Charles Darwin

by A. N. Wilson

  It now seems overwhelmingly probable66 that Annie Darwin contracted tuberculosis some time in 1850, when she was aged nine. Tuberculosis is caused by a slow-working bacillus, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which can be picked up in infected milk or passed through the air when a carrier coughs. Could she have picked up the disease when she was shown round the Wedgwoods’ Etruria Works in 1848, and seen the children working there? Out of 387 workers, 103 were between the ages of ten and seventeen, and thirteen were under ten. Jos II told an inquirer that he had no information about the health of these children, though many employed in delicate painting-work with lead glazes were said to have ‘that sort of delicacy which is universal in sedentary employments’,67 and many were feared to be consumptive – the word ‘consumption’ arising out of the disease’s wasting effect. The existence of the tubercle bacillus was not discovered until 1882, by the German bacteriologist Dr Robert Koch.

  Dr Thomas Yeoman, a London physician, wrote, ‘Consumption, Decline or Phthisis, is the plague-spot of our climate; amongst diseases it is the most frequent and the most fatal; it is the destroying angel who claims a fourth of all who die.’ Sir James Clark, one of Queen Victoria’s doctors and a leading authority, believed that a third of all deaths in England arose from tuberculous diseases. These took many forms. It was not simply a lung disease. It could enter the abdomen causing tuberculous peritonitis: it could infect the blood, leading to meningoencephalitis, which would induce vomiting and coma.

  When, exactly, Annie was touched by the ‘destroying angel’ cannot be known. Emma, who gave birth to the eighth child, Leonard, in January 1850, had many other things to notice. In May, Miss Thorley took Annie to London to see Obaysch at the Zoo, the first hippopotamus in Britain (or so palaeontologists observed) for half a million years. Queen Victoria visited the creature five times and, with her gift for making unlikely favourites, found his eyes ‘very intelligent’. Richard Owen noted that it ‘now and then uttered a soft complacent grunt, and lazily opening its smooth eyelids leered at its keeper with a singular protruding movement of the eyeball’. The hippo had been obtained from Abbas Pasha, Viceroy of Egypt, by the British Consul General in Cairo, and tickets to see him were in great demand. Darwin obtained them as a Fellow of the Zoological Society.

  With June, there was evidence of the tribal tendencies of the Wedgwoods to meet in great packs. Five Wedgwood cousins came to Down – Ernie and Effie travelled from London. Cecily, Amy and Clement from Barlaston. In addition Darwin’s aunt Sarah Wedgwood, his mother’s last surviving sibling, had taken a house called Perleys in the village. She was tall, upright, skinny and unbending. ‘It is my misfortune’, wrote this child of the great manufacturer, ‘to be not of an affectionate disposition, though affection is almost the only thing in the world I value.’ Annie and Etty enjoyed the ‘mysterious charm’ of Aunt Sarah’s rather neglected garden.68

  It was while the Wedgwood cousins were staying, during a hot dry summer broken by thunder and lightning, that Emma began to notice that Annie was not well. ‘Annie first failed about this time,’69 she added as an annotation to her diary. The child began to find her lessons a strain, and often wept after going to bed. The physician Richard Cotton, describing tubercular symptoms in children, would note, ‘the child is peevish, irritable, and indisposed to exertion’.70 It would seem that Annie was in fact an exceptionally sweet-natured child which made her exhaustion and frequent cascades into distress the more noticeable. Late summer brought outings which plainly tired her. In August, Emma and Miss Thorley escorted the elder children on a nine-mile ride in the phaeton to Knole. A little later, Darwin and his wife took Willie, Annie, Etty and baby Leonard to stay with Uncle Jos (Josiah III) and his wife Caroline (Darwin’s sister) at Leith Hill Place, a lovely house on the Surrey Heights. Expeditions searching for bilberries in the low-growing shrubs of that sandy upland should have been just the kind of day these children most loved, with Willy, now ten, showing himself a chip off the old block by carrying his entomological box with him on each outing and displaying a lepidopteral mania. Annie, though, was ‘overfatigued’.71

  On the last Sunday in August, the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Bird Sumner, came over to Down from Addington, his summer palace near Croydon, to conduct a confirmation service for the elder Lubbock children in the parish church. He was a moderate evangelical, and he spoke in a ‘very plain and easy’ manner to the children (Lady Lubbock noted), meditating on the lines from Bishop Ken’s hymn –

  Teach me to live that I may dread

  The grave as little as my bed.

