Charles and Emma (15 page)

Hooker was amused by the book, which annoyed Charles to no end. He wrote to his friend, “I have also read the ‘Vestiges,' but have been somewhat less amused at it than you appear to have been: the writing and arrangement are certainly admirable, but his geology strikes me as bad, and his zoology far worse.” Adam Sedgwick, Charles's old geology professor from Cambridge, declared that
Vestiges
was so uninformed and so inaccurate it could have been written by a woman! Some religious people were furious that it ignored the biblical account of creation and man's expulsion from the Garden of Eden. In general, people who felt England needed a
new social order found
Vestiges
appealing; those who wanted society to remain as it was hated the book.

Charles knew that in order to avoid the criticisms being leveled at
Vestiges,
he would have to build up his argument even more, and gather more examples, more indisputable factual evidence. His own species book had suffered a serious blow, if not a sudden death. He decided to work on a new edition of his
Journal of Researches,
putting in some more hints about his species view. But he had no desire to be the center of a controversy like the one
Vestiges
had started. He would find something else to write about.

 

Chapter 18

Barnacles and Babies

 

My chief enjoyment and sole employment throughout life has
been scientific work; and the excitement from such work makes
me for the time forget, or drives away, my daily discomfort.

—C
HARLES, IN HIS
A
UTOBIOGRAPHY

 

I
n July 1845, about nine months after Charles read
Vestiges,
George Darwin was born. There were now four children at Down House. And Charles finished the second edition of his first literary child,
The Voyage of the
Beagle, which he sent off to a new publisher, John Murray. Murray would not withhold royalties as his first publisher had, and he would not make Charles pay him to have his books published, as some other publishers did.

At Maer, Bessy was failing, so Emma went home to see her. She went without the children, which was quite unusual, leaving Charles to negotiate his work around them. He kept her apprised of his success (and failure): “In the morning I was baddish, and did hardly any work, and was much overcome by
my children…” He reported that the children were romping “in the drawing-room, jumping on everything and butting like young bulls at every chair and sofa, that I am going to have the dining-room fire lighted to-morrow and keep them out of the drawing-room. I declare a month's such wear would spoil everything in the whole drawing-room.”

Emma and Charles had been very practical when it came to furnishing their house. The chairs and sofas were to be comfortable, sturdy, and long-lasting. Only after satisfying those requirements did Emma and Charles care what anything might look like. It was a good thing the furniture was sturdy.

In many upper-class Victorian households, the children spent most of their time in the nursery with the nurse or governess or in the kitchen having their meals alone, and were trotted out to say hello to the parents once in a while. At Down the children were not confined to the nursery and the kitchen at all. In fact, a cousin exclaimed after a visit that the only place to be sure
not
to find a child was in the nursery.

And the only place to be sure to find what you were looking for was in Charles's study. Emma had not become more organized or tidy as time went on. This meant that the children were in and out of his study looking for rulers and scissors and scraps of paper to draw on.

Once when Etty was the third or fourth child to run into his study of a morning, Charles gave her “his patient look” and said, “Don't you think you could not come in again, I have been interrupted very often.”

The children were sensitive to Charles's needs and routine, but they couldn't help bothering him sometimes. They did try hard to avoid going into his study when they were bleeding and needed a sticking plaster to put over the cut, because they knew Charles hated the sight of blood. Etty later
wrote, “I well remember lurking about the passage till he was safe away, and then stealing in for the plaster.”

One October day in 1846, in his study, Charles took out one of his last specimens from the voyage. It was a barnacle that he had found on the southern coast of Chile. It was a tiny thing, perhaps the smallest barnacle in the world. Looking at the volcano-shaped creature, he knew what some of his friends had been trying to tell him was correct. To work out his species theory he had to become adept at describing at least one creature in minute detail. Darwin looked at this barnacle under his microscope. Then he looked at other barnacles under his microscope. He was thrilled to see how many small variations there were from barnacle to barnacle, from species to species. He wrote to FitzRoy that he was spending day after day “hard at work dissecting a little animal about the size of a pin's head…and I could spend another month, and daily see more beautiful structure.”

