Charles Darwin The squire naturalist in DowneBritish naturalist in full Charles Robert Darwin

born February 12, 1809, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England died April 19, 1882, Downe, Kent

Darwin drafted a 35-page sketch of his theory of natural selection in 1842 and expanded it in 1844, but he had no immediate intention of publishing it. He wrote Emma a letter in 1844 requesting that, if he died, she should pay an editor £400 to publish the work. Perhaps he wanted to die first. In 1842, Darwin, increasingly shunning society, had moved the family to the isolated village of Downe, in Kent, at the “extreme edge of [the] world.” (It was in fact only 16 miles [26 km] from central London.) Here, living in a former parsonage, Down House, he emulated the lifestyle of his clerical friends. Fearing prying eyes, he even lowered the road outside his house. His seclusion was complete: from now on he ran his days like clockwork, with set periods for walking, napping, reading, and nightly backgammon. He fulfilled his parish responsibilities, eventually helping to run the local Coal and Clothing Club for the labourers. His work hours were given over to bees, flowers, and barnacles and to his books on coral reefs and South American geology, three of which in 1842–46 secured his reputation as a career geologist.

He rarely mentioned his secret. When he did, notably to the Kew Gardens botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, Darwin said that believing in evolution was “like confessing a murder.” The analogy with this capital offense was not so strange: seditious atheists were using evolution as part of their weaponry against Anglican oppression and were being jailed for blasphemy. Darwin, nervous and nauseous, trying spas and quack remedies (even tying plate batteries to his heaving stomach), understood the conservative clerical morality. He was sensitive to the offense he might cause. He was also immensely wealthy: by the late 1840s the Darwins had £80,000 invested; he was an absentee landlord of two large Lincolnshire farms; and in the 1850s he plowed tens of thousands of pounds into railway shares. Even though his theory, with its capitalist and meritocratic emphasis, was quite unlike anything touted by the radicals and rioters, these turbulent years were no time to break cover.

From 1846 to 1854, Darwin added to his credibility as an expert on species by pursuing a detailed study of all known barnacles. Intrigued by their sexual differentiation, he discovered that some females had tiny degenerate males clinging to them. This sparked his interest in the evolution of diverging male and female forms from an original hermaphrodite creature. Four monographs on such an obscure group made him a world expert and gained him the Royal Society’s Royal Medal in 1853. No longer could he be dismissed as a speculator on biological matters.