Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  Parslow did much more than guard the silver. As several guests mentioned, he was nearly a member of the family. He was Darwin’s valet, accustomed to helping him with all his personal requirements. Over the years he performed as nurse and bathman, sometimes cradling Darwin like a baby while he was sick. “About thirty years ago many’s a time when I was helping to nurse him, I’ve thought he would die in my arms,” he said after Darwin’s death.27 He was natural history assistant and trusted messenger. He travelled with the family, young and old, on holidays, to school, and for excursions; taught the boys to shoot; bought cows and sold horses for his master; played billiards; and told the lads to take their boots off in the hall. More than this, he was patriotic and public-spirited, joining in with village life. He signed up for the voluntary militia in Bromley before shifting, in the company of Darwin’s oldest boys, to drill with the High Elms Rifle Corps, a volunteer corps set up by the Lubbock family. He served as overseer to the Downe Friendly Society, which probably meant that he collected the subscriptions. Darwin paid for him to join the West Kent Liberal Association. His life was the mirror image of his master’s, the other half of a Victorian gentleman’s existence. He knew all the houses that the family visited, the names as familiar to him as they were to Darwin—High Elms, Hopedean, Leith Hill Place, Queen Anne Street, Abinger Hall, Kew, and Bassett. One special friend of his was John Lubbock’s butler at High Elms. When Lubbock was elected to Parliament, Darwin gave Parslow the afternoon off so that he could join the High Elms staff in celebrating victory in the servants’ hall. More often than he liked to remember, Parslow drove the horse and cart to Kew Gardens to fetch plants or took the train to deliver manuscripts to John Murray in Albermarle Street. “No man ever had a truer affection for the whole family than Parslow,” said Francis.

  Parslow retired from Darwin’s service in 1875 with an annual pension of £50. He moved to the “Home cottage” and afterwards occasionally came up to the house for a day’s duties when the family were short-staffed or required rooks to be shot. He was fond of the infant Bernard, who called him “Pa,” and sometimes invited Bernard to visit the cottage on his own for tea. In return, when Bernard was given a Swiss doll, he christened it Parslow. “He is devoted to it, feeding it with titbits, and having it to look on at his bath,” said Francis. In retirement, Parslow’s attention turned to his vegetable garden: first prize for potatoes in the village show, runner beans two years after. He attended Darwin’s funeral and outlived him by sixteen years. He died in 1898 and was buried in Downe churchyard.

  William Jackson took Parslow’s place, neither smart, efficient, nor tidy—a little man with red cheeks and wispy side whiskers, looking much like the groom he once was, a distinct character also much loved by Bernard as he grew up. Jackson considered himself fully one of the family. While waiting at table he would pay attention to what was being said and sometimes contribute his own remarks. Bernard once asked Emma what the play Electra was about and whether it was nice. Emma said it was very nice. “What is it about?” asked Bernard, still a very little boy. “About a woman who murdered her mother,” said Emma, whereupon Jackson doubled up with laughter.28

  Jackson liked having a small boy around and often used to make things for him, constructing a sentry box in the orchard and then some miniature walking sticks, labelled by Bernard according to the houses he used to visit with his father Francis. Bernard also watched with admiration as Jackson constructed a scale model of Down House out of cork and glue, his masterpiece, on which he was engaged for years. Jackson’s treatment of the bow windows and the glass in the roof of the veranda struck Bernard as “the high water mark of human ingenuity.”29 When Bernard learned to ride on a donkey, aged three, it was Jackson, Jones, and Fred who plodded round the paths and Sandwalk with him. And it was Jackson, Jones, and a French nursemaid called Pauline who taught him cricket on the lawn—that is, until Harriet, “sonsy, pink and handsome,” and with a loud laugh, took over, lobbing a tennis ball to Bernard along the upstairs corridor with a little red fire engine serving as the wicket.

  According to these members of staff, Darwin was a considerate employer, inexhaustibly polite, but one who shied away from taking disciplinary action. Mrs. Evans the cook seemed incapable of organising things in the kitchen as efficiently as he privately desired, yet he could not bring himself to remonstrate. Certain areas of household expenditure were slack. Darwin resented the annoying discovery that a miller had cheated him for years in supplying flour. One gardener sold a cow and pocketed the money without anybody knowing until Darwin did the end-of-year accounts. Francis, who recorded these details, said he “used to regret he didn’t look after things like his father used to.” In particular, Darwin avoided change in his domestic arrangements, disliking those occasions when he had to sack an employee—another instance of his innate antipathy to involving himself in potentially unpleasant circumstances. The servants that were satisfactory often stayed for a long time. Parslow remarked that it was a contented household.

  He was a very social, nice sort of gentleman, very joking and jolly indeed, a good husband and a good father and a most excellent master. Even his footmen would stay with him as long as five years. They would rather stay with him than take a higher salary somewhere else. The cook came there while young and stayed till his death—nearly thirty years.30

  Although these men and women shared Darwin’s life so fully, his work remained a mystery to them. John Lubbock once asked Lettington, the gardener, about Darwin’s health.

