Creation (Movie Tie-In)

by Randal Keynes

  The building works began in the spring of 1843. Charles took advice from the builder’s foreman, “a sort of Jack of all knowledge.” “From the effects of a £1 present and the hopes of another” the foreman was very helpful. Charles commented: “I suspect he is an old rogue, but he is a useful one.” The house had been badly laid out, and one of the bricklayers told Charles with a gloomy shake of his head, “A most deceptious property to buy, sir.” Charles felt that the alterations made it a quite substantial home. On the ground floor the family had three rooms—a large and open drawing room with a new bay window looking southwest into the garden, a dining room and Charles’s study looking over the lane. In the hall, a wide staircase led to the first floor. The bedroom above the drawing room shared the newly built bay and the windows opened out over the garden, the meadow and the valley to the west. Charles and Emma had separate bedrooms. It appears that the one with the new bay window was to be for her; according to Charles, “Emma’s bedroom will be truly magnificent; I quite grudge it her.”

  In the passage between the drawing room and the dining room was the door to the “offices,” the kitchen, pantry and scullery, and the back staircase to the servants’ bedrooms on the second floor. During the first two years, the offices were cramped and inconvenient for the many servants who worked for the young family, and when Charles and Emma needed to add a schoolroom on the first floor for Willy and Annie, the servants asked if they also could be given more room. Charles felt it was “so selfish making the house so luxurious for ourselves and not comfortable for our servants, that I was determined if possible to effect their wishes.” He engaged the village builder, John Lewis, to rebuild the offices with the schoolroom above and a new passage and back door into the yard.

  While the building works were going on, Emma took Willy and Annie to stay with her Allen cousins in Wales. Charles reported to her that Mr. Lewis had quarrelled with his carpenters and laid them all off. Lucy, one of the servants, “was very good natured and took keen interest about one man whose wife had come from a distance with a baby and is taken very ill. The poor man was crying with misery, but we have persuaded Lewis to take him back again.” These were the “hungry forties” when many labourers had to take their families from place to place for any casual work they could find.

  Charles’s cousin Fox wrote to him in the weeks before the first anniversary of his wife’s death in childbirth. The passing of time had not softened Fox’s grief. Charles wrote back that he had thought “time inevitably would have done you more good than it seems to have done.” He continued humbly, “I had hoped (for experience I have none) that the mind would have refused to dwell so long and so intently on any object, although the most cherished one.” He thought about the value of feelings and the roots of human nature. “Strong affections have always appeared to me the most noble part of a man’s character . . . you ought to console yourself with thinking that your grief is the necessary price for having been born with (for I am convinced they are not to be acquired) such feelings.” He ended on another note of deference to Fox’s understanding of grief. “But I am writing away without really being able to put myself in your position. You have my sincerest sympathy and respect in your sorrow.”

  In September Emma and Charles’s next child was born. She was christened Henrietta, and was known as Etty. George (my great-grandfather) followed in 1845, Elizabeth, known in her childhood as Betty, in 1847, Francis in 1848, Leonard in 1850 and Horace in 1851. All except Betty and Horace wrote accounts of their childhoods which are the sources of much that follows. Thinking back on her early years, Etty’s impression was that her mother was almost entirely wrapped up in her husband and the children. “The life of watching and nursing which was to be my mother’s for so long . . . cut her off from the world.” When Charles became ill, “intercourse with our neighbours almost ceased, and we children had a rather desolate feeling that we were aliens. But I think that my mother never felt this as any loss. She was not essentially sociable as he was.” Emma was often unwell with recurring headaches and fevers, and she noted her ailments in her diaries alongside Charles’s “bilious vomitings” and fever. Her jottings were all brief and matter-of-fact, but they show how she cared for Charles every day while coping with her own illness.

