The Darwin Conspiracy

by John Darnton

  Now that I am eighteen years of age, I am forced to wear one of my crinolines and endure the torture of tight lacing (twenty-four inches around the waist—not an inch more). I find I can hardly move nor breathe, I who love nothing better than to run unfettered in the fields and hide in the woods and clay-pits. Etty is permitted to forgo the corset owing to her delicate constitution.

  In short, all are busily occupied, with the exception of poor Papa who is usually confined to bed with stomach ailments in anticipation of the socialising to which he must needs submit himself.

  The bustle provides the impression, if only for the afternoon, that the Darwins are a normal and contented family. In some ways, we most certainly are, though at times I perceive a strangeness beneath the gaiety and manners.

  What it is that is amiss I do not know. But an astute observer sitting in our midst at the grand table might notice a forced quality to the laughter and, were he as perspicacious as some of our modern novelists from Mudie’s Library like Mrs Gatskell or Mr Trollope, he might be able to detect the reasons for it. We are not as we present ourselves to the unknowing outsiders.

  Indeed, I sometimes feel that our attempts at hospitality and gaiety are mere play-acting.

  6 January 1865

  Papa, as always, is at the centre of our household. I feel his moods have grown increasingly worse in the six years since the publication of Origin. He now retreats to his study for hours on end, but not in the old way which I recollect so fondly. Then he would immerse himself in his study of barnacles or some such, scooting around contentedly in his wheeled chair, emerging every so often for a pinch of black snuff from the jar in the hall, looking up with curiosity when one of us children burst in upon him to ask for a foot-rule or a pin and never taking umbrage at the interruption. Now, he hides himself away for hours on end, almost as if he did not want to be in our company, and try as I might, I cannot fathom the reason for his ill humour.

  Three days ago, in search of a sticking-plaster, I chanced to open the door and came upon him sitting in his black leather horse-hair chair, so lost in gloomy thought that when I spoke, he started like a deer. He rose up and demanded to know why I was ‘stealthily creeping up’ on him so that he could not have ‘a moment’s peace’. He thundered on in that vein so long that even when I closed the door, his voice could be heard throughout the hall, with the result that Camilla broke off her German lessons with Horace to come to the top of the staircase and peer down with evident concern.

  Recently he directed Parslow to attach a small round mirror to the window-casement so that by positioning himself in his chair he could obtain a view of the front step. He told us that in that way he could catch sight of the postman, but I doubt the explanation. I believe that the arrangement enables him to examine unseen any caller, the easier to support the pretence that he is not at home. My concern is that it is not simply the desire to avoid interruption that impels him to this course but rather something more profound and disquieting.

  Nor has Papa’s health shown any improvement. Quite the contrary, it has worsened noticeably in recent times. He now retches two or three times a day and often complains of stomach problems, including wind, which is so odoriferous he refuses to travel. In addition to dyspepsia, he is subject to dizziness, fainting-spells and headaches. On some days he breaks out in eczema. Poor Mamma has become a veritable Florence Nightingale, sacrificing herself at all hours to bring him tea and rub his back and read aloud to soothe his nerves and distract him from his various ailments. He has had constructed a sort of water-closet in his study, a basin set inside a platform in the floor, hidden behind a half-wall and curtain, no more than ten feet from his corner of precious books and tiny drawers. It is for emergencies; in this way, he is able to lunge up from his chair, thrusting his writing-board to one side, and run to vomit. At the sound, which is truly horrible, the servants gather nervously in the hall, looking at one another, and only Parslow is allowed to enter to offer aid. Sometimes he has to actually lift Papa, limp and pale and dripping with perspiration, and carry him upstairs to his room.

  11 January 1865

  Papa has been ill as long as I can remember. When he takes to his bed, a pall is cast upon the household and we all scarcely dare to speak above a murmur.

  Mamma says the attacks are brought on by his work, by the strain of thinking so hard about natural science. To support her speculation she notes that his initial attack, now almost thirty years ago, came as he was first framing his theory on the transmutation of species and natural selection. For twenty-two years he kept his theory a secret in private notebooks, except for discussions with a few friends and colleagues like Sir Charles Lyell, the geologist, and Mr Hooker, the botanist at Kew, and by correspondence with Mr Asa Gray at Harvard.

  Can you imagine, she says, the strain from carrying the weight of all that theorising for all those years? No wonder Papa sought the miracle water-cure from Dr Gully. I accompanied him to Malvern once and was shocked at how willingly he submitted himself to freezing baths and the torture of being wrapped in the frigid ‘dripping-sheet’ that is intended to send the blood from one organ to another.

