Creation (Movie Tie-In)

by Randal Keynes

  This book explores Darwin’s life with his family and his thinking about human nature in the interweavings around Annie and her memory.

  CHAPTER ONE

  MACAW COTTAGE

  Marriage—First home in London—First child—

  Annie’s birth—Infancy

  WHEN AT TWENTY-NINE Charles Darwin thought about marry ing, he took a piece of paper and wrote: “This is the question.” Under “Not Marry” he jotted down: “Freedom to go where one liked—choice of society and little of it. Conversation of clever men at clubs. Not forced to visit relatives and to bend in every trifle—to have the expense and anxiety of children—perhaps quarrelling—loss of time . . . How should I manage all my business if I were obliged to go every day walking with my wife. Eheu! I never should know French, or see the Continent, or go to America, or go up in a Balloon.” Under “Marry” he noted: “Children (if it please God), constant companion (and friend in old age) who will feel interested in one.” He weighed all the points for and against, and made up his mind. “My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, and nothing after all. No, no, won’t do. Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London house. Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, and books and music perhaps . . . Marry—Marry—Marry. Q.E.D.”

  A few days later, in July 1838, he visited his uncle, Josiah Wedgwood II, at his home, Maer Hall, near the Wedgwood factory in Staffordshire. Josiah’s daughter Emma was there. She was a year older than Charles and had been a companion to him since childhood. She was lively and attractive and had been courted by many young men, but she was now looking after her elderly mother who had lost her mind, and faced the prospect of remaining single. Charles had met her in London earlier in the month, and they now had a long talk together by the fire in the library. He decided that he wanted her to be his wife. She was very happy in his company, and felt tentatively that if he saw more of her, he might really like her. When he proposed three months later, she accepted him eagerly. She went straight to her Sunday school for the village children after the “important interview,” but “found I was turning into an idiot, and so came away.” She wrote to her Aunt Jessie Sismondi: “He is the most open transparent man I ever saw and every word expresses his real thoughts.” He was “the most affectionate person possible.” Like many of the Wedgwood family, she often found it difficult to show her feelings. She felt it was a great advantage to have the power of expressing affection, and was sure that he would “make his children very fond of him.”

  Charles and Emma lost no time in planning for the future. They agreed to live in London while Charles was tied there by his scientific work, and the next month he was back at his lodgings in Great Marlborough Street, house-hunting anxiously. Emma wrote to him from Maer: “It is very well I am coming to look after you, my poor old man, for it is quite evident that you are on the verge of insanity and we should have had to advertise you—‘Lost in the vicinity of Bloomsbury, a tall thin gentleman &c. &c., quite harmless. Whoever will bring him back shall be handsomely rewarded.’ ”

  After the five years from 1831 that he had spent on HMS Beagