by Paul Johnson
I thank you with all my heart for your openness with me & I should dread the feeling that you were concealing your opinions from me for the fear of giving me pain. It is perhaps foolish of me to say this much but my own dear Charley we now belong to each other & I cannot help being open with you. Will you do me a favour? Yes I am sure you will: it is to read our saviour’s farewell discourse to his disciples which begins at the end of the 13th chapter of John. It is so full of love to them & devotion & every beautiful feeling. It is the part of the New Testament I love best. This is a whim of mine—it would give me great pleasure though I can hardly tell you why. I don’t wish you to give me your opinion about it.
There the matter rested until, in February 1839 (they were married on January 29), Emma wrote her husband a long letter. It is one of the great love letters of the nineteenth century. It is worth quoting at length both because it radiates wisdom and shows why Emma was such a good wife for Darwin, so important to the success of his mission, and also because the response it evoked in him tells us a lot about Darwin and his nature. She wrote:
The state of mind which I wish to preserve with respect to you, is to feel that while you are acting conscientiously & sincerely wishing, & trying to learn the truth, you cannot be wrong; but there are some reasons that force themselves upon me & prevent my being always able to give myself this comfort. . . . I will write down what has been in my head, knowing that my own dearest will indulge me. Your mind & time are full of the most interesting subjects & thoughts of the most absorbing kind, viz following up yr own discoveries—but which make it very difficult to you to avoid casting out as interruptions other sorts of thoughts which have no relation to what you are pursuing or to be able to give your whole attention to both sides of the question. . . .
May not the habit in scientific pursuits of believing nothing until it is proved, influence your mind too much in other things which cannot be proved in the same way, & which if true are likely to be above our comprehension. I should say also that there is a danger in giving up revelation which does not exist on the other side [of the question], that is, the fear of ingratitude in casting off what has been done for your benefit as well as for that of all the world & which ought to make you more careful, perhaps even fearful lest you should not have taken all the pains you could to judge truly. I do not know if this is arguing as if one side is true & the other false, which I meant to avoid, but I think not. I do not quite agree with you in what you once said—that luckily there were no doubts as to how one ought to act. I think that prayer is an instance to the contrary, in one case it is a positive duty & perhaps not in the other. But I dare say you meant in actions which concern others & then I agree with you almost if not quite. I do not wish for any answer to all this—it is a satisfaction to me to write it & when I talk to you about it I cannot say exactly what I wish to say, & I know you will have patience, with your own dear wife. Don’t think it is not my affair and that it does not much signify to me. Every thing that concerns you concerns me & I should be most unhappy if I thought we did not belong to each other forever.
I am rather afraid my own dear Nigger will think I have forgotten my promise not to bother him, but I am sure he loves me & I cannot tell him how happy he makes me & how dearly I love him & thank him for all his affection which makes the happiness of my life more & more every day.
The letter, not notable for its logic—it was, as I say, a love letter—had its effect, in sanctifying the metaphysics of their religious differences and revealing to Darwin the nobility of her nature. He wrote at the end: “When I am dead, know that I have many times kissed and cryed over this—C.D.” It is not a letter many wives could have written or many husbands cherished. Among their contemporaries, it is not an exchange that would have been possible between, say, the Gladstones or the Tennysons or the Lincolns. Or between George Eliot and G. H. Lewes, or Jane and Thomas Carlyle, or Professor and Mrs. Huxley, or Charles’s brother Erasmus and his then intimate friend Harriet Martineau—just to mention a few couples known to or contemporary with them. The letter and its footnote form an important piece of information about the personal background to Darwin’s great work.
Darwin’s relationship with his wife, close and tender but characterized by an unbridgeable gap over belief, added an important dimension not to his work as such but to his presentation of it. It complicated and deepened the trauma caused by his profound awareness of the Priestley crisis in his family history and his anxiety not to repeat it. Darwin was not going to allow any religious consideration to impede his scientific work. But he was anxious to avoid, if humanly possible, any open charge of infidelity and, above all, any angry and public conflict. Marriage to Emma enormously increased his anxieties and fears on this point. In fact, the age of Church-and-King riots were over. The coming “No Popery” commotion of the early 1850s, in response to the reinstitution of the Catholic hierarchy in England by the Vatican, though noisy, was a very tame affair compared to the Priestley riot of the early 1790s, let alone the dreadful Gordon Riots of 1780. The Victorian age was altogether more subdued and purely argumentative, even gentlemanly, in expressing its religious differences than the eighteenth century. But Darwin could not bank on this, and his secret terror of becoming involved in a fight with religious fundamentalists was now redoubled by his knowledge of the infinite distress it would cause Emma. It set up a constant anxiety in his mind, and this in turn affected his health.
