Dr White: My name is Paul White and I’m here with Pietro Corsi today. This is part of a series of interviews that the Darwin Project is doing on Darwin and religion, and Pietro is an expert, particularly on early nineteenth century and late eighteenth century evolution and the controversies surrounding evolutionary theories.

Dr White: I think I want to start by asking you a bit more about that period, and we [historians] have – from your work and others’ – now quite a … bigger picture I think of what kinds of debates were going on around transformist theories before Darwin. In the British context, we have a sense too of what the religious significance[s] of some of those debates were, particularly in geology, but I don’t think that we have such a picture for France. I think the view that we have is of a very politicised arena, if one thinks of href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-2786.html”>[Jean Baptiste de] Lamarck and >[Georges] Cuvier and href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-1839.html”>[Etienne] Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, but I’m not sure what the religious dimensions of those debates were about, and maybe we can start with that.

Prof Corsi: Yes, well you see, the French scene deserves close attention. I think that people have been working – and doing excellent work – for England, as you said. Myself [included], but a lot of others as well: we build on each other’s work, which is natural. Germany’s now being opened up a bit thanks to works by Bob Richards or Sander Gliboff; that is, we now understand the extent to which forms of evolution – let’s keep it very broad – were debated in Germany.

The French scene is particularly interesting because – let me start with a provocation - I think everything needs to be done. We have concentrated our attention on very, very few main actors – the ones you mentioned: Cuvier, Lamarck, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire – and we have not paid… I don’t want to say, ‘any attention’ because as you know in history, there is always someone who has written an article, so will always find a contradiction in what you are saying, but let’s say that extremely rare are the examples of systematic investigation on ways of communicating science [in France before or during Darwin's career], for instance, and what does it mean to publish in science [in France in that period]. Let me try to be as simple as possible.

The assumption is that French science is basically concentrated on the Academy of Sciences (through the various names it took: the Institut, you know, it was… the Academy of Sciences was abolished in 1793, reconstituted in 1795 with the name of the Institut, then at the [Bourbon] Restoration after Napoleon fell, it was given again, back, the name of Académie des sciences, but let’s say, ‘the Institution of Science’) and people have also assumed that the science which is interesting to look at was mainly done in the Jardin des Plantes: in the natural history museum in Paris. Now, of course, no-one can deny the centrality of Cuvier and later on, well, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and also the centrality of Lamarck, in zoology in particular. It is often forgotten that Lamarck was extremely respected as an invertebrate zoologist.

Well, the work I’ve been doing in the last four or five years has concentrated on periodicals, which is obvious, and dictionaries. I worked on about six dictionaries published between 1802 and 1844. In each of these dictionaries there is a huge coverage of what people felt important for the understanding of the succession of life throughout history or at the surface of the world. References to religion are extremely limited if not non-existent. However, one extremely prolific writer, whose name is Julien-Joseph Virey, very well known in France, in England as well, and in the United States – he was one of the earliest racialist theorists of the nineteenth century – he was strongly providentially oriented. That is, he believed that spontaneous generations and the ascent of life through increasing degrees of complexity was dominated by the spirit of God: God acted in nature through these natural processes. But he is the only one so explicit. So the reference is to a broad natural theology outlook. It is interesting because, for instance, Virey, before reading Paley in 1802, he already uses the eye as a key argument in natural theology, so drawing on a tradition which is difficult to monitor. Some names come to mind, but it’s really difficult to monitor.

When you plunge into these dictionaries and these periodicals, you realise how much concentration on Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire has been distorting our appreciation at a very basic level: what were people talking about? Now, that question needs to be put, without prejudices. You may say, well, some of these people were living outside the Institution. If I have five minutes, I can say that. Let me take only one case: href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-550.html”>[Jean Baptiste Georges Marie] Bory de Saint-Vincent.

Bory de Saint-Vincent was the editor of the Dictionnaire classique d’histoire naturelle (the Classical dictionary of natural history) that travelled with href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-1.html”>Darwin on the Beagle. Bory de Saint-Vincent, in the 1820s, was a key protagonist of a furious battle against Cuvier, and he was one of the earliest promoters of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in the public press. Not only that, but he also produced, or had people writing for him, articles showing the close link between German embryology and Saint-Hilaire and monitoring the relationships, even the personal relationships, between big names in German science who had visited Paris and had become friendly with Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.

Now, in a wonderful book written by Toby Appel on the Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire-Cuvier debate of 1830, she mentions Bory de Saint-Vincent, saying that he was – and she is right – that he was a rather picturesque figure, almost… someone active at the fringe of proper science, who had even gone to prison for debts, for three years. So, here we have someone who writes in dictionaries and journals, very prolific, very inventive, but cannot be taken seriously because he was really someone spending money with actresses and being a kind of… extravagant person.

Now, if you look at the three years in prison, and you study what happens in France after 1825… In France after 1825… Well, the movement starts in the early 1820s: ‘23, ‘24. Napoleon dies in March 1821. In France there is almost no [immediate] reaction. The reaction starts around ‘23, ‘24. The more the French government moves to the right wing, the more people try to start saying that Napoleon was a great hero. Now, in popular theatrical representations in Paris, the hero becomes more and more the soldier of the Napoleonic army who comes back to France after being stranded in Russia for years and finds France corrupted. The officer of the Napoleonic army becomes a kind of person who people have to trust to put the country in order again. Now, Bory de Saint-Vincent had been an officer of the Napoleonic army [and was] known for that; had been condemned to death in 1815 for being a strong supporter of Napoleon; had been forced to flee France for years, hiding in Belgium, Holland and Germany. In 1826 he is put in prison for debts. In doing that, he fulfils the paradigm of the theatrical figure of the Napoleonic officer. He is poor, forced to go to prison for debts, but he has a moral strength. So, historians have looked at Bory’s imprisonment for three years as a sign of his being outside mainstream. I am prepared to argue that by going to prison, like someone went to the gulags in Russia, he was not going out of credibility, he was increasing his credibility. So that should tell you how complex the situation was.