A century earlier, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus had come up with a system for classifying living beings—from kingdoms (plant and animal) to class (such as mammal), order (Carnivora), family
(Canidae),
genus
(Canis),
and species
(Canis familiaris,
or dog). The system presumed that all species had already been fixed and would not change. Up until this point, if a natural historian saw variation between creatures thought to be of the same species, he ignored it. Charles could not—would not—ignore the variations. He asked other scientists to send him their barnacle collections, and over the next days, weeks, and months he pulled down more bottles of barnacles from his shelves. As he looked at the many minute variations in the
Cirripedia
under his microscope he saw the opposite of the prevailing assumption, and confirmation of his presumption: species were mutable; there was no barrier preventing
the creation of new species. And he kept discovering new species of barnacle. Soon the horizontal surfaces in his study were covered with barnacles from all over the earth. By the end of that year, he decided that he would make a detailed study of all the barnacles he could get his hands on.

Even though he continued to suffer from illness (“at present I am suffering from four boils & swellings, one of which hardly allows me the use of my right arm & has stopped all my work & damped all my spirits,” he wrote in a letter to Joseph Hooker in April 1847), the next years brought on more barnacles and more babies. In July 1847, another daughter, Elizabeth, was born. The following August, Francis, called Frank, joined the family as the sixth child. Charles did not stop using his children as specimens.

“I asked one of my boys to shout as loudly as he possibly could, and as soon as he began, he firmly contracted his orbicular [eye] muscles.” Charles kept making his son yell, and every time he did, he closed his eyes. When Charles asked him why he did that, his son answered that he was not aware he was closing his eyes. So Charles wrote it down to instinct.

These years brought more death, too. Emma's mother, Bessy, had died in March of 1846. Now Dr. Darwin, their last parent, was getting sicker and sicker. Charles hated to leave Down House, but he made the trip up to Shrewsbury to visit his father. He and Emma kept in constant touch, and when she told him about the latest with the children, he wrote back about Annie, “I suppose now and be-hanged to you, you will allow Annie is ‘something.' I believe…that she is a second Mozart; anyhow she is more than a Mozart considering her Darwin blood.” Practically everything he wrote about related to his theory. How did Annie get her musical talent? Certainly
not from him, but from Emma. And given the tone-deaf Darwin inheritance she had to overcome, she was clearly a musical genius.

He missed his children dearly as he walked around his old childhood home and its grounds.

 

This lovely day makes me pine rather to be with you and the dear little ones on the lawn. Thank Willy and Annie for their very nice notes, which told me a great many things I wished to hear; they are very nicely written. Give them and my dear Etty and Georgy my best love. This place is looking lovely, but yet I could not live here: the sounds of the town, and blackguards talking, and want of privacy, convince me every time I come here that rurality is the main element in one's home.

 

In November 1848, Charles got word that his father was on his deathbed. Erasmus wanted him to come up to London and go on to Shrewsbury with him. But Charles himself was too sick to go right away. He was also too sad, and too uneasy with death to push himself. Charles would miss his father, the man whose advice he had received (and usually followed) throughout his life. He never spoke of him with anything other than respect and admiration; he said that his father was the wisest man he had ever known. His notebooks were filled with sentences that began, “My father says” and “According to my father.” And Dr. Darwin had been supportive of him over the years, both financially and emotionally. Even so, Charles's sisters worried that Charles didn't realize how proud their father had been of him, and they told him so.

But Charles could not move quickly, and Erasmus went on to Shrewsbury without him. Dr. Darwin died, and Charles arrived at the Mount only after the funeral.

