Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  She took a leaf out of Darwin’s book and confided some of these religious shortcomings to Litchfield before her marriage. Arthur J. Munby, a friend of Litchfield’s, said that this “petite young woman of 27, with a face not unlike the photographs of her father but very feminine and tender, with bright hazel eyes, and every feature full of life and expression,” had told Litchfield that she “did not believe in a personal God.”99 It should perhaps be mentioned that Bessie Darwin also disputed conventional faith. In 1866 she had refused to get confirmed, telling her mother that she believed in neither the Trinity nor the catechism. “Lizzy says she shd feel hypocritical to have anything to do with the Cat & that as she does not believe in the Trinity or in Baptism she does not feel much heart for it,” noted Emma. These daughters were not slavish hierophants. Many years later, Henrietta contributed an appreciative word or two about Munby to the Working Men’s College Journal, although it is clear that even then she had no idea about Munby’s unconventional living arrangements with his servant Hannah. Somewhat underestimated by historians, and evidently more thoughtful about her religious position than previously assumed, Henrietta appears in these records as an intelligent, independent, caring young woman. Her parents found it a wrench to let her go.

  The impending marriage threw Darwin into “very bad health.” As the day drew nearer he cast a morbid gloom over the proceedings. It was Darwin’s duty to escort Henrietta to the altar and formally “give her away.” But the combination of acknowledging her forthcoming separation from him, the walk up the aisle, and public performance before a God in whom he did not believe was possibly too much. “He could hardly bear the fatigue of being present through the short service,” said Francis.

  “It was with much exertion that he came to the village church for the wedding,” recalled Henrietta many years later.

  Any sort of festivity was quite out of the question, and no friends or relations were invited. But a few of Richard’s working men friends managed to find out the day and the hour, and walked the four miles from Orpington Station in order to be present at the ceremony. Great wonder was roused in the mind of our old butler (who was in fact one of the family) as to who these strangers could possibly be, for every face was known in the little village.100

  After such a start, it was probably inevitable that both Henrietta and Richard Litchfield became ill on their wedding tour in Europe, a situation echoing her parents’ marriage and one that proved hard for the newly-weds to handle with equanimity so far away from home. Her silence as to the cause of the trouble may indicate some gynaecological problem. As far as is known, Henrietta never became pregnant, although she certainly at the beginning of her marriage expected children. Darwin’s views on the matter were mixed. A year later, when some signs of pregnancy might have been anticipated if all were well, he explained to his cousin William Fox that “Henrietta has no child, & I hope never may; for she is extremely delicate.”101 Henrietta suffered from intermittent collapses in health for the next four or five years, some of which were very disabling, and she and Litchfield moved into a form of relationship that mirrored her previous invalid experiences. “R is a jewel of a nurse,” she wrote from Cannes on her honeymoon. “We feel very married each lying sick in our beds as if we’d been at it 30 years like Father and you.”102

  Darwin felt the break dreadfully. “I was a favourite of yours before the time when you can remember,” he reminisced sentimentally.

  How well I can call to mind how proud I was when at Shrewsbury, after an absence of a week or fortnight, you would come and sit on my knee, and there you sat for a long time, looking as solemn as a little judge.—Well, it is an awful and astounding fact that you are married; and I shall miss you sadly. But there is no help for that, and I have had my day and a happy life, notwithstanding my stomach; and this I owe almost entirely to our dear old mother, who, as you know well, is as good as twice refined gold. Keep her as an example before your eyes, and then Litchfield will in future years worship and not only love you, as I worship our dear old mother. Farewell my dear Etty. I shall not look at you as a really married woman until you are in your own house. It is the furniture which does the job.103

  XI

  It was just as well that he had another project to keep him occupied. As soon as The Descent of Man was published, he returned to the intriguing theme of facial expression. The subject appealed to him, and had done so for many decades. Admittedly, he had at first intended to include all of his material on the subject in a single chapter in The Descent of Man, and he had already collected a great deal of it to that purpose. But it became far too bulky to include. “I have resolved to keep my Essay on Expression in Man & animals for subsequent & separate publication.” Now he relished the opportunity to mould his ideas into a separate volume making a sequel to Descent.

