SOURCE: “Shelley and Erasmus Darwin,” in Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference, edited by Kelvin Everest, Leicester University Press, 1983, pp. 129-46.

[In the following essay, King-Hele argues that Darwin's scientific, religious, and political ideas, as revealed in his poetry, strongly influenced the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.]

In the 1790s Erasmus Darwin would have needed no introduction: he was rated a great poet and respected as an eminent scientist; and he enjoyed a legendary reputation as a physician. Today, however, Darwin does need some introduction, and paradoxically it is because he was a giant who strode too easily across too many academic fields. He achieved more in a wider range of intellectual disciplines than anyone has done since. This seems to disqualify him from earning academic recognition, because university departments are monocultural and prefer to study historical figures who are themselves monocultural and do not cause embarrassment by dragging teachers into the terra incognita of a different culture.

Details of Darwin's life and work may be found in my recent biography:¹ here my aim is to go over some of his ideas and achievements that are relevant to Shelley, and to try to show how Darwin influenced Shelley.

Darwin lived from 1731 to 1802, and by profession he was a doctor, at Lichfield and Derby. He was a tall and powerful-looking man, cheerful and sociable, very conscientious and kind in his medical work. People from all over the country came to consult him: he was widely regarded as the finest physician of his time. That fails to impress us today: we have a poor opinion of eighteenth-century medicine. Yet this poor opinion is perhaps a little unfair, because it can be argued that a prime function of doctors is to pretend to be able to treat untreatable disease. Twentieth-century medicine has so far utterly failed to find the causes or cures of the killer diseases of its time, heart disease, cancer and so on, and will seem a mass of blundering inadequacy in a hundred years' time, if civilization survives so long. On this view, medicine is always a failure: the treatable diseases, like smallpox today, do not arise, and it is the untreatable ones that remain. Certainly there was no shortage of untreatable diseases in the eighteenth century. For 40 years, day after day, Darwin battled in vain with useless weapons against the invisible army of microbes.

Inevitably, this uphill struggle shaped his ideas. He began in his early twenties with a vague faith in a benevolent deity. But he soon abandoned this belief: for how could a benevolent deity allow such appalling diseases to rage as they did, bringing so much sorrow to those who were bereaved? From 1760 to 1781 Darwin lived at Lichfield in a house at the edge of the Cathedral Close, but he became notorious for his scorn of Christianity, though he was usually tactful enough to avoid giving too much offence. When a new bishop was installed, he politely attended the ceremony, and someone asked him how he liked the sermon. ‘Why sir,’ he said ‘it contained some very good words.’ Although Darwin had a bad stammer, his conversational powers impressed everyone who met him, and Maria Edgeworth remarked that his peculiar powers of wit and sarcasm ‘gained him strong ascendancy in private society’.²

Darwin's professional career was most successful, but it was in his spare time that he was a real genius, and this genius had several different facets. First, there was his genius for friendship, and its extraordinary outcome—the gathering together of the Lunar group, or the Lunar Society of Birmingham,³ to give it a more formal title. It was as Darwin's friends that most of the members were drawn in: Boulton, Wedgwood, Keir, Edgeworth, Watt, and even Withering, all arrived via Darwin. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that history changed direction because of their activities. They were the main driving force of intellect behind the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and therefore of the technological world we see about us today. Closely connected with the Lunar group, and almost a father-figure to it, was Benjamin Franklin. Darwin was 26 when he met Franklin in 1758 and their friendship remained strong until Franklin's death 32 years later. It is no surprise that Darwin strongly supported the American and French Revolutions, as well as the Industrial Revolution.

The second facet of Darwin's genius was as a mechanical inventor. His speaking machine; his horizontal windmill; his copying machines; and many improved carriage designs—all these were made, worked well and were the most advanced of their kind. He was a compulsive inventor and he sketched dozens of designs on paper that have proved to be curiously prophetic, like those of Leonardo da Vinci. Rocket motors, steam turbines and multi-mirror telescopes, for example, were sketched by Darwin and later made to work by others. His mechanical genius was historically important because, combined with his conversational powers, it gave him the prestige to act as a leader and initiator in the Lunar group. But his mechanical talent is not directly relevant to Shelley, so I shall say no more about it.

The third and most profound aspect of Darwin's genius was his amazing scientific insight. He often saw correctly how Nature functions, in both the physical and biological spheres. He stated the ideal gas law 30 years before its official discovery. He was the first to propound the principle of adiabatic expansion of gases, and he used the principle to explain how clouds form—a very basic discovery, especially in the British climate. In biology he was the first fully to describe the process of photosynthesis, the basis of all plant life, and he made many contributions on plant nutrition. He propounded a theory of biological evolution which, although unproved, was not essentially different from that of his grandson Charles. Of course Charles rightly has the main credit—he assembled the evidence and convinced the world. Erasmus was about a century too early, and earned only ridicule and abuse for his evolutionary theory, correct though it was.

Though evolution is the finest product of his scientific insight, his most substantial and laborious scientific work was as a botanist. He spent about seven years in the 1780s translating the works of Linnaeus from the Latin, and produced two books, A System of Vegetables (1783-5) and The Families of Plants (1787). These detailed catalogues of plants run to 2,000 pages—a massive work of botanical scholarship.

The fourth strand of Darwin's genius was what one reviewer called his ‘imperial command of words’. This emerges in his letters, and most of all in his long poems The Botanic Garden and The Temple of Nature. In the 1790s The Botanic Garden knocked the literary world sideways, and overturned established judgments. Horace Walpole, usually a difficult man to please, said ‘Dr Darwin has destroyed my admiration for any poetry but his own’.⁴ The poem was in two parts: part I, The Economy of Vegetation, was a scientific encyclopedia; while part II, The Loves of the Plants, was a frivolous popularization of the Linnaean volumes. The whole poem ran to 4,500 lines, backed up by scientific notes to the tune of 100,000 words. Unpromising material, it seems, for a best-seller, but that is what it became. Darwin's glittering couplets and comic quirks had nearly everyone fascinated, and comparisons with Homer, Dante and Milton were frequent. Darwin's success in presenting science to the literary world has never since been rivalled and probably never will be. He did even better in his second poem, The Temple of Nature, because the verse is just as good and the subject-matter is an astonishing tour de force—an exposition of biological evolution.

The final facet of Darwin's spare-time genius was his power to electrify the Romantic poets. Coleridge once called Darwin ‘the first literary character in Europe, and the most original-minded man’.⁵ Coleridge and Wordsworth were both deeply indebted to Darwin's poems, and to his massive textbook on medicine and biology, Zoonomia.⁶ Darwin's influence on Keats was less, though still appreciable.⁷ His strong hold over Shelley is the theme I shall now develop.

Perverse though it may seem, I shall begin with one of Darwin's ideas that Shelley failed to seize—his theory of biological evolution. In a 55-page chapter in volume 1 of Zoonomia, Darwin specifies the main mechanisms of evolution, noting the changes produced in animals over many generations by selective breeding, the occurrence of mutations, the rôle of ‘lust, hunger and security’ in determining the favoured variations, and the operation of sexual selection. He concludes that ‘all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament’, during a time span of ‘millions of ages’. Fortunately there is no need to go into detail, because his theory is basically the same as orthodox modern beliefs.

Shelley ordered Zoonomia from Hookham in 1812 and presumably read it.⁸ And he certainly read The Temple of Nature. So evolution was handed to him on a plate, yet he only nibbled at it instead of swallowing it whole. I feel that Shelley was unperceptive on this question: I regard it as his worst failure in the field of ideas. Here was a new world-view that had the supreme merit of being correct, and would have answered several of the philosophical problems he worried about—giving a non-religious answer to ‘the problem of evil’, for example. As it is, Shelley remains a pre-evolutionary thinker: some of his philosophical flights are admirable, but to me some seem unnecessary and dated.

Why did Shelley fail to take up evolution? Perhaps it was because he never escaped from religious imperatives. That sounds strange, when he wrote The Necessity of Atheism; but Shelley was basically religious and, even when he reacted violently against it, he still allowed religion to dominate his pattern of thought. In particular, he never escaped from Christianity. He said of Christianity, ‘No man of sense can think it true’, yet he continued to worry over it. In Timothy Webb's excellent book Shelley: a Voice not Understood (1977), the largest entry in the index is, not surprisingly, ‘Shelley’; but the second largest is, more surprisingly, ‘the Bible’. Though Shelley rejected Christianity in his late teens, he continued to admire some aspects of it, and Prometheus Unbound is often seen as a vindication of New Testament morality. Shelley's Platonism is also a piece of pattern-seeking only one stage removed from Christianity: he had a thirst for a universe with a divine pattern. A world developing by the chancy and messy process of evolution was not a concept that attracted him. Perhaps the cruelty of the struggle for existence repelled him, and he could not accept that slaughter should be the agent of Earth's biological future. Or perhaps he just thought evolution unlikely: many people did, but we might expect Shelley to be more far-sighted.

Unlike Shelley, Darwin had no religious obsessions. He escaped early from his vague belief in a benevolent God and he was psychologically free to go against the Church's dogma that species were created and altered by God for his own inscrutable purposes. In the 1760s England was quite tolerant about religious dissent, and Darwin was able to shake off any sense of guilt about denying religion.

One of Darwin's many technological interests in the 1760s was in the construction of the first major canal in England, the Trent-and-Mersey. Wedgwood and Brindley were the real driving power behind the canal, but Darwin worked closely with them. In digging the Harecastle Tunnel north of Burslem, many huge fossil bones were found—possibly dinosaur bones. Since Darwin was a doctor, people expected him to be able to identify bones; but he failed, and ‘lost face’ in the process. It made him think, and in the late 1760s he adopted the idea that species evolved and died out naturally without any divine interference. His family coat-of-arms was three scallop-shells, and he added the motto ‘E conchis omnia’, or ‘Everything from shells’ to express his faith in evolution. It seems an innocuous motto, until you realize its implications—that all animals have evolved from shelly (without the second e) sea creatures. Still, you might think that no one would have realized this in 1770. But not so. Dr Seward, canon of Lichfield Cathedral, knew Darwin well, and was alert to his irreligious tendencies. Dr Seward saw through the motto and attacked Darwin with some satirical verses. Darwin, he says,

                              renounces his Creator,
And forms all sense from senseless matter.
Great wizard he! by magic spells
Can all things raise from cockle shells.(9)

Darwin was so pleased with the motto that he had it painted on his carriage. But after this official rebuke, he had to have it painted out again to avoid offending his rich Christian patients. (It is a curious coincidence that the Shelley coat-of-arms is also three shells, though they are whelks not scallops. But it is only a coincidence, and not Darwinian influence on Shelley!)

