Creation (Movie Tie-In)

by Randal Keynes

  After the experience of her first pregnancy, Emma wanted to be prepared for the next delivery. There were four signs to watch for: missing a period, which was referred to in polite conversation as “ceasing to be unwell,” morning sickness, changes in the breasts, and feeling the baby move, which was known as “quickening.” After one or more of the signs, the due date was calculated by “the reckoning”—counting forty weeks from three days after the last menstruation. Emma marked her periods in her diary with a special cross, and when she missed one just seven months after Willy was born, she numbered forty weeks forward from three days after the last cross.

  She suffered morning sickness a month later, but by then she had Charles to care for as well as herself. He became ill while they were staying with her parents at Maer in August, and from then until November she noted his symptoms in her diary every day. This “Maer illness,” as he later called it, was the first long and serious attack of the disorder which was to dog him for the rest of his life, and for Emma it eclipsed her own discomfort. Charles had been healthy and lively as a young man. He had suffered acutely from sea-sickness on HMS Beagle and was laid low by fever a few times, but otherwise was one of the hardiest and most energetic members of the ship’s company. By the time he married Emma he was already showing signs of his later illness, and she wrote: “I shall scold you into health.” But he could not recover by an effort of will. Among his recurring symptoms were a state of languor and discomfort in which he found he could not work, swimming of the head, dying sensations and black spots before the eyes, spasmodic stomach pains, wind and vomiting, bouts of eczema and boils.

  While at Maer, Charles was unhappy to be so ill and weak, and spent many hours in the nursery with his baby son. Emma’s daily notes record a rich diet for Charles’s delicate digestion. “Pulse 60, oysters and artichokes . . . pulse 52, partridge and pudding . . . very good day, hare, oysters, pulse about 54.” One day, she wrote: “Turtle did not agree.”

  In the twenty-first week of her second pregnancy, Emma felt the child move in her womb, and wrote “quicken” in her diary. A week later, as Charles was recovering from his illness, the family returned home to Macaw Cottage. The novelist Maria Edgeworth, who knew the Wedgwoods and Darwins through her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, paid a call on Emma and Charles after Christmas. She wrote to a friend: “Mrs Darwin is the youngest daughter of Jos Wedgwood, and is worthy of both father and mother, affectionate and unaffected and, young as she is, full of old times. She has her mother’s radiantly cheerful countenance even now, debarred from all London gaieties, and all gaiety but that of her own mind, by close attendance on her sick husband.”

  When Emma was nearly eight months pregnant, a fifteen-year-old girl, Bessy Harding, came from Maer to be Willy’s nursemaid. Emma was in discomfort and preoccupied, and found it difficult to look after her child. She wrote later that in the weeks before her second confinement, “I could take so little notice of the little boy that he got not to care a pin for me, and it used to make me rather dismal sometimes.”

  As the days passed, Emma continued to jot symptoms in her diary. “Very languid . . . Great lassitude . . .” But the words “At his work” show that once again it was Charles she was watching, not herself.

  Emma’s sister Elizabeth had come again to be with her for the birth. In her thirty-eighth week, Emma made a small sign of how she felt in her diary. On the first of March she drew a pencil doodle of a fancy pigeon, a “pouter” with a huge inflated crop. The next day, she wrote “confined,” and Annie was born.

  It seems to have been a difficult birth. Emma and Charles’s cousin Dr. Holland attended. Emma was ill afterwards and a nurse, almost certainly from University College Hospital, came to help. A wet-nurse was also engaged. She was probably chosen from the daily advertisements in The Times. The day after Annie was born, a notice appeared in the “Want Places” column. “As wet-nurse, a young woman from the country, with her first child, who has a good breast of milk, and has been confined a week.” Most who advertised had their own infant at the breast, but some did not. A few days later, a notice appeared: “As wet-nurse to take an infant to nurse to whom every attention will be paid, a respectable female who has just lost her own child.”

