Charles Darwin

by A. N. Wilson

  When Jos died in 1795, he left Sukey £25,000 and a fifth share of the Etruria Works. It was a colossal fortune. In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the immense wealth of the aristocratic Mr Darcy is indicated by the fact that his sister Georgiana is worth £30,000 – plainly intended to convey to the reader riches beyond the normal dreams of avarice (though not beyond the dreams of the rascal Mr Wickham).14

  It was something of a triumph for Jos Wedgwood, who had suffered smallpox and a major amputation, to live sixty-five years in the world. His son Tom, all but the inventor of modern photography, made it only to thirty-four, not sharing his father’s high tolerance for alcohol and opiates. Eighteenth-century medicine was a rough business and they were lucky to have as their physician and family friend Erasmus Darwin, who stood by Wedgwood’s side through many a crisis, including the amputation.

  Wedgwood and Darwin were not merely the literal ancestors of many of the Victorian intellectual ‘aristocracy’. They were also its spiritual godfathers. The Lunar Men, of whom Erasmus Darwin was a leading luminary, met in Birmingham, Lichfield or Derby, to exchange world-changing thoughts. Joseph Priestley would tell his friends around the dinner-table of what he called ‘dephlogisticated air’. Priestley was within an inch of discovering oxygen. His experiments would enable Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier to do so. Priestley could tell his dinner-neighbour, though not quite using this language, of the properties of water – H2O. Since his neighbour at table happened to be Scottish engineer James Watt, they were fast on their way to seeing the uses of steam. Since their host was Birmingham manufacturer Matthew Boulton, there was money to construct machinery using steam, and since one of their friends was the ever-adventurous entrepreneur Wedgwood he could pay for a small steam engine for use in his works. The cleverness of these men stimulated each to new heights of invention. Wedgwood, as a nonconformist, could not attend a university or join a profession, but his sons and daughters could marry into the landed gentry. Cleverness turned into money which turned into new social positionings. Such transformations could not happen in the France of the old regime.

  It was not an ‘arranged’ marriage in the formal sense of that word, as a royal marriage might be, or as oriental marriages might be, in our own day. It was, however, all but arranged. Josiah and Erasmus had been the best of friends, and a marriage between Robert Waring Darwin and Susannah Wedgwood did slightly more than cement this friendship. It established a dynasty, and it confirmed that, with their great wealth, the Wedgwoods were now safely rescued from the class of mere manufacturers. Josiah’s son, Josiah II, Sukey’s brother, had established himself at Maer Hall, some twenty-five miles from Shrewsbury, a large Elizabethan house, with extensive park laid out by Capability Brown and woodland full of game. Jos II (Uncle Jos to Darwin) and his elder brother John had married two of the daughters of a Welsh squire – John Allen of Cresselly in Pembrokeshire. Socially speaking, they had arrived, and, while they led the life of gentlemen, they left the old Etruria Works, with its bottle-ovens belching smoke into the Burslem air, in the incompetent hands of their cousin Tom Byerley. None of them possessed any of old Josiah’s business acumen – not Byerley, who had tried his hand at acting before being rescued by old Jos and brought into the firm; not Tom Wedgwood, the youngest son, who had died of a drug-and-drink overdose; not John, who had tried to establish himself as a banker and lost a fortune; not quiet, gentle, amiable Jos II. Indeed, by the time Charles Darwin was born, the fortune could very easily have been dissipated had it not been for Robert Waring Darwin, who, as well as being a competent doctor, was also an astute money-man. It was Robert Darwin who had bailed out John Wedgwood when he got into difficulties. It was Robert Darwin who had put up the money for Jos II to take Maer Hall on a thirty-year lease for £30,000, and to pay for his sons to go to Eton. It was Robert Darwin who tried to control the excesses of Byerley’s children, whose residence at Etruria Hall, the fine old Palladian house built near the works by Josiah I, gave them delusions of gentrified grandeur. Indeed, when Charles Darwin was only a year old, his father had gone to Maer to a crisis meeting with Jos. Continental and American trade had more or less ceased because of the war, and the Wedgwoods were still spending money as if they were aristocrats. John’s London bank was not the only bank to fail because of the economic crisis. He was insolvent.

