Charles Darwin in Cambridge

The following sections are included:

• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction

Charles Robert Darwin was born on 12 February 1809, the fifth of six children of a wealthy family in the small market town of Shrewsbury, Shropshire. 1809 was the period now remembered as the setting for Jane Austen's novels and the Napoleonic Wars in which Britain was the primary opponent for supremacy in Europe and far beyond. Napoleon was finally defeated in 1815. The post war era would see Britain become the world's greatest military and economic power for over a century. Another consequence of the wars was that Spain lost her South American colonies. With the end of Spain's control, there was an opening up of trading opportunities with her former colonies. In the 1820s Britain would seek to strengthen ties there and thus sent out naval surveying and mapping expeditions, two of which were by a small ship called HMS Beagle. This, very briefly stated, is the world into which Darwin was born…

In October 1825 Darwin's father sent him, aged only 16, to the University of Edinburgh to study medicine along with his brother Erasmus. Erasmus had been admitted a student at Christ's College, Cambridge on 9 February 1822. He was continuing his medical studies in Edinburgh which was far ahead of Cambridge in medicine. In going to Edinburgh, Darwin was following in the tradition of his father and grandfather. The two Darwins lodged together at 11 Lothian Street. The instruction at Edinburgh was through lectures and demonstrations. Darwin found the lectures “intolerably dull”. Out of his own interest, he also attended lectures on natural science. He praised most highly Thomas Hope's entertaining chemistry lectures. Darwin took copious notes which still survive. He also attended lectures on geology by Robert Jameson, the Regius Professor of Natural History. Darwin later claimed that Jameson's old-fashioned geology and ungentlemanly sneers at the more recent Plutonian or volcanic theories of colleagues convinced Darwin, for a time, to ignore geology. Edinburgh University was undoubtedly an important formative influence on Darwin. It was markedly secular compared to the English universities and he learned important lessons about contemporary science which he retained throughout his life…

Cambridge in 1828 was a quiet market town on the broad flat plains of fenland surrounded by reclaimed and many still unreclaimed marshes of East Anglia. The town was bisected by the meandering river Cam. The town, with a population of 21,000, was about one and a half miles long from north to south and one mile wide. The university population, all male, was about 2,000. It was said that Oxford was a university in a town and that Cambridge was a town in a university. In the centre of the town was the marketplace. The food and goods available here were of the highest quality in the kingdom — a result of the demand and the considerable paying power of the seventeen colleges and their inhabitants. Much of it came via the river on barges. The punts so beloved of students and unwieldy tourists today are the descendants of flat bottomed boats used to navigate the shallow marshlands of the region. Graham Swift's 1983 novel Waterland illuminates the part that water has played in the region. The university, which sent two members to Parliament, regulated the markets and issued licenses to trade with the university…

Settled in his lodgings overlooking what was then a much narrower Sidney Street, Darwin began to make friends and renew old acquaintances. His brother Erasmus returned on 8 February 1828 (T.11.25). Perhaps lodging over the tobacconist's shop led to some teasing. One friend, Albert Way (1805–1874) of Trinity College, drew a mock coat of arms for Darwin in April 1828. This comic coat of arms depicts crossed tobacco pipes, meerschaum pipes, cigars, a wine barrel and beer tankards, evidently drinking and smoking were Darwin's trademarks!…

Darwin returned to Christ's on 24 February 1829. Fox was gone, he had taken his B.A. degree on 23 January, ranking 88^th out of 160. Earlier in the month, Darwin's cousin Hensleigh Wedgwood was elected a Finch and Baines Fellow, but he would hold this only until October 1830. Two days after returning to his comfortable rooms, Darwin wrote Fox to report on his stay in London where he had visited entomologists F. W. Hope and James Francis Stephens. The former had generously given Darwin specimens of 160 beetle species for his collection. Darwin ordered a beetle cabinet to help house his growing collection. Darwin also reported that “By Grahams decided advice, I do not go in for my little Go.” John Graham (1794–1865) replaced Shaw as Tutor in 1829. He clearly did not think Darwin was ready to pass the examination. Shipley described Graham as “one of the most brilliant of the alumni of the College (fourth Wrangler and Chancellor's Classical Medallist in 1816), who was elected Master of the College in 1830, and was appointed to the Bishopric of Chester in 1848. Graham was one of the small group of Cambridge Liberals in the days of the first Reform Bill, and a strong supporter of the abolition of University tests. As a disciplinarian in College, he is said to have been somewhat too “easy-going” After Graham was elected Master in 1830, Darwin's Tutor was Edward John Ash (1799–1851)…

