Erasmus Darwin, from The Temple of Flora, by Robert Thornton, 1810

We’re all heard of Charles Darwin, and indeed the last couple of blogs have been about one impact of his ideas on evolution, but who knows much about his grandfather?

I certainly didn’t until I chanced across something he’d written which made me think I ought to find out a bit more about him. Somewhat to my surprise  I discovered  that he was  at least as multi-talented as the more famous Charles and, in his own way, almost as important.

Erasmus Darwin  was not only a man of extraordinary intellectual insight with his own pioneering ideas on evolution, he was a successful doctor, an inventor, a “lunartick” scientist, gardener, botanist and   later in life he became the most famous poet of his day.  Often accused of atheism he also had radical views  neither of which was  a good idea during the wars with revolutionary France at the very end of the 18thc.

The result has been that  for the last 150 years he has largely been overshadowed his grandson, and, I think,  unfairly so.

Darwin’s visiting card

Erasmus Darwin, c1770

Erasmus  was born near Nottingham in 1731 the son of a lawyer. He went to Cambridge and then in 1753 went to Edinburgh to  study medicine. After qualifying he set up  practice in  the cathedral city of Lichfield, then more important than its near southern neighbour Birmingham.  Conscientious and sympathetic he proved a good doctor and became sufficiently celebrated that he was approached to become physician to King George III – an opportunity he declined. He promoted treatments that were then unusual, taking a keen interest in exercise regimes and the benefits of good ventilation.

The mechanical bird recreated at the Erasmus Darwin Museum in Lichfield

Darwin’s Horizontal windmill

In his spare time  he developed a great interest  in science and technology, writing a paper for the Royal Society “On the ascent of vapour”, aged just 26, and being elected a Fellow of the Society in 1761.  He was to go on and invent a three-wheeled steam-carriage which was never built because of the cost, a speaking machine , a canal lift, a vertical-axis windmill which was put into use by Josiah Wedgwood, a copy-writing machine, a diving bell, and numerous designs for horse-drawn carriages with improved systems  of steering, springing and traction. Many of Darwin’s other inventions were just sketches adapted  and developed later by others, such as  an artificial bird powered by gunpowder, a multi-mirror telescope and  a rocket motor powered by hydrogen and oxygen. However, presumably because he was fearful of ruining his hard-won reputation as a doctor, these were usually done anonymously.

Around 1760 he became one of the founding members of  what became known as the Lunar Society of Birmingham, a group which also included the engineer and businessman Matthew Boulton,   the engineer James Watt,  the potter Josiah Wedgwood, and the chemist Joseph Priestly. Another famous name who met with them was the American Benjamin Franklin who spent  most of mid-1750s to the mid-1770s in Britain.

Mr Bennett’s Electric doubler …for the purpose of subjecting a flowerpot to perpetual positive or negative electricity. from Darwin’s Phytologia [1800]

Darwin’s electrostatic doubler 1776
https://archive.org/details/doctorofrevoluti0000king/page/117/mode/1up

Darwin’s  friendship with Boulton and Franklin helped lead to a great interest in electricity, which as I have shown in earlier posts was being “discovered” in the mid-18thc, with experiments into its effects on both plant growth  and human medicine. Incidentally He also  took the lead in ensuring an early lightening conductor was  fitted on Lichfield’s  cathedral.

The  aim of these “Lunarticks” as they nicknamed themselves  was to improve science and technology. Although the group was very informal and kept no records  they became  one of the chief intellectual drivers of the Industrial Revolution. They were also radical reformers, supporting the freedom of the press, religious toleration, parliamentary reform and abolition of the slave-trade.  This was to bring them considerable trouble in later years when the French Revolution got under way.

For more on the Lunar Society take a look at Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men (20xx) or listen to the Radio 4 In Our Time programme broadcast in 2003

Darwin’s house in Cathedral Close, Lichfield now the Erasmus Darwin Museum

 

 

Sketch of the bridge and Chinese palings from Desmond King-Hele’s Erasmus Darwin, 1999

Darwin and his wife Polly, who he married in 1758, lived in a house in Cathedral Close Lichfield. When they moved in, the front garden which contained part of the moat that surrounded the close, was overgrown and a friend described how he “flung a broad bridge of shallow steps with Chinese paling descending from his hall door to the pavement.” He cleared the moat “rendering it with Lawny smoothness” and planted it with lilacs and Roses.

He also rented another piece of ground to install a pond for cold water bathing. That might sound a bit weird to us – although think of wild water swimming – but it was a familiar treatment suggested by Georgian doctors.

