ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´

DR ERASMUS DARWIN, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, was famous during
his working life as a physician, an inventor and a man of science. But this
image changed abruptly at the age of 57 when his poem The Loves of the Plants
was published anonymously in April 1789. Darwin was trying to give his readers
a painless guide to Linnaeus’s descriptions of the sexual systems of plants
by humanising the plants and their sexual behaviour. He was offering ‘diverse
little pictures’ with figures that ‘may amuse thee by the beauty of their
persons, their graceful attitudes or the brilliancy of their dress’.

The poem was an instant success. Horace Walpole, not usually an easy
man to please, wrote: ‘You will agree with me that the author is a great
poet . . . I send you the most delicious poem on Earth.’ And he spoke for
most readers of the poem.

The Loves of the Plants was announced as Part II of a longer poem, The
Botanic Garden. When Part I eventually appeared, three years later, it proved
to be much more scientific, being almost an encyclopedia of science. Part
I also sported 200 pages of notes on recent discoveries – rather like extracting
the most significant articles, long and short, from a year’s issues of New
ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´. The complete Botanic Garden had 4376 lines of verse, on the strength
of which Darwin became the most famous English poet of the day for a few
years. He also exercised a surprising influence over many poets now recognised
as his betters, such as Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge and the younger
Romantic poets, Keats and Shelley.

To go back to the beginnings, Erasmus Darwin was born in 1731 at Elston,
a village between Newark and Nottingham, near the geographical centre of
England. He was the youngest of seven children of Robert Darwin, a lawyer
who possessed a large house and a modest income. Erasmus was a pupil at
Chesterfield School for nine years. Then he studied for three years at Cambridge
University, where two published poems showed his skill in rhyming couplets.
He completed his education as a doctor with two years at the Edinburgh Medical
School. Darwin began his career as a physician in 1756 at the cathedral
city of Lichfield, just north of Birmingham, then only beginning its industrial
growth. Immediately Darwin was lucky (or perhaps skilful?) in curing an
important patient. Given this flying start, his medical career was most
successful. He was to become the best-known doctor in the Midlands of England,
and some of the stories that helped to create his legendary reputation strain
our credulity today. One such story concerned alcohol: Darwin himself gave
it up after suffering gout and, although he lived in a hard-drinking era
(for those with the money), he apparently persuaded most of the gentry in
his own and neighbouring counties to become ‘water-drinkers’.

Darwin was a large, energetic and powerful-looking man, but decidedly
overweight by modern standards: ‘Eat or be eaten’ was a motto of his. After
subduing the gout, he was never ill himself, striding unscathed through
a daily environment of appalling diseases. This personal experience tended
to bias him against the germ theory of disease. Everyone agreed that Darwin
was conscientious and kind as a doctor, and he usually treated poor patients
free. Sympathy and an optimistic manner that boosted the patient’s resistance
to disease were probably at the root of his medical success.

Despite a stammer, Darwin was also most successful socially. The novelist
Maria Edgeworth referred to his powers of wit, satire and peculiar humour,
which ‘gained him strong ascendancy in private society’, while Coleridge
thought his conversation ‘wonderfully entertaining and instructive’. He
had a great talent for friendship and nearly all the friends were lifelong.
But he was also noted for ‘sarcasm of a very keen edge’ on occasion and,
although he lived in the Cathedral Close, he was not a believer in divine
revelation. When a new Bishop of Lichfield was installed, he politely attended
the ceremony; but when asked how he liked the sermon he replied: ‘Why sir,
it contained some very good words.’

Lunatic pursuits

Though hard-working as a doctor, Darwin devoted more intellectual energy
to his spare-time interests in science and technology. His first paper for
the Royal Society, On the ascent of vapour, appeared in 1757, and he became
a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1761, the first of five generations of
Darwins who were Fellows continuously until 1962. Darwin’s paper showed
he was very keen on steam engines, and it was technology and invention that
chiefly occupied him in the 1760s. His closest friend was Matthew Boulton
in Birmingham, but his passion for science was also fuelled by Benjamin
Franklin, another lifelong friend whom he met before 1760. Darwin’s early
inventions included a three-wheeled steam-carriage which was never built
because of the cost, a speaking machine which astonished everyone, and numerous
designs for horse-drawn carriages with improved methods of steering, springing
and traction. Darwin did have the carriages built and he tested them as
he drove on the long journeys to visit the rich patients who provided most
of his income.

