Charles and Emma

by Deborah Heiligman

  He was careful not to jump to conclusions, but he saw what he saw: “Jenny was amusing herself—, by getting out ears of corn with her teeth from the straw, & just like child not knowing what to do with them, came several times & opened my hand, & put them in—like child.”

  Like a child. What would it mean about God’s creation if apes and humans were related? In the religious worldview, there was a hierarchy of living things, from the lowliest of the low, animals like lice or slugs, to fish and birds and cats and apes, up to human beings, who were at the top—but not as high up as angels. Charles was beginning to think that people were more closely related to orangutans than to angels, if angels existed at all. Like a child. People and apes must be related, and if so, they must have a common ancestor. But how did the common ancestor change to create humans and apes? If species do change, as Charles felt certain they did, how was that happening? What was the mechanism that drove this change?

  Charles, like Emma, was a voracious reader, and as he read in a wide range of subjects, from philosophy and theology to history and political theory, he was reading with a purpose—to understand the natural world and, most specifically, the origin of species.

  On September 28, 1838, two months after his visit to Maer, Charles opened another notebook (he wrote in many at once). This one was red leather, with a “D” on the front. In gray ink, on pages edged in green, he wrote about something he’d read. An Essay on the Principle of Population was written by the economist Thomas Robert Malthus in 1798. Malthus’s essay was about society, and about people, most especially about how poor people succumb in an environment where there are limited resources. He argued that without disease, famine, and poverty, the human population would grow too fast. People need food; people need sex. If there is more population growth than the food supply can accommodate, something must and will happen to reduce the population.

  People still discussed and argued about what Malthus had to say, especially about the problems of poverty. Were workhouses the answer, as Malthus said? Should the poor be given charity, or should they be left to fend for themselves? The novelist Charles Dickens felt Malthus depicted poor people as less than human; in novels such as Oliver Twist, he sought to remedy that, making poor people well-rounded main characters. Charles, Erasmus, and their London friends discussed these problems over dinner. What might Malthus’s ideas mean—for better or for worse—to society?

  But Charles was even more interested in what Malthus’s theory might mean for nature and for the origin of species. As Charles read the essay, he thought more about animals and plants than about people. He believed there was a direct analogy, a way into the species problem. Reading Malthus and thinking about the natural world, Charles realized that nature was not happy and peaceful, as Paley had described in his natural theology books. The lion did not lie down with the lamb. Life in nature was a struggle, just as in the crowded, poverty-ridden neighborhoods of London. In human society there were not enough jobs for the growing numbers of people; in nature—on a desert island or on top of a mountain—there was also a struggle for existence when there was not enough food for the growing number of birds, beasts, or bugs. Charles reasoned that if too many individuals of a species are born in the same place and try to live off a limited supply of food, there is a fight for survival. The weaker ones die. The ones that are strongest, best adapted to the conditions of the area and most able to get the food, survive. Those who survive pass on their traits to their offspring. This was true of cockroaches, sheep, bees, and beetles.

  And birds.

  While on his voyage, Charles had usually been careful to label every bird, every fossil, every plant. He would write down where he found it and what he thought (or knew) it was. But leaving the Galapagos Islands, he uncharacteristically had thrown birds from different islands into one bag. He regretted this later when he realized that the mockingbirds and the finches would have been wonderful evidence for his theory. On the journey home, he thought about how the mockingbirds from the Galapagos Islands of San Cristóbal and Isabela looked the same, but the ones from Floreana and Santiago seemed different. And each kind was found only on its own island. Were they just varieties, or were they evidence of new species? Had the birds been blown over from the coast of South America and then diverged as they lived and died, generation after generation, on the islands? he wondered. And if they had, what did that mean about the creation of new species?

  When he got back to England, he had given his mockingbird and finch specimens to John Gould, an ornithologist. Gould was especially excited about the finches: There seemed to be more than a dozen species of finches never seen anywhere else before. Gould told Charles that he had brought back birds that seemed to live only in the Galapagos. Charles’s inkling was confirmed: Species were not stable. They were not created in one fell swoop by God, never to change, as the Bible said and most people believed.

  As Charles looked at the beaks of the finches, he began to see evidence of the fight for survival that precipitated the change. He began to see that beaks adapted to the kinds of seeds available on the island. Big beaks could crack open big, hard seeds; small beaks were better for hard-to-get-at seeds. This was not God’s design; it was design brought about by the need for food. His birds and Malthus’s theory had given him the mechanism for the transmutation of species.

  In his notebooks, Charles began to write about his idea of how it all happened. He thought about how traits get passed down, over and over again. He surmised that traits that are passed on change and adapt according to what is needed for survival. These changes—very small ones—add up over time to make bigger changes. These bigger changes result in the creation of new species. He called his idea “modification by natural selection.” He knew he had to study his idea in minute and exacting detail, in an organized and disciplined way. But he now had “a theory by which to work.” Observing Jenny, reading Malthus, thinking about the finches, he put it all together.

