D Darwin

Darwin

Established as a school for the sons of clergy, Marlborough stood as a bastion of 19th-century Anglicanism. But this affiliation did not debar the College from acknowledging emerging ideas in the sciences, including Charles Darwin’s theories on natural selection and evolutionary biology.

Published in November 1859, On the Origin of Species provoked wide controversy as it entailed a challenge to the authority of Holy Scripture, and thereby to those within the Established Church who argued for the integrity of biblical accounts of Creation.

While many 19th-century Anglicans vilified Darwin and his teaching, his theories found a sympathetic audience among some at Marlborough. In fact, the College bought all of Darwin’s books on their first publication, including On the Origin of Species, The Descent of Man and the exploratory work on psychology The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. The books formed part of the library of Marlborough’s famous Natural History Society, the first school science club to be established anywhere in the country. Founded in 1864, the Society encouraged pupils to undertake fieldwork in the Wiltshire countryside and publish their findings in annual Proceedings. The College owns two early copies of On the Origin of Species, the one shown here being a rare first edition. Now regarded as the most famous book of biological science of all time, only 1,250 copies were printed; but such was the immediate public interest in Darwin’s explosive theories that the publisher, John Murray, issued a larger, second edition in January 1860. The ideas propounded in the book were famously the subject of a debate staged at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held in the Natural History Museum, Oxford, in June 1860, an event subsequently remembered as the ‘Oxford Evolution Debate’. Fought out between the celebrated biologist Thomas Huxley and the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, the debate drew wide attention to the increasing discord between science and religion in the mid-Victorian era. Marlborough’s Master between 1871 and 1876, Frederic William Farrar, became a personal friend of Darwin’s, and persuaded the authorities to permit his burial in Westminster Abbey after his death in 1882, despite objections from resentful clerics. A generation after his death, the scientist’s grandson, Charles Galton Darwin (1887–1962), later to be Director of the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington, began his scientific studies at Marlborough as a boarder in Cotton between 1901 and 1906.