The Dual Anniversary of Dickens and Darwin
By Gina Dalfonzo|Published Date: December 01, 2009
Two major literary anniversaries took place this year, when both Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities turned 150 years old.
The former book was recognized with a multitude of books and articles (both pro and con), films (both pro and con), museum exhibits, websites, and even a keychain. The latter book was honored rather more quietly. There was a 150th anniversary edition (paperback), a project that sent out serial installments of the book via email, and—that was about it.
Why the difference? There are several possible reasons. For one thing, the anniversary of On the Origin of Species happened to coincide with its author’s bicentennial, resulting in a sort of year-long double celebration. For another, many followers of Darwin are enthusiastic proselytizers, and are seizing this opportunity to promote his work.
Yet another possible factor is that in our current educational system, and in society at large, science is generally understood to rank much higher in importance than literature. Science tends to be seen—accurately or not—as applying to our lives in very concrete, practical ways that fiction cannot.
But there’s another major reason for the different levels of veneration: the difference in worldview. Darwin’s materialistic worldview has in many ways come to dominate and shape our cultural institutions. In the United States alone, although the majority of citizens profess a belief in a Creator, many of the leading voices in the news media, in entertainment, in academia, and in government consistently promote a Darwinian view of life.
If Darwin’s Origin of Species can be seen as ushering in a new era in Western thought, Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities embodies biblical ideals that are often seen as downright backward. But for this very reason, we can look to Dickens for a corrective to some of the Darwinian ideas that have had a harmful impact on our society.
Radical Change, Simple Faith
Origin of Species aimed at nothing less than telling the story of all life on Earth. Dickens chose a considerably smaller canvas for his historical novel, focusing on a handful of years before and during the French Revolution. Yet both of them were examining similar patterns of behavior: the struggle for survival and dominance among different groups. In Darwin’s case, the focus was the biological struggle among species; for Dickens, it was the historical struggle in which the people of France overthrew their corrupt and tyrannical government, only to turn tyrants themselves.
But Darwin, when he wrote Origin of Species, had long since jettisoned any vestiges of Christian faith that he once had. He wrote that his scientific studies caused him to lose his faith by middle age, but in fact, as both Benjamin Wiker in The Darwin Myth and Michael Flannery in Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Intelligent Evolution recently have pointed out, that loss actually had occurred much earlier. As Denyse O’Leary put it in a review of Flannery’s book, “Far from embracing materialism on account of the implications of his theory, Darwin developed a theory to support the materialism he already believed in.”
As both Wiker and Flannery show, not everyone in Darwin’s time considered it necessary for an evolutionist to be a materialist; his fellow scientist and evolutionist Alfred Russel Wallace certainly was not. But Darwin deliberately pitted himself against the idea of a Creator, frequently writing that this or that natural phenomenon was “inexplicable on the theory of creation.” The struggle for survival was guided solely by “Nature,” not by God.
On the other hand, a careful study of Charles Dickens’s thought reveals a stronger Christian worldview than he is often given credit for. Living in the midst of the Victorian culture, with all its rapidly changing views on religion, science, and humanity’s place in the world, Dickens nonetheless held firmly to his belief in a loving Creator. His was a “simple faith,” according to pastor and author Gary Colledge in his book Dickens, Christianity and The Life of Our Lord.
In thinking and writing about Christianity, Dickens focused almost wholly on “the person and the work of Jesus” and was more interested in “moral-ethical concerns” than “doctrinal” ones—an interest that has sometimes produced a mistaken impression that he denied the deity of Christ. But, Colledge adds, the simplicity of Dickens’s faith did not make it a “simplistic and shallow” faith, nor an unorthodox one. He understood the significance and centrality of Christ’s redemptive work, and judging by the religious themes frequently seen in his writings, it was often uppermost in his thoughts.
We also know that Dickens explicitly rejected the Malthusianism that Darwin and many others embraced. As Wiker writes in The Darwin Myth,
In September 1838 Darwin picked up that great macabre masterpiece written at the end of the eighteenth century, Thomas Mathus’s Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus argued that an ugly “fact” of life was that the more you feed people, the more they will breed, and so there will always be far more mouths to feed than food to put in them. The poor will be with us always, and any attempt to help the miserable wretches will only produce more misery by creating even more wretches. . . .
