Charles Darwin

by A. N. Wilson

  Both brothers were seized by psychosomatic symptoms upon the receipt of this news. Although Catherine had suggested Bobby start his journey on Thursday, Friday found him only having got as far as London from Down. From Ras’s house in Park Street, Darwin wrote to his ‘ever dear Mammy’: ‘I often fear I must wear you with my unwellnesses & complaints. Your poor old Husband.’ So wrote a man who had not yet reached the age of forty.

  Ras, who had also been ill, at least managed to reach Shrewsbury the day before the funeral and to follow the procession to the church, with the four Parker boys, children of Darwin’s eldest sister Marianne, acting as honorary pallbearers. After them came Caroline and Jos Wedgwood, Dr Parker, with Catherine, Ras and Susan Darwin. By the time Charles arrived in Shrewsbury, the service had already begun. He did not go to the church but stayed behind at The Mount with his sister Marianne, who was too distraught to attend. Ras wrote later to Fanny and Hensleigh that everyone at The Mount had been ill but, as Dr Parker observed, from nervous feelings rather than from any known disease.42

  By now, ‘nervous feelings’ and their debilitating physical consequences took up the greater part of Darwin’s waking life. In 1849 he wrote to his old servant Syms Covington, ‘I have not been able to walk a mile for some years.’ Illness, as for so many of the rentier class in the nineteenth century, had become a full-time occupation. Hence, it was a great era of quack cures. Sir Walter Scott lampooned the vogue for spas in St Ronan’s Well (1824). Spa towns all over Europe sprang up offering relief to valetudinarians with limitless time at their disposal. One of the fads which gripped the Austrian mountain clinics in the early 1840s was the water cure, pioneered by Vincenz Priessnitz in Gräfenberg. Dr James Wilson, a fashionable general practitioner in the heart of London – Sackville Street, Piccadilly – returned from Austria in 1842 bowled over by Priessnitz’s methods and, presumably, by his commercial success. He shared his obsession with a medical neighbour in Sackville Street, Dr James Manby Gully. Both young doctors (Wilson was born in 1807, Gully was born in 1808, the son of a coffee-planter in Kingston, Jamaica) were liberal in politics, forward-thinking in their medical ideas. There is no evidence that Gully or Wilson were quacks, if by that is denoted medics who are deliberately fraudulent. Gully had suffered grave financial hardship after the abolition of slavery when his Irish father went bust, unable to make a profit from coffee if he paid his former slaves. He was not averse, therefore, to making money, even though he probably genuinely believed in the healing properties of hydrotherapy. He and Dr Wilson decided to find a spa town which would be ‘an appropriate locality for the practice of hydro-therapy’. They settled upon Malvern, a spa village, nestling upon the stretch of majestic hills from which, in the fourteenth century, Piers the Ploughman had seen his visions of the ‘fair field full of folk’. Its medieval priory has some of the most magnificent fifteenth-century glass in England. Though its healing wells refreshed visitors in the eighteenth century, it was still a tiny place when Wilson and Gully descended upon it. Its population in 1817 was numbered in the hundreds, and when Wilson arrived in 1842 there were 477 houses and 2,768 souls.43 Wilson, for his clinic, purchased a bankrupt hotel. Gully bought two large houses in Wells Road. Dr Wilson was undoubtedly the cleverer of the two medics. He spoke seven languages and his vast library contained over 700 volumes on the water cure alone.44 His patients were more than a little in awe of him as he rode about the hills on his thoroughbred bay mare, an autocrat who insisted with great fierceness on his regimen being followed to the letter. It was inevitable that he and Gully should quarrel since, although Gully always credited his colleague with having pioneered the treatment, it was he who made the water cure into a real craze, he who put Malvern on the map. While Dr Wilson, with his tall bearing, high brow and side-whiskers, seemed like an authoritative university professor, Dr Gully, rather short and smooth, looked like a chancer, a conman. It seems entirely fitting that his career ended shadily – when his mistress, Mrs Charles Bravo, was accused of murdering her husband in 1876. This was long in the future, however, and by then he had attracted a string of famous men and women to Malvern, many of whom had taken his cure – Carlyle, Tennyson, Florence Nightingale among them.

