Charles and Emma

by Deborah Heiligman

  In January 1874, Emma and Charles headed to London. Emma was sixty-five, Charles was about to turn sixty-five. Charles now had a long white beard, which he had started growing in 1863 because eczema made it uncomfortable for him to shave. He was thinner than ever, and frail. He looked like the wise old sage he was now considered to be. For even with the controversy—and there was still some—evolution had become more or less accepted as fact.

  It was, in all ways but one, a typical trip to London. They were going to visit Erasmus. They would see their grown children who lived in London. Charles would see his publisher and also some doctors. But Charles and Emma also were going to attend a séance—in Erasmus’s house. Eras, like many people who held séances, was a skeptic, but intrigued. If they held the séance in his house, he could try to make sure there was nothing done beforehand to fake the results.

  One cold winter afternoon, Erasmus gathered some friends and family around his dining room table. It was a close and cozy crowd. Etty was there with her husband, Richard, as was Hensleigh, of course, with his wife, Fanny, and their daughter Snow. Emma was thrilled by the presence of one of the guests—the novelist known as George Eliot, author of one of Emma’s favorite books, Middlemarch. Her real name was Mary Ann Evans, and she had come with her longtime companion, George Lewes, who wrote about natural history and was an advocate of Darwinism. Emma and Charles’s son George came; he had hired the medium, a Mr. Williams. Charles wanted Huxley to come, and he may have been there—but anonymously. Huxley was evolution’s public champion, still fighting for Darwinism. He coined the term agnostic to mean one who believes you cannot know whether God exists because you cannot prove God’s existence. He did not want to be recognized by a medium who could claim later that Huxley believed in conjuring up the dead. Huxley, if he was there, showed up for the fun of it, as did most of the attendants.

  They darkened the room, closing the curtains and shutting the doors. The group sat down around the table. George and Hensleigh sat next to Mr. Williams on either side, holding down his hands and feet so he couldn’t make anything happen. No one wanted this to be an ordinary séance, meaning one that was contrived by the medium. It was more of a test. The rest of the group joined hands and they all sat quietly—or tried to. Lewes could not help making jokes. Etty found him troublesome; they were supposed to “play the game fairly.”

  Etty later wrote that “The usual manifestations occurred, sparks, wind-blowing, and some rappings and movings of furniture.”

  Charles Darwin was not in the room to see what happened. He had gone upstairs to lie down, as he reported later, “before all these astounding miracles, or jugglery, took place.” He said he was too hot and tired to stay. Lewes later wrote that he and Mary Ann Evans left, too, in disgust, when the medium demanded that the room be totally dark.

  When it was over, Charles came downstairs. Upon seeing all the chairs disarranged, he was mystified. He knew that what had happened—Emma reported that the chairs had been lifted up high over their heads—was a result of trickery, not spirits from the other world. But “how the man could possibly do what was done passes my understanding,” Charles said. He did not doubt that it was all a hoax. He declared, “The Lord have mercy on us all, if we have to believe in such rubbish.” He thought it was too bad that people spent so much time and energy investigating the supernatural when there was so much to figure out about reality.

  Yet, after this séance, Thomas Henry Huxley definitely did go to another séance, and reported about it to Charles. Huxley used diagrams to explain how Williams must have produced various effects. Charles wrote back, “To my mind an enourmous weight of evidence would be requisite to make one believe in anything beyond mere trickery…”

  Not long afterward, Williams was proved to be a fraud. But that didn’t mean to everyone that all spiritualism was false. Many people still believed.

  Emma was not convinced one way or the other, though she remained cynical and thought it was almost certainly trickery. Still, according to Etty, Emma, as always, kept an open mind.

  Chapter 31

  Warmth to the End

  I cannot bear her notion that God took him away because

  she was so deeply attached to him. Not that I think a person

  cannot be selfish in their love; but it is not the strength

  of the love that is the sin, but the selfishness.

  —EMMA, WRITING TO AN AUNT ABOUT A MEMOIR THEY BOTH READ

  Charles and Emma played backgammon every night, and they kept track of who won and who lost. They took it all very seriously. When Charles wasn’t winning, he would yell, “Bang your bones!” He was quoting Jonathan Swift’s Journal to Stella.

