In his correspondence, Darwin describes the symptoms from which Anne suffered. For example, from Malvern, in March 1851, he wrote to Fox to say,
I have brought my eldest girl here & intend to leave her for a month under Dr Gully; she inherits, I fear with grief, my wretched digestion.11
This suggestion by Darwin that Anne may have inherited the illness from which he himself suffered was presumably based on the fact that his daughter’s symptoms were similar to his own, notably in respect of her vomiting. This is discussed below.
The following month, Darwin wrote to Emma from Malvern, in respect of Anne:
she keeps the same, quite easy, but I grieve to say she has vomited a large quantity of bright green fluid. Her case seems to me an exaggerated one of my Maer illness.12
Here Darwin is referring to the fact that he himself had fallen seriously ill at Maer Hall, home of Josiah Wedgwood II, on 4 August 1840 and had not returned to his own home until 14 November.13
Anne died at Malvern on 23 April 1851, aged ten years. Six days later, Darwin wrote again to Fox. ‘Thank God she suffered hardly at all, & expired as tranquilly as a little angel.’14
Darwin agonizes over whether he was in any way to blame for the ill health of his children
Apart from those mentioned above who died young, several of the Darwins’ surviving children experienced ill health, notably Henrietta, Leonard, Horace, and Erasmus. This led Darwin to declare, in April 1858,
I have now six Boys!! & two girls; & it is the great drawback to my happiness, that they are not very robust; some of them seem to have inherited my detestable constitution.15
Evidence has been produced that Darwin’s chronic illness was the result of Chagas’ disease. However, although this is an infectious disease, it is virtually impossible for a person to contract it from another (infected) person, for reasons already discussed. Therefore, Chagas’ disease was not the culprit.
(It crossed the mind of the author that Darwin may have brought back some Reduvius ‘bugs’ from South America, but London’s Natural History Museum has no record of this.)
Darwin’s investigation of cousin marriages
Darwin was aware not only that there had been intermarriages between Darwins and Wedgwoods, but also between Wedgwoods and Wedgwoods. For example, he himself had married his first cousin Emma, and Emma’s grandfather Josiah Wedgwood (I) and Josiah’s wife Sarah (née Wedgwood), were third cousins. Therefore, when, on 17 July 1870, he wrote to his near neighbour Sir John Lubbock MP, the possibility that such ‘inbreeding’ had been the cause of his children’s illnesses was clearly in his mind.
As I hear that the census will be brought before the House to-morrow [a reference to the Second Reading of the Census Bill by the House of Commons], I write to say how much I hope that you will express your opinion on the desirability of queries in relation to consanguineous [relating to or denoting people descended from the same ancestor]16 marriages being inserted. As you are aware, I have made experiments on the subject during several years; and it is my clear conviction that there is now ample evidence of the existence of a great physiological law, rendering an enquiry with reference to mankind of much importance. In England, & many parts of Europe the marriages of cousins are objected to from their supposed injurious consequences; but this belief rests on no direct evidence. It is therefore manifestly desirable that the belief should either be proved false, or should be confirmed, so that in this latter case the marriages of cousins might be discouraged.17
In other words, by analyzing data produced in this way by the census, the question would be answered once and for all. Lubbock did attempt to have the Census Bill amended along the lines which Darwin had suggested but, this being a politically sensitive subject, his amendment was defeated. This led Darwin to declare, angrily,
When the principles of breeding and inheritance are better understood, we shall not hear ignorant members of our legislature rejecting with scorn a plan for ascertaining whether or not consanguineous marriages are injurious to man.18
Recent research into the subject
In May 2010 scientists Tim M. Berra, Gonzalo Alvarez, and Francisco C. Ceballos published the results of their study entitled ‘Was the Darwin/Wedgwood Dynasty Adversely Affected by Consanguinity?’19
A genetic explanation
It has always been known that consanguineous unions may have a deleterious effect on the offspring of such unions. However, only since Darwin’s time has an explanation been forthcoming.
