Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  One secondary consequence of this honorary degree was that the Cambridge Philosophical Society requested a portrait of Darwin in his LL.D. robes. Darwin had been a member of the society since Henslow’s day and it was where his first published pamphlet, cooked up by Henslow from remarks taken from his Beagle letters, had been read to other members. Forty years on, he felt privileged to comply. Subscriptions from members and other Cambridge graduates quickly amounted to some £400, and the society commissioned William Blake Richmond, shortly to become professor of fine art at Oxford (the son of the artist George Richmond, who had drawn portraits of Darwin and Emma at the time of their marriage), to take the portrait. Richmond lived in Sevenoaks, only a short ride from Downe. Darwin sat to him in June 1879, although not without making a fuss. George Darwin had to hire the scarlet LL.D. robes at short notice from a Cambridge outfitter and bring them home to Down House; and he had to hire them again, a few weeks later, to send by post to Richmond’s studio for the finishing touches. Artist and model talked prosaically. “Once I asked Mr. Darwin which of the years of a child’s life were the most subject to incubative impressions,” said Richmond. His answer was “Without doubt, the first three.”10

  Emma greatly disliked the painting, and was glad to see it go to Cambridge. When she saw it for a second time in the early 1880s, it was just as bad as she remembered. “We went to see the red picture & I thought it quite horrid, so fierce & so dirty. However it is under a glass & v. high up so nobody can see it.”11

  II

  Imperturbably, he settled into a steady routine, a stalwart of the village community, taking on much of the identity of a country squire.12 He mingled with other landowners, clergymen, farmers, and neighbouring worthies, each of them an integral part of the cross-section of society traditionally most concerned with village affairs. Despite its closeness to the metropolis, Downe was still essentially rural in structure, its surface hardly ruffled by shifting social demarcations or any rush of incomers with new occupations or ideas. Darwin carried out a number of minor philanthropic activities in and around the village, primarily acting as treasurer of the Coal and Clothing Club from 1848 to 1869, and establishing the Downe Friendly Society (also called the Downe Benefit Society) in 1850 and serving as its treasurer for thirty years. He kept the accounts of both organisations and dealt with the official paperwork and government regulations for such societies. He was furthermore a founding trustee for the Bromley Savings Bank and encouraged small investors among the Downe community by arranging savings accounts for them with this organisation.13 Francis and Leonard Darwin continued the same form of paternalistic, fiscal encouragement by founding in 1879 a “Penny bank” at Downe, for men, women, and children.

  On the female side, as was customary for her age and position in society, Emma would “visit” a few women on a regular basis with food, cast-off clothing, and medical advice, primarily concentrating on members of the Coal and Clothing Club whose efforts to save small sums of money declared them to be, in the terminology of the time, the deserving poor. Her letters to Henrietta and Bessy were sprinkled with comments about her cases, and her account books reveal that she backed up these charitable intentions with constant small sums of cash, a sixpence here, three shillings there. In 1870 her annual total for “gifts” was £27 5s. 4d, about the same amount spent on household candles. For some forty years she also issued “penny bread-tickets” to those who rang the doorbell at Down House. These tickets were recoverable at the village bakery.14 Darwin could be prickly if he thought his wife’s generosity over the tickets was being exploited. “Wonderful charitable people the Darwins were,” said John Lewis, the village carpenter in an interview after Darwin’s death.

  Used to give away penny tickets for bread on the baker. I’ve given away thousands and thousands. And very good to the poor for blankets and coal and money till they got run on. One man used to brag in the pubs that he could live without work—till Mr. Darwin heard of it.15

  Emma poured most of her energies into the Sunday school, where she and her daughters, and other young ladies of the district, voluntarily taught children the rudiments of reading and writing. As part of this project, Emma ran a little lending library, and in later years she promoted a Sunday reading room for adults. All of these activities, however, were nothing more nor less than what was expected of them. Neither Emma nor her husband went so far as to sit on a charity hospital board, which would require them to issue admission notes to hospital, nor did the Darwin womenfolk attend the Bromley Workhouse on a philanthropic basis (as did the Bonham Carters). They performed their chosen civic duties with a sense of satisfaction, not making any public show about commitment.

