 43

armed with thorny leaves about eight feet high, and have smooth leaves above; as if they were conscious that horses and cattle could not reach their upper branches’.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

86

deal with dynamic, extended time-spans as well as discrete, ordered spaces. Dismissed as a series of ‘far-reaching digressions’ by Desmond King-Hele,44 this section deserves considerable attention for the way in which it lurches for a while from the spatial mode of the Linnaean tabula to a more associative time-driven mode which climaxes in a strangely overwrought confrontation with the figure of Time himself: a return of the poetically repressed which has to be escaped from if Darwin’s chosen tabular mode is to be permitted to continue. Starting with the strange story of Tremella at the end of Canto One, this moment of transitional poetic take-off and return continues in the next canto through the transmogrification of a shred of thistledown into Montgolfier’s balloon, and carries on with extended accounts of various textiles going far beyond plant description, and beginning to display some of the breadth of Darwin’s non-botanical concerns: with Egypt, with modern industry, and with the confrontation between progressive Time and pathological religious superstition, and thence to the theme of medicinal cures for such pathologies which inaugurates the more regularly topic-based structure which governs the end of the second canto and all of the third. This take-off into imaginative poetic time begins at the end of Canto One, with the full-length melodrama of the fungus Tremella, which Anna Seward called the ‘transcendent passage’ of the whole poem.45 Deconstructed in Darwin’s lengthy note as perhaps actually a type of bird-vomit, the Tremella is – or seems to be – a rootless fungus sometimes found collapsed into jelly, particularly near streams. From these elements an extraordinary scenario is constructed, with Tremella’s windblown rootlessness compared to a wild flight over ‘steeps’ (1.443) and whirlwind-blasted ‘craggs’ (1.441) on ‘Dove’s green brink’, with only ‘sad Naiads’ to mourn her. Quite arguably, some of these details feed their way into the lonely crag-scramblings of Wordsworth’s ‘Mad Mother’ and into his famous ‘Lucy’ lyric ‘She dwelt among the untrodden ways/ Beside the springs of Dove’, and there is a more definite pre-echo of the tragically pivotal lines of Cowper’s ‘Castaway’ – ‘No voice divine the storm allay’d,/ No light propitious shone’46 – in Tremella’s despairing flight where No dim electric streams, (the northern dawn,) With meek effulgence quiver’d o’er the lawn; No star benignant shot one transient ray To guide or light the wanderer on her way. (1.437–40)

Arguably, Cowper’s and Wordsworth’s disturbing lyrics of isolation tune in to something genuinely haunting in Darwin’s Tremella account, where by no means all that seems strange in the verse is dissolved by a careful reading of the note. The ‘playful image’ of herself which Tremella sees in the river is not just a dancing King-Hele, Unequalled Achievement, 235. Seward, Memoirs, 300. 46 William Cowper, ‘The Castaway’, 61–2. 44 45

Plants

87

reflection but a ‘play’ on her imminent liquefaction; the baring of her breast by the wind recasts the frequent saucy eroticism of one of Loves’ favourite motifs – as when Zephyr ‘Tears with rude kiss’ Anemone’s ‘bosoms gauzy veil’ (1.341) – in confusingly darker tones: ‘As the bleak blast unfurls her fluttering vest,/ Cold beats the snow upon her shuddering breast’, the ‘shuddering’ here playing between arousal, fear, cold and the quivering of jelly (1.447–8). Above all, her consequent metamorphosis into a congealed embodiment of her tears, and the surreal transmutation of this metamorphosis into a frantic journey away from the society of those who could help her, recasting the time of unrecognizable transformation as a space of distance travelled, are genuinely and hauntingly weird. From this dramatically extended story we move straight into Canto Two’s freely associative take-off, lightly floating from thistledown to balloons to cotton manufacture to Egypt to Mrs Delany’s Linnaean flower-collages, and starting to come to ground in a strange superimposition of conceptual space onto the flow of time represented by Linnaeus’s ‘Watch of Flora’.47 Planned though not realized by Linnaeus, this was a circular flower-plot designed to show the time of day in purely spatial terms, with the successive opening and closing of its flowers which Watch with nice eye the Earth’s diurnal way, Marking her solar and sidereal day, Her slow nutation, and her varying clime, And trace with mimic art the march of Time. (Loves 2.167–70)

The phrase ‘march of Time’ introduces a confusingly rushed set of images involving an ornate modern domestic clock (of the sort currently being marketed by Darwin’s friend Boulton) capped by the apocalyptic figure of Time grasping ‘his giant-mace’ in ‘huge fingers’ to ‘dash proud Superstition from her base’ and destroy ‘her strong towers and gorgeous fanes’.48 We then return to the floral clock, as Time’s destructive male violence seems to be contrasted with the feminized, flower-growing ‘gay hours’ and ‘light moments’ which we have earlier glimpsed lovingly flinging a ‘magic chain’ round his feet.49 This mess of images can perhaps be related to the figure of Time tied to the ground in the female-governed Temple of Nature, which we looked at in Chapter 2. At this strange turning-point in Loves, the way the apocalyptic Time (whose assaults on superstition suggest Darwin’s tacit approval) seems to burst into a more feminized, space-governed reading of individual moments, only to be tied down and replaced by them, arguably suggests that Loves is conducting an internal argument with itself. The impulse to read Time historically – leading to the antireligious utopian politics which occasionally breaks through the placid surface of Darwin’s poetry, especially in the planned fifth canto of his discarded Progress of Loves, 2.165n. Loves, 2.184–5. 49 Loves, 2.187, 191, 171. 47

48

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

88

Society – is countered by a refusal of such totalizing enticements in the name of what Walpole calls the individual ‘short enchanting poems’ distributed across the space of Loves: the former impulse being identified as male and the latter as female. If this is so, the impulse towards a larger argument seems to simmer on for a while in debunkings of political and religious power: in the figure of the fallen, grass-eating King Nebuchadnezzar, and a satirical comparison of hypnotic drugs to St Anthony’s mass conversions of shoals of fish.50 But hereafter, the poem’s counter-impulse towards ‘each light moment’ seems to restore itself as (with the appearance of the health goddess Hygeia)51 the rest of Canto Two becomes a fairly straightforward medicinal list; recapturing the one-after-another listing technique of Canto One’s early stamen counting, in the place of the one-image-suggestinganother technique of the section from Tremella’s bizarre flight to Time’s assault on superstition. Arguably, the attempt to let the flow of associative mental time into a poem structured round a listing of carefully distributed spaces has proved too much for it: a fact strangely attested in the real confusion of the whole clock/Time episode following the exhilarating flights of fancy (the thistledown, balloons and paper flowers) which have preceded it. So far, I have tried to describe how the spatialized tabula of Linnaean taxonomy enables Loves to offer the reader a bouquet of ‘short inchanting poems’, in which the flowers are increasingly able to be used as pretexts or springboards into much wider issues. If the choice of flowers often seems random, that randomness itself is part of the point, demanding kinds of mental energy which can lie dormant in more structured, purposive texts. The seemingly unconscious emergence of such a sense of purpose in Canto Two, summed up in the temporal apocalypse of Time destroying superstition with his mace, constitutes the poem’s most fascinating internal crisis, with the ground laid bare by Time’s (perhaps longed-for) act of destruction needing to be immediately reclaimed for the space-filling growths of ‘each gay moment’, each once more conceived as a separate flower. Botany after Loves Darwin’s interest in plants does not end with Loves, or stay loyal to Linnaeus. His last prose treatise Phytologia, or The Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening (1800) turns its back on the Linnaean System’s claim to have much internal logic beyond convenience. While some Linnaean classes and orders are ‘beautifully natural’, others are not: since the actual numbers of stamens and pistils can vary within what are clearly the same species, these would be better differentiated by the ‘proportions, situations, and forms’ of these organs than sheer number alone (566). Phytologia firmly relates this revision of Linnaeus to the evolutionary theories hinted at in Loves’ accounts of holly and turmeric, and first fully set forth in Zoonomia (1794): Loves, 2.209–26, 243–64. Loves, 2.355.

50 51

Plants

89

This mutability or uncertainty of the number of the organs of reproduction belonging to individual flowers, would seem to arise from an attempt of all organized beings towards greater perfection. Whence as the success of the process of reproduction becomes more certain from the greater perfection of the vegetable being, the organs for the purpose of reproduction seem to become fewer. (567)

The same process is observable in the animal kingdom, where ‘the less perfect seem to possess organs for a more numerous reproduction as fish and insects.’ In parallel with animals, plants may be evolving towards diminishing their sex organs, and even increasingly ‘separat[ing] themselves from hermaphrodite flowers’ into those of different sexes, ‘as in the classes of monœcia and diœcia’.52 In the terms established by Foucault and Bernal, this late self-revision by Darwin graphically illustrates how his grandson’s time-driven world starts to replace the Linnaean tabula of eternal differences. At the imaginative level, this replacement takes a further step with Darwin’s last poem, The Temple of Nature. Here, we re-encounter the figure of Time whose destructive potential seemed such a disturbing force in Loves, again bound but this time forced to reveal the secrets of both past and future. These secrets involve the on-going story which Loves largely withholds: the evolution of all plants and animals from a single primal ‘filament’. Animal life takes the lead in Temple as a whole, but its second canto on ‘Reproduction of Life’ incorporates some of the new findings of Phytologia and has as its centrepiece the flower-strewn wedding procession of Cupid and Psyche, used to symbolize the triumph of ‘despotic’ sexual Love which has now replaced asexual parthenogenesis in the evolutionary story. In her intriguing study of The Poet as Botanist, M. M. Mahood describes this as the ‘apogee’ of Darwin’s work as a botanical poet. Outside this passage, Mahood is very critical of Darwin’s biology: for her, the ‘plant-animal analogies’ underlying the whole mise-en-scène of Loves as well as Darwin’s continuing fascination with crossover species such as the Venus flytrap and sensitive plant are an ignis fatuus which is ‘nothing like science’ in the modern sense.53 But Mahood notes a strong advance from the fanciful plant-animal links of Loves to the full evolutionary awareness of life as ‘a growing and branching tree’ in Temple, where Darwin seems at last ‘to In relation to this and the previous points on ‘analogy’, see Theresa M. Kelley’s brilliant account of how Darwin’s analogies start to undermine his Linnaean divisions, in line with the non-Linnaean ‘natural system’ of Jussieu and others, which looked for numerous links implying actual relationships rather than the single ones convenient for Linnaean differentiation (Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012], 78–89). 53 Mahood, The Poet as Botanist, 70, 68. For Mahood, Darwin’s misunderstandings about the spontaneous generation of microbes, the role of bees in pollination (better understood by the poet Cowper in his 1785 account of cucumbers) and the role of hydrogen in photosynthesis all suggest that ‘he had a genius for drawing wrong conclusions’ even when very close to the evidence for the right ones. 52

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

90

have decided in favour of an early division of the kingdoms’. 54 All this comes to a head in the ‘ecstatic fire’ of the wedding of Cupid and Psyche, which reunites the kingdoms again through their separate-but-parallel developments of sexual love. With pairs of happy animals already chained to its rear, the couple’s triumphal car also receives the homage of ‘delighted Flora’ (2.389), who Calls to her purple heaths, and blushing bowers, Bursts her green gems, and opens all her flowers; O’er the bright Pair a shower of roses sheds, And crowns with wreathes of hyacinth their heads…. – Slow rolls the car, – the enamour’d Flowers exhale Their treasured sweets, and whisper to the gale; Their ravelled buds, and wrinkled cups unfold, Nod their green stems, and wave their bells of gold; Breathe their soft sighs from each enchanted grove, And hail The Deities of Sexual Love. (Temple 2.393–6, 405–10)

Mahood is not alone in emphasizing Darwin’s ‘feeling for the organism’, whether plant or animal. Noting the underlying seriousness of the idea played with in Loves, that plants really are ‘individuals’, Nicola Trott and Desmond King-Hele link this firmly to Wordsworth’s credo that ‘’tis my faith that every flower/ Enjoys the air it breathes’; and for Tristram Stuart, Darwin was the ‘greatest progenitor’ of the insistence of Shelley and other Romantics ‘that all life was endued with sensitivity’.55 Robert Richards gives this aspect of Darwin a major role in his study of The Romantic Conception of Life, noting F. W. J. Schelling’s important influence on the ‘one life within us and abroad’ of Coleridge’s ‘Eolian Harp’, but pointing out that ‘The principle event that sparked’ such ideas in Schelling was reading Zoonomia’s argument (which Phytologia carries further) that ‘every bud of a plant constituted a new individual’.56

Mahood, Poet as Botanist, 78, 74. William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’; see Nicola Trott,

54 55

‘Wordsworth’s Loves of the Plants’, in 1800: The New Lyrical Ballads, ed. N. Trott and S. Perry (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 143; King-Hele, Romantic Poets, 64; and Tristram Stuart, Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India (London: Harper Collins, 2006), 357. See too Emma Spary, ‘Political, Natural and Bodily Economies’ in Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine, J. A. Secord and E. C. Spary (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 191. Spary also throws useful light on the ‘ecological’ implications of Darwin’s understanding of the word ‘economy’ (178–95, 227). 56 Robert Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 300. Though Schelling, like Coleridge, eventually found Darwin’s evolutionism too mechanistic, he did not dispute its ‘empirical facts’, and according to Richards, Darwin’s ‘steely ideas’ about irritability as the criterion for life ‘made surprisingly deep dents in the philosopher’s theories’ (314–5).

Plants

91

We shall follow such ideas further in the last two chapters on Darwin and Romanticism. In trying to deal with most of what Darwin has to say about plants, particularly in Loves, this chapter has not been able to avoid ‘trailing’ some of the issues raised by his two later poems, Economy and Temple. Foremost among these is the theory of evolution, but more glancing references to industrial processes and products, and to Darwin’s religious scepticism and fascination with Egypt, have also been hard to avoid. From here on in this book such themes will take centrestage and, since their treatments in Economy and Temple are often intertwined, for substantial stretches I shall consider both these extraordinarily wide-ranging poems together under various headings. However, one of these topics belongs chiefly to Economy, and will I hope serve as a helpful introduction to that poem as a very different thing from Loves, to which the two-part Botanic Garden hitches it with some of the strains and tensions of ‘framing’ already explored in Chapter 3. Bearing both that chapter and the brief outline of Economy’s content in my Introduction in mind, the following chapter will begin to unpack the substantive content of The Economy of Vegetation (1791), by way of one specific issue: its treatment of industrial machinery.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 5

Machinery The Economy of Vegetation (often simply referred to as The Botanic Garden, on the understanding that Loves has its own very separate identity) is an enormous work, in the range of themes and issues it touches on. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, it is also a highly radical work, praising both the American and French Revolutions, denouncing slavery and beginning to raise the challenges to orthodox religion which would become even more explicit in later works. This radicalism, which put Darwin into real danger, needs to be borne in mind as we make our entry into Economy’s substantive content by way of one topic particularly central to it: its praise of the Industrial Revolution, of which many of Darwin’s Lunar Society friends have a good claim to be the fathers. While we all benefit greatly from the industrial world created by this Revolution, many will also feel some ambivalence about it; and this present chapter – perhaps more than any other – will make an attempt to address this ambivalence. Some of its arguments will be given a broader context in Chapter 10 (on ‘Politics’); but this chapter aims to balance some possible limitations of Darwin’s essentially humanist vision against the breadth, fancy and wit of his strong feeling for machinery. Modern Industry ‘Machinery’ has two eighteenth-century meanings, both of them crucial to The Economy of Vegetation. Linked to the Latin idea of the deus ex machina, it was often used to denote the supernatural beings who in some way manage the action of epic poetry, as in Samuel Johnson’s discussion of the angelic ‘machinery’ of Milton’s Paradise Lost. It also has the more familiar sense of denoting man-made equipment designed for particular tasks: something we do not usually think of as poetic at all. Darwin has a claim to be one of the best machine-poets in the second sense, combining delicacy and humour with an accurate insider knowledge of the metallic objects with which such friends as James Watt, Matthew Boulton and Josiah Wedgwood were poised to transform the landscape and living patterns of Britain.1 Part of the delicate humour comes, however, from the other kind of machinery: the fantasy that all this wonderful equipment is operated not by human hands, but by those of the supernatural salamanders, gnomes, nymphs and sylphs who divide the physical world of Economy between them. 1 Francis D. Klingender devotes one of the eight chapters of his pioneering Art and the Industrial Revolution (ed. and rev. Arthur Elton [St Albans: Paladin, 1972 (1947)]) to The Botanic Garden (especially Economy) praising its nymphs’ ‘mischievous propensity for unexpected metamorphoses into machinery’ (32), its tension between classical form and modern content and ‘the engaging charm which is the outcome of that tension’ (35).

94

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

Economy’s accounts of physical machines driven by ethereal machineries are anticipated by a single passage in Loves. Here a botanical description of Gossypia or cotton leads into an account of one of the Industrial Revolution’s primal scenes: Richard Arkwright’s water-powered cotton-spinning Cromford Mill near Matlock. In Emma Crewe’s frontispiece to Loves, Flora exchanges her gardening implements for Cupid’s arrows, and something similar happens here, when the nymph Gossypia takes over the implements of the water-god Neptune while he takes over her spinning tasks: The Nymph, Gossypia, treads the velvet sod, And warms with rosy smiles the watery God; His ponderous oars to slender spindles turns, And pours o’er massy wheels his foamy urns! With playful charms her hoary lover wins, And wields his trident, – while the Monarch spins. (2.87–92)

Amid the cross-dressing comedy, cotton’s wielding of Neptune’s trident has a further meaning, as the note clarifies: since Sir Richard Arkwright’s ingenious machine has not only greatly abbreviated and simplified the labour and art of carding and spinning the Cottonwool, but performs both these circumstances better than can be done by hand, it is probable, that the clothing of this small seed will become the principal clothing of mankind. (2.87n)

The ‘trident’ to be seized by cotton is thus the expansion of Britain’s ruling of the waves which will accompany its industrially based domination of world markets. The underside of this rule of Queen Cotton – the dependence on Indian labour which would soon be transferred to American slaves – is not mentioned here: we only enter cotton’s life-story after its entry to Britain, as ‘emerging Naiads cull/ From leathery pods the vegetable wool’ (2.93–4). The note makes clear that these are in fact women labourers, but Darwin here inaugurates a long habit of omitting the human workforce almost entirely from his industrial descriptions. The verse alone implies that these ‘Naiads’ or water-nymphs are themselves an aspect of the power of the river ‘emerging’ through the mill’s machinery, whose workings are recounted in the next 10 lines with no further human presence, as the cotton wool progresses from revolving cards to comb to rollers and finally on to the spools of saleable spun thread. Similar interplays of ethereal and physical machineries run throughout Economy, starting with this collaboration between the first canto’s fire-nymphs and James Watt’s precursor Thomas Savery in developing the steam engine: Nymphs! You erewhile on simmering cauldrons play’d, And call’d delighted Savery to your aid; Bade round the youth explosive Steam aspire In gathering clouds, and wing’d the wave with fire; Bade with cold streams the quick expansion stop,

Machinery

95

And sunk the immense of vapour to a drop. – Press’d by the ponderous air the Piston falls Resistless, sliding through its iron walls; Quick moves the balanced beam, of giant-birth, Wields his large limbs, and nodding shakes the earth. (Economy 1.253–62)

This account of the expansion and condensation of steam imitates what it describes: with the nymphs’ free play, Savery’s youthful delight and the openvowelled rhymes (‘aspire / fire’) evoking an upward and outward movement brought to a sudden end by ‘stop’. The playful nymphs are replaced by the cold streams they now simply ‘bid’ and, just as we realize we are now definitely inside a machine, the clinching ‘drop’ suggests both the sudden contraction from steam to water and the plunge which will pull the piston down to fill the vacuum.2 The repeated plunging of the pumping or wheel-rotating beam to which all this gives rise is neatly anthropomorphised to an image of earth-changing affirmation, in the nodding giant of the last line. In the next section, the anthropomorphism of the now-outdated Savery/ Newcomen machine’s ‘large limbs’ develops into a broader imagery of the ‘strong arm’ of Watt’s ‘Giant-power’ as it explores mines, crams wind into bellows, pours water into cisterns, and uses its ‘forceful fingers’ to twirl millstones and its ‘hard hands’ to mine for copper which, in a final switch of body part, it squeezes through the ‘iron lips’ of the rollers at Matthew Boulton’s new Soho coin mint (1.263–83).3 In contrast to the fire-nymphs who set the whole process going, steam power itself is now decisively male: a single, giant-limbed body forcing ‘reluctant’, ‘struggling’ matter to its will (1.264, 269). Darwin’s Invisible Workforce But if Darwin’s supernatural personifications lend poetic wings to his descriptions of the new machinery, Maureen McNeil rightly points out that in passages like the above, ‘the labourer’s role in the production process was totally ignored.’4 In the second canto’s description of Wedgwood’s Etruria pottery works we hear how, ‘charm’d’ by the touch of the Gnomes of Earth, 2 The piston and ‘nodding’ beam were actually invented by Thomas Newcomen (1712), but marketed under the patent of Thomas Savery, whose 1689 steam engine was basically a pump. 3 Watt’s 1774 transformation of the Savery/Newcomen engine with a separate condenser and other additions made it far more flexible and cheaper in coal. As Darwin’s note puts it: ‘A few years ago Mr Watt of Glasgow much improved this machine, and with Mr Boulton of Birmingham has applied it to [a] variety of purposes, such as raising water from mines, blowing bellows to fuse the ore, supplying towns with water, grinding corn and many other purposes’ (1.254n). 4 Maureen McNeil, Under the Banner of Science: Erasmus Darwin and His Age (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 17.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

96

the kneaded clay refines, The biscuit hardens, the enamel shines; Each nicer mould a softer feature drinks, The bold Cameo speaks, the soft Intaglio thinks. (Economy 2.307–10)

All the verbs (except ‘drinks’) are used intransitively, so that by an intricate grammar the pottery seems to make itself, with the rare alexandrine at the end adding to the sense of awakening, spontaneous life. As McNeil points out, the way in which the labour is attributed to the china itself, or to ‘“gnomes” who magically perform the work required’, really only ‘focuses attention on Wedgwood as the person who assembled these magical forces’.5 Citing another passage where ‘with strong arm immortal Brindley leads/ His long canals’ and then ‘Mines the firm rock, or loads the deep morass’, she points out that it ‘clearly was not Brindley … who did the physical labour in such a project’.6 We have seen how Arkwright’s Cromford cotton mill is operated by the ‘emerging Naiads’ of water power rather than workers in Loves (2.93); in a condensed reworking, Temple tells us how: Arkwright taught from Cotton-pods to cull, And stretch in lines the vegetable wool; With teeth of steel its fibre-knots unfurl’d, And with the silver tissue clothed the world. (Temple 4.261–4)

In asking the question ‘Whom did Arkwright teach?’ McNeil focuses useful attention on the verbs as key fissure-points in Darwin’s industrial descriptions: here particularly glaring because the transitive verb ‘taught’ expects an object which is simply withheld.7 Leaving aside the slave labour at the root of the whole process, we are left with the idea that, through the steel teeth of his machines rather than his labour force, and then through his trading networks rather than the sailors and dressmakers they employed, Arkwright spun the cotton and ‘clothed the world’ himself. We can link such points to Marx’s observation that under industrial capitalism ‘the entire process appears as not subsumed under the direct skilfulness of the worker, but rather as the technological application of science’; and to Raymond Williams’s tracing of the shift in the meaning of ‘industry’, in exactly this period, whereby the work of the ‘industrious’ labourer gives way to the ‘industrial’ output of machines and managers.8 McNeil, Under the Banner of Science, 20. Economy 3.329–32; McNeil, Under the Banner of Science, 20. See also Fara,

5 6

Erasmus Darwin, 144–5. 7 McNeil, Under the Banner of Science, 17. 8 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (1857–8), qtd in McNeil, Under the Banner of Science, 19; Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Flamingo, 1983), 165–6.

Machinery

97

Another commentator finds another case of ‘the dog that didn’t bark’ in Darwin’s lack of concern with industrial diseases.9 As a physician, Darwin had a strong commitment to treating the poor for free: he began his career by arguing with his friend Albert Reimarus over a slip-up which led to a poor patient being charged for treatment, and his Derby friend Brooke Boothby later praised his ‘ever open door’ which relieved ‘the suffering poor’ at once from ‘poverty and pain’.10 In the Midlands towns where he worked he would certainly have encountered some of the new industry’s ill effects first-hand, yet apart from general advice about good ventilation he simply never refers to them, either in published works or letters.11 He took no part in correspondence between his medical friends William Withering and Thomas Beddoes about Birmingham’s massive incidence of consumption among ‘casters of fine brass work’ due to metal dust; and, although he worked with Wedgwood on devising a horizontal windmill to grind flint underwater after earlier discoveries of the dangers of inhaling its dust, he never refers to this rationale for the process, nor to Wedgwood’s insistence on glazing his china with lead, despite other doctors’ complaints about its lethal risks.12 There may have been several reasons for this apparent blind spot: a typically eighteenth-century belief that the physical benefits of active labour always trumped the dangers of idleness; a simple wish not to offend his industrialist friends; or, less cynically, a conviction that the new industry’s benefits to mankind must not be hindered with minor carpings. Economy’s passage on the ‘Giant-power’ celebrates how the steam-powered Albion flour mill in Lambeth can produce a ‘Feast without blood! and nourish human-kind’ (1.278), leading to a proto-vegetarian note on bread’s superiority to meat.13 The enormous Albion Mill was Boulton and Watt’s most ambitious project to date; it burned down in 1791, but at least one Lambeth resident may have taken a very different view of it from Darwin, if Peter Ackroyd is right to suggest that it part-inspired William Blake’s ‘dark satanic mills’, defacing and displacing Albion’s green and pleasant land.14 In Birmingham – despite the view for which Blake’s three words have been made to stand – Boulton’s Soho factory was cleaner and offered better health protection than the numerous older cottage-industry metalworks which made the town notorious for the mixture of soot, oil and clinker coating its residents’ homes, faces and lungs.15 And as Darwin noted enthusiastically, the steam-powered Soho Mint also involved a massive reduction of earlier workforces: four 12-year-old 9 Tim Carter, ‘Erasmus Darwin, Work and Health’, in The Genius of Erasmus Darwin, ed. C.U.M. Smith and Robert Arnott (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 289. 10 See King-Hele, Unequalled Achievement, 19, 118. 11 For Darwin’s general stress on good ventilation, see Female Education, 70–75; on his youthful advice (while extremely drunk) to a crowd of Nottingham labourers to air their homes and workshops, see Seward, Memoirs, 67. 12 Carter, ‘Work and Health’, 291, 293–4, 297–8. 13 Economy, 1.278n and AN 11.22. 14 Peter Ackroyd, Blake (London: Minerva, 1996), 130–31. 15 See Mike Jay, The Atmosphere of Heaven: The Unnatural Experiments of Dr. Beddoes and His Sons of Genius (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 14.

98

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

boys could now produce 30,000 guineas per hour (Economy 1.281n). The Luddite machine wrecking of 1811–12, induced by the destruction of the cottage weaving industry and consequent unemployment in Nottinghamshire, was only a speck on the horizon in 1791, and apparently well beyond Darwin’s friends’ own factory doorsteps. Nonetheless, as early as 1757 another industrial poet, John Dyer, did address such problems, even if only to dismiss them on the grounds that expanding markets would always create demand for more product. After lavishing praise on the spanking new technology of Lewis Paul’s water-powered wool-spinning machine, Dyer begs the women who make their living from more traditional methods to keep calm: Nor hence, ye nymphs, let anger cloud your brows; The more is wrought, the more is still requir’d: Blithe o’er your toils, with wonted song, proceed.16

By contrast to Dyer’s breadline-threatened ‘nymphs’, the only nymphs addressed in Darwin’s industrial poetry are those representing the machinery itself. Birmingham and Colebrookdale It is easy to extend the critique of Darwin’s pro-industrialism further than its various dogs which refuse to bark. As in previous chapters, Anna Seward provides a useful touchstone here: this time through her poem ‘Colebrook Dale’ (1785– 1787), deploring the environmental ugliness of Abraham Darby’s iron-smelting works in the Severn Valley, comparing its ‘dusk artificers’ to usurping ‘Cyclops’ and then musing rather more ambivalently on the uses Birmingham makes of its cast iron. For Donna Coffey, Seward’s poem ‘points a ghostly finger’ at Darwin’s move from the nature-loving Lichfield gardener to the pro-industrialist who would soon emerge in The Economy of Vegetation: a poem which ‘has nothing to do with vegetation and everything to do with economy’.17 Here the ‘poetic, nature-loving, even feminized’ Darwin is replaced by a grasping, quintessentially masculine figure who will compound his theft of Seward’s ‘Verses’ by converting their naiads and dryads into gnomes who plunder the earth for its clays and iron ores (even his evolutionary geology is industrially tainted, since it was his friends’ mines that ‘revealed the layers of the earth and the vast scale of geological time’).18 For Coffey, Seward’s ‘Colebrook Dale’ is partly a prophetic riposte to this shift in Darwin’s interests, replacing the nurturing ‘Genius’ of her earlier verses with the 16 John Dyer, The Fleece: A Poem in Four Books (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1757), 3.86–7, 87–8. 17 Donna Coffey, ‘Protecting the Botanic Garden: Seward, Darwin, and Coalbrookdale’, Women’s Studies 31, no. 2 (2002): 145. See also Sharon Setzer, ‘“Pond’rous Engines” in “Outraged Groves”: The Environmental Argument of Anna Seward’s “Colebrook Dale”’, European Romantic Review 18, no. 1 (2007): 69–82. 18 Coffey, ‘Protecting the Botanic Garden’, 160.

Machinery

99

figure of a new ‘venal Genius’ of Midlands landscape destruction, ‘faithless to his charge’ in resigning his ‘outraged groves’ to the forces of profit-seeking ugliness.19 However, Coffey’s claim that Seward’s poem prophetically analyses the ‘car-wreck’ of the Industrial Revolution needs to be tempered with the point that it is not industry itself that is attacked, merely its location: it is excellent that Birmingham metalwares are sold round the world, just a shame that its iron needs to be shipped in from a beautiful Shropshire valley rather than already ‘unpoetic scenes’ like the ‘arid moor’ of ‘smoke-involv’d’ Sheffield – the ‘cavern’d flames’ of whose furnaces are fed by coal torn from its surrounding hills, which then corral its fumes into a perpetual ‘sullied’ drizzle.20 Neither this nor Birmingham’s own pollution of its population greatly worries Seward: her picture of Birmingham’s ‘month to month’ expansion into ‘The street elongate, and the statelier square’ allies it to wondrous magical processes like the silent freezing of lakes or chemical crystallization,21 the latter image linked to the transformative ‘Genius’ of the Lunar friends Boulton, Keir and Priestley, and to Watt’s vast engine, whose extended arms, Heavy and huge, on the soft-seeming breath Of the hot steam, rise slowly; – till, by cold Condens’d, it leaves them soon, with clanging roar, Down, down, to fall precipitant.22

Unlike the wholly negative image of the desecrated Colebrook Dale, this engine is the product of ‘rich inventive Commerce’, which has made the ‘enlighten’d sons’ of Birmingham ‘rever’d’ in every land (316). If Seward’s poem ‘points a ghostly finger’ at Darwin’s poetic abandonment of gardens for industry, it is only in terms of attitudes to scenery, not of underlying ideology. Indeed, the above steam-engine passage may well have given him some hints, though its somewhat pallid blank verse – with the emotionalized repetition of ‘Down, down’ gesturing at too many vague responses, none very negative in the context – compares poorly to his tight couplets. On the other hand, Seward’s poem does bring out another of Darwin’s dogs that don’t bark, in that its descriptions of Sheffield (negative but fundamentally uncaring) and of Birmingham (largely positive, though her winding Miltonic sentences may conceal some ambiguities of attitude) do attempt to describe modern townscapes in a way Darwin simply does not. For all its industrial focus, there is not a single description of an industrial town anywhere in Economy or the rest of Darwin’s poetry. Along with such towns’ attendant diseases and above all of the workers who create their wealth, this is a significant absence. Coffey, ‘Protecting the Botanic Garden’, 156–8. Anna Seward, ‘Colebrook Dale’, in The Poetical Works of Anna Seward, vol. 2

19 20

(1810), 318. See Setzer, ‘“Pond’rous Engines”’, 70. 21 Seward, ‘Colebrook Dale’, 317. 22 Seward, ‘Colebrook Dale’, 316.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

100

Future Visions The problem of Darwin’s invisible workforce is less acute when we turn to Economy’s visions of the future, where precise details of productive techniques can hardly be expected. The best known such passage is the climax to Canto 1’s account of steam power: Soon shall thy arm, Unconquer’d Steam! afar Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car; Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear The flying-chariot through the fields of air. – Fair crews triumphant, leaning from above, Shall wave their fluttering kerchiefs as they move; Or warrior-bands alarm the gaping crowd, And armies shrink beneath the shadowy cloud. (Economy 1.289–96)

The steamships and trains of the second line of this extraordinary passage were already being practically considered by Darwin’s circle,23 and the ensuing account of powered flight should be considered along with the nearby note that since balloons cannot carry much weight ‘there seems no probable method of flying conveniently but by the power of steam, or some other explosive material; which another half century may probabl[y] discover’ (1.254n). Our current dependence on the ‘explosive’ power of oil took somewhat longer to come about, but the prediction is clearly accurate in outline. The colourful picture of ‘fair’ female crews waving their kerchiefs from the plane is continuous with the celebratory image of ballooning, but the concluding image of armies shrinking under airborne attack takes us into darker territory with which we are all familiar: it is not for nothing that Brian Aldiss has called Darwin one of the fathers of science fiction, and Michael R. Page links him directly to H. G. Wells.24 Another of Darwin’s future visions predicts transport through another hitherto unnavigable medium. Joseph Priestley’s discovery and separation of oxygen will soon enable submarine travel: See Economy, 1.254n; Uglow, Lunar Men, 93–4, 131; King-Hele, Unequalled Achievement, 50–51. 24 Brian Aldiss, Billion-Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1973), 14; Michael R. Page, The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H. G. Wells: Science, Evolution, and Ecology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012). The picture of ‘crowds’ and ‘armies’ shrinking beneath the power of whoever controls the planes can be juxtaposed to Darwin’s foregoing account of Roger Bacon’s discovery of gunpowder, which could have been penned by the American gun lobby. Probably inspired by the American militias, Darwin sees guns as ‘of public utility by weakening the tyranny of the few over the many’ (1.242n): because of gunpowder, ‘Guilt with pale brow the mimic thunder owns,/ And Tyrants tremble on their blood-stained thrones’ (1.251–2). In the same note, he also remarks that improvements in the formula may soon enable gunpowder to ‘supersede the use of steam’: a harnessing of explosive power that would eventually be achieved by oil. 23

Machinery

101

Led by the Sage, Lo! Britain’s sons shall guide Huge Sea-Balloons beneath the tossing tide; The diving castles, roof’d with spheric glass, Ribb’d with strong oak, and barr’d with bolts of brass, Buoy’d with pure air shall endless tracks pursue, And Priestley’s hand the vital flood renew. (Economy 4.195–200)

Unlike aeroplanes, the submarines will be used peacefully, in fish farming on a massive scale: Then shall Britannia rule the wealthy realms, Which Ocean’s wide insatiate wave o’erwhelms; Confine in netted bowers his scaly flocks, Part his blue plains, and people all his rocks. (4.201–4)

The confinement of this development to British submarines is part of a general insistence on technology’s patriotic benefits, reinforced here by a play on the image of Britannia ruling the waves.25 More internationalist in scope, Darwin’s other future visions involve far-reaching plans for benign global climate change: fire-nymphs will ‘On ice-built isles expand a thousand sails’ (1.529) and float this polar iceberg fleet southwards to cool the tropics; in cases of drought the nymphs will ‘o’er the soil ten thousand points erect’ (1.551), collecting the ‘electric flame’ of lightning to precipitate rain (551n). Finally the researches of the meteorologist Richard Kirwan into the climatic effects of wind systems will enable the sylphs of air to redirect them and ‘With Lapland breezes cool Arabian vales,/ And call to Hindostan antarctic gales’ (4.345–6). These visions are directed at global cooling rather than warming but, now that ice is disappearing from the poles with the aid of exhausts from cars, planes and power stations rather than nymphs and sylphs, they are perhaps among Darwin’s most disturbing. They are aspects of a confidence in the rightness of changing nature and an impatience with obstacles – including the awkward needs of human workforces – which place Darwin and his friends and heroes at the start of the long journey to where we are today: a world of extraordinary wealth for some and terrifying danger for all, totally dependent on and perhaps terminally poisoned by that ‘other explosive material’, superseding the power of steam, to whose use he so happily looked forward. But if Darwin’s technological vision intermeshes with some of our darkest fears, he must still be given high credit for making such an energetic effort to put it on the agenda of poetic imagination. As late as the 1930s, post-Romantic 25 Similar patriotic references appear in the description of ‘Imperial’ Kew Gardens bending ‘the wreath round George’s royal brow’, and of the produce of Boulton’s Soho Mint, where ‘George and Britain guard the sterling coin’ (Economy, 4.557, 578; 1.288).

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

102

expectations led to the warning term ‘Pylon Poets’ being erected round writers like Stephen Spender who dared to intrude ungainly pylons into the pastoral meadows of English poesy.26 From Darwin’s own period, a poem such as Seward’s ‘Colebrooke Dale’ can easily be set up as the truer poetry, but I would finally argue that such moves are simply easier than Darwin’s effort to bestow real imaginative glamour and vision on the world we actually inhabit, and to which we owe so much of our way of life. However rhetorically simple it may be to divorce his and his friends’ technology from ‘Nature’, Darwin also traces connective lines of force between the supposed opposites which make him a major poet of Nature in the larger, holistic sense of exploring all the connections of ‘how things are’ – or De Rerum Natura, as the title of his greatest model puts it. The refusal of divisions which allows the elemental beings of a poem supposedly devoted to vegetation to spend so much of their time on machines and other matters, is fundamental to Darwin’s vision of the physical world as a complex of interrelated forces. Once again, the idea of juxtaposed spaces for all these operations is more important than any unilinear story which would try to set untouched Nature before the activities of use and enquiry which put us in touch with it, only leading up to modern inventions as a magnificent or disastrous finale. The four elements are a useful way of shuffling the whole science-and-nature pack, so as to replace ideas of sequence with those of parallel and connection, moving easily from the formation of geological strata to Wedgwood’s Etruria works, thence to Wedgwood’s anti-slavery interventions as well as the ancient mysteries of a classical vase he copied, and thence to the transmigration of matter from soil to plants and back again. In our own time, the environmentalist movement counterbalances the global hubris threatening environmental destruction with the first space-photograph of the earth as a single place, the planetary near-organism termed ‘Gaia’ by the environmentalist James Lovelock.27 A similar sense of ecosystemic connections – heightened by occasional views from outer space – is certainly one of the things Darwin’s multi-tasking elementals are designed to convey. Nonetheless, within the well-shuffled spaces of Economy there is a narrative struggling to get out. In this narrative Nature remains very much a single entity, with no either/or contrast between its primal and human manifestations, but a single unbroken line can begin to be drawn between the earth’s planetary formation, the emergence and subsequent development of its life forms, and all the mixtures of love, conflict, culture and inventiveness which form a human nature out of a wholly material one. Structuring Darwin’s last poem, The Temple of Nature, but also sporadically glimpseable in Economy, this line of growth and connection is the subject of the next two chapters. Stephen Spender, ‘The Pylons’, Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1933), 47. James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University

26 27

Press, 1979). On Darwin’s feeling for ‘the entire biosphere’ see also Mahood, The Poet as Botanist, 72.

Chapter 6

Matter (1): Evolution Darwin was a materialist, who believed matter and its inherent energies explain all the phenomena of the universe, including human life and thought. (The inclusion of energy in the package is vital: without it matter becomes passive machinery requiring some other force to animate it: the ‘ghost in the machine’ of Cartesian dualism.) This chapter and the next attempt to explore Darwin’s ‘matter’, initially in the context of the classical materialism he developed from his great poetic model Lucretius, and more broadly in the sense that, after Loves, the non-botanical science of the universe is the main content of his poetry. Hence the formal, cultural and political concerns of other chapters in this book will only be tackled rather intermittently in these two, which chiefly focus on cutting to the bone of some hard, often intricately argued ‘matter’. Much of Darwin’s scientific thought is laid out at depth in his prose treatise Zoonomia or in letters and pamphlets; but none of these sources attempts to synthesize his total materialist vision as completely as the two poems Economy and Temple, together with the scientific essays (many at publishable length) which comprise their notes. Parts of this material vision – particularly its cosmology and geology – emerge from the well-shuffled science of Economy, but it is organized in its fullest and clearest sequence in The Temple of Nature, whose Preface declares its intention to describe ‘the operations of Nature in the order … in which the progressive course of time presented them’. We shall see in later chapters how Temple wrestles with the idea of progressive time at the level of material human history; this chapter and the next show how it uses much larger-scale ideas of time to re-shape the vision of ‘the operations of Nature’ which it shares in part with Economy and Zoonomia. The present chapter explores Darwin’s intensely dramatic account of the evolution of the earth and its living species; Chapter 7 continues what is essentially the same story, into the complex interactions between materially formed bodies and minds. Love, Matter and Lucretius A first way into the relations between all these topics, and into Darwin’s chief poetic model for connecting them, is offered by Temple’s opening invocation: Immortal Love! who ere the morn of Time, On wings outstretch’d, o’er Chaos hung sublime; Warm’d into life the bursting egg of Night, And gave young Nature to admiring Light! –

104

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin You! whose wide arms, in soft embraces hurl’d Round the vast frame, connect the whirling world! Whether immers’d in day, the Sun your throne, You gird the planets in your silver zone; Or warm, descending on ethereal wing, The Earth’s cold bosom with the beams of spring; Press drop to drop, to atom atom bind, Link sex to sex, or rivet mind to mind; Attend my song! – With rosy lips rehearse, And with your polish’d arrows write my verse! (Temple 1.15–28)

The biggest of Darwin’s Enlightened spaces is the space-time of the entire universe, as brought to light and animated here by the Eros of Immortal Love. With his inspiring arrows and outstretched wings, this wide-armed Eros is in a sense one more of Darwin’s spatializing, encapsulating visual pictures, but what he encapsulates is the story of large-scale time itself. Temple will go on to elaborate how the ‘egg of night’ – or potential matter – existed ‘ere time began’, then became ‘warm’d into life’ by a fiery explosion flinging matter in all directions, until stabilized by the ‘soft embraces’ of Newtonian gravity (which in one of Darwin’s versions will eventually make it reimplode in what is now hypothesized as a ‘big crunch’, before it again bursts out phoenix-like from a fresh egg). With matter thus separated out by what Darwin calls the ‘repulsion’ of heat, the amorous powers of gravitational and chemical ‘attraction’ bind its free-floating drops and atoms together in new combinations: these include the water-covered earth, where a kind of aggravated attraction known as ‘contraction’ produces the first stirrings of a fourth phenomenon, ‘life’. The organisms thus spontaneously created eventually evolve into those capable of sexual reproduction which, in the case of humans, is closely connected to the mutual sympathies on which society is based. The four-part movement with which the forces of attraction ‘Press drop to drop, to atom atom bind,/ Link sex to sex, or rivet mind to mind’ tallies with many other quaternities we shall meet in the following chapters, from the four faculties of the sensorium to the four ages of society. This constant stress on fours might seem to verge on superstition at times but, as balanced here in the fourway antitheses of the tightly stopped heroic couplet, it belongs more to Darwin’s spatializing aesthetics than his scientific reasoning, implying more a way of helping us grasp these things than a hint at any kind of providential arrangement beyond that provided by matter’s discernible laws. Arguably, these quaternities mark something of a midway point in the Foucauldian shift from Linnaean categories to (Charles) Darwinian progress, in that each stage of each foursome marks a temporal development from the last at the material level, while apparently occupying an equal and counterbalancing space with the other three at the level of presentation.

Matter (1)

105

Temple’s image of energized, form-creating love is modelled in part on the Roman poet Lucretius’ invocation of the love goddess Venus at the start of his great materialist poem, De Rerum Natura: darling of men and gods, nurturing Venus, ... striking alluring love into the breasts of all creatures[: since] you alone govern the nature of things, since without you nothing comes forth into the shining borders of light, nothing joyous and lovely is made, you I crave as partner in writing [these verses] on the Nature of Things.1

As Lucretius will go on to make clear, he does not literally believe in the active agency of Venus or any other deity: instead, both poets are using their love gods to emphasize the kind of connection between sexual and chemico-physical attraction which ‘makes the world go round’. Following his philosophical guide Epicurus, Lucretius goes on to deduce everything, from the formation of the first matter to the most delicate refinements of human thought and feeling – including religious superstition – from a single chain of material causes. This chain begins with a chaos of atoms, only prevented from falling eternally through space by a slight tendency to swerve and collide with each other, forming eventually into chance conglomerations of matter driven to combine into various further forms by their atoms’ continuing energy. These further forms include the earth and heavenly bodies, and then the first living organisms, which emerged fully formed from the damp soil; having been put together by chance only a few of these were equipped to survive, but those that did perpetuated their species through the omnipresent instinct for sex. As one of these surviving life forms, we humans gradually developed our present social formations and consequent passions and beliefs (including religion) through a number of recognizable stages, driven by need and the slow expansion of technology. As Stephen Greenblatt has argued, De Rerum Natura played a crucial role in ‘how the world became modern’ and Temple’s reworking of Lucretius’ model of progress is both an expression and – I would argue – an important motor of this modernity.2 But there are differences as well: for Darwin, the causal chain goes right back to a single cosmic explosion not unlike our present-day Big Bang, and thereafter develops through ‘certain immutable properties ... such as general gravitation, chemical affinity, or animal appetency’, ignored by the ‘blind chance’ of the Epicureans, but still firmly grounded in material, atomic origins. (Somewhat hopefully, Darwin’s only note on this subject suggests that the simple acceptance Lucretius, DRN 1.21–5. Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York:

1 2

Norton, 2011): this US subtitle gets Lucretius’ measure better than the tamer British ‘How the Renaissance Began’. On a more abstract level, Harold Bloom uses the idea of the Lucretian swerve or clinamen to structure part of his The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). For a valuable discussion of Darwin as a Lucretian poet, see Noel Jackson, ‘Rhyme and Reason: Erasmus Darwin’s Romanticism’, Modern Language Quarterly 70, no. 2 (2009): 177–94.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

106

of such regular laws would instantly convert the Epicureans’ tendency to ‘lead the mind to atheism’ into a sublime proof of ‘the existence of a Deity as the first cause of all things’.3) And although Lucretius may have helped him towards his theory that organic life emerged from inert matter through a fertile fusion of ‘Warmth and Moisture’ (1.417), for Darwin it is crucial that complex life forms only evolved from simpler ones, rather than emerging fully formed – as in Ovid’s Lucretian description of lions and elephants rearing up from the mud of the Nile, which Temple lovingly paraphrases in verse while knocking it down to size in the notes. Cosmology Darwin’s quaternities, Lucretianism and overarching vision of erotic attraction will reappear throughout this chapter and the next, but what follows concentrates mainly on his presentation of the story of matter as an unbroken line, from primal explosion to the formation of the earth, and from there to the evolution of species and the construction of socialized human psychology. This evolutionary story begins with the formation of the universe and then of the Earth, in a radical cosmology and geology which draws on some of the bolder speculations of a range of scientists including the great German-born astronomer William Herschel, as well as Darwin’s own friends John Michell, John Whitehurst and James Hutton. Starting this chain at the beginning: Darwin agrees with aspects of the modern ‘Big Bang’ theory that the universe was created – or created itself – through an initial time-and-space-producing explosion of matter, rather than being made by the God of Genesis, or existing forever in a ‘steady state’, as many scientists still believed up to the 1960s.4 As Economy puts it, in a crucial passage anticipating Temple’s paean to ‘Immortal Love’: When Love Divine, with brooding wings unfurl’d, Call’d from the rude abyss the living world. “– Let there be light!” proclaim’d the Almighty Lord, Astonish’d Chaos heard the potent word; – Through all his realms the kindling Ether runs, And the mass starts into a million suns; Earths round each sun with quick explosions burst, And second planets issue from the first; Bend, as they journey with projectile force, In bright ellipses their reluctant course; Orbs wheel in orbs, round centres centres roll, And form, self-balanced, one revolving Whole. – Onward they move amid their bright abode, Space without bound, the bosom of their God! (Economy 1.101–14)

Temple, 4.147n. Simon Singh, Big Bang: The Most Important Scientific Discovery of All Time and

3 4

Why You Need to Know About It (London: Harper Perennial, 2004), 442.

Matter (1)

107

For Horace Walpole, these lines ‘that by miracle describe and comprehend the creation of the universe out of chaos, are in my opinion the most sublime passage in any author, or in any of the few languages with which I am acquainted’.5 From Sir Richard Blackmore’s Creation (1712) onwards, a substantial tradition of Newtonian, explicitly anti-Lucretian ‘physio-theological’ poems had used such themes to prove the existence of a divine creator, and it has been persuasively argued that Darwin’s initial success was largely owing to readers being so used to this tradition that they took any ‘sublimely’ elevated treatment of these topics as belonging to it.6 Darwin helps this impression on its way with his loudly capitalized references to God; but these are undercut by a note equating the ‘Love Divine’ – which is, if we read carefully, the only ‘Almighty Lord’ referred to, even when planets rest in ‘his’ gravitational bosom – with ‘the very ancient and sublime allegory of Eros, or Divine Love, producing the world from the egg of night’ (Economy 1.101n). Though this much-applauded account climaxes in an apparently stable, ‘selfbalanced’ universe, the notes point to some rather more unsettling science. One of Darwin’s ways of picturing the primal explosion is that ‘the whole of Chaos, like grains of gunpowder, was exploded at the same time, and dispersed through infinite space at once, or in quick succession, in every possible direction.’ It is the mutually exerted gravity of the new matter thus instantaneously spread throughout space that keeps the universe ‘self-balanced’, and If these innumerable and immense suns thus rising out of Chaos are supposed to have thrown out their attendant planets by new explosions, as they ascended; and those their respective satellites, filling in a moment the immensity of space with light and motion, a grander idea cannot be conceived by the mind of man. (Economy 1.105n)

Arguably, this tallies with one aspect of the modern theory that there was no space before the Big Bang somehow created it along with the first ‘moments’ of time itself. Furthermore, the Big-Bang idea of a continually expanding universe is also suggested when Darwin cites the great astronomer William Herschel’s hypothesis that ‘the whole sidereal system is gradually moving round some centre, … and [the stars] may thence be supposed to have emerged or been projected from the material, where they were produced.’7 If so, this centre ‘may be an opake mass of matter’ – an idea first floated in 1784 (seven years before Economy) by Darwin’s

Walpole, Correspondence, 42.363. List, Erasmus Darwin and the Poetry of Science, 159–61. 7 Economy, 1.105n. William Herschel was partnered by his sister Caroline in many 5 6

discoveries, but since these galactic explorations were chiefly his, I refer to ‘Herschel’ in the singular for what follows.

108

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

friend and Cambridge tutor John Michell, who essentially proposed the ‘Black Hole’ theory that some matter may be so dense that light cannot escape from it.8 This idea of a black hole lurking at the galactic centre is not too disturbing if our apparently healthy galaxy is all there is, as was generally assumed and as depicted in Herschel’s drawings of it as the flattish disc with extended arms that we still recognize.9 However, to picture such a finite shape at all suggests that space may contain more such, and at one stage Herschel believed he had indeed observed other distant galaxies, some of them still growing and some apparently imploding back to their black-hole centres. Two of his papers on very distant cloudlike ‘nebulae’ (1785, 1789) presented them as evidence that the universe contained many more galaxies than this one.10 In Richard Holmes’s words, in the second of these papers Herschel used the botanical metaphor of ‘the germination, blooming, foliage, fecundity, fading, withering and corruption of a plant’ to convey a picture of varying youth and decrepitude in these other galaxies, concluding that ours too will at some time implode in what is now hypothesised as a ‘Big Crunch’.11 In 1791 Herschel retracted this view, describing the nebulae instead as newly emerging stars within our own galaxy: the view with which he is usually still identified. 12 The dates of the daring 1789 paper and its 1791 retraction tally respectively with the highpoint of internationalist sympathy for France’s mingling of creation with destruction, and the start of Britain’s ever-growing reaction into the security of home and hearth; and Holmes suggests that while the ‘sublimity’ of Herschel’s Milky Way–only Big Bang remained acceptable – and directly influenced Haydn’s The Creation (1798) – his alarmingly atheistic 1789 ‘Big Crunch’ ideas were largely buried because they did not.13 It is, however, this latter idea that Darwin’s 1791 Economy embraces just as Herschel was retracting it:

8 John Gribbin, Science: A History, 1543–2001 (London: Penguin, 2003), 293, 331; Simon Schaffer, ‘John Michell and Black Holes’, Journal for the History of Astronomy 10 (1979): 42–43. Recently, a 16-year study by Reinhard Genzel has confirmed Herschel’s hypothesis of a massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy, ‘feeding’ on adjacent stars: see Pallab Ghosh, ‘Black Hole Confirmed in Milky Way’, BBC News, 9 December 2008. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/sci/tech/7774287.stm (accessed 9 April, 2013). 9 Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London: Harper, 2008), 122. 10 Holmes, Age of Wonder, 197. 11 Holmes, Age of Wonder, 192. For the Big Crunch see Singh, Big Bang, 490–91. 12 Thus Simon Singh’s generally informative Big Bang devotes considerable attention to Herschel’s massive expansion of cosmic space and time, but emphasizes the restriction of his model of the universe to our own galaxy, based on a misreading of the many nebulae he discovered as ‘stars in the early phase of their life … within the realm of the Milky Way’ rather than as distant glimpses of further galaxies, as suspected by Immanuel Kant (Singh, 179–80). 13 Holmes, Age of Wonder, 199, 197. See also Fara, Erasmus Darwin, 244–5.

Fig. 6.1

William Herschel, Outline of the Galaxy. Plate 8 figure 4 from his paper ‘On the construction of the heavens’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 75 (1785): 213–66. Reproduced by kind permission of the Royal Society.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

110

So, late descry’d by Herschel’s piercing sight, Hang the bright squadrons of the twinkling Night; … … Flowers of the sky! ye too to age must yield, Frail as your silken sisters of the field! Star after star from Heaven’s high arch shall rush, Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush, Headlong, extinct, to one dark centre fall, And Death and Night and Chaos mingle all!14

By putting such ideas so confidently into the public domain, Darwin freeze-frames a radical moment in British astronomy which now tends to be overlooked, and for whose disturbing implications he himself attracted much of the flak once the early enthusiasm for Economy’s sublimity had cooled into suspicious reaction.15 Though certainly cutting-edge in ways which seem to anticipate several modern breakthroughs, Darwin’s careful tracking of Herschel and Michell does not make his cosmology original in itself. Where he can claim the kind of scientific originality for which King-Hele calls him ‘unequalled’ is in his synthesis of many different kinds of evidence to lead from the idea of the earth as a piece of slowly cooling matter, towards the idea of the evolution of organic life. Geology Darwin’s family coat of arms contained three scallop shells, and when he had it painted on the side of his carriage in 1770 he added the motto e conchis omnia (‘Everything from shells’). He was forced to remove it again when Canon Thomas Seward, Anna’s father, outed him for incipient atheism in a satire presenting him as a modern Epicurus who renounces his Creator, And forms all things from senseless matter. Great wizard he! by magic spells Can raise all things from cockle shells.16

Economy, 4.359–6; 371–6. As the note (369n) glosses, the ‘vacant spaces’ round nebulae suggest that they are pulling in nearby stars, giving early warning that eventually all stars ‘must finally coalesce in one mass’, until nature rises like the immortal phoenix ‘from her funeral pyre on wings of flame,/ And soars and shines, another and the same’ (4.377–80).This hopeful suggestion gets no corresponding scientific support from its note, which instead simply appeals to the ancient wisdom about the phoenix symbolising ‘the destruction and resuscitation of all things’ (4.377n). In current thinking, however, some scientists who have followed Einstein in predicting a final ‘Big Crunch’ also predict a ‘Big Bounce’ where matter starts to fly outward again (Singh, Big Bang, 146, 490–91). By the time of Temple both Crunch and Bounce disappear, Herschel is praised instead for his discovery of ‘the Georgian Star’, later renamed Uranus (Temple, 4.237–40), and the phoenix image is reworked to convey the transmigration of organic matter (4.411–16). 15 Holmes, Age of Wonder, 197–8. 16 See King-Hele, Unequalled Achievement, 89. 14

Matter (1)

111

In his entertaining account of this fracas, King-Hele suggests that the motto’s ‘shells’ were a slight misnomer for the ‘microscopic filaments’ at the real basis of Darwin’s evolutionary system. However, ‘everything’, in the sense of his evolutionary theory, did arise from shells, and from the geological evidence provided by their remains. As Darwin argues at various points, the abundance of chalk, marble and other ‘calcareous’ derivatives all over the earth’s surface clearly indicates the existence of sea-born life forms before the emergence of land, suggesting a sequence from marine to terrestrial species which explains the many residual amphibious features in the latter; and also, through the strange forms of many shellfish fossils, suggesting a long succession of species extinctions. In outlining the formation of the present-day earth, Darwin thus presents geology and biology as a single package. In Economy we hear how the earth slowly cooled after its ejection from the sun, and how ‘from its vaporous air, condensed by cold,/ Descending torrents into oceans roll’d’ (Economy 2, 13–18). As Temple continues the story, ‘Organic life began beneath the waves’ (Temple 1.295) – by processes to which we shall return – and: The tenants perish, but their cells remain; Whence coral walls and sparry hills ascend From pole to pole, and round the line extend. (Temple 1.316–20)

Land only emerges after these chalky deposits from submarine shells and other ‘recrements’ have already added significant strata to the seabed. But this emergence only occurs when proto-volcanic eruptions from the earth’s molten core ‘drink’ in seawater to cause massive, steamy explosions: imprison’d fires in central caves Burst the firm earth, and drank the headlong waves; And, as new airs with dread explosion swell, Form’d lava-isles, and continents of shell. (Temple 1.321–4)

On the newly formed land masses of combined igneous and sedimentary rock, the eruptions continue with ‘rocks on rocks, on mountains mountains raised,/ And high in heaven the first volcanoes blazed’ (Temple 1.326–7). In Economy we also hear how the explosions of this ‘elemental war’ eject the moon from the vast ‘waste’ which becomes the Pacific Ocean (Economy 2.73–80). For the geology of the above passages, Darwin’s notes appeal to a number of sources including his Lunar Society colleague John Whitehurst and his Edinburgh friend James Hutton. Neither the picture of the earth being initially covered by water nor of its land being thrown up by volcanic activity was completely new: ‘Neptunists’ such as the German A. G. Werner argued that deposits from the primal sea were themselves sufficient to produce land, while Hutton was one of several ‘Plutonists’ who argued from the uneven arrangement of strata, and much evidence of heat-induced rock transformations, that more violent subterranean eruptions

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

112

were involved.17 In his Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth (1778), the firmly Christian Whitehurst synthesized some of these ideas but attempted to fit them to the biblical account, foreshortening the timescale involved and insisting on a ‘Neptunian’ development of land sufficient to nurture Adam, Eve and their descendants before an enormous submarine eruption completely reconfigured the earth’s strata in Noah’s Flood. However, an Appendix of more concrete details told a different story, implicitly supporting Plutonist ideas of a more continuous series of transformative eruptions.18 In Economy, Darwin grants Whitehurst his pre-volcanic ‘primeval islands’, even linking them to the ‘paradise of the sacred writers’, while insisting they must have been largely bare chalk and courteously sidestepping the impossibility of their human habitation (Economy 2.36n). By the time of Temple, however, they have all but disappeared – except in a cross-reference back to Economy – in favour of Hutton’s ‘Plutonist’ land formation by a series of eruptions (Temple 1.319n, p. 28). However, Darwin also queries Hutton’s extreme steady-state theory that this series had ‘with respect to human observation, … neither a beginning nor an end’, arguing instead for the earth’s initial ejection from the sun in line with the Herschelian Big Bang,19 Though questionable on this single point, Hutton contributed greatly to Darwin’s confidence that the earth was formed ‘perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind’ (1801 Zoonomia 2.240). In challenging the established Christian dating of the earth as around 6,000 years old, they were both building on arguments already more cautiously conveyed by the century’s two most celebrated naturalists, Linnaeus and the great French philosophe George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. As a Neptunist, Linnaeus hinted that the land would need much more than 6,000 years to build itself out of the sea and breed sufficient fauna to explain the increasingly studied fossil record.20 Buffon, convinced like Darwin that the Earth was projected from the Sun, conducted various cooling experiments to prove that a body as big as the earth would have taken at least 75,000 years to cool to its present state: a tiny period by modern standards but a big leap for the eighteenth century.21 Uglow, The Lunar Men, 300. Maxwell Craven, John Whitehurst of Derby, Clockmaker and Scientist 1713–88

17 18

(Ashbourne, Derbyshire: Mayfield Books, 1996), 94–5; Uglow, The Lunar Men, 301–2. 19 James Hutton, Abstract of … The Theory of the Earth, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1785, 28; Economy AN 24.65. See James C. McCusick, ‘“Kubla Khan” and the Theory of the Earth’, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 134–51 for an interesting application of these ideas to Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’. Describing Darwin’s ‘geogony’ as ‘cosmological in scope, unlike Hutton’s or Whitehurst’s’, Noah Heringman argues that Temple works to ‘unify the three branches of natural history into one science’, bringing ‘the earth’s original matter, or “lava projected from the sun,” into circulation in a general economy that also involves organic matter’ (Noah Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology [Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2004], 224, 226). 20 Gribbin, Science: A History, 220–21. 21 Gribbin, Science: A History, 226.

Matter (1)

113

The Evolution of Life Though neither Linnaeus nor Buffon pushed these ideas into a direct confrontation with established religion, both implicitly related them to their primary biological interests, in theories of wide variation within very broadly-defined species which influenced the most radical of all Erasmus Darwin’s scientific propositions: the evolution of all living organisms from a single seaborn ‘filament’. In the Preface to Loves, Darwin notes how Linnaeus ‘ingeniously imagines, that one plant of each Natural Order was created in the beginning; and that the intermarriages of these produced one plant of every Genus, or Family’, and so on down through species to varieties.22 In presenting this theory as ‘ingeniously imagined’, Darwin allows more orthodox readers to feel that Linnaeus goes too far in undermining the biblical separate creation of species, while perhaps actually hinting that he does not go nearly far enough. When applied to animals, Linnaeus’s belief that ‘intermarriage’ had once leapt species gaps led him to question privately whether there were any ‘generic differentia between man and ape’ and, publicly, to classify them both together as primates.23 In Britain, the eccentric Scots Enlightenment thinker Lord Monboddo was convinced that orangutans were essentially human, and in France Buffon – who criticized Linnaeus’s classifications as too static – argued yet more strongly ‘that the ape is of the family of man, that he is but a degenerate man’, just as the ass and the horse may only differ ‘through degeneration from a common ancestor’.24 For all of these proto-evolutionists, the ‘created’ orders or species apparently remain the bedrock on which variety grows; although Samuel Butler – an enormous admirer of Erasmus Darwin’s evolutionism – detects a subversive ‘vein of irony’ in Buffon’s refusal to push his findings to their evolutionary conclusions, an irony which Butler thinks Darwin should have been able to see through.25 Perhaps he did: a note in Temple credits Buffon with the suggestion ‘that mankind arose from one family of monkeys on the banks of the Mediterranean; who accidentally had learned to use … that strong muscle which constitutes the ball of the thumb’, thus creating the opposable thumb and the ‘improved use of the sense of touch’ by which ‘monkeys acquired clear ideas, and gradually became men’ (Temple 2.122n). We shall return to this early glimmer of what the followers and opponents of Darwin’s grandson would know as the great ‘monkey debate’; for now, we

Loves, Preface, v. Gribbin, Science: A History, 219. 24 Gribbin, Science: A History, 228. For a fuller discussion of the racial implications of 22

23

some of these ideas – and Darwin’s non-involvement in them – see Fara, Erasmus Darwin, 195–215. 25 Samuel Butler, Evolution, Old & New: Or: the Theories of Buffon, Dr Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, as Compared with that of Charles Darwin, 3rd ed. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1921), 81, 83–4.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

114

need to take several steps backwards in considering Erasmus Darwin’s specific contributions to evolutionism. In the 1789 Loves he makes an early step into these dangerous waters in a note on turmeric’s ‘beardless youths’, or unproductive stamens capable only of ‘Platonic love’ (1.67–8), seguing with little explanation into the possibility raised by such useless vestiges that Perhaps all the products of nature are in their progress to greater perfection? an idea countenanced by the modern discoveries and deductions concerning the progressive formation of the solid parts of the terraqueous globe. (1789 Loves 1.65n)

By 1791 this cryptic note was expanded to include such features as vestigial male nipples, suggesting that animals too have ‘in a long process of time undergone changes in some parts of their bodies, which may have been effected to accommodate them to new ways of procuring their food’ (1791 Loves 1.65n). Referring across to this note, another one in Economy cites Buffon to the effect that ‘swine have four toes, but two of them are imperfectly formed, and not long enough for use’, suggesting that ‘Perhaps all the supposed monstrous births of Nature are remains of their habits of production in their former less perfect state, or attempts towards greater perfection’ (Economy 1.101n). As we have seen, ‘the progressive formation of the solid parts of the terraqueous globe’ is firmly tied in to Darwin’s evolutionary theory in its evidence for the very early existence of chalk-producing crustaceans. These take on a further significance when one Economy note considers the difference between presentday shellfish and fossilized forms such as ammonites, asking: Were all the ammoniae destroyed when the continents were raised? Or do some genera of animals perish by the increasing power of their enemies? Or do they still reside at inaccessible depths in the sea? Or do some animals change their forms gradually and become new genera? (Economy 3.66n)

The first of these ideas could tie in with the ‘catastrophism’ – the idea of a series of species-destroying upheavals – with which the great paleontologist Cuvier would still try to reconcile the fossil record with scripture. The fourth, however, clearly raises the idea of continuous evolution, and the second the mechanism of natural selection most strongly identified with Darwin’s grandson. Though fossils do not take the foreground in Erasmus Darwin’s evolutionism they are a key part of its background, from his father Robert’s discovery of a fossil now identified as a plesiosaurus (still on display in the Natural History Museum) to a correspondence about Wedgwood’s 1767 discovery of some strange bones, jocularly identified by Darwin as a cross between a camel and a ‘Patagonian ox’, which King-Hele pinpoints as the starting point of his serious thinking about evolution.26 King-Hele, Unequalled Achievement, 2–3, 78.