  At the beginning of October Miss Thorley took Annie and Etty to the then popular coastal resort of Ramsgate. In those days you could board ferries from Ramsgate to France and Belgium, which partly added to its attraction. Queen Victoria had stayed there in her teens. Late as it was in the year, the Darwin children bathed in the sea, handing in their names in the bathing-room on the promenade. The names were then entered on a slate. Swimmers took it in turns to enter the bathing-machines, strange devices like gypsy caravans which enabled the holidaymakers both to preserve their modesty and to enter into deep water without the long walk through shallows. A horse would pull their machine to waist-high waves, a door at the back of the machine would open and an umbrella of canvas would then unfold to conceal the bathers from the eyes of anyone watching from the beach.

  When the children had been in Ramsgate a fortnight, their parents arrived. Emma was pregnant yet again. Darwin had promised to give himself a break from work, but could not resist examining the barnacles on Ramsgate pier. Two days after their arrival – Emma would afterwards remember their sick child’s ‘bright face on meeting us at the station’72 – Annie became feverish, headachy, and it was clear that she was seriously unwell.

  In November, they took her to see Dr Henry Holland, who had attended at her birth. Annie’s ‘nights became worse about this time’, noted Emma.73 At home, the sickly child was allowed to have her tea in her father’s study, drinking from blue teacups on the mahogany Pembroke table, rather than being with the other children in the nursery. She and Etty made arrangements of seashells gathered at Ramsgate, and Darwin gave them some of the shells he had brought back from his Beagle voyage. In December they took Annie for a second visit to Dr Holland, who appeared powerless to help her. A little while later, Emma ominously wrote in her diary ‘Annie began bark.’74

  It was at this juncture that the Darwins turned to Dr Gully. Darwin consulted the Malvern doctor by letter; Gully seems to have suggested that they apply a version of the water treatment at home.75

  Christmas came and went. At first Darwin had wrapped Annie in a wet sheet and rubbed vigorously for five minutes. Next he tried the ‘spinal wash’, rubbing a wet towel up and down her spine. Then he tried ‘packing’ her in damp towels and sheets for as long as an hour and a half. Next, ‘shallow baths’ were tried in which hands and feet were soaked and scrubbed. ‘The feet and hands, the soles and palms especially,’ wrote Gully, ‘contain an accumulation of animal nerves and of blood vessels . . . in order to bind them by the closest sympathies with the great centres of thought and volition, so that their applications and movements may be accurately directed by the mind.’76 These gruesome routines were followed, with no curative effect, for the weeks of January and February 1851.

  Darwin went up to the London Library and borrowed books to read to the child – Geneviève by Lamartine, and The Book of the Seasons by William Howitt, a natural history book for children. Darwin found that his brother Erasmus and Hensleigh and Fanny Wedgwood were all talking about a book called Phases of Faith in which Francis Newman, brother of John Henry, recounted the collapse of his Christian belief. Newman gave classes on geometry at the Ladies College (later Bedford College, London) which were attended by, among others, Mary Ann Evans – who would become famous writing novels as George Eliot. Evans lodged (and slept) with John Chapman, the proprietor of the forward-thinking Westminster Review of which she was the editor, and e
nlisted Newman, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill and James and Harriet Martineau – anonymously – to propagate ‘enlightened radicalism’.77 They believed, in her words, ‘in the Theism that looks on manhood as a type of godhead and on Jesus as the Ideal Man’,78 and she recruited George Lewes – the man who would eventually become her life-companion – to write on the evolutionary ideas of Lamarck.

