Darwin's Plots

Gillian Beer's classic Darwin's Plots, one of the most influential works of literary criticism and cultural history of the last quarter century, is here reissued in an updated edition to coincide with the anniversary of Darwin's birth and of the publication of The Origin of Species. Its focus on how writers, including George Eliot, Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hardy, responded to Darwin's discoveries and to his innovations in scientific language continues to open up new approaches to Darwin's thought and to its effects in the culture of his contemporaries. This third edition includes an important new essay that investigates Darwin's concern with consciousness across all forms of organic life. It demonstrates how this fascination persisted throughout his career and affected his methods and discoveries. With an updated bibliography reflecting recent work in the field, this book will retain its place at the heart of Victorian studies.

Third Edition

Gillian Beer

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Gillian Beer 1983, 2000, 2009

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published by Routledge & Paul plc 1983
Art paperback edition 1985
Second edition published by Cambridge University Press 2000
Third edition 2009

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-0-521-76769-9 hardback
ISBN 978-0-521-74361-7 paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Nature, if we believed all that is said of her, would be the most extraordinary being. She has horrors (horror vacui), she indulges in freaks (lusus naturae), she commits blunders (errores naturae, monstra). She is sometimes at war with herself, for, as Giraldus told us, ‘Nature produced barnacles against Nature’; and of late years we have heard much of her power of selection.

Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, second series, 1864, p. 566.

Contents

Foreword

Early in Darwin's Plots, Gillian Beer argues that On the Origin of Species is ‘one of the most extraordinary examples of a work which included more than the maker of it at the time knew, despite all that he did know’. With these words Professor Beer initiated an enterprise that itself probably included more than she knew, despite all that she did know – which, to say the least, was a lot. For the book remains as alive and important now as it was when it appeared in 1983, on the first crest of the booming ‘Darwin Industry’, which has in the past fifteen years expanded even beyond the imagination of those who already understood how enormously rich and fertile Darwin's thought remained. Unlike most great scientists of the past, whose work has been absorbed by science (and often by culture) and marked as a brilliant stage toward later developments, Darwin remains strangely and almost charismatically alive – he ‘has grown younger in recent years’, says Professor Beer – and evolutionary biology remains an active force in science and beyond.

Darwin's Plots identifies a ‘remnant of the mythical’ in his arguments, a not quite complete fit ‘between material and theory’, a willingness to fall back on ‘unknown laws’, a passion for multiplicity and for aberrations. In teaching us how Darwin's metaphors and language work, by refusing any simple placement of his thought, either historical or philosophical, Professor Beer in effect predicted his continuing power to fertilise and disturb.

Darwin's name long ago entered the language to mark off a dog-eat-dog, cruelly competitive world. But, as Beer demonstrates, Darwin's language had shown him as much a believer in cooperation and what Kropotkin called ‘mutual aid’ as in ruthless competition. Beyond the popular imagination, up through the continuing human interest of the Beagle voyage and the continuing worry over the religious implications of evolutionary theory, the sustained interest of scholars and scientist in his work has made him perhaps the most discussed writer in English besides Shakespeare. Like the language that Professor Beer so brilliantly analyses, Darwin has remained endlessly interpretable, and the work of understanding him and using his ideas has accelerated during the past two decades.

As Professor Beer herself notes, the most impressive achievement of the Darwin industry in that time has been the extraordinary edition of Darwin letters, which to the moment of this writing, through nine volumes, takes us only up to 1861, that is, two years after the publication of On the Origin of Species. The notebooks – richly suggestive in their indications of the way Darwin was thinking in the run-up to his great work – have been published. An enormously useful register and summary of all his correspondence is now available. Perhaps most interestingly of all, as a result of the crucial archival work that produced the Letters, several notable biographies have appeared, particularly Voyaging, by Janet Browne, and Charles Darwin, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore. These studies, while refusing anything like the traditional hagiographical approach and while thickening our understanding of Darwin as a creature of his moment and a complex and multiply motivated man, give us a Darwin who might begin to correspond in life to the complex artist/ scientist who produced the language that Professor Beer so richly analyses. But, as she rightly notes in addressing the Desmond–Moore biography, her own approach, fastening on the particularities of the complex and remarkably flexible language of Darwin's texts, undercuts the implication that Darwin was absolutely a man of his time, explicable in terms of the conventions of the middle-class society to which he so nervously and doggedly adhered.

At the same time as the biographical and archival interest in Darwin has intensified, there has been an explosion of interest in Darwinian theory, particularly through evolutionary psychology: Daniel Dennett has pronounced Darwin's idea ‘dangerous’ in a study that provocatively follows out the line that sees Darwin as unrelentingly and courageously materialist and antimetaphysical. Richard Dawkins has carried the myth of Darwin's commitment to a pervasively competitive world deep into microbiology with his theory of The Selfish Gene. E. O. Wilson and Steven Pinker, prominently among others, take Darwin as the patron saint of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, which pursue reductionism into the intricacies of human consciousness and behaviour. Each of these writers claims Darwin as his own but in effect together they simply multiply the number of different Darwins his posterity has created. The Darwin Gillian Beer gives us will not stand still for such unequivocal cooptations. Her new preface gives us some sense of how the approach of Darwin's Plots would have handled these later versions of Darwin, would have placed them inside the myths of our own culture and of the cultures they presume to transcend, and would have raised the kinds of questions that would make resting in their extreme versions of Darwin impossible. And beyond these struggles, within the limits of yet stricter science, Darwin remains controversial in the continuing combat between palaeontological and microbiological evolutionary biology. Outside of the official confines of science, the Victorian battle between God and Darwinian materialism continues in the attacks of creationism. Darwin's Plots prepared us for the tensions within and against Darwinian thought, as it worried the forms of our ‘plots’, the possibilities of meaning, order, futurity, development, death.