Darwin arrived at his belief in evolution by 1770, when he was in his thirties, but he thought about it for 25 years before publishing the detailed account in Zoonomia. Unfortunately for Darwin, Zoonomia appeared in 1794 when the repression after the French Revolution was gathering strength in Britain, and any expression of ideas that disturbed the status quo was unwelcome. Darwin was undeterred by the hostile reception, and wrote a second long poem, which he called The Origin of Society—you only have to change three letters to get The Origin of Species. And that is what he might well have called the poem, because he presents a picture of the evolution of life from microscopic specks in primeval seas, gradually developing under environmental pressures, through fishes, amphibians and reptiles to the forms we now see on Earth. The amazing feature of the poem is his calm assumption, a hundred years ahead of his time, of a scenario that now seems to be largely correct. But Darwin was too far ahead of his time: the reviewers objected to his neglect of the Deity, and even Shelley never realized that here, in this picture of the past, was a marvellous chance to adopt a philosophy ahead of his time. This poem that Darwin called The Origin of Society is the one published after his death under the neutral title The Temple of Nature. Someone had cold feet about the more pointed title, but only the title page is changed. As a sample of The Temple of Nature, here are the four couplets into which Darwin crams the whole of the evolution of life on Earth:

Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born, and nurs'd in Ocean's pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.(10)

Closely allied to Darwin's theory of biological evolution is his philosophy of organic happiness, which appealed more to Shelley, and to Wordsworth and Coleridge. Darwin expounds this philosophy in his book on plant life, Phytologia (1800). It rests on three assumptions: the first is the idea that all living things enjoy life. The capacity for happiness is greatest, he says, among the higher animals—a class in which human beings are sometimes arrogant enough to place themselves—but the capacity for enjoyment extends right down the scale to smaller animals, insects and even plants. Darwin firmly believed that plants have feelings: this is the basis of his long poem The Loves of the Plants, where he humanizes the sex life of plants. It is from Darwin's idea that Wordsworth derived his faith that every flower enjoys the air it breathes. Coleridge also absorbed the idea of organic happiness, and in the Ancient Mariner, which is riddled with Darwinian borrowings, the mariner shed his guilt once he managed to love all living things. Shelley was addicted to the idea of organic happiness, too: it animates many of his poems, ‘The Sensitive Plant’ and ‘Love's Philosophy’ being the most extreme examples.

Today some people react sympathetically to the idea that plants feel, but then repress the idea, to avoid their gardens becoming like jungles as a result of their reluctance to prune roses or even root out weeds. Other people think it a silly idea, because they believe you need a large brain, or at least a small brain, to enjoy happiness. But it is generally agreed that the most intense form of human happiness is sexual pleasure, and for most people that is largely a matter of blood filling erectile tissues. The brain is very subsidiary; only its primitive areas are involved. So creatures with smaller brains may relish sex even more than we do, and they may get more pleasure than we do. This seems to be accepted, even by puritans, who condemn sexy people for ‘behaving like animals’. If you agree that sexual pleasure is more important for animals than for intellectuals, how far down the ‘great chain of being’ do you go? Perhaps to plants? The tissues of plants are kept constantly tense by the osmotic pressure of the sap, so perhaps they are in a state of continual enjoyment?

Whatever the answers may be, these questions lead to the second of the three basic ideas behind Darwin's philosophy, namely the importance of sex. He calls sex ‘the masterpiece of nature’, because it gives such pleasure, which he greatly approves of, and also because it provides genetic variation, giving evolution the variety of material from which, by ‘survival of the fittest’, species are improved. Reproduction without sex is inefficient in improving the species. As Darwin puts it,

Birth after birth the line unchanging runs,
And fathers live transmitted in their sons.(11)

(Making the unisex creatures male may savour of male chauvinism: but when you have to find a rhyme for ‘runs’, sons are better than daughters!) Darwin often exploited the comic possibilities of sex and sexlessness among plants and animals and, like Shelley, often used negatives to heighten the effect, as in the famous line about the oyster,

Unknown to sex the pregnant oyster swells,(12)

and in describing the nine asexual generations of the aphis:

Unmarried aphides prolific prove
For nine successions uninform'd of love.(13)

The third building block in Darwin's philosophy of organic happiness is the struggle for existence in nature. Most people think the struggle is cruel, and so did Darwin at first. But then he saw beyond the apparent cruelty and realized that the survivors in the struggle are, by and large, the healthiest and happiest creatures. So the evolutionary struggle is a maximization both of fitness and of happiness, and is a thoroughly good thing.

