Capturing Darwin's Dilemma:
The Scriptwriter's Story
In crafting a film about Charles Darwin's great
dilemma—whether or not to go public with his incendiary
theory of evolution—scriptwriter John Goldsmith faced
some quandaries of his own: How do you offer a fresh portrayal
of one of the world's most iconic figures? Can you convey the
essence of Darwin's scientific ideas in the context of a
compelling drama? What's more, how do you avoid the "gotchas"
of countless Darwin experts apt to catch any tiny inaccuracy?
In this interview, Goldsmith, who years ago traced part of
Darwin's Beagle voyage to better understand the man,
explains his fascination with both Darwin and his wife Emma,
and the extraordinary research he did to get the details
right.
First impressions
NOVA: In a film about Darwin, why did you open with a
scene about Alfred Wallace?
John Goldsmith: That's where the story begins. Always
begin at the beginning. The whole concept of the film was to
take a piece of Darwin's life and tell the story of
On the Origin of Species and evolution generally within
that framework, right? And the trigger for Darwin publishing
anything on evolution was this letter that came out of the
blue from Wallace. It's kind of like a spear thrown that goes
thunk! into Darwin's heart as he sits there peacefully
in Down House in North Kent. It's really where the story
starts.
Q: In the script, you describe the set using Wallace's
own words. What research did you do for this?
Goldsmith: Well, Wallace, God bless him, wrote lots of
autobiography. As well as collecting and selling specimens, he
wrote books. And he wrote a book about his experiences in
Borneo and Malacca, and that book contains a description of
his room.
Q: It's one of many instances where you tied your
details—dialogue and sets and other parts of the
script—to historical documents, which I found
impressive.
Goldsmith: As far as I could, because even if one can't
precisely get it right in terms of props and production, at
least the whole team knew what we were aiming for.
Q: When we first see Darwin, he's in his study. He's
making a beehive out of cardboard. What impression did you
want to give of him right away?
Goldsmith: Well, that's an interesting example. You
know, more is known about Darwin than he even knew about
himself, because he wrote incessant letters. He was virtually
a recluse for most of his life, and his equivalent of the
telephone and e-mail was the postal service. So lots and lots
of letters. And there's a wonderful thing online now, the
Darwin Correspondence Project. The crucial years that I was interested in, they're all
there.
"He was a lovely father. They were a very unusual family."
I wanted to know exactly what he was doing on the date when
the story starts. And I managed, by going through all this
correspondence, to discover that he had just received a letter
from his brother Erasmus and was making this little model
beehive. Erasmus had sent him a drawing and instructions on
how to make it, and that's what he was doing.
Q: That's remarkable, that you pinned down that moment.
Goldsmith: If it had been any other subject, really,
one wouldn't have bothered. One would have made something up.
But the world is full of Darwin experts who know what he had
for tea on May the 4th of 1862, down to the last lump of
sugar, and they're all sitting there with their pencils
poised.
Q: You were trying to avoid their gotchas.
Goldsmith: Exactly, yes. But it's also a classic
example of reality driving the creative side of things,
because it's a wonderful example of the kind of man Darwin
was—the meticulous care he took. He was interested in
everything.
A very nice fellow
Q: From all that you've read of Darwin, how would you
sum up his character?
Goldsmith: Well, he's a character who, alas, has
vanished from the world: the independent scientist. He isn't
holding a job down; he has no chair at a university. He can do
exactly what he wants. And because Darwin realized that if any
example in nature upset his theory the theory was dead, he
made it his business to look into absolutely every aspect he
could think of in nature.
When you delve into the detail of his life and the evolution
of his theory, it really hits home the kind of extraordinary
range of his activities, everything he was interested in.
Q: From barnacles...
Goldsmith: From barnacles to the beehive.
Q: If it weren't for Wallace sending this letter, do
you think Darwin would have ever published his theory?
Goldsmith: I don't know. I don't think anybody does.
It's very hard to say. He'd written about half of [what he
called] "the big book." My feeling is he probably would have
prevaricated for some years more. I think, inevitably, he
would have published, because if it hadn't been Wallace coming
up with something similar, somebody else would have. There
were a lot of people working in this area. But given his
druthers—as they say in North America—he probably
would have left it until he was on his deathbed in order to
avoid all the fuss.
Q: Why would Wallace send Darwin this letter and his
paper on evolution?
Goldsmith: Well, Wallace didn't actually ask Darwin to
comment. He just asked him to pass it on to [the eminent
scientist] Sir Charles Lyell. Darwin and Wallace had met.
They'd corresponded. Darwin was a client. [Darwin had bought
specimens from Wallace.] So, really, Darwin was a contact.
Darwin came from the upper middle class. He'd inherited a
chunk of the Wedgewood family fortune. His father, Dr.
[Robert] Darwin, had made an awful lot of money. He was
extremely well connected in politics and literature. Wallace
was from a completely different background and sort of knew
nobody. And of course, in Victorian England, as I suppose it
is today, it's who you know. And Wallace obviously liked
Darwin. Darwin was an extremely likable man. He wasn't a snob.
He was a very nice fellow.
"A lot of the dialogue in the movie is verbatim from letters
and diaries..."
Q: When Darwin reads the letter, he becomes physically
ill.
Goldsmith: Yes.
Q: I assume that detail wasn't documented in the
historical record.
Goldsmith: (laughs) Yes. Well, we don't know whether he
threw up, but he had that tendency. Any kind of strain would
make him physically ill. He suffered terribly from this very
mysterious illness.
Q: And this letter certainly would have been upsetting.
You mentioned that about half of Darwin's "big book" was
already written by the time he received it.
Goldsmith: Yes. Then, because of the necessity to get
something out, he abandoned the big book and started again.