  I have a conjecture of my own to explain Papa’s indisposition, for I marked the occasions when it seizes him most dramatically. It occurs not just when the subject of his theory arises but when an event happens that refers to the genesis of the theory. For example, Papa had an unusually severe and prolonged attack of vomiting after receiving that dreadful letter from the Dutch East Indies in 1858, the one in which Mr Alfred Russel Wallace proposed his nearly identical theory, so close in all its particulars that Papa moaned that the very phrases could serve as chapter-headings for his own book. Then Papa rallied to put his own theory of natural selection before the public, acceding to the exhortations of Mr Huxley and others that the two papers, his and that of Mr Wallace, be presented simultaneously at the Linnean Society. He worked in a frenzy to rush Origin into print and became so exhausted that he could barely finish it. But the true illness came shortly afterwards, not when the theory itself was challenged but when his achievement was called into question because of the coincidence of its having two authors. That nasty Richard Owen, who dreams of heading up a new Museum of Natural Science and is one of Papa’s main detractors, was said to have remarked at a dinner on Eaton Place: ‘What can be so unimaginable as a child with two fathers?’ To which the riposte, to the amusement of everyone present, was: ‘Especially if one of them is an ape.’

  I do not see why people should react that way, even if Mr Wallace did arrive at a similar theory. Perhaps the coincidence can be taken as more proof of its genuine validity, not less, because once a compelling idea is in the air, more than one person is bound to seize it. That is especially true for the theory of natural selection, since it is supremely elegant in its simplicity. In any case, Papa is the one who laboured to make it presentable and understandable. He is so sensitive, I know he hates all the controversy, including those cartoons in Punch and those horrid drawings in Vanity Fair, and it upsets him no end to discover that Mr Wallace has received little credit or that people might think that he himself acted in some untoward way to deny Mr Wallace priority.

  I wish my father would travel, for I believe that nothing is as much a remedy to frayed nerves as new horizons. But he scarcely stirs himself to go to London these days and adamantly refuses to consider crossing the Channel, which seems odd for someone who travelled around the world and experienced so many exotic adventures as a young man. Not so long ago three of his old shipmates from the Beagle came to stay for a week-end and Papa worked himself into such a state that he could barely spend ten minutes with them.

  Afterwards my brother Leonard came upon Papa in the garden and they strolled together across the lawn. To hear him tell it, Papa suddenly broke off all conversation and turned away with a horrid expression that made a strong impression upon Leonard, who later told me, ‘There shot through my mind the conviction that he wishes he were no longer alive.
’

  20 January 1865

  I had hoped to be able to report that our lives had improved at Down House, but alas, this is not to be. Our home resembles a sanitarium. Papa has resumed the water-treatment on his own, even going so far as to use the outdoor hut that John Lewis made some fifteen years ago. It is an ingenious contraption out by the well, with a little rooftop steeple that holds four or five gallons of water. Papa undresses inside and pulls a little rope to send the water rushing down upon him with great force. Horace and I sometimes station ourselves outside and we hear such gasps and groans that one would think the person inside was dying. We wait five minutes and then Papa rushes out fully dressed again but looking frozen and so miserable that one of us usually consents to accompany him on his rounds along the Sandwalk, his path for thinking, built specially at the end of the garden behind our property.

  Two days ago, I had a row with Papa. I happened to be in his study and I picked up his cosh from its usual place on the mantelpiece. It is little more than a foot-long coil of wire with metal knobs on either end, heavy enough to serve as a useful tool or to fend off an animal, should it come to that. He keeps it as a souvenir of his time in South America since he used to carry it in his belt during his excursions there. Suddenly Papa walked in, and seeing me holding the implement, proceeded to berate me, saying he had told me never to touch it, which I am sure is not the case. He then renewed his accusation that I was ‘a petty spy’, which struck me as very hurtful and totally unwarranted. I replaced the cosh and held my tongue until I brushed past him to the doorway, whereupon I whirled around and said something wicked, namely, that I thought he was unreasonable and spiteful. Etty heard me and told Mamma, who said I must apologise or do without dinner and I chose the latter, remaining in my room and missing the nightly gathering in the drawing-room. I tried to read this new book by the mathematician, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but was so upset I could not at first concentrate on the words, although later I found myself succumbing to its magical spell. Sometimes I feel like Alice: I find myself at odds with this world, as if I too had fallen down a rabbit-hole. At certain moments I believe I am twenty-foot tall and can see things that elude everyone else, and at other moments I fear I am no bigger than a mouse and must run about to avoid being stepped upon.

  22 January 1865

  I once overheard my father assert that ‘a good scientist is a detective on the track of Nature’. I may not be a scientist but, laughable as it sounds, I do think I would make a most excellent detective.

  Truth be told, I have been spying, although that is not the word I would choose to describe it. I do so because once my curiosity has been pricked, I cannot help myself. I like nothing better when company is present than to slip into a shadow and make myself inconspicuous in order to overhear what is being said. It is the only way to find out what is going on in the world, and is certainly more interesting than the Edmonton Review or The Times. That was how I learnt about the shocking case of Peter Barratt and James Bradley, who murdered poor little Georgie Burgess; they made him get undressed and beat him with sticks in a brook until he stopped moving. One of the men observed that the two boys were so small their heads could barely be seen over the dock and another said he was pleased they were sentenced to a full five years in a reformatory.

