‘The Evolution of Charles Darwin’: new biography by Diana Preston breathes new life into a familiar story

Acclaimed narrative historian Diana Preston (“Eight Days at Yalta”; “Lusitania”; “Before the Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima”), a first cousin of Charles Darwin’s wife Emma “many generations removed,” returns with this meticulously researched compelling narrative of a well-known tale.

While Darwin’s almost five-year-long voyage on H.M.S. Beagle and its impact on his theory of evolution is widely recognized, it was also, Preston notes in her introduction, “an evolution in Darwin himself” as he embraced new experiences ranging from eating his first banana at Cape Verde to drinking tortoise urine in the Galápagos, the place most associated with him in the public mind.

Charles Darwin, born in 1809 on the same day as Abraham Lincoln, was sent to boarding school at age nine, not long after his mother Susannah Wedgwood’s death. There, Preston writes, he “became an enthusiastic collector of everything from coins to shells.”

Later, he followed his older brother Erasmus to medical school in Edinburgh, where he took taxidermy lessons from John Edmonstone, a former enslaved man. Transferring to Cambridge where he studied with the intent of becoming a country parson, Darwin spent three years he referred to as “the most joyful in my happy life.” Studying with geologist Rev. Adam Sedgwick in the summer of 1831 he learned how to mark stratified rock on a map and to scour rock specimens for fossils, skills that became essential on his epic expedition.

Selected by the Beagle’s captain, Robert FitzRoy, to be his intellectual on-board companion, Darwin wrote him an ebullient letter in November 1831 about being invited to join the crew of 70: “My second life will then commence, and it shall be as a birthday for the rest of my life.”

It was also an unpaid internship during which he was expected to pay for his share of food. On his first day at sea, Dec. 28, Darwin suffered from acute seasickness, upset compounded by the screams of several fellow crew bound to upright posts and brutally flogged by FitzRoy as punishment for drunken Christmas revelry.

Relying heavily on firsthand accounts by Darwin and 26-year-old FitzRoy (a traditional Creationist who would blame himself for allowing 22-year-old Darwin to develop heretical theories), Preston lifts from their diaries and correspondence remarkable details that surprise and delight almost 200 years later.

There’s an on-board library with 400 volumes; the first feeling of tropical warmth that he recorded in his diary “does its best to smooth our sorrow,” and the welcome “mental rioting” of stream-of-consciousness scribblings from Darwin. In Patagonia, when a kaleidoscope of white butterflies swarmed the ship, he wrote that several crew exclaimed with delight, “it’s snowing butterflies.” When he went ashore (where he spent three-fifths of the journey exploring, sketching and gathering 5,400-plus specimens), Darwin always toted his copy of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” for company.

Of the many letters he wrote during the voyage only two are to his domineering doctor father, one in which Darwin hoped he would “be able to do some original work in Natural History,” an unintentionally ironic understatement of what he would accomplish.

Letters to and from others sustained him, nevertheless. In the early months of the journey he wrote to one of his sisters, “No half-famished wretch ever swallowed food more eagerly than I do.” In January 1836, he wrote to another sister, Susan, that deprived of correspondence for 18 months he felt “much inclined to sit down and have a good cry.”

After the Beagle anchored on Oct. 2, 1836 back in England, Darwin was among the first to disembark. He would never go abroad again. He developed his detailed observations into 189 handwritten pages that became an abstract of his species theory, which he confided to a cousin was “the cause … the main part of the ills to which my flesh is heir.”

As a result, he had out of necessity installed in his study, Preston explains, “a curtained-off alcove containing a makeshift lavatory … where he could vomit when illness struck.” It frequently did. Worried about the possibility of his sudden death, he wrote a letter to his wife outlining his desire for her to devote £400 to the publication of his theory and also that she “take trouble in promoting it.”

Two decades later “On the Origin of Species” was published. The 1,250 first-edition copies sold out the first day. Anthropologist Thomas Henry Huxley correctly predicted to Darwin that he would “have the rare happiness” of seeing his ideas triumphant in his time.

Diana Preston’s vibrant reconstruction of Darwin’s extraordinary journey, world-changing work and the consequences he experienced makes it all accessible and new in her telling.

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