for those who realised too late that they had spent the evening snubbing the most distinguished person in the room.
In fairness, men such as William Bovill MP, Dr Lyon Playfair, General John Lefroy and Sir Wentworth Dilke had not seen Darwin for several years. Chronic ill-health, brought about partly by the anxiety of being known as the man who had killed God, kept Darwin in seclusion at Down House, his estate in rural Kent. Here he lived with his devoted wife Emma and their seven surviving children, sticking to a rigorous programme of thinking and writing unruffled by the flim-flam of scientific celebrity. A recent flare-up of his long-standing symptoms, which included vomiting and eczema, had given Darwin a gaunt, papery look that made him appear much older than his fifty-seven years. But, explained Emma Darwin, writing to her aunt Fanny Allen the day after the Royal Society event, it wasn’t so much the ravages of ill-health that had made Charles unrecognisable as his new beard – ‘it alters him so’.
Charles Darwin, beardless, four years before he published On the Origin of Species (c.1855)
You can see why the scientific establishment had been baffled. The last time anyone had set eyes on Charles Darwin he had been clean-shaven, apart from muttonchop sideboards. During the past four years of almost total withdrawal from public life he had grown a heavy beard that covered the lower half of his face and reached a good way down his chest. Instead of being ginger and springy like his earlier sideboards, this new instalment of facial hair was soft and white, which made him seem both ageless and ancient. It also made him look like someone else entirely. The features by which Darwin used to be most easily recognised – pouchy jowls and a long, thin, downturned mouth that readily rearranged itself into the sweetest smile – had vanished under a carpet of hair. Even his famously bulbous nose, which he always joked made him look like a farmer, seemed different somehow.
Darwin never trimmed his beard, although he did hack regularly at the hair on his upper lip to produce what his son Francis described as ‘a rather ugly appearance’. This habit of pruning his moustache too severely for elegance was a consequence of wanting to keep it out of his food at mealtimes. There was nothing he could do, though, about the stains left by his heavy snuff habit, which gave the middle part of the ’tache a dirty yellow look, colloquially described as ‘snuffy’. His hair, or at least the fringe that remained around the edges of his massive skull, was cut by Emma whenever Charles remembered to ask her.
By the time Charles Darwin had started growing his beard in 1862 he was already behind the times, as middle-aged gentlemen living in the country are apt to be when it comes to matters of fashion. In the 1830s and 40s, the decades of his young adulthood, the prevailing taste had been for clean-shaven faces. You have only to look at pictures of his near-contemporaries – Disraeli, Dickens, Ruskin – to see a series of girlish-looking young men, tender and rosy-skinned. But shift forward fifteen years, and each one of those lovely faces now lies buried under bristling facial hair. The first sign of a change in fashion had come in the late 1840s, when sideboards began creeping further down men’s faces, broadening out to the point where they became fully-fledged sidewhiskers. There were several ways of styling these new arrivals: broad but close-cropped attachments were known as ‘muttonchops’, while long, combed-out ones became ‘Piccadilly weepers’ or ‘Dundrearies’, after a dimwitted character in a play by Tom Taylor. Sidewhiskers could either be worn on an otherwise clean-shaven face, as Darwin did until he was fifty-three, or they might be teamed with a neat moustache, as modelled by that unlikely pin-up, Prince Albert.
Prince Albert in the 1840s
Gradually muttonchops and Piccadilly weepers crept further south, eventually meeting up under the chin sometime in the early 1850s. The result was the ‘Newgate frill’ or ‘chinstrap’, an odd arrangement whereby the neck and jaw were left riotously hairy while the rest of the face was clean-shaven. The effect was like a reverse halo, and was sported by Darwin’s younger friend and colleague, the botanist Joseph Hooker. Darwin, coming to beard-wearing a few years later, opted for the newly popular ‘natural’ beard. A natural beard required a man to do nothing more than leave his facial hair to grow untouched, give or take the occasional snip at the moustache with his wife’s scissors. This was also known as a ‘philosopher’s beard’, in homage to those thinkers of the Roman Republic such as Epictetus, Critolaus and Diogenes, who distinguished themselves from the smooth-shaven citizenry by their far-seeing wisdom and shaggy facial hair. Which explains why, aboard HMS Beagle in the 1830s, the young, temporarily bearded Charles Darwin had earned the nickname ‘Philos’.
Yet just because everyone else was growing a beard by the 1860s, it didn’t mean that Darwin found it easy or natural to follow suit. When the time came to announce that he had belatedly succumbed to the new fashion, he sent Hooker advance warning in the form of a photograph. In June 1864 the eldest Darwin boy, William, had taken a picture of his newly shaggy father in the garden at Down House, and this was now despatched to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, where Hooker was Director. A copy also went to Asa Gray at Harvard. Self-conscious about the change he was unveiling, Darwin described his new look in his covering letters with a metaphorical shrug as ‘venerable’. Hooker, sensing Darwin’s anxious embarrassment, responded enthusiastically by return of post, declaring that his newly bearded friend appeared exactly like the figure of Moses in the fresco on the walls of the House of Lords. In this kitsch Biblical scene by J.R. Herbert, a hugely bearded and elaborately mustachioed Moses – he appears to have waxed the ends for the occasion – carries down the Tablets of the Law to some slightly less hairy Israelites. Hooker’s compliment was a neat if oblique allusion to the way Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had, in the five years since its publication, become the secular equivalent of the Mosaic tablets, a textual key to Life itself. Funnily enough, said Darwin in his pleased reply to Hooker two days later, his sons had said exactly the same thing about him looking like Moses.
Joseph Hooker modelling a neck beard, or ‘Newgate frill’
Darwin’s decision to announce his new beard to Hooker and Gray by sending them a photograph is not quite as coy as it sounds. Victorian men of science, even those who knew each other well, frequently used this new technology to exchange portraits as a way of strengthening personal and professional bonds. On receiving the ‘venerable’ photograph, Hooker immediately asked if he could have a copy to send to George Thwaites, Superintendent of the botanical gardens at Peradeniya, Ceylon, and another for Daniel Oliver, Professor of Botany at University College, London, both of whom he knew would value an updated image of the author of On the Origin of Species.
Even so, you sense that Darwin, always thin-skinned, was worried about how this new beard would go down in his wider professional network. The half-joke about the beard being ‘venerable’ was his way of putting distance between himself and his startling new appendage. In the unlikely event that Hooker or Gray made fun of his altered appearance, Darwin would be able to brush off his hurt by presenting his beard less as an essential part of himself than a temporary prop, a joke beard almost. Of course neither man offered any such barb. Gray’s only slightly carping comment was that the beard aged Darwin, a point that was picked up by another disappointed recipient of the photograph who was startled to discover that the clean-shaven middle-aged scientist he was used to picturing had turned into an ‘elderly gentleman with a grey beard’.
Most important of all, though, Darwin was determined that Hooker should not run away with the idea that he had grown a beard because he thought it suited him, or because, heaven forbid, he was trying to look fashionable. He was doing it, he explained carefully, for the sake of his health. In the late spring of 1862 the facial eczema from which he had suffered all his adult life had flared up in a ‘violent’ attack, bubbling his face and swelling his lips. At the spas Darwin routinely visited in search of a cure for his repertoire of mysterious yet distressing symptoms, men suffering from skin conditions were routinely advised to grow a beard. This was both a way of hiding the disfigurement