The scientific discussion meetings of Darwin, Boulton and their friend
Dr William Small grew into what was called the Lunar Society of Birmingham,
though it was never more than a loose collection of friends. Other members
in the late 1760s and the early 1770s were the engineer James Watt, the
potter Josiah Wedgwood, the chemist James Kier and R. L. Edgeworth, inventor
and man-about-town (and father of Maria), who had all been friends of Darwin
before coming into the Lunar group. Darwin’s inventiveness helped to propel
the ‘Lunaticks’, as they called themselves, towards their goal of improving
technology. They tried to do so informally and in lively style. They kept
no records, but the group was one of the chief intellectual stimuli of the
Industrial Revolution.

Darwin had married Mary Howard in 1758, but she died in 1770, leaving
him with three young sons. He remained unmarried during the 1770s, but not
without offspring; the two Miss Parkers, as they were known, were brought
up in his house. About 1777 Darwin created a botanic garden a little west
of Lichfield, and this was the inspiration for the poem that appeared 12
years later. In the late 1770s he also produced a cornucopia of mechanical
inventions. The most used invention was the vertical-axis windmill operated
at Wedgwood’s pottery for 12 years; potentially the best invention was a
copying machine that produced perfect copies of letters but was never exploited
and has been lost. Many of Darwin’s other inventions were sketches reinvented
later by others, such as his canal lift, artificial bird, multimirror telescope
and hydrogen-oxygen rocket motor.

In 1781 Darwin was married again, to a young widow, Mrs Elizabeth Pole.
They moved from Lichfield to Derby, where their seven children seem to have
enjoyed a very happy family life. At Derby in the 1780s Darwin was 50 kilometres
from Birmingham, too far away to join in the conviviality of the Lunar Society.
Instead, he embarked on the scholarly project of translating from Latin
two of the works of the great Swedish naturalist Linnaeus. The translations
occupied him for about seven years and led to two tomes with English titles,
A System of Vegetables (1785) and The Families of Plants (1787). Darwin
had been shy of publicity as an inventor because he thought it might injure
his medical practice, and he was equally shy as an author. The books were
published as the work of ‘A Botanical Society at Lichfield’, though the
society never had more than three members, of whom only Darwin was active
(and he was not at Lichfield). Translating the long lists of plant characteristics
was hard work, and Darwin consulted Dr Johnson, Sir Joseph Banks and about
40 other botanists to decide how often he should coin new words. The translations,
though now forgotten, were a great success at the time, and introduced more
than 50 new words into the English language, mostly detailed botanical terms.

Darwin was also active during the 1780s in what we would call scientific
research. He explained the principles of artesian wells in a paper for the
Royal Society in 1785. His greatest achievement in physical science was
to formulate the principle of adiabatic expansion of air, and then to show
how such expansion of nearly saturated gases explains the chief process
by which clouds form.

To summarise Darwin’s situation early in 1789, we can say he was supreme
as a physician in the Midlands of England and was happy to stay there. (King
George III was not so happy, and kept on asking: ‘Why does not Dr Darwin
come to London? He shall be my physician if he comes.’) He was of high repute
in science, the man who discovered how clouds form. He had produced an impressive
array of inventions. He was assiduous and scholarly as a botanist. But the
Linnaean translations were very tedious, both to work on and to read: so,
as light relief, he decided to rework the material frivolously in verse
in the hope of spreading the word of the Linnaean revelation to a wider
public.

That was the origin of The Loves of the Plants, comic in treatment,
serious in intent and wildly successful in practice. The poem extends to
1836 lines in rhyming couplets glittering with ornamentation. This thick
coating of sugar on the pill ensured that the Linnaean scheme was swallowed,
and at least partially appreciated, by a wide swathe of the reading public.

The tone of the poem is set in the ‘Proem’ that introduces it. ‘Gentle
reader! Lo, here a Camera Obscura is presented to thy view, in which are
lights and shades dancing on a whited canvas, and magnified into apparent
life.’ In this early attempt at a film or television spectacular, Darwin
would have had trouble with the censor if the dancing had been visible rather
than mere word-painting. ‘If thou art perfectly at leisure for such trivial
amusement, walk in and view the wonders of my Inchanted Garden.’ The Roman
poet Ovid changed people into trees and flowers: Darwin did the opposite,
by turning flowers into humans who act out the behaviour of the pistils
and stamens in the 24 classes of the Linnaean sexual system. Darwin promises
to tell us:

What Beaux and Beauties crowd the gaudy groves, And woo and win their
vegetable Loves.

