He wrote in his “N” notebook, “A child crying. Frowning, pouting, smiling, just as much instinctive as a bull.” Just as a newborn calf butts his head, or a young crocodile snaps his jaws, a baby makes his needs known by crinkling his brow, crying, cooing. These things are not learned, but are inherited: “I assume a child pouts who has never seen others pout,” he wrote.
He wrote down all his observations and many years later would publish them in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. But for now, watching the baby helped him formulate his theory. He wrote that it was “extremely difficult to prove that our children instinctively recognize any expression. I attended to this point in my first-born infant…and I was convinced that he understood a smile and received pleasure from seeing one, answering it by another, at much too early an age to have learnt anything by experience.”
Emma reported to Aunt Jessie, “It is a great advantage to have the power of expressing affection and I am sure he will make his children very fond of him.” And children it would be, for four months after writing that letter, Emma was pregnant again.
When their next child was born, on March 2, 1841, it was a girl, Anne Elizabeth. Annie gave Charles ample opportunity for more scientific study. Although Charles was enraptured with Doddy, Annie was a great rival to her brother in his affections. She was from the very beginning a bright and sunny baby, who loved to be held and hugged and kissed. Charles adored her. And when Emma lay in bed with her, the baby reached out to touch her mother. Annie quickly stole her parents’ hearts.
Chapter 16
Down in the Country
A frog jumped near him and he danced and screamed with
horror at the dangerous monster, and I had a bout of kissing
at his open, bellowing mouth to comfort him.
—CHARLES, DURING A VISIT TO THE MOUNT WITH DODDY
By the spring of 1842, the house on Upper Gower Street was starting to feel crowded. Annie was no longer a baby; she was a real little person. Emma wrote to Aunt Jessie, “My little Annie has taken to walking and talking for the last fortnight.” As usual, she told it like it was: “She is 13 months old and very healthy, fat and round, but no beauty. Willy is very much impressed with his own generosity and goodness to her.”
The children needed more room to play. The garden, decent enough for Charles to pace, was too small for romping around in; now Charles and Emma had to pay for a key to get into the gardens at Gordon Square, which were enclosed and a safe place for the children to toddle and run freely. The house was crowded, not only with Charles’s specimens in spirits of wine and the like, but also with the servants who went along with Charles’s live specimens and their nurturing: the children’s beloved red-haired Scottish nurse, Brodie, night nurses, other day nurses, the cook, the housemaids, and Joseph Parslow, who had replaced Syms Covington—after the short-lived tenure of a butler who stole the knives.
Both Emma and Charles found that London’s whirl of noise, dirt, crowds, and foggy, smoggy air was getting to be too much for them. Emma joked to Aunt Jessie, “The London air has a very bad effect upon our little boy’s v’s and w’s, he says his name is ‘Villy Darvin,’ and ‘Vipe Doddy’s…own tears away…’—my inclination for the country does not diminish.”
London seemed to make Emma’s headaches worse. Both of them felt better overall during their visits to the country at Maer or the Mount. During a visit to his father the previous summer, Charles had gotten medical advice, as well as a warning about Doddy. To Charles’s dismay, Dr. Darwin had pronounced Doddy a delicate child. Charles always wondered if first cousins produced sickly children, and now here was his father confirming that concern. And upon interviewing the servants, Dr. Darwin had discovered that the toddler was being fed half a cup of cream every morning. Charles was chagrined. He told Emma, “I presume you did not know any more than I.” The doctor said that was “one of the most injurious things we could have given him.” Charles vowed that they should look after their children better and not trust “anything about our children to others.” This included religion; they did not name godparents for the children. Although they were not certain yet exactly how they would do it, they knew they wanted to be in charge of their children’s religious upbringing.
During that visit to the Mount, Charles had also received the promise of a loan from his father to buy a house in the country. Although he had some more networking to do in the city and he and Emma were torn about his leaving the scientific center of England, he was not getting out that much because of his ill health. He was spending most of his time inside writing. Emma told Aunt Jessie, “Charles is very busy finishing his book on Coral islands, which he says no human being will ever read, but there is such a rage for geology that I hope better things.” After working on it for three years and seven months, he had sent the manuscript to his publisher in January 1842. He felt much relieved at finishing it, and he started to feel better physically.
Now in the spring of 1842, the family made a trip to Maer, where Charles, freed from his coral reefs, started to think again about his species theory. Puzzling over how new species were created, he turned to experts in different fields: He talked to Elizabeth about gardening. He talked to farmers about breeding cattle and sheep. He watched bees pollinate flowers. And as he relaxed with his family around him, he decided to write down his thoughts all in one place. He had left his notebooks back in London, but he had so much in his head anyway. He took out some paper and a soft pencil and wrote down a rough argument for the mutability of species. He called it “descent with modification,” and he used the term “natural selection” for the mechanism of change. He began with Part 1: “On Variation Under Domestication, and on the Principles of Selection.” He wrote, “An individual organism placed under new conditions [often] sometimes varies in a small degree…Also habits of life develope certain parts. Disuse atrophies.” He wrote and then erased, “Most of these slight variations tend to become hereditary.”
