Charles Darwin

by A. N. Wilson

  3

  What He Owed to Edinburgh

  AFTER THE DEATH of Sukey Darwin, the household and its habits underwent a change. Darwin remembered, a month after his mother had died, staring blankly out of a classroom window, at the little Unitarian school in Shrewsbury run by the minister, Mr Case, and seeing a horse, riderless, being led to the graveyard. The funeral of a dragoon was taking place in the very churchyard where Darwin’s mother lay. ‘It is surprising how clearly I can still see the horse with the man’s empty boots and carbine suspended to the saddle, and the firing over the grave.’1

  This was one of the last memories he would have of the world seen through a Unitarian window. With his wife’s death, Dr Robert Waring Darwin took the children to the parish church, rather than to the meeting-house. And Bobby was soon withdrawn from the little school run by Dr Case and sent as a boarder to join his elder brother Ras at Shrewsbury School. Geographically, the school was close enough to The Mount, but gone were the comforts of home, gone the goodnight kiss from his affectionate elder sisters before he went to sleep. Public schools in 1818 were alarming places, and without the protection of his brother Ras it would have been even worse. The elder Darwin boy would – with gaps – be the younger boy’s protector until he grew up. The children slept in crowded, unheated dormitories. There was no modern plumbing, so the place stank. There was small opportunity to wash. Cruelties and sexual depravity among the boys were the norm. Many of the buildings were all but unchanged since the school had been founded in the reign of Edward VI. The headmaster – from 1798 until 1836 – was Dr Samuel Butler (grandfather of the satirist of the same name, and later Bishop of Lichfield). Butler was one of the best headmasters in England of the date, and Shrewsbury was, by comparison with Rugby before Dr Arnold, a good school. When Butler took it over, there were just eighteen pupils,2 so the overcrowding witnessed by Bobby and Ras Darwin was a token of Butler’s success in attracting the children of the gentry and the aspirant middle classes. The place had a distinguished history – it was Sir Philip Sidney’s old school – but it was highly unsuitable for a boy of Darwin’s cast of mind. In those days, the curriculum at a public school consisted of a little mathematics, and the rest of the time was devoted to learning Latin and Greek – chiefly Latin. A boy at Harrow during this period believed that he thought in Latin while at the school.3

  Darwin, by his own confession, never mastered languages. ‘Nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind than Dr Butler’s school, as it was strictly classical, nothing else being taught except a little ancient geography and history. The school as a means of education to me was simply a blank.’4

  In its own strange way, Shrewsbury School was a preparation for life, in so far as it gave time to Darwin to develop on his own. He was in a condition which we should recognize as suppressed bereavement, but which was not seen as such either by him or by his teachers and family – even though the observant father was struck by Bobby’s solitary, blank-minded walks. Once, when walking in this state around the old fortifications of Shrewsbury, the boy careered off a path and fell – as it happened only seven or eight feet. For the rest, he was not bullied. His classmates considered him ‘old for his age . . . in manner and in mind’.5 He was an avid reader. He liked Shakespeare’s History Plays, and Thomson’s Seasons – the favourite poem of his grandfather Josiah Wedgwood. Someone gave him a book called Wonders of the World ‘which I often read, and disputed with other boys about the veracity of some of the statements; and I believe that this book first gave me a wish to travel in remote countries, which was ultimately fulfilled by the voyage of the Beagle’.6 Moreover Ras introduced him, when he got older, to the delights of chemistry. They read Henry and Parkes’s Chemical Catechism and they made ‘all the gases and many compounds’. The other boys nicknamed him ‘Gas’. ‘I was once publicly rebuked by the head-master, Dr Butler, for thus wasting my time over such useless subjects; and he called me very unjustly a “poco curante”, and as I did not understand what he meant, it seemed to me a fearful reproach.’7 (It means an indifferent or uninterested person.)

  Many of his happiest, and most intellectually engaged, moments were spent out of doors. From an early age, he was an avid beetle-collector, and looked back with pleasure on a visit to Plas Edwards in Wales, when he was only ten, when he identified a large black and scarlet hemipterous insect, many moths (Zygaena) and a Cicindela which were not found in Shropshire.

