Charles and Emma (8 page)

Emma's beautiful older sister Charlotte, whom Charles had had a crush on when he was younger, wrote to her future brother-in-law, “How truly & warmly I rejoice in this marriage. Nothing else could have happened to give me so much pleasure—it seems as if it was the only thing to wish for. As
much as it is possible to rely upon the happiness of any two people I feel a reliance on yours & Emma's.”

Even Poor Old Ras, as Charles called his brother, expressed his excitement and his vicarious happiness. He wrote to Charles, “It is a marriage which will give almost as much pleasure to the rest of the world as it does to your-selves—the best auspices I should think for any marriage.”

There were, indeed, many reasons to have auspicious hopes for the marriage. In Geneva, Aunt Jessie wrote to her niece:

 

Everything I have ever heard of C. Darwin I have particularly liked, and have long wished for what has now taken place, that he would woo and win you. I love him all the better that he unites to all his other qualifications that most rare one of knowing how well to chuse a wife, a friend, companion, mother of his children, all of which men in general never think of…I know I shall love him.

 

Aunt Jessie was a devotee of palm reading, one of the “minor superstitions” that was in vogue, along with séances, phrenology, and physiognomy. She continued in her letter, “I knew you would be a Mrs. Darwin from your hands.”

But Aunt Jessie didn't quite have the whole picture from Emma's letter. Jessie had known her fiancé very well, and she was madly in love with him. So even though some of her family hadn't approved that she was marrying an Italian, not someone from their British social circle, her engagement was a time of social whirlwind and happiness. She and Sismondi hadn't had to get to know each other. It was different for Charles and Emma; for them, the engagement was a time for discovery. There were things to talk about and work through, what kind of life they'd like, where they'd live—and then there was the religion question.

Through letters and visits, Charles started to say things to Emma that he had been too nervous to say before. Although there was the risk of a broken engagement, it was unlikely. Emma was already in love and wanted to know what Charles thought about everything. His openness was something she prized. She wrote to Aunt Jessie, “He is the most open, transparent man I ever saw, and every word expresses his real thoughts. He is particularly affectionate and very nice to his father and sisters, and perfectly sweet tempered.”

And Charles knew he had made the right decision; he was in love with Emma and he told her so. On the Wednesday after their engagement he wrote to her from Shrewsbury to say that “there was never anyone so lucky as I have been, or so good as you…I have thought how little I expressed how much I owe to you; and often as I think this, I vow to try to make myself good enough somewhat to deserve you.”

Ever organized and practical, he went on to ask her to think about the decisions they would have to make—mostly where they would live. He asked her to make sure a fire was lit in the library when he returned to Maer on Saturday so they could sit next to the warmth and have “some quiet talk together.”

Charles was worried that Emma would find life with him dull, since she was so used to the many lively family gatherings and parties at Maer. He loved Maer, too: “My life has been very happy and very fortunate, and many of my pleasantest remembrances are mingled up with scenes at Maer, and now it is crowned.” But he confessed to her that he had a great deal of work to do that preoccupied his mind. He had his boxes of specimens to analyze, and he had questions, thoughts, and ideas exploding inside of him. He was still worried about some items on the
Don't Marry
side of his list, especially “loss
of time.” Emma for her part was worried about, among other things, plays; Charles didn't like them very much, and she would miss them if they never went to the theater.

Charles couldn't hide his excitement at their marriage, and he was already impatient. He could not wait until they would be together always. “Like a child that has something it loves beyond measure, I long to dwell on the words
my own
dear Emma.”

He begged her not to show the letters to anyone; he said he wanted to feel like it was just the two of them, sitting side by side. “My own dear Emma, I kiss the hands with all humbleness and gratitude, which have so filled up for me the cup of happiness—It is my most earnest wish I may make myself worthy of you…Most affectionately yours, Chas. Darwin.”