In any case, Bory is interesting precisely for what I said at the beginning: his attempt to update evolutionary theories and make them more credible. For Bory, Lamarck is not credible because he does not have a proper theory of spontaneous generation and he also does not have a credible theory to explain how new successive increased organic complexities are achieved. So Bory launches a new research program using microscopes, on spontaneous generation, which attracts, for five years, enormous European attention – and [receives attention] in England as well. He also embraces embryological development models [which] Lamarck didn’t have, and he was right: Lamarck did not have a theory like that. So, for Bory de Saint-Vincent, sponteneous generations are similar to chemical combinations, and once you have a spontaneously generated molecule, and you have several spontaneously generated molecules sticking together to form cryptograms, for instance, you can only have that growth in the same way in which once you have a crystal, that crystal can only grow in one way. So, Bory de Saint-Vincent believed that he had achieved a totally materialistic explanation of the origin of life and of the ascent in complexity without reference to any final causes, and of course little… let alone of any creation. Bory was, contrary to Virey who was a Providentialist, Bory was extremely scathing against religious interpretation of creation, and against the Bible. He always made jokes…

The final point I would like to make – and I’m sorry I’ve been too long – of the complexity of France: I have personally assumed, and I have even written, that… After the fall of Napoleon and the Restoration (we are talking of the period between 1815 and 1830) there was an increasing movement towards the right. In 1825 the government [of France] tried to pass a legislation against blasphemy. Anyone could be condemned to death, even, if a judge thought that what he or she said was blasphemous. It was the major attack against the freedom of expression in France. Even the reactionary writer [Francois-Auguste-Rene, vicomte de] Chateaubriand wrote against it. I assumed that the same kind of iron fist was applying to science. I was totally wrong. The more you read this hugely diffused literature (I mean, for these dictionaries you can also know how many copies were sold: they were huge print runs; publishers became extremely rich by publishing these dictionaries)… now, in these dictionaries, Bory de Saint-Vincent could even say things like, ‘The Chinese are a well-organised society. They don’t believe in the immortality of the soul, which is a dream, and their society shows very well that we don’t need that hypothesis.’ Now, that is written in a period in which there is blasphemy legislation, so clearly a lot of scientific popular writings were not scrutinised, and the freedom of expression and the imaginative proposals that [were] pulling together different traditions, [were] enormously free.

Dr White: Another area which your work has explored is the kind of engagement with evolutionary theory that was done by clerical thinkers, by theologians; your work on href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-3836.html”>Baden Powell, in particular. This kind of surprising [way] in which transformism was taken up within the church in order to effect some kind of religious reformation or theological reformation is something that we find continues and is a very big part of the reception of Darwin. I’m just wondering again, going back to France, if we see any comparable engagement in the theological world with transformist theories.

Prof Corsi: This is a very good question, because it was a matter of friendly contention with a couple of French historians – friends of mine – at a conference recently. I said that you do not have, in France, the same intensity and density of debate concerning, for instance, biblical geology or the natural theological appliations of geological or life sciences. And, in particular, one senior historian of France told me, well, Pietro, it’s not true: the question is that the issue has never been addressed [by historians]. So, there is someone… - it’s a caution I’m bringing forward against what I’m going to say, [there] is someone [who] strongly believes that there are so little studies that it’s difficult to say – however, I’m still pretty confident that you do not have, in France, the same intense engagement in natural sciences from the clergy that you have in England. After all, Charles Darwin was quite happy at the prospect of becoming an Anglican minister, because Anglican ministers, what they did, most of them, was precisely natural history. The amount of reading British clergyman were doing in the French natural sciences I just described before is absolutely outstanding. After all, a lot of French Lamarckian [literature] was owned by English clergymen. You do not have that in France. Moreover, in France, even during the hardest years, 1825–1830, when the minister of education – let’s talk about that – was a bishop, [Denis-Luc] Frayssinous.

Frayssinous was very worried to curb atheism, but even more worried [of] subversion and people not being friendly to the government. (So they closed down the faculty of medicine for a few months in 1824, if I’m not wrong.) But you do not have the same engagement in debating, within theological circles, these issues concerning natural history, let alone evolution or Lamarckism. So I think England is quite – in my view – quite original precisely because of the constitution, I mean the professional structure, of the Anglican clergymen. I found people endorsing moderate forms of Lamarckism even within the extreme right wing high Tory church, for instance on the subject of Noah’s ark. It is surprising the extent to which these people knew about Continental science.

I’m just focusing on France; people have been writing on href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-1966.html”>[Joseph Henry] Green, the private doctor of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had been to Germany and knew German anatomy but also knew href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-2641.html”>[Immanuel] Kant’s philosophy. I still believe up to the mid-1830s not many English people knew German. (The evidence of that is that I found several people quoting German literature from the French translations. So… more studying needs to be done, but I think that [the evidence so far] is [representative of] the reality.) So, briefly, you do not have in France, the same systematic and massive list of publications. concerning the theological bearings or the religious bearings of developments in natural science.

Dr White: I want to ask you about Darwin’s own understanding of the prehistory of evolution, which we find laid out in that historical preface to the third edition [of Darwin's On the origin of species], and I’ve heard you remark that this is an extraordinarily simplified picture of precursors that he lays out. His view of the French scene, for example, is extremely simplified. I’m just wondering how you might explain that: is Darwin, in fact, not reading very much of the kind of literature that you mentioned, that’s quite prolific, or is he trying to construct a picture that will promote… his own originality, I suppose?

Prof Corsi: I think both.

As you know, some historians have stressed Darwin’s nasty side (I cannot believe in that because I adore Darwin) and stressed the fact that Darwin insisted on his originality. >Richard Owen started first, in a nasty review in 1860. I don’t believe that, I’m sorry. I think it’s too simple; [if] we apply contemporary academic climbing to a completely different mindset. But people always try to say how original they are. That’s natural, especially if you work forty years on a project! But I don’t think that is the case [here]. I think generational factors are much more important. Let me give you one instance.

For people like John Fleming, the Scottish minister and naturalist, friend of href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-3051.html”>Charles Lyell, the debate I was sketching before – Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Cuvier, Bory de Saint-Vincent, Virey – to John Fleming, in the 1820s, these were burning issues. If you read Fleming’s writings on Lamarck from 1820 to 1830, you will notice a change of tone. At the beginning, he is almost sympathetic. By the end of the 1820s, he is worried and he is more and more critical of potentially dangerous atheism implicit in Lamarck. By 1830 in England, a lot of people are really worried that Lamarckian evolution will join with political radicalism and create a new, atheistic view of nature. They are extremely surprised, by 1835, to notice that none of that is coming from France. However, they almost overreacted. William Whewell, in the review of the second volume of the Principles of geology by Lyell, published in 1832, William Whewell reviewed the second volume and said, ‘We were rather worried by how many friends Lamarck is making throughout Europe,’ and therefore Lyell reviews Lamarck in the opening eleven chapters, by the way, of Principles of geology, thus providing the most accurate and substantial summary of Lamarck’s theory available in England, and indeed perhaps in Europe.

But Darwin in ‘32, well, of course he knew a lot about insects, about coleoptera. He knew a lot through conversation with href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-2235.html”>[John Stevens] Henslow of what biogeography was, and of course he went on a trip in the summer to study geology: a field trip with href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-4276.html”>[Adam] Sedgwick. But when he started reading these French authors, for Darwin they were not any more a burning issue. By 1834, the issue was almost academic within a lot of people, and William Whewell, in 1837, wrongly thought it was time to say, That’s it. And in the History of [the] inductive sciences, William Whewell said investigation on the origin and transformation of life is not a legitimate field in science, but of course, he failed in that.