  “Oh!” he said, “my poor master has been very sadly. I often wish he had something to do. He moons about in the garden, and I have seen him stand doing nothing before a flower for ten minutes at a time. If he only had something to do I really believe he would be better.31

  Bernard hit this note of bemusement neatly when he recalled a new nurse’s remark. “It was a pity that Mr. Darwin had not something to do like Mr Thackeray; she had seen him watching an ant-heap for a whole hour.”32

  IV

  By now Darwin was far more prosperous than he had ever expected to be. “He used often to say that what he was really proud of was the money he had saved,” recorded Francis. “He also took much pleasure in the money he made by his books.”33 The income from Darwin’s books was now relatively high, every new edition and translation bringing a cheque of one or two hundred pounds from Murray. When Darwin totted this up in 1881, he noted that the “total receipts from earnings on books” during his lifetime came to £10,248 (close to half a million in modern terms). This sum was large for science, although perhaps not for creative literature as a whole. Anthony Trollope reckoned that his novels, down to 1879, brought him some £70,000.34

  From about 1878 or so, Darwin took to dividing up his annual surplus between the children, a plan borrowed from a local friend, George Norman. He did not make an equal division. The figures in 1881 were £474 for each son, £316 for either daughter. This reflected his alternative arrangements for the girls, based on trust funds that provided them with an independent income. After Henrietta’s marriage he continued paying her a personal allowance of £100 a year.

  Darwin’s main source of financial comfort was his investment income, based on some shrewd capital purchases over the years. He rarely took risks. Much of the capital in his hands was held in a number of different trust funds for Emma or the individual children, and he diligently reinvested interest payments back into each. The remainder was his own, inherited directly from his parents, a proportion of which was still in the form of loans and mortgages. Darwin also owned Beesby Farm, in Lincolnshire, land that he rented out and that returned a regular income. He and Erasmus, and their brother-in-law Charles Langton, who was noted in the family for his good eye for an investment, cautiously moved the remaining capital around. Darwin spoke with admiration of the way Langton doubled his first wife’s fortune through canny investment. Bit by bit, the older generation drew William, the banker, into the process, making him a trustee for his brothers�
� and sisters’ settlements, and executor for his parents, uncles, and aunts.

  The last third of the century was a good time for investors prepared to put money into the nation. The joint-stock banking system was stable, the expanding empire filled government coffers, inflation presented no threat, and through its gilt-edged securities the treasury guaranteed a fixed return on loans and investment.35 Darwin consequently bought into the Exchequer loan and consolidated stock (consols). Giving advice to his sister Caroline in the last months of his life he strongly advised her to buy “ordinary Government 3 percent Stock,” reinforcing his advice by adding, “My father used to say that everyone ought to hold some of this stock.” He looked overseas, and towards import and export companies, at times holding shares in Pennsylvania Oil, the London Docks, Massachusetts Railway, and the East and West India Docks. “What do you think about Southampton Docks for your mother’s £1000?” he asked William. “I think that the Leeds Corporation or the Leicester Corporation wd. be best, & next the Canada Bonds.” He avoided gold and cotton, both unstable after the Civil War years in America.

  Although lucky windfalls from railway companies in mid-century had helped him create an extensive railway portfolio, he had sold off most of these stocks by the 1870s in order to reinvest more safely elsewhere. In 1860, for example, he received dividends of £8,000 from the North Western and £7,800 from the Great Northern, part of which he promptly used to buy £5,000 of government consols as security for William. He put £10,150 of this windfall into the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway, and (by finding another £340) added £990 to his North Eastern Preference Berwick railway debentures. From time to time, he bought a stake in railway companies that were moving towards profitable mergers or were building a new line, such as the London and North Western, or the North Eastern, the latter a notoriously aggressive company that preyed on weaker businesses. Here his views on the struggle for existence among animals and plants interlocked exactly with political economy—the united biological and social world that Spencer thought ran according to the “law of railway morals.”

  Darwin found room for some remunerative local activities as well. He and Lubbock were principal share-holders in the Mid-Kent Railway Company and the South Eastern Railway, which during the 1860s and 1870s opened up a tangle of short-lived railway lines in the area around Beckenham and Bromley where they both lived. In 1855, Darwin and Lubbock had backed a line called the Mid Kent and North Kent Junction, running for less than five miles from Lewisham to Beckenham, and for a period Beckenham was the nearest station to Darwin’s house. Then he and Lubbock financed a side line from Bromley to St. Mary Cray in 1858, which was sold at a profit to the London, Chatham and Dover Company. Darwin and Lubbock supported the South Eastern Railway, which gradually absorbed other lines, and aided the development of Farnborough and Orpington stations. Later they interested themselves in the new stations in London at Blackfriars Bridge and Ludgate Hill.36

  Dividends could be handsome. In 1863, Darwin had calculated that he was worth £122,131.37 In 1881, the year before his death, William estimated Darwin’s capital as £282,000 (nearly £13 million in modern terms). This included the residue of his brother Erasmus’s estate. “Did you ever expect to be worth over ¼ of a million?” inquired his son. Further to this, Emma possessed £24,000 invested independently on her behalf.38

