Charles and Emma (14 page)

—C
HARLES TO
J
OSEPH
H
OOKER
, J
ANUARY
11, 1844

 

O
n September 22, 1842, just a week after they moved into Down House, Emma wrote in her diary “very feverish, violent headaches” and on September 23, “Mary born.” Mary Eleanor looked like Emma's mother, Bessy, which made Emma glad. She hoped the baby would take after her mother not only in looks, but also in personality. Emma worried that each day's post would bring the news that her mother or father had died. A new life to replace the old, fading ones was a blessing, and the new baby should have been a great comfort to Emma. But Mary was weak and sickly.

On October 16, Emma wrote in her little diary, simply, “died.”

A few weeks after moving into their new home, they had to bury a baby. Emma bravely wrote to her sister-in-law Fanny,
“Our sorrow is nothing to what it would have been if she had lived longer and suffered more.”

Charles was devastated; he had had very little experience with death. His mother had died when he was eight, and all he remembered of her or her death was the body lying on the bed. What had struck him more was the funeral of a soldier he witnessed soon afterward. To the end of his life, he remembered that scene and how it struck him so forcefully. He wrote, “I can still see the horse with the man's empty boots and carbine suspended to the saddle, and the firing over the grave.” He had hated funerals ever since. Now, thirty-four years later, Charles had to see his own little baby put into a grave. They buried Mary Eleanor at the Down churchyard cemetery. Emma told Fanny, “Charles is well to-day and the funeral over, which he dreaded very much.”

Although both Emma and Charles were struck hard by the death, they found some solace in keeping busy. Emma wrote to Fanny, “I keep very well and strong and am come down-stairs to-day. With our two other dear little things you need not fear that our sorrow will last long, though it will be long indeed before we either of us forget that poor little face.”

Charles went back to his notes about geology to work on a book about volcanic islands. This helped to distract him from his grief and his anxieties about his other children. He also threw himself into house renovations, to make the old and ugly house more livable, and even beautiful. He had written to his sister Catherine just before they had moved in, “I feel sure I shall become deeply attached to Down, with a few improvements—It will be very difficult not to be extravagant there.” And so it was. Charles took it upon himself to make the house and the grounds so beautiful that Emma would love it as much as she loved Maer. Over the next couple of years,
Charles had the drawing room made bigger and added a kitchen wing so there would be more room for the growing number of servants. He moved the lane next to the house farther away, to provide more privacy. He planted flowers like those at Maer. Emma had always felt that the flowers at Maer were more beautiful than anywhere else, and Charles wanted her to feel the same way about the blossoms at Down.

Charles loved the room that he had picked to be his study. It faced northeast, which meant that it wouldn't be too hot from direct sun but would be lit by a few rays of sunshine early in the morning when he started work. He fixed up the room just the way he wanted it, with wooden shelves built in an alcove. He used these shelves to file his notes, his notebooks, and pages of books that he tore out. (He didn't always bother keeping whole books, just the pages he found interesting.) He had a table in the middle of the room where he sat to look at his specimens through a magnifying glass or simple microscope, and to read his scientific papers. He sat on a high-backed chair that he had raised up on an iron frame with wheels, so he could move around the room. When he wrote, he put a board across his lap. Since he was often in need of a privy, he put one in the corner of the room, screened off for privacy. Behind the curtain he had a chamber pot, bowls, water, and towels.

Charles added a strip of land about three hundred yards long on the western boundary of the property. He bought it from his neighbor John Lubbock. There, Emma and Charles designed a path after one they both loved at Maer. They planted it with trees—hazel, alder, birch, and dogwood—as well as privet hedges and holly bushes. Emma had ivy planted, and bluebells, anemones, cowslips, and primroses. They made a path covered with sand from the woods. They called their
path the Sandwalk, and it became Charles's walking and thinking path as well as a place for the children to play.

Charles and Emma both soon became very attached to Down House, and everything about it. When, a few years later, the postal authorities changed the spelling of the town to Downe, the Darwins did not go along. They had moved into Down House, and Down it would remain.

 

In the autumn of 1842, not long after baby Mary died, Emma's brother Hensleigh fell ill, and Emma invited Fanny to send their oldest children to live at Down House for a couple of months. She would take care of them so Fanny could take care of Hensleigh. The new house now bustled with the activity of five children: Julia Wedgwood, called Snow because she had been born in a snowstorm, age nine; James (called Bro), eight; and Erny, five; plus Doddy, not quite three, and Annie, one and a half.

During this visit Emma discovered that bribery was a good way to get a child to do what you wanted. She overheard one of the nursemaids trying to convince little Erny to put on a warm coat. He refused. Emma intervened. She told him that she would give him a shilling if he wore it now, and would give him a shilling every time he put it on. He put on the coat for the shilling. The next day he put it on again and declared, “I don't want to have that shilling, Aunt Emma; this coat is so nice now I have got it on.”

The children said that Emma never used bribery in important moral matters, such as being kind to another person or an animal, but if she wanted a child to put on a coat or shoes, or talk a little more softly at lunch, she had no problem offering a bribe. Emma and Charles were not strict, and they took pains to explain to the children clearly what few rules
there were. There was, therefore, very little willful disobedience. But sometimes, a small bribe was just the thing.

The hustle and bustle of all the children helped Emma with her grief over the death of her baby, and it distracted her from worry about her ill parents. Charles's work and the house renovations comforted him. And Charles and Emma found consolation in each other. In a few months Emma was pregnant again.

But by the next summer, when Emma was seven months pregnant, her fears were realized. Josiah had grown weaker and in July 1843, he died. Emma went to Maer to be with her family and that September 25, Henrietta was born. They called her Etty. There were now three healthy children for Charles and Emma to love.