  Robert Waring Darwin, who had inherited considerable sums from Erasmus, was the man who kept the Wedgwoods from bankruptcy. Like his father, he was huge – tall and fat – with a stammer; and, unlike his father, who was on the whole good-natured, Robert was depressive and irascible. His marriage to Sukey cannot have been one which made her very happy, even if she had not inherited her own mother’s depressive temperament. Hardly a week passed without furious outbursts by her husband, whose only consolation, after such eruptions, was to visit the plants in his hothouses. He was not able to conceal from her the fact that, had it not been for him, her father’s business, snobbishly neglected by her brothers, who did not wish to sully their hands with trade, would probably have gone under.

  Charles Darwin, as well as growing up with a father whose anger was terrifying, also grew up with a sense that the Darwins were a cut above the Wedgwoods. In grown-up life, he would absorb himself, when not contemplating the breeding of pigeons or orchids or the ancestry of baboons, with his own pedigree, but it was always with the Darwin and not the Wedgwood side of the story that he was concerned. Unlike Owd Wooden Leg, who had spent a mere couple of years at a school in Newcastle under Lyme, and who had served an apprenticeship as a humble potter, the Darwins had gentle pedigree. A William Darwin had possessed an estate at Cleatham. His son, born in 1620, had served in the royalist army and had afterwards been called to the Bar. His eldest son, William Darwin, had married an heiress, after whom Charles Darwin’s father was named, Miss Waring, who had brought the manor of Elston, Nottinghamshire, into the Darwin family. Erasmus Darwin, whose brothers included a poetical botanist and the rector of the family living (Elston), had been to Cambridge before studying medicine at Edinburgh. They were miles apart from the nonconformist artisans from whom Sukey sprang. Only Josiah I’s money, and the mutation we have described, by which a new species, the upper-middle class, came into being, made possible Charles Darwin’s parentage.

  Whatever the nature of Robert Waring Darwin’s beliefs, it must have been with a mixture of emotions that he witnessed his wife taking her children each Sunday, not to the parish church, but to the Unitarian meeting-house in Shrewsbury.

  Had they visited the meeting-house in 1798, they might have heard the young Coleridge preaching there, when he was briefly the minister to the Shrewsbury congregation. It was in this meeting-house that the teenager William Hazlitt heard Coleridge speaking – ‘his forehead was broad and high, light as if built of ivory, with large projecting eyebrows’.15 The poet’s career as a Unitarian preacher was of short duration partly because of the generosity of Sukey’s brothers, Jos and Tom, who gave Coleridge an allowance of £100 a year to pursue his philosophical journeyings. Unitarianism was new to Coleridge, who was the child of a parson in the West Country, but it ran deep in the Wedgwoods. Old Jos supported the meeting-house at Newcastle under Lyme, where among other luminaries Joseph Priestley, no less, was a preacher. Jos and Priestley did their best to support the Warrington Academy – known as ‘the cradle of Unitarianism’,16 and Sukey’s brothers were educated there. This was at a time when scientific education was non-existent in such establishments as Eton and Winchester. Priestley helped ensure that the students were abreast of the latest scientific learning. They had some interesting teachers, including Dr Marat, who was subsequently murdered in his bath in Paris by Charlotte Corday on account of his bloodthirsty support of Jacobinism.

  Unitarianism was an attempt to marry Christianity with Reason. The doctrine of the Trinity was discarded, though the person of Christ was venerated. Sukey was imbued with many of the values of the meeting-house, not least a sense that education was as vital for women as
for men, and a belief in science. A passion for botany was one of the things which she had in common with her husband. Darwin’s schoolfriend William Leighton remembered Mrs Darwin teaching him ‘how by looking at the inside of the blossom the name of the plant could be discovered’.17 It is a strange fact that in his Autobiography Darwin makes no mention of his parents’ intense interest in plants. Nor does he tell us that his later fascination with pigeon-breeding was copied from his parents, who reared a great variety – the ‘Mount pigeons’ were well known in Shrewsbury.18 ‘All my recollections seem to be connected most with self’19 (my italics). This sentence could, and indeed must, be said by anyone attempting to write an autobiography, even one as rudimentary as Darwin’s, which was penned for purely private consumption by his children. Nevertheless, the self-absorption of Darwin is by any standards remarkable. One slightly questions, for example, his claim that he, of all the Darwin children, was alone in forming collections of coins, seals and minerals. It is clear that he and his siblings shared their parents’ love of botanizing, for example, and one wonders whether his sisters had flower albums which he simply failed to notice. Something to which he does own up is having been a compulsive liar. The same Leighton who recalled Mrs Darwin’s teaching him about plants (and Leighton went on to become a well-known lichenologist and botanist) was told by the infant Darwin that he ‘could produce variously coloured polyanthuses and primroses by watering them with certain coloured fluids, which was of course a monstrous fable, and had never been tried by me. I may here also confess that as a little boy I was much given to inventing deliberate falsehoods, and this was always done for the sake of causing excitement.’20

