Charles and Emma

by Deborah Heiligman

  Charles and Syms carried by hand “some few dozen drawers of shells,” so the shells wouldn’t shatter. By six o’clock they were in the house and by eight they had a meal of eggs, bacon, and tea. Charles felt “supremely comfortable.”

  There were so many specimens everywhere that the house looked like a museum. Over the next few days, the two men moved as many crates of specimens as they could into one of the front attic rooms, and Charles dubbed it the Museum. He wanted the rest of the house to be a home for Emma; he did not want the science to take over completely.

  Charles exulted in his new home. It was only a hundred yards from Regent’s Park, where he and Emma could go walking together. And now that the dead dog was gone, he assured her, “The little garden is worth its weight in gold.” It was very narrow, but it was ninety feet long, big enough for Charles to pace in every day. He spent the next days working, setting up the house as best he could, hiring a cook and other servants—consulting with Emma and his sisters and Fanny. He also started receiving wedding gifts. One puzzled him: “My good old friend Herbert sent me a very nice little note, with a massive silver weapon, which he called a Forficula (the Latin for an earwig) and which I thought was to catch hold of soles and flounders.” But Erasmus, who knew these things, told him it was for asparagus. Harriet Martineau sent some of her own books to help start their library, and Henslow brought Charles a silver candlestick. Mrs. Henslow offered to give him advice on household matters.

  In between setting up, he found time to make some notebook jottings, too. Once again he analyzed Specimen Number One, Charles Darwin. “What passes in a man’s mind. When he says he loves a person—do not the features pass before him marked, with the habitual express emotions, which make us love him, or her.—it is blind feeling, something like sexual feelings…” What else influences love, he wondered. Is it affected by other emotions? He thought of Emma and was eager, lonely, and frustrated.

  His frustration grew when he read a letter from Emma postponing the wedding five days. “You will have a few days more time on your hands than you expect my dear Charley as the marriage must be fixed for the 29th instead of the 24th (I always said about the 24th) I am afraid you will be rather vexed at this but I hope you will have the Drs maxim that I must always be in the right properly impressed on your mind.” She was right about one thing—it did vex him.

  For her part, Emma was vexed when he referred to the house as “his,” not “ours,” and she told him so. She also told him that she did not approve of Lyell’s idea that he and Charles should dine every evening at the Athenaeum Club, leaving the wives at home alone. Apparently Henslow told him he should take many solitary walks, too. Emma was not eager to move to London and be left alone all the time: “I must say looks as if you meant to give in a good deal, to Mr Lyells plan of the Athenaeum. If you follow Mr Henslows advice about walking & Mr Lyells precepts about dining I shall see quite…little of you…These excellent steady old friends of yours have a good deal to answer for in corrupting your mind.”

  Charles had no intention of leaving Emma alone; he wanted to be with her as much as she wanted to be with him. Even though he reassured her, Emma still was not happy with Lyell, and especially not with the way he treated his wife, who just sat quietly and did not say much. Emma decided not to read his book, as she had been planning to do.

  Emma was not one to sit by quietly and not say much. “By the way now we seem to be clearing old scores,” she wrote to Charles, “they told me at Shrewsbury that you had the audacity to call me ‘little baggage’! but I won’t believe it till I hear it with my own ears, (& then I advise you to take care of your own ears).”

  Charles, for his part, also wanted to come clean. He warned her about what she was really in for with this man devoted to his specimens and his thoughts. After a lovely visit to Maer a few weeks before the wedding, he told Emma that she would have to humanize him. Five years on the voyage and the last two spent working so hard had made him too much of a brute, and he hoped that Emma would “soon teach me there is greater happiness than building theories and accumulating facts in silence and solitude.”