  His delight was obvious. “I feel an exaggerated degree of interest in the subject of expression,” he said to Franciscus Donders, in Utrecht, before asking him a complicated physiological question. He loved the sensation of breaking new ground, of uniting disparate fields, and the zest of setting out on a fresh line of inquiry.

  Friends and family found the topic just as attractive. People from every corner of Darwin’s daily life supplied him with quaint stories about animal expressions. Dr. James Paget knew a terrier that frowned in concentration. Lady Lubbock described the intelligent faces pulled by her pug-dog. Johann Krefft, a museum-keeper in Australia, told him about monkeys throwing temper tantrums like a child, while Alois Humbert saw a hummingbird persistently deceived by flowered wallpaper. On and on the letters flowed, each receiving a place in Darwin’s researches. Charles Spence Bate, the dentist and naturalist whom Darwin recalled from his barnacle days, wrote to him with an interesting, though anthropomorphised, account of a old dog who showed “moral courage” while having his teeth extracted.

  In turn, Darwin delved into his own and his family’s experiences. Pain, of course, was more or less a daily accompaniment. He wrote to Donders about vomiting.

  I had not thought about irritating substances getting into nose while vomiting; but my clear impression is that mere retching causes tears; I will however try to get this point ascertained. When I reflect that in vomiting (subject to the above doubt), in violent coughing from choking, in yawning, violent laughter, in the violent downward action of the abdominal muscle as during the evacuation of faeces when constipated, & in your very curious case of the spasms,—that in all these cases, the orb-muscles are strongly and unconsciously contracted; & that at the same time tears often certainly flow, I must think that there is a connection of some kind between these phenomena.104

  At home, he studied Francis playing the flute, watching his mouth and the muscles straining in his neck.105 “I have got a good deal of information about the pouting of children of savages, & this makes me wish much for precise details about the pouting of English children,” he went on to ask William.

  None of you children ever pouted. I am the more interested, as I fully believe that Pouting is a vestige (an embryonic relic during youth) of a very common expression of the adult anthropomorphous apes when excited in many ways.106

  Then, after returning from honeymoon, Richard Litchfield tentatively offered his new father-in-law some thoughts on the origins of music and singing. These struck Darwin as “very good.” Eager to find something in common, the two men discovered that this book on the expression of the emotions gave them a mutual topic of interest. Litchfield helped Darwin write a section about song emerging as a courting ritual among animals. The ability of music to stir the emotions was something that Darwin could also evidently discuss with Litchfield, and he confided to him that the expressive beauty of Effie Wedgwood’s (now Farrer’s) voice moved him to tears.107 Together they criticised Herbert Spencer’s theory of the origin of music. Even a son-in-law could be drawn into Darwin’s preoccupations.

  Young women in Darwin’s circle of acquaintance revealed themselves as capable anthropological observ
ers. Margaret Vaughan Williams (Jos and Caroline Wedgwood’s middle daughter) helped him with babies’ expressions, first describing her own infants and then those of her friends and other family members. “Mary Owen’s 3½ yr. old child has a habit of sticking out her lips when she feels shy, but as it is not a pout of sulkiness, I do not know if you care about it,” she reported.

  She makes no sound. The lips do not seem to become tubular (that is the corners are not drawn together, or hardly). The upper lip is stiffened and projected beyond the lower one, (tho’ both stick out to a certain extent) the lips sometimes not quite closed.108

  Topics like these provided him with easy access into the domestic kingdoms primarily run by women. Darwin was remembered by his nieces for this appreciative attention to their babies’ development.