Though Shelley did not pick up the evolutionary implications, he did follow Darwin in his empathy with Nature, seeing the flowers and the plants and the forests as having a life of their own—a life to be respected, and often envied, because Nature was seemingly contented, suffering none of his own miseries. The ‘Stanzas written in Dejection, near Naples’ and ‘To a Skylark’ are two examples among many. Shelley would often personify natural objects, plants and flowers particularly, and sometimes even the rocks. Darwin was there before him, noting that many mineral strata, like limestone or coal, are the remains of animal or vegetable life and are therefore ‘mighty monuments of past delight’. Every time you drive a car, you are burning what Darwin called a monument of the ‘past felicity of organized nature’.

I now turn to other ideas of Darwin's that had a greater impact on Shelley, and first to Darwin's burning faith in the power of technology and mechanical invention to improve the conditions of life. Shelley took over this faith, uncritically at first, and later with some reservations.

To appreciate Darwin's enthusiasm, we have to think ourselves back to the 1750s, when the Industrial Revolution was just beginning, opening wide vistas into a world where mechanical power could replace human muscle. It was not by accident that Britain was to lead the world into industrialization: it was because ‘there were giants in those days’. The men were there with the vision to see the possibilities and the enterprise to bring them to fruition. The members of the Lunar group, Darwin and his friends Boulton, Watt, Wedgwood, Keir, and others, saw the vision most clearly and were most effective in converting it to reality. The most important single invention was Watt's improved steam engine (1765), and its progress can be followed in the enthusiastic letters Watt wrote to his closest friend at that time, James Lind: ‘I can think of nothing else but this machine. I hope to have the decisive trial before I see you’.¹⁴ Two years later Watt made his fateful first visit to the Midlands: he met Darwin, and he met Dr Small, the self-effacing friend of Darwin and Boulton, who held the Lunar group together. Watt told them the secret of his engine, and he was delighted by their enthusiasm. Watt was plagued by self-doubt and dejection, and he needed the ‘good supply of cheerfulness’ which Darwin always provided for him. For the next seven years Small, Darwin and Boulton kept Watt's demon of depression at bay and continually urged him to join Boulton in Birmingham. Eventually, in 1774, Watt made the move to Birmingham, and the Boulton-and-Watt engine began its epoch-making course. Without the encouragement and enthusiasm of the Lunar group, Watt's engine might have languished undeveloped, and the Industrial Revolution would not have gone full steam ahead as it did. Darwin and Watt remained close friends for the next 30 years. On Darwin's death, Watt wrote, ‘It will be my pride, while I live, that I have enjoyed the friendship of such a man.’¹⁵

The Lunar group promoted many other advances in technology. Josiah Wedgwood, who was Darwin's closest friend in the 1780s, probably did more in simultaneously advancing science, art and industry than anyone else has ever done. Then there was James Keir, who is little known but was the chief pioneer of the chemical industry. Keir was Darwin's oldest friend—they met at Medical School—and he was also a cousin of James Lind. Boulton himself was to be called ‘the first manufacturer of England’ and ‘the father of Birmingham’. His metal manufactory at Soho was the finest in the world, and he made many innovations, such as his coining machines. To these we may add Darwin's inventions and those of Richard Edgeworth (which included ‘macadamized’ roads) as well as the many advances in technology made by Watt, the greatest of British engineers.

How is Shelley linked with the Lunar group? The connection occurred when he was a schoolboy at Eton. The official teaching there—apart from the science lectures by the itinerant lecturer Adam Walker—did not awaken Shelley's interest. His real teacher was his self-chosen mentor Dr James Lind, whose name Shelley ‘never mentioned without love and veneration’, according to Mary. Shelley was right to be impressed, for Lind had a ‘Lunar’ mind, wide-ranging and original: recognizing Shelley's exceptional talents, Lind gave him time and guidance. Lind was Physician to the Royal Household, a noted scientist and Fellow of the Royal Society, yet also a radical and perhaps a revolutionary. He was Keir's cousin, and 40 years earlier, as Watt's best friend, he had been in at the birth of the improved steam engine. Lind was in thought and in spirit a member of the Lunar Society and, although he lived in the wrong place to be a real member, he passed on the innovating spirit of the Lunar group to Shelley.¹⁶ The written text that best expressed that spirit was Darwin's poems (and their notes), which Lind would have urged Shelley to read. Shelley soon picked up, among other things, Darwin's enthusiasm for the march of technology, as expressed for example in his prophecies of air travel in The Botanic Garden:

Soon shall thy arm, unconquer'd steam! afar
Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car;
Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear
The flying-chariot through the fields of air.
—Fair crews triumphant, leaning from above,
Shall wave their fluttering kerchiefs as they move;
Or warrior-bands alarm the gaping crowd,
And armies shrink beneath the shadowy cloud.(17)

Shelley lapped up this mixture of technological enthusiasm, prophecy and comedy, explaining to Hogg how these discoveries would improve life and emancipate the slaves, and also passing on other ideas of Darwin's, about producing food chemically, about the importance of electricity, and so on.¹⁸ The details are not too important: the crucial point is that Shelley retained this passion for science and technology marching forward to improve standards of life. But in his later years he also foresaw some of the dangers of rampant technology, going beyond the rather naive technological optimism of Darwin.