Charles knew that Emma was torn about leaving Maer, and leaving her sister Elizabeth alone to care for her sick parents. Josiah was now ill, too. Emma put herself in Elizabeth's place and realized that she probably would not have rejoiced if it had been her sister who was leaving. She felt guilty and wanted to push the wedding off a little bit to help ease the transition for all the Wedgwoods.

But Charles couldn't wait, and he couldn't help himself. After he signed his name, he wrote, “Remember life is short, and two months is the sixth part of the year, and that year, the first, from which for my part, things shall hereafter date.” He told her he would leave the timing up to her but that he would be in agony “until I am part of you—Dearest Emma, good-bye.”

 

After another visit to Maer, and more talks by the fire, Charles went back to London. He found it impossible to concentrate
on work, though he did try. All he wanted to do was find a house for them. On November 23, 1838, he wrote to Emma, “I positively can do nothing, & have done nothing this whole week, but think of you & our future life.—you may then, well imagine how I enjoy seeing your handwriting…It is a very high enjoyment to me, as I cannot talk to you, & feel your presence by having your own dear hand within mine.”

He
was
able to write in his notebooks, especially to explore his own emotions and feelings. In his “M” notebook, where he had written about his pre-proposal anxiety attack, he now analyzed jealousy. Where did those horrible feelings come from? Again thinking of man as a part of the animal kingdom, he realized that “Jealousy probably originally entirely sexual.” A man, an ape, a blue-footed booby tries to attract a female to mate with. He becomes jealous if there is competition and he fails “to drive away rival.”

And in another private notebook, his “N” notebook, bound in rust-colored leather, he analyzed his body and new sensations he was having from those geese by the fire, which likely were no longer just intimate
talks.
“Sexual desire makes saliva to flow,” he wrote, and added later, “yes, certainly.”

He had a “curious association” thinking about his newfound romantic life. He thought of watching a family dog, Nina, “licking her chops.” Though kissing Emma had to be better than kissing a dog, anyhow, he could not help but make the connection to people kissing. He wrote, “ones tendency to kiss, & almost to bite, that which one sexually loves is probably connected with flow of saliva, & hence with action of mouth & jaws.” He made another human-animal connection: “Lascivious women are described as biting: so do stallions always.”

He continued, “No doubt man has great tendency to exert
all senses, when thus stimulated.” And he read up on the subject and quoted a certain Professor Bell, who said there was a connection between smell and sexual desire and the feelings one gets when listening to beautiful music. Charles thought that listening to music could be rapturous, religious even.

Thinking about love and sexual desire, he returned to a favorite theme—how are we humans like animals? He thought about dogs, how mother dogs licked their puppies partly to clean them, but also to show affection. “This habit probably originated in the females carefully licking their puppies—the dearest object of their love—for the sake of cleansing them…Thus, the habit will have become associated with the emotion of love.”

No wonder Emma's friend Ellen Tollet wrote to her, “You two will be quite too happy together, and I hope you will have a chimney that smokes, or something of that sort to prevent your becoming quite intoxicated.”

Charles
was
getting carried away, intoxicated. His intense feelings were offset by tentativeness, though. He felt shy: “Shyness is certainly very much connected with thinking of one-self…blushing is connected with sexual, because each sex thinks more of what another thinks of him, than of any one of his own sex.” Here was a difference with his animal cousins: Animals do not blush. But “sensitive people apt to blush.”

He wrote, “Blushing is intimately concerned with thinking of ones appearance,—does the thought drive blood to surface exposed, face of man, face, neck—upper bosom in woman: like erection.” The women Charles had seen in England had little exposed, but gowns, especially dressy ones, could have low-cut necklines, exposing the upper bosom.

He talked to his father the doctor. Dr. Darwin might have told him that when the time arrived he could extinguish the
lamps because, Charles wrote, “No surer way to blush, than particularly to wish not to do so. How directly personal remark will make any one blush.—Is there not some saying about a person even blushing in the dark…A person who blushes in the dark is proverbially a most modest person.”

Charles thought about Emma all the time. He read and reread her letters, three, four, five times.