  The Coal and Clothing Club lay closest to Darwin’s bookkeeping heart. He and the vicar, the Rev. John Innes, had early on set up this system, in which a few pennies were collected from the villagers every month and larger donations obtained from the local gentry. Darwin gave £5 every year. The money was spent on winter necessities. Members would run up an account in the village shop that was paid off at intervals by Darwin, as the treasurer, against subscriptions. The intentions of this “club” were characteristically Victorian in their encouragement of self-help and self-discipline in expenditure. Darwin, for instance, held the purse-strings and could easily exercise power over those who were unable to bring sober commonsense to their saving and shopping. He continued to run this club with other local gentlemen after Innes left to make his home in Scotland.

  The Friendly (or Benefit) Society served a somewhat different purpose in that it provided insurance cover against loss of work, illness, or funeral charges. Similar small insurance societies sprang up all through the nineteenth century as a form of group protection, matched on the larger scale by the trade unions and cooperative societies, and developing in response to the challenges of urban life, industrialisation, and rural uncertainty. All Darwin’s instincts told him it was his duty to initiate this kind of local scheme in which self-help and financial independence could be promoted, a kind of monetary natural selection in which his advice might confer the advantage of prudence on his flock. He believed the Downe villagers were unlikely to take such steps themselves. He and Innes had sought advice from John Stevens Henslow, who had been a pioneer in local insurance arrangements. “I have succeeded in persuading our Clodhoppers to be enrolled in a Club,” Darwin declared energetically in 1850.16

  Darwin did not like challenges to his authority in running these organisations. The Downe Friendly Society teetered in 1877 when two or three independently minded members wanted to recoup their investment as a lump sum. Because of the nature of the insurance policy, which was calculated on the expected number of contributions over future years, this would have meant Darwin’s dissolving the society at a loss to other members. Annoyed, he called on the dead hand of bureaucracy to prevent insubordination. Armed with official documents from the Registrar of Friendly Societies, he accosted his miscreants in the village pub.

  Last night I gave the club a long harangue, which I think produced some effect; at least it acted like a bomb-shell for all the members seem to have quarrelled for the next two hours. I do not think there is the least chance of the dissolution of the club. I had much satisfaction in reading aloud the penal clause.17

  Darwin won, but not before he had printed and distributed a single-sided sheet containing extracts from the Friendly Societies Act of 1875 and an amending Act of 1876.18 He arranged with the registrar to withdraw £290 from the National Debt Office to distribute among the membership as an interim cash bonus—a sweetener. The remainder stayed in the bank.

  He participated in the parish’s educational activities, too, sitting on the “vestry” for a number of years, the supervisory body for local schooling. Darwin joined Lubbock, Innes, and other parish dignitaries in setting up the “National” nondenominational day school, whose large single room was subsequently made available as an evening reading room for working men. Innes and Darwin performed well together on t
hese projects. The two were very different—the vicar and the scientist, the Tory and the Liberal—but liked each other all the same. Their tendency to take opposite views became a source of humour. On Innes’s final visit to Down, before going to Scotland, Darwin declared, “Brodie Innes and I have been fast friends for thirty years, and we never thoroughly agreed on any subject but once, and then we stared hard at each other, and thought one of us must be very ill.”19

  “We often differed,” Darwin wrote to him afterwards, “but you are one of those rare mortals, from which one can differ & yet feel no shade of animosity—& that is a thing which I shd. feel very proud of, if anyone could say of me.” Innes similarly appreciated his connection with Darwin. When he settled in Morayshire, home of the kirk and rabid sectarianism, he mischievously enjoyed the stunned silence that would greet his casual remark that Charles Darwin was one of his closest friends. “Dear me! If some of your naturalists, and my ritualist friends were to hear us two saying civil things to each other, they would say the weather was going to change, or Paris to be relieved, both which I wish might happen.”20

