Charles and Emma

by Deborah Heiligman

  He was making copious notes in small leather notebooks filled with high-quality paper made from linen rags. Each notebook was labeled with a letter. He had opened the first one, a brown leather notebook with a metal clasp, in July 1837. On the cream-colored pages, he had begun to jot down his secret and revolutionary thoughts about the origin of new species. Examining specimens he had collected, Charles was finding evidence that went against the prevailing concept of creation, which was that God had created all the species of birds, bees, and beetles at once and that there were no new ones since the first creation. Some people argued that fossils existed because God, displeased with his creations, had engineered a few worldwide catastrophes that had destroyed all the existent species and then had started creation all over again. But Charles had a very different idea, and he was accumulating pages and pages of observations, thoughts, ideas, and questions, filling up more and more notebooks, each with a different focus and marked with a different letter. He had many questions, from the everyday: “Owls. transport mice alive?” to the pointed: “How easily does Wolf & Dog cross?” How could he answer all of them if he succumbed to the mundane responsibilities of married life? He would have to spend his time hurrying down the street with a box in one arm and a baby in the other. There was so much to write on the Not Marry side of the page!

  He continued, “Cannot read in the Evenings—fatness & idleness—Anxiety & responsibility—less money for books &c if many children forced to gain one’s bread.”

  And yet, even on this side of the paper, he conceded “(But then it is very bad for ones health to work too much).”

  Back to the negatives. “Perhaps my wife won’t like London; then the sentence is banishment & degradation into indolent, idle fool.”

  Charles wasn’t completely sure he liked London himself. The city was noisy and dirty, the weather murky, the air often polluted with a yellow smog from the new factories and from all the fireplaces burning dirty coal. He often longed for the countryside near Wales where he grew up. But he thought that living in the country might make him lazy, which would be terrible for his work. He absolutely did not want to be either idle or a fool. On the other hand, you could stay in London and still be idle. Erasmus was; he was no fool, but he had neither a wife nor a career. Charles looked at him and knew that was not what he wanted.

  So. That’s where he ended his list of reasons not to marry.

  Under Marry, Charles began: “Children—(if it please God).” He did enjoy other people’s children. He played with them, and he observed them. He wrote in one of his secret notebooks “Children have an uncommon pleasure in hiding themselves & skulking about in shrubbery. When other people are about: this is analogous to young pigs hiding themselves.”

  Looking at his friends’ and cousins’ children he thought not only of pigs but also of “savages,” as the English called native people. During his voyage around the world, his encounters with natives had been startling and enlightening. On the Beagle there were three people from Tierra del Fuego who had lived for a while in England. They had been “civilized” in that they now wore British clothes and had adopted British manners. But when Charles and his shipmates first arrived in Tierra del Fuego, a group of natives perched on an overhang above the sea “sprang up, and waving their tattered cloaks sent forth a loud and sonorous shout.” They wore little clothing. Some of them, even full-grown women, were completely naked. Their hair was tangled, but many of the people had dramatically painted faces, with a bright red bar from ear to ear, white-chalked eyelids, streaks of black charcoal. As different as they looked, they were able to communicate with the English travelers and could imitate anything. One native man had learned new dance steps, which impressed Charles. Spending time with these people had made Charles think of ways that pigs, children, primitive peoples, Englishmen all were related. This was a clue to his secret theory.

  But now, thinking about children, he was thinking also as a man and a potential father. It would be nice to have his own little piggies skulking about in the bushes.

  Charles definitely liked to be surrounded by people. He had good friends and was close to his sisters and his brother. Having a wife would be really nice. He continued on the Marry side, “constant companion (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one—”

  He hoped his wife would live a long time, unlike his mother, who had died painfully, probably of an infection, when Charles was only eight. His father, an experienced and extremely successful doctor, had not been able to save her. Her death devastated Dr. Darwin, though Charles himself hardly remembered her. He hoped he would find someone who would be interested in him, definitely, but he also wanted someone he could love. He wrote “object to be beloved & played with.”

  And then: “better than a dog anyhow.”

  Sometimes Charles thought dogs were easier than people. He had loved dogs since he was a boy, and they loved him. When Charles had just gotten back from the voyage, he found it difficult at first to resume where he had left off with his sisters and his father. He had changed, and they didn’t seem to be able to adjust to that. But when he went out into the yard and whistled, his dog (who was surly to everyone else but adored him) rushed out to walk with him, as if their last walk had been the day before, not five years earlier. Why couldn’t people be more like dogs? he wondered—and wished. But a dog can’t do everything, and so a wife would be better than a dog anyhow.