But what I’m trying to repeat again and get at is that by the time in which Darwin sets to read these people – Lamarck, Bory de Saint-Vincent, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and others – they have become almost sources. They are not any more [part of a] burning debate, [a] hot debate, on which people feel things are at stake. So I think generational factors are like that. Darwin was not misleading readers: he is simply not aware; he has not lived through that. The historical sketch by Darwin, in my view is very disappointing, but I’m not accusing Darwin of [being responsible] for that. I simply say that he’s tried to think, who are the people who said something [about evolution before he did]. For instance, he mentions href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-3917.html”>[Constantine Samuel] Rafinesque, this very strange character. We now know much more about him. By the way, Rafinesque was a close friend of Bory de Saint-Vincent and probably got his idea from Bory, when he published in 1822 that varieties become species through a constant process of modification: new varieties, new species, and so on and so forth. But Darwin did not know that. For Darwin, Rafinesque was just one name who said something. And naturally so, because by 1860 these people were curiosities, whereas if you are in the 1820s or the early 1830s these people make up a worrying scenario of people in different parts of the world claiming that nature has capabilities of spontaneous self-organisation, which is the basic of Lucretian atomism and certainly not a religious view of nature. So my answer will be that Darwin read what he needed, not because what he needed was a matter of burning concern around him but because it was a concern to him personally.

Dr White: Given that there was so much work and debate about transformism in the late eighteenth century and right through the first part of the nineteenth century, when Darwin does publish what difference does it really make then to the debate in France? We don’t have to talk about it as a straightforward [matter of the] reception of Darwin’s ideas, but is the fact that Darwinism is now out there… does that really change the way the French talk about transformism and the way in which they engage with their own tradition of transformist thought?

Prof Corsi: I think that in France, Darwin was looked at as a very clever botanist. In particular, he was given a seat at the Academy of Sciences in botany, not in zoology. People felt challenged. The earliest reaction to Darwin was typically French: ‘We already said it.’ That poses a problem for historians because historians assume that Lamarck was dead not only physically in 1829 but even morally: no-one took him seriously. I think that is totally not true. But nevertheless, people who say that Lamarck cut no ice in France itself, well, they have to explain why the immediate reaction to [Darwin]… People, even in letters, said, ‘Oh, well, Lamarck already said that.’ Of course, Lamarck has not said what Darwin said, even though some people say, well, within Darwin there are Lamarckian elements. I don’t think they are Lamarckian. I think the idea that during your lifetime you can acquire some character or you can move some of your organs in some direction, however fractionally, and that that can be passed on to your children, that does not amount to Lamarckianism: everyone believed that throughout Europe; very few people doubted that. The question is to what an extent, and there Darwin was not Lamarckian in that, because he did not believe that you can have, for instance, major organic transformations simply because of use or lack of use. So for Darwin, Lamarckian factors (in our language, not in his language) were amongst the many factors producing variation, of which – as we know very well - he knew very little (and he was in good company). So, variations are produced in which way? Well, amongst other things, they are also produced through use and lack of use.

The French were aware of Lamarck and in fact, in the 1850s Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s son - just to mention one – href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-1840.html”>Isidore, reviewed the entire debate in a very successful publication. He really spelled out the story and said, which are the main views on the transformation of species today? And he gave a fair account: of Lamark; of his father (of course, he tended to give prominence to his father)… and he declared, in 1858, that the question of whether we can explain speciation in natural terms is widely open and whoever comes with a good idea, we will listen to him. That was the political message. At the href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-4454.html”>Geological Society in Paris, which has been very little studied (the Geological Society in France had similar status to the href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-1841.html”>Geological Society in England; however, whereas on the Geolocial Society in England we have marvellous studies from [Martin] Rudwick, [James (Jim)] Secord, Simon Knell, marvellous studies; for France we have almost nothing)… in the debate of the Geological Society of France in the 1850s, an agreement was found that the question has to be analysed more thoroughly: that clearly there must be something explaining why a little shell dies out and another shell appears, only slightly different but certainly different, and the idea that God creates each of them, in succession, is a bit ridiculous. So, for instance, a German author, who will be the first translator of Darwin, [Heinrich Georg] Bronn, is widely read in France, and debated in France, precisely because he has a theory equating domestication to speciation and claiming that in the past something analagous happened.

However, when Darwin came out with a fully-fledged and powerful theory, the reaction was a bit… closing up. France was… they knew they lost out to him, and 1870 was a confirmation. There is a big debate: did, really, French science decline? And of course, as every thesis as broad as that – ‘French science declined’ - people are now finding a lot of counter-examples. The question is very complex. Let me simply say, I just published a book on that correspondence, with the preface in English, explaining precisely this point. We have visitors who left testimonies – contemporaries – [who] openly said that what Paris had been until 1830, now London was. In particular, one of my authors spends two years, 1854 and 1855, in Paris, working at the Natural History Museum and working in the huge paleontological collections in Paris, and becomes a very good friend of a paleontologist who is openly Lamarckian, and believes in evolution, straightforward. This chap moves to London in 1857 and writes back in shock. He says, no French collection can now equal the British Museum. Not only that, but he goes through France and goes to the famous fossil locations, for crocodiles – the famous Teleosaurus or fossil crocodiles – the north of France; the centre of France and Paris for invertebrates; and he constantly says, British gold is buying everything.

So there is even the idea that British collections and private collectors have put French science out of the market. Funding for research decreased in Paris across the board, that’s clear. So, the French are very edgy about Darwin; also for the fact that the enormous European success of Darwin signifies to some a kind of serious attempt to [topple] the superiority of French science, exemplifies it. So there is also an institutional psychological reaction. I don’t want to enter into the reaction in scientific terms because of course the French developed their own form of evolutionary theories. They also experiment in Lamarckian terms well before [Trofim Denisovich] Lysenko. In France, there were a lot of experiments, especially on animal breeding for agricultural purposes and plant cultivation – acclimatisation, it was called: acclimatisation – that were based on Lamarckian principles. So Darwin’s natural selection was totally alien to the French scientific scene and to the French psychological scene… with an exception, of course: the [French] translator of Darwin, href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-4113.html”>Clémence [Auguste] Royer.

I’m waiting for Darwin scholars (I’m not a Darwin scholar even though of course I’ve read Darwin) to explain why Darwin appeared to have been so late in understanding that [his French] translator was so rabid that it was almost embarassing. Now, the translator of Darwin into French, if I have a minute to say, was called Clémence Royer; was a lady. She has all our sympathies. She was a proto-feminist; the first lady to be honoured with an honorary degree in medicine in France. She lived with a married man, which was absolutely scandalous. She had been giving lectures on Lamarck in Lausanne in the 1850s. I mean, she is really our darling. Yet, she writes in the preface to the Origin of Species that the worst of all sins is Christian charity: the weak have to be eliminated. Now that’s hard stuff, but she was really not speaking a French language. That is, that was not mainstream. Certainly, people who used Darwin in that way in France, well, there were [some], but later on, in the 1880s where you have a kind of social Darwinism with radical undertones. But I never understood, according to the letters you have published, why Darwin took so long – because he read French quite well - why he did not read that preface and say, ‘What is this girl saying? That’s not me,’ or something.