26

Matter (1)

115

Despite the above few hints in Botanic Garden, Darwin’s first full statement of his evolutionary theory appeared in the 1794 Zoonomia’s Section 39, ‘Of Generation’, which builds up its argument through a series of stages. Individual creatures such as butterflies and frogs change greatly in the course of their lives, and species can also be changed by deliberate or accidental breeding. From this it can be concluded that embryos acquire their particular features incrementally, rather than in the current ‘preformationist’ theory which sees them as growing from pre-existing ‘homunculi’ in the paternal sperm (as in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy) and then growing ‘by distention of a primordial nest of germs, included one within another, like the cups of a conjurer’ (1801 Zoonomia 2.235–6). Furthermore, the great similarities underlying the obvious differences between many types of animal suggest a common origin, with their distinctive features being explainable in terms of their usefulness in securing a mate (as with stags’ horns or cocks’ spurs), food (as with elephants’ trunks and various birds’ beaks) or security (as with birds’ wings and various types of camouflage). To support the claim of underlying connections, Darwin points to the way amphibians straddle the apparent gap between land and water creatures, insects manifest so many differences among themselves as to lessen their differences from other organisms, and plants resemble ‘the inferior order of animals’ in their reproductive organs and occasional sensitivity to touch (as with the mimosa and Venus flytrap). Linnaeus has hinted that all plants derive from a few basic types, with variations arising from ‘their perpetual contest for light and air above ground, and for food and moisture beneath the soil’ (243). Conjecturing from all this that ‘one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life,’ Darwin again considers the fossil evidence for the extinction of many species, as well as the ancient idea (as in Plato’s Symposium) that man was originally hermaphrodite as an expression of some awareness of pre-sexual reproduction, and cites Hume’s suggestion that the world might very well ‘have been gradually produced … by the activity of its inherent principles, rather than by a sudden evolution of the whole by the Almighty fiat’.27 Considering all this, Darwin finally asks: would it be too bold to imagine, that in the great length of time, since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages, before the commencement of the history of mankind, . . . that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the great First Cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts . . .; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end? (1801 Zoonomia 2.240)

27 Zoonomia (1801) 2.247. This last usage of ‘evolution’ to denote Bible-based creationism is a helpful reminder that Erasmus Darwin himself never used the word in the modern sense; and indeed his grandson’s Origin of the Species only includes ‘evolved’ in this sense as its very last word.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

116

Evolution as Poetry Though sometimes described as being mainly about evolution, Zoonomia more or less rests its case there; leaving it to the poetry of Temple to fill out the case more fully. In turning to Temple’s presentation of these ideas, it is important not to let go of the fact that it is poetry, not prose. Citing the Botanic Garden Apology’s defence of ‘extravagant theories’ as widening the horizons of scientific research, Noah Heringman argues that the synthesizing project inspired by ‘Darwin’s overarching materialism’ actually needs the daringness of poetry as ‘a natural medium for scientific concepts’.28 His poetry ‘is, perhaps, the last monument of a form of aesthetic experience that accommodated both science and poetry and judged both on one standard’, by contrast to the values associated with Romanticism, which present ‘Nature’ as a site of subjective experience and source of metaphors for other things, rather than as an object of holistic poetic inquiry.29 Heringman’s argument that Darwin needs the ‘extravagance’ of poetry to effect the synthesis of cosmic physics, geology and biology which is nonetheless a major scientific contribution, is well borne out in Temple’s account of the evolutionary process. Devices of analogy, synecdoche, rapid compression and ambiguous superimposition all play important parts in conveying the single complex vision whose separate underpinnings are more carefully laid out in the notes. Temple’s skilful use of such devices can be illustrated from its opening reply to the question ‘[f]rom what fair fountain mortal life arose’, as ventriloquized through Darwin’s mouthpiece Urania: God the First cause! – in this terrene abode Young Nature lisps, she is the child of God. From embryon births her changeful forms improve, Grow, as they live, and strengthen as they move. (Temple 1.223–6)

Remembering that for Darwin ‘God’ always simply implies the First Cause of natural laws, his presentation of Nature as a lisping young girl conceals a dramatic paradox: that it is precisely the evidence for the earth and universe as still in a state of development – and hence ‘young’ only by contrast to the Huttonian ‘steady state’ theory that it has existed forever – that is about to prove it immeasurably old (‘perhaps millions of ages’30), at least by contrast to Archbishop Ussher’s orthodox 6,000-odd years. Aided by a note emphasising how ‘the improved knowledge of geology’ teaches us that the earth is still in process of formation, these four intensely compressed lines prepare us to apply this model of growth from stellar

Heringman, Romantic Rocks, 224. Heringman, Romantic Rocks, 227. 30 Zoonomia (1801), 2.240. 28 29

Matter (1)

117

and planetary ‘embryon births’ straight across to nature’s living organisms, strengthening and developing themselves through activity. We have already considered Temple’s accounts of the primal explosion and formation of the sea-covered earth, and will return later to Darwin’s guesses about precisely how, ‘Nurs’d by warm sun-beams in primeval caves/ Organic Life began beneath the waves’ (1.233–4). Now we hear how eventually, after innumerable ‘successive generations’, In countless swarms an insect-myriad moves From sea-fan gardens, and from coral groves; Leaves the cold caverns of the deep, and creeps On shelving shores, or climbs on rocky steeps. As in dry air the sea-born stranger roves, Each muscle quickens, and each sense improves. (Temple 1.326–32)

The fusing of this (already grammatically singular) ‘insect-myriad’ into a single rapidly developing ‘sea-born stranger’ telescopes events in a way that we can still perhaps remember from child’s textbook depictions of evolution as a kind of freeze-frame sequence from fish to reptile or from ape to man. Despite the whiff of purposive Lamarckian teleology in such images, it is worth keeping a close watch on the ways in which Darwin repeatedly interrupts his apparent focus on a single individual – ‘the sea-born stranger’ – with reminders of the ‘myriad’ reality he is really talking about. An important stylistic element here is the way the rules of Latinate poetic diction allow ‘the’ to imply a plural number while focusing synecdochally on a single instance. In the lines ‘From Nature’s womb the plant or insect swims,/ And buds or breathes, with microscopic limbs’ (Temple 1.249–50), the play of ‘ors’ and ‘ands’ sets up a kind of triple vision in which what is essentially ‘the’ same creature swims, buds or walks off into simultaneous possibilities. This imagery of forking paths takes on a stranger resonance in describing the internal formation of the circulatory system: In branching cones the living web expands, Lymphatic ducts, and convoluted glands; Aortal tubes propel the nascent blood, And lengthening veins absorb the refluent flood; Leaves, lungs, and gills, the vital ether breathe On earth’s green surface, or the waves beneath. (Temple 1.259–64)

Here the focus on ‘the’ (single) ‘living web’ of veins is so carefully detailed that it comes as a shock to return in the last two lines to the previous triple vision whereby this system could belong equally to plants, mammals or fish. There is now a dramatic leap as:

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

118

Next the long nerves unite their silver train, And young Sensation permeates the brain; Through each new sense the keen emotions dart, Flush the young cheek, and swell the throbbing heart. (Temple 1.269–72)

This account of the developing nervous system maps itself straight onto the branching veins of the previous lines; but suddenly there is something identifiably human in the ambiguities of ‘flush’ and ‘swell’, evoking both the full establishment of the mammalian circulatory system and the moments of ‘keen emotion’ specific to the figure of ‘bewilder’d Man’ whom we will see receiving ‘Reason’s light’ three lines later on (1.275). In another passage, we again glimpse bewildered Man both embedded in and emerging from the common experience, when Darwin sums up the argument that all land organisms ‘Rise from aquatic to aerial forms’ with something that turns out to be rather more than a simple simile: Thus in the womb the nascent infant laves Its natant form in the circumfluent waves; With perforated heart unbreathing swims, Awakes and stretches all its recent limbs; With gills placental seeks the arterial flood, And drinks pure ether from its Mother’s blood. Erewhile the landed Stranger bursts his way, From the warm wave emerging into day; Feels the chill blast, and piercing light, and tries His tender lungs, and rolls his dazzled eyes; Gives to the passing gale his curling hair, And steps a dry inhabitant of air. (Temple 1.388–400)

Anticipating Ernst Haeckel’s post–Charles Darwinian formulation that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ – that embryos go through previous evolutionary stages in the womb – this bravura passage stresses the ‘perforated heart’ and ‘gills placental’ which enable us to relive our marine past in the womb: the limbs are ‘recent’ in both senses of ‘newly developed’.31 Reworking a famous passage from Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, 32 Darwin pushes to the limit the poeticdiction synecdoche whereby ‘wave’ and ‘flood’ can stand for any kind of water Ernst Haeckel, Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (1899). The idea has a longer history, for which see Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). 32 Lucretius, DRN, 5.222–7, 396–7: ‘the child, like a sailor cast forth by the cruel waves, lies naked upon the ground, speechless, in need of every kind of vital support, as soon as nature has spilt him forth with throes from his mother’s womb into the regions of light, and he fills all around with doleful wailings.’ 31

Matter (1)

119

while still distantly evoking the grandeur of the sea. The image of the Crusoe-like ‘landed Stranger’ makes this evocation concrete: the baby is twice ‘nascent’, in person and in actually recapitulating the whole emergence of life from sea to land, experiencing its ‘chill blast, and piercing light’ for the first time with a mixture of shock and exhilaration.33 Darwin, Darwin and Lamarck Of course – as Roy Porter put it – the ‘inspired scientific showmanship’ underlying Temple’s ‘sublime panorama of change’ may lead one to view it as little more than ‘a spectacular theatrical set, … held together largely by the trompe l’oeil of literary flair and some bombastic ideological rhetoric (what hostile critics called ‘Darwinizing’)’, but this is a spoofed description which Porter offers only to demonstrate its falsity, in the light of the acute interest in ‘Nature in microcosm, in the individual case’ which really did validate much of Darwin’s evolutionary science.34 Discussing this science, James Harrison concludes that Darwin ‘had in his grasp all, or almost all, the constituent parts of the full theory of evolution by natural selection … without ever piecing them together in the way his grandson was able to’: instead he mixed some appeals to sexual selection with ‘Lamarckian mechanisms’ and – ‘indicating, perhaps, his belief that other important factors remained to be discovered’ – a ‘vague, teleological principle of progress built into the very texture of creation’.35 ‘Teleology’ – implying that the idea of progressive improvement is already implanted – may indeed be implicit in some of Darwin’s references to nature’s ‘attempts towards greater perfection’ (Economy 1.101n). But his points about mass extinctions of less successful species, the vestigial lingering of redundant features, and the growth of tusks and antlers as examples of sexual selection, propose many less intentional routes up what Richard Dawkins calls the (Charles) Darwinian ‘Mount Improbable’ of increasing complexity.36 In this context, the implied slur of Harrison’s phrase ‘Lamarckian mechanisms’ demands some further consideration.

33 See George Reuben Potter (‘Mark Akenside, Prophet of Evolution’, Modern Philology 24, no. 1 (August 1926): 55–64) for a comparison of Temple with the intriguing if much sketchier poetic evolutionism of Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of the Imagination (1744), where God leads the generations on ‘From the mute shell-fish gaping on the shore, / To men, to angels, to celestial minds’ (2.344–5). 34 Roy Porter, ‘Erasmus Darwin, Doctor of Evolution?’ in History, Humanity and Evolution, ed. J. R. Moore, vol. 1. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 41, 42, 56. 35 James Harrison, ‘Erasmus Darwin’s View of Evolution’, Journal of the History of Ideas 32, no. 2 (April–June 1971): 260–61. 36 Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable (New York: Norton, 1996).

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

120

The Darwin with whom ‘evolution’ is now most identified asserted, in a brief but damning aside, that ‘It is curious how largely my grandfather, Dr Erasmus Darwin, anticipated [Lamarck’s] erroneous views.’37 Whether or not this ‘anticipation’ amounts to direct influence on Lamarck has been disputed38 but, because he believed species change could arise from the inheritance of acquired characteristics, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck has gone down in history chiefly as Charles Darwin’s binary other, the Man Who Got Evolution Wrong. However, Charles’s best-known contemporary champion, Richard Dawkins, insists that Lamarck ‘deserves to be honoured, … along with Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus’ for beating a path towards fully developed evolutionism, and strikingly points out that the inheritance of acquired characteristics was generally accepted up to the twentieth century, not only by Lamarck and Buffon before him but also by Charles himself, although it happened not to be crucial to his theory of natural selection.39 Charles Darwin’s own Life of Erasmus Darwin is a fascinating document for many reasons: an important source for King-Hele’s and Uglow’s fuller biographies, it carefully removes Darwin from the public sphere into the private one of family affection, reflecting and perhaps boosting Victorian perceptions of him as a bad poet – ‘no one of the present generation reads, as it appears, a single line of it’ – and, most strikingly, barely mentioning his evolutionism in a quick glance at his science.40 What Roy Porter calls this somewhat ‘desperate’ self-distancing almost certainly arises from a fear of being tarred with the brush of his grandfather’s pronounced atheism, which Charles honourably makes no attempt to cover up.41 All the same, the unstated scientific link between the two Darwins is unignorable, given the Life’s initial context as an extended preface to an 1879 German study of ‘A Contribution to Descent Theory’ by Ernst Krause, translated as ‘The Scientific Works of Erasmus Darwin’ and rather awkwardly combined with Charles’s Life in a volume simply called Erasmus Darwin in 1880. For Krause, the importance C. Darwin. The Life of Erasmus Darwin, vi. Gribbin, Science: A History, 336. 39 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Black Swan, 2007), 288–9; Richard 37 38

Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (London: Penguin, 1991), 290. David Shenk has recently cited some new, apparently pro-Lamarckian, evidence that learned behaviours can be genetically transmitted to animal offspring not exposed to the initial stimuli (David Shenk, The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told about Genetics, Talent and IQ Is Wrong (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 9–10; see too Oliver Burkeman, ‘Why Everything You’ve Been Told about Evolution Is Wrong’, Guardian, 19 March 2010, G2 section, 6–9. For Erasmus Darwin’s importance as one of the ‘ghosts’ whispering in his grandson’s ear, see Rebecca Stott, Darwin’s Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists (London: Bloomsbury, 2012) 40 C. Darwin, Life of Erasmus Darwin, 33, 34–42. 41 Porter, ‘Erasmus Darwin: Doctor of Evolution?’, 59; C. Darwin, Life, 63. In Erasmus Darwin, Fara points out how earlier evolutionists were effectively ‘written out of history’ by Charles Darwin’s followers, to make natural selection look like the only possible account of the whole process (235).

Matter (1)

121

of Erasmus’s evolutionism is not in doubt: Lamarck ‘was evidently a disciple of Darwin’, and none the worse for it.42 A later admirer, George Bernard Shaw, follows a similar line in the ‘NeoLamarckian’ Preface to his futuristic play Back to Methuselah (1920): Shaw greatly prefers what he sees as both men’s ‘will’-based evolutionism to the soullessness of Charles Darwin’s blind adaptationism, which he blames for the narrow self-seeking of modern politics, from capitalism and imperialism to Marxism.43 The elder Darwin cannot be held responsible for the fact that one of Shaw’s two chief examples of a likeminded thinker is Friedrich Nietzsche, whose will-based philosophy would help to underpin his growing fascination with fascistic supermen.44 The other such thinker, and Shaw’s main source, is Samuel Butler, whose Evolution Old and New: or, The Theories of Buffon, Dr Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, as compared with that of Charles Darwin (2nd ed., New York: Dutton, 1911) criticizes the elder Darwin for failing to note the irony in which Buffon veiled his own radical theories, but firmly asserts that ‘Dr. Darwin goes beyond his successor, Lamarck’ and that ‘The chief fault to be found with Dr. Darwin’s treatise on evolution is that there is not enough of it; what there is, so far from being “erroneous,” is admirable’ (196–7). Before exploring Darwin’s extension of his theories to the development of human nature, I conclude this account of his genuinely ground-breaking evolutionary arguments with this unqualified paean by Ernst Krause, in the work to which Darwin’s grandson would make such a sidelong contribution: [Erasmus Darwin] was the first who proposed and consistently carried out, a well-rounded theory with regard to the development of the living world, a merit which shines forth most brilliantly when we compare it with the vacillating and confused attempts of Buffon, Linnaeus and Göthe. It is the idea of a power working from within the organisms to improve their natural position; ... this new view is so grand that it deserves a higher appreciation than it has ever met with. The Cartesio-Paleyan comparison of Nature with a great piece of clockwork ... is finally got rid of by it.45

Ernst Krause, Erasmus Darwin. With a Preliminary Notice by Charles Darwin (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1880), 212. 43 George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch (London: Constable, 1921), xx, xliii, lvi–lxii, etc. 44 Shaw, Back to Methuselah, liii. 45 Krause, Erasmus Darwin, 211–2. Krause’s italics. 42

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 7

Matter (2): Bodies and Minds It is, then, a myth that everyone accepted the biblical story of creation until 1859, when Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species plunged us all into a religious crisis from which we never recovered. But, however many studies demonstrate that work’s part in a long continuum of such ideas, it is a myth that we seem to need. Temple’s ‘Darwinizing’ – or arguing for ‘Man’s having progressed from an Ouran Outang state’, as Coleridge put it – was firmly enough on the map in the early 1800s to be widely known and disapproved of. However, if denying God’s direct role in the creation was bad, it was not seen as much worse than denying his power to conduct some sort of special relationship with human beings through their immaterial souls and minds. Many reviewers made little distinction between Darwin’s evolutionism and his more general ‘system of materialism’: arguing for instance that his confinement of God solely to the role of First Cause is the same as asserting that ‘the phenomena of the world arise, independently of the Deity, from the appetencies of matter alone’, or objecting to his ‘supremely absurd system’, with its ‘dangerous … total denial of any interference of the Deity in the creation and preservation of everything’, and its ‘adherence to a system of materialism, degrading to human nature’. 1 Discussing such responses to Temple, Roy Porter particularly pinpoints the broadly progressive Edinburgh Review’s horror at the ‘basic heresy’ of undermining ‘the distinction between mind & matter, thereby endowing matter with inherent vitality’.2 In Temple itself, this distinction between mind and matter is consistently undermined from the moment when the ‘landed Stranger’ – who may equally be the first land creature and the newborn human baby – brings Canto One’s bravura account of evolution’s early stages to an end. Having described the emergence of life in its first canto, Temple goes on to celebrate the psycho-physiology of sex, and then to explore the ‘Progress of the Mind’, as greatly aided by the imitative skills which humans owe to the accident of their uniquely sensitive powers of touch. Finally, its last canto attempts to console us for the way in which evolutionary competition makes a ‘slaughter-house’ of ‘the warring world’, without recourse to 1 Reviews of Temple in The Universal Magazine 1 (1804), 518; Annual Review 2 (1803), 593; Flowers of Literature 3 (1804), 464. Citing these and other passages, Julia List points out that not all were as critical, and some objected more to Darwin’s lack of proof than his arguments per se (Erasmus Darwin and the Poetry of Science, 180–85). 2 Porter, ‘Erasmus Darwin: Doctor of Evolution?’, 59; see anonymous ‘Review of The Temple of Nature’, Edinburgh Review (1803): 491–506.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

124

the standard religious answers. Reworking many psycho-physiological arguments from Darwin’s massive prose treatise on the workings of the body, Zoonomia, these three cantos largely leave behind the first canto’s overlaps with Economy’s cosmo-geology, and carry the story which began with its primal explosion right through to the formation of modern human society, and to its difficult need to recognize how totally it is created out of an evolving continuum of bodies and minds. Sex, Sight and Touch Each of Temple’s cantos has a single illustration, by Henry Fuseli. Canto One’s is the pagan-like Frontispiece depiction of the many-breasted Goddess Nature, to be discussed in the next chapter. The illustration of Canto Two, on ‘Reproduction of Life’ (facing p. 55), depicts Eve’s birth from Adam’s rib. This biblical image may seem like a counterbalancing nod to religious orthodoxy, but in fact it crystallizes a very specific scientific argument. The first part of the canto pays a lot of attention to plants and more primitive animal species which reproduce by parthenogenesis, without sexual differentiation. The birth of Eve then represents the wonderful moment of transition to sexual reproduction, which Darwin calls the ‘chef d’oeuvre’ of nature. The image of Eve emerging from the male might easily be read as a simple metaphor for this transition, but cheekily Darwin’s note suggests that the whole Edenic myth is derived from the ancient Egyptians’ ‘profound inquiries into the original state of animal existence’. Darwin’s ‘Egyptian’ rereading of the Bible will be explored in later chapters: for now it can simply be taken as a marker for the non-traditional reading of sex which it accompanies. For Darwin, the sexual act is one of the prime instances of the mind’s inextricability from bodily matter. Before moving on to other instances, it is instructive to spend a little longer on one sexual speculation where he seems to have been misled by the masculinist assumptions of his era, before correcting it in his later prose works in ways that mark him out as a genuine scientist. However, he simply seems to have found it too exciting to omit from his verse; and so in Temple we now hear how the asexual ‘original state of animal existence’ undergoes a transformation when: The potent wish in the productive hour Calls to its aid Imagination’s power, O’er embryon throngs with mystic charm presides, And sex from sex the nascent world divides. (2.117–20)

As in some of the evolutionary passages discussed earlier, Darwin’s tendency to superimpose different but analogous realities is in overdrive here. The ‘potent wish’ is in one sense the inchoate Lamarckian drive of ‘embryon throngs’ to evolve

Matter (2)

125

THE CREATION OF EVE

Fig. 7.1

Henry Fuseli, ‘The Creation of Eve’, opposite p. 55 of Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature (Joseph Johnson, 1803). Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

126

to a higher level, but it also firmly gestures at one of Darwin’s oddest theories about human reproduction, as declared in the first edition of Zoonomia (1794–6). This is that the precise identity of a child – even including its sex and appearance – is formed solely by what the father is wishing and imagining at the moment of conception. Hence the dream of Adam which Keats too would use as an image of imagination’s power – ‘he awoke and found it truth’3 – becomes for Darwin both the moment of evolutionary need which produces sex itself, and the ‘twinkle in the father’s eye’ to which all humans owe their existence. What may seem to us one of Darwin’s most extraordinary views – though it has parallels in Tristram Shandy’s belief that his ‘homunculus’ suffered irreparably from his father’s train of thought being interrupted while ejaculating – also offers a good example of his ability to change his mind.4 In Phytologia (1800) and Zoonomia’s third edition (1801) – though not fully in this last poem – he finally replaces this idea with the awareness that each parent contributes equally, as earlier argued by Buffon.5 The fact that Darwin partly deduced this by analogy with plants (which clearly cannot be thought of as imagining their offspring into existence) serves as a reminder of how little was still understood about the transmission of parental characteristics until Gregor Mendel paved the way towards modern genetics – and we might also remember that Mendel owed his own breakthrough to a close study of peas. In Temple, we enter more familiarly ‘Darwinian’ territory once sexual differentiation is achieved. The need for sex explains many of the passions which the more developed animals will share with mankind: not only love but also ‘the Demon, Jealousy’, leading to inter-male conflicts whose sexual rewards contribute to the survival of the fittest by favouring strengthened physiques and such additional weaponry as deers’ antlers, boars’ tusks and – when we get to humans – knights’ armour. Meanwhile, sex apart, other accidental developments give other advantages, including the development of the opposable thumb from ‘one family of monkeys on the banks of the Mediterranean’ (Temple 2.122n). Because of this, while sharing many passions with them, humans do differ from animals in one major respect: the delicacy of touch bestowed by the hand’s new ability to grasp and encircle objects: The hand, first gift of Heaven! to man belongs; Untipt with claws the circling fingers close, With rival points the bending thumbs oppose, Trace the nice lines of Form with sense refined, And clear ideas charm the thinking mind. (Temple 3.122–6)

John Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. M. and

3 4

N. New (1759–67), vol. 1 (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), chapters 1 and 2. 5 Phytologia, 131; Zoonomia (1801), 2.296.

Matter (2)

127

The clear ideas produced by our literal and thence metaphorical ‘grasp’ of objects in their unique separateness then enable us to recognize changes of form and hence measure movement, time and number.6 Such ‘clear ideas furnish’d by the hands’ have, however, only become negotiable by way of ‘the pure language of the Sight’, which enables us to relate and conceptualize them (3.163–4). This conceptualization is achieved through the active ‘power of imitation’, which now becomes the central topic of Temple Canto 3’s survey of the ‘Progress of the Mind’: Hence when the inquiring hands with contact fine Trace on hard forms the circumscribing line; Which then the language of the rolling eyes From distant scenes of earth and heaven supplies; Those clear ideas of the touch and sight Rouse the quick sense to anguish or delight; Whence the fine power of Imitation springs, And apes the outlines of external things; With ceaseless action to the world imparts All moral virtues, languages and arts. (Temple 3.279–88)

For Darwin, ‘Imitation’ ranges from the mind’s production of ‘ideas’, in active re-creation of sense impressions, to the numerous ways of representing these ideas in language and the creative arts, and thence to the sympathetic mirroring of others’ feelings which produces socialized behaviour. Building on the sexual and parental love we share with animals (‘Cupid’ and ‘Storge’ respectively), a combination of this awareness of others’ subjectivity with the filial sense of beauty instilled from the mother’s breast produces the platonic Eros or ‘Sentimental Love’ which ‘binds Society in golden chains’ and constitutes the ‘Origin of Society’ which gives Temple its subtitle.7 Psychology The complex of ideas clustered round ‘Imitation’ takes us firmly from the story of evolution into the realm of human psychology. The way in which Imitation combines physical/mental responses with ‘ceaseless action’ correlates to Darwin’s broader ideas about the nervous system or ‘sensorium’, which connects ‘the medullary part of the brain, spinal marrow, nerves, organs of sense, and of the muscles’ to ‘that living principle, or spirit of animation, which resides throughout the body’ (1801 Zoonomia 1.9). Darwin insistently divides the ‘motions’ of this mind-body sensorium into the four ‘faculties’ of irritation, sensation, volition and association, in a way which Desmond King-Hele has called ‘about as clear Temple, 3.129–30, 125n; see Porter, ‘Erasmus Darwin’, 57. See Temple, 3.177–206. For the Cupid / Eros distinction see 3.178n, and for Storge

6 7

see AN 9.

128

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

as mud’, but which Roy Porter has seen as ‘an extremely ambitious attempt to unite the … physiology of nervous stimulus and response with the utilitarian associationism of Locke, Hartley and [Darwin’s] friend Priestley’.8 Each of these four faculties is ‘an exertion or change’ in a ‘part of the sensorium’, which may be physical or mental. To simplify: something impinges on our bodily nerves (irritation), our mind processes it (sensation), we do something in response (volition), and that response often involves others linked to it by habit (association).9 The ‘something we do’ may be mental as well as physical, and the ‘association’ may be physical as well as mental, as when we unthinkingly use numerous muscular contractions to pick something up. Though sometimes cumbersome, this formula has the advantage of covering everything, from the first twitchings of the primeval microbes in Canto 1 to the post-Lockean ‘associations of ideas’ underlying Darwin’s theories of imagination, aesthetic response, dreams and madness, as we shall see in a moment. Between these extremes, Darwin manages to make these four categories sufficiently robust for ‘diseases’ or imbalances in one or other of them to account for all the human ailments listed in Zoonomia, the bulk of which is designed as a guide for fellow-physicians. One area of mind-body crossover which particularly interested Darwin is what he calls ‘reverie’, described in Zoonomia as ‘the pursuit of some interesting train of ideas’ in which ‘we cease to be conscious of our existence, are inattentive to time and place, and do not distinguish this train of sensitive and voluntary ideas from the irritative ones excited by the presence of external objects’ (Zoonomia [1801] 1.317). This divorce of ‘sensitive and voluntary’ mental activity from the external physical ‘irritations’ with which it usually interacts accounts for a range of exceptional psychosomatic states, from occasional sleep-walking and -talking to lifelong ‘diseases of volition’, as in the case of a Warwickshire farmer who believed he was cursed to remain cold forever, however many coats and blankets he was covered with (4.68–9). This last case became the basis for Wordsworth’s ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, to be discussed in Chapter 11; and there are many further connections with Darwin’s ideas on reverie and allied states in the works of the Romantic period. Hence when Coleridge talks about ‘that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith’,10 he quite closely echoes Darwin’s account of the ‘reverie’ induced by works of art: When by the art of the Painter or Poet a train of ideas is suggested to our imaginations, which interests us so much …, that we cease … to use any voluntary efforts to compare [them] with our previous knowledge of things, a 8 King-Hele, Doctor of Revolution, 238; Porter, ‘Erasmus Darwin’, 46. For Porter, the stimulus-response physiology derived ultimately from Albrecht von Haller, by way of several of Darwin’s Edinburgh mentors. 9 Temple, AN 2.13, citing Zoonomia (1801), 1.39–40. 10 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions (London: Rest Fenner, 1817), Chapter 14.

Matter (2)

129

compleat reverie is produced: during which time, … be it but for a moment, the objects themselves appear to exist before us.11

This account appears in The Loves of the Plants, which also offers a full-length poetic description of a nightmare: a different kind of reverie where disbelief is suspended by no means willingly. Placed in the ‘gothic’ third canto which selects plants with some connection to the idea of horror, the initial description of ‘Laura’ or laurel (3.39–78) as a single pistil surrounded by ‘twenty priests’ or stamens fit well with the idea of Laura as herself the powerful Delphic oracle, inspired by her own hallucinogenic leaves to deliver ‘unwill’d’ prophecies on which ‘[c]ontending hosts and trembling nations wait’ (3.47). 12 But in an apparent reversal of these powerful associations, the simile which follows picks up only on the idea of ‘unwill’d’ mental processes, as represented by the passive female dream victim in Henry Fuseli’s bestknown painting, ‘The Nightmare’ (3.51–78).13 In Darwin’s poetic reworking of Fuseli’s painting, all agency is given to the incubus or ‘squab Fiend’ (3.52), whose ghostly steed is only included in the picture to literalize the idea of Nightmare: it is the Fiend’s sitting on her breast that induces the sleeper’s tormented visions of warfare, slain lovers and the ‘stern-eye’d Murderer with his knife behind’ (3.67). As Darwin’s note makes clear, the Fiend symbolizes the ‘suspension of the power of volition’ which induces nightmare when in conflict with the ‘painful desire’ to move (3.74n): hence the Incubus with his petrifying ‘Gorgon eyes’ and ‘leathern ears’ indifferent to her cries is not a figure from her dreams but an externalization of her own stifling/stifled body (3.77–8). A circle of a kind is thus completed with the Delphic oracle Laura’s identity with the laurel which sends her into a different reality. Arguably, the interplay between the powerful prophetess and the powerless dreamer makes Darwin’s account of Fuseli’s painting a significant nexus for Romantic ideas of the empowered-because-disempowered imagination, as in Coleridge’s suspension of disbelief or Keats’s ‘Negative Capability’.14 However, the response of the depressive poet William Cowper to this passage was more simple and basic: ‘Most of our readers have suffered at times by the distressing incubations of the NIGHT-MARE, and all who have, will taste [this] passage.’15 Given the way in which Cowper’s own conviction of personal damnation was repeatedly exacerbated by terrible dreams, the word ‘taste’ has rarely been more poignantly applied. Loves, Interlude 1.52–3. The description of Laura conforms to Janet Browne’s suggestion (discussed in

11

12

Chapter 4) that flowers whose single pistil is surrounded by many stamens are often given attributes of special power by Darwin. See Browne, ‘Botany for Gentlemen’, 612. 13 Part of this passage had been written and appended to a print of the picture as early as 1783, and in fact helped to establish the personal connection with Fuseli which led to Darwin’s continuing fruitful association with Fuseli’s publisher Joseph Johnson as well as the artist himself. See King-Hele, Unequalled Achievement, 173. 14 See Ross, ‘To Charm thy Curious Eye’, 380–82. 15 Cowper, Review of Loves, Analytical Review 4 (May–August 1789): 34.

130

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

Nightmarc London Published June 1791 by J.Johnson & Pauls Church Yard

Fig. 7.2

Henry Fuseli, ‘Nightmare’, opposite p. 126 of Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, Part Two: The Loves of the Plants, 4th ed. (1799). Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library.

Matter (2)

131

Darwin’s insistence on applying his four types of ‘motion’ to every kind of mental or physical activity carries the polemical point that we can never talk about bodies and minds in isolation: the profoundest thought and the least conscious reflex or habitual action, such as breathing, are all simply motions at various points between the ‘extreme’ and ‘central’ parts of the single holistic sensorium which makes us into sentient beings. For Alan Richardson, this flow between mind and body allows for a new ‘emphasis on unconscious mental processes guided by habit and “natural” desire’ which makes Darwin a key contributor to a new ‘neural romanticism’, differing markedly from the ‘mechanistic’, purely receptive psychology of Locke and Hartley.16 For Darwin, we construct our mental impressions from a range of external signs, rather than merely receiving them passively. Richardson points to Zoonomia’s use of optical illusions, such as coloured dots producing oppositely coloured after-images, and suggests that its references to the dizzy after-impressions of spinning round in circles could well have influenced the famous skating episode in Wordsworth’s Prelude.17 The similar ‘Romantic’ subjectivism of lines like Cowper’s ‘myself creating what I saw’ or Coleridge’s ‘we receive but we give/ And in our life alone does Nature live’18 is more often traced back to Berkeley’s Essay on Vision, but Darwin draws significantly on Berkeley and was, arguably, himself a significant conduit for his ideas. Thus Neil Vickers argues that Darwin’s reading of Berkeley remained a strong influence on Coleridge well after the latter’s rejection of Hartleyan materialism, as witness his ‘abstruse researches’ into the overlap between the senses of sight and touch.19 But despite its Berkeleyan-idealist dimensions, it was for its materialist underpinnings that Darwin’s somatic psychology drew most attention, of an increasingly negative kind. In his significant study of Darwin’s influence on nineteenth-century psychology, From Soul to Mind, Edward S. Reed argues that his insistence on the mind and body as a single continuum made Darwin ‘the most important European psychologist’ of the early nineteenth century, in the negative sense that it was to escape the atheistic implications of his ‘Frankenstein’s Science’ that the study of the mind/soul was established as a separate psychiatric discipline, in which – from the later 1810s – all reference to Darwin’s ‘underground psychology’ of the mind’s formation directly from the body was firmly and deliberately suppressed.20 16 Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 14, 12–16. 17 Richardson, British Romanticism, 12–13; William Wordsworth, 1805 Prelude 1.478–86. 18 Cowper, The Task, 4.290; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Dejection: An Ode’ (1817), 47–8; Temple, 3.144n. 19 Neil Vickers, ‘Coleridge’s “Abstruse Researches,”’ in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 168–74. See too Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 29. 20 Edward S. Reed, From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to William James (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), xi, 43.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

132

Frankenstein’s Science Reed is not alone in seeing links between Darwin and ‘Frankenstein’s science’.21 The connection is brought home from the start of Frankenstein’s first Preface by Percy Shelley (1818): ‘The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence.’22 This is amplified in Mary Shelley’s 1831 Introduction, where she describes her memories of how Percy and Byron ‘talked of the experiments of Dr Darwin … who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion’.23 The ‘vermicelli’ (i.e. little worms) are probably an indistinct memory from Temple’s long note on ‘Spontaneous Vitality of Microscopic Animals’, which describes the apparent self-generation of tiny wriggling vorticella in ‘a sealed glass phial’, while the growth of other little quasi-worms in ‘a paste composed of flour and water’ may have subliminally suggested the ‘pasta’ dimension of Mary’s admittedly garbled recollection.24 Percy’s 1818 reference to ‘German physiologists’ points to a hinterland of ideas about the material basis of ‘vitality’ which connects Darwin to the Shelleys’ controversial doctor-friend William Lawrence, by way of the physiologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, under whom Lawrence had studied at Göttingen University. Lawrence almost lost his Chair of Anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons after a much-publicized controversy in which he maintained that the human capacity for life was inherent in biological organization rather than being mysteriously ‘superadded’ in some divine way as his rival, John Abernethy, maintained. As one See Christa Knellwolf and Jane Goodall, eds, Frankenstein’s Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780–1830 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), many of whose essays trace this science specifically to Darwin. 22 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: Or The Modern Prometheus – The 1818 Text, ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3. In ‘Evolution, Revolution and Frankenstein’s Creature’, in Knellwolf and Goodall, eds, Frankenstein’s Science, Allan K. Hunter links Darwin’s model of the sensorium to the Creature’s self-fashioning through experiences of pain and pleasure (139); the fears that the latter’s request for a mate will produce a rapidly expanding ‘race of devils’ to Temple’s Malthusian fears about ‘unrestrain’d’ overpopulation (M. Shelley, Frankenstein, 138; Temple, 4.369); and the Creature’s formation from ‘the unhallowed damps of the grave’ to Darwin’s insistence on a continuity of organic matter whereby ‘Emerging matter from the grave returns’ (M. Shelley, Frankenstein, 36; Temple, 4.399–400; Hunter, ‘Evolution, Revolution’, 140; see too Carlos Seligo, ‘The Monsters of Botany and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’, Science Fiction: Critical Frontiers, ed. K. Sayer and J. Moore (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). 23 M. Shelley, Frankenstein, 195–6. 24 Temple, AN, 3; see Jane Goodall, ‘Electrical Romanticism’, in Knellwolf and Goodall, eds., Frankenstein’s Science, 118. The undoubted presence of even less visible spores inside the glass phials designed to exclude them clearly invalidates what Darwin saw as good evidence for his theory that ‘Organic life began beneath the waves’; but his more valid conviction that matter must have shifted from an inorganic to a living state at some point is clearly a strong influence on Mary Shelley’s novel of assisted self-generation. 21

Matter (2)

133

of Abernethy’s defenders triumphantly pointed out, Lawrence’s supposed view that ‘there is no other difference between a man and an oyster, than that one possesses bodily organs more fully developed than the other’ echoes Dr Darwin’s favourite ‘creed’ that ‘man, when he first sprang by chance into being, was an oyster, and nothing more.’25 Clearly, by imagining a situation where life – however mysterious – is instilled by organic rather than divine means and then affords the Creature a full range of human thoughts and emotions, Mary Shelley sides with Darwin and Lawrence against the superadded mind/soul of Lawrence’s opponents.26 The Lawrence-Abernethy debate is sometimes described as ‘the Vitalism Controversy’, but there are various possible views as to what ‘vitalism’ actually means. In giving human (but not animal) ‘vitality’ a supra-material status allowing for the insertion of the God-given soul, Abernethy certainly championed one kind of ideological vitalism.27 But there was also a more ‘holding statement’ view which located life firmly in the body while admitting there was something mysterious about it which still had to be discovered: hence Lawrence’s mentor Blumenbach stressed that his term Bildungstrieb (or ‘formative drive’) ‘serves merely to designate a peculiar power formed by the combination of the mechanical principle with that which is susceptible of modification’.28 For Darwin too, ‘vitality’ is an ‘ethereal flame’ we cannot fully explain, though it does belong equally to humans and oysters, and completely to the world of matter which we after all know to be governed by other material ‘ethers’ such as gravity.29 Nonetheless, for the Quoted in one of Marilyn Butler’s appendices to M. Shelley, Frankenstein, 243. As a pioneer of racial anthropology with his De generis humani varietate nativa

25 26

[On the Natural Variety of Mankind] (University of Göttingen, 1775), Blumenbach may also have influenced the far more explicit racism of Lawrence’s Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man (London: J. Callow, 1819), 476. 27 See Holmes, Age of Wonder, 309–13, and Marilyn Butler’s Introduction to M. Shelley, Frankenstein, xviii–xx. 28 Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Über den Bildungstrieb and das Zeugungsgeschäfte (Göttingen: J. C. Dieterich, 1781). See Richards, Romantic Conception of Life, 216–29. 29 As Sharon Ruston argues, Darwin denied that ‘the principle of life can move and [a]ffect matter without being, in some part, matter itself’ (Sharon Ruston, Shelley and Vitality [Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005], 31). What Roy Porter called his ‘physiological vitalism’ (Porter, ‘Erasmus Darwin’, 59) had strong roots in his medical training in Edinburgh, where the Cartesian dualism between an inert, purely machine-like body and superadded soul had been increasingly questioned. C.U.M. Smith stresses Darwin’s debt to his Edinburgh professor Robert Whytt, whose Essay on the Vital and Other Involuntary Motions of Animals (1763) rejected the ‘reductionist dualism’ of Boerhaave and ‘developed the idea of a sentient non-material agent acting through the medium of the nervous system’ (‘All from Fibres: Erasmus Darwin’s Evolutionary Psychobiology’, Genius of Erasmus Darwin, 134). Maureen McNeil also explores the Edinburgh connection, emphasizing the identification of life with ‘excitability’ by William Cullen and his maverick successor John Brown (McNeil, Under the Banner of Science, 153). However, McNeil’s insistence that this identification led Darwin to a ‘mechanical’ view of the body which legitimized turning workers into machines is rebuked by Porter, for whom his insistence on vital energy shows that ‘Darwin was concerned to rescue ‘man’ from the aspersions of being just a machine’ (Porter, ‘Erasmus Darwin’, 60).

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

134

religious Coleridge, Darwin’s sense that the nature of life ‘is utterly inexplicable’ distinguished him favourably from other materialists, such as John Thelwall, who saw it simply as ‘the result of organized matter acted on by external stimuli’.30 The question of exactly how ‘vital warmth’ relates to physical organization was one of the period’s chief physiological problems. Temple’s account of evolution tries to explain this link in terms of a four-stage process involving ‘Repulsion. Attraction. Contraction. Life’: the heat of the Primal explosion and subsequent chemical reactions force atoms of matter apart, and this Repulsion is then counteracted by a gravity-like Attraction which somehow recombines them, so that Cords grapple cords, and webs with webs unite; And quick Contraction with ethereal flame Lights into life the fibre-woven frame. (Temple 1.235–46)

With its neat match to other Darwin quaternities – the four ‘faculties of the sensorium’, the four elements, and the four cantos of the major poems – the fourfold repulsion-attraction-contraction-life arrangement has tidiness to recommend it, but does not explain exactly how the ‘ethereal flame’ of life starts to impel the first proto-muscular ‘contractions’. There was, however, an obvious candidate for this. Electricity Mary Shelley’s comment on the (supposedly Darwinian) process of waiting for a piece of pasta to animate itself – that ‘not thus, after all, would life be given’ – is followed by a more promising possibility: ‘galvanism had given token of such things.’31 One case in point – noted by Richard Holmes – was Giovanni Aldini’s near-reanimation of a hanged London murderer in 1803 by applying electric shocks whereby ‘the jaw began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and the left eye actually opened.’32 In the 1780s, Luigi Galvani had apparently demonstrated that the twitchings of dissected frogs’ legs revealed an innate ‘vital electrical fluid’ and, though later shown by Alessandro Volta and others to have been caused by the metal used in his experiments,33 the idea of a link between life and electricity and/or magnetism underlay a craze for electric-shock machines and the work of such showmen as Dr James Graham – who invented sex therapy with his electrified ‘bed of Hymen’34 – 32 33 30

Coleridge, letter to John Thelwall, 31 December 1796. M. Shelley, Frankenstein, 195–6. Holmes, Age of Wonder , 317. Holmes, Age of Wonder, 314; Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee and Peter Kitson, Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 192–3. 34 See Lydia Syson, Doctor of Love: James Graham and His Celestial Bed (Richmond, Surrey: Alma Books, 2008), 182–6. 31

Matter (2)

135

and Anton Mesmer, whose cures by ‘animal magnetism’ were satirized in Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte (1790). Though much intrigued by such issues, Darwin did not literally believe that life was some form of electricity: he certainly had no time at all for Mesmerism – ‘necromancy, astrology, chiromancy, witchcraft, and vampyrism, have vanished from all classes of society; though some are still so weak in the present enlightened times as to believe in the prodigies of animal magnetism’ (Temple, 4.270n) – and in Zoonomia he queries Galvani’s attempts ‘to show a similitude between the spirit of animation … and the electric fluid’, stating firmly that ‘animal contraction is governed by laws of its own, and not those of mechanics, chemistry, magnetism, or electricity.’35 Nonetheless, Darwin suggests a series of similar links when, Early in Temple’s third canto, the Muses conduct a series of electro-magnetic experiments and mark how two electric streams conspire To form the resinous and vitreous fire; Beneath the waves the fierce Gymnotus arm, And give Torpedo his benumbing charm; Or, through Galvanic chain-work as they pass, Convert the kindling water into gas. How at the poles opposing Ethers dwell, Attract the quivering needle, or repel. … And last how born in elemental strife Beam’d the first spark, and lighten’d into Life.36

Zoonomia, 1.83; see too Rafaella Simili, ‘Two Special Doctors: Erasmus Darwin and Luigi Galvani’, in Genius of Erasmus Darwin, 153; and McNeil, Under the Banner of Science, 155. 36 (Temple 3.21–8, 33–4). John Hunter’s experiments with electric eels (Darwin’s ‘Gymnotus’) would become thoroughly entwined with the vitalism debate: Lawrence mocked his rival Abernethy’s attempt to link his ‘superadded’ model of vitality directly to electricity (Marilyn Butler, Introduction to M. Shelley, Frankenstein, xx), a link partly suggested by the electric-eel research of the latter’s mentor Hunter. The four lines I have omitted from the quoted Temple passage also set the ‘repulsive’ heat and ‘attractive’ gravity whose balance shapes all matter alongside the positive/negative bipolarities of magnetism and ‘resinous and vitreous’ electricity (so called from the surfaces whose rubbing seemed to cause different kinds of ‘fire’ before Franklin, Priestley, Volta and others established their connection as poles of a single force). This attempt to form a grand unifying theory of ‘ethers’ takes us to the longest of all Darwin’s notes, AN 12 (‘Chemical Theory of Electricity and Magnetism’), which also takes in chemistry and – perhaps unsurprisingly – sex, in a way which seems to finally fulfil the promise of Temple’s opening call to Love to ‘Press drop to drop, to atom atom bind,/ Link sex to sex, or rivet mind to mind’ (1.25–6). Darwin’s Eros is his ‘Chemical Theory of Electricity and Magnetism’ made rosy-lipped poetic flesh. 35

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

136

The way in which these experiments are immediately followed by a plunge into this canto’s theme of ‘the progress of the Mind’ suggests – while not quite affirming – a quasi-electrical source for the human power of thought as well as life: a train of connections suggesting that the ‘galvanism’ which Mary Shelley saw as making up the inadequacies of wriggling pasta might have also had a source in Darwin’s Temple. Accepting Matter At every level, Darwin’s science works to integrate the apparent stasis of physical matter with the idea of ceaseless energy and motion. Arguably all theories of matter have to do this to a certain extent, but Darwin’s sense of a continuous evolution from the primal explosion to the constant attraction-repulsion interplay energizing all matter at the atomic level, and thence to the active ‘volitions’ connecting us to the rest of the organic world from our simplest sense-perceptions to the most refined sympathies and the ‘chef d’oeuvre’ of sex, is extraordinary in its sweep and range. But if this vision of Nature as endlessly creative – rather than simply created – is the main subject of his poetry, he is not blind to the ways in which this very creativity also entails massive destruction. Just as its invocation to Love echoes the opening of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, Temple ends with an attempt to address the issues raised by its conclusion. Lucretius simply leaves us – strangely and unsettlingly – with a gruelling description of plague-stricken Athens piled high with the dead and dying, as a terrible image of what matter can do to matter, and hence perhaps a reason not to pin our hopes on anything beyond the well-lived moment.37 For a long Anti-Lucretian tradition, this bleak conclusion stands as a key marker for the inadequacies of non-salvatory atheism, as compared to the Christian promise of an afterlife summed up in St Paul’s exclamation, ‘O death, where is thy sting? Oh grave, where is thy victory?’38 Darwin fights through to the same affirmation as St Paul, but by a very different, wholly materialist route. At the start of Temple’s last canto, the poet’s Muse speaks out for the first time on the harshness of the material world described so glowingly up to now. Starting with a direct translation of Virgil’s famous praise of science, widely acknowledged as a tribute to Lucretius (‘Blest is the Sage, who learn’d in Nature’s laws/ … views the insatiate Grave with eye sedate’),39 she nonetheless laments the horrors of the ceaseless struggle of all organisms for survival: Air, earth, and ocean, to astonish’d day One scene of blood, one mighty tomb display! From Hunger’s arm the shafts of Death are hurl’d, And one great Slaughter-house the warring world! (Temple 4.63–6).

Lucretius, DRN, 6.1138–286. 1 Corinthians, 15.55; see Temple, 4.402–4. 39 Temple, 4.7–10; Virgil, Georgics, 2.490–92. 37

38

Matter (2)

137

This Darwinian vision of the survival of the fittest long precedes the mid-Victorian era with which it is usually identified, and helps to contextualize the imagery of ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’ which fills Tennyson’s In Memoriam ten years before the appearance of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species.40 Like Lucretius’ poem, the Muse’s complaint climaxes with a vision of ‘livid Pestilence’, which combines with the ‘Dearth’ of poverty to devastate ‘the shuddering Earth’, nip young lives in the bud and bear ‘the innocuous strangers to the tomb!’ (Temple 4.117–22). But Lucretius simply leaves us staring at his Athenian plague, either because his poem is unfinished or because he is testing to the limit the philosophical resolve he hopes to have already instilled. Darwin, by contrast, tries to make science give more positive answers: reproving the poetic Muse’s sensibilitous despair, the scientific Urania first enumerates life’s benefits, from the simple ‘bliss of being’ and the direct pleasures of the eye and ear (4.150–82) to the achievements of the creative arts (4.291–336) and the idealizations of ‘Fancy’ which have inspired patriots, philanthropists and scientists to make the world a better place (4.182–290). From here, she moves to Thomas Malthus’s argument that ‘war and pestilence, disease and dearth’ (4.373) are necessary brakes on human population, while skirting round his notorious corollary that most attempts at social improvement are therefore a waste of time. But the main plank of Urania’s argument – building on Lucretius’ foundational assertion that ‘nothing can be created out of nothing’41 – is the conservation of organic matter: While Nature sinks in Time’s destructive storms, The wrecks of Death are but a change of forms; Emerging matter from the grave returns, Feels new desires, with new sensations burns. Thus sainted Paul, ‘O Death!’ exulting cries, ‘Where is thy sting? O Grave! thy victories?’ (Temple 4.395–404)

With quizzical brevity, the related note identifies ‘the resurrection of the body’ in an improved state, ‘with consciousness of its previous existence’, as clearly all that St Paul’s exclamation could possibly be referring to. Presumably, if not discernible to our minds, this ‘consciousness’ lives on in our bodies. Even the sedimentary rocks and soil of the earth are part of this process, ‘Mighty Monuments of Past Delight’ (4.450) which store the remains of past pleasure-enjoying organisms so that ‘the Bliss of Being’ (4.446) can be recycled to new ones. It was for such reasons that Pythagoras taught

See King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin (1963), 79. According to Fara (Erasmus Darwin, 236), Charles’s own copy of Temple, now in Cambridge University Library, marks this ‘Slaughter-house’ passage for special attention. 41 DRN, 1.155–6. 40

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

138

With ceaseless change how restless atoms pass From life to life, a transmigrating mass

and hence That man should ever be the friend of man; Should eye with tenderness all living forms, His brother-emmets, and his sister-worms. (4.419–20, 426–8)

After these affirmations of Love’s power to ‘link mind to mind’, and unlike Lucretius’s staring-out of the abyss at the heart ‘Of the Nature of Things’, the last moments of Darwin’s last poem return us to the mighty Temple of Nature, whose mass choric celebration of the enthroned Goddess climaxes with Urania’s final unveiling of her – and no other god’s – ‘Truth Divine’ (4.463–524). These two chapters have aimed primarily to describe the scientific ‘matter’ of Economy and Temple, and only secondarily their manner of conveying it. For most of the rest of this book, these two poems return to their status as cultural objects, to be situated in a context of poetic modes and social beliefs, with the issues of mental space and narrative time once more to the fore. Accordingly, we turn next to the imaginative hinterland which enables Darwin to place his devastatingly materialist history of Nature in a fantastically described temple of which she is, beyond any doubt, the goddess.

Chapter 8

Myths

The last chapter brought the proto–(Charles) Darwinian story of evolution up to the point where Nature’s last veil is about to be removed. This image serves as a reminder that the preceding poem’s whole survey of cosmic space and deep time has been conducted within an ancient-looking temple, where the castle-crowned, many-breasted Goddess of Nature has always been present in the dead centre, and only our perspective on her has changed. This goddess is at once the object of ongoing scientific inquiry and the Isis, Cybele or Diana Multimammia who once both nurtured and terrified the ancient world. Chapter 2 of this book contrasted Darwin’s ‘Enlightened Spaces’ with the time-impelled narratives of both Romanticism and ‘Darwinian’ evolution, and drew attention to the figure of Time, lying ‘by sculpture bound’ on the floor of the densely pictorialized Temple of Nature. The chapter connected the idea of Darwin’s urge to immobilize Time with Foucault’s and Bernal’s arguments about how a spatial, Linnaean-style mapping or tabulation of knowledge was about to be replaced by an inrush of time-aware historicity, bringing in its wake Romanticism and the Charles-Darwinian ‘tree’ of continuing evolution. For Bernal, this earlier spatialism was further connected to a long-held ‘Ancient Model’ of widespread cultural dissemination to Greece from Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean, as opposed to the nineteenth-century ‘Aryan Model’ of a founding northern input into Greece, which enabled Europe to picture itself as the bearer of historical change to other races and nations. Bernal also argues that two important vectors of the Egypt-based Ancient Model of cultural orientation were the Hermetic alchemy of the Renaissance – named after Hermes Trismegistus, who was also the Egyptian wisdom-god Thoth – and the Freemasonry into which many of its traditions transmuted in the eighteenth century. These are traditions in which Darwin is deeply embedded, and the present chapter and the next two will try to explore some of the tensions which his commitment to cutting-edge modern science sets up with his continuing commitment to the Egyptianized Ancient Model in the very late eighteenth century. Weird Science The difficulty of handling such topics is suggested by the staggering sales of Dan Brown’s ‘symbological’ thrillers, the blockbusting The Da Vinci Code (2003) and its companion novels Angels and Demons and The Lost Symbol. From the outing of Europe’s greatest geniuses as secret Illuminati or Knights Templar to the quest for a vast Masonic pyramid hidden in the heart of Washington, DC, these novels

140

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

plug straight into a great pool of continuing popular speculation about secretive anti-religions and the dotting of the world’s great capitals with covert Egyptian symbols, and as such have excited equal measures of public excitement and educated critical contempt. The conglomeration of ideas and practices which included Masonry, Rosicrucianism, Illuminism, Hermetic mysticism and a general fascination with Egypt played a real part in the intellectual life of Enlightenment Europe as well as America. And yet – except in the case of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, or when a select few writers such as Blake and Yeats make it impossible to avoid – current criticism finds such weirdo material exceptionally hard to deal with. There is, arguably, a real fear of contamination in the thought of taking such crankiness seriously, coupled (in Freemasonry’s case) with a now rather outdated fear that its mysteries cannot be spoken of without arousing the ire of dark forces. Only a few studies have successfully bridged the divide between the academic and the cultish; yet these topics open up important dimensions of politics, sociality and artistic imagination which standard accounts of Enlightenment culture are often handicapped by ignoring.1 This was a culture which interpenetrated the arts and sciences of the Enlightenment at numerous points, and in this chapter I shall argue that it receives strong expression in Darwin’s poetry. The fact that he himself became a Freemason as a young student in Edinburgh is not the main point here: what is more important is the range of ways in which he uses this culture’s imagery to draw the arts and sciences together, and his assumption of a significant readership able to pick up the connections he is making. His most striking devices for figuring these art-science connections are to be found in the ‘machineries’ of his two major poems: Economy’s Rosicrucian spirits 1 Of the relatively few serious studies, those by Margaret C. Jacob and Frances A. Yates are discussed later in this chapter. On individual writers and artists, Ronald Paulson’s Hogarth: Volume 2. High Art and Low, 1732–1750 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992) and Jennifer N. Wunder’s Keats, Hermeticism and the Secret Societies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009) stand out for their serious consideration of their subjects’ engagement with Masonic or Hermetic imagery. Iain McCalman’s Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988) and The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro: Count Cagliostro, Master of Magic in the Age of Reason (London: Century, 2003) consider Masonic and other mythologies as important aspects of Romantic-period culture, but chiefly as a kind of cover for radicalism in other areas. There are useful discussions of mythology making some mention of Darwin in Nigel Leask, ‘Mythology’, in An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, ed. Iain McCalman and Jon Mee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) , 338–45; and in Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1992), 147–59. A lengthier, if rather idiosyncratic, reading of Darwin’s engagement with myth can be found in Elizabeth Sewell’s The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960) but the most penetrating older discussions of Darwin’s mythography are the two 1970s articles by Irwin Primer and Robert N. Ross to be discussed later in this chapter. On broader Enlightenment mythography, Frank E. Manuel’s The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959) remains one of the best guides.

Myths

141

and Temple’s ‘Eleusinian’ temple of instruction. But both of these are underlain by a more general way of reading classical myths which runs through all Darwin’s poems, and might at first sight seem to be simply what we expect from such a neoclassical age. However, I hope that the following reading of these readings will take us progressively through what looks like a fairly straightforward penchant for classical references, towards some of the weirder depths of the Enlightenment Ancient Model. Classical Myths: Bacon and Spence Darwin’s three major poems are littered with mythical narratives, in the form of the Homeric similes which both illustrate and offer relief from his science. These are typically presented with a single linking word such as ‘So’, ‘Thus’ or ‘Hence’, marking the transition from ‘fact’ to ‘illustration’ in a way which can seem highly repetitive at times, but does have the advantage of economy. In The Loves of the Plants, most of the classical or biblical myths referred to resemble the poem’s other little stories in starting from some fanciful point of resemblance to the plant being described, with no further necessary implications.2 However, one myth is treated differently: the torments of Prometheus’s liver for his gift of stolen fire to man are compared, not to the physical details of the vineplant, but to the effects of the wine it produces. The myth is seen not just as offering a chance parallel but as a deliberately constructed ‘hieroglyphic’ allegory for the damaging effects of alcohol: ‘The swallowing drams cannot be better represented in hieroglyphic language than by taking fire into one’s bosom; and certain it is, that the general effect of drinking fermented or spirituous liquors is an inflamed, schirrous, or paralytic liver’ (Loves 3.371n). The idea that myths are ancient ‘hieroglyphic’ allegories of material truths – some only now being rediscovered by modern science – becomes much more significant in The Economy of Vegetation and The Temple of Nature. Hence Economy links the incorporation of Medusa’s snaky hair in Minerva’s shield to the human harnessing of fire; the birth of Eros to the expansive heat which set the universe in motion; and the half-death which shuttles Adonis between Venus and Proserpine to the ‘decomposition and resuscitation of animal matter’ which dies

2 Thus the Amazon queen Thalestris’s warlike stature is compared to the enormous size of the Kleinhovia tree; the once-mighty Nebuchadnezzar’s grass-eating to the greening of the fertilized Hellebore; Medea’s infanticides to Impatiens’s projection of its seeds; the snakes which throttled Laocoon and his sons to the parasitic Cuscuta; the harmless fire playing round Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to the Nasturtium’s electric flashes; the transformation of Lot’s wife (and hence Orpheus’s and Aeneas’s comparable losses of their wives) to the Saline Basil’s daily excretion of salt; Hercules’ cross-dressing with his wife Dejanira to the stamen-covered pistil of the ‘masculine lady’ Arum; and the swimming Leander to various waterweeds.

142

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

and is then recycled in new organisms.3 After a very mythically dense opening (to be discussed later), Temple revisits many of the same myths as Economy, in broadly the same spirit. Thus Venus’s sea birth is linked to the emergence of land; Ovid’s story of animals emerging from Nile mud to the real facts of evolution; and Eve’s birth from Adam’s rib to the switch from asexual to sexual reproduction.4 In Economy and Temple, then, myths are often read as deliberate scientific allegories. The main model Darwin himself cites for this view is Francis Bacon’s De Sapientia Veterum or Of the Wisdom of the Ancients (1609, trans. 1619). As the Economy Apology puts it: Many of the important operations of Nature were shadowed or allegorized in the heathen mythology, as the first Cupid springing from the Egg of Night, the marriage of Cupid and Psyche, the Rape of Proserpine, the Congress of Jupiter and Juno, Death and Resuscitation of Adonis, &c. many of which are ingeniously explained in the works of Bacon. (Economy vii)

Bacon’s account of the first of these examples is a main source for Canto One’s lines on Immortal Love: Thus when the Egg of Night, on Chaos hurl’d, Burst, and disclosed the cradle of the world; First from the gaping shell refulgent sprung Immortal Love, his bow celestial strung. (Economy 1.413–6) 3 Economy, 1.217–22, 413–20; 2.575–600. Other instances in Economy include the comparison of Venus’s marriage with Vulcan to the beauty accompanying volcanic eruptions; the labours of Hercules to the achievements of steam power; Jupiter’s destruction of Semele to the scorching effect of over-hot summers; the fire which lit Elijah’s sacrificial pyre and subsequent rainfall to the effects of the lightning-gathering sky-needles Darwin hopes will someday eliminate drought; the sea birth of Venus to the first emergence of land; Vulcan’s capture of Venus while making love with the fiery Mars to the chemical combination of ‘azote’ and ‘pure air’ (nitrogen and oxygen) which expels heat; Jupiter’s affairs with earth-born women to oxygen’s combination (as Darwin thought) with various minerals to produce acids; Jupiter’s shower-bringing marriage with Juno to the production of water from hydrogen and oxygen (pace Jupiter’s earlier production of acids as oxygen, he is now the hydrogen); Hercules’s diversion of the river Achelous to modern canal building; the marriage of Psyche and Cupid to the freeing of oxygen into the atmosphere by sunlight; the fall of Icarus to an early ballooning accident; the rape of the flower-gathering Proserpina by the subterranean Pluto to the oxidization of metal by plant-generated oxygen; and the destruction of Sennacherib’s army to various deadly desert winds. 4 Temple 1.371–8, 401–20; 2.135–58. Other instances in Temple include the comparison of Adonis’s alternation between Venus and Proserpina (again) to the recycling of organic matter; the marriage of Psyche and Cupid (this time) to the triumph of sexual love; the Trojan war over Helen to male animals’ fights over females; Abraham’s feeding of the angels to the scientific Muse’s regaling of the poet’s muse with the fruit of Knowledge; Eros’s love for ‘Dione’ (who may or may not be Venus) to the Platonic love which ‘binds Society in silken chains’; and Adam and Eve’s discovery of Evil through eating the apple to the guilt induced by eating meat.