Apart from seasickness, Darwin had survived his Beagle voyage with his good health intact. The first symptoms of a change occurred on September 20, 1837, when he suffered an “uncomfortable palpitation of the heart,” and his doctor, fearing overwork, advised complete rest. During the winter of 1839–40, there was a definite deterioration, and a multitude of symptoms: nausea, vomiting, headaches, stomach pains, rheumatism, heart pain, flatulence, and chronic fatigue. These symptoms and many others persisted at intervals for the rest of his life. His illness, if such a collection of disparate symptoms could be grouped under a single head, was never satisfactorily diagnosed, though Darwin consulted more than a dozen doctors over the years. One suggestion was incipient epilepsy. Another was a tropical fever as a result of an insect bite during the Beagle years. Darwin’s father, who might have solved the mystery, declined to treat him, from a prejudice, common among doctors, against having a member of the family as a patient. He very likely would have concluded the illnesses were psychosomatic in origin, provoked by Darwin’s worry about his work, the widening breach between natural selection and religion, and the fear of distressing Emma.
One result of Darwin’s period of ill health was a move out of London, which Darwin had always felt was a “filthy and noxious place” anyway, with its fogs, smogs, smoke, bad air, and river stench. They found the perfect place in July 1842: Down House, in a small hamlet of the same name near Farnborough in Kent. It was large enough to accommodate a growing family and servants but unpretentious, “built of shabby bricks,” with forty acres. It has now been restored, more or less to the condition, inside and out, that it was in when Darwin lived there, and it is open to the public, so those sufficiently interested can see exactly how Darwin spent the last forty years of his life.
Down was intensely quiet and totally secluded then, and Darwin immediately set about increasing the privacy by planting trees. What he wanted, he now decided, was the ability and right to exclude any visitors when he was working intensely or not in the mood to receive them, together with the chance to invite them, for meals, for weekends, or for longer stays, if he felt like it or needed to see savants for professional reasons. The combination of Down, which was only thirteen miles from London, and his “illnesses,” which gave him the privileged status of an invalid, exactly met this requirement. The shrewder observers, such as the diarist William Allingham, noted the way in which Darwin used his ill health to produce a mixture of total seclusion and accessibility, another reason for thinking his complaint psychosomatic.
Darwin made various ingenious and frustrated efforts to cure himself, using new “scientific” techniques that appealed to his intellect. For one, the water cure, he submitted himself to a Dr. Gully, of the Spa at Malvern, for a sixteen-week program. For this he rented a house, The Lodge, Malvern (still to be seen). He was denied sugar, salt, bacon, and alcohol and had wet compresses placed on his stomach all day, changed every two hours. This did not cure him permanently, but he felt it did him good. And he liked it. So back at Down, he built himself a douche hut near the three-hundred-foot-deep well in the garden. This had a cistern that held 640 gallons of water. With the help of his butler, Parslow, or his Beagle valet Syms Covington (until the latter went to Australia), he had a huge shower, through a two-inch pipe, every day, and a plunge bath every hour. Between plunges he took exercise along a 250-yard track known as the Sandwalk, which he laid down in the garden. This water cure, undertaken in many different forms, was further varied by a novel system known as the ice cure, in which bags of ice, frequently changed, were pressed against his back for periods of ninety minutes each. In one way or another, these modish techniques, which included electric shocks, were enjoyed by Darwin for forty years. He seems to have liked them partly at least because they involved a regular and satisfying routine.
Darwin loved routine. At Down House, he had regular timetables, which of course changed a little in accordance with his work or medical treatment, but almost imperceptibly. One went as follows. A walk on rising at between 6:30 A.M. and 7:00 A.M. Breakfast at 7:30 A.M. Work at 8:00 A.M. for ninety minutes. Then an hour’s writing of letters (he wrote probably over twenty thousand, a large proportion of which have survived and have been published). At 10:30 A.M., there was a further ninety-minute work period. Then at noon, a medicinal shower, followed by the Sandwalk and a visit to the greenhouses, which were extensive and involved scientific plantings vital to his work. Then came luncheon (as he called it), a glance through the newspapers (the Times, Morning Post, and Daily News), a further session of letter-writing, a rest, during which a novel was often read to him, and a thirty-minute walk. At 4:30 P.M., a sixty-minute work period began, followed by a social half hour in the drawing room talking to the family and visitors. Then came another ninety-minute rest period, high tea at 7:30 P.M. (this was partly a result of Darwin’s Midland upbringing, where the main meal was usually taken at lunch, confusingly called dinner). After that came backgammon, usually with Emma, reading scientific books and periodicals, and bed at 10:30 P.M. Characteristically, Darwin kept a careful record of his gambling (only for points, not money). He told an American correspondent in 1876 that, so far, he had won 2,795 games of backgammon; Emma, 2,490.
Gradually Darwin made Down a house and workplace of exactly the kind he wished. His income was periodically increased by his generous father and, despite a growing family, there were years in which a good half of it was saved and reinvested. It is curious to us that Darwin did not employ a clever young man as an assistant, preferably one with modern language skills who could have combed through the current scientific publications, especially those in German. He could well have afforded such help, and his failure to do so was to prove costly. He spent money, however, on making his kitchen garden, hothouses, and woods an adjunct of his study in housing all the plants and creatures he wished to observe and record.