  After Innes left, Darwin sometimes wrote to him about the curates appointed by proxy in his place. Innes, as the holder of the church living, had the privilege of naming his ecclesiastical replacements, but this was always tempered by the church’s centralised administrative system. Often he accepted references at face value. Hence Mr. Robinson, the curate who unwisely took a fancy to a housemaid, had to go. The next one was little better. These to-ings and fro-ings gave Darwin rather a prejudice against young curates and the bishops who appointed them. He would apparently repeat with grim satisfaction Harry Wedgwood’s adage “A bench of bishops is the devil’s flower garden.”21 The curates became so unsatisfactory at one point that Innes offered to hand over his right of appointment to Darwin, momentarily forgetting that most clergymen would consider the author of the Origin of Species the last man in England appropriate to oversee a church living. The letters between them on these issues reveal many of the internal workings of a small rural parish.22 Darwin and Innes shared the same sense of resignation when faced with human folly or the byzantine rules of church bureaucracy. Innes, Fox, Henslow, and Langton were a breed of unassuming clergymen whom Darwin respected.

  These parish activities came to an abrupt halt when Darwin argued with George Ffinden, the vicar from 1871. Ffinden came from the sanctimonious, soulful end of church doctrine with a distinct aura of ritualism and tractarianism about him, someone who would have been much better placed in an Oxford college than a country living whose inhabitants were relatively unmoved by either Anglican church or Nonconformist chapel. Ffinden had evidently been warned that his parish included the great scientist. “I confess that, perhaps, I am a bit sour over Darwin and his works. You see, I’m a Churchman first and foremost. He never came to church, and it was such a bad business for the parish, a bad example.”23 Ffinden started boldly by putting high church teachings on the school curriculum. Darwin thought that a few prayers before lessons were “acceptable,” but not reciting the entire Thirty-nine Articles in chorus.

  Then Ffinden interfered with the evening use of the schoolroom as an adult reading and social club, one of Emma’s pet schemes. Irritated, Darwin applied by letter to the education inspectorate in London to get independent approval of the evening use of the room. He sent the official reply, with a stiff little note, to the parish council. A succession of tit-for-tat retaliations ensued, the very stuff that drives provincial life onwards. Ffinden considered that his position as minister to the souls of the parish was usurped and was curt to Darwin when they next met. Darwin resigned from the school committee in response. Then Ffinden refused to acknowledge him when they met in the street. Shortly afterwards, John Lubbock, who also sat on on the school committee, took Darwin’s part and threatened to build a new reading room, outside Ffinden’s jurisdiction. Emma flounced off to worship at Keston, never returning to the flint-built church in Downe. There is some anecdotal evidence that Lubbock also stopped attending Downe church because of Ffinden’s interference with the Lubbocks’ customary village patronage. Emma certainly believed Ffinden treated the Down House butler, Joseph Parslow, very unkindly at his wife’s funeral in Downe in 1881, as cheap retaliation against all things Darwinian. “Did I tell you of Mrs Parslow’s death. Poor P takes it very patiently & has rather benefitted than otherwise by Mr Ff’s brutal behaviour at the funeral … he thinks the ArchB ought to be informed.”

  Towards the end of the 1870s, Darwin urged his son Francis to join the school committee. Francis tried to oust Ffinden from the committee, perhaps successfully, because Ffinden shortly afterwards resigned, although he remained as vicar to the parish until after Darwin’s death. Darwin sent £25 for the church restoration fund and wiped his hands of any further contact. “I remember his giving me a subscription for the church and the house-restoration or building,” said Ffinden later.

  “Of course,” he told me, “I don’t believe in this at all.”

  “I don’t suppose you do,” I said to him. Quite candid on both sides.24

  III

  Early in 1878 the Darwins completed an extension to Down House intended for Francis and his son, Bernard. The building work had actually been going on for some time, for they had engaged the architect, William Cecil Marshall (who became a good friend), two years earlier, soon after Amy’s death. Darwin spent £1,000 on the rooms and furniture. These new works were supposed to provide a billiard room (Francis occupied the old billiard room) and another bedroom and dressing room upstairs. But the family changed their minds as soon as the new rooms were available. The sons suggested that Darwin should take the downstairs room as a bigger and better study. He moved into the new room in February.

