the following March Darwin had moved into rooms at 36 Great Marlborough Street, just off Regent Street, where there was space for himself, his servant and the crates of self-addressed material from the voyage that continued to arrive at Woolwich docks. He spent his days preparing a series of descriptive accounts of his five-year expedition, including The Voyage of the Beagle and the multi-decker Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle, to which Jenyns, Owen and Gould would contribute volumes. Although he had received a grant of £1,000 to defray publication costs, thanks to the generosity of the Chancellor of the Exchequer Thomas Spring Rice, this was the last time the twenty-eight-year-old would have to look for financial support from beyond his own family. As an academically disappointing teenager, he had been educated first for medicine (half-heartedly at Edinburgh University) and then for the Church (even more sluggishly at Cambridge), before his father finally acknowledged that Charles’s real talent lay elsewhere, in the natural sciences. Dr Darwin, who had grown wealthy from his secondary career as a genteel moneylender to Shropshire’s first families, now settled on his younger son sufficient capital to produce an annual income of £400. This was enough for a bachelor to get by on, as long as he didn’t develop a sudden mania for women or horses. By this single stroke of luck, Charles Darwin became that most enviable and slightly old-fashioned of creatures, a gentleman of independent means, free to follow his intellectual interests wherever they led.
Just as Darwin was clattering his crates into Great Marlborough Street, workmen digging in nearby Trafalgar Square stumbled across a cache of elephant and tiger fossils. In that jolting moment modern Britain felt both ancient and very strange. This sense that the world was out of joint was magnified a few weeks later when a young girl ascended the throne after 120 years of middle-aged male rule. A propitious moment, then, for Charles Darwin to embark on a programme of enquiry that would end by dislocating the foundations of existence.
It started in a humdrum enough way, with a series of cheap notebooks into which Darwin dashed down his thoughts on the topic of ‘transmutation’. This was the word he used to describe the snail-paced process by which plants and animals developed variations to suit their particular environment, eventually branching off to form entirely new species. Page after page of Philos’s notebook was filled with breathless jottings on pigs, lions, volcanoes, rhododendrons, mountains, pelicans, coral and greyhounds, as he worried away at the question of how animal and plant life had evolved over millennia to fit what he knew from both observation and reading was the earth’s continually shifting crust. Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus had made a start on the topic forty years earlier in his path-finding Zoonomia. The Frenchmen Lamarck and Cuvier had continued to work on the subject from different perspectives during the difficult years of the French Revolution. Now young Charles Darwin of Great Marlborough Street took up the baton, trying to design a model that would make sense of his Beagle samples, as well as account for the data he continued to harvest from the hedgerows and farmyards of Great Britain.
Over the next eighteen months Darwin spent what little free time he had from his cataloguing work letting his mind roam over the big questions. Within weeks of disembarking from the Beagle he had reached the conclusion that species operate without divine agency. In his own mind God was dead, even if it would take decades before he hinted as much to anyone outside his immediate circle. But in that case, what was the mechanism that drove transmutation? And where did that leave Man, who according to Christian teaching was God’s special creation, quite separate from the beasts of the field? From the spring of 1838 Darwin became a frequent visitor to the heated giraffe house at Regent’s Park Zoo, where he spent hours staring at its temporary resident, an orangutan called Jenny. Dressed in human clothes, sulking and skittish by turns, Jenny resembled nothing so much as a hairy, copper-coloured baby. Opening his new maroon notebook Darwin wrote: ‘Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work worthy the interposition of a deity. More humble & I believe true to consider him created from animals.’
Although he liked to describe himself as a hermit, Darwin did allow himself to be tempted out during these months, especially to any social event that was likely to prove professionally useful. It was for this reason that he eventually agreed to serve as Secretary to the Geological Society, which brought him into frequent contact with Charles Lyell, Richard Owen and pretty much every scientific man who mattered. All the same, he was careful to muffle the direction in which his thoughts were tending. Over the previous two hundred years scientists and theologians had attempted to reconcile Christianity with the emerging evidence of the earth’s ancient history. According to this hybrid model of ‘natural theology’, God was a kind of celestial watchmaker: He made the universe and its laws, although not necessarily in the seven days described by Genesis, and then retired to view His work from a great distance.
Darwin’s growing conviction that even this theory gave God too much agency was likely to be painful to older men like Lyell, who was still hoping to reconcile his radical geology with his liberal Anglican faith. Meanwhile, Owen, although helpful in identifying the Beagle fossils, was increasingly likely to react furiously to any challenge to his belief that species were immutable, each one the result of a separate act of creation. How, Owen reasonably argued, could a jellyfish become an ox, or an amoeba an ostrich? More important, at this time of political upheaval – it was only five years since the Great Reform Act had extended the franchise to the urban middle classes – transmutation challenged the essential distinction between human and animal, and by analogy suggested that the boundaries that kept different races and classes of mankind apart might be a matter of custom rather than divine edict. Far from God carefully appointing men to particular stations, the social order might more accurately be conceived as an arbitrary free-for-all, with the winners – people like the Darwins, for instance – merely lucky, or at least canny, rather than especially deserving. No wonder Charley kept his mouth shut and his notebooks close.
One of the reasons Darwin had decided not to settle back home in Shrewsbury on his return from the Beagle was that it would require him to make a constant round of ‘visits to stupid people, who neither cared for me, nor I for them’. Afternoons that could have been spent over his microscope would be frittered away taking tea with his sisters’ friends. Yet although the stuffy rooms in Great Marlborough Street allowed him to pursue the autonomous, anonymous existence of an urban intellectual, there were still some social niceties that Charles Darwin Esq., late of The Mount, Shrewsbury, was obliged to observe. Getting his hair trimmed, for a start. By now Darwin’s various Beagle beards were a thing of the past. They had been replaced with wide ‘weepers’ and a clean chin, the standard look in late-1830s Britain for a man of the professional classes. A portrait from this time by George Richmond shows that Darwin’s light-brown hair was already scanty for a man who was not yet thirty (see plate 6). Still, by carefully brushing forward his fringe in the ‘Caesar’ style that had been fashionable two decades earlier, he could just about pass off his bulging forehead as evidence of a large brain rather than a receding hairline. Here was the early-Victorian equivalent of the comb-over, although whether Darwin’s hairdresser, William Willis of 19 Great Marlborough Street, sniggered or shrugged or even suggested the arrangement in the first place, we simply do not know.
Willis, who was forty-one, was originally from Huntingdonshire. He had been swept into London twenty years earlier on the tidal wave of migration that had deposited thousands of young people from the country into the crowded capital as combatants in the new urban struggle for existence. Arriving with his wife Elizabeth around 1818, he set up as a hairdresser in Brydges Street, just off fashionable Covent Garden, before moving west to larger premises in Great Marlborough Street. Aided in time by his sons Alfred and Charles, he got his living cutting the hair of the professional men who made their homes in the handsome streets that ran eastwards off Regent Street. The fact that Willis made a point of describing himself in trade directories as a ‘haircutter and perfumer’ rather than ‘barber’ suggests that he took care to present his establishment as a superior one. While he almost certainly shaved chins in addition to cutting hair, he probably forswore the teeth-pulling, minor surgery and drug-dispensing that had for centuries been associated with barbering of the rougher kind. Great Marlborough Street was a popular