  In a letter to Professor Asa Gray on January 28, 1876, he wrote:

  Pray give our very kind remembrances to Mrs. Gray. I know that she likes to hear men boasting, it refreshes them so much. Now the tally with my wife in backgammon stands thus: she, poor creature, has won only 2490 games, whilst I have won, hurrah, hurrah,

  2795 games!

  Charles could brag about winning more games, but Emma won more gammons, which meant that when she won, Charles still had all his pieces on the board. That doubled the number of points he lost. They played doggedly on, battling on the backgammon board.

  In 1876, Emma and Charles looked forward to the birth of their first grandchild. Frank was married to a woman named Amy, whom they loved; they could not wait for the baby. In September, Bernard Darwin was born. But Emma and Charles’s happiness was short-lived. Amy became ill, and with Frank and Charles by her side, died a few days later. Another life cut too short. Frank, of course, was devastated. Charles told a friend that his son walked around bewildered and dazed. Looking at Frank’s suffering, Charles knew for sure that he did not want to outlive Emma. He couldn’t take it.

  Emma was distraught as well, and, unusual for her, had become so undone that it was Charles who took over and gave all of them the emotional support they needed. But she soon rallied, and it was decided that Frank, who was working as Charles’s secretary, would live at Down with Bernard.

  Emma took charge of the nursery, and Bernard became, in a very real way, Emma’s last baby. She devoted herself to him and his care as if she were a young woman. Although Amy’s death had filled Emma with anxiety, Bernard was a happy, easy, and healthy baby, which eased Emma’s anxiety quite a bit. Both of his grandparents doted on him. “Your father is taking a good deal to the Baby,” Emma wrote to Etty. “We think he (the Baby) is a sort of Grand Lama, he is so solemn.”

  Frank helped his father with a collection of letters that he wanted to publish, and with an autobiography that Charles was preparing for his children and grandchildren. Frank had also become fascinated by plants. At Down, he and Charles worked together studying the movement of plants in relation to light and gravity. They also looked at the evolution of plants.

  And Charles had a new obsession. He had had so many in his life—beetles, barnacles, orchids, and now worms. Years ago, Uncle Josiah had suggested to Charles that worms moved the dirt around; it looked as though that movement made rocks sink into the ground. Charles now had time to test out the theory. He put chalk and small pieces of wood on the ground and noted how deeply rocks sank over time. In his twenties now, Horace made a mechanical instrument that helped his father study how far a stone moved vertically. He carried out many of the experiments and observations.

  Charles decided to study worms more closely—their behavior and how their movements affected the ground. Once again, he thought that tiny actions brought about cumulative effects and great change. Most of his studies he conducted at home, but he looked at worms wherever he went. In June 1877, he and Emma, along with Frank, Bernard, and the baby’s nursemaid, made a pilgrimage to the great prehistoric monument Stonehenge. Emma wrote to Etty before they left that she was afraid it would “half kill” Charles. She wrote to Etty almost every day now.

  It would be a two-hour train ride and a twenty-four-mile drive in
a coach. Emma was eager to see the stone monuments and the Cathedral Church at nearby Salisbury. But Charles was “bent on going, chiefly for the worms.” He liked to look at the action of worms in different types of soil. When they arrived at Stonehenge, the guard allowed him to dig as much as he wanted. Charles is probably the only tourist (adult, anyway) ever to pay more attention to the ground at Stonehenge than to the huge stone monoliths.

  Back at Down, Charles involved the whole family in his worm obsession. One day, he decided to see if he could figure out what worms hear. They gathered in the drawing room around the piano. Emma played the piano, Frank the bassoon, and Elizabeth, who was unmarried and also lived at home, shouted. Even little Bernard joined in on the metal whistle. The worms did not react to the noise at all. But when he placed the worms on Emma’s piano—in flower pots—then the worms responded to the vibrations they felt. If Emma struck a single note, high or low, the worms retreated into the soil.