Dr White: I think I’ll just ask you one more question, which is about this debate in the French Academy in the 1870s. You said that Darwin is eventually recognised as a botanist, not as a zoologist, and it’s a long series of debates… about this. It’s something that you’ve worked on, and I’ve read some of the accounts of these debates and it’s striking the different arguments that are brought against Darwin. On the one hand, Darwin is [portrayed as] an amateur, so he’s not really doing proper science the way it’s done today, and this is a striking observation if we think about French science as actually in decline at this point and Darwin representing a threat. Another [means of portrayal is that]: Darwin is a wild speculator. And then there’s this curious defence by href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-3892.html”>[Armand de] Quatrefages in which Darwin is brought out as a way of practising science which is free from politics: an emphasis on Darwin’s really [strong] devotion to truth, and his hard work and dedication. [Quatrefages argues that we] should look to Darwin as someone who can show us that science can be something higher than politics, which to me suggests that there is a kind of intense politicisation of Darwin and maybe this radicalism that you mentioned with Royer’s translation: a kind of anti-clerical Darwin that’s being put forward at this time; that this is another problem.

Prof Corsi: I totally agree. De Quatrefages is a very interesting figure because you see, in France, the interest for geology, for instance, fades away. It’s difficult to say when, but certainly by the 1860s the public interest in geology of the 1850s has gone and a lot of these geologists and paleontologists become human anthropologists and move into anthropology or prehistory. Now, de Quatrefages is someone who does almost precisely that, because he moves into anthropology (what we would call today anthropology) and he’s an extremely cultivated man. He writes rather interesting stuff on the French precursors of Darwin. He writes for La [sic] revue de deux mondes, a very important general culture magazine.

And you are totally right: that is, there are several voices taking part in this debate. But the question of amateurs versus professional scientists… I think it’s very important to stress. The French institutional scientists that we take for granted had in fact to fight a very long battle to exercise a monopoly on science, because they themselves, at least until the 1830s, were very much threatened by amateurs: publishers, writers…

When Cuvier launches his dictionary of natural sciences, he writes an appeal to the public and says, do not buy a rival dictionary – done by Virey and amateurs – because, he says, we the professors of the Natural History Museum are the only ones entitled to speak about nature because we have the collections. And then he says, also because we are in touch with all the merchants of specimens throughout Europe. Well, Cuvier’s dictionary fails: after volume 4, no-one buys it. Now, there may be complex economic reasons as well, but I submit to say that we have assumed that because French institutional science was politically so powerful, that means that these people represented science in the eyes of the French public. My claim is that they rarely did so, and it depended more on individuals rather than on a class.

Clearly, Darwin… you rightly said that, thanks for pointing that out. Darwin… people felt threatened. I mean after all, French professors had fought very hard battles to get the privileges of an aristocratic position. French professors, even today, enjoy something which is unthinkable in England or in other European countries or the United States: the right to accumulate several jobs. Up to the second half of the nineteenth century, professors had the right to appoint their assistants (usually [they appointed] their relatives), and their successors. So to a paradoxical extent, institutional science in France had gained the privileges of the aristocracy: life appointments; accumulation of salaries; accumulation of jobs; family lineages being perpetrated. Now to them, the amateur who could attract attention was a real threat. […]

Of course, in England, remember, in 1830, the great debate on the decline of science in England. An extraordinary debate, that occurred precisely when British science was taking up enormously. And people talk about decline! They say, Which is our model?, the French scientists. In France, scientists have [been] made barons, counts. They are honoured by the state. In England, not. So, in 1832, at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, href=”darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-3871.html”>[Charles] Pritchard, [John] Dalton and I don’t remember who… [These] four scientists are knighted. So that’s an important thing. However, the image of the French scientists they had and we have is not really accurate because they were not state fonctionnaires; they were not state bureaucrats. To some extent they were, but they enjoyed privileges that would be unthinkable in England, not for the reasons that they were honoured, but for this monopoly on positions.

Even today, a top scientist can be a member of at least four different universities and institutions: a full member. Today, you don’t have salaries anymore, you only have one salary (so that’s regrettable for our colleagues!), but certainly the principle of accumulating jobs puts the French science in another light. So there was a lot at stake if, suddenly, amateurs could claim that they were doing top science. French scientists had been saying, There is only one top science – it’s ours – and there cannot be other ones.

Dr White: Do you want to say anything else about the ways in which Darwin might have been perceived as a kind of – or that he was being used by others besides his translator to promote a kind of - attack on the church; as a kind of anti-clerical instrument? Or is that…

Prof Corsi: Oh yes. But you see, republicans… France becomes a lay country in 1870 after the [Paris] Commune and in 1871 - ‘70-’71 – the defeat. Then the Third Republic is ushered in which is officially non-religious and in fact mostly anti-clerical. But they do not tend to use Darwin much. I mean, there are people who do that, as we have already seen. Clémence Royer certainly uses Darwin against every cleric. I mean, Clémence Royer hates rabbis, imams, clergymen: every form of religious person is hated by her.

There are people who do that, but you would not say that it is in the name of Darwin. Often it is in the name, in fact, of Lamarck. Lamarckianism is progressive and republican because it gives you a chance. The educational system of France is based, in a kind of paradoxical way, on a pedagogical principle that stresses the incremental capability of every individual to acquire knowledge. Therefore: free education; therefore: the promotion of bright lower class kids who are sent to Paris to the École Normale and they become President of the Republic, for instance, or great scientists.

So what they saw as the Darwinian model was not cohesive enough for a great country as France [was]. We often forget that even in the 1870s and ’80s, France was still the most populous country in Europe. And certainly, before the unification of Germany, the largest country in Europe. So what we may call – I don’t want to be offensive – but what people call French arrogance had quite a substantial truth in it. That is, they had been the major player in world politics up to the 1850s and ’60s. 1870 was a shock to them, [an] enormous shock, because Napoleon had lost several battles but my god, how did he lose them! You know, it was really a mighty fight: it was all the world against him. But 1870 was little Prussia. Prussia was not the Prussia it became later on. It was a relatively small state with advanced technology, using new explosives, new rifles, new technologies. And the French were totally shattered. So, the least they wanted collectively, if one can say so in history, talking, the least they wanted was the idea that within society you had stiff competitions. Society has to be organically construed.

Many evolutionary biologists in France of the second half of the century worked essentially on colonies of animals. That is, they worked on animals that co-operate. The co-operation for life was much more liked by the average French intellectual rather than the struggle for life.

Dr White: Well, I think we’ll stop there. Thank you…

Prof Corsi: Sorry, I’ve been too long.

Dr White: No, no, it’s fine. Thank you very much, Pietro.

The views expressed in the interview may not be those of the Darwin Correspondence Project.

Date of interview:

17 July 2009.

Location:

St. Anne’s College, Oxford

Interviewer:

Dr Paul White, Darwin Correspondence Project, University of Cambridge.

Interviewee:

Pietro Corsi, Professor of the History of Science, University of Oxford

Recorded by:

Dr Paul White (as above).

Edited by:

Sam P. Kuper, Darwin Correspondence Project, University of Cambridge.

