earlier.
Prince Albert around the time of his engagement to Queen Victoria
So perhaps we should not be surprised when, on 10 October, the day after she had escaped being branded by Clark as the originator of the lie against Lady Flora, Victoria found herself thinking differently about the twenty-year-old Albert of Saxe-Coburg. The first time they met he had seemed steady and dull. But the trauma of these past six months had made steady and dull seem strangely alluring. Which is why, on that autumn Friday morning when she ‘went to the top of the staircase and received my 2 dear cousins Ernest and Albert’, Victoria was, for a moment, quite taken aback. The Princes, she had to admit, were much improved: taller, older – in fact the sort of men who might make a maiden Queen’s heart beat faster. The younger one in particular … well, she could hardly believe her eyes: ‘It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert,’ she wrote breathlessly in her journal that night, ‘– who is beautiful.’
2
I
On 28 April 1866 the Royal Society held a Saturday soirée at Burlington House, its grand Palladian headquarters just off Piccadilly. Although the event had been timed to coincide with London’s social season, it would be gilding things to describe the occasion as ‘glittering’. This was a gentlemen-only affair, attended by professional men of science and genteel savants in subfusc who gathered to ponder the latest advances in their own discipline, learn about developments in others, catch up with old friends and make contact with new ones. The glaring absence of ladies probably accounts for the glum mood of the twenty-four-year-old Prince of Wales, who had agreed to attend the event only after months of nagging from the Society’s President, General Edward Sabine. Bertie’s sulkiness was hardly helped by knowing that his hosts would have much preferred to be welcoming his father, the late Prince Albert, in his place. Now there was a man you could have guaranteed to take a genuine interest in the exhibits that cluttered the stately interior of Burlington House that night: deep-sea telegraph cables encrusted with barnacles, a machine for extracting oxygen from the atmosphere, photographs of sunspots, not forgetting ‘Mr Preece’s electrical signals for communication in railway trains’. Buzzing around these emblems of modernity were the leading geologists, naturalists and chemists of the day, all avid for a glimpse of tomorrow’s world. The Prince of Wales by contrast looked ‘utterly uninterested’ in any of it, managing to last for little more than an hour before slipping off into the Piccadilly night to begin his evening, this time for real.
Before he left, though, His Royal Callowness was scheduled to shake hands with some of the Royal Society’s most distinguished Fellows. Amongst the select group was a tall, stooped man with a long grizzled beard that appeared to put him in his mid-sixties at least. The Prince clearly had no idea who the old gentleman in the dress suit was, and the old gentleman appeared equally flustered in return. Failing to understand whatever listless remark the young Prince lobbed in his direction, the reluctant courtier gave a deep bow and scurried away.
It is hardly surprising that the Prince of Wales either did not know or did not care that the old man who had just been presented to him was Charles Darwin, the most celebrated scientist of the century, winner of the Copley Medal, and author of the epoch-making On the Origin of Species. What was extraordinary, though, was the fact that most of the other guests at the Royal Society had failed to recognise Darwin too. Indeed, the scientific superstar had been obliged to sidle up to old friends and introduce himself, an ordeal for such a shy man, and a mortification for those who realised too late that they had spent the evening snubbing the most distinguished person in the room.
In fairness, men such as William Bovill MP, Dr Lyon Playfair, General John Lefroy and Sir Wentworth Dilke had not seen Darwin for several years. Chronic ill-health, brought about partly by the anxiety of being known as the man who had killed God, kept Darwin in seclusion at Down House, his estate in rural Kent. Here he lived with his devoted wife Emma and their seven surviving children, sticking to a rigorous programme of thinking and writing unruffled by the flim-flam of scientific celebrity. A recent flare-up of his long-standing symptoms, which included vomiting and eczema, had given Darwin a gaunt, papery look that made him appear much older than his fifty-seven years. But, explained Emma Darwin, writing to her aunt Fanny Allen the day after the Royal Society event, it wasn’t so much the ravages of ill-health that had made Charles unrecognisable as his new beard – ‘it alters him so’.
Charles Darwin, beardless, four years before he published On the Origin of Species (c.1855)
You can see why the scientific establishment had been baffled. The last time anyone had set eyes on Charles Darwin he had been clean-shaven, apart from muttonchop sideboards. During the past four years of almost total withdrawal from public life he had grown a heavy beard that covered the lower half of his face and reached a good way down his chest. Instead of being ginger and springy like his earlier sideboards, this new instalment of facial hair was soft and white, which made him seem both ageless and ancient. It also made him look like someone else entirely. The features by which Darwin used to be most easily recognised – pouchy jowls and a long, thin, downturned mouth that readily rearranged itself into the sweetest smile – had vanished under a carpet of hair. Even his famously bulbous nose, which he always joked made him look like a farmer, seemed different somehow.
Darwin never trimmed his beard, although he did hack regularly at the hair on his upper lip to produce what his son Francis described as ‘a rather ugly appearance’. This habit of pruning his moustache too severely for elegance was a consequence of wanting to keep it out of his food at mealtimes. There was nothing he could do, though, about the stains left by his heavy snuff habit, which gave the middle part of the ’tache a dirty yellow look, colloquially described as ‘snuffy’. His hair, or at least the fringe that remained around the edges of his massive skull, was cut by Emma whenever Charles remembered to ask her.
By the time Charles Darwin had started growing his beard in 1862 he was already behind the times, as middle-aged gentlemen living in the country are apt to be when it comes to matters of fashion. In the 1830s and 40s, the decades of his young adulthood, the prevailing taste had been for clean-shaven faces. You have only to look at pictures of his near-contemporaries – Disraeli, Dickens, Ruskin – to see a series of girlish-looking young men, tender and rosy-skinned. But shift forward fifteen years, and each one of those lovely faces now lies buried under bristling facial hair. The first sign of a change in fashion had come in the late 1840s, when sideboards began creeping further down men’s faces, broadening out to the point where they became fully-fledged sidewhiskers. There were several ways of styling these new arrivals: broad but close-cropped attachments were known as ‘muttonchops’, while long, combed-out ones became ‘Piccadilly weepers’ or ‘Dundrearies’, after a dimwitted character in a play by Tom Taylor. Sidewhiskers could either be worn on an otherwise clean-shaven face, as Darwin did until he was fifty-three, or they might be teamed with a neat moustache, as modelled by that unlikely pin-up, Prince Albert.
Prince Albert in the 1840s
Gradually muttonchops and Piccadilly weepers crept further south, eventually meeting up under the chin sometime in the early 1850s. The result was the ‘Newgate frill’ or ‘chinstrap’,