  There was a strong feeling at the time that it was natural and right for a mother to breastfeed her own child, and women in society who chose to avoid the bother were criticised harshly. Mothers who were unable to breastfeed may have felt the reproach in obscure ways. A doctor wrote: “It may be called a fixed law of nature that a healthy woman should suckle her offspring.” Not to comply with this “arrangement of Providence” was to forgo the first reward after the pain of childbirth. “It is plainly intended to cherish and increase the love of the parent herself, and to establish in the dependent and helpless infant from the first hours of its existence those associations on which its affections and confidence afterwards will be most securely founded. The evidence of design is manifest. So long as the child is unborn, no milk is secreted in the mother’s breast, but no sooner does she give it birth, than this fluid is prepared and poured forth, admirably fitted in its qualities for the rapid growth of its delicate organism.” The doctor made a link with animals to drive his point home. “Animals, even those of the most ferocious character, show affection for their young; they do not forsake or neglect them, but yield them their milk and watch over them with the tenderest care. Woman, who is possessed of reason as well as instinct, must not manifest a love below that of the brute creature.”

  Emma had some difficulties caring for Annie during the first weeks after the birth, but after two months, she felt quite well and able to nurse her. “The baby too, which began by being a very poor little thing, is now thriving and smiling very sweetly. I believe Elizabeth thought me a very unnatural mother while she was here, and I think she did care more for it than I did, but I like its company very much now.” Emma was returning to normal life, playing again on the piano and enjoying being able to “play with the little boy and walk about and do what I like, without always thinking about oneself which is very tiresome.”

  She jotted down in the back of her diary some piano music to buy: sonatas by Clementi and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. She had learnt the piano as a child, and when George IV’s wife Mrs. Fitzherbert visited her school in the 1820s, she was chosen to play a piece as the best pupil. At one time she had lessons from Chopin. Charles now paid for her to receive lessons from Ignaz Moscheles, the Czech virtuoso who had taught Mendelssohn and was one of the foremost pianists of the day. His style was incisive and he disliked the flamboyant romanticism of Chopin and Liszt. Emma had a crisp and fine touch, and it was said that she played always with intelligence and simplicity. But “she could endure nothing sentimental, and ‘slow movements’ were occasionally under her treatment somewhat too ‘allegro.’ ”

  The Darwins and Wedgwoods all looked to Charles’s father, Robert, a wealthy and successful physician in Shrewsbury, for medical judgements and prescriptions. Dr. Darwin gave Charles robust advice about his own ailments, and provided “receipts” for Willy and Annie. “In all inflammatory ailments of very young children, three drops of Antimonial wine repeated twice a day, is usually sufficient, but in decided fever a grain of Calomel with a little Chalk may be safely given.” “A drop of Sal volatile will sometimes compose an infant to sleep, given at night.” For a baby with a constant cough and soreness in the mouth, he suggested “one grain of chalk with Opium, with three drops of Antimonial wine to be dropped on brown sugar.” Antimonial wine was a solution of tartar emetic and sherry wine. Calomel was mercurous chloride. Sal volatile was carbonate of ammonia. These compounds had almost no value in treating the conditions for which they were used, and some could be very harmful.

  With one in five infants dying in their first year, most children were baptised within a few weeks after their birth. But Charles and Emma were in no hurry, and took Annie to Maer in late May to be christened with her cousin Sophy, daugh
ter of Caroline and Josiah Wedgwood. As it happened, the government’s new General Register Office took its first National Census while they were there. Enumerators visited every household in the country and listed every person present on the census night. There were twenty-one people in the return for Maer Hall—Emma’s father Josiah and her mother Bessy, her brother Josiah, Caroline, Charles, Emma,Willy and Annie, and thirteen servants.

  The house was a Jacobean mansion in a small park with a lake. Dr. Holland’s wife described the Wedgwood family’s life there. “They have freedom in their actions in this house as in their principles. Doors and windows stand open. You are nowhere confined. You may do what you like. You are surrounded by books that all look most tempting to read. You will always find some pleasant topic of conversation or may start one, as all things are talked of in the general family.”

