Darwin and the Barnacle

by Rebecca Stott

  Emma, renowned for her tenderness as a nurse, heartbreakingly separated from her eldest daughter, sent another pair of eyes to watch with Darwin’s own – those of Fanny, who had an ‘eye for illness’, and four children of her own. Emma pleaded with Charles: ‘You must let her experienced eye do some of the watching.’13 Fanny, emotionally strong and organized, arrived in Malvern from London with her lady’s maid, who took Etty back to London with her to be distracted by her cousins, who had been sent to stay with their Aunt Caroline at Leith Hill Place. Fanny took lodgings next door and settled herself in. Her task was to watch over them all. She wrote to Emma about Charles: ‘I do not try to prevent him doing a good deal about poor Annie. It seems as if it was some relief to be doing something, though occasionally it may be too much.’14 Fanny also took particular care of Brodie, who was ill with worry, crying constantly and unable to sleep. Miss Thorley, she noted, had no less feeling but more self-restraint.

  Through these seven sickbed days and nights, Charles, Brodie, Fanny and Miss Thorley watched over every flicker of Annie’s recumbent body, sponging her limbs with vinegar, spooning broth, wine, orange juice or water into her mouth, rubbing her feet, trying to change the bed sheet without hurting her frail, thin body, and, as things got worse, holding her still while the local doctor applied a catheter to ‘draw’ her urine. They watched each other, too, looking for signs of more or less hope in each other, or signs of exhaustion. Together in this room filled with the smells of chloride of lime and vinegar, and full of the paraphernalia of the Water Cure, they listened to Annie’s ramblings. The fever had made her delirious and she mumbled and sang for many hours at a time, then suddenly came to and recognized one of them or thanked them politely for a spoonful of orange juice or gruel. Everything had to be observed and recorded.

  Although Annie’s characteristically fine manners remained constant throughout the pain and delirium, Darwin was shocked more than anything by how little of the Annie he knew remained. It was a little like watching at the bedside of a stranger, until those longed-for moments of recognition. He wrote to Emma:

  This morning she is a shade too hot; but the Doctor … thinks her going on very well. You must not suppose her out of great danger. She keeps the same; just this minute she opened her mouth quite distinctly for gruel, and said ‘that is enough’. You would not in the least recognise her with her poor, hard, pinched features; I could only bear to look at her by forgetting our former dear Annie. There is nothing in common between the two … Poor Annie has just said ‘Papa’ quite distinctly.15

  Charles cried a good deal over the next week. He cried when he read Emma’s tender notes and frantic enquiries. He cried when she enclosed a pressed flower she had picked from Annie’s garden. He cried after Dr Gully’s visits and when Annie recognized him. Gully-had explained that, with gastric fevers such as this, nothing could be determined for certain until the end of a fortnight from the onset of the illness. So they were playing a waiting game. Annie would either survive into the last week of April, or not. Each further day gave them more hope.

  For seven long days and nights this routine continued. The dawn light filtered in through the curtains, gradually filling the room; shadows moved slowly; then, later, lamps would be lit, meals taken in an adjoining room, letters received and written, reports made. Annie’s temperature rose and fell; her pulse strengthened, then weakened. Visits from Dr Gully would raise or dash their hopes. Each time Charles struggled to summarize Annie’s sickness since the doctor’s last visit: her pulse, whether or not she had vomited, and the degree of delirium she had shown during the night. Each time he struggled to be as accurate as he could be, resisting the impulse to exaggerate her pain or be overly optimistic. Gully would listen and then pronounce his sombre judgement: ‘Not essentially worse,’ he would say, or ‘She is turning the corner,’ or ‘No progress.’ On one occasion, Charles wrote agonizingly to Emma, he had recorded that Annie had been able to urinate without the catheter and that her bowels had moved at the same time. He had been sure that this was a certain sign of improvement and he could not wait for the doctor’s arrival. He had felt ‘foolish with delight’; but when the Doctor arrived, he saw these signs quite differently, as a reason for alarm, not delight. ‘These alternations of no hope and hope sicken the soul,’ he wrote.