He did not shy away from problems; he listed them. “Difficulties on theory of selection,” he wrote. “It may be objected such perfect organs as eye and ear, could never be formed.” This was where the work was to be done. He would have to provide answers to all the problems he could think of. The sketch was only thirty-five pages long; he knew he would have hundreds more pages when he worked out all the steps and answered all the objections. But just as with his Marry, Not Marry list, he left out the problem of religion. He knew that taking God out of the story of creation would cause the biggest objections of all: from Emma, her sister Elizabeth, some of his other cousins, and even his scientific friends Lyell and Henslow. He just did not know how to answer these protests. He still struggled with what he himself believed about God.
He tucked the pages away and, back in London, continued working on the problem of finding a place for his growing family to live. He now was sure he wanted to leave the city. One of his fears, back when he was trying to figure out if he should marry or not, was that moving to the country would make him idle. But working on the species sketch at Maer had gone well; he now knew that he would not be idle in the country. The quiet would, in fact, be good for his work. Erasmus and Lyell were both horrified that he should even consider leaving London, but Charles was determined. He was tired of it all: the yellow fog, the horse dung in the streets, the noise. He needed quiet to think; the children needed space to run. Besides, they definitely needed more room. Emma had gotten pregnant with their third child around the time Charles finished Coral Reefs. She was due in September. So the house hunting began in earnest.
Rather than go north to the countryside near where they had grown up, which was too far away from London, Emma and Charles decided they wanted a place that was an easy day’s train trip back into the city so Charles could go in if needed but be home at night to sleep. Though he could always stay overnight with Erasmus, he and Emma hated to spend any time apart.
Charles found a house he thought would do in the Kent countrys
ide. It was a Georgian house, not unlike the Mount, in a small village called Down, about sixteen miles from London Bridge. He did not love the house itself; he thought it was rather ugly and looked neither charmingly old nor refreshingly new. But it was in good repair, and there were plenty of rooms and bedrooms. Also it was very much a country house, surrounded by fields and rural walks. He loved the countryside. He did worry that the house was too far away from the train station—the eight and a half miles would take about an hour by horse-drawn carriage. But the train to London would take only about another hour. That was close enough so that Charles could get to London in about two hours and come back the same day. He took Emma to see the house.
It was a gray day when they set out, and Emma had a toothache and a headache. Her reaction was not what Charles had hoped it would be. She did not like the house at all, nor did she like the countryside. The chalky fields did nothing for her; she longed for a landscape like the one around Maer—beautiful, green, and varied. But Charles liked the Chalk District; he loved the landscape of low, rolling hills. And he was taken with the hedges, plants, and flowers, including the purple magnolias up against the house. In the spring there would be pale blue violets and primroses, goldilocks, wood anemones, and white Stellaria. He especially liked the trees. There were some old cherry trees with delicious cherries. There were chestnut trees, walnut trees, lime, mulberry, fir, and a fine old beech tree. There were not many apple trees, but there were quince, pear, and plum trees. He loved all the walking paths around the house—so much bigger than his tiny garden in London. He hoped Emma would ignore the ugliness of the house, the gray day, and her headache, and give it some more thought.
On the ride back to London, Emma started to feel better about the house in Down. She liked a more expensive house in another part of the countryside and wished that Dr. Darwin would give them more money so they could buy a nicer one. But back in foggy, dirty, cramped London, she reconsidered. They could afford Down House. She really wanted to get out of the city. So Down it would be. They decided to use Dr. Darwin’s money to buy the house and an additional eighteen acres. They both began to look forward to the calm, quiet life that the country would bring them.
On August 14 Willy cut two teeth, as Emma recorded in her diary; and the next day there were riots in the pottery factories—including Wedgwood Pottery. Workers were striking all over England, fighting wage cuts and demanding the right to vote. Troops marched through London on their way to quell riots in Manchester, passing by 12 Upper Gower Street. Outside the Darwins’ home, strikers trying to win support shouted to passersby, “Remember, you are brothers!”
Though Charles and Emma sided with the protesters, they preferred things quiet and calm; neither one liked or wanted to cause any upheaval. It was with the hope of a peaceful and quiet place to live and work that they packed up for the move to Down even as the workers protested around them.
Erasmus did not help with the move this time; he was not needed. He didn’t want them to move away; he called their new home “Down-in-the-mouth.” Even though it was so close to London, it was quiet, very rural, at the edge of the earth, Eras felt—but that was just what Charles and Emma wanted. It promised a boring social life, too, which was fine with them. They had not been socializing much in London anyway. As Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy says in Pride and Prejudice, “In a country neighborhood you move in a very confined and unvarying society.” The Darwins would not find many people to visit with in the village of Down—though John Lubbock, an astronomer, banker, and mathematician, was building a house a mile away. Charles and Emma would import friends and relatives. And they would make their life as serene and tranquil as they could.
Not everything in their families was tranquil, though. Dr. Darwin was now in a wheelchair, Bessy was stuck in a fog, and Josiah was sinking from either a stroke or a degenerative neurological disease. Dr. Darwin managed to visit Josiah, but he was so upset by his old friend’s terrible condition that he could offer no medical help. He broke into tears.
