Creation (Movie Tie-In)

by Randal Keynes

  In the first years, both daguerreotype studios were very popular and a visit was an intriguing experience. Maria Edgeworth wrote to a friend in 1841 about having her likeness taken. “It is a wonderful, mysterious operation. You are taken from one room into another, up stairs and down, and you see various people whispering, and hear them in neighbouring passages and rooms unseen, and the whole apparatus and stool on high platform under a glass dome casting a snap-dragon blue light making all look like spectres, and the men in black gliding about . . .”

  Many were disconcerted by the images the apparatus caught, but they had to accept them as objective, and truthful in that new way. One commentator wrote: “The common remark upon showing your sun picture to friends is, ‘Well, it isn’t a flattering portrait, but it must be like, you know!’ ” And George Cruikshank, the Punch cartoonist, wrote in a poem, “Photographic Phenomena”: “ ‘Well, I never!’ all cry; ‘it is cruelly like you!’ But truth is unpleasant to prince and to peasant.” The commentator warned ladies not to “make up a face for the occasion” because the result was often disastrous. “If ladies, however, must study for a bit of effect, we will give them a recipe for a pretty expression of mouth. Let them place it as if they were going to say prunes.”

  Charles first took Willy to Claudet’s studio in August 1842 around the time of Willy’s secret raid on the pickle jar. Annie was only a year and five months old at the time and could not have been kept still for the full minute required for the exposure. Ernie Wedgwood had appeared in Richmond’s watercolour as an angelic little child elegantly posed in a rocky landscape. Charles had to hold Willy firmly on his lap in front of Claudet’s painted backcloth, and the camera caught them with the ruthlessness for which it was feared. Charles avoided the camera’s eye, as if to say “This picture is of my son, not me.” Willy was wearing his best frock; after walking past the toy stalls, climbing the stairs and the long queue, the loading of the camera and being posed by the studio assistant under the mysterious blue light, he sat without moving but looked warily at the photographer, waiting for the next strange thing to happen.

  The contrast between Richmond’s watercolour of Ernie and Claudet’s daguerreotype of Willy shows clearly the change from art to photography which people were coming to understand and accept in the early 1840s. The disquiet people had felt when they first saw Tommy and Jenny at the Zoological Gardens in the late 1830s was like the effect of a cruel sun picture. The man-like apes were recognisable and yet different, and the young man watching his small children in Macaw Cottage was drawing a truth about human nature out of the likeness.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  YOUNG CROCODILES

  Down House—The Big Woods—Servants—Brodie and Parslow—

  Charles’s theory—Life for the young children

  IN JULY 1842, on a gloomy day under a cold northeast wind, Charles and Emma found Down House in Kent. After a year in Macaw Cottage, they knew they wanted to live in the country. Life in their London terrace was confined and unhealthy for growing children; Charles and Emma wanted to escape from the social round of calls and dinners, and they dreamt of a garden like the ones they had been brought up in at Maer and in Shrewsbury. At the same time, though, Charles wanted to be able to visit friends in London to talk about natural history, and be home with Emma for supper. As the new railway lines snaked out from the metropolis through the home counties, Charles and Emma looked along the routes for a house from which Charles could get to London and back the same day. In Annie’s first months, Emma started noting properties and their acreages in her diary—forty acres at Langley, six near Reading and twenty-five in Harrow Weald. They wanted to buy a house in Woking but missed it, and looked at Down House as a second best.

  Charles thought the house ugly and Emma was disappointed with its surroundings, but it was situated just as she liked “for retirement, not too near or too far from other houses.” The village of Downe (spelt with an “e” from the 1850s, while the Darwins have always referred to the house as “Down House” or “Down”) was a cluster of about forty households round an old flint church with an ancient yew and a gnarled walnut tree. There was a butcher, a baker and a post office. Charles wrote to his sister: “The little pot-house where we slept is a grocer’s shop and the landlord is the carpenter, so you may guess style of village.” The villagers touched their hats “as in Wales,” and sat at their open doors in the evening. The manor was “a most beautiful old farm-house with great thatched barns and old stumps of oak trees,” and there were a number of so-called “gentry houses,” villas with a few acres each for people with independent means.

