The effect was like a reverse halo, and was sported by Darwin’s younger friend and colleague, the botanist Joseph Hooker. Darwin, coming to beard-wearing a few years later, opted for the newly popular ‘natural’ beard. A natural beard required a man to do nothing more than leave his facial hair to grow untouched, give or take the occasional snip at the moustache with his wife’s scissors. This was also known as a ‘philosopher’s beard’, in homage to those thinkers of the Roman Republic such as Epictetus, Critolaus and Diogenes, who distinguished themselves from the smooth-shaven citizenry by their far-seeing wisdom and shaggy facial hair. Which explains why, aboard HMS Beagle in the 1830s, the young, temporarily bearded Charles Darwin had earned the nickname ‘Philos’.
Yet just because everyone else was growing a beard by the 1860s, it didn’t mean that Darwin found it easy or natural to follow suit. When the time came to announce that he had belatedly succumbed to the new fashion, he sent Hooker advance warning in the form of a photograph. In June 1864 the eldest Darwin boy, William, had taken a picture of his newly shaggy father in the garden at Down House, and this was now despatched to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, where Hooker was Director. A copy also went to Asa Gray at Harvard. Self-conscious about the change he was unveiling, Darwin described his new look in his covering letters with a metaphorical shrug as ‘venerable’. Hooker, sensing Darwin’s anxious embarrassment, responded enthusiastically by return of post, declaring that his newly bearded friend appeared exactly like the figure of Moses in the fresco on the walls of the House of Lords. In this kitsch Biblical scene by J.R. Herbert, a hugely bearded and elaborately mustachioed Moses – he appears to have waxed the ends for the occasion – carries down the Tablets of the Law to some slightly less hairy Israelites. Hooker’s compliment was a neat if oblique allusion to the way Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had, in the five years since its publication, become the secular equivalent of the Mosaic tablets, a textual key to Life itself. Funnily enough, said Darwin in his pleased reply to Hooker two days later, his sons had said exactly the same thing about him looking like Moses.
Joseph Hooker modelling a neck beard, or ‘Newgate frill’
Darwin’s decision to announce his new beard to Hooker and Gray by sending them a photograph is not quite as coy as it sounds. Victorian men of science, even those who knew each other well, frequently used this new technology to exchange portraits as a way of strengthening personal and professional bonds. On receiving the ‘venerable’ photograph, Hooker immediately asked if he could have a copy to send to George Thwaites, Superintendent of the botanical gardens at Peradeniya, Ceylon, and another for Daniel Oliver, Professor of Botany at University College, London, both of whom he knew would value an updated image of the author of On the Origin of Species.
Even so, you sense that Darwin, always thin-skinned, was worried about how this new beard would go down in his wider professional network. The half-joke about the beard being ‘venerable’ was his way of putting distance between himself and his startling new appendage. In the unlikely event that Hooker or Gray made fun of his altered appearance, Darwin would be able to brush off his hurt by presenting his beard less as an essential part of himself than a temporary prop, a joke beard almost. Of course neither man offered any such barb. Gray’s only slightly carping comment was that the beard aged Darwin, a point that was picked up by another disappointed recipient of the photograph who was startled to discover that the clean-shaven middle-aged scientist he was used to picturing had turned into an ‘elderly gentleman with a grey beard’.
Most important of all, though, Darwin was determined that Hooker should not run away with the idea that he had grown a beard because he thought it suited him, or because, heaven forbid, he was trying to look fashionable. He was doing it, he explained carefully, for the sake of his health. In the late spring of 1862 the facial eczema from which he had suffered all his adult life had flared up in a ‘violent’ attack, bubbling his face and swelling his lips. At the spas Darwin routinely visited in search of a cure for his repertoire of mysterious yet distressing symptoms, men suffering from skin conditions were routinely advised to grow a beard. This was both a way of hiding the disfigurement and of avoiding the further irritation that came with daily shaving. So that was what Darwin decided to do. Or rather, according to his carefully crafted version of events, it was what his wife Emma told him to do. On 4 July 1862, in a faux-casual postscript to a letter about the cross-pollination of wheat, Darwin announced to his eldest son William, ‘Mama says I am to wear a beard.’
Despite being careful to give the impression that he had had no choice in the matter, Darwin had every reason to welcome this chance to hide his face from the world. As a twenty-year-old Cambridge undergraduate he had been so self-conscious about his scaly skin and ‘bad’ blubber lips that he had been known to pull out of planned beetle-hunts with friends in order to sit alone in his rooms until he was fit to be seen in public. On one occasion he had even fled halfway through an expedition in North Wales on account of his blistered skin. And while some of his adolescent self-consciousness had lightened by middle age, his symptoms had not. As a clean-shaven adult he had, on occasions, been rendered ‘hardly recognisable’, according to Hooker, by a particularly bad flare-up of facial eczema, which turned his usually plump, mild face red and angry, so that he resembled an indignant cherub.
This would be unpleasant for anyone, but for a man who had long been convinced of his own ‘hideousness’ it was mortifying. Following his mother’s death when he was eight, Charles had been raised by his older sisters at the family home, The Mount, in Shrewsbury, ruled over by their forbidding physician father, Dr Robert Darwin. Loving and responsible though Marianne, Susan and Caroline Darwin were, the grief-felled teenage girls found it hard to give the little boy the unconditional love he now needed so badly. Instead, they expressed their affection as anxious caretakers are apt to do, by finding fault. Caroline became known as ‘the Governess’, Susan was ‘Granny’, and both of them kept up a drizzle of complaints about young Charley’s spelling, handwriting and, in Caroline’s case, his looks and personal hygiene. Absorbing the message that he was somehow unacceptable – was that why Mama had gone away so suddenly? – Darwin grew up believing that he was ‘painfully ugly’. His nose, he told a school friend, was ‘as big as your fist’, and for that reason he was careful never to be pictured in profile. As a lanky adolescent he hated his large feet, made even more conspicuous by bunions. And his habit of gulping down comfort wherever he could find it meant that he had taken to asking for second helpings at every meal, like a giant Oliver Twist. In fact, for a time it looked as though young Charley Darwin was on his way to becoming as fat as his grandfather, the poet, physician and early evolutionist Erasmus Darwin, who was a twenty-four-stone mountain of a man. Eaten up by self-consciousness, the plump, knobbly-footed teenager dashed through the backstreets of his native Shrewsbury between school and home in an attempt to avoid people’s pitying looks. Even as a twenty-nine-year-old man, one who had made a thrilling name for himself by sailing around the world on HMS Beagle, not to mention losing twenty pounds in the process, Darwin was terrified of asking his cousin Emma Wedgwood to marry him. She would, he was convinced, find him ‘repellently plain’.
When Charles Robert Darwin was born in 1809 it had been into the smooth-chinned world of Jane Austen. The men from the provincial gentry and professional classes amongst whom the Darwins and their Wedgwood cousins naturally took their place were nearly always clean-shaven. In scraping the whiskers from their chins each morning with well-tempered cast steel they announced themselves as inheritors of Enlightenment values: rational, civilised, the opposite of beasts. Darwin’s father and grandfather before him, both distinguished men of science, had shown their treble-chinned faces to the world, confident about meeting its gaze without need for concealment. An open face denoted an open mind; beards, by contrast, were for men with something to hide.
In these circumstances it was inevitable that a smooth face became not only philosophic, but fashionable too. George ‘Beau’ Brummel’s morning shaving ritual was deemed so instructive that the cream of London’s ton was invited to pull up a chair and watch.