  On the other side of the coin, his household expenses were modest—even frugal. Darwin’s account books show an annual expenditure of about three to four thousand pounds, a relatively small sum for an establishment of some twenty people living on an estate of twenty acres. These account books were his private works of art, on which he lavished an inordinate amount of time and attention. Everything was listed, everything was totalled and tabulated. At a glance he could observe whether one year was more expensive than another in coal, beer, stables, books, medicines, holidays, or charitable donations. Emma’s accounts were kept separately, but he totalled them up just as efficiently. At the bottom of each column was a place for recording errors, the minute adjustments that to him made all the difference. Excluding the profit from his books, his annual personal income sometimes reached £6,000 or £7,000. Each year he invested, out of savings, £2,000, £3,000, or £4,000. He did not have many outgoings beyond household expenses. Income tax and other obligatory payments such as fire insurance and the Poor Rate were low in the nineteenth century, for him no more than £111 total in 1873. He paid pensions to the longest-serving servants, like Parslow, and was generous to former governesses, who, like the old ladies in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, were usually reduced to watchful poverty, including Brodie, the children’s first nurse, to whom Emma wrote regularly until her death in 1873. Darwin paid £30 a year to the former governess Miss Pugh so that she could take an annual holiday from the asylum where she lived.

  In all this he took personal satisfaction. Understanding and regulating the domestic economy of his house was as delicate a piece of work as any of his natural history projects, and the results were as intricate and judiciously balanced as a patch of natural woodland. Darwin was not an outright Victorian patriarch, financially dominant, top of the tree. Instead, he brought with him a perceptive, sympathetic understanding of a man’s place at the head of the household. His objectives were to protect, to provide, to be private and attached to his home. All the same, he expected to oversee the budgets of his wife and children, to be consulted, and if necessary to give his permission.39 “I think they were a model couple in the way in which the machinery of their joint life worked,” said Francis in full sentimental flow.

  My mother was always consulted about everything, but the ultimate decision of anything important really rested with my father; & my mother always seemed perfectly happy that it should be so. On the other hand he was glad to be managed in all little things. He often said in fun that the woman was the real master in a house. He considered her a sort of conscience in small things & matters of small etiquette.40

  His thrifty nature was a family joke. The children warned each other about his air of worried abstraction when the annual accounting came along. Every September they waited for forecasts of poverty. The “workhouse season,” they called it. “Thank God, you’ll have bread & cheese,” he once said to the boys, and Francis remembered being small enough to take him literally.

  The steady hum of these financial cogs was unexpectedly altered in 1878 when Anthony Rich, an appropriately named solicitor, informed Darwin that he wished to leave him his fortune as a token of his admiration.41 Mr. Rich was apparently sincere in his desire to honour Darwin, in the same way as a devoted parishioner might bequeath assets to a local church, or a graduate to his college. Thoroughly taken by surprise, Darwin tried to persuade Mr. Rich otherwise. He was not an elderly institution in need of an endowment fund. Moreover, it occurred to him that the letter might be a practical joke or a fraud, or that he would somehow be drawn into public embarrassment. He was wary of being bound by the ties of generosity. So Huxley jumped on a train on Darwin’s behalf to take a look at Rich in his home town of Worthing, and returned to say that he was a wholly respectable man, interested in science, liberal, decent, and childless. He was a Cambridge graduate who occasionally published little-read works on classical antiquities. In turn, the solicitor was so impressed by Huxley that he put him into his will as well, leaving him in 1881 the house that had excited Huxley’s admiration, informally valued by Darwin as worth £3,000.42

  When Darwin and Rich subsequently met, one intent on giving, the other on refusing, Darwin discovered that Rich would not change his mind. In the end, he accepted the money on the grounds (as Rich pointed out) that he had five sons to provide for. By regarding the sum as a legacy for his boys, Darwin managed to justify the business to himself. Thereafter he scrupulously performed the duties into which this unusual situation pushed him, corresponding with Rich, courteously inquiring about his welfare, drawing him into his researches, and keeping him up to date with the boys’ progress, especially a
s it related to scientific developments. Rich replied at length, taking an informed interest in evolutionary matters. Little else is known about him or his bequest.

  The rest of the family regarded it as a wonderfully unexpected bonus. Emma could hardly believe that her frugal husband had agreed. “We shall be disgustingly rich & F. is thinking of reckless extravagance in the matter of Chutnee & Bananas, & Bessy & I have been running riot in bulbs & flowers. Leo is scheming a new tennis court.”43 If Rich had hoped for public recognition, however, it was not forthcoming. Darwin regarded the bequest entirely as a private affair, as did the sons who were the beneficiaries. It was hardly mentioned in their recollections of Darwin’s life. Darwin never saw the money himself. Rich died in 1891, well after he did. The boys apparently inherited from this bequest several thousand pounds apiece.

  V

  Having Francis at home made all the difference to Darwin’s botanical researches. From 1876 or so, Francis carried out a wide range of microscopical inquiries, looking into the agglutination (“clumping”) that his father claimed to see in Drosera cells as well as pursuing observations on protoplasmic streaming. The two worked closely together on the movements of plants and on insectivorous species.