The Expression of The Emotions in Man and Animals - History of The Book

History of The Book

In the weeks before Queen Victoria's coronation in 1838, Charles Darwin sought medical advice on his mysterious and troubling physical symptoms, and then retreated to Scotland for a period of rest and a "geologizing expedition" - but actually spent some of his time revisiting the old haunts of his Edinburgh undergraduate days. On the day of the coronation - 28 June 1838 - Darwin was in Edinburgh. A few days later, he opened his private notebook on "metaphysics" (philosophical speculation) - the M Notebook - and, over the next three months, filled it with his thoughts about the possible interaction of hereditary factors with the mental and behavioural aspects of human and animal life. The critical importance of the M notebook has been customarily viewed in its relationship to Darwin's conception of natural selection as the central mechanism of evolutionary development - which he recorded in the contemporaneous B and D Notebooks - and seems to have grasped around September 1838. These notes have a tentative and fragmented quality, especially in Darwin's descriptions of conversation with his father (a successful doctor with a special interest in psychiatric problems) about recurring patterns of behaviour in succeeding generations of his patients' families. Darwin was anxious about the materialistic drift in his thinking - and of the disrepute which this could attract in early Victorian England - at the time, he was mentally preparing for marriage with his cousin Emma Wedgwood who had refined Christian sensibilities. On 21 September 1838, Darwin recorded a confused and disturbing dream in which he was involved in a public execution where the corpse came to life and claimed to have faced death like a hero. Darwin formed the core of his evolutionary theory at the same time that he was considering a scientific understanding of human behaviour and family life - and was in some emotional turmoil. A discussion of the significance of Darwin's early notebooks - together with an annotated presentation of their text - can be found in Paul H. Barrett's Metaphysics, Materialism and the Evolution of Mind - Early Writings of Charles Darwin (1980).

"Mental qualities are determined by the size, form and constitution of the brain: and these are transmitted by hereditary descent." George Combe (1828) The Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to External Objects.

"One is tempted to believe phrenologists are right about habitual exercise of the mind altering form of head, and thus these qualities become hereditary....When a man says I will improve my powers of imagination, and does so, - is not this free will...." Charles Darwin (1838) The M Notebook.

"To avoid stating how far I believe in Materialism, say only that emotions, instincts, degrees of talent, which are hereditary are so because brain of child resembles parent stock - (and phrenologists state that brain alters)...." Charles Darwin (1838) The M Notebook.

Little of this surfaced in On The Origin of Species in 1859, although Chapter 7 contains a mildly expressed argument on instinctive behaviour. In the public management of his evolutionary theory, Darwin understood that its relevance to human emotional life could draw a hostile response. Nevertheless, while preparing the text of The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication in 1866, Darwin decided focus his public statement of evolutionary biology with a book on human ancestry, sexual selection and secondary sexual characteristics including emotional expression. After his initial correspondence with the psychiatrist James Crichton-Browne Darwin set aside his material concerning emotional expression to complete The Descent of Man, which covered human ancestry and sexual selection. Darwin concluded work on The Descent of Man on 15 January 1871. On 17 January 1871, he started work on The Expression of the Emotions, employing the unused material on emotional expression; and, on 22 August 1872, he finished work on the proofs. In this way, Darwin brought his evolutionary theory into close approximation with behavioural science, although many Darwin scholars have remarked on a kind of spectral Lamarckism haunting the text of the Emotions.

Darwin notes the universal nature of expressions in the book:

. This connection of mental states to the neurological organization of movement (as the word emotion suggests) was central to Darwin's understanding of emotion. Darwin himself displayed many biographical links between his psychological life and locomotion, taking long, solitary walks around Shrewsbury after his mother's death in 1817, in his seashore rambles near Edinburgh with the Lamarckian evolutionist Robert Edmond Grant in 1826/1827, and in the laying out of the sandwalk - his "thinking path" - at Down House in Kent in 1846. These aspects of Darwin's personal development are discussed in John Bowlby's (1990) psychoanalytic biography of Darwin.

Darwin points to a shared human and animal ancestry in sharp contrast to the arguments deployed in Charles Bell's Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression (1824), which claimed that there were divinely created human muscles to express uniquely human feelings. Bell's famous aphorism on the subject was:

In The Expression, Darwin reformulates the issues at play:

- hinting at a neurological intimacy of language with psychomotor function (body language). However, Darwin agreed with Bell's emphasis on the expressive functions of the muscles of respiration. Darwin had listened to an attack on Bell's opinions by the phrenologist William A.F. Browne at the Plinian Society in December 1826, when he was a medical student at Edinburgh University. However, Darwin later explained that he had been alerted to Bell's theory of expression in 1840, when he chanced on the first edition of Bell's book during a visit to his wife's family in Staffordshire. Darwin's response to Bell's neurological theories is discussed by Lucy Hartley in her Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth Century Culture (2001).

In the composition of the book, Darwin drew on world-wide responses to his questionnaire (circulated in the early months of 1867) concerning emotional expression in different ethnic groups, on hundreds of photographs of actors, babies and children, and on descriptions of psychiatric patients in the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum at Wakefield in West Yorkshire. Darwin corresponded intensively with James Crichton-Browne, the superintendent of the Wakefield asylum. At the time, Crichton-Browne was preparing his West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports. Crichton-Browne was the son of the phrenologist William A.F. Browne, and Darwin remarked to him that the book "should be called by Darwin and Browne". Darwin also drew on his personal experience of the symptoms of bereavement. He considered other approaches to the study of emotions, including their depiction in the arts - discussed by the anatomist Robert Knox in his Manual of Artistic Anatomy (1852) and by the actor Henry Siddons in his Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action (1807) - but abandoned them as unreliable.