Myths

143

As Bacon presents it, the elder Cupid – or Love as opposed to the younger Cupid of sexual desire – signifies ‘the appetite or desire of the first matter, or (to speak more plaine), the naturall motion of the Atome’, whose ability to attract at a distance is symbolized by his arrows, while the egg of obscure night from which he springs appropriately tallies with the inability of such early atomists as Epicurus to explain this attraction adequately. Cupid is naked because ‘nothing [is] properly naked but the first particles of things.’5 Darwin again follows Bacon in seeing Pluto’s rape of Proserpina as an early account of oxidization by fire or rust, pointing out in addition that even his friend Priestley’s experiments with oxygen or ‘pure air’ were anticipated by the ancients: The fable of Proserpine’s being seized by Pluto as she was gathering flowers, is explained by Lord Bacon to signify the combination or marriage of etherial spirit with earthly materials. … This allusion is still more curiously exact, from the late discovery of pure air being given up from vegetables, and that then in its unmixed state it more readily combines with metallic or inflammable bodies. 6

Bacon, then, offers Darwin a general method for reading ancient myths and applying them to modern science. But for his structuring of such perceptions within the quadripartite, four-element ‘machinery’ of Economy in particular, Darwin turns to another significant figure, Joseph Spence. A friend of Pope and Addison, Spence was an Oxford professor of poetry with a considerable knowledge of Roman antiquities, gleaned from several Grand Tours as a nobleman’s tutor. For the structuring of his Baconian mythography within the quadripartite, fourelement ‘machinery’ of Economy, Darwin draws repeatedly on Spence’s prose dialogue Polymetis: or, An Enquiry concerning the Agreement between the Works of the Roman Poets, and the Remains of the Ancient Artists (1747). This densely illustrated work starts in a garden, where the eponymous proprietor – whose name means ‘many-skilled’ – explains to two friends how he has disposed his famous collection of Roman sculptures, medals and engravings in five themed temples. The central one is devoted to most of the main Olympian gods and personifications of key virtues, and the surrounding four to the deities of fire (including the sun and stars and, hence, time), air (in a ‘Temple of the Four Winds’ like that to be found on many eighteenth-century estates), water (hence Neptune and Venus in her sea-born aspect are to be found here rather than in the first temple); and earth.7 As well as gods the temples include such lower elemental forces as sylphs 5 Sir Francis Bacon, The Wisdom of the Ancients, trans. Sir Arthur Gorges Knight (London: John Bill, 1619), 77–8, 82. 6 Economy 4.178n. See Bacon, Wisdom of the Ancients, 158–9. Similar materialist explanations of myths can be found in Abbé Antoine Banier’s commentaries on Ovid (in Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Latin and English (Amsterdam, 1732), and in Jean Le Clerc’s commentaries on Hesiod, frequently referenced in Thomas Cook’s The Works of Hesiod translated from the Greek (2 vols., London, 1728). 7 Joseph Spence, Polymetis: or, An Enquiry concerning the Agreement between the Works of the Roman Poets, and the Remains of the Antient Artists, 2nd ed. (London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1755), 2.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

144

and naiads.8 Spence’s idea of the central temple of the major gods surrounded by four subservient aspects or emanations is perhaps echoed in the quincunctial arrangement of the four elements ‘attiring’ Flora in Darwin’s Economy frontispiece. Spence uses numerous engravings of Roman reliefs and sculptures, plus a battery of footnoted quotations from Latin poets, to enforce the argument of his title-page epigraph from Pope, that in antiquity ‘The Verse and Sculpture bore an equal part;/ And Art reflected images from Art’.9 But for all its antiquarian air, Spence concludes Polymetis with a defence of modernity. Criticizing current classical education for privileging high literature over the common pool of images to be found in visual art and everyday prose, he argues that if any modern poet was to form a new scheme, for machinery, consisting of … any imaginary beings, by whatever name he pleased to call them: our poets would have as full scope [as the ancients] for introducing them, [using for instance] that thought in the Newtonian philosophy, which supposes all motion may possibly be occasioned by the immediate impulse of some spiritual being.10

The management of all physical motions and processes by precisely such spirits is the general basis of Economy’s modern ‘machinery’ of watery nymphs and airy sylphs, whose more specific features resemble Spence’s own elemental division of the divine powers. Egypt Spence confines Polymetis itself firmly to Roman mythology,11 but for Darwin this cannot be divorced from Egypt: Spence, Polymetis, 207, 236. In one of his Temple notes Darwin echoes Spence’s call for a ‘universal language

8 9

of the eye’, uniting visual and poetic symbolism in such emblematic objects as the halo or the cap of Liberty (Temple AN 6.21; see Spence, Polymetis, 292, 147). Elsewhere his interpretations of ancient imagery frequently rely on Spence: Psyche as a butterfly being warmed by Cupid’s torch in the Proem to Loves (1789) and Temple (2.223n, see Spence Plate 6 and p. 71); and in Economy: Orpheus and Hercules (AN 22. 57); the phoenix as a symbol of eternity (4.377n); Cupid revealing love’s power by breaking Jove’s thunderbolts and riding a lion (1.389n; 4.254n; Spence, 71); and Venus as a symbol of land’s emergence from the sea (2.47n; Spence Plate 30.3 and p. 220; see too Temple 1.372n). 10 Spence, Polymetis, 319. The last reference points to that whole alchemical dimension in Newton’s work which seems to contrast so strangely with modern ideas of his scientific pre-eminence, but which feeds strongly into Freemasonry and almost certainly into Darwin’s own world-view. See, e.g., the University of Indiana’s website, The Chymistry of Isaac Newton, http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/#, accessed 12 January 2011. 11 Polymetis excludes even parts of the Greek pantheon that do not have Roman counterparts, pokes fun at the notion of filling one’s grounds with animal-headed Egyptian deities, and criticizes the voluminous collection of engravings in Bernard de Montfaucon’s

Myths

145

The Egyptians were possessed of many discoveries in philosophy and chemistry before the invention of letters; these were then expressed in hieroglyphic paintings of men and animals; which after the discovery of the alphabet were described and animated by the poets, and became first the deities of Egypt, and afterwards of Greece and Rome. (Economy, Apology, p. ix)

Much repeated by Darwin, this formula remains somewhat staggering: the Egyptians poured their great scientific wisdom into hieroglyphic pictures whose meaning was then forgotten, but with the invention of alphabetical writing – ironically helped along by papyrus from the Nile – these pictures were reinterpreted as narrative stories about beings who then became the gods of Western civilization. The idea that the gods really symbolized something else had a respectable Christian pedigree, in various devout attempts to account for the diffusion of polytheism after Noah’s Flood.12 Thus the Rev. Jacob Bryant’s A New System, or, An Analysis of Ancient Mythology (1774–6) uses an often tortuous etymology to derive all ancient cultures from Noah himself, who is supposedly the real referent of the Egyptian god Osiris as well as the Greek Prometheus and a panoply of others.13 Abbé Noël-Antoine Pluche’s earlier History of the Heavens (1739, tr. 1741) derives all the aberrations of polytheism from the Egyptians’ misreadings of zodiacal figures introduced for good astronomical reasons by Noah’s grandson Thoth – who became their god of wisdom in the wake of his father Ham’s transformation into their supreme god Ammon.14 Astronomical predictions of seasonal events were particularly important in a land where everything depended on the flooding of the Nile and, as Darwin’s Economy note on this topic tells us:

Antiquity Explained, and Represented in Sculptures, trans. D. Humphreys (London: Tonson & Watts, 1721) for its promiscuous mixing of mythologies (Spence, Polymetis, 4–5). By contrast, Darwin draws significantly on the same Montfaucon in Temple’s discussions of Egyptian hieroglyphics (1.76n). 12 Many linguistic, anthropological and mythological theories of the time were what Nigel Leask calls ‘diffusionist’, postulating ‘the theory of the dispersal of all cultures from a common source’ (Leask, ‘Mythology’, 339). A great many of these attempted to fit the known evidence inside the biblical narrative. 13 Jacob Bryant, A New System, or, An Analysis of Ancient Mythology, 2 vols. (London: Payne, Elmsley, White & Walter, 1774), 2.253. By contrast James Burnet, Lord Monboddo, has little interest in biblical origins and argues in Of the Origin and Progress of Language, vol. 1 (Edinburgh and London: Kincaid, Creech & Cadell, 1773) that though most European and some Asian languages probably derive from Egypt, this did not include native Americans or Pacific Islanders (1.477, 475–7). In a Temple note on ‘the cradle of the world’, Darwin cites both these views with respect, but follows Monboddo’s less biblical line in excluding more distant cultures (Temple 1.36n). 14 Noël Antoine Pluche, The History of the Heavens, considered according to the notions of the poets and philosophers, compared with the doctrines of Moses, trans. J. B. de Freval, 2 vols. (London, 1740), 1.24–5, 29–30, 97.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

146

The Abbe Le Pluche observes that as Sirius, or the dog-star, rose at the time of the commencement of the flood its rising was watched by the astronomers, and notice given of the approach of inundation by hanging the figure of Anubis, which was that of a man with a dog’s head, upon all their temples.15

The accompanying engraving of the ‘Fertilization of Egypt’, designed by Fuseli and engraved by Blake, is the most imaginatively impressive in Economy: as glimpsed approaching us between the legs of a gigantic dog-headed Anubis whose real origin is shown by the star he is worshipping, a rain-and-lightning shedding god resembling Jupiter Pluvius16 depicts in a single image the emergence of the Olympian gods from the Egyptian misreadings of astronomical symbols which Pluche argues for.17 But not all comparative mythographers were such devout Christians as Bryant or Pluche. For some, Judaeo-Christianity’s numerous links with Egyptian and other mythologies could be used to unpick orthodox religion itself. As well as Pluche, Darwin’s Economy note on Anubis also cites Travels (1787) by Constantin de Volney. The reference itself is simply factual, but Volney’s later The Ruins, or Revolutions of Empires (1791) – English version brought out by the DarwinFuseli-Blake publisher Joseph Johnson in 1795 – was soon to become a favourite text of the ‘Jacobin’ underground for its dream vision of all the world’s religions being tried and found wanting by a world court led by a ‘free and powerful nation’ very like Revolutionary France.18 Arguing that virtually all religions, including Christianity, derive from misreadings of Egyptian astrological symbols, Ruins includes a zodiacal map of the heavens in which Pluche’s Nile-watching Sirius mingles with the astronomical configurations on which Adam, Noah, Mary and Joseph are supposedly based. Volney was himself greatly influenced by Charles Dupuis, whose massive The Origin of All Religious Worship appeared in 1795, to be followed by a more manageable abridgement in 1798. For Dupuis too, the transformation of Sirius to Anubis indicates how astronomy was ‘the soul of the Egyptian system’, which in turn influenced most other ancient religions, but his overall view of such religions is rather more respectful than Volney’s: he sees the gods as imagined ‘emanations’ Economy, 3.129n; see Pluche, History of the Heavens, 1.27. As described from an image on the Antonine Column, and later connected to the

15 16

Nile, by Spence in Polymetis, 210–11, 229. 17 The further possibility that this long-bearded Jupiter himself gives birth to the Father-God of Judaeo-Christian monotheism is of course not part of the devout Pluche’s message, but may be one of the meanings of Blake’s conversion of a figure very like this into his sinister God-parody Urizen (whose name, as I argue elsewhere, may be a fairly simple distortion of another Graeco-Roman sky-god, Uranus). See Martin Priestman, Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 102–4. 18 Constantin-François Volney, The Ruins, or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires, trans. Anon (London: J. Johnson, 1795), 150.

Myths

147

Fertilization of Egypt Fig. 8.1

Henry Fuseli, engraved by William Blake, ‘Fertilization of Egypt’, opp. p. 127 of Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden, Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation (London: J. Johnson, 1791). In the author’s possession.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

148

from a creative force strongly identified with the sun, which the Egyptians saw as ‘a great God, architect and moderator of the universe’.19 To enforce his theory of a universal sun cult, Dupuis argues that the Egyptian Osiris, Greek Hercules, Persian Mithras and Indian Krishna were all solar emanations; as was indeed the Christ whose name and birth story so resemble Krishna’s, despite the suppression of this evident truth by the early ‘Christian doctors, quite as ignorant as they were wicked’.20 With the French revolutionaries Volney and Dupuis, then, the devout quest to explain the existence of polytheistic religions as a diffusion of misread Egyptian symbols expands to embrace Christianity itself. Another revolutionary sharing similar ideas was Thomas Paine, for whom Christianity ‘sprung out of the tail of the heathen mythology’.21 Like Volney and Dupuis, Paine believed that Christianity’s desperate attempts to hide its own origins led to the suppression of the older solar worship across Europe, including that of the ancient Druids whose emphasis on sun-oriented architecture and light/dark contrasts was eventually smuggled back in the disguised form of Freemasonry.22 We shall return to this topic: first, there is another aspect of Darwin’s mythography to consider. Economy’s ‘Rosicrucian’ Spirits Alongside its links with Spence’s four-square distribution of Graeco-Roman myths among the four elements, the elemental ‘machinery’ of Economy opens another window onto Darwin’s mythographic hinterland: The Rosicrucian doctrine of Gnomes, Sylphs, Nymphs, and Salamanders, was thought to afford a proper machinery for a Botanic poem; as it is probable, that they were originally the names of hieroglyphic figures representing the elements. (Economy, Apology, p. vii)

Although ‘Rosicrucianism’ is thus clearly ‘written on the tin’ of Economy, few commentators have looked very hard for this ingredient inside it: after all, Darwin’s most obvious reason for using these spirits is their reassuring familiarity from Pope’s frothy satire The Rape of the Lock (1714). There is plenty of humour in Darwin’s use of them too, but perhaps also a more precise awareness of some of the ground covered by the word ‘Rosicrucian’. Rosicrucianism was a seventeenth-century movement which combined an interest in science with various mystical ideas conveyed in an array of symbols Charles François Dupuis, The Origin of All Religious Worship, trans. Anon (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1984 [1798]) 24; see too 19. 20 Dupuis, Origin of Religious Worship, 70. 21 Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (New York: Putnam, 1896), 25. 22 Thomas Paine, ‘The Origin of Freemasonry’, in Complete Writings, vol. 2, ed. P. S. Foner (New York: Citadel Press, 1945), 830–41. 19

Myths

149

ranging from the eponymous rose and cross to the emblem of outspread wings. It was an outcrop of the Hermetic alchemy which had grown up since the fifteenth century, in the wake of Marsilio Ficino’s translations of writings purporting to be those of the Egyptian god Thoth, or Hermes Trismegistus. As well as much mysticism, the Hermetic texts contained what seemed to be scientific instructions about a range of chemical processes, including ways of prolonging life and turning other metals into gold: the elixir of life and philosopher’s stone at the heart of the Renaissance proto-science known as alchemy. Taking over many alchemical ideas and symbols, seventeenth-century Rosicrucianism was an intellectual movement with a range of further elusive links: to the Anglo-German Protestant cause before and during the Thirty Years’ War, and to the tale of the clearly allegorical medieval sage Christian Rosenkreuz, who is supposed to have left instructions for the formation of some kind of secret society dedicated to his ideas. According to Frances A. Yates, it is highly questionable whether such a society was actually formed in any concrete way: Rosicrucianism was more a ferment of ideas and international links spread by a series of manifestoes contemplating the idea of forming such a group.23 Among many other features, this ‘society’ involved philanthropy, a dedication to progressive science and medicine, and a range of symbolic words and signs recognizable by initiates despite the plain-clothes disguises which allowed them to spread their teachings unsuspected by the authorities. The ultimate source for Pope’s and Darwin’s elemental spirits is A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on other Spirits (c. 1540), by the Renaissance alchemist Paracelsus; but, according to The Rape of Lock’s Preface, they reached Pope through an explicitly Rosicrucian work: ‘a French book call’d Le Comte de Gabalis’.24 Published in 1670 by Abbé de Montfaucon de Villars, Le Comte de Gabalis is constructed as a dialogue in which a mysterious ‘Polish Count’ tells the narrator how to invoke the Nymphs, Sylphs, Gnomes and Salamanders in charge of the four elements. These spiritual beings are best contacted through certain quasi-scientific processes: ‘One has only to seal a goblet full of compressed Air, Water, or Earth and to leave it exposed to the Sun for a month’; or, for Salamanders, concentrate ‘the Fire of the World in a globe of crystal, by means of concave mirrors’.25 Just as in Pope, these elementals can ‘Assume what sexes and what shapes they please’,26 but their relationships with humans are often presented Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 207. 24 Paracelsus, ‘A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on other Spirits’, in Four Treatises of Theophrastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus, trans. and ed. C. L. Temkin et al. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1941), 213–54; Alexander Pope, Preface to The Rape of the Lock, in The Poems of Alexander Pope: A OneVolume Edition of the Twickenham Text., ed. J. Butt (London: Metheun,1968), 217. 25 Abbé N. de Montfaucon de Villars, Comte de Gabalis, trans. Anon (London: William Rider & Son, 1913), 49–51. 26 Pope, Rape of the Lock, 1.69–70. 23

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

150

in highly erotic terms. As we might recall when Pope’s Sylphs desert Belinda on noting ‘An Earthly Lover lurking at her Heart’, this erotic contact is lost when humans begin desiring each other.27 Indeed, for Villars (unlike for Milton), Adam damned the whole human race through the sexual intercourse with Eve for which the forbidden fruit is clearly only a metaphor, and the only way back to Eden is to study the science of Nature under these spirits’ guidance: ‘How remedy this evil? How restring the lute and recover that lost sovereignty? Oh Nature! Why art thou so little studied?’28 There are several possible echoes of Le Comte de Gabalis in Darwin’s work. Villars’s techniques for summoning fire spirits may find an echo in Economy’s metaphor for the Goddess’s summoning of Salamanders from starlight: ‘So the clear Lens collects with magic power/ The countless glories of the midnight hour’.29 Less certainly, the summoning of earth and water spirits in sealed glass containers may lie somewhere behind the sealed goblets which ‘spontaneously’ produce the microbes of Temple’s first Additional Note: in this context, we may remember that Victor Frankenstein’s science is inspired in equal parts by alchemists such as Paracelsus and Mary Shelley’s garbled impression of Darwin’s having produced the stirrings of life ‘in a glass case’.30 Despite Darwin’s wholehearted enthusiasm for every aspect of sex and reproduction, the opening of Temple may carry some weird echoes of Villars’s idea of the Fall as the loss of erotic contact with spirits caused by Adam’s intercourse with Eve, as symbolized by the fruit. Temple’s description of the Fall is so compressed as to be highly ambiguous about the fruit’s meaning: we are only told that Eve ‘Eyed the sweet fruit, the mandate disobey’d,/ And her fond Lord with sweeter smiles betray’d’, whereupon Adam ‘Spread his wide arms, and bartered life for love!’ (Temple 1.43–4). In its echo of the ‘wide arms’ of ‘Immortal Love’ a few lines earlier, Adam’s sublime shrug ennobles rather than diminishes him;31 nonetheless it is significant that before this event the Garden of Eden was inhabited by unclad ‘Graces’ and ‘guiltless Cupids’, who now disappear until their later ‘tittering’ reentry to the blasted site of the lost Paradise through a crystal tunnel, marking our first introduction to the Temple of Nature’s precincts (Temple 1.39–40, 57–64). If we read these Loves and Graces as versions of Villars’s eroticized elementals, cold-shouldered by Adam’s embrace of Eve but resummonable with glass phials Pope, Rape of the Lock, 3.144. Villars, Comte de Gabalis, 133, 125, 47. Villars’s rereading of the whole of biblical

27 28

history in these terms is highly bizarre, with Ham ‘branding’ his posterity with ‘horrible’ blackness by his choice of a human over a spiritual wife: a direction in which Darwin certainly does not follow Villars. 29 Economy 1.89–90. 30 Temple, AN 1.3; M. Shelley, Frankenstein, 195–6. 31 The same arm-spreading gesture recurs throughout the Temple opening, as when Melancholy ‘Spreads her pale arms and bends her weeping neck’ (1.124) and Nature ‘Extends o’er earth and sea her hundred hands’ (1.130).

Myths

151

and mirrors, we might relate their return, at the moment of our muse’s rediscovery of a lost ‘Nature’, to the exclamations with which Villars follows his own account of the Fall: ‘How remedy this evil? … Oh Nature! Why art thou so little studied?’32 Yates argues that, rather than forming a coherent social grouping, Rosicrucianism was chiefly represented through a series of coded manifestoes with names like Fama Fraternitatis RC (1614) and The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz (1616), which had a scientific, progressive but secretive emphasis. Such texts fed in turn into Isaac Newton’s alchemical speculations (on which, we might recall, Joseph Spence proposes a ‘modern machinery’ could be based), and arguably included Bacon’s mysterious proto-science-fiction utopia The New Atlantis (1624, trans. 1627).33 The latter work describes a secretive group of benevolent island dwellers who visit our world to dispense their physicianly wisdom ‘invisibly’, in deliberately undistinctive disguise. According to some of Villars’s Rosicrucian editors, Bacon himself appears in just such a disguise as the ‘Polish’ Count de Gabalis, having, like other magi granted the elixir of life, ‘only pretended to die’.34 For Yates, the ‘Rosicrucian Enlightenment’ revolved around a shared symbolic code and progressive, mystico-scientific outlook, rather than around card-carrying membership of a tangible social group. It did, however, feed into two of eighteenthcentury England’s most distinctively ‘Enlightenment’ social groupings, both of which included Darwin as a member. One of these was the Bacon-inspired Royal Society, established by Charles II as a formalization of the ‘invisible college’ of scientific thinkers formed in Oxford by the (probably) Rosicrucian John Wilkins; the other was Freemasonry. We shall shortly turn to the latter, by way of the mysterious Temple opening already touched on, but before doing so it is worth considering two of the many arresting Rosicrucian images of scientific enlightenment reproduced in Yates’s fascinating study.35 The first of these, H. Khunrath’s ‘Cave of the Illuminati’, depicts a rough, rocky hill penetrated by a tunnel leading to a point of light at the other end, lined with inscriptions on receding white rectangles which give the tunnel’s internal surface a glassy look. Some tiny figures, ascending the hewn stone steps to this tunnel and then proceeding along it, clearly represent initiates to some sort of new enlightenment. The other, connected by Yates with John Wilkins’s mobile Baconian ‘Invisible College’ from which the Royal Society sprang, is T. Schweighardt’s representation of a square tower on wheels, with the rose and cross symbols over its door and glimpses of scientific experiments through its windows: inscribed with warnings to Villars, Comte de Gabalis, 47. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, chapters 4–6, 9 and 14. 34 See the 1913 commentary on Villars’s Comte de Gabalis, 5–6. According to this 32 33

commentary, the name ‘Gabalis’ points to the Jewish Kabbalah, as passed on by hierophants in a system ‘identical’ to ‘esoteric Masonry’ (4). A possible reason for Erasmus Darwin’s interest in this text is suggested by the commentator’s remark that Villars also wrote a work on ‘the origin of species’ which inspired Lamarck and thence Charles Darwin (xviii). 35 Yates, Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 53, xvi.

152

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

COLLEGIVM FRATERNITATIS

MOVE

OCCIDENS

Fig. 8.2

Picture of ‘The Temple of the Rosy Cross’, in Theophilus Schweighardt, Speculum sophicum Rhodo-stauroticum (Frankfurt am Main,1618). Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library.

Myths

153

the unworthy not to enter, it occupies a plain surrounded by rugged rocks, on which various scenes of human bafflement are taking place. The presence of rough rocks in both images suggests those we have to penetrate to approach Darwin’s Temple of Nature, whose devotion to scientific learning, in a setting unguessed at by most, may well echo that of this ‘Invisible College’ of Rosicrucianism.36 Entering the Temple We have already noted a few moments from Temple’s densely allegorical opening; now it will be useful to give some sense of how they all fit together. The poem starts with a brief invocation to the Muse and then the longer one to ‘Almighty Love’ which we considered in Chapter 6. This is followed by the riddling retelling of the Fall of Adam and Eve we have just glanced at, after which we see the Garden of Eden replaced by a howling desert surrounded by apparently impenetrable rocks. But after a command to the ‘profane’ to go no further, we now follow the ‘tittering’ spiritual-allegorical ‘Loves and Graces’ previously exiled from Eden through a glass-walled tunnel under these rocks, into a central space occupied by the towering Temple of Nature, ‘unwrought by mortal toil’. Now admitted as an initiate alongside them, the poet’s Muse inspects the hieroglyphics on the Temple’s walls and visits its various areas allegorizing time, pleasure, pain, death and fear of oblivion. A description of the majestic hundred-breasted goddess Nature placed ‘in the midst’ of all this leads to an extended account of the ancient Greek Eleusinian Mysteries, which according to the Preface supplies the ‘machinery’ for the whole poem. The Eleusinian initiation rituals are said to have been ‘stolen’ from Nature’s temple, and the title of their chief instructor – the Hierophant – is now applied to the poem’s chief spokesperson Urania, the Muse of Science who is also Nature’s priestess. The Poet’s own Muse poses a series of questions about the temple’s hieroglyphics, which seem to centre round the deaths of heroes and lovers past, as particularly exemplified by Orpheus’s failure to redeem his wife Eurydice from the Underworld; after which the conversation switches rather abruptly to the questions about the origins of life itself, which Urania devotes most of the rest of the poem to answering. This opening contains a riot of mythographic ideas, suggesting that our debarment from the pleasures of Paradise following Adam and Eve’s sensual There are some other interesting parallels between Darwin and what Yates presents as John Wilkins’s Rosicrucian interests (Yates, Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 236–7). Darwin hails Wilkins’s ‘grand design of an universal language’ in one of Temple’s Additional Notes (AN 6.22), while in another (AN 15.120) he describes his own construction of a speaking machine which we may compare to Wilkins’s invention of a ‘magico-scientific speaking statue of Memnon’ (Yates, Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 236–7); the original ‘speaking’ Egyptian Memnon-statue receives an Additional Note to itself in Economy (AN 8.17). Wilkins’s idea of harnessing birds to fly to the moon (in A Discovery of a World in the Moon, 1638) also has a kind of echo in Darwin’s experiments with ballooning and Loves’ description of Montgolfier flying his balloon into outer space. 36

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

154

enjoyment of knowledge is itself just a myth which true initiates can laugh at. In fact, it turns out, we can re-enter Eden through a side-entrance leading to the temple of science and nature, whose materialist truths have long been inscribed in Egyptian hieroglyphs on its walls. The Egyptian theme is continued in the figure of the many-breasted Goddess of Nature: Shrin’d in the midst majestic Nature stands,37 Extends o’er earth and sea her hundred hands; Tower upon tower her beamy forehead crests, And births unnumber’d milk her hundred breasts. (Temple 1.129–32)

Such depictions of many-breasted Nature (her hundred breasts reduced to three in Fuseli’s challengingly strange Frontispiece) are not in themselves unusual in Enlightenment texts: a similar image appears in the Frontispiece of Linnaeus’s Fauna Svevica (1746);38 Hogarth drew a saucy image of Cupids peeping under her skirt in an image Darwin may have known of;39 and frontispieces to several editions or translations of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura from 1620 onwards showed Nature squirting milk from her many breasts and surrounded (like Economy’s Flora) by personifications of the four elements.40 The ‘tower upon tower’ crowning Nature’s appearance ‘in the midst’ of a crowd of hieroglyphic symbols may be connected to the table or ‘tablet of Isis’ which Darwin discusses in a slightly earlier note (Temple 1.76n). As reproduced in Montfaucon’s Antiquity Explained, this depicts the Nature goddess Isis enthroned in the centre of a rectangle packed with other figures and symbols. Disappointingly, it is now thought to date only from Roman times. 38 Londa Schiebinger interestingly links Linnaeus’s image to his coinage of the word ‘mammal’: see Nature’s Body, 61. 39 This image appears on Hogarth’s subscription ticket for his Harlot’s Progress, where assorted Cupids peep up the skirt of the multi-breasted goddess (Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, ed. Paulson, Plate 13). Ronald Paulson links this image both to Hogarth’s Freemasonry and his reading of Warburton (Hogarth, Analysis, xxxv–xxxvi), and we might suspect a further link to the point in the Eleusinian legend – and perhaps ritual – when the priestess Baubo distracts Ceres/Demeter from her grief by revealing her own private parts (See Thomas Taylor, A Dissertation on the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries (Amsterdam: Weitstein, 1790), 121–2). An admirer of both Warburton and Hogarth, Darwin may be leaving a sly ambiguity in concluding Temple’s Eleusinian rites with the Priestess’s removal of Nature’s veil from somewhere between a bowing and a kneeling position. 40 See particularly the Frontispiece to Le Poëte Lucrece, translated by M. D. Marolles (Paris, 1651), reproduced by Philip Ford, ‘Lucretius in Early Modern France’, in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, ed. S. Gillespie and Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 232. Though not many-breasted, similar images of Nature as a goddess needing to be unveiled by science continued into the nineteenth century. A sculpture of ‘Nature unveiling before Science’ has been linked by Ludmilla Jordanova to a nineteenth-century iconography of female anatomical dissection (Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries [New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989], chapter 5, 87–110). 37

Myths

155

THE TEMPLE OF NATURE Fig. 8.3

Henry Fuseli, ‘The Temple of Nature, frontispiece of Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature (Joseph Johnson, 1803). Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library.

156

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

Darwin’s Nature echo those of Lucretius’ materialist deconstruction of the earthmother Cybele ‘who carries cities on her head’, and she can be further linked to a range of fertility goddesses from the Eleusinian Demeter to the Ephesian Diana Multimammia. According to Darwin’s greatest mythographic influence, William Warburton, all of these can be seen as variants of the Egyptian Isis, of whom the ancients believed that ‘the First Cause of all things is communicated to those who approach the temple of Isis with prudence and sanctity’.41 The ‘First Cause of all things’, in the shape of the primal explosion, is the first thing the poet’s Muse learns after her reverent approach to this Temple. The Eleusinian Mysteries In an earlier passage (1.53), those approaching the temple’s precincts were greeted with the cry of ‘Hence, ye profane!’, with which non-initiate attenders of the ‘Lesser Mysteries’ were turned away from the secret ceremonies of the ‘Greater Mysteries’ practised in Eleusis near Athens.42 Through these, members of the Graeco-Roman elite were initiated (as Darwin’s Preface puts it) into ‘the philosophy of the works of Nature, with the origin and progress of society’, as ‘taught by allegoric scenery explained by the Hierophant to the initiated’. Treated as a very important part of Greek and then Roman culture, the Mysteries preserved the elite status of their teachings by threatening death to any who revealed them: a threat so effective that their exact nature remains a mystery to this day. Nonetheless, the eighteenth century saw many attempts to reconstruct their content, which was generally seen as subverting the ‘vulgar’ polytheism by reducing it to a set of allegories. Depending on your viewpoint, these either anticipated Christian monotheism or else hinted at materialist truths which undermined all religion. Darwin’s own reading of the Mysteries borrows heavily from the unorthodox Christian apologist William Warburton, whose immensely detailed examination of the issue allows plenty of space for materialist arguments, so long as they accept that some idea of ‘immortal’ survival beyond death is at the heart of the Mysteries’ teachings. In Darwin’s account, once we have been admitted to the altar of the Goddess Nature, we learn that From this first altar fam’d Eleusis stole Her secret symbols and her mystic scroll; With pious fraud in after ages rear’d Her gorgeous temple, and the gods rever’d. – First in dim pomp before the astonish’d throng, 41 Lucretius, DRN 2.606–9; Temple 1.131; William Warburton, The Divine Legation of Moses, in The works of the Right Reverend William Warburton, Lord Bishop of Gloucester, 7 vols. (London: T. Cadell,, 1788), 1.192. 42 See G. E. Mylonas, Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 224–85.

Myths

157

Silence, and Night, and Chaos, stalk’d along; Dread scenes of Death, in nodding sables dress’d, Froze the broad eye, and thrill’d the unbreathing breast. Then the young Spring, with winged Zephyr, leads The queen of Beauty to the blossom’d meads; Charm’d in her train admiring Hymen moves, And tiptoe Graces hand in hand with Loves. Next, … on pausing step the masked mimes Enact the triumphs of forgotten times, … Each shifting scene, some patriot hero trod, Some sainted beauty, or some saviour god.43

In the brief but crucial note, Darwin tells us that ‘These Mysteries were invented in Egypt and afterwards transferred into Greece along with most of the other early arts and religions of Europe’; and for more information refers us to the extended essay on them which constitutes his (Blake-illustrated) Additional Note on the Portland Vase in Economy. We shall return to this note in the next chapter; but many of its rather sprawling guesses about the Mysteries are better focused in this brief footnote in Temple. This stresses that the Mysteries enacted four distinct scenes: In the first part of this scenery was represented Death, and the destruction of all things ... Next the marriage of Cupid and Psyche seems to have shown the reproduction of living nature; and afterwards the procession of torches … probably signifies the return of light, and the resuscitation of all things. Lastly, the histories of illustrious persons of the early ages seem to have been enacted. (Temple 1.137n)

Temple 1.137–50, 53–4. These eighteen lines on the Eleusinian Mysteries (137–54) are completely absent from the Progress of Society drafts, and seem to be a late addition here, probably accounting (along with another couplet somewhere) for the 20 lines by which Darwin misnumbers all the passages referred to in Canto One’s Additional Notes, which were probably set in print before the final text of the poem (see, e.g., 1.247n’s reference to AN 1, which refers to the same line as line 227). Another oddity about these lines is that, where the relevant note (1.137n) refers to the marriage of Cupid and Psyche (a theme which becomes the heart of the second canto), the verse provides a description of something rather different, in fact a fairly recognizable description of Botticelli’s great painting Primavera. Generally seen as based on Lucretius’ passage beginning ‘It ver, et Venus’ (DRN, 5.737–40) – which also appears as the epigraph to Economy – the painting features an enshrined Venus, a flower-strewing Spring, Cupid, the wind-spirit Zephyr, and the Three Graces, all of whom can be glimpsed in Darwin’s description here (1.145–9). A third oddity is that the text mispositions the last couplet quoted above, after a couplet probably intended as a conclusion to the whole scene, about concealing all these truths from vulgar throngs. Together, all these oddities suggest a last-minute addition to the text, whose exceptional significance Darwin tries to bring home with the note and the Preface’s claim that it provides the ‘machinery’ of the whole poem. 43

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

158

This fourfold sequence of death, marriage, torches (as borne by the weddinggod Hymen) and ‘illustrious persons’ becomes the more significant if we bear in mind the claim of Temple’s Preface that this Eleusinian ‘allegoric scenery … gave rise to the machinery of the following Poem’. Arguably, these four scenes are more or less replicated in the poem’s four-canto structure, with the lament for life’s transience which concludes Canto One followed in turn by Canto Two’s celebration of sexual reproduction (with Cupid and Psyche as centrepiece), Canto Three’s account of ‘Progress of the Mind’ or mental enlightenment, and Canto Four’s attempt to balance ‘Good and Evil’ through its celebrations of the ‘resuscitation of all things’ capped with its praises of modern heroes of science and philanthropy.44 Darwin’s major source for these ideas was Warburton’s The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated on the Principles of a Religious Deist (1737–1741). This extraordinary mythographic work uses a convoluted argument about the Hebrews’ special destiny to exclude the Jewish religion from its thesis that all other ancient religions held ideas about immortality, which many of them concealed from the masses in secret mystery cults. Initially focused round the Egyptian myth of Isis’s resurrection of Osiris, these were spread through the ancient world by a range of cult founders such as the Persian Zoroaster, Thracian Orpheus and Boetian Trophonius, and attached to relevant local gods such as the Athenian/Eleusinian Demeter, whose quest to regain her daughter Persephone from the underworld closely echoes the original Isis-Osiris myth. 45 Considering the importance of the ‘Botanic Goddess’ Flora to The Botanic Garden, it is perhaps surprising that Darwin makes no play with the crop and flower goddesses Demeter/Ceres and Persephenone/Proserpina in the Temple opening, although their implicit links with his insistence on the endless recycling of organic matter are clear enough. But Warburton’s mystery-founders Trophonius and Orpheus are firmly present and correct in the poem, as is his insistence on an Egyptian origin and his four-stage reading of the Eleusinian Mysteries themselves. A Dignified Pantomime Temple’s note on the Mysteries ends with the query: Might not such a dignified pantomime be contrived, even in this age, as might strike the spectators with awe, and at the same time explain many philosophical truths by adapted imagery, and thus both amuse and instruct?46

See Irwin Primer, ‘Erasmus Darwin’s Temple of Nature: Progress, Evolution, and the Eleusinian Mysteries’, Journal of the History of Ideas 25 (1964): 65; Mahood, The Poet as Botanist, 73. 45 Warburton, Works, 1.168–9. 46 Temple 1.137n. 44

Myths

159

This query is somewhat faux-naif, since such instructive pantomimes did indeed exist plentifully in the eighteenth century, under the aegis of Freemasonry. In these, initiates are sometimes blindfolded, half-undressed or subjected to other symbolic forms of death, before being admitted to a new life by way of a series of allegorical images and explanations. Several accounts of such ritualized inductions have strong parallels with various aspects of Temple. In one such account, a postulant seeks admission to ‘the great Temple of Nature’, whose wisdom will replace ‘the perfection’ once ‘embodied in Adam’ but then lost through the Fall.47 After being tested by a first examiner in an outer room, the postulant is led into an inner one whose paraphernalia include a square painted floorcloth depicting the earth, surrounded by the four elements we might recognize from Darwin’s Economy. A second, more august examiner explains other symbols on the floorcloth, including: an adept’s transformation of an ‘ashlar’ or rough stone into a hewn cube, the division of a primal unity into male and female principles, and a flaming star representing ‘nature, the breath of God, the universal and central fire which enlivens, sustains and destroys all things’. These details come from a description of a Masonic-Rosicrucian initiation ceremony. Although we might remember Frances Yates’s doubts about cardcarrying Rosicrucian membership in the seventeenth century, she supports Thomas De Quincey’s remark that the definitely social Freemasonry of the eighteenth century largely ‘arose out of the Rosicrucian mania’.48 The links were not explicit in the main branch of ‘Modern’ Freemasonry, but certain other branches included overtly ‘Rosicrucian’ orders or degrees, from one of whose ceremonies the above account is taken. Clearly, its ‘dignified pantomime’ has many parallels with the opening of Darwin’s Temple, with its attempt to restore Adamic perfection and its replacement of rough rocks by a perfected temple of Nature; and there may be further parallels with Canto Two’s account of the primal hermaphroditism symbolized by Adam before the birth of Eve, and also with Temple’s title page epigraph about ‘fiery vigour’ as the source of all life, itself quoted from the ‘Underworld’ Book Six of Virgil’s Aeneid, on which Warburton based most of his theories about Eleusinian initiation rituals.49 Arguably, then, the kind of dignified Eleusinian pantomime which Darwin bemoans the lack of was alive and well in that characteristically eighteenthcentury institution, Freemasonry. Before turning to a broader consideration of this phenomenon, it is worth considering two other sources where – as in Temple – certain aspects of Masonic induction ceremonies are lightly fictionalized. In one, a male initiate journeys through a realm of vice and poverty along a ‘secret path’ to a temple ‘built of transparent stone … of a quadrangular form’. This Masonic-Rosicrucian ritual is described in Christopher McIntosh, The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason: Eighteenth-Century Rosicrucianism in Central Europe and Its Relationship to the Enlightenment (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), 59–70. 48 Yates, Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 207. 49 See Temple 1.478 and AN 10; Economy AN 22; Temple 1.229–38 and title page. 47

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

160

Once entered, this turns out to be adorned with symbolic representations of industry and commerce, somewhat like the hieroglyphics depicting ‘arts and empires’ in Darwin’s temple.50 His allegory-strewn journey climaxes with a hymn of praise for Pitt the Elder as a defender of the people’s liberty, much as Darwin’s Temple acts out the final Eleusinian ‘scene’ – the celebration of heroes – in its final canto’s praise for the modern prison liberators John Howard, Lord Moira and Sir Francis Burdett.51 The other Masonic source is a series of sketches in which a female initiate is first seen travelling through a wilderness towards a temple in the shape of an Egyptian pyramid. Reversing the Eden myth, she then overcomes a giant serpent before being led by an Athena-helmeted conductress, past various other evils towards the threatening figure of Father Time, who leaps out from an underground cave, only to be defeated by a tubby figure in modern dress while overhead a phoenix symbolizes constant rebirth, as it does in both Economy and Temple. 52 Taking over as the heroine’s guide, the latter leads her to the temple’s entrance, in front of which he forces the god Hermes to slump down on an unhewn stone inscribed ‘Pierre Brute’, perhaps reminding us of the rough rocks through which Darwin’s temple must be approached. The first of these journeys towards enlightenment comes from a politically minded Masonic text with a half-familiar-sounding title, The Temple of Virtue by David Fordyce (1759).53 The second features in eight designs by the great landscape painter Philip De Loutherbourg, for a series of paintings intended to line the walls of a female lodge of the ‘Egyptian’ Freemasonry concocted by the mystical con-man Cagliostro, who appears as the postulant’s tubby rescuer. Along with the Rosicrucian account considered above, they both refer more or less directly to the initiation rituals of eighteenth-century Freemasonry, and I think offer sufficient proof that Darwin’s Eleusinian Temple is modelled first and foremost on a Masonic lodge. Darwin’s Freemasonry In 1754, while a 23-year-old medical student in Edinburgh, Darwin took part in just ‘such a dignified pantomime’ himself, when he was enrolled at St David’s David Fordyce, The Temple of Virtue (1759), as described in Margaret C. Jacob’s Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 61–2. 51 Temple 1.153–4, 4.205–22. 52 See Figures 8.4 and 8.5. All 8 of Philip De Loutherbourg’s depictions of the travails of a female initiate (1786) are reproduced, with a helpful commentary, in Iain McCalman’s Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro, 165–7. For the phoenix and the binding of Time, see Economy 4.377-80; Temple 4.111-16 and 1.79–80. 53 Fordyce, The Temple of Virtue (1759), as described in Jacob’s Living the Enlightenment, 61–2. 50

Myths

Fig. 8.4

161

P. J. de Loutherbourg, ‘Reflections for the companions’ (c. 1787), watercolour on paper. Reproduced by kind permission of Torre Abbey, Devon, and the Bridgeman Art Library.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

162

Lodge Number 36, as a Freemason.54 Though noted by several Masonic sources, this youthful initiation is barely mentioned in academic studies of Darwin, the one exception I have found being a brief note in Desmond King-Hele’s most recent edition of the letters. However, the passage referred to there not only indicates Darwin’s own Freemasonry, but suggests the reason why he himself made so few other references to it. In a somewhat prickly response to a 1754 correspondent’s nudging hints, Darwin wrote: Are you a Mason? Your greeting of me by 3 times 3 would make me conjecture so. But take care what you write about such things.55

Darwin’s caution not to ‘write about such things’ has been followed by virtually all his critics and biographers. Apart from this single note, King-Hele makes no mention of Darwin’s Freemasonry in his voluminous biographical work on him; and the two other critics who come nearest to raising the issue only do so in terms of analogy, not identity: Irwin Primer – in an article to be discussed later – analyses Temple’s Masonic parallels, while Jenny Uglow simply points out that Darwin ‘asserted, as the Masons did, that the true wisdom of the ancient world had belonged to the Egyptian Magi [and that in] the Eleusinian mysteries the nub of the great wisdom remained’ (my italics).56 The incuriosity – or reticence – of these three excellent commentators is understandable, in the light of the strong associations raised by the word ‘Freemasonry’. For many nowadays, the idea of intelligent people swearing bloodcurdling oaths to protect a lot of secretive mumbo-jumbo – while fixing up numerous backstairs deals and ensuring ‘jobs for the boys’ – is at best just embarrassing and at worst downright sinister. But before treating Darwin’s youthful enrolment as any kind of special case, we should relate it to an eighteenth-century context in which the following were also Freemasons: in the British arts Wren, Pope, Swift, Hogarth, Boswell, Garrick, Gibbon, Sheridan, Smart, Burns; in the sciences, a preponderance of the Royal Society which included virtually all serious scientists since its inception in 1660; in politics, Wilkes, Burke, Canning, George IV, Wellington; among American founding fathers Franklin, Washington and numerous subsequent presidents; See alphabetized entries for Darwin in William Denslow, 10,000 Famous Freemasons (Richmond, VA: Macoy, 1937) and A. G. Mackey and H. L. Haywood, Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (Chicago: Masonic History Company, 1909). For a fuller account of Darwin’s Freemasonry see Neville B. Cryer, ‘Erasmus Darwin: A Little Known Mason of Derby’ (Typescript of lecture delivered at Tyrian Lodge, no. 253 (Derby, 2000), in the possession of Erasmus Darwin House, Lichfield), especially p. 5. 55 Erasmus Darwin to Thomas Okes, [17–23] November 1754, in The Collected Letters of Erasmus Darwin, ed. Desmond King-Hele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 22. 56 Uglow, The Lunar Men, 423 (my italics); Irwin Primer, ‘Erasmus Darwin’s Temple of Nature’. See too Fara, Erasmus Darwin, where the Lunar Men are seen as only ‘Resembling Eleusinian Hierophants or Masonic Grand Masters’ (222). 54

Myths

163

in France Voltaire, d’Alembert, Helvetius, d’Holbach, Lafayette, the Duke of Orleans, Danton and probably Napoleon Bonaparte; in the German-speaking world, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Haydn and, most famously, Mozart.57 Given this list, perhaps a more interesting one would consist of famous eighteenth-century males who were not Freemasons. Hence Darwin’s Edinburgh enrolment in 1754 was no isolated event. His fellow medical student James Keir enrolled with him, and the Lunar Society they went on to co-found in Birmingham would also include the Masons James Watt and, as honorary member, Benjamin Franklin. 58 Like many of Darwin’s Royal Society colleagues, Joseph Banks, another frenetic networker with many Lunar links, was probably also a Mason. The idea of the Lunar Society as a kind of substitute lodge for some of its members is not unfeasible: a recent Masonic researcher points out that, though Darwin’s Edinburgh initiation took him to quite a high level as a ‘Mark Mason’, there were no working lodges in Nottingham or Lichfield and only one in Birmingham.59 Derby also lacked a lodge when he moved there in 1780, although interestingly one was founded a few years later by a friend of his, after Darwin had already (1783) set about establishing a Derby Philosophical Society on the Lunar model. Darwin’s son Francis and grandson Reginald joined the Derby lodge after his death, but the two studies to explore this question come to different conclusions as to whether Darwin himself was ever a member.60 Given this larger context, a few further points can now be sketched in about some of the mythographic influences on Darwin mentioned earlier in this chapter. Pope, Spence, Hogarth, Volney and Dupuis were all Masons, and Warburton is much cited in Masonic texts. 61 Apart from his Rosicrucian spirits, Darwin’s 57 One needs to be a little careful with such lists – which both Masons and conspiracy theorists may wish to inflate for opposite reasons – but the one above is compiled from reasonably reliable sources, and the (rather patchily applied) rule of secrecy suggests that it may be far from complete. The Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon provides a useful list (http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/biography/index.html, accessed 14 April 2013), as do Denslow, 10,000 Famous Freemasons and Wunder, Keats, Hermeticism and the Secret Societies, 35. 58 For Keir, see Cryer, ‘Erasmus Darwin: A Little Known Mason of Derby’, 5. Watt’s and Franklin’s Freemasonry is well known and Banks’s membership is claimed by several masonic sources although his biographers are virtually silent on the matter: John Gascoigne implies his membership in noting that he turned down a Grand Mastership, but goes no further than saying he was ‘sympathetic to Freemasonry’ (John Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 222n77). 59 Cryer, ‘Erasmus Darwin: A Little Known Mason of Derby’, 5–6. 60 Cryer’s conviction that Darwin joined this lodge goes against an earlier claim that his name is ‘conspicuous by its absence’ from their rolls, in J. O. Manton, Early Freemasonry in Derbyshire, 1913. 61 See, e.g., J.W.S. Mitchell, The History of Freemasonry and Masonic Digest, vol. 2 (Marietta, GA: Mitchell, 1859), 185.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

164

specifically Masonic debts to Pope may include the latter’s Temple of Fame, from which Temple derives much of its allegorical décor. Joseph Spence – the arranger of the four elements round a central space, as also seen on the Masonic Rosicrucian’s carpet – was co-warden of the Florence lodge which became a social hub for Grand Tourists to Italy, and he subsequently joined one of its members – the notorious founder of the quasi-Masonic Hellfire Club, Sir Francis Dashwood – in the similarly ritualled Society of Dilettanti, whose contribution to the British Neoclassical revival is discussed in the next chapter.62 Hogarth’s Masonry has been persuasively linked by Ronald Paulson to the close reading of Warburton which led him to his cheeky depiction of Diana Multimammia, and also more broadly to his breast-based theory of the famous ‘line of beauty’, as inset within an Egyptian pyramid in the mysterious title-page image of The Analysis of Beauty. This theory’s great influence on Darwin is discussed in the next chapter, and in Chapter 10 we shall also return to Dupuis’s and Volney’s more radical take on Masonry, as well as that of Paine, who (though the evidence is inconclusive) has certainly been claimed as both a Mason and as a founding American Rosicrucian. Masonic Culture Freemasonry’s relations to eighteenth-century sociality and politics will be explored further in Chapter 10; here it is useful to establish a little more of its culture and history. Starting from a mass gatecrashing of real seventeenth-century stonemasons’ guild ‘lodges’ by upper- and middle-class ‘speculative masons’, and perhaps at one point connected to the underground cause of the exiled Stuart monarchy, British Freemasonry was nationally established by the formation of the London ‘Grand Lodge’ in 1717, and went on to attract members across the political spectrum. As peripatetic but highly skilled workers, medieval masons had relied on national networks of ‘lodges’ to discuss their ‘craft’ and make contacts, protecting trade secrets through coded passwords, signs and symbols which embedded various stories about masonry’s ancient lineage. It was around this paraphernalia that the ‘speculative’ interlopers constructed modern Masonry. While this clearly had its Establishment side, regularly bestowing Grand Mastership on members of the royal family and high aristocracy, Margaret C. Jacob argues that it was also a crucial channel for the ‘radical enlightenment’: a Europe-wide way of ‘living the enlightenment’ for people of ‘the literate and modestly to greatly affluent classes’, including those unlikely to have directly encountered the works of the philosophes through which ‘Enlightenment’ is often defined.63 Its substitution of the term ‘Grand Architect of the Universe’ for ‘God’, and insistence on freedom of religion given a broad acceptance of that idea, gives it some claim to have been the Enlightenment’s nearest thing to a ‘Deist church’, Eric Towers, Dashwood: The Man and the Myth (London: Crucible, 1986) 38, 45. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, 8.

62 63

Myths

165

despite the array of Biblical imagery it mingles in with its sometimes bewildering combination of elements of Hermetic Egyptianism, Rosicrucianism and Baconian scientism, and its system of secret-keeping practices studded with Eleusinian references. Despite this dizzying range of sources, many of its key symbols and enthusiasms now seem hard to distinguish from what we might merely regard as typically eighteenth-century. From an admiration for Newton to a liking for Palladian architecture; from Gothic knights to pyramids; from biblical figures such as Solomon to classical ones such as Hercules; from a special penchant for the number three to an equally special penchant for the number four: trying to pick out such motifs individually as infallible Masonic giveaways is a thankless task.64 However, some of the narratives embodied in its rituals do present a rather clearer outline of Freemasonry’s concerns. Centrally, these narratives involve the murder of the chief builder of Solomon’s Temple, Hiram Abiff, and the attempt to trace his body and effect some kind of revenge or resuscitation.65 This story can be mapped not only onto other resurrection stories like those of Osiris, Adonis, Eurydice or the Eleusinian Proserpina, but also onto the allegorical journey undertaken by the initiate to each new Masonic ‘degree’, from blindfolded darkness and variously enacted death threats, to the new life of initiated membership. The image of Solomon’s temple maps not only onto the natural universe constructed by the ‘Great Architect’, but also onto the floor designs and other appurtenances of the Masonic lodges (often called temples) where the initiations and meetings take place. Hence one of the things Freemasonry does is to spatialize time, or at least blunt its unidirectional advance, through various notions of circularity and rediscovery. Its key ceremonies repeat the idea of an initiate’s journey between various symbolic points, carefully mapped out on a few feet of floor in a temple or lodge where time is thought to be defeated – as in De Loutherbourg’s designs for Cagliostro’s lodge, or with ‘His Scythe revers’d, and both his Pinions bound’ (l. 148) in Pope’s Masonic The Temple of Fame. For Darwin, this firmly spatializing structure operates as a necessary frame, holding Time in place long enough to make him utter his evolutionary truths, as he lies ‘by sculpture bound’ in a Temple whose Masonic lineaments flicker in and out of view as we undergo our journey of initiation across its few feet of floor. Darwin’s take on myths, Egypt, Rosicrucian spirits and Masonry may, then, be weird, but in eighteenth-century context, not all that weird. Academic discussion of This is no longer because these things are particularly hidden: from when Margaret C. Jacob began her studies in the 1970s until now, most of the once-secret archives have been flung open (see her The Origins of Freemasonry: Facts and Fictions [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006], 5); and complete verbatim accounts of Masonic ceremonies have in any case been in print since the eighteenth century: Anon., Jachin and Boaz: or, an authentic key to the door of free-masonry, both ancient and modern (London: W. Nicoll and E. Newbery, 1785). 65 See Jachin and Boaz, 25–33. 64

166

Fig. 8.5

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

P. J. de Loutherbourg, ‘Painting for the Lodge of the Companions’ (c. 1787), watercolour on paper. Reproduced by kind permission of Torre Abbey, Devon, and the Bridgeman Art Library.

Myths

167

these questions in relation to the period’s art and literature remains very sporadic: there is little in studies of Pope or Swift to match Ronald Paulson’s superb survey of Hogarth’s Freemasonry, and, while Burns’s Freemasonry is more widely known about, it often comes across as a quirky minor detail about him, rather than a chance to explore the complex of aesthetic, political or freethinking effects with which it links his creative work to many others’. As for broader interests in mythology, these are routinely allowed to the Romantics (where would Romantic studies be without Prometheus?), but for many people the eighteenth century’s interest in the subject more or less stops at the idea that it simply accepted pagan myths as a dimension of the Graeco-Roman classics, to be endlessly recopied but rarely related to more modern concerns. I suggest that the way Darwin links these ideas to a scientific materialism he takes completely seriously points us into a world where a lusty paganism is alive and well, and the deist church of Masonry can often serve as a mask for some radical levels of Freethought. In the next two chapters we will consider some further ramifications of this paganism both within and outside Masonry, and look at the political backlash some of it aroused, as responses to the French Revolution hardened into a full-blooded anti-Jacobin witch hunt.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 9

Aesthetics, Sex, Myths and History: Darwin and Richard Payne Knight From a certain distance, Darwin’s literary output shows an almost uncanny resemblance to that of a contemporary whom he neither met nor ever referred to: Richard Payne Knight (1750–1824). Though some 20 years younger, Knight’s writing career overlapped closely with Darwin’s and, like Darwin, he alternated between prose treatises and extended didactic verse, dealing with such topics as gardens, picturesque aesthetics, ancient mythology, Lucretian materialism and ‘the progress of society’. The fact that neither writer so much as mentions the other usefully suggests more about the wider coherence of their shared Enlightenment culture than would any more demonstrable convergence. Both Darwin and Knight created their own gardens and wrote about them in their first substantial poems, perhaps following the Virgilian-Miltonic tradition which saw the rural genres of Pastoral and Georgic as a kind of limbering-up for Epic. Both drew on the botanical expertise of Knight’s brother Thomas Andrew Knight as well as their joint acquaintance Sir Joseph Banks; both explore the tension between the ‘smooth’ aesthetic of Capability Brown and the ‘rougher’ aesthetics of Picturesque landscape theory; and both were attacked for their radical politics and libertine emphasis on sex, which allowed their anti-Jacobin critics to merge them into a single composite figure. Both combined all these interests with the antiquarian enthusiasms of a circle including Banks, Sir William Hamilton and the self-styled Baron D’Hancarville; both developed theories of ancient art and mythology which directly challenged orthodox Christian beliefs; and both strongly echoed the anti-religious materialism of Epicurus and Lucretius. Finally, both embarked on dangerously political poems of social history with almost identical names – Knight’s The Progress of Civil Society and Darwin’s substantial abandoned draft The Progress of Society – both modelled on the same passage from Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. Taken together, then, Darwin and Knight can help us to identify a range of interests shared across a significant swathe of late Enlightenment culture. But this very context of similarity also makes their points of difference and disagreement all the more striking. The aim of this chapter is to open out some of these differences in ways that will help lead us towards the final chapters’ discussions of Darwin and Romanticism. The second half will explore the links and contrasts between these writers’ two ‘Progresses’ in relation to space, time, history and the politics of their own day. The first half will approach this with a quicker glance at some other apparent parallels and divergences.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

170

Landscape and the Picturesque In Chapter 2 we considered the word ‘picturesque’, as applied to Darwin’s poetic style by Seward and others. Knight is also strongly identified with ‘the picturesque’, but in more specific association with his aesthetic theories about landscape. Darwin was interested in landscape too, and I shall begin my exploration of the parallelism – perhaps even the unacknowledged dialogue – between the two writers by glancing at Darwin’s occasional involvement in the ‘picturesque debate’, which Knight pugnaciously initiated against supporters of both the ‘smooth’ aesthetic of Capability Brown and the absolute identification of specific shapes with specific responses underlying Edmund Burke’s famous treatise on The Sublime and the Beautiful. Darwin’s Botanic Garden is based on his own Linnaean garden near Lichfield, as most fully described in Economy’s opening description (in fact borrowed from Seward) of how he Rais’d the young woodland, smooth’d the wavy green, And gave to Beauty all the quiet scene. (Economy 1.57–8)

Somewhat likewise, Knight’s first poem, The Landscape (1794), is based round his reconstruction of his own Downton Castle estate in Herefordshire. However, its aesthetic pronouncements are full of contempt for the ‘smooth’ aesthetic associated above all with Capability Brown, preferring instead a ‘picturesque’ aesthetic shot through with roughness and variety. A gardener’s good taste should Teach him to place, and not remove, the stone On yonder bank, with moss and fern o’ergrown; To cherish, not mow down, the weeds that creep Along the shore, or overhang the steep.1

A few years later, Darwin’s Temple makes an apparent attempt to marry such novel views with the Brownesque aesthetic of his Botanic Garden opening. Now, while still rhapsodizing over the beauty of ‘wavy lawns’, ‘bending woodlands’ and ‘Hills, whose green sides with soft protuberance rise’, he embraces the ‘rough’ picturesque aesthetic with equal fervour, exclaiming over

Richard Payne Knight, The Landscape, A Didactic Poem in Three Books, 2nd ed. (London: G. Nicol, 1795) 2.194–7. For an excellent account of Knight’s approach to the picturesque, see Andrew Ballantyne, Architecture, Landscape and Liberty: Richard Payne Knight and the Picturesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See too The Arrogant Connoisseur: Richard Payne Knight, 1751–1824, ed. Michael Clarke and Nicholas Penny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), and Frank J. Messmann,. Richard Payne Knight: The Twilight of Virtuosity (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1974). 1

Aesthetics, Sex, Myths and History

171

The moss-grown antlers of the aged oak, The shaggy locks that fringe the colt unbroke, The bearded goat with nimble eyes, that glare Through the long tissue of the hoary hair; – As with quick foot he climbs some ruin’d wall, And crops the ivy, which prevents its fall. (Temple 3.247–58)

In relation to this passage – while mentioning neither theorist by name – Temple’s substantial note on ‘Analysis of Taste’ apparently joins the ‘picturesque debate’ initiated by the pugnacious Knight in response to his friend and neighbour Uvedale Price’s Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful (1794).2 In The Landscape and later, while agreeing with Price on many things, Knight takes issue with his Burkean treatment of the sublime, the beautiful, and now the picturesque, as absolutely dependant on specific forms, rather than on the ‘associations of ideas’ built up in individual minds. Like Knight, Darwin makes the Burkean categories of the sublime and beautiful subsets of a ‘picturesque’ whose attractions depend largely on mental association, rather than belonging inherently to certain kinds of object, as argued by the Burkeinspired Price.3 However, Darwin does follow Burke in seeing the qualities of smoothness and roundness as inherently beautiful, while carefully explaining that this key role is founded on infant associations with comfort and nutriment rather than the intrinsic appeal on which Burke insists.4 Whenever waving lawns or Etruscan urns Give the nice curves, which swell the female breast[,] The countless joys the tender Mother pours Round the soft cradle of our infant hours, In lively trains of unextinct delight Rise in our bosoms recognized by sight; Fond Fancy’s eye recalls the form divine, And Taste sits smiling upon Beauty’s shrine. (Temple 3.216–22)

For Peter Heymans, Temple is ‘one of the most ambitious attempts in the Romantic period to establish a dialogue between evolutionary science and aesthetic philosophy’: Animality in British Romanticism: The Aesthetics of Species (London: Routledge, 2012), 171. 3 Uvedale Price, Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful, 2nd ed. (London: J. Robson, 1796), 60–61. 4 See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1757) 213, 286–9. Heymans makes the point that Temple also undermines Burke’s gendering of the male sublime and female beautiful through the power it gives to femininity in the sublimely beautiful ‘triumph of Despotic Love’ (2.370), with its close links to evolutionary violence (see Heymans, Animality in British Romanticism, 179–80. 2

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

172

Referring to Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty, a footnote concludes that ‘according to the ingenious idea of Hogarth, … the waving lines of beauty were originally taken from the temple of Venus’: the subsequently eroticized ‘Paphian shrine’ of the mother’s breast.5 Despite Darwin’s stress on early mental associations, the breast-centred aesthetics of Temple’s 1803 ‘Analysis of Taste’ note and related passages may well be among the targets of Knight’s anti-Burkean Analytical Enquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805) two years later, which pours particular scorn on the attribution of the ‘instinct’ of beauty to the breast’s smoothness and roundness. Naughtily, Knight undermines this idea with the thought-experiment of moulding a pudding in the same shape. Before a lover of women’s beauty pronounces either the infidel or the sceptic guilty of blasphemy against nature, let him take a mould from the … lovely bosom of this masterpiece of creation, and cast a plum pudding in it (an object by no means disgusting to most men’s appetites) and I think he will no longer be in raptures with the form whatever he may be with the substance.6

So much, it would seem, for the ‘nice curves’ of beauty. Knight’s attack on Burke’s absolutist aesthetics is of a piece with his antiBurkean view of politics as a dialectical process, which repeatedly confounds the sublime-beautiful distinction by being both at once. Always happy to cast himself as the infidel and blasphemous sceptic, Knight was also a political radical (or at any rate, Foxite Whig) who – at least for a time – shared Darwin’s vocal support for the French Revolution. In a much-quoted passage, Darwin’s Botanic Garden celebrates the awakened France as a giant breaking the bonds of ‘Confessors and Kings’, using his hundred arms to wave ploughshares and billhooks over his tyrants’ heads.7 Even more dramatically – since the Bastille-storming years of Darwin’s description had now (by 1794) given way to the Reign of Terror – Knight climaxes his own garden poem The Landscape by comparing the cathartic release of popular energies in France with the flood caused by undamming an artificial lake: But break the mound, and let the waters flow; Headlong and fierce their turbid currents go; Sweep down the fences, and tear up the soil; And roar along, ’midst havock, waste, and spoil; Till spent their fury: – then their moisture feeds The deepening verdure of the fertile meads; … So when rebellion breaks the despot’s chain, First wasteful ruin marks the rabble’s reign; Till tired their fury, and their vengeance spent,

Temple 3.207n; see too 3.174. Richard Payne Knight, An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste, 4th ed.

5 6

(London: T. Payne & J. White, 1805), 183. 7 Economy 2.377–94.

Aesthetics, Sex, Myths and History

173

One common interest bids their hearts relent; Then temperate order from confusion springs, And, fanned by freedom, genius spreads its wings.

Bloody though the revolution on ‘Gallia’s shores’ may be, ‘Yet, from these horrors, future times may see / Just order spring, and genuine liberty.8 As we shall see in the next chapter and later in this one, both Darwin’s and Knight’s revolutionary passages would return to haunt their authors and often link them in their critics’ minds, with a particular question-mark hanging over the unstable ‘wildness’ of the Knightian picturesque, and its mingling of sublime horror and beautiful order within a vision of unstoppable process. But this linkage also involved other issues. Sex and Mythology Despite Knight’s scepticism about the formal attributes of breasts, both authors also wrote enthusiastically about sex; a theme which both linked in various ways to pagan mythology. The saucy amours of Darwin’s 1789 Loves of the Plants, climaxing in a Tahiti where ‘The Loves laugh at all but Nature’s laws’, had been preceded three years earlier by Knight’s most notorious work, A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (1786). Offering many suggestive links with Darwin’s explorations of ancient mythology as well as his laughing Loves, Knight’s treatise was semi-privately published under the protection of the top-drawer Society of Dilettanti. For further protective cover, it was modestly appended to an open letter to its president (Banks) from the Naples-based diplomat and antiquarian Sir William Hamilton, describing his discovery that wax images of male genitalia were regularly sold and donated as votive offerings at the church of a nearby town.9 While not losing the chance for anti-Christian satire this situation suggests, Knight’s Priapus builds on the arguments of Hamilton’s antiquarian adviser, the self-styled Baron D’Hancarville, to deduce an ur-religion spread throughout the ancient world, whose phallic and vaginal imagery goes beyond a general unabashed enthusiasm for sex to a sense of the ‘generative or creative powers’ underlying all aspects of life.10 As the source of creative heat the sun is another object of reverence, its symbolism often merged with the phallus in various intricate ways, such as the statue of the sun-announcing cockerel with an erect penis for a beak which provides one of the most shocking and discussed of the

Knight, Landscape, 3.389–405, 419–20. For an excellent exploration of this work’s implications in its own age and ours, see

8 9

Giancarlo Carabelli, In the Image of Priapus (London: Duckworth, 1996). 10 Richard Payne Knight, A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus and its Connexion with the Mystic Theology of the Ancients, in Two Essays on the Worship of Priapus, ed. Anon (London: privately printed, 1865 [1786]), 22.

174

Fig. 9.1

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

From Plate 2 of Richard Payne Knight’s A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus and its Connexion with the Mystic Theology of the Ancients [1786]. In Two Essays on the Worship of Priapus, ed. Anon (London: privately printed, 1865). In the author’s possession.

Aesthetics, Sex, Myths and History

175

‘obscene’ engravings for which Priapus was excoriated even more than for its text, once it escaped from the charmed circle of its original publication.11 Though Darwin never mentions Priapus, its arguments and connections with the Hamilton circle have several points of connection to his own mythographic interests, as presented in Economy’s extended note on the Portland Vase. The Portland (or Barberini) Vase had entered Darwin’s circle by way of his friend Josiah Wedgwood’s obsessive attempt to perfect his characteristic ‘bisque and jasper’ style by copying its delicate white reliefs on dark glass.12 The Vase had been sold to the Duchess of Portland from Hamilton’s Naples collection and came already garlanded with several interpretations of the two tableaux separated by its handles – including those of D’Hancarville and Hamilton’s nephew Charles Greville, a good friend of Darwin’s and one of Knight’s co-‘Dilettanti’. The more intriguing of these tableaux depicts a seated woman, apparently fondling a snake between her knees and inviting a youth through a doorway while Cupid flies overhead with a lighted torch. In his note, Darwin queries D’Hancarville’s suggestion that the youth is Orpheus since he has no lyre, but expands on his idea that the woman is welcoming a new entrant to the Underworld (Economy AN 22, p. 57). From this, Darwin builds up an elaborate theory that the youth represents ‘Mortal Life’ being greeted by the Persephone-like figure of ‘Immortal Life’ after his death, with Cupid’s presence indicating that we achieve immortality through sexual reproduction. Darwin then links this theory to Warburton’s account of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which we discussed in the last chapter. For Darwin, the stringent secrecy laws against revealing the Mysteries’ inner meanings more directly are recalled by a robed 11 Knight, Priapus, Plate 2 Fig.3; see too Knight, The Progress of Civil Society (London: G. Nicol, 1796), xxi, where Knight cheekily points out that the figure is owned by the Vatican, and its inscription means ‘Saviour of the World’. For Knight, such images depend on an ancient ‘system of emanations’ (Priapus, 48), whereby fundamental forces of nature are represented by more specific human or animal forms which are still understood to express them rather than to deserve worship in their own right. Thus the Egyptian bullfigure Apis was first seen as ‘only an image of the Spirit of Osiris’, who himself only represented particular aspects of the creative solar energy, as expressed in his light/darkness dualism with the monster Typhon or Set, and his many imagistic links with the sacrificial narratives of the Syrian Adonis and Graeco-Roman Dionysus/Bacchus (Priapus, 30). A decade after Priapus, Charles Dupuis was to use a similar language of ‘emanations’ to describe the ‘multitude of Gods’ as well as elemental spirits and indeed angels, and Dupuis’s citation of the early Christian father Origen in support of this idea is echoed in turn by Knight’s later Alfred (1823), whose Preface calls Origen’s ‘system of emanations’ the only Christian doctrine ‘entirely compatible with the now generally received system of the universe’ (Dupuis, Origin of Religious Worship, 61, 56; Knight, Alfred: A Romance in Rhyme [London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1823], vii). 12 Wedgwood’s sculptor-designer John Flaxman brought it to his employer’s attention as ‘the very apex of perfection to which you are endeavouring to bring your bisque and jasper’; see Robin Brooks, The Mystery of the Portland Vase (London: Duckworth, 2004), 136.

