Charles and Emma (9 page)

Emma knew Charles was a good man, an honest and moral one. He was affectionate and kind to his family and to animals. He was vehemently antislavery, as was their Wedgwood grandfather, Josiah, who had campaigned against slavery from 1787 until his death in 1795. Josiah Wedgwood's pottery factory had made a medallion that was the emblem of the antislavery movement. It had a black basalt relief figure of an African slave in chains, bent down on one knee. In a semicircle around it were the words “Am I not a man and a brother?” Josiah's factory reproduced many copies of the figure on brooches and seals, too. He sent some of the medallions across the Atlantic to Benjamin Franklin, for use in his American antislavery campaign. Slavery had been outlawed in Britain in 1807, but it still caused contention among some of the British upper class.

During Charles's voyage, at a stop at Bahia in Brazil, he had gotten into a heated argument with Captain FitzRoy over slavery. FitzRoy defended slavery, stating that some slaves were happy because their masters were good to them. The proof was that when those slaves were asked if they wanted to be freed, they said no. In front of their masters. Charles hated confrontation and controversy, but he could not hold his tongue about this. He told his captain that it was impossible for slaves to answer truthfully in front of their masters, and that it was impossible to be happy without having any control over your own life, without hope of change. FitzRoy had
almost thrown Charles off the ship for disagreeing with him. Charles wrote about this incident in his account of the voyage, which would be published soon after his marriage to Emma. He wrote, “These deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty.”

Emma knew Charles really thought things through and that he struggled with his doubts about faith. She knew that belief in God was not something he was just tossing out the way the maids at Maer tossed out the dirty water. So she prayed for him just as Jesus prayed for his disciples in John 17:3: “And this is life eternal, that they might know the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou has sent.” She loved Charles and was about to tie herself to him. But how could she give her all to him as she wanted to do, so that they belonged completely to each other, bound in love, if she couldn't be sure that they would be together in heaven, as she would be with Fanny and, she hoped, as she would be one day with all her loved ones? Emma's mother was slipping away, too. Once brilliant and vibrant, Bessy was spending more and more time in a fog. Emma knew she soon would lose her completely. She could let her go without too much pain since she knew she would see her again in heaven. But what about Charles?

Emma was not asking Charles to believe in everything as it was written in the Bible. She did not believe that every part of the Bible was literally true either. She was just asking Charles to accept the love of Jesus, whom she saw as the kind, sweet, loving son of God.

Charles apparently did as she wished: He read Jesus' farewell discourse. But the letter he wrote to her afterward is lost. Her reply survived: “I am sitting with Mamma instead of going to church. I shall find it much pleasanter to have a little talk with you than to listen to Allen's temperance sermon.” (John Allen Wedgwood was Emma's cousin on her mother's side, and the vicar of Maer.) She continued, “Thank you dear Charles for complying with my fancy. To see you are in earnest on the subject will be my greatest comfort & that I am sure you are. I believe I agree with every word you say, & it pleased me that you shd have felt inclined to enter a little more on the subject.”

So what did he say? How did he reassure her? He had friends who were deeply religious. His old mentor Henslow, for one. Charles himself had not given up on God entirely. He remembered standing in the Brazilian rain forest while on his voyage and being stirred by its beauty, moved to think of a higher power. He had written in his
Journal of Researches,
the account of his voyage, which he was preparing to be published, that “it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind.”

But that feeling of devotion would not be enough to satisfy most people. Most people around Charles believed that God had not only created all the species of animals at once, but that he had also created the social structure of their world. The church was an integral part of British society, and it dictated the rules of the class-ordered society that they all lived in. Some people did see the problems with the British class system, and many people knew that something did have to be done to help the poor, but the upper classes wanted desperately to hold on to their position at the top of the society.
And they felt that the people in the lower classes, the servants who cooked the meals, scrubbed the floors, washed the clothes, and emptied the chamber pots at Maer and the Mount were doing what they were meant to be doing. With God at the top, British society was neat and ordered. Everyone knew his (or her) place.