On the Origin of Species is a much shorter book. It was
intended to be a sketch. It grew into 300 or 400 pages. But
the big book was going to be 1,000 pages, I would think.
Q: So, in a way, Wallace did Darwin and the world a
favor, because what we got is such a readable book.
Goldsmith: It's incredible. It's amazing. He was a
naturally excellent writer. He had a very accessible, easy
style. He never talks down. He never oversimplifies. But his
mind is so clear and his perceptions are so straightforward
that any lay reader like me can understand.
Loving parents
Q: Early in the film you introduce Darwin's children,
scampering around the house. What do we know about Darwin as a
father?
Goldsmith: He was a lovely father. They were a very
unusual family. They lived in a way that very few upper-class
Victorian families lived. They had a very loving, informal,
very modern attitude to children and to child rearing.
Absolutely a million miles away from what we think of as a
Victorian upper-class way of thinking, where you had a formal
handshake with your parents at six o'clock before going to
bed, and that's about all you saw of them. In the Darwin
house, they believed in playing with their children and
talking to them and being with them.
Q: It's endearing.
Goldsmith: It is.
Q: Why is the memory of Annie, Darwin's daughter who
died at 10 of scarlet fever, so significant in the film?
Goldsmith: It was the great emotional moment of
Darwin's life. What remnants he had of Christian faith, I
think, were absolutely killed stone dead by that. It touched
him enormously. He adored her, absolutely adored her. They had
a very special relationship. And he had to watch her die. I
mean, it was absolutely appalling.
"I suspect that Emma came to realize that her faith could
survive evolution."
Q: The film pivots on Darwin's relationship with Emma.
How did you get a sense of their relationship? Was there
correspondence?
Goldsmith: Obviously, they lived together 50 years, so
they didn't often write to each other. But he occasionally
went away to take the water cure and so on, and they would
write to each other. Also, Emma kept diaries. My great friend
Edna Healey, who wrote the life of Emma (Emma Darwin: The Inspirational Wife of a Genius), used the diaries and the letters extensively. You get a
very good picture of Emma from that. She was, how can I put
it? She was quite lazy. She didn't get up very early in the
morning. She liked to lie in bed.
What neither of them were—which was remarkable for those
days—neither of them was a snob. England was very, very
class-conscious. And Darwin and Emma simply weren't that way,
Emma particularly. She wasn't interested in fine clothes. She
was sort of casual, a very loving, wonderful mother.
We're very lucky. She wrote children's stories, and we found
one that she'd written, which we used bits of in the movie.
And they're enchanting, they're absolutely lovely, and they
give you the person.
The conflict between them
Q: What about Emma's religious views?
Goldsmith: She was a convinced Christian. She was a
Unitarian, which means she wasn't a kind of raving
evangelical. To quote Erasmus Darwin, Charles's grandfather,
"Unitarianism is a featherbed for fallen Christians." I love
that. So she wasn't a fundamentalist, but she did believe in
the basic tenets of the Christian faith. She believed in the
afterlife and so on. And it was a sorrow to her that her
husband didn't. She writes somewhere that she believes their
love will go on forever, and she would love it if he believed
the same. He couldn't, really.
Q: You have a line—it's one of my favorite lines
in the film—where Emma refers to "Notebook D," a famous
notebook in which Darwin writes about evolution, as "Notebook
D, for the devil." Did you conjure that yourself?
Goldsmith: I'm afraid I did, yes. A lot of the dialogue
in the movie is verbatim from letters and diaries and so on,
but I have allowed myself creative leeway occasionally, and
that's one of my little things, yes. I hope I'll be forgiven
by the Darwin community. I don't suppose I will be.
Q: Another great line, I believe, is a direct quote:
When Darwin is writing to his friend Joseph Hooker about his
ideas, he uses the phrase "it is like confessing a murder."
Goldsmith: Yes. It's so hard for us to imagine
ourselves back in that time when it was like murdering
something. He realized the intellectual consequences and
theological consequences and philosophical consequences of
what he was thinking.
Q: Do you think that, ultimately, Emma was able to
reconcile her religious views with Darwin's view of evolution?
Goldsmith: This is an area I didn't go deeply into. But
the Anglican Church and, indeed, the Roman Catholic Church,
quickly came to terms with evolution. After the initial
outrage and shock, horror, people realized that this actually
didn't chop the legs off conventional religion at all. And I
suspect that Emma came to realize that her faith could survive
evolution, as the faith of millions and millions and millions
of Christians has.
Q: Was it challenging to tell this story without having
the screen time to develop characters like Joseph Hooker and
Charles Lyell more?
Goldsmith: Not really, because it's a domestic drama,
and that's what we wanted to do. If we'd had millions, we
could have done it a completely different way, but we didn't.
And, in a way, I'm rather glad we didn't, because I think, as
a domestic drama on a small scale, it's much better for
television. Also, it focuses the mind wonderfully.
It's really about these few terrible weeks in Darwin's life.
And it's really about Darwin coming clean to Emma, if you
like, and then having to have that final conversation, a
conversation about God, which they'd avoided throughout their
marriage. They'd never really talked about it. They'd agreed
to just leave that to one side. Most marriages survive on
those strategies. But in these circumstances, they simply have
to have the conversation, and they do, and it's the emotional
climax of the movie.
Emma then has my favorite line, when Darwin's feeding flies to
a sundew flower, and he asks her about publishing, and she
says—and this is a verbatim quote from Emma—"I
suppose you're going to prove it's an animal." It's her way of
saying, "Yeah, go ahead and publish." She had a wit, Emma did.
Q: Well, we're very glad that those few terrible weeks
took place, aren't we?
Goldsmith: We are. Changed the world.
