Darwin's mail

I’ve just read Janet Browne’s two-volume biography of Charles Darwin, and it’s a magnificent achievement — one of the finest biographies I’ve ever read. I especially admire Browne’s judgment in knowing when to stick with the events of the life and when to pull back her camera to reveal the larger social contexts in which Darwin worked.

One of the interesting subthemes of the book concerns the way Darwin gravitated towards technologies that would allow him to pursue whatever aroused his curiosity — and whenever his curiosity was aroused he tended to become obsessive until he satisfied it. For instance, though he hated having his photograph taken, he made extensive use of photographs in writing his peculiar book on The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

Also: if you think of the various scientific institutions and journals of the Victorian era as a kind of network, he and his chief supporters (Thomas Henry Huxley above all) skillfully exploited those technologies to spread the news of natural selection far more quickly than it could have been expected to spread otherwise.

But as someone who has a long-standing interest in the postal service, these passages from the early pages of the second volume are especially provocative:

Systematically, he turned his house into the hub of an ever-expanding web of scientific correspondence. Tucked away in his study, day after day, month after month, Darwin wrote letters to a remarkable number and variety of individuals. He relied on these letters for every aspect of his evolutionary endeavour, using them not only to pursue his investigations across the globe but also to give his arguments the international spread and universal application that he and his colleagues regarded as essential footings for any new scientific concept. They were his primary research tool. Furthermore, after the Origin of Species was published, he deliberately used his correspondence to propel his ideas into the public domain—the primary means by which he ensured his book was being read and reviewed. His study inside Down House became an intellectual factory, a centre of administration and calculation, in which he churned out requests for information and processed answers, kept himself at the leading edge of contemporary science, and ultimately orchestrated a transformation in Victorian thought.

Maybe it wasn't the telegraph that was the Victorian internet but rather the penny post — even if it was slower.

And Darwin was utterly unashamed to use letters to get other people (friends, family, and often strangers) to do research for him:

He also hunted down anyone who could help him on specific issues, from civil servants, army officers, diplomats, fur-trappers, horse-breeders, society ladies, Welsh hill-farmers, zookeepers, pigeon-fanciers, gardeners, asylum owners, and kennel hands, through to his own elderly aunts or energetic nieces and nephews. Many of his letters went to residents of far-flung regions — India, Jamaica, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, China, Borneo, the Hawaiian Islands — reflecting the increasing European domination of the globe and rapidly improving channels of communication.

It’s a good thing that Darwin was a wealthy man: “In 1851 he spent £20 on ‘stationery, stamps & newspapers’ (nearly £1,000 in modern terms) ... By 1877 Darwin’s expenditure on postage and stationery had doubled to £53 14s. 7d, a sum roughly equal to his butler’s annual salary.”

And here’s Browne’s incisive summary of this method:

If there was any single factor that characterised the heart of Darwin’s scientific undertaking it was this systematic use of correspondence. Darwin made the most of his position as a gentleman and scientific author to obtain what he needed. He was a skilful strategist. The flow of information that he initiated was almost always one-way. Like countless other well-established figures of the period, Darwin regarded his correspondence primarily as a supply system, designed to answer his own wants. “If it would not cause you too much trouble,” he would write. “Pray add to your kindness,” “I feel that you will think you have fallen on a most troublesome petitioner,” “I trust to your kindness to excuse my troubling you.” ...

Alone at his desk, captain of his ship, safely anchored in his country estate on the edge of a tiny village in Kent, he was in turn manager, chief executive, broker, and strategist for a world-wide enterprise. Once, in a passing compulsion, he attached a mirror to the inside of his study window, angled so that he could catch the first glimpse of the postman turning up the drive. It stayed there for the rest of his life.

war is over, if you tweet

Last week I finally got around to reading Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet, his history of the telegraph. One of Standage’s major themes is the widespread belief, in the early days of the telegraph, that the technology itself would somehow usher in a New Age of international peace and cooperation. After all, said one observer of the time, the telegraph was “transmitting knowledge of events, removing causes of misunderstanding, and promoting peace and harmony throughout the world.” “It brings the world together,” said another. “It joins the sundered hemispheres. It unites distant nations, making them feel that they are members of one great family. . . . By such strong ties does it tend to bind the human race in unity, peace, and concord.”

Standage goes on to point out that the development of the internet was accompanied by the same rhetoric: twelve years ago Nicholas Negropnte famously proclaimed that the internet would end nationalism and bring about world peace, and he was just one of many prophets preaching the same gospel.

From my editor Adam Keiper I now get this story by Jonathan Last: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose indeed. Clay Shirky: “Twitter makes us empathize.” British PM Gordon Brown: because of Twitter, “You cannot have Rwanda again.”

Really? Twitter can keep people from taking machetes to their neighbors? And sending and receiving 140-character messages will make us empathize? The assumptions underlying all of these statements are precisely the same assumptions that underlay the praise of the telegraph a hundred and fifty years ago: that one group of people cannot have fundamentally different interests than any other group; that any conflict is the product of insufficient information; that the provision of sufficient information will immediately end any conflict; that familiarity inevitably breeds not contempt but affection and respect; that human beings are naturally filled with compassion and simply require a technology sufficiently powerful to release that compassion. But — alas — none of these assumptions is true.