  He was beyond excited. He now knew for sure that this theory was going to be the governing force of the rest of his life.

  But what about Emma?

  His theory essentially eliminated God’s role in the process of creation. What would Emma think? He knew he was flirting with materialism, the philosophical doctrine that says that there are no spiritual or divine forces in nature, only matter. If Emma knew, would she want him to be flirting with her? In one of his notebooks he wrote, “Oh you materialist!” There was no denying—to himself—what he was becoming.

  This juxtaposition of his heart and mind gave him not only headaches but weird dreams. One night he had an anxiety attack that woke him up. Not to be deterred, he used himself as a specimen, just like Jenny, and made observations.

  “Fear must be simple instinctive feeling,” he wrote in his “M” notebook, a dark red leather one marked “private” inside because he was filling it with thoughts about emotions and mental issues—his own and those of his family and his friends. “I have awakened in the night being slightly unwell & felt so much afraid though my reason was laughing & told me there was nothing, & tried to seize hold of objects to be frightened at.”

  He watched himself carefully and in the dim light recorded, “The sensation of fear is accompanied by troubled beating of heart, sweat, trembling of muscles.” He asked himself how his fear related to what happened in the jungle to an animal scared by a predator: “are not these effects of violent running away,” he scribbled.

  Looking back at early man, perhaps, or at his ape cousins, he saw that running away was what you did instinctively when you were afraid; retreating was the usual effect of fear. He could relate to the instinct to run away. Wouldn’t it be easier to run than to confront the object of your fear? But what if you could not run fast enough to get away? Could an orangutan outrun a lion? What were the other options? You could play dead: “the state of collapse may be imitation of death, which many animals put on.” Should he play dead with Emma? Just forget the idea of marrying her?
Or of marrying at all?

  He was anxious not because he thought he was wrong about the origin of species, but because he felt sure he was right. He knew what he had to say would be shocking to Emma and others who believed that God was the creator of all species. And he knew that if he confessed that he thought God was not part of the equation, he would hurt people close to him, especially the woman with whom he wanted to share his life.

  “Conceal your doubts!” his father had said. He just couldn’t. Not completely. He could not lie. But maybe he didn’t have to tell everything he was thinking. He wrote to himself, in his notebook, just after his anxiety attack, that he would “avoid stating how far, I believe, in Materialism.” He didn’t have to tell the whole thing. Yet.

  He wrote down his thoughts about marriage again, this time focusing not on the “if” but on the “when.” “If one does not marry soon, one misses so much good pure happiness—”of caressing his wife, of feeling that flush of passion. But what about adventure? If he married soon, “I never should know French,—or see the Continent,—or go to America, or go up in a Balloon, or take solitary trip in Wales…” But again he came to the same conclusion: “Never mind my boy—Cheer up—One cannot live this solitary life, with groggy old age, friendless and cold and childless staring one in one’s face, already beginning to wrinkle. Never mind, trust to chance—”

  * * *

  Finally he couldn’t take it any longer. He couldn’t stop thinking about Emma. On November 9, he, along with Hensleigh and Hensleigh’s wife, who was also named Fanny, got on the train toward Staffordshire. Charles was scared that Emma wouldn’t accept him—not just because of the religion question, but also because of his ugly nose. He had almost been rejected for his nose once before; the captain of the Beagle, Robert FitzRoy, was a believer in phrenology and physiognomy and thought you could tell someone’s character by the shape of the skull and face. He looked at Charles and worried that the shape of his nose meant he was lazy. He almost didn’t let him on the ship. But FitzRoy had taken a chance on Charles, and now Charles had to take a chance. He would ask Emma and pray she said yes. He felt sick the whole journey to Maer, and Saturday was torture. Maer was filled with people—cousins, two elderly aunts—and Charles didn’t think he could summon up the courage to ask her. What if she said no?

  But on Sunday morning, Charles got Emma alone by the library fire for another goose. The goose. He finally asked her to marry him.

  Emma was shocked.

  Chapter 8

  A Leap

  E. says she can perceive sigh, commences as soon

  as painful thought crosses mind, before it

  can have affected respiration.

  —CHARLES DARWIN, “N” NOTEBOOK

  When Emma and Charles walked out of the library and back into the hubbub of the family gathering, they both looked dismal. The elderly aunts who were visiting took one look at them and came to the conclusion that Charles had proposed and Emma had refused. No one else in the house seemed to suspect anything at all, and Emma went on with her regular Sunday schedule. She went to the village Sunday school to teach. She had continued teaching there, even with Fanny gone; it was a part of her attempt to live more like Fanny had, more religiously. She had even written her own children’s stories to use in the classes.

  But when she got to the Sunday school—held in the Maer Hall laundry—and tried to teach the children, she couldn’t concentrate. As she put it later to Aunt Jessie, “I went straight into the Sunday School after the important interview, but found I was turning into an idiot and so came away.”