Not all believed the Malthusian charter—a most striking example being Charles Dickens. His Ebenezer Scrooge is Malthusian man made flesh. . . . Later, when a repenting Scrooge tearfully begs to know if the sickly cripple Tiny Tim will live, the ghost of Christmas Present throws Scrooge’s cold words back at him: “If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the population.” . . .
Darwin, however, did not have the benefit of being visited by the ghosts of Christmas; and for him, Malthus was far too useful to be dispensed with. Malthus allowed Darwin to put death in a new, more positive light. Life was profligate, imprudently overproducing, casting forth far more than it could ever feed, generating every manner of variation of species, with no thought about how to care for them all. But death was a good accountant; it knew how to deal with “too much life.” It cut down the surplus population, and did so with ruthless precision. The weak, sickly, malformed, unfit, all were methodically removed by its cold, keen scythe.
Death, Darwin thought, was the key to life, a complete inversion of [his wife] Emma’s superstitious belief in a creator God and the idea that death was the punishment for original sin. Death was, is, and always will be, the creator. Unlike the biblical God, it does not pronounce everything good, it does not demand peace; instead it is the winnower of dross and imperfection, and by this means of culling surplus populations it creates a fitter species. War, the incessant struggle of creature against creature, species against species, is the true furnace of creation and progress.
In practice, Darwin found himself unable to carry Malthusianism all the way to its logical conclusion. He was a kind man and a dedicated abolitionist. But as Wiker shows, the charitable impulse that led him to oppose slavery was an uneasy fit for a man of Darwin’s ideas. As he showed in Origin of Species and his later book The Descent of Man, his theory, which essentially boiled down to “might makes right,” led to consequences with which he himself was uncomfortable.
In The Descent of Man, he wrote, “No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that [helping weak and sick people] must be highly injurious to the race of man. Excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” Driven by his own twinges of conscience, Darwin admitted that humans must have “sympathy” for each other, but his theory gave him no sound basis for such sympathy.
It is highly unlikely that The Descent of Man will be celebrated with cheers and commemorations when its 150th anniversary rolls around. A society may eagerly embrace the idea of freedom from God and morality, without wanting to take a close look at the end result of that theory. Nevertheless, those results surround us every day. When an internationally respected organization, founded by a eugenicist, is still targeting the poor and minorities for abortion; when religious and racial minorities are victims of genocide; when only about 10 percent of children with Down syndrome are allowed to live; when euthanasia of the elderly and the terminally ill is seen as merciful—then we see the true fruits of Darwinism.
Darwinism in Fiction
(Note: This section contains major spoilers for A Tale of Two Cities.)
Did his contemporary Charles Darwin influence Dickens at all? Though we have no real evidence that he did, it is interesting to note that much of Dickens’s story of the class struggle in revolutionary France plays out like a Darwinian case study, as the balance of power shifts and the fight for dominance intensifies.
At the center of events in A Tale of Two Cities is a French aristocrat, Charles Darnay—formerly Charles Evrémonde—who lives with his wife and family in England. During the Reign of Terror, when Charles returns to Paris to help an old servant who has been arrested, he himself is arrested and tried as an aristocrat, emigrant, and enemy of the people.
One of the foremost figures among the revolutionaries is Madame Defarge, who with her husband runs a small wine shop in Paris. Near the end of the story, the Defarges produce evidence that when Madame Defarge was a young girl, Charles’s father and uncle had raped and killed members of her family, who were peasants on the Evrémonde estate.
It does not matter that Charles Darnay himself is innocent, having been a toddler at the time; it does not matter that he is a good man who broke away from his corrupt family, even to the point of taking a new surname, and who has always tried to help the poor. The story sways the jury against him and he is sentenced to die. Madame Defarge, once powerless against Darnay’s family, is now the one with the power, and she uses it without mercy, planning “extermination” not just for Charles but also for his wife, child, and father-in-law. In Dickens’s words:
It was nothing to her, that an innocent man was to die for the sins of his forefathers; she saw, not him, but them. It was nothing to her, that his wife was to be made a widow and his daughter an orphan; that was insufficient punishment, because they were her natural enemies and her prey, and as such had no right to live.
Madame Defarge, we might say, exemplifies Darwinism. She is the vengeful instrument of a remorseless fate, vaguely but fearfully foreseen by Charles Darnay’s mother when he was only a child. Trying in vain to make amends for her family’s crimes, she says at one point of little Charles, “I have a presentiment that if no other innocent atonement is made for this, it will one day be required of him.”