  Downe was sixteen miles from London, a two-hour journey by train and carriage from London Bridge Station. But Charles felt that he and Emma were “at the extreme verge of the world.” “It is the quietest country I ever lived in . . . To the east and west there are impassable valleys, to the south only one very narrow lane, and to the north, through the village, only two other lanes.” The village is situated high on the chalk uplands of the Kentish North Downs. The landscape has been patterned through the centuries with settlements, fields and lanes on the high ground, and thick woods beneath, in which cattle, sheep and pigs were fattened on acorns and beechmast. Emma wrote that the valleys were “crowned at the top with old hedges and hedgerows, very disorderly and picturesque, and with enormous clusters of clematis and blackberries, and a great variety of yews and other trees.”

  Down House was at the time a gaunt villa a short way out of the village; Charles felt that it had “somewhat of a desolate air.” Around the house there were many old trees—cherry, walnut, yew, spanish chestnut, pear, larch and mulberry. There were quinces, medlars, plums and a purple magnolia. The field was a good hay-meadow and the previous owner had kept three cows, a horse and a donkey. Emma, now six months pregnant with her third child, agreed with Charles that they could make a home for their family there, and he set about buying the property at once so that they could move from Macaw Cottage and be settled in good time before the birth.

  The soil over the chalk was heavy red clay, “abounding” as Charles noted “with great irregularly shaped, unrolled flints, often with the colour and appearance of huge bones.” He wrote: “The charm of the place to me is that almost every field is intersected . . . by one or more footpaths. I never saw so many walks in any other country. The country is extraordinarily rural and quiet, with narrow lanes and high hedges.” Reading the landscape with his geologist’s eye, he decided that the valleys, now dry, were “in all probability ancient sea-bays,” and wondered “whether the sudden steepening of the sides does not mark the edge of vertical cliffs formed when these valleys were filled with sea-water.” Three miles to the south, the ground fell away sharply to the Kentish Weald, thickly wooded and rolling over rock formations with a long history that Charles knew well from the writings and talk of friends in the Geological Society.

  In 1825, Dr. Gideon Mantell had found fossil fragments of what he thought was a monstrous lizard in a quarry in the Weald near Lewes in Sussex, thirty miles to the south. He called it “iguanodon” and in 1841 Professor Owen coined the word “dinosaur” for the beast and its cousins in the remote geological past. Dr. Mantell gave a vivid account of the world of the iguanodon in his popular book The Wonders of Geology. He wrote that the country had then been “diversified by hill and dale, by streams and torrents, the tributaries of its mighty river. Arborescent ferns, palms, and yuccas, constituted its groves and forests; delicate ferns and grasses, the vegetable clothing of its soil; and in its marshes, equiseta [horsetails], and plants of a like nature, prevailed. It was peopled by enormous reptiles, among which the colossal Iguanodon and the Megalosaurus were the chief. Crocodiles and turtles, flying reptiles and birds, frequented its fens and rivers, and deposited their eggs on the banks and shoals.” Charles Lyell speculated in his Principles of Geology about what might happen if the warmth of the ancient climate were to be restored. “Then might those genera of animals return, of
which the memorials are preserved in the ancient rocks of our continents. The huge iguanodon might reappear in the woods, and the ichthyosaur in the sea, while the pterodactyl might flit again through umbrageous groves of tree-ferns.”