  Dogs predictably played a role. Darwin included in his researches his dog Polly, the terrier formerly owned by Henrietta, and Bob, the stable dog. After Henrietta’s marriage, Polly adopted Darwin completely. “She has taken it into her head that F. is a very big puppy. She is perfectly devoted to him.… She lies upon him whenever she can, and licks his hands so constantly as to be quite troublesome. I have to drag her away at night,” declared Emma. This was the dog that slept in a basket by the study fire while Darwin wrote. She appeared in his Expression of the Emotions either catching a biscuit on her nose (Darwin thought she was very clever) or as a pictorial example of a “Small dog watching a cat on a table,” a copy-book illustration of alertness and attention. Nor were these her first scientific appearances. Darwin was accustomed to claim, with an admiring pat, that her multicoloured coat proved his hypothesis of pangenesis. After she had a bad burn as a puppy, her hair had grown back red instead of white. “My father used to commend her for this tuft of hair as being in accordance with his theory of pangenesis; her father had been a red bull terrier, thus the red hair appearing after the burn showed the presence of latent red gemmules.”109

  Huxley saw the amusing side of this fireside philosophy and scoffed at Polly’s elevated place in Darwinian doctrine. He called her the Ur-hund (ancestor-dog or idealised type of dog) and sent a drawing of her imaginary evolutionary tree in which equal doses of cat and pig appeared.110 She was “more remarkable for the beauty of her character than her form,” retorted Henrietta defensively.

  Bob featured here and there as well, a large dog, full of character. He and Parslow used to sit under the cherry trees every summer, Parslow with a gun to scare the birds, Bob waiting to bark at them.111 Darwin used him to explain his principle of emotional antithesis, in which individual expressions were said to develop as opposites to an earlier, more basic, emotion. A dog’s attitude of submission probably emerged as a deliberate reversal of the signs for aggression.

  Similarly, the attitude of dejection was the reverse of the expression of pleasure. Bob was the dog who used to put on a “hot-house face,” an attitude of utter despair, when he realised that his master intended visiting the greenhouse rather than striking out on a long country walk.

  This consisted in the head drooping much, the whole body sinking a little and remaining motionless; the ears and tail falling suddenly down, but the tail was by no means wagged. With the falling of the ears and of his great chaps, the eyes became much changed in appearance, and I fancied that they looked less bright. His aspect was that of piteous, hopeless dejection; and it was, as I have said, laughable, as the cause was so slight.… It cannot be supposed that he knew that I should understand his expression, and that he could thus soften my heart and make me give up visiting the hot-house.112

  XII

  For his research into expressions, Darwin made extensive use of photographs and line drawings. Previously, he had little need for illustrations in his investigations or in his written texts, except for a few minimally informative charts and diagrams. This is not to say that he had no visual appreciation or that he failed to think in pictorial terms. Quite the reverse. When he did need illustrations, as in his early work on barnacles or the copiously illustrated Zoology of the Beagle, he commissioned good natural history artists and laboured over the accuracy of details. He used diagrams and maps in his geological treatises and happily put pictures of pigeons in Variation and other animals and birds in the Descent of Man. He paid for George Darwin to have lessons in engraving from George Brettingham Sowerby, a noted natural history artist. His two oldest sons, William and George, made many of the original line drawings for his botanical essays and articles.

  Significantly for the expression project, however, Darwin interested himself in photography, the growing art form of the century. In his day, Darwin knew or corresponded with several able photographers, including Dr. George Wallich, whose natural history work initially brought them together, Adolphe Kindermann in Hamburg (Camilla Ludwig, the governess, purchased pictures for him in Kindermann’s studio), and Oscar Rejlander, who specialised in photographing emotional expressions. He also acquired a number of portrait images from the Bopp photographic firm in Innsbruck and cabinet cards from Giacomo Brogi in Florence. In the end, his collection ran to around one hundred images. During 1866 he paid out a total of £14 in small sums for photographs, nearly doubling his overall costs for “Science” that year.113