  Darwin became attracted to him when he read Dr Gully’s book, The Water Cure in Chronic Disease: An Exposition of the Causes, Progress & Terminations of Various Chronic Diseases of the Digestive Organs, Lungs, Nerves, Limbs & Skin; and of their Treatment by Water and Other Hygienic Means. It was published in 1846 by the canny man who had bought out Vestiges – John Churchill, of Princes Street, Soho. It is a relatively long book, 692 pages, and like almost all medical books written more than a few decades ago, it reads like mumbo-jumbo. Gully cunningly directed his sights, however, on sufferers from chronic disease – that is, those who would live long enough to make their illness a hobby, and return again and again for expensive treatment. He noted that disease had ‘a greater tendency to become chronic in some than in other persons’, realizing that those who devoted any time to reading his book would almost inevitably belong to the ‘some’ rather than to the ‘other’ category. In particular he was able to observe that these individuals tended to have the same symptoms, ‘chronic irritation of the stomach and bowels’. Also, ‘they are nervous and fidgety, excessively anxious about all they are or are not concerned in; are for the most part bad sleepers, and wake with a sense of sinking’.45 Darwin was hooked.

  Expanding on his theme of nervous headaches and nervous dyspepsia, such as had plagued Darwin ever since his return from South America, Dr Gully honed in on symptoms which plainly matched the great naturalist’s own. Mucous indigestion was a sort of asthma of the bowel, a build-up of mucus in the lower bowel. ‘You may give fictitious, temporary appetite, by bitters &c,’ Gully told his eager readers: ‘you may send blood to the surface for a period with various stimulants, but you can neither maintain appetite until you have got rid of mucous inflammation, nor keep blood on the surface until you have made it, and directed it thither, and these two ends can only be fulfilled by the hygienic means of the water treatment.’46 In this section of his book, Dr Gully could have been describing Darwin. To his generalized diagnoses of the conditions he claimed to cure he appended case histories, such as the woman who had hardly known a day without sickness since adolescence and was unable to stir from her sofa until she came to Malvern. She was wrapped in wet sheets and ‘The effect on the nervous system was immediate; she declared she had not known such calmness for thirty years.’ After three weeks, a woman who had been vomiting for thirty years was cured.47

  The death of Dr Robert Darwin had left all his children far better off than they had anticipated. It transpired that he had converted all his canal stocks into railway stocks, so that he was able to leave each child with an annual income of over £8,000. (Thanks to his advice, his Wedgwood relations had also shifted round their investments and became richer, though Emma for some reason had retained some of her canal shares, and their poor performance caused Darwin anxiety.)48

  Money could not eliminate mortality, however, and a month after Robert died, Darwin sent his three eldest children up to London to have their likenesses immortalized in Daguerreotype. Emma’s uncle, Tom Wedgwood, had been a pioneer of photography and together with his friend Humphry Davy had made experiments with ‘silver pictures’. He got as far as reproducing images on paper which had been moistened by silver nitrate, but he did not know how to fix them. He died of drugs and drink aged thirty-three in 1805.

  It was a French inland revenue official, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, who discovered that exposing an iodized silver plate in a camera would result in a lasting image, if the latent image on the plate was developed by exposure to fumes of mercury and then fixed with a solution of salt. This was ten years before Dr Robert died, and Daguerreotypes were now common. The three children, all notably plain with round, all but double chins, disdainful cupid’s-bow lips and snub noses, are frozen in boredom by the long exposure. William, the eld
est, clutching a book as a stage prop, was destined to become a banker. Henrietta, Etty, in a check frock fringed with a lace collar, has no stage prop – her hands rest on her lap. Short lank hair fell strictly combed from a central parting. She would marry Richard Buckley Litchfield and live until 1927. The photo which haunts us is that of Annie, holding a little basket of flowers. Her dress is identical to her sister’s. Her hair, plaited and bowed, hangs like catkins on either side of her face. Because we know her fate – death aged ten – she appears to be staring reproachfully at Death itself, asking why she is to be given so little of life.

