Did Darwin convert to Christianity on his death bed, as so many evangelists have claimed?  And, at the other end of the string, was his ‘conversion’ to the evolution idea based on his recognition of species differences among the finches of the Galapagos?  The answer in both cases is NO.

The death bed conversion story was stimulated by the temperance and revival evangelist Lady Elizabeth Hope, the wife of Admiral Sir James Hope.  She is said to have visited Darwin shortly before his death. The first published comment appeared in the Boston Watchman-Examiner on August 19, 1915, thirty-four years after the event:

‘About seven months before Charles Darwin died in 1882, a woman known as “Lady Hope” supposedly visited him and found him reading the Bible's Book of Hebrews. When she mentioned the subject of creation as recorded in the Book of Genesis, he became agitated, but asked her to come back to speak about Jesus Christ to a group of servants, tenants and neighbors.’

The story claims that Darwin told Lady Hope that the Bible was the greatest book ever written.  He expressed regret that his evolution theory sprang from his young mind insufficiently restrained by the caution of greater maturity.  Lady Hope didn’t explicitly claim that Darwin had ‘converted’; instead she said that he had returned to the religious habit of his youth.  However, evangelicals magnified her comments into conversion.  Indeed, a rumor of conversion had long circulated among them, for tales of conversion from unbelief were confirmations of Glory Halleluiah.  She may have been playing on the rumors, about which she doubtless knew.

Is there anything to Lady Hope’s tale?  Did she meet with Darwin, and if so, why?  James Moore andEdward Caudill believe that the meeting might have happened, despite denials by the Darwin family.  Lady Hope was active in Kent at the time of the supposed meeting (September 1881) and indeed lived close to Downe.  An interview would have been consistent with Darwin’s long-term commitment to Downe community affairs and to the temperance movement particularly.   Moore finds it plausible that Darwin may have expressed regret that his theory was touted by atheists as proof of their views.  While he was comfortable with genteel agnosticism, his loyalty to his wife Emma, and concern for his respectability, excluded identification with atheism.  He had, at the time of the purported meeting, made arrangements for his burial in the Downe church cemetery.  But there is no evidence that Darwin had engaged in serious Bible reading, or any reading of it at all. 

Moore discusses the Darwin family’s persistent denial of the Lady Hope story, including denial that they met.  The family effort, led by Francis and Henrietta, depicted him as a humanist Anglican.  In 1918 Francis issued this statement: ‘Lady Hope's account of my father's views on religion is quite untrue. I have publicly accused her of falsehood, but have not seen any reply. My father's agnostic point of view is given in my Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. I., pp. 304-317’.

The family position on the question doesn’t take into account Darwin’s involvement with the Brethern Church leader James Fegan, who was active with young men among the seasonal agricultural workers in Kent.  Fegan requested the use of a schoolroom in Downe where the Darwin family sponsored a temperance reading room.  Darwin responded to Fegan’s request:

‘You have more right to it than we have, for your services have done more for the village in a few months than all our efforts for many years. We have never been able to reclaim a drunkard, but through your services I do not know that there is one drunkard left in the village

Once this context is established, Lady Hope’s own statement about the visit (as distinguished from the Watchman-Examiner report previously mentioned) becomes less implausible.  It is a lengthy statement (quoted by Moore) stating many details about Darwin and Down House that testify to her direct acquaintance.  Here are some key points.  (1) Darwin, on learning of her local temperance activities, invited her to visit him at Down House ‘at 3 pm’—the common time of Darwin’s meetings.  (2) She makes no assertion that he had undergone conversion. (3) She doesn’t say that he was ‘bed-ridden’, as he was not.  (4) He expressed regret that exponents of his evolution theory ‘made a religion out of it’.  All of this is consistent with what we know of Darwin’s late life.  But then the hard part.  On her entry to his studio, he was sitting on a sofa reading St Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews.  He began the conversation by commenting ‘on some of the great Gospel truths’; and ‘[Darwin] spoke of Christ in this way: He is the King, the Saviour, the Intercessor, dying, living, and [he] discoursed rather freely, and with great animation on different parts of the subject’.  When Lady Hope responded by asking about the association of his name with doubts about the Book of Genesis, “His whole aspect changed.  A look partly of anger, and partly of great distress, was on his face, as he closed his hands, throwing them forward, while he said with a sort of groan or sigh; ‘I was young then.  I was ignorant; I was enquiring, searching, trying to find knowledge.  I wanted the truth and there and then’. He hesitated, as if he was quite overcome, and burst out with a louder voice, apparently in great displeasure, ‘They went and made a religion out of it’.”  This is a challenge!  Let us consider.