  A view far out over the Weald from a point on the escarpment three miles south of Down House came to have a special importance for Charles, and he later explained it to his children when he told them about geology and the history of the landscape around their home. He was to write in The Origin of Species how his theory of evolution needed aeons of time for the long sequence of branching development, “all changes having been effected very slowly through natural selection.” Past ages had been “incomprehensibly vast,” and their extent impressed his mind “almost in the same manner as does the vain endeavour to grapple with the idea of eternity.” One way to grasp the vastness was “to stand on the North Downs and look at the distant South Downs.” Charles pictured “the great dome of rocks” which must have filled and risen over the wide valley in recent geological time. It had been 1,100 feet thick on one reckoning, and he calculated that it might have taken three hundred million years to eat away the rocks. “I have made these few remarks because it is highly important for us to gain some notion, however imperfect, of the lapse of years. During each of these years, over the whole world, the land and the water have been peopled by hosts of living forms. What an infinite number of generations, which the mind cannot grasp, must have succeeded each other in the long roll of years!”

  In August, when Charles and Emma were back in London preparing for the move, labourers in the “manufacturing districts” of the north and west went on strike for the Chartists’ demands for electoral reform, and a sudden wave of fear spread among the well-off. Emma had read Thomas Carlyle’s Chartism with its urgent plea for serious attention to the bitter discontent of the “Working Classes.” She had found his arguments “full of compassion and good feeling, but utterly unreasonable.” On the fifteenth of the month she wrote in her diary, “Riots in Potteries,” the only public event she ever recorded. Violence had broken out very close to her family home near the Wedgwood factory in Staffordshire. The Times had reported a confrontation between strikers and armed soldiers near the house of a Wedgwood cousin in Burslem, in which three rioters were killed. “The fatal charge on the mob yesterday morning has had a salutary effect, and probably saved two churches from the destruction threatened. It was made about half-past ten . . . opposite the corner of Mr Wedgwood’s house. The town was menaced by the advance of two columns of the mob . . . The Riot Act had been previously read, and the commanding officer gave the order to charge and fire.” A clergyman’s house nearby was a smouldering ruin. “It is remarkable that the mob gave the old clergyman ten minutes . . . to get away, being lame and only able to walk with two sticks. They made a capture of his surplice, put it on one of the mob in mockery, who paraded in front of the house when on fire; while others tore his Bible into tatters, and scattered the leaves in the street. Several Dissenters were calm and smiling witnesses of this gross outrage!” In the 1840s, an “age of revolutions,” respectable people feared all kinds of nonconformity. The Unitarian Wedgwoods counted as Dissenters, and Unitarians were reckoned to be all the more dangerous for their claimed faith in reason.

  When serious disturbances broke out in Manchester, the government decided that troops should be sent from London to impose order, and trains were prepared at Euston Station to take them north. Crowds gathered to shout support for the strikers, and thousands of people milled in the streets around Macaw Cottage waiting for the soldiers to march past on their way to the station. Policemen cleared the way for a troop of a hundred and fifty cavalry and four artillery pieces, but when seven hundred foot guards approached with three wagons of ammunition, the crowd shouted, “Don’t go and slaughter your starving fellow- countrymen,” and groaned loudly as they entered the railway yard. The next day a crowd of five thousand gathered. They listened to the “harangues of several Chartist demagogues who were speaking the most seditious language in the hearing of the police,” and yelled dis cordantly when another six hundred soldiers came.

  Soldiers and Chartists at Euston Station

  The disturbances died down after a few days and The Illustrated London News reported: “The semi-revolutionary movements that have been spreading so much alarm over all parts of the Kingdom are now happily subsiding into peace; the law has vindicated its majesty, and order and tranquillity are once more beginning to fold their wings over the land.”

