Darwin Revised, and Carefully Edited

This latest biography in what seems an unending stream has been around long enough now that most Darwin enthusiasts will have made up their minds about it. And yet it is still worth “reviewing”: it is, from any point of view, a work of substantial scholarship that enlivens a life we may have all thought to be—literarily speaking— exhausted from excessive coverage; it is written from a perspective radically different from that characteristic of most Darwin biographies; and equally important, it implicitly raises fundamental issues about how biography should be written, and about what relation the cultural or philosophical study of science has to the science under discussion. (Where, in that obscure borderland between fact and interpretation, may biographers legitimately roam? may they imply connections not factually supported? or infer attitudes and feelings not literally derivable from the data? To what degree, in the interests of argument and of the narrative efficiency the audience has a right to demand, are biographers free to disguise the complications behind their inexplicit interpretations?) Finally, this newest Darwin challenges the dominant tradition of interpretation of Darwin’s character and in doing so invites resistance to the very notion of “scientific genius.”

While Adrian Desmond and James Moore never drop the apparatus of scholarship or the strategies of objectivity, of meticulous and rigorous examination of the overwhelming volume of facts now available through the apparently indefatigable energies of the Darwin industry, their very strong points of view self-evidently but inexplicitly inform all the data—how they are chosen, how they are represented, how they are interpreted. Moreover, their biography is published by a commercial, not a scholarly press, and clearly makes its appeal to a nonspecialist audience interested in learning about the personal drama of Darwin’s life. The scholarship is there in the footnotes, and it is prodigious, and Darwin is the title on the title page—but “The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist: Darwin” is what the dust jacket announces, and the melodrama of the dust-jacket writer is not entirely absent from the book proper.

Darwin makes energetic claims for itself, claims that make sense both for a popular audience and for the specialists ready to rethink the Darwin they already know. All “previous biographies have been curiously bloodless affairs,” the authors assert at the outset; not so theirs. This is a particularly strong claim given the recent appearance of John Bowlby’s Charles Darwin: A New Life (1990), which also attempts to reinterpret Darwin fullbloodedly. But Bowlby’s full blood is psychological, while Desmond and Moore’s is socio-historical; and a comparison between the two “new” Darwins might be very instructive. In any case, both these new biographies, but more intensely Desmond and Moore’s, are implicitly hostile to the “history of ideas” tradition and to the iconographic impulse that drives so many biographies of “great men.” Desmond and Moore claim that while other biographies have “broken little new ground and made no contact with the inflammatory issues and events of [Darwin’s] day,” this biography “sets out to be different”: it will “pose awkward questions . . . probe interests and motivation . . . portray the scientific expert as a product of his time . . . depict a man grappling with immensities in a society undergoing reform” (p. xviii).

In the light of claims made so aggressively, the “blood” in this biography is either part of the problem or, as the authors think, the solution. Such an approach, they believe, will undermine the iconographic and overly intellectual biographical strategies that have dominated previous lives of Darwin. Unlike Bowlby’s, which sets out straightforwardly to answer certain questions about Darwin’s illness psychoanalytically, as though he were a patient, this book “explains” Darwin by reading him into history and into the class culture of nineteenth-century England. Desmond and Moore make their appeal to the two audiences by writing melodramatically and without theoretical apparatus about the facts that they have worked very hard to dig out, and their interpretations are embedded in the representation, not explicitly announced. The...