  It was of his own life, however, that her father was starting to despair. Strange as it may appear to the reader of the twenty-first century that a great scientist could fall for Dr Gully’s mumbo-jumbo, Darwin was not alone in hoping to become well through the water cure. For the children, the thought of their father leaving Down other than for a hurried visit to town was novel. The idea of the whole family moving was revolutionary. Etty could still remember, sixty years later, ‘the exact place in the road, coming up from the village, by the pond and the tall Lombardy poplars, where I was told’.49

  They were all to move, Jessy Brodie, the children, Miss Thorley the governess, the whole boiling. Emma and Darwin left Down on 8 March and travelled via London, taking the London & North Western Railway to Birmingham, changing to the British & Birmingham Railway to Worcester and travelling the eight miles or so from Worcester to Malvern by four-horse coach. (Great Malvern station was not opened until 1860; the present beautiful railway buildings, in which English Gothic meets Austrian Tyrol, by the architect E. W. Elmslie, were completed in 1862. Malvern was originally on the Worcester & Hereford Railway, later absorbed by the Great Western Railway.) For the first few days, the Darwins stayed at the grandest hotel in the town, the Foley Arms (its full name being the Royal Kent & Foley Arms because Queen Adelaide had once stayed there), before moving into the Lodge, a white stucco villa on the Worcester Road, set in its own grounds, on a wooded slope. (Everything in Malvern is on a slope.) Darwin, writing to his cousin Fox, and offering him a berth in the spare bedroom, described it as ‘a very comfortable house, with a little field & wood opening on to the mountain, capital for the children to play in’.50

  From the first, Darwin was captivated by Dr Gully, and for his sake was even prepared to reduce his snuff intake to six pinches daily.51 Those who frequent spas, adopt cranky diets or pursue supposedly curative regimens care only partially for the efficacy of the treatment. The commercial purveyor of such programmes knows that a large part of the attraction is the time it allows the patient to concentrate uninterruptedly upon themselves and their symptoms. Meanwhile all those employed at the clinic, from the doctors to the nurses to the meanest orderly, are being paid to concentrate on their patients, and their patients alone, so that the valetudinarian, however devoted their partners, carers or family at home, has the satisfaction of knowing that every flickering attention must be devoted not merely to them, but to those tormentors with whom they are partially in love, their symptoms. Clever little Annie noticed this. Emma wrote to Fox: ‘Annie was telling Miss Thorley all her Papa had to do about the water cure and how he liked it. “And it makes Papa so angry.” Miss T must have thought it a very odd effect. He said it did make him feel cross.’52

  Darwin described the exacting regime to his sister Susan.

  ¼ before 7 get up, & am scrubbed with rough towel in cold water for 2 or 3 minutes, which after the first few days made & makes me very like a lobster – I have a washerman, a very nice person, & he scrubs behind, whilst I scrub in front – drink a tumbler of water & get my clothes on as quick as possible & walk for 20 minutes – I cd walk further, but I find it tires me afterwards. I like all this very much. At the same time I put on a compress, which is a broad wet folded linen covered by mackintosh & which is ‘refreshed’ – ie dipt in cold water every 2 hours & I wear it all day, except for about 2 hours after midday dinner; I don’t perceive much effect from this of any kind. After my walk, shave & wash & get my breakfast, which was to have been exclusively toast with meat or egg, but he has allowed me a little milk to sop the stale toast in. At no time must I take any sugar, butter, spices, tea, bacon or anything good – At 12 o’clock I put my feet for 10 minutes in cold water with a little mustard & they are violently rubbed by my man; the coldness makes my feet ache much, but upon the whole my feet are certainly less cold than formerly.

  This excerpt from a letter which takes the reader through every moment of the day – the patient wrapped in a wet sheet, the patient wrapped in a blanket, the patient offered a hot-water bottle, fed homeopathic medicines (‘which I take obediently without an atom of faith’)53 – gives the flavour of the self-obsession. Only those who were abnormally self-preoccupied could endure not merely the discomfort of such routines, but also their tedium. Charles Dickens tried the cure, but, unlike the other Charles, he was able to see its absurdity. ‘Oh Heavens, to meet the Cold Waterers (as I did this morning when I went for a shower bath) dashing down the hills, with severe expressions on their countenances, like men doing marches and not exactly winning.’54

