Charles Darwin: Voyaging, Vol. 1

CHAPTER 1 - STORMY WATERS IF CHARLES DARWIN had spent the first half of his life in the world of Jane Austen, he now stepped forward into the pages of Anthony Trollope. Victorian Britain seemed to be at peace with itself as political agitation at home and memories of the Crimean War and Indian uprising gave way to relative stability in the late 1850s and early 1860s. Free trade and carboniferous capitalism pushed ahead as the great manufacturing industries of the nation boomed. In the grand houses of London, Viscount Palmerston picked up his silk hat to become prime minister in 1857, followed in short order by Lord Derby in 1858, and then Palmerston again in 1859, while Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone, and Richard Bright stalked the wings impatient to transform the face of party politics. Cathedral cities hummed with religious controversy; books and magazines poured from the presses; the newly affluent took tours and holidays; and a whole army of clerks, civil servants, bureaucrats, bankers, and accountants was called into being to administer the fresh commercial horizons that accompanied the emerging empire, as India, China, Canada, South America, and the Antipodes increasingly fell under British economic domination. Steam technology was the hero of society. At that time Britain possessed two-thirds of the world's capacity for cotton factory production and accounted for half the world's output of coal and iron, an unmatched degree of industrial preeminence. The length of railway track snaking across the countryside doubled from 1850 to 1868. Lawn-mowers, water-closets, gas lights, iron girders, encaustic tiles, and much, much more were available to those who could afford them. Although Queen Victoria and her ministers were soon to encounter complex foreign affairs in Garibaldi's Italy and painful consequences from the Civil War in the United States of America, the ethos of "improvement" prompted significant developments in domestic housing, health, education, communications, dress, and manners. "The genius of England is universally admitted to be of an eminently enterprising and speculative character," declared the magazine Once a Week.1 Confidence soared. Social boundaries shifted. Even so, the contradictions at the heart of Victorian life were more obvious than ever. Fraud, filth, overcrowding, poverty, death, and violence were a fact of life in the urban slums. Rural communities had lost in a decade more than 40 percent of the male workforce to industrial, colonial, and military demands and bleakly faced another round of agricultural depression and distress. The nation's religious faith, although never coherent, was fracturing into fervour or dissent. While many from the ruling ranks of society turned a blind eye to these issues, a remarkable array of novelists, statisticians, medical men, radical divines, and social activists were starting to reveal the squalor alongside prosperity and discovering the interesting in the ordinary. In time, parliamentary leaders would open their minds to a second round of political reform in the nineteenth century, egged on by the high sense of purpose, moral earnestness, doctrines of self-help, and appreciation of decorum that characterised the emerging middle classes. From real-life Westminster to imaginary Barchester and back again, Trollope easily captured in his novels this sense of the personal and parochial. But life was not simple even for those whom Lord Salisbury called "persons of substance." These mid-century years were not so much an age of equipoise as framed by social and political contrasts. It was an age of capital, labour, complacency, and faith; at the same time, an age of cities, misery, change, commerce, deference, and doubt. In among the contrasts stood the unobtrusive figure of Charles Darwin. Supported by a family fortune derived from the Industrial Revolution, Darwin was content to become a thorouBrowne, Janet is the author of 'Charles Darwin: Voyaging, Vol. 1' with ISBN 9780394579429 and ISBN 0394579429.