by A. N. Wilson
Darwin would be able to offer to the nineteenth century something even more irrefutable than the principles of political economy which had apparently been immutable since history began. He could offer scientific proof that the clever and the strong and the adaptable triumphed over the weak by a law of nature. Harriet Martineau deemed herself to be ‘radical’ in politics, as did the Darwins and the Wedgwoods. Her father, a cloth manufacturer in Norwich whose business collapsed after the banking crisis of 1825, no doubt contributed to what seems, to a modern eye, a confusion in her mind – on the one hand thinking of herself as ‘progressive’, while at the same time, in her famous tales, written as ‘Illustrations of Political Economy’, advocating free trade and an absolute non-interventionist approach to industrial law. She stridently opposed any attempt by the legislature to impose safety regulations in factories, for example. Mill hands were among the happiest and healthiest of the working classes, ‘while the woes of others are attributable to ignorance, bad dwelling, crowding – in short town not mill evils’.46 She greatly opposed Lord Ashley’s Ten Hours Bill, believing that the working man could take care of himself.
At the same time she believed society was moving ever onward and upward. The light which was present at Runnymede when Magna Carta was signed ‘shone in the eyes of Cromwell after Naseby fight . . . and is now shining down into the dreariest recesses of the coal-mine, the prison, and the cellar’ – and would eventually ‘vivify’ the whole world.47 There was no need for Lord Ashley to pillage ‘the rights of one class of people at the expense of the earnings of another’.48 When the working classes adapted, improved themselves, they would be as cheerful as the prosperous mill operatives she imagined living in the North. The Victorian rentier class of which Miss Martineau was a shabby-genteel representative, Darwin a well-heeled one, had to persuade themselves that there was something inexorable, natural, about their superiority to the working class on whom their wealth in point of fact depended.
8
Lost in the Vicinity of Bloomsbury
ON 27 NOVEMBER 1838, the naturalist wrote in his notebook, ‘Sexual desire makes saliva to flow “yes, certainly” – curious association: I have seen Nina licking her chops . . . ones tendency to kiss, & almost bite, that which one sexually loves, is probably connected with flow of saliva, & hence with action of mouth & jaws . . . The association of saliva, is probably due to our distant ancestors having been like dogs to bitches. How comes such an association in man – it is bare fact, on my theory intelligible.’1
The notebook contains reflections upon matters which would interest Darwin for the rest of his life, some of which would resurface in published form, in The Origin of Species (1859), in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) and in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). It contains in its early pages material which derived from conversations with his father about insanity. Later, Dr Darwin was displaced as confidant by Emma Wedgwood, and she herself made an annotation on page 113 of the book: ‘A child born on the 1st March was frightened on the 24th May at Cresselly by the boys making faces at it, so much so that the nurse had to carry it out of the room, nearly 3 months old.’
Notebook N, as it is now called, is an object which contains between its rust-coloured leather covers and in its mere ninety-two leaves so much of Darwin. It contains the range of his reading in the late 1830s: Johann Caspar Lavater on physiognomy, John James Audubon on the birds of America, William Gardiner’s The Music of Nature, James Mackintosh’s Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy; Lamarck, Hume (Natural History of Religion), Oliver Goldsmith’s Essays, as well as old Sir Thomas Browne. There is, in other words, a wide range, and the need at all times to collect and annotate and question every detail of experience – the spectacle of a restless dog, evidently dreaming, a panther at the zoo uncovering its teeth to bite, ‘the senseless grin of passion’.2 Then, how typical, there are the everlasting questions: ‘Has an oyster necessary notion of space?’;3 ‘Does a negress blush? I am almost sure Fuegia Basket did.’4 Then, we find the tendency which would become ever more marked as Darwin grew older, that is the yearning to generalize from the particular, not least to find in the particular confirmation of his general evolutionary ideas. ‘Our distant ancestors having been like dogs to bitches.’5 And then again, Notebook N contains the handwriting of the Wedgwood cousin who would become Darwin’s wife. Meanwhile he, observing her increase of saliva flow, and his own, as their kisses became more sexual, did so with the same degree of detachment as Henslow had seen a chimpanzee pout and whine when a man went out of the room,6 or as the Keeper at London Zoo had noted that wolves wag their tails ‘a little when attending to anything or excited’.7 Darwin’s and Emma Wedgwood’s degree of excitement in one another’s company could be noted with clinical accuracy: ‘Blushing is intimately concerned with thinking of one’s appearance, does the thought drive blood to surface exposed, face of man, face, neck – “upper” bosom in woman: like erection.’8 Emma’s own addition to the notebook – about the three-month-old baby crying when boys made faces at it – locates all these thoughts, buzzing in the brain of Darwin, within the family circle: in this case in the Allens’ house, Cresselly, in Pembrokeshire. The baby in question was one of the many members of the family called John: Emma’s nephew (son of her brother Henry Allen Wedgwood – Harry).
When Darwin’s mind turned to marriage, there was never much doubt that for him, as for so many members of his family, this would mean marriage to a cousin.
