The link between Charles Darwin and stuttering

From time to time, I’ve written at this website about the topic of stuttering. As a volunteer, I was responsible for media relations during the early years of the Canadian Stuttering Association, which I co-founded. I’m a co-founder, as well, of the Estonian Stuttering Association and the International Stuttering Association.

I have an interest in references in works of biography, and in accounts of research about stuttering, regarding the role that stuttering may have played in the lives of prominent stutterers, both famous and infamous.

I would be interested in any references that site visitors have come across; please contact me through this website if you know of such references or contact me at jpill@preservedstories.com

The following text provides some background related to this topic.

My own impressions and remembrances about stuttering go back to an otherwise cheerful day in a grade four class in Montreal. The event I recall takes place about a decade after the end of the Second World War. Teacher asks me a question; I try to answer. But as I realize with some concern, the words I wish to say are stuck in place at a location not clear to me. The realm inside of which the words are immobilized is not at some immediate, physical level of speech production. The issue is making its presence known, instead, at some other level, I know not where, in my brain.

In dealing with stuttering, a number of strategies may be adopted by some people who stutter, with the aim of diminishing the pain associated with listener responses, when speaking with normally fluent speakers. In my own case, I began to stutter at the age of six, my mother once told me. My way of speaking became a source of concern, first of all for my conversational partners and, in time, also for myself. In response, I adopted several strategies aimed at addressing this state of affairs.

Sometimes, I would choose to substitute what I sensed would be an easier word to say, in place of a more difficult word. The drawback of such a strategy is that a person who substitutes words, in this way, may end up speaking in circles; may lose the power of direct speech; and may say things that do not make a lot of sense. I also adopted a policy of not saying much of anything at all including on occasions when, otherwise, I would have chosen to freely express my thoughts and feelings. As well, I began to avoid some speaking situations altogether. Such strategies tend to remove a person from the mainstream of life.

Not all stutterers choose these methods of avoidance. Some will opt, instead, to stutter openly, in every speaking situation they encounter. Stutterers who adopt such a public-facing stance may, in addition, purposefully seek to position stuttering as an everyday, alternative mode of speech production, the manifestation of a particular category of neurodiversity. Such a strategy promises to lead to productive outcomes – which would, however, be easier to achieve for some people who stutter, and more difficult for others.

Charles Darwin

My impressions and remembrances about stuttering also concern what I’ve learned about prominent stutterers, famous and infamous. Names of famous stutterers, in particular, can be readily accessed online and in print. Information that is backed up by reliable citations, such as from printed sources dealing with biography, or dealing with research about stuttering, are of particular value, if we seek to learn about the role that stuttering may have played in lives of famous stutterers.

Profiles of stutterers whose names are attached, in contrast, to infamy, or disrepute, are also available but not as easy to find. Again, not much of value can be said about this category of stutterers, unless we have access to relevant citations from reliable sources, regarding the role that stuttering may have played in their lives.

Among famous stutterers, Charles Darwin, the author of the Origin of Species, and Thomas Willis, a seventeenth-century English anatomist and physician, widely regarded as the founder of neurology, come to mind at once. Nicolae Ceaușescu, the Romanian dictator, also comes to mind, in his case, as a person who stutters whose public profile denotes disrepute and infamy.

In reading about famous stutterers, one of the first sources I turned to was The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, in which Darwin refers to his enjoyment of meetings of the Plinian Society, which he attended during his two years at Edinburgh University, before he moved on to studies at Cambridge University. As the Oxford Languages dictionary notes, plinian refers to a type of volcanic eruption in which a narrow stream of gas and ash is violently ejected from a vent to a height of several miles. Founded in 1823 and expired in the 1840s, the society, Darwin writes, “consisted of students, and met in the University for the sake of reading papers on natural science and discussing them.”

Darwin speaks of delivering two brief papers at meetings of the society, of two small discoveries arising from his study of marine zoology. From his account, it would appear likely that Darwin’s stuttering would have been of a mild or moderate nature, which would not have interfered with giving talks at the Plinian Society. In contrast, the probability remains quite high, it may be suggested, that if a severe stutterer were to have made the attempt to engage in public speaking at such a meeting, the effort would not have turned out as well as a person may have wished to anticipate.

Darwin writes, in the autobiography: “I used regularly to attend, and the meetings had a good effect on me in stimulating my zeal and giving me new congenial acquaintances.” In the next sentence, he refers to a student who stammered severely when attempting to speak at a meeting:

One evening a poor young man got up, and after stammering for a prodigious length of time, blushing crimson, he at last slowly got out the words, “Mr. President, I have forgotten what I was going to say.” The poor fellow looked quite overwhelmed, and all the members were so surprised that no one could think of a word to say to cover his confusion.

Darwin makes it clear he does not identify with the stutterer he describes. He establishes his distance from the speaker by characterizing him as a “poor young man” and “poor fellow.” If Darwin had been a severe stutterer, it is unlikely, I believe, that he would have used such a characterization.

The observation that all the witnesses were stunned underlines that the social order – or what the sociologist Erving Goffman has called the interaction order – had, in this case, been irrevocably disrupted; the social interaction, which had until that point been ongoing and undisturbed, had now been transformed into a state of silent cessation. Given a state of shock which extended to each of the listeners, no attempt was made to set the interaction back on track; no one ventured forth, that is, to say a suitable word or two, in order to “cover [the young man’s] confusion.”

Having read the autobiography and several other books by and about him, I still did not know much about Darwin in his role as stutterer. With information provided by Janet Browne, however, the author of a series of carefully cited, in-depth studies of Darwin’s life and times, I finally came across an authoritative account, which I now look forward to reading, of the link between Darwin and stuttering.

I would be interested in any references, regarding topics discussed at this post, that site visitors have come across; please contact me through this website if you know of such references or contact me at jpill@preservedstories.com