Cover of the book under review. [Click to enlarge it.]
n this elegant study setting the poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) against the early reception of Charles Darwin's ideas in the United States, literary historian Renée Bergland considers the American poet’s life alongside that of the British scientist and traces the diffusion of Darwin's general orientation toward nature — which Bergland sees as awe-struck, reverential, nearly ecstatic — as his ideas on natural selection and evolution traveled from Victorian Britain into the surprisingly lively intellectual milieu of antebellum Amherst, Massachusetts.
At the center of this study is Dickinson’s poetry which, writes Bergland, “sings with the strange green magic of Darwinian science.” Consider the exuberant entomology of the final stanza of Dickinson’s “Flowers – Well – if anybody,” written around 1859:
Butterflies from St Domingo
Cruising round the purple line –
Have a system of aesthetics –
Far superior to mine. [qtd. on p. 294]
Over the course of the book, Bergland convincingly demonstrates how short a step it was from Dickinson's imagined butterflies of Santo Domingo to Darwin's descriptions of the flocks of tropical butterflies he observed while serving as ship's naturalist on the Beagle. By studying the poet and the scientist together, Bergland throws open "a window into a time before thinkers worked in atomized disciplinary silos, a time when scientists, philosophers, theologians, poets, and political activists were in constant conversation” (17).
Although the book’s principal pair never met, and were separated by a generation and an ocean, Bergland finds that they nevertheless held many interesting things in common. They had similar childhoods and similarly retiring yet stubborn personalities as well as preferred books, writers, and activities. These suggestive commonalities provide Bergland with opportunities to explore their lives in tandem. Bergland’s early chapters present similarities from their childhoods. As children both Darwin and Dickinson enjoyed easy access to marvelous home gardens maintained by extraordinarily green-thumbed mothers: one grew figs in her cottage garden in Amherst, the other cultivated oranges in Shropshire. These childhood gardens seem to have set the stage for both figures as lovers of botany in later life. A second intriguing commonality: Despite having somewhat shy and retiring natures, both Darwin and Dickinson thrived in stimulating but not overwhelming social and intellectual contexts. For Dickinson, this was the richly intellectual but small town of Amherst, with its new university bankrolled partly by the Dickinson family; for Darwin, there was the manageable sociability of Kent, which was sufficiently far from London to isolate him from its noise and crowds but close enough to attract visitors, including some from Amherst, as we’ll see.
The book unfolds chronologically, following the protagonists along the long arcs of their lives. Most chapters focus on only one figure, either Dickinson or Darwin, as each pursued surprisingly similar interests and developed surprisingly similar attitudes. They both cultivated an anti-authoritarianism, for instance, that protected their solitude and with it, their freedom to pursue unusual interests. In his university days at Christ's College, Cambridge, Darwin “studied beetles with determination while avoiding his tutors” and “shirked the assigned reading as much as possible without failing” (69), preferring edgier fare such as Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830) and Alexander von Humboldt's Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions (1814). A generation later, and an ocean away, Dickinson struggled during her brief time as a student at Mount Holyoke in South Hadley, near Amherst, where she resisted intense pressure to join the college’s superficial and conformist Congregational Church. A reluctant student of subjects that held little intrinsic interest to her, she preferred to be at home among her beloved plants and poems—and that’s exactly where she went after a short time away (170-75).
As Bergland shows, both Dickinson’s and Darwin’s resistance to orthodoxy permitted them to retreat into their distinctive worlds of science and art. But at least for Dickinson, this inward turn was simply part of being a thoughtful member of the nineteenth-century Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Not far from Amherst, Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was following a similar path as he prepared A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), an account of a boat trip he took with his brother in 1839. Bergland links Thoreau's rejection of religion to a view of enchanted nature that she sees as particularly Darwinian and Dickinsonian: “In Thoreau’s view, Christian churchgoers risked losing sight of what he saw as truly sacred: the enchanted green world, that ‘certain fairy land’ that could only be found the convex surface of the earth.” “In general,” Bergland continues, “the mid-nineteenth-century approach to science championed by Herschel, Lyell, and Darwin gave both Thoreau and Dickinson ways of understanding the world that allowed them to push back against social expectations and to rely instead on their own experience and observations” (167-68).
How did Darwin’s ideas reach Dickinson? After all, the two never met, and Dickinson appears not to have read his work, though she sometimes made general reference to it. Instead of a direct path of influence from Darwin to Dickinson, there is a network of individuals — thinkers, scientists, writers, educators — who in various ways promoted Darwinism within nineteenth-century Amherst’s effervescent intellectual scene. A key figure was Edward Hitchcock (1793-1864), an Evangelical preacher and chemistry professor who also served as state geologist of Massachusetts as well as a founder of what in time became the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Hitchcock corresponded with Darwin and attracted to Amherst luminaries in Darwin’s circle such as Harriet Martineau and the geologist Charles Lyell (144-150). A second waymaker, Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911), a Unitarian minister and writer who visited Darwin twice in Kent and served as Dickinson's editor at the Atlantic Monthly. As Bergland explores the links among Darwin, Dickinson, and various intermediaries, she establishes the long reach of Darwin’s ideas as they came westward across the Atlantic through personal and professional connections.
Related Material
- Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and the Intellectual Ferment of the Mid- and Late Victorian Periods
- Darwin's Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution by John Holmes [book review]
References
[Book under review] Bergland, Renée. Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.
Last modified 11 October 2024