From the spring of that eventful year 1838 he had begun to think earnestly about marriage. Much has been made, in our story, of the importance of money. Although Dr Darwin and Josiah II had plenty of it, Charles Darwin did not feel especially rich, and the prime objection which he put down on paper when mulling the question over was: ‘If marry – means limited. Feel duty to work for money. London life, nothing but Society, no country, no tours, no large Zoolog. Collect, no books.’ It was certainly enormously to Baron Alexander von Humboldt’s advantage that his homosexuality obviated the need to shackle himself with domesticity and dinner-parties. Darwin was differently made. It has often been noticed how often sex comes not only into his thoughts, but into the titles of his books. Yet the need to get on was, if anything, as strong; as was the purer thirst for knowledge which now consumed all his waking hours. The sheer time-wasting involved in courtship was an agonizing prospect – yet another reason for marrying a cousin whom he knew already and who would require no initiation into the family ethos. The notes on this question of marriage were infinitely bound up with his future career. One possibility would be to put in for a Cambridge professorship, though interestingly enough he considered that there he would be a ‘fish out of water’. This was ‘better’9 than poverty, of course.
He visited Shrewsbury in July and it seems clear that he discussed the whole matter with the ‘Governor’, who ‘says soon for otherwise bad if one has children – one’s character is more flexible – one’s feelings more lively & if one does not marry soon, one misses so much good pure happiness’.10 The pros and cons of matrimony were duly written out in note form. Cons included ‘forced to visit relatives and to bend in every trifle’ and – underlined twice – ‘Loss of time’. Advantages, rather engagingly, included ‘Charms of music & female chit-chat. These things are good for one’s health – but terrible loss of time.’11
In 1837 Darwin’s sister Caroline had married her cousin Josiah Wedgwood III of Maer Hall. It was to Maer that Darwin returned in the summer of 1838, and there he began to woo Josiah’s sister Emma. Bessy Wedgwood, Emma’s mother, had teased Dr Darwin by pretending that she hoped Charles would marry Harriet Martineau,12 so it was a hearty relief to realize that his son had seen sense and had kept matters in the family.
‘Emma having accepted Charles gives me as great happiness as Jos having married Caroline, and I cannot say more,’ the Doctor wrote to Josiah II, signing himself ‘your affectionate brother’.13 Announc
ing his betrothal to Lyell, Darwin said, ‘The lady is my cousin Miss Emma Wedgwood, the sister of Hensleigh Wedgwood, & of the elder brother, who married my sister, so we are connected by manifold ties.’14 The old aristocracy, the landed classes, whose stranglehold on political power in Britain had been somewhat loosened by the Reform Act of 1832, could preserve its power in part by rigidly selective matrimonial processes, Lady Catherine de Bourgh doing all in her power to limit the number of Miss Bennets who could capture the fancy of a Mr Darcy. The new ‘aristocracy’, the Victorian upper-middle class and intelligentsia, would have to guard its breeding stock no less jealously – if anything rather more.
The letters which Emma wrote from Maer to her cousin and future husband during November and December are full of humour and affection, but they make no pretence to passion: ‘Write to me soon like a dear old soul.’15 One letter is signed, ‘your affectionate Grandmother Emma W’.16 She writes to ‘my poor old Charley’,17 ‘My own dear old geologist’,18 and ‘my own dear Nigger’.19 Emma was a year older than Darwin. The high, flat brow, hooded eyes and thin straight lips which curled in a humorous smile marked her instantly as a Wedgwood. Slightly untidy ringlets fell on either side of the intelligent face. She wore a faintly crooked central parting. The brown eyes and nose are almost comically identical to those of her brother Jos.
It would quickly turn out to be a stable, harmonious partnership, though it demanded of Emma two painful sacrifices. One was that she was electing to share her life with a man who lacked her belief in Christ. She had clearly winkled this out of him in their conversations before marriage. Quite what Darwin did or did not believe at the beginning of 1839 we can only conjecture, but it is probably safe to define his position as ‘theism, in which God is the first cause and creator of a universe that operates entirely according to laws’.20
Emma who, together with her sisters ran the Sunday school for local children at Maer, was a believer in Jesus Christ, in the redemption of the world through his blood and in the Resurrection. His father had counselled Darwin to keep his doubts a secret from Emma, but there was too much mutual respect in the relationship for that to be a possibility. She implored him to read ‘our Saviour’s farewell discourse to his disciples which begins at the end of the 13th chap of St John. It is so full of love to them & devotion & every beautiful feeling. It is the part of the New Testament I love best.’21
Equally, however, she wanted Darwin to continue being honest with her. She knew that ‘you are acting conscientiously & sincerely wishing, & trying to learn the truth . . . May not the habit in scientific pursuits of believing nothing till 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 beyond our comprehension[?]’ She feared the danger of ‘giving up revelation . . . 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 . . .’ These words were written a month after marriage. Darwin wrote at the end of it, ‘When I am dead, know that many times, I have kissed & cryed over this.’22 The knowledge that they were a grief to his wife added poignancy to his researches, but neither of them lost their affection for the other nor their own integrity.