  The parish church was in the grounds, and Emma’s father had appointed his lame and eccentric nephew Allen Wedgwood as vicar. Charles privately considered Allen “half idiotic in some respects,” though “with a store of accurate and even profound knowledge.” Allen baptised the two children Anne Elizabeth and Ann Sophy. Annie’s names were, like Willy’s, “proper family names.” Charles’s great-great-grandmother had been Anne Waring; she had brought an estate in Nottinghamshire into the family, and her tablet in the parish church of Elston commemorated her as “daughter, wife, mother, mistress, neighbour answering Solomon’s character of a good woman.” The name Elizabeth was chosen for Emma’s mother in her sad and slowly deepening dementia.

  After the baptism, Charles went to stay with his father and sisters in Shrewsbury while Emma stayed with Annie at Maer. Bessy the nursemaid had taken Willy ahead and Charles was touched by his pleasure at seeing him. “He sat on my knee for nearly a quarter of an hour . . . and looked at my face and pointing, told everyone I was Pappa . . . When I had had him for about five minutes, I asked him where was Mama, and he repeated your name twice in so low and plaintive a tone, I declare it almost made me burst out crying. He is full of admiration at this new house and is friends with everyone and sits on Grandpapa’s knees. He shows me the different things in the house. Dear old Doddy—one could write for ever about him.” Charles looked forward to hearing from Emma about herself and Annie who, “as I have several times remarked to myself, is not so bad a girl, as might be expected of Doddy’s rival.” But Charles feared his son was a coward. “A frog jumped near him and he danced and screamed with horror at the dangerous monster, and I had a deal of kissing at his open bellowing mouth to comfort him. He threw my stick over the terrace wall, looked at it as it went, and cried ‘Tatta’ with the greatest sangfroid and walked away.”

  A few days later, Charles warned Emma: “A thunder storm is preparing to break on your head, and which has already deluged me, about Bessy not having a cap.” Emma was not particular about their maid’s appearance, but Charles’s sisters said that she looked “like a grocer’s maidservant,” and his father added angrily: “The men will take liberties with her, if she is dressed differently from every other lady’s maid!” Charles told Emma that he had taken half the blame on himself, and “never betrayed that I had beseeched you several times on that score. If they open on you, pray do not defend yourself, for they are very hot on the subject.”

  When the family was back in Macaw Cottage, Charles wrote to his cousin Fox: “We are all well here . . . our two babies are, I think, strong healthy ones, and it is an unspeakable comfort, this.” At the end of the year, Emma was breastfeeding Annie, but she had little milk and the doctor told her it would not matter if she stopped. When Annie was nine months old, Emma felt she was “very ugly, poor body, with a broken out ear just like mine.”

  Charles was a doting father to Willy and Annie, and was eager for their attention. Willy, just two in January 1842, sat with his parents at table and behaved “with great decorum.” But Annie was “very naughty” about her father and would not go to him. So, Emma wrote one day, “he has given her up and devoted himself to Doddy.” That month, Emma became pregnant with her third child. She numbered the weeks ahead to forty-one, writing at the sixth week, “Taken ill at this stage last time,” and at the tenth week, “I got better at about this time last time.”

  A few weeks later, William Darwin Fox’s wife died giving birth to their sixth child. With Emma now expecting her third, Charles must have had the dangers of her forthcoming confinement in mind when he wrote to his cousin: “What a comfort it must be to you; that is, I think I should find it the greatest, the having children. It must make the separation appear less entire. The unspeakable tenderness of young children must soothe the heart and recall the tenderest, however mournful remembrances.” He told Fox that Emma was “uncomfortable enough all day long and seldom leaves the house, this being her usual state before her babies come into the world.” But, he wrote, “my two dear little children are very well and very fat.”