After the Christmas break, Darwin returned from London to Christ's on New Year's Day 1830. About this time, Darwin and seven friends formed an informal weekly dining club called either the “Gourmet Club” or “Glutton Club”. The club consisted of Darwin, Herbert, Whitley, Watkins, Cameron, James Heaviside of Sidney Sussex College, Robert Blane of Trinity College and Henry Lowe of Trinity Hall. They dined in each other's rooms in rotation. Herbert later recalled the formation of the club in a letter to Darwin's son Francis Darwin: At our first meeting Cameron proposed that we should call ourselves the “Glutton Club” to show our contempt for another set of men who called themselves by a long Greek title, meaning — “fond of dainties;” but who falsified their claim to such a designation by their weekly practice of dining at some road-side inn, 6 miles from Cambridge, on Mutton Chops, or Beans & Bacon. The name we adopted was in truth most dysphemistic, if I may use such a word; for we were none of us given to excess, but our little dinners were very recherchés & well-served; & we generally wound up the evening with a game of mild Vingt-&-un…

Darwin's final examination for the B.A. degree took place between 14–20 January 1831. It consisted of three days of written papers. Darwin was a poll candidate. The poll (an abbreviation of the Greek ‘Hoi Polloi’ for the crowd) consisted of those students who took an ordinary pass degree rather than an honours degree. The examination consisted of six parts: Homer, Virgil, Euclid, arithmetic and algebra, Paley's Evidences of Christianity (1794) and Principles of moral and political philosophy (1764), and Locke's An essay concerning human understanding (1690)…

In August 1831 Darwin took an important and instructive geological tour of North Wales, partly in the company of Professor Adam Sedgwick. Darwin became more than proficient with the surveying, measuring and hammering of practical geological field work. He learned how to read the landscape and to determine rock types, their angles of bedding and so forth. It was all part of reconstructing the past from the fragmentary evidence under foot. For the next few years, geology would move uppermost in Darwin's scientific interests. Upon returning home to Shrewsbury, Darwin received a letter from Henslow which changed his life, and the world, forever. It was an offer to travel on board the Royal Navy surveying ship HMS Beagle as naturalist. The offer came originally from the ship's captain, Robert FitzRoy (1805–1865) who was preparing to sail for South America and return by way of the Pacific and so circumnavigate the globe. FitzRoy's appeal for a naturalist was passed to his superior, the Hydrographer of the Navy, Francis Beaufort (1774–1857). Beaufort then appealed to his contact at Cambridge, George Peacock. Peacock thought first of Henslow who was very tempted but was unable to accept. Henslow next suggested Jenyns who was also tempted but equally unable to accept because of his own duties. Henslow and Jenyns were in no doubt as to who to recommend for the post — the recently graduated and scientifically accomplished Darwin. For many years it was believed that Darwin was invited as a gentleman companion to FitzRoy, and was not the official naturalist on the Beagle. This has recently been shown to be incorrect. Darwin really was the naturalist on the Beagle…

The plan to become a clergyman, as Darwin later recollected, was never “formally given up, but died a natural death when on leaving Cambridge I joined the Beagle as Naturalist.” But for a brief time at least he imagined spending the rest of his life living and working in Cambridge. In a memorandum to himself written around April 1838, Darwin weighed up the pros and cons of marriage. If he married, he feared, he would have to earn a living to adequately support a wife and family. The first possibility that came to mind was a: “Cambridge Professorship, either Geolog, or Zoolog.” As he teetered towards the inevitability of marriage he decided there were two alternatives. “Cambridge, better, but [it would be like being a] fish out of water, not being Professor & poverty. Then Cambridge Professorship, — & make best of it, do duty as such & work at spare times — My destiny will be Camb. Prof. or [to be a] poor man; [and live on the] outskirts of London, some small Square &c: — & work as well as I can”…

On 22–24 June 1909, over 400 scientists and dignitaries from 167 different countries gathered at Cambridge to celebrate the centenary of Darwin's birth and the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species. The event was an unprecedented success — never before had such a celebration been held, not for an institution or a nation — but for an individual scientist. The celebrations began with a reception in the Fitzwilliam Museum. On 23 June presentations and speeches in the Senate House were followed by a garden party given by the Master and Fellows of Christ's College in the College grounds…

The year 2009 was the 150^th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species and the 200^th anniversary of Darwin's birth. It was by far the largest worldwide commemoration of a historic scientist the world has ever seen. Probably over 1,000 publications, lectures, conferences, books articles documentaries and other commemorative events were created. My own list on Darwin Online records over 600. I myself published four books, about eleven articles, gave countless radio, TV, podcast, newspaper and magazine interviews and gave over 40 public lectures in a dozen countries. I expect other Darwin scholars experienced similar demand…

The following sections are included:

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• APPENDIX 1
• APPENDIX 2
• REFERENCES
• INDEX