In the offspring of consanguineous unions there is a far greater likelihood than would otherwise be the case of alleles occurring at a particular locus of the chromosome being identical. Furthermore, if both of these identical alleles are recessive, then the recessive gene produced in this way will appear in the genotype (genetic constitution) of the offspring, and because recessive genes tend to code for traits which are less advantageous to the individual than is the case for dominant genes, this will tend to have a negative affect on that individual’s phenotype – set of observable characteristics or traits.20
Having made an exhaustive study of the Darwin/Wedgwood pedigree, the authors concluded that yes, ‘the high childhood mortality experienced by the Darwin progeny might be a result of consanguineous marriages within the Darwin/Wedgwood dynasty’.
Could Darwin have infected his children with Chagas’ disease?
Person-to-person transmission of Chagas’ disease is not thought to be possible, in normal circumstances. However, researchers Luiz Carvalho and others have discovered, from experimentation with mice, that ‘T. cruzi is able to reach the seminiferous tubule lumen, thus suggesting that Chagas’ disease could potentially be transmitted through sexual intercourse’.21
But if it was the case that Darwin’s semen did contain T. cruzi and if he transmitted this organism to his wife Emma during sexual intercourse, this does not explain why she herself did not contract the disease, or why seven of the Darwins’ ten children were apparently healthy.
The Darwins’ surviving children
William Erasmus. Born on 27 December 1839 and educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, he became a banker in Southampton, Hampshire. He married Sara Price Ashburner of New York. There were no offspring. He died in 1914.
Henrietta Emma (‘Etty’). Born on 25 September 1843, she married Richard Buckley Litchfield. Henrietta edited her mother Emma’s personal letters and had them published in 1904. There were no offspring and she died in 1929.
George Howard. Born on 9 July 1845 and educated at St John’s and Trinity College, Cambridge, he became a mathematician, barrister-at-law, Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge University and Fellow of the Royal Society. George was knighted in 1905. He married Martha (Maud) du Puy from Philadelphia, and the couple had two sons and two daughters. He died in 1912.
Elizabeth. Born on 8 July 1847, she did not marry. She died in 1926.
Francis. Born on 16 August 1848, he was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge and St George’s Hospital Medical School, London, and became Professor of Botany at Cambridge and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Francis was knighted in 1913. He edited much of his father’s correspondence, and published the Life and Letters of Charles Darwin in 1887 and More Letters of Charles Darwin in 1903. He also edited and published Darwin’s Autobiography. His first marriage was to Amy Ruck, who died shortly after the birth of their son Bernard. His second wife was Ellen Crofts, by whom he had a daughter Frances. He subsequently married Florence H. Fisher. Francis died in 1925.
Leonard. Born on 15 January 1850, he served as a major in the Corps of Royal Engineers, taught at the School of Military Engineering, Chatham, and served in the War Office, Intelligence Division. He became Liberal-Unionist MP for Lichfield, Staffordshire, was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and President of the Royal Geological Society from 1908 to 1911. He was married to Elizabeth F. Fraser, and subsequently to Charlotte M. Massingberd. There were no offspring. Leonard died in 1943.
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Horace. Born on 13 May 1851, he was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge and became an engineer and designer of scientific instruments. He was co-founder of the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company, Mayor of Cambridge, and Fellow of the Royal Society. Horace was knighted in 1918. He married Emma C. Farrer, who bore him three children. He died in 1928.