  Darwin found Francis Newman’s Phases of Faith ‘excellent’.79 Reading the Bible, Newman wrote, ‘The further I inquired, the more errors crowded upon me, in History, in Chronology, in Geography, in Physiology, in Geology. Did it then at last become a duty to close my eyes to the painful light?’80 Newman concluded, ‘The law of God’s moral universe, as known to us, is that of progress.’81 It is clear to the set who wrote for the Westminster, most of them known to Erasmus and the Wedgwoods, that ‘God’ was now a word used in a sense which deprived it of its old meaning and was to be enshrouded, either actually or metaphorically, in inverted commas. For Mary Ann Evans, Newman was ‘our blessed Saint Francis’.82

  Meanwhile, Annie became ever weaker, and more tearful. March was cold, and by Annie’s birthday, on the 2nd, it was clear that the water treatment was a torture. Her hacking cough turned to influenza as rain battered the windows of Down House and winds howled. Emma and Charles Darwin were entering the phase of despondency when parents clutch at straws. Seven months pregnant, Emma was not in a position to travel. It was decided that Darwin and Brodie should go with Annie and Etty to Malvern.

  They took lodgings in the Worcester Road at Montreal House, whose landlady was Eliza Partington. It was on the opposite side of the Worcester Road from their previous Malvern house, so that, rather than backing on to the hills, its gardens looked towards the Vale of Evesham. On 31 March Darwin left Brodie and the children here, and returned to London, quite unaware of the very grave nature of Annie’s illness. Miss Thorley was sent down to Malvern to give the girls their lessons between the intervals of Annie’s treatment at the hands of Dr Gully. She found a child who had rapidly deteriorated in two weeks. Annie started to vomit and to run high fevers. Gully wrote to Darwin warning him that his daughter’s life was in danger. While Darwin journeyed to Malvern, Miss Thorley and Dr Gully sat by the child’s bed, feeding her spoonfuls of white wine and watching her pass in and out of delirium.

  By the time Darwin arrived, Gully had returned to his clinic and was busy with other patients. There was a swift and efficient postal service between Malvern and Down so that Darwin was able to send daily bulletins to Emma between 17 April – when he wrote, ‘She looks very ill: her face lighted up & she certainly knew me’83 – until her death on 24 April. The flickerings, sometimes surges, of hope which characterize both correspondents are perhaps the most pitiable feature of these excruciatingly painful letters. By 20 April, he could write, ‘I do not know, but think it is best for you to know how every hour passes. It is a relief to me to tell you: for whilst writing to you, I can cry.’84 It was natural to him to observe, so that the whole painful death, in which the child made rallies and relapses, vomited and was fed wine or brandy, slept, wept, woke and yet again was sick, is punctiliously noted. On 23 April he wrote:

  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 am so thankful for the daguerreotype. I cannot remember ever seeing the dear child naughty. God bless her. We must be more & more to each other my dear wife.85

  Fanny Wedgwood suggested that she should take Darwin’s place at the funeral, and he accepted, with misgivings, but also with the knowledge that he and Emma needed one another. He left Malvern the day after Annie’s death, and was able to write to Fanny from Down on Friday the 25th, ‘It is some sort of consolation to weep bitterly together.’86

  The funeral was arranged hurriedly, but no expense was spared. Darwin paid £57 12s 6d to Cox and Co. for a full-blown ceremonial, with a hearse, a coach for family mourners, black horses with ostrich-feather plumes, and two ‘mutes’, paid mourners, swathed in black gowns, kid gloves, silk hairbands and strands of crape.87 Fanny arrived in Malvern with her lady’s maid, who was sent home to Leith Hill Place immediately, taking Etty to be with her cousins. So it was that on the day of the funeral in Malvern, Darwin and Emma were weeping at Down, and Etty was on her way to a resumption of healthy child-life. The following Wednesday, Caroline Wedgwood wrote of the children, ‘They are all gone cowslip-gathering in the fields . . . Etty seems quite content and excellent friends with all the cousins.’88

  Those left in Malvern on Friday 25 April were Fanny Wedgwood, Hensleigh, Miss Thorley and Brodie. The hearse drew up in the drive of Montreal House, and the coffin was stowed. They then made their slow progress for the funeral service at the Priory conducted by Mr Rashdall, the vicar. Annie was buried in the churchyard near the Abbey Gate. Darwin eschewed pieties or quotations from the Bible when he chose the wording on her stone: ‘ANNE ELIZABETH DARWIN, BORN MARCH 2, 1841. DIED APRIL 23, 1851. A DEAR AND GOOD CHILD’.