  Charles kept to his routine as much as possible, with Frank by his side. The routine was the same as when Frank had been a child, though now his father walked stooped over when he took his turns around the Sandwalk.

  Frank and Charles worked hard together on the collection of letters, which would focus mostly on the scientific ones, especially his correspondence with his closest associates: Hooker, Henslow, Huxley, Gray, and his dear friend Charles Lyell, who had died in 1875 and been buried in Westminster Abbey.

  Frank relished the time with his father. He later said, “How often, when a man, I have wished my father was behind my chair, that he would pass his hand over my hair, as he used to do when I was a boy. He allowed his grown-up children to laugh with and at him, and was, generally speaking, on terms of perfect equality with us.”

  As the children grew up, they all remained close to Emma and Charles and with each other. It is often the case that with a great father the sons feel they cannot fill his shoes; the Darwin boys did not try. There were no hard feelings in the Darwin family. Charles and Emma had always loved their children for who they were. And they were proud parents. In a letter to George, Charles wrote, “Oh Lord, what a set of sons I have, all doing wonders.”

  Charles and Emma rarely parted from each other. He hated to be away from her for even one night. She was his “constant companion (& friend in old age)” as he had hoped his wife would be. In 1877 when he was awarded an honorary degree at his old university, Cambridge, Emma went with him and wrote to William how proud she was. “I felt very grand walking about with my LL.D. in his silk gown.”

  And together they had gone on the journey of faith. In a letter in 1879, Charles wrote what he now believed about science and faith and how he had gotten there. He said that it was absurd to doubt that a man could be a theist and an evolutionist, as someone had said. Charles pointed to his friend Asa Gray, who was both. As for his own views, he said they were of “no consequence to any one except myself.” Knowing, certainly, that his views were indeed important to other people, he answered the question—in part. He said, “My judgment often fluctuates. Moreover whether a man deserves to be called a theist depends on the definition of the term: which is much too large a subject for a note.”

  In his autobiography, which he intended just for his family, he wrote that although he was “very unwilling to give up my belief…disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete.” But in the 1879 letter, which was to a member of the public, he wrote that even at his most “extreme fluctuations,” he was never an atheist “in the sense of denying the existence of a God.—I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.” Whether he wrote that because he knew the letter would likely become public and that is how he wanted to be known, or whether that was an accurate appraisal of his beliefs, we’ll never be certain. But it does seem as though with age came acceptance of his own ignorance. As Emma had told him, he could not prove or disprove the existence of God. Religion was not a science.

  Happily for Charles—and perhaps not coincidentally—with age also came better health. His symptoms were much less severe, and he spent much less time in pain. Since he was old and had lived such a sickly life, he didn’t do more than he used to. Yet he had always been extremely busy and productive, even when he was ill. To his gardener it looked like he wasn’t doing much at all when he walked about the grounds observing the flowers. Asked about his master’s health, the gardener said, “He moons about in the garden, and I have seen him standing doing nothing before a flower for ten minutes at a time. If he only had something to do, I really believe he would be better.” In fact he was, as usual, making scientific observations.

  In the cold January of 1880, Charles’s children, concerned that he never dressed warmly enough, gave him a fur coat. He was delighted at the thought but told Emma privately that he doubted he would ever need to wear such a thing. He wrote to the children, “The coat…will never warm my body so much as your dear affection has warmed my heart.” Though he did add, “I should not be myself if I did not protest that you have all been shamefully extravagant to spend so much money over your old father.” But he put on the coat almost immediately and wore it so constantly, as Emma told Lenny, that he was “afraid it will soon be worn out.”

  That summer Emma became obsessed with the worms, too. Charles had taken to attempting to train them, but Emma told Lenny he “does not make much progress, as they can neither see nor hear.” So they could not respond to cues they were given. Still she spent hours with Charles in the garden, watching the worms. She wrote, “They are, however, amusing and spend hours in seizing hold of the edge of a cabbage leaf and trying in vain to pull it into their holes.”

