Charles and Emma

by Deborah Heiligman

  Charles

  and

  Emma

  The Darwins’ Leap of Faith

  DEBORAH HEILIGMAN

  Henry Holt and Company

  New York

  To my constant Companion

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC

  Publishers since 1866

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, New York 10010

  www.HenryHoltKids.com

  Henry Holt® is a registered trademark of Henry Holt and

  Company, LLC.

  Copyright © 2009 by Deborah Heiligman

  All rights reserved.

  Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Heiligman, Deborah.

  Charles and Emma : the Darwins’ leap of faith / Deborah

  Heiligman.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4299-3495-4 / ISBN-10: 978-0-8050-8721-4

  1. Darwin, Charles, 1809—1882—Juvenile literature. 2. Darwin, Emma

  Wedgwood, 1808—1896—Juvenile literature. 3. Naturalists—

  England—Biography—Juvenile literature. I. Title

  QH31.D2H42 2008 576.8’2092—dc22 2008026091

  First Edition—2009 / Designed by Elynn Cohen

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. ∞

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Contents

  Foreword

  Chapter 1 Better Than a Dog

  Chapter 2 Rat Catching

  Chapter 3 Conceal Your Doubts

  Chapter 4 Where Doors and Windows Stand Open

  Chapter 5 Little Miss Slip-Slop

  Chapter 6 The Next World

  Chapter 7 The Sensation of Fear

  Chapter 8 A Leap

  Chapter 9 A Busy Man

  Chapter 10 Melancholy Thoughts

  Chapter 11 A Whirl of Noise and Motion

  Chapter 12 Heavy Baggage, Blazing Fires

  Chapter 13 Definition of Happiness

  Chapter 14 Pregnant Thoughts

  Chapter 15 Little Animalcules

  Chapter 16 Down in the Country

  Chapter 17 Sudden Deaths

  Chapter 18 Barnacles and Babies

  Chapter 19 Doing Custards

  Chapter 20 A Fretful Child

  Chapter 21 God Only Knows the Issue

  Chapter 22 A Dear and Good Child

  Chapter 23 Against the Rules

  Chapter 24 Terrible Suffering

  Chapter 25 The Origins of The Origin

  Chapter 26 Dependent on Each Other in So Complex a Manner

  Chapter 27 What the Lord Hath Delivered

  Chapter 28 Feeling, Not Reasoning

  Chapter 29 Such a Noise

  Chapter 30 Mere Trickery

  Chapter 31 Warmth to the End

  Chapter 32 Happy Is the Man

  Chapter 33 Unasked Questions

  Epilogue So Much to Worship

  Acknowledgments

  Family Tree

  Source Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  Square Fish

  Gofish

  Readers’ Theater compiled from passages of Charles and Emma

  Foreword

  The story of Charles Darwin has never been told this way before.

  Authors by the hundreds have written about Darwin’s genius and the way his ideas transformed the world. Scholars by the thousands have described the adventures that made him famous: first, his voyage around the world as a young naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle and, second, his discovery of the vast, novel, and strange intellectual territory that he mapped in his masterpiece, The Origin of Species.

  Those two stories are among our civilization’s most celebrated eureka moments. But as far as I know, this is the first book to focus on the adventure that began when Darwin, home from his voyage, took out a piece of scrap paper and made himself a quirky, funny, very candid list of the pros and cons of settling down.

  Charles Darwin’s search for a woman to marry led him almost immediately to a private eureka moment, when he visited his aunt and uncle at Maer Hall, in Staffordshire, and sat down by a fire in the library to have a little chat (they called it “a goose”) with his cousin Emma Wedgwood.

  In that time and place, marriage between cousins was not at all unusual, and everyone thought Charles and Emma were a good match. There was only one problem, one obstacle to their happiness: Emma was religious. She cared deeply about her Christian faith. When Charles confessed to her the revolutionary ideas that he was scribbling in his secret notebooks, she felt frightened. Emma thought they would be parted by death forever, go separate ways in eternity, because she would go to heaven and Charles would go to hell.

  How Charles and Emma struggled with this dilemma and made a successful marriage of science and religion is the story told in this book. Reading it helps us understand in the most vivid, intimate, and personal way how shocking Darwin’s ideas were for the people of his time, including some of the people who were closest to him. It helps us see why he felt he had to keep his ideas to himself for so long, writing secret on the covers of the journals and notebooks in which he scribbled furiously during the months and years after the voyage of the Beagle. The ideas in Charles’s notebooks seemed revolutionary and dangerous, not only to many of the people around him in nineteenth-century England but to the woman he loved more than anyone in the world. We can understand better why he spent twenty years refining and polishing his theory before he dared, with dread and misgivings, to publish The Origin of Species.

  So often the scientific and the religious views of life are seen as two separate worlds. As enemies. And in a sense you might say that Charles and Emma Darwin were each sleeping with the enemy. But they were not enemies. They were the best of friends, and their story is an inspiration. They had ten children. They lost three. One of those deaths was so tragic and terrible that Charles and Emma could hardly bear to talk about it for the rest of their lives. The problem of faith and religion and the afterlife in some ways only grew larger as they confronted those tragedies and faced the chasm at the end of life. And yet together they triumphed.