  He listed more positives: “Home, & someone to take care of house—Charms of music & female chit-chat.—These things good for one’s health.—but—”

  There it was again—“terrible loss of time.” Too much music, too much chitchat. Not enough time to do his work. Again he looked at his brother, Erasmus. Even though he was a bachelor, Eras spent much of his time with women—mostly other men’s wives—taking them on errands in his carriage, going to dinners. But then he returned them to their husbands. Harriet Martineau wasn’t married, and there was gossip about Harriet and Erasmus. But Eras seemed determined to remain single. His father and sisters wanted to fix him up with their cousin Emma Wedgwood, mostly to stop the gossip, but so far nothing had happened there. Erasmus was in control of his own life, as Charles could be if he stayed a bachelor, too. Yet—

  “My God, it is intolerable to think of spending ones whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all.—No, no won’t do.—Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House.”

  Alone in his smoky, dirty London house, Charles thought about love and romance and what went with it. He read poems by the romantics William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge—“Where true Love burns Desire is Love’s pure flame…” He filled his notebooks with the scientific aspects of love, with questions about breeding and heredity. So far most of his questions were about animals, but in his notebook marked “B,” Charles wrote in brown ink on pages with faint green rules, “In Man it has been said, there is instinct for opposites to like each other.” Perhaps he and his wife would be opposites, but close.

  “Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps—”

  And heading off to bed later.

  He ended his list under Marry, “Compare this version with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro’ St.”—his life on Great Marlborough Street, where he went to bed alone.

  The lists on the left and right side of the page looked about the same length. But Charles felt that he had found more reasons to marry than not. He wrote on the left side, squeezed at the bottom, the answer to his question: “Marry—Marry—Marry Q.E.D.”

  QED: quod erat demonstrandum, Latin for “which was to be demonstrated or proved.” He had proven to himself that he should get married. On paper at least. But he had one other fear, a fear that he could not bring himself to write down. The issue was too big. He would have to talk to his father.

  Chapter 2

  Rat Catching

  I do not believe that anyone could have shown mo
re zeal

  for the most holy cause than I did for shooting birds.

  —CHARLES, ON HIS CHILDHOOD PASSION

  To talk to his father, Charles set out for home. Home was the Mount, a large, square brick house in Shrewsbury, a quiet market town in the county of Shropshire about 150 miles northwest of London. Even with the expanded railroad, the trip from London to Shrewsbury was a long one; it had to be made by train and carriage. The journey would take Charles all day, about twelve hours.

  The Mount was typical of Georgian architecture from the previous century. The house had regular, strict proportions, which was how Charles’s father liked things. Charles’s father, Dr. Robert Darwin, was a huge man—over three hundred pounds, with a huge personality and reputation to match. People from all over Shropshire came to him for advice—both medical and financial, for he was a successful physician and a keen businessman. He had invested his and his wife’s money well. Charles’s mother, Susanna, was the daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, who had founded the famous and profitable Wedgwood pottery company.

  The house was set at the bend of a river, and there were beautiful gardens out back. It was the home of a wealthy family, with maids and other servants to boil water, empty chamber pots, light the gaslights and oil lamps, keep the fires going to make the house warm(ish), prepare the meals, do the laundry (by hand), and in general run the house, just as they had when Charles was growing up.

  Charles was born at the Mount on February 12, 1809 (the very same day a baby named Abraham Lincoln was born across the Atlantic Ocean in a log cabin in Kentucky). Charles—or Bobby, as he was called as a baby—was the fifth of six children. He and Erasmus were the only boys. There were four girls, including Catherine, who was born not quite two years after Charles.

  Because Susanna had died when Charles was so young, it was Robert Darwin who was the main adult presence in the household—and a presence he was. From the time Charles was little, Dr. Darwin would hold forth for hours at a time at the dinner table and in the parlor afterward with his children and any company as captive audiences. He expounded his ideas about medicine, human nature, politics, and business. Though he loved his children, he did not give them much freedom of thought: He was certain that his views were the right views. In only one area did he allow them some amount of leeway, and that was in religion. He raised the children as Unitarians. Unitarianism was a lenient Christian faith at the center of social reform in England. It was not very demanding about the specifics of belief. Charles’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had made fun of Unitarianism, saying it was a “featherbed to catch a falling Christian.” Dr. Darwin liked to quote that saying, too. But being a Unitarian was good for many reasons. Unitarians did not stand out in society as heretics, but the faith was easy to live with if you felt uncomfortable with a more serious, stricter branch of Christianity.

  Susanna Wedgwood had been a bright and lively woman, and Dr. Darwin had been very much in love with her. But she was sickly before she died, so Charles and Catherine were raised and taught by the older girls: Marianne, Caroline, and Susan. Charles was very close to his older sisters, and looked to them as mothers. And he always adored and looked up to his big brother, Erasmus. But growing up he liked to spend much of his time alone. He took long walks by himself around the Shropshire countryside, thinking.

