Charles and Emma (11 page)

With a packed lunch in hand, Emma and Charles took the train back to London. “We ate our sandwiches with grateful hearts for all the care that was taken of us, and the bottle of water was the greatest comfort,” Emma reported in a letter to her mother.

As Charles had arranged, when they got home to Gower Street, the fires were blazing in welcome.

 

Chapter 13

Definition of Happiness

 

A thousand thanks to you, dearest Emma, for your delightful
letter which from the cheerful happy tone of it drew tears of
pleasure from my old eyes. I am truly thankful to find you
so happy, and still more so that you are sensible of it,
and I pray heaven that this may only be the
beginning of a life full of peace and tranquility.

—B
ESSY
W
EDGWOOD TO
E
MMA
, F
EBRUARY
1839

 

I
n Jane Austen's novel
Pride and Prejudice,
Charlotte Lucas tells her friend Elizabeth Bennet that it is better to go into a marriage blind to the other person's faults. “Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other, or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the least.” Charles and Emma had gotten to know each other through letters and visits, but like any couple, they would only really get to know each other by living together.

But happiness in marriage, as Austen's heroine Elizabeth
Bennet knows, is not only a matter of chance. It's also a matter of love, and a matter of determination on both sides. And willingness to compromise. “It is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life,” Charlotte Lucas continues in her speech to Elizabeth Bennet. After a short time with Emma, Charles knew he was going to have to make a serious compromise. Little Miss Slip-Slop had grown up into Big Mrs. Slip-Slop. Unlike Charles, she was not careful to put things back where she got them; the freethinking atmosphere at Maer had not inculcated order into her as the strict atmosphere at the Mount had into Charles. Their new home was not going to be as neat and organized as Charles liked. But Emma was worth it; so, as his daughter Henrietta wrote much later, he “made up his mind to give up all his natural taste for tidiness.” He decided he “would not allow himself to feel annoyed by her calm disregard for such details.” He would keep his study neat and orderly, but the rest of the house would be how Emma wanted.

In their first few days together, they mostly stayed in—it was snowing. But they also did some shopping for furniture, dishes, and clothes, including a morning gown for Emma. It was “a sort of clarety-brown satin,” she wrote to Elizabeth, and she felt it was “very unobjectionable.” They borrowed some novels from the library, starting a lifelong tradition of reading together—usually Emma read to Charles while he rested from his work. Charles liked novels with happy endings, and he once wrote, “I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me…and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily—against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if it be a pretty woman all the better.”

Charles and Emma both took setting up house seriously. For once, Charles did not mind spending money. But he did start recording every pound he spent in a pocket account book and would continue that practice for the rest of his life. He wrote that they started with £573 in the bank and £36 cash in hand. They spent money on medicine, a coffeepot, a pickle pot, stationery with their new address (12 Upper Gower Street) printed on it, a haircut for Charles, shaving soap, beer, biscuits, a table for the pantry, wages for the servants, fares for hackney coaches, and tickets for the opera. Charles also bought a going-away present for Syms Covington.

Soon they ventured out and “went slopping through the melted snow,” as Emma wrote to Elizabeth, to pick out a pianoforte that was to be a present from Emma's father. Both Emma and Charles were so thrilled at the prospect of having the beautiful mahogany grand—Emma for herself, Charles because he knew it would make her happy—that when they were walking on Gower Street a few days later and saw a pianoforte van, Charles shouted out to see if it was going to number 12. It was. They put the piano in the small back room, where, even though it was cramped, they spent most of their time, for it looked out on their garden. This room seemed more like the country and therefore more like home than any other part of the house.

Emma gave Charles “a large dose of music every evening,” as she said, and even though he could never remember a tune and was probably tone deaf, he enjoyed her playing very much. (“Charms of music and female chit-chat,” as he had written on the
Marry
side of his list.) In that first week they also gave their first dinner party, as sort of practice, for Hensleigh and Fanny and Erasmus. Erasmus was condescending at first; he said the dinner was just like those he gave. But, as
Emma reported home, “when the plum-pudding appeared he knocked under, and confessed himself conquered very humbly.”

Charles had written in one of his notebooks, “Definition of happiness the number of pleasant ideas passing through mind in given time.” Now he found happiness not just in his mind; he found it in real life.

But sad news arrived during this happy time. Caroline and Jos's baby had died. Emma was quite shocked, though Charles had known it was coming from the way his sister described the baby's appearance and symptoms. At that time many infants died—as many as one in four or five, depending on social class and living conditions. To lose a baby was not unusual, but it was, of course, very sad. Caroline, who had married late, was devastated. Elizabeth wrote to an aunt, “the thoughts of this precious child and the preparations for it have occupied her in an intense way.” The death had an effect on everyone in the family, including Charles and Emma, who were hoping to have their own baby soon.

For the newlyweds there was much to absorb and to get used to, going from single to married, and without a honeymoon for a transition. (Neither one of them wanted to take a trip.) Emma wrote to her mother that Charles wasn't quite used to her “honours yet.” He picked up a letter addressed to her and “could not conceive who Mrs. C. Darwin could mean.”

But time and shared experiences got them used to being husband and wife. One day, as they were out walking near the Athenaeum Club, they saw Leonard Horner—father of the Horner girls. He looked like he was trying to avoid them. “Charles said his face, trying to pretend not to see us, was the most comical thing he ever saw.” Later that evening, Charles
received a note from Mr. Horner. Apparently his report of seeing the newly married Charles Darwin with his bride made a big impact on the Horneritas. Together Charles and Emma imagined the scene.

