When she did give him the letter, Charles read it. There was so much to say, but also nothing to say. He would not pray, he would not accept the Revelation. Although Charles knew what pain it gave Emma to believe he would burn in hell, he couldn’t lie to her. He knew later, after he was gone—for certainly he would go first—she would see this letter. Like the others she had written him, he kept it always.
He wrote on it, simply:
God bless you. C.D.
June, 1861.
Chapter 29
Such a Noise
I remember when in Good Success Bay, in Tierra del Fuego,
thinking…that I could not employ my life better than in adding
a little to natural science. This I have done to the best
of my abilities, and critics may say what they like,
but they cannot destroy this conviction.
—CHARLES, IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY
One day Charles walked into the drawing room and found Lenny sitting on the sofa—not jumping on it—and reading a copy of The Origin of Species. It was the first time Lenny was home from boarding school. He was about thirteen. Being out in the world by himself, he had discovered that everyone was talking about his father’s book—even boys his own age. When Charles saw Lenny reading it, he said, “I bet you half a crown that you do not get to the end of that book.” Charles was right; but Lenny never paid up.
George, about five years older and a better student, was reading his father’s book on orchids and had convinced the headmaster at school to read part of it with him and do some of the experiments at school.
Soon Horace, the youngest boy, would go to school, too, and then it would be just the two girls at home. The girls did not go to school, but learned at home and, according to Etty, had a spotty education. But that was how it was done in many upper-class Victorian families: the boys went to school, and the girls stayed home. Charles and Emma remained involved and loving parents—to the boys in person on school holidays and through the mail the rest of the year. “Your last letter was not interesting, but very well spelt, which I care more about,” Emma wrote to Lenny. She tried gallantly to produce a generation of Darwins who could spell, unlike their famous father.
With more time on her hands now that the children needed her less, Emma found a passion that brought her into touch with the world outside of Down. She waged a campaign to invent a more humane trap for game-hunting. She wrote a letter titled “An Appeal,” in which she said:
An English gentleman would not himself give a moment’s unnecessary pain to any living creature, and would instinctively exert himself to put an end to any suffering before his eyes; yet it is a fact that every game preserver in this country sanctions a system which consigns thousands of animals to acute agony, probably of eight or ten hours duration, before it is ended by death. I allude to the setting of steel traps for catching vermin.
Emma got the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals involved, and they had a contest to see who could invent the most humane but effective trap. Although no trap was good enough to win, the cause became known.
Emma also took up gardening more than she had before; it was something she and Charles shared, a love for flowers. Although Charles continued to direct the battle for evolution behind the scenes and work on new books for his publisher, what gave him the most pleasure was doing experiments with his orchids and other plants. He wanted to see how they grew, how they moved toward the light, and how they crossed to produce new plants. He put nets on Emma’s azaleas to see if it would change the way they grew. Emma didn’t mind his experiments with her flowers or his forages into her sewing box for threads to use in his experiments. She didn’t mind that he had seedlings in little pots all over the place, but Charles decided it was silly for him to keep going to his neighbor’s greenhouse—where he had his bigger plants—so he built his own in the backyard. It was finished in 1863.
Only once did gardening come between them. Both Charles and Emma loved the Sandwalk; they walked on it together day after day, year after year. When they had first moved in, Emma had planted bluebells and anemones, primroses, cowslips, and wild ivy, which she especially loved. But as will happen in gardens, other plants grew there—dog’s mercury and Jack-in-the-hedge—and they tended to overtake the plants Emma loved. A good example of survival of the fittest! So occasionally she hired someone to pull up the dog’s mercury and the Jack-in-the-hedge so that her favorites could flourish. Once she hired a young boy to pull up those plants and he pulled up the ivy by mistake. Emma was distraught; she loved that ivy. Much to her chagrin, Charles laughed at how upset she was, which made Emma furious. He claimed it was the only time she was ever cross with him.
While his theory was being challenged and extolled, Charles’s health continued to plague him. Once it got so bad that he vomited for twelve days in a row. Emma insisted that Charles have another water cure and that they should also give Horace some treatment, for he was still sickly. In September 1863, they headed for Malvern, staying with Erasmus in London on the way. Erasmus thought Charles seemed sicker than he had in a long time; they all hoped the water cure would help both him and Horace. But going back to the place where Annie had died was too much for Charles in his weakened physical and emotional state. Once there, he became so feeble and frail that he could barely leave the villa they had rented. Etty later wrote that during this time Charles seemed to have lost his memory and may even have had an epileptic seizure.
One day during their stay in Malvern, Emma went to the churchyard to find Annie’s grave. She had never seen it; neither had Charles. Emma walked and walked through the cemetery, searching for her daughter’s tombstone, but she could not find it. When she went back and told Charles of her failure, he sent a letter to his cousin Fox, who had visited Malvern before and had written to Charles describing the grave. Charles wrote, “Will you tell us what you can remember about the kind of stone & where it stood; I think you said there was a little tree planted…”
Before they got his answer, Emma went out again, and this time she did find the stone. Annie would have been twenty-two had she lived, but to them she was still ten years old, still the dear and good child she had always been.