Darwin was introduced to evolution at age 18, during his year of study in Edinburgh.  His Cambridge studies deepened his knowledge of geology and the diversity of animal life, interpreted under Rev. William Paley’s natural theology perspective.  His reading during the Beagle voyage exposed him to the evolution literature, but he retained his natural theology and his religious commitment.  His transition to the evolutionary perspective, in 1838 at age 29, was mediated by the Rev. Thomas Malthus.  (Rev. Paley’s Natural Theology, it should be noted, was also Malthusian). It was not accompanied by a ‘crisis of faith’; in his Autobiography (1878) he says that his faith gradually slipped away, without emotional upheaval or depression.  At the time of the publication of the Origin, he remained a theist, and he warmly accepted Rev. Asa Gray’s defense of himself and the Origin against the charge of atheism.  Indeed, he arranged for Gray’s defense to be reprinted in the UK at his own expense.  But the supposed meeting with Lady Hope was three years after writing his Autobiography: had Darwin reverted to faith?  So it seems from Lady Hope’s explanation of Darwin’s request that she deliver a hymn-singing service, on his estate, to his servants, tenants, and neighbors.  When she asked what she should speak on, he responded, “’Oh on the Lord Jesus Christ,’ he answered most earnestly.  Of course I was willing indeed.”  But the service wasn’t held because ‘there was a lack of sympathy on these lines in the house’.  This too is plausible.  Emma was in control of household affairs, and it’s unlikely that she would approve of Lady Hope’s highly visible incursion.  

The report of Darwin’s highly emotional reverence for his Savior lies well outside the dimensions of his psychology.  Nowhere in the extensive record of his feelings and states of mind is there any suggestion that his Christian phase involved feelings of sin and redemption.  The only emotional peak was his angry rejection of Providence on the death of his daughter Annie in 1851.  This is the one exception to his statement, in his Autobiography, that as he grew older, his feelings flattened to a plain, without their former peaks and troughs.  That an agnostic in this emotional condition should suddenly discover Christian fervor for the Savior is unconvincing.  And there is another reason for rejecting Lady Hope’s report of his Christian confession.  Only two weeks after her supposed visit, Darwin met with two prominent advocates of the fusion of evolutionary atheism into socialist, revolutionary politics, Edward Aveling and Ludwig Büchner!

References

James Moore, The Darwin Legend, New York: Baker Books, 1994.

Edward Caudill, Darwinian Myths, University of Tennessee Press, 1997.

At the funeral of the great advocate of the working class, his long-time friend and admirer, Friedrich Engels, declared that ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history’.  The linkage was among the core ideas of reformist advocacy.  Darwin was famous; Marx was not—fewer than a dozen mourners attended his funeral at Highgate Cemetery.  Coupling their names was a quick way of conveying a sense of the high status of the obscure German. 

Engels was not the first to make the linkage.  Marx himself was the first.  In the spring of 1873, he sent Darwin a copy of volume two of Das Kapital, with the inscription ‘Mr Charles Darwin/ on the part of his sincere admirer. Karl Marx/ London 16 June 1873’.   (He also sent a copy to Herbert Spencer on the same day).  Darwin didn’t reply until 1 October of that year, when he wrote:

Dear Sir

I thank you for the honour which you have done me by sending me your great work on Capital; & I heartily wish that I was more worthy to receive it, by understanding more of the deep & important subject of political Economy.  Though our studies have been so different, I believe that we both Earnestly desire the extension of Knowledge, & that this in the long run is sure to add to the happiness of Mankind.  I remain Dear Sir/Yours faithfully/Charles Darwin

Darwin didn’t read the book—only 105 of its 822 pages are cut, and he wrote no marginal comments.  Did he know anything about Marx, or have any sense of Das Kapital’s teaching?  Probably not, since this brief note is the only reference to Marx in his abundant notes and correspondence.  Little can be inferred from letter since Darwin dutifully replied to all correspondents, regardless of their status.  And he himself sent copies of his publications far and wide.  Two observations might be made however. 

In July, 1870, Napoleon III declared war on Prussia.  The French army was defeated in a bare two months and soon thereafter Bismarck formed the German Empire from a collection of independent states.  Meanwhile a republican government was formed in France, under Jules Favre, who lead a recovery of the French army to drive the German armies from France.  It didn’t work, for the German armies surrounded the heavily fortified Paris.  In late March, 1871, populist elements in Paris formed a government that came to be called the Paris Commune. 