  Charles was so preoccupied with his thoughts that he forgot to show up for a dinner he had been invited to attend. Maybe it was his instinct for survival—the dinner was at the Horners’ house. The family waited around the table for him while he sat happily alone at the Athenaeum, reading and eating his dinner as he had taken to doing. “I made a very stupid mistake yesterday,” he wrote to Emma. “I utterly forgot the invitation & kept the whole party waiting whilst I was quietly at dinner here.—I had to send a very humble note this morning, & backed it by calling, and had a very pleasant sit.”

  It wasn’t just work that preoccupied him; it was the thought of Emma:—“My own dear future wife.” The letters flew back and forth, daily or even twice a day. Emma, uncharacteristically for her, was also romantic and sentimental. She was almost embarrassed by her enthusiasm. “I am rather ashamed of writing to you so soon again but if I disguise my writing in the direction I am in hopes the post master at Newcastle will think it is somebody else.” She wrote with candor, letting Charles see who she really was, just as he was doing with her: “Today the Miss Northens are coming very early & I shall have to do a prodigious quantity of friendship with Ellen who adores me extremely & will want to know all about every thing & my chief aim will be to tell her nothing about any thing. I shall treat her like your sisters do the Owens pretend to be very open & carefully never tell anything.”

  And although (perhaps because) she found it difficult to talk about religion in person, Emma once again wrote to Charles. On January 23, less than a week before the wedding, she wrote about her concerns.

  You need not fear my own dear Charles that I shall not be quite as happy as you are & I shall always look upon the event of the 29th as a most happy one on my part though perhaps not so great or so good as you do. There is only one subject in the world that ever gives me a moments uneasiness & I believe I think about that very little when I am with you & I do hope that though our opinions may not agree upon all points of religion we may sympathize a good deal in our feelings on the subject. I believe my chief danger will be that I shall lead so happy comfortable & amusing a life that I shall be careless & good for nothing & think of nothing serious in this world or the next.

  This world or the next. She wasn’t letting go.

  On the day they had originally set for the wedding, January 24, 1839, Charles was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, which was a rather important milestone in his career, but he didn’t even mention it in a letter to Emma. Instead he told her that he had had a bad headache for two days and two nights. He was afraid he wouldn’t be well enough to get married, but the train to Shrewsbury “quite cured me.” He arrived at the Mount to get ready for the wedding, and wrote to her at Maer. She had asked him to, afraid that it would be the last letter she ever got from him, for once they were married they did not expect to be spending time apart. “The house is in such a bustle,” Charles told her, “that I do not know what I write. I have got the ring, which is the most important piece of news I have to tell.”

  Finally, on Tuesday, January 29, Charles, with the ring, and Emma in a green silk dress, went to the church at Maer. Emma was thirty, Charles would turn thirty in two weeks. Neither one liked pomp and ceremony, so the service was quick and attended only by a few members of their close family. Emma’s mother, Bessy, was too sick to leave her bed, and Erasmus did not even come in from London. Charles’s sister Caroline and Emma’s brother Josiah were there, but their infant was very ill, which set a pall over the whole day.

  The group went back to Maer Hall, where Emma quickly changed out of her fancy clothes, and the two newlyweds said their farewells. Emma tried to say good-bye to her mother, but Bessy was still asleep. This was actually a great relief to Emma, who had been worried that her mother was lying there feeling terrible for missing the ceremony.

  With a packed lunch in hand, Emm
a and Charles took the train back to London. “We ate our sandwiches with grateful hearts for all the care that was taken of us, and the bottle of water was the greatest comfort,” Emma reported in a letter to her mother.

  As Charles had arranged, when they got home to Gower Street, the fires were blazing in welcome.

  Chapter 13

  Definition of Happiness

  A thousand thanks to you, dearest Emma, for your delightful

  letter which from the cheerful happy tone of it drew tears of

  pleasure from my old eyes. I am truly thankful to find you

  so happy, and still more so that you are sensible of it,

  and I pray heaven that this may only be the

  beginning of a life full of peace and tranquility.