The arrival of children at regular intervals delighted him. Unlike many studious men, especially scientists, Darwin never regarded children, especially his own, as a nuisance or a distraction. On the contrary, he tried to give them employment. When working on bees, he placed each child (he then had six available) at special points along routes he thought bees took in their search for suitable flowers. He dusted each plant with flour, which adhered to the bee’s body, and told the children to shout out each time a bee with flour on it reached another plant. This was one of dozens of experiments in which we know he involved them. His son Leonard, when three, was observed going out in the garden to look at a flower and, when questioned, replied, “I’ve a fact to do.”
Darwin was especially kind to children when they were ill. Any sick child had the right to lie covered in blankets on the sofa in his study. The deaths of three of his ten children were painful tragedies to him. The one that hit him the hardest was the fatal sickness of his favorite child, Annie, which began in June 1850, when she was nine, and ended in her death the following April when she was ten. We have a good photograph of her taken two years before her death. She obviously very much resembled her mother, but Darwin loved her primarily because of her goodness and the sweetness of her nature—“a perfect angel.” The inexorable progress of her mysterious malady is recorded in detail in letters and notebooks. Darwin felt a huge burden of guilt because he believed her trouble was inherited from himself. She was subjected to the water cure under Dr. Gully, wet-sheet wrappings every two hours, rubbing of the back with a saturated towel, showers and pumpings, and ice-cold baths, especially of her feet and hands. Then, not responding, she was taken to Malvern, but nothing availed. On April 23, 1851, Darwin wrote to Emma, at Down:
She went to her final sleep most tranquilly, most sweetly at 12 o’clock today. Our poor dear dear child has had a very short life but I trust happy, & God only knows what miseries might have been in store for her. She expired without a sigh. How desolate it makes one to think of her frank cordial manners . . . I cannot remember ever seeing the dear child naughty. God bless her . . . my own poor dear dear wife.
Emma’s diary simply recorded: “12 o’clock.” It is notable that Darwin’s letters during the final phase were one long prayer to God for her recovery. He mentions God fourteen times in his letter to Emma; she, only twice. The blow was the worst single torment in his entire life, exceeding in pain even the death of his mother. He was too distraught to attend the little girl’s funeral. He never forgot her, and he never forgave God for taking her away. The cruelty, as he saw it, blew away the last vestige of his belief in a benign deity. What Leibniz had called theodicy, the notion of divine justice, no longer made any sense to him, and thereafter, though without admitting it to Emma, he carried on his work as though God did not exist. The final collapse of his belief, be it noted, had nothing to do with scientific discovery: It was purely a matter of intimate loss. But he now possessed no personal religious reason, on his own account—leaving aside his respect for Emma’s feelings—for avoiding the direst conclusion to his work on evolution by nature alone. From 1851 his work took on an extra intensity and vehemence.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Making of a Masterpiece
Nearly a quarter of a century elapsed between Darwin’s return from the Beagle voyage and the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. It may be asked: What exactly was he doing during these years, the best in his life in terms of intellectual maturity and physical energy? He opened his notebooks on transmutations in 1837. He hit upon his working theory of natural selection in 1838. He saw himself as collecting material for his great book so as to present his theory backed by overwhelming evidence, and it is certainly true that he amassed an ever growing pile of facts about the way organisms grew. As he put it, “I am like Croesus, overwhelmed by my riches of facts.” The term overwhelmed was apt. Like many other scholars of all times, Darwin accumulated more material than he could ever possibly have n
eeded. He never acquired the basic economic theory of research: an overprovision of material and evidence is not only unnecessary but a positive hindrance to a completed work.
In fact, he began to sketch his theory of natural selection as the means by which species were varied and created as early as 1842 and completed it in 1844. Why did he not publish it sooner, in some form? Why wait fifteen years? There were two reasons, both tinged by fear. If there was one possible judgment that terrified Darwin, it was that his conclusions about natural selection would be dismissed as “mere speculation.” In mid-Victorian times, it was the deadliest phrase to be used about innovative science and was frequently employed. Hence he was determined to accumulate the maximum possible number of examples that fitted his working theory before making it public. The second reason was less admirable. Darwin’s fear of the Priestley factor, compounded by the don’t-upset-Emma factor, compelled him, almost despite himself, to go on accumulating examples as a way of delaying the need to publish. This, too, is not an uncommon phenomenon in research.
Besides, it is a fact made overwhelmingly clear by Darwin’s research notebooks that he took great delight in investigating, dissecting, classifying, and recording organic things and creatures. And the smaller they were, the more he liked it. It is a curious reflection on the emphasis of his research that he never did any serious research on vertebrates. He made no real attempt to become an expert anthropologist. He was interested in facial expressions and observed his children carefully as they became old enough to exhibit them. He studied, for comparison, the emotions of any available animal, such as his dog Bob, noting his “Hot House Face,” for example. But that, plus occasional visits to the zoo, was as far as it went. The arrival of the first gorilla in England, paraded in Wombwell’s Circus, which was a sensation in 1855, aroused surprisingly little interest in him. The emergence of evidence about Neanderthal man, soon after, also did not fascinate him as one might have expected.