Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum. Kathryn Hughes

How, Owen reasonably argued, could a jellyfish become an ox, or an amoeba an ostrich? More important, at this time of political upheaval – it was only five years since the Great Reform Act had extended the franchise to the urban middle classes – transmutation challenged the essential distinction between human and animal, and by analogy suggested that the boundaries that kept different races and classes of mankind apart might be a matter of custom rather than divine edict. Far from God carefully appointing men to particular stations, the social order might more accurately be conceived as an arbitrary free-for-all, with the winners – people like the Darwins, for instance – merely lucky, or at least canny, rather than especially deserving. No wonder Charley kept his mouth shut and his notebooks close.

      One of the reasons Darwin had decided not to settle back home in Shrewsbury on his return from the Beagle was that it would require him to make a constant round of ‘visits to stupid people, who neither cared for me, nor I for them’. Afternoons that could have been spent over his microscope would be frittered away taking tea with his sisters’ friends. Yet although the stuffy rooms in Great Marlborough Street allowed him to pursue the autonomous, anonymous existence of an urban intellectual, there were still some social niceties that Charles Darwin Esq., late of The Mount, Shrewsbury, was obliged to observe. Getting his hair trimmed, for a start. By now Darwin’s various Beagle beards were a thing of the past. They had been replaced with wide ‘weepers’ and a clean chin, the standard look in late-1830s Britain for a man of the professional classes. A portrait from this time by George Richmond shows that Darwin’s light-brown hair was already scanty for a man who was not yet thirty (see plate 6). Still, by carefully brushing forward his fringe in the ‘Caesar’ style that had been fashionable two decades earlier, he could just about pass off his bulging forehead as evidence of a large brain rather than a receding hairline. Here was the early-Victorian equivalent of the comb-over, although whether Darwin’s hairdresser, William Willis of 19 Great Marlborough Street, sniggered or shrugged or even suggested the arrangement in the first place, we simply do not know.

      Willis, who was forty-one, was originally from Huntingdonshire. He had been swept into London twenty years earlier on the tidal wave of migration that had deposited thousands of young people from the country into the crowded capital as combatants in the new urban struggle for existence. Arriving with his wife Elizabeth around 1818, he set up as a hairdresser in Brydges Street, just off fashionable Covent Garden, before moving west to larger premises in Great Marlborough Street. Aided in time by his sons Alfred and Charles, he got his living cutting the hair of the professional men who made their homes in the handsome streets that ran eastwards off Regent Street. The fact that Willis made a point of describing himself in trade directories as a ‘haircutter and perfumer’ rather than ‘barber’ suggests that he took care to present his establishment as a superior one. While he almost certainly shaved chins in addition to cutting hair, he probably forswore the teeth-pulling, minor surgery and drug-dispensing that had for centuries been associated with barbering of the rougher kind. Great Marlborough Street was a popular residential address for doctors – the proper sort, with clean hands and letters after their names – and it is unlikely that Willis would have chosen the location if he was planning to offer the pulling, hacking and blood-spilling associated with the red-and-white swirl of the barber’s pole.

      Like any migrating countryman, William Willis brought his old skills and pastimes with him when he settled in London. Breeding pedigree dogs and fancy birds had long been a profitable sideline for urban barbers, since it required minimal space and capital. It drew too on a discerning eye and a feel for physical form. If you could tend a gentleman’s whiskers, or advise him on his bald patch, it was a short step to running your hands over a prize spaniel’s coat, or measuring the length of its tail with your eye.

      Although Darwin had himself been born a countryman – it was only eleven years since his exasperated father had yelled at him for caring about nothing except shooting and dogs – he had been away from the loamy farmlands of Shropshire for a long time. Talking to men like Willis jogged his memory about the way forward-thinking landlords, including his own Uncle Jos Wedgwood in Staffordshire, cross-bred livestock to produce juicier, taller, woollier, stronger, milkier animals, which could be mated in turn to bring about a permanent swerve in the species. Here, thought Darwin, might be a useful analogy for what happened in a state of nature, where animals that were best adapted to their surroundings survived and bred, passing on their genetic advantage to their offspring. Cooped up in the ‘vile, smoky … prison’ that was London in high summer, Darwin harvested his country friends’ expertise on selective breeding. He quizzed his old college contemporary Thomas Eyton about his owls and pigs, while William Yarrell, a Fellow of the Zoological Society, was happy to explain his experiences of crossing established breeds with hybrids.