  On the first Sunday in September Charles went to Down House. Emma, now eight months pregnant, followed a week later with Willy, Annie and Bessy the nursemaid. Two days after arriving, she paid a courtesy call on their closest neighbour, Mrs. Mary Price at Down Lodge. Charles wrote to his cousin Fox in December that the family’s move from London had “answered very well; our two little souls are better and happier, which likewise applies to me and to my good old wife.” But he had left out a sharp pain. A week after visiting Mrs. Price, Emma had been feverish and had a violent headache. The next day, in the thirty-sixth week of her pregnancy by the careful reckoning she had made in her diary, she gave birth to a second daughter. The child was baptised Mary Eleanor in the village church at the beginning of October, and Charles wrote to a friend two days later that Emma was making a quicker recovery “owing, I think, to country air, than she has ever done before.” But Mary died within three weeks. Charles chose a burial plot for the family close to the west door of the church, and Mary was buried there. Emma wrote to her sister-in-law Fanny Wedgwood: “Our sorrow is nothing to what it would have been if she had lived longer and suffered more. Charles is well today and the funeral is over, which he dreaded very much.” Emma felt she regretted the loss of her baby more from her “likeness to Mamma, which I had often pleased myself with fancying might run through her mind as well as face . . . 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.”

  Emma was soon taking walks, and noticed the wild climber, traveller’s joy, which was covering the autumn hedgerows with its seed-heads. Willy approved strongly of “country ’ouse,” and Annie at eighteen months tottered here and there over the unaccustomed space of floor and grass. Emma’s chief impression of the first year at Down was that “we enjoyed the intense quiet, as we knew no one.”

  In her early childhood at Down, Annie’s world was bounded by the deep woods in the valleys around the village. During the first winter, when Emma’s brother Hensleigh was ill, three of his children, Julia or “Snow” aged nine, James or “Bro” aged eight and Ernie aged five, came to stay. Living as they did in a London terrace, they were eager to play out of doors, in the fields, woods and clay-pits. The weather was sharp and cold and there was snow on the ground, but Emma let Bessy the nursemaid take them with Willy and Annie into the Big Woods in the wide valley to the south. The woods, where Charles once saw a polecat, were a mass of hazel-copse with occasional oaks and crossed by narrow footpaths. The children lost their way and wandered helplessly for hours. Bessy cried and Annie was distressed. Snow and Willy found themselves on their own and managed to make their way home. Charles met them as they came back, and gathered what he could from Snow about the other four. He asked some neighbours to help look for them, and they eventually found them near a farmhouse in the valley, after Bessy had been carrying Annie for three hours. Charles noted in his book of accounts that he had paid seven shillings to “People hunting children.”

  Bessy was ill for a year afterwards, and though Annie cannot have been able to understand anything at the time, Bessy must have told her about the day when she could talk with her. Two years later, Emma found that Annie was upset by one of her books. It was called Little Robert and the Owl and was about a boy who got lost in a wood as he went to visit his grandmother one winter evening. He crept inside a hollow tree, driving out the owl, and fell asleep while thinking conf
idently of a verse he remembered from the Prophet Ezekiel: “And I will make with them a covenant of peace, and will cause the evil beasts to cease out of the land: and they shall dwell safely in the wilderness, and sleep in the woods.” His dog Faithful found him next morning and all was well. Annie knew a hollow ash tree in the Darwins’ meadow, and the children heard the owls in the woods during the winter nights. Annie could not stand hearing the story but insisted that Little Robert “must have somebody to take care of him.”

  When spring came, Charles walked along the narrow lanes and found the banks clothed with primroses and pale blue violets. “A few days later some of the copses were beautifully enlivened by Ranunculus auricomus, wood anemone and a white Stellaria.” In June 1843, he wrote that “the sainfoin fields are now of the most beautiful pink, and from the number of hive bees frequenting them, the humming noise is quite extraordinary.” He was also struck by the number of different kinds of bush in the hedgerows, all entwined by traveller’s joy and bryony. The neighbourhood he was exploring was to be the range of his daily walks and observations as a naturalist for the remaining forty years of his life.

  As the family settled in, Charles and Emma got the measure of their new home. They wanted more rooms, an orchard, a good kitchen garden, dry paths, a view over the valley to the west and shelter from the fierce north wind. They were also most anxious for privacy from people walking along the lane to the next village, as Charles found their gaze “intolerable.” He employed a builder and filled every afternoon with his schemes for the grounds, planting bushes, levelling banks, digging the lane down by two feet and raising mounds in the garden with the earth.