  Annie was brought up in a household of servants. During the 1840s Charles was spending around £1,500 each year from his father and family trusts. That was equivalent to around £67,000 today according to the Bank of England’s index of values, but the comparison cannot be precise. A manual called The Complete Servant suggested that a gentleman and lady with children and an income of £1,500 would normally employ a cook, two house-maids, a nursery maid, a coachman, a footman and a man to help in the stable and garden. During Annie’s early childhood, Charles had a butler, a footman and two gardeners. Emma had a cook, a kitchen maid, a laundry maid, a housemaid, a nurse for the children and one or two nursery maids. The butler had the cottage next to the coachhouse in the yard, and the two gardeners lived in the village.

  There was an open market for domestic staff in The Times and other newspapers, but the Darwins preferred to engage people they knew or whom sisters, brothers, cousins, close friends or neighbours could vouch for. According to Etty, her mother managed the household with a light hand and played down domestic difficulties. “It was remarkable how she infused this spirit into the household and made the servants ready to co-operate with her, often even at great inconvenience to themselves . . . She would take any trouble to help them or their relations, and in return there was nothing they would not do to please her. In an emergency they would cheerfully work like horses; or anyone would change their work; the cook would nurse an invalid, the butler would drive to the station, and anybody would go an errand anywhere or be ready to help in looking after the poor people.”

  Francis wrote that his father was loved and respected as a master of servants; “he always spoke to them with politeness, using the expression ‘Would you be so good’ in asking for anything.” Francis remembered being reproved by him for using more spoons than he needed to, because it meant more work in cleaning. His father tried to avoid harsh words with the staff. When Francis was a small boy, he heard the head gardener being scolded for abusing the second gardener, and “my father saying angrily ‘Get out of the room, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. ’ It impressed me as an appalling circumstance, and I remember running upstairs out of a general sense of awe.”

  According to a family story, once when it was time for supper, Charles went into the kitchen and played the cook’s hand at whist for her, so that she could get on with preparing the meal. The cook was Jane Davies from Wales; she was known as Mrs. Davies although she was unmarried. Annie knew her as “Daydy” and Francis remembered her kindness in spite of constant threats of “tying a dish-cloth to your tail” which he never understood. Annie was at home in the kitchen; she often ate meals there, and could generally extract gingerbread and other good things from Daydy when she wanted.

  There was no bathroom in the house, nor any hot water except in the kitchen, but the housemaids carried bath-cans here and there. Bessy Harding was the first of a succession of young maids who helped with the children and did other menial tasks. Emma used to let the children’s mess accumulate till the room “becomes unbearable,” and then called Bessy in to tidy up. Once when Bessy was looking after Etty and the small child was being particularly trying, Emma wrote that Bessy was “so tender and sweet-tempered, she is a jewel.”

  There were also a housemaid, a nursery maid and a laundry maid, all girls from villages nearby. With the children and the young servants, the Darwin household at that time had only four people over twenty-five, and twelve or more under. A book for children, Little Servant Maids, gave an account of a servant’s life. It was a great favourite of Etty’s, and she always remembered how it “described in the most delightful way all the activities of the little maids, their sins and the sins of their mistresses.” It declared with merciles
s severity the assumptions of respectable people who expected subservience from their staff. Children going into service “should consider what sort of behaviour is most likely to gain the good-will of ladies and gentlemen . . . Let poor boys and girls . . . be quiet and orderly in their manners, and civil in their mode of answering. A servant . . . will find it necessary to be constantly subduing her own will, and giving up her inclinations at the direction and command of others.”

  Emma put the book into a lending library she ran for the village children. Every Sunday afternoon they came to the village schoolroom near the church to borrow and return their books. Etty watched jealously as her favourite books were lent out, and pointed out to her mother when they were not returned. She believed that “if a book was much enjoyed, the proof was that it was stolen however often it was replaced. This was the fate of my beloved Little Servant Maids.” It seems remarkable now that the village children wanted to read the book, but many girls had to seek a “place” because it was the only way to earn money for the family or escape from drudgery at home. As the book made clear, the ways of a genteel household were quite different from those that poor girls were used to, and the book gave them an idea of what to expect. The Darwins’ maids probably had an easier time than many, but it must have been a very hard life for any who were attached to their family and friends, and unhappy to submit to the discipline of quiet obedience to strangers.