  And there was Maer, their second home, with the Wedgwood cousins, where they could escape the moods and rages of Robert Darwin. In the year following the death of Darwin’s mother, the chance of going to Maer was denied him. Probably this was one of the reasons why his father sent him to board at Shrewsbury – just to get him out of the house, and to give him the companionship of other boys. Sukey’s death had coincided with painful money-wrangles between her two brothers, John and Jos, each blaming the other, and each expecting Robert Darwin both to give them financial assistance and to advise them. The death of Sukey and the money-strife plunged the whole extended family into gloom, and Jos decided that the best way of putting it to one side was to take six months abroad. He made no secret of the fact that his ideal life would be one of ‘wise and masterly inactivity’. So in March 1818 he took his wife, their four daughters – ranging in age from nine to twenty-four – and his twenty-two-year-old niece Eliza to Paris for six months. His sister Sarah moved into Maer. While the Wedgwoods were in Paris, they had a rather exalted life, attending the salon of Madame Récamier, and being presented to the Queen of Sweden.8 It was only after the Wedgwood tribe had returned to Maer, when Darwin was ten and upwards, that his life there could resume. It was at Maer that he could develop his passion for field sports, shooting and fishing. So passed his teens.

  When Darwin was thirteen, his elder brother was admitted to Christ’s College, Cambridge. Although Darwin’s classmates at Shrewsbury found him ‘old for his age’, it is clear from Ras’s letters to him from Cambridge that Bobby was still an indulged and rather juvenile boy. ‘I am getting on very comfortably here,’ Ras wrote from Christ’s. ‘Settled in fruiterers, where ye jellies & puffs & cakes & buns &c would tempt the most obdurate sinner, quite as much as ye Lumberland pigs with knives and forks stuck in their backs’ (he is alluding to Peter Breughel’s 1567 painting of Das Schlaraffenland, or Land of Cockaigne, where such creatures appeared cooked and ready for consumption). ‘I know you don’t like long letters & I have nothing to say so good bye be a good boy & you shall have a sugar plum I remain yours affect E. Darwin.’9

  From Cambridge, Ras regaled his younger brother with accounts of the lectures he was attending on chemistry. It is in these letters, too, that we first hear the name of Professor Adam Sedgwick, the Woodwardian Professor of Geology, who advised Ras where to find geological specimens for his younger brother. Sedgwick would play a large role in Charles Darwin’s later life. One of the advantages of college life, compared with school, was that the young men were expected to attend chapel only once a day, rather than the twice which was the norm for Shrewsbury boys. ‘Some evenings preceding Sts days we go to Chapel in surplices, wh: look for all the world like sheets, & indeed one man of St Johns went, for a wager, into chapel dressed in a sheet, & sat before the master without being discovered.’10

  Grandfather Erasmus Darwin had been at St John’s College. He had sent Robert Waring Darwin to Edinburgh University, which had a much more distinguished record at this date for the teaching of medicine, followed by a spell at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Probably old Erasmus also felt it was absurd to send his son to a university (Cambridge or Oxford) which would admit pupils only if they submitted to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, even though he had done so himself in his youth. (The requirement to swear to the Articles was not lifted until after Catholic Emancipation in 1829, which allowed Roman Catholics and nonconformists to attend the older English universities, and to read for the Bar at the Inns of Court.) Ras wou
ld eventually become, like his father, a fully qualified physician, but, unlike Robert Waring, he never practised – indeed, he scarcely ‘did’ anything, learning to engage in ‘wise and masterly inactivity’ with as much aplomb as his charming Uncle Jos at Maer.

  For Robert Waring Darwin, the idleness of his sons was a grief to witness. He could see that Charles was getting nothing out of Shrewsbury, and he was anxious that Ras should not become a pure idler after Cambridge. He decided, when Ras had spent three years at Christ’s, to send his elder son for a year’s medical training at Edinburgh. As for Charles, the irate Doctor once rebuked him, ‘You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.’11 In a moment of inspired decisiveness, Robert Darwin decided to take Bobby out of school and send him north to Edinburgh with his brother Erasmus. He would make doctors out of both his sons, and they could follow in the family tradition of medicine.