Emma even got Charles to go to church with her. She kept hoping he'd find a way to have faith. Erasmus's friend Harriet Martineau had a brother, James, who was a Unitarian theologian. James Martineau preached that the gospels could transform an individual into a believer just through their beauty, not through strict, traditional belief in every word of the Bible. That's what Emma hoped would happen with Charles. If only he would take the gospels to heart. Yet perhaps going to church wasn't good for him. She wrote to her sister Charlotte, “My Charles has been very unwell since Sunday. We went to church at King's College and found the church not warmed, and not more than half-a-dozen people in it, and he was so very cold that I believe it was that which has made him so unwell.”

So the dance of a married couple had begun. She played the piano for him, and though he had a tin ear, he listened with enjoyment and love. He put up with her sloppiness; she understood his need for long hours at work. She agreed to go to fewer parties and dinners since he did not like them. He went to the theater with her, and to church.

Fanny wrote to a friend that the couple was settling in to married life well. “Emma is looking very pretty and unanxious, and I suppose there are not many two people happier than she and Charles.”

Emma kept notes in a little date-book diary, as she had for years. She did not write at length—just small notations about the weather and about household events: “Erasmus drank tea” and “Wrote to Mamma” and “Wrote to Elizabeth,” “Church at
King's college,” “Fanny and Hensleigh here,” “Dined Dr. Holland's,” and “Party at Lyell's.” Charles took Emma to one of his old favorite haunts, which Emma recorded in her diary only as an enthusiastic, “Zoo!”

In April she made the little note “Charles Journal.” Charles's first book was to be published that summer—his account of the voyage on the
Beagle.
It was part of a multivolume set called
Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of HMS
Adventure
and
Beagle
Between the years 1826 and 1836.
The other volumes were written by Captain FitzRoy. Darwin's part would be called, first,
Journal and Remarks.
It later became known simply as
The Voyage of the
Beagle. He had kept a 770-page diary while on the voyage; the book was culled from that. When the page proofs arrived, he was nervous about how his book would be accepted.

In spite of his happiness, Charles was not well physically. He suffered from stomach problems, fatigue, and at times, nervousness, as well as headaches. Emma had had headaches, too, since she was a teenager. She kept track of his symptoms as well as her own in her diary. She also made note of her menstrual cycle.

And on August 15, Emma wrote, “halfway now I think from symptoms.”

 

Chapter 14

Pregnant Thoughts

 

I should be most unhappy if I thought
we did not belong to each other forever.

—E
MMA TO
C
HARLES, AROUND
F
EBRUARY
1839

 

E
mma was pregnant. They had both hoped for a baby, and they were thrilled, but pregnancy was dangerous in the nineteenth century. About one in every two hundred women died in childbirth. As Emma knew well from her sister Fanny's early death, one never knew when her time would come. Or her husband's. Women were at greater risk because of pregnancy and childbirth, but Charles's health continued to worsen, and they didn't know what was wrong with him. Were his stomach upsets, heart palpitations, fatigue, and bouts of giddiness symptoms of something that might be fatal? What if Charles died soon? What if Emma did not survive this pregnancy and childbirth? Would they meet again in heaven? The question of what happens after death had a new urgency for Emma.

Meanwhile as Charles worked hard, not only on his geology, but also on his ideas about the transmutation of species, the more he learned, the more skeptical he became about religion. Every morning he left Emma sleeping comfortably in their bed, to go “write about coral formations,” as he wrote to his sister Caroline. He worked until about ten, and then had breakfast with Emma. Afterward they sat together, and Charles watched “the clock as the hand travels sadly too fast to half past eleven—Then to my study & work till 2 o'clock luncheon time.” They spent afternoons together at home often, with Emma doing needlework in Charles's study. Sometimes they did errands in town together, but Charles also went off to scientific meetings or to talk to an expert about his specimens. In the evenings, Emma read to Charles and played piano for him. And “then bedtime makes a charming close to the day,” wrote Charles. He told Caroline that Emma was “essentially going on well & undeniably growing.”

But the gulf Emma felt between them pained her. While she tended to the running of the house, hiring and firing cooks and other servants, planning meals that might help settle Charles's stomach, while her body cradled and nourished their developing child, Charles was in his study with his specimens, writing in his notebooks, and honing his arguments. Emma wondered if he was keeping himself open to the possibility of God. She took out a piece of paper and while he worked, she began once again to set down her thoughts about religion.

She wrote that she knew he was “acting conscientiously & sincerely & sincerely wishing, & trying to learn the truth.” He could not be wrong in pursuing his science, she said. But Emma had grave doubts that science was the answer to everything. She knew that Charles prized openness and honesty as she did and she hoped “that my own dearest will indulge me.”

She worried that he was so busy with his science that he wouldn't look elsewhere for answers. “Your mind & time are full of the most interesting subjects & thoughts of the most absorbing kind, viz following up your own discoveries—but which make it very difficult for you to avoid casting out as interruptions other sorts of thoughts which have no relation to what you are pursuing or to be able to give your whole attention to both sides of the question.”

Emma knew that Charles did look at every side of a question. He had even shown her his
Marry, Not Marry
list and other notes he had written about the marriage question. So she asked him to look at the religious side again. She told him she thought he was unduly influenced by other people, especially his older brother, Erasmus, “whose understanding you have such a very high opinion of & whom you have so much affection for, having gone before you.” Emma knew Erasmus had what she considered heretical thoughts. Since he had paved the way, it made it easier for Charles to go down this path without fear. But Emma thought these kinds of doubts should scare Charles; they scared her. She asked him to take the time and effort to move away from Erasmus and the other doubters and to look at the other side. “It seems to me also that the line of your pursuits may have led you to view chiefly the difficulties on one side, & that you have not had time to consider & study the chain of difficulties on the other, but I believe you do not consider your opinion as formed.”