Technological enthusiasm, then, was injected into Shelley by Darwin, and by Lind; but even more important was (as usual) the subconscious influence, on this occasion the example of Darwin's poems, which gave Shelley the idea that putting science into poems was a natural and a proper thing. Of course Shelley rejected Darwin's artificial verse form—the glittering couplets, sharp as lancets. Instead Shelley did something much better: he succeeded in infusing poetry with science. In my view this is one of his greatest achievements: the fourth act of Prometheus Unbound, ‘The Cloud’ and the ‘Ode to the West Wind’ marry science and poetry in a way that few if any other poets have achieved. What is more, the style became part of Shelley's habitual thinking and often enriched his verse. I have discussed this subject enough elsewhere,¹⁹ and shall say no more about it here.

Enthusiasm for technology and infusing poetry with science were both intellectual influences of Darwin on Shelley. I shall now look at a more emotional subject, which might be described as religion-plus-politics, or scepticism-plus-reform. Darwin and Shelley both had an innate tendency to think similarly on these subjects, so Shelley found Darwin's ideas congenial and was influenced by them. Darwin was a sceptic in religion and did not accept Christianity. Darwin was ‘a lover of freedom and a foe to all forms of cruelty’, to quote a well-worn Shelleyan cliché. (It may seem an ill-defined cliché to us, but to Shelley it was real and appealing.) As well as having the right ideas, Darwin had expressed his ideas publicly and had as a result suffered some persecution, mild though it seems compared with modern techniques of scientific torture by the state.

Darwin believed in a vague Deism when young and gradually outgrew it as he defined his evolutionary ideas. But he always accepted the idea of a God who created the Universe and then took no further interest in it—a sort of absentee landlord. With this belief (or unbelief, or is it something between?) Darwin could pose as a Deist in order to mollify the respectable, and he refers to the ‘Almighty Lord’ in this role in his poems, without any obvious sarcasm, for example when describing the creation of the Universe in The Economy of Vegetation.

For most of Darwin's working life, there was in England a rather admirable tolerance in religious matters. But this changed in the repression of the 1790s, when anyone who opposed religion risked being regarded as a traitor. The atmosphere of suspicion is captured in a letter from Darwin to Edgeworth in March 1795:

I dare not mention his name [that of the King] for fear that high treason may be in the sound; I have a professed spy shoulders us on the right, and another on the opposite side of the street, both attornies! and I hear every name supposed to think differently from the minister is put in alphabetical order in Mr Reeve's doomsday book, and that if the French should land, these recorded gentlemen are to be all imprison'd to prevent them from committing crimes of a deeper dye.²⁰

So the situation was quite dodgy for Darwin in the later 1790s: sounds of witch-hunting were in the air, and Darwin had to take care that he did not become the hunted.

Darwin's comments on religion in his poems were not usually direct attacks, but stinging side-swipes. His evolutionary theory in Zoonomia is a more serious attack, because it has the effect of depriving God of the rôle he was designed to fill. I think Darwin hoped that people would not realize what he had done. But after a year or two they did, and in 1798 Darwin was attacked quite viciously—though only verbally—in the Anti-Jacobin magazine. A poem called ‘The Loves of the Triangles’ appeared, written by Canning, then Under Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, helped by Frere and Ellis. It was a parody of Darwin's Loves of the Plants, and rather a silly parody too. But it was very effective, because the time was ripe for Darwin to be deflated: his reputation had become grossly over-inflated in the early 1790s and people enjoyed seeing the balloon pricked.

But Canning's parody had a more serious purpose too. The real sting was in the notes, where Darwin was ridiculed for three ideas: (1) that human beings were descended from lower animals; (2) that the Earth was much more than 6,000 years old, the official Christian figure, which contrasted with Darwin's ‘millions of ages’, i.e. hundreds of millions of years; and (3) that electricity would have important future uses. Every properly brought-up person knew that human beings were made in the image of God, and could not possibly be descended from animals; that the Earth was 6,000, or to be more precise, 5,802 years old in 1798; and that electricity was just a toy, to be used as Shelley used it, for parlour tricks like making people's hair stand on end. ‘The Loves of the Triangles’ attacked not only Darwin but also another dangerous radical, William Godwin, who had an even stronger hold on Shelley. But Godwin was never a best-seller among the respectable, as Darwin was. So Darwin was the main target, and Canning's parody did greatly damage his reputation. A hundred years later it became apparent that all three of Darwin's ‘ridiculous’ ideas were correct, but by then Darwin's reputation was low, and few noticed his posthumous triumph over his attackers. Shelley was unaware of this future vindication: for him it was enough that Darwin had been persecuted, or at least satirized for propounding ideas that were obnoxious to the religious.