  Darwin’s revolutionary ideas have become so established now that biologists cannot imagine life without them. But those same ideas still have the power to frighten and disturb many devout people. The ability of Charles and Emma to go beyond those differences—to love each other in spite of them—is an inspiring story for our time.

  Because the love story of Charles and Emma has not been told before at full length, even old Darwin fans will find much here to enjoy. Consider the last paragraph of The Origin of Species, one of the most famous passages in science. There Darwin sums up his whole view of life by talking about an entangled bank. I never knew until I read this book that this was a bank that Charles and Emma often saw on their walks from Down House, their home in the country. Charles and Emma were entangled in their love and science, just as mind, heart, and spirit are entangled in each one of us.

  Reading Charles and Emma, one feels that their love story was one of the most significant adventures and greatest masterpieces of Darwin’s life.

  —JONATHAN WEINER

  Pulitzer prize-winning

  author of The Beak of the Finch

  In her presence he found his happiness,

  and through her, his life.

  —FRANCIS DARWIN

  Chapter 1

  Better Than a Dog

  Why, the shape of his head is quite altered.

  —DR. ROBERT DARWIN, IN 1836,

  AFTER CHARLES’S FIVE-YEAR VOYAGE

  In the summer of 1838, in
his rented rooms on Great Marlborough Street, London, Charles Darwin drew a line down the middle of a piece of scrap paper. He had been back in England for almost two years, after a monumental voyage around the world. He was in his late twenties. It was time to decide. Across the top of the left-hand side, he wrote Marry. On the right he wrote Not Marry. And in the middle: This is the Question.

  It was easy for Charles to think of things to write under Not Marry.

  “Freedom to go where one liked,” he began. Charles loved to travel. His voyage had lasted almost five years; he had been the naturalist on the HMS Beagle, a British surveying ship. He was horribly seasick while on board, but he spent as much time as he could on land, exploring on horseback and on foot, and collecting thousands of specimens, from corals in the Cocos-Keeling Islands of the Indian Ocean to beetles in Australia to a fox in Chiloé Island, Chile. He now lived in London with his servant from the Beagle, Syms Covington, “Fiddler and Boy to the Poop Cabin.” Charles had taught Syms to shoot and skin birds and to help him list and catalogue the specimens. Now Charles and Syms were surrounded by neatly stacked wooden crates, casks, and barrels filled with many of their treasures from Patagonia, Brazil, Chile, and Tierra del Fuego: fossil bones, skins, shells, fish preserved in spirits of wine, mammalia in spirits of wine, insects, reptiles and birds in spirits of wine, plants, rocks, carcasses of dead animals, and beetles. What if Charles wanted to go on another adventure and collect more specimens? How could he do that if he got married?

  Next, under Not Marry he wrote: “—choice of Society & little of it.—Conversation of clever men at clubs—”

  On Great Marlborough Street, Charles lived just a few doors away from his older brother, Erasmus, and he was spending much of his time with Eras and his circle of intellectual friends, which included the historian and writer Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane; the writer Harriet Martineau; and the Darwins’ first cousin, Hensleigh Wedgwood. They discussed the huge changes in England brought on by industrialization. When Charles had left for his voyage, there were a few trains; now the railroad zigzagged all over the country, reaching places only horse-drawn carriages had gone before. The growing number of mills and factories changed the landscape as well; towns and cities were expanding, as was the division between rich and poor. The rich benefited from the new industry and from Great Britain’s burgeoning empire. The poor suffered in the squalor that Charles Dickens was capturing so well in his serialized novels. Erasmus and his circle debated the Poor Laws, which were shunting the destitute into workhouses; they discussed the need for social reform.

  There were divisions in religion in nineteenth-century England, too. Religious zealots and religious dissenters were making noise while members of the Church of England and Unitarians like the Darwins also quietly questioned their faith. Freethinking liberals, Eras and his circle were respected members of the British upper classes, and Charles found it easy—and stimulating—to be with them. Because they were open-minded and liberal, Charles knew he could broach with them some of the radical scientific thoughts he was beginning to have. This was what mattered to him. Not going to dinner parties, teas, and other torturous social occasions where people inundated him with seemingly endless questions about his travels.

  Not that all of his social occasions were torturous. Charles was spending time with—and being courted by—three sisters in one family. The Horner girls were clever young women, well-read and educated, with promising intellectual futures. They even shared his interest in natural history, geology, and zoology. Their oldest sister, Mary, was already married to a new friend of his, Charles Lyell, a prominent geologist. Mr. Horner approved of Charles Darwin as a son-in-law and hoped for a match. “I have not seen anyone for a long time with a greater store of accurate knowledge,” he wrote to Mary. Erasmus teased Charles, calling Mrs. Horner “Mother-in-law.” So the marriage question was not hypothetical.