Lichfield from Robert Plot’s History of Staffordshire 1686

Another prominent medic and former Lichfield resident was Sir John Floyer (1649-1734). He was an earlier proponent of cold baths,  wrote about them enthusiastically, and built one for himself in a little valley, on the western outskirts of Lichfield. In 1777 Darwin bought about eight acres of land there including Floyer’s bath describing the valley as  ‘irriguous from various springs, and swampy from their plenitude’ with a ‘mossy fountain of the purest and coldest water imaginable’.  He dammed the tiny stream to form   ‘small lakes that mirrored the valley’ and teaching ‘it to wind between shrubby margins’.  He also cut into the steep rocky sides of the valley to form a grotto which had “a perpetual dribbling of water… like a shower from a weeping rock’..

For more on the Georgian fashion for  Cold Baths see Clare Hickman’s online article  Taking the Plunge, (2010)

Darwin’s valley, from OS 25″ map surveyed 1882

 

This was all preliminary to  laying out what he called a botanic garden. Unfortunately there is no plant list, nor any sketches of what it look like but there are a couple of brief contemporary descriptions:  ” after leaving the bath, the stream was conducted by several falls of highly picturesque appearance to a small pool surrounded by a shrubbery [with] a mazy path …[and] all the effects of an extensive wilderness.”  More important though is the comment by Anna Seward, a family friend who said “it was laid out with ” various classes of plants, uniting the Linnaean science with the charm of the landscape.”

Plan outlining the Linnaean design of the Cambridge Botanic Garden, published with Thomas Martin’s  Catalogus Horti Botanici Cantabrigiensis (1771),   Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

This was highly unusual because  traditionally most botanic collections were  laid out geometrically, or perhaps  divided into four zones to represent the quarters of the globe. It was only from  the 1760s onwards that a new style emerged with   botanical gardens such as those at Cambridge and Edinburgh using regular shaped beds  laid out in plant families according to the Linnaean system.  Darwin’s botanical garden went one stage further, because he  not only laid out the plants according to Linnaean rules but he did so in a decidedly ungeometric way, adopting instead the principles of a picturesque landscape rather like that of  William Shenstone of  The Leasowes estate.  It’s likely that he used it, in part at least, for growing medicinal plants for use in his medical practice. 

After Polly died in 1770, leaving him with a young family he threw himself into the work of the Lunar Society but also began to take a bigger interest in  systematic botany, acquiring Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae and on a bigger scale the twenty-seven volumes of Comte de Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle for his library and helping fellow medic  William Withering produce his arrangement’ of Britain’s flora according to the ‘celebrated’ Linnaean system.

Radbourne Hall, nr Derby,  Robert Marris  undated charcoal sketch late 18th/early 19thc

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Elizabeth Pole, later Darwin

After fathering   two more daughters by his children’s nanny, in 1781 he remarried.  Elizabeth Pole. She  and her late husband had been patients of Darwin and he had long admired her. She was “thirty-three, dashing, witty and rich: half the young men in the country were after her”. Darwin was “forty-nine, stout, stuttering and lame, with two grown sons, and two illegitimate daughters”  but to everyone’s surprise they had a long and happy marriage and had 7 more children.  They moved to her late husband’s home Radbourne Hall near Derby.

The botanic garden was left in the hands of a friend John Jackson who ‘maintained’ it ‘on the original plan’ until his death in 1798.

Darwin’s valley from Google Maps. The meandering course of the stream can still be discerned but the ponds and the bathhouse are well hidden by trees.

It was reported that people continued to visit the site and that both the ‘Bath and Botanic Garden’ were ‘much used’ but after Jackson died it soon reverted to nature.  Forty  years later in  the July 1838 issue of  the Gardener’s Magazine an article showed how it ” gradually fell away from its former beauty, until it has at length become a mere wilderness; the ponds being choked with weeds, the cascades broken down, the walks overgrown with rank grass, and the trim parterres converted into pasture for cattle.” It wasn’t totally lost because “sometimes, in the spring of the year, one may yet find a stray snowdrop, or a clump of daffodils, which have survived the general wreck ; but these are all that remain to tell of its high and palmy days… At one end of the garden there is an old bath… This has suffered in the general decay : the dressing-room serves the ignominious purposes of a sheep-pen ; the doors are broken down, the windows rifled of their glass, and the fountain itself choked with weeds and rubbish.”

Radbourne Hall

Illustration of Linnaeus’s 24 classes from A System of Vegetables, 1785

As Derby was too far away to meet regularly with his friends in the Lunar Society, Darwin took up a new project: the translation of the work of Carl Linnaeus  from Latin into English.  This was technically difficult because of long lists of plant characteristics, many of which had no obvious English equivalent and so he consulted  Sir Joseph Banks, Dr Johnson, and William Curtis of Curtis’s Botanic Magazine, as well as many others to help him. Sometimes they had to  coin new words and about  50 of these, mostly detailed botanical terms, entered the English language, .

