Sex at Dawn

In some respects, the sexual mores of Victorian Britain replicated the mechanics of the age-defining steam engine. Blocking the flow of erotic energy creates ever-increasing pressure which is put to work through short, controlled bursts of productivity. Though he was wrong about a lot, it appears Sigmund Freud got it right when he observed that “civilization” is built largely on erotic energy that has been blocked, concentrated, accumulated, and redirected.

“To keep body and mind untainted,” explains Walter Houghton in The Victorian Frame of Mind, “the boy was taught to view women as objects of the greatest respect and even awe. He was to consider nice women (his sister and mother, his future bride) as creatures more like angels than human beings—an image wonderfully calculated not only to dissociate love from sex, but to turn love into worship, and worship of purity.” When not in the mood to worship the purity of his sisters, mother, daughters, and wife, men were expected to purge their lust with prostitutes, rather than threatening familial and social stability by “cheating” with “decent women.” Nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer observed that “there are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone; and what are they if not sacrifices on the altar of monogamy?”⁸

Charles Darwin was certainly not unaffected by the erotophobia of his era. In fact, one could argue that he was especially sensitive to its influence, inasmuch as he came of age in the intellectual shadow of his famous—and shameless—grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who had flouted the sexual mores of his day by openly having children with various women and even going so far as to celebrate group sex in his poetry.⁹ The death of Charles’s mother when he was just eight years old may well have enhanced his sense of women as angelic creatures floating above earthly urges and appetites.

Psychiatrist John Bowlby, one of Darwin’s most highly regarded biographers, attributes Darwin’s lifelong anxiety attacks, depression, chronic headaches, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, and hysterical crying fits to the separation anxiety created by the early loss of his mother. This interpretation is supported by a strange letter the adult Charles wrote to a cousin whose wife had just died: “Never in my life having lost one near relation,” he wrote, apparently repressing his memories of his own mother’s death, “I daresay I cannot imagine how severe grief such as yours must be.” Another indication of this psychological scarring was recalled by his granddaughter, who remembered how confused Charles had been when someone added the letter “M” to the beginning of the word OTHER in a game similar to Scrabble. Charles looked at the board for a long time before declaring, to everyone’s confusion, that no such word existed.¹⁰

A hyper-Victorian aversion to (and obsession with) the erotic seems to have continued in Charles’s eldest surviving

daughter, Henrietta. “Etty,” as she was known, edited her

father’s books, taking her blue crayon to passages she

considered inappropriate. In Charles’s biography of his free-thinking grandfather, for example, she deleted a

reference to Erasmus’s “ardent love of women.” She also removed “offensive” passages from The Descent of Man and Darwin’s autobiography.

Etty’s prim enthusiasm for stamping out anything sexual wasn’t limited to the written word. She waged a bizarre little war against the so-called stinkhorn mushroom (phallus ravenelii) that still pops up in the woods around the Darwin estate. Apparently, the similarity of the mushroom to the human penis was a bit much for poor Etty. As her niece (Charles’s granddaughter) recalled years later, “Aunt Etty ... armed with a basket and a pointed stick, and wearing a special hunting cloak and gloves,” would set out in search of the mushrooms. At the end of the day, Aunt Etty “burn[ed them]

in the deepest secrecy on the drawing room fire with the door locked—because of the morals of the maids.”¹¹

He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Don’t get us wrong. Darwin knew plenty, and he deserves his place in the pantheon of great thinkers. If you’re a Darwin-basher looking for support, you’ll find little here. Charles Darwin was a genius and a gentleman for whom we have endless respect. But as is often the case with gentleman geniuses, he was a bit clueless when it came to women.