The very first plant in Linnaeus’s lists, and therefore in the poem,
is the virtuous Canna or Indian reed, one male and one female:

First the tall Canna lifts his curled brow Erect to heaven, and plights
his nuptial vow.

So even this most virtuous of plants is presented in a manner decidedly
risque, and the polyamorous ploys of other species give Darwin the chance
for wicked but politely expressed human parallels. He has a field day with
Lychnis (ten males and five females):

Each wanton beauty, trick’d in all her grace, Shakes the bright dew-drops
from her blushing face; In gay undress displays her rival charms, And calls
her wondering lovers to her arms.

The poem is not completely fixated on sexual magnetism. Darwin brings
in many plants just for their beauty and interest, and there are some rather
fine engravings, notably of Meadia and of the insectivorous plant Dionaea
muscipula (Venus’s flytrap), which fascinated him. Another of the illustrations,
the frontispiece, shows Flora with Cupid’s bow and arrows, and Cupid with
Flora’s spade and rake. It is nicely symbolic of the poem’s theme of males
and females sharing pleasurably.

Darwin’s technique of humanisation is shown quite well by Anemone. He
says in a note that the flower opens its petals only when the wind blows,
and he turns this into verse as follows (a calash is a hood):

So shines the Nymph in beauty’s blushing pride, When Zephyr wafts her
deep calash aside; Tears with rude kiss her bosom’s gauzy veil, And flings
the fluttering kerchief to the gale.

The first of Blake’s prophetic poems, The Book of Thel, appeared later
in 1789, and Blake’s title page shows two huge blossoms of a pasqueflower
(Anemone pulsatilla), with a gowned girl rising from one flower and a naked
youth leaping out of the other, about to seize her. This is a pictorial
example of the influence of Darwin’s poem, but the verbal echoes are more
obvious. Almost 200 plausible echoes of The Loves of the Plants can be found
in the poems of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and others.

Darwin soon realised that if he continued in the same vein throughout
the poem he would run out of erotic situations and also bore his readers.
So he started to bring in mythological or historical episodes related to
the particular plant, and it was these vivid and imaginative pictures that
pleased his readers most. For example, the carline thistle with its plumed
seeds leads on to Montgolfier flying in his balloon:

So on the shoreless air the intrepid Gaul Launch’d the vast concave
of his buoyant ball. He flies on over towns and towers and temples while,
far below: Silent with upturn’d eyes unbreathing crowds Pursue the floating
wonder to the clouds.

Then in a further flight of fancy Darwin sends Montgolfier off to explore
the planets, ‘the red eye of Mars’, Jupiter with its ‘silver guards’ (satellites),
‘Saturn’s crystal ring’ and the newly discovered Uranus (the Georgian star).
Not content with this, he imagines Montgolfier driving off into interstellar
space, where the constellations salute him.

Returning rapidly to Earth, Darwin takes a look at flax and cotton,
painting a detailed picture of Arkwright’s spinning machines:

With wiry teeth revolving cards release The tangled knots, and smoothe
the ravell’d fleece; Next moves the iron-hand with fingers fine, Combs the
wide card, and forms the eternal line.

And so on, for many more lines. Darwin knew all the ins and outs of
Arkwright’s machinery and sketched dozens of design improvements for spinning
machinery in his manuscript Commonplace Book. In The Loves of the Plants,
and even more in the more scientific Part I of The Botanic Garden, Darwin
was in effect the laureate of the Industrial Revolution, celebrating in
verse the marvels of the machinery, praising the enterprise of the industrialists,
and glorying in the taming of energy in the mill or the steam engine. But
he did not foresee the more dismal social consequences of the factory system
in later years.

Darwin’s excursions into the social effects of the plants are not all
optimism. He has no illusions about the problems caused by Papaver, the
poppy, which he characterises as an oriental princess, Sopha’d on silk,
amid her charm-built towers.