  In Down, Emma relied totally on the reports she received by post twice a day. She strained to listen for the sound of the postman’s step on the gravel path above the other domestic noises. In the last stages of pregnancy, she struggled to keep the house running smoothly and the children calm, without the usual support of Miss Thorley, Brodie and Charles himself. Emma’s seventy-year-old Aunt Fanny came to Down House to be with her and together they tried to interpret Annie’s progress at a distance, from the details of Charles’s letters alone. Emma trusted Charles to be absolutely truthful in his accounts: ‘I tell you everything just as it is, my dearest Emma,’ he wrote, and Emma responded with gratitude: ‘Your account of every hour is most precious.’ She dated and ordered each letter so that she could read them repeatedly over and over in sequence in order to try to discern where they were leading: ‘Your two letters of Monday are certainly better. Poor sweet little thing! I felt more wretched today than any day, but now I do think looking at the accounts of the last four days that there has been progressive improvement from that time.’ She summarized and condensed Charles’s reports of Annie’s illness into her own diary accounts, writing for Easter Sunday, 20 April: ‘sick 3 or 4 times & took brandy once’; 21 April: ‘much better’; 22 Tuesday: ‘Diarrhea came on’. That same day she received a letter from Fanny to warn her that Annie was in imminent danger and that she was to expect the worst.

  Wednesday 23 April was stormy. The rain swept off the Malvern Hills, lashing at the windows of Montreal House. Darwin remembered how each of Annie’s turns for the worse seemed to have been accompanied by storms. When she had lain in bed with Emma with influenza, the rain had fallen heavily for several days. When she had first become sick, the previous summer when the Wedgwood cousins were visiting, there had been a great storm with thunder and lightning. And here it was again.16 Darwin might almost have felt superstitious. Brodie almost certainly was, coming as she did from the coast of north-east Scotland, where storms would often signal fatalities in the village. Some of the fisherwomen would cover the mirrors in their houses during a thunderstorm and leave the windows and doors open, so that if the thunder got into the house, it could get out without having to damage anything.

  By noon, the thunder was breaking in Malvern and it was difficult to listen for Annie’s last faint breaths above its roars. Charles sat down to write the worst letter he would ever have to write:

  My dear dearest Emma, I pray God Fanny’s note may have prepared you. She went to her final sleep most tranquilly, most sweetly at twelve o’clock today. Our poor dear dear child has had a very short life but I trust happy, and God only knows what miseries might have been in store for her. She expired without a sigh. How desolate it makes one to think of her frank cordial manners. I am so thankful for the daguerrotype. God bless her. We must be more and more to each other, my dear wife.’17

  Emma didn’t receive this letter until the following day. On the Wednesday on which Annie died she waited for a letter, but John Griffith the postman had nothing to give her. Knowing the family’s grief, he was apologetic, and checked the bag a second time, but there was nothing. This meant the worst. She wrote the following day to Charles with as much stoicism as she could muster: ‘Till four o’clock I sometimes had a thought of hope, but when I went to bed, I felt as if it had all happened long ago. When the blow comes, it wipes out all that preceded it and I don’t think it makes it any worse to bear…. My feeling of longing after our lost treasure makes me feel painfully indifferent to the other children, but I shall get right in my feelings before long.’18

  To Fanny she wrote: ‘I do feel very grateful to God that our dear darling was apparently spared all suffering,
and I hope I shall be able to attain some feeling of submission to the will of Heaven.’ She was struggling with her God. Fanny, knowing that Emma and Charles needed to comfort each other, insisted that Charles return to Down as soon as he could, and he arrived by nightfall on Thursday. Fanny stayed in Malvern to oversee the laying out of Annie’s body and to arrange the funeral with her husband, Hensleigh. She wrote to Emma and Charles on 25 April: ‘Hensleigh and I are just returned from that sad & last work of laying your dear child in her earthly resting place.’19 Later, at Darwin’s request, she sent him a small map marking the position of Annie’s grave in the graveyard of the Priory Church, under a cedar of Lebanon. The tombstone read simply:

  ANNE ELIZABETH

  DARWIN

  BORN MARCH 2, 1841

  DIED APRIL 23, 1851

  A DEAR AND GOOD CHILD.