Though Darwin's reputation was dealt a serious blow in 1798, it had been too high before: many people had thought him the equal of Shakespeare or Milton, and he retained some vestiges of this valuation even as late as the 1860s. Statistical proof is conveniently provided by G. L. Craik's popular History of English Literature, which went through several editions. Craik was critical of Darwin, but it is revealing to see how many pages he devotes to various poets: Byron has three pages, Shelley six, Shakespeare nine, Milton 12 and Darwin 18. In Shelley's day Darwin still retained even more of his former glory.

Shelley—or at least the Shelley of Queen Mab—would have relished Darwin's attacks on religion in The Botanic Garden. Darwin is particularly scathing about religious idolatry, as in his ludicrous picture of St Anthony preaching to the fishes, which is too long to quote here.²¹ Darwin was also severe on the Christian Church over its equivocal attitude to slavery. But his most direct attack was on the avarice of the Europeans who conquered South America in the name of Christianity:

Heavens! on my sight what sanguine colours blaze!
Spain's deathless shame! the crimes of modern days!
When Avarice, shrouded in Religion's robe,
Sail'd to the West, and slaughter'd half the globe;
While Superstition, stalking by his side,
Mock'd the loud groans, and lap'd the bloody tide;
For sacred truths announced her frenzied dreams,
And turn'd to night the sun's meridian beams.(22)

This is in the same spirit as Queen Mab. But Darwin was not obsessed by Christianity, as Shelley was. Shelley treated Christianity as an important force in the world, as indeed it was; whereas Darwin treated Christian myth on an equal footing with classical myth. He was more secure than Shelley in his beliefs that Christianity was not true and that Truth would prevail.

In politics, too, The Botanic Garden breathes the spirit of revolution. Darwin keenly supported the American Revolution, in which his friend Franklin was so deeply involved, and in The Economy of Vegetation he celebrates it in some rather breathless couplets:

So, borne on sounding pinions to the West,
When Tyrant-Power had built his eagle nest,
While from his eyry shriek'd the famish'd brood,
Clenched their sharp claws, and champ'd their beaks for blood,
Immortal Franklin watch'd the callow crew,
And stabb'd the struggling Vampires, ere they flew.
The patriot flame with quick contagion ran,
Hill lighted hill, and man electrised man;
Her heroes slain awhile Columbia mourn'd,
And crown'd with laurels Liberty return'd.(23)

The verse is poor, yet it appealed to Shelley—indeed the first two lines are almost a precognitive parody of Shelley's style when he is celebrating liberty and attacking tyranny, as in Cantos I and XI of Laon and Cythna and in the ‘Ode to Liberty’.

Darwin had a very high opinion of his old friend Franklin, as is obvious from his splendid last letter to Franklin, in May 1787 when Franklin, now aged 80, had just begun attending the exhausting sessions of the Philadelphia Convention, where he was instrumental in persuading the delegates to agree the Constitution of the United States. Darwin's letter reads: ‘Whilst I am writing to a Philosopher and a Friend, I can scarcely forget that I am also writing to the greatest Statesman of the present, or perhaps of any century, who spread the happy contagion of Liberty among his countrymen; and … deliver'd them from the house of bondage, and the scourge of oppression’.²⁴ This is not typical of Darwin's letters, which are usually bantering and jokey: but Shelley would have applauded, I think.

In his picture of the French Revolution, Darwin introduces the ‘warrior Liberty’, who had for a long time been asleep in France, ‘unconscious of his chains’:

Round his large limbs were wound a thousand strings
By the weak hands of Confessors and Kings;
O'er his closed eyes a triple veil was bound,
And steely rivets lock'd him to the ground;
While stern Bastile with iron cage inthralls
His folded limbs, and hems in marble walls.
Touch'd by the patriot-flame, he rent amazed
The flimsy bonds, and round and round him gazed;
Starts up from earth, above the admiring throng
Lifts his Colossal form, and towers along.(25)

The image of Liberty escaping from his bonds would have appealed to Shelley.

Darwin is tough on tyrants in general, and describes the army of Cambyses being overwhelmed in a sandstorm, to try to convince us that

Heaven's dread justice smites in crimes o'ergrown
The blood-nursed Tyrant on his purple throne,(26)

lines that are very reminiscent of Queen Mab.

Darwin kept quiet during the repression of the 1790s, but he returned to the attack in his last poem The Temple of Nature. The amazing final canto, entitled ‘Of good and evil’, begins with a tirade against war, which he hated, expressed in the double-hammer-blow style that he often used when angry:

When War, the Demon, lifts his banner high,
And loud artillery rends the affrighted sky;
Swords clash with swords, on horses horses rush,
Man tramples man, and nations nations crush;
Death his vast scythe with sweep enormous wields,
And shuddering Pity quits the sanguine fields.

He goes on to the war in nature, and describes the struggle for existence in all spheres: the wolf attacks the lamb; the lamb feeds on plants. The plants themselves struggle with each other:

Yes! smiling Flora drives her armèd car
Through the thick ranks of vegetable war;
Herb, shrub, and tree, with strong emotions rise
For light and air, and battle in the skies.

Darwin's belief that plants have feelings heightens the drama of the struggle. After looking at the oceans, where the carnage is perhaps worse, Darwin concludes

From Hunger's arm the shafts of Death are hurl'd,
And one great Slaughter-house the warring world!