For Charles to go against God and religion was to go against the established social structure. If his theory became well known, and popular, it could topple British society on its head. If God had not ordained the hierarchy everyone lived by, then England could tumble into chaos. And Charles—a polite man, a conservative in the sense that he did want to conserve the British way of life, a man who did not want to hurt any-one—certainly did not want to be responsible for chaos.

As for Emma, she did not know why Charles had to reject God. While she and her family always questioned the status quo, she didn't think you had to deny the existence of God. And she desperately wished Charles wouldn't either. Although she did feel somewhat relieved because he had read Jesus's farewell to his disciples, she was still concerned about the void between them.

For Charles, marrying Emma made his religious doubts real and tangible. As real as the person who would be lying in the bed next to him.

 

Chapter 11

A Whirl of Noise and Motion

 

I quite agree with you in the happiness
of having plenty to do.

—E
MMA TO HER UNCLE
J. C.
DE
S
ISMONDI
, D
ECEMBER
1838

 

D
ay after day, at the end of a morning spent deep in thought—it was late November and he was now able to get a little work done—Charles would come out of 36 Great Marlborough Street into the yellow autumn fog. “I have seen no one for these two days,” he wrote to Emma, “and what can a man have to say who works all morning in describing hawks and owls, and then rushes out and walks in a bewildered manner up one street and down another, looking out for the words ‘To let.'” Up and down Regent Street, Oxford Street, and Cavendish Place. Maybe he would find a home near where Lyell and the former Mary Horner lived on Harley Street; or maybe he would find a house in Chelsea, where Thomas and Jane Carlyle had moved a few years earlier. To the east was Russell Square, and to the north was the area around the new
university, University College London, which was known as the godless university, where great men were thinking great thoughts—but were not being trained, as at Cambridge and Oxford, for the church.

Everywhere he walked in London he had to avoid horse manure (one hundred tons left each day) and mud, and the street sweepers who swept it all away, as well as the hansom cabs and personal horse-drawn carriages—barouches, landaus, broughams, and curricles—rolling through the streets. He endured the “whirl of noise and motion,” as Dickens characterized London in his then-current serial,
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby,
which everyone was gobbling up in
Bentley's Miscellany,
a literary magazine.

Charles was desperate to find a house. After talking it over, he and Emma had agreed that they would begin their lives together in London, for Charles still had much to do in the city. As secretary of the Geological Society, he listened to debates about the significance of fossils. Many of the geologists argued against an evolutionary theory that one of his old Edinburgh professors, Robert Grant, proposed. Grant's theory mostly came from one that had been suggested by a Frenchman named Jean-Baptiste Lamarck late in the previous century. Charles agreed with much of what Lamarck had to say, especially that the environment in which an animal lives causes it to change. And he enjoyed listening to the debates. But he knew that he had more to contribute and would have even more to contribute if he could get more analysis of his specimens—those that were already out with experts and those that still needed to get to other specialists. To do this, he had to be in London, especially so he could use his considerable charm to convince the experts to hurry up.

Maybe later Charles and Emma would move out to the
country, for the ease and quiet. But for now they would stay in town, and they needed to find a place to live—his rooms on Great Marlborough Street were not big enough for Charles, Emma, a butler, a cook, a maid, and all the beetles, fossils, and shells. He moaned to Emma in a letter, “Houses are very scarce and the landlords are all gone mad, they ask such prices. Erasmus takes it to heart even more than I do, and declares I ought to end all my letters to you, ‘yours inconsolably.'”

In the mornings he was not only writing about hawks and owls, he was also pouring out his ideas about religion and faith, and about morality and conscience. His thoughts spilled into his notebooks, and out of them, onto scraps of paper, and onto stationery from the Athenaeum Club, where he took most of his dinners. He wondered if morality was innate, not learned or taught. He scribbled, “I suspect conscience, an hereditary compound passion. Like avarice.” If people were, in essence, naturally moral, what was the need for religion, really? Don't we all have the right moral instincts? In his “N” notebook, he observed, “It does not hurt the conscience of a Boy to swear, though reason may tell him not, but it does hurt his conscience, if he has been cowardly, or has injured another bad, vindictive.—or lied &c &c.” The acts we do that hurt others seem wrong to us. Why? Are we born knowing right from wrong, or do we have to learn it?