  Emma had had no idea that Charles was going to propose. She thought they would go on being friendly cousins, maybe close friends, for years. But when he asked her, she knew her answer right away. She had said yes without hesitation. She wanted to marry Charles Darwin. It was Charles’s turn to be shocked; he had not expected her to answer right away. He got another headache.

  He had chosen Emma, and she had said yes in large part because they had known each other their whole lives. But they didn’t really know each other. It was a big leap to go from being friendly cousins to being husband and wife. What had they done?

  Emma wrote to Aunt Jessie later that she was “too much bewildered all day to feel my happiness.” And since there were so many people around, they did not make a big announcement. “We did not tell anybody except Papa and Elizabeth and Catherine.”

  But when they did tell Josiah, he cried with happiness. He loved Charles and thought he would be a perfect match for Emma, his youngest daughter. He felt Charles was a prize. There were practical reasons for his joy, too. Since they were cousins, the family money would stay within the family, just as it had when Emma’s brother Jos had married Charles’s sister Catherine. Charles had every reason to hope his father would feel the same way. He would ask his permission the next day. Catherine was delighted, too, of course. She and Emma were friends; they had made that trip to Paris together, stopping in London on the way back. Maybe she had seen the signs back in May during that visit.

  Even Elizabeth was happy, for she liked Charles very much. It must have been hard news for her to take, though. She was sure she wouldn’t get married. And it meant she would be left at home to take care of their aging father and ill mother. Bessy had been sick for quite a while; she slipped in and out of dementia. But when they told her, and she understood, she was thrilled, too.

  Emma reported to Aunt Jessie, “Indeed I was so glad to find that all of them had been wishing for it and settling it. It is a match that every soul has been making for us, so we could not have helped it if we had not liked it ourselves.”

  And yet Emma and Charles spent the whole day feeling rather miserable at the shock of their engagement; they were both astonished at the suddenness of their decision. They didn’t tell anyone else in the house until the evening, when they went into Hensleigh’s bedroom.

  As they gathered, Emma learned that Hensleigh’s wife Fanny had suspected what had occurred. They had a “large party talking it over till very late.” Hensleigh—he of the box and child—had given Charles serious pause about getting married. But now Charles would be joining him in the juggling of domestic life. Back in London, he talked with Hensleigh about science and religion, working out his thoughts about transmutation of species, about God, and about natural selection. Hensleigh, like Emma, was a theist. But he was also a scholar. He was a philologist, looking at how language evolves over time.

  Late into the night, Emma was “seized with hunger.” The servants were asleep, but, as she wrote to Aunt Jessie, “Hensleigh went down to forage in the kitchen and found a loaf and 2 lb. butter and a carving knife, which made us an elegant refection.”

  They ate bread and butter to celebrate their engagement.

  Charles wrote in his diary on November 11, 1838, “The day of days.” The next day Charles and Emma had a few little talks, which put them both a bit more at ease. Then Charles and Catherine went back to Shrewsbury so he could ask his father’s permission as well.

  Having finally proposed and been accepted was a huge relief to Charles. After all those tumultuous months, filled with turbulent thoughts, anxiety attacks, and headaches, it was finally settled. He would marry. His wife would, he hoped, sit next to him on the sofa, take care of him, and anchor him.

  When he was traveling around the world on the Beagle, Charles was wretchedly seasick almost every day he was on board the ship. He lived for the times he could get off the rolling, rocky seas and onto solid land. Emma might not be passionate like his old girlfriend, Fanny Owen, was; she might not be sophisticated the way the Horner girls were, but she was brilliant and she was open-minded and she was unflappable. She could be his solid land in the tumultuous seas of his heretical thoughts.

  At Shrewsbury, Dr. Darwin couldn’t have been happier with Charles’s choice. He wrote to his brother-in-law Jos that the marriage gave him great happiness. For days he walked around the Mount telling Charles that he, too, had
“drawn a prize!” just as Josiah said Emma had.

  Everyone in the extended circle of family and friends was thrilled. Letters flew back and forth praising the match. One friend wrote, “It is very like a marriage of Miss Austen’s, can I say more!” But the plot was very different. In Jane Austen’s novels there are star-crossed lovers who have impediments thrown in their way—by their parents, society, or their own doubts. There are issues of class, suitability, or inheritance. There is much buildup to the engagement, and then the book ends quickly with a happy wedding.

  With Charles and Emma, there was very little buildup, very little—if any—flirting before the engagement. There was no denial, no star-crossed agony leading to their engagement. It was afterward that things began to heat up.

  It was that day, by the fire, that their story really began. In the library at Maer, they had made a leap, though not over class lines or parental objections. They had made a leap to marry even though they had one big difference between them that could stand in the way of their happiness. For Charles had not heeded his father’s advice: He had not concealed his religious doubts.

  Chapter 9

  A Busy Man

  I hardly expected such good fortune would turn up for me.

  —CHARLES DARWIN TO Charles Lyell, November 12, 1838

  You will be forming theories about me & if I am cross or

  out of temper you will only consider ‘What does

  that prove.’ Which will be a very grand &

  philosophical way of considering it.