  The servant to whom Annie was closest from her earliest years was the children’s nurse, Jessie Brodie. She was known to everyone as Brodie, not Miss like the governess or Mrs. like the cook because she had a lower position than either. When she came to the household in 1842 she was forty-nine, a tall, erect woman with carroty hair, china-blue eyes and marked features deeply pitted with smallpox. She looked severe in a photograph taken some years later, but Etty remembered that she had a “most delightful smile.” She came from a small fishing port on the northeast coast of Scotland. Her father had been a ship’s master who had been kept prisoner by the French in the Napoleonic Wars, and she had heard nothing of him for ten years.

  In 1839, before coming to the Darwins, she had worked for the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray as nurse to his two young daughters, Anny aged two and the newborn Jane. In Brodie’s first months with the Thackerays, Jane fell ill with a chest infection and died. Brodie helped at the birth of Thackeray’s third daughter, Minnie, in May 1840, and Anny Thackeray later wrote that she remembered first seeing her little sister wrapped in flannel on Brodie’s lap. “My nurse said ‘Come here, Missy, and look at your little sister.’ And I said ‘I can’t see her, Brodie,’ and Brodie said ‘Look at her kicking her little feet.’ ”

  Shortly after Minnie’s birth, Thackeray’s wife became severely disturbed and after apparently trying to drown the three-year-old Anny in the sea at Margate, tried to drown herself while the family was travelling on a steamer from London to Cork. Thackeray wrote to his mother that he never saw anything more beautiful than Brodie’s care for the children on board the steamer. “She was sick every quarter of an hour, but up again immediately staggering after the little ones, feeding one and fondling another. Indeed a woman’s heart is the most beautiful thing that God has created, and I feel I can’t tell you what respect for her (I have).” In the following weeks while Thackeray was having to cope with his wife’s breakdown, there was “only poor Brodie of whom I can make a friend; and indeed her steadfastness and affection for the little ones deserves the best feelings I can give her. The poor thing has been very unwell, but never flinched for a minute, and without her, I don’t know what would have become of us all.”

  At the time Brodie had plans to marry a well-to-do man, but she decided that she would not go until Mr. Thackeray could arrange something for his wife and the children. She stayed with them; the man went to Australia, and she lost her chance. Thackeray could not afford to keep her on, and she went to the Darwins in 1842. Early the next year, when his daughters were being looked after in Paris, he wrote from London to his Anny: “How glad I shall be to see all my darlings well; and there is somebody else who wants to see them again too, and that is Brodie who longs to come back to them.” Anny Thackeray knew that Brodie had gone to work for Mr. and Mrs. Darwin “who had a little girl of my own age called Anny too.”

  Minnie Thackeray by her father

  In the early months at Down House, Emma had to support Brodie when Bessy Harding was “pert” to her, but after a while things went smoothly. Brodie also kept in touch with Mr. Thackeray and saw his two children often, but on one occasion he did not tell her that they were in London. He wrote to his sister: “She is so prodigiously fond of the children that to see them for an hour would give her more pain than pleasure, and we have not had the heart to send to her.” Anny Thackeray always remembered that Brodie had “a genius for loving.”

  A story has been passed down in the Darwin family that Brodie once said it was a pity Mr. Darwin had not something to do like Mr. Thackeray. She had seen him watching an ant-heap for a whole hour.

  Etty in her old age could still remember Brodie “almost as if she was before my eyes, sitting in the little summer-house at the end of the Sand-walk, and hear the constant click-click of her knitting needles. She did not need to look at her stocking, knitting in the Scotch fashion with one of the needles stuck into a bunch of cock’s feathers, tied to her waist, to steady it. There she sat hour after hour patiently and benevolently looking on, whilst we rushed about and messed our clothes as much as we liked.”