  Emma was more frank in a letter to her aunt. “My little Annie has taken to walking and talking for the last fortnight. She is thirteen months old and very healthy, fat and round, but no beauty.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  PTERODACTYL PIE

  Charles’s secret—Ideas at Cambridge—HMS Beagle—Species—

  Human nature—Man and ape—Jenny the orang

  WHEN HE COMPLETED HIS almanac for 1841, Charles wrote “Annie born,” and on the next line, “Sorted papers on Species theory.” Annie was a little child like a hundred others in the neighbourhood, but her father was living with a secret idea that put him in a place of his own. For four years he had been working quietly on his theory to explain how new species came into being. He had not revealed it to anyone yet, because it was a direct challenge to accepted ideas about the Creation and Man’s place in Nature, and he could guess all too easily how most people would react. The theory was eventually to shock the world and change our understanding of natural life. It was bound up with his strongest interests, his ideas about religion and human values, his ambition as a scientist, his relationship with Emma and his fascination with his children.

  As a young boy in Shrewsbury, Charles had loved long walks on his own, collecting insects and bird-nesting. Dr. Darwin thought his son a very ordinary child and said: “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” At sixteen he was sent to study medicine at Edinburgh University. Some years later he thought back to the teaching with a shudder. “I shall ever hate the name of Materia Medica, since hearing Duncan’s lectures at 8 o’clock in a winter’s morning—a whole, cold, breakfastless hour on the properties of rhubarb!” He often went to see patients at the hospital but could not bear to see them in pain and remembered with horror for the rest of his life one operation on a poor street boy who cursed and screamed as the surgeon worked without anaesthetic. He turned to natural history, taking careful notes as he walked round the mineral collection in the college museum, and spending days wandering along the shores of the Firth of Forth looking for small sea creatures.

  In his second year at Edinburgh, Charles persuaded his father that medicine was not for him, and they agreed that he would instead go to Cambridge to read for holy orders. His idea was to become a country parson, caring for his parishioners but living for natural history. When he arrived at Christ’s College in 1828, he joined his cousin William Darwin Fox and a group of friends who shared a passion for collecting beetles in the countryside and fens around Cambridge. He attended Professor Adam Sedgwick’s lectures on geology and learnt botany from Professor John Henslow.

  Charles and his friends read William Paley’s Natural Theology, which explained the accepted way of understanding the natural world as a grand array of evidence of God’s creative power and goodness towards man. Paley argued that if you found a watch on the ground and someone asked how it came to be there, you would guess and reply that the watch had a maker who had built it for the purpose which it served; and the artificer must have “comprehend
ed its construction, and designed its use.” Every organ of every living creature was clearly designed for a purpose in the same way, and gave evidence of God’s power and wisdom as the Creator of all things.

  Natural theology was part of the thinking of the age. In the late 1850s, Mrs. Beeton, author of the best-selling Book of Household Management, was to open her section on cooking fish with a chapter on their natural history. She reminded her readers that “In studying the conformation of fishes, we naturally conclude that they are, in every respect, well adapted to the element in which they have their existence.” Using one of Paley’s examples, she explained how a fish’s air bladder worked, and exclaimed: “How simply, yet how wonderfully, has the Supreme Being adapted certain means to the attainment of certain ends!’

  It was a premise of natural theology that each kind of plant and animal had been first brought into being by God in a separate act of creation. Once created, species were fixed. The idea that one species might change through time into another was rejected because it clashed with the Book of Genesis and put into question both the need for a Divine Creator and the wisdom of his designs.

  The task of natural theology was to interpret “the Book of Nature” and draw people up to “Nature’s God.” A clergyman writing on marine life drew a lesson from the myriads of organisms that could be seen with a magnifying glass on a frond of seaweed. “Their name was legion . . . a legion of God’s creatures doing good, actively employed in doing his will, and consequently happy. Though they had never been seen by man, God would have not lost his praise, for he gave them life, and rendered that life uninterruptedly happy . . . If one frond is the habitation of a million happy creatures, how great must be the amount of happiness which God is giving every moment to the utterly uncountable myriads of his creatures that inhabit the deep!”