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Lady Hope in 1887

Elizabeth Reid, Lady Hope (née Cotton^[1]; 9 December 1842–8 March 1922) was a British evangelist who is generally believed to be the Lady Hope who claimed in 1915 that she had visited the British naturalist Charles Darwin shortly before his death in 1882. Hope claimed that Darwin had recanted his theory of evolution on his deathbed and accepted Jesus Christ as his saviour.

Biography

Elizabeth Cotton was born in 1842 in Tasmania, Australia, the daughter of a British general, General Sir Arthur Cotton. Aged 35, she married a widower, retired Admiral Sir James Hope, who was 34 years her senior, in 1877 becoming Lady Hope of Carriden. Sir James died just four years later.

She and her father were part of the evangelist temperance movement, living in Beckenham, Kent about 6 miles from Downe (where Charles Darwin died on 19 April 1882) during the early 1880s.

Hope remarried in 1893 to T. A. Denny, an Irish businessman some 24 years her senior. She continued to use the name "Lady Hope" rather than "Mrs Denny". Denny died in 1909. Hope travelled to the United States in 1913. It was there in 1915, 33 years after Darwin's death, in Northfield, Massachusetts that the story first appeared.

Hope died in 1922 in Sydney, Australia, of cancer and is buried there.

The Lady Hope story

Charles Darwin in 1881, the year before his death.

Down House, Darwin's home, where Hope claimed she met Darwin.

The Lady Hope Story first appeared in an American Baptist newspaper the Watchman Examiner on 15 August 1915. The author was identified only as a "consecrated English woman", "Lady Hope", but research by L.G. Pine, a former editor of Burke's Peerage, found no Lady Hope other than Elizabeth Hope who was adult in the 1880s and still alive in 1915.

The article was preceded by a four-page report on a summer Bible conference held in Northfield, which that year ran from 30 July to 15 August 1915.

Original text of the article

The text reads:

It was one of those glorious autumn afternoons, that we sometimes enjoy in England, when I was asked to go in and sit with the well known professor, Charles Darwin. He was almost bedridden for some months before he died. I used to feel when I saw him that his fine presence would make a grand picture for our Royal Academy; but never did I think so more strongly than on this particular occasion.

He was sitting up in bed, wearing a soft embroidered dressing gown, of rather a rich purple shade.

Propped up by pillows, he was gazing out on a far-stretching scene of woods and cornfields, which glowed in the light of one of those marvelous sunsets which are the beauty of Kent and Surrey. His noble forehead and fine features seem to be lit up with pleasure as I entered the room.

He waved his hand toward the window as he pointed out the scene beyond, while in the other hand he held an open Bible, which he was always studying.

"What are you reading now?" I asked as I seated myself beside his bedside. "Hebrews!" he answered - "still Hebrews. 'The Royal Book' I call it. Isn't it grand?"

Then, placing his finger on certain passages, he commented on them.

I made some allusions to the strong opinions expressed by many persons on the history of the creation, its grandeur, and then their treatment of the earlier chapters of the Book of Genesis.

He seemed greatly distressed, his fingers twitched nervously, and a look of agony came over his face as he said: "I was a young man with unformed ideas. I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering all the time over everything, and to my astonishment, the ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion of them."

Then he paused, and after a few more sentences on "the holiness of God" and the "grandeur of this book," looking at the Bible which he was holding tenderly all the time, he suddenly said: "I have a summer house in the garden which holds about thirty people. It is over there," pointing through the open window. "I want you very much to speak there. I know you read the Bible in the villages. To-morrow afternoon I should like the servants on the place, some tenants and a few of the neighbours; to gather there. Will you speak to them?"

"What shall I speak about?" I asked.

"Christ Jesus!" he replied in a clear, emphatic voice, adding in a lower tone, "and his salvation. Is not that the best theme? And then I want you to sing some hymns with them. You lead on your small instrument, do you not?" The wonderful look of brightness and animation on his face as he said this I shall never forget, for he added: "If you take the meeting at three o'clock this window will be open, and you will know that I am joining in with the singing."

How I wished I could have made a picture of the fine old man and his beautiful surroundings on that memorable day!

Denial by Darwin's children

Darwin's family all denied the story and campaigned against it. Darwin's son Francis wrote in a letter on 28 May 1918:

Lady Hope's account of my father's views on religion is quite untrue. I have publicly accused her of falsehood, but have not seen any reply. My father's agnostic point of view is given in my Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. I., pp. 304–317. You are at liberty to publish the above statement. Indeed, I shall be glad if you will do so."