  One day he was walking on a public footpath at the top of some old ruins around Shrewsbury. He was so caught up in his thoughts that he walked right off the footpath and fell down seven or eight feet. He remembered years later that “the number of thoughts which passed through my mind during this very short, but sudden and wholly unexpected fall, was astonishing.”

  Charles could entertain himself for hours just by thinking, or by observing birds, or watching sticks and leaves float down a stream. He made notes as he watched the birds, writing down what they did, how they behaved. And like many young boys, he was a collector. He collected shells, seals, coins, and minerals. He studied them and organized them by kind—in the tradition of natural historians. As he got older, his great love was hunting and shooting. Later in life he shuddered at how many animals he had killed. But at the time he quivered with joy and excitement before picking up a gun.

  Soon after Susanna died, Dr. Darwin sent Charles to a boarding school that was just a mile from the Mount. Since school was so close and since he was not happy there—they didn’t teach him much, or what they did try to teach him he wasn’t interested in learning—Charles went home often and usually had to run to school before classes started or before the buildings were locked up at night. When he wasn’t sure he would get there on time, he’d pray earnestly to God to help him. Much later he remembered that if he got to school on time, he attributed his success “to the prayers and not to my quick running, and marveled how generally I was aided.” In spite of his father’s nonbelief, Charles gave God the credit.

  In high school, Charles was still not a good student. Yet outside of school, in a little shed at home, Charles loved to do chemistry experiments with Erasmus. He did them so often that his school friends nicknamed him Gas. But science was not considered a valuable use of any young man’s time, and his headmaster admonished him for not paying more attention to his math or his Latin.

  Dr. Darwin decided to take Charles out of high school since he wasn’t making much use of it anyway. Erasmus, who was twenty-one, was going to Edinburgh, Scotland, to study medicine; Charles could tag along. Both boys were bright, and it seemed obvious to Dr. Darwin that they should follow him in his profession. So at only sixteen, Charles went straight to medical school.

  In Edinburgh, some of the professors and students loved natural history, and Charles learned from them. He spent time with Erasmus, went to scientific talks, joined clubs, and got to know a freed slave named John Edmonstone, who taught him how to stuff birds. This would become quite handy later on, and he enjoyed Edmonstone’s company very much. But he didn’t like his medical school classes. He watched two operations, both of which he ran away from before they were finished. One of them was an amputation on a child; the child screamed in pain, for there was no anesthesia. Charles listened to the poor child’s screams and saw all that blood and decided he could never go into medicine. He hated the sight of blood for the rest of his life.

  When Dr. Darwin heard that Charles wanted to leave school, he wrote to him in anger, “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”

  Erasmus did not become a doctor either. Dr. Darwin, it seems, was not always right. But now, in the summer of 1838, Charles still wanted to get his father’s advice about marriage. He arrived at the Mount determined to talk to his father about the problem that was so big he hadn’t put it on his Not Marry list.

  Chapter 3

  Conceal Your Doubts

  Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy

  the interposition of a deity. More humble and I believe

  true to consider him created from animals.

  —CHARLES, “C” NOTEBOOK, 1838

  Dr. Darwin had seen everything in his medical practice. He was not surprised by much. So now, in the summer of 1838, when Charles told him that he wanted to get married but was afraid about a few things, Dr. Darwin was ready to help.

  First Charles told his father that he was worried he wouldn’t be able to support a family with his current plan of pursuing science. Dr. Darwin knew Charles was going to have his first book published, an account of his voyage on the Beagle, and it was clear that he had a promising scientific career.

  But, Charles’s father told him, even without any income from his work, he would be fine. With family money from the doctor’s practice and wise investments, Charles would have enough to support himself and a family quite nicely while he pursued natural history and wrote books.

  This was a huge relief to Charles. But there was still a major concern holding him back. A problem so big that even Charles, who wrote down all of his th
oughts, couldn’t put it on paper. This problem was as big as it got.

  The problem was God.

  Charles hadn’t always thought about God or religion as a problem. In fact, after he had given up the idea of medicine, both Charles and his father thought he was going to be a country parson. Even though Dr. Darwin was not a religious man himself, having a son who was in the church was not an anathema to him. Being a country parson was an honorable profession for a British gentleman, and one that left a good amount of time for pursuing other activities, such as collecting. So ten years earlier, Charles had left Edinburgh and had gone off to study theology at Christ’s College, Cambridge.

  While at university, Charles read theology, not just on assignment but also for pleasure. He especially enjoyed the works of William Paley. He read Paley’s A View of the Evidences of Christianity, his The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, and his Natural Theology. Paley wrote about natural history, arguing that if you examined specimens carefully, you could see how beautifully they were created, how perfect they were in their adaptations. This to Paley was evidence of the existence of God and proof that God was the creator of all species. Charles thought these arguments were well-written, coherent, and logical. He did not, at that point, question Paley’s premises about God’s role in creation. He later said that he had learned from Paley how to construct an argument.