© Darwin Correspondence Project (except birdsong recording href=”http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=13662″ >”Wren4.wav” by Acclivity, used under href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling/1.0/”>Creative Commons Sampling License v1.0)

[Auditorium slowly fills up.]

Dr Durant: Okay, hello everybody, welcome. If I can encourage [you] people who are still coming in to take your seats… That would be great, and the little ring reminds me to ask everybody who has a cell phone to please turn it off. I’m also asked to please request that nobody take any photographs.

In case you didn’t realise, any of you, the whole of this evening’s event is being webcast live, so there’ll be no shortage of images, but the images will be on the Web and we’d rather not have photographs taken here, please.

Dr Durant (contd):My name’s John Durant. I’m the Director of the MIT Museum. It’s great to have you all here. I want to welcome you, also, on behalf of MIT’s Technology and Culture Forum, with which we’re partnering in a series of events of which this production is a part. Amy McCreath, our Episcopal Chaplain, is here in the audience. A special welcome to her, and to friends from the Forum.

I want to just tell you a little bit about how the evening is going to work, and then I’m going to introduce a friend and colleague from England.

The idea is that we’re going to see a one-act play (if you thought you were here for a debate or something else, you’re in the wrong place!) and after the play, we’re going to have a period of discussion of some of the issues that the play has raised. We’re going to be joined, I hope, up here by Craig Baxter, the author of the play, and by Professor Janet Browne, who’s a professor in the History of Science department at Harvard and an eminent scholar of things Darwinian. It’s entirely up to all of you how that discussion goes, so please keep in mind the question and discussion section at the end.

Now, a brief word about how this all came about. This is the week that includes Darwin’s birthday, the 12^th of February – these days known increasingly as Darwin day – and partly, though I’m not sure if it was intentional, but Alison will tell us, partly to coincide with that, there is currently running around New England a tour of a play based on some of Darwin’s correspondence, about which you’ll hear more later. The whole idea for the play is the idea of the Darwin Correspondence Project at Cambridge University Library in England, and in order to really tell you how this all came about, and just a little bit of the background as to what you’re going to see, I’m going to hand over to Alison Pearn from the Darwin Correspondence Project. Alison…

[Applause.]

Dr Pearn: Thank you, John, for that introduction, and on behalf of my colleagues on the Darwin Correspondence Project in the other Cambridge – Cambridge, U.K. – I’d like to say thank you to John and to MIT for making this evening['s event] possible. It’s great to be here. Thanks to all of you for coming.

The Darwin Correspondence Project is an Anglo-American project. Most of us are based in the U.K., really because it is Cambridge University Library over there that holds the largest collection in the world of Darwin’s scientific papers and books. Our reason for existing is to locate, research and publish complete transcripts of all the letters that we can find, either written by or to Charles Darwin. So far, we’ve located around fourteen-and-a-half thousand, which he exchanged with close to two thousand correspondents. Those, today, are scattered around the world, including [at] many locations in the United States, including a very important collection here in the Gray Herbarium of Harvard. I’ll come to that again in a moment.

The dramatisation that you’re going to see tonight is our second collaboration with Craig Baxter. We’re very fortunate to have been able to work with him. We asked Craig to take something like three hundred or so letters and printed material. The letters are [mostly ones] exchanged between Darwin and Asa Gray, and Asa Gray was Professor of Botany in Harvard, so it’s a particular pleasure to be able to bring this here [to Cambridge, Massachusetts]; we really wanted to do this.

The dramatisation is part of a larger project for us on Darwin and religion. It’s funded by the John Templeton Foundation. We have sections on our website now on Darwin and belief, and also on design in nature. This dramatisation was a way of introducing people to some of the difficult questions raised by Darwin’s theories, questions that he and his correspondents – in particular, Asa Gray – discussed quite intimately through letters. So what you’re going to hear… are in the the nature of conversations between leading scientists at a crucial time in the history of ideas.

I think the main point that I need to make to you is that almost without exception, every word you are going to hear is actually a word written by one or other of the protagonists. This was the brief that we gave Craig. We did not allow him to create anything, we did not allow him to interpolate anything. So, apart from that, I think the piece speaks for itself, and I will now turn the stage over to Darwin and Asa Gray. Thank you.

[Applause.]

[The official script for this version of Re:Design is available here.]

Dr Durant: Well, I’m sure you’d all like to join me again in thanking first Paul Bourne who directed this play [Applause.], Terry Molloy and Patrick Morris who just so splendidly acted the play [Applause.]. and Craig Baxter who wrote it.

Now, as I said, what we’re going to do… I’m going to re-use some of the props and I’m going to ask Craig and Alison and Janet Browne if they’d like to join me up here and we’ll have a conversation about what you’ve just heard.

(Janet, please get the one that works… we’ve tried this before, some of these props are not too sturdy, actually. Yes, best MIT Victorian furniture, this! Absolutely…)

Now, I’m hoping that our friends, my colleagues in the museum, could arrange to put the lights up a little bit in the audience so that I can see, a bit more clearly, some of you.

We’re going to use mics, partly because that way you’ll all hear the questions and the answers – [The house lights come on.] oh, great – and also because if we don’t use mics, the people listening to this on the Web won’t hear a thing. So, there’s a simple rule, which I have to remember up here, to pass the mic to whoever’s speaking, and you need to just get my attention if you want to ask something, and wait for a hand mic to be given to you. So, now’s your chance. Please, what would anybody like to ask, or raise as a subject, about Re:Design? [Long silence.]Cor, I can’t believe it…

Please, yes. Just hang on a second.

Lady audience member: Well, thank you very much for a very educational presentation. I really enjoyed it.

If this correspondence had not been with Asa Gray about religion, is there someone else that Darwin could have corresponded with that would have brought religion to the foreground in the same way that this set of correspondence did? I think it’s kind of an interesting thing that, in a centennial year, that religion is being framed, and so I’m not sure if there’s someone else he could have been corresponding with that could have done this job as notably. Asa Gray has once again brought Darwin back into play in America.

Dr Durant: My colleagues are fighting over who shouldn’t get to respond, so I’m going to ask Janet Browne first and we can go back.

Prof Browne: It’s a wonderfully interesting question, which is why we’re both thinking hard here, on our feet. I think Darwin could have had such a conversation with [Thomas Henry] Huxley, but it would have taken a very different turn, and that Huxley, for all his very obvious commitment to agnosticism, was a really intense and interested thinker about theology, so that had Darwin… I think he [Darwin] and Gray, as you saw in this wonderful performance, generated a great deal of trust and confidence in each other and that allowed some of these ideas to be expressed. I’m never sure he had quite the same trust in Huxley. He was always a little apprehensive of Huxley’s severe critical intellect. So, I think I might want to go out on a limb and say this is unique.