After the story had been revived in 1922, Darwin's daughter Henrietta Litchfield stated in The Christian for 23 February 1922 in an article titled: Charles Darwin's Death-Bed: Story of Conversion Denied by Mrs. R.B. Litchfield:

I was present at his deathbed, Lady Hope was not present during his last illness, or any illness. I believe he never even saw her, but in any case she had no influence over him in any department of thought or belief. He never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier. We think the story of his conversion was fabricated in the U.S.A. ... ...The whole story has no foundation what-so-ever."

In 1958 The Autobiography of Charles Darwin was republished edited by Darwin's granddaughter Nora Barlow, which restored various passages edited out by Francis Darwin in the original 1887 edition.

Subsequent retellings and academic investigation

Lady Hope gave her own slightly different account in a letter dated around 1919 – 1920 received by S. J. Bole, author of Battlefield of Faith (1940). The text is given in Dr Paul Marston's article.

The story spread and became a popular urban legend. The claims were republished as late as October 1955 in the Reformation Review and in the Monthly Record of the Free Church of Scotland in February 1957.

There has been subsequent academic investigation into the story. Ronald W. Clark's The Survival of Charles Darwin explained the story but did not go into much detail. In 1994 Open University lecturer and biographer James Moore published The Darwin Legend, which claimed that Hope had visited Darwin sometime between 28 September and 2 October 1881, when Francis and Henrietta were absent and Charles' wife Emma was present, but that Hope subsequently embellished the story. Moore outlined his assessment in Darwin — A 'Devil’s Chaplain'? of 2005.^[1] Dr Paul Marston's article gives a different analysis, but generally supports this conclusion. He draws attention to discrepancies between the 1915 article and Lady Hope's later letter, which more plausibly has Darwin lying on a sofa rather than being in bed, and does not include the suggestion that Darwin was "always studying" the Bible.

The claim has continued to be used by modern creationists, including Boniface Adoyo, the Chairman of the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya.^[2] Nevertheless, one of the most influential creationist organizations of the early twenty-first century, Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis has strongly debunked the legend.^[3]

Conclusion

False stories of deathbed recantations for other people are common. Indeed, in his 1879 biography of his grandfather, Charles Darwin himself recounted how the story had been started that his grandfather Erasmus Darwin had called for Jesus on his deathbed in 1802, and concluded by stating that "Such was the state of Christian feeling in this country at the beginning of the present century... we may at least hope that nothing of the kind now prevails".

Charles Darwin's views on religion were complex and varied over his lifetime. While he tried to avoid controversy, he tended towards agnosticism or deism, and consistently rejected Christianity in his later life. In fact, some of his views on Christianity were so critical that his son, Francis Darwin, decided to delete them from his father's autobiography before publication. They were restored only in 1958 by Charles Darwin's granddaughter Nora Barlow. In one of these passages Darwin wrote:

By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported, — and that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become, — that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible by us, — that the Gospels cannot be proven to have been written simultaneously with the events, — that they differ in many important details, far too important, as it seemed to me to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eye witnesses; — by such reflections as these, which I give not as having the least novelty or value, but as they influenced me, I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation. The fact that many fake religions have spread over large portions of the earth like wildfire had some weight with me. But I was very unwilling to give up my belief; I feel sure of this, for I can remember often and often inventing day-dreams of old letters between distinguished Romans, and manuscripts being discovered at Pompeii or elsewhere, which confirmed in the most striking manner all that was written in the Gospels. But I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct.

References

• Clark, R. W. (1984). The Survival of Charles Darwin. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-380-69991-5
• Moore, James (1994). The Darwin Legend. New York: Baker Books. ISBN 0-8010-6318-3
• Moore, James (1999). "Telling tales: evangelicals and the Darwin legend." In David Livingstone, et al. Evangelicals and science in historical perspective. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. 1999, pp. 220-233.
• Moore, James (2005). "Darwin—A 'Devil's Chaplain'?" American Public Media. Retrieved on 2009-01-08

Footnotes

^  Her maiden name is sometimes incorrectly given as Stapleton-Cotton. This is an error that appeared in Burke's Peerage; the Stapelton-Cotton name branched off the Cotton lineage after her ancestors had branched.

External links

• talk.origins on the Lady Hope story
• Newman, Robert C. (no date) The Darwin Conversion Story: An Update. Biblical Theological Seminary
• Marston, Paul. 2002. Charles Darwin and Christian Faith, from Scibel
• Thompson, Bert. 1991. Did Darwin Repent?, from ApologeticsPress.org
• More information from the Stephen Jay Gould Archive
• Anon. 1997. Book review of The Darwin Legend