  The solipsism and the dishonesty would scarcely be worth mentioning in so small a child were it not that both characteristics were carried on into grown-up life. All my recollections seem to be connected most with self. It would be fascinating to know, say from interviewing his sisters, whether these characteristics predated Sukey Darwin’s death, or whether they are in some way connected with it.

  Sukey Darwin evidently suffered from a variety of symptoms, difficult at this distance to diagnose. There were frequent blinding headaches, and intestinal disorders. Like her mother before her, she often went to Bath to take the curative waters. In July 1817, she was taken very ill, with severe vomiting. Dr Robert Darwin realized that her condition was serious enough to warrant summoning her unmarried sister Kitty from their Staffordshire cottage Parkfields, Tittensor – where she lived with her mother and her sister Sarah. Kitty found Sukey in a bad way. Apart from brief visits from her eldest and youngest daughters, Marianne and Caroline, she had not seen her children for some days. She could scarcely talk. Writing back to Parkfields, she added a postscript that she did not think she would live through the night. In fact, she did so, but twenty-four hours later – probably of peritonitis – she died. Darwin had not been allowed into the sickroom. In later years, he would say that nearly all memory of his mother had totally faded from his mind. ‘I can remember hardly anything about her except her death-bed, her black velvet gown, and her curiously constructed work-table,’ he wrote.21 He remembered his father’s tears, and Dr Robert’s inability to convey his grief; but of his mother, he said, he remembered almost nothing.

  Darwin was eight and a half years old when Sukey died, aged fifty-two. I recall once asking the psychiatrist Anthony Storr what was the worst possible age at which to lose a parent. He replied without hesitation, ‘Nine,’ going on to say that you were old enough to be able to be fully aware of what had happened, but lacking any of the emotional equipment which enables you to grieve. John Bowlby, another eminent (child) psychiatrist, fixed upon Darwin’s habit, even as a child, of taking long solitary walks in a condition known as the ‘fugue’ state, without any idea what he was thinking. This, said Bowlby, suggests ‘a state that is known to occur in persons who have failed to recover from a bereavement’.22 It would clearly be a mistake to say that because Darwin failed to remember his mother she was therefore of no importance to him. Equally mistaken would be to say that, because Darwin’s childhood was prosperous and superficially carefree, it was happy. From the age of eight and a half onwards, a number of behaviour patterns emerge from which Darwin never escaped until his dying day. One is for a series of psychosomatic illnesses and stress-related symptoms to manifest themselves. Almost as soon as his mother had died, Darwin began to develop eczema, which usually erupted all over his hands, but also encrusted his face and lips. When this happened, it was permitted for him to forgo the society of strangers and remain at home. The need to withdraw into the family, and for extended periods not to see anyone except his family, was, once again, a compulsion which never left him. Another factor, observable from the start, was a need to prove himself, to win, and to be seen as the only player in the field. Thus others could remember Mrs Darwin teaching her children botany, but in his Autobiography Darwin wished to represent himself, even as a child, as self-taught. The desire to get on, to assert the will, was at the same time concealed, partly by involuntary bouts of illness and melancholy, and partly by compulsive time-wasting: by apparently mindless brooding and by sport.