Alison may want to say why it was chosen to be expressed in such a form in this forthcoming bicentenary year, but I think it’s very remarkable. And I find this play just wonderful. It really moves me, in lots of different ways, and it is a unique correspondence. But I won’t [continue]…

Dr Pearn: Yes, I think the fact that we did choose this correspondence with Gray in order to be part of the Darwin and religion resource that I mentioned, which is also a Web-based resource, is sort of evidence in itself that this was the correspondence where these subjects were discussed most fully. I think Darwin generally was reluctant to discuss his beliefs. He actually said in at least one letter that whatever he believed should not make a difference to what anybody else believed (he said his own personal beliefs should not) and he was wary in general, so I think Janet was quite right. It was the sense of trust and of friendship that must have been extremely important in that relationship.

Dr Durant: Just an observation: some of what we heard reminds me a little bit of some of the correspondence between Thomas Huxley and Charles Kingsley, especially around the subject of personal suffering at the loss of a child. Now, there’s lots and lots of differences between Huxley and Charles Kingsley and Darwin and Gray, but is there any merit in that comparison?

Prof Browne: John’s already described it, but there are some very moving letters between Huxley and Kingsley. When Huxley’s child dies, it’s Kingsley who pulls him back from the edge of despair. Kingsley, as you know, was a radical, but a very concerned vicar in Britain, and Huxley appears, rather like Darwin, to have taken the death of a child as a moment in which these individuals looked at their faith and found that they couldn’t believe quite in the way that was expected of them. It’s Kingsley who helps Huxley out of that situation, and Kingsley of course [remains] a believer; Huxley possibly not.

Dr Durant: Okay, we should make sure that others have a chance to ask as well, so unless… I don’t want to stop anybody speaking, but I saw another hand, did I, at the back? Several, actually. Right at the back and then… Oh no, it’s one of our graphic panels I’m looking at! Sorry, I’m inviting an exhibit to ask a question. Sorry, please…

A second lady audience member: I just was wondering if there was sort of any outcry when Darwin died, for him, like, being buried in Westminster Abbey, with him being so, kind of, against religion.

Dr Durant: Isn’t that an interesting fact, that he was buried in Westminster Abbey? Janet, would you like to speak to that?

Prof Browne: We don’t know much about what was said in the public newspapers at that time against the burial. There was a tremendous reaction that Darwin, for all the controversy that surrounded his views, was nevertheless a very great figure, and so that this national accolade was entirely appropriate. We might want to look back on that and see what agendas were being fulfilled by Darwin being buried in Westminster Abbey. It’s often said, and is supported, I think, by the historical record, that the Royal Society figures, the scientists who knew Darwin very well, were extremely keen to get permission to have him buried in Westminster Abbey so that it was a sign that science was okay: science wasn’t atheistical; science was where Britain should be moving; the progress of Britain depended on proper science being performed. So, we – John knows more about the public press than I do, but… – we don’t know of very many underground revolts against this activity.

Dr Durant: I get the sense, from what I’ve read about the circumstances of Darwin’s burial, that one group of people who actually came close to revolt were actually Darwin’s family. There’s a sense in which the whole business of Darwin’s burial was taken out of the family’s hands in a rather abrupt way, but that’s not really what you were referring to, so…

Other questions? Questions, please, too, about the play. We’ve got the playwright here. What a frustrating thing for a playwright to have to use somebody else’s words entirely! I don’t know how that works, but anyway, please, yes…

Gentleman audience member Before the play, we were told that nearly all the words that the actors speak are from the letters themselves, so they’re either Darwin’s words or Asa Gray’s words, and so I’m wondering how… How much did you, sort of, shape the story from the letters, and how did you do that? And also, what’s the ethic of doing that? I mean, why is it important that they be only Darwin’s and Asa Gray’s words? And if that is important, how does shaping the story, changing the letters and sort of turning them into a narrative… how does that work?

Craig Baxter: Well, I suppose what I felt I needed to do was to tell the story that was there in the letters, and to look at the story first. And then [to] tell the story using the words, that was the second job. So it’s a creative editing job, really, rather than an authorial [one]. It’s very technical. Strangely, I’d not done anything like it before I did this work for the Darwin [Correspondence] Project, but it’s quite liberating in a way, because you see the story – it’s there before you – and you have your resource and you have your limits and you work within those, and that’s quite refreshing and liberating. But in order to tell the story, you have to cheat: with the chronology particularly (those words weren’t [all] written in the order in which you heard them today); some parts were actually written to other people, but they’re in the same [vein]. For example, Darwin’s joke about, Was my nose designed… was actually [in] a letter to [Charles] Lyell, but seemed to be… a good joke, but also it seemed to be part of that [discussion]. He was saying similar things to several people at the same time.

The actual correspondence between Gray and Darwin had huge gaps in it. Not all the letters have survived. Also, there’s a lot of assumed knowledge between two correspondents: they’re not telling the whole story. So I had to tell the story for them, and I used the words of Gray and Darwin, but they weren’t always directed to each other, so there’s quite a lot of cheating. But the good thing about this project is that the scripts are available online and they’re footnoted, so you can actually see – you go to the Darwin [Correspondence] Project website – and you can see exactly where I’ve cheated. So, I feel it’s important to be open about that.

Has that answered his points?

Dr Durant: Please, yes, Debra. I should say, Debra Wise is the [Artistic] Director of the Underground Railway Theater and involved in the Catalyst Collaborative which, for those of you who don’t know it, is an initiative here at MIT between the theatre arts (I’m sorry, I’m breaking my own rule [about using a microphone]) at MIT and the Underground Railway Theatre just here in Central Square to foster – guess what – drama with a science content. So Debra’s on home turf here. Debra…

Debra Wise: We really hope to host [Re:Design] at our new theatre, which hasn’t yet opened its doors. It’s wonderful that you came to Cambridge; I was so glad.

I wanted to say about the play that one of the things I really liked about it [was] – I don’t know how much cheating was required to do this, but – the way it revealed to us the connections between the thought about the progress or not of the human mind and spirit in relation to the abolitionism and the war in this country and the idea of intelligent design and the progress of human ideas and being able to understand or grasp and moor itself, and think in new ways. I thought that was really, really good, and really provocative. I just want to know what other people thought.

I thought about you [Craig] like a collagist, trying to place these things together so we sort of move into that territory and move out. It was very nice. It was so easy and nuanced it felt, really, like conversation. The actors, of course, did a great job too to make that possible. That was great.

Dr Durant:Thank you. Do you want to comment on that?

Craig Baxter: No. [Laughter.]

Dr Durant: Please, towards the back.

A second gentleman audience member: Thank you. I have a question regarding set design, which is – no pun intended there – I notice that on one side of the set you have Gray’s office set up and on the right you have more of a home setting for Darwin and I was curious if there’s something in the letters that inspired you to create such a rigid look for Gray versus Darwin’s, sort of, more home appeal, personal style.

Craig Baxter: The set design is down to Paul Bourne but I think his starting point for what he did there was the difference in their lifestyles. Gray was a professional man, professor of a busy department and had lots of administrative duties and lots of pressures on his time. Darwin was much more his own man. He was at home: that’s where he did his work. He had great problems with his health, so he couldn’t do a job. He worked at his own pace. He had time to do his own thing. So we wanted to make that contrast between the two. (He’s got a much more comfortable chair, I realise as well!) That’s probably necessary.