—a line echoed by Shelley in Queen Mab (VII, 48).

Darwin finds plenty of evils in human life too, and they are nearly the same as those Shelley castigates in Queen Mab. Slavery is the first, Luxury the next:

And led by Luxury, Disease's trains
Load human life with unextinguish'd pains.

Darwin is very severe about alcohol:

Here laughs Ebriety more fell than arms,
And thins the nations with her fatal charms.

Darwin's first wife died of alcohol poisoning, taken to deaden the pain of the unknown disease from which she suffered. Darwin interpreted the Prometheus myth alcoholically: for him the fire Prometheus stole was alcohol, and the consequence was diseases of the liver, one of the commonest causes of death among the many hard-drinking country gentlemen who were patients of his.

Alcohol is followed by religion:

There the curst spells of Superstition blind,
And fix her fetters on the tortured mind.

Next is avarice:

Here ragged Avarice guards with bolted door
His useless treasures from the starving poor.

And so on. Is there no end to the misery? Yes, there is, he says: good and evil are balanced. Humans enjoy the pleasure of consciousness, the delights of natural scenery, the warmth of sunshine, the fragrance of flowers, the taste of fruits, the charms of the arts, and above all (needless to say) we can ‘drink the raptures of delirious love’. We can also savour the triumphs of technology, and Darwin foresees tower blocks, piped water and traffic jams:

Bid raised in air the ponderous structure stand,
Or pour obedient rivers through the land;
With cars unnumber'd crowd the living streets,
Or people oceans with triumphant fleets.

Then Darwin returns to biology, stressing how all species tend to proliferate wildly:

All these, increasing by successive birth,
Would each o'erpeople ocean, air, and earth.

Death is essential if they are to be kept in check, and he outlines his idea of organic happiness. ‘The wrecks of Death are but a change of form’, he says, and life rises again.

Shout round the globe, how Reproduction strives
With vanquish'd Death—and Happiness survives.

At the end of the third canto Darwin had introduced the Seraph Sympathy, who fills ‘Man's cold heart’ with ‘celestial ardour’ and showers affection on the world, unbarring the prisons, liberating the slaves and dispensing ‘universal love’: it is almost a model for the end of act III of Prometheus Unbound. Darwin concludes the fourth canto of his poem with a procession of nymphs en route to the altar of Nature's Temple. It is a pleasant and soporific ritual, with Celestial Love offering high rewards in brighter climes above, and other vague politenesses. But suddenly Darwin interrupts the pleasantries to remind us that

Fierce furies drag to pains and realms unknown
The blood-stain'd tyrant from his tottering throne.(27)

That could stand as a motto for Queen Mab.

Darwin's blacklist is almost identical to Shelley's in Queen Mab: tyrants, superstition, slavery, war, alcohol, avarice and luxury. The only absentee is flesh-eating. Darwin was not a vegetarian like Shelley, but he did have a bias against meat-eating. His immense appetite for fruit and dairy products was notorious. One rather nasty obituary notice remarked that ‘his stomach had a strong power of digestion’ and that ‘Eat or be eaten’ was one of his mottoes as a doctor.

To me, Queen Mab is the quintessence of Shelley, because you can see his ideas clearly. They are too brash and strident, and many were modified as he matured, but in Queen Mab you can see Shelley's mind naked, before he dressed it in sophisticated clothing. All the ideas in Queen Mab, apart from vegetarianism, can be found in Darwin. The machinery of the poem—the goddess in a magic car—is exactly the same as Darwin's, too. And it is unlikely that Shelley would have chosen to include long scientific notes—almost as long as the poem—if he had not had Darwin before him as a model. Some of Shelley's ideas came from other sources, but Queen Mab relies heavily on Darwin for ideas, machinery, format and sometimes even the words.

To conclude, I shall give a few of the many verbal parallels between Darwin and Shelley, beginning with two from Queen Mab. Darwin's attack on war,

While mad with foolish fame, or drunk with power,
Ambition slays his thousands in an hour,

is paralleled by Shelley's

When merciless ambition, or mad zeal
Has led two hosts of dupes to battlefield.(28)

Darwin's discussion of organic life includes the phrase, ‘when a Monarch or a mushroom dies’, which Shelley obviously remembered when he wrote

You monarch, in his solitary pomp,
Was but the mushroom of a summer day.(29)

An even more striking resemblance, too long to quote, is between the arrival of Shelley's goddess in a magic car (Queen Mab, I, 199-217) and the arrival and departure of Darwin's (Economy of Vegetation, I, 59-68 and IV, 629-40).