  In 1881, Erasmus Darwin died and was buried at Down. When Horace’s first child was born in December, he named him Erasmus. They had all loved their uncle. As William said, “To me there was a charm in his manner that I never saw in anybody else.”

  That year Charles also published The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits. In the conclusion, he wrote, “Worms have played a more important part in the history of the world than most persons would at first suppose.” And more people were interested in worms than Charles would have thought. This book sold better than any of his others!

  In early 1882, Charles suffered several heart attacks. Though not fatal, they left him weak and unable to walk without pain in his chest.

  In March he was so sick that it was an occasion on the days he got up to look out the window. But then, when spring came and it got warmer—“exquisite weather,” Emma wrote—Charles was able to get outside. He had lost his lifelong pleasure of walking, but he spent many happy hours sitting in the orchard with Emma. They both knew that the end was probably near as they sat and listened to the birds sing in the spring sunshine and admired the crocuses opening up.

  In many ways, both Charles and Emma had been preparing for his death since they were first married. He had been so sickly, and it was really only in his last years of life that his health was fairly normal. Emma nursed him one last time and recorded his symptoms in her diary. And as she sat by his bed, he told her what he needed her and the family to know. “Tell all my children to remember how good they have been to me,” he whispered to her.

  Like Annie, Charles was always polite and grateful when he was sick. “I was so sorry for you, but I could not help you,” he told Emma, thanking her for all her years of taking care of him. And, as he often had told her over the course of their lives together, “It’s almost worthwhile to be sick to be nursed by you.”

  On Monday, April 17, Emma wrote in her little diary that Charles did some work and went into the orchard with her twice. On Tuesday, she wrote “ditto”—another day of work and sitting in the orchard. But then, at midnight, he had a “fatal attack.”

  The next morning, Charles reassured Emma, “I am not the least afraid of death.”


  As he slipped slowly away into unconsciousness, he told her what he had said many times before, what she already knew, but what he had to say again: “Remember what a good wife you have been to me.”

  Emma held Charles to her one last time.

  Chapter 32

  Happy Is the Man

  His body is buried in peace, but his name liveth evermore.

  —FROM GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL’S FUNERAL ANTHEM,

  SUNG AS THE COFFIN OF CHARLES DARWIN

  WAS LOWERED INTO THE GRAVE

  On Wednesday, April 19, 1882, Emma wrote in her diary, “3½.” Charles had died at three thirty, with Emma holding him. Etty, Elizabeth, and Frank were also by his side. Charles was seventy-three.

  That afternoon, Emma went down to the drawing room for tea as usual. Etty and the others watched in wonder as she let herself be amused. She smiled a little, and once almost even laughed. It was so like Emma to bear her grief alone, to hold it inside and be strong for the others, who were crying inconsolably. Charles’s absence would hit Emma again and again over the years, painfully, but for now she had a family to take care of and a funeral to consider.

  Emma wanted Charles buried at the church graveyard at Down. He had wanted to be buried at Down, too, in the village where he had spent most of his life. That was where the two babies lay; that was where Charles had buried his brother Erasmus the year before. Down was near Emma; it was home.

  The next day, as the rest of the family began to arrive, Polly, the dog who had been so attached to Charles, suddenly grew deathly ill. Frank had to put her down. In her diary, Emma wrote “Polly died” and “all the sons arrived.”

  They buried Polly under a Kentish Beauty apple tree.

  The undertaker came to Down House and laid Charles out in the coffin on his wheeled cart. The plan was still to bury him in the church graveyard near his babies and his brother. But when Frank informed Huxley, Hooker, Lubbock, and other friends of his father’s death, they felt strongly that Charles should be given a hero’s burial. A quick campaign began, and within a day or two, twenty members of Parliament signed an edict that Charles should be buried in Westminster Abbey. He would be laid to rest in the nave, next to Sir John Herschel, the astronomer, whose quote calling the origin of species the “mystery of mysteries” Charles had used in the introduction to his Origin of Species. He would also be near the great Sir Isaac Newton. Emma, who finally agreed that Charles would have graciously accepted the offer, only wished he could be closer to his friend Charles Lyell, who was buried in the nave of the abbey, too.