according to his carefully crafted version of events, it was what his wife Emma told him to do. On 4 July 1862, in a faux-casual postscript to a letter about the cross-pollination of wheat, Darwin announced to his eldest son William, ‘Mama says I am to wear a beard.’
Despite being careful to give the impression that he had had no choice in the matter, Darwin had every reason to welcome this chance to hide his face from the world. As a twenty-year-old Cambridge undergraduate he had been so self-conscious about his scaly skin and ‘bad’ blubber lips that he had been known to pull out of planned beetle-hunts with friends in order to sit alone in his rooms until he was fit to be seen in public. On one occasion he had even fled halfway through an expedition in North Wales on account of his blistered skin. And while some of his adolescent self-consciousness had lightened by middle age, his symptoms had not. As a clean-shaven adult he had, on occasions, been rendered ‘hardly recognisable’, according to Hooker, by a particularly bad flare-up of facial eczema, which turned his usually plump, mild face red and angry, so that he resembled an indignant cherub.
This would be unpleasant for anyone, but for a man who had long been convinced of his own ‘hideousness’ it was mortifying. Following his mother’s death when he was eight, Charles had been raised by his older sisters at the family home, The Mount, in Shrewsbury, ruled over by their forbidding physician father, Dr Robert Darwin. Loving and responsible though Marianne, Susan and Caroline Darwin were, the grief-felled teenage girls found it hard to give the little boy the unconditional love he now needed so badly. Instead, they expressed their affection as anxious caretakers are apt to do, by finding fault. Caroline became known as ‘the Governess’, Susan was ‘Granny’, and both of them kept up a drizzle of complaints about young Charley’s spelling, handwriting and, in Caroline’s case, his looks and personal hygiene. Absorbing the message that he was somehow unacceptable – was that why Mama had gone away so suddenly? – Darwin grew up believing that he was ‘painfully ugly’. His nose, he told a school friend, was ‘as big as your fist’, and for that reason he was careful never to be pictured in profile. As a lanky adolescent he hated his large feet, made even more conspicuous by bunions. And his habit of gulping down comfort wherever he could find it meant that he had taken to asking for second helpings at every meal, like a giant Oliver Twist. In fact, for a time it looked as though young Charley Darwin was on his way to becoming as fat as his grandfather, the poet, physician and early evolutionist Erasmus Darwin, who was a twenty-four-stone mountain of a man. Eaten up by self-consciousness, the plump, knobbly-footed teenager dashed through the backstreets of his native Shrewsbury between school and home in an attempt to avoid people’s pitying looks. Even as a twenty-nine-year-old man, one who had made a thrilling name for himself by sailing around the world on HMS Beagle, not to mention losing twenty pounds in the process, Darwin was terrified of asking his cousin Emma Wedgwood to marry him. She would, he was convinced, find him ‘repellently plain’.
When Charles Robert Darwin was born in 1809 it had been into the smooth-chinned world of Jane Austen. The men from the provincial gentry and professional classes amongst whom the Darwins and their Wedgwood cousins naturally took their place were nearly always clean-shaven. In scraping the whiskers from their chins each morning with well-tempered cast steel they announced themselves as inheritors of Enlightenment values: rational, civilised, the opposite of beasts. Darwin’s father and grandfather before him, both distinguished men of science, had shown their treble-chinned faces to the world, confident about meeting its gaze without need for concealment. An open face denoted an open mind; beards, by contrast, were for men with something to hide.
In these circumstances it was inevitable that a smooth face became not only philosophic, but fashionable too. George ‘Beau’ Brummel’s morning shaving ritual was deemed so instructive that the cream of London’s ton was invited to pull up a chair and watch. In an attempt to match his dandy friend, the Prince Regent kept his porcine face free from stubble, while the only time his father King George wore a beard was when he had disappeared temporarily into the land of the mad. Meanwhile, at the Darwins’ local workhouse in Shrewsbury, which went by the euphemistic name of ‘The House of Industry’, the poor were shaved once a week. This provision was designed less to bolster the inmates’ well-being than to return their faces to a state of order and legibility, in the hope that their minds and morals might follow suit.
All of which makes young Charles Darwin a highly unusual young man. For by the time he was twenty-seven he had grown and shaved off his beard multiple times. One of the few contexts in which it was acceptable for a late-Georgian gentleman to sport facial hair was while at sea. And Darwin, famously, had spent almost five years, from December 1831 to October 1836, on HMS Beagle, a ten-gun brig-sloop commissioned by the Admiralty to survey the coast of South America. Although his position as a self-funded ‘gentleman naturalist’ did not bind him formally to navy discipline, Darwin instinctively observed the service’s codes of conduct during his exposure to them. And those codes decreed that, while it was acceptable for officers to grow beards at sea, on shore they were obliged to shave. Mixing with the local elites, both native and European, the ten or so Beagle officers were expected to appear as smooth-skinned gentlemen when presenting their papers to the Consul, dining at the house of a British merchant, attending a concert, visiting a botanic garden, hunting with the local padre, and even on trips up-country to stay on a grandee’s coffee estate.
Robert FitzRoy, captain of the Beagle – a stickler for a clean shave
In the case of HMS Beagle, the obligation to keep up appearances was doubly pressing, for the captain of the ship was Robert FitzRoy, nephew to the late Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh, and well-known for being the most crashing snob. FitzRoy was also ‘an ardent disciple of Lavater’, and therefore keen on reading faces and skulls for signs of character. He had almost turned Darwin down for the post of ship’s naturalist simply because, as Darwin recalled in his autobiography, ‘he doubted whether anyone with my nose could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage’. An out-of-place beard might mean the young man being left behind for good.
Darwin must have started growing a beard soon after the Beagle set sail from Plymouth on 27 December 1831, for by the time the ship reached the Equator seven weeks later he was sufficiently bristly for the crew to be able to perform the symbolic shaving ritual that always marked a seaman’s first ‘crossing of the line’. Under the watchful eye of a makeshift ‘Neptune’ the sailors ‘lathered my face & mouth with pitch and paint, & scraped some of it off with a piece of roughened iron hoop’, before dunking the neophyte in a tub of water. Darwin found the whole business ‘disagreeable’, although he knew he had got off lightly. The thirty-one equatorial debutants who followed him had ‘dirty mixtures’ pushed into their mouths and rubbed on their faces, the kind of toxic rough-housing that would have played havoc with the gentleman naturalist’s tender skin, not to mention his delicate stomach (he had been throwing up non-stop since they left Plymouth). All the same, you do sense a certain muffled pride in Darwin’s reaction to this bit of ritual bonding. The young man who just a few years earlier had scuttled home to his elder sisters whenever the crudities of public school proved too much had managed to survive this symbolic first shave without fainting or having to lie down.
After spending the spring and early summer of 1832 surveying the crumpled coast around Rio de Janeiro, the Beagle headed south towards Montevideo. As the little ship nosed towards Terra virtually Incognita the tone on board stilled and chilled. The barometer was falling, the seas were restless, and on coming ashore it was clear that something had changed. All the comfortable props of civic stability – sun-dappled white churches, busy market places, discreet whores, weather as pleasant as an English garden on a hot summer’s day – were beginning to fall away. In their place came armed soldiers, empty shops, sullen women, sheets of driving rain. Sailing into Montevideo at the end of July, the Beaglers had been corralled into putting down an insurrection of local black troops, while in Baha Bahia a month later Darwin had the feeling he was being watched, and his passport was checked and double-checked by henchmen of the local warlord. Safely back on board ship and headed south again, the older hands started to tell end-of-the-earth stories about shipwrecks, savage Indians and –