Creation (Movie Tie-In)

by Randal Keynes

  One of the springs, St. Anne’s Well, lay in a hollow in the hillside reached by a path climbing steeply from the centre of the village. According to Joseph Leech, “The water itself, which dribbles away into a carved stone basin at the rate of about a glass a minute, through a kind of penny whistle placed in the mouth of a pleasant dolphin, is quaffed by crowds in a little house which is half a pedlar’s shop and half a pump room, attached to a cottage where knives and forks are hired out to tourists, and kidney surreptitiously grilled between meals for hungry patients under water treatment.”

  Dickens overheard talk at the spring. In the cool chamber a woman sat, “plying her needle, while enjoying pious conversation with a lady who has some tracts in her hand. They are saying ‘how very ’andsome’ the clergyman was that preached last Sunday.” A German band, brought over by Dr. Gully, also played there every morning, and invalids could then “slowly imbibe the pure element to an andante of Haydn’s, or toss off tumblers from the ‘sacred rill’ to a Pot-pourie of Donizetti, or the measured time of the Presburgh Polka.”

  A guide for visitors explained that the paths up behind the well “wind in every direction among the hills, constantly traversed during the season by parties of pedestrians, or invalids on donkeys, enjoying the many splendid views with which the country abounds, and courting the invigorating breezes, there far removed from those sources of contamination too frequent in the vales below.” Leech wrote that, “the moment you set your foot on the summit, commerce cries and clatters around you with its importunate clamour, in the shape of basket-girls pestering you to become the purchaser of ginger-beer, biscuits, and walnuts, or the owners of return donkeys tempting you with a cheap ride down again.” The donkeys could be hired by the day or the hour from the Donkey Exchange near Lamb’s Bazaar. They stood patiently, as many as forty or fifty, with white cotton cloths covering the side saddles for ladies.

  During the family’s stay, Willy went for lessons with a clergyman, Mr. Fancourt, who took in pupils at the Ankardine House Academy. There were dancing lessons on Fridays for all the children. These were a treat for Annie, as there was no dancing instruction in Downe. The Misses Clinnick at Pomona House had “secured the assistance of the most eminent Masters in the county for Music, Singing, Dancing, and Drawing.” Annie enjoyed music; watching her face as she listened to others playing, Charles felt sure that she had a strong taste for it. He wrote to a friend, “I believe . . . that she is a second Mozart,” and then, thinking of his own weakness with tunes, he added, “She is more than a Mozart, considering her Darwin blood.”

  Dancing was an essential accomplishment for young ladies at the time, and it taught a child important points about behaviour, expression and grace. John Locke had written a hundred and fifty years before in his Treatise on Education: “Nothing appears to me to give children so much confidence and behaviour, and so to raise them to the conversation of those above their years, as dancing.” Children were first taught the positions, which “constitute the alphabet of dancing.” The Young Lady’s Book, a manual of feminine accomplishments, said: “The Batte ments &c in the positions form a series of very graceful domestic morning exercises, and we strongly recommend their frequent practice.” Annie danced quadrilles; according to The Young Lady’s Book, “the lady who joins in a quadrille aspires . . . to glide through the figure with easy and unobtrusive grace.”

  Another entertainment for the family was Dr. Gully’s belief in clairvoyance. George remembered that “he bothered my father for some time to have a consultation with a clairvoyante, who was staying at Malvern, and was reputed to be able to see the insides of people and discover the real nature of their ailments. At last he assented to pacify Dr Gully, but on condition that he should be allowed to test the clairvoyante’s powers for himself. Accordingly, on going to the interview he put a bank note in a sealed envelope. After being introduced to the lady, he said ‘I have heard a great deal of your powers of reading concealed writings and I should like to have evidence myself; now in this envelope there is a bank note and if you will read the number I shall be happy to present it to you.’ The clairvoyante answered scornfully ‘I have a maid-servant at home who can do that.’ But she had her revenge, for on proceeding to the diagnosis of my father’s illness, she gave a most appalling picture of the horrors which she saw in his inside.”