Charles missed them terribly when, a few months after Etty was born, he went to Shrewsbury to see his father and sisters. He wrote to Emma, “I got into a transport over the thought of Doddy and talked, like an old fool, for nearly an hour about nothing else…I ended with protest that although I had done Doddy justice, they were not to suppose that Annie was not a good little soul—bless her little body. Absence makes me very much in love with my own dear three chickens.”

But always percolating and demanding his attention was Charles's species book. In January 1844, he wrote to his friend Joseph Hooker, a botanist, that he was working on a theory about the origin of species. “At last gleams of light have come, & I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.”

He most certainly did not want to murder God. But he felt certain he was right that species were changeable, and
were changing. He continued to make observations and amass facts. As usual when Charles had a question, he went to someone who knew far more about the subject than he. Not just geologists, paleontologists, and ornithologists, but also farmers, breeders, and his hairdresser. He had written in his “D” notebook, “My hairdresser (Willis) says that strength of hair goes with colour. Black being strongest.” Was there a hereditary reason for that, he wondered, or for skin color? Would dark skin prevent malaria?

All the observations he made—on himself, his children, the animals and plants around him—were in service to his theory of natural selection. Looking at each organism he studied, he tried to work out how that species had been formed. He always thought, too, about the objections people would raise. And by the next summer, Charles had finished his book
Geological Observations on the Volcanic Islands Visited During the Voyage of HMS
Beagle. So it was with great purpose that, as soon as he sent his volcano book in to his publisher, Charles turned back to the thirty-five-page species draft he had written two summers before at Maer. By early July 1844, he had expanded and rewritten the rough pencil draft. He felt it was good enough to be copied out by someone with a neater hand, so he gave it to the schoolmaster at Down.

When he got it back, seeing his species theory in print—in handwriting other than his own—was scary. His draft did not answer every objection he could think of, and there were probably still more objections he hadn't thought of yet. He knew his ideas were practically blasphemous and so his book had to be as irrefutable as he could make it. He wasn't nearly ready to publish yet.

But what if he died before he felt ready to publish it? It was not unreasonable for him to anticipate his own death—
he had been ill for so long, and the doctors could not figure out what was wrong with him. Had he contracted an illness on the voyage? Did he have some fatal disease? He did not know if his stomach problems and his heart palpitations would lead to his death. He could succumb at any moment—in fact, anyone could.

He had to entrust this draft to someone and give that person instructions on how to publish it in the event of his death. Whom could he trust to make sure it would happen? He didn't turn to Hensleigh, or even to his brother Erasmus, who would not be at all shocked by his theory or have any reluctance to publish it. He turned instead to the one person he had the most faith in, the person he could trust above all others to carry out his wishes.

On July 5, 1844, he wrote, “My. Dear. Emma. I have just finished my sketch of my species theory. If, as I believe that my theory is true & if it be accepted even by one competent judge, it will be a considerable step in science. I therefore write this, in case of my sudden death, as my most solemn & last request…that you will devote 400£ to its publication & further will yourself, or through Hensleigh, take trouble in promoting it…” He went on to suggest possible editors for the book—Lyell, or perhaps Henslow.

He rarely sent anything out without Emma reading it first. But how would she respond to his bold theory? In between nursing baby Etty, supervising the kitchen and nursery staffs, taking care of Charles, and playing with the older children, Emma read the draft. She made notes in places where she didn't understand what he was saying, as she often did on his papers.

“Not clear,” she wrote a few times, when she thought his language could be more lucid. In two places, where Charles
explained how the eye, such a complex organ, had evolved, she challenged his theory. “A great assumption/E.D.,” she wrote. And two pages later, “Another bold saying.” To believe that the eye had evolved from tiny changes over many years was, to Emma, to make a leap of faith.

Charles had been worried about the eye two summers earlier when he wrote that pencil draft. In fact, he was worried about the formation of the eye and other complex organs even back when he was still living in London. He had written in his “D” notebook, “it will be necessary to show how the first eye is formed.” Charles felt that if he could explain the evolution of the eye, he could convince even the harshest skeptic that he was right. Emma was in so many ways the perfect reader. And despite her misgivings about the religious ramifications, Emma not only agreed she would publish this draft in case of his sudden death, she also helped him make it better.

After Emma's reading, he was ready to test it out on a few others. He sent a copy to Joseph Hooker and later to another botanist, in America, Asa Gray. Slowly he started to let his idea out to other trusted friends. He had a unique theory; he knew he was sitting on something big, and original.

But in October of 1844, a book called
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
came out. It was published anonymously. The author argued that species were transforming all the time. The author used several of the examples and many of the same arguments as Charles had just done in his draft. The author used Lyell's geological theories, that the earth was constantly changing, and applied it to the living world, just as Charles did.
Vestiges'
argument included fossils, the development of embryos, similarities in anatomy among species, and even behavior, just as Charles did. The book differed in two
major ways (other than the anonymity, which Charles would not do): the
Vestiges
author had not figured out evolution by natural selection, the mechanism that Charles believed drove the creation of species. And the
Vestiges
author did do something Charles had not done even in his sketch—the book included mankind and the origin of all life in its scheme. It said that human beings came from orangutans, like Jenny in the zoo. Under the protection of anonymity, the author felt free to go against God.

What upset Charles most about
Vestiges
was the huge public reaction to the book—both positive and negative. Even though it was highly controversial for all the reasons Charles knew that his would be, it sold extremely well. There were three more editions in the first year, and it was published in America almost immediately.

Charles watched as in drawing rooms and scientific clubs all over the British Empire, in newspapers and journals around the English-speaking world, people argued about the book. Not only what it said, but who wrote it. (The author turned out to be a journalist named Robert Chambers, who only confessed to its authorship at the end of his life.)