NOTES
1. Oxford Dictionaries Online.
2. Cor.4, p.411.
3. Cor.4, p.412.
4. Cor.4, p.415.
5. Cor.4, p.424.
6. Darwin to W. E. Darwin, 3 October, Cor.5, p.63.
7. Darwin to W.E. Darwin, 24, Cor.5, p.81.
8. Darwin to Fox, 17 July, Cor.4, p.148.
9. Keynes, Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution, pp.200–1.
10. Steensma, ‘Down syndrome in Down House: trisomy 21, GATA1mutations, and Charles Darwin’, Blood: Journal of the American Society of Hematology, Volume 105, No.6, pp.2614–16
11. Darwin to William Darwin Fox, 27 March 1851, Cor.5, p.9.
12. Darwin to Emma, 18 April 1851, Cor.5, p.14.
13. Cor.5, p.14, note 2.
14. Darwin to Fox, 29 April 1851, Cor.5, p.32.
15. Darwin to Jenyns, 1 April, Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter 2251.
16. Oxford Dictionaries Online.
17. Darwin to Lubbock, 17 July 1870, Cor.18, p.215.
18. Darwin, The Descent of Man, p.688.
19. Berra, Alvarez and Ceballos, ‘Was the Darwin/Wedgwood Dynasty Adversely Affected by Consanguinity?’, In Bio Science, May 2010/Vol.60, No.5, pp.376–83.
20. Oxford Dictionaries Online.
21 Carvalho, Luiz O.P., and others. ‘Trypanoma cruzi and myoid cells from seminiferous tubules: interaction and relation with fibrous components of extracellular matrix in experimental Chagas’ disease. International Journal of Experimental Pathology, 2009, February: 90(1): pp.52–7.
Chapter 42
The Final Decade
Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Men and Animals was published in 1872.
The following January, Emma wrote to her aunt Fanny Allen to say that she was shortly to meet the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway. ‘We have just been reading a very grand sermon of his on Darwinism.’1 In fact, Darwin and Conway were acquainted, as will shortly be seen.
Born in Virginia, USA in 1832, Moncure Daniel Conway was the son of an attorney, judge, and slave-plantation owner. He himself was an amateur anthropologist who enjoyed studying the customs and religions of the various races of the world. In 1854, when he became a Unitarian minister, Conway preached anti-slavery sermons and, in 1858, he ‘debunked New Testament miracles’.2 In 1863 he came to England and, the following year, became the preacher at South Place (Unitarian) Chapel and leader of the South Place Religious Society (SPRS), Finsbury, London.
The SPRS had its origins in an earlier society, founded in 1793 by a group of nonconformists, known as ‘Philadelphians’ (from the Greek philadelphia – ‘brotherly love’) or ‘Universalists’ (a Universalist being a member of an organized body of Christians who hold the belief that all humankind will eventually be saved3 -i.e. that salvation is available to all). In June 1819 the SPRS formally united itself with the Unitarian Association.4
On 22 May 1823 the SPRS’s then minister William Johnson Fox, laid the foundation stone of the South Place Chapel, Finsbury, London, which was duly opened on 1 February the following year. A decade later, the Society severed its connections with Unitarianism, since when it has been independent of any other denomination.
In his address to the Society, delivered on 27 March 1842, Fox declared, ‘I Believe in the duty of free enquiry, and in the right of religious liberty.’5 He then asked:
What is Deity? Let creeds tell us what they please, in phraseology simple or obscure – what is Deity but the loftiest conception of each mind? As high as each soul can get in its notion of the true, the wise, the good, the powerful – that, to each, is God. All else is verbiage.