The Redeemer Redeemed
But Dickens was not a Darwinist. And he was not about to let a pitiless force of nature like Madame Defarge have the last word. He had, in fact, been preparing an atonement all throughout the novel, an instrument of grace that would break the endless cycle of revenge and violence between the warring families.
That grace arrives in the improbable form of Sydney Carton, an English lawyer and friend of the Darnay family, who has followed them to Paris to try to help them in their time of need. Carton has served as a kind of double or shadow of Darnay all through the book; not only does he bear a strange physical resemblance to Darnay, but he also happens to be hopelessly in love with Darnay’s wife, Lucie.
But unlike the upright Darnay, Carton is a slovenly, depressed alcoholic. Though he is brilliant enough to have had a great career in the law, he instead makes his living doing menial paperwork for a colleague. Feeling that he has wasted his life and talents, Carton desires only to drink himself into oblivion.
Though he never had any hope of being good enough for Lucie, Carton once made her a promise that he would give anything, even his own life, for her or anyone she loved. And thus it is this sad, flawed figure who will provide the “innocent atonement,” transforming him into one of the unlikeliest—and greatest—Christ figures in all of literature. Before Darnay can be executed, Carton blackmails his way into the prison; drugs Darnay and has him removed by an accomplice; and, taking advantage of their physical likeness, takes Darnay’s place on the ride to the guillotine. Having fulfilled his long-ago promise to Lucie, he leaves behind a letter telling her, “I am thankful that the time has come, when I can prove [my words]. That I do so is no subject for regret or grief.”
Carton’s self-sacrifice, though known to only a few people amid the bloodthirsty mob, transcends their rage and vengeance, and paradoxically ends the book on a note of triumph. And Dickens makes sure that we know that this redemptive act was inspired by something above and beyond human nature.
The once cynical and bitter Carton, who tended to lament his bad “luck” in life, is a completely different man by the time he goes to his death. On the night that he begins to form his plan to take Darnay’s place, Carton spends hours walking the streets of Paris, repeating to himself the Scripture verse that was read at his father’s funeral: “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall we live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me, shall never die.”
Intriguingly, once he has made the decision to give up his own life for another, Carton no longer thinks of life in terms of “luck” or “chance”—in what we might call Darwinian terms, in fact—but as a sacred and eternal gift. The same man who once told Charles Darnay, “The greatest desire I have, is to forget that I belong to [this world],” has come to believe that “of little worth as life is when we misuse it, it is worth [an] effort.”
Another verse of Scripture that applies equally well to the transformed Carton would be: “He that loseth his life for My sake shall find it.” He is not only a redeeming figure, but a redeemed one. Redemption, Dickens seems to suggest, has to happen on a personal level before it can flow outward to change and heal a society. And part of both indivdual and societal redemption is realizing the value of life as a gift from the Creator.
Competing Visions
Whatever their differences, one might at first think that Dickens and Darwin at least share a rosy view of the future of humanity. Darwin concludes his book on a note of unqualified optimism: “And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.”
For his part, Dickens suggests that Sydney Carton, on the scaffold, has a final prophetic vision that includes the following: “I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.”
But beneath the surface, these two visions could not be more different. For Darwin’s vision is a morally neutral one, free from values of any kind. His “perfect” beings would be merely specimens of superior physical and mental strength, not of goodness, kindness, or tolerance. And when we consider a situation like the one in Dickens’s novel—or when we read Darwin’s follow-up to his own celebrated book—we might begin to wonder if the fierceness of the struggle for survival might end up creating species known more for brutality than perfection.
Dickens, meanwhile, is envisioning a fundamentally moral society, in which the sins of the past have been “expiated” by the struggles and suffering of those who want to be “truly free” of tyranny. One can argue over whether such a goal is attainable by any human society.
But this much is clear: Darwinism is incapable of either envisioning or creating such a society. The only hope of even coming near that goal is a supernatural one—a Redeemer from outside the struggle, who alone can save humanity.
That’s why, as the Darwinian vision that has fascinated humanity for 150 years wears thin—as we face the consequences of a world ravaged by disrespect for human life—the Dickensian vision, rooted in a Christian worldview, is an alternative that holds out true hope.
Gina R. Dalfonzo is editor of The Point and Dickensblog and a writer for BreakPoint Radio.
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