  But these were not to be Darwin’s last words on Annie. A week after her death, when he had begun to be able to control his tears, when he had answered several letters of condolence to the men of the family and announced her death in The Times, he took several pieces of mourning paper in order to write a final obituary of his daughter. It was an attempt to recover the Annie who had slipped away, to summon a clutch of memories and to separate off the living, joyous Annie from the dying and dead one with the pinched and sad features. How to put Annie into words? What was she now and where was she now? Who had Annie been to herself, to her mother, to her father? What had been the significance of her short life? And the meaning of it? Now, with the problem of conjuring up Annie before him, memorializing her, preserving her spirit and the memories she had left behind, he was strangely and surprisingly uninhibited. The words came easily, fluently. This was a wholly different experience from his usual daily struggle to describe the barnacles: the scratching out of abandoned and inadequate adjectives, the torn-up paper. Here, too, he needed to be precise, detailed; he needed to be able to distinguish Annie from her siblings, define her unique combination of characteristics like those of the barnacles; but the precise, passionless language of barnacle-description would not do now:

  Genus: Lepas

  Description: Capitulum flattened, subtriangular, composed of five approximate valves. The valves are either moderately thick and translucent, or very thin and transparent; and hence, though themselves colourless, they are often coloured by the underlying corium. These surfaces are either smooth and polished, or striated, or furrowed, and sometimes pectinated.20

  He drew on other parts of himself to describe Annie, reaching for adjectives he had not used for years. They came with little effort, with his heart so full. He crossed out very little and, as he wrote, Annie rose up clearly and strongly before his mind’s eye, like her ghost with him in the room, lying asleep on the chaise longue. He could almost hear her heavy breathing still. He could sec her face above all – the translucent skin, the lengthening facial bones, the branching vein across her temple; and he could sense her spirit, the way she made other people feel when she entered the room, the little dances she would do to tease him on the Sand Walk. He could look at her still in his mind’s eye, just as he remembered she had looked at him with that extraordinary directness of a child’s gaze. He changed almost nothing but stopped to correct one sentence that began ‘From whatever point I look at her’ to ‘From whatever point I look back at her’. He struggled to place her in the past tense, when she was so vividly there before his eyes: her sparkling eyes glinting round the door of the study as she smuggled him in some snuff, which Gully had forbidden.

  21 Darwin’s Memorial of Annie

  In this beautiful and lyrical twelve-page account he was concerned to distinguish Annie from her brothers and sisters and to define her ‘chief characteristics’, the touchstone of her personality. This was easy, he found: she was joyful, loving, neat and sensitive; and he remembered her touch – her hunger for the warmth of her mother’s face and longing to stroke the bare skin of Emma’s arms. She loved to be kissed. She loved to smooth her father’s hair and his clothes. Now that she was gone, he felt her death as an emptiness where she might have been – an ache. He could conjure her up in his mind’s eye, see her working at his desk or in the schoolroom, comparing the shells or feathers she had collected with his colour chart – even smell her sometimes; but he could not feel her. He would reach for her face or the shine of her hair and find only empty space. ‘Her figure and appearance were clearly influenced by her character: her eyes sparkled brightly; she often smiled; her step was elastic and firm; she held herself upright, and often threw her head a little backwards, as if she defied the world in her joyousness. Her hair was a nice brown and long; her complexion slightly brown; eyes dark grey; her teeth large and white.’21 ‘But looking back,’ he concluded, ‘always the spirit of joyousness rises before me as her emblem and characteristic: she seemed formed to live a life of happiness.’ Annie was made for joy – reason enough and meaning enough for a short life.

