I was watching the History channel last night and they featured Charles Darwin. Briefly, it said he was about 30 when he returned from his travels on the Beagle and then spent the next 40 years as a semi-recluse at his country home. It was a pretty big, nice home. I’m guessing there was a need for a hefty income to support his large family.
What did he do to generate that income?
I don’t know about that, but his job on board the Beagle, according to one of Stephen Jay Gould’s essays, was basically “Captain’s Companion”. The Captain needed someone not in the crew (with which he wasn’t supposed to socialize) to talk to. He was not the ship’s naturalist or scientist.
The wiki article on Darwin says:
I got tired of reading after that.
Basically, he was a “gentleman scientist.” His father was a wealthy doctor and businessman who set him up for life. His research was mostly self-funded. he was officially listed as an unpaid “Captain’s Companion” and a “Naturalist” on the Beagle, but he never actually punched a clock for anybody. He was independently well-heeled.
Perhaps it should be mentioned that it was once not unusual for science to be a “hobby,” of sorts for rich people, rather than a paid profession.
Not to mention that he was rather prolific as an author and lecturer.
As Diogenes has noted, Robert Darwin was fabulously wealthy by middle-class standards of the day, as indeed had been his father Erasmus. Not quite in the wealth league of the new industrialists like Boulton, Watt and the Wedgwoods, but very much part of the same social circle.
The expectation that Charles should train as a doctor was part of this family tradition - it was the profession that the family knew how to make lots of money in. While disappointed by his decision to switch from medicine, his father’s support saw him through university, the years at sea and setting him up as a married gentleman of science in London.
Charles also married into the Wedgwoods and so Emma’s background was wealthy as well.
Off the top of my head, I’m fairly sure that his father bought the houses - first in Gower Street and then the one at Downe - for him.
Once settled down into marriage, he starts investing seriously. Some land investments, but the main ones are in railway shares. A cautious investor, he managed to avoid the main crashes of the railway booms and busts. From the 1850s onwards he’s making perhaps £5-10,000 a year steady income from these investments alone.
His income from the books was non-trivial. But after a few talks to learned societies in the 1840s, I can’t think of any occasions where he gave a public lecture. Indeed I doubt he then did any sort of public speaking, other than to local audiences at parish and charitable meetings in Downe.
Given that the 150th anniversary is only days away, I’ll note that this includes the famous reading of the papers at the Linnean Society on 1st July 1858. They were presented by Lyell and Hooker. Neither Darwin nor Wallace was present.
For someone like Huxley, such income was necessary to make a living.
David Quammen’s The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution is an excellent and reasonable brief summary of the post-Beagle life of Charles Darwin, including his writing for the Geographical Society, formation of the theory of “descent” via “natural selection”, original publication and many later revisions of On the Origin of Species (all of which were remarkably popular and contributed to the aforementioned comfortable estate enjoyed by the Darwin family), and his marriage to the pious Emma Wedgewood (which may have made him hesitant to publish some of his more extreme opinions, particularly The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals), child rearing, and frequent illness. Oh, and a long tiring bit about barnacles and orchids. In short, Darwin’s job was “Figure stuff out and then write about it,” which is a good gig if you can swing it.
As bonzer notes, Darwin’s competitor/defender/advocate Thomas Huxley had to make a living, first by collecting specimens, later by public lectures and debates, and publishing of books and essays. Quammen talks a little about him, too, as well as Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus.
Stranger
Thanks for the recomendation, Stranger.
Another example of a 19th century “hobbiest scientist” is John Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh. He spent most of his career doing research at his private lab set up on the family estate. He held only one academic post and that only for 5 years. He was serious scientist and made many important discoveries, although he did engage in a certain amount of blue-sky research…
Another independently wealthy scientist was Henry Cavendish, discoverer of hydrogen. He belonged to a wealthy aristocratic family - both his grandfathers were dukes. The late Queen Mother had Cavendish ancestors on her mother’s side.
The book, Fabulous Science, by John Waller has a chapter on the Huxley-Wilberforce debates that came to be known as a battle between science and religion. In particular, Waller talks at length about how scientists in the nineteenth century were viewed, and how the struggle for professional scientists to be accepted socially needs to be taken into account when viewing the Huxley-Wilberforce debate (it wasn’t really a religion vs. science debate at all—Wilberforce himself was a “gentleman scientist” and there was genuine problems with Darwin’s theory as originally proposed).
Another wealthy scientist-inventor hobbyist is… just about everybody.
Virtually every scientist/inventor/hobbyist in history was wealthy or at least well-off with a generous patron, at least before the 19-20th century. Even the ones who came from lower class backgrounds mostly aquired fortunes through hard work before setting their sights on science.
Rayleigh … blue sky … 
Bravo, well done! But why is grass green? 
Thank you. Nice that someone noticed my joke and posted about it.
Made out of green cheese?
IIRC, quite a few people who weren’t independently wealthy made a living by collecting specimens from the wild. They sold them to wealthy people who had naturalism as a hobby, but weren’t ablebodied, fanatic or rich enough to collect specimens themselves, as Darwin did.
For instance, the Victorian era saw naturalist fads where everybody had to have a orchid collection, and, of course, the hothouse to go with it.
Or ones own fern collection. Fern collections were hot back in the day. Ever seen those monstrous rock heaps and grotto’s in Victorian gardens? Those were erected to show off the fern collection (growing on it), and one’s shell and fossil collection (cemented into the grotto itself, in a hugely kitch way).
Anyway, such amateur specimen hunters would be rather poor, and yet had to be knowlegable of their subject. At least knowledgable enough to bluff to their buyers. A lot of ridiculously obvious forged fossils date from those days.