  After three months of the treatment, Charles wrote to John Herschel that it had had “an astonishingly renovating action” on his health. “Before coming here, I was almost quite broken down, head swimming, hands tremulous and never a week without violent vomiting. All this is gone, and I can now walk between two and three miles. Physiologically, it is most curious how the violent excitement of the skin, produced by simple water, has acted on all my internal organs. I mention all this out of gratitude to a process which I thought quackery a year since, but which now I most deeply lament I had not heard of some few years ago.”

  As his health slowly recovered, Charles went out for long walks on his own. He told Fox that he had looked for beetles for old times’ sake, but could not find one. When he walked in the early morning on the great hill above the house he would have seen, as Dickens did, “the sheep come running up the shaded side to meet the sun, instead of crouching into dark nooks. Then the lark springs up from some grassy crevice, and the swallows are innumerable . . . On the east the mists still shroud the landscape; but on the Herefordshire side all is clear and bright, both within the shadow of the hills and beyond it. What a vast shadow it is! and how cool lie the farmsteads and orchards and dark pools within it!”

  Some features of the landscape reminded Charles of the ancient history of the earth and his species theory. When he had accompanied Professor Sedgwick on his geological expedition to Wales in 1831, Sedgwick was working out the sequence of the oldest strata and the fossils they contained, because he realised that life forms appeared for the first time at a certain level, and the forms of progression they showed, such as that from invertebrates to vertebrates, must have some significance for the history of the natural world.

  A young clergyman, the Reverend William Symonds, knew Charles from the Geological Society and gave lectures in Malvern about the rocks of the neighbourhood. In his book Old Stones, he explained the origins of the Malvern Hills as Charles would have understood them. They were a ridge formed from some of the oldest rocks known, at the time called “Plutonic” from the ancient god of hell, which had been thrust up through the overlying strata in the remote geological past. To give a sense of the forces involved, Symonds quoted “the words of Mr Darwin in The Voyage of the Beagle on the effect of earthquakes, and the gradual uprising and sinking of land in South America . . . ‘Daily it is forced home on the mind of the geologist, that nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable as the level of the crust of this earth.’ ” Symonds wrote that “forces rest beneath, which, if called forth, might rend a world; but which are yet so beautifully and so perfectly under His control, that slowly and imperceptibly whole continents are uplifted and depressed.” Symonds pointed to evidence all around the neighbourhood “of the vast, the unmeasured lapse of time since first our planet was called into being.” He felt with Sedgwick that “geology impresses the mind, perhaps more than any other subject of natural history, with the truth of a beginning, and the far-reaching and eternal agency of the First Great Cause . . . Surely, then, we learn here an important fact in geologic history, viz. that everything was created, and that the lowliest animal appeared not upon the wide world’s surface without the fiat of the Creator.”

  Another local naturalist, Edwin Lees, had similar visions of the distant past in the plant-covered rubble of a limestone quarry on the south side of the hills. If Charles found a quarry on a walk, he would always look round for any rock exposures of interest. Lees wrote: “Before the eye are exposed the supporting ribs of the earth’s framework, moulded within the depths of the primeval ocean, and now lifted up today by the force of the . . . outbreak that reared that
lofty citadel . . . Broken debris of ancient marine life strew the ground all about . . . But strange is the mixture of the extinct life of the past, that formed the foundations of the hills, with the evanescent encroachments of the present. The ancient heraldic forms of nature, the Trilobite and the Encrinite, with numerous shells and corals, lie in upturned confusion on the sides of the quarry, covered with the rank weeds and thistles that strive again to entomb them, and with monstrous coltsfoot leaves, that spread thickly around, though only the growth of a single season—the hasty scum of yesterday. But the deposit of past life is thrown into the kiln, the smoke of ancient forests trails in the air, and lime goes to form new combinations of life in this wonder-working scene.”