The project took him no less than seven years and led to the publication of A System of Vegetables in 1785 and  The Families of Plants in 1787.   Again to avoid publicity potentially interfering with his  medical practice the books appeared as the work of ‘A Botanical Society at Lichfield’.

Parts of the Flower from A System of Vegetables

While Darwin was a keen proponent of Linnaeus system his practical experience and garden experiments made him realise that it  wasn’t perfect. He thought  it necessary to also pay attention to other plant characteristics apart from just the number of stamens and pistils. To do so so he drew on his observations and reading to devise  a ‘plan for disposing part of the vegetable system of Linnaeus into more natural classes and orders’ which he thought would be more useful, especially for medical plants.

Full Street from Lysons’ Magna Britannia vol.5, 1806

The house in Full Street, which ironically given Darwin’s radicalism later became the Conservative Club before being demolished in 1933

The Darwins left Radbourne in 1783 and moved into a large house on Full Street in the very centre of Derby itself with a walled garden running down to  the banks of the Derwent.

One of the first things he did was to help found  the Derby Philosophical Society, which held its augural meeting in his house. Its members included not only most of the local doctors but also  industrialists, and landowners who wanted to use the ‘daring hand of experimental philosophy’ to increase the ‘common heap of knowledge’ and  contribute to the ‘useful arts’ and sciences.  They created a large library of  medical, scientific agricultural and horticultural books and were obviously interested in the connections between these subjects. It seems that he also hoped the Derby Society would be able to hold joint meetings with the Lunar Society.

For more on the Derby Society see Paul Elliott’s article on the West Midlands History website.

Crossing the Derwent, drawn by Erasmus’s granddaughter Violetta

Darwin began a new garden behind the house at Full Street but also acquired an orchard on the opposite side of the river which he used an experimental ground. .He was to use his  findings  for ideas about agricultural and horticultural improvements in his later books, notably Phytologia. Because the road route  was circuitous, to reach the orchard from the garden  he bought a boat and used a pulley system to take it across the river.    Like the Lichfield botanic garden, his Derby gardens became well known locally and seem to have attracted a lot of visitors. He catalogued the plants he grew and  papers in the Cambridge University library  list over 200 trees in the orchard and garden. There was also a large range of   hardy plants, although many were native species rather than conventional garden cultivars. That might explain why accounts of the garden describe it as  an ‘extensive wilderness’, or even a collection of weeds.

A page from Charles Darwin’s pocket book, with Erasmus’s annotations on the left.
© Cambridge University Library

His sons inherited his interest in botany. One, Charles,   who was training to be a doctor but died aged just 20, kept a pocket book of nature prints which his father later annotated with Linnaean classifications.  Another,Robert, was sent as many as 300 plants by his father ‘with their names’ which, he explained, would ‘half set you up as a botanist’. Darwin may well have been involved in a plant exchange network with friends but others were probably obtained from local nurseryman Joseph Mason, who, according to Loudon kept a ‘good nursery and florist’s garden’ with a reputation for  growing auriculas, polyanthuses, double primroses, carnations and other flowers.

Three of Darwin’s children in the garden at Full Street, from Pearson’s Life of Francis Galton, 1914

Darwin had a large heated greenhouse – 82ft long and 9ft wide – built in the garden. It had a roof made of small panes of glass about 8″ square and was divided into two sections so that ‘one half may be a month forwarder than the other’. Each had its own stove and circulated hot air through the flues set into the walls and pipes under under the floor, which resembled  the way the famous local silk mills were heated.  The greenhouse produced an ‘abundance of kidney beans, cucumbers, melons and grapes’, but not pineapples. Additionally  the ‘young ladies’ had ‘filled the vine-house’  with plant pots, mostly ‘originally imported from Elston’, the Darwin family seat .  It cost him £100, in large part because of the high tax on glass at the time.

Darwin’s bookplate

At the same time Erasmus carried on inventing, including two garden-related gadgets. One was a mini-plough to dig potato trenches and the other a ‘melonometer or brazen gardener’ designed to control the ventilation  in green houses according to the weather.  [For a description of how it worked follow this link].    He also continued his scientific research,  giving papers on artesian wells, and explaining the formation of clouds to the Royal Society  but he also decided to rework his translations of Linnaeus from a dense and difficult botanical text into something lighter and more accessible with the idea of spreading acceptance of Linnaeus’s system of  taxonomy to the general public.   For that he drew on his own gardening experience  and the result is going to be the subject of another post soon.

For more information it’s worth a good place to start is Revolutionary Players, a West Midlands History website which has lots of short articles about Darwin, and copies of a number of his letters.  For a more detail account of his life then try Desmond King-Hele’s Erasmus Darwin:a life of unequalled achievement

Darwin’s visiting card