Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles
Darwin, was born near Nottingham on December 12, 1731. He was educated
at Cambridge and Edinburgh and settled first near Lichfield and later at
Derby. A remarkable polymath, he became a best selling poet during the
same years that he  worked
as a country doctor, naturalist, medical botanist, and inventor. Darwin
expounded one of the earliest theories of evolution ("all vegetables and
animals now living were originally derived from the smallest microscopic
ones"), and he described the importance of sexual selection to continuing
changes within species ("the final cause of this contest among males seems
to be, that the strongest and most active animal should propagate the species,
which should thence become improved"). His two most important technical
works are Zoonomia (1794), a medical textbook punctuated with reflections
on philosophy, natural history, and human life and Phytologia (1800),
a scientific discussion of agriculture and gardening. His book length poems,
The
Botanic Garden (1789-91) and The Temple of Nature (1803), were
widely read and even more widely discussed. His friends and associates
included a pantheon of leading lights in a wide variety of fields: Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Joseph
Priestley, Josiah Wedgwood, James Watt, Dr. Johnson, the poet Anna
Seward (who also wrote Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin), and R.
L. Edgeworth, father of Maria. Darwin was one of the founders of the well
known Lunar Society, second only to the Royal Society in its importance
as a gathering place for scientists, inventors, and natural philosophers
during the second half of the eighteenth century. He emphasized the role
of sexuality in all reproduction and attributed the possibility of emotion
to plants. He expressed great interest in the work of Volta and Galvani
on muscular contraction, arguing in 1791 that electricity was the basis
for all nerve impulses. He recorded accurate observations on subjects as
wide ranging as photosynthesis, neurology, meteorology, geology, and psychology.
Often quoted poetic lines from Darwin's The Temple of Nature clearly
anticipate the outlines of his grandson's theory by half a century:
Organic Life
beneath the shoreless waves
Darwin exerted a powerful influence on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Mary Shelley among other literary figures. Wordsworth cited him as a source for "Goody Blake and Harry Gill" in Lyrical Ballads (1798) and Coleridge claimed that Darwin possessed "perhaps, a greater range of knowledge than any other man in Europe, and is the most inventive of philosophical men." Coleridge, however, also coined the term darwinizing, meaning to speculate wildly, in reference to Darwin's evolutionary ideas. In addition, Wordsworth and Coleridge clearly had Darwin, among others, in mind when they attacked the "gaudiness" of eighteenth-century poetic diction in the "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads. Darwin was also in the minds of the Shelley Circle (Mary, Percy, Lord Byron, Polidori) during the Frankenstein summer of 1816; he is referred to in Percy's "Preface" to the 1818 edition and in Mary's introduction to the 1831 edition of the novel. Even Keats, who studied medicine before turning to poetry, was affected by the power of Darwin's ideas about an organic unity that linked plants, animals, and human beings. While the Romantics often criticized Darwin for his eighteenth-century poetic diction, his enthusiasm for materialist science, and the speculative aspects of some of his thinking, they were powerfully influenced by his view of the natural world and his belief in connections between human and nonhuman life. (A.N.) |