Charles Darwin: the power of place by Janet Browne

Marek Kohn welcomes a biography that plants Darwin's revolution in the soil of home

To consider Darwin as a great Briton is to underestimate him. Darwin is not so much a figure as a kind of cultural province, made of letters and manuscripts, theses and volumes, cartoons and columns, specimens and data. He is an empire in the history of science, and his demands on the serious biographer are imperial. As a man of letters, he takes some beating. There are 14,000 of them, incoming and outgoing. As for the facts he collected in support of his theory, they are almost beyond number.

The Darwinian province owes much of its prosperity to its intimate integration within the larger polity. Janet Browne's subtitle alludes at one level to the strength that Darwin gained from his base at Down House, in Kent: research station, retreat, manorial seat and family home. More broadly, it refers to the importance of Darwin's position in society. As a gentleman, he had excellent social connections; as a correspondent, he amassed 14,000 epistolary ones. Down House was the hub of an international network, based on the bustling Victorian postal system. He even angled a mirror in his study so that he could see the postman coming.

One morning in 1858 – the point where Browne's new volume of biography takes up the tale from its 1995 predecessor, Voyaging – Darwin got infinitely more than he bargained for in his post. He opened an envelope that had made its way from the Spice Islands, in what is now Indonesia, to find a statement of the theory that he had been privately nursing for about 15 years.

Lying in a native hut, his imagination churned by malarial fever, the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace had hit on the idea of natural selection for himself. Darwin's consternation can readily be imagined. "All my originality," he wailed, "will be smashed."

In his alarm, he missed the point. It was not that he was the only person to have been visited with what the philosopher Daniel Dennett has proposed as "the single best idea anyone has ever had". Natural selection had occurred to a couple of others before Darwin and Wallace, but its significance had passed them by. Darwin's greatness lay in the edifice of evidence and argument he built around the idea. Wallace could never have achieved such a synthesis, as Wallace himself was the first to insist.

Making a go of their awkward relationship brought out the best in both. For Darwin, as Browne pithily observes, it was a matter of his honour as a gentleman, while Wallace was overwhelmed by the deference that befitted his status as a self-taught naturalist who had to sell his specimens to make a living. But their generous and genuine exchanges are an example to us all.

The relationship between the "two independent workers caught in a single, unexpected thunderclap" is one instance of the pervasive warmth that makes Darwin's life such a pleasure to contemplate. His was not an alienating science conducted in sterile conditions behind laboratory doors, but a passionate inquiry into nature that took place in the garden of Down House and the bosom of his family. His attention was gripped by orchids, and insect-eating sundew plants, and eventually worms. Almost at the end of his life, he was digging up earthworms, and spying on them at night with his grown-up son Francis – who, at his father's behest, played the bassoon to them, to see if they could detect sound. Father and son's efforts were repaid: his worm book sold like hot cakes, proving to be his most popular work.

Even where there was profound difference, there was harmony. Emma Darwin wrote her husband a letter, grave in reverence and love, urging him to find comfort in the Lord. Charles could not, but in the margin he wrote, "God bless you." His loss of faith hardened as time went on, but he and those around him were blessed with the gift of accommodation.

Outside his home, a more diffuse tolerance and ideological flexibility were fundamental to the establishment of the Darwinian province. The Church of England turned out to be remarkably flexible over evolution, despite the consternation experienced by young curates who saw that God was no longer the only story. Darwin's respectability guaranteed his position, and his distaste for confrontation helped – though the example of the self-proclaimed "bulldog", Thomas Huxley, shows that fighting talk could also get one to the top of the Victorian tree. Inevitably, the cartoonists made a monkey of him, a mascot of the Victorian science that had unexpectedly made monkeys of everybody. That, it appeared, was progress. When the time finally came, Darwin was interred in Westminster Abbey.

It certainly helped that Darwin was a down-to-earth theorist. He did not intimidate the British public with monumental Germanic philosophy, but offered them facts arranged like a novel. His style was unassuming but determined: in his own anxious way, chronically tormented by illness, he upheld the great British ideal of modesty in excellence.

Out of all the virtues of Janet Browne's outstanding biography, the clinching one is the unassuming manner that respects and conveys the spirit of its subject so well. Underlying this is a foundation of facts, perfectly Darwinian in character, as steady and solid as Down House. Browne demonstrates that Darwin requires scholarship and empathy, not dramatisation or digital enhancement. Her sympathy does not obstruct her vision: she notes his assumption that he should get more from his correspondents than he gave back, and, more sharply, his failure to attend colleagues' funerals. But that seems to be about the worst to be said of him.

Only one key relationship receives less attention than it should. He kept it private for years, then revealed it and changed the world. But afterwards, in the face of criticisms for which scientific answers were not yet available, he drew back in his relationship with the idea of natural selection. Successive editions of the Origin of Species gave increasing weight to other possible means of evolutionary change, including the inheritance of acquired characteristics. It fell to Wallace to keep the banner flying – despite an equally ardent commitment to spiritualism – while Darwin's own Darwinism pulled in its horns.

The result was a fudge that established evolution as an accepted truth, but not the mechanism that explained it. To many, natural selection seemed to have gone to the grave with its founding theorist. Darwin's revolution did not take place until long after the end of Darwin's own story.

Marek Kohn's 'As We Know It: Coming to Terms with an Evolved Mind' is published by Granta