  Best of all are the occasions when the men assemble in the billiards-room, for there is a perfect hiding spot in a corner beside the divan and they become so engrossed in the game that they entirely forget me. In the summer they leave the windows open for air and I sit outside beneath the flower-box of primroses and cowslips. That was where I learnt about the Mutiny in India some years back; Mr Huxley said it all began because the Moors were forced to bite into cartridges that had been greased with pig fat or some such thing which I did not fully understand. Only this week I heard Papa say that the war between the Confederacy and the Northern states in America is causing trouble in Jamaica. He said: ‘The niggers are ready to rise up against us.’

  But Mr Thomas Carlyle was confident that Governor Eyre would deal with them.

  It appears that Papa favours the Northern states. I know that he finds slavery an abomination—I have heard him describe arguments he had with Captain FitzRoy on that score—and I am certain he would like to see the institution eliminated from the face of the earth. But I have also heard him speak of Southern Americans as a refined and aristocratic people, close to Englishmen in outlook and sophistication, in contrast to the brash and vulgar Northerners. A Southern victory would mean inexpensive cotton for our manufacturers. When I hear him talk like this I cannot help but think that in his heart he tilts towards the South.

  25 January 1865

  The thought has occurred to me that I am uncommonly adept at ferreting out the secrets of others. It is simply a gift that has come to me unlooked for, in the same manner that Etty is quick with words or George skilled in calculations.

  When we were children, our cousins would visit us on holidays and with our augmented numbers we had the run of Down House. We played at roundabouts, a game in which we sought hiding-places in all the nooks and crannies inside and out, and I was always the first to find others and the last to be discovered. Oftentimes I would lie in my temporary nest for an hour or more, my heart beating like a little bird’s, listening to the frustrated shouts of my pursuers as the shadows lengthened into evening. Sometimes I would stay hidden long after the game had been abandoned, turning up in the lighted back doorway to great acclaim.

  The key, I discovered, was to cast one’s mind into those of the other players; once one divines where they themselves might hide, it is no great feat to find some other place they would never consider. Being a mistress of concealment is not a trick. It is a facility, akin to intuition. I find that if I stop and collect myself and ponder deeply, I can project myself into the mind of someone else and then I can anticipate what that person might think and do.

  I myself have a number of secrets, which I would not dare to confess to any living soul. One concerns a son (who shall be nameless) of Sir John Lubbock, whose estate at High Oaks we sometimes visited when I was not yet in full maidenhood—or when I had not yet become unwell, as Mamma would put it.

  The two of us would steal off together across the fields to an old walnut-tree that had been struck by lightning, an immense stump rising twenty feet in the air and hollowed out by nature’s usage. This we pretended was our dwelling and as we played at man and wife, we indulged ourselves in things that make me blush to think upon. I would permit him, in the act of leaving for his work-place, to plant a kiss upon my cheek, and once or twice we progressed beyond that, though not of course to any extent that would give me cause for repentance. Still, when I see him at church, I am embarrassed.

  Because Mamma does not believe in the Creed, when the congregation recites it, we turn away from the altar and face them; once or twice I have caught his eyes looking at me in a most provocative way and felt my face burning red.

  He may be highborn, but he is far from a gentleman to subject me to such treatment; although, as long as I am being truthful, I admit that I do not totally disavow the way it makes me feel.

  28 January 1865

  Mamma and I took a long walk this morning because the weather is unseasonably warm for the height of winter. Despite the auspicious day I sensed that she had something pressing upon her that she wanted to tell me, and as we approached the wooded area to the south, she began in a soft voice. She said that Papa’s health was better but still not as much improved as she had hoped. And then she said she felt I was aggravating his condition by my behaviour, which she described as ‘disrespectful’. She suggested that I look to Etty for ‘lessons in deportment’, noting that my sister never gives cause for concern. Quite the opposite; she said that Etty is a joy to Papa and even supports him in his work by proofreading his manuscripts.

  I am afraid my reaction was peevish. I replied that I thought there were any number of areas in which Henrietta could take ins
truction from me. I pointed in particular to the area of physical well-being, for Etty is just like Papa and falls prey to all manner of illnesses. She is the acorn that falls close to the oak. Papa sent her away to Moor Park for the water-treatment and ever since her relapse at Eastbourne she has been an invalid herself, and that has made her the centre of attention. Papa coddles her and visits her bedroom to enquire about her health with solicitousness written all over his face. As a result, I said, Etty received numerous special privileges. At this my mother grew angry and asked me to cite an example. I replied that we went to Torquay so that she might take the sea air and that she was given a special bed-carriage for the journey, and also that she was permitted to go sea-bathing in the horse-drawn machine like all the ladies of fashion, to which my mother replied: ‘You should be grateful that you are sound in body and not begrudge your sister treatments that might cure her or alleviate her suffering.’

  At that I fell silent.

  I know Mamma and Papa prefer Etty to me. They are always telling her how pretty she is and how becoming such and such a dress is on her and what a fine wife she will be one day and they never pay such compliments to me.

  When I was a child they looked upon me as unladylike because I loved to run fast and ride down the stairs standing up on the sliding-board and because I was able to climb out the nursery-window on to the mulberry-tree. Mamma said that was the way boys behaved. It was true that sometimes when we opened the old trunk to play ‘dress-up’, Etty would don Mamma’s pearls and long dresses and I would favour the costumes of buccaneers and explorers.