He had grown up with the Ten Commandments—including “Thou shalt not bear false witness”—and with the injunction to love your neighbor as yourself. But soon after his mother died, he had told a classmate that you could grow different-colored flowers by watering them with colored water and that his mother had taught him how to figure out the name of a plant by looking inside its blossom. Charles had made this all up and felt terrible about his lie later. Though
maybe he shouldn't have—his classmate went on to become a well-known lichenologist and botanist, and he said that Charles had roused his attention and curiosity.

Charles thought back to his boyish lies and misdeeds. He once picked fruit from one of his father's trees and hid it in the bushes. Then he ran in “breathless haste” and “spread the news” that he had discovered a hoard of stolen fruit. He also stole fruit to eat and to give away to some poor people who lived nearby. Once he killed a bird with a stone, and he still felt bad about that, too. He felt ashamed about all of this and confessed these incidents in his autobiography, which he wrote as an old man.

Charles thought about arguments for belief—Emma's and other people's. He pondered his own reactions to those arguments. He read other people's ideas, not only those of Malthus, but also of Adam Smith, who had written in the previous century about free-market economics and capitalism. Charles read scholars and theologians who wrote about religion and philosophy. He talked to his friends, to Erasmus and to Hensleigh. They questioned just as he did. He thought of his mentor, John Stevens Henslow, who was a scientist and was also religious, as was Charles Lyell. He thought about Captain FitzRoy, who had married a religious woman and was now a Bible literalist—he thought every word in the Bible was true. Thomas Carlyle thought about these questions, too, and he wrote what would become a motto of the Victorian era: The dilemma was that they were becoming “destitute of faith, yet terrified of skepticism.”

Charles was skeptical, and was scared to take it public. He wasn't ready to shake up the world. He had to think of Emma's feelings. In his private notes, Charles wrote that people do believe in things that can't be proved. Belief was not about reason, he concluded: “Belief allied to instinct.”

He made notes to himself about the strong emotions that make one think about God and heaven. “The emotions of terror & wonder so often concomitant with sublime.” He realized that it makes people feel good and powerful to feel a part of God, a part of the sublime. It is on that feeling of sublimity, even greater than one feels when standing atop a mountain and looking at a glorious view, that religions are based. Charles had sublime feelings listening to Handel's
Messiah.
But nothing, not his mother's death, not his feelings of awe in a Brazilian rain forest, had given him a faith in the afterlife the way Fanny's death had done for Emma.

He also went over the ideas of Malthus again and again. He thought about the similarities between people and animals, especially people at war. “When two races of men meet, they act precisely like two species of animals,” he wrote. “They fight, eat each other, bring diseases to each other &c, but then comes the more deadly struggle.” What was at stake in nature was the survival of an entire species. Not only the survival of an entire species, but also the creation of new species. The thought made him wild with excitement.

But he did not let the emotion overcome him; he looked at facts. And he looked at how people changed animal species. He looked at dog breeders, who created new breeds by selecting for traits they wanted. They bred dogs for foxhunting, for duck hunting, for bringing down bulls, and for squeezing into tight places to catch rats and other vermin. He looked at dogs crossed with wolves and with foxes; he looked at Persian greyhounds, Italian greyhounds, setters, and spaniels. He looked at how quickly new breeds were made. The same thing happens in nature, he realized, without human intervention. “It is a beautiful part of my theory that domesticated races…are made by precisely the same means as species.” In nature, without human intervention, the changes took longer. But he felt
nature did it with more perfection. (Late in the twentieth century, scientists would show that species can change quickly in nature—in guppies, in bacteria, and, most poetically, in the finches of the Galapagos Islands, which were key to Charles's theory.)