  Conservative in his old age, Darwin made the new study look as much like the old as possible. He put the pictures in the same place over the mantelpiece, the armchair and table where he was accustomed to find them. However, even he liked the novelty. He said he was pleased with the couch that Emma purchased, the large tables for his plant pots, the clean northwestern light. With hardly a nod of regret he sold his special billiard table, and he hung a photograph of Emma by his armchair, an act of homage that apparently pleased her. Francis took over his father’s original study, which with the former billiard room created a small suite of rooms for him. Gaily, the old people experimented with a telephone which Leonard brought home one day from Chatham, probably a military model for use in the field rather than one of Bell’s magnetic-coil units.

  Leo had brought a telephone but it is rather a disappointing creature—They did not bring a long enough wire so that we kept hearing the talking outside the room in the natural way, & I could not hear Leo’s voice at all (hardly) tho’ I cd. Elinor’s very well. Aunt Eliz was m. interested but could not hear v. well.25

  In a more general sense, Darwin’s paternalistic role in the external community of Downe was repeated indoors. Behind the green baize door another world ran parallel to Darwin’s. In 1878 there were over a million domestic servants in Britain, making service the second-largest occupation after agricultural work. A household the size of Darwin’s would usually have included a butler, who might double as a manservant, one or more footmen (in livery), a coachman or groom (in livery), one or two housemaids, a cook, a lady’s maid, a nursery maid, a parlourmaid, a laundry maid, and gardeners, stablehands, and governesses as required. The 1861 census return for Down House listed twelve servants, a little over 2 percent of the total village population of 496. The 1871 census listed only six or seven because the family was away from home on that day. Among the employees living on Darwin’s property were William Brooks, the head gardener (aged seventy in the 1871 census), who occupied a cottage in the grounds with his wife and child; Samuel Jones, a coachman, originally from Llandudno; and George Bridger, a footman engaged from Emma’s sister when Elizabeth’s and Charlotte’s homes in Hartfield were sold. By the end of the 1870s, John (a coachman), Fred (a groo
m), and James (a footman) had joined them. These, and other staff, stayed with the Darwins for years, sometimes all their lives, growing old together. Moffat, the senior footman, arrived in 1858 and remained for twenty years. Most of the staff lived free of charge in the house, their meals and uniforms included, with a small monthly or quarterly cash payment on top. Darwin’s total salary costs for servants hovered around £100 per annum, a sum that was about half his butcher’s bill for any single year.

  The settled nature of the garden staff revealed the steady employment patterns traditionally fostered by the landed gentry. William Brooks remained at Down House as head gardener until 1872, when he retired at the age of seventy-one. Henry Lettington, the second gardener, aged forty-eight in the 1871 census, who married Brooks’s daughter, took over the older man’s position and stayed on past Darwin’s death. Mr. and Mrs. Brooks may have continued to live in the gardener’s cottage at Down with their daughter and son-in-law: the records are unclear. There were occasional tremors in this regime. At some point in the 1870s, Darwin’s sons persuaded him to engage an active young Scotsman for the garden. “The two old servants were dreadfully bustled by [the Scotsman], and I well remember their flushed faces after the first morning’s digging in the serious Scotch manner,” said Francis.26 Considerately, Darwin let the new man go. Lettington was ultimately replaced by Tommy Price, of whom Emma said “his work is not worth is. a day.”

  In small establishments like this the butler reigned supreme, his exalted status emphasised by the fact he wore civilian dress, not livery. Among other duties, Joseph Parslow looked after the wine and casks and the family silver, and took overall responsibility for the dining room, which included cleaning the best tableware and wineglasses himself. The silver was a fair responsibility, valued at £179 12s. 6d in the 1840s (around £10,000 in modern terms), including the Darwins’ wedding gifts and Emma’s bracelet of “gold, diamond and emerald.” Parslow kept his butler’s pantry locked, and possibly also slept there. His wife, Eliza (a dressmaker), and their children lived down the road in a tied cottage while he was in service. His daily life was inextricably interwoven with that of the household. One of Parslow’s daughters worked as a maid at the house, probably Anne Parslow, aged nineteen when listed in the 1861 census. Bernard Darwin’s nurse Mary Anne married Parslow’s son Arthur in 1881.