  This interest stretched seamlessly across his personal and working life. At home, he liked to exchange portrait photographs with other men of science and regularly sat to photographers for this purpose, although not without stating that “of all things in the world, I hate most the bother of sitting for photograph.” As occasion demanded he also sent Emma and other family members to the London studios. He encouraged William and Leonard to take informal photographs in and around the house, content to see his sons experience the fun of setting up their paraphernalia and messing about with chemicals. The informality did not extend to himself, however. He was never photographed by the boys in his shirtsleeves or at work in his garden or study. Nevertheless, Leonard took several photographs of his father that subsequently became well known, striving for artistic effects in imitation of Cameron’s portraits, and on one occasion depicting Darwin in an armchair on the veranda.

  The new medium was an important resource for Darwin. For the first time, visual evidence became helpful for his work in the evolutionary area, contributing in its own way to the transformative moment in the late-nineteenth-century sciences when pictorial representations began to play increasingly exciting (and increasingly problematic) roles in the construction of knowledge. Naturally enough, while working on the Expression volume he studied books of art illustrations. At one point he must have asked for one or two of Landseer’s typically expressive animal scenes to be photographed for him, for he had copies of these and of a number of Madonnas and female saints in his collection. He mostly concentrated on representational photographs, probably thinking that they were somehow more objective in the way they presented reality, more straightforward documents than even nature itself. But he experienced all the usual problems that scientists encounter in turning artefacts into evidence for theories—problems of attribution and authenticity, of understanding the limits of what the material could tell him, of learning photography’s distinctive way of participating in the creative process, much as he had once taught himself how to “see” the geological structures underneath a landscape or the evolutionary connections hidden in pigeon feathers or barnacle valves.114

  He soon discovered that relatively primitive nineteenth-century techniques—dependent as they were on long exposure times—were unable to capture fleeting facial expressions as he desired.115 Despite these limitations, he collected a number of photographs from professional portrait studios, from medical and psychiatric institutions, and from individual enthusiasts in England and abroad, including one now attributed to Charles Dodgson, and a series from the Office of the Library of Congress.116 His collection contained few anthropological photographs, undoubtedly a reflection of the difficulties of photographing in the field, the most notable exception being a picture he pos
sessed of members of the von Ambras family, a “hairy family” regarded as medical curiosities.117

  Because of the impossibility of recording a flickering expression, Darwin was specially grateful for the research being pursued by Guillaume Duchenne, a French physician who experimented on the activity of muscles. Quite by chance Duchenne had encountered in the Paris hospitals a middle-aged man whose facial nerves were insensitive to pain. Duchenne used him as a human guinea-pig for analysing the contraction and relaxation of different facial muscles. In an unusual series of experiments, he applied electric (galvanic) currents to certain points on this man’s cheeks and forehead, rather as a laboratory worker might make a frog’s leg contract using the same technique, noting as he did so that the process was like “working with a still irritable cadaver.”118 The man’s facial muscles could be galvanised and then kept fixed sufficiently long to take photographs. These pictures were issued in a medical album (not for general circulation) in 1862 as Mécanisme de la pbysionomie bumaine. The photographs were unsettling. The juxtaposition of the man’s forced expressions and the electrical head-dress that created them made for uncomfortable viewing.

  Darwin did not mind. He was impressed by Duchenne’s analysis, exactly what he was trying to do himself with less satisfactory results. Duchenne demonstrated that there were no special muscles in human faces dedicated to the higher human emotions, overturning the traditional view established by Charles Bell in 1806. Bell’s account had been definitive for much of the century. In that account Bell arranged the “passions” in a system based on pain and pleasure, exertion and relaxation, a system that served as his manifesto for understanding the nervous system, and also exemplified the natural theological view that human expressions were designed by God for the purpose of communicating feelings.119 There were muscles in the human face, Bell claimed, specially designed for the display of God-given emotions such as morality, shame, and spirituality. Darwin—and others like Pierre Gratiolet—had come to reject such a viewpoint completely.