They declared:

‘The proletarians of Paris, amidst the failures and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them to save the situation by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs.... They have understood that it is their imperious duty, and their absolute right, to render themselves masters of their own destinies, by seizing upon the governmental power.

The Commune lasted but two months. The new French government under Louis Thiers terminated it by killing an estimated 30,000 communards in one week.  Karl Marx was close to these events.  In 1871 he wrote The Civil War in France to exalt what ‘our heroic Party comrades’ had attempted and to expose their errors.  The book was published by a working class association and was distributed throughout Europe in the expectation that the example of the world’s first communist government would stimulate the next effort.  In one sense that happened.  The Paris Commune became the lode star of socialists and anarchists, including Vladimir Lenin.

My second observation concerns Darwin’s social class.  As a gentleman of his times, he could not but know something about political economy. Indeed, he read the Scottish economists from whom he drew heavily in his views about human moral sentiment, set forth in The Descent of Man.  But he was also a working capitalist, practicing as he did the art of investment, especially in railroad stock, with great success.  By his death he had accumulated a large fortune of about £283,000.  Marx was aware of Darwin’s status, of course; his profession of sincere admiration was compatible with classifying Darwin and Spencer as bourgeois thinkers and apologists. 

In 1931, the story began to circulate that Marx proposed to dedicate the second volume of Das Kapital to Darwin.  The basis of the story was a letter, dated 13 October 1880, that Darwin wrote to an unidentified correspondent gracefully declining the offer of the dedication of a book.  The letter was published in a journal managed by the Marx-Engels-Institute, Moscow, in 1931.  The letter says, in part:

Dear Sir,

I am obliged by your kind letter & the Enclosure.---the publication in any form of your remarks on my writings really requires no consent on my part, & it would be ridiculous in me to give consent to what requires none.  I shd. prefer the part of Volume not be dedicated to me (though I thank you for the intended honour) as this implies to a certain extent my approval of the general publication, about which I know nothing . . . yet it appears to me … that direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is be promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds. …It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion … I may, however, have been unduly biased by the pain which it would give some members of my family, if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion …’

Fifty years after this story was launched, detailed research by a variety of investigators finally put it to rest: the letter was not addressed to Marx, but to Edward Aveling, who wished to dedicate to Darwin his Freethought book, The Student’s Darwin.  About a year after Darwin declined Aveling’s invitation, he granted an interview (Septermber 28, 1881) to Aveling and the German secularist advocate, Ludwig Büchner.  These two advocates were the core of the linkage of Darwinism (the struggle for existence) with atheism, and both to far-reaching social reform culminating in the replacement of class society by the oppressed.  Only a few months before the meeting, Büchner founded The German Freethinker’s League, the first openly atheist organization in Germany.  In 1884 he published Progress in Nature and History in the Life of the Darwinian Theory, and in 1894, Darwinism and Socialism.  Aveling’s activism is the British parallel.  He studied medicine and biology at King’s College, London and achieved appointment as a lecturer.  Like Büchner, he was an effective speaker and communicator.  Also like Büchner, his atheism quickly led to his dismissal from his university position.  He made good his loss by affiliating with the newly established National Secular Society (founded by Charles Bradlaugh in 1866), and associated closely with one of Bradlaugh’s lieutenants, Annie Besant.  However, Marxism was odious to Bradlaugh; Aveling’s Marxism was made transparent by his partnership with Marx’s daughter, Eleanor.  Aveling accordingly moved to the Social Democratic Federation, established in June 1881 by H.M. Hyndman and Eleanor Marx. 

That Darwin agreed to meeting these militants was grievous to Emma.  At her suggestion, Darwin’s long time friend the Rev. Brodie Innes, once the vicar of the Downe church, was invited.  In their biography, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist, Adrian Desmond and James Moore wrote of the meeting:

The table became an embodiment of Darwin’s life-long dilemma. It was less a lunch, more a last supper; everybody he had loved, everything he had feared, every paradox of his career had come together in a penultimate act. Here, his disapproving evangelical wife, his kindly Tory vicar, his genetically weak children, and his atheistic disciples Büchner to his right and Aveling on the left.

This is an eloquent image of the many paradoxes of the meeting.  Although Darwin discouraged militant arguments against religion because they supposedly have little effect on the public, he nevertheless indirectly supported their use of his theory to propagate atheism.  What passed between them during their meeting?  How did Darwin respond to their enthusiasm for the rising tide of working class revolt, which even his disciple Thomas Huxley supported?  Alas we do not know.  It is relevant to note that Darwin also supported, in much the same spirit, the secularist advocacy of the de-frocked Unitarian minister, Francis Ellingwood Abbott, to whose periodical, Index, he subscribed.  Darwin told Abbott that he ‘agreed to almost every word’ that Abbott wrote. 

