After trips to the zoo and other excursions around town, Charles and Emma took their family home to Down. It was a relief to be back in the country. The city always made them both feel worse physically. And life had to go on. Charles had two books on barnacles coming out: A Monograph on the subclass Cirripedia and A Monograph on the fossil Lepadidae. He planned to write at least two more. He had more work to do when he was ready. He would not have Annie to make his hair beautiful or whirl around the Sandwalk with him. But he had Emma and the other children.
Over the summer, Emma realized that Etty, who was not quite eight, was suffering terribly from her sister’s death. She had lost her playmate just as Emma had lost Fanny all those years ago. But Etty was just a small child. She did not have a real understanding of death. Emma had told the children that Annie had gone to heaven. This did not comfort Etty at all.
One evening that summer, as the family listened to Miss Thorley sing, Emma noticed that Etty looked upset. She took her out of the room and asked her what was the matter.
“But Mamma,” Etty said, “where do the women go, for all the angels are men.”
Emma asked her if she was thinking of Annie. Etty said she had not been thinking of Annie, but then she burst into tears.
Etty agonized over heaven and hell because she felt she was not as good a girl as Annie had been. On a few occasions Emma tried to reassure her, but Etty focused on the fact that she was deficient somehow. She kept trying to be “better.” The maids did not help—they told her that Annie had been much sweeter and nicer than she was.
“I used to be a very naughty girl when Annie was alive, do you think God will forgive me?” she asked her mother another evening. And she pleaded, “Will you help me to be good?”
“Annie was a good child,” Emma told her. “I do not think you will find it difficult to be as good as she was.” But something was bothering Etty. Emma asked her what made her so unhappy.
“I am afraid of going to hell,” Etty replied.
Emma told her, “Annie is safe in heaven.” The implication was that Etty, if she was a good girl, would go to heaven, too.
But Etty knew that she was not Annie.
“Come to me,” Emma said, “and I will try to help you as much as I can.”
“But you are always with somebody,” Etty challenged her.
Emma was always busy, with other children, with servants, with visitors. But she was concerned enough about Etty to write down these conversations. She told Etty to pray, and she prayed with her, but Etty was not consoled. She worried that she was too proud, too selfish to go to heaven. Unlike Emma, who had been old enough at twenty-four to commit herself to faith and to being a good and religious person like Fanny, Etty was just eight. Emma had written that note to God: “help me to become more like her, and grant that I may join with Thee…” But what could Etty, a small child, do to come to terms with her sister’s death and to make herself feel better?
Emma took it as a good sign when Etty asked for some of Annie’s hair to put in a locket, and that she was able to talk about her sister’s death. The following February, Etty told Emma, “I think about Annie when I am in bed.” And, “Mamma when I see anything belonging to Annie it makes me think of her. Sometimes I make believe (but I know it’s not true) that she is not quite dead, but will come back again sometime.”
Emma knew it was good for Etty to talk about Annie. But she found it too difficult and painful to talk about her lost daughter. So did Charles. He did not speak of Annie more than once or twice for the rest of his life.
Etty said later that her mother never got over Annie’s death. When Emma died, an old woman of eighty-eight, Etty found a “little packet of memorials” that Emma had kept: a half-finished piece of wool work, a child’s desk, paper of texts in a child’s hand, and two ornamental pocket books. Emma had also copied out part of a poem, “Early Death,” by Hartley Coleridge:
She pass’d away, like morning dew
Before the sun was high;
So brief her time, she scarcely knew
The meaning of a sigh.
Charles had also kept something in addition to his memorial of Annie. He kept the notes he had taken of Annie’s symptoms during her illness and while she lay dying.
Emma and Charles coped with Annie’s death the best they could—both together and separately. What united them was their love for each other and their love for Annie and their other children. Would their religious differences divide them? Aunt Jessie had written a year and a half earlier, “We have none of us to choose our religion. It comes to us by the atmosphere in which we live, we modify it afterwards according to our different minds, and many by our hearts only.” Would Emma and Charles modify their religious feelings together or separately?
Emma held on to the hope of heaven. Charles could not.
Soon after Annie died, Charles wrote to his cousin Fox, “I do not suppose you will have heard of our bitter & cruel loss…Thank God, she suffered hardly at all, and expired as tranquilly as a little angel…She was my favourite child; her cordiality, openness, buoyant joyousness and strong affections made her most lovable. Poor dear little soul. Well it is all over.”
For Charles it was all over. Although he knew he would continue to think, to read, and to talk with Emma about his religious beliefs, he was certain he would never see Annie again.
When he had arranged for Annie’s tombstone at Malvern, he put no quotes from scripture on it, as was usually done. The marker read only:
ANNE ELIZABETH
DARWIN
BORN MARCH 2. 1841
DIED APRIL 23. 1851
A DEAR AND GOOD CHILD
Chapter 23
Against the Rules
“Well, you have come quite wrong; you should have turned
to the right, but I am going to Bromley myself and I will shew
you the way.” They then walked on with the kind old woman.