This leads on to a powerful picture, alluring and then chilling, of
the effects of opium:

Faint o’er her couch in scintillating streams Pass the thin forms of
Fancy and of Dreams; Froze by enchantment on the velvet ground Fair youths
and beauteous ladies glitter round. She waves her wand and wakes them. Then,
She waves her wand again! – fresh horrors seize Their stiffening limbs,
their vital currents freeze.

Darwin knew many of the effects of opium but continued to prescribe
it for many ailments, because it did have a real effect whereas other ‘boasted
nostrums only take up time’.

Darwin’s digressions include several lightly disguised attacks on oppression,
slavery and superstition, which are themselves lightly disguised code words
for the established order and religion. The word sacred occurs nine times
in The Loves of the Plants, six times sarcastically and three times neutrally.
An example is in Darwin’s ludicrous cartoon of St Anthony preaching to the
fishes. With ‘thundering voice’ the saint cried ‘Bless ye the Lord’.

The winds and waters caught the sacred word. And mingling echoes shouted
‘Bless the Lord!’ The listening shoals the quick contagion feel, Pant on
the floods, inebriate with their zeal, Ope their wide jaws, and bow their
slimy heads, And dash with frantic fins their foamy beds.

This frolic arose from the Indian berry Menispermum, which intoxicates
fish. There is more tilting at religion when he comes to Linnaeus’s horologe
or ‘watch of Flora’, which is the cue for a rather biased view of Time:

Here Time’s huge fingers grasp his giant-mace, And dash proud Superstition
from her base, Rend her strong towers and gorgeous fanes, and shed The crumbling
fragments round her guilty head.

This caricature of Time as a knocker-down of churches might have passed
unnoticed hidden among the flowers, but Darwin’s attacks on slavery are
open and savage:

E’en now in Afric’s groves with hideous yell Fierce Slavery stalks,
and slips the dogs of hell; From vale to vale the gathering cries rebound,
And sable nations tremble at the sound!

He implores the ‘Senators’ of the British parliament to heed their consciences
and set things right, remembering that: He who allows oppression shares
the crime.

This was fair and open cudgelling of the powers-that-be, but the guardians
of public virtue were more concerned about the irregular sexuality of the
plants. Because they were only plants not humans (or were they?), and because
botany was deemed suitable for ladies, Darwin was saucily bypassing society’s
taboos. This was bad enough, but Darwin made it worse by showing the plants
as really keen on sex. There is never any reluctance to indulge and bad
consequences are never shown: it is all an idyll and a pleasure for both
males and females. Darwin could easily justify himself, too, because puritanical
plants would soon die out.

The zeal of sex (or perhaps love) is clearest in the finale of the poem,
where Darwin focuses on Adonis (‘many males and many females live together
in the same flower’):

A hundred virgins join a hundred swains, And fond Adonis leads the sprightly
trains . . . Licentious Hymen joins their mingled hands, And loosely twines
the meretricious bands.

The human parallel is the society of the Areoi in Tahiti, which ‘consists
of about 100 males and 100 females who form one promiscuous marriage’. Venus
watches in delight:

Wide o’er the isle her silken net she draws, And the Loves laugh at
all but Nature’s laws.

Who would have thought that a didactic poem about botanical classification
could end in a scene so unbotanical, so jovial and so subversive?

Equality in the eighteenth century

This scene and many others show the virtual equality of the males and
females. There is very little male chauvinism here. On balance, I think
the women are more powerful, chiefly because there are so many active goddesses
and nearly all the poem is ‘spoken’ by the Goddess of Botany. The women
also have more power individually, because nearly all are portrayed as beautiful,
or at least seductive, and can lead men a merry dance whenever they wish,
which is always in this sexy Darwin-land.

As well as the sexual system, Darwin carried over from the Linnaean
translations his habit of coining words. In the complete Botanic Garden
there are at least 140 words that either are the earliest usages recorded
in the Oxford English Dictionary or are earlier than the earliest in the
OED. There are several of these in the quotations I have given, including
gauzy, sopha’d, charm-built, scintillating, the sexual use of promiscuous
and the wire cards in the spinning machine. Among the other 134 are brineless,
Cannabis, convoluted, frenzied, geological, hydrogen and iridescent.