1881 was also the year that the Scottish philosopher, William Graham, published his ambitious synthesis, The Creed of Science: Religious, Moral, and Social, in which he attempted to show that and how major scientific discoveries, from astronomy to zoology, can be integrated into a materialistic world view that enhanced humanity’s moral and social needs.  Graham created a ‘dialogue’ by juxtaposing Optimistic and Pessimistic assessments of science and public opinion. Physicists, for example, had argued from thermodynamic principles that the Sun’s heat was dissipating over time.  This meant that the Earth was cooling and would eventually not support animal or plant life: the end of the world was coming (Lord Kelvin estimated 30 million years).  This idea had a strong depressing effect on Darwin and many others.  Another pessimistic observation was the increase of the ratio of the unfit in European populations, thanks to improved sanitation and other public health measures.  Here again Darwin was among those gloomy about the future.  Graham undertook to show how these negatives could be resolved into a positive assessment.  In contrast to his response to Aveling’s short book, The Student’s Darwin, Darwin read Graham’s long book and waxed enthusiastic.  This contrast suggests that Darwin was sensitive to the difference between liberal and socialist agendas.

References

Colp, Ralph Jr., The myth of the Darwin-Marx letter, History of Political Economy 14(1982):461-482.

Paylor, Suzanne, Edward B. Aveling: The People’s Darwin, Endeavor 2005, 29:66-71. 

On June 30, 1860, the last day of the annual British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) meeting, a session was devoted to the debate on Darwin’s book.  The debate became a paramount icon of the Darwin legend because it displays the complete discrediting of religiously inspired objections to the evolution paradigm.  Sir Julian Huxley declared that it was ‘the most important event of the 19th century’.  In a like enthusiasm, the Darwin biographer Janet Browne called it ‘a defining moment in Victorian history’.  What aroused such ecstasis among Darwin’s devotees?

An important element for understanding the event is realization that BAAS meetings encouraged participation by the general public and (of course) the media.  Evolution had been a lively topic during the week.  Some 700 people jammed the Oxford Museum for the closing event.  It was expected that Samuel Wilberforce would ‘smash’ Darwin’s theory.  Wilberforce was indeed the right man.  As Bishop of Oxford, he was on home ground.  He was one of two Vice Presidents of the BAAS.  He was an amateur ornithologist and had taken Honors in Mathematics as an undergraduate.  He was a critic of Vestiges of Creation, and his lengthy critical review of the Origin was in press.  Wilberforce presented a thirty minute criticism of the Origin, which he commended as a valid scientific inquiry, but specified points that it had failed to prove.  And he concluded, the story says, with a taunt, asking whether it was through grandmother or grandfather that one claimed descent from the monkey. 

The presiding officer, Darwin's former teacher Rev Henslow, called on Huxley to speak. He defended the logic and evidence of Darwin's theory, and finished with the damning declaration that he was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth. No one doubted his meaning and the effect was tremendous. One lady fainted and had to carried out: I, for one, jumped out of my seat…’ 

The legend interprets Huxley's retort as an epigrammic contrast of science to theology that shifted the mixed feelings of the audience to emphatic support for Huxley, for science, and for Darwin.  Here, we are told, is a ‘defining moment in Victorian history’. 

But did it happen? Did Wilberforce taunt Huxley about his ancestry and did Huxley respond as claimed? Did the audience convulse in laughter at the Bishop and treat Huxley as a hero?  

Doubts arise because the first report of Huxley’s demolition occurs in a gossipy article, `A Grandmother's Tale', in Macmillan's Magazine--38 years after the event.  It has been accepted as an accurate report of events until recently.  Investigation shows that the author, Mrs. Isabella Sidgwick, transmitted the opinions of some participants—notably Huxley—as if they were the consensus of the audience.  Here's what we now know about the event. 

 *The session was reported by three journalists.  None quoted the famous Huxley quip.  Only one journalist reported a confrontation. 

*There’s no indication in reportage or correspondence of participants that Wilberforce was humiliated or that the audience was resolved for or against Darwin.

*In post-event correspondence with Darwin, Joseph Hooker said that Huxley could not be heard by

the audience and claimed that it was he who had successfully pressed Wilberforce.  The Athenaeum reportage supports this claim in that it devotes much more space to Hooker’s comments than to Wilberforce or Huxley. 