Shelley's earliest poems, written before Queen Mab, have many echoes from Darwin, especially the battle scene in Shelley's ‘Henry and Louisa’, which is very like Darwin's lines about the battle of Minden in The Loves of the Plants.³⁰

Echoes of Darwin can be heard in many of Shelley's later poems, including his greatest, Prometheus Unbound. Shelley's theme is the regeneration of the world through universal love, and he uses as his messenger the wingèd Spirit of the Earth who has on his head ‘a light [with] emerald beams’. This is very much like Darwin's wingèd Seraph Sympathy, who ‘bright o'er Earth his beamy forehead bends’ and ‘charms the world with universal love’. Other parallels include the evolutionary picture in act IV of Prometheus Unbound of populations that are ‘mortal but not human’; many phrases from Shelley's Earth-Moon duet, also in act IV; and the climactic last line of act III,

Pinnacled dim in the intense inane,

which probably derives from Darwin's memorable line,

Hung with gold-tresses o'er the vast inane.(31)

Shelley's lyrics of the sky are often reminiscent of Darwin, who wrote a great deal about the sky—and discovered how clouds form. For example, Darwin's phrase, ‘each nice pore of ocean, earth and air’, inspired Shelley's summary of water circulation in ‘The Cloud’,

I pass through the pores of the oceans and shores.(32)

Darwin personifies ‘the western wind’ and asks the Nymphs of fire to ‘wring the rain-drops from his tangled hair’. Shelley personifies the West Wind too and refers in his Ode to ‘the locks of the approaching storm’ and rain-clouds

Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean.(33)

Darwin's Loves of the Plants, a catalogue of plants which are shown as sensitive to a wide range of emotions, is obviously the model for Shelley's ‘Sensitive Plant’, a poem which also serves to remind us that the theme of death and rebirth in vegetation is central to Darwin's work and also important in Shelley's.

In The Witch of Atlas Shelley's witch would

Ride singing through the shoreless air …
And laughed to hear the fire-balls roar behind.

This is very like Darwin's nymphs, who

Ride with broad eye and scintillating hair,
The rapid Fire-ball through the midnight air.(34)

Canto II of Darwin's Temple of Nature, where he describes Urania lamenting human wrongs, is a precursor of Adonais, and there are resemblances in several other poems, such as Epipsychidion and the ‘Ode to Liberty’.

Though not everyone will agree with my conclusions, I hope I have given adequate reasons for my beliefs that Erasmus Darwin greatly influenced the Shelley of Queen Mab: that Shelley retained those essential ideas; that he followed Darwin's example by integrating science with poetry; and that he continued to remember, subconsciously perhaps, many of the more memorable of Darwin's verses, which he had read in his teens when his mind was malleable.

Notes

1. D. King-Hele, Doctor of Revolution: the Life and Genius of Erasmus Darwin (1977).

2. R. L. Edgeworth, Memoirs (3rd edn, 1844), 299.

3. See R. E. Schofield, The Lunar Society of Birmingham (1963).

4. H. Walpole, Letters, ed. P. Toynbee (16 vols., 1905), XV, 41.

5. S. T. Coleridge, Collected Letters, ed. E. L. Griggs (6 vols., 1956-71), I. 177.

6. For Darwin's influence on Coleridge and Wordsworth, see King-Hele, Doctor of Revolution, 259-61, 265-70, and the references cited there.

7. See King-Hele, Doctor of Revolution, 303, and the references cited there, particularly B. Blackstone, The Consecrated Urn (1959).

8. Letters, I, 340-2.

9. From MS at Salt Library, Stafford.

10. Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature (1803), I, 295-302.

11. Ibid., II, 107-8.

12. Ibid., II, 89.

13. Ibid., II, 131-2.

14. J. P. Muirhead, The Origin and Progress of the Mechanical Inventions of James Watt (3 vols., 1854), I, 4.

15. Ibid., II, 279.

16. See D. King-Hele, ‘Shelley and Dr Lind’, Keats-Shelley Memorial Bull., xviii (1967), 1-6.

17. Erasmus Darwin, The Economy of Vegetation (1791), I, 289-96.

18. Life, I, 50-2.

19. D. King-Hele, Shelley: his Thought and Work (1971), 188-95, 213-27.

20. D. King-Hele (ed.), The Letters of Erasmus Darwin (1981), 279.

21. Erasmus Darwin, The Loves of the Plants (1789), II, 243-64.

22. Darwin, The Economy of Vegetation II, 413-20.

23. Ibid., 361-70.

24. The Letters of Erasmus Darwin, 166.

25. Darwin, The Economy of Vegetation, II, 379-88.

26. Ibid., 431-2.

27. Darwin, The Temple of Nature, IV, 11-16, 41-4, 75-6, 77-8, 83-4, 97-8, 315-18, 367-8, 451-2, 507-8.

28. Darwin, The Temple of Nature, IV, 103-4; Queen Mab, VI, 178-9.

29. Darwin, The Temple of Nature, IV, 383; Queen Mab, IX, 31-2.

30. Darwin, The Loves of the Plants (1791 edn), III, 263-308.

31. Prometheus Unbound, III, iv, 3; IV, 287-316; IV, 424-502; III, iv, 204: The Temple of Nature, III, 467-8; The Economy of Vegetation, I, 98.

32. The Economy of Vegetation, I, 85; ‘The Cloud’, 75.

33. The Economy of Vegetation, I, 432; ‘Ode to the West Wind’, 17.

34. The Economy of Vegetation, I, 127-8; The Witch of Atlas, 485, 488.