Revolutionary Recliners

When we went to Cambridge last Monday, a very small placard among the many in the exhibit on Darwin’s “gap years” on the HMS Beagle caught my eye. This card, folded in half and placed somewhat randomly throughout the historical artifacts and related descriptions, simply read “I hope my wanderings will not unfit me for a quiet life.” Darwin wrote this in 1832 when he was only 26 and still had four more years of wandering ahead of him. A quick Google search reveals that the letter which he wrote to his friend and cousin, William Darwin Fox. Fox was a settled clergyman in Cheshire and led the life that Charles Darwin could have seen for himself. He had, after all, been training to become a clergyman himself.
The emotions expressed in this simple sentence are particularly interesting when considered with the fact that Darwin was considered to be a “conservative revolutionary.” There is a line from the Oasis song “Don’t Look Back in Anger” that says “gonna start a revolution from my bed” (doubly relevant because we heard it covered in Scotland; here it is live Manchester). The song intends the lyrics to be facetious and a display of the singer’s ambivalence. Yet, this is almost literally what Darwin ended up doing, a hundred fifty years before the words were written. Following his marriage, he ensconced himself at Downe House attempting quite respectably to make a quiet life for himself. As his ideas brought him somewhat reluctantly into the limelight, Darwin remained above the fray, communicating to most people by letter but doing so fervently. While he may have gone through the motions of leading a quiet life, however, Darwin and his contributions cannot be said to be anything short of revolutionary. It was exactly his wanderings on the Beagle that enabled these ideas to flourish. Therefore, not only did his travels unfit him for a quiet life, but actually made the life of the local clergyman an impossibility for Darwin. He was too changed by them and in some ways took on a life of their own. So even while Darwin remained quietly at home writing thousands of letters, he did indeed start a revolution from his bed—or at least his armchair.