  While at Malvern, Darwin continued to do small amounts of work and to continue learned correspondence – on 9 April he thanked Hooker for ‘two interesting gossipaceous & geological letters’. Hooker was in the Himalayas, and wrote detailed accounts of glacial formations and ‘Malarious valleys’.55 Sadly, the long hours of the water treatment did not allow Darwin the time, even had he possessed the energy, to make explorations of the Malverns, whose complex geology is of interest – the central core containing some of the oldest (Pre-Cambrian) surface rocks in Britain, so old that they contain hardly a trace of fossilized living creatures. Some of the Pre-Cambrian rock is fused with later molten material – green-tinged hornblende, pink gabbro, black diorite and other granites – from which the garden walls and villas of mid- to late Victorian Malvern were so characteristically constructed.

  By June, however, he was telling astronomer-polymath Herschel that the water cure had:

  an astonishing renovating action on my health; before coming here I was almost quite broken down, head swimming, hands tremulous & never a week without violent vomiting, all this is gone, & I can now walk between two & 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.56

  Most of the time in Malvern could be summarized by his phrase ‘perfectly idle. Health greatly improved’.57 On 30 June 1849 they returned to Down and he resumed his work on barnacles and geology.

  As soon as he reached home, he determined to continue with the water treatment, and he engaged a local builder named John Lewis to build a wooden hut near the well in the garden where he could have ‘showers’. Lewis’s fifteen-year-old son was taken on as Darwin’s page. Every morning he would go to the hut and pump gallons of water into a little steeple attached to the roof. Darwin would undress in the hut and young Lewis would pull a string, releasing water on to his master’s back ‘with great force’. Etty remembered how she and Annie would hear their father groaning inside the hut. Then he would come out, ‘half running and half frozen’, to walk with the two little girls in the Sandwalk.58 From July 1849 to June 1851 he took some form of water treatment every day: a daily douche if at home, or, if he were staying with his sister Caroline or with the Wedgwoods, he would merely be wrapped in dripping sheets.59 He also dosed himself with hydropathic remedies prescribed by Dr Gully, and at Dr Gully’s suggestion he consulted a clairvoyante whose powers, she alleged, enabled her to ‘see the insides of people & discover the real nature of their ailments’. Darwin showed her a sealed envelope and said, ‘I have heard a great deal of your powers of the reading concealed writings and I should like to have evidence myself; here is this bank note & if
you will read the number I shall be happy to present it to you.’ She replied that she had a maidservant at home who could do that. She informed him that ‘the mischief’ was in his stomach and his lungs and described to him ‘a most appalling picture of the horrors which she saw in his inside’.60 Darwin concluded she had been tipped off by Dr Gully: what is of interest is not that Darwin retained some scepticism about her clairvoyant powers, but that he agreed to consult her in the first instance. Although he tried to convince himself that the water cure had been effective, it was not long before his old symptoms returned, and to judge from the careful note he took of his flatulence, this seems to have troubled him on a daily basis, the ‘fits’ of it occurring anything up to seven times daily, to a severity which ranged from ‘slight’ to ‘excessive’.61 This being the case it would not have required very powerful clairvoyant powers to discern that his insides were ‘full’ – and at intervals less full – of ‘horrors’.

  Coincident in time with the growth of flatulence and the varying successes and failures of Dr Gully’s treatments, Darwin’s vestiges of glimmering Christian belief ebbed away. He wrote later that in the 1840s ‘disbelief crept over me at a slow rate but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct.’62 On other occasions, however, later in life, he would admit ‘I am in thick mud . . . yet I cannot keep out of the question.’63 Although acknowledging that ‘the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton,’ Darwin was unable completely to leave the subject alone.64 Whereas the naturalist Darwin, slow, patient, contemplative, could not cut corners and lived for the intellectual pleasure of research, the other Darwin, the man with one big simple idea, started first with the theory, and was doing his best to make the evidence prove the theory. The trouble with this, as Darwin himself recognized, was not just that ‘a dog’ was speculating about the mind of Newton. It was more that, as Wittgenstein was to put it, if a lion could speak we could not understand him.65 The dog and Newton did not have a common language. Science could neither prove nor disprove theology, however much the observable nature of things, and mercilessness of things, might make religious faith and practice impossible. The sheer indifference of the material universe was about to hit the Darwin family in the most painful way possible.