With any production, you’re trying to emphasise and draw out the differences that are there and that was why those decisions were made.

Prof Browne: Just a very brief remark further to what Craig’s saying, is that in the history of science sense, what we also have here is: two ways of doing science that were emerging in the middle years of the 19th century. Darwin did all his scientific research at home, both with practical experiments in and around the home and his gardens and so forth, and with letters from his study, so it’s a domestic science that he was pursuing, and that comes out very strongly in the books that he wrote.

In Gray we see the beginnings of professionalism. We represent it here, as indeed it was, very 19th century, but it was the beginning of university science.

Dr Durant: Thank you.

Prof Browne: One more thing. This is entirely a non-sequitur, but further to the set… We’ve had this performance before and we found people are longing to take away the letters around the edge, all these wonderful facsimile letters. Which, please don’t!

Dr Durant They’re not actually, I believe, originals from the Darwin correspondence, but nevertheless they are needed, is the general thing I think we should be saying here, yes.

So, the person I saw first was in the front row here, and then there was another hand over here somewhere, number two. Please.

A third gentleman audience member: If Asa Gray were alive today, would he have appeared at the Dover trial? I ask this for two reasons. One: do you think – and I’d be just curious, I mean it seems fairly manifest to me – do you think that this pertains very directly to the issues which are under scrutiny under the name of intelligent design these days? That’s the first part. But also, was Gray the sort of person who went sailing into battle on behalf of causes he believed in and which were, nevertheless, strictly personal?

Dr Durant: I’ll say something about intelligent design but Janet and Alison may want to comment about Gray and whether he would have been comfortable charging into battle like that.

There are obvious resonances, and I’m assuming that was well known to our colleagues back in Cambridge [UK] in thinking about bringing this particular play here right now. It’s hard, isn’t it, sitting in the United States in 2008, to listen to this without being reminded of things going on all around us. Just one observation about that is: it seems to me that the biggest difference between what we saw portrayed here from the 19th century and what we’re living through now is not so much the intellectual content of the debate – which seems uncannily similar – it’s a difference in the spirit with which the debate is being conducted. The striking thing to me is that [in Darwin and Gray] you have two men who become increasingly, genuinely friendly and have warmer and warmer feelings to each other even as they’re basic differences on fundamental matters of philosophy and religion become clearer and clearer with the passage of time. Now, I’m not interested in maligning anybody in the contemporary debates but it doesn’t feel like that, to me at least, as I watch what’s going on in the debates about intelligent design. There’s a lot…

Same audience member: No, malign them. [Laughter.]

Dr Durant: No. You can do it if you want. It is striking that you have a lot less generosity of spirit, shall we say, and sides seem to have been taken in a much more, sometimes, embittered way: caricatures being drawn. Your question about, ‘Could Gray have gone to the Dover trial?’ is intriguing because in some ways, if you look at it purely in terms of what we’ve heard tonight, his repeated return to the notion that somewhere at the heart of all this there is design evidenced for all to see, you would feel, well, maybe he could. And yet at the same time he’s being generous to Darwin and saying we must allow natural history to explore the limits of its knowledge and its potential to help us understand these things. I get filled with a bit of regret when I watch this about what this has all turned into a hundred and fifty years later, to be honest.

Now, Gray: would he have gone to battle in a courtroom? I sort of somehow wonder if he might not. Alison?

Dr Pearn: Speaking from a perspective of a non-American…

Dr Durant: Well, there are several of them here! [Laughter.]

Dr Pearn: There are actually, yes.

Dr Durant: I’m rather embarassed about that.[More laughter.]

Dr Pearn: I think it’s very striking that Gray, as the dramatisation I think brings out, was very steadfast in his own personal position. Nevertheless, he was very, very important in spreading Darwin’s ideas, Darwin’s theories in the States, and he did that very consciously and very deliberately. It didn’t stop with his reviews of [On the] Origin [of Species]. He actually arranged for the American publication of Origin and was very energetic in helping Darwin to get [others] of his books published in the States as well. He actually dealt himself, personally, with the American publishers and he helped Darwin, too, when Darwin was working on what became [The] Expression of the Emotions [in Man and Animals], when he was actually dealing with man, which was more significant, really, than anything that was done in Origin.

Darwin drew up a questionnaire that he was having copied out by his wife and daughters, and it was Gray who actually first had it printed for him and disseminated. So he was a very active supporter of Darwin’s work.

Same audience member: And there were the big public debates with [Jean Louis Rodolphe] Agassiz as well, right? I mean, that is sailing into battle to some extent.

Dr Pearn: It certainly is, and I think… To bring this play over to the States and to have the Agassiz jokes appreciated is absolutely wonderful.

Dr Durant: Yep, the Agassiz laboratory isn’t so far from here, is it? Now, more points and questions from the floor. There was a hand here. Yes, please.

A third lady audience member: My question is more… It’s away from the theories of Gray, but I’ve worked with a lot of things so I know that handwriting can give you some pretty interesting details and I don’t… I haven’t looked that much at the handwriting of Gray and Darwin – a little bit of Gray – but how much did the handwriting shape, kind of, thoughts of how everything was put together? Did it at all? Maybe it didn’t, but I would imagine that over time as they became more friendly the handwriting itself might have changed, so I’m curious if that shaped the opinions.

Dr Durant: What an interesting question, and that’s for both of these folk on either side of me?

Same audience member: It’s for everyone, yeah.

Dr Pearn: Well, first of all, what the Darwin Correspondence Project does is remove everybody else’s need to look at the handwriting, because we publish transcripts, the great virtue of which is they’re searchable. We have not yet gone into digitisation, so you’ll just have to take my word for anything I say, pretty much…

I’m not conscious of ever having really thought in those ways about handwriting. The kind of thing we do pick up from the physical appearance of the letters… You can sometimes tell when Darwin or one of his correspondents is rushed, and we’re very careful to give information in our transcriptions about deletions and insertions and so on. There are sometimes drafts of letters, and they’re fascinating, because they really can let you into the thought process. I think at one point in the dramatisation Gray says, I’m glad to see that you wrote in your own hand. If Darwin was ill, then his wife or daughters would act as his secretaries. Or again, if he was ill, he might write in pencil because you can’t actually write with a dip pen if you’re lying down. So there are things that we can tell from the physical appearance.

If you’re asking about character being revealed in handwriting, it’s not something that I’ve ever really considered, I don’t think. I don’t know whether Janet has.

Prof Browne: It’s never been the role of the editorial team to think too much about the character that’s being expressed in the handwriting. It take all of our days to decipher most of it. [Laughter.] But there are a couple of extraordinary letters which I think perhaps I might just mention to you. In the dramatisation you did hear about Darwin being so very ill in the 1860s, and that’s a well-known aspect of his life. During that time there are some extraordinary, brief letters written to [Joseph Dalton] Hooker, one of his very close friends, and I think also to Gray, and the handwriting there is incredibly bad. It’s wide-spaced; it’s big, open writing, and it’s just a line saying, My dear Hooker, I must just write this… Your friend, C. Darwin. There are one or two like that. They’re very unusual in the whole fourteen thousand that we have.

