One of the aspects of our
London walks is that they are more about people than about buildings. It’s all very well to know that a particular building was built in a particular year and is designed in a specific style of architecture, but it is people, not buildings, that make history.
To that end we people our London walks with those who lived in the places that we pass. You will learn a great deal about famous figures from London’s past as we tell you their stories.
If there is an anniversary connected to those people then we are happy to make the most of it on our London walks and 2009 sees many such important anniversaries.
Take Charles Darwin for example. For him 2009 holds a double anniversary because he was born 200 years ago this year and it was 150 years ago this year that he published his epoch-making book On the Origin of the Species By Natural Selection.
Charles Robert Darwin (1809 -1882) was born in Salop, Shrewsbury. He was the son of a free-thinking physician, Robert Waring Darwin, and Susannah Wedgewood, the daughter of the pottery magnate Josiah Wedgewood.
Between 1825 and 1827 he studied medicine at Edinburgh University, but found anatomy and surgery somewhat repugnant and so spent much of his time collecting sea creatures.
In 1827 he was sent to study theology at Christ’s College Cambridge, but spent his time instead shooting birds and collecting beetles.
After graduating in 1831 he joined Captain Robert Fitzroy. Commander of HMS Beagle, as an unpaid companion and naturist on a five year voyage to carry out a scientific survey of the southern hemisphere.
During these five hard years at sea, he made geological observations, collected animal and plant specimens, and acquired a huge amount of knowledge about natural history and geology.
He also found compelling geological evidence to the support the Scottish geologist Charles Lyell’s theory that the surface of the earth had not come about in one moment of creation but rather had been shaped continuously by natural causes over a vast period of time. Darwin was soon adapting this theory to the organic world.
Returning in 1836 he settled in London, became very active in the Geological Society of London and began publishing works that established his reputation in scientific circles, most notably his Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S Beagle, which was published in 1839.
By this time, however, he had come to the momentous realisation that species evolved and so were neither fixed in one continuous state nor were they created by miracles. However, it was twenty years before he actually published this earth shattering theory.
In the late 1830’s that he began suffering with digestive problems and vomiting, symptoms of an ailment that would afflict him for the rest of his life and which led him to lead a somewhat reclusive existence.
In January 1839 he married his wealthy cousin Emma Wedgewood and the moved into Down House in Kent where Darwin enjoyed the lifestyle of a wealthy country gentleman.
During his first sixteen years at Down House he worked continuously on his theory of evolution. The death of his father in 1848, and of his 10-year-old daughter, Annie, in 1851, both caused him to question his Christian faith.
In 1856 he began work on a major volume on ‘natural selection,’ but was somewhat perturbed when, in 1858, the Welsh naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace sent him a paper that presented a similar evolutionary theory to his own.
Darwin was prompted to write a much shorter book on evolution than he had originally planned and led him, in July 1858, to present a joint paper on evolution in collaboration with Wallace to the Linnaean Society in London.
The following year, in November 1859, Darwin’s ground breaking book On the Origins of the Species by Means of Natural Selection was finally published. Darwin was very cautious in how he put over his theory and, significantly, he avoided the crucial question of the origin of man.
His book received a mixed reception. Some hailed it as the most important scientific work of the age, others argued that he had not provided sufficient evidence to support his theory, whilst many people were outraged that Darwin’s work went against the Biblical account of creation and that it suggested that life on earth was the result of chance as opposed to grand design.
Darwin published his responses to his various critics in five subsequent editions of the Origin and finally, in 1871, he tackled the most controversial theory of all in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, in which he argued that mankind was descended from anthropoid apes. He also presented his theory of ’sexual selection’ to explain those attributes of species that could not be explained by natural selection.
Needless to say his theory was condemned by the church. His wife Emma was a staunch Catholic and so Darwin would walk her and the children to church but remain outside for the duration of the service.
He died on 19th April 1882 and is buried in Westminster Abbey, an honour which shows that, despite the effect that his theories had on orthodox contemporary religion, Darwin was considered a major, though respectable intellectual.
Although his work and theories are still somewhat controversial, and are still much debated and argued over, what cannot be denied is that Charles Robert Darwin revolutionised the way in which we humans perceive ourselves in relation to the natural world.