*If Wilberforce’s comments reflected his review of Origin, we know Darwin’s reaction.  He said to Hooker that ‘it is uncommonly clever; it picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts, and brings forward well all the difficulties'; and to Lyell, ‘the Bishop makes a telling case against me, by accumulating several instances where I speak very doubtfully’.  Wilberforce’s review argued two key points: that domestication evidence is not evidence for speciation because varieties loose their traits when allowed to inter-breed; and the geological-paleontological evidence is inconsistent with the claim that organisms continuously evolve.  The Bishop accepted natural selection as a negative agency that preserves species integrity.  At no point did he appeal to ecclesiastical authority. 

*Huxley’s epigram sources to a letter he wrote to Darwin about a month after the event.  He doesn't expressly say that Wilberforce raised the descent question.  Huxley himself had raised it on several occasions during the conference.  Some of the audience would have known this; hence the relevance of Wilberforce’s question, if he raised it. 

*In correspondence, Darwinians confess that they were highly aroused against Wilberforce.  Typical is Hooker’s statement to Darwin on 2 July: ‘Sam Oxon got up and spouted for half an hour with inimitable spirit, ugliness and emptiness and unfairness. I saw he was coached up by [Richard] Owen and knew nothing, and he said not a syllable but what was in the Reviews; he ridiculed you badly and Huxley savagely’.  It is remarkable that in the correspondence there is no discussion of the cogency of Wilberforce’s criticisms, even though Darwin himself acknowledged their cogency.  This observation is especially telling in Huxley’s case, for in his review of the Origin, he too pointed out the discrepancy between Darwin’s gradualist thesis and the fossil record: he agreed with Wilberforce!  But so did many naturalists. It continues to this day as a major theme of evolution research and controversy. 

How then should we evaluate Isabella Sidgwick’s Grandmother’s Tale?  Although the telling event didn’t happen, it is a fair report of the attitudes of Darwinians, especially Hooker and Huxley.  For them the issue with Wilberforce wasn’t the cogency of argument but status: the time had come to eliminate Anglican control of Oxford and Cambridge, and to reduce its influence on public life.  The extraordinary power, for Darwinians, of the Huxley anecdote is conveyed by Darwin’s leading biographer, Janet Browne, in her rendering of the Huxley-Wilberforce episode.  Although she knows that Huxley’s triumph is imaginary, she devised a way to save it. 

`The gossip running through the crowd afterwards’, she writes, ‘quickly crafted an epic narrative, a collective fiction with an inbuilt meaning much more tangible and important than reality. All felt they were witnessing history in the making' (pp. 124f).  

If we keep our eyes on real events, we readily see that Bishop Wilberforce’s true challenge in 1860 wasn’t Huxley but the publication of the book, Essays and Reviews.  It was a detailed statement of godless theology. The authors were in the camp of David Friedrich Strauss (The Life of Jesus Critically Examined), who displaced the sacred book by a strictly historical approach.   Essays and Reviews was a best seller: 22, 000 copies in two years (compare the Origin: 16,000 copies in the UK, 1859-1882).  The contributors were Oxford dons and clergymen.  As Bishop of Oxford, Wilberforce was obliged to take action.  Late in 1860 he chastised Essays and Reviews and its contributors in a letter to The Times signed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and 25 bishops. He menaced the authors with indictment in the ecclesiastical courts for heresy.  Two contributors were indicted and dismissed from their appointments in 1862.  They appealed to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which in 1864 dismissed the heresy judgment.  Anglican traditionalists (including Wilberforce) were infuriated.  Wilberforce took the case to the laity and clergy and obtained a synodical condemnation of the book for heresy.  Nevertheless, one of the contributors, William Templeton, became Archbishop of Canterbury some years later while the remainder continued in their pastoral and university appointments. 

References

 

Brooke, John Hedley. Darwinism and Religion: A Revisionist View of the Wilberforce-Huxley Debate Link  

Browne, E. Janet.  Charles Darwin: The Power of Place.  New York: Knopf, 2002. 

Lucas, John R. 'Wilberforce and Huxley: a Legendary Encounter', The Historical Journal, 22 (1979), 313-30. 

Thomson, Keith S. 'Huxley, Wilberforce and the Oxford Museum', American Scientist, 88 (2000), 210-13. 

Waller, John.  Fabulous Science: Fact and Fiction in the History of Scientific Discovery.  Oxford University Press, 2002 

[Wilberforce, Samuel] (Review of) ‘On the origin of species’, Quarterly Review, August, 1860, pp. 225-264.