  Horace was born three weeks after Annie’s death. Perhaps Emma saw Annie there in the flickering fluidity of her newborn son’s face – a gesture, an expression that for a moment brought Annie back. Nothing is ever quite lost. She struggled to come to terms with her God, who had given Annie life as well as taken it away. When it seemed most unbearably unjust, she had to explain her God to Etty, answering Etty’s persistent questions about where her sister was with as much confidence and affection as she could. Annie was now with the angels, she told her. Etty, seven years old, struggled to map out the place that Annie had gone to and became confused. If all the angels were men, like Gabriel, then where would Annie have gone? Were there separate rooms for the girl angels? she asked. She wanted to be good, afraid of the consequences if she was not, for the maids had always compared her with the good Annie, the angel sister. If she wasn’t good, she might be left behind when her mother and all the good children went to heaven together. She pleaded with her mother to help her to be good: ‘Mamma, I used to be a very naughty girl when Annie was alive. Do you think God will forgive me? I used to be very unkind to Annie.’22 Emma assured her that they would all be reunited in heaven; but Etty knew that something did not make sense: why had Jesus taken the good one?

  Charles kept silent. Perhaps he longed to relieve Etty of her tormented resolutions to be good, seeing in them his own struggle as a child after his mother’s early death, his own struggles as a man with the death of his unbelieving father. Annie had indeed been good; but goodness had not helped her to survive. Why had she died? Because she had inherited poor health. She had become too weak to survive. Perhaps he longed to tell Etty that she did not need to worry about watching herself, recording herself, being good enough for God. Perhaps he wanted to say what he was beginning to feel himself: that these were all ‘notions of the cave’ and that after death there was nothing – no God waiting to scour Annie’s record book to decide whether she would be consigned to heaven or hell. She had only to be strong for life; and she hadn’t been strong enough.

  One thing is certain, that Life flies;

  One thing is certain, and the Rest is lies;

  The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.23

  Notes

  1 Charles Darwin, A Monograph of the Sub-Class Cirripedia (Palaeontographical Society, 1851), pp. 2–3.

  2 William Howitt, The Book of the Seasons; or the Calendar of Nature (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831), pp. 16–17. Charles Darwin borrowed this from the London Library in January for Annie.

  3Randal Keynes, Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin, his Daughter and Human Evolution (London: Fourth Estate, 2001), p. 159.

  4 For further interpretations of Darwin’s struggle with his religious beliefs see James Moore, ‘Of Love and Death: Why Darwin Gave up Christianity’, in J. Moore, ed., History, Humanity and Evolution: Essays for John C. Greene (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), pp. 95–229.

  5 See Darwin’s Reading Notebook DAR 119:22b.

  6 Harriet Martineau, Eastern Life: Present and Past, 3 vols
(London: Edward Moxon, 1848), p.354.

  7 H. G. Atkinson and H. Martineau, Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development (London, John Chapman, 1850).

  8 Ibid., p. 10.

  9 Randal Keynes, op. cit., p. 169.

  10 CD to Emma Darwin 21 April 1851, Correspondence 5: p. 20.

  11 CD to Emma Darwin, 18 April, Correspondence 5: p. 14.

  12 CD to Emma Darwin, 17 April 1851, Correspondence 5: p. 13.

  13 Emma Darwin to CD, 19 April, Correspondence 5: p. 15.

  14 Cited Randal Keynes, op. cit., p. 172.

  15 CD to Emma Darwin, 19 April 1851, Correspondence 5: p. 16.

  16 Fanny wrote to her daughter Effie that it was ‘just at twelve o’clock that we heard her breathe for the last time, while the peals of thunders were sounding. Poor Miss Thorley was very ill after and Brodie too. I never saw anyone suffer as she did, but they are both going tomorrow, Brodie to Down and Miss Thorley to her own home. She wants rest.’ Cited Keynes, op. cit., p. 176.

  17 CD to Emma Darwin, 23 April 1851, Correspondence 5: p. 24.

  18 Emma Darwin to CD, 24 April 1851, Correspondence 5: p. 24.

  19 Fanny Wedgwood to CD and ED, 25 April 1851, Correspondence 5: p. 29.

  20 Charles Darwin, Living Cirripedia (London: The Ray Society, 1851), pp. 67–8.

  21 CD’s account of Annie can be found as Appendix II of Correspondence 5, pp. 540–3. It is also reprinted in its entirety in Randal Keynes, op. cit., pp. 195–8.

  22 Emma kept a careful record of Etty’s questions in the months after Annie died and her own responses to them. These are reproduced in Appendix II of Correspondence 5, pp. 542–3.

  23 From The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward Fitzgerald in 1859 (London: Foulis, 1917).