—FROM “THE POUND OF SUGAR,”
A STORY BY EMMA DARWIN
As time went on, life at Down House settled back into a routine. Everyone missed Annie, but there were still seven children and Charles had his work to continue. His health had deteriorated again, but with Emma to nurse him as she always did, he turned back to his barnacles by October 1851, six months after Annie’s death. His spirit was not in it, but the work routine helped his grief.
Emma kept her grief private, but she would struggle with depression off and on for the rest of her life. Losing her beloved treasure, as she thought of Annie, Emma worried about what else could and would happen to those she loved; nobody, nothing was safe. And Charles’s religious doubts continued to sadden her. She did find solace in prayer and in her faith. Her belief in an afterlife was not diminished by Annie’s death; it had been strengthened, just as it had, years earlier, by Fanny’s death. In her old age, Aunt Jessie had come to the same conclusion. She wrote to Emma, “Now that I stand at the end of my life, as it were, and commonly called a long one, too, the whole appears to me so short, so fleeting, as if nothing was worth thinking of but the Eternity in which we recover all our earthly loves.”
Emma and Aunt Jessie had always kept in close touch through letters. Their fondness for each other went back many years, to the time that Emma and Fanny had lived with Aunt Jessie and Sismondi as young women. Emma and Aunt Jessie didn’t see each other as often as either would have liked, even after Aunt Jessie moved back to England when Sismondi died. But Emma regaled her aunt with stories about the children, which Aunt Jessie loved to read. She wrote, “My dear Emma, how I do love you when you talk of your children!…You are poetic without knowing it, which is the prettiest poetry of all…Blessed mother of happy children you are, my Emma.”
Of course Aunt Jessie knew that Emma wasn’t always happy, but the children kept her busy. Very busy. Down House was overflowing with rambunctious children, mostly boys. Etty and Lizzy (as Elizabeth was now called) were the only girls left. Lizzy felt the imbalance. One day she ca
me out of the drawing room and saw her papa.
“I’m so dull,” she told Charles. “There is only horrid beastly boys in the drawing room.”
Charles had to agree. He wrote to his cousin Fox to congratulate him on his tenth child and said, “When I have a tenth, send only condolences to me. We have now seven children all well, thank God, as well as their mother; of these seven, five are boys; and my father used to say that it was certain that a boy gave as much trouble as three girls; so that bona fide we have seventeen children.”
The boys were energetic, and each different from the next. Of the older boys, George stood out for his enterprise. Charles wrote to Willy at school that “Georgy draws every day many Horse-guards, and Lenny is as fat as ever.” George drew his pictures of horse-guards, knights, and castles on the backs of Charles’s manuscript drafts and notes, which Charles threw into the cupboard under the stairs by the garden door, along with the children’s toys, tennis rackets, parasols, and croquet mallets. As George got older, he needed more paper, for he wrote stories to go with his pictures. So he foraged in the cupboard and wrote The Fairies of the Mountain on the back of his father’s notes about barnacles and observations about pigeons and chickens. Emma and Charles kept the papers, not for Charles’s drafts, but for George’s childhood creations. (The barnacle notes on the back of George’s story are the only ones left; the rest got thrown away.) Aunt Jessie loved hearing about George; she could tell he was brilliant and told Emma that if he could find work he loved when he grew up, he would find happiness.
Just as Etty had complained that there was always someone else who needed Emma, Charles seemed to sometimes feel he needed more from Emma than he could get, too, and he wanted a certain kind of attention from her. In October 1852, just half a year after saying they had enough children, he joked to Fox, “Emma has been very neglectful of late & we have not had a child for more than one whole year.”
In early 1853, Aunt Jessie got ill; her heart started to fail. Emma could not go to her, but she heard from Jessie’s sisters what happened next. On March 3, as she lay in bed, Jessie gave directions about her last wishes to her sisters. When she finished she was still for a few minutes and then said quietly, “I think that is all.” After a pause, she cried, “Sismondi, I’m coming,” and looked up as if she saw him standing before her. Then she died.
Emma would miss Jessie very much. Hearing that story had to be hard for her for another reason. Would Emma see Charles on her deathbed, beckoning her to the beyond? Who or what would he see on his deathbed? What would he be thinking—believing—at that moment?
Charles still struggled with religious questions, and with how Emma and other religious people would react to his going against the biblical story of creation. But he felt certain that his theory was right, that new species were created all the time by the process of natural selection. And he was finally working toward letting his theory out into the world. He started to tell more people about it, testing the waters. But he did not want to cause upheaval or controversy. He was an English gentleman to the outside world, and he did not want to ruin his reputation by breaking the rules of society.
At home it was a very different story. There were still few rules at Down House, and Charles was not very good at enforcing the ones he and Emma did make. This was well known among his children. In 1855, when Lenny was about five, Charles walked in to find his son jumping up and down and tumbling all over a new sofa.
“Oh Lenny, Lenny,” Charles said. “You know it is against all rules.”
“Then,” Lenny said to his papa, “I think you’d better go out of the room.”
And so Charles did.