The duty of free enquiry, or ‘the right of religious liberty,’ – what means it but that without let, molestation, or hindrance, without censure, aversion, or punishment, man is to think whereto his being tends?6
Despite his assertion that God was man made, rather than the other way around, Fox declared that it was important ‘to derive all the truth and beauty that we can from the scriptures of the Old and the New Testaments’.7
Therefore, Fox’s notion that God is a product of the human mind coincided with Darwin’s own beliefs. Finally, in 1888, the SPRS was renamed the South Place Ethical Society.8
In his Centenary History of the South Place Society, published in 1894, Conway refers to a
Discussion Society, formed in 1877 … [and to] the ‘Conference of Liberal Thinkers’, which gathered here in 1878; and the many course of lectures, beginning with those of 1873, when … Huxley, and the younger Darwin [i.e. Charles] were heard here [i.e. addressed the Society], and extending to those on ‘Religious Systems of the World’ and ‘National Life and Thought’.9
I recall with happiness that Charles Darwin expressed to me his warm interest in South Place, as did Sir Charles and Lady Lyell, whom we often saw here; and [philosopher and social reformer] John Stuart Mill and Professor [William Kingdom] Clifford [Professor of Applied Mathematics at University College, London].10
Conway demonstrated that he possessed a more than rudimentary grasp of the meaning of Darwinism, when he declared that:
All moral or social progress depends on the freedom to develop differences. In every step of physical progress, from the sponge up to man, we see a small difference of some organism from its species, and a long struggle of that difference to hold its own against the majority, and gradually develop a new species with its variation from the old.
Conway, whose inclination was now towards humanism and freethinking, extended this analogy to religion. It was
by differentiation of religious belief [that] larger religions were evolved. And so on with all the various developments, whose sum we call Civilization.
Now, one fundamental fact we can see which our freethinking fathers could not see, namely, that all moral or social progress depends on the freedom to develop differences. That is what the great discovery of Darwin taught us. Freedom to differ from the majority is, therefore, the condition [i.e. prerequisite] of all progress, social, moral, and physical.11
Darwin’s lifelong preoccupation had been with how animals and plants evolve physically, but he would undoubtedly have agreed with Conway that the human mind is also capable of evolving, and will do so more readily in a free environment. Conway continued, scathingly:
How many great works of genius have been burnt by the common hangman? Nearly every one up to the Reformation, and many after that. The authority of a few particularly unfit officials to decide for forty million English intellects what they shall read, appears intolerable … .12
Antiquated laws are sometimes spoken of as ‘dead letters’ but they are never dead; they continue their subtle work in the mind of the people, and survive as the prejudices which discourage the thinker and retard progress. It is, therefore, a great and worthy aim to which our energies may be wisely consecrated, in this centenary year of our Society, to obtain the removal of all surviving censorships on literature, art, and ethical science, maintain the honour of individual independence, and establish entire intellectual, moral, and religious Liberty.13
Again, Darwin would have concurred with such sentiments absolutely.
To Nicolaas D. Doedes, student of natural history at the University of Utrecht, Holland, Darwin declared, in April 1873,
the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide. The safest conclusion seems to be that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man’s intellect … .14
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The following September Darwin wrote frankly to Lyell on the same subject.
Many persons seem to make themselves quite easy about immortality & the existence of a personal God by intuition; & I suppose that I must differ from such persons, for I do not feel any innate conviction on any such points.15
Returning to the theme in March 1878, to Scottish journalist James Grant, Darwin opined that:
The strongest argument for the existence of God, as it seems to me, is the instinct or intuition which we all (as I suppose) feel that there must have been an intelligent beginner of the Universe; but then comes the doubt and difficulty whether such intuitions are trustworthy.16
And that November, he told botanist Henry N. Ridley:
many years ago when I was collecting facts for the Origin, my belief in what is called a personal God was as firm as that of Dr Pusey himself, & as to the eternity of matter I have never troubled myself about such insoluble questions.17
In April 1879 Emma wrote to Russian diplomat Baron Nicolai A. von Mengden to say of her husband:
He considers that the theory of evolution is quite compatible with the belief in a God; but that you must remember that different persons have different definitions of what they mean by God.18
That is to say, Emma was not convinced that the God whom Darwin had in mind was the same one whom she as a Christian worshipped.
In May, to John Fordyce, author of works on the modern social order, Darwin wrote:
It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist & an evolutionist. What my own views may be is a question of no consequence to any one except myself.— But as you ask, I may state that my judgement often fluctuates. Moreover whether a man deserves to be called a theist depends on the definition of the term: which is much too large a subject for a note. In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.19
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