Darwin’s great influence over the Romantic poets is perhaps even more
surprising than the popular success of his poem. When The Loves of the Plants
was published, Wordsworth was 19 and Coleridge 17. Wordsworth admitted to
being ‘under an injurious influence from the dazzling manner of Darwin’
in the early 1790s: he took over Darwin’s idea that plants are capable of
feeling and he sometimes echoed Darwin’s words in his poems. Coleridge,
who seemed to know the poem by heart, did not like Darwin’s ornate style
and said: ‘I absolutely nauseate Darwin’s poem.’ But poems such as The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan have dozens of echoes from Darwin.
And, in 1796, Coleridge called Darwin ‘the first literary character in Europe
and the most original-minded man’, a stunning tribute indeed.

Darwin’s reputation as a poet fell away during the Victorian era, though
he had influenced Shelley and Keats about 1820 and G. L. Craik’s popular
History of English Literature in the 1860s still gave Darwin twice as much
space as Shakespeare and six times more than Byron. The decline continued
in the early 1900s, and by then it was allowable to ridicule Darwin without
reading him. A rich comedy developed when several literary pundits of that
era showed their stupidity by quoting excerpts from The Loves of the Plants
as examples of unintentional humour. Darwin, with his sarcasm of very keen
edge, would have made mincemeat of them. Darwin did suggest an inverted
exclamation mark to indicate irony for those who were too thick to recognise
it, but he never put the idea into practice.

A few years after publication of The Botanic Garden, between 1794 and
1796, Darwin produced a completely different kind of book, Zoonomia: or
the laws of organic life, a two-volume biological treatise running to 1300
quarto pages. It is in prose, not in verse, despite the fact that a number
of eminent scientists and historians have said it is a poem, and have even
condemned it as a bad poem. Like computer viruses, such ‘scholarship viruses’
can proliferate damagingly.

The most compelling chapter of Zoonomia is Darwin’s illuminating presentation
of what we now call biological evolution. He gives examples to show that
there is variation within a species, and he states that the controlling
forces are those of lust, hunger and security. Males of many species, he
says, have developed weapons to combat each other for the purpose of exclusive
possession of the females. The contest ensures ‘that the strongest and most
active animal should propagate the species, which should thence become improved’.
The spur of hunger, Darwin, says, ‘has diversified the forms of all species
of animals’, as for example in the varied beaks of birds, adapted to break
the harder seeds, as sparrows, or the softer seeds and buds, as the finches.
The need for security has led to ‘great swiftness of foot’ and ‘armed shells’,
and what we call protective camouflage.

All this gave Darwin a confident belief in the variation and improvement
of species, proceeding ‘by its own inherent activity’. People soon realised
that this meant without divine intervention, and the godly (who were numerous
and powerful) decided that Darwin must be put down. Coleridge, dismissing
the idea that species might change over the course of generations, said
‘this is Darwinizing with a vengeance’. He scorned the theory ‘of Man’s
having progressed from an Ouran Outang state’, preferring ‘the history I
find in my Bible’ that ‘Man first appeared with all his faculties perfect
and in full growth’. Joseph Priestley, though once a fellow member of the
Lunar Society, was even more scathing: ‘If there be any such thing as atheism,
this is certainly it.’ It was really a preview of the furore caused by Darwin’s
grandson’s On the Origin of Species 60 years later. But during the war against
revolutionary France in the late 1790s, new and irreligious ideas were not
to be tolerated. William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802) gave Darwin a hammering
with the heavy artillery of theo-zoology.

Darwin did not recant, however. Far from it. He wrote a second long
poem describing the evolution of life from the microscopic specks in primeval
seas through fishes, amphibians and reptiles to human beings and the society
they sometimes succeed in creating. Darwin died at the age of 70 in 1802,
and his poem, which he called The Origin of Society, was published after
his death under a neutral title The Temple of Nature. In this poem Darwin
lays more emphasis on the struggle for existence, probably because he had
read Malthus’s Essay on Population (1798). Zoonomia and The Temple of Nature
fell out of favour, but Charles Darwin read them both, and they presumably
played a part in preparing his mind for evolution.

The Botanic Garden is not really affected by these evolutionary imperatives,
but the poem is worth remembering on its bicentenary because no scientist
has since produced a long scientific poem so popular with the reading public,
or so influential with the young poets of the day.

Desmond King-Hele FRS is the author of Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic
Poets (Macmillan, 1986) and Satellite Orbits in an Atmosphere (Blackie,
1987).