  In the early nineteenth century Edinburgh was the largest and most prestigious medical school in Great Britain, with over 900 students a year preparing to be doctors.12 A medical degree was usually conferred after three years, most students having mastered at least one modern language and attended lectures on general science, as well as having undergone three intensive periods of six months apiece, during which they attended medical lectures. Very many students, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, found the lectures unsatisfactory, and reckoned that they learnt far more, especially about surgery, from their practical work on the wards and in the theatres of the hospitals.13

  Darwin doubted whether Ras ever really intended to practise as a physician, but it was very clear that their father intended them to follow in his profession. Even before he was sent to Edinburgh, Charles was given practical experience doing medical visits in Shrewsbury.

  I began attending some of the poor people, chiefly children and women in Shrewsbury. I wrote down as full an account as I could of the cases with all the symptoms, and read them aloud to my father, who suggested further inquiries, and advised me what medicines to give, which I made up myself. At one time, I had at least a dozen patients, and I felt a keen interest in the work. My father . . . declared that I should make a successful physician, meaning by this, one who got many patients.14

  Whether Darwin himself ever supposed he would complete his medical training, we cannot tell. For the time being, he was happy again, with his brother as his constant companion.

  The two tall youths – Darwin still only sixteen and his elder brother just twenty-one – arrived in Edinburgh in October 1825, a week before the lectures began, to give them time to find lodgings and, as Ras put it, so that they could ‘both read like horses’.15 They found lodgings at 11 Lothian Street with a Mrs Mackay, ‘a nice clean old body’.16 They promenaded about the town, they went to church, where they were agreeably surprised to find the sermon lasted only twenty minutes, as opposed to the two hours they had feared from reading Sir Walter Scott’s novels – and they often wrote home. Their sisters Catherine and Caroline took it in turns to write to them, urging Bobby to be diligent about reading French – and ‘something more interesting than the Baroness & Countess “silly letters”’ (presumably a reference to the letters of Mme de Sévigné to her daughter the Comtesse de Grignan) – and passing on such micromanaged instructions as ‘Papa says Erasmus may wear Flannel next his skin in cold weather by all means & that he may sleep in it also, tho he does not think that very advisable – but in warm weather he very much objects to it.’17 The Doctor who had himself studied at Edinburgh knew that there was not a strong likelihood of much warm weather in Edinburgh between the months of October and March.

  Darwin was never an aesthete, but he was, among other things, an aspirant geologist. He could not have failed, from the very first, to be impressed by the skyline of Arthur’s Seat, the remains of a volcano, 375 million year old (as we now know), which broods over the city, and by Salisbury Crags, to the east of the city centre, formed some twenty-five million years later, a sill, or lateral intrusion of volcanic material into the older sedimentary rock. The dense grey of this rock was quarried to build the city – the grey cobbles of the streets, the dour grey houses of the old town that cluster round the Royal Mile going up to the massive stone castle, and the elegant grey stone of the Georgian New Town, with its perfectly proportioned streets, squares and crescents which follow the wold-like roll of the hills looking down into the Firth of Forth. There is no city to compare with it for sheer majesty, and in few cities is one so aware of the relationship between geology and the human inhabitants.

  Charles Darwin’s Autobiography plays down the significance of his years in Edinburgh. This is all part of his quite deliberate attempt, as the author of The Origin of Species, to represent himself as a complete original, and to be silent about his influences. In fact, without the years in Edinburgh, it is doubtful whether he would have become an evolutionist at all.

  At first, however, he concentrated on medicine. Some of his notes, made during lectures, survive from this period, and it is clear that he was a diligent student, despite finding some of the lectures boring. ‘Your very entertaining letter’, he wrote to his sister Caroline,

  . . . was a great relief after hearing a long stupid lecture from Duncan on Materia Medica – But as you know nothing of the Lectures or Lecturers, I will give you a short account of them. Dr Duncan is so very learned that his wisdom has left no room for his sense, & he lectures, as I have already said, on the Materia Medica, which cannot be translated into any word expressive enough of this stupidity. These last few mornings, however, he has shown signs of improvement & I hope he will ‘go on as well as can be expected’. His lectures begin at eight in the morning. – Dr Hope begins at 10 o’clock, & I like both him and his lectures very much. (After which Erasmus goes to Mr Lizars on Anatomy, who is a charming Lecturer.) At 12, the Hospital, after which I attend Munro on Anatomy – I dislike him & his Lectures so much that I cannot speak with decency about them. He is so dirty in person & actions . . .18

