JSTOR

THE YEAR 2009 is crowded with anniversaries: Lincoln, Gladstone, Mendelssohn, Tennyson, Poe, Paine, Braille, Burns, Johnson, Haydn, Handel, Purcell, Henry VIII, Scaliger, and Calvin, to mention only the most prominent. But the name that stands out, and not only for historians of science, is Charles Darwin. In part this is because the celebration is a double one, the bicentennial of his birth and the sesquicentennial of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. But above all, Darwin's current celebrity is bound up with the peculiar circumstances facing evolutionary theory in the early twenty‐first century. On the one hand, within the sciences Darwin's iconic status has never been higher. The tools of molecular biology, especially genetic sequencing, have transformed the status of discussions of evolution among scientists; what many practitioners had tended to dismiss as a speculative sideshow to the real work of science has moved to the center of the research agenda. On the other hand, in many parts of the world—most notably the United States—public resistance to evolutionary biology is widespread and growing, to a point where attacks on Darwin threaten the foundations of introductory education in the sciences. This divergence of views has itself become iconic of perceived fissures between science and the public on many other issues, especially in relation to religion.

Darwin is thus simultaneously dartboard target and poster boy, a situation guaranteed to generate maximum interest and controversy. Advance planning for the current celebrations has been meticulous and widespread. Thousands of events have been organized at every level, from major international institutions to student groups and family parties. In Britain, the support of key individuals and institutions has led the BBC to sponsor a comprehensive range of programming as part of its science strand. Boston, Oklahoma, Cambridge, Sydney, and scores of other universities have sponsored lecture series and conferences. There are exhibitions on Darwin and the visual arts (including the largest show ever held at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge), displays of specimens from the Beagle voyage, and recreations of Darwin's domestic life at Down. The centerpiece has been the outstanding exhibition that opened at the American Museum of Natural History in November 2005. Although initially failing to find corporate sponsors, who feared a creationist backlash, this show has since gone on to become the most successful of its kind ever held and is now touring in multiple versions throughout the world. Sometimes the focus on Darwin can become overwhelming. It is possible to buy Darwin stamps, drink from a Darwin mug, wear Darwin clothes, and eat the same food Darwin did; and in Britain all these things can be bought using Darwin coins and Darwin banknotes. Anything left over can quickly be spent on Darwin scholarly monographs and Darwin conferences.

It is appropriate, then, that this Focus section deals with Darwin as a cultural icon. Although the degree of attention this year is surely unprecedented, it continues a process that began in Darwin's own lifetime. In the 1860s people were already singing Darwinian songs, and Darwinian cartoons began to appear around the same time. As Janet Browne shows, Darwin's portrait circulated through the new medium of photography. Portrait cards of Darwin, like those of other famous men and women, sold well in photographic shops in Europe and North America, and his image also appeared regularly in the burgeoning illustrated press. With his great beard and deep, sad eyes, Darwin helped to sharpen stereotypes of the scientific genius as sage and seer.

These images, though numbingly familiar today, were in fact relatively scarce at the time of their first appearance. Our own techniques of mass reproduction can encourage the assumption that Darwin and explicitly evolutionary themes were ubiquitous or typical features of the mass culture of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when in fact they appeared sporadically and often in marginal circumstances. As Janet Browne has stressed elsewhere, Darwin's fame during his lifetime was “a relatively minor and specialized glory.”1 Tracing the ways in which Darwin became a cultural icon is thus a highly specific problem, considerably more limited than understanding how themes of Darwinism and evolutionary science entered into popular culture and the arts. In tackling these larger issues, it would be unfortunate for historians of science to limit themselves to the generic confines of Darwin portraiture, “monkeyana,” and images of primeval humans. To go beyond these specific cases we need to become not only more skilled in interpreting visual evidence, but also more speculative in making connections. The benefits of taking more adventurous perspectives are evident in the Darwin exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art and the Fitzwilliam Museum, where direct references to Darwin himself are relatively rare.2 Even in the topical genre of evolutionary cartoons, as Constance Clark notes in her wide‐ranging study, Darwin's portrait image is rarely found after his death: his character was so generally revered, however his theories were viewed, that his image lost much of its use. The grotesque conjunction of Darwin's head on a monkey's body, which had been a mainstay of the sharper (and sexually suggestive) cartoons of the late Victorian era, almost disappeared by the early decades of the twentieth century. By that time, the iconic status of Darwin's person was firmly established, even as his theories became increasingly subject to burlesque and ridicule. Most evolutionary polemics (both for and against) featured images of monkeys, apes, and especially gorillas—but not Darwin himself.

Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis's pioneering account of the musical aspects of Darwin's reputation confirms this pattern. Throughout most of her story the central figures in the lyrics of evolutionary song are again monkeys and gorillas, often depicted with racist overtones. Tellingly, “Darwin” appears less often than “Darwinian” and “Darwinism.” Interestingly, both pro‐ and anti‐Darwinian lyrics draw on a similar repertoire of ape imagery. Only with the anniversary celebrations in 1959 does Darwin himself begin to occupy center stage, in the elaborately staged musical entitled Time Will Tell. This extraordinary production drew on long‐standing (especially German) academic and municipal celebrations of heroic men of letters and learning with commemorative choral performances and drinking songs; but in this case such convivial celebration is extended and combined with the traditions of the Chicago musical theater scene.3

As the evidence accumulated here suggests, the establishment of Darwin's reputation is part of the larger story of the emergence of the mass media in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To a considerable extent, Darwin's fame was manufactured by the elaborate machinery of image making that surrounded death in this period: the international production of obituaries, the publication of private letters, the release, reviewing, and translations of biographical memoirs. These years also witnessed an unprecedented transformation in the global communication system; thanks to the telegraph, Darwin's death in April 1882 was reported at length in the Calcutta newspapers only twenty‐four hours after the announcement in the Times in London.4 Analogous mechanisms for maintaining celebrity, from the production of comic magazines to the staging of musical productions and the issuing of long‐playing records, underpin the history of Darwin's reputation in the twentieth century. The Darwin we recognize today is a by‐product of these developments. Yet although historians of science know something about forms of cultural production, much remains to be done—not least in understanding how the mass media operate on a regular basis, not just in reinforcing the iconic status of a particular figure. The needs of magazine editors, music publishers, newspaper columnists, and portrait photographers only occasionally intersected with the interests of Darwinian science. It is not surprising, then, that Darwin's long‐term celebrity is the outcome of a few critical intersections: the “gorilla wars” of the 1860s, the funeral in Westminster Abbey, the appearance of the official “life” in 1887, the centennial celebrations in 1909, the Scopes trial in the 1920s. Such occasions offered the opportunity for slight twists on familiar themes of progress, ape origins, Darwin's respectability, and so forth.

Repetition is perhaps the most striking feature of the rich range of sources surveyed in all three essays in this Focus section. Similar themes and images recur with extraordinary persistence across the decades, from the newspaper caricature of an evolutionary tree in the New York Evening Post in the 1920s to marine biologists at Woods Hole in the 1980s singing “The Amphioxus Song” using a reprinted edition of Songs of Biology. The three essays offer what Smocovitis identifies as “samplings” of a wide range of these materials; considerable scope remains for closer readings, drawing on a range of analytical techniques common in art history, literary criticism, and musicology. Does it matter that these images were placed in albums, that these cartoons appeared in newspapers, or that these songs were actually sung? Historians of science have begun to move away from the traditional focus on innovation and discovery but have yet to tackle fully the issues involved in analyzing and interpreting apparent sameness; there is much more to do in identifying audiences and exploring how materials that seem identical become radically different depending on the contexts of use.

The need to start from the practices of users is nowhere clearer than in the most iconic and frequently reproduced of all Darwinian objects: the text of the Origin of Species. For the Origin has, notoriously, been read in all sorts of ways and from a remarkably wide range of perspectives. It has been quoted, summarized, abridged, and reviewed, with translations into more than thirty languages. Yet we lack a good synthetic view of the reception of Darwin's books; in Britain, the standard account is now half a century old.5 The literature on the global reception of Darwinism has grown exponentially but remains as deeply fissured along national borders as a fractious meeting of the League of Nations. More integrated approaches would surely show that the continued relevance of visual and aural images of Darwin is the result of the range, richness, flexibility, and ambiguity that generations of readers have found in his writing. Darwin's power as an icon—as with religious images of Saint Jerome or Saint John—consistently derives from his role as an author.

Timetables of celebration and scholarship rarely run in tandem, and as I write (in May 2009) the Darwin bicentennial year looks likely—with notable exceptions—to follow a familiar pattern. The emphasis so far has been on consolidation and public outreach. Certainly there has been nothing quite like the bracing historiographical debates that took place during the coming of age of history of science as a discipline in the 1960s and 1970s. Strikingly, it was as long ago as the 1980s that studies of Darwin's early notebooks and manuscripts achieved their most significant results, and the biographies that appeared between 1991 and 2002 remain the standards. The most innovative recent research has been on the reception of Darwin's work, particularly outside the English‐speaking world, its connections with race, and its relations with the fine arts. And as in these three essays, there has been fresh attention to the visual, literary, and aural aspects of Darwinism and to its character as public science. These approaches (not least as the ongoing edition of Darwin's correspondence moves into the period leading up to publication of The Descent of Man and the bulk of the nineteenth century's literary production goes online) have the potential to open up completely new questions. Whether analyzing celebrity will allow historians to escape the pitfalls of hero worship remains to be seen, although remaining aloof from the current hoopla would be not only impossible but a grave mistake. What is certain is that 2009 will provide a rich feast for future historians concerned with the iconic status of the scientist.