Aunt Jessie’s beloved husband, Sismondi, had died earlier that summer, and just before they moved to Down, Emma got an upsetting letter from her. Jessie was miserable. She could barely go on without her husband. “He so filled every instant of my life, that now my feeling of desolation passes all description.” Aunt Jessie wished she could be certain of heaven. “If I could but have…firm faith that he has only passed from the visible to the invisible world, and already lives and is waiting for me, oh what happiness that would be.”
Emma was sad for her older relatives as she took William and Annie and moved, nine months pregnant with their third child, into Down House on September 14, 1842. Charles joined them a few days later. They were ready to start their new life.
Chapter 17
Sudden Deaths
I think I have found out (here’s presumption!) the simple way
by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends.
—CHARLES TO JOSEPH HOOKER, JANUARY 11, 1844
On September 22, 1842, just a week after they moved into Down House, Emma wrote in her diary “very feverish, violent headaches” and on September 23, “Mary born.” Mary Eleanor looked like Emma’s mother, Bessy, which made Emma glad. She hoped the baby would take after her mother not only in looks, but also in personality. Emma worried that each day’s post would bring the news that her mother or father had died. A new life to replace the old, fading ones was a blessing, and the new baby should have been a great comfort to Emma. But Mary was weak and sickly.
On October 16, Emma wrote in her little diary, simply, “died.”
A few weeks after moving into their new home, they had to bury a baby. Emma bravely wrote to her sister-in-law Fanny, “Our sorrow is nothing to what it would have been if she had lived longer and suffered more.”
Charles was devastated; he had had very little experience with death. His mother had died when he was eight, and all he remembered of her or her death was the body lying on the bed. What had struck him more was the funeral of a soldier he witnessed soon afterward. To the end of his life, he remembered that scene and how it struck him so forcefully. He wrote, “I can still see the horse with the man’s empty boots and carbine suspended to the saddle, and the firing over the grave.” He had hated funerals ever since. Now, thirty-four years later, Charles had to see his own little baby put into a grave. They buried Mary Eleanor at the Down churchyard cemetery. Emma told Fanny, “Charles is well to-day and the funeral over, which he dreaded very much.”
Although both Emma and Charles were struck hard by the death, they found some solace in keeping busy. Emma wrote to Fanny, “I keep very well and strong and am come down-stairs to-day. With our two other dear little things you need not fear that our sorrow will last long, though it will be long indeed before we either of us forget that poor little face.”
Charles went back to his notes about geology to work on a book about volcanic islands. This helped to distract him from his grief and his anxieties about his other children. He also threw himself into house renovations, to make the old and ugly house more livable, and even beautiful. He had written to his sister Catherine just before they had moved in, “I feel sure I shall become deeply attached to Down, with a few improvements—It will be very difficult not to be extravagant there.” And so it was. Charles took it upon himself to make the house and the grounds so beautiful that Emma would love it as much as she loved Maer. Over the next couple of years, Charles had the drawing room made bigger and added a kitchen wing so there would be more room for the growing number of servants. He moved the lane next to the house farther away, to provide more privacy. He planted flowers like those at Maer. Emma had always felt that the flowers at Maer were more beautiful than anywhere else, and Charles wanted her to feel the same way about the blossoms at Down.
Charles loved the room that he had picked to be his study. It faced northeast, which meant that it wouldn’t be too hot from direct sun but would be lit by a few rays of sunshine e
arly in the morning when he started work. He fixed up the room just the way he wanted it, with wooden shelves built in an alcove. He used these shelves to file his notes, his notebooks, and pages of books that he tore out. (He didn’t always bother keeping whole books, just the pages he found interesting.) He had a table in the middle of the room where he sat to look at his specimens through a magnifying glass or simple microscope, and to read his scientific papers. He sat on a high-backed chair that he had raised up on an iron frame with wheels, so he could move around the room. When he wrote, he put a board across his lap. Since he was often in need of a privy, he put one in the corner of the room, screened off for privacy. Behind the curtain he had a chamber pot, bowls, water, and towels.
Charles added a strip of land about three hundred yards long on the western boundary of the property. He bought it from his neighbor John Lubbock. There, Emma and Charles designed a path after one they both loved at Maer. They planted it with trees—hazel, alder, birch, and dogwood—as well as privet hedges and holly bushes. Emma had ivy planted, and bluebells, anemones, cowslips, and primroses. They made a path covered with sand from the woods. They called their path the Sandwalk, and it became Charles’s walking and thinking path as well as a place for the children to play.
Charles and Emma both soon became very attached to Down House, and everything about it. When, a few years later, the postal authorities changed the spelling of the town to Downe, the Darwins did not go along. They had moved into Down House, and Down it would remain.
In the autumn of 1842, not long after baby Mary died, Emma’s brother Hensleigh fell ill, and Emma invited Fanny to send their oldest children to live at Down House for a couple of months. She would take care of them so Fanny could take care of Hensleigh. The new house now bustled with the activity of five children: Julia Wedgwood, called Snow because she had been born in a snowstorm, age nine; James (called Bro), eight; and Erny, five; plus Doddy, not quite three, and Annie, one and a half.
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