Fig. 9.2

‘The Second Compartment’ of the Portland Vase, engraved by William Blake, opp. Additional Notes p. 127 of Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden, Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation, (London: J. Johnson, 1791). In the author’s possession.

The second compartment

Aesthetics, Sex, Myths and History

177

figure with finger held to lips on the bottom of the vase: the female Hierophant who ‘Drives the profane from Mystery’s bolted door,/ And Silence guards the Eleusinian lore’; or else perhaps the cross-dressing eunuch Atis, loved and castrated by the nature goddess Cybele and said to have first brought the Mysteries from the East. As with Knight’s mythographic readings, sex is strongly present in Darwin’s reading of the Vase: not only in the figures of Atis and Cupid but in the arch description of Immortal Life as a ‘beautiful female, … fondling between her knees a large and playful serpent’. This serpent’s symbolic relevance relates to the regular sloughing and renewal of its ‘external skin’ and its erect position as opposed to the drooping torch which represented ‘mortality’ in the vase’s other main tableau: a contrast which implicitly relates it to the upright torch of Cupid in the present one. Though Darwin does not press it all the way home, the symbolism linking these elements clearly points to his often-conveyed view that our ‘immortality’ is achieved through nature’s ‘chef d’oeuvre’, sexual reproduction. But while this view may owe much to D’Hancarville’s (and perhaps Knight’s) theories of universal Priapism, it is somewhat more grounded: for Darwin sexual imagery relates more to the overwhelming importance of reproduction than to the universal workings of the religious mind. There is another difference-in-resemblance between Knight and Darwin in their attitudes to secrecy. Darwin’s approving description of the guardian of Eleusinian secrets suggests an embrace of the ‘double doctrine’ of scientific and other knowledge – long used by Deists and covert atheists – whereby it is reasonable to keep the real facts of Nature secret from the public, at least until they are ready for them. This doctrine was embraced by the early Deist John Toland, whose secret society–celebrating Pantheisticon has been seen (by Margaret C. Jacob and others) as feeding directly into that prime embodiment of ‘double doctrine’, Freemasonry.13 Such ideas clearly underlie the expulsions of the profane at the thresholds of Economy and Temple, despite the paradox that in a published work such prohibitions really constitute an open invitation to read on. For Knight, what Darwin calls the Mysteries’ ‘pious fraud’ (Temple 1.139) is fraud pure and simple: a means for those in the know to keep the ‘vulgar’ in awe. This key difference in Knight’s and Darwin’s mythographies may relate to the fact that – though often skirting the same interests and topics, and being sometimes cited as a forebear by various quasiMasonic groups14 – there is no evidence that Knight was himself a Mason. If there was a general intention to keep the blasphemies of Priapus private to the (quasi Jacob sees Toland’s Pantheisticon (1720) as a blueprint for a ‘highly heretical’ quasiMasonic ritual ‘intended to praise nature and not God’ (Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, 61, 24). Though this ritual was never officially adopted, Toland’s book was republished in 1751 with an explicitly Masonic marginal gloss. 14 The site of the Crowleyesque ‘Ordo Templi Orientis’ gives ‘Sir Richard Payne Knight’ an unexpected knighthood, and appoints him a magus: http://www.sacred-texts. com/oto/lib52.htm (accessed 23 March 2013). 13

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

178

Masonic?) Dilettanti Society which first circulated it, that privacy soon broke down, and Knight’s whole stance was that of a whistleblower against all forms of secrecy, whether ancient or modern. Egypt and Greece So far, we have observed many parallels between the interests of Knight and Darwin, and a few differences which may seem rather minor. However, one more apparently small difference in the field of mythography will eventually lead us towards the much greater issues of history, race and society, with which this chapter will conclude. For both Knight and Darwin, the early worship of Nature’s creative forces contained more wisdom than established Christianity; but one crucial way in which Knight differs from Darwin (and a great many other Enlightenment mythographers) is in his reluctance to grant mysteries transmitted from Egypt any special role in either the establishment or loss of this ancient wisdom. For Knight, the Egyptians drew their images from sources as far afield as India, and there are many alternative routes back to the wisdom they shared with others before losing it altogether under the Persians.15 While happy to stress Egypt’s formative influence on Judaeo-Christianity and cite its enormous antiquity to challenge the orthodox dating of the earth to the early fifth millennium bc, Knight dismisses its serious influence on Greece, suggesting whenever possible that supposedly ‘profound’ Egyptian wisdom was in fact implanted from Greece much later. Knight drily identifies the Persian Cambyses’ invasion of Egypt in 525 bc as the point when animal worship – to which the elite Magi had confined ‘the vulgar’ by not explaining that bulls and jackals were simply ‘emanations’ – became widespread owing to the Persians’ massacre of all the ‘learned and rational’ who had arrogantly concealed its real meaning.16 Whereas Warburton, Darwin and others detect a strong Egyptian influence on the Greek Mystery cults, Knight sees the proto-modern science of Greek cults such as Orphism, with its pre-Copernican grasp of ‘the plurality of worlds, and true solar system’, as home-grown. For Knight, the supposed wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus was a belated Greek import to Egypt rather than vice versa, and although ‘the Egyptians pretended that all foreigners received their sciences from them’, all those who entered the country were in fact ‘put to death or enslaved’ and could not therefore have spread Egyptian science anywhere.17 This disparagement of Egypt in favour of Greece and India becomes a good deal more pronounced in Knight’s later Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology (1818), which seizes on the Sanskrit studies of Sir William Jones and others to argue for an early Indian influence Knight, Priapus, 53. Knight, Priapus, 31. 17 Knight, Priapus, 41, 19. 15 16

Aesthetics, Sex, Myths and History

179

on Egypt rather than – as Priapus had still grudgingly allowed as possible – the other way round.18 In contrast to Knight’s dismissive account, it is instructive to look at the way Darwin covers Cambyses’ Persian conquest of Egypt. Darwin agrees with Knight that all memory of Egypt’s ancient religion was destroyed by this event, but sees this as a tragedy of epic proportions, implicitly comparing the Persians’ tyranny over their African victims to the horrors of the modern slave trade. Economy places an impassioned account of Cambyses’ conquest straight after a diatribe on oppression in America, Ireland, France and Mexico, and finally on the trade in African slaves. Darwin calls on the elements to protect the memory of these last victims: ‘AIR! bear to heaven upon thy azure flood/ Their innocent cries! – EARTH! cover not their blood!’ (Economy 2.429–30). By way of a very extended simile, this then leads us into by far the longest of Darwin’s few historical narratives, describing Cambyses’ conquest of Egypt: Thus when Cambyses led his barbarous hosts From Persia’s rocks to Egypt’s trembling coasts, Defiled each hallowed fane, and sacred wood, And, drunk with fury, swell’d the Nile with blood; …. Slow as they pass’d, the indignant temples frown’d, Low curses muttering from the vaulted ground; … Prophetic whispers breathed from Sphinx’s tongue, And Memnon’s lyre with hollow murmurs rung; Burst from each pyramid expiring groans, And darker shadows stretch’d their lengthen’d cones. – (Economy 2.435–8, 445–52)

These whispered curses come to partial fruition when a section of Cambyses’ army is buried by a sandstorm so intense that men and camels find themselves climbing up hills of their buried fellows before being buried themselves: Wave over wave the driving desert swims, Bursts o’er their heads, inhumes their struggling limbs; Man mounts on man, on camels camels rush, Hosts march o’er hosts, and nations nations crush,Wheeling in air the winged islands fall, And one great earthy Ocean covers all! (Economy 2.489–94)

Counterbalancing the earlier plea to the Earth to ‘cover not [the] blood’ of presentday slaves, the passage implicitly identifies these with their Egyptian fellowAfricans, and the hubristic Persians’ living burial with that deserved by modern slave owners. Richard Payne Knight, An Inquiry into the Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology (London: A. J. Valpy, 1818), 11, 43, 118. 18

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

180

We might compare Darwin’s linking of the oppression of ancient Egyptians and modern African slaves with Knight’s very different linkage – or rather contrast – between appropriate responses to the plights of enslaved Africans and modern Greeks under the Turkish yoke. Knight’s late epic Alfred: A Romance in Rhyme (1823) climaxes with a prophecy in which the Saxon sage Osbert denounces the modern-day English for tacitly condoning the Turkish enslavement of the Greeks, a crime far worse than the black slavery about which abolitionists make such a fuss: Can none but sable savages obtain Relief from wrongs, or sympathy with pain? By habit callous, and by nature base, They neither feel, nor understand disgrace.19

These themes – of Egypt versus Greece, and sympathy versus contempt for Africans – deeply imbue the two historical works with almost identical titles which Knight and Darwin worked on within two or three years of each other: Knight’s The Progress of Civil Society (1796) and Darwin’s unfinished The Progress of Society (1798–1800). Before considering these, it will be useful to summarize the many points of resemblance, and of difference, we have surveyed so far. In their garden descriptions, their embrace of the picturesque, their vocal poetic support for the French Revolution, their genial view of sex and their use of pagan myths and images to destabilize Christian assumptions, Darwin and Knight are extraordinarily similar. As we shall see in the next chapter, these similarities did not escape the anti-Jacobin critics who began to scour the cultural landscape for pro-revolutionary tendencies throughout the 1790s. Yet Darwin and Knight also diverge on certain key issues: not just some of the minutiae of aesthetic response, but also the relative status of certain ancient cultures, particularly Egypt and Greece, as well as the moral imperative to abolish slavery. These divergences are most usefully contextualized by Martin Bernal, whose Black Athena extends Foucault’s arguments about a shift from spatial to temporal orientations in our period, to include a major corresponding shift in readings of the ancient world vis-á-vis modern imperialism. To give Bernal’s argument space to breathe, I shall lay Darwin and Knight aside in the following section. Martin Bernal’s Black Athena What may seem like a minor divergence about the status of Egypt is illuminated by Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1987).20 Bernal’s highly controversial study rests on four main arguments: first, Knight, Alfred, 358–61. This book has aroused much controversy, particularly among Classics lecturers

19 20

fed up with being told by students that Socrates and Cleopatra were black: see Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers, eds., Black Athena Revisited (Chapel Hill and London:

Aesthetics, Sex, Myths and History

181

that the ancient Greeks themselves believed that their mythology and much of their culture reached them by way of invasions from Egypt and Phoenicia; second, that this ‘Ancient Model’ of the flow of cultures was almost universally accepted until the later eighteenth century, when it began to be replaced by an ‘Aryan Model’ deriving Greek culture from a Northern, Indo-European invasion; third, that the reasons for this replacement were overwhelmingly ideological, with roots in Romantic theories of racial ‘progress’; and fourth, that though an IndoEuropean invasion did take place the Ancient Model was in fact broadly true, as demonstrated by numerous linguistic and other links between Greece, Egypt and Phoenicia. The first and last of these claims are matters for experts, and the third opens up large questions to which we shall return. But the second claim, about the longstanding acceptance of the ‘Ancient Model’ and its replacement by an ‘Aryan’ one in the Romantic period, is the least contested of the four and offers a fruitful basis for comparing Darwin’s and Knight’s attitudes to ancient – and hence modern – culture. For Bernal, the Ancient Model had a radical edge in the eighteenth century.21 Rather than setting the classical Greeks and Romans up as a known ideal which moderns could imitate but never transcend, it postulated their world as a falling away from an Egyptian knowledge which, being lost, must be looked for again in the future rather than in the known past. Furthermore, the traces which Egypt had left behind suggested a challengingly allegorical reading of all religions, whose dangerous unorthodoxy necessarily made it the province of a vanguardist elite: ‘The idea that mythology is an allegorical interpretation of historical events or natural phenomena to the masses, who are capable of grasping only a partial truth’ constituted a ‘general scheme of the twofold truth or philosophy’ which itself went back to ancient times but empowered the modern intellectual to set his findings against the beliefs of normal society.22 Foremost among these beliefs was of course the orthodox Christian religion, and one of the hottest theological issues of the Enlightenment was whether Moses imported a significant Egyptian element into Judaism and thence into Christianity itself. Bernal points out that the eighteenth-century belief in the precedence of Egypt needs to be distinguished from the ‘Egyptomania’ which seized Britain and the rest of Europe in the early nineteenth, particularly in the wake of Napoleon’s Egypt campaign and the country’s subsequent British takeover after the Battle

University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 3–4. But, even as represented in Lefkowitz and Rogers’ formidable demolition job, Bernal’s opponents do mostly acknowledge that his arguments fall into several distinct aspects, of which the collapse of one does not necessarily invalidate the rest. More specifically, Robert Palter’s essay on ‘Eighteenth Century Historiography in Black Athena’ (209–66) disputes Bernal’s tone and numerous details but leaves his central claims about the Enlightenment largely intact. 21 Bernal, Black Athena, 178–9. 22 Bernal, Black Athena, 181.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

182

of the Nile in 1798.23 These events led to a new aesthetic enthusiasm for actual Egyptian remains, and a more accurate understanding of them which climaxed in Jean-François Champollion’s 1822 decipherment of hieroglyphic writing itself from the Rosetta Stone. However, by this point the tide had already set against the Ancient Model – indeed, Champollion’s (and Darwin’s acquaintance Thomas Young’s) disappointing exposure of hieroglyphics as phonetic based rather than as pure thought-ideograms was the last nail in its coffin – so that the aesthetic craze for things Egyptian was now posited on a sense of exotic distance rather than of filling in the gaps in a continuity.24 Shelley’s sonnet ‘Ozymandias’ – inspired by a head of Rameses II displayed in the British Museum in 1817 – well exemplifies this new sense of irrecoverable distance. In works such as Hellas, Shelley also exemplifies what Bernal calls ‘Hellenomania’, the Romantic idealization of Greece which needs to be distinguished from the broader Neoclassicism of the eighteenth century.25 Though elements of Greek culture were part of the Augustan mental landscape, they were not usually encountered first hand: from Roman copies of Greek sculpture to Latinised names such as Jupiter, Ulysses and Oedipus Rex, Greece was filtered through the eyes of Rome. The move to a more imaginative engagement with the idea of Greece – and particularly Athens – as a living political and cultural alternative to our own world was greatly stimulated by the Dilettanti Society’s sponsorship of Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens (1762–1816), placing Knight and his circle near the birth of the new Grecianism.26 Hellenomania replaced a broad, Latin-based sense of continuity from the whole classical world with a passionate identification with the artistic achievement, nascent democracies and non-puritanical paganism of Greece. For Bernal this preference for ‘young’ Greece over older empires such as Egypt feeds into an ‘Aryan Model’ which derives Western culture from a healthbringing northern invasion of the Greek peninsula rather than from a shared, Bernal, Black Athena, 267. Bernal, Black Athena, 252. In deciphering the Rosetta Stone, Champollion should

23 24

share the credit with the polymathic doctor Thomas Young, who also established the wave theory of light as well as the causes of astigmatism. Visiting Darwin in 1794, Young sceptically admired the ‘singularity and boldness’ of his medical views but was more impressed by his collection of ancient cameos: see Andrew Robinson, The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young, the Anonymous Polymath Who Proved Newton Wrong, Explained How We See, Cured the Sick, and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone, Among Other Feats of Genius (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006), 1–3, 42–3. 25 Bernal, Black Athena, 281–336. 26 Though the ‘Dilettanti’ name reflects a Grand Tour of Italy as a prime condition of membership, Knight’s own focus on Sicily (the subject of his Expedition into Sicily, based on his 1777 Grand Tour) and the area round Naples, including the priapic Isernia, is based on these regions’ position as parts of Magna Graecia, the loose confederation of Greekfounded states founded from the eighth century bc, long preceding the Roman conquest of Italy.

Aesthetics, Sex, Myths and History

183

partly African, Mediterranean world, and which bears much responsibility for the newly ideological racism of the nineteenth century. For Bernal, Sir William Jones’s establishment of the Indo-European language family led to a widespread cultural preference for the India of the Brahmins (seen as Western conquerors of darker-skinned native Indians) over an Egypt which was coming increasingly to be seen as ‘African’.27 The identification of the Indo-European languages with the racial group which the new anthropology saw as emerging from the Caucasus led eventually to the full-blown ‘Aryan Model’, according to which Greek culture emerged from the subjection of the aboriginal Pelasgians by Aryans who invaded Europe from the east and, hence, the Balkan peninsula from the north. A further factor contributing to Greece’s greatness was thought to be its rocky terrain, contributing to a fierce independence of spirit which found perfect expression in the small, self-governing city-state.28 All these ideas can be found in the view of Greece presented in Knight’s Progress of Civil Society, where ‘Freedom, in sterile Greece, its head uprear’d’, in explicit contrast to the ‘cold inactive stupor’ of an Egypt which ‘trembled at a master’s nod’.29 Bernal gives several reasons for the Ancient Model’s decline. The Hermeticalchemical belief that the texts of the Egyptian ‘Hermes Trismegistus’ or Thoth predated both the classical Greeks and the Bible had already been undermined by the seventeenth-century scholar Isaac Casaubon, who updated them to early Christian times. However, Bernal rejects the common claim that this destroyed alchemy at a stroke: with its eighteenth-century absorption into Freemasonry, the Ancient Model continued as an often-progressive force up to the French Revolution, when Dupuis’s Origin of All Religious Worship (1795) and Volney’s Ruins (1791) identified the belief in an Egyptian origin for the world’s religions unequivocally with revolutionary France.30 Even more than Champollion’s decipherment, it was this contaminating revolutionary association which led to the rapid relegation of Egypt to a dead, antique past where its power to subvert the claims of both the Greek ideal and Christianity was effectually extinguished. What Bernal fails to acknowledge fully enough here is that, for militant deists and atheists, claiming an Egyptian origin for religion is not necessarily to be proEgypt: implicitly for Dupuis and more polemically for Volney, its invention of state religion makes Egypt one of the villains of world history. It is something close to this position – blaming rather than acknowledging Egypt for its contribution to Judaeo-Christianity – that made Knight’s 1786 Priapus such an object of scandal and such a significant precursor of their work, at the same time as paving the way for the demolition of their still Egyptocentric ‘Ancient Model’ in the name of proGreek ‘Hellenomania’.

29 30 27 28

Bernal, Black Athena, 1–2, 224–30. Bernal, Black Athena, 333–4, 209–11. Knight, Civil Society, 5.173, 170–71. Bernal, Black Athena, 25, 250–51.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

184

Bernal mentions neither Knight nor Erasmus Darwin by name, but the connection he makes between this Egypt/Greece shift and a broader shift from spatializing to time-driven epistemologies – as discussed in Chapter 2 – is well illustrated by the story of Darwin’s only attempt to write about history, and its bizarre entanglement with Knight’s treatment of exactly the same subjects. Darwin’s Ghost Poem Despite its almost limitless comprehensiveness, the published oeuvre of ‘Dr Darwin, the everything’ has one important gap: the messy details of human history. Even Temple, despite its subtitle ‘the Origin of Society’ and such canto-titles as ‘Progress of the Mind’, in fact leaps at a series of single bounds from such crucial events as life’s emergence onto land, the beginnings of sexual reproduction and the separation of the human thumb, to examinations of a fully formed modern consciousness manifesting little development through real historical time. Elsewhere, despite Economy’s celebrations of current and future human inventiveness, the only significant historical fluctuations are between classical/biblical antiquity and an undifferentiated modernity which rarely reaches back more than a century.31 However, two prominently placed passages near the start of Temple reveal ghostly traces of a fourth poem, which does promise to explore this missing historical dimension. The opening eight lines declaring what Temple will actually be about are followed by another six, outlining a different poem altogether: Four past eventful Ages then recite, And give the fifth, new-born of Time, to light; The silken tissue of their joys disclose, Swell with deep chords the murmur of their woes; Their laws, their labours, and their loves proclaim, And chant their virtues to the trump of Fame. (Temple 1.9–14)

There is no trace of these four eventful Ages or the ‘new-born’ fifth one in Temple, nor of the historically grounded mythography described in its Preface: The Deities of Egypt, and afterwards of Greece, and Rome, were derived from men famous in those early times, as in the ages of hunting, pasturage, and agriculture. The histories of some of their actions recorded in Scripture, or celebrated in the heathen mythology, are introduced, as the Author hopes, without impropriety into his account of those remote periods of human society. (Temple Preface i–ii). 31 Apart from brief glances at the Great Plague and Roger Bacon’s invention of gunpowder (Economy 4.87–126; 1.237–52), the only aspects of non-ancient history mentioned are the depredations of the Spanish conquistadors and the start of the British slave-trade, clearly intended to make specific contemporary points about European hypocrisy and greed (Economy 2.411–30).

Aesthetics, Sex, Myths and History

185

In the poem we have, ‘remote periods of human society’ may be touched on from time to time, but in no way do their specific ‘joys’, ‘woes’ or ‘famous’ men determine the arrangement of the poem. In fact, these two passages are palimpsestic traces of another poem, tentatively titled The Progress of Society, of which Darwin drafted a substantial portion before abandoning it, converting some of its opening to the different purposes of Temple, and failing to remove these two rogue passages from the manuscript which Joseph Johnson printed up after his death.32 Judging from its substantial early portions and notes outlining the rest, the poem’s five cantos were to have traced the progress of human society through the four ages of hunting, pasturage, agriculture and commerce, before climaxing with a utopian future age of ‘philosophy’ or science. Ambitiously, and using the Temple of Nature as a focus of some highly elaborate ‘machinery’, the poem also planned to explain the superstructural developments of art, mythology and religion by reference to what Marx would call the material ‘base’ of the ages’ changing technologies and social arrangements. Hence, by contrast to its more cosmically instructive role in Temple, Progress’s Temple of Nature is devoted to describing humanity’s progress in terms of developing technologies of warfare and material production. The roles of goddess Nature and muse-hierophant Urania are combined in the figure of the Priestess of Nature, who instructs a fluttering bevy of ‘genies’ to demonstrate each age’s particular skills in turn, and create artworks depicting the various gods and heroes who have risen to fame as epitomes of those skills. Unlike in Economy and Temple, where the gods are seen as misread hieroglyphic metaphors of physicochemical processes, here they are mixed indiscriminately with human heroes and heroines as users and devisers of implements. This humanization of gods is known as ‘Euhemerism’, after the ancient blasphemer Euhemerus who (as described by Warburton) broke the secrets of the Eleusinian Mysteries by declaring that he knew where the gods had once lived, and where they were buried.33 Thus in Canto One of Progress, the discoveries of the club, sling and bow are exemplified by the weapons of Hercules and Samson, by David’s killing of Goliath, and by Apollo’s and Diana’s arrow-massacre of Niobe’s children. In later fragments and outlines, Omphale’s subjection of Hercules to women’s work suggests the transition from the Age of Hunting to the gentler skills of Pasturage, as does the sapping of Samson’s strength by Delilah’s pastoral love songs and the advanced technology of her scissors; and the sheep-sacrificing Abel’s murder by the crop-growing Cain exemplifies the rise of Agriculture, as does Bacchus’s invention of wine.34 The contrast between this approach to myth See Appendix A for the text of this poem, edited from manuscript. Warburton, Divine Legation, Works 1.189. 34 In other examples, the pastoral origins of poetry are exemplified by the birth of the 32

33

Muses, and the establishment of patriarchy by the stories of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son and various scenes from the life of Moses, while the importance of water wells to a nomadic herding population is exemplified by a fragment on Rebecca at the well before her marriage to Isaac. There seems a danger of running out of myths by the time we reach Canto Four’s Age of Commerce, where the only legendary figure named is the inventor Dedalus.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

186

and that of Darwin’s other works appears most sharply in the planned treatments of the rape of Proserpina and the death of Adonis: elsewhere invested with much secret significance as allegories for the transformations of matter, they now appear simply as markers for the ‘rapes’ which ‘stand prominent’ in the age of hunting (Daphne and Syrinx also exemplify this danger of an under-populated age), and the dangers of hunting itself.35 In the published Temple of Nature, this turn towards Euhemerist mythography is completely abandoned, along with Progress’s elaborate machinery of Zeitgeist genies and the whole theme of human history itself. I would argue that this abandonment of history throws a significant light on the split between Enlightened and Romantic values explored in this book’s second and eleventh chapters. To establish this, it is important to take a closer look at Progress’s ‘four ages’ historiography in the light of Knight’s eerily similar poem, The Progress of Civil Society, beginning with their shared sources in Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura and such Scottish Enlightenment philosophical historians as Adam Smith. Stadial Theories of History As we noted in Chapter 6, Temple’s evolutionary history draws repeatedly on some parts of De Rerum Natura’s fifth book; but Darwin turns to another part of the same book for Progress’s attempt to trace how certain clearly defined stages or ‘ages’ of social development succeed each other from logical necessity, and not through mere accident, deliberate decision or divine decree. Of course some ages’ theories were religiously based, and not particularly wedded to ideas of ‘progress’. The idea of a steady god-decreed decline from a golden to a silver, bronze and then iron age was, from Hesiod’s Works and Days on, the basic Graeco-Roman model of history.36 However, Lucretius influentially turns this ‘ages’ story into a wholly material history, trying to balance pros and cons and pinpoint exactly how each grew out of the last.37 Progress 1.377–412; ‘Prologue to the first canto’, note 3. However, this model was often complicated in various ways, to allow for moments

35 36

of improvement as well as deterioration: after the bronze age Hesiod himself inserts a rather awkward return to the gold standard in a fourth age of heroes, before an almost vertical decline to iron in the fifth (Hesiod, Works and Days, in Hesiod and Theognis, trans. D. Wender (London: Penguin, 1973), 63–4). 37 Thus Lucretius’ primitive age of hunting and foraging, where people ‘could not look to the common good’ (DRN, 5.958) is replaced by a more settled age centred on families and cattle, which enables kings to emerge and establish a primitive aristocracy based on strength (5.1108–12). Once property becomes more widely distributed with the discovery of metals needed for effective agriculture and exchange (5.1241–96, p. 160–62), these early kings are overthrown and a period of Hobbesian mob rule ensues, leading eventually to ‘mankind, tired of living in violence’ submitting to ‘rules of law’ (5.1136–50, esp. 1145–7), in an increasingly technological world of ships, roads, art and poetry, all ‘taught by practice and the experiments of the active mind’ (5.1136–50).

Aesthetics, Sex, Myths and History

187

In the eighteenth century, this Lucretian model of the four ages developing logically out of each other was strongly echoed in the ‘stadial’ theories of Scottish Enlightenment historians: particularly Adam Smith, Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson and William Robertson. Thus in Lectures on Jurisprudence (1762) Smith states that ‘The four stages of society are hunting, pasturage, farming, and commerce’.38 In Smith’s masterpiece The Wealth of Nations (1776), the monarchy emerging in the second of these ages is challenged in the third by a landowning agricultural aristocracy, whose endless warring is only subdued in the fourth age when kings ally with the new commercial classes inevitably created by the landowners’ growing wealth.39 Two or three years before Darwin abandoned his own Progress, Knight published his similarly named The Progress of Civil Society: A Didactic Poem in Six Books (1796), firmly modelled round the Scottish Enlightenment reading of Lucretius. The first four books follow Smith’s pattern almost exactly, easily absorbing it back into the Lucretian model from which Knight proclaims his ‘general design’ is taken.40 In his fifth book, ‘Of Climate and Soil’, Knight also owes much to Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (1748), whose derivation of history from material conditions was another key model for the Scottish historians, one of whom called Montesquieu ‘the Lord Bacon of this branch of philosophy’ of which Adam Smith ‘is the Newton’.41 However, Knight’s poem also displays some of the new pressures to which such views were now subjected by the French Revolution. Strongly reversing The Landscape’s implicit endorsement of the Revolution as a violent flash flood leading to eventual renovation, here Knight dwells luridly on the mass killings of the Reign of Terror, while still trying to fit them in with Smith and Robertson’s optimistic vision of increasing commerce as the natural stadial ‘end of history’. Expanding on a long revisionist note at the end of The Landscape, Knight now depicts France as descending into a new age of barbarism where ‘rapes and murders grow the rights of man’.42 Stadial theory always allows for such slides back into earlier stages, but Knight blames this one specifically on the burgeoning Adam Smith, ‘Chapter on Private Law’, Lectures On Jurisprudence, ed. R.. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael and P. G. Stein (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982). See Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 6–7, for Knight’s Civil Society as a possible conduit of these stadial ideas to Wordsworth. 39 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976): Editors’ Introduction, vol. 1, 12; vol. 2, 689–718 (bk 5, ch. 1); vol. 1, 400–410 (bk 3, ch. 3). See too Lucretius, DRN 5.1136–50, esp. 1145–7. 40 Knight, Civil Society, v. 41 John Millar, quoted by Andrew Skinner in Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations: Books 1–3, ed. Andrew Skinner (Harmondsworth: Penguin Pelican, 1979), 30. 42 Civil Society, 6.428. See too The Landscape (3.145n, 73–7), where the vast note rescinding the pro-revolutionary implications of the concluding flood metaphor completely takes over the poem’s last five pages. 38

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

188

of a disgruntled urban proletariat, ‘connected’ for the first time as a class by the demands of ‘growing capital’: when, for trade in busy crowds they join, Or throng the caverns of the gloomy mine; When growing capital, their swarms, collects, And nice arrangement, different arts, connects; The gathering multitudes … Feel courage from their active numbers rise, And learn, their lazy rulers, to despise.43

Knight certainly treats the French Revolution as an awful warning of what might happen in Britain if it does not allow sufficient freedoms and balancings of power to ease the strains of capitalism, but there is also a dreadful gusto in his depiction of the people as a mountain avalanche rushing ‘through the forests with collected force’ and breaking the great oaks and cedars in the way, which still (as in The Landscape) identifies them as a possibly inevitable force of nature.44 The sense of violence as midwife of the future weaves throughout The Progress of Civil Society. Throughout, Knight ties human progress indissolubly to oppression or conflict between sexes, races and classes, showing from the start how ‘partial discord lend[s] its aid, to tie/ The complex knots of general harmony’.45 Thus, at the end of Book 1, no sooner have the first social structures begun to ease the hardships of the age of hunting than The listless savage shrunk from care and toil; And, on the humble partner of his bed, Devolved the labour that his leisure fed.46

Having thus successfully ‘devolved’ the serious work to the women, the men express their hunting-bred instincts in the – suddenly modern-sounding – manly vices of drinking, smoking, duelling and gambling. In Book 2, the further security of pasturage leads to the class-divisive institutions of kingship and slavery, the latter of which gives rise through contrast to the ‘useful folly’ of the sense of honour: ‘The low condition of the humbled slave/ More lofty feelings to the master gave’.47 A footnote (citing Robertson) adds that although American Indians have no slaves, the males’ fierce sense of honour is fed by the enslavement of their womenfolk.48 As with Smith, the age of agriculture leads to the rise of a lawless, overmighty aristocracy finally brought to heel in the age of commerce, when 45 46 47 48 43

44

Civil Society, 6.385–92. Civil Society, 6.407–18. Civil Society, 1.21–2. Civil Society, 1.462–4. Civil Society, 2.446, 2.359–60. Civil Society, 2.359n.

Aesthetics, Sex, Myths and History

189

Discriminated ranks of life appear; Mechanic labour sinks in dregs below; Design above, and bright invention flow; While, over all, luxurious pleasures dose In listless lethargy and tired repose. 49

Neither the class divisions nor the unappealing luxuried torpor of the rich are presented as surmountable: they are the very ‘springs of steel’ of the mechanism we would call capitalism, whereby ‘Mutual desires and wants the whole pervade,/ And rank to rank unite, and trade to trade’.50 But though this mechanism clearly constitutes Knight’s best ideal of civil society with money at its ‘moral centre’ (267), the French Revolution has revealed – as we have seen – how its class contradictions can destroy it. Civil society, then, is continually being both formed and threatened by oppression – of women, slaves and labourers. So far, so Marxist perhaps. But Knight’s fifth book on ‘Climate and Soil’ extends this conflict model into a vision of perpetual race war. In this vision, the contrast between Aryan Greece and such Afro-Asian empires as Egypt and Persia becomes crucial. Knight describes how ‘Freedom, in sterile Greece, its head uprear’d’, in explicit contrast to the ‘cold inactive stupor’ of an Egypt which ‘trembled at a master’s nod’.51 These ‘Grecian bands, that firmly stood,/ And dyed Plataea’s fields with Persian blood’ are presented as the outcome of an earlier settlement of their peninsula by a northern race responsible for ‘most of the revolutions of Europe’, and characterised by tall stature, fair complexions, light-coloured hair and large blue or hazel eyes: of all races, this is ‘the farthest removed from … the Negro’.52 In this, this race is sharply contrasted with the other ‘wandering nations’ responsible for most Asian revolutions, whose dark complexions announce their greater proximity to Africans, whose ‘sable hue and bloated face’ in turn announce their close kinship to ‘their parent race’, the ape.53 As well as Montesquieu, Knight is drawing here on the theories of such protoevolutionists as Buffon, Linnaeus, Camper and Monboddo – as crystallized in the latter’s insistence on the complete identity between orangutans and certain African and Southern Asian races.54 On such a spectrum from fully human to near-animal the Greeks stand at the top: an idea which bears out Bernal’s argument that at just 51 52 53 54

Civil Society, 4.228–32. Civil Society, 2.233, 255–6. Civil Society, 5.173,170–71. Civil Society, 5.401–2, 5.315n. Civil Society, 4.227–30. In L’esprit des lois, cold climates are seen as breeding virtue, and rocky landscapes or islands the spirit of freedom, in contrast to the laxity and inertia bred by warm and fertile landscapes. See Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, trans. T. Nugent, 2 vols. (London: J. Nourse & P. Valliant, 1750), 1.316–7, 386–7; Monboddo cites Buffon and Rousseau on the orangutan as a prelinguistic ‘human’ type (Origin and Progress of Language, 1.174–6). 49

50

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

190

this period the emergent ‘science’ of anthropology joined with ideas of Greek superiority and the philological identification of a common Indo-European urlanguage to construct the Caucasian ‘Aryan model’ which justified the continuing expansion of the power of those latter-day Greeks, the British.55 Knight’s Progress thus already embodies the racially inflected branch of stadial theory which the nineteenth century knew as ‘Social Darwinism’. Utopia and Revolution: Darwin’s Fifth Age It was probably one or two years after the 1796 publication of Knight’s poem that Darwin began work on his own Progress of Society, which at first glance is quite extraordinarily similar. Both Progresses open with addresses to Love before devoting a book or canto apiece to the Lucretian four ages of hunting, pasturage, agriculture and commerce, and then bringing us to the present day in a final section – two books in Knight’s case and one canto in Darwin’s plan. All these resemblances lead Desmond King-Hele to suggest that Darwin must have started his poem in direct imitation of Knight’s, but this seems improbable given Darwin’s normal level of high conceptual originality.56 Their shared interest in Lucretius and Smith is a more likely answer, and indeed a belated awareness of Knight’s poem may have been one of the reasons for Darwin’s abandoning his own Progress. But a closer look at Darwin’s outlines for Progress reveals some crucial differences from Knight’s poem. Above all, the Age of Commerce which for Knight and Smith forms the ideal ‘moral centre’ towards which the rest of history moves is not the goal of the exercise: for Darwin, not only does this age perpetuate the ‘slavery’ which began in the Age of Agriculture, but it embodies its oppressive spirit at every level: ‘And gold triumphant rules the world enslaved’. The realization of humanity’s true ‘Nature’ is deferred to the fifth and final Age of Philosophy, the true golden age whose ‘Central Hall’ hides it in the middle of the other four, which thus together constitute its shifting, ultimately transient periphery. In this coming golden age, even though the ‘Ruins of superstition long remain’,57 there will be: Liberty … Philosophy. Science. Peace. Elements subdued. Swords turned to ploughshares. Every man under his fig tree.

The last words here have an American feel to them, exactly echoing Darwin’s acclamation of Franklin’s achievement of these goals on the eve of Britain’s surrender in 1782.58 There will be ‘no crime’ and it will at last be a ‘Moral 57 58

Bernal, Black Athena, 1–2. See King-Hele, Unequalled Achievement, 354. This note sounds like an echo of the central motif of Volney’s Ruins. See the Bible, Micah 4.4; letter to Wedgwood, 17 October 1782 (Collected Letters, 212). 55 56

Aesthetics, Sex, Myths and History

191

world’, governed only by Christ’s injunctions to ‘Love each other’ and ‘Do as you would be done by’.59 But for all its idealism, Darwin’s outline suggests that he would have been less and less able to explain the actual mechanisms of historical change as the poem progressed. Knight’s sharply dialectical awareness of class, land and gender tensions is to some extent mirrored in Darwin’s earlier ages: there are numerous ‘rapes’ in the first age, ‘war for the wells of water’ in the second, and a definite emergence of kingship in the third, but little overall suggestion of how such pressure points might force change to the next stage – especially when all the real work is done by fluttering crews of genies. And Darwin’s future age of Philosophy has no space at all for Knight’s ideas of violent but necessary conquest, particularly of darker Southern races by lightskinned Aryans. As an evolutionist, Darwin always steers a wide berth round the guesses of Monboddo and others about Africans being close to apes: his only remark on humans’ specific ancestry is framed as a passing allusion to Buffon, and places the single family of African monkeys from whom we may derive our opposable thumb on the shores of the Mediterranean, long recognized as a crossroads of the ancient world.60 Everywhere else in Darwin, Man is just Man, or rather – less sexistly – ‘humankind’. The fact that slavery marks the worst blot on the Age of Commerce is completely consistent with Economy, whose only significant statements on post-classical history revolve around the barbaric savagery of the Spanish conquistadors in Mexico and Peru, and of Britain’s continuing involvement in the slave trade. To tie these in as inevitable to the ‘progress’ he was now celebrating, as Knight does, would have been in flat opposition to the cry of the kneeling, chained slave copied from Wedgwood’s abolitionist ceramic medallions in Economy, ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’61 In fact Darwin’s plans suggest no intrinsic role for revolutionary violence: the move from the enslavement of the world by Commerce to the triumph of Philosophy does not seem to be dialectical but simply natural. Remembering Knight’s sense of the need for a revisionary sequel to The Landscape’s notoriously pro-revolutionary passage, it is fair to assume that – if Darwin’s Progress had been published – readers would have expected a similar retraction of Economy’s even more fervent account of the recumbent giant of France rearing up, with 59 Despite the mention of Christ, Darwin’s utopian vision is knowingly blasphemous. Early in the poem, he images his model of five-stage unidirectional advance by way of King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a statue made of many metals, from iron feet to golden head. As expounded in the Bible (Daniel 2.31–45), the dream prophesies the fall of the Babylonian empire, reading downward from the present age’s golden head to the clayand-iron feet from which we derive the proverbial ‘feet of clay’. With striking blasphemy Darwin reverses this pessimistic reading, using the familiar image instead to denote a steady rise from baser metals to the golden head of his utopian future age. See Progress, 1.27–34 and note 9. 60 Temple 2.122n. 61 Economy 2. opp. 87.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

192

‘Plowshares his swords, and pruning hooks his spears’ (an account we shall return to in Chapter 10).62 After the Terror and outbreak of war in 1793, a continued celebration of such images would have been impossible: in an explicitly historical poem written in the stress of war some reckoning with the French Revolution would certainly have been expected, and there is very little evidence that Darwin’s optimistic reading of it ever fundamentally changed. I would argue that it was above all the impossibility of dealing with a Revolutionary France which – unlike America – had still not turned its swords back into to ploughshares that compelled Darwin to abandon his one attempt at history. Progress had marked his single tentative move towards the time-driven epistemology which Foucault and Bernal identify with the turn of the nineteenth century; but at just that time Darwin turned back to the securer stabilities of the Egyptianized ‘Ancient Model’ in the poem he would publish as Temple. Though Egypt and Eleusis may inform Progress’s use of the Temple image at an implicit level, it never mentions either of them, and its Euhemerist mythography celebrates technological changes as and where they occur, with no specific need to be traced back to lost Egyptian secrets. With Temple, the explicitly Eleusinian references are added to Progress’s temple description for the first time, and myths are once more explained as Egyptian encodements of science, as in Economy. The temple walls’ emphasis on reviving past heroes becomes almost hopelessly (or just possibly, sublimely) obscure. However, once launched into its evolutionary narrative, Temple becomes totally confident in its recounting of a very different ‘history’ from that attempted by Progress, a history whose religion-shaking radicalism points straight into the (Charles) Darwinian nineteenth century, but with no loss of the ‘Ancient Model’s’ spatializing, Egyptianizing powers of explanation. If the prospect of joining Knight in celebrating the dialectics of brutal oppression and revolutionary violence finally proves too much for Darwin’s lateemerging sense of history, his retreat to his old spatializing aesthetic still gives him enough poetic force to synthesize – virtually for the first time – that other dialectic of evolutionary growth and violent destruction which would loom so large in the coming century.

Economy 2.392.

62

Chapter 10

Politics

The last two chapters have looked at Darwin’s Freemasonry and his abandonment of history as a writable topic. Both these subjects come into sharper focus when related to his public role as a highly identifiable spokesman for radical causes, in the increasingly reactionary Britain of the 1790s. This chapter tries to establish the extent of that radicalism, before moving on to consider the mounting pressures it placed on Darwin in the last years of his life, when attempting to write his final, most ambitious work. Chapter 6 considered some of Darwin’s blind spots as an enthusiastic promoter of industry. These included industrial diseases and injuries, the look and feel of the new towns and factories, and above all – through the device of Economy’s elemental ‘machinery’ – the claim of industrial workers themselves to any kind of poetic presence. Such blind spots may have been somewhat sinister straws in the wind, but they were widely shared within a social group that saw itself committed to social reform and improvement on a broad range of other fronts. In Birmingham and Stoke-on-Trent, the new factories grew out of sprawls of older home-based versions of the same industries, which generally produced worse pollution and more dangers to health. And the ways in which the new levels of efficiency threatened older patterns of employment could be masked for a while by the phenomenal boom in demand for Staffordshire pottery and ‘Brummagen’ metalware. While pushing for progress on the industrial front, Darwin could certainly feel himself to be radical on others as well, ranging from reasonably respectable causes such as the abolition of slavery and prison reform to the outspoken support for the French Revolution which – though also widely shared in its early years – became decreasingly acceptable as the 1790s wore on. Slavery, Food and Agriculture Looking outwards from their Midlands stronghold, the Lunar men had a sharp eye for social injustices of many kinds, with a particular focus on the slave trade. Thomas Day’s poem ‘The Dying Negro’ (1775) and Wedgwood’s jasperware medallion of a chained and kneeling slave, inscribed ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ (1787), made common cause with works by Evangelicals such as William Cowper and Hannah More in a concerted propaganda effort which Darwin enthusiastically joined.1 Economy’s linking of Egyptian defeat with African slavery, considered in 1

For an excellent discussion of Darwin’s abolitionism and its wider context, see Fara, Erasmus Darwin, 164–8.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

194

the last chapter, accompanied an engraving of Wedgwood’s medallion, and had been anticipated by a longer, dramatically signalled anti-slavery passage in Loves, where Egypt happens to play the villain. At the end of its horror-filled third canto, Loves approaches the slavery theme by way of the American plant Cassia, the discovery of whose seeds in Europe suggests the idea of a mother casting her children on the waters, and hence Moses’ mother trusting her baby son to the vagaries of the Nile (3.421–34). We hear how, once grown up, Moses encounters an Egyptian slave-driver and wrenches ‘the red scourge from proud Oppression’s hands’ (3.437–8), after which the whole poem grinds to an abrupt visual and metrical halt with a double-space both before and after a single doubly-indented couplet in unfamiliar tetrameters:

Hark! heard ye not that piercing cry, Which shook the waves and rent the sky! –

E’en now, e’en now, on yonder Western shores Weeps pale Despair, and writhing Anguish roars: E’en now in Afric’s groves with hideous yell Fierce Slavery stalks, and slips the dogs of hell. (3.441–4)

The ‘cry’ whose shock value the poem aims to capture both metrically and visually on the page is at once the anguished roar of slaves in the Americas and the hideous yell of slavers hunting their prey in Africa: victim and oppressor bound in a single Gestalt, as in the Frontispiece of Blake’s anti-slavery Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1794). With a further visual shout, Darwin capitalizes his address to ‘Ye bands of Senators!’ (3.445), and echoes the story of Moses’ growth to manhood in his image of Conscience as at first a ‘still small voice’ which disarms the criminal as Moses did the slave-driver, and then, if still ignored, ‘speaks in thunder’ as when Moses brought plague down on Egypt and delivered the Commandments (3.451–4). From Paul Robeson’s rendition of the spiritual ‘Go Down, Moses’ to Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision ‘I have seen the Promised Land’, the figure of Moses has remained central to the struggle against slavery and its aftermath: and Darwin’s passage may have added its contribution to this set of associations. The generally utilitarian tone of Darwin’s later agricultural treatise, Phytologia (1800), experiences a similar jolt of self-interruption when slavery comes to be mentioned, in its account of the various sources of sugar: In the sugar-cane it abounds in such large quantity as to contribute much to the nourishment of mankind. And, – and what? – Great God of Justice! grant, that it may soon be cultivated only by the hands of freedom, and may thence give happiness to the labourer, as well as to the merchant and consumer. (Phytologia 77)

As with Loves’ shock-use of tetrameters in a similar context, the self-interruption of ‘ – and what? – Great God of Justice!’ is designed to make a smooth read past the horrors of slavery impossible.

Politics

195

Phytologia contains other moments where the interests of ‘the merchant and consumer’ are outweighed by more humane considerations. Darwin’s critique of the maximization of profits also extends to an attack on the enclosure of small farmers’ arable land for cattle pasturage, or to grow grain for the alcohol industry. While supporting the conversion of undeveloped commons to arable land in the name of efficiency, he is completely opposed to the enclosure of tenant-farmers’ smallholdings. Since meat is more profitable than crops, the enclosed arable land is usually converted to pasturage, leading to rural depopulation, a stifling of the skills of ‘the people of agriculture’ (Phytologia 468), an inability to provide for the years of actual famine common in the war-torn 1790s and the health dangers of a ‘too carnivorous’ diet. Darwin proposes the reintroduction of fast-days for meat as well as the closure of distilleries which convert much-needed grain into alcoholic ‘poison’; and he tellingly quotes (or slightly misquotes) Oliver Goldsmith’s Deserted Village on the destruction of the rural economy by the naked profit motive: ‘Worse fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,/ Where wealth accumulates, but men decay’ (468–9). In The Temple of Nature, Darwin dramatically extends his campaign against over-consumption of meat into a new interpretation of the Eden myth, whereby Adam and Eve’s first knowledge of Good and Evil is equated with humanity’s ‘Conscience felt, for blood by Hunger spilt,/ The pains of shame, of sympathy, and guilt!’ (Temple 3.459–60). On a more practical level Darwin deduces from the length of the human intestine that ‘Mankind ... seems by nature to be designed to subsist on both vegetable and animal nutriment’ (Phytologia 469) and was not himself a complete vegetarian; nonetheless, Tristram Stuart has argued that the ‘authoritative statistics’ of his attack on excessive meat production and consumption provided ‘the basis for the new case for vegetarianism’ increasingly being made by political radicals from John ‘Walking’ Stewart to Darwin’s great admirer Percy Shelley.2 ‘All French Both in Chemistry and Politics’ Like most of his Lunar colleagues, Darwin ardently supported the American Revolution and the early stages of the French one, writing to James Watt in early 1790, ‘Do you not congratulate your grand-children on the dawn of universal liberty? I feel myself becoming all french both in chemistry and politics.’3 His most explicit expression of this ‘all french’ enthusiasm came in Economy’s dramatic linking of the two revolutions, introduced by way of a comparison between the piercing of lightning-filled clouds by ‘Immortal Franklin’ and his subsequent 2 Stuart, Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India (London: Harper Collins, 2006), 405; see also 357–9, 404. 3 Darwin, Letters 200, to Watt 19 January 1790. Whatever Watt’s grandchildren felt, his son James became an ardent revolutionary, travelling to France in 1792 as an emissary from the radical Manchester Constitutional Society to the Jacobin Club (Uglow, Lunar Men, 452).

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

196

‘stabbing’ of the fleeing vampires of Britain’s ‘Tyrant-power’. The electricity thus collected transmutes into a ‘patriot-flame’ of freedom, spreading round the world so that ‘Hill lighted hill, and man electrised man’ until it reaches the bound and sleeping ‘Giant-form’ of France:4 Long had the Giant-form on Gallia’s plains Inglorious slept, unconscious of his chains; Round his large limbs were wound a thousand strings By the weak hands of Confessors and Kings; ... Touch’d by the patriot-flame, he rent amazed The flimsy bonds, and round and round him gazed; Starts up from earth, above the admiring throng Lifts his Colossal form, and towers along; High o’er his foes his hundred arms He rears, Plowshares his swords, and pruning hooks his spears; Calls to the Good and Brave with voice, that rolls Like Heaven’s own thunder round the echoing poles. (Economy 2.377–94)

In the last lines a neat metaphorical circle is completed, whereby the lightning Franklin first took from the heavens is followed by the thunder of universal liberty. Whether Darwin ever really retracted his support for the French Revolution is unclear. The question raised in my last chapter about how he would have tackled it in a published Progress of Society did not have to be answered in the scientific Temple, which in any case had the good luck to be finished for publication during the short-lived Peace of Amiens in 1802, the year of Darwin’s death. Seizing on the prospect of this ‘fostering peace’, Temple’s most explicitly political passage (4.273–90) says nothing about French military aggression, pouring praise instead on the ‘patriot heroes’ who defend justice and liberty in Parliament while unnamed others ‘with blood unsated wage/ Wide-wasting war with fell demoniac rage’. As in the lectures which had led the young radical Coleridge to be ejected from Bristol in 1795, the anti-war theme leads directly to an attack on political censorship at home, calling on the patriot left to repeal Pitt’s draconian muzzling laws and save, oh save, in this eventful hour The tree of knowledge from the axe of power; With fostering peace the suffering nations bless, And guard the freedom of the immortal Press! (4.283–6).

Economy 1.385, 2.355–88. Fulford, Lee and Kitson have an illuminating chapter called ‘Man electrified man’ (whose title, however, misreads the long ‘s’ of Darwin’s betterscanning ‘electrised’), linking this passage to Coleridge’s similar language of ‘the electric fluid of truth … conveyed from man to man, and nation to nation’ (Tim Fulford, Tim, Debbie Lee and Peter Kitson, Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 189). 4

Politics

197

Temple also adds an interesting buried twist to a motif present in all three of the major poems: the praise of the widely-respected prison reformer John Howard (see Loves 2.439–72; Economy 2.565–74). Howard duly appears as one of the heroes who make life worth living in Temple’s consolatory fourth canto, but this time accompanied by two others: So Howard, Moira, Burdett, sought the cells, Where want, or woe, or guilt in darkness dwells. (4.205–6)

Alongside the universally honoured Howard stand two leading opponents of Pitt’s highly repressive 1793 suspension of habeas corpus for unspecified offences against the state: the parliamentary radical leader Sir Francis Burdett, who in 1797 forced an investigation into Coldbath Fields prison where arrestees were held without trial, and Francis Rawdon Hastings, Lord Moira, who in 1801 vigorously opposed habeas corpus suspension in Ireland. Darwin’s placing of ‘want, or woe’ before ‘guilt’ as reasons for imprisonment suggests where his sympathies lie, and there may also be a Masonic subtext in the case of Moira who, as the Freemasons’ acting Grand Master, made a point of allowing French prisoners of war to form lodges and earn money by producing Masonic insignia.5 Arguably then, Temple continues to hint at political sympathies which would have come more loudly to the fore in a completed Progress. The comparatively muffled nature of these hints is an index of the increasing ferocity of the attacks on Darwin as a prominent radical, which had relentlessly gathered head through the 1790s. The Attacks on Darwin In 1793, Darwin’s ‘all french’ sympathies had put him directly in the government’s line of fire. In 1791, full of Loves’ still-anonymous success, he had co-founded the Derby Society for Political Information, whose manifesto demanding full adult male suffrage was sent to the French National Assembly and then published in the Morning Chronicle.6 As Uglow puts it, ‘the timing could not have been worse’, since 1791 saw the upsurge of violent anti-radicalism leading to the Birmingham riots directed chiefly at his friend Joseph Priestley’s similar embrace of ‘french’ chemistry and politics. Priestley barely escaped with his life from the Churchand-King rioters who trashed his Unitarian chapel, home and laboratory with equal thoroughness, effectively shattering what remained of the Lunar Society.7 5 These were displayed in the ‘Freemasonry and the French Revolution’ Exhibition, July–December 2009, Freemason’s Hall, London. 6 Uglow, Lunar Men, 455; E. Fearn, ‘The Derbyshire Reform Societies’, Derbyshire Archeological Journal 88 (1968): 51. 7 Uglow, Lunar Men, 440–45; for an excellent account of these riots, see Mike Jay, The Atmosphere of Heaven: The Unnatural Experiments of Dr. Beddoes and His Sons of Genius (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 1–9.

198

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

In late 1793, the Morning Chronicle editors were prosecuted for printing the Derby Society’s ‘levelling’ manifesto. Had not the great Treason Trial defender Thomas Erskine secured their acquittal, Darwin could well have found himself in the dock for sedition as well, especially since Erskine had unwisely hinted in court that the manifesto was the work of ‘the first poet of the age’, and Economy’s ringing defence of the ‘Giant’ France’s self-emancipation – a ‘sublime sally of tooconfiding imagination’ which Anna Seward noted made Darwin ‘countless foes’ – had recently been extracted and circulated as a specifically revolutionary text by the much-prosecuted radical bookseller Daniel Isaac Eaton.8 A year after the Morning Chronicle trial a carefully aimed satire emerged, which tarred Darwin and his more radically outspoken scientific disciple, Thomas Beddoes, with active support for violent revolution. In 1794, the anonymous The Golden Age, a poetical epistle from Erasmus D-n, M.D. to Thomas Beddoes, M.D. sketched out exactly the kind of attack a poem such as Darwin’s Progress of Society, climaxing in a golden age of scientific ‘philosophy’, might have met with. Ventriloquizing Darwin as anticipating ‘those blissful days,/ When fair Philosophy’s meridian rays/ Shall brighten Nature’s face’, the satire links some of Darwin’s known views with Beddoes’s visionary suggestions about the medical effects of the various newly separated gases, and about the genetic modification of plants to produce ersatz butter and tallow.9 Thus ‘Darwin’ describes how we will soon see ‘plants, susceptible of joy and woe’, providing our meat; so that the man of the future who suffers from the consumptive effects of ‘excess of Oxygene’, can cure himself with ‘Rich Cream and Butter from his herd of Trees’, or in cases of ‘Hydrogene’ excess ‘can take/ From some regenerate Oak a savoury steak’.10 Taking particular aim at Beddoes’s loud support for the French Revolution, the satire links all this to dreams of a world where ‘Ranks and Distinctions cease, all reeking lie/ In the mean muck of low Equality!’ while ‘pious Atheists’ defy ‘The King of Kings, that bugbear of the sky’ and, in the climax, a chorus of pigs is exhorted to ‘Stretch your triumphant throats, and strive to make/ The frighten’d welkin with your Gruntings shake!’11 The references to pigs and egalitarian muck link this satire to many others – from right as well as left – building on Burke’s

8 Uglow, Lunar Men, 458; see also Paul Elliott, ‘“More Subtle than the Electric Aura”: Georgian Medical Electricity, the Spirit of Animation and the Development of Erasmus Darwin’s Psychophysiology’, Medical History 52, no. 2 (April 2008): n73; and Seward, Memoirs, 223. 9 Anon., The Golden Age, a poetical epistle from Erasmus D-n, M.D. to Thomas Beddoes, M.D. (London and Oxford: F. & C. Rivington and J. Cooke, 1794), 4–5, title page. 10 The Golden Age, 10. Another effect of the new science will be to defer old age indefinitely so that ‘in all the bloom of Eighty’ every woman will ‘a lovely L’ENCLOS prove’ and ‘Drive Boys of future Cent’ries mad with love’ (p. 9; for Darwin’s treatment of Ninon de l’Enclos in Loves, see Chapter 4). 11 The Golden Age, 11–12, 15.

Politics

199

notorious phrase about the French Revolution embodying the wishes of ‘the swinish multitude’.12 Another kind of attack linked Darwin to Richard Payne Knight rather than to Beddoes, sometimes by way of the god Priapus’s dual role as a sex embodiment and a protector of gardens. Hence in his anti-Jacobin epic The Pursuits of Literature (1794–1797), T. J. Mathias sneers at the way Darwin’s Loves raises ‘lust in pinks’ in ‘tetrandryan, monogynian strains’ and – lamenting in a note that ‘young ladies are instructed in the terms of botany which are very significant’ – castigates poets who ‘In verse half veil’d raise titillating lust/ Like girls that deck with flowers Priapus’ bust’. In a footnote, Mathias uses Angelica Kauffman’s ‘elegant print’ of this bust of the garden-god (which is not ithyphallic, but does leer somewhat suggestively at two nymphs affectionately decking it with flowers13) as a stepping stone to the first of his several attacks on the ‘ordure and filth’ of Knight’s Priapus, which he calls on the state to prosecute for its ‘licens’d blasphemy’.14 In somewhat calmer mood, Mathias elsewhere describes how he could, were he a bad enough poet, Give with Darwin, to the hectic kind, Receipts in verse to shift the north-east wind, With Price and Knight grounds by neglect improve, And banish use, for naked Nature’s love.15

A note links Knight’s crazy back-to-naturism and Darwin’s mad-scientist proposals for redirecting the wind to the overweening can-do attitude of Diderot/ d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, whose ‘true cream’ was the blood-drenched French Revolution. Not normally prone to respond to criticism, Darwin privately penned the following fairly mild response to Mathias: Pursuits of letters, what you will, You’d better lay aside your quill. You’ve sure the poetasters’ curse, Who blame bad poetry in worse.16

Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 117. The Golden Age is well contextualized by Jay, The Atmosphere of Heaven, 108–9; elsewhere it is sometimes astonishingly taken as Darwin’s own work (see G. S. Rousseau, ‘Political Gout: Dissolute Patients, Deceitful Physicians, and other Blue Devils’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society 63 (2009): note 15; Richard C. Sha, ‘Scientific Forms of Sexual Knowledge in Romanticism’, Romanticism on the Net 23 (August 2001), para. 11). 13 See Giancarlo Carabelli, In the Image of Priapus, Plate 21. 14 T. J. Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature: A Satirical Poem in Four Dialogues, 5th ed. (London: T. Beckett, 1797), 55, 67–9. 15 Mathias, Pursuits of Literature, 2.47–50. 16 Lichfield and Derby, 35. 12

200

Fig. 10.1

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

William Wynne Ryland after a painting by Angelica Kauffman, ‘Nymphs Adorning the Statue of Pan [Priapus]’ (1776), stipple engraving. Reproduced by kind permission of the Science Museum/ Science and Society Picture Gallery.

Mathias’s linking of Darwin and Knight would become a common anti-Jacobin motif, and as a way into exploring this linkage it is worth considering a few more of the many assaults on Knight’s Priapisms and other thought-crimes. Writing to Horace Walpole in 1796, William Mason follows Mathias in calling for Knight’s expulsion from Parliament, and includes an impromptu sonnet denouncing The Progress of Civil Society’s reliance on ‘the madman Lucretius’ and ‘the filthy dregs of Epicurus’ sty’. In reply, Walpole likewise condemns Knight’s attempt to ‘restore the superannuated atheism of Lucretius’, for which ‘this new Priapus’

Politics

201

is ‘only fit to be erected in the Palais de l’Egalite’.17 Earlier, a 1794 lampoon (perhaps by John Matthews) had proposed to honour Knight either in the Pantheon of revolutionary Paris or else with a colossal effigy made of the yew-trees Knight recommends in The Landscape: ‘The God of Gardens thou shalt stand,/ To fright improvers from the land,/ A huge and terrible Priapus’.18 A cartoon shows this topiary-giant from behind while two ladies gaze in horror at something left to our imagination at its front. Some of these links between Knight’s radical gardening and the obscenities of Priapus depend on the fact that, as well as representing the male member, Priapus is also the Roman god of gardens, whose ithyphallic effigies warn away birds and trespassers in ‘Priapic songs’ such as Horace’s Satire 1.8. Especially given the Horatian trespassers’ warning of Botanic Garden’s ‘Stay your rude steps!’, Priapus could also be used to undermine Darwin’s garden poem, as we saw with Mathias’s side-slipping linkage from Darwin’s Loves to Angelica Kauffmann’s female Priapus worshippers to Knight. Thus in ‘The Unsex’d Females’ – whose title and much else comes from Mathias – the conflicted Richard Polwhele (whose laudatory sonnet prefaces Botanic Garden’s third edition, 1795) intersperses continued praise of Darwin himself with attacks on what Luisa Cale calls ‘the female reading community’ round Loves, dispatching two artists commended by it in the single couplet: ‘Classic Kauffman her Priapus drew/ And linger’d a sweet blush with Emma Crewe’.19 According to the Mathias-inspired note on these lines, Crewe’s Loves frontispiece gives Flora ‘an air of voluptuousness too luxuriously melting’, while ‘Angelica Kauffman’s print [of Priapus] should accompany Miss Wollstonecraft’s Instructions in Priapism [and] plant-adultery’. Also forging damning links with Knight, the most effective of the anti-Darwin satires was The Loves of the Triangles, produced by the government-sponsored Anti-Jacobin magazine in 1797. The gifted Anti-Jacobin team of George Canning, George Ellis and John Hookham Frere had already produced, over three issues, a parody of Knight’s Progress of Civil Society, called The Progress of Man. The Darwin parody Triangles came out the next week and also ran for three issues. A key element of these twinned parodies was the pretence that they were both by the same author, a ‘Mr Higgins’, who explicitly introduces Triangles as a sequel to his ‘Progress’ poem. ‘Higgins’ also embraces elements of Godwin and Coleridge, part of the joke being that all radicals think the same; but the Higgins link between the Knight and Darwin poems is set up far more specifically.20 Hence the Knight parody Progress of Man already carries echoes of Darwin when the plea for looser

Knight, The Landscape, ix–x; Walpole, Correspondence, 29.334–41: 15 and 22 March 1796. 18 John Matthews (attributed), A Sketch, from The Landscape, A Didactic Poem. Addressed to R. P. Knight, Esq (London: R. Faulder, 1794), 21–2. 19 Richard Polwhele, The Unsex’d Females (London: Cadell and Davies, 1798), 105–6. 20 Introduction to Loves of the Triangles, in The Anti-Jacobin (1799), 2 vols., 2.162–3. 17

Fig. 10.2

Concluding image of A Sketch, from The Landscape: A Didactic Poem, addressed to R. P. K., attrib. John Matthews (London: R. Faulder, 1794). Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library.

Politics

203

divorce laws in Knight’s Civil Society is conflated with the praise of ‘Nature’s laws’ in the ‘promiscuous marriage’ of the Tahitian finale of Loves: Learn hence, each Nymph, whose free aspiring mind Europe’s cold Laws, and colder Customs bind – O! learn, what Nature’s genial laws decree – What Otaheite is, let Britain be!21

Progress of Man links such double digs at the two poets with a broader assault on the encyclopaedizing tendencies of their Lucretian didactic mode. Canning’s father had translated the eighteenth century’s most celebrated anti-Lucretian poem, Cardinal Polignac’s Anti-Lucretius, and his son now carries on the good work with this two-pronged attack on the two poets who most fully represent De Rerum Natura’s godless attempt to explain ‘Life, the Universe and Everything’, as well as those of the d’Alembert/Diderot Encyclopédie whose ‘true cream’ (as Mathias had put it) was the Reign of Terror. Hence Progress of Man’s ‘Argument’ lists its contents with a sinister randomness applicable to all these objects of attack: The Subject proposed. – Doubts and Waverings. – Queries not to be answered. – Formation of the stupendous Whole. – Cosmogony ; or the Creation of the World: – the Devil – Man – various Classes of Being: – Animated Beings – Birds – Fish – Beasts – the Influence of the Sexual Appetite – on Tigers – on Whales – on Crimpt Cod – on Perch – on Shrimps – on Oysters. – Various Stations assigned to different Animals : – Birds – Bears – Mackarel. – Bears remarkable for their fur – Mackarel cried on a Sunday – Birds do not graze – nor Fishes fly – nor Beasts live in the Water. – Plants equally contented with their lot : – Potatoes – Cabbage – Lettuce – Leeks – Cucumbers. – Man only discontented – born a Savage; not choosing to continue so becomes polished – resigns his Liberty – Priestcraft – King-craft – Tyranny of Laws and Institutions. – Savage Life – description thereof: – The Savage free – roaming Woods – feeds on Hips and Haws – Animal Food – first notion of it from seeing a Tiger tearing his Prey – wonders if it is good – resolves to try – makes a Bow and Arrow – kills a Pig – resolves to roast a part of it – lights a Fire – Apostrophe to Fires – Spits and Jacks not yet invented. – Digression. – Corinth. – Sheffield. – Love the most natural desire after Food. – Savage Courtship. – Concubinage recommended. – Satirical Reflections on Parents and Children – Husbands and Wives – against collateral Consanguinity. – Freedom the only Morality.22

In this list it is not just obviously ‘Jacobinical’ elements like the critique of kings and priests or the recommendation of free love that are being attacked, but the whole encyclopaedizing tendency able to leap so lightly from Crimpt Cod to Cucumbers to Concubinage. The banality of such topics enforces the point that The Progress of Man, in The Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner, 2 vols (1799) 2.99. Prog. Man, Anti-Jacobin, 1.524–5.

