The Evolution of Darwin and Lincoln

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Newscom Four score and 120 years ago, two revolutionary thinkers were born on the same day, a world apart. The Daily Beast talked to Adam Gopnik, author of a new dual biography, Angels and Ages, about why they're still so influential, what Obama has learned from them, and who wrote the better beach read.

Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were both born on February 12, 1809. By the end of the nineteenth century, they stood as skyscrapers of world thought to be approached only by intrepid biographers. Adam Gopnik, the longtime New Yorker writer and author of the new book Angels and Ages, comes at the task by considering them both as literary men. “They matter most because they wrote so well,” he writes. Where Gopnik’s Lincoln is a lawyerly speechmaker, taking his crowds through delicately-constructed arguments, his Darwin is a really Victorian novelist with a magnifying glass: “a craftsman of enormous resource and a lot of quiet mischief.” More than just a literary study, Angels and Ages allows Gopnik to think about what the two men might have been like to know. He talked to The Daily Beast about Lincoln’s Shakespeare fixation, Darwin’s parenting skills, and what Barack Obama learned from both men.

Of all the ways you could have approached Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, why approach them as writers?

I guess because a) because it’s the only thing I have any expertise in—putting down sentences; and b) because I thought that all the things that had done, in a funny way we remember them most because of what they wrote. If you think about it, if Darwin had not written a book like The Origin of Species, and The Descent of Man, which are masterpieces of English prose, and of reasoning, he would be part of the history of science, not part of the living consciousness of contemporary people. And similarly, we remember Lincoln for his words—for the speeches that he made. Had he been the same man, doing the same things, but an awkward or ineloquent speaker, he would not register in our heads in anything like the same way.

I think Lincoln scholars tend to clean up how estranged he was from his own father. He didn’t go to his father’s funeral, which is a pretty rough statement.

So how did Lincoln—who had little formal education—become a great writer of speeches?

It’s so hard to figure. I think it was that he had very pure models to work with, which sometimes works better for people.

He had basically the model of Shakespeare, the Declaration of Independence—Jefferson’s writing—and legal argument. And those, I think, are the three elements that go in and out of his speech. So there’s a certain purity of purpose to it, which creates that great directness of address. And I think, as I say in the book, what’s really beautiful in Lincoln’s speeches, and what I wasn’t prepared for until I sat down to read them right through, was the combination of pedagogy, at times picayune legal argument, and grand summary. Or not grand summary, but flat, memorable summary.

Lincoln had a lot of Shakespeare rattling around in his brain.

All the time. He read Shakespeare truly obsessively. Before he was President, [and] while he was President, and I think those rhythms got inside of him in an extremely natural way. It’s also kind of backwards frontier humor, and we know he loved that kind of stuff as well. And I don’t think you can begin to fully grasp what it means for a kid coming from an essentially illiterate background to discover writing and reading.

You know, my father’s father was a butcher. He could read, but it wasn’t his favorite pastime. I see in my own father, who was a professor of English—he’s retired now—that books are not furniture, books are the fireplace. Books are the sacred hearth of your existence. Clearly, Lincoln felt that way as well. He sort of couldn’t believe that he had managed to make an existence for himself where he actually owned books. That he owned all the books he wanted, and could read books whenever he wanted to. And I think that’s one of the great breaks in life, is people coming from a simple background who discover writing and reading, and find it as essential to them as breathing.

Lincoln was self-conscious about his father, even to the point of belittling him.

I think the Lincoln scholars—from whom I’ve learned everything I know about Lincoln—I think they tend to clean up how estranged Lincoln was from his own father. My own sense is that he did not like the old man, he saw him as an obstacle to his own self-emancipation. And he didn’t go to his father’s funeral, which is a pretty rough statement.