Prof Durant: Thank you. Please, yes, right here, and then there.

A fourth lady audience member: I just wondered… It seems the two men are contemporaries: there’s only one year difference in their age, but Darwin is played by a much older man; Asa Gray seems younger. I wonder: was that by design or just… happened to be?

Dr Durant: How were the actors chosen with respect to age?

Craig Baxter: It wasn’t a conscious decision. There’s a popular conception of Darwin and I suppose that is of quite an old man with a big bushy beard, isn’t it, and Terry’s beard is quite short, so we thought that was kind of capturing his younger years as well, but… No, it wasn’t a conscious decision. The characters kind of arrive of the page and they sort of have an age. I guess maybe because Darwin is talking about his health and his bad health a lot, you sense that that ages him and his behaviour: because he’s suffering with his health in a way that Gray wasn’t. So, I suppose that’s the only explanation I can offer. Again, it’s another question that wasn’t a conscious decision to cast different aged actors, no.

Dr Durant: John, please: microphone over there. Thanks.

A fourth gentleman audience member: First, I loved it, the play. I also found this exchange, some of these discussions, extremely interesting. Somebody mentioned – Janet mentioned – that Gray was a professional, a professional from Harvard: he had all the stuff, and he certainly describes himself as a professional. But I am pretty sure that he was the person who led the scientific fight to declare the sequoias the first national preserve, which was a very political fight in the California state legislature and then the first [such] legistlation in the United States. So really, he was one of the first examples, I suddenly realise, of the public intellectual; of the scientist as speaking to the lay community, which Darwin didn’t. So Gray didn’t describe himself that way, but he actually played that role in the debates [with] Agassiz. I mean, he actually stepped out.

Now, while I have the mic, and apropros of that question, next Thursday at 4pm in this exact place, Ken Miller from Brown, the professor of biology who was the lead witness at Dover, Pennsylvania, will be here telling the story of participating in that trial. I’ve heard him talk and it’s a fascinating tale, so I recommend it. It’s not thatre, but it’s the closest thing to it.

Dr Durant: It’s not theatre, but it’s about a piece of theatre, namely a court trial. Yes, I should have mentioned that. That’s a good opportunity and you’re very welcome to come back and hear that. He didn’t quite play the same role as Asa Gray might have played, but on the other hand, for those who don’t know him, he’s an academic biologist who’s also a practising Roman Catholic, so he has very great interest in the issues that we say described tonight.

Do you want to comment about Gray’s work, Janet, in conservation and so on?

Prof Browne: No, I actually don’t know enough, really.

Dr Durant: No? Okay, fine. Please, any more questions? Yes, Owen, microphone please.

A fifth gentleman audience member: This is just a minor curiosity, but those pictures that were taken during the play… Was that last pairing… Do you have actual pictures of Asa Gray and Darwin, surviving?

Craig Baxter: Theatrical license, I’m afraid. [Laughter.] I felt it was important that we see the fact that they meet. They’ve corresponded for years; they did meet early on before they were friends; but that [last] meeting, I felt that was very powerful emotionally for the story. But of course, they didn’t write letters when they were with each other, so it’s a technical problem: how do we have a scene? I tried very hard to carve out realistic dialogue from the letters and I just couldn’t do it, it just didn’t work, so that was our solution.

The same audience member: It was splendid; I’m sorry I asked the question! [Laughter.]

Craig Baxter: Yes, but it’s important to appreciate that there are theatrical pressures as well as [historical] pressures. And I think Darwin was quite reluctant to have his photograph – is that right? – taken with other people, perhaps because of his health, and it’s quite a protracted and difficult process in those times.

Dr Durant: There’s room for one more question, I think, and we probably need to stop, but I just had suddenly thought of a question myself, which is about the theatre. We had Darwin walking quite a bit – across the correspondence, rather puzzlingly – but of course, he’s famous for having taken his sandwalks, and I just wonder: was that in the back of people’s minds when you had him, as it were, perambulating from time to time?

Craig Baxter: Yep. [Laughter.]

Dr Pearn: I should have mentioned that there is a longer version, actually, of this script. Poor Craig’s had to do this several times for us; we’re so demanding. And there is a full theatrical version in which we have a sandwalk…

Dr Durant: Oh, right.

Dr Pearn: … and a lot of letters, which are part of the scenery. So, I think this is actually a rather economical way of…

Dr Durant: The best the MIT Museum can do by way of sandwalk.

Dr Pearn: I think it’s brilliant.

Dr Durant: One more question from you all, then, please, if there is one, and then I think we probably need to let our friends go home. Is there another question? Please, right in the front.

A fifth lady audience member: Hi, I was just wondering if there was anything that was known about Emma Wedgwood’s beliefs and standings?

Dr Pearn: That’s a very interesting question and I’m sure Janet may want to add something to this too, but I’ve mentioned our website several times and we have just recently, on the Darwin Correspondence Project website, put up a section about Darwin and belief, where we have been able to draw on previously unknown – or known only to the family – material about the relationship between Charles and Emma, and about Emma Darwin’s beliefs. We were allowed to look at that material because the members of the family felt that she had been, perhaps, wrongly portrayed as having held her husband back in terms of his own statement of his views; and [also felt] that the complexity of her own beliefs was not being properly understood. So, I think the best thing I can do is say: have a look at what we’ve got on the website. We’re hoping to expand that. Some of the material is quite difficult to work with. So, a very interesting question.

Dr Durant: When you say it’s difficult to work with, do you mean hard to decipher or…?

Dr Pearn: It’s hard to decipher. Unfortunately, some of it is now only available to us as rather poor photocopies of marginal notes that she made in a bible, and there are some marginal notes by Charles as well, but this is material that we’re only just beginning to explore. We’re very fortunate to have it. I should say, in fact – I think Janet will agree with me in his – the Darwin family, the extended Darwin family, have been extremely generous in general in making material available. Many of the letters that we work with belong to members of the Darwin family, but they’ve always made them accessible to scholars.

Dr Durant: Janet.

Prof Browne: Well, that’s a great way to finish: what Alison’s just said was a great way to finish our discussion, but to repeat something of what she’s said, Emma Darwin has been a figure that people have found quite easy to caricature, so that it may well have been a handy device to have Emma represent the theological opposition to his views, so that one finds in older studies (and certainly not on the website of the Darwin Correspondence [Project]), one finds the suggestion that she did hold him back, and I think the correspondence is truly showing that that’s not the case.

Dr Durant: Well, I think you’ll agree we’ve been doubly fortunate. I think we’ve been first fortunate that the project in Cambridge was able to organise this tour of New England and that they came here. And we’re also fortunate we could have the support of so many colleagues, particularly Janet Browne from Harvard’s History of Science department. So, thanks to the team, thanks to the actors, thanks to all of you for coming, and keep following! [Applause.]

There’s another performance on Saturday afternoon, so if you have friends who couldn’t make it tonight, tell them about it.