While they were at Malvern, they got word that the Hookers’ six-year-old daughter had died. Like Charles, Hooker had no hope that he would see his “flower of my flock” again in heaven. But Charles wrote to him and reassured him that in time he would remember her with much less pain, as he did Annie. “My dear old Friend,” Charles wrote, “your note is most pathetic I understand well your words: ‘wherever I go, she is there’.—I am so deeply glad that she did not suffer so much, as I feared was inevitable. This was to us with poor Annie the one great comfort.—Trust to me that time will do wonders, & without causing forgetfulness of your darling.”
Two years later, in 1865, still suffering, Charles tried an ice cure, which also did not help. But although he felt sick most days for much of the day and often slept terribly at night, he kept writing and publishing books and articles, on orchids and climbing plants. He was also revising The Origin for more editions, adding details from new research and correcting errors. He was very productive, even with his illness. “I am surprised at my industry,” he said. And he continued to love his work.
In 1867, he sent out questionnaires about facial expression and body motions to people in different parts of the world. He had been interested in emotions and expressions in people and in animals since his first notebook jottings, through the observations of animals and his own children. He wanted to widen his research to people outside his family and to people of different races and nationalities so that he could make a more definite study and eventually publish a book about his findings. He asked seventeen questions, including: “Is astonishment expressed by the eyes and mouth being opened wide, and by the eyebrows being raised?” and “Does shame excite a blush when the colour of the skin allows it to be visible? and especially how low down the body does
the blush extend?” and “Is contempt expressed by a slight protrusion of the lips and by turning up the nose, with a slight expiration?” and “Do the children when sulky, pout or greatly protrude the lips?” and “Can guilty, or sly, or jealous expressions be recognized? though I know not how these can be defined.”
Charles’s long-range goal was to write the huge book he had intended from the beginning, including all the material and evidence he had amassed and would continue to amass about evolution by natural selection. But his publisher did not think one huge book would sell well and encouraged him to publish smaller books about more specific topics, which is what he did. All his later books can be said to be continuations of The Origin of Species.
Because of Charles’s fame, the biggest change at Down was that there were more and more visitors who made pilgrimages to meet him. Fans came from all over, including foreign countries. Sometimes they stayed to lunch. Emma wrote to one of her sons in later years, “We have been rather overdone with Germans this week.” But both Charles and Emma liked having visitors; Emma still ran to the front door when she heard someone coming up the drive. Charles attached a mirror to the outside of the house so that when he was in his study he could see who was coming up the walk—visitors and the all-important postman.
Even with the hubbub, Charles’s routine stayed the same: He would rise early in the morning and go for a walk before breakfast. From about eight o’clock, he would work in his study for an hour and a half, when he would take a break to listen to Emma read letters or a novel. Sometimes, though, Charles would just wear himself out with work. He would say, in the middle of writing a sentence, “I am afraid I must leave off now.” And it would be time for a rest.
Lunch was the main meal of the day and was served at about one. After that, Charles read the newspaper, wrote letters, or read until three. Then he’d rest, and sometimes Emma would read to him. He’d work again from about four thirty to five thirty, when he would take another rest. Then he and Emma would have a simple tea at seven thirty, followed by a couple of games of backgammon, or Emma would play the piano or read to him, as they had begun to do their first week of married life on Gower Street.
Charles took two or three walks around the Sandwalk every day with Emma and one of the dogs. They had a Newfoundland called Bob, who loved to go on walks with Charles. The routine changed slightly after Charles built the greenhouse. Now before his walks he often stopped into the hothouse to take a look at his plants. This dismayed Bob, who would put on his “hot-house face of despair” as Charles called it. Bob hated for their walk to be delayed.
Charles loved dogs—and when his grown children started calling him and Emma Father and Mother instead of Papa and Mama, he declared, “I would as soon be called Dog.” Dog was better than Father, anyhow, but Papa was best of all.
Charles’s motto was “It’s dogged as does it,” and while it may not have been a reflection of his love of dogs, it was a reflection of his work ethic. He never stopped working, even when he was ill. In 1871, when Horace was twenty, Charles finally finished his book on the origin of the human species, The Descent of Man. It was not until he wrote this book that he used the word evolution to describe how species change. The book met with mixed reviews—some people were, of course, angry at the argument that humans and animals have a common ancestor. Religious people were upset that Charles rejected the idea of God as creator. But the response was not loud; most people criticized the ideas, not the author. And the book sold very well.