  —BESSY WEDGWOOD TO EMMA, FEBRUARY 1839

  In Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Lucas tells her friend Elizabeth Bennet that it is better to go into a marriage blind to the other person’s faults. “Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other, or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the least.” Charles and Emma had gotten to know each other through letters and visits, but like any couple, they would only really get to know each other by living together.

  But happiness in marriage, as Austen’s heroine Elizabeth Bennet knows, is not only a matter of chance. It’s also a matter of love, and a matter of determination on both sides. And willingness to compromise. “It is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life,” Charlotte Lucas continues in her speech to Elizabeth Bennet. After a short time with Emma, Charles knew he was going to have to make a serious compromise. Little Miss Slip-Slop had grown up into Big Mrs. Slip-Slop. Unlike Charles, she was not careful to put things back where she got them; the freethinking atmosphere at Maer had not inculcated order into her as the strict atmosphere at the Mount had into Charles. Their new home was not going to be as neat and organized as Charles liked. But Emma was worth it; so, as his daughter Henrietta wrote much later, he “made up his mind to give up all his natural taste for tidiness.” He decided he “would not allow himself to feel annoyed by her calm disregard for such details.” He would keep his study neat and orderly, but the rest of the house would be how Emma wanted.

  In their first few days together, they mostly stayed in—it was snowing. But they also did some shopping for furniture, dishes, and clothes, including a morning gown for Emma. It was “a sort of clarety-brown satin,” she wrote to Elizabeth, and she felt it was “very unobjectionable.” They borrowed some novels from the library, starting a lifelong tradition of reading together—usually Emma read to Charles while he rested from his work. Charles liked novels with happy endings, and he once wrote, “I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me…and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily—against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if it be a pretty woman all the better.”

  Charles and Emma both took setting up house seriously. For once, Charles did not mind spending money. But he did start recording every pound he spent in a pocket account book and would continue that practice for the rest of his life. He wrote that they started with £573 in the bank and £36 cash in hand. They spent money on medicine, a coffeepot, a pickle pot, stationery with their new address (12 Upper Gower Street) printed on it, a haircut for Charles, shaving soap, beer, biscuits, a table for the pantry, wages for the servants, fares for hackney coaches, and tickets for the opera. Charles also bought a going-away present for Syms Covington.

  Soon they ventured out and “went slopping through the melted snow,” as Emma wrote to Elizabeth, to pick out a pianoforte that was to be a present from Emma’s father. Both Emma and Charles were so thrilled at the prospect of having the beautiful mahogany grand—Emma for herself, Charles because he knew it would make her happy—that when they were walking on Gower Street a few days later and saw a pianoforte van, Charles shouted out to see if it was going to number 12. It was. They put the piano in the small back room, where, even though it was cramped, they spent most of their time, for it looked out on their garden. This room seemed more like the country and therefore more like home than any other part of the house.

  Emma gave Charles “a large dose of music every evening,” as she said, and even though he could never remember a tune and was probably tone deaf, he enjoyed her playing very much. (“Charms of music and female chit-chat,” as he had written on the Marry side of his list.) In that first week they also gave their first dinner party, as sort of practice, for Hensleigh and Fanny and Erasmus. Erasmus was condescending at first; he said the dinner was just like those he gave. But, as Emma reported home, “when the plum-pudding appeared he knocked under, and confessed himself conquered very humbly.”

  Charles had written in one of his notebooks, “Definition of happiness the number of pleasant ideas passing through mind in given time.” Now he found happiness not just in his mind; he found it in real life.

  But sad news arrived during this happy time. Caroline and Jos’s baby had died. Emma was quite shocked, though Charles had known it was coming from the way his sister described the baby’s appearance and symptoms. At that time many infants died—as many as one in four or five, depending on social class and living conditions. To lose a baby was not unusual, but it was, of course, very sad. Caroline, who had married late, was devastated. Elizabeth wrote to an aunt, “the thoughts of this precious child and the preparations for it have occupied her in an intense way.” The death had an effect on everyone in the family, including Charles and Emma, who were hoping to have their own baby soon.

