Introduction to
THE TEMPLE OF NATURE

by Martin Priestman


  1. Erasmus Darwin's last, defiant, densely-packed scientific poem The Temple of Nature, or The Origin of Society was a crucial influence on both the Shelleys, suggesting the opening imagery of Percy's Queen Mab and the conversation between him and Byron about spontaneously-animated "vermicelli" which helped to inspire Mary's Frankenstein.1 The poem also compresses into its four cantos and extensive annotation a great deal of the hard knowledge, speculative brilliance and poetic daring of previous works in verse and prose which had in their turn greatly influenced Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and many others. In what Desmond King-Hele has called "a life of unequalled achievement," Darwin touched base with almost every aspect of the age of revolutions we label, somewhat inadequately, The Romantic Period. With fellow members of the Birmingham-based Lunar Society2 such as James Watt, Matthew Boulton, Josiah Wedgwood and Joseph Priestley, he was a prime mover of the Industrial Revolution, and his agricultural treatise Phytologia, or The Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening (1800) put the weight of his massive botanical knowledge behind the Agrarian one. He was also the period's most successful physician, whose medical treatise Zoonomia, or The Laws of Organic Life (1794-6, revised 1801) helped to initiate the radically materialist psychology which Alan Richardson terms "neural Romanticism," and the need to suppress which Edward S. Reed sees as the source of a soul-based nineteenth-century psychology. In the other sciences, Darwin attempted and often achieved new syntheses of the most recent, cutting-edge work in geology, astronomy, chemistry and the study of electricity; while in zoology his arguments for the evolution of species—anticipating those of his grandson Charles by more than half a century—have been described by Roy Porter as providing "the British Enlightenment's most sublime theory of boundless improvement" (443).

  2. Politically, Darwin was a radical-progressive Whig. His enthusiasm for the American Revolution was boosted by personal friendship with one of its fathers, Benjamin Franklin; his support for the early stages of the French one was never—as it was by many other erstwhile "jacobins"—explicitly retracted.3 Though perhaps unwilling to notice the new kinds of misery caused by the industrial innovations of friends such as Boulton and Wedgwood,4 he strongly opposed the slave trade,5 wrote against the eviction of the powerless "people of agriculture" by the enclosure of farm land6 and, in A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools (1797), supported womens' right to a rounded education in the arts and sciences. Such radical progressivism played well to an intensely admiring public in his first literary breakthrough, the two-poem work collectively titled The Botanic Garden (1791), comprising The Economy of Vegetation and the earlier-published The Loves of the Plants (1789). The latter of these courted controversy on three counts: by espousing the still-shocking classification of plants according to their sexual traits with which the Swedish Carl Linnaeus had recently revolutionized the study of botany;7 by representing these traits in terms of a series of increasingly promiscuous-seeming human love affairs; and by explicitly addressing women and children as its primary audience.8 The Economy of Vegetation, placed first though published second, is primarily a physico-chemical account of matter and the formation of the earth, which thinly veils its underlying materialism under the figure of the Goddess of Botany addressing the sprites of the four traditional elements, in a structure loose enough to allow for many celebrations of fellow Lunar Society members' scientific and industrial achievements, and for many assaults on tyranny and religious "superstition." But by the later 1790s the same attitudes were considered dangerously libertine, irreligious and hence (in an increasingly common conflation) pro-French. The Anti-Jacobin magazine's 1798 parody, "The Loves of the Triangles,"9 devastated Darwin's reputation, deliberately confusing his views with those of more declared radicals such as William Godwin and libertines such as Richard Payne Knight,10 and poking—admittedly hilarious—fun at his common poetic device of fanciful personification as at once outmoded and  heartlessly frivolous.

  3. The substantial debts of Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge to Darwin—especially to The Botanic Garden and Zoonomia—have been increasingly acknowledged since Desmond King-Hele's Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic Poets (1986). Blake engraved some of Botanic Garden's illustrations, and clearly drew on its plant-personifications for his Songs and Book of Thel.11 Despite a similar degree of influence on their youthful work, Wordsworth's and Coleridge's coming of age as the Romantic poets we recognize coincided with their rejection of the Augustan poetic style of which Darwin was then the leading representative. In 1796, the then-footloose Coleridge spent several months in Derby, largely drawn thither by opportunities for conversations with Darwin, who had moved there from Lichfield in 1783 and seems to have tried to help him find work.12 Coleridge's remark "I absolutely nauseate Darwin's poem" (i.e. The Botanic Garden) needs to be set against many borrowings13 and against his clearly overwhelmed response to "the first literary character in Europe, and the most original-minded man": Darwin was "the everything, except the Christian! [with] a greater range of philosophical knowledge than any other man in Europe. . . . He thinks in a new train on every subject," though the recent Unitarian convert needed to add, "except religion."14 Wordsworth's careful separation, in the 1802 Lyrical Ballads Preface, of the "immediate" pleasures of poetry from the more recondite ones of un-"familiarized" scientific knowledge, as well as its rejection of personification and the "inane phraseology" of poetic diction, suggests Darwin as the key reference-point against which Wordsworth's new poetic defines itself. However, the same Preface's claim that the ballad-form of "Goody Blake and Harry Gill" will give the psychological "fact" it embodies its first real