That same year, Etty got married. She was the first Darwin child to do so. Both Charles and Emma had become very close to Etty over the years—Charles even depended on her to read his drafts. Though she would continue to do so, Charles would miss her presence very much. In later years he would rest on the sofa in the drawing room and look at some old china and pictures that Etty had arranged. He called it Henrietta’s shrine. Charles and Emma took her marriage hard and felt they did not know the man, Richard Litchfield, well enough. But other people vouched for him, including Erasmus, whose opinion they always valued. And apparently Litchfield was happy to have Etty as his wife, even though, like Charles, she did not conceal her religious doubts. She told him that she did not believe in a personal God. She did have more faith than Charles, however; she was, after all, a child of Emma’s, too.
When Etty was away on her honeymoon, Charles wrote to her, “From your earliest years you have given me so much pleasure and happiness that you well deserve all the happiness that is possible in return; and I do believe that you are in the right way for obtaining it.” He told her he would miss her sadly, but “I have had my day and a happy life, notwithstanding my stomach; and this I owe almost entirely to our dear old mother, who, as you know well, is as good as twice refined gold.” He advised her to use Emma as an example, and then her husband would not only love her but would worship her “as I worship our dear old mother.”
Emma missed Etty terribly and wrote to her constantly. She gave her all kinds of news and gossip, and reported on the goings-on at Down, including those that involved Etty’s dog, Polly, a rough-haired fox terrier, whom she left there. Polly adopted Charles.
“I think she has taken it into her head that F. [Father] is a very big puppy.” Emma told Etty. “She is perfectly devoted to him…will only stay with him and leaves the room whenever he does. She lies upon him whenever she can, and licks his hands so constantly as to be quite troublesome. I have to drag her away at night, and she yelps and squeaks some time.”
Polly was known to be a cunning dog and could get Charles to give her what she wanted. When it was nearing dinnertime, if Charles passed by, she would tremble with misery. Even though he knew her character, he would declare her to be “famishing” and in need of food, quickly. He used to make her catch biscuits off her nose, and told her to “be a very good girl.”
In 1872, Charles published his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, in which he was able to use all those notes he made about the children growing up. He wrote about his babies, his experiments on them, and on his screaming sons. He also wrote about his dogs, and made Bob famous for his hothouse face of despair. By now, he was not afraid to admit that he thought Jenny the orangutan was cousin to us all.
The outside world loved and reviled Charles Darwin. He received honors and lavish reviews; he received angry reviews and nasty letters. People made portraits and statues of him; they drew disrespectful, mocking cartoons about him. “My views have often been grossly misrepresented,” he wrote later, “bitterly opposed and ridiculed, but this has been generally done, as I believe, in good faith.” He also said, “On the whole I do not doubt that my works have been over and over again greatly over praised.”
He withstood it all, with his friends out in the world fighting for him and with Emma by his side at home, as she had been since they made their leap.
Emma was bemused and also proud. In 1873, she wrote to an aunt, “I sometimes feel it very odd that anyone belonging to me should be making such a noise in the world.”
Chapter 30
Mere Trickery
I have been speculating last night what makes a man
a discoverer of undiscovered things…As far as I can conjecture
the art consists in habitually searching for the causes and
meaning of everything which occurs.
—CHARLES TO HIS SON HORACE, 1871
Over the years of their marriage, Emma and Charles each became more like the other in their beliefs—or at least their differences seemed less important. While Emma never stopped believing in God and Jesus, her faith seems to have become less intense. Always an open-minded person, she became more tolerant of Charles’s views, and she seemed to be less concerned about his lack of faith. Etty later wrote that she thought Emma was sad to have lost the convictions she had had. Etty said, “She kept a sorrowful wish to believe more, and I know it was an abiding sadness to her that her faith was less vivid than it had been in her youth.”
But it could also have been that she was just content to be quiet about her beliefs and not impose them on others, including Charles.
For his part, Charles admitted that Emma had been right when she said that his looking at the world in a scientific way probably precluded him from looking at it in a religious way. Perhaps to do the great science he did, he had to focus entirely that way—to let religion in would have diluted his effort. That did not mean he would deny Emma—or any-one—their beliefs. But for him, science was the way to get answers.
Perhaps in reaction to doubts about traditional religion, various kinds of spirituality had become popular in England, even among some of Charles and Emma’s intellectual friends and family, including Hensleigh Wedgwood. Emma’s smart and widely read brother attended séances, communed with spirit guides, and collected photographs that seemed to show ghosts and spirits. Both Emma and Charles were upset by Hensleigh’s obsession. He wanted to talk about little else, and he urged Charles and Emma, and even Thomas Henry Huxley, to get involved. Hensleigh sent Huxley a photograph he thought showed a ghost. When Huxley told him that the photographer had superimposed an image on the plate, and it could not be real, Hensleigh did not believe him. Hensleigh was not the only one in their circle captivated by spirits and ghosts. All over London, séances were being held in parlors and living rooms and at dining tables. Even Alfred Russel Wallace, the naturalist who had also come up with the theory of natural selection, was a spiritualist, now working on a book that would be published soon—Miracles and Modern Spiritualism.
It was only a matter of time before the Darwins would find themselves in one of those darkened rooms. It was intriguing even for the skeptical.
Charles and Emma Page 18