10 October 2002 8:30 EST

by Henry Nicholls

[caption and credit]

A curious sliver of Darwinian history is being illuminated with a new edition, launched today, of Charles Darwin's The Life of Erasmus Darwin. Charles's account of his grandfather - a respected physician, famous poet, inventor, and leading intellectual of his day who strongly believed in evolution - was first published in 1879, but with about 16% of Charles's original text missing. It had been cut by the axe of his prudish daughter, Henrietta, who found it "dull" and "too long."

The publisher of the new editon, Cambridge University Press, boasts that "this account of his grandfather is the last of Charles Darwin's books to be published in full." Fittingly, 2002 is the bicentennial year of Erasmus Darwin's death.

Desmond King-Hele, erstwhile space scientist and a leading authority on Erasmus Darwin, has dug deep into the archives of Cambridge University Library, UK, to study the set of proofs that Charles had printed from his first draft. By comparing them with the 1879 edition, King-Hele has painstakingly revealed, in italics, all the alterations that Henrietta made to Charles's first effort. "It was an absolute nightmare" to detail all her changes, King-Hele told BioMedNet News, "because she not only cut it down, but she cut it up ... into actual pieces, and then stuck them together again in different places.".

Many of Henrietta's cuts were purely editorial, rearranging sentences to make them read better and chopping out the odd bit of waffle. She was a very intelligent woman, said Alison Pearn, editor on the Darwin Project, which aims to publish all the known letters written and received by Charles Darwin. "She helped, more than most people would probably realize, with his work," Pearn said. "The letters reveal that Henrietta was very involved, as someone with whom her father and his scientific colleagues discussed their work."

Nevertheless, on this occasion her editing was heavier than normal. "Some of it is censorship," said King-Hele, who believes her motivation was to protect him. "She obviously cut out the parts which might cause people to make remarks about him."

Of all the sections that didn't make it into the 1879 edition, "the most important one, by far, is Charles's summing-up of Erasmus," said King-Hele. This lengthy passage, right at the end of the book, shows that Charles felt very favorably toward Erasmus because of his multitude of talents, energy, and strong humanity. But in it, Charles takes a swipe at the strong Christian feeling in early 18th-century Britain that, he wrote, "grossly and often calumniated" the memory of his grandfather. King-Hele's guess is that Henrietta so disapproved of this slander on the church that she took out the scissors for one last and rather significant snip.

In many of the other, shorter passages that she scrapped, Charles takes an indulgent turn away from reflecting on his grandfather's life to step onto the soapbox. At one point, he castigates "those bigots who now oppose vaccination," dismissing them as "too ignorant to be able to see their own ignorance." Elsewhere, he shows his strong opposition to slavery, describing it as "this great national crime."

Charles' decision to take a break from his scientific endeavors and write this book was precipitated by an essay titled "Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather and forerunner of Charles Darwin," written by Ernst Krause and published in the German science journal Kosmos to celebrate Charles' 70th birthday. This essay described Erasmus's own ideas on evolution, published 65 years before those of his grandson, and it drew out the parallels between them.

On reading the article, Charles wrote to Krause. He asked if he could have the article translated into English, and later offered to write a "preface" that ended up book-length - some 100 pages, and 50% longer than Krause's own effort. Nevertheless, Krause went down as the author of the first edition comprising the two pieces; consequently, said King-Hele, "it's never been put into bibliographies [of Darwin] because it's said to be by this man Krause."

Interestingly, the text also contains a rabble of minor inaccuracies, which King-Hele has set straight. For example, Charles writes that "Erasmus practiced as a solicitor in Derby" when in fact we know he practiced in Lichfield in Staffordshire. However, King-Hele excuses these minor errors because, surprisingly, Charles knew virtually nothing about his grandfather's life when he sat down to write the book. This might have been because Charles' father Robert had steadfastly refused to talk about his own father Erasmus.

King-Hele explains that when Erasmus had published his own ideas on evolution he was "absolutely battered by everyone, from the government to the church." Consequently, "Robert was appalled, and he just resolved to say nothing about it again because he wanted to be respectable and respected." Charles has another excuse for the occasional slip-up - he only took about a month to research and write the work. "He was bound to make mistakes. I don't blame him for that at all," King-Hele said. "I think he did very well, considering."

King-Hele's interview for the radio program Great Lives will be broadcast October 25, 2002 at 11:00 pm GMT. Links for live streaming will be available on BBC online radio.

Picture caption and credit:
Charles Darwin, image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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