  So, in Shrewsbury, a new life began for the six of them, living with the vast, obese, irascible Doctor: Marianne, who was nineteen; Susan, fourteen, Erasmus (Ras), thirteen, Catherine, nine, Bobby – as Darwin was known in the family – eight, and Caroline, seven. From now on, the family bond, both with his siblings at The Mount and with his Wedgwood cousins at Maer, was absolutely central, and he had every opportunity for fishing, shooting, botanizing. Yet there was the great Absence – that of his mother. There were the telltale psychosomatic disorders. There were the long solitary walks, his mind blank. And there was the alarming, gigantic, angry father. Because Darwin was a ‘gentleman’ – and because family was all to him – he would never have given himself over to the heretical, subversive thoughts of his fellow Salopian (twenty-six years younger) Samuel Butler, who in a note ‘On Wild Animals and One’s Relations’ wrote: ‘If one would watch them and know what they are driving at, one must keep perfectly still.’23 Butler, even more than Freud (certainly as far as the English-speaking world was concerned, up to the First World War), was the great subversive pointing out, in his heretical novel The Way of All Flesh and in his explosive posthumous notebooks, what for many of those great, self-enclosed Victorian families was the hideous truth about the Family:

  I believe that more unhappiness comes from this source than from any other – I mean from the attempt to prolong family connection unduly and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so. The mischief among the lower classes is not so great, but among the middle and upper classes it is killing a large number daily. And the old people do not really like it much better than the young.24

  The reason for it was simple: money. In the past, among the upper classes, younger sons had to leave their estates or lands and seek a fortune, either in the armed services or the professions, or in the Empire. The classes beneath, likewise, were either taken up with the need to work or went in search of it, leaving their kinfolk behind. Only the new class, the Victorian rentier class, lived in one another’s pockets as the Darwins and Wedgwoods were to do. They had to do so, for fear of the glue which held them together – their money – slipping out of their grasp, and their being obliged, horror of horrors, to enter a trade. Butler again: ‘Next to sexual matters there are none upon which there is such complete reserve between parent and child as those connected with money. The father keeps his affairs as closely as he can to himself and is most jealous of letting his children into a knowledge of how he manages his money.’25 This is deeply true of the Darwins. It was not until he married that Charles Darwin had anything approaching a candid conversation about money with his prodigiously rich father. Only when the old man died did Darwin realize quite how rich they were. But it was always there in the background. Money produces the greatest security a human being can have in the capitalist w
orld, but – witness the chaotic affairs of Darwin’s uncle John Wedgwood, for example, trying his hand at banking, going bust, and suffering from mental illnesses – it also produces the greatest insecurities. This was what that other great subversive Victorian text, Das Kapital, played upon constantly. Money and capital, which underpinned the rich man’s flowering lawns, could also land even so venerable a figure as Sir Walter Scott in Queer Street as the result of improvident investment and the unseen movement of markets. This lurks behind the playful, yet essentially nervous, little story in Darwin’s Autobiography, in which a pal of his played a trick on him.

  A boy of the name of Garnett took me into a cake shop one day, and bought some cakes for which he did not pay, as the shopman trusted him. When we came out, I asked him why he did not pay for them, and he instantly answered, ‘Why, do you not know that my uncle left a great sum of money to the town on condition that every tradesman should give whatever was wanted without payment to anyone who wore his old hat and moved [it] in a particular manner?’ And then he showed me how it was moved. He then went into another shop where he was trusted, and asked for some small article, moving his hat in the proper manner, and of course obtained it without payment. When we came out, he said, ‘Now if you like to go by yourself into that cake shop (how well I remember its exact position), I will lend you my hat, and you can get whatever you like if you move the hat on your head properly.’ I gladly accepted the generous offer, and went in and asked for some cakes, moved the old hat, and was walking out of the shop when the shopman made a rush at me, so I dropped the cakes and ran for dear life, and was astonished by being greeted with shouts of laughter by my false friend Garnett.26

  Proudhon (‘Property is theft’) or Lenin would have appreciated the story: the mysterious tilt of the propertied person’s hat being as arcane as any other indicator of the rights of property. Old Josiah’s money-bags had been filled by selling exquisite wares which thousands of people actually wished to own, to adorn their dinner-tables and mantelpieces. That was Capitalism, Stage One, and of course, Victorian England was dotted with similar success stories in mills, steelworks and manufactories of all kinds. Capitalism Stage Two, however, in which money itself was making money, as in the life of Dr Robert Waring Darwin, took you into the world of Mr Merdle in Little Dorrit – one moment the richest and most sought-after man in London, the next a ruined swindler who cut his own throat.