  Both Brodie and Miss Thorley were very much discomposed by the funeral. Miss Thorley went for a drive, alone, among the hills, and said when she returned that she was better. Brodie appeared inconsolable. Fanny urged her to go back to Down as soon as possible, hoping that once she was settled into routines with the other children ‘she will be able to put restraint on herself’.89 Brodie’s grief could not, however, be restrained. Etty remembered that she ‘quite lost her self-control, and indeed, almost, her reason, and insisted on leaving’.90

  Three weeks after Annie had died, Emma gave birth to a son. They named him Horace.

  10

  An Essay by Mr Wallace

  THE 1850s WAS the patient, slow decade in which Darwin cogitated upon, and tested, his theory of the origin of species. Before the decade was out, he would be bounced by events into declaring the theory before the world. Illness, natural reclusiveness and love of family all combined to keep him much at Down. For months on end, he was by way of being a hermit. He was not, however, intellectually isolated – not entirely. Two men who played a vital role in the story were Edward Blyth, the Tooting druggist who was now the curator of the museum at Calcutta, and Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95).

  Huxley was the son of that mathematics master at the grammar school in Ealing who had taught the Newman brothers, John Henry and Francis. When Huxley was eight, the headmaster of this school died, and George Huxley the mathematician, disliking his successor, moved the family to his native Coventry. Strangely enough, Thomas Huxley’s formal education seems to have been rather neglected by his father. He was his parents’ seventh child, the youngest to survive infancy, and perhaps by then tiredness and grief had sapped them. If he had scant formal schooling, however, Huxley grew up in a clever, well-read household. He read Sir William Hamilton’s Logic at an early age and he mastered German. When he was fourteen, two of his sisters married doctors, and this determined the boy’s future. The Coventry brother-in-law, Dr Cooke, excited young Thomas’s interest in anatomy. The other medic, Dr Scott, was London based, and in 1841 Huxley went to the capital to become his apprentice. He became an accomplished anatomist, and obtained a Free Scholarship at the Charing Cross Hospital and Medical School in 1842. It took four years in those days to qualify as a doctor, and by 1846 Huxley was able to join the Royal Navy and sail with HMS Rattlesnake, which left England for the southern hemisphere in that year.

  Fine boned, dark haired, bright eyed, impulsive and charming, Huxley was to be one of Darwin’s doughtiest allies: so doughty and so loyal that it is sometimes easy to overlook the fact that he was never in the strictest sense an orthodox Darwinist. For the first seven years of his acquaintance with Darwin he was a non-believer in the transmutation of species, and in the years after the publication of The Origin of Species he was really closer to the vie
ws expressed in Chambers’s Vestiges than he was to Darwin’s view of natural selection. His importance in the story, though, cannot be exaggerated because he was all the things which reclusive, nervous, slow Darwin was not. Huxley loved debate, he was unafraid of controversy and he was an exuberant man, as extravert as Darwin was introvert. Moreover, he was far more widely read than Darwin, had the command of several languages, had mastered philosophy and, unlike Darwin, completed his medical training and was a qualified academic scientist. As the ship’s surgeon on HMS Rattlesnake to Australia, Huxley had plenty of time for research, and concentrated on hydrozoa. The papers which he sent home to the Royal Society on the Medusae led to his being greeted, when he returned to London, as a scientific anatomist of the first rank. He came home in 1850, but it was five years before he could afford to marry Henrietta Anne Heathorn, the girl he had met, and fallen in love with, in Sydney. In that time, he had published over thirty learned scientific articles. For most of his life he would remain under the shadow of Owen, who was the leading anatomist in Europe, and one reason for this was the diffuseness of Huxley’s intelligence: he liked to write, and to lecture, on all manner of subjects other than anatomy, venturing into ethics and philosophy. Since, however, his medal from the Royal Society was awarded principally for his work on marine biology, it was inevitable that the man who had spent four years investigating sea urchins, speculating on the embryology of marine life and peering at barnacles should have wanted to meet Darwin, whose work on barnacles proved him a kindred spirit. Darwin finally completed his work on these arthropods in 1854 after eight years devoted to the subject. He nervously sent a copy of his book to Jermyn Street where Huxley, a poor man who needed to work for his living, was a lecturer at the School of Mines.