  We can hear Brodie’s voice and sense her passionate affection for the children she looked after, in a letter she wrote to congratulate Etty on her marriage, twenty years after leaving the Darwins’ service. She was then in her late seventies, living on her own in a stone tenement in Aberdeen. “Think how happy I was when I got your very kind letter . . . It was so very kind of you My owen Sweet pet to Send it. I Cannot Describe how Much I estame it . . . I not going to writ much more as Present it is very Dark & Dismall to Day . . . Now My Sweet Child I Am just going to finish . . . I hoop you will Both excuse Me for My Shortcummings—Godd by My Derest one. May the blessings of the Lord Rest uppon you and your Dear Husband. I am My Sweet Child your ever affect Miss Old Brodie.”

  Annie played with Joseph Parslow, the butler, who came from Glouces tershire and had been Charles’s manservant in London. Emma’s Aunt Jessie found him “the most amiable, obliging, active, serviceable servant that ever breathed.” Once when he went with Charles to Shrewsbury, Dr. Darwin was shocked by his “long greasy hair” and asked him in the hearing of the other servants “whether he was training to turn into my Lord Judge with a long wig.” Parslow married Emma’s maid Eliza in the early 1840s and she then set up as a dressmaker in a cottage in the village, where she taught needlework to girls apprenticed to her by Emma.

  According to Francis, “no man ever had a truer affection for the whole family than Parslow.” However, “he was a curiously simple-minded man and, if sent to buy a cow, would say the seller, ‘a most respectable man, assured him it was a good cow.’ ” The children all remembered him as a kind friend. Francis did not remember ever being checked by him “except in being turned out of the dining-room when he wanted to lay the table for luncheon, or being stopped in some game which threatened the polish of the sideboard, of which he spoke as though it was his private property.” “He had what may be called a baronial nature: he idealised everything about our modest household, and would draw a glass of beer for the postman with the air of a seneschal bestowing a cup of Malvoisie on a troubadour . . . It was good to see him on Christmas Day—with how great an air would he enter the breakfast-room and address us: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, I wish you a happy Christmas, etc. etc.’ I am afraid he got but a sheepish response from us.” Parslow enjoyed music; he sang tenor in the parish church choir and helped the village children with their musical performances in the schoolroom. He also won prizes for potatoes, carrots, beans and onions at the village vegetable and flowe
r shows.

  When Annie was two and three-quarters, Emma put two little combs in her hair, and Charles felt that it made her look “quite a beauty.” Annie and Willy liked to play with pictures, and were allowed to cut them out from Punch and The Illustrated London News, and from other magazines, almanacs and penny chapbooks which were bought from the street-sellers who came out from London to hawk their wares from door to door. The children coloured these “scraps” with their paints and stuck them onto the stitched cloth pages of their scrapbooks. A roughly sewn album, which may have been Annie’s, has a picture from March’s Penny Book of Sports and others from an alphabet book, Park’s Cock Robin. Charles noted when Annie was three and a half years old that he had seen her “looking at a print of a girl weeping at her mother’s grave. I heard Willy say ‘You are crying.’ She burst out laughing and said ‘No I aren’t; it is only the water coming out of my eyes.’ Her face was red and eyes full of tears. She seemed to wish to excite the emotion again, and went on saying ‘Poor Mamma, poor Mammy.’ Willy then seemed to find it rather melancholy and said ‘Is her Mamma really dead? Has she got no nurse?’ ”

  The nursery rhymes that Charles and Emma spoke and sang to the two young children had come to them by word of mouth in their own childhood, from parents, nurses and playmates. In 1842, James Halliwell published the first printed collection, The Nursery Rhymes of England, and Emma bought a copy. The simple timeless worth of the rhymes was not obvious to some. Halliwell had to defend them against claims that they were immoral, and did so by suggesting that they were “harmless and euphonious nonsense.” But Charles was happy to acknowledge their value. Thinking about a botanical point, the distribution of plants through the dispersal of seeds, he once wrote to a friend about how a seed could be eaten, and the eater itself be eaten in turn before the seed eventually sprouted somewhere far away. “I find fish will greedily eat seeds of aquatic grasses, and that millet seed put into fish and given to stork and then voided, will germinate. So this is the nursery rhyme of ‘This is the stick that beat the pig’ &c &c.”