Meanwhile back at Maer, referring to all the scientific work she thought her future husband was doing, Emma had written to Aunt Jessie, “I am so glad he is a busy man.”

 

Chapter 10

Melancholy Thoughts

 

My reason tells me that honest & conscientious
doubts cannot be a sin, but I feel it would be
a painful void between us.

—E
MMA TO
C
HARLES
, N
OVEMBER
1838

 

A
s he prepared for their upcoming marriage, Charles had certain things on his mind. Emma had others. She was back at Maer getting new clothes because her aunts told her she had to present herself better once she was married. Aunt Jessie wrote that Emma should always be “dressed in good taste; do not despise those little cares which give everyone more pleasing looks, because you know you have married a man who is above caring for such little things. No man is above caring for them.”

So Emma thought about and prepared a new wardrobe for her new life. And she relished the time with her family; it would be hard for her to leave them. “I bless the railroad every day of my life, and Charles is so fond of Maer that I am sure he
will always be ready to steam down whenever he can. So that we shall always be within reach of home,” she wrote, reassuring herself. During this time before the wedding, she visited with her friends, wrote letters to Charles, and looked forward to letters from him.

She expressed no regret about her decision to marry him, and when Charles visited Maer, she felt happy and in love. Yet when he left, she felt depressed. She worried about the big subject that was in the way of their happiness. For in those talks by the fire he had not concealed his doubts about God, miracles, and creation. He had told her at least part of what he was thinking about the origin of species, and he admitted that he was not a believer as she was.

At Maer without Charles, his charm, his wit, his very presence to remind her of all she loved about him, the problem of their religious differences loomed large. Emma wrote to him, “When I am with you I think all melancholy thoughts keep out of my head but since you are gone some sad ones have forced themselves in, of fear that our opinions on the most important subject should differ widely.”

She was glad he had told her of his doubts, even though his father had advised him not to say anything. (He had confessed that, too.) The fact that he was open with her gave her hope for their future. She wrote, “I thank you from my heart for your openness with me & I should dread the feeling that you were concealing your opinions from the fear of giving me pain.”

But as she contemplated leaving her home to start a life with him, she was scared. In fact, she was more than scared; she was in pain. Although she knew that honest and conscientious doubts could not be a sin, and she told him so, she had to be honest with him about her fears, too. She wrote, “It is
perhaps foolish of me to say this much but my own dear Charley we now do belong to each other & I cannot help being open with you.” She worried that their difference of faith would be a terrible void between them. She was not willing to give up her belief in an afterlife; to do so would relinquish hope that she would see her sister Fanny again. Perhaps she could convince him to find another route to faith, one that did not require belief in Genesis.

“Will you do me a favour?” she asked. “Yes I'm sure you will,” she answered herself. She knew that Charles cared as much about their happiness as she did; she knew, also, that Charles was not someone who wanted to upset her or anyone else. She asked him to read Jesus' farewell discourse to his disciples, which begins at the end of the thirteenth chapter of John. “It is so full of love to them & devotion & every beautiful feeling. It is the part of the New Testament I love best.”

According to the book of John, before he was betrayed by Judas, Jesus washed his disciples' feet. He tells them, “If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another's feet.” Jesus wanted his disciples, and all of his followers, to love their neighbors enough to even wash their dirty feet. Emma found this love beautiful.

“This is a whim of mine it would give me great pleasure, though I can hardly tell why,” Emma wrote to Charles. But they both knew why she wanted him to read that chapter: She desperately wanted Charles to believe in Jesus so he would go to heaven with her.

Jesus tells his disciples that if they follow his teachings, “Whither I go, thou canst not follow me now; but thou shall follow me afterward.” But “if a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.” Emma could not
bear the thought of spending eternity without Charles, of Charles burning in hell. She did not want him to give her his opinion; she asked him just to read it, and then she changed the subject to her new wardrobe. “The plaid gown arrived safely yesterday & is unanimously pronounced to be very handsome & not at all too dashing.”