  Darwin was fascinated by the clinical lectures, held in the hospitals, with real patients to demonstrate upon. This was preparation for becoming a physician such as his father. About anatomy, however, he was squeamish. The better lecturers, such as the hated Alexander Monro, would offer students an ancient grizzly corpse ‘fished up from the bottom of a tub of spirits’. This was the Edinburgh of the Burke and Hare scandals, and corpses were not easily obtained.19 Darwin also, like the other medical students, attended operations. He saw two, one of which was conducted on a child – ‘but I rushed away before they were completed. Nor did I ever attend again, for hardly any inducement would have been strong enough to make me do so; this being long before the blessed days of chloroform. The two cases fairly haunted me for many a long year.’20

  Some writers on Darwin have given the impression that this squeamishness about surgery made him abandon his medical course at once. It is true that he everlastingly regretted not learning the art of dissection at Edinburgh – though in later life he taught himself, and became good at it. He did not, however, give up either medicine or Edinburgh, however boring he found Duncan, and however distressing the operating theatres. He still had much to learn there. Both he and Ras were voracious readers, and the titles they borrowed from the library belie any idea of them being idlers. They read their way through John Mason Good’s The Study of Medicine (1822) and Christopher Robert Pemberton’s A Practical Treatise on Various Diseases of the Abdominal Viscera (1806), while keeping up general scientific reading and studies of natural history, including John Fleming’s The Philosophy of Zoology (1822), William Wood’s Illustrations of the Linnaean Genera of Insects (1821), Robert Kerr’s The Animal Kingdom (1792) and Samuel Brookes’s Introduction to Conchology (1815). Darwin borrowed Newton’s Optics and Boswell’s Life of Johnson as well. They also walked for miles in the Pentland Hills or explored the seashore at Portobello or Leith where the Firth of Forth with its m
udflats and marshes teemed with wildlife.21

  When the vacation came, in March, Erasmus left Edinburgh. He would return to Cambridge to complete his studies. Darwin stayed behind in Edinburgh. He returned to Shrewsbury in late spring for a glorious, long vacation. Accompanied by two friends, he explored North Wales. With knapsacks on their backs, they covered thirty miles a day. They climbed Snowdon. There followed a riding holiday with his sister, and many happy weeks were spent at Maer. This was the summer when shooting became a real passion. ‘My zeal was so great that I used to place my shooting-boots open by my bedside when I went to bed, so as not to lose half a minute in putting them on in the morning; and on one occasion I reached a distant part of the Maer estate, on the 20th of August for black-game shooting, before I could see: I then toiled on with the gamekeeper the whole day through thick heath and young Scotch firs.’22 He kept an exact record of every bird he shot.

  Apart from the sport, the joy of Maer was the company of the Wedgwoods. He finally got his eye in with his mother’s brother, the diffident Uncle Jos. ‘He was the very type of an upright man, with the clearest judgement. I do not believe any power on earth could have made him swerve an inch from what he considered the right course.’23 It was at Maer that Darwin first found himself a grown man, able to converse with the older generation of his mother’s family in a way he never found easy with his own father. The Wedgwoods of Maer of his own generation were as close to him as his own siblings: and now that he was grown up, Darwin need not feel deterred by an age-gap with his cousins. He could appreciate, for example, what a very clever man was Uncle Jos’s fourth son, Hensleigh – six years older than Darwin, a Fellow of Christ’s College and an accomplished mathematician. There were three other boys – the first-born, Josiah III, Harry and Frank – and four daughters – Charlotte (born 1797), Elizabeth, so short as to be almost a dwarf, Fanny, who though a couple of years older than Darwin was considered a possible wife for him, and Emma, who was every inch a Wedgwood in physiognomy (brow, eyes, chin). She bore a striking resemblance to Darwin’s mother, her aunt. She had thick chestnut hair and was ‘scatty’ – wildly untidy. Her family nickname was ‘Little Miss Slip-Slop’.24 She and her tiny sister Elizabeth ran a Sunday school in the Maer Hall laundry, teaching the sixty or so village children to read and write, and instructing them in religion.