The second sacrifice made by Emma was, from a practical point of view, more demanding. The courtship letters saw him as a patient who needed looking after. Often, as when she signed herself as his ‘Grandmother’, she viewed the situation as a comedy. ‘It is very well I am coming to look after you my poor old man for it is quite evident that you are on the verge of insanity & we should have had to advertize you, “Lost in the vicinity of Bloomsbury a tall thin gentleman &c &c quite harmless whoever will bring him back will be handsomely rewarded.”’23 Darwin, for his part, had clearly not spared Emma the details of his mysterious condition. After a railway journey back from Staffordshire, in which he had changed trains at Birmingham and not had time for dinner, he added, ‘I have no very particular news to tell you, as you will guess by my having written so full an account of my stomachic disasters.’24
Throughout the autumn which culminated in his betrothal, Darwin had been suffering from intense headaches, cardiac palpitations and repeated gastric upsets. Emma, a humorous and healthy young person, was unable at first to take these symptoms entirely seriously. Her satirical self-casting, before she married him, as Darwin’s mental nurse, granny and helpmeet would prove to be prophetic. Darwin had come to believe that ‘a test of hardness of thought’ was felt as ‘weakness of my stomach’. It was the period when, while still unpacking the collection, he was filling the notebooks with thoughts and with extracts from his reading, as well as with his melancholy regurgitations of Malthus. Which of these mental exertions – the contemplation of volcanic eruptions in South America, or the idea of Malthusian struggle being the explanation for all forms of animal life – led to his outbursts of nausea and flatulence he does not appear to have known. His medical advisers urged him ‘strongly to knock off all work’. It is advice which the young Darwin, the pre-Beagle Darwin, would have accepted with gusto. The prematurely aged, bald, bewhiskered scientist, ‘lost in the vicinity of Bloomsbury’, would have been quite incapable of emulating the young loafer of The Mount or Christ’s College and simply taking his gun and rods for a few happy days of country sport. He had become a man possessed. Some have even wondered, from the evidence of the notebooks, whether Darwin, even at this early stage of his thought, feared exposure to criticism, even persecution, if he were able beyond question to verify Blyth’s theory of species origin.25 ‘Mention persecution of early Astronomers – then add chief good of individual scientific men is to push their science a few years only in advance of their age (differently from literary men), must remember that if they believe & do not openly avow that belief they do as much to retard as those whose opinion they believe have [sic] endeavoured to advance cause of truth.’26
The dynamic of their relationship seems to have been entangled with Darwin’s psychological need, on some level, to be a semi-invalid. Somehow, the testing of the theory – which had become ‘my Theory’ – needed an inordinate amount of time and seclusion. A normal life, which included travel and social life, would have eaten into his research time. The body rescued him and with a set of debilitating psychosomatic conditions it confined him to base. This would have been no use, indeed would have led to loss of time, had his transmutation from world traveller to reclusive invalid not been accompanied by finding a willing nursemaid.
Darwin decided that the marital home should be in central London. His initial ambition was for ‘small house near Regent’s Park – keep horse’.27 Fossil-collecting and botanizing were more in his line than house-hunting, however, and having ‘been all round’ Regent’s Park he found nothing suitable. ‘After many long walks, Erasmus & myself are driven to the conviction, that our only resource will be in the streets or squares near Russell Square.’28
Over a thousand new houses had been built on the Duke of Bedford’s estate in Bloomsbury between 1792 and 1828, the year when the University of London opened in Gower Street. Moreover it was during the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s that Robert Smirke’s majestic British Museum was being built on Great Russell Street. University College Hospital (originally the North London Hospital), a centre of pioneering work in medicine and anatomy, was near by. By choosing to live in Bloomsbury, Darwin, as well as placing himself conveniently close to Euston Station (handy for trains to Staffordshire), was in the very centre of the march of mind. The house which he eventually lighted upon, 12 Upper Gower Street, had been the residence of the first Warden of University College, Leonard Horner.29 (Horner, Edinburgh born and bred, had known Darwin in Scotland. His appointment as Warden was unwise, and having quarrelled with most of the professors and the University council, Horner had resigned in July 1831.30) The advantage of becoming the tenant of this Bedford-owned property was that they took it fully furnished. ‘We shall not have much to buy – even t
he crockery & glasses are very perfect.’31 The solicitor acting for them ‘examined all the tables & chairs & said they are made of excellent wood & must have cost a great deal of money. In fact I am convinced we have been most fort[unat]e & I am in great triump [sic] at having come to so good an end.’32 He was cutting things fine, for arrangements were not finalized until after Christmas 1838, only weeks before the wedding. On New Year’s Day 1839 large vans pulled up outside 12 Upper Gower Street and began to unload. ‘I was astounded, & so was Erasmus, at the bulk of my luggage & the Porters were even more so at the weight of those containing my Geological Specimens.’33 Because of the yellow curtains and bright garishness of the new furnishings, No. 12 was nicknamed Macaw Cottage.34