* * *
Charles was a creature of habit, and the whole family’s routine revolved around his. Yet the household really was focused on the children as much as it was on Charles. Not only was the furniture bought for sturdiness, chairs were made into trains; the children ran in and out of the house, taxing Parslow’s patience at times. But Parslow doted on them as well. He had made a sliding board that went down the stairs so the children could play inside when the weather was bad.
There was no “children should be seen and not heard” rule, as was common in Victorian households. One visitor described luncheons at Down as violent. Much to the chagrin of some of the servants and to the consternation of Emma’s sister Elizabeth, the children even used bad language such as “the devil take” or “I wish to God.” Charles thought it was funny. He loved to tell about how one day Lenny, age six, was lying on his papa’s lap. The boy looked up at his father and said coolly to him, “Well, you old ass.”
Shocked by his own words he quickly said, “Really, I did not mean to spurt that out.”
There was a morality to the house, and Emma was the moral center, the bribery notwithstanding. But she also struggled with rules—and sometimes disobeyed them, such as turning around during the Trinity prayer. She could not decide on rules for the family about what should and should not be done on Sunday.
Etty wrote later, “In the years when we were growing up I believe my mother was often puzzled as to what rules to make about keeping Sunday. I remember she persuaded me to refuse any invitation from the neighbours that involved using the carriage on that day, and it was a question in her own mind whether she might rightly embroider, knit or play patience.” After Emma died, Etty found a list among Emma’s papers. Just as her husband would have done, she wrote down the pros and cons “on the side of abstaining from what other people think wrong, tho’ you do not” and “on the side of doing as you think right, without considering the opinion of others.” She could barely think of anything to write on the first side—just that other people would think they were sinners if they did not behave on Sundays. But on the side of doing what you think is right she wrote, “The sincerity of showing yourself as you really are. The real good it would do the world not to have artificial sins.” Emma was, and had always been, sincere and without pretense. Besides, she thought that England “would be morally the better for some amusements on Sunday, “ as she continued on her list.
She did care what the servants thought: “Whether the servants know you as you are and do not take your opinions as any guide for theirs—whether they learn toleration in short.”
But above all she was thinking of the children. How could they be happy being restrained even on one day of the week? “All this only applies to my own doings, as I do not feel at all sure enough in any way to interfere with the pleasures of sons of the age of mine.”
Although Charles was the funny one, the one who told jokes and stories, the children adored Emma, too. She was much more reserved, but, according to Etty, “there was always about her a bright aliveness” and “a happy enjoyment of fun and humor.” But she didn’t laugh much. Etty later wrote that strangers were sometimes put off by her seeming sternness, though she wasn’t actually stern at all. She was calm and sometimes solemn, and together that could be mistaken for gravity. But she was always welcoming to all visitors, known or unknown. As Etty later wrote, “She would hurry to the front door at Down, eager for the first moment of greeting. In summer weather she would be on the little mound which overlooks the entrance road, waiting to wave a welcome as the carriage drove up. The contrast of this outspringing of warmth with her usual calm demeanour, made every arrival a kind of special festival.”
All the children knew she was tenderhearted, and although Etty had complained earlier that her mother was always with someone, she wrote later that her mother stopped whatever she was doing to watch what a child wanted her to watch—two titmice playing leapfrog in the garden that Etty pointed out to her, for instance. Emma also played piano for the children—a special galloping tune that made them run around the parlor.
The open-mindedness of Maer Hall won out over the strictness of the Mount at Down House. The children never felt disapproval or judgment from their parents.
When Elizabeth did not want to be confirmed, she felt free to tell her mother tha
t she did not have the heart to pretend she believed in the Trinity. Emma must have had mixed feelings about her daughter not being confirmed, but she abhorred hypocrisy. She did not want her daughter to do something she didn’t believe in just for appearances’ sake. So she allowed Elizabeth to skip confirmation.
Emma taught them about morality through stories she wrote. One of their favorites was called “A Pound of Sugar.” It features a little boy called Bobby—Charles’s nickname as a baby—and his little sister, named Lizzy. Bobby’s grandfather asks him to get a pound of sugar in town. Grandfather tells him to make sure he turns right when he crosses the road. So Bobby and Lizzy set out for Bromley, and Bobby turns left. The children get lost, but they are not punished for it; instead an old woman helps them find their way back into town. In town, neither child remembers what it is they were supposed to buy and they come home with a pound of salt instead of sugar. The tea tastes terrible with the salt in it, but Grandfather does not punish Bobby. He just sends the children out again the next day to buy sugar. They come home empty-handed because a boy thief tricks them out of their money. Again they are not punished. The story ends happily with Bobby and Lizzy buying not only sugar, but a toy as well. What was the moral of the story? That deviating from the rules does not get you punished and grown-ups are always there to help you? Was Emma trying to tell Charles something?
The real Bobby was all grown up now, and as other people turned right, he felt he must turn left. Would it turn out happily in the end? What would happen when Charles went against the rules?
Chapter 24
Terrible Suffering
Yearly more are bred than can survive; the smallest grain
in the balance, in the long run, must tell on which death
Charles and Emma Page 14