Charles's body responded to his father's death, or at least it seemed that way. His illnesses were becoming so bad and so frequent that he sometimes could not work more than twenty minutes at a time without having a pain or discomfort somewhere. Finally, in 1849, the whole family packed up to go to Malvern, where he could get an extensive treatment called a water cure with a doctor named James Gully. The water cure consisted mostly of applying cold water to the outside of the patient's body—with cold showers and baths. The patients were also packed and wrapped in wet sheets. The nurses applied friction, or rubbing. Steam baths were prescribed, too. Charles was concerned that the treatment was delaying his barnacle work, but on May 6 he wrote to Henslow that the water cure was doing him good. “You will be surprised to hear that we all—children, servants, and all—have been here for nearly two months. All last autumn and winter my health grew worse and worse: incessant sickness, tremulous hands, and swimming head. I thought that I was going the way of all flesh.” But his illness lessened and he got stronger. At Malvern the regime consisted not only of the water cure but also of plain food and springwater to drink. It was all to be pure air, pure water, pure food.

The doctor also told him to stop using snuff, “the chief solace of life,” because it might harm his troublesome digestion. His only complaint was that he couldn't think—he had “the most complete stagnation of mind. I have ceased to think even of barnacles!”

He was feeling so much better that when they got home he continued much of the regimen; he even installed a cold shower outside.

But even with all of this treatment, he did not get appreciably better. Emma spent many nights sitting with him,
holding him, comforting him, tending to him, as he suffered from sleeplessness, heart palpitations, and his almost constant digestive upset. During the day she tended to him, too. It was the norm for Charles to be sick.

And for the children, as long as they weren't too horribly ill, it was nice to be sick at Down. Emma and Charles were both loving parents, and illness had kind of a happy aura about it, in part because Charles was always sick, and everyone loved Charles. One of their granddaughters later wrote that “at Down ill health was considered normal.” If not normal, at least kind of special. The sick child got the treat of being able to spend the morning in Papa's study, curled up on the sofa while he worked. In the afternoon the sick child got to play many games of backgammon with Papa, or hear stories read by Mama or Papa. The sick child received, above all, extra attention. So it was nice to be sick at Down House. At least just a little sick.

 

Chapter 19

Doing Custards

 

A good, cheerful, and affectionate daughter is the
greatest blessing a man can have, after a good wife.

—J
OSIAH
W
EDGWOOD TO
D
R
. R
OBERT
D
ARWIN UPON

THE ENGAGEMENT OF THEIR CHILDREN,
N
OVEMBER
1838

 

A
nnie often waited outside her father's study until it was time for his morning walk. She hated to disturb him, but she was eager to take some turns around the Sandwalk with Papa. Although Charles walked at a brisk pace, Annie went ahead, pirouetting in front of him. She called it “doing custards.”

From the time she was a baby, Annie was a family favorite. She was a joyful, happy child, with a bright face and a ready smile. She loved to play and was a good big sister and older cousin. The grown-ups loved her, too, for she was open and honest, a much-prized virtue. “Transparent,” as Emma had called Charles a dozen years earlier. Annie's aunt Catherine Darwin said of her that she was “always so candid and kind-hearted.” Aunt Fanny Wedgwood called her bright and engaging, “so open and
confiding and lovable.” Another relative said he “always found her a child whose heart it was easy to reach.”

Annie could also read other people easily. Even when she was playing boisterously with her cousins, all Charles had to do was give her a quick look and she would quiet everyone down. She loved to please; Charles could count on her to sneak him a pinch of snuff from the snuffbox, and she watched with pleasure as her father indulged his naughty habit.

Annie took after both Emma and Charles; they felt she was a lovely combination of both of them. She was musical like her mama. But Charles could claim her neatness and propensity for order. Charles noted that from an early age she was neater than her big brother. When she was just over a year old, he watched “how neatly Annie takes hold in proper way of pens, pencils and keys. Willy to present time with equal or greater practice cannot handle anything so neatly as Annie does, often in exact manner of grown-up person.” As she got older, she loved to read, like both of her parents, but she had a particular fondness for looking up words in the dictionary and for comparing word by word two editions of the same book. She liked to look up places on the map, and to arrange objects by color.