  For the newlyweds there was much to absorb and to get used to, going from single to married, and without a honeymoon for a transition. (Neither one of them wanted to take a trip.) Emma wrote to her mother that Charles wasn’t quite used to her “honours yet.” He picked up a letter addressed to her and “could not conceive who Mrs. C. Darwin could mean.”

  But time and shared experiences got them used to being husband and wife. One day, as they were out walking near the Athenaeum Club, they saw Leonard Horner—father of the Horner girls. He looked like he was trying to avoid them. “Charles said his face, trying to pretend not to see us, was the most comical thing he ever saw.” Later that evening, Charles received a note from Mr. Horner. Apparently his report of seeing the newly married Charles Darwin with his bride made a big impact on the Horneritas. Together Charles and Emma imagined the scene.

  Emma even got Charles to go to church with her. She kept hoping he’d find a way to have faith. Erasmus’s friend Harriet Martineau had a brother, James, who was a Unitarian theologian. James Martineau preached that the gospels could transform an individual into a believer just through their beauty, not through strict, traditional belief in every word of the Bible. That’s what Emma hoped would happen with Charles. If only he would take the gospels to heart. Yet perhaps going to church wasn’t good for him. She wrote to her sister Charlotte, “My Charles has been very unwell since Sunday. We went to church at King’s College and found the church not warmed, and not more than half-a-dozen people in it, and he was so very cold that I believe it was that which has made him so unwell.”

  So the dance of a married couple had begun. She played the piano for him, and though he had a tin ear, he listened with enjoyment and love. He put up with her sloppiness; she understood his need for long hours at work. She agreed to go to fewer parties and dinners since he did not like them. He went to the theater with her, and to church.

  Fanny wrote to a friend that the couple was settling in to married life well. “Emma is looking very pretty and unanxious, and I suppose there are not many two people happier than she and Charles.”

  Emma kept notes in a little date-book diary, as she had for years.
She did not write at length—just small notations about the weather and about household events: “Erasmus drank tea” and “Wrote to Mamma” and “Wrote to Elizabeth,” “Church at King’s college,” “Fanny and Hensleigh here,” “Dined Dr. Holland’s,” and “Party at Lyell’s.” Charles took Emma to one of his old favorite haunts, which Emma recorded in her diary only as an enthusiastic, “Zoo!”

  In April she made the little note “Charles Journal.” Charles’s first book was to be published that summer—his account of the voyage on the Beagle. It was part of a multivolume set called Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of HMS Adventure and Beagle Between the years 1826 and 1836. The other volumes were written by Captain FitzRoy. Darwin’s part would be called, first, Journal and Remarks. It later became known simply as The Voyage of the Beagle. He had kept a 770-page diary while on the voyage; the book was culled from that. When the page proofs arrived, he was nervous about how his book would be accepted.

  In spite of his happiness, Charles was not well physically. He suffered from stomach problems, fatigue, and at times, nervousness, as well as headaches. Emma had had headaches, too, since she was a teenager. She kept track of his symptoms as well as her own in her diary. She also made note of her menstrual cycle.

  And on August 15, Emma wrote, “halfway now I think from symptoms.”

  Chapter 14

  Pregnant Thoughts

  I should be most unhappy if I thought

  we did not belong to each other forever.

  —EMMA TO CHARLES, AROUND FEBRUARY 1839

  Emma was pregnant. They had both hoped for a baby, and they were thrilled, but pregnancy was dangerous in the nineteenth century. About one in every two hundred women died in childbirth. As Emma knew well from her sister Fanny’s early death, one never knew when her time would come. Or her husband’s. Women were at greater risk because of pregnancy and childbirth, but Charles’s health continued to worsen, and they didn’t know what was wrong with him. Were his stomach upsets, heart palpitations, fatigue, and bouts of giddiness symptoms of something that might be fatal? What if Charles died soon? What if Emma did not survive this pregnancy and childbirth? Would they meet again in heaven? The question of what happens after death had a new urgency for Emma.