  When Annie walked with her father over the hills, he could tell her about their history and the succession of past worlds of which they had been part. He kept a young person’s wonder in his understanding of nature, and he was glad to share it with his children.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE FRETFULNESS OF A CHILD

  Annie’s last summer—Illness—Ramsgate—

  Winter months—Annie’s birthday

  WHEN THE FAMILY CAME HOME from Malvern in 1849, Charles carried on with the water treatment on his own, and John Lewis the builder erected a wooden hut for his daily shower near the well in the garden. Lewis’s fifteen-year-old son came to work in the household as Charles’s page. Every morning he would go out to the hut and pump gallons of water up into a little steeple attached to the roof. Charles undressed in the hut; he pulled a string, and the water fell on his back with great force. Etty remembered that she and Annie used to stand outside to “listen to his groans, and I have an image of his coming out half running and half frozen to take his usual morning walk in the Sand-walk, where we meant to accompany him.”

  Charles and Emma’s eighth child, Leonard, was born in January 1850. Chloroform had been introduced for relieving pain two years before, and Charles had arranged for the doctor to give it to Emma for the birth. But, as he wrote to his cousin Fox, “Her pains came on so rapidly and severe, that I could not withstand her entreaties for chloroform and administered it myself, which was nervous work, not knowing from eye-sight anything about it or of midwifery. The Doctor got here only ten minutes before the birth. I thought at the time I was only soothing the pains, but it seems she remembers nothing from the first pain till she heard that the child was born. Is this not grand?” He wrote later to Hooker that when he gave the treatment to Emma, “I was perfectly convinced that the chloroform was very composing to oneself as well as to the patient.”

  Charles had been worrying for some time about his boys’ future. He was well off now that he had inherited part of his father’s fortune, and he hoped to pass on his wealth to his children, but with seven now to provide for and the ever-present fear that one of his investments might fail, he wanted each boy to have a profession. He could not bear to think of them wasting “seven or eight years in making miserable Latin verses,” but Willy had to master Latin to be admitted to a boarding school, and Charles found a tutor “who teaches nothing on earth but the Latin Grammar.” At the end of January, when Willy was just ten, he went to lodge with the Reverend Mr. Wharton,Vicar of Mitcham in Surrey. Mr. Wharton had six other pupils between eleven and fourteen. All Willy remembered later of his time with them was the stag beetles which were common in the neighbourhood and kept by the boys to play with.

  Douche bath at Malvern

  When Willy left for Mr. Wharton’s, Annie was the eldest child at home. Etty was six, George four, Betty two and Francis one. The younger children were all close in age; the gap of two and a half years between Annie and Etty was a reminder of Mary who lay in the family grave near the door of the parish church.

  Annie now led the others out to play; she suggested games and kept the peace. The child whom everyone remembered later with such affection must have been the confident and forthcoming Annie of those months. Charles wrote later that “her cordiality, openness, buoyant joyousness and strong affection made her most lovable.” His unmarried sister Catherine said she often used to think of living nearby in her “solitary old age,” and “what a bright affectionate little niece I should have in her, and how she would not despise me, but be always so candid and kind-hearted which was so entirely her nature.” Fanny Wedgwood commented on her “bright, engaging, qualities, so open and confiding and lovable.” And Emma’s brother-in-law, Charles Langton, commented on her “responsive and confiding nature,” adding that he had “always found her a child whose heart it was easy to reach.”

  Charles was an anxious parent, feeling that “Nothing comes up to the misery of having illness amongst one’s children.” But up to Annie’s ninth year, they had not been seriously affected by the diseases that struck so many households. Some illnesses came “more or less to all” as one doctor wrote, and when each of the Darwin children was born, an entry was made in the family Bible with headings for smallpox vaccination, chickenpox, measles, scarlet fever and whooping cough. Willy, Annie, Etty and George had chickenpox in 1845, and Annie, Etty and Betty had scarlet fever in 1849. Charles and Emma were acutely worried when the scarlet fever came because it was often fatal, but their children recovered. When Charles wrote to Syms Covington in Australia later in the year, he mentioned that his children were “all, thank God, well and strong.”