  And Charles Darwin was a good catch. He was a tall man, about six feet, thickset—big but not fat. He was athletic and fit from his adventures on the voyage. He dressed conservatively in the styles of the day: tailcoat, fine linen shirt with standing collar, and tall hat. He had gray eyes, a ruddy complexion, and a pleasant face, though he did not like his nose, which he felt was too big and bulbous. He was from an upstanding, wealthy family; he had much to talk about, and he had a promising future. His reputation had, as they say, preceded him. While he was traveling, Charles had sent back thousands of his specimens to his old Cambridge professor, John Stevens Henslow. Some of these specimens had begun to make him famous in the natural history world before he had even returned to England, including a rare fossil head of a giant ground sloth he had found in Argentina “in horizontal position in the cemented gravel; the upper jaw & molars exposed,” as Charles had written in his first geological specimen notebook. The remarkable fossil sloth head had been presented at a meeting of the British Association of the Advancement of Science in Cambridge.

  But if he were to marry one of the Horner girls, or anyone else, he could see the obligations ahead, whereas if he remained single, he would be freer to pursue his science.

  He added to the Not Marry side of his list, “Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle.” He liked his brother, his sisters, his cousins the Wedgwoods. But what if he didn’t like his wife’s relatives? There was so much compromising you had to do if you were married. He could see it in his friends, many of whom had gotten married while he was away.

  Walking down the street one day not long after he had gotten back, he had seen his cousin Hensleigh carrying a child in one hand and a round box in the other. Hensleigh had married a cousin from the other side of his family in 1832, the year Charles left on the voyage. (First cousins often married at this time, especially in the upper classes.) Now Hensleigh had two children, and Charles shuddered at the thought of all the juggling a young father had to do. Did he want the responsibility? His reaction to this scene was so strong that it made the rounds of the family gossip: Emma Wedgwood, Hensleigh’s sister, wrote to her sister-in-law with amusement how struck Charles was by Hensleigh’s juggling.

  Not surprising, therefore, that Charles continued his Not Marry list with “—to have the expense & anxiety of children—perhaps quarrelling.” It wasn’t just the time and distraction that worried him; although he was frugal, he doubted he would ever make enough money by collecting beetles and writing about coral. Lack of money always led to fights, that he knew. And could he stand the anxiety and worry of having children? Cholera, a deadly disease, had just reached England for the first time, and there were epidemics of typhus, typhoid fever, and scarlet fever. Children got sick, children died. So there would be worry about health along with worry about money. And it all would take so much time. That was the crux of the issue. He wrote and underlined twice “Loss of time.”

  Charles needed as many hours a day as he could have to do his work. First of all, he had to solicit more experienced naturalists to help him analyze his specimens. Charles had so many kinds of specimens; he was not an expert on every bird, bone, and bug. He had already given out his rare Megatherium bones and his finches and mockingbirds from the Galapagos Islands. But he had more of his collections to distribute to experts, and he had to urge them, coax them, to tell him what they thought. What did he have? Had he found new species? What significance did his finds have, if any?

  As a single man with no family responsibilities, he could meet with these experts, go to scientific meetings, and visit museums and libraries whenever he wanted to. He didn’t have to worry about a wife or her relatives dictating how his time should be spent.

  Charles felt strongly that he had no time to waste. Near the end of his voyage, he had heard from one of his sisters that Henslow and another old professor of his, Adam Sedgwick, were both very interested in the bones he had sent back. Sedgwick declared his collection “above all praise” and said that Charles would have “a great name among the Naturalists of Europe.” Charles found this terri
bly gratifying and knew that with those endorsements he would continue to work hard on natural history. He wrote, “A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.”

  Before the voyage, Charles had been a typical natural history collector. In nineteenth-century England, everyone from country parsons to teenage girls collected butterflies, flowers, even stuffed birds and fossil bones. Looking at God’s wondrous handiwork was a worthwhile avocation, and in some cases, vocation. Collectors tried to amass and describe as many of God’s species as possible and hoped to find new crabs, moths, finches, or ferns. And if you were lucky, the new species you discovered would be named after you—Charles had a few named after him, including a South American ostrichlike bird, the Rhea darwinii, and a frog that lived in Chile and Argentina, Rhinoderma darwinii.

  Although he was pleased to have such an extensive collection, Charles was thinking about something bigger when he looked at his fossils. He was thinking about the origins of life. While on the voyage, reading Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology and looking at desert islands, rugged cliffs, and volcanoes, Charles knew that Lyell was right: Earth was not formed in 4004 b.c. as Archbishop James Ussher had calculated in 1658. This date had been incorporated into an authorized Bible in 1701, and many people still believed it was a fact. But Charles was certain that the earth was formed much longer ago than that and was still being formed. Once he realized that the earth was changing, that the story of creation in the Bible was not literally true, Charles’s mind was opened to the possibility of a different kind of creation in the animal and plant kingdoms. Looking at the specimens he had collected, Charles realized that species were forming and changing all the time, too. The idea of evolution, or transmutation, as it was then called, had been debated and refuted for years. But toward the end of his voyage, and now back in England, as he looked at bird specimens from the Galapagos Islands, Charles had the beginnings of a new theory to explain transmutation. He felt sure that if he could work it through, he would change the way the world thought about creation. He desperately wanted and needed to work it through. He had started the great project already, and he was consumed by it, giving it hours and hours every day.