21 22

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

204

poetry should stick to its own world rather than trying to colonize the subjectmatter of prose. From its title onwards, The Loves of the Triangles hits on an even better device for making this point, by assuming and hence consolidating the complete incompatibility between the emotional, artistic sphere of love poetry and the heartless scientific sphere exemplified by the triangles and other geometrical figures which now replace Darwin’s amorous plants. In making such a rich joke of this incompatibility, Canning and Co. denied and cancelled the more delicate thread of irony by which Darwin himself sustained the confection of his own ‘Loves’ poem; their satire insisting on a strict ‘or’ alternative between love and science, whereas Darwin’s whole poetic is constructed on a series of ‘ands’. For Darwin, the known facts of – and areas for valid speculation opened up by – science have a permanent potential for ‘analogy’ with those of art, myth, the tenderest emotions and all the other ‘origins of society’ as we know it. While never to be taken quite seriously, Darwin’s gently ironical ‘machinery’ is essential for lubricating away any local frictions between realms which are nonetheless worth bringing together, to take us ‘from the looser analogies, which dress out the imagery of poetry, to the stricter ones, which form the ratiocination of philosophy’. By making this irony into a sarcasm of their own, the Canning team enforce the rigid separation between art and science, poetry and prose, which will become standard from the Romantic period onwards. Darwin’s response to this skilful parody is uncertain since he kept quiet about it, but for Seward this silence only exposed his anxiety: ‘Instead of pretending, as he did, never to have seen or heard of the Loves of the Triangles, when questioned on the subject, he should voluntarily have mentioned that satire everywhere, and praised its wit and ingenuity.’23 Assuming her assumption to be correct, the AntiJacobin parodies were very possibly responsible for Darwin’s Temple of Nature, by putting an end to his planned Progress of Society. First, they may simply have drawn his attention to the fact that his progress-poem had, in a sense, already been written, by Knight. Second, in their toxic fusion of elements from both poets, the Anti-Jacobin team make a fair guess at what a ‘Progress of Society’ by Darwin might actually have been like. The dig at Rousseauistic ‘back to nature’ visions in such conflations as ‘What Otaheite is, let Britain be!’ actually has less to do with Knight’s dialectic of oppression and necessary progress than with Loves’ climactic celebration of ‘Nature’s laws’.24 In the light of such digs, Darwin’s attempt in Progress’s very structure to plot the development of human culture as a triumphant return to the Goddess Nature’s age of philosophy, where ‘Liberty returns’ at last, would have looked like simply fulfilling all the Anti-Jacobin’s worst expectations, as well as those of the anonymous 1794 ‘Golden Age’.25

Seward, Memoirs, 208–9. Prog. Man, Anti-Jacobin 2.99. Loves, 4.490. 25 Darwin, Progress of Society, 1.126. 23 24

Politics

205

That satire’s linkage of utopian republicanism with radical science is repeated in the Triangles Preface, where ‘Higgins’ links the discourse of ‘his’ previous Progress of Man directly to the evolutionary theories already controversial from Darwin’s Zoonomia, and to the ‘radical gas’ theories of Darwin’s friend Beddoes: if, as is demonstrable, we have risen from a level with the Cabbages of the field ... by the mere exertion of our own energies, we should, if these energies were not repressed and subdued by the operation of prejudice and folly, by King-craft and Priest-craft ..., continue to exert and expand ourselves ... in a ratio hardly capable of being calculated by any Science of which we are now masters ... to a rank in which [Man] would be, as it were, all mind; would enjoy unclouded perspicacity and perpetual vitality; feed on Oxygene, and never die, but by his own consent.26

From the start, Triangles takes aim at Botanic Garden’s presentation of the poem as a specially defended space: STAY your rude steps, or e’er your feet invade The Muses’ haunts, ye Sons of War and Trade! Nor you, ye Legion Fiends of Church and Law, Pollute these Pages with unhallow’d paw!27

From Seward’s gentle 1778 plea to the vainglorious and mercenary to ‘come not here’, we have moved via Darwin’s more stentorian 1791 version – ‘Stay your rude steps! whose throbbing breasts infold/ The legion-fiends of Glory, or of Gold!’ – to this insinuation that to oppose gold and glory at all is to oppose the current war with Revolutionary France, the necessary defence of trade routes, and ultimately British law and Christianity themselves. After much initial comedy about ‘The sly Rectangle’s too licentious Love’ and circles joining in ‘osculation sweet’, Triangles goes on to laud the achievements of ‘mild Philosophy’ in the ‘regenerate land’ of ‘happy France!’ where ‘Taste with Rapine saunters hand in hand’ and ‘Reform greets Terror with fraternal kiss’; bringing England the joyous prospect of an imminent French invasion through which ‘The Communes spread, the gay Departments smile,/ Fair Freedom’s Plant o’ershades the laughing Isle’ and, in the poem’s climax, the ‘Sylphs of Death’ erect a guillotine for William Pitt, whose ‘liberated head rolls off below,/ And simpering Freedom hails the happy blow!’28 In the logic of the twinned Progress of Man and Triangles spoofs, this is the point to which the whole sequence which began with happy savages, glanced at Otaheitian orgies and then plunged into the sex lives of polygons was really leading. The Canning team’s apparently uncanny foreknowledge of Darwin’s draft Progress of Society seems to extend to his technological genies: at one point Triangles, Anti-Jacobin, 2.164–5. Triangles, Anti-Jacobin, 2.168. 28 Triangles, 130–33 and later lines, Anti-Jacobin, 2.204, 279–80. 26 27

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

206

Triangles’ supernatural management is handed over to diabolical ‘Gins’,29 and the Progress of Man satire closely anticipates Darwin’s focus on primitive technology: Darwin’s genies ‘bend the yielding bow with sinews strong,/ Strain the wide horns, and stretch the twisted thong’, while the Canning team’s primitive man ‘The unfashioned bow with labouring effort bends/ In circling form, and joins the unwilling ends’, using ‘twisted grass’ as the string.30 Though such technical descriptions had an honourable descent from Virgil’s description of making a plough in the Georgics, the imminent death of a long tradition of didactic poetry can be read in such a passage, whose only humour resides in the assumption that any descriptions of detailed labour and/or technology can now suddenly be regarded as funny. In any case, abandoning both his spiritual and his technological ‘machinery’ along with his utopianism, Darwin turned from Progress to Temple, which firmly separates its still-fanciful opening from a content which tackles theoretical rather than practical physics without the aid of fluttering sylphs or genies. But this was by no means a total pulling-in of horns. Darwin had already aroused controversy with Zoonomia’s evolutionism, and it almost seems as though the Triangles footnote about Man evolving from ‘the Cabbages of the Field’ now supplied him with a handy checklist of points to answer if he was not to be laughed out of court scientifically, as arguably he had been on the grounds of poetic style and utopian politics. But if the abandonment of his genies and personifications suggests that Darwin was to some extent abashed by the assault on his style, there is evidence of a quiet fight-back in a few specific moments of Temple. The heartless frivolity for which Canning’s team tries to nail him is epitomized in their description of the triangles’ ‘Fair Sylphish forms’, which ‘weave the meanless dance,/ Wave the gay wreath, and titter as they prance’.31 There is an echo here of Economy’s water-nymphs, who ‘tittering dance amid the whispering sedge’, but Darwin throws the sarcasm of ‘titter’ straight back in Temple’s elaborate opening, where assorted ‘Loves and Graces’ approach the temple of scientific instruction through their glass-walled tunnel beneath storm-tossed mountains: Through the bright arch the Loves and Graces tread, Innocuous thunders murmuring o’er their head; Pair after pair, and tittering, as they pass, View their fair features in the walls of glass.32

There is a subtextual reference here to Lucretius’ lines on Epicurus – ‘neither fables of the gods could quell him, nor thunderbolts, nor heaven with menacing roar’ – suggesting that the thunders overhead represent religious orthodoxy’s efforts to 31 32 29 30

Triangles, 97–8, Anti-Jacobin, 2.201–2. Darwin, Progress, 1.229–32; Prog. Man, 78–81, Anti-Jacobin, 1.558–9. Triangles, 25–6, Anti-Jacobin, 2.170. Economy 3, 36; Temple 1.61–2.

Politics

207

scare people away from the science of nature.33 As such, they give the initiate spirits’ tittering a knowing, laughing-out-of-school quality quite different from the triangles’ sinister brain-dead giggles. To anyone noticing the echo, the AntiJacobin assault becomes part of the ‘innocuous’, distantly murmuring thunder against which The Temple of Nature still intends to have the last laugh. Anti-Masonry Chapter 8 explored Darwin’s typically eighteenth-century Freemasonry, and mentioned the reluctance of modern literary commentators to discuss such things at much depth. No such reticence afflicts the religious wing of present-day AntiMasonry, however. If you search ‘Erasmus Darwin Freemason’ on Google, your first few hits will tell you something like this: that ‘Erasmus Darwin was no ordinary Mason, he was one of the highest ranking masters in the organization’; that this high rank and his ‘dark personal life’ directly embroiled him with the sinister Masonic Illuminati and Jacobin clubs ‘whose primary duty was to oppose religion’; and above all that it was from the specifically Masonic cult of atheistic ‘Naturalism’ that he concocted the evolutionary poison lapped up by his grandson Charles (another secret Mason), who produced what was in fact only a ‘revision’ of The Temple of Nature after having apparently ‘listened to his grandfather since childhood’. If we extend the search to the Lunar Society and add the term ‘Rosicrucian’, we find that the Society was inspired by the sinister magus Bacon and co-founded by Darwin in the name of an ‘apostate Satanism, having the purpose of pulling down as many Christian souls as possible’, helped along by Franklin and that undercover Rosicrucian William Small, the latter of whom had previously infected his young pupil Thomas Jefferson with the godless views which lurk behind the American Declaration of Independence, as well as behind secretive Masonic university fraternities such as Phi Beta Kappa.34 Unpicking this nonsense might start by pointing out that Erasmus died seven years before Charles’s birth, that ‘Master Mason’ (as opposed to ‘Worshipful’ or ‘Grand’ Master) designates most Freemasons and not just leading figures, and that Erasmus seems to have been inactive after his youthful initiation. But more interesting is the awestruck compliment to his vast influence paid by such sites, and their gripping evocation of the kinds of connection between Freemasonry, religious freethought, science and dangerous politics which are meat and drink to what might be called the narrative genre of conspiracy theory. As such they follow the main contours of two powerful attacks on radical Freemasonry, both published Lucretius, DRN, 1.68–9. On 20 February 2009, these and similar statements predominated in my first few hits

33 34

on these topics, from sources ranging from the eccentric David Icke to Islamic creationists to ultra-Catholic survivalists, on sites whose titles range from ‘The Evolution Deceit’ and ‘The Religion of Darwinism’ to ‘Illuminati Conspiracy Archive’ and ‘Pre-Tribulation Planning for a Post-Tribulation Rapture’.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

208

in 1797, which have some claim to be the founding fathers of this thrilling narrative genre. Neither of these texts names Darwin specifically, but in terms of long-term impact, we might see them as two more of the vultures circling over the head of the ageing poet as he struggled on towards his last, defiantly Masonic poem. The first and most gripping of these texts was Abbé Augustin de Barruel’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme (1797), whose four volumes deal respectively with the ‘Anti-Christian Conspiracy’ of Voltaire and the philosophes; the ‘Anti-Monarchical Conspiracy’ of Freemasonry; the ‘Antisocial Conspiracy’ of Adam Weishaupt’s Bavarian Illuminati; and lastly the feeding of all these conspiracies into the French Revolution. It is an absolutely riveting read, perhaps above all in the second volume’s accounts of the Masonic initiate’s gradual rise towards the ‘higher degrees of Masonry’, where allegory is thrown aside and the ‘twofold principle of Liberty & Equality is unequivocally explained by war against Christ and his Altars, war against Kings and their Thrones!!!’.35 For Barruel, the Masonic view of the world as one great temple admitting ‘the Jew, the Turk or the Idolater’, together with their lodges’ self-identification as ‘temples to virtue’ bringing adepts out of ‘profane’ darkness, implicitly and blasphemously identifies the Christian Church with sin and ignorance.36 He tells us how in some lodges, entry to the rank of ‘Elu’ involves an oath to avenge the assassination of the temple builder Hiram, for which the blindfolded initiate must stab and decapitate a blood-filled dummy; subsequent rituals identify the object of this revenge both with Christ himself and with the medieval king Philip le Bel, whose annihilation of the proto-Masonic Knights Templar will only be truly avenged by the execution of a reigning French monarch.37 Hence, despite the comparative innocence of many ordinary Masons, the whole structure consists of one long ‘apprenticeship to ferocity and murder’, grooming them for the regicide and dechristianization of the French Revolution:38 a programme through which the much-reiterated word ‘temple’ runs as a sinister leitmotif. Even more blood-curdling than this account of the Masons is the third volume’s account of the yet more singleminded Bavarian Illuminati, a statement by whose leader Adam Weishaupt forms the epigraph to all of Barruel’s four volumes: ‘Princes and Nations shall disappear from the face of the Earth ... and this Revolution shall be the work of Secret Societies’. Sometimes using Freemasonry as a cover, the Illuminati supposedly planned the whole course of the French Revolution (despite having been very thoroughly disbanded in 1784), and Barruel’s horrified account of their atheistic anarchism and secretive cell structure directly if perversely inspired the young Percy Shelley’s attempts to set up just such societies of ‘philanthropists’ and other enlightened atheist-republican Abbé Augustin de Barruel, Memoirs, illustrating the History of Jacobinism, trans. R. Clifford, 4 vols. (London: T. Burton & E. Booker, 1797), 2.293. 36 Barruel, Memoirs, 2.294–5. 37 Barruel, Memoirs, 2.297–300, 2.310, 2.322. 38 Barruel, Memoirs, 2.300. 35

Politics

209

initiates – as comically satirized by Shelley’s friend Thomas Love Peacock in Nightmare Abbey.39 Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) had already dropped hints about the Illuminati as the linchpin of a wider revolutionary underground,40 but the major British assault on Masonic Illuminism was Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the secret meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati and Reading Societies (1797) by the leading Scottish scientist John Robison. The title says it all: the transition from the sinister Illuminati to any or all sorts of ‘reading Societies’ clearly feeds into the atmosphere which had produced the famous 1794 treason trial of members of the London Corresponding Society, as well as the earlier 1793 trial of members of Darwin’s own Derby Society for Political Information. Proofs of a Conspiracy proclaims its Enlightenment credentials with a Lucretian epigraph, and nominally excludes British Masonry from its charges. Himself a Mason when young, Robison had joined his co-initiate James Watt in his early steam experiments, which included designing a steam-powered organ for a Scottish Masonic lodge.41 Nonetheless, Proofs has been fairly described as exemplifying ‘the McCarthyism of the late 1790s’ by Irwin Primer, who sees Temple as ‘in part, a guarded reply to Robison’s harrassment of the Masons and other secret societies’.42 Darwin might have been particularly incensed by Robison’s attacks on two Lunar colleagues, identifying Joseph Priestley’s materialist psychology – which Darwin shared – with ‘the detestable doctrines’ of Illuminatism, and citing Illuminist praise of the ‘philosopher and Cosmopolite’ Benjamin Franklin for betraying ‘a private correspondence entrusted to him’ in the interests of Freemasonry.43 Robison’s and Barruel’s association of the French Revolution with Freemasonry partly rests on the broadly fair assertion that many of the philosophes whose ideas fed the Revolution were in fact Masons. The Parisian lodge Les neufs soeurs – whose members included Franklin and Voltaire – is particularly singled out, and continuities detected with the Jacobin Club itself, which began as a debating club and – as Simon Schama puts it – ‘took from Masonry the pleasure of ritual and arcane symbolism, grafting the messages of revolutionary politics onto Masonic 39 Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey and Crochet Castle (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 47, 92; see Martin Priestman, A Place to Stand: Questions of Address in Shelley’s Political Pamphlets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 226. 40 Burke, Reflections, 229, footnote. 41 See Uglow, Lunar Men, 96. In this context it is worth noting that Barruel also identifies as an ex-Mason, while Jennifer N. Wunder makes the point that George Canning’s Masonry was well-known, and his adoption of the Masonic triangle as his prime weapon against Darwin can be seen in this context of Masonic in-fighting. See Wunder, Keats, Hermeticism and the Secret Societies, 58. 42 Primer, ‘Darwin’s Temple of Nature’, 73. 43 John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, 4th ed. (London, 1798), 481–2, 190.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

210

emblems like the eye of surveillance and the stonemason’s level (signifying equality)’.44 Both Robison’s and Barruel’s assaults on Illuminized Masonry extend to the whole high valuation of Egypt and the Eleusinian Mysteries which we have seen inscribed throughout Darwin’s works. Barruel denounces the Illuminist belief that ‘the Religion of the Jews was but a modification of the reveries of the Egyptians’, points out that ‘Eleusis’ was the ‘secret’ name of the Illuminati headquarters at Ingolstadt, and routinely calls their instructors ‘Hierophants’.45 He also repeats in shocked tones the Illuminist phrase ‘pious fraud’ to describe their veiling of materialist propaganda under the garb of religion; coincidentally or not, Darwin applies the same phrase to the Mysteries with implicit approval.46 Barruel repeatedly plays with the image of the ‘veil’ to describe how Masonry and Illuminism lure in the unwary with a pretence of religious orthodoxy, only to whip it away at some more advanced stage of membership: thus, at the climax of the entry rites to the higher degree of Kadosch, ‘the veil is rent asunder’ as initiates are instructed that Masonry’s true aim is the destruction of all altars and thrones.47 As we noted earlier, Temple climaxes with the removal of the final veil of the Isis-like Goddess of Nature. Before the French Revolution this might have seemed innocent enough, but after the early 1790s such Isis imagery had become highly charged. A contemporary painting by Charles Monnet of ‘The Fountain of Regeneration’ depicts the enormous papier-mâché statue of Isis erected by Jacques-Louis David on the ruins of the Bastille in 1793: though in this case not multiple, her breasts squirt regenerative drinking water for the masses.48 Primer notes a new ‘association ... with the Revolution’ in the many-breasted goddess Nature’s appearance on the cover of François Peyrard’s ‘Lucretian and atheistic essay’, De la Nature et de ses Lois (Paris, 1793), and quotes Robison’s appalled rendition of the ‘high priest’s’ speech at the unveiling of the Goddess of Reason and Nature (played by an underdressed actress) during the ‘abominable farce’ of the 1793 dechristianization of Notre Dame Cathedral: “Behold a masterpiece of nature (lifting the veil which concealed the naked charms of the beautiful Madms. Barbier): this sacred image should inflame all hearts.” And it did so: the people shouted out, “No more altars, no more priests, no God but the God of Nature.”49

If, as discussed earlier, Darwin was diverted to Temple by a growing sense of the field-day the anti-Jacobins would have had with Progress, his shift of stance Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 527. 45 Barruel, Memoirs, 3.250; see also, e.g., 3.210. 46 Barruel, Memoirs, 3.253; Temple 1.139; see too Primer, ‘Darwin’s Temple of Nature’, 65. 47 Barruel, Memoirs, 2.323. 48 See Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 72–3. 49 Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy, 252; Primer, ‘Darwin’s Temple of Nature’, 71. 44

Fig. 10.3

Charles Monnet and I. S. Helman, ‘The Fountain of Regeneration on the Ruins of the Bastille, 10th August, 1793’, from Les principales journées de la révolution (Paris, 1838). Reproduced by kind permission of the British Museum.

La Fontaine de la Regeneration

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

212

positively courted this other kind of attack for its ‘infidel’ Masonry. And if, as Primer argues, he made this shift in full awareness of such attacks – particularly given Robison’s many connections within his own scientific circle – then its publication was an act of real political defiance. This defiance can be read from the implicit theology of the two poems: Progress’s use of the Temple of Nature to symbolize the labour mankind only had to undertake after Adam’s Fall was not religiously subversive in itself, whereas Temple’s use of it to ‘titteringly’ replace the whole Edenic myth is profoundly so. Furthermore, the banning of the profane, the tittering entry scene and the long ‘Eleusinian’ passage, which are all absent from Progress, now accentuate Darwin’s return to the Masonic Egyptianism which is underplayed by Progress’s more provisional, Euhemerist mythography. In other words, Temple positively trumpets its debts to Egyptianized Freemasonry, just as this movement’s more radical aspects were coming under strong attack. As we noted in the last chapter, Bernal would relate such attacks to the larger crisis of the Egyptian ‘Ancient Model’ in the wake of its contaminating French Revolutionary associations, as exemplified by the comparative mythographies of the radical Masons Volney and Dupuis. However, disentangling these radical aspects from the more ‘Establishment’ side of Freemasonry – a side which continued to flourish in forms we can easily recognize today – requires a little more exploration of its place in the society of the late eighteenth century. Accordingly, this chapter ends by shifting its emphasis from Darwin specifically, towards some broader shifts in the Enlightenment sociality he so conspicuously represents and celebrates. Masonry and Sociality In the words of T. S. Ashton, ‘In the eighteenth century the characteristic instrument of social purpose was not the individual or the State, but the club.’50 And according to Peter Clark’s careful study of such clubs, eighteenth-century Freemasonry ‘provided a spinal element in social networking, helping to underpin contacts and communication in business, politics, and local administration’.51 It can, then, be seen as an aspect of a broader eighteenth-century sociality rather than something apart, and we have already considered its partial overlaps with such influential groupings as the Royal Society, the Society of Dilettanti, and the Lunar Society. But while Masonry clearly had its Establishment side, regularly bestowing ‘Grand Mastership’ on members of the royal family and high aristocracy, it also had more wildcat tendencies. Some of these emerged in the formation of the breakaway ‘Antients’, with their proliferation of excitingly secret degrees going way beyond the three steps of the (confusingly older) ‘Moderns’, and there may T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 127. 51 Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 348. 50

Politics

213

have been a radical tendency in some separatist groups’ self-identification with the medieval Knights Templar, supposedly martyred by a conspiracy of kings and popes.52 As we glimpsed from the designs for the maverick Cagliostro’s female lodge, some breakaway branches even admitted women: a practice much more common on the European continent, round whose wilder branches much British suspicion was starting to swirl by the 1780s and 1790s.53 We also noted the emphasis on Liberty in David Fordyce’s allegory The Temple of Virtue. According to the paranoid Barruel, the French watchwords ‘Liberty’ and ‘Equality’ were both first planted in people’s minds by Masonry, which cunningly pretended to keep them separate until the moment when the long-plotted revolution could bring them together. Less hysterically, Margaret C. Jacob argues that the Masonic ‘Equality’, theoretically shared by members of all classes once they entered the lodge, did give something of a blueprint for other forms of post-feudal organization in the Habermasian ‘public sphere’, and may indeed have influenced various nascent systems of participatory, proto-democratic government.54 Masonry’s part in the American Revolution is still much debated: the existence of an ‘Anti-Masonic party’ as a major political grouping in the late 1820s suggests that some still saw it as wrestling for the nation’s soul, after a birth whose Masonic elements certainly include such leading figures as Franklin and Washington, but which some see as continuing through in the design of such national symbols as the dollar bill and Egyptianized Washington Monument.55 Jefferson expressed guarded approval of the Illuminati56 and, though there is some doubt about the affiliations of Tom Paine, that arch-bearer of the revolutionary virus clearly understood Freemasonry as a site of underground resistance to oppressive Christianity, and has been claimed as a co-founder, with Franklin, of America’s oldest order of Rosicrucians.57 See David V. Barrett, A Brief History of Secret Societies (London: Robinson, 2007), 108–13; Clark, British Clubs and Societies; David Harrison, The Genesis of Freemasonry (Hersham, Surrey: Lewis Masonic, 2009), 309–49, 58–61. 53 Margaret C. Jacob, Origins of Freemasonry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 19. 54 Jacob, Origins of Freemasonry, 53–5. 55 For the latter idea, see Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol (2009); for the former, see Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s more tongue-in-cheek The Illuminatus Trilogy (1975). 56 Thomas Jefferson, letter to Bishop James Madison, 31 January 1800, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. P. L. Ford, vol. 7 (New York and London: Putnam, 1896), 49. Roundly mocking Barruel’s and Robison’s ‘Bedlamite’ ravings, Jefferson sees Weishaupt as an almost Christ-like, quasi-Godwinian anarchist forced to work undercover by the joint tyranny of the Catholic Church and Bavarian State. 57 See Thomas Paine, ‘The Origin of Freemasonry’, 830–41. This begins as a mocking exposure of supposed Masonic secrets, but then turns into a serious exploration of Freemasonry as a cover for an ancient Druidism driven underground by Christian persecution. It is hard to know how far Paine’s surprisingly positive conclusion to his apparent debunking can be linked to the present-day claim by America’s oldest Rosicrucian order (Fraternitas 52

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

214

In Britain, the networking sociality of Ashton’s world of ‘clubs’ began to come under increasing pressure after the onset of the French Revolution. The Pitt government’s muzzling of ‘the immortal press’ – against which we saw Darwin protesting earlier in this chapter – was accompanied by another act against Seditious Meetings, in what are jointly known as Pitt’s ‘Two Acts’ of 1795. The impact of these and the more draconian Unlawful Societies Act of 1799 was gleefully recorded in Walter Hamilton Reid’s The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in This Metropolis (1800). Perhaps because of its many influential members, from the Prince of Wales downwards, the Unlawful Societies Act excluded official Freemasonry from its blanket ban on many very similarly constituted societies, but forced it to present tidy records of membership, and to begin to move from riotous tavern upper-rooms to inspectable purpose-built premises. As Clark points out, from the turn of the nineteenth century, there were signs that Freemasonry was becoming less open, more private. There was a growing trend towards local lodges renting or building dedicated premises, instead of gathering in public drinking houses. Government action against seditious societies led to the Unlawful Societies Act in 1799, which required the registration of lodges. ... In Britain, there was internal pressure to end the creative rivalry between Ancients and Moderns, and this was finally achieved in 1813. By then the formative age of Freemasonry was surely over.58

Towards Romanticism So far in this book we have considered three ways in which the year 1800 can be seen as a turning point. For Foucault, it is roughly the moment when Linnaean spatialism gives way to Charles-Darwinian historicism. For Bernal, it is not only this but also the moment when the Egyptocentric Ancient Model gives way to the Aryan Model which provides the ideological justification for imperialism. For Clark, it is when the Freemasonry ‘spinal’ to Enlightenment sociality becomes tamed and domesticated. In these last three chapters I hope to have shown that there are links between these phenomena, involving an increasingly difficult Enlightenment effort to hold on to its sense of the imagined spaces needed for its particular kinds of understanding and sociality, in the face of an onrush of temporal events surrounding and caused by the French Revolution.

Rosae Crucis) that two of its 1774 founders were Benjamin Franklin and Paine himself (http://www.soul.org/ accessed 9 July 2009; see too David Barrett, A Brief History of Secret Societies, 197). Paine’s arguments about Druidical sun worship owe much to the earlier deist John Toland, who (along with his coinages of ‘deism’ and ‘pantheism’) virtually inaugurated eighteenth-century Druidomania with his A Critical History of the Celtic Religion and Learning: containing an account of the Druids (London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding), 1719. 58 Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 349.

Politics

215

For students of literature, the 1798 Lyrical Ballads and its 1800 Preface also mark the birth of Romanticism. And for students of Erasmus Darwin, these same years mark the slipping away of his reputation from that of the pre-eminent poet of the 1790s to the forgotten figure of whose work his grandson could cheerfully assert that ‘no one of the present generation reads, as it appears, a single line of it.’59 The coincidence between all these events seems to be one of those situations for which the well-worn phrase ‘it is no coincidence’ was coined. Of course it is important to be aware that at least some of these 1800 tipping points may have been subconsciously theorized around our tendency to think in terms of centuries, and I do not in fact claim that nineteenth-century Romanticism was cut off from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment by an unbridgeable gap. There are numerous ways in which the writers we call Romantic continue the Enlightenment project by other means; and more specifically there are many ways in which most of the best-known Romantics borrow directly from Erasmus Darwin. These mixtures of continuity and rupture are the subject of the next chapter.

Darwin, Life of Erasmus Darwin, 33.

59

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 11

Romantic Times (1): Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth Most literary scholars approach Erasmus Darwin via one or more of the six Romantic poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats. Some time ago, Darwin’s role in the discussion was usually to represent the ‘before’ aspect of a kind of ‘before-and-after’ commercial for Romanticism, a dreadful ‘what might have been’ for our literature had it not been saved by this transformative event. More recently, Darwin has been admitted to the debate on a more even footing, as a significant influence or background to these writers at the level of ideas or even of imagery, and an important reference-point if we want to connect one or more of them to cultural spheres outside pure literature, such as science. However, though Darwin is increasingly given his due as a mover and shaker or a source of ideas, the words ‘and bad poet’ are still often hovering somewhere in the air, whether openly stated or not. What this book has tried to do is to give Darwin’s poetry its own gravitational field, different from these poets’ work but with a weight and density of its own. In part, it has tried to do this by emphasizing his poems’ spatiality, their sense of fields of material to be presented evenly to the gaze, comparatively free of the pressures of time. In establishing this, I have appealed to Foucault’s and Bernal’s suggestions of an epistemic shift from map-like spatiality to time-impelled historicity, somewhere around 1800. Of course this is too neat, and of course there are major continuities across the centuries; furthermore, my citing of these two writers on this point does not necessarily imply a wholesale ‘Foucauldian’ or ‘Bernalian’ commitment to their views on other issues. Nonetheless, this sense of a space-time shift is useful when we turn our attention to the contrasts and often convoluted connections between Darwin and the ‘big six’ poets who have come to be grouped together as The Romantics. In Chapter 9 we contrasted Darwin’s difficulties in abandoning his Egyptocentric model of wide cultural spread with Richard Payne Knight’s narrative of racial progress centred on ancient Greece. We shall see connections with Knight’s Hellenomania in the next chapter’s accounts of Byron, Shelley and Keats; but Knight is not himself quite a Romantic and, in turning to Romanticism proper, it is important to supplement Bernal’s post-Enlightenment model of tree-like growth from initially small, localized roots, with the tales of personal development we commonly associate with Romantic poetry. It could be argued that the early nineteenth-century admiration for ‘young’ Greece, Charles Darwin’s inaugural sketch of the still-growing ‘tree’ of species growth, and numerous nationalist histories encoding European nations’ right of ceaseless self-extension, are not only

218

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

linked together but have their more personalized echoes: in the cult of childhood, in autobiographical quest narratives, in Romantic lyrics of self-loss and recovery. This chapter will consider the decisive moves in this direction taken by Coleridge and Wordsworth, and the way in which these moves were partly focused by way of an ongoing combative dialogue with Darwin’s work. But it will also consider the danger of putting all tremendous and radical poetry of the 1790s under the heading of ‘Romanticism’ by beginning with the very different case of Darwin’s many direct parallels and intersections with Blake. The next chapter will round off the exploration of the six canonized Romantics through somewhat briefer considerations of Byron, Shelley and Keats – whose quest for new imaginative spaces marks a partial revaluation of Darwin – before again complicating matters by looking at a different tradition. This is the continuation of a strand of didactic-scientific poetry by a number of women poets who look more or less explicitly to Darwin as a model. The particular attraction of this model for women is thought about in the context of the increasing specialization of thought and knowledge in the male world: a specialization some women writers manage to sidestep through a partial continuation of earlier, Enlightenment patterns of thought. In very different ways, this resistance to specialization is also one of the key elements linking Darwin’s work to that of William Blake. Blake’s Picturesque William Blake’s inexorable absorption into the ‘big six’ canon of Romantic poets means that his importance for understanding the kind of Enlightenment aesthetic I have been linking to Darwin is in danger of being obscured. For one thing, Blake’s sense of the book as a physical object arguably aligns it more with the full-bloodedly material textuality of a work like The Botanic Garden than with the dynamics of any Romantic genre, however avant-garde. Hence Darwin’s plurality of discursive levels – poetic text, self-enclosed narratives, prose text across a range of registers, illustrations, varied encasing peritext of prefaces and end matter – has its parallels in a work such as Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), whose mixture of verse, proverbs, discursive prose, ‘memorable fancies’ and visual images makes it virtually uncategorizable as anything but ‘text’. And as his intratextual illuminations repeatedly insist, in terms of Bernal’s space-time distinction Blake’s work is supremely spatial, in the sense of first establishing a physical/conceptual space and then filling it, from the edges inward as it were. To apply the word ‘picturesque’ to a poet whose poems are pictures seems almost too obvious, which may be why it has so rarely been done.1 The 1 In a move that has become typical, G. K. Chesterton’s William Blake (London: Duckworth, 1910) uses Stothard’s ‘picturesque’ as a purely negative contrast to Blake’s art (60). The term is used only in passing and limited to The Book of Thel in Morris Eaves’s William Blake: The Early Illuminated Books (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 14, 234.

Romantic Times (1)

219

poems are not simply accompanied by pictures but incorporated into them through various elements, from elaborate borders to pictures within the lettering itself, which strongly offset any impulse to submit to the page-turning narrative drive. The pictorialism is accompanied by a strong sense of symmetry. Where Darwin’s doubly-paired cantos repeatedly juxtapose object and simile with the linking ‘So’ as a token of theoretical even-handedness between the claims of science and poetry, Blake repeatedly uses his pictured spaces to explore binary ‘contraries’: between Innocence and Experience, Heaven and Hell, before and after the Fall. Without moving backwards as well as forwards between these pairs of opposites, there is ‘no progression’.2 Elsewhere, apparent forward movements are still interrupted by such binaries for long stretches: in Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) the opening sense of ecstatic progression is dramatically frozen by Bromion’s rape of Oothoon after only 20 lines, after which the situation depicted in the frontispiece – of the two antagonists bound ‘back to back’ in their cave while the tormented Theotormon immobilizes himself in sympathy – becomes the entire mental space explored by the rest of the poem.3 This method has sometimes been explored in terms of a kind of proto-Marxist dialectic, and of course, Blake is the great prophet of certain kinds of progress. But again this is often conveyed in terms of physicomental spaces which are juxtaposed antithetically before being (sometimes) transformed, as in the sequence of linked prophecies (1793–1795) which tracks the progress of the Orcian revolution through a superimposed sequence of continents, from America to Europe to The Song of Los’s Africa and Asia. If there is a general case for claiming Blake as a prime exemplar of the kind of Enlightenment spatialism this book has tried to define, there is certainly a case for claiming Darwin’s work as a specific influence. Loves (1789) was published by Joseph Johnson shortly before Blake produced Songs of Innocence (1789), and as one of Johnson’s best engravers Blake went on to make key illustrations for Economy in 1791–1792, just as he was drafting much of Songs of Experience in his notebook. The flowers of Loves are a clear influence on some of Blake’s work at this time: Experience contains a subset of flower poems – presenting flowers as sexually desiring or satisfied beings – which seem to riff directly on Loves and Darwin’s self-description there as ‘only a flower-painter’.4 Thus Blake’s anthropomorphic ‘Sun-flower, weary of time,/ Who countest the steps of the Sun’ picks straight up from Loves’ sunflower Helianthus which ‘watches, as it moves, the orb of day’. The amorous flower-spirits of the title page of The Book of Thel (also 1789) and the ‘Argument’ plate to Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1794) 2 See The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) Plate 3; Songs of Innocence and Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (1794). 3 The Illuminated Blake: All of William Blake’s Illuminated Works with a Plate-byPlate Commentary, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Dover, 1992), 125. 4 Loves, 47. See David Worrall, ‘William Blake and Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library 78 (1974–1975): 401; King-Hele, Romantic Poets, 35–9, 45–7.

220

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

are also probably inspired by Loves. On a darker note, some of Blake’s more sinister trees – from Experience’s ‘A Poison Tree’ to the ‘Tree of Mystery’ associated with oppressive religion in ‘The Human Abstract’ and The Book of Ahania – owe a debt to Loves’ longest additional note, on the deadly Javanese Upas-tree, which would also be taken up by Byron and other Romantics as a symbol of the blighted life.5 Blake’s more direct immersion in Economy seems to have had a definite effect on works such as America (1793), where the newly unchained giant of revolution, Orc, derives in part from Economy’s description of revolutionary France as a similar ‘Giant-form’.6 And Blake’s early depictions of Orc’s great antagonist Urizen (in Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 1793) echo the naturistically derived rain god in the ‘Fertilization of Egypt’ plate he engraved for Darwin’s poem.7 In The First Book of Urizen (1794), Economy’s spirits and Fuseli’s frontispiece (though Blake did not engrave this) lie behind Plate 24’s depiction of the four elements of Urizen’s fallen world, including the fiery rebel Fuzon who will lead the attack on Urizen in the sequel, The Book of Ahania. Also in Urizen, Orc’s growth in the womb takes him from a worm through ‘Many forms of fish, bird & beast’: a case of ontogeny replicating phylogeny resembling the evolutionary speculations of Zoonomia, which was going through Johnson’s press as Blake wrote.8 It is also probable that the two-part Botanic Garden offered Blake a model for his Songs of Innocence and Experience in terms of structure. The former’s curious portmanteau form, in which two very different, aesthetically discontinuous texts lean substantial parts of their weight on each other, has no literary parallel I can think of apart from Blake’s Songs. If we pull the lens far enough back, there are many parallels of content too: Loves is partly addressed to children, sympathetic to African slaves and predominantly rural, its floral sexuality strictly innocent in the Blakean sense of being guilt-free. Also published in 1789 – and so ‘innocent’ of the knowledge of the French Revolution, although arguably full of the expansive libertarian optimism that led up to it – Blake’s Songs of Innocence both stands alone and prepares the reader for its counterbalancing part, Songs of Experience (1794, largely written 1791–1792). Appearing when the Revolution has taken real effect, both Economy and Experience are far more complex and nuanced than their innocent predecessors: beginning with disconcerting subversions of the biblical creation story, both could broadly be called urban (though, strangely, Darwin’s machine-scapes never quite become townscapes) and align themselves 5 See Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 4.st 126; and Richard F. Gustafson, ‘The Upas Tree: Pushkin and Erasmus Darwin’, PMLA 75, no. 1 (March 1960): 101–9. 6 Blake, America: A Prophecy, Plates 1, 2 and 8; Darwin, Economy 2.377. 7 Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, title page, Illuminated Blake, 127; Darwin, Economy, ‘The Fertilization of Egypt’, opp. p. 127. See Priestman, Romantic Atheism, 102–4. 8 Blake, The First Book of Urizen, Plate 19. Carmen S. Kreiter traces this idea to the embryological dissections of John Hunter (the ‘Jack Tearguts’ of Blake’s ‘An Island in the Moon’), whose work was closely tracked by Darwin and whose brother William had once taught Darwin anatomy. (See Carmen S. Kreiter, ‘Evolution in William Blake’, Studies in Romanticism 4, no. 2 (Winter 1965): 110–18.)

Romantic Times (1)

221

with the American and French revolts against ‘Confessors and Kings’ on a broad range of fronts.9 There are certainly arguments against the above attempt to reabsorb Blake into the late Enlightenment context represented by Darwin, of which I shall try to deal with three. The first is that – after the beautiful Poetical Sketches – Blake’s style eliminates virtually all traces of eighteenth-century ‘poetic diction’. The second is that one of the best-known facts about Blake is his opposition to much that the ‘Enlightenment’ seems to stand for, from its neoclassicism to the scientific materialism of Bacon, Newton and Locke. The third is that the ‘dangerous enthusiasm’ of Blake’s artisan-class, religiously tinged political radicalism is very different from the polite progressivism of Darwin’s gentrified professionalmanagerial circle, however much their interests may have briefly overlapped at the dawn of the French Revolution. In response, I would completely concede the first point, about Blake’s poetic style: this owes debts to a range of eighteenth-century influences, from various types of religious poetry to Ossian, but none of these have much bearing on a writer like Darwin. On the second point, however, I would argue that Blake’s opposition to ‘the Enlightenment’ has many traces of ‘true friendship’.10 His hostility to GraecoRoman classical writers becomes more nuanced if we recognize how deeply the Enlightenment was invested in other aspects of antiquity, from the Druidomania of Toland and Stukeley to the Egyptianism which opened a way for contextualizing the biblical narrative within a broader range of myths read as allegories, leading perhaps to Blake’s own extraordinary minglings of Christianity with allegorized polytheism. But Darwin’s typically Enlightenment embrace of the deadly triad of Bacon, Newton and Locke, coupled with a more specific embrace of the dark Satanic mills to which their world-view gave rise, would certainly seem to place someone like him in Blake’s line of fire as a Satan or Urizen incarnate.11 Nonetheless, some of Blake’s poetry shows a good understanding of Darwin’s science, as in Orc’s phylogenic ontogeny, and in the debts to Economy’s account of Earth’s ‘central fires’ which have been well explored by David Worrall.12 Also related to these central fires, David Erdman glimpses Economy’s account of iron-bearing lava Economy 2. 380. While Loves’ clearly signalled dependence on its belated Part One has no exact parallel in Songs, many would agree with Northrop Frye that the latter’s claim to show ‘the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul’ only works if we see how Innocence comments on Experience as well as the other way round (Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969], 237). 10 See The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, last line of Plate 20. 11 As often noted, Blake’s ‘mills’ combine the heavy industries of Darwin’s circle with a broader mindset where the Urizenic Satan acts as ‘Newton’s Pantocrator, weaving the Woof of Locke’ (Milton 1.4.11). 12 David Worrall, ‘William Blake and Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library 78 (1974–1975): 397–417. See too Matthew Green, ‘Blake, Darwin and the Promiscuity of Knowing: Rethinking Blake’s Relationship to the Midlands Enlightenment’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 30, no. 2 (June 2007): 193–208. 9

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

222

lurking behind the painfully smelted Luvah of Blake’s Four Zoas, punningly combined with the primal Love which bursts Darwin’s Egg of Night, itself arguably a source for Blake’s Mundane Shell.13 If there is something finally Urizenic about Darwin’s determination to trace everything back through its causal chain to the ‘One Law’ of science, there is also much of Oothoon or the life-affirming Voice of the Devil in his insistence on a teemingly subjective organic diversity in which ‘ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way/ Is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five’.14 For Blake, the Urizen who cannot see that ‘One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression’ is in any case not purely a villain: like the monumentally depicted Newton whose compasses he shares he is a deeply understood antagonist, to be confronted again and again in various forms, in what can be described as an in-house fight within the Enlightenment mindset.15 The third kind of objection to seeing Blake as an Enlightenment figure arises from the uncovering of some of his cultural roots in a lower-class or artisanal ‘dangerous enthusiasm’ very different from Darwin’s polite progressivism. Hence Jon Mee has brought out numerous persuasive links between Blake’s imagery and Darwin’s, but also pointed to a kind of glass ceiling between Blake’s world of street-religious millenarian enthusiasm and the ‘respectable radicals’ of Joseph Johnson’s circle, to whom he related more as occasional employee than as social equal.16 At around the same time as Mee, E. P. Thompson inveighed against attempts to link Blake to ‘the’ tradition of elite Neoplatonism without going through the modes of underground ‘Muggletonian’ dissent through which it must have reached him.17 More recently, Keri Davis has convincingly replaced Thompson’s Muggletonians with Moravians,18 and Marsha Keith Schuchard has built on this link to connect Blake with a range of further fringe groupings from practising alchemists, Kabbalists and of course Swedenborgians, to Mesmerists, Tantrists and Grahamists, many of them committed to the theory if not the practice of intense sexual activity as a route to spiritual enlightenment, and often crosspollinating with the wilder fringes of ‘Antient’ and Rosicrucian Freemasonry.19 Together, such studies have greatly enhanced our awareness of the density and mental vigour of the nexus of religious mysticism and sexual libertarianism David Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 333n11. See Blake, Vala, or the Four Zoas, 2.71–110, 2.25; Darwin, Economy 1.140, AN 6, 1.101. 14 Blake, Urizen, Plate 4.40, Marriage, end of Plate 6. 15 Blake, Marriage, end of Plate 24; the famous painting ‘Isaac Newton’ (1795). 16 Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 147–59, 220–22. 17 E. P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), xx, 65–105. 18 Keri Davis, ‘William Blake’s Mother: A New Identification’, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 33, no. 2 (Fall 1999): 36–50. 19 Marsha Keith Schuchard, Why Mrs Blake Cried: William Blake and the Erotic Imagination (London: Random House/Century, 2006). 13

Romantic Times (1)

223

which a London artisan like Blake was able to inhabit, and which seems to offer such a puzzling counterpoint to the traditional picture of this period as one of polite reason. The idea that many of the above groupings were further connected with radical politics would certainly have been confirmed by Abbé de Barruel, for whom the 1770s and 1780s were blighted by a Europe-wide eruption of new Masonically linked sects from Kabbalists to Martinists, the sudden quietening of whose pseudo-mystical babble at the dawn of the French Revolution gave clear proof that this was the event that all their underground activism had really been leading up to. He gives most prominence to the Swedenborgianism which he sees as a Masonic offshoot, and whose importance for Blake immediately before the French Revolution has never been in doubt. However, in the voraciously social eighteenth century, it is not always easy to see where respectable sociality ends and cultish enthusiasm begins, as witness a small selection of those at one time or other in contact with that wildly networking epitome of Enlightenment, Joseph Banks. While Banks himself was at the respectable end of Masonry, he encouraged investigations of phallic religion by Payne Knight and the orientalist Thomas Maurice, his cousin General Rainsford and Swedenborgian secretary Sigismond Bacstrom set up as practising alchemists, and the botanist Georg Forster, who replaced Banks on Cook’s second voyage, moved restlessly between Rosicrucianism, Masonry and ardent revolutionism.20 In other words, arguably even the ‘polite’ Enlightenment would have had a stronger instinctive grasp of many of Blake’s apparently ‘underground’ ideas and images than the two subsequent centuries which have done so much admirable work in reconstructing them for us. Blake, then, has a substantial presence in, and a continuous dialogue with, many of the Enlightenment outlooks this book has tried to define through the instance of Darwin. In now moving to consider the two founding Romantics Coleridge and Wordsworth, it is useful to begin with an initial contrast between their positive views of continuous growth through time, and Blake’s world of strongly spatial binary juxtapositions, in which images of continuous growth are certainly possible but are often presented as troubling and traumatic in various ways. For Blake for instance, trees often bespeak the growing power of mental tyranny, and although some of his most famous poems focus on childhood we see few easy transitions between that state and an adult world of parents, priests and beadles: the binary is rarely smoothly bridged and the Nurse who remembers her younger self turns ‘green and pale’ with suppressive envy.21 Processes of growth do happen, but they are rarely painless. For Coleridge and Wordsworth, by contrast, the answer to many of the problems posed by their greatest lyrics lies in some form of ‘organic’, tree-like See Schuchard, Why Mrs Blake Cried, 298–9, 318; McIntosh, The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason, 62. 21 Blake, Songs of Experience (1794), ‘Nurse’s Song’, 4. See also ‘A Poison Tree’, ‘The Human Abstract’, ‘The Chapel of Love’, ‘Holy Thursday’. 20

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

224

growth. Bernal links the Romantic plunge into time to the general metaphor of the growing tree, as opposed to the map or chart of knowledge; and I suggested that the Romantic tale of personal growth might be added to this type of metaphor. With the two founding Romantics Coleridge and Wordsworth, this idea of personal growth in time becomes crucial, while Darwin’s sense of conceptual spaces to be crammed with arresting content – without enough regard for the emotional time the reader needs to absorb and go along with it – comes to seem glittering, sickly or ideologically threatening in other ways. Though Wordsworth is the older of the two, I begin with Coleridge; this is partly because he was rather more articulate about the changes he underwent in the 1790s from Darwin’s kind of Enlightenment radicalism to what can be called ‘Romantic ideology’, and partly because this articulation was significantly crystallized through his own personal contacts with Darwin himself. Coleridge’s Nausea In 1796 Coleridge visited Derby twice, to solicit subscribers for his periodical The Watchman, to seek work, and quite specifically to visit Darwin himself, as the friend of his Unitarian hero Joseph Priestley and the inspirer of Thomas Beddoes’s radical-scientific Pneumatic Society – towards which Coleridge had strongly gravitated in Bristol, along with Humphry Davy and the ex-Lunar satellite Tom Wedgwood.22 According to King-Hele, the two poets had several enjoyably bantering conversations, and – after calling Unitarianism ‘a feather bed to catch a falling Christian’ – Darwin may have offered Coleridge work in Derby, as his amanuensis or as a schoolteacher.23 It was after their first meeting that Coleridge wrote to his friend Josiah Wade about Dr Darwin, the everything, except the Christian! Dr Darwin possesses, perhaps, a greater range of knowledge than any other man in Europe, and is the most inventive of philosophical men. He thinks in a new train on all subjects except religion.24

Writing to the radical John Thelwall a year later, he described Darwin as ‘the first literary character in Europe, and the most original-minded man’.25 Interesting for the way they bring out the indistinct pre-Romantic borderline between ‘literature’ and scientific ‘philosophy’, these tributes to Darwin’s Europe-wide pre-eminence are also, as Desmond King-Hele puts it, simply ‘stunning’.26 See Ian Wylie, ‘Coleridge and the Lunaticks’, in The Coleridge Connection: Essays for Thomas McFarland, ed. R. Gravil and Molly Lefebure (London: Macmillan, 1990), 30–32. 23 King-Hele, Unequalled Achievement. 301–2. 24 To Josiah Wade, 27 January 1796, Collected Letters, 1.177. 25 To John Thelwall, 6 February 1797, Collected Letters 1.305. 26 King-Hele, Unequalled Achievement, 265. 22

Romantic Times (1)

225

King-Hele notes dozens of probable Darwinian influences on Coleridge’s thought: perhaps the most important – also explored at length by Elisabeth Schneider and with reservations by Jennifer Ford – being the claim that Coleridge’s ideas about the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ in the presence of art, and more broadly about the unconscious mind in general, owe more to Darwin’s accounts of ‘reverie’ in Zoonomia and the Interludes of Loves than to the German Romanticists, such as A. W. Schlegel, more normally cited as his sources.27 As we noted in Chapter 3, Robert Richards argues that another great Coleridgean influence, F.W.J. Schelling, was hugely impressed by Zoonomia’s ideas about irritability as the criterion of all life, and played a key part in bouncing these back to Coleridge in the idea of the ‘one life’.28 It is perhaps this kind of transnational influence on his admired Germans that lies behind Coleridge’s extraordinary claim that Darwin has the most ‘original’ mind in Europe. Coleridge’s reading of Darwin also greatly influenced his poetry. Despite holding fingers firmly round nose whenever mentioning Darwin – as the fashion still was in the earlier twentieth century – John Livingstone Lowes’s groundbreaking The Road to Xanadu (1927) established The Botanic Garden as a substantial source for ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Kubla Khan’.29 It is true that many such debts relate to Darwin’s prose notes, as with the Ancient Mariner’s water-snakes (derived from a note on luminescent microbes), or Religious Musings’s description of the simoom, which actually owes more to Economy’s long quotation from James Bruce’s Travels than to the poem itself.30 But in flashes, Coleridge also shows enthusiasm for Darwin as a poet, planning a ‘Hymn to Dr Darwin – in the manner of the Orphics’ in the 1790s,31 and noting in 1812 that ‘I have often wished to see Claudian’s splendid poem on the Phoenix translated into English verse in the elaborate rhyme and gorgeous diction of Darwin’. Economy’s passage on the universe’s future rebirth through a Herschelian ‘Big Bounce’ (see Chapter 6) borrows in part from that poem, and Darwin references the generally rather obscure Claudian more than once elsewhere.32 In 1803 Coleridge retitled

27 King-Hele, Romantic Poets, 128–32; Elisabeth Schneider, Coleridge, Opium and ‘Kubla Khan’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 96–8; Jennifer Ford, Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 22–6. 28 Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life, 300, 314–15. 29 John Livingstone Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), 19, 36, 99, etc.; King-Hele, Romantic Poets, 88–147. 30 King-Hele, Romantic Poets, 95, 104–5. 31 Coleridge, Coleridge’s Notebooks, 6. 32 King-Hele, Romantic Poets, 127. Claudian also appears in the title-page epigraph to Loves and as a guide to the Eleusinian Mysteries in Economy’s Portland Vase note (AN, 57).

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

226

an earlier poem ‘Darwiniana’, to bring out its ‘half-mockery of Darwin’s style.33 First published in 1796 as ‘The Hour when we shall Meet Again’, this brief lyric expresses a sense of amorous loss through a consciously Loves-derived flower allegory. As with Darwin’s ‘opening roses’ strewn by ‘Morn’s fair hand’, Coleridge’s ‘rose of May’ droops through the long night until ‘Young Day’ returns to revive her, weeping with sympathetic dew: Weeps the soft dew, the balmy gale she sighs, And darts a trembling lustre from her eyes. New life and joy th’ expanding flow’ret feels: His pitying mistress mourns, and mourning heals!34

Alongside its floral anthropomorphism, this accurately captures such mannerisms as the repeatedly typifying ‘the’, and the mirrored chiasmuses (a kind of chiasmus squared) of the first and last lines. In Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge accuses Darwin’s style of ‘dulcia vitia’, or sweet corruption, a description which can be related to his curt remark to John Thelwall – in the same year that produced the above imitation – that ‘I absolutely nauseate Darwin’s Poem’.35 However, this dismissal needs to be seen in the context of Coleridge’s relationships, not only to Darwin but to Thelwall himself, to whom he had written a few weeks before about Darwin’s mind being the most original in Europe. A great seeker-out of atheists to disagree with (Godwin was another), Coleridge had actively sought Thelwall’s friendship out of admiration for his status as a radical martyr following the great 1794 Treason Trials; but this letter shows him as somewhat irked by Thelwall’s tone of superiority as a literary mentor, as well as by his aggressive atheism. Coleridge’s cry of nausea comes at the end of a defence of his own Religious Musings against Thelwall’s devastating critique of everything from its religious content (‘enough to make any man sick’) to the ‘inharmonious’ stresses of its Miltonic blank verse.36 Earlier in this letter, Coleridge had criticized Darwin’s suave insincerity in concealing his atheism in public;37 so now his closing riposte – ‘As to Harmony, it is all association – Milton is harmonious to me, & I absolutely nauseate Darwin’s Poem. Yours affectionately – S. T. Cole[ridge]’ – can Coleridge, Poetical Works, p. 96; see Derwent and Sarah Coleridge, quoted in The Complete Poems, ed. W. Keach (London: Penguin Classics, 1997), 467. 34 ‘The Hour When We Shall Meet Again’, 11–18; Poetical Works, 96; see Loves 2.10. 35 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions (London: Bell and Daldy, 1866), 38; letter to John Thelwall, 13 May 1796; Collected Letters, 1.216. 36 Thelwall to Coleridge 10 May 1796; qtd. in Duncan Wu, ed., Romanticism: An Anthology, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 321–2. For an interesting discussion of these letters, see David Fairer, ‘A little sparring about Poetry’: Coleridge and Thelwall, 1796–8’, Coleridge Bulletin 21, New Series (Spring 2003): 20–33. 37 Coleridge, Collected Letters, 1.214. 33

Romantic Times (1)

227

be read as a brief outburst of petulance at Thelwall’s claim to be sickened by his own poetry, instantly softened by the declaration of fraternal affection but slamming the door on further debate.38 The remark that ‘it is all association’ shifts the debate from the technical discussion of ‘harmony’ to that of emotional or ideological alignment – Milton’s religious bluntness versus Darwin’s suave insincerity – but arguably builds this point on an implicit acceptance that at one level Darwin’s perfectly balanced couplets are more outwardly ‘harmonious’ than Milton’s rough, enjambed blank verse. Implying the nausea caused by the dulcia vitia of too much sweetness rather than by poetic incompetence, Coleridge’s remark can be further related to the notebook comment we considered in Chapter 2, that Darwin’s poetry ‘arrests the attention too often’, which implies that the attention does want to be arrested by all the ‘beautiful objects’ in Darwin’s painterly studies, but simply finds them too much to hold down in the stomach of the mind, as it were. Another aspect of Coleridge’s critique of Darwin is supplied by Biographia Literaria’s comparison of Darwin’s poetry to the ‘Russian palace of ice, glittering, cold, and transitory’, as described in Cowper’s The Task.39 We can compare this image of ice to Coleridge’s other uses of such images to denote the HartleyanPriestleyan materialism he abjured around 1798, and which (I argue elsewhere) feeds into the frozen world the Ancient Mariner enters when his ship overshoots its goal.40 But just as significantly, we might remember the context in which Cowper uses the original image in The Task, as a transition between describing the ice formations thrown up round a stream in winter and the themes of political tyranny he will go on to explore: between these two topics stands the Russian Empress Anna’s cold, smiling ice palace, which like tyranny itself was ‘once a stream, and soon to glide into a stream again’. As applied by Coleridge to Darwin, this image of frozen power not only connotes Darwin’s ‘cold’ atheism but also speaks volumes about the transition between the transparent visuality of the Enlightenment aesthetic and the time-driven Romantic sense of universal flow. This sense of necessary flow also underlies the image of the Eolian harp, used repeatedly by both Coleridge and Wordsworth to denote the unpredictable streams of thought and inspiration, sweeping through the mind as the breeze sweeps the strings of the instrument placed in an open window to catch it. Hence, Coleridge devotes his most important early lyric to the music of that simplest lute Placed lengthways in the clasping casement – hark How by the desultory breeze caressed!’.41

40 41 38 39

12–14.

Coleridge, Collected Letters, 1.214. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 9. See Cowper, The Task, 5. 151–76. Priestman, Romantic Atheism, 42, 152–3. Coleridge, ‘The Eolian Harp’ (1796 version, originally titled ‘Effusion XXV’),

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

228

This key Romantic image can be compared, but also contrasted, to the Egyptian ‘Lyre of Memnon’ on which Darwin dwells more than once, and which Economy describes thus: So to the sacred Sun in Memnon’s fane, Spontaneous concords quired the matin strain; Touch’d by his orient beam, responsive rings The living lyre, and vibrates all its strings; Accordant ailes the tender tones prolong, And holy echoes swell the adoring song. (Economy 1.183–8)

This lyre is activated not by the wind but the sun, whose heat expands the frame so that its wires twang eerily. The underlying idea of spontaneous, nature-created music is the same, but in this case the ‘nature’ is that of the uniformly enlightening sun and gestures towards the universal sun worship we discussed in chapters 8 and 9; whereas in the image of the Eolian harp, both nature and the music it creates are fleeting, sporadic and driven by movement in time, when ‘by the desultory breeze caressed’. Nonetheless, the underlying idea of a music created by nature rather than art is the same, and there is a different echo of Darwin when Coleridge asks: And what if all of animated nature Be but organic harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought …?42

As Alan Richardson argues, the word ‘organic’ was put on the map by Darwin, to emphasize the firmly bodily links between all life-forms, as in the subtitle of Zoonomia, or The Laws of Organic Life, or in Economy’s ‘organic frame’ of ‘all that breathe or bud’ (4.43–5); hence it is ‘tightly bound to the word “organ” [implying] a vision of life that begins with the material body, not with an idealized mind or transcendent spirit’.43 For Richardson, Darwin’s huge influence ‘can be gauged from the sudden appearance, across many genres of writing in the 1790s, of the term “organic” itself ... in an (Erasmus) Darwinian sense’. Literary examples include Blake’s negative term ‘finite organical perception’ in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but also the Coleridgean ‘organic harps’ we have just been considering, through which all animals, plants and humans are unified by the ‘one life within us and abroad’. By contrast to this usage, the definitively ‘Romantic’ image of poetic/ artistic ‘organic form’ emerged later, in such formulations as: ‘The organic form ... is innate; it shapes as it develops itself from within, and the fullness of its ‘The Eolian Harp’, 36–8. Alan Richardson, ‘Erasmus Darwin and the Fungus School’, Wordsworth Circle 33

42 43

(2002): 113.

Romantic Times (1)

229

development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form.’44 Here the ideas of fullness and perfection have sources in the philosophical idealism which Coleridge only embraced after 1798–1799, when he visited Germany and ‘snapped [the] squeaking baby-trumpet of sedition’ which had earlier linked him to the materialism of Priestley, Beddoes and – despite the reservations about his poetry – Darwin. 45 The growth of ‘organic’ from its materialist origins to its ideal perfection as a touchstone for Romanticism was thus itself something of an organic process, in the latter sense. Coleridge never completely turned his back on Darwin, especially when he saw some of his ideas as helping to break down over-rigid distinctions: Neil Vickers and Dahlia Porter have pointed out how his ‘abstruse researches’ into the mingling of sight and touch probably blended idealist, anti-Lockean thoughts from Darwin as well as Berkeley as late as 1805; and how in On Method (1818) he praised Darwin’s radical revision of Linnaeus’s bald taxonomy, as shown in Loves’ imaginative emphasis on ‘the harmony between the vegetable and animal world’ as a way of gesturing towards the underlying ‘relations of things’.46 Nonetheless, Coleridge’s well-documented turn against Hartley’s necessitarianism ‘and all the irreligious metaphysics of modern infidels’ at the dawn of the nineteenth century involved a growing rejection of much that Darwin stood for.47 This rejection was fundamental to his plans for the vast work he was constantly urging Wordsworth to write: the never-completed The Recluse. As ‘the first and only true Phil[osophical] Poem in existence’, The Recluse was expressly planned to supersede the scientific-didactic ‘philosophical’ mode whose prime exemplars were Lucretius and Darwin.48 Noel Jackson and David Duff have both discussed the way these two writers’ dangerously atheistic reputations put a question mark over the very idea of a philosophical poem; and the aggrieved tone of some of Coleridge’s letters to Wordsworth conveys his anxiety that his friend has not gone far enough in avoiding their influence. Thus one key letter of 1815 denounces Lucretius as a poetic model – ‘Whatever in Lucretius is Poetry is not

44 Qtd in Coleridge’s Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Continuum, 1989), 53. 45 Letter to George Coleridge, c. 10 March 1798; Collected Letters, 1.260. 46 See Neil Vickers, ‘Coleridge’s “Abstruse Researches”’, 168–74; Dahlia Porter, ‘Scientific Analogy’, 213–4. 47 Letter to Thomas Poole, 16 March 1801. 48 Coleridge to Wordsworth, 30 May 1815, Collected Letters, 4.574. For a fuller discussion of the links between Darwin, Lucretius and Wordsworth’s planned ‘philosophical poem’, see Noel Jackson, ‘Rhyme and Reason: Erasmus Darwin’s Romanticism’, Modern Language Quarterly 70, no. 2 (2009): 171–2, 192–4; and for the dangerously radical implications of the term ‘philosophical’ in this period see David Duff, Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 59–62.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

230

philosophical; whatever is philosophical is not Poetry’49 – and warns Wordsworth against the absurd notion of ... Darwin, and all the countless Believers – even (strange to say) among Xtians of Man’s having progressed from an Ouran Outang state – so contrary to all History, to all Religion, nay, to all Possibility.50

As well as crystallizing some of Coleridge’s feelings about Lucretius and Darwin, this 1815 letter conveys a widening difference from Wordsworth around the issue of materialism. Though this difference should not be exaggerated – they remained at one on many issues – it is a useful place to begin in considering Wordsworth’s own take on some of the things Darwin represented. Wordsworth’s Mind of Man One reason for Wordsworth’s inability to complete Coleridge’s plan for him may have been that he still had at least half a foot in the materialist camp. Lucretius’ influence permeates Wordsworth’s work, from the noble savages and attacks on superstition in the first Salisbury Plain drafts (1793–1794) to the farewell to Nature worship in ‘Elegiac Stanzas, Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm’ (1807).51 Coleridge’s letter warning against Lucretian influence was prompted first and foremost by Wordsworth’s publication of The Recluse’s intended first part, The Excursion (1814), which was prefaced by a verse ‘Prospectus to The Recluse’. In proclaiming Wordsworth’s aim to make ‘the Mind of Man/ The haunt, and the main region of my song’ while flying undaunted past ‘Jehovah – with his thunder’, the ‘Prospectus’ directly echoes Lucretius’ account of the religion-defying mental flights through which Epicurus created his materialist philosophy: ‘Neither fables of the gods could quell him, nor thunderbolts, nor heaven with menacing roar.’52 In making the Mind the main region of his song, Wordsworth drew substantially on Darwin’s materially grounded psychology. While working on Lyrical Ballads he went out of his way to borrow a copy of Zoonomia, where he found the ‘authenticated’ account of one of the psychosomatic ‘Diseases of

Letters, 4.574. In a general turning of the tide against didactic poetry, Darwin’s Temple had been criticized by others in exactly the same terms (The Critical Review, s2, 38 (1803): 361; see List 191). 50 Letters, 4.574–5. Elsewhere (as eventually published in ‘Notes on Stillingfleet’, The Athenaeum, no. 2474, 27 March 1875) Coleridge called such evolutionary notions ‘Darwinizing’, long before anyone had heard of Charles Darwin. 51 For further Lucretian echoes in Wordsworth, see Martin Priestman, ‘Lucretius in Romantic and Victorian Britain’, in A Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, ed. S. Gillespie and P. Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 292–5. 52 Wordsworth, ‘Prospectus to The Recluse’, 40–41, 33; Lucretius, DRN, 1.68–9. 49

Romantic Times (1)

231

Volition’, which he worked up into ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill: A True Story’.53 The claim to ‘truth’ is important, since this poem’s tale about the fulfilment of a poor woman’s curse on her oppressor – by making him ‘never more be warm’ (100) for the rest of his life – pushes it right up against the edge of the supernatural, but not beyond it. In Darwin’s original account, the story is used to demonstrate the power of mental convictions over physical processes: a removal of the mind/ body distinction which does not abandon a materialist understanding of the mind. Arguably, Wordsworth’s situation of this strange story in a context of village gossip makes it a central example of his whole Lyrical Ballads project, ‘to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention to the lethargy of custom’, as Coleridge put it (my italics).54 In declaring his aim to explore ‘the Mind of Man’ while flying past Jehovah’s thunders in the ill-fated Recluse, Wordsworth is arguably still anchoring himself in the materialist psychology he partly learned from Darwin, where ‘analogy’ is the closest one ever comes to the supernatural. Darwin’s influence appears in many of Wordsworth’s other probings of psychology, where the mind/body interface is crucial. As noted in Chapter 7, Wordsworth’s Prelude reminiscence of making the world ‘work like a sea’ around him by stopping dead when skating may well have been inflected by Darwin’s Berkeleyan thoughts on the relativity of perception.55 And Wordsworth’s uses of the word ‘organic’ arguably stay far more grounded in the body than Coleridge’s. In his discussion of Darwin-inspired uses of the word, Richardson argues that The ‘pure organic pleasure’ that Wordsworth celebrates in the two-part Prelude of 1799 stems from the ‘organs and recipient faculties’ – the neural and sensory organs – that the blest infant babe develops through the ‘discipline of love’ (1:396, 2:281–2). This founds in turn the highly responsive ‘organic sensibility’ that Wordsworth makes the first requisite of poets in the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads.56

Zoonomia (1801), 4.68–9. See Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, 145–6, 154, 158, for Zoonomia’s Hartleyan associationism and use of psychosomatic ‘case studies’ – not just this one – as influences on Wordsworth; for instance on the suckling baby’s power to restore sanity in ‘The Mad Mother’. 54 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 145. 55 Alan Richardson suggests that Zoonomia’s account of the dizzy after-impressions of spinning in circles probably influenced the famous skating episode in Wordsworth’s Prelude, where ‘still the solitary cliffs / Wheeled by me’ after suddenly stopping short (Alan Richardson, British Romanticism, 12–13; William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), 1.478–86; Zoonomia (1801), 1.23). King-Hele also notes an echo of Darwin’s skaters who ‘hiss along the ice’ at the very end of Economy canto 3 (3.570) in Wordsworth’s ‘We hissed along the polished ice’ (1.461; King-Hele, Romantic Poets, 80–81). 56 Richardson, ‘Erasmus Darwin and the Fungus School’, 113. 53

232

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

In fact, Darwin contributes a great deal more than the word ‘organs’ to The Prelude’s ‘infant babe’ passage, which draws strongly on Zoonomia’s account of how babies begin to both grasp and construct the beauty of nature at the mother’s breast. Described at length in prose in the chapter ‘Of Instinct’, the idea is summarized in Zoonomia’s prefatory poem, ‘To Erasmus Darwin, on his Work intitled Zoonomia’ (1794), by the young poet Dewhurst Bilsborrow: Warm from its cell the tender infant born Feels the cold chill of Life’s aerial morn; Seeks with spread hands the bosoms velvet orbs, With closing lips the milky fount absorbs; … Eyes with mute rapture every waving line, Prints with adoring kiss the Paphian shrine, And learns erelong, the perfect form confess’d, Ideal Beauty from its Mother’s breast.57

Though with less emphasis on ‘Paphian’ erotics, there are many parallels with this idea in The Prelude’s account of how the ‘babe who sleeps/ Upon his mother’s breast’ slowly gathers ‘passion from his mother’s eye’ until, Subjected to the discipline of love, His organs and recipient faculties Are quickened, are more vigorous, his mind spreads, Tenacious of the forms which it receives. .. From this beloved Presence – there exists A virtue which irradiates and exalts All objects through all intercourse of sense.58

Though the mother’s breast is now merged with her eye in a single ‘beloved Presence’, the idea of varied sensations of comfort combining into a unified focus of love, whose ‘virtue’ is then projected outwards on to the rest of nature, runs very close to Darwin/Bilsborrow’s prioritizing of the maternal breast as the source of all future sensations of beauty. The ‘Bilsborrow’ element in all this needs a little more explanation. A young Derby disciple of Darwin’s, Dewhurst Bilsborrow did an excellent job of summarizing Zoonomia in his prefatory poem of 1794, and Darwin later borrowed the above passage verbatim – with acknowledgment – in the 1803 Temple’s longer expansion of the breast-as-beauty theory.59 Wordsworth had clearly not 57 Dewhurst Bilsborrow, ‘To Erasmus Darwin, on his Work Entitled Zoonomia’, Zoonomia (1801) 1.v–vi. See too ‘Of Instinct’, Zoonomia 1. 200–202. 58 The Two-Part Prelude (1799), 2.281–4, 288–90; in William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. J. Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and S. Gill. (New York and London: Norton, 1979), 20–21. 59 Temple 3.167–76. The relevant note on ‘Analysis of Taste’ repeats the Zoonomia passage cited above (Temple AN 8, 91–2).

Romantic Times (1)

233

read this Temple expansion when he wrote about the ‘infant babe’ in the Two-Part Prelude of 1798/9, but Bilsborrow’s original passage – as quoted above – gives particular prominence to this aspect of Zoonomia’s psychologized aesthetics. Wordsworth may have paid Bilsborrow’s poem particular attention because the latter was a Cambridge friend of his younger brother Christopher Wordsworth, whom Bilsborrow had gratifyingly informed of William’s ‘repute with Dr. D.’ on the strength of his early Descriptive Sketches (1793).60 Curiously Coleridge – who was present at the same Cambridge discussion, and hence also knew Bilsborrow – later suggested that Darwin used the latter’s name as a cover for his own authorship of the Zoonomia poem: an interesting suggestion since its style is almost indistinguishable from Darwin’s and its very accurate rendition of his physiology, including a hint at his evolutionism, makes it read almost as a blueprint for the later Temple.61 Bilsborrow’s report of Wordsworth’s ‘repute with Dr. D.’ on the strength of the early Descriptive Sketches usefully introduces another aspect of the DarwinWordsworth connection: the debate about poetic diction. Published by Joseph Johnson in 1793, Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches echoed many tropes from Johnson’s star-writer, including the closed couplets, inversions, synecdoches, occasional Egyptianisms and swarming personifications. With his heart awakening to the sun like Memnon’s lyre, Wordsworth describes his 1791–1792 walks through Switzerland and France in the early days of the French Revolution, whose future prospects he hails in a climactic comparison of ‘Freedom’s waves’ to the flooding Nile: Oh give, great God, to Freedom’s waves to ride Sublime o’er Conquest, Avarice, and Pride, … – Give them, beneath their breast while Gladness springs, To brood the nations o’er with Nile-like wings.62

The poetic-diction contraction ‘give them … to’ puts the waves of Freedom in sublime charge of a riot of personified evils (a full ten lines of which I have omitted above), climaxing in the improbable picture of Gladness ‘springing’ underwater while the waves’ wings brood over the nations. Somewhere behind this orgy of mixed metaphors we might glimpse the ‘brooding’ with ‘mighty wings outspread’ of Milton’s dove-like Heavenly Muse at the start of Paradise Lost, mingled with Economy’s Darwin-Fuseli-Blake image of the ‘Fertilization of Egypt’, where the Urizenic Nile-pouring god spreads his wings over the nations from Abyssinia to Egypt.63 But even Darwin’s personifications never run quite so amok as in this Robert Woof, William Wordsworth 1793–1820: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 27; see too King-Hele, Unequalled Achievement, 288; H. W. Garrod, Wordsworth: Lectures and Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), 55–6. 61 See King-Hele, Romantic Poets, 126. 62 Wordsworth, Descriptive Sketches (1793), 791–2, 804–5. 63 Milton, Paradise Lost, 1.20–21; Economy, facing 127. 60

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

234

tangled passage, and when Wordsworth revised the poem in 1849, he retained the ‘Nile-like wings’ (reallocating them to a godly ‘just cause’ rather than ‘Freedom’) but pruned away most of the other personifications, along with the revolutionary fervour. Famously, personifications are among the things Wordsworth attacked in the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, as he launched his campaign against the ‘gaudiness and inane phraseology’ of ‘what is usually called poetic diction’.64 Whether aimed specifically at Darwin or not, the Preface is clearly aimed at everything he stands for poetically, attacking the way such ‘gaudy’ artifices impel the poet to break in upon the sanctity and truth of his pictures by transitory and accidental ornaments, and endeavour to excite admiration of himself by arts, the necessity for which must manifestly depend upon the assumed meanness of his subject.65

As laid out in Addison’s foundational ‘Essay on the Georgics’, the idea of poetic ‘ornament’ – implying a kind of class condescension from grand style to supposedly ‘mean’ subject matter – was one of the key planks of eighteenth-century didactic poetry in general, but can be seen as taken to particularly elaborate extremes in Darwin’s constant attempts to transfigure his dry or vulgarly material content through prettified personifications, Latinate inversions and long epic similes with only the most ‘accidental’ links to their topics. For several critics, these attacks are aimed at Darwin quite specifically.66 The probability is reinforced by the placing of the above formulation straight after a comparison of the Poet and the ‘Man of Science’. However, this comparison also suggests a much more complex engagement with Darwin’s attempt to fuse science with poetry: The Man of Science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude: the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. … [T]hough the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his favorite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings. … If the labours of Men of Science should ever create any material revolution (direct or indirect) in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the poet … will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of Science . . . he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of Science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us.67

LB Preface, 600, 596, 608. LB Preface, 607. 66 See King-Hele, Unequalled Achievement, 316–8; David Knight, ‘Epilogue: ‘One 64 65

Great Slaughter-House the Warring World: Living in Revolutionary Times’, in The Genius of Erasmus Darwin, ed. C.U.M. Smith and Robert Arnott (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 363. 67 LB Preface, 606–7.

Romantic Times (1)

235

This formulation puts several ideas together in ways we might not expect. The idea that science is solitary and poetry communal sounds strange in the context of Botanic Garden’s popularity and Lyrical Ballads’ somewhat niche market, especially if we contrast the received image of Wordsworth wandering lonely as a cloud to that of Darwin’s hyperactive networking. The phrase ‘atmosphere of sensation’ seems to stake another claim on territory that should be Darwin’s: not only is ‘sensation’ one of his four ‘faculties of the sensorium’, but his whole intensely pictorial aesthetic reads like one long bid to throw an atmosphere of his kind of directly registered visual sensation around the objects of science, where there may have been none before. Lastly, the claim that poets are only waiting for scientists to effect a ‘material revolution’ that becomes ‘familiar’ to us all before following in their steps seems curious in the face of the Industrial Revolution currently being effected by Darwin’s friends, and already resonantly celebrated in his poetry. However, Wordsworth’s re-staking of the science/poetry terrain is seriously meant. Over time, his plain language – even about wandering lonely as a cloud – has connected him to far more of ‘all human beings’ than the then-popular Darwin; his version of ‘sensation’ as a rich conglomerate of initial impact and morally connected feeling wins out in the long run over Darwin’s careful distribution of these elements across the four ‘faculties of the sensorium’; and the sharing of deep experiences about the revolutions of the new science – rather than simple glowing descriptions of them – still had to wait for new literary forms to emerge, in the shapes of science fiction, the industrial novel and (perhaps) the Chartist protestpoem. But Wordsworth could not have pinpointed these things so sharply without the careful, by no means unsympathetic juxtaposition of his own efforts with ‘the remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist’ – the three fields of discovery at the heart of Darwin’s Botanic Garden. Wordsworth’s revolutionary claim that poetry should speak the language of prose also, of course, won out in the end. But he does concede a value to metrical arrangement and, here again, Darwin seems to be on his mind. Rather strangely, Wordsworth uses his own ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ as a prime example of why important scientific truths need to be translated from prose to poetry to achieve their greatest impact: the story from Zoonomia has now ‘been communicated to many hundreds of people who would never have heard of it, had it not been narrated as a ballad’.68 He is not, then, opposed in principle to the recasting of scientific prose into verse, since he rather seems to be blaming Darwin for not doing so in this case. The impulse to versify such truths is right, but this is how it should be done: not through vast personifications of ‘the’ faculties of the sensorium, but through the narrated tale of ‘a’ rich cattle-farmer and ‘a’ pauperized old woman. Wordsworth’s specific attitudes to Darwin were, then, a mixture of positive and negative. Within limits, the same could be said about his approach to the LB Preface, 612.

68

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

236

identification of texts with spaces which I have described as characteristic of the Enlightenment. The sense of an ongoing conflict between the ideas of subjective time and planned literary space emerges in the Excursion Preface’s rather strange link between the still-unpublished, autobiographical Prelude and the vast edifice of the never-completed Recluse: the two Works have the same kind of relation to each other … as the ante- chapel has to the body of a Gothic church. Continuing this allusion, … [my] minor Pieces, which have been long before the Public, when they shall be properly arranged, will be found … to have such connection with the main Work as may give them claim to be likened to the little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses, ordinarily included in those edifices.69

A similar effort to spatialize can be found in the arrangement Wordsworth insisted on for the last, complete edition of his verse, with chronological evolution buried under a quasi-Linnaean system of imposed headings such as ‘Poems founded on the affections’ and ‘Poems on the naming of places’.70 However, this stern relegation of his own work to a series of conceptual or quasi-architectural spaces has increasingly come to be seen as a mammoth effort of self-suppression, wilfully hiding the story of ‘the growth of a poet’s mind’ which is what his readers really want from Wordsworth, and whose real medium is time, not space. It is interesting that the tools of this self-suppression hark back to Enlightenment models: the Linnaean sense that to tabulate a field of material is to explain it, the parallels with Darwin’s presentation of his poems as ‘vestibuled’ Botanic Gardens or Temples within whose recesses many other strange little poems seem to lurk. But the more important point to make is that the time-driven Wordsworth most readers now care about – and there is an argument that it was partially he who created these habits of reading in the first place – exists in flat opposition to such models. The supreme exemplar of this time-driven mode is The Prelude, whose final title (though chosen by Wordsworth’s widow) appropriately converts the vestibular ‘ante-chapel’ idea from spatial to musical terms. Its earlier provisional titles, ‘The Growth of a Poet’s Mind’ and ‘The Poem to Coleridge’, bring out both its prime theme of growth and its sense of origin in a fluid interpersonal situation. The primacy of time emerges strongly in its first line, ‘Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze’: the immediacy of ‘Oh’, the present tense, the sense that a ‘preblessing’ moment has just been superseded, however temporarily, and the image of the Romantic ‘breeze’ itself, which we looked at in Coleridge’s poem on the Eolian harp, and which will here turn into the ‘Aeolian visitations’ described some hundred lines further on.71 The fact that the poem can later look back in awe at the spontaneity of this opening ‘glad preamble’ is another example of its occupation Wordsworth, Preface to The Excursion, in Poetical Works, ed. T. Hutchinson and rev. E. De Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 589. 70 See contents page of the above edition, xi. 71 Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), 1.104. 69

Romantic Times (1)

237

of a series of present moments, as repeatedly recalled by the present-time dialogue with Coleridge which counterpoints its archaeology of many other such moments in the past. And of course one of the things that dialogue reveals is that The Prelude is a form of prolonged truancy from the planned ‘philosophic song’ of The Recluse, to which his Aeolian visitations have so traumatically failed to lead.72 Even more dramatically temporal than the first line about the gentle breeze is the opening to the original two-part Prelude of 1798/9, which appears in the final (1850) version at line 269. Here the first ‘line’ consists of only four words: ‘Was it for this [?]’. In 1798, the ‘this’ referred to is the writer’s block of his dispersed Aeolian visitations, while the question ‘Was it …?’ leads straight into the picture of Wordsworth’s childhood whose poetic promise implicitly answers it with a resounding ‘no’. While refusing even to glance back at the opening state of block – its omission only gestured at in the first missing half-line – the whole subsequent story of Wordsworth’s mental growth remains grammatically dependent on it, an extended subordinate clause in a cleverly evasive construction which only demands the fullest possible plunge into the poet’s past to produce the required, triumphantly unblocking negative. It is this sense of writing oneself out of a situation of entrapment which is not itself interesting that constitutes both Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s most lastingly influential form: the Romantic lyric of escape written in ‘real’ emotional time.73 Coleridge’s lime-tree-bower prison, the over-silent cottage of ‘Frost at Midnight’ and the nerve-jangling pre-storm weather of ‘Dejection’ are all written away from in this way, as are Wordsworth’s unresolved clashes with his last visit to the Wye in ‘Tintern Abbey’ and the loss of visionary gleam in the Immortality Ode. If The Prelude has some claim to be the first great modern epic, it is crucial that it is founded in just the same lyric structure, overcoming the sense of confinement to particular mental spaces – here, the writer’s block – by putting them in dynamic relationship to those other ‘spots of time’ which are endlessly open for revisiting, because time has taken over from space as the dimension through which poetry moves. As we turn to the later Romantic poets Byron, Shelley and Keats, this structure remains vital. But it is joined by other elements – including a quest for new kinds of imaginative space to escape into – in which Darwin’s influence is a newly definite presence, particularly by way of The Temple of Nature, which hardly registers at all in Wordsworth’s or Coleridge’s responses to his work. As well as considering these issues, the next chapter will turn to Darwin’s rather clearer, more acknowledged influence on some particular areas of women’s poetry, as a way into a final examination of the new nineteenth-century element of specialization dividing the arts from the sciences, which Darwin’s influence and the work of many women writers worked, for a while, to undermine. Wordsworth, Prelude, 1.230. ‘Real’ needs its inverted commas because many of these lyrics were repeatedly

72 73

revised.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 12

Romantic Times (2): Later Romantics and Women Poets Places to Be: Byron, Shelley, Keats For Wordsworth and Coleridge, Darwin features as a large but troubling figure: a still-active challenge to their own developing aesthetic. For the younger Romantic generation of Byron, Shelley and Keats he is less problematic: safe for the young Byron to reject as passé, but also available for Shelley, Keats and the mature Byron to draw on as a fellow-pagan whose lushly pictorialized classicism is ripe for plunder, especially with Temple’s richly imaged inductions into nonChristian mental spaces now added to the mix. Though they took a great deal from Wordsworth and Coleridge, including their temporally driven lyric structure, I would argue that all three poets make a partial return to an Enlightenment, perhaps a quasi-Eleusinian, quest for special spaces or vantage points from which new kinds of reality can be mapped. However, while Darwin had a significant input into this search for places to be, there is also a difference, revolving particularly around views of the Greek and Mediterranean world. In the last chapter, I made broad connections between the Romantic narrative of personal growth through time and what Martin Bernal calls ‘the Aryan Model’ of cultural diffusion. Such connections can only be very partial and, in my reading, Wordsworth and Coleridge do not throw much light on the ‘Aryan’ idea; but Byron, Shelley and Keats certainly do. One thing that unites these three very diverse poets is a shared interest in ‘the warm south’, and above all Greece, as a locus of pleasure, youth and properly sense-based truths about life. For Keats, Greece is largely an idea, brought alive by looking into Chapman’s Homer or at urns in the British Museum: objects whose air of fusty antiquity magically dissolves into a world dominated by young people, with only a small smattering of gloomy elders such as the dream-dissolving philosopher Apollonius in Lamia, or the despairing titans surrendering to the march of progress in Hyperion and its revision. For Byron, who visited it twice, Greece was an actual place whose potential for youthful revival was being stifled within the ageing grasp of the Ottoman Empire, its fragrant Leilas in constant need of rescue from its tyrannical Hassans by déraciné Westerners such as the Byronic Giaour: a situation later literalized by Byron’s entry into the Greek independence struggle during which he died.1 For Shelley, the same struggle inspired his last published work Hellas: A Lyrical Drama (1822), depicting the Turkish Sultan’s growing despair See Byron, The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale (1813).

1

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

240

at the prospect of defeat, while the chorus of enslaved Greek women sings of how ‘The world’s great age begins anew,/ The golden years return’. In Shelley’s earlier Laon and Cythna (1817), the eponymous pair’s struggle against theocratic tyranny may stand for all kinds of British and Western struggles against kingcraft and priestcraft, but the names of its young champions are Greek, and the work was soon republished as The Revolt of [i.e. ‘against’] Islam (1818). Moving to ancient times, the ‘sneer of cold command’ of the oriental tyrant is transferred to the Egyptian Ozymandias, with the tumbled absurdity of a statue to Rameses II giving us the Romantic period’s most memorable depiction of the Egypt on which Darwin’s Ancient Model had built such an absolute trust. Of course, Darwin’s poetry is full of apparently Greek images, from Psyche to Pluto to the Hierophants of Eleusis. But these figures are not really Greek Greek, so much as particular manifestations of a continuum from Egypt to Rome and, perhaps, the Holy Land. With the later Romantics – as with the older Richard Payne Knight – this model of cultural spread is largely abolished in favour of the moment of birth marked by a quintessentially European Greece, ‘for ever panting, and for ever young’. In Chapter 9 we saw how thoroughly Knight’s ‘Hellenomania’ tallied with the latent racial imperialism Bernal attaches to the new ‘Aryan Model’ of cultural diffusion. In his classic study British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire, Nigel Leask teases out how far similar critiques might be extended to Byron and Shelley, asking whether their pro-Greek, anti-Asian depictions of ‘revolution against empire’ might really encode a new ideology of ‘empire as revolution’.2 However, leaving these questions aside, I would certainly argue that these younger poets’ idealization of Greece was also part of a larger quest for imaginative places to be, on which Darwin had a significant impact. Byron Before considering this impact, it is useful to start with a sense of how passé Darwin’s poetry had come to seem only five years after his death. Coleridge’s comparison of Darwin’s poetry to Cowper’s ‘Russian palace of ice, glittering, cold, and transitory’ conveys a (still somewhat awe-inspired) view of Darwin’s ultimate impermanence. It is a view dismissively taken as read by the young Byron in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), where a lofty note tells us that the current neglect of The Botanic Garden ‘is some proof of returning taste. The scenery is its sole recommendation.’3 In the style wars of the Romantic period Byron allies himself with Pope and such comparatively traditional writers as Crabbe, Rogers and the ex-Anti-Jacobin editor William Gifford, begging ‘these, or such as these’ to Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), especially 1–54, 103–20. 3 Lord Byron, note to English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, Poetical Works, ed. F. Page, corr. J. Jump (1970), p. 868. 2

Romantic Times (2)

241

Restore the muse’s violated laws; But not in flimsy Darwin’s pompous chime, That mighty master of unmeaning rhyme, Whose gilded cymbals, more adorn’d than clear, The eye delighted, but fatigued the ear; In show the simple lyre could once surpass, But now, worn down, appear in native brass; While all his train of hovering sylphs around Evaporate in similes and sound: Him let them shun, with him let tinsel die: False glare attracts, but more offends the eye. Yet let them not to vulgar Wordsworth stoop ...4

As the polar opposite to ‘vulgar Wordsworth’, then, Darwin embodies some of the potentialities of the Augustanism Byron’s own rather clanging versification still aims to espouse, but takes them much too far. The sarcasm of ‘mighty master’ is perhaps not total: though the ‘pompous chime’ of Darwin’s alliteration and clever rhyming ultimately tires our ears, the scenery is not too bad and our eyes have been briefly delighted and attracted before finally taking offence. The strong aural-visual tension in Darwin’s work – what Seward calls ‘picturesque sound’ – is well caught in the ambiguity of ‘gilded cymbals’: Darwin’s lines used to look good but turn out to sound brassy (or is it in fact – as our ears but not eyes tell us – his overadorned symbols that have this effect?). The hovering sylph-similes are part of the problem; but the crucial charge of ‘flimsiness’ ultimately rests on that of incomprehensibility: Darwin’s pompous sound effects claim much but are finally ‘unmeaning’. Nonetheless, Byron seems to draw on a number of Darwininan ‘meanings’ in his later Cain: A Mystery (1821), where Lucifer takes the God-questioning hero on a trip into outer space to witness the smallness and destructibility of planet Earth, and to encounter the prehistoric mammoths and dinosaurs whose fossils undermine the received account of a single, man-centred Creation.5 While not quite evolutionary – Byron seems to accept Cuvier’s ‘catastrophism’ within a steady-state theory of the cosmos6 – this episode carries echoes of the way Montgolfier’s balloon flight dramatically segues into a truly cosmic exploration of deep space in Loves, and also of Economy’s Herschelian dying planets and fossil evidence for a developing earth.7 Byron’s irreverent rewriting of the whole Eden myth in the light of such material revelations echoes the spirit of Temple’s similar subversions of the story through each of its cantos in turn. In particular, Cain’s partly vegetarian motives for killing his sheep-sacrificing brother broadly echo 6 7 4 5

Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 891–903. Byron, Cain: A Mystery, II.i.27–49, II.ii.44–144. Byron, Cain, Preface, p. 521. Loves 2.25–66; Economy 4.371–80.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

242

the Portland Vase note’s argument that this murder represents the supercession of hunting by agriculture, as well as Temple’s suggestion that the true Edenic knowledge of good and evil was the ‘Conscience felt, for blood by Hunger spilt’ at the first killing of animals.8 Shelley However, many of these ideas may have reached Byron through Shelley. William Dean Brewer stresses the emergence of Cain from Byron’s ‘diabolical discourse’ with Shelley, centred in part on the earth-surveying space flight which structures the latter’s Queen Mab (1813).9 But arguably Shelley’s space flight is itself influenced by Darwin: not only the Montgolfier scene in Loves but also – in Queen Mab’s fairy carriage and the sky temple to which she wafts the dreaming Ianthe – the Goddess of Botany’s descent in a flower-wreathed chariot, and the Temple of Nature’s ‘mystic’ vantage-point ‘high in air, unconscious of the storm’.10 Mab’s parallels with Temple continue, through the whole radical-infidel mise-en-scène of a female hierophant inducting an unspoilt female novice in Lucretian materialism, egalitarian comparisons of monarchs to mushrooms, and such echoed phrases as ‘making the earth a slaughter-house!’11 Shelley also announced his vegetarianism in Mab’s future vision of how some day Man will no longer slay ‘the lamb that looks him in the face’ (8.211–12), his long final note on which echoes Temple in arguing that ‘The allegory of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of evil’ clearly signifies ‘the disease and crime that have flowed from unnatural diet’: a theme also allegorized by Prometheus’s tormented liver, in close parallel to Loves’ attribution of these torments to alcohol.12 Though Shelley is better known for a very different version of Prometheus, it is clear that his earlier thoughts on the myth flowed along similar medical-allegorical lines to Darwin’s. According to King-Hele, Shelley’s most revered Eton tutor was the radical scientific polymath Dr James Lind, who may not have met Darwin but admired his work and had numerous close links with his circle, being a cousin of Darwin’s oldest Lunar friend James Keir and a close associate of Watt, Banks and Herschel.13 Darwin, Economy AN 22.55; Temple 3.459; Byron, Cain, III.i.288–316. William Dean Brewer, The Shelley-Byron Conversation (Gainesville: University

8 9

Press of Florida, 1994), 92–4. 10 P. B. Shelley, Queen Mab A Philosophical Poem, with Notes, 1.59–62, 264–8; Darwin, Economy 59–62, Temple 65–6. 11 Shelley, Queen Mab, 9.31–2, 7.48. See Temple 4.383, 4.66. For the radical implications of Shelley’s debt to the Lucretius-Darwin tradition in calling Queen Mab ‘A Philosophical Poem’, see David Duff, Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 59–62. 12 Queen Mab, Note to8.211–12; Major Works, 83-4; see Temple 3.459; Loves (1789) 3.371n. 13 King-Hele, Romantic Poets, 187–9.

Romantic Times (2)

243

Lind introduced Shelley to the works of Lucretius and Godwin as well as Darwin, whose writings Shelley devoured while climbing rocks and exploring scenery in Wales in 1811, between his Oxford expulsion for The Necessity of Atheism and the explosion of political activism which resulted in his incendiary Irish pamphlets and Queen Mab. We have already looked at Darwin’s contribution to some of the science which reached Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein through Percy; Paul Gilmore has further argued that Percy’s own electrical metaphors – such as the ‘electric life that burns within’ poetry in A Defence of Poetry – exemplify a ‘development of a materialist understanding of electricity for exploring and describing the force of literary aesthetics’, derived in large part from ‘Erasmus Darwin’s conclusion that the nervous impulse was electric’.14 Meanwhile, Hugh Roberts’s majestic analysis of Shelley’s Lucretianism sees Darwin as one of the channels linking Lucretius to Shelley’s sense of evolutionary progress on the social and aesthetic levels, if not on the biological one.15 King-Hele’s Romantic Poets and his earlier study of Shelley bring out many moments where Shelley echoes Darwin specifically, as in ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1819) where the ‘tangled boughs of heaven and ocean’ and the cry ‘I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!’ echo Economy’s account of ‘the Western Wind ... wring[ing] the raindrops from his tangled hair’ and Tremella’s ‘I sink! I fall!’ in Loves.16 The meteorology of ‘The Cloud’ (1820) is also Darwin’s, with (for instance) the line ‘I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores’ echoing Economy’s ‘each nice pore of ocean, earth and air’.17 The listing of a series of humanized flowers culminating in the sensibilitous Mimosa pudica in ‘The Sensitive Plant’ (1820) clearly adds this to a lengthening tradition of Darwinian ‘botanic garden’ poems.18 Among Shelley’s longer works, there are verbal echoes in Prometheus Unbound – as in ‘the vast inane’/ ‘the intense inane’ for empty space – and perhaps some more structural ones in Adonais, where the prophecies of Keats’s revival in some other state echo Economy’s accounts of the Adonis myth as an emblem of organic recycling, and where Temple’s muse-hierophant Urania is arguably merged with Darwin’s favourite goddess Venus into the mourning figure of Aphrodite Urania, 14 Paul Gilmore, Aesthetic Materialism (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 72 15 Hugh Roberts, Shelley and the Chaos of History (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1997), 364–6. See also pp. 244–5 for Darwin’s contribution to the Lucretian contemplation of entropy and universal slaughterhouse-like violence in Shelley’s ‘Vision of the Sea’. 16 Shelley, ‘Ode to the West Wind’, 17, 54; Economy 1.430–2; Loves 1.451. See KingHele, Romantic Poets, 207–12; Desmond King-Hele, Shelley: His Thought and Work, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1971), 218. 17 Shelley, ‘The Cloud’, 75; Economy 1.85. 18 King-Hele, Romantic Poets, 209–10. However, Loves’ influential full-dress depiction of mimosa (1.301–16) is in turn anticipated by Cowper’s mocking ‘The Poet, the Oyster, and Sensitive Plant’ (1783).

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

244

goddess of a ‘heavenly love’ whose non-Christianized contrast with purely sexual love is another strongly Darwinian idea.19 Finally, the uncompleted The Triumph of Life – with its disturbing image of life itself as a cruel chariot-progress crushing its celebrants beneath its wheels – very arguably draws on the similar chariotprogress of ‘the Deities of Sexual Love’ (2.244) in Canto Two of Temple, which M. M. Mahood sees as Darwin’s ‘apogee’, but where the submission of all living things ‘To swell the triumph of despotic LOVE’ implies a cruel undertow to life’s processes which Shelley’s last poem more exhaustively explores.20 Shelley’s picture of Bacon who ‘compelled/ The Proteus shape of Nature’ to open the cave hiding ‘the secrets of its reign’ recalls both Darwin’s general reverence for Bacon as a scientific myth deconstructor, and his use of Proteus’s enforced truth telling as an allegory of the forthcoming revelation of the Temple of Nature’s secrets.21 For Theresa M. Kelley – in one of the ‘Interludes’ which help to structure her study of botany and romantic culture along the lines of Darwin’s Loves – both the appearance of Rousseau as a gnarled tree-root in Triumph of Life and the whole of ‘The Sensitive Plant’ mark Shelley’s response to Darwin’s botany, albeit a partial turning away from its sexual enthusiasms in these poems’ contemplations of solitary death.22 These are only a few instances demonstrating that, if Darwin influenced Wordsworth and Coleridge chiefly through the prose of Zoonomia and the Botanic Garden notes, his verse – particularly that of The Temple of Nature – had a truly massive impact on Shelley, permeating both his thought and imagery in ways which have still not been adequately grasped. Keats But from a certain distance and in general feel, the Romantic poet closest to Darwin might seem to be Keats. As trained medical practitioners, both poets offset their sharp doctorly awareness of life as an alternation of physical enjoyment and painful decay with appeals to a classical world, in whose contemplation such processes can be understood at some more timeless level. While Darwin’s Portland Vase encodes the Mysteries’ teachings on the immortality of sensitive matter, Keats’s Grecian Urn embodies the immortality of sensual pleasure through its teachings about truth and beauty. Both have bravura passages on Psyche as a key link between the soul/mind and sexual enjoyment, and – as King-Hele has shown – both favour a vocabulary of sensually tinged words such as ‘blush’ and

King-Hele, Romantic Poets, 200–207, 213–17. King-Hele, Romantic Poets, 219–20; see Shelley, The Triumph of Life, 107–62; M.

19 20

M. Mahood, The Poet as Botanist (2008), 78; Temple 2.388. 21 Shelley, The Triumph of Life, 269–73; Economy, Apology vii; Temple 1.83–8. 22 Kelley, Clandestine Marriage, 210–15.

Romantic Times (2)

245

‘pant’, and new or newly applied words such as ‘beamy’ and ‘tiptoe’.23 Here we might bear in mind Alan Bewell’s arguments about Darwin’s neologisms as part of The Botanic Garden’s wider campaign to ‘sell’ novelties to an eager public: arguably, a suspicion of such hucksterish motives for Keats’s similar coinages added to his dismissal by some critics as a ‘Cockney’.24 In the mid-twentieth century, one of the strongest claims for Darwin’s continued poetic importance – unladen with the usual sarcasms – was made in a substantial chapter in Bernard Blackstone’s major study of Keats, while Robert N. Ross compared Darwin’s non-judgemental picturesque mode (albeit unfavourably) to the Keatsian idea of ‘Negative Capability’.25 More recently, Hermione de Almeida has linked the two writers by way of their shared medical culture, and Jennifer N. Wunder has extended this into a discussion of longstanding links between medicine and the interest in Hermetic Masonry and Rosicrucianism which emerges, for instance, in the four Economy-like elementals of Keats’s ‘Song of Four Fairies’.26 Nonetheless, despite the abundance of such links at a general level, moments of specific influence are harder to detect than one might think: the Vase and the Urn depict very different things; and Keats’s Psyche owes far more to Mary Tighe’s brilliant Psyche, or The Legend of Love (1805) than to Temple, whose paeans to Psyche (pace King-Hele) only influenced Tighe indirectly if at all.27 Above all, while Darwin’s classical world ranges unspecifically between Egypt, Greece and Rome, Keats’s is usually emphatically Greek. However, starting at the general level of the younger Romantics’ handling of the space-time issue, it is arguable that the theme of ‘initiatory spaces’ which we find in Cain and Queen Mab takes on a further centrality with Keats. And it is also arguable that Darwin stands somewhere behind the two manifestoes of the poet’s task which bracket Keats’s brief career: Sleep and Poetry (1817) and the unfinished The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream (1819). Sleep and Poetry envisages a three-stage poetic development. The first two stages take us from the ‘realms of Flora and old Pan’, invoking a world of flowery sexual dalliance, to a ‘nobler’ recounting of more serious concerns identified with King-Hele, Romantic Poets, 248: King-Hele’s ingenious comparison of word frequencies from Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley and Byron, as well as Darwin and Keats, does show convincingly that (given the right choice of words) the Darwin-Keats correlation is strong. 24 Bewell, ‘Erasmus Darwin’s Cosmopolitan Nature’, 20–21. See, e.g., John Gibson Lockhart on ‘The Cockney School of Poetry No. IV’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 3 (1818): 519–24. 25 Bernard Blackstone, The Consecrated Urn: An Interpretation of Keats in Terms of Growth and Form (London: Longmans, Green, 1959), 337; Ross, ‘“To Charm thy Curious Eye”’, 380–82, 394. 26 Hermione De Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 10–11, 74–5, etc.; Wunder, Keats, Hermeticism and the Secret Societies, 20; see too 5, 58–9, 65. 27 See Romantic Poets, 172–3. 23

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

246

‘Shapes of delight, of mystery, and fear’, as called up by a flying charioteer who has descended to summon them from the more substantial forms of ‘trees and mountains’.28 This movement broadly echoes that from the flowery content of Loves to the chariot-borne goddess’s summoning of spirits of the whole physical universe in Economy. And it might be these reminiscences of Darwin which trigger the poem’s sudden, otherwise rather inexplicable denunciation of the PopeDarwin closed couplet for turning Pegasus into a ‘rocking horse’. In a more dimly suggested third phase, on the chariot’s departure ‘A sense of real things comes doubly strong’, threatening to ‘bear along / My soul to nothingness’ until the poet manages to bring his mind back to the place where he woke from sleep at the start of the poem: ‘a poet’s house who keeps the keys / Of pleasure’s temple’.29 This was Leigh Hunt’s cottage, full of ‘sacred busts’ and paintings of poets, heroes and classical gods, including one of a ‘fane’ or temple ‘and thereto a train / Of nymphs approaching’.30 This account of Hunt’s house strongly recalls Temple’s opening mise-en-scène, with its ‘pictur’d walls’ lined with ‘busts of Gods’, heroes and ‘Beauty’s radiant forms’, as visited by ‘virgin trains’ of postulants (similar ‘trains of virgins’ reappear in ‘Ode to Psyche’).31 The recalling of Darwin’s poetic muse to the festivities of his Temple, after the fourth canto’s despairing visions of the earth as ‘one great slaughter-house’,32 finds an echo in Keats’s awakening from the soul-destroying awareness of ‘real things’ to the neoclassical beauties of Hunt’s cottage. I would argue that Darwin also stands behind the unfinished The Fall of Hyperion (c. 1819), describing the poet’s induction into the deeper mysteries of life and art by the hierophant of a massive Eden-replacing temple. Finding himself in a garden full of fruit ‘By angel tasted or our Mother Eve’, the poet eats his fill before draining a poisonous draught which transforms the garden into an ‘eternal domed Monument’ as old as ‘Nature’s rocks’, reaching to the clouds and strewn with symbols of dead Christianity.33 To the west of its quadrilateral structure is an altar whose steps the poet must ascend or die; having achieved this feat, learned ‘what ’tis to die and live again’ and proved he is one ‘to whom the miseries of the world/ Are misery, and [who] will not let them rest’, he is interrogated by a ‘high Prophetess’ as to whether he is a mere dreamer or a poet who ‘pours out a balm upon the world’, a ‘humanist, physician to all men’.34 The poet’s neardeath experience resembles the first stage of Temple’s four-stage account of the Eleusinian Mysteries, whose warning ‘Hence, ye profane!’ seems to be echoed 30 31 28 29

242–5.

Keats, Sleep and Poetry, 102, 123–38. Keats, Sleep and Poetry, 186–7, 230–47,157–9, 354–5. Keats, Sleep and Poetry, 357, 363–5. Keats, ‘Ode to Psyche’, 29–33; Temple 2.221–424, 1.159–62. See Romantic Poets,

Temple 1.76, 179–80; 4.66. Keats, The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, 31, 46–51, 69–80. 34 Keats, Fall of Hyperion, 87–90, 107, 141–9, 201, 190. 32 33

Romantic Times (2)

247

in the prophetess’s rigorous testing of Keats’s worthiness to proceed. From here, with the identification of the prophetess and the giant statue above the altar as the fallen titans Moneta and Saturn, the poem begins to lead into the story of the titan Hyperion’s replacement by the poetry and medicine god Apollo; but this opening presentation of a temple-space of instruction and death-rebirth enactment either draws strongly on that of Darwin’s Temple or else on the Eleusinian-Masonic initiation rituals on which it is based. The theme of hard-won initiation into special knowledge by way of a special space recurs through Keats’s other work, from stout Cortes’s prospect from a peak in Darien, to Melancholy’s ‘sovran shrine’ to which only those who burst joy’s grape are admitted, to the many-roomed mansion from whose ‘chamber of maiden thought’ various doorways lead into darker realms.35 But if Keats finds many ways to spatialize time – to turn its key moments into imaginative places to be – this sense of initiatory space is of course always drenched in an awareness of the shortness of time, into which those spaces will soon again dissolve like the ‘faery lands forlorn’ to which the nightingale’s song can only briefly transport us. Women Romantic Poets Treating the six poets so far discussed as representing all of ‘Romantic Poetry’ is a very traditional thing to do, but it is one of the attitudes which this study of a writer who emerged as a clearly significant poet alongside three of them has aimed to challenge and complicate. The fact that, nonetheless, I have given a great deal of attention to the six arises very much from the weight they still carry in Romantic studies, with a substantial industry devoted to each: a great many readers will chiefly be interested in Darwin’s work for its connections to one of more of theirs. But of course there were many more poets in the Romantic period whose work has some connection to Darwin’s. Desmond King-Hele’s Romantic Poets touches on a good number of these, if sometimes rather glancingly, and I refer readers to his discussions of Southey, Scott, Landor, Campbell, Hunt, Peacock and Clare, and possible cross-influences between Loves and Crabbe’s The Library. Of other writers strongly aware of Darwin, I have tried to comment usefully on Cowper, Knight, Mary Shelley and particularly Anna Seward earlier in this book. I would like to conclude by considering a diverse range of further poets with two things in common: they all responded very directly to Darwin’s work, and they were all women. One of the things the six great male Romantics have taught us is that poetry belongs to a special sphere called ‘Literature’. Coleridge’s youthful acknowledgement of Darwin as ‘the first literary character in Europe’ soon gave way – partly under Coleridge’s own influence – to a world where that statement Keats, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, 14; ‘Ode on Melancholy’, 26– 30; Letter to J. H. Reynolds, 3 May 1818. 35

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

248

would become virtually incomprehensible.36 Poetry did something on its own, whose message was, in a sense, the special nature of poetry itself. The fact that even the most proselytizing of the big six – Shelley – declared that ‘didactic poetry is my abhorrence’37 helped to mark the passing of a poetry whose main aim was to talk about something other than its own special powers of insight: the real world which was now in process of being subsumed under other modes of knowledge – the physics, chemistry, biology, or indeed the politics or philosophy, which were now acquiring their own status as separate professional specialisms. This shift also involves a deep irony as regards poetic language: what Wordsworth saw as the utterly unnatural, specialized language of ‘poetic diction’ had traditionally been used precisely as a language: a transparent window through which to look at something different from itself. Wordsworth’s poetic revolution in favour of ‘the language of prose’ actually removed this transparency, leaving us with a language focused chiefly on the poetic voice’s own workings. The ‘Man of Science’ whom Wordsworth saw as pursuing a lonely path incommunicable by poetry had in fact been highly communicative up to this point.38 The nineteenth-century birth of the professional male ‘scientist’ and his specialist offshoots was matched by the professionalization of poetry: imaginative young men making their way in the world increasingly felt the need to choose between poetry and other professions – as Keats famously did on abandoning his promising medical career – and in doing so had to think hard about what poetry was, in and of itself. Imaginative women did not have to make the same choices in quite the same way: on the one hand there was the ongoing multitasking of family life; on the other, in some cases, there was a certain freedom of choice in what do with the rest of the time. When this choice included poetry, it could flow reasonably naturally out of and into other activities: exploring the nature of love, extending religious obligations, responding to world events, or passing on useful knowledge to children and others. In drawing such distinctions between women and men one has to be very careful: in particular, leading women poets such as Charlotte Smith and Felicia Hemans worked at a highly professional level, both of these urgently needing to earn livings for themselves and families in the wake of marital breakdowns and defaulting husbands. Nonetheless, the idea of writing as part of a multitasking continuum is rather more valid for women than men in the period; and because of this continuum, it is useful to turn to women Romantic poets for signs of the survival of Darwin’s idea of a didactic poetry designed to intersect with life. There is an initial difficulty with the word ‘Romantic’ here: of woman writers often listed as Romantic, a significant number were in their forties or fifties during the 1790s, when Wordsworth and Coleridge were defining what became known as British ‘Romanticism’ in their twenties. While all younger than Darwin (born Coleridge, letter to John Thelwall, 6 February 1797; Collected Letters 1.305. Shelley, Preface to Prometheus Unbound, in Major Works, 232. 38 For this and the preceding Wordsworth quotes, see LB Preface, 600–601, 606. 36

37

Romantic Times (2)

249

1731), Charlotte Smith, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Anna Seward and Hannah More were born in the 1740s, and Ann Yearsley and Mary Robinson in the 1750s. Accordingly, it makes little sense to present them as sharply more ‘Romantic’ than Darwin. They too belong to the late-Enlightenment space which much of this book has tried to define: nonetheless (perhaps because they are less afraid of sensibilitous, personalized emotion than Darwin), they have come to be classed as ‘Women Romantic Poets’ in a number of influential anthologies and elsewhere.39 One aspect of Darwin’s ‘didacticism’ shared by many important women writers of the 1780s and 1790s is a kind of directness of political response which would become more problematic (for men as well as women) after the early years of the French Revolution. Barbauld, More, Yearsley and Robinson all wrote powerfully against slavery, in poems which shared many images of barbarous cruelty and callous wealth with those of Darwin, Cowper and Thomas Day. As Barbauld’s ‘Epistle to Wilberforce’ (1792) puts it, all these writers took part in a concerted poetic campaign whereby ‘The Muse … awak’d’ in the abolitionist cause. Barbauld, Smith and Robinson were also politically on the left, and prone to join their attacks on the pre-1789 French ancien regime with critiques of all but the most rational religion. In the same spirit as Darwin’s depiction of France as a hundred-armed giant bound down equally by ‘Confessors and Kings’, Barbauld’s ‘To a Great Nation’ (1793) calls on France to rise ‘Briareus-like’ against invaders; while Smith’s The Emigrants (1793) mingles personal sympathy for exiled French clergymen with contempt for the blind superstition and corrupt power which made them so ripe for expulsion.40 At the end of the 1790s, Robinson’s The Progress of Liberty (1801) joins many other poems of the period (though not Darwin’s) in tracing the emotional arc from early embrace of French liberty to despair at its stifling by the twin reigns of Terror and Napoleon: the arc of Knight’s Landscape and Civil Society, of Books 9–11 of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, and of Coleridge’s ‘France: An Ode’.41 Like Coleridge and Robinson, Barbauld traces the departure of the spirit of liberty through the tangles of the French Revolutionary Wars, but her devastating Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: A Poem (1812) is closer to Temple’s despairing call to ‘Save, oh save, in this eventful hour,/ The tree of knowledge from the axe of power’ (4.283–4) in identifying repressive wartime England as the main site of Freedom’s departure, in a world where the ‘giant’ of Napoleonic France has See, e.g., Duncan Wu, ed., Women Romantic Poets: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); Paula R. Feldman, ed., British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). 40 Anna L. Barbauld, ‘Epistle to William Wiberforce’, line 11, and ‘To a Great Nation’, line 17, in Anna Laetitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. W. McCarthy and E. Craft (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001), 123, 134; Charlotte Smith, The Emigrants: A Poem in Two Books, in Women Romantic Poets, ed. Wu, 88–110. 41 ‘The Progress of Liberty’, in Mary Robinson: Selected Poems, ed. J. Pascoe (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000), 300–302. 39

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

250

become more a force of nature than an object of blame, and only America holds out any hope for humanity. Invoking many of Darwin’s allies and heroes – Priestley, Franklin, Howard, Davy – Barbauld’s poem both pronounces the definitive end of their scientific-liberationist late-Enlightenment moment, and marks the end of her own long poetic career, overwhelmed from all sides by accusations of unpatriotic treason.42 Botanical Poetry Such overlaps of political theme and shared outlook do not, however, tell us a great deal about Darwin’s impact as a specifically didactic poet. A more immediate line of influence can be found in the field of scientific poetry; and many of the period’s leading women writers showed some kind of response to Darwin’s poeticized science, and to the botany of Loves in particular. For an older generation, Loves’ sexual content raised no difficulties as to what was discussable in these areas, and any disapproval tended to be mingled with relaxed amusement. Thus for Hannah More (born 1745, writing in 1789), Loves is ‘marvellous’ and Darwin ‘indeed a poet’, but if taken seriously, I feel, like the most passionate lover, the beauty of the cyclamen or honeysuckle, but am as indifferent as the most fashionable husband to their amours, their pleasures, or their unhappiness. [If I took these seriously I] should no longer think that wearing a nosegay was ‘a venial delight unblamed’, but be filled with alarm lest every rose and pink I gathered might make a multitude of widows and orphans.43

More might have taken a different tone after the French Revolution had turned her into the guardian of the nation’s morals, but Elizabeth Moody (born 1737) hits a similar amused note as late as 1798. Moody’s delightful ‘To Dr Darwin, on Reading his Loves of the Plants’ (1798), deplores the way Darwin sings that in botanic schools, Husbands adopt licentious rules; Plurality of wives they wed, And all they like – they take to bed.44

42 Barbauld, ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, A Poem’, lines 1–10, 313–34, 143, 186, 201–3; in Selected Poetry and Prose, 160–73. 43 Hannah More, letter to Horace Walpole, April 1798; Walpole, Correspondence, 31:295. 44 Elizabeth Moody, ‘To Dr Darwin, on Reading his Loves of the Plants’, from Poetic Trifles (1798), included in Sam George, Botany, Sexuality and Women’s Writing 1760– 1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), Appendix 2, 194–6. I have found George’s inclusion and discussion of this and other women’s botanical poems very useful.

Romantic Times (2)

251

The poem goes on to explain that although Linnaeus’s sexual system ‘things … reveal’d, / Which prudent Plants would wish conceal’d’, he only ‘prattles’ in prose, so ‘soon forgot is all he tattles’. It is only through the ‘enchantment’ of Darwin’s verse that we find certain irremovable images fixed in our heads: hence the cypress ought to invoke venerable images of ancient coffins and church-doors made from its sturdy wood, but thanks to Darwin, as the cypress tree’s boughs hang o’er my head, I recollect from you I read, His wife he exiles from his bed.45

Ending with a plea to Darwin to ‘tune no more thy lyre’s sweet powers/ To libel harmless trees and flowers’, it is possible to read Moody’s 1798 poem as part of the turn against Darwin’s amorous plants also marked by The Anti-Jacobin’s Loves of the Triangles and Polwhele’s The Unsex’d Females in the same year. However, the tone is very different: in the very act of rejecting Darwin’s distracting imagery, Moody – like More earlier – cheerfully acknowledges both its ‘enchanting’ appeal and the complete legibility of its sexual content. For Anna Barbauld, too, the first thing to note about Loves is the brilliance of the writing: the description of Arkwright’s cotton-mill is ‘a piece of mechanism as complete in its kind as that which [it] describes’.46 However, this remark is something of an aside in the long literary campaign she undertook with her brother John Aikin to establish a tradition of British didactic poetry which was also influential in redefining it. The prefaces to their joint 1790s series of new editions of didactic poets, from Thomson to their favourite Akenside, extended the pro-Virgilian, anti-Lucretian thesis of Aikin’s Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry (1777) to argue – as Barbauld put it – that ‘the Didactic Muse [makes] a very indifferent School-mistress’, except when throwing a ‘lustre’ over reasonably common knowledge.47 In placing Darwin’s kind of direct didacticism some way behind that of the more sensibilitous Akenside, Barbauld’s and Aikin’s work thus chimes in with Wordsworth’s appeals for ‘an atmosphere of sensation’ in scientific topics, in which the poet can ‘move his wings’.48 But a good many women poets do continue to use the Didactic Muse as a schoolmistress, modelling their educational poems directly on the expository mode of Loves, which is clearly seen as not just one, but the model for botanical poetry. Nonetheless, this model often finds itself subjected to a kind of critique from Moody, ‘To Dr Darwin’, George, Botany, Sexuality, 196. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Preface to Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of Imagination

45 46

(London: Cadell & Davies, 1794), 4. 47 Barbauld, Akenside Preface, 2–3. The didactic poets series was published by Cadell & Davies through the 1790s, with new illustrations by Thomas Stothard and others. See Martin Priestman, ‘Didactic and Scientific Poetry’ in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Volume 3: 1660–1790, ed. David Hopkins and Charles Martindale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) 424, note 80. 48 Wordsworth, LB Preface, 606–7.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

252

within, by a quiet replacement of its insistent sexualization of plants with other sources of interest: particularly the way plants actually look, and their relation to human emotional concerns. Here Charlotte Smith is a significant instance: her Conversations Introducing Poetry, Chiefly on Subjects of Natural History (1804) is an educational work in which a Mrs Talbot instructs her two children in the two topics mentioned in her title. Though mainly in prose it includes numerous poems by Smith and others, showing how natural history should be handled in verse, and culminating in ‘Flora’, a more substantial poem which is specifically introduced by way of a discussion of The Botanic Garden’s handling of Rosicrucian spirits and flower personifications. An interesting gender divide is suggested when we learn that one of the boys enjoys Darwin’s notes while the other ‘immediately entered into the intention of the author, when [told] that Ovid transformed his men and women into plants or animals’; to which their sister retorts that ‘it is plants and flowers I like, and not these ladies and their lovers.’49 To satisfy all parties, Mrs Talbot’s final poem personifies Flora, ‘not in the splendours that surround her in the highly coloured description of Dr Darwin; but simply clad, even in her own manufacture’. The initial description of Flora’s ‘leafy car’ is in fact just as elaborate as that of the Goddess Botany’s ‘blushing car’ in Economy: in Smith, The saxifrage, that snowy flowers emboss, Supplied the seat; and of the mural moss The velvet footstool rose, where lightly rest Her slender feet in cypripedium drest.50

However, the accurately designated floral ‘dressing’ of the goddess’s equipment and entourage is based more on appearance than taxonomic imperatives: we may need the Darwin-like notes to remind us what saxifrage and cypripedium are, but more to help us to picture them than to understand their reproductive biology. Furthermore, Smith’s poem is directed not only at children but at adults familiar with her oeuvre: in line with her other works of political protest and wounded sensibility, she presents herself as seeking Flora out as a refuge from her own ‘miseries’ and ‘the crimes and follies of mankind’. If this carries echoes of The Botanic Garden as a haven for victims of ‘Disasterous Love’, this is only thanks to Anna Seward’s involuntary contribution to the opening of Economy.51 Smith’s tight policing of botany within a prose scene of instruction, focused particularly round young girls, inhabits a broader tradition. Botanical instructors from Darwin’s protégée Maria Jacson to the Quaker Priscilla Wakefield – who led the field with her Rousseauesque Mental Improvement (1794) – also lightly fictionalize their information in prose narratives where teachers or interlocutors Charlotte Smith, Conversations Introducing Poetry, Chiefly on Subjects of Natural History, 2 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1804), 2.169. 50 Charlotte Smith, ‘Flora’, lines 33–6, in Conversations, 2.184. 51 ‘Flora’, lines 2, 6, in Conversations, 2.183. See Economy 1.26; Seward, ‘Verses’; Memoirs, p. 129. 49

Romantic Times (2)

253

patrol the perimeters of appropriate female need-to-know.52 In poetry, several other women writers follow Loves’ presentation of botany quite closely, though still with interesting differences. Arabella Rowden’s A Poetical Introduction to the Study of Botany (1801) follows Darwin in presenting Linnaean stamens and pistils as lovers, but of a more virtuously platonic kind: hence her description of ‘Cistus or Rock Rose’ identifies the flower with a solitary lady-pistil surrounded by loving stamens, but their role is chiefly as chivalrous defenders, trying to shield her from ravishers in the shape of human flower pickers.53 While also explicitly acknowledging Darwin, Maria Montolieu’s The Enchanted Plants skirts round the stamen-pistil action while allowing its flowers to conduct equally passionate affairs with bees and other pollinating insects.54 While all these cases do involve a bowdlerization of some aspects of Loves’ influence, it is worth pointing out that this involves more a shifting than a complete erasure of sexual emphasis. They put botany in a more clearly moral or emotional context than Darwin, and remind us of plants’ interactions with the rest of the world – as plants rather than through metaphors – in a way which forms no part of Darwin’s plan. Poems on the Elements None of these divergences remove the fact that Darwin’s Loves had a strong impact on poetry by women, and this is partly due to a long tradition (as skilfully appealed to in its ‘Proem’ and much else of the paratext discussed in Chapter 3) of seeing flowers as women’s business, in both domestic and educational spheres. However, two women poets in particular also demonstrate an interesting take on the physics, chemistry and geology of Economy. In part similar and in part very different, both Anne Bannerman’s The Genii (1800) and Eleanor Porden’s The Veils (1815) recast Darwin’s well-balanced Rosicrucian elementals into dramatic narratives where fire, earth and water become largely evil forces, battling against the purer, more heavenly element of air. Primeval forces unconnected to the plant nurturing of Darwin’s ‘economy of vegetation’, Bannerman’s genii of earth, fire and water were driven underground by God’s creation of the pleasant, plant-filled Eden, until Adam’s fall unleashed them again to cause storms, earthquakes and floods (though not Noah’s flood, which was specifically sent by God) up to the Last Judgment, when fire will destroy the others and then itself before the final restoration of Paradise. Before this happy event, the genii involve themselves in many of the least pleasant situations described by Darwin: the Potosí silver mines which epitomize Spanish oppression in South America; Icelandic geysers and volcanoes; the maelstrom; the deadly winds of sirocco and simoom. By contrast, the benign ‘soft spirits of the See George, Botany, Sexuality, 10. Arabella Rowden, A Poetical Introduction to the Study of Botany (1801), extracted

52 53

in George, Botany, Sexuality, 197. 54 Maria Montolieu, The Enchanted Plants, Fables in Verse (London: Thomas Bensley, 1800). See List, Erasmus Darwin and the Poetry of Science, 151.

254

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

fluid air’ seem barely distinguishable from the cloud-reclining angels who fill the virtuous with visions of ‘life eternal’, free from the elements at last.55 By turning Darwin’s vegetation-nurturing quaternity of forces into a threeagainst-one conflict, Bannerman adds the ingredient his original poem completely lacked: the drama of a through-narrative. Far from existing in balance, the elements are distributed in terms of the familiar Christian narrative of an evil which breaks out and triumphs for a time, only to be finally overcome by good. Darwin’s ecology of balance and connection is replaced by an eschatology where nature is mostly alien, except for a few aspects which are arbitrarily designated as heavenly. Published in 1800, with Britain plunging ever-deeper into war, Bannerman’s poem shares its taste for horror with Ann Radcliffe’s gothic novels, and seems to mark a retreat to fundamentally anti-scientific Christian certainties in a situation where much of the cosmos seems hostile. By interesting contrast, Eleanor Porden’s The Veils (1815), published when she was 20 but largely written when she was only 16, is also full of images of warfare but perhaps marks something of a return to Enlightenment confidence in science. This is combined with a similar confidence in a range of elaborate poetic models, from the densely-annotated elemental activities of Darwin’s Economy to the chivalric quest-allegories of Spenser’s Faerie Queene: while not imitating Spenser’s stanzaic form, Porden regularly appeals to him, and another strong influence is probably Mary Tighe’s thoroughly Spenserian Psyche, or The Legend of Love (1805), which hugely influenced Keats. With no Christian underpinning whatever – unlike Spenser or Bannerman – Porden plunges deep into cutting-edge physics and chemistry in a way that seems partly designed as a polemical demonstration of women’s full right of access to these increasingly specialized fields of knowledge. Nonetheless, the metaphorical ‘machinery’ Porden uses to fuse this science with the demands of poetry has some resemblance to Bannerman’s: a reworking of Darwin’s elemental spirits into a narrative where air is good and the other three elements are evil. Each of three maidens has had her veil stolen by a gnome of earth, a salamander of fire or a ‘hydida’ of water. The poem describes their and their knightly true loves’ efforts to recover these veils before a year has passed, after which the maidens will have to marry the elemental kings who have stolen them. Betrayed by the baron of the magic castle where they have all come to seek rest, but assisted by the sylphs of the air, the lovers undergo numerous adventures taking them deep into the realms of each element in turn. Porden’s scientific grasp of the various substances belonging to these realms is conveyed through a riot of personifications and an undertow of long Darwinesque notes linking these fanciful descriptions to real physical qualities, with numerous acknowledgments to the Royal Institution lectures given by Humphry Davy and others, which Porden’s Advertisement tells us she regularly attended. 55 Anne Bannerman, The Genii, in Poems (Edinburgh: Mundell, Doig & Stevenson, 1807 [1800]), pp. 129, 122. I am grateful to Julia List’s PhD thesis for drawing my attention to this poem and to Eleanor Porden’s The Veils, which is also briefly discussed in KingHele’s Romantic Poets, 267–8.

Romantic Times (2)

255

Porden declares her goal as ideally combining ‘the scientific knowledge of Sir Humphry Davy, and the energy and imagination of Lord Byron and Mr. Scott’.56 While fully acknowledging the influence of Pope and Darwin on her ‘Rosicrusian’ spirits, she stresses the originality of her own handling of them and the modernity of her science. Both these claims are broadly true: though there are repeated echoes of Darwin, for instance in her descriptions of a salt mine and the strange reproductive system of the aquatic valisneria, her notes on such things go into even more detail than his, and cite more up-to-date authorities.57 As for originality, Darwin’s Rosicrucian spirits’ placid ordering of the universe is distinctly tame compared to Porden’s ferocious elementals: her poem’s biggest centrepiece is a massive war in which fire mounts a successful attack on earth until water, its supposed ally, treacherously tries to overwhelm them both, to which earth and fire retaliate with a volcanic eruption which causes such losses to all three elements that they declare a truce and turn their attentions to air instead. Porden’s handling of personification is well exemplified in the depiction of the heroic gnome Asbestos, who takes the leading role in earth’s battle against fire, led by Pyros, the salamander king. In the thick of the battle, we hear how Pyros turn’d, and fresh opponents sought. When now Asbestos, trusting in his might, Provok’d the conquering chieftain to the fight. So long his arm the powers of fire had brav’d, So oft his monarch and his army sav’d, Each adverse warrior fled his arm appall’d, And he th’ Invincible was justly call’d.58

The relevant notes discuss how the flexibility of asbestos is echoed in the knight’s armour, and his/its chemical kinship to the weavable substance amianthus, which features in the poem as his sister and chief mourner when even he is finally reduced to ash by fire. If there are no specific echoes of Temple’s evolutionism, nor are there any suggestions of a divine purpose beyond the activities of the material elements, and a striking passage deduces the earth’s enormous age and numerous transformations from its fossil-filled strata, in a way which echoes Economy’s and Temple’s dangerous geology.59 Nonetheless, while lively, intelligent and enjoyable, it would be hard to argue that Porden’s poem has any strongly overarching view to put across, except perhaps that science ought to be fun, and poetry should still be able to handle it in new and inventive ways. The 16-year-old Porden’s ambition to combine ‘the scientific knowledge of Sir Humphry Davy, and the energy and imagination of Lord Byron and Mr. Scott’ Eleanor Anne Porden, The Veils; or, The Triumph of Constancy (London: John Murray, 1815), viii. 57 Porden, The Veils, pp. 112, 150–51. 58 Porden, The Veils, p. 77. 59 Porden, The Veils, pp. 110–11. 56

256

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

has synergies with a more famous work by another teenager: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published three years later. For both, ‘science’ (as it was becoming known) was still felt to belong naturally to ‘literature’ (in a sense which was rapidly starting to shrink); and for both, the Enlightened spaces of Darwin’s scientific poetry were a major inspiration. Perhaps simply the sense that they were allowed to weave these two regions together without full prior expertise in either was what enabled these unspecialized teenage women to do it. Nonetheless, both moved decisively on or away from Darwin’s influence by turning the themes of Economy and Temple into narratives, where the balances of Darwin’s Enlightened spaces – celebrating Nature’s amazing energies as endlessly repeatable – are plunged into disaster by entering the medium of unidirectional narrative time.

Conclusion The bulk of this book has attempted to understand the Enlightenment assumptions behind Darwin’s poetry, without a priori recourse to the distorting lens of postRomantic criteria. In doing so it has enforced a distinction between ‘space’ and ‘time’ which risks its own distortions: of course all writing incorporates both these things at every level, and of course many Enlightenment texts tell timedriven stories in the way Darwin’s do not. Nonetheless, I have tried to argue that his very extremism on this point brings together important aspects of the Enlightenment world-view, which are present but more diffused in other works. Wherever possible, then, Darwin tries to present time – the time of verse, the time of evolution, the time of past and future social developments – as some kind of mappable space, whether through his Linnaean tabulations, the chiasmatic symmetries of his couplets or his four-way divisions of history and the elements. In the previous two chapters I have argued that, perhaps in response to the French Revolution’s shattering of so many certainties, the foundational Romantics Wordsworth and Coleridge plunge their sense of the knowable into historic time, particularly that of the evolving self, where even the most significantly revisitable spaces are re-read as ‘spots of time’. But also that, while holding on to much of this, Byron, Shelley and Keats actively quest for new kinds of special place or special viewpoint, from ‘young’ ancient Greece to outer space. However temporary and provisional (Cain’s space-flight ends in disaster; all Keats’s fairylands dissolve), many of these places and spaces rediscover Darwin’s poetry – especially that of Temple – in a surprising number of new ways, demonstrating that, while not ‘of’ what has come to be called Romanticism, Erasmus Darwin is certainly embedded ‘in’ it very deeply indeed. But not all of Darwin’s connections with his rough contemporaries need to be discussed in these terms. There are different synergies with those nearer his own generation who have come to be classed as ‘Romantic’ but who share much of his Enlightenment sense of poetic space and function: Blake in some very specific ways, but also Seward, Barbauld and Smith. For all of these, the mapping of ideas onto a grid of easily juxtaposed spaces still enabled a flow between poetry and other kinds of knowledge which became harder as the nineteenthcentury specializations of ‘science’ and ‘literature’ set in. There are also political synergies: many of these older writers shared Darwin’s sense that the French Revolution was a natural development from Enlightenment assumptions, and that (as the Shelley generation also came to feel) its failures finally mattered less than Britain’s withdrawal from those assumptions into reactionary unreason and state policing of speech and the press. How far this withdrawal can be related to the growth of separate specialisms mentioned above is an intricate question. But as a prime exemplar of the expansive,

258

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

pre-specialist Enlightenment idea of knowledge, both the depth and range of Darwin’s polymathic achievements are close to being – in Desmond King-Hele’s daring adjective – ‘unequalled’. If that is not quite the obvious word for his poetic performance alone, I would like to conclude this book by arguing that his poetry is at least quite exceptional, both in what it tries to do and in what it actually achieves. Darwin’s poems lead us to what he called the ‘vestibule’ of a quite astonishing range of thought and knowledge: both that of his own day and sometimes – particularly in Temple’s very well-founded evolutionism – of our own. But this achievement in terms of content is also an achievement of form: and quite specifically of those ‘machineries’ of elaborate setting, personification, and tight if artificial diction which would soon attract such criticism. In the eighteenth century, plenty of other didactic poems work their way through particular topics, from the Newtonian arrangement of the cosmos to the production of cider or wool or the pleasures of the imagination . Most such poems are in blank verse, as if to draw poetry as near as possible to the ‘natural’ address of instructive prose; but Darwin is almost unique for his time in going quite the other way: towards artifice, towards closed Latinate couplets and ‘machineries’ of personified flowers, ethereal spirits, sculpted temples and complex addresser-addressee relationships, and towards a constant, bouncing interplay between madly fanciful verse and tightly-argued prose notes. What I hope to have shown in this book is that there is nothing knee-jerk or automatic in any of these technical features: each of Darwin’s forms aims to do something completely different, or at least to open out the diverse facts of the universe in a newly witty and inventive way. While I hope my inclusion of the hitherto-unknown text of The Progress of Society in this book has been useful for a range of reasons, one of the things it reveals is how carefully Darwin thought about form. Though, after its abandonment, its temple of nature did prove adaptable to a completely different poem, this was only managed through a total revisioning of its messages about both nature and mythology, and the replacement of its Zeitgeist genies with Temple’s wholly different four-stage ‘Eleusinian’ machinery. Each of these elements makes a major impact not only on the knowledge to be conveyed, but on how it is conveyed. If these two variant ‘Temple’ structures and the two equally varied structures of The Botanic Garden - the amorous flowers of Loves and Economy’s Rosicrucian spirits – all lead us collectively to ‘the vestibule’ of almost all the knowledge of Darwin’s day and more, they each do so in a completely different way. It is the combined wit, flexibility and sharp focus of each of these four routes of entry to virtually the whole world of the late Enlightenment which do perhaps after all make Darwin ‘unequalled’, not only as a scientific thinker, but as an astonishingly inventive poet.

Appendix A The Progress of Society, or the Temple of Nature By Erasmus Darwin Introduction Darwin’s unfinished historical poem The Progress of Society was probably drafted in 1798–1799. Throughout successive drafts the ‘Progress’ title vies for preference with ‘The Temple of Nature’ (and once with ‘History of Mankind’), only clearly emerging as first choice in the last, most finished version. One source of this poem’s interest is the light it throws on Darwin’s published The Temple of Nature, or The Origin of Society (1803), with which it shares a long opening section; but still more interesting is the completely different poem it turns into after that, with the Priestess of Nature and her genies demonstrating the technologies, myths and artworks of the four ages of hunting, pasturage, agriculture and commerce, soon to be followed by a utopian age of philosophy or science, when crime and slavery will be abolished and swords turned to ploughshares. The poem is discussed in detail in chapters 9 and 10, in terms of its strange parallels with Richard Payne Knight’s similarly Lucretian poem The Progress of Civil Society (1797), and of the light it throws on Darwin’s historiography, mythography, and vulnerability to political attack. The only other published version of this poem features as an appendix of my online edition of Darwin’s Temple of Nature in Romantic Circles, to whose editors I am grateful for permission to publish this thoroughly revised and re-checked edition.1 The drafts of The Progress of Society fill four small notebooks housed in Cambridge University Library, catalogued as DAR 227.2:22–25. In terms of composition, the order seems to be 23, 24, 22, 25. The text of Canto 1 given below is based on the most apparently finished version (22); that of Canto 2 on the rougher, tentative start made in 25, the only version of the canto. These are followed by the outline of the whole poem sketched in the earliest notebook, 23. The other notebook, 24, contains intermediate work on Canto 1, and has mainly been used to corroborate, or occasionally fill out, the text derived from 22. I have used figures in square brackets to indicate the source of each section of text: the page numbers are counted from the first to last inside-cover of the relevant notebook. (For anyone consulting the original notebooks, this involves doubling http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/darwin_temple/progress/progress.html (accessed 23 March 2013). 1

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

260

the numbers pencilled there on the right-hand pages, and adding intervening odd numbers for the left-hand ones.) One passage is from a loose sheet, as explained in the relevant note. I have added my own line numbers, and followed Darwin’s punctuation and capitalization where these are consistent with his usual published style: elsewhere, I have changed them at will in the interests of readability. My thanks are due to Cambridge University Library’s Manuscripts Department for the opportunity to study and copy from these fascinating drafts.

[227.2:22] [1]



THE PROGRESS OF SOCIETY, A POEM IN FIVE CANTOS2

[2]

Prologue to the first Canto The observations and industry of mankind have discovered many arts, which have influenced their manners, increased their felicity, or added to their numbers. Amongst these may be numbered the discovery of the uses of fire, the calling on the strength of animals to facilitate labour, the invention of letters, preparing and spinning vegetable substances, the discovery of iron, of the magnet, and of gun-powder. But the situations or circumstances which seem more distinctly to have mark’d the progress of human society are first the Hunting State with it’s necessary arms, as the club, bow, and fishing net; in this state of the world their heroism consisted in conquering noxious animals, and their sustenance in catching the inoffensive ones. Hence the great deeds of Hercules, Apollo &c, who were afterwards worshipd as deities. The world must have been thinly inhabited in this state of mankind; in the wilds of North America3 it has been estimated, that one family scarce could subsist by hunting within five miles of another. Amongst the crimes of this lawless age murders were not infrequent, but Rapes seem to stand prominent, whence the fables of Apollo and Daphne, Pan and Syrinx, Pluto and Proserpine; which were afterwards ornamented by the poets, and allegorized by the philosophers.4 To this succeded the age of Pasturage, afterwards that of Agriculture, then of Commerce and now of Philosophy, as explain’d in the Prologues to the subsequent Cantos. [3] This title is written inside the cover of 227.2:22. A deleted, barely legible reference indicates Darwin’s source for this account of

2 3

Native American populations: perhaps a Dr Jackson. 4 This suggestion that ‘philosophers’ later turned these stories into allegories (of scientific processes and so forth) is Progress’s only concession to the allegorical mythography of both the earlier Botanic Garden and the later Temple.

Appendix A

261

Argument Invocation. Ages of Hunting, Pasturage, Agriculture, Commerce, and Philosophy. Image of Nebuchadnezer. Address to Love. Paradise Lost. Temple of Nature. Proteus bound by Ulysses. Bowers of Pleasure. Den of Oblivion. Shrine of the Goddess. The Priestess or Hierophant.5 Orpheus’s descent into Hell. Genies of the Chase. Discover fire. Form the club, spear, javelin, bow, and sling. Make canoes, nets, and fish-hooks. [4] The Progress of Society6 Canto I Four past eventful ages, Muse! recite,7 And give the fifth, new-born of Time, to light. The silver tissue of their joys disclose, Swell with deep chords the murmur of their woes; Their laws, their labours, and their loves proclaim, And chaunt their virtues to the trump of Fame.8 Say first, how Man in boundless forests stray’d, And pluck’d wild clusters from the intangled shade; Assail’d with knotted club his bestial foe, Flung the rude stone, and strain’d the stubborn bow. Next how on shelter’d lawns by gushing springs9 Dwelt in their leafy tents the Shepherd-Kings; From vale to vale their fleecy squadrons drove And realms reecho’d to the lute and love. Then, how the shining ploughshare turn’d the soil,

10 [3]

[6]

‘The Priestess or Hierophant’ is a late insertion. See line 174, and related note. This is preceded by ‘The temple of Nature’, deleted. 7 I have throughout rendered Darwin’s underlinings as italics: in the published version, 5 6

he would presumably have used small capitals. 8 These opening lines are confusingly retained almost verbatim in lines 1.9–14 of the published Temple of Nature, which nowhere describes any such five ages specifically. Unless otherwise specified, lines referred to from Temple are in Canto 1. 9 These four lines replace: Next, how their leaf-built tent, or chamber’d rock Caved with one roof the Patriarch and his flock; While through green vales by trickling rills they rove, And realms re-echo to the lute and love. The deleted version’s early introduction of housing issues and use of the word ‘Patriarch’ – rather more evocative than ‘Shepherd Kings’ – seem better than the replacement, whose ‘fleecy squadrons’ demonstrate poetic diction at its laziest .

262

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin And harness’d oxen shared the ingenious toil; While towers and towns the admiring fields infold, And plenty laughs amid her waving gold. Last, how as Commerce piled with busy hand Her treasured ores, and bade her sails expand, O’er earth and ocean roll’d her freighted cars Warm’d by new suns, and led by stranger-stars. Now mild Philosophy assumes his reign, And all the Charities adorn his train; Virtue’s soft forms our glowing hearts engage, And Liberty returns, and leads the golden age. So saw Assyria’s King with wild affright 10 A spectre stalk amid the troubled night; Huge feet of lead sustain’d the giant-mass With knees of iron, and with arms of brass, High o’er the clouds his silver chest he raised, And far in night his golden forehead blaz’d. Onward he step’d amid the prostrate throng And nations trembled as he passed along. Immortal Love! whose golden fetters, hurl’d 11 Round Nature’s frame, connect the whirling world; Whether you roll the sun’s attractive throne

20

[2:23, 47] 30

[2:22, 8]

10 This spectral statue appeared to King Nebuchadnezzar in a dream: it was interpreted by Daniel as prophesying Assyria’s decline from present glory (the golden head) to a future of increasingly base matter down to the feet ‘part of iron and part of clay’ (the source of the proverbial ‘feet of clay’), meaning that eventually the empire will fall in ruins (see Daniel 2:31–33). With astonishing impudence Darwin completely reverses Daniel’s interpretation, to produce an image of society’s steady rise through four ‘baser’ ages to the dawning utopian Age of Philosophy, symbolized by the golden head. The version of these lines given here (from 227.2:23, p. 47) is Darwin’s first attempt, which actually gets the metal of the feet wrong but whose picture of this vast figure striding through the night is far more awe inspiring than in his later corrected but more static version, and leads more effectively into the following paean to Love (which will reign supreme over the prophesied golden age). The tamer corrected version (in 2:22, p. 6) is as follows: Thus in dread dreams before Assyria’s throne To Night’s pale orb a motley spectre shone; Broad iron feet sustain’d the giant-mass, Wide knees of lead, and kimbo arms of brass; In bright expanse his silver chest he raised, And high in air his golden forehead blazed. 11 From here we return to following 2:22. The substantial section from (my) lines 35 to 182 was retained, with significant changes and additions, in lines 1.15–214 of the published Temple. This apostrophe to ‘Immortal Love’ echoes Lucretius’ opening invocation to Venus in De Rerum Natura, which is also imitated in Richard Payne Knight’s address to ‘Almighty Love’ in The Progress of Civil Society, 1.91–112. A key aspect of Darwin’s concept of Love as the primary social force (which Temple would rework in a different way) is made clear by his first draft of this passage, beginning ‘Lord of Society! Celestial Love!’ [227.2:22, p. 7].

Appendix A Or gird the planets in your silver zone; With crystal cords to atom atom bind, Link sex to sex, or marry mind to mind; Attend my song! – with rosy lips rehearse And with your silver arrows write my verse! – So shall my lines soft-rolling eyes engage, And snow-white fingers turn the volant page, The smiles of Beauty all my toils repay, And youths and virgins chant the living lay. Where Eden’s sacred bowers triumphant sprung12 By angels guarded, and by prophets sung, Wav’d o’er the East in purple pride unfurl’d, And rock’d the golden cradle of the world. – Four sparkling torrents fed with wandering tides Their velvet avenues, and flowery sides; On sun-bright lawns unclad the Graces strayed, And guiltless Cupids haunted every glade; Till the fair mother of mankind, erelong, Heard, unalarm’d, the Tempter’s serpent-tongue; Eyed the sweet fruit, the mandate disobey’d, And her fond Lord with sweeter smiles betray’d; – Conscious awhile with throbbing heart he strove, Spread his wide arms, and barter’d peace for love! – Now rocks on rocks, in savage grandeur roll’d, With circling sweep the blasted plains infold; 13 The incumbent crags eternal tempest shrouds, And livid lightenings cleave the lambent clouds; Round the firm base loud-howling whirlwinds blow And sands in burning columns dance below. Here high in air, amid the desert soil, Towers a vast Fane, unwrought by mortal toil;14

263

40

[10] 50

60 [12]

In both this and the published poem, the Temple occupies the site of the Garden of Eden, but with very different implications in each case. Here, the socially productive labour it represents comes appropriately after Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Paradise, condemned thenceforth to live by the sweat of their brows. In Temple, Urania’s teachings about the real origins of life from the big bang to the evolution of species represents a religiously unorthodox alternative to the creation myth represented by the Garden of Eden. 13 ‘With circling sweep’ is replaced by ‘steep above steep’ in the latest draft, but this earlier version makes it far clearer than in Temple (1.47–52) that these rocks now occupy the site of the Garden of Eden, and that their ‘circling sweep’ encloses a central space where the Temple is to be found. However, Temple adds to this a crucial passage warning off unworthy would-be initiates, and describing the Loves and Graces’ ‘tittering’ approach to the Temple through a crystal-walled tunnel beneath the rocks (1.53–64). 14 This first introduction to the temple does not specifically name it the Temple of Nature, as Temple does (1, 66). One of the earliest drafts (in 227.2:23) calls it ‘Nature’s Fane’ in the first line, and ‘The Temple of Nature’ frequently reappears throughout the drafts as an alternative title; otherwise, it could equally well be described as the Temple of Arts. 12

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

264

O’er many a league the ponderous domes extend, And deep in earth the ribbed vaults descend; A thousand jasper steps with circling sweep Lead the slow votary up the winding steep; Ten thousand pieres, now join’d, and now aloof, Spread their long arms, and bear the branching roof; Unnumber’d ailes connect unnumber’d halls, And sacred symbols crowd the pictured walls;15 With pencil rude forgotten days design, And arts or empires live in every line. While chain’d reluctant on the marble ground, Indignant Time reclines, by Sculpture bound;16 And, sternly bending o’er a scroll unroll’d, Inscribes the future with his style of gold.17 So erst, when Proteus on the briny shore, New forms assumed of eagle, pard, or boar; The wise Ulysses18 bound in sea-weed thongs The struggling god amid his scaly throngs; Till, in deep tones, his opening lips at last Disclosed unwill’d the future and the past. High, o’er piazza’d courts, and long arcades, The bowers of Pleasure wave their blossom’d shades;19 Blow their bright colours, breathe their rich perfume, Bend with new fruits, with flow’rs successive bloom. Here, on soft beds of thornless roses press’d, In slight undress recumbent Graces rest; The Queen of Beauty arms her quiver’d loves, Schools her bright nymphs, and practises her doves; Calls round her laughing eyes in playful turns The glance that lightens, and the smile that burns; Forms the still tear, the meeting whisper tries, Heaves her white bosom with resistless sighs; Or moulds with rosy lips the magic words, That bind the heart in adamantine cords. Deep-whelm’d beneath, in rock-surrounded caves,

70

80

[14]

90

[16]

100

These symbolic murals are appropriate to the poem’s function of explicating the historical significance of the myths they depict. As retained in the published poem, this emphasis on the temple’s depictions of gods, heroes and lovers becomes opaque and mysterious. 16 Time’s ‘binding’ by Sculpture suggests the immortalizing of past discoveries by art and mythology. 17 Time’s Proteus-like ability to ‘inscribe’ the future as well as the past makes more sense in a poem predicting a utopian fifth age of philosophy than in the backward-looking Temple. 18 A mistaken memory from Homer’s Odyssey: in the published Temple (1.85) Ulysses correctly becomes ‘Atrides’, i.e. Menelaus. 19 Pleasure’s presence in the Temple underlines the poem’s programme of exploring the ‘joys’ and ‘woes’ specific to each age. Through the figure of Venus (95), Pleasure is also linked to the sexual instinct which, presumably, prompts human development in specific directions. 15

Appendix A Oblivion dwells, and labels all her graves;20 O’er each dark nich a ponderous stone is rolled, And seven-fold doors the dreadful den infold; No spicy Zephyrs breathe, no sunbeams cheer, Nor song nor simper ever enters here; O’er the green floor, and round the dew-damp walls, The slimy snail, and bloated lizard crawls; While on white heaps of intermingled bones The muse of Melancholy sits, and moans; Showers her cold tears o’er Beauty’s early wreck, Spreads her pale arms, and bends her marble neck. – So in rude rocks beside the Aegean wave, Trophonius scoop’d his sorrow-sacred cave;21 Unbarr’d to pilgrim feet the brazen door, And the sad sage, that enter’d, smil’d no more. High in the midst the Shrine of Nature stands,22 Extends o’er earth and sea her hundred hands; Tower upon tower her beamy forehead crests, And births unnumber’d milk her hundred breasts; Drawn round her brows a lucid veil depends, O’er her fine waste23 the purfled woof descends; Her stately limbs the gather’d folds surround, And spread their golden selvage on the ground.24 Long trains of Virgins from the sacred grove, Pair after pair, in bright procession move, With flower-filled baskets round the altar throng, Or swing their censers, as they wind along.

265

110

[18]

120

[20] 130

20 In contrast to Pleasure, ‘Oblivion’ – followed by ‘Melancholy’ (112) – implies the many deaths incurred by each age’s ‘woes’ as well as the fear of forgetting our history which led each age to memorialize its developments in myth. In the published Temple (1.106–13), Darwin expands the list yet further with ‘Pain’, perhaps in line with Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian understanding of progress as a simple matter of increasing pleasure at the expense of pain. Arguably, this is one of several moments where Progress’s reasonably comprehensible mise-en-scéne gets obscured by overcrowding in Temple. 21 Though reduced to four lines here and in the final Temple (1.125–8), Trophonius looms larger in the early plans. As an oracle whose cave revealed truths too disturbing for normal minds, he stands fittingly for the ‘dark side’ of Darwin’s vision both of history, as here, and of evolutionary destruction, as in Temple. 22 The positioning of the goddess’s shrine is not completely clear, here or in Temple. ‘High in the midst’ suggests it is inside the main building, presumably in the ‘Central Hall’ dedicated to Philosophy in the outline (see below). However, other aspects of the description suggest it is outdoors – perhaps at the centre of a temple complex including an alternation of ‘halls’ and external spaces: see for instance the Muse’s account of exploring ‘Each sun-bright avenue, and green recess’ (1.141–6). 23 ‘waste’: sic. 24 ‘Selvage’ = ‘hem’. At this point, the published Temple of Nature inserts the crucial passage (1.137–54) on the Eleusinian Mysteries, describing them as copied from the shrine of Nature.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

266

The fair Urania leads the blushing bands,25 Presents their offerings with her snow-white hands, Pleas’d to their dazzled eyes in part unshrouds The Goddess-form – the rest is hid in clouds. ‘Priestess of Nature! – while with pious awe26 Thy Votary bends, the mystic veil withdraw; Charm after charm, succession bright! display, And give the Goddess to adoring day! So kneeling realms shall own the Power divine, And heaven and earth pile incense on her shrine. – Oh, grant the Muse with pausing step to press Each sun-bright avenue, and green recess; Led by thy hand survey the trophied walls, The statued galleries, and the pictured halls; Scan the proud pyramid, and arch sublime, Earth-canker’d urn, medallion green with time, Stern busts of Gods, with helmed heroes mix’d, And Beauty’s radiant forms, that smile betwixt. – Waked by thy voice, transmuted by thy wand, Their lips shall open, and their arms expand; The Warrior laureled, and the Lover slain, Leap from their tombs, and sigh and fight again. ‘So with his potent lyre, when undismay’d Descending Orpheus sought the infernal shade; Love led the sage through Death’s tremendous porch; Cheer’d with his smiles, and lighted with his torch; – Pleased round the God the shadowy squadrons throng, And sigh, or simper, as he steps along; Sad swains & love-lorn nymphs on Lethe’s brink Hug their past sorrows, and refuse to drink; Hell’s triple dog his curled ears erects,27

140 [22]

150

160

[23]

Urania, the Muse of Astronomy who according to Milton inspires Paradise Lost, is also here the ‘Priestess of Nature’ who instructs Darwin’s own muse. The ‘trains of virgins’ (1.127) are postulant worshippers of Nature, whose offerings Urania presents at the shrine, half-revealing the goddess as she does so. 26 The speaker here seems to be Darwin’s own ‘Muse’ (1.141), asking Urania to reveal more of Nature. In Temple, the whole poem is structured as a dialogue between this muse and Urania, the latter much to the fore. 27 The eight lines on Cerberus and Proserpine starting here are revised (on p. 23, facing the main text on p. 24) from a briefer four: Hell’s tripple Dog his playful jaws expands, Howls in soft tones, and licks his baby hands; Night’s soften’d Empress sooths with amorous wiles Her iron-hearted Lord, – and Pluto smiles. – The published Temple reverts to this version’s brevity about Cerberus (thus losing the wittily appropriate rhyme on the plural ‘necks’), but keeps the revised version’s sensuous unfreezing of Proserpine. 25

Appendix A Sheathes his soft claws, and smooths his bristly necks, Howls in soft tones, his playful jaws expands, Fawns round the God, and licks his baby hands. Night’s dazzled empress feels the golden flame Warm her cold blood, and thaw her icy frame; Charms with soft accents, sooths with amorous wiles Her iron-hearted Lord, – and Pluto smiles. – His trembling Fair the Bard triumphant led From the pale mansions of the astonish’d dead; Gave to admiring day his beauteous wife, Ah! soon again to sink from light & life!’ Her lifted arm, indulgent to my song, Waves the fair Hierophant, and moves along.28 Soft plumes of silver shade her amber hair, Nod, as she steps, and undulate in air; Bright chains of pearl, with golden buckles braced, Clasp her white neck, and circle round her waste; Thin folds of silk in soft meanders wind Down her fine form, and fluttering stream behind; O’er the smooth floor the widening purple trails, Swells, as she moves, & swims upon the gales. – – ‘Here,’ with sweet voice the pausing Beauty calls,29 And dulcet accents murmur round the walls, ‘In green pavillions, or in marble courts, The Genies of the Chase prelude their sports,30 Rise on aurelian wings in glittering throngs, Stretch their light limbs, and try their tender tongues; To climes uncultured lead their marshal’d swarms, And teach the nascent nations arts and arms.

267

[24] 170

180 [26]

190

28 ‘Her’ (1.173) is underlined in the original, matching the small capitals announcing a new section in Temple 1.205 – though Darwin’s drafts are not consistent about this. The Hierophant is the officiating figure who interprets the Eleusinian Mystery rituals to the initiates. This name for the Priestess of Nature Urania is the only allusion to Eleusinian matters in the draft poem. 29 From this point, the draft poem diverges completely from Temple, where the Priestess answers a wholly new set of questions about the formation of life, rather than responding to the request for explanations of the temple’s mythological images – though these questions are, confusingly, retained. 30 In Darwin’s day the word ‘genie’ was close to ‘genius’ (as in ‘genius of the place’) in denoting the tutelary spirit of a place or phenomenon, though more modern overtones of an oriental assisting spirit (or ‘djinn’) may be starting to creep in. So these ‘Genies of the Chase’ are the informing spirits of the Age of Hunting, to be succeeded in Canto 2’s Age of Pasturage by ‘Genies of the Pastured Plain’, and so on. These genies have a similar prettifying function to Economy’s elemental spirits, and have no parallel in the published Temple of Nature. The following section (1.191–236) shows them developing the earliest forms of human technology: a clever way of making these discoveries appealing by removing the need to imagine actual primitive people making them.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

268

‘Here Vestal forms by quick attrition raise From puny rods the evanescent blaze;31 Blow with transparent cheeks the glowing light, And give new lustres to the astonish’d night; Round earthen caldrons pile the crackling wood, And gaze delighted on the bubbling flood; Feed with bright hands the innocuous flame by turns, And watch with virgin smiles their sacred urns. ‘These Genie-trains with jasper axes wound The stubborn oak, and wrest it from the ground; Tear the rough bark, with flinty fragments rub The rugged knots, and form the murderous Club;32 Heave up from earth, on sinewy shoulders bear, Or whirl the whistling terror in the air. ‘Those shape from poplar boughs the spear uncouth33 With wasting flame, and arm with ivory tooth; Launch the long balanced javelin on the skies, And watch the floating shadow as it flies. ‘Those with sharp flints and smouldering fires o’erwhelm, And scoop the broad breast of the bulky elm; Trail from the rock along the adhesive plain, And launch the unwieldy wonder on the main; 34 Hinge the strong rudder, raise the sculptured prow, And fringe with oars [the] burnish’d sides below. ‘Those in light skiffs the impending rocks explore And pluck long sea-weed from the winding shore; Weave with fine mesh, with plunging weights beset, And buoy with dancing corks the tramel’d net;35

200

[28]

[27]

210

[30]

In Rome, the Vestal Virgins tended a sacred fire which must never go out. This twin association of ‘Vestal’ allows Darwin to link his ethereal, presumably virginal, genies to the first discovery of fire making through rapid friction (‘quick attrition’) and the subsequent need to conserve the flame for future use. 32 As the first weapon, the club is a major development. But in describing its making, Darwin gestures at other stone-age technologies, including the stone-age flint scraper and ‘jasper axe’ – jasper being quartz, whose crystalline structure lends itself to sharp, hard points and edges. 33 The following 12 lines (1.205–18) are on facing page 27, replacing deleted lines on p. 28. Darwin omits opening inverted commas to the section’s three paragraphs, which I have restored for consistency. The making of the spear depends on the discovery of fire making already described, and the formation of its sharp tip from an animal’s tooth suggests a pre-existing hunting technology – perhaps the club. 34 Again earlier technologies – fire and flint tools – are presupposed in the making of the dugout canoe. ‘Adhesive plain’ (1.211) wonderfully indicates the sheer frictional labour of transporting heavy objects before the invention of the wheel. 35 Again, we leap forward in time: these ‘light skiffs’ seem an advance on the first dugouts, and the fine mesh, corks and weights of the fishing net imply a range of other skills. 31

Appendix A ‘There on steep rocks a softer Genie springs, And spreads in bright expanse her spotted wings;36 Treads with soft female form the printless strands, The tall rod bending in her graceful hands; Flings with light lash the viewless hair, and tries The dimpling mirror with delusive flies;37 – So some bright nymph our heedless hearts beguiles With tuneful accents, and alluring smiles; Charm’d with broad eye we watch the sportive fair, And Beauty draws us with a single hair. 38 ‘These bend the yielding bow with sinews strong, Strain the wide horns, and stretch the twisted thong; The feather’d shaft with venom’d gums anoint, Or gild with serpent-foam the dangerous point.39 – Those with strong arms in rapid circles swing The tangent pebble from the whirling sling; High o’er the woods ascends the flinty ball And gazing armies tremble at it’s fall. ‘So when in Elah’s vale Goliah trod,40 Scorning the armies of the living God; While his broad eyes with crimson fury gleam, His shield a boat, his spear a weaver’s beam, Onward with strides colossal tower’d along, And waved his falchion o’er the shrinking throng, A shepherd youth from Carmel’s flowery rocks, Left to the prowling wolves his vagrant flocks; Sought the affrighted camp, to arms unknown, Cull’d from the transient stream a polished stone,

269

220

[29]

230

[30]

[32]

240

[31]

36 These wings are a useful reminder that we are still watching genies generating the ideas for the ‘arts and arms’ being described (see 1.190), rather than actual primitive people practising them. 37 ‘Viewless’ means ‘invisible’: presumably the hair is a real one, perhaps horsetail hairs tied together. The use of a rod and ‘trying’ (= teasing) of the water’s ‘dimpling’ surface suggest fly-fishing: another fairly advanced technology. 38 . A nod to Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (2.28), where fishing is used as a simile for female beauty rather than vice versa, as here. These last four lines are considerably worked over, this final version from p. 29 replacing a deletion in the main text (p. 30). 39 From the club and spear we have advanced to the bow and arrows, whose venomed tips will reappear in the description of Apollo (1.292) – reinforcing the wider point that myths are really descriptions of technological advances. 40 The next 17 lines (1.237–54) on David and Goliath (see 1 Samuel 17) are deleted in the draft, despite much careful revision – perhaps because Darwin is still introducing the tools of the Age of Hunting through the Genies’ activities and it is too early for specific examples. But since the passage does not appear elsewhere, I retain it here.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

270

And as his cheek with kindling ardour shone,41 Measured with dauntless eye the threatening foe, ‘And this,’ he cry’d, ‘ shall lay the Vaunted low.’ Then heaven-inspired his pliant sling he whirl’d, And high in air the flinty fragment hurl’d; Deep in his forehead sunk the deathful wound, Sunk, – and he thunder’d headlong on the ground.42 – Long virgin trains in bright procession move43 And touch their harps to victory and Love; Present their garlands, as they pass along, And shouting armies join the applauding song.’ – Charm’d round the nymph attend the Genie-throngs And hail the Beauty with their silver tongues, Cling round her fringed robe in playful bands, Bend their fair brows and clap their echoing hands, Swim round her beamy brow in airy rings, Or hovering hang upon their velvet wings, On her fair lips with fond attention gaze, Court her sweet smile, and live upon her praise. – Now to the shadowy portico she bends Her stately step, the marble curve ascends, Lo! self-unbar’d on diamond hinges roll’d,44 The ponderous gates their silver valves unfold;45 Onward, sublime, she waves her beckoning hand, Calls with soft voice, and points with lifted wand, ‘Here, on rude pedestals, or pictured woofs, 46

[32] 250 [34]

260 [33] [34]

270 [36]

This line makes for an oddly placed triplet emphasizing nothing very important and could easily be omitted, but Darwin does not indicate this possibility. 42 This couplet is more effective than page 33’s tamer replacement: ‘Deep in his ample forehead sunk the wound,/ And the proud warrior thunder’d on the ground’. 43 These four lines are not deleted with the rest of the David section. Cleverly ambiguous, they could apply both to the women who arouse King Saul’s envy by singing David’s praises (1 Samuel 18.6–9) and to the ‘virgin trains’ we have already seen learning the secrets of the Temple of Nature. 44 ‘on diamond hinges roll’d’ is deleted but better than the tamer replacement, ‘on hinge of burnish’d gold’. 45 We are now entering the temple building, via its portico and double door, of which the ‘valves’ are the leaves. If the goddess’s shrine ‘in the midst’ was indoors, Urania presumably led us outside to view the genies’ activities ‘in green pavilions or in marble courts’ (1.185). We are now turning from their physical enactments of the skills of the Hunting Age to their artistic depictions of its mythology within the relevant ‘hall’. An earlier draft (2:23) has ‘Wide to the West the eternal gates unfold’, though the outline in the same notebook puts the Age of Hunting in the ‘Eastern Hall’ and Canto 3’s Age of Agriculture in the Western one. 46 As well as enacting the ‘arts and arms’ of the Age of Hunting, its genies record its achievements in works of visual art, including statuary, tapestry, mosaics, designs inset into ceilings (‘laqueated’ means ‘recessed’) and the pictographic, pre-phonetic ‘unletter’d 41

Appendix A Mosaic floors or laqueated roofs, The Genies of the Chase their toils record, In sacred symbol, or unletter’d word; Stamp with fine dye, or raise with chissel bold The historic marble or poetic gold. ‘First, nich’d in parian stone, Diana moves47 With warrior-grace, the Goddess of the groves; Imprints the spangled lawn with buskin’d tread, The beamy crescent trembling on her head; O’er her fair bosom cross the silken strings, And, as she steps, the golden quiver rings; Her opening hounds the affrighted lair proclaim,48 And her keen shafts transfix the flying game. ‘Next, crown’d with golden rays Apollo stands,49 His bow still vibrates in his graceful hands, Onward with lofty step He seems to spring, And sends the unerring arrow from the string, Fierce Python writhing feels the feather’d dart,50 Pierce his hard scales, and tremble in his heart, Bites with his foaming teeth the shaft in vain, And curls in death his undulating train. ‘Round the twin pair the wreaths of fame would blow, Bright as the polish’d shaft, and silver bow, Fair as the rising blush, that lights the morn, Soft as the beam of Night’s unwaining51 horn, But mean revenge with unextinguish’d shame – And on an helpless woman! – blots their name. Lo! where pale Niobe her children shrouds,52

271

280

[38] 290

[37] [38] 300

word’ of hieroglyphics. According to Darwin’s often-stated theory, classical mythology was largely based on over-literal misreadings of symbolic images attempting to describe real phenomena: here, technological developments rather than the natural processes foregrounded in Temple as well as The Botanic Garden. 47 As goddess of hunting, Diana (Artemis) is appropriately the first of the genies’ artistic depictions. 48 Hounds ‘open’ when they start baying on finding the prey; ‘affrighted lair’ – the lair whose inhabitant is frightened – illustrates Darwin’s penchant for extreme Latinate compression. 49 As Diana’s brother, Apollo shares her interest in hunting and archery; the rays indicate that he is also the sun god. 50 Python was a deadly serpent which was pursuing Apollo’s mother, Leto. Once killed, its venom made his arrows especially deadly. See too line 232 and note. 51 ‘unwaining’ [sic]. Presumably ‘unwaning’, though the moon’s horns do in fact wane. 52 Niobe was a Theban queen who boasted that her 20 children made her a more successful mother than Leto, who only had two. To avenge this slur on their mother, Apollo and Diana shot all of Niobe’s children; later, she was turned into a perennially weeping statue. The work

272

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin And hears the bow-string twang amid the clouds; One with quick step the rising tempest shuns, The winged shaft o’ertakes her, as she runs, On her fair neck inflicts the fatal wound, And struggling Beauty pants upon the ground; In fearful agony another stands, 53 Spreads to relentless heaven her tremulous hands, The shaft unerring drinks her rosy breath, And her pale throbbing bosom heaves in death. ‘Unjust the Gods!’ a youth indignant cries, Bends o’er his sister, and upbraids the skies, Through his cleft throat descends the feather’d wood, And the green herbage drinks his gushing blood. Two tender twins, embracing in the storm, In sex they differ, but agree in form, Sink with fond kiss in ivory arms caress’d, One barbed arrow nails them breast to breast. Sighs the sad queen, and suppliant as she kneels, Her last sweet hope beneath her robe conceals.54 ‘Next, on wide pedestal, of heavenly birth Gigantic Hercules adorns the earth; With gaping mouth the Lion’s shaggy spoil

[227.2:37]

310

320 [227.2:22.40]

Darwin put into rewriting and perfecting the following description may be related to his painful memories of his first wife Polly (Mary Howard)’s last days before her death in 1770. In acute pain only partly alleviated by alcohol and opium, she suffered delusions that some invisible presence intended to kill her children. In Darwin’s words, ‘don’t kill my Children, sais she, pray don’t’ – with such a beseeching Countenance – ‘don’t kill them all, leave me one, pray leave me one!’ – Oh Heavens! – ’ (DAR 227.2:7, qtd in King-Hele, Unequalled Achievement, 92). Apollo’s role as god of medicine may have added to the Niobe story’s poignancy for Darwin, who prescribed the opium. 53 A ringed ‘O’ (whether or not by Darwin is unclear) at the end of p. 38 directs us to a loose draft page for Zoonomia (DAR 227.2:37, explaining the psycho-physical connections between mumps, hydrophobia and involuntary erections), containing the present lines 1.306–19 on its back. With its fierce protest at the gods’ injustice, this is a considerable improvement on p. 38’s deleted version, which ends bathetically thus: Sink two fair youths in mutual arms caress’d, One barbed arrow nails them breast to breast; Her youngest love beneath her robe she hides, Through her spread arms the cruel arrow glides. Ten blooming youths in anguish bite the ground, And ten fair bleeding sisters sleep around. Modern usage makes the last line of this particularly unfortunate, but Darwin clearly had trouble hitting the right note: ‘And ten fair sister beauties bleed around’ is one of several other attempts. 54 The much-improved rewriting ends with a comma. I have amended this to a full stop in the hope that Darwin planned to leave the passage here, rather than making another attempt at the bathetic ending quoted in the above note.

Appendix A Hangs o’er his arm, and trails upon the soil; O’er his broad neck his knotted club reclines,55 And fix’d on heaven his glissening eyeball shines; Bursts from descending clouds immortal Truth56 With voice seraphic calls the dazzled youth, Round her bright limbs celestial lustres glow, And lambent glories tremble round her brow; With graceful step the radiant Goddess leads The admiring Hero to immortal deeds, Grasps his strong wrist, and points with arm sublime Yon sun-bright realms, where Virtue conquers Time. ‘There, canopy’d with marble, Samson lies, And sleep eternal seals his sable eyes. – Who siezed unarm’d the Lion’s iron claws, And tore with sinewy arms his grinning jaws; From Gaza’s temples pluck’d the gates of stone, And slew a thousand warriors with a bone;57 Submits to Dalilah’s vindictive wiles, Delusive accents, and seductive smiles; Stretched in the shade, where wanton woodbines twine, On banks of moss his giant limbs recline; Soft silken dreams his love-sick senses wrap, And Valour sinks on Beauty’s velvet lap. Now her fair hands his length of hair unbind, And spread the exuberant tresses to the wind, O’er his closed eyes she bends with wily peep, And sweetly warbles, ‘Mighty Warrior, sleep; ‘Soft dreams attend thee safe from war’s alarms, ‘Press’d to my bosom, circled in my arms; ‘The plumes of conquest o’er thy temples wave, ‘And Love protect the tender and the brave’. – Lock after lock her pearly combs unfold,

273

[42]

330

340 [43] [44]

350

55 Hercules’ link with hunting is emphasised by drawing attention to his cudgel and his habitual wearing of the skin of one of his early antagonists, the Nemaean lion. 56 Perhaps not the first story the archetypal tough guy now brings to mind, the ‘Choice of Hercules’ between Pleasure and Virtue was a much-repeated neoclassical motif: based on an ancient Greek allegory by the sophist Prodicus, it was the subject of a painting by Caracci, an essay by Addison and an oratorio by Handel. Though Pleasure is absent from Darwin’s account, the inspiring figure of ‘immortal Truth’ is clearly identifiable with the ‘Virtue’ which (a favourite Darwin idea) ‘conquers Time’. In early outlines (draft 2:23) Darwin also planned to describe Hercules dressing as a woman in servitude to Omphale, but does not develop the idea here. 57 Samson’s eyes are sealed, not only in death but because he was blinded by the Philistines on being captured (Judges 16:21). Earlier, he killed a lion with his bare hands (Judges 14:5–6) and a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass (15:15–17). He pulled down the temple on his enemies (16:29–31), after being betrayed to them by Dalilah (or Delilah), who cut off his strength-giving hair as he slept (16:4–20).

274

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin And silver scissors part the waving gold.58

[This is as far as the most finished version of Canto 1 gets, in 227.2:22. What follows is from some much rougher tryouts in the first notebook, 227.2:23. These are less legible, and sometimes contain spaces between beginnings of lines and the planned rhyme-words at the end. These passages appear in fragments all over the notebook: I have simply put together what seem to me the best versions, in ways which tell a roughly coherent story. The sequence of narratives is pure guesswork, and the punctuation is mine.] [227.2:23] Where were ye, Genies of the sylvan chase, When Cephalus some gentle air address’d, And sent the arrow into Procris’ breast?59 There, as he stands beneath the poplar’s shade, ‘Come Gentle Air’ the Eolian hunter said; Heard, from behind, the rustling branches move, And sent a fatal shaft amid the grove. Runs gentle Procris to his arms, confest, The venom’d arrow trembling in her breast: Pale on the moss the bleeding beauty lies, And bends on Cephalus her swimming eyes. ‘I sink! I sink! – amid the intangled grove, Ah me! I watched thee with suspecting love! No other flame thy tender bosom warms! Oh love, receive me in thy circling arms; Lay me, oh lay me on the moss-grown heath, Drink my last tear, and catch my [??] breath.’ [Death stop’d her tongue, back sunk her beauteous breath, And sighing sinks into the arms of death.] O’er the pale corse the lover bends and sighs Strikes his … breast, and turns to heav’n his eyes. Pale sleeps Adonis in his early bloom, And Beauty’s Goddess weeps upon his tomb:60 With ceaseless sighs his clay-cold bosom warms, And kneeling spreads her desolated arms.

[22]

360

[31]

[32] [29] 370 [31]

[38] 380

58 ‘silver scissors’ replace a deleted ‘glittering forfex’, Pope’s (perhaps too) well-known euphemism for scissors in Rape of the Lock. 59 Procris hid behind a bush to spy on her husband Cephalus, who was rumoured to be meeting a lover while out hunting. In fact he was simply calling on the breeze (‘gentle air’) to cool him; but, hearing a sound from the bushes, he mistook his hidden wife for an animal and killed her. 60 A beautiful youth loved by Venus (Aphrodite), Adonis was hunting on Mount Libanus (Lebanon) when a boar gored his thigh and killed him. In this version, Venus mourns her inability to save him; though in some versions – which Darwin makes much play with in Economy – she manages to revive him every summer while the enamoured Proserpina (Persephone) claims him for the Underworld through the winter.

Appendix A



Ere rose the sun which lights the vernal morn, The graceful hunter sounds his bugle horn; Call’d with intrepid voice the Hunter throng, His two spears glittering as he step’d along. On left Libanus [??] stood, And echoed to his voice the alarmed wood. The intrepid youth, his [??] hounds at bay, Burst through surrounding [??] his dreadful way; The bristly mane the furious monster rears, With shield impenetrable stays his spears, With stroke oblique eludes his eager eye, And gores with ivory tusk his tender thigh. Soon Venus hurries to the fateful groves; Around the Goddess cling her weeping loves. O’er the pale youth the bending Goddess stood And mix’d her briny sorrows with his blood. ‘Alas! Sweet youth, Adonis, must we part? Tear lip from lip, and sever heart from heart? One last embrace, one dying kiss, bestow: Thy love shall follow to the realms below. On me, on me, alights severe my doom: Immortal powers descend not to the tomb!’ There, quick emerging from Enna’s sacred shade, Impatient Ceres seeks the ravish’d maid,61 Calls all the Gods to [listen?] to her wrong, And Heaven and Earth re-echo to her tongue. Drawn by fierce serpents o’er earth’s wide plains afar She seeks her daughter in her iron car. Round Etna’s rocky sides … light: A thousand torches illumine the night. O’er earth in vain at length her troops invade, Deep caves of earth, and Hell’s tremendous shade.

275 [36]

[35] 390

400 [38]

410 [227.2:23]

61 After Proserpina/Persephone was abducted by Pluto/Hades, her mother Ceres/ Demeter conducted a long day-and-night search for her in a dragon-drawn chariot, using torches lit from Mount Etna. This fragment is very rough indeed, with exceptionally dubious scansion even for an early draft; but seems worth including as the only example of the ‘rapes’ which Darwin’s ‘Argument’ claims at length as characteristic of the sparsely populated age of hunting. The fact that he hardly gets on to this theme in verse may suggest an uncertainty between deploring and celebrating such deeds – a kind of uncertainty about the negative sides of his successive ages which may have contributed to his abandonment of the poem.

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

276

Further fragments of Canto I a.

b.



With chemic tints the gothic windows paint And gild or deck the tutelary saint.62

[1]

These from fell pards the shaggy trophies tear Or strip his furry mantle from the bear; Steep with crude barks from oaks astringent tore And fill with liquid wood the widening pore.63

[32]

[227.2:25] [14]



Canto II64 Now rose in purple pomp the breezy dawn, And crimson dew-drops trembled on the lawn; Blazed high in air the temple’s golden vanes, And dancing shadows veer’d upon the plains.65 Slow up the steep the Priestess-Muse ascends, Her gauzy veil in spiry volutes bends, The purple burden, on the pavement roll’d, Swells in the breeze, and spreads it’s fringe of gold. Wide to the East the massy jambs display66 Their folded valves, and catch the rising ray. Here with mute grace awhile the Goddess stands,

10

Probably intended for the description of the genies’ artistic depictions (1.272–7 above), this couplet intriguingly points a way forward for later cantos: in depicting the advances of the agricultural and commercial ages which will see the rise of Christianity, it will be theoretically possible to move on from depictions of classical gods and Old Testament heroes to those of saints. 63 Presumably intended for the account of early technologies (1.199–236 above), this description of the creation of early shields from animal-hide gets interestingly technical in its description of binding and toughening the hide in ‘liquid wood’ made from infusing oak bark in water. 64 This canto, on the Age of Pasturage, appears only in the draft notebook 227.2:25, in a much rougher state than Canto I. My square-bracketed page references are to this book, starting on p. 14 where the most completed version begins, after several rougher ones. 65 These four much-revised lines are transferred to Canto 1 of the final Temple (1.155–8). 66 ‘Massy jambs’ is replaced by ‘brazen folds’ in a later version, but this leads to the kind of repetition (see ‘folded valves’ in the next line) Darwin generally revises to avoid. Again, we approach the temple from outside. Though Pasturage’s door is now in the east, the outline in 227.2:23 puts the Age of Hunting in the Eastern Hall and the other two in the West and North, leaving the South for Pasturage, where it is also placed in earlier Canto 2 drafts. 62

Appendix A The silver keys of Nature in her hands, 67 Points where on high the letter’d freeze records ‘The Age of Pasturage’ in glittering words. – 68 The gilded key through steely mazes slides, The bolt results, the brazen valve divides;69 Roofs, floors and walls return the silver light, And mingling glories burst upon the sight. “First to the curious eye refulgent springs70 In sculptured gold the shepherd race of kings;71 Throned on green turf beneath the woodland shade From vale to vale the tented nations stray’d,72 Drove to the grassy hill or bubbling rocks Their bellowing herds and fleecy vagrant flocks, Wing’d the slow hours with … dulcet lay, Music and Love the business of the day. Here the bright Genies of the pastured plain With infant arts attendant in their train The paper barks from vernal poplars rend, Beat on smooth stones, with wooden rolls extend; Round leafless boughs the twisted cordage roll, And stretch the new canvas on the central pole;73 With tents unnumber’d whiten all the glade, And pleased recline beneath their peaceful shade. There softer tribes in artless measures sing,74 Bore the smooth pipe or stretch the trembling string, Breathe their rude accents to the unfinish’d lyre, In concord sweet as Peace and Love inspire. Those, with rude tubes and inquiring eyes, Watch the slow planets journeying through the skies,

277

[17]

[12] 20

[11] 30

40

[13]

67 The drafts show great uncertainty whether these keys should be ‘silver’ or ‘golden’ – perhaps in relation to these metals’ link with specific ages. 68 In contrast to the ‘unletter’d word’ of the Hunting Age (1.275), the Age of Pasturage’s invention of writing is stressed in the ‘letter’d’ frieze bearing its name. 69 ‘Rebound’ is amended to ‘result’ (= ‘jump back’) in some versions. Some versions try to substitute half of this couplet with the nice line, ‘The silent hinge in diamond pivots glides’, but the attempt is always abandoned. 70 The following passage is from an earlier draft than those used up to now, and continues from an earlier version of the doorway’s announcement of the ‘Age of Pasturage’. 71 Kingship also emerges with pasturage in Canto 2 of Knight’s Civil Society (2.285–332) and, rather less clearly, in their joint source, Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (5.1105). 72 The pastoral age precedes that of permanent settlement: people live in movable tents. 73 They learn to make tents out of beaten and rolled tree bark, cord and branches. The ‘new’ unbalances the scansion but seems to be intended. 74 These shepherd-genies’ invention of music and love poetry echoes a common assumption about the pastoral age, also stressed in Knight’s Civil Society (3.186–217).

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

278

Raise the tall gnomon on the letter’d brass75 And watch the slow-sailing shadows as they pass.

Further Fragments of Canto II (From here it becomes increasingly hard to guess at the intended sequence; accordingly, I simply copy some of the more legible and/or sustained fragments in the order they appear in the 227.2:25 notebook.) a.

b.

c.

In native charms Rebecca stood And hailed the strangers issuing from the wood. With golden key the parsimonious well unlocks, Gives the cool beverage to the panting flocks; Hears the delightful tale in love and truth, Surveys the bracelets and admires the youth.76

[4]

O’er brazen gates an arch incumbent bends77 Its pointed ribs, its column’d base extends Long shepherd crooks with flowery chaplets crown’d, And [??] reeds with knots of ribbon bound In rude festoons the aspiring front adorn Tip’d by the radiant [??] of the morn.

[17]

The Goddess now the sculptured wall inspects, Calls with soft voice, with warning wand directs, ‘In iron cups the liquid metals hold Or pour the [treasure?] in the letter’d mold, In level lines metallic letters fix’d With commas, points and semicolons mix’d.’78

[18]

A gnomon is the pin of a sundial. The sciences of astronomy and timekeeping begin in the pastoral age. 76 In Genesis 24, Rebecca gives Abraham’s servant well-water for his camels – a sign that she is a suitable wife for Abraham’s son Isaac. Accordingly, the servant gives her bracelets and her family allow her to return with him to marry Isaac. 77 Probably intended for the description of the gates (2.9–10), indicating their pastoral imagery – the shepherd’s crook and reed-pipe – and their pointed (gothic?) arches, the latter perhaps echoing the openings of the tents whose making is described in 2.33–40. 78 My closing inverted commas, and I have omitted an undeleted ‘periods’ to preserve the scansion. This increasingly illegible passage describes the modern process of printing: the ‘demon’ in the following line is clearly the ‘printer’s devil’ or apprentice who handled the ink. Though this technology is way beyond the pastoral age, the aim could be to stress the significance of its invention of writing, which ultimately led to print. 75

Appendix A

279

On each side smear’d with ink a demon stands And smears the pages with his sooty hands. In one [??] they print a thousand tongues, And at each stroke a sermon or a song. On wings of winds … proclaim, Outfly the winds, out-shout the trump of fame. So Babel’s tower … Tower upon tower to heaven they rear … And the cumbrous ruin strews the ground.79

d.

e.

And while her tongue prophetic truths inspire Bold she bends her o’er the enraptured lyre, And as the fate of future times she sings And shakes prophetic transport from the strings, Guides the pencil, chissel & style obey, And raptured Genies model from the lay. Here beneath the figtree and the vine Descending, Peace & Liberty recline

[55]

Here while soft scenes of flattering Summer reign, Fair as the golden age which poets feign, Enamour’d youths express their artless loves And virgin beauties haunt their native groves; Trace his long strides, about his garments cling,80 Bend the small bow, & whirl the tiny sling; Climb the tall bower, the blushing cluster reach, Shake the ripe nut, or pluck the dulcet peach. Soft Loves and Graces lead the dancing hours, The turf their carpet and the roof their bowers. There Winter’s icy hand unroofs the bower,81 Pale Cold rides trembling on the icy wind, Drops the caved rock, & famine scowls behind.82 From the wet roof the icy style distills; … rills. …

[59]

The last five lines are very fragmentary but seem worth including, though it is hard to see how the Babel myth gives positive support to Darwin’s enthusiasm for the globalizing powers of the printing press. 80 The ‘youths and virgins’ suddenly seem to turn out to be children; the ‘he’ to whose strides they cling could possibly be the personified summer. 81 The roughness of this whole section is indicated by the bad fit between the otherwise unrhymed ‘bower’ at the end of this line and the ‘hours / bowers’ rhyme of the preceding couplet. 82 ‘Drops the caved rock’ is unclear but the words do seem to appear thus in both pencilled and inked versions. 79

280

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin Howls the lean wolf, the gaunt Hyena growls, Rolls his red eyes, and shakes his shaggy head, Snuffs the scared prey, & tears the leafy shed.

f.



Screen’d by green [??] from the eye of day Her laughing brood around the fountain play These from their little palms [??] drink Or spread on turf-beds sleep upon the brink. One smiling beauty in her arms caress’d Seeks with extended hands her milky breast83 … smiling lye Guards the wantons with her watchful eye. … with busy eye and eager tongue On the green margin of the rill they throng.

[60]

[227.2:23]

Early Outline of the Poem (The following draft outline of the five cantos, from 2:23, is rough and presumably early, but full of fascinating hints as to the overall shape and concerns of the planned poem. I have tidied up punctuation and capitalization.) [2] The Temple of Nature84 or The Progress of Society a poem in five Cantos – or History of Mankind in six Cantos Canto 1 Temple of Nature bowers of Venus den of Trophonius [3] 83 Revised to a less legible line which could be: ‘Seeks with its hunting eyes her snowy breast.’ 84 This first page of the first notebook (2:23) represents Darwin’s earliest efforts to fix the title. ‘The Temple of Nature’ may not have been the first thought, since it is squeezed in above ‘The Progress of Society’. Both titles appear at various points elsewhere, but this is the only mention of ‘History of Mankind’ as a title, or of six cantos. The mention of the bowers of Venus and den of Trophonius so early on is striking: retained in all versions through to the published Temple, their significance becomes increasingly unclear, but they are clearly very important to Darwin.

Appendix A

281

Canto I. Age of Hunting Argument. Eastern Hall. Subject proposed. Love invoked. Temple of Nature. Den of Trophonius beneath it. Heroes of Antiquity. Speech of Dying Indian. Skins for clothing, Lion’s skin. Bow and arrow. Spear. Nets. Language. No old age. Famine, naked form. Rapes. Rape of Proserpine. Adonis killed by a Boar and lamentation of Venus. Rufus killed by an arrow. Time. Sampson and Dalilah. Hercules and Omphale. [in pencil: ‘Nymph of the buskin’d leg and quiver’d neck/ Inventress of the bow’, Diana. Nimrod]85 [4] Canto II. Age of Pasturage Houses of leaves, nymphs’ and fawns’ dance and caverns. Patriarchs, love-songs, music, pastorals, Hieroglyphicks. War for the wells of water. Government. Religion. Miracles. Red sea. Faith. Abraham and Isaac. Religion. Miracles. Clothes of skins. Golden calf. Property. War. Murrain. Famine. Love-pastoral. Astronomy. Sun-dial with verses on it. Birth of the muses. Wheeled carriages. Shepherd Kings. Abel. Genies of the lowing herds make musical instruments. Moses and the fiery bush. Southern Hall. ‘Thin paper barks the … papyrus yield / Beat on smooth stones, with wooden [??] spread.’86 [5] Canto III. Age of Agriculture Cain and Abel. Tools. Beasts made to labour. Iron. Cities. Slavery. Flax. Silkworm. Spinning. Weaving. Letters. Arms. Wine. Bacchus. Genies of the cultur’d plain. Western Hall. ‘Kings in those days possessed the lands’.87 [6]

85 Though Darwin here puts Hunting in the Eastern Hall, a verse draft in this early notebook (2:23) has ‘Wide to the West the eternal gates unfold’. 86 Though Pasturage is here in the South, it has moved to the East in the opening of 2:25’s verse text. 87 There is further writing on this page but it is largely illegible. The story of Cain and Abel can easily be read as symbolizing the supersession of pasturage by agricultural crop growing. In contrast to the pastoral age, whose ‘woes’ apart from war were mainly natural disasters (murrain and famine), the agricultural age involves the socially created evils of slavery, animal labour, iron weapons and alcohol. Placing Agriculture in the West fits well with the outline’s darkening move from East (dawn of mankind) to South (idyllic pastoral noon) to declining West (this agricultural age) to North (the even greater evils of commerce). Darwin’s later decisions to put Hunting in the West and Pasturage in the East disrupt this clear pattern of decline, perhaps because it is too pessimistic, but leaves the significance of the four halls less clear.

282

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

Canto IV. Age of Commerce Navigation. Dedalus. Money. Manufactures. Printing. Compass. Glass. Luxury. Slave trade. Sugar. Spirit of wine. ‘And gold triumphant rules the world enslaved.’ Northern Hall. [In pencil:] ‘Arithmetic/ Unlock’d the future with her golden key’.88 Canto V. Age of Philosophy Central Hall. Liberty. No crime. No [??]. Ruins of superstition long remain. Philosophy. Science. Peace. Elements subdued. Swords turned to ploughshares. Every man under his fig tree. Moral world. Love each other. ‘Do as you would be done by’.89

88 Despite the triumphs of manufacture, this age of commerce (more or less the present) intensifies the ills of the preceding one: slaves are traded as well as owned, and wine is turned into spirits, which as a doctor Darwin strongly condemned. The only hero is Dedalus: something which possibly bodes ill for the project of explaining myths in terms of technological developments. The keynote line about gold enslaving the world suggests a generally negative reading of the age of commerce. 89 It is a nuisance that the second thing to be abolished is particularly illegible: neither ‘war’ nor ‘slaves’ quite fits but it is clearly something bad. The concluding embrace of Jesus’s moral principle ‘Do as you would be done by’ (which involves no claim that he is the Son of God) is echoed in the published Temple (3.488–9). The positioning of the Age of Philosophy at the temple’s centre, alongside the Goddess of Nature herself, suggests that the other four ages have been painful efforts to realize natural laws, which will only be discovered through scientific progress.

Bibliography Ackroyd, Peter. Blake. London: Minerva, 1996. Akenside, Mark. The Pleasures of Imagination. London: Cadell and Davies, 1794 [1744]. Aldiss, Brian. Billion-Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1973. Analytical Review. London: J. Johnson, 1788–98. Anon. The Golden Age, a poetical epistle from Erasmus D-n, M.D. to Thomas Beddoes, M.D. London and Oxford: F. & C. Rivington and J. Cooke, 1794. Anon. Jachin and Boaz: or, an authentic key to the door of free-masonry, both ancient and modern. London: W. Nicoll and E. Newbery, 1785. Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner. Ed. William Gifford. Poetry written by George Canning, George Ellis and John Hookham Frere. 2 vols. 4th ed. London: J. Wright, 1799. Ashton, T. S. The Industrial Revolution, 1760–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964. Bacon, Sir Francis. The Wisdom of the Ancients. Trans. Sir Arthur Gorges. London: John Bill, 1619. ———. The New Atlantis. London: 1627. Ballantyne, Andrew. Architecture, Landscape and Liberty: Richard Payne Knight and the Picturesque. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Banks, Joseph. Banks’s Descriptions in the Journal of Places and Peoples encountered during the Endeavour Voyage. In South Seas: Voyaging and Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Pacific (1760–1800). http://southseas.nla. gov.au/journals/banks_remarks/122.html. (Accessed 19 March 2013). Bannerman, Anne. Poems. Edinburgh: Mundell, Doig & Stevenson, 1807. Barbauld, Anna Laetitia. Preface to Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of Imagination. London: Cadell and Davies, 1794. ———. Anna Laetitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose. Ed. W. McCarthy and E. Craft. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001. Barrett, David V. A Brief History of Secret Societies. London: Robinson, 2007. Barruel, Abbé Augustin de, Memoirs, illustrating the History of Jacobinism. Trans. R. Clifford. 4 vols. London: T. Burton & E. Booker, 1797. Barsanti, Giulio. La Scala, la mappa, l’albero: Immagini e classificazioni della natura tra Sei e Ottocento. Florence: Sansoni, 1992. Bernal, Martin. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985. London: Vintage, 1991 [1987]. Bewell, Alan. ‘“Jacobin Plants”: Botany as Social Theory in the 1790s’. Wordsworth Circle 20 (1989): 132–39.

284

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

———. Wordsworth and the Enlightenment. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989. ———. ‘Erasmus Darwin’s Cosmopolitan Nature’. ELH 76, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 19–48. Bilsborrow, Dewhurst. ‘To Erasmus Darwin, on his Work intitled Zoonomia’. In Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, 3rd ed., volume 1, v–vi. London: J. Johnson, 1801. Blackstone, Bernard. The Consecrated Urn: An Interpretation of Keats in Terms of Growth and Form. London: Longmans, Green, 1959. Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. Revised ed. New York: Anchor Books, 1988. ———. The Illuminated Blake: All of William Blake’s Illuminated Works with a Plate-by-Plate Commentary. Ed. David V. Erdman. New York: Dover, 1992. Bligh, William. A Voyage to the South Sea. London: George Nicol, 1792. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich. De generis humani varietate nativa [On the Natural Variety of Mankind]. University of Göttingen, 1775. ———. Über den Bildungstrieb and das Zeugungsgeschäfte. Göttingen: J. C. Dieterich, 1781. Borges, Jorge Luis. Other Inquisitions 1937–1952. Trans. Ruth L. C. Simms. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975. Boscovich, Roger Joseph, SJ. A Theory of Natural Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966. Brewer, William Dean. The Shelley-Byron Conversation. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Brooks, Robin. The Mystery of the Portland Vase. London: Duckworth, 2004. Browne, Janet. ‘Botany for Gentlemen: Erasmus Darwin and “The Loves of the Plants”’. Isis 80, no. 4 (December 1989): 592–621. Bryant, Jacob. A New System, or, An Analysis of Ancient Mythology. 2 vols. London: Payne, Elmsley, White & Walter, 1774. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1757. ———. Reflections on the Revolution in France. London: J. Dodsley, 1790. Burkeman, Oliver. ‘Why Everything You’ve Been Told about Evolution Is Wrong’. Guardian, 19 March 2010, G2 section, 6–9. Burnet, James. See Monboddo, Lord. Butler, Marilyn. Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760–1830. Oxford University Press, 1981. ———, ed. Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Butler, Samuel. Evolution, Old & New: Or: the Theories of Buffon, Dr Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, as Compared with that of Charles Darwin. 3rd ed. London: Jonathan Cape, 1921.

Bibliography

285

Byron, George Gordon, Lord. Poetical Works, 3rd ed. Ed. F. Page, corrected J. Jump. London: Oxford University Press, 1970. Calè, Luisa. ‘“A Female Band Despising Nature’s Law”: Botany, Gender and Revolution in the 1790s’. Romanticism on the Net 17 (February 2000). Canning, George (Senior). A Translation of Anti-Lucretius. London: 1766. Canning, George (Junior), See Anti-Jacobin. Carabelli, Giancarlo. In the Image of Priapus. London: Duckworth, 1996. Carter, Tim. ‘Erasmus Darwin, Work and Health’. In The Genius of Erasmus Darwin, ed. C.U.M. Smith and Robert Arnott, 289–301. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Chesterton, G. K. William Blake. London: Duckworth, 1910. Clark, Peter. British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Clarke, Michael, and Nicholas Penny, eds. The Arrogant Connoisseur: Richard Payne Knight, 1751–1824. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982. Claudian. Claudian, with an English Translation by Maurice Platnauer. 2 vols, Loeb edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1922. Coffey, Donna. ‘Protecting the Botanic Garden: Seward, Darwin, and Coalbrookdale’. Women’s Studies 31, no. 2 (2002): 141–64. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. London: Bell and Daldy, 1866 (reprinting first edition of London: Rest Fenner, 1817). ———. ‘Notes on Stillingfleet’. Athenaeum 27, no. 2474 (March 1875). ———. The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. E. H. Coleridge. London: Oxford University Press, 1912. ———. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 6 vols. Ed. E. L. Griggs. Oxford: Clarendon, 1966–1971. ———. Coleridge’s Criticism of Shakespeare. Ed. R. A. Foakes. London: Continuum, 1989. ———. The Complete Poems. Ed. W. Keach. London: Penguin Classics, 1997. ———. Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection. Ed. Seamus Perry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Constantine, David. Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton. London: Phoenix Press, 2002. Copley, Stephen, and Peter Garside, eds. The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Cowper, William. Poetical Works. Ed. H. S. Milford. 4th ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1967. ———. Review of The Botanic Garden Part Two: The Loves of the Plants. Analytical Review 4 (May–August 1789): 29–36. ———. Review of The Botanic Garden Part One: The Economy of Vegetation. Analytical Review 15, (London: J. Johnson, 1793): 287–93. Craven, Maxwell. John Whitehurst of Derby, Clockmaker and Scientist 1713–88. Ashbourne, Derbyshire: Mayfield Books, 1996.

286

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

Cronin, Richard. The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of the Pure Commonwealth. Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Cryer, Rev. Neville B. ‘Erasmus Darwin: A Little Known Mason of Derby’. Typescript of lecture delivered at Tyrian Lodge, no. 253 (Derby, 2000), in the possession of Erasmus Darwin House, Lichfield. Danchin, Pierre. ‘Erasmus Darwin’s Scientific and Poetic Purpose in The Botanic Garden’. In Science and Imagination in XVIIIth-century British Culture, ed. Sergio Rossi, 133–50. Milan: Edizioni Unicopoli, 1987. Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. New York: D. Appleton, 1864. ———. The Life of Erasmus Darwin. Ed. Desmond King-Hele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Darwin, Erasmus. A System of Vegetables ... translated from ... Linnaeus ... by a Botanical Society at Lichfield. Lichfield: J. Jackson, 1783. ———. The Families of Plants ... translated from ... Linnaeus ... by a Botanical Society at Lichfield. Lichfield: J. Jackson, 1787. ———. The Loves of the Plants. London: J. Johnson, 1789. ———. The Botanic Garden (The Economy of Vegetation and The Loves of the Plants). London: J. Johnson, 1791. ———. A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools. Derby and London: J. Drewry & J. Johnson, 1797. ———. Phytologia, or The Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening. London: J. Johnson, 1800. ———. Zoonomia, or The Laws of Organic Life. 3rd ed. London: J. Johnson, 1801. ———. The Temple of Nature, or The Origin of Society. London: J. Johnson, 1803. ———. Cosmologia: A Sequence of Epic Poems in Three Parts. Retitled edition of The Economy of Vegetation, The Loves of the Plants and The Temple of Nature. Ed. Stuart Harris. Sheffield: Stuart Harris, 2002. ———. The Collected Writings of Erasmus Darwin. Introduction M. Priestman. 9 vols. Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004. ———. The Temple of Nature, or The Origin of Society, with edited text of The Progress of Society. Ed. M. Priestman. Romantic Circles internet edition 2006. http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/darwin_temple/ (accessed 14 April, 2013). ———. To Elizabeth, with Love. Shorter Poems. Ed. Desmond King-Hele. Sheffield: Stuart Harris, 2008. ———. The Collected Letters of Erasmus Darwin. Ed. Desmond King-Hele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ———. The Prince; My Son; Our Hero: Three Elegies. Shorter Poems. Ed. Stuart Harris. Sheffield: Stuart Harris, 2009. ———. Poems of Lichfield and Derby. Shorter Poems. Ed. Desmond King-Hele and Stuart Harris. Sheffield: Stuart Harris, 2011. ———. Poems of School and University. Shorter Poems. Ed. Desmond KingHele and Stuart Harris. Sheffield: Stuart Harris, 2012.

Bibliography

287

Davis, Keri. ‘William Blake’s Mother: A New Identification’. Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 33, no. 2 (Fall 1999): 36–50. Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker. London: Penguin, 1991. ———. Climbing Mount Improbable. New York: Norton, 1996. ———. The God Delusion. London: Black Swan, 2007. De Almeida, Hermione. Romantic Medicine and John Keats. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. ———. ‘Romanticism and the Triumph of Life Science: Prospects for Study’. Studies in Romanticism 43 (2004): 119–34. Denslow, William. 10,000 Famous Freemasons. Richmond, VA: Macoy, 1937. De Quincey, Thomas. De Quincey’s Works 6. Edinburgh: Black, 1863. Duff, David. Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Dupuis, Charles François. The Origin of All Religious Worship. Trans. Anon; Introduction by Robert R. Richardson, Jr. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1984. Dyer, John. The Fleece: A Poem in Four Books. London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1757. Eaves, Morris. William Blake: The Early Illuminated Books. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Eco, Umberto. The Search for the Perfect Language. Trans. J. Fentress. London: HarperCollins, 1997. Elliott, Paul. ‘Erasmus Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and the Origins of the Evolutionary Worldview in British Provincial Scientific Culture, 1770–1850’. Isis 94 (2003): 1–29. ———. ‘“More Subtle than the Electric Aura”: Georgian Medical Electricity, the Spirit of Animation and the Development of Erasmus Darwin’s Psychophysiology’. Medical History 52, no. 2 (April 2008): 195–220. Ellis, George. See Anti-Jacobin. Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet Against Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969. Fara, Patricia. An Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Icon, 2002. ———. Sex, Botany and Empire: The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks. Cambridge: Icon, 2003. ———. Erasmus Darwin: Sex, Science, and Serendipity. Oxford University Press, 2012. Fairer, David. ‘A little sparring about Poetry’: Coleridge and Thelwall, 1796–8’. Coleridge Bulletin 21, New Series (Spring 2003): 20–33. Fearn, E. ‘The Derbyshire Reform Societies’. Derbyshire Archeological Journal 88 (1968): 47–59. Feldman, Paula R., ed. British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Ford, Jennifer. Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

288

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

Ford, Philip. ‘Lucretius in Early Modern France’. In The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, ed. S. Gillespie and Philip Hardie, 227–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Foreman, Amanda. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. London: Flamingo, 1999. Forster, George. A Voyage round the World. Ed. Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof, assisted by Jennifer Newell. 2 vols. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000 [1777]. Forster, Johann Reinhold. Observations Made during a Voyage round the World. Ed. Nicholas Thomas, Harriet Guest and Michael Dettelbach. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge, 2002 [1996]. Frere, John Hookham. See Anti-Jacobin. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press, 1969. Fulford, Tim, ‘Coleridge, Darwin, Linnaeus: The Sexual Politics of Botany’. Wordsworth Circle 28, no. 3 (Summer 1997): 124–30. Fulford, Tim, Debbie Lee and Peter Kitson. Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Gale, Monica R. Lucretius and the Didactic Epic. London: Bristol Classical Press, 2001. Garrard, Greg. ‘An Absence of Azaleas: Imperialism, Exoticism and Nativity in Romantic Biogeographical Ideology’. Wordsworth Circle 28. no. 3 (1997): 148–54. Garrod, H. W. Wordsworth: Lectures and Essays. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927. Garside, Peter. See Copley, Stephen. Gascoigne, John. Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ———. Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Genette, Gerard, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. George, Sam. Botany, Sexuality and Women’s Writing 1760–1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Ghosh, Pallab. ‘Black Hole Confirmed in Milky Way’. BBC Radio 4 News, 9 September 2008. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/sci/tech/7774287.stm (accessed 9 April 2013). Gilmore, Paul. Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Golden Age, The. See Anon. Goodall, Jane, ‘Electrical Romanticism’. In Frankenstein’s Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780–1830, ed. Christa Knellwolf and Jane Goodall. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.

Bibliography

289

Gould, Stephen Jay. Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. Gray, Thomas. The Poetical Works of Gray and Collins. Ed. A. L. Poole. 2nd ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1926. Green, Matthew. ‘Blake, Darwin and the Promiscuity of Knowing: Rethinking Blake’s Relationship to the Midlands Enlightenment’. Journal for EighteenthCentury Studies 30, no. 2 (June 2007): 193–208. Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: Norton, 2011. Gribbin, John. Science: A History, 1543–2001. London: Penguin, 2003. Gustafson, Richard F. ‘The Upas Tree: Pushkin and Erasmus Darwin’. PMLA 75, no. 1 (March 1960): 101–9. Hancarville, Baron d’ (Pierre-François Hugues). Collection of Etruscan, Greek, and Roman Antiquities from the Cabinet of the Honble. Wm. Hamilton. 4 vols. Naples, 1766–1767. ———. Veneres et Priapi (Veneres uti observantur in gemmis antiquis). London, 1785. Harris, Stuart. Erasmus Darwin’s Enlightenment Epic. Sheffield: Stuart Harris, 2002. Harrison, David. The Genesis of Freemasonry. Hersham, Surrey: Lewis Masonic, 2009. Harrison, James. ‘Erasmus Darwin’s View of Evolution’. Journal of the History of Ideas 32, no. 2 (April–June 1971): 247–64. Hartley, David. Observations on man, his frame, his duty, and his expectations. 2 vols. London: Hitch & Austen, 1749. Hassler, Donald M. The Comedian as the Letter. D. Erasmus Darwin’s Comic Materialism. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973. ———. Erasmus Darwin. New York: Twayne, 1973. Hawkesworth, John. Account of the Voyages … in the Southern Hemisphere. London, 1773. In South Seas: Voyaging and Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Pacific (1760–1800). http://southseas.nla.gov.au/index.html (accessed 7 February 2009). Hayden, Ruth. Mrs Delany: Her Life and Her Flowers. London: Colonnade Books, 1980. Haywood, Ian. See Leader, Zachary. Hazlitt, William. The Spirit of the Age: or Contemporary Portraits, 2nd ed. London: Henry Colburn, 1825. Helman, I.S. See Monnet, Charles. Heringman, Noah. Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2004. ———. ed. Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History. New York: SUNY Press, 2003. Hesiod, Works and Days, in Hesiod and Theognis. Trans. D. Wender. London: Penguin, 1973.

290

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

Heymans, Peter. Animality in British Romanticism: The Aesthetics of Species. London: Routledge, 2012. Hockney, David. Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters. London: Thames & Hudson, 2001. Hogarth, William. The Analysis of Beauty. Ed. R. Paulson. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997. Holmes, Richard. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. London: Harper, 2008. Horace. The Complete Odes and Epodes. Trans. W. G. Shepherd. London: Penguin, 1983. Hudson, Pat. The Industrial Revolution. London: Arnold, 1992. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. 3 vols. London: John Noone, 1739– 1740. Hunter, Allan K. ‘Evolution, Revolution and Frankenstein’s Creature’. In Frankenstein’s Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780–1830, ed. Christa Knellwolf and Jane Goodall, 133–50. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Hutton, James. Abstract of … The Theory of the Earth. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1785. Jachin and Boaz. See Anon. Jackson, Noel. ‘Rhyme and Reason: Erasmus Darwin’s Romanticism’. Modern Language Quarterly 70, no. 2. (2009): 171–94. Jacob, Margaret C. The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981. ———. Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in EighteenthCentury Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. ———. The Origins of Freemasonry: Facts and Fictions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Jakobson, Roman. ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Distrurbance’. In Fundamentals of Language, ed. R. Jakobson and Morris Halle, 90–96. The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1956. Jardine, N., J. A. Secord and E. C. Spary, eds. Cultures of Natural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Jay, Mike. The Atmosphere of Heaven: The Unnatural Experiments of Dr. Beddoes and His Sons of Genius. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Jefferson, Thomas. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Ed. P. L. Ford. New York and London: Putnam, 1896. Jones, Peter M. Industrial Enlightenment: Science, Technology and Culture in Birmingham and the West Midlands, 1760–1820. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008. Jordanova, Ludmilla. Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989.

Bibliography

291

Keats, John. The Major Works. Ed. Elizabeth B. Cook. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Kelley, Theresa M. ‘Romantic Exemplarity: Botany and “Material” Culture’. In Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History, ed. Noah Heringman, 223–54. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. ———. ‘Romantic Nature Bites Back: Adorno and Romantic Natural History’. European Romantic Review 15 (2004): 193–203. ———. Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. King, David. Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World. New York: Harmony Books, 2005 King-Hele, Desmond. Shelley: His Thought and Work, 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1971. ———. Erasmus Darwin, 1731–1802. London: Macmillan, 1973. ———. Doctor of Revolution: The Life and Genius of Erasmus Darwin. London: Faber, 1977. ———. Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic Poets. Macmillan, 1986. ———. Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement. London: Giles de la Mare, 1999. ———. ‘Designing Better Steering for Carriages (and Cars), with a Glance at Other Inventions’. In The Genius of Erasmus Darwin, ed. C.U.M. Smith and Robert Arnott, 197–216. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Kitson, Peter. See Fulford, Tim. Klingender, Francis D. Art and the Industrial Revolution. Ed. and rev. Arthur Elton. St Albans: Paladin, 1972 [1947]. Knellwolf, Christa, and Jane Goodall, eds. Frankenstein’s Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780–1830. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Knight, David M. ‘Epilogue: “One Great Slaughter-House the Warring World”: Living in Revolutionary Times’. In The Genius of Erasmus Darwin, ed. C.U.M. Smith and Robert Arnott, 357–64. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Knight, Richard Payne. Expedition into Sicily. Ed. Claudia Stumpf. London: British Museum Publications, 1986 [1777]. ———. A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus and its Connexion with the Mystic Theology of the Ancients. In Two Essays on the Worship of Priapus, ed. Anon. London: privately printed, 1865 [1786]. ———. The Landscape, A Didactic Poem in Three Books. 2nd ed. London: G. Nicol, 1795. ———. The Progress of Civil Society: A Didactic Poem in Six Books. London: G. Nicol, 1796. ———. An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste. 4th ed. London: T. Payne & J. White, 1805. ———. An Inquiry into the Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology. London: A. J. Valpy, 1818.

292

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

———. Alfred: A Romance in Rhyme. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1823. Krause, Ernst. Erasmus Darwin. With a Preliminary Notice by Charles Darwin. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1880. Kreiter, Carmen S. ‘Evolution in William Blake’. Studies in Romanticism 4, no. 2 (Winter 1965): 110–8. Labbé, Jacqueline. Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism. London and New York: Macmillan and St Martin’s, 1998. Laird, Mark, and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, eds., Mrs Delany and her Circle. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009. Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. La Mettrie, Julien Offray de. Machine Man and Other Writings. Trans. and ed. Ann Thomson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Lawrence, William. Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man. London: J. Callow, 1819. Leader, Zachary, and Ian Haywood, eds., Romantic Period Writings 1798–1832: An Anthology. London: Routledge, 1998. Leask, Nigel. British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). ———. ‘Mythology’. In An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, ed. Iain McCalman and Jon Mee, 338–45. Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Lee, Debbie. See Fulford, Tim. Lefkowitz, Mary R., and Guy MacLean Rogers, eds., Black Athena Revisited. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. L’Enclos, Ninon de. Life, Letters and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L’Enclos, the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century. Ed. and trans. C. H. Robinson and W. H. Overton. Chicago: Lion Publishing Co., 1903. Linnaeus, Carolus. Systema Naturae. Leyden: Haak, 1736. ———. A System of Vegetables ... translated ... by a Botanical Society at Lichfield. Lichfield: J. Jackson, 1783. ———. The Families of Plants ... translated by a Botanical Society at Lichfield. Lichfield: J. Jackson, 1787. List, Julia. ‘Erasmus Darwin and the Poetry of Science’. PhD diss., University of Melbourne, 2011. Liu, Lydia H. ‘Robinson Crusoe’s Earthenware Pot: Science, Aesthetics and the Metaphysics of True Porcelain’. In Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History, ed. N. Heringman, 139–71. New York: SUNY Press, 2003. Lockhart, John Gibson. ‘The Cockney School of Poetry No. IV’. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 3 (1818): 519–24. Logan, J. V., The Poetry and Aesthetics of Erasmus Darwin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1936.

Bibliography

293

Lovelock, James. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Lowes, John Livingstone. The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura. Translated as On the Nature of Things by W.H.D. Rouse, rev. M. F. Smith. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Mackey, A. G. The Symbolism of Freemasonry. New York: Clark & Maynard, 1869. Mackey, A. G., and H. L. Haywood. Encyclopedia of Freemasonry. Chicago: Masonic History Company, 1909. MacLean Rogers, Guy. See Lefkowitz, Mary R, Mahood, M. M. The Poet as Botanist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Manuel, Frank E. The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959. Mason, William. The English Garden: A Poem in Four Books. York: A. Ward, 1783. Mathias, T. J. The Pursuits of Literature: A Satirical Poem in Four Dialogues. 5th ed. London: T. Beckett, 1797. Matthews, John (attributed). A Sketch, from The Landscape, A Didactic Poem. Addressed to R. P. Knight, Esq. London: R. Faulder, 1794. McCalman, Iain. Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988. ———, ed., with Jon Mee. An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro: Count Cagliostro, Master of Magic in the Age of Reason. London: Century, 2003. McCusick, James C. ‘“Kubla Khan” and the Theory of the Earth’. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life, ed. Nicholas Roe, 134–51. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. McIntosh, Christopher. The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason: Eighteenth-Century Rosicrucianism in Central Europe and Its Relationship to the Enlightenment. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992. McNeil, Maureen. Under the Banner of Science: Erasmus Darwin and His Age. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. ———, ed., with Iain McCalman. An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, Oxford University Press, 1999. Messmann, Frank J. Richard Payne Knight: The Twilight of Virtuosity. The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1974. Meteyard, Eliza. The Life of Josiah Wedgwood from His Private Correspondence and Family Papers. 2 vols. London: Hurst & Beckett, 1866.

294

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

Milton, John. Poetical Works. Ed. D. Bush. London: Oxford University Press, 1969. Mitchell, J.W.S. The History of Freemasonry and Masonic Digest, vol. 2. Marietta, GA: Mitchell, 1859. Monboddo, James Burnett, Lord. Of the Origin and Progress of Language, vol. 1. Edinburgh and London: Kincaid, Creech & Cadell, 1773. Monnet, Charles, and I. S. Helman. Les principales journées de la révolution. Paris, 1838. Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de. The Spirit of Laws. Trans. T. Nugent. 2 vols. London: J. Nourse & P. Valliant, 1750. Montfaucon, Father Bernard de. Antiquity Explained, and Represented in Sculptures. Trans. D Humphreys. London: Tonson & Watts, 1721. Montolieu, Maria. The Enchanted Plants, Fables in Verse. London: Thomas Bensley, 1800. Mylonas, G. E. Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961. Packham, Catherine. ‘The Science and Poetry of Animation: Personification, Analogy and Erasmus Darwin’s Loves of the Plants’. Romanticism 10, no. 2 (2004): 191–208. Page, Michael R. ‘The Darwin Before Darwin: Erasmus Darwin, Visionary Science, and Romantic Poetry’. Papers on Language and Literature 41. no. 2 (2005): 146–69. ———. The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H. G. Wells: Science, Evolution, and Ecology. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012. Paine, Thomas. The Age of Reason; Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology. New York: Putnam, 1896. ———. ‘The Origin of Freemasonry’. Complete Writings, vol. 2. Ed. P. S. Foner, 830–41. New York: Citadel Press, 1945. Palter, Robert. ‘Eighteenth Century Historiography in Black Athena’. In Black Athena Revisited, ed. M. R. Lefkowitz and G. M. Rogers, 209–66. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim). ‘A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on other Spirits’. In Four Treatises of Theophrastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus. Trans. and ed. C. L. Temkin et al., 213–54. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1941. Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth. 3 vols. Cambridge: Lutterworth, 1992–1993. Peacock, Thomas Love. Nightmare Abbey and Crochet Castle. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. Penny, Nicholas. See Clarke, Michael. Pevsner, Nikolaus, The Englishness of English Art. London: Penguin, 1964 [1956]. ———. ‘Richard Payne Knight’. Pevsner on Art and Architecture: The Radio Talks, ed. Stephen Games, 6–11. London: Methuen, 2002 [1947]. Piggott, Stuart. William Stukeley, An Eighteenth-Century Antiquary. Rev. ed. London: Thames & Hudson, 1985.

Bibliography

295

Pluche, Noël Antoine. The History of the Heavens, considered according to the notions of the poets and philosophers, compared with the doctrines of Moses. Trans. J. B. de Freval. 2 vols. London, 1740. Polwhele, Richard. The Unsex’d Females. London: Cadell and Davies, 1798. Pope, Alexander. The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text. Ed. J. Butt. London: Methuen, 1968. Porden, Eleanor Anne. The Veils; or, The Triumph of Constancy. London: John Murray, 1815. Porter, Dahlia. ‘Scientific Analogy and Literary Taxonomy in Darwin’s Loves of the Plants’. European Romantic Review 18 (2007): 213–21. Porter, Roy. ‘Erasmus Darwin: Doctor of Evolution?’ In History, Humanity and Evolution, vol. 1, ed. J. R. Moore, 36–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ———. Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World. London: Penguin, 2001 [2000]. ———. Flesh in the Age of Reason. London: Penguin, 2005. Potter, George Reuben. ‘Mark Akenside, Prophet of Evolution’. Modern Philology 24, no. 1 (August 1926): 55–64. Price, Martin. ‘The Picturesque Moment’. In From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1965. Price, Uvedale. Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful. 2nd ed. London: J. Robson, 1796. Priestley, Joseph. Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit. London: J. Johnson, 1777. ———. Priestley’s Writings on Philosophy, Science and Politics. Ed. John A. Passmore. New York: Collier, 1965. Priestman, Martin. Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ———. ‘The Progress of Society? Darwin’s Early Drafts for The Temple of Nature’. In The Genius of Erasmus Darwin, ed. C.U.M. Smith and Robert Arnott, 307–19. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. ———. ‘Lucretius in Romantic and Victorian Britain’. In A Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, ed. S. Gillespie and P. Hardie, 289–305. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ———. ‘Visions of Matter: Lucretius and the Masons in the Romantic Late Enlightenment’. In Pan tra i Filosifi, ed. G. Carabelli and P. Zanardi, 163–80. Padova: Il Poligrafo, 2008. ———. A Place to Stand: Questions of Address in Shelley’s Political Pamphlets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ———. ‘Didactic and Scientific Poetry’. In The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Volume 3: 1660–1790, ed. David Hopkins and Charles Martindale, 401–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Primer, Irwin. ‘Erasmus Darwin’s Temple of Nature: Progress, Evolution, and the Eleusinian Mysteries’. Journal of the History of Ideas 25 (1964): 58–76.

296

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

Reed, Edward S. From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to William James. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Richards, Robert J. The Romantic Conception of Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Richardson, Alan. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ———. ‘Erasmus Darwin and the Fungus School’. Wordsworth Circle 33 (2002): 113–16. Riskin, Jessica. Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Rittenbush, Philip C. ‘Erasmus Darwin’s Second Published Poem’. Review of English Studies 13, no. 50, New Series (May 1962): 158–60. Roberts, Hugh, Shelley and the Chaos of History. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1997. Robison, John. Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe. 4th ed. London, 1798. Robinson, Andrew. The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young, the Anonymous Polymath Who Proved Newton Wrong, Explained How We See, Cured the Sick, and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone, Among Other Feats of Genius. Oxford: Oneworld, 2006. Robinson, Mary. Mary Robinson: Selected Poems. Ed. J. Pascoe. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000. Roe, Nicholas. Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988. ———, ed. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Ross, Robert N. ‘“To Charm thy Curious Eye”: Erasmus Darwin’s Poetry at the Vestibule of Knowledge’. Journal of the History of Ideas 32, no. 3 (1971): 379–94. Rousseau, G. S. ‘The Sorrows of Priapus: Anticlericalism, Homosocial Desire, and Richard Payne Knight’. In Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, 101–55. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987. ———. ‘Political Gout: Dissolute Patients, Deceitful Physicians, and other Blue Devils’. Notes and Records of the Royal Society 63 (2009): 277–96. Ruston, Sharon. Shelley and Vitality. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Schaffer, Simon. ‘John Michell and Black Holes’. Journal for the History of Astronomy 10 (1979): 42–43. Schama, Simon. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. Schiebinger, Londa. Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. Schneider, Elisabeth. Coleridge, Opium and ‘Kubla Khan’. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953.

Bibliography

297

Schuchard, Marsha Keith. Why Mrs Blake Cried: William Blake and the Erotic Imagination. London: Random House/Century, 2006. Secord, J. A., See Jardine, N. Seligo, Carlos. ‘The Monsters of Botany and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’. In Science Fiction: Critical Frontiers, ed. K. Sayer and J. Moore, 69–84. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. Setzer, Sharon. ‘“Pond’rous Engines” in “Outraged Groves”: The Environmental Argument of Anna Seward’s “Colebrook Dale”’. European Romantic Review 18, no. 1 (2007): 69–82. Seward, Anna. Original Sonnets on Various Subjects; and Odes Paraphrased from Horace. London: G. Sael, 1799. ———. Memoirs of Dr Darwin, Chiefly During his Residence at Lichfield. London: J. Johnson, 1804. ———. The Poetical Works of Anna Seward. 3 vols. Ed. Walter Scott. Edinburgh: Ballantyne, 1810. ———. Bluestocking Feminism: Writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 1738–1785. Volume 4: Anna Seward. Ed. Jennifer Kelly. London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999. Sewell, Elizabeth. The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960. Sha, Richard C. ‘Scientific Forms of Sexual Knowledge in Romanticism’. Romanticism on the Net 23 (August 2001). http://www.erudit.org/revue/ ron/2001/v/n23/005993ar.html#re1no28 (accessed 9 April 2013). Shaw, George Bernard. Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch. London: Constable, 1921. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: Or The Modern Prometheus – The 1818 Text. Ed. Marilyn Butler. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Major Works. Ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Shenk, David. The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told about Genetics, Talent and IQ Is Wrong. New York: Doubleday, 2010. Shteir, Ann B. Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England 1760 to 1860. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. ———. ‘Flora primavera or Flora meretrix? Iconography, Gender, and Science’. Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 36. no. 1 (2007): 147–68. Simili, Rafaella. ‘Two Special Doctors: Erasmus Darwin and Luigi Galvani’. In The Genius of Erasmus Darwin, ed. C.U.M. Smith and Robert Arnott, 145–58. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Singh, Simon. Big Bang: The Most Important Scientific Discovery of All Time and Why You Need to Know About It. London: Harper Perennial, 2004. Siskin, Clifford, and William Warner, eds. This Is Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Smellie, William, ed. Encyclopaedia Britannica. 3 vols. London: Donaldson, 1773.

298

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 2 vols. Ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner and W. B. Todd. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976. ———. The Wealth of Nations, Books 1–3. Ed. Andrew Skinner. Harmondsworth: Penguin Pelican, 1979. ———. Lectures On Jurisprudence. Ed. R.. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael and P. G. Stein. Oxford: Clarendon, 1982. Smith, Charlotte. Conversations Introducing Poetry, Chiefly on Subjects of Natural History. 2 vols. London: J. Johnson, 1804. Smith, C.U.M. ‘All from Fibres: Erasmus Darwin’s Evolutionary Psychobiology’. In The Genius of Erasmus Darwin, ed. C.U.M. Smith and Robert Arnott, 133– 43. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Smith, C.U.M., and Robert Arnott, eds. The Genius of Erasmus Darwin. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Southey, Robert. ‘Sayers’s Works’. Quarterly Review 35 (1827): 198–201. Spary, Emma. ‘Political, Natural and Bodily Economies’. In Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine, J. A. Secord and E. C. Spary, 178–95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Spence, Joseph. Polymetis: or, An Enquiry concerning the Agreement between the Works of the Roman Poets, and the Remains of the Antient Artists. 2nd ed. London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1755. Spender, Stephen. Poems. London: Faber & Faber, 1933. Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Ed. M. and N. New. London: Penguin Classics, 2003. Stott, Rebecca. Darwin’s Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. Stuart, Tristram. Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India. London: Harper Collins, 2006. Suster, Gerald. The Hell-Fire Friars. London: Robson Books, 2000. Syson, Lydia. Doctor of Love: James Graham and His Celestial Bed. Richmond, Surrey: Alma Books, 2008. Taylor, Thomas. A Dissertation on the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries. Amsterdam: Weitstein, 1790. Temple, Sir William. ‘Upon the Garden of Epicurus, or Of Gardening in the Year 1685’. In Five Miscellaneous Essays by Sir William Temple, ed. S. H. Monk. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963. Teute, Fredrika J. ‘The Loves of the Plants; or, the Cross-Fertilization of Science and Desire at the End of the Eighteenth Century’. Huntington Library Quarterly 63. no. 3 (2000): 319–45. Thomas, Nicholas. Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook. London: Penguin, 2004. Thomson, Ann. ‘Pantheism and Enlightenment: The State of the Debate’. In Pan tra i Filosifi, ed. G. Carabelli and P. Zanardi, 17–29. Padova: Il Poligrafo, 2008.

Bibliography

299

Thompson, E. P. Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Toland, John. A Critical History of the Celtic Religion and Learning: containing an account of the Druids. London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, 1719. Tooke, John Horne. Epea pteroenta. Or, the Diversions of Purley. Part I. London: J. Johnson, 1786. Towers, Eric. Dashwood: The Man and the Myth. London: Crucible, 1986. Tregear, E. ‘Hina’s Voyage to the Sacred Isle’. Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand 18 (1886): article 65, 498. Trott, Nicola. ‘Wordsworth’s Loves of the Plants’. In 1800: The New Lyrical Ballads, ed. N. Trott and S. Perry, 141–68. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Uglow, Jenny. The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future. London: Faber & Faber, 2002. Valsania, Maurizio. ‘Another and the Same: Nature and Human Beings in Erasmus Darwin’s Doctrines of Love and Imagination’. In The Genius of Erasmus Darwin, ed. C.U.M. Smith and Robert Arnott, 337–55. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Vickers, Neil. ‘Coleridge’s “Abstruse Researches”’. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life, ed. Nicholas Roe, 155–74. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Vico, Giambattista. The New Science. 3rd ed. Trans. D. Marsh. London: Penguin, 2001. Villars, Abbé N. de Montfaucon de. Comte de Gabalis. Trans. Anon. London: William Rider & Son, 1913. Virgil. Virgil with an English Translation by H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G. P. Goold, Vol. 1, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I-VI. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Volney, Constantin-François. Travels through Syria and Egypt, in the years 1783, 1784, and 1785. 2 vols. Trans. Anon. London: G. G. J. & J. Robinson, 1787. ———. The Ruins, or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires. Trans. Anon. London: J. Johnson, 1795. Walpole, Horace. The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence. Ed. W. S. Lewis et al. 48 vols. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press and Oxford University Press, 1937–1983. Warburton, William. The works of the Right Reverend William Warburton, Lord Bishop of Gloucester. 7 vols. London: T. Cadell, 1788. Warner, William. See Siskin, Clifford. Weisberg-Roberts, Alicia. See Laird, Mark. Williams, Raymond. Keywords : A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Flamingo, 1983. Wilson, Philip K. ‘Erasmus Darwin on Human Reproductive Generation: Placing Heredity within Historical and Zoonomian Contexts’. In The Genius of Erasmus Darwin, ed. C.U.M. Smith and Robert Arnott, 113–32. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.

300

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

Withering, William. A Botanical Arrangement of All the Vegetables Naturally Growing in Great Britain. 2 vols. Birmingham: M. Swinney, 1776. Woof, Robert. William Wordsworth 1793–1820: The Critical Heritage. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Wordsworth, William. Wordsworth: Poetical Works. Ed. T. Hutchinson, rev. E. De Selincourt. London: Oxford University Press, 1950. ———. The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850. Ed. J. Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and S. Gill. New York and London: Norton, 1979. ———. The Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth. Ed. Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Worrall, David. ‘William Blake and Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden’. Bulletin of the New York Public Library 78 (1974–1975): 397–417. Wu, Duncan, ed. Women Romantic Poets: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. ———, ed. Romanticism: An Anthology. 3rd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Wunder, Jennifer N. Keats, Hermeticism and the Secret Societies. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. Wylie, Ian. ‘Coleridge and the Lunaticks’. In The Coleridge Connection: Essays for Thomas McFarland, ed. R. Gravil and Molly Lefebure. London: Macmillan, 1990. Yates, Frances A. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. London and Oxford: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978 [1964]. ———. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972. Yeo, Richard. Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Index Note: In some entries, the most significant sections are shown in bold. Abernethy, John 132–3, 135 Ackroyd, Peter 97 Addison, Joseph 143, 234, 273 Aldiss, Brian 100 The Analytical Review 9, 129 The Annual Review 123 The Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner 8, 74, 201, 203–7, 240 The Loves of the Triangles 3, 5, 201, 204–7, 251 The Progress of Man 201, 203–5 Akenside, Mark 36, 37, 119, 251 Albion Flour Mill 97 alchemy 139, 144, 149–51, 183, 222–3 Aldini, Giovanni 134 Alston, Charles 71 American Revolution 2, 14, 16–18, 31, 32, 93, 100, 162, 190, 192, 195, 207, 213, 221 antiquarianism 8, 13, 14, 18, 19, 54, 143–4, 169, 173, 221 Areoi (Arreoy) 81–4 Aristotle 31, 41, 62 Arkwright, Richard 14, 16–17, 37, 94, 96, 251 Ashton, T. S. 212, 214 astronomy, see cosmology atheism 2, 21, 26, 62, 69, 106–10, 120, 131, 136, 177, 183, 198, 200, 207–10, 226–7, 229, 243 atomism 26, 104–5, 134–6, 138, 143, 263 Bacon, Sir Francis 10, 141–3, 151, 165, 187, 207, 221, 244 Bacon, Roger 100, 184 Ballantyne, Andrew 170 Banier, Antoine 143 Banks, Sir Joseph 8, 11, 13, 14, 16–17, 19–20, 24, 54, 63, 65, 66, 73, 74, 81–4 , 163, 169, 173, 223, 242

Bannerman, Anne 253–4 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia 16–17, 19, 37, 249–51, 257 Barrett, David V. 213, 214 Barruel, Abbé Augustin de, 8, 208–10, 213, 223 Beddoes, Thomas 15, 16–17, 97, 198–9, 205, 224, 229 Berkeley, George 131, 229, 231 Bernal, Martin, Black Athena 7, 31–2, 89, 139, 180–4, 189–90, 192, 212, 214, 217–18, 224, 239–40 Bewell, Alan 4, 5, 45, 63–6, 70, 72, 74–7, 81, 187, 231, 245, 283 The Bible 112–13, 115, 123–4, 141, 145, 150, 165, 183, 184, 190–1, 220, 221, 262–3, 269, 273, 278–9, 281 ‘big bang’ 2, 17, 24, 25, 37, 104–10, 112, 117, 124, 134, 136, 156, 263 Bilsborrow, Dewhurst 67, 232–3 Birmingham 2, 5, 10, 13, 95, 97-9, 163, 193, 197 Black, Joseph 8, 13, 14, 16–17 black holes 13, 18, 108 Blackmore, Sir Richard 26, 107 Blackstone, Bernard 245 Blake, William 14, 15, 16–17, 56, 140, 146, 147, 157, 176, 217–23, 228, 233, 257 America 220 The Book of Thel 219 The First Book of Urizen 220, 222 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 218, 219, 222, 228 Milton 97, 221 Songs of Innocence and Experience 51, 74, 219–21, 223 Visions of the Daughters of Albion 194, 219, 220 Bligh, William 83 Bloom, Harold 105 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich 132–3

302

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

Bonaparte, Napoleon 163, 181, 249 Boothby, Brooke 14, 16–17, 97 Borges, Jorge Luis 30, 48 botany 4–5, 7, 14, 16–18, 19, 21, 23–6, 45–56, 63–91, 94, 102, 108, 129, 148, 158, 169, 199, 219, 229, 234–5, 243–4, 248, 250–3 Boulton, Matthew 1, 2, 8, 14, 16–17, 65, 87, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101 Brewer, William Dean 242 Brindley, Thomas 14, 24, 96 Bristol 15, 16–17, 196, 224 Brooke, Henry 26 Brooks, Robin 175 Brown, Dan 139, 213 Brown, John 133 Brown, Lancelot ‘Capability’ 58, 169–70 Browne, Janet 4, 73, 75, 77–9, 129 Bryant, Jacob 145–6 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de 8, 71, 112–14, 120–1, 126, 189, 191 Burdett, Sir Francis 160, 197 Burke, Edmund 8, 41, 162, 170–2, 198–9, 209 Burnet, James, see Monboddo, Lord Butler, Marilyn 43, 133, 135 Butler, Samuel 113, 121 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 22, 51, 65, 132, 217, 218, 220, 237, 239–42, 245, 255, 257 Cain: A Mystery 241–2 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers 240–1 Cagliostro, Count 140, 160, 165, 213 Calè, Luisa 72, 74, 75, 201 Cambridge 13, 15, 16–18, 108, 233, 259–60 Cambyses 178–9 camera obscura 48, 53 Camper, Petrus 189 Canning, George (Senior) 203 Canning, George (Junior), 162, 203, 209; see also Anti-Jacobin Carabelli, Giancarlo ix, 173, 199 Carter, Tim 97 Casaubon, Isaac 183 Cavendish, George 13, 16–17, 19 Cavendish, Henry 16–17

Champollion, Jean-François 182–3 chemistry 4–5, 15, 17–18, 27, 41, 56, 63, 104–5, 134–5, 142, 145, 185, 195, 234–5, 248, 253–5 Chesterton, G. K. 218 chiasmus 29, 36–40, 59–60, 226 Christianity 10, 12, 13, 15, 112, 136, 145– 8, 156, 169, 173–5, 178, 180–1, 183, 191, 205, 207–10, 213, 221–2, 224, 239, 244, 246, 254, 276 Clark, Peter 212–14 Clarke, Michael 170 classicism 14, 15, 26–7, 31, 41, 46, 49, 57, 73, 93, 103, 141–4, 164, 167, 180– 4, 221, 239–40, 244–7, 271, 273, 276; see also Greece, Lucretius, mythology, Portland Vase, Rome Claudian (Roman poet) 46, 49, 71, 225 Coffey, Donna 60, 98–9 Colebrookdale 98–9, 102 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 15, 16–17, 34, 40, 44, 90, 112, 123, 128–9, 131, 196, 201, 217–18, 223–31, 233, 236–7, 239, 244, 247, 248, 249, 257 Biographia Literaria 40, 128–9, 226–7, 231, 240 ‘The Eolian Harp’ 44, 90, 227–8 ‘The Hour when we shall Meet Again’ 226 Letters 6, 9, 12, 15, 134, 224, 226–7, 229–30, 248 Lyrical Ballads 3, 39, 44, 227 Notebooks 34, 44, 227 Cook, Captain James 16–17, 21, 24, 58, 74, 81, 83, 223 cosmology 4, 5, 16–18, 26, 106–10, 145–6, 266, 278, 281 couplets 20, 22, 29, 36–9, 44, 50, 99, 104, 194, 227, 233, 246, 257, 258 Cowley, Abraham 26, 71 Cowper, William 8, 14, 16–17, 26, 36, 37, 74, 89, 129, 193, 243, 247, 249 ‘The Castaway’ 86 Reviews of Darwin’s poetry 9, 129 The Task 26, 36, 37, 62, 63, 83, 131, 227, 240 Craven, Maxwell 112 Crewe, Emma 46, 47, 94, 201

Index Cronin, Richard 43 Cryer, Rev. Neville B. 13, 162, 163 Cullen, William 8, 13, 16–17, 133 Cupid (Eros) 22, 25, 46–7, 49–50, 56–7, 89–90, 94, 127, 142–4, 150, 154, 157–8, 175–7, 263 Cuvier, Georges, Baron 71, 114, 241 Darby, Abraham 98 Darwin, Charles (son of E. D.) 21 Darwin, Charles (grandson of E. D.) 2, 5, 31, 69, 104, 113, 118–21, 123, 137, 139, 151, 192, 207, 214, 217, 230 The Life of Erasmus Darwin 58–9, 120, 215 Darwin, Elizabeth (second wife of E.D.) 14–15, 21–3, 35, 61 Darwin, Erasmus letters 2, 162, 190, 195 life 1–3, 12–15, 20–3, 58, 70, 110, 160–1, 197–8, 204, 224 major poems: The Botanic Garden 20, 23–24, 36–8, 45–115, 170, 175–7, 201–5, 218–27, 235, 240, 243, 258; see also The Economy of Vegetation and The Loves of the Plants The Economy of Vegetation 6–7, 20, 23–4, 29, 45, 51–68, 91– 102, 103, 106–12, 114, 140–50, 159, 170, 172, 175–80, 184–5, 191–3, 195–8, 219–22, 225, 228, 241–6, 252–6, 258, 267 The Loves of the Plants 3, 7, 20, 21, 23–7, 30, 33, 39, 45–56, 58–60, 65–8, 69–91, 94, 113–14, 128–30, 141, 173, 194, 197, 199–204, 219–21, 226, 241–4, 250–3, 258 The Progress of Society xiv, 1–2, 7, 23, 25, 27, 29, 38–9, 157, 169, 180, 184–92, 196–8, 204–6, 210–2, 258, 259–82 The Temple of Nature, or The Origin of Society 2, 6–7, 20, 23–7, 29–30, 32–34, 40, 42–4, 65–8, 89–91, 96, 103–6, 110–3, 116–38, 139–42, 150–67,

303

170–2, 177, 184–6, 192, 195–7, 206–13 , 232–3, 237, 239, 241–7, 249, 255–8, 259–67, 270–1, 280 shorter poems 20–3, 35, 38, 54, 199 prose: The Families of Plants, translated from Linnaeus 25, 73 Phytologia, or The Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening 25–6, 88–90, 126, 194–5 A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools 15, 25–6, 71, 97 A System of Vegetables, translated from Linnaeus 25, 73, 84 Zoonomia, or The Laws of Organic Life 2, 13, 25–6, 29, 42, 88, 103, 112, 115–16, 124–31, 135, 205–6, 220, 225, 228, 230–3, 235, 272 Darwin, Mary (first wife of E. D.) 1, 13, 272 Darwin, Robert (father of E. D.) 13, 114 Dashwood, Sir Francis 164 David, Jacques-Louis 210 Davy, Humphry 15, 16–17, 224, 250, 254–5 Dawkins, Richard 119–20 Day, Thomas 14–15, 16–17, 26, 193, 249 De Almeida, Hermione 245 De la Croix, Demetrius 26, 71 Deism 13, 18, 164, 167, 177, 183, 214 Delany, Mary 8, 16–17, 54, 62, 78, 87 Della Porta, Giambattista 53 Denslow, William 162, 163 De Quincey, Thomas 159 Derby 14–15, 23, 97, 163, 224, 232 Derby Philosophical Society 16–17, 163 Derby Society for Political Information 16–17, 197–8, 209 Devonshire, Georgiana, Duchess of 13, 16–17 didactic poetry 26–7, 36, 49, 50, 169, 203, 206, 218, 229–30, 234, 248–56 Diderot, Denis 10, 199, 203 Dilettanti (Society of) 14, 16–18, 164, 173, 175, 178, 182, 212 Drummond, William Hamilton 14 Duff, David 229, 242

304

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

Dupuis, Charles-François 8, 146, 148, 163, 164, 175, 183, 212 Dyer, John 36, 98 Eden, Garden of 65, 124, 150–4, 159–60, 195, 212, 219, 241–2, 246, 253, 263 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell 15–17, 26 Edgeworth, Maria 15–17, 19, 74 Edinburgh 11, 13–14, 16–18, 21, 111, 128, 133, 140, 160, 163 Edinburgh Review 123 Egypt 5, 32, 41, 54, 86–7, 124, 139–40, 144–9, 153–60, 164–5, 175, 178–84, 189, 192, 193–4, 210–4, 217, 220–1, 228, 233–4, 240, 245 Ehret, Georg 76 electricity 13, 14, 22–3, 86, 101, 134–6, 141, 196, 243 Eleusinian Mysteries 29, 60, 141, 153–62, 165, 175–7, 185, 192, 210–2, 225, 239–40, 246–7, 258, 265, 267 Elliott, Paul 198 Ellis, George, see Anti-Jacobin empire 7, 63–5, 16–18, 74, 101, 121, 160, 180–2, 189–91, 214, 239–40, 262, 264 Encyclopaedia Britannica 72 Encyclopédie 199, 203 Enlightenment 3, 5, 7–8, 9–12, 27, 29–33, 40–4, 62, 68, 99, 104, 139–41, 151–4, 158–60, 164, 169, 181, 186, 209, 212–15, 217–19, 221–4, 227– 8, 236, 239, 249–50, 256, 257–8; see also Scottish Enlightenment epic poetry 26–7, 52, 93, 169, 180, 237; see also similes Epicureanism 62, 63, 78–9, 105–6, 110, 143, 169, 200, 206, 230 Erskine, Thomas 16–17, 198 Etruria Works 95, 102 Euhemerus 185–6, 192, 212 evolution 2, 5, 7, 9, 14, 24–6, 30–2, 37–8, 70, 85, 88–91, 98, 103–21, 123–7, 134, 136, 139, 142, 165, 171, 186, 189, 191, 192, 205–7, 220, 230, 233, 241, 243, 255, 257–8, 263, 265 Fara, Patricia 5, 6, 42, 74, 84, 96, 108, 113, 120, 137, 162, 193

Fairer, David 226 Fearn, E. 197 Feldman, Paula R. 249 Ferguson, Adam 187 Ficino, Marsilio 149 Flowers of Literature 123 Franklin, Benjamin 8, 14, 16–17, 135, 162–3, 190, 195–6, 207, 209, 213–14, 250 French Revolution 2, 11, 43, 71, 74, 93, 108, 146, 148, 167, 172, 180, 183, 187–92, 193, 195–9, 205, 208–14, 220–1, 223, 233–4, 249–50, 257 Frere, John Hookham, see Anti-Jacobin Ford, Jennifer 225 Ford, Philip 154 Fordyce, David 160, 213 Foreman, Amanda 13 Forster, Georg 83, 223 Forster, Johann Reinhold 83 Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things 7, 29–32, 40, 69, 89, 139, 180, 192, 214, 217 Franklin, Benjamin 8, 14, 16–17, 135, 162, 163, 190, 195–6, 207, 209, 213–14, 250 Freemasonry 6–8, 11, 13–14, 16–19, 83, 139–40, 144, 148, 151, 154, 159–67, 177–8, 183, 193, 197, 207–14, 222–3, 245, 247 Frye, Northrop 221 Fulford, Tim 4, 5, 71, 74, 75, 134, 196 Fuseli, Henry 8, 14, 15–17, 55, 78, 124, 125, 129–30, 146–7, 154–5, 220, 223 Gale, Monica R. 27 Galton, Francis 15 Galton, Samuel 15 Galvani, Luigi 134–6 gardens 21, 26, 45–6, 51, 52–68, 74, 85, 94, 98–9, 101, 117, 143, 150, 153, 169–70, 172, 180, 199, 201, 243, 246, 263 Garrard, Greg 64 Garrod, H. W. 233 Gascoigne, John 11, 19, 20, 163 Genette, Gerard 46–8 Gentleman’s Magazine 58–9

Index geology 4, 5, 14, 16–18, 98, 103, 106, 110–6, 124, 253, 255 George II, King, 38 George III, King, 2, 19, 63, 65, 73, 101 George, Sam 70, 75, 79, 81, 84, 250, 251, 253 Gilmore, Paul 243 Godwin, William 14, 201, 213, 226, 243 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 72, 121, 163 The Golden Age (satire) 198–9, 204 Goldsmith, Oliver 195 Good, John Mason 14, 16–17 Goodall, Jane 132 Goodenough, Samuel 72 Gould, Stephen Jay 118 Graham, James 134, 222 Gray, Thomas 61, 63 Greece 29, 32, 41, 66, 139, 144–5, 148, 153, 156–8, 178–84, 189–90, 217, 239–40, 245–7, 257, 273 Greek 26, 37, 42, 48, 49, 69–70, 73 Greenblatt, Stephen 105 Greville, Charles 16–17, 175 Gribbin, John 108, 112, 113, 120 Haeckel, Ernst 118, Hamilton, Sir William 16–17, 169, 173, 175 Hancarville, Baron d’ (Pierre-François Hugues) 169, 173, 175, 177 Harris, Stuart 20, 21, 27 Harrison, David 213 Harrison, James 119 Hartley, David 40–2, 128, 131, 227, 229, 231 Hassler, Donald M. 3, 5, 37 Hawkesworth, John. 81, 83 Haydn, Joseph 108, 163 Hayden, Ruth 54 Haywood, H. L. 162 Heberden, William 16–17 Helman, I. S. 211 Heringman, Noah 4, 112, 116 Hermeticism 139–40, 149, 165, 178, 183, 245 Herschel, Caroline 107 Herschel, William 8, 16–17, 25, 106–10, 112, 225, 241, 242 Hesiod (Greek poet) 143, 186 Heymans, Peter 171

305

hieroglyphics 32, 41–2, 145, 153, 160, 182, 264, 266, 271 Hockney, David 53 Hogarth, William 8, 41, 140, 154, 162, 163–4, 167, 172 Holmes, Richard 108, 110, 133, 134 Homer (Greek poet) 27, 141, 239, 264 Hooke, Robert 20 Horace (Roman poet) 26, 49, 57, 60, 63, 201 hortus siccus 54, 56, 74 Howard, John 160, 197, 250 Howard, Mary, see Darwin, Mary Hume, David 8, 13, 16–17, 40, 41, 115 Hunter, Allan K. 132 Hunter, John 8, 16, 18, 135, 220 Hunter, William 8, 13, 16, 18, 220 Hutchinson, Lucy 14 Hutton, James 8, 14, 16, 18, 106, 111–12, 116 Illuminati 139, 140, 151, 207–10, 213 illustrations 14, 47–48, 55, 56, 67, 76, 79–80, 124–5, 130, 143, 147, 155, 157, 174, 176, 202, 218, 219 Industrial Revolution 2, 93–4, 99, 235; see also machinery Isis 139, 154–6, 158, 210–1 Jachin and Boaz: or, an Authentic Key to the Door of Free-masonry 165 Jacson, Maria 74, 252 Jackson, Noel 105, 229 Jacob, Margaret C. 11, 140, 160, 164–5, 177, 213 Jakobson, Roman 40 Jay, Mike 97, 197, 199 Jefferson, Thomas 14, 16, 18, 207, 213 Johnson, Joseph 14–16, 18, 55, 129, 146, 185, 219, 220, 222, 233 Johnson, Samuel 73, 93 Jones, Peter M. 10 Jones, Sir William 178, 183 Jordanova, Ludmilla154 Kames, Henry Home, Lord 41, 187 Kauffman, Angelica 8, 78, 199–201 Keats, John 44, 126, 129, 140, 217–18, 237, 239, 243–7 The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream 245, 246–7

306

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

Sleep and Poetry 245–6 Keir, James 8, 13, 14, 16, 18, 99, 163, 242 Kelley, Theresa M. 4, 5, 89, 244 Kew Gardens 38, 63–5, 74, 101 Khunrath, H. 151 King, David 66 King, Martin Luther 194 King-Hele, Desmond 4, 6, 20, 21, 59, 162 ‘Designing Better Steering for Carriages (and Cars), with a Glance at Other Inventions’ 2 Doctor of Revolution: The Life and Genius of Erasmus Darwin 127–8 Erasmus Darwin, 1731–1802 137 Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement 4, 12, 13, 50, 58, 65, 74, 84, 86, 97, 100, 110–1, 114, 120, 129, 190, 224, 233, 234, 258, 272 Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic Poets 4, 90, 219, 225, 231, 242–4, 245, 247, 254 Shelley: His Thought and Work 243 Kitson, Peter 74, 134, 196 Klingender, Francis D. 93 Knellwolf, Christa 132 Knight, David M. 2, 4, 234 Knight, Richard Payne 8, 16, 18, 41, 169– 92, 199–201, 217, 223, 240, 247 Alfred: A Romance in Rhyme 175, 177–8, 180 An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste 172 A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus 173–5, 178–9, 183, 199–201, 223 Expedition into Sicily 182 An Inquiry into the Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology 178–9 The Landscape: A Didactic Poem 170–3, 187, 191, 199, 201, 249 The Progress of Civil Society: A Didactic Poem 169, 175, 180, 183, 186–92, 201, 203–4, 217, 249, 259, 262, 277 Knight, Thomas Andrew 169 Krause, Ernst 120–1 Labbé, Jacqueline 62 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 117, 119–21, 124, 151

language 30–1, 41–4, 69–73, 127, 178–9, 183, 190, 234–5, 248, 281; see also hieroglyphics, poetic diction Laqueur, Thomas 77 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de 69–70, Lawrence, William 132–3, 135 Le Clerc, Jean 143 Leask, Nigel 140, 145, 240 Lee, Debbie 74, 134, 196 Lefkowitz, Mary R. 180–1 L’Enclos, Ninon de 78, 79, 198 Lichfield 8, 13, 17–18, 21, 23–5, 34, 39, 54, 56, 58, 60–1, 64–5, 73, 79, 84, 98, 163, 170 Linnaeus, Carl (Carl von Linné) 7, 14–18, 23–6, 30–2, 45, 48–52, 63–7, 69–78, 81, 84–9, 104, 112–13, 115, 139, 154, 214, 229, 251, 253, 257 The Families of Plants 25, 48, 73, 84 Systema Naturae 69, 76 A System of Vegetables 25, 48, 73, 84 Linnaeus, Elisabeth Christina 78 List, Julia 26, 123, 254 Liu, Lydia H. 50 Logan, J. V. 5, 36, 41, London Corresponding Society 16, 18, 209 Loutherbourg, Philip James de 160–1, 165–6 Lovelock, James 102 The Loves of the Triangles (satire), see Anti-Jacobin Lowes, John Livingstone 225 Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 8, 14, 16–18, 26–7, 62, 103–7, 118, 136–8, 154, 156–7, 169, 186–7, 190, 200, 203, 206–7, 229–30, 242–3, 262, 277 Luddism 98 Lunar Society 2, 5, 12, 14, 16–18, 73, 93, 111, 163, 197, 207, 212 machinery 1, 2, 7, 91, 93–102, 103, 133, 134, 153, 206, 220 ‘machinery’ (supernatural) 25, 27, 29, 60, 67, 93–6, 140, 143–4, 148, 151, 153, 157–8, 185–6, 193, 204, 206, 254, 258 Mackey, A. G. 162 MacLean Rogers, Guy 180 Mahood, M. M. 4, 84, 89–90, 102, 158, 244 Malthus, Thomas 132, 137

Index Manton, J. O. 163 Manuel, Frank E. 140 Marx, Karl 96, 121, 185, 189, 219, Mason, William 36, 57, 58, 63–5, 200 materialism 7, 8, 26, 53–5, 103–6, 116, 123, 131–8, 141, 143, 154, 156, 167, 169, 185–6, 209–10, 218, 221, 227–32, 241–3 Mathias, T. J. 8, 199–202, 203 Matthews, John 201–2 McCalman, Iain 140, 160 McCusick, James C. 112 McIntosh, Christopher 159, 223 McNeil, Maureen 4, 6, 95–6, 133, 135 medicine 1–2, 13, 16–18, 19, 22–5, 29, 85–6, 97, 128, 132–4, 149, 151, 198, 242, 244–7, 272, 282 Mee, Jon 140, 222 Mendel, Gregor 126 Mesmer, Anton 135, 222 Messmann, Frank J. 170 Michell, John 13, 16, 18, 106, 108, 110 Millar, John 187 Milton, John 27, 67, 93, 99, 150, 169, 226–7, 233, 245, 266 Moira, Francis Edward Rawdon-Hastings, Lord 160, 197 Monboddo, James Burnett, Lord 113, 145, 189, 191 Montgolfier, Joseph-Michel and JacquesEtienne 86, 153, 241, 242 Moody, Elizabeth 74, 250–1 Monnet, Charles 210–1 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de 187, 189 Montfaucon, Father Bernard de 144–5, 154 Montolieu, Maria 253 More, Hannah 16, 18, 193, 249–51 The Morning Chronicle 197–8 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 135, 140, 163 Murdoch, William 14, 15 Mylonas, G. E. 156 mythology 1–3, 14, 19, 24, 27, 41, 66, 124, 139–67, 169, 173–86, 192, 212, 221, 241–4, 258, 259–82 natural philosophy 1, 5, 6, 25, 29, 41, 44, 48, 51, 71, 144, 145, 156, 185, 187, 190–1, 198, 204–5, 224,

307

248, 259–62, 264–5, 282; see also botany, chemistry, cosmology, physiology Newcomen, Thomas 95 Newton, Sir Isaac 10, 13, 16, 18, 35, 68, 104, 107, 144, 151, 165, 187, 221, 222, 258 Nietzsche, Friedrich 121 Nodder, Frederick 80 ‘Obereah’ 83 The Office (TV comedy series) 60 Origen 175 Orphism 140, 158, 178, 225 Otaheite (Tahiti) 24, 75, 81–4, 173, 203, 204 Ovid (Roman poet) 21, 48–9, 53, 69, 70, 106, 142, 143, 252 Packham, Catherine 72 Page, Michael R. 100 Paine, Thomas 8, 148, 164, 213–14 Palter, Robert 181 Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim) 149–50 paratext 7, 45–56, 253 Parker, Mary 14 Parker, Mary Jr 14–15 Parker, Susanna 14–15 Paulson, Ronald 140, 154, 164, 167 Peacock, Thomas Love 209, 247 Penny, Nicholas 170 Perry, James 83 Perry, Seamus 34 physiology 4, 6, 25, 29, 123–38, 233 pictures 29, 34, 46, 49–50, 53–6, 62, 85, 104, 108, 129, 219, 234, 252, 264, 266, 270; see also hieroglyphics, illustrations, picturesque, visuality picturesque, the, 33–6, 39–44, 65, 169–73, 180, 218–19, 241, 245 Piggott, Stuart 13 Pitt, William, the Elder 160 Pitt, William, the Younger 196, 197, 205, 214 Plato 62, 115, 222 Platonic love 22, 23, 127, 114, 142, 253 Pluche, Noël Antoine 145–6 poetic diction 3, 20, 36–40, 44, 117, 221, 233–5, 248, 261

308

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

Pole, Elizabeth, see Darwin, Elizabeth Polignac, Cardinal Melchior de 203 Polwhele, Richard 8, 74, 78–9, 201, 251 Pope, Alexander 8, 13, 16, 18, 21, 26, 33, 37, 51, 57, 58, 63, 143, 144, 162, 163, 167, 240, 246, 255 The Rape of the Lock 148–50, 269, 274 The Temple of Fame 164–5 Porden, Eleanor Jane 8, 253–5 Porter, Dahlia 4, 5, 51, 71, 229 Porter, Roy 4, 6, 9, 11, 119, 120, 123, 128, 133 Portland, Margaret Cavendish-Harley, Second Duchess of 16, 18, 19, 54 Portland Vase 14, 16–18, 19, 50, 56, 157, 175–7, 225, 242, 244 Potter, George Reuben 119 Priapus 69, 173–8, 182, 199–201 Price, Uvedale 41, 171, 199 Priestley, Joseph 8, 14, 16, 18, 24, 26, 99, 100–101, 128, 135, 143, 197, 209, 224, 227, 229, 250 Priestman, Martin 14, 146, 209, 220, 227, 230, 251 Primer, Irwin 140, 158, 162, 209–10, 212 The Progress of Man (satire) see AntiJacobin Proserpina (Persephone) 141–3, 158, 165, 186, 260, 266, 274–5, 281 psychology 1, 4–7, 23, 25, 35, 40, 65, 106, 123–32, 209, 230–3, 272 Pythagoras 137–8 radicalism 1, 5, 7, 8, 11, 14, 15, 16–18, 25, 42–3, 75, 83, 93, 106, 110, 113, 121, 140, 164, 167, 169, 172, 181, 192, 193–214, 221–4, 226, 229, 242 Reed, Edward S. 131 Reid, Thomas 13, 16, 18 Reid, Walter Hamilton 214 Reimarus, Albert 13, 16, 18, 97 Revett, Nicholas 182 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 53, 54 Richards, Robert J. 90, 133, 225 Richardson, Alan 131, 228, 231 Riskin, Jessica 131 Rittenbush, Philip C. 54 Roberts, Hugh 243 Robertson, William 187, 188

Robeson, Paul 194 Robison, John 8, 209–13 Robinson, Andrew 182 Robinson, Mary 249 Romanticism 3–8, 11–12, 15, 21, 31–2, 40, 41, 44, 51, 55, 65, 68, 90–1, 116, 128–9, 131, 139, 167, 169, 181–2, 186, 214–15, 217–49, 257–8 Rome 14, 19, 32, 41, 46, 49, 71, 105, 143–6, 148, 154, 156, 167, 175, 181–2, 184, 186, 201, 221, 240, 245, 268 Rose, Hugh 72 Rosicrucianism 140, 148–53, 159–60, 163–4, 165, 207, 213–14, 222, 223, 245, 252, 253, 255, 258 Ross, Robert N. 41, 140, 245 Rousseau, G. S. 199 Rousseau, Jean-Jaques 14, 15, 16–18, 22, 26, 189, 204, 244, 252 Rowden, Frances Arabella 16, 18, 74, 253 Royal Society 10, 13, 16–18, 73, 84, 109, 151, 162, 163, 212 Rudbeck, Olof 66 Ruston, Sharon 133 St Paul 136–7 Sandwich, Fourth Earl of 16, 18 Savery, Thomas 94–5 Saville, John 61 scansion 36, 59–60, 275, 277, 278 Schaffer, Simon 108 Schama, Simon 209–10 Schelling, F. W. J. 90, 225 Schiebinger, Londa 4, 70. 71, 72, 75, 77, 79, 154, 210 Schneider, Elisabeth 225 Schuchard, Marsha Keith 222–3 Schweighardt, Theophilus 151–3 science, see natural philosophy Scottish Enlightenment 8, 11, 13, 14, 16–18, 113, 186–7 Scott-Waring, John 83 sculpture 32, 34, 39, 139, 143–5, 165, 264, 268, 277, 278 Seligo, Carlos 132 Setzer, Sharon 98, 99 Seward, Anna 8, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20, 44, 46, 61, 78, 79–81, 83, 84, 110, 247, 249, 257

Index ‘Colebrook Dale’ 98–9, 102 Memoirs of Dr Darwin 33–7, 51, 56–9, 70–1, 86, 97, 170, 198, 204, 241 ‘Verses Written in Dr Darwin’s Botanic Garden’ 24, 56–64, 67, 98, 170, 205, 252 Seward, Thomas 110 Sewell, Elizabeth 140 sex and sexual difference 7, 23–5, 45, 48, 51, 60–1, 69–84, 89–90, 104–5, 115, 119, 123–7, 134–6, 142–3, 149–50, 158, 169, 173–7, 180, 184, 188, 199–203, 219–20, 222, 244–5, 250–3, 263 Sha, Richard C. 72, 199 Shaw, George Bernard 121 Shea, Robert 213 Shelley, Mary 15, 247 Frankenstein 131–4, 136, 150, 256 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 15, 90, 132, 182, 195, 208–9, 217–18, 237, 239–40, 242–4, 248, 257 Hellas: A Lyrical Drama 182, 239–40 Laon and Cythna 240 ‘Ozymandias’ 182, 240 Prometheus Unbound 242, 243, 248 Queen Mab 242–3, 245 The Triumph of Life 244 Shteir, Ann B. 73, 75, 79 similes 24, 27, 29, 33, 40, 42, 51, 54, 58, 67, 81, 118, 129, 141, 179, 219, 234, 241, 269 Simili, Rafaella 135 Singh, Simon 106, 108, 110 Siskin, Clifford 10 slavery 1–2, 5, 14–15, 16–18, 93–4, 96, 102, 178–80, 184, 188–91, 193–4, 220, 240, 249, 259, 281–2 Small, William 14, 16, 18, 21, 207 Smellie, William 71, 72 Smith, Adam 8, 13, 16, 18, 186, 187, 188, 190 Smith, C. U. M. 133 Smith, Charlotte 8, 16, 18, 74, 248, 249, 252 Sneyd, Honora 61 Society for Constitutional Information 16, 18 Soho Mint 95, 97, 101 Soho Works 97 Solander, Daniel 16, 18, 54, 74 Southey, Robert 34, 247

309

Spalding Gentlemen’s Society 13, 16–18 Spary, Emma 90 spatiality 7, 12, 27, 29–34, 36, 39–40, 46, 52, 56–7, 60, 65–8, 69, 84–8, 102, 104, 138, 139, 143–4, 164–5, 180, 184, 192, 205, 214, 217–19, 236–7, 239, 245–7, 257–8 Spence, Joseph 8, 50, 66, 143–4, 145, 146, 148, 151, 163, 164 Spender, Stephen 102 steam power 1, 14, 94–5, 97–101, 142, 209 Sterne, Laurence 55, 115, 126 Stewart, John ‘Walking’ 195 Stott, Rebecca 120 Stuart, James ‘Athenian’ 182 Stuart, Tristram 90, 195 Stukeley, William 13, 16, 18, 221 synecdoche 36, 38–40, 43, 63–4, 116–18, 233 Syson, Lydia 134 Tahiti, see Otaheite Taylor, Thomas 154 Temple, Sir William 62 temporality, see time Teute, Fredrika J. 75 Thelwall, John 6, 9, 16, 18, 134, 224, 226–7, 248 Thomas, Nicholas 83 time 7, 27, 31–4, 40, 44, 84–9, 103–10, 115, 139, 160, 165, 184, 192, 217, 223–4, 227–8, 236–7, 247, 256–8, 264, 273, 278 Toland, John 177, 214, 221 Tooke, John Horne 8, 16, 18, 42 Towers, Eric 164 Tregear, E. 83 Trott, Nicola 90 Uglow, Jenny 5, 12, 13, 21, 61, 100. 112, 120, 162, 195, 197, 198, 209, Unitarians 14–15, 16–18, 197, 224 The Universal Magazine 123 Venus (Aphrodite) 22, 81, 105, 141–4, 157, 172, 243, 262, 264, 274–5, 280–1 Vickers, Neil 131, 229 Villars, Abbé N. de Montfaucon de 149–151

310

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

Virgil (Roman poet) 26, 49, 136, 159, 169, 206, 251 visual arts, see pictures, picturesque, sculpture, visuality visuality 19, 25, 29, 32–5, 39, 41–4, 49–50, 53, 104, 144, 218–19, 227, 235, 241, 270; see also picturesque vitality 123, 132–5, 205 Volney, Constantin-François 8, 146–8, 163, 164, 183, 190, 212, Volta, Alessandro 134, 135 Voltaire 10, 62, 79, 163, 208, 209 Wakefield, Gilbert 14, 16, 18 Wakefield, Priscilla 74, 252 Walpole, Horace 8, 9, 50, 54, 66, 74, 84–5, 88, 107, 200–201, 250 Warburton, William 8, 41–2, 154, 156–8, 159, 163, 164, 175, 178, 185 Warner, William 10 Watt, James 1, 8, 14, 16, 18, 93, 94–5, 97, 99, 163, 195, 209, 242, Wedgwood, Josiah 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 24, 50, 65, 93, 95–6, 97, 102, 114, 175, 190, 191, 193–4 Wedgwood, Tom, 224 Weishaupt, Adam 208, 213 Wells, H. G. 100 Werner, A. G.111 Whitehurst, John 8, 14, 16, 18, 106, 111–12 Whytt, Robert 13, 133

Williams, Raymond 96 Wilkins, John 8, 30, 151, 153 Wilson, Robert Anton 213 Withering, William 8, 14, 16, 18, 25, 73, 97 Wollstonecraft, Mary 14, 16, 18, 78–9, 201 Women artists 8, 16–17, 46–7, 54, 62, 78, 87, 94, 201 Women writers 14, 16–18, 19, 37, 74, 78–81, 198, 201, 247–56; see also Shelley, Mary, and Seward, Anna Woof, Robert 233 Wordsworth, William 15, 21, 65, 187, 217–18, 223–4, 227, 229–37, 239, 241, 244, 248, 257 Descriptive Sketches 232–4 Lyrical Ballads 3, 21, 39, 86, 90, 128, 231, 235, 237 Preface to Lyrical Ballads 20, 33, 35, 37, 44, 234–5, 248, 251 The Prelude 131, 231–2, 236–7, 249 The Recluse 229–31, 236 Worrall, David 219, 221 Wright ‘of Derby’, Joseph 8, 16, 18, 85 Wu, Duncan 249 Wunder, Jennifer N. 140, 163, 209, 245 Wylie, Ian 224 Yates, Frances A. 11, 140, 149, 151, 153, 159 Yeats, W. B. 140 Young, Thomas 15, 182