  In May 1850, Miss Thorley took Annie on a trip to London. The “great icon of the day” was Obaysch, the first hippopotamus to be seen in England, or at least the first for half a million years, as some palaeon tologists pointed out. The British Consul General in Cairo had obtained it from Abbas Pasha,Viceroy of Egypt, for the collection at the Zoological Gardens, and Charles had tickets as a Fellow of the Zoological Society. Everyone wanted them and Charles passed on to his brother Erasmus those that the family did not use. When Professor Owen saw the animal, “it now and then uttered a soft complacent grunt, and lazily opening its thick smooth eyelids, leered at its keeper with a singular protruding movement of the eyeball.” The historian Thomas Macaulay wrote: “I have seen the Hippo both asleep and awake, and I can assure you that, asleep or awake, he is the ugliest of the works of God.” But Queen Victoria, who eventually saw Obaysch five times, found that his eyes were “very intelligent.”

  For Annie, the first three weeks of June were quiet; aunts and uncles came and went while she looked after the younger children. At the end of the month, Willy came back from Mr. Wharton’s for the summer holiday, and five Wedgwood cousins came to stay: Ernie and Effie from London, and Cecily,Amy and Clement from Barlaston. Willy had escaped from his Latin lessons and, for the cousins, the easy and open way of life at Down was also a release from the confines of their households in London and the Potteries. There were six older children together, but Annie had Cecily and Effie as her special friends.

  The cousins’ arrival was a sudden change of pace for Annie; the weather was very hot, and five days later, as the dry spell broke with thunder and lightning, Emma saw that she was unwell. Emma wrote later in her diary: “Annie first failed about this time,” and in her recollections of Annie’s last months, she noted that she “never was well many days together afterwards, finding her lessons a great effort and frequently crying especially after she went to bed.” Emma remembered that during this time, “from her clinging affectionate nature, if she felt uncomfortable she was never easy without being with one of us.”

  In August Emma took Annie and Miss Thorley on a nine-mile ride in the family’s phaeton to Knole. The great house was open to visitors, and the Darwins admired the thousand-acre park. A guide published in 1839 described how from a furze-bank in the grounds the visitor could “catch the chimneys and long roofs of the house, prominent above the many broad masses of oak and sycamore and the feathery tops of beech which rise from the intervening valley; and it will well repay an evening walk to view its towers and gables standing forth in bold relief against the setting sun, or the long lines of the grey twilight clouds.” />
  A few days later, Charles and Emma took Willy, Annie, Etty and the five-month-old Leonard to stay with Uncle Joe and Aunt Caroline at Leith Hill Place. Sophy was now nine, Greata seven and Lucy four. Emma remembered that Annie was very happy. The children clambered over the heath above the house looking for the season’s bilberries in the low-growing shrubs. The berries were small and purplish black, and their sweet juice stained the children’s hands and mouths; but Annie was “overfatigued” by the effort.

  Back at Down, Emma found that she was pregnant with her ninth child. In September, Charles noted that Willy was “showing the hereditary principle by a passion for collecting Lepidoptera,” and bought him an entomological box. He also gave him a pony, and started teaching him to ride. “We began without stirrups, and in consequence Willy got two severe falls, one almost serious. So we are thinking of giving him stirrups, more especially as I am assured that a boy who rides well without stirrups has almost to begin again when he takes to stirrups.”

  On the last Sunday in the month, the villagers turned out to watch when the Archbishop of Canterbury came to confirm the elder Lubbock children in the parish church. He gave an address “both extempore, and very plain and easy, even for the most uneducated to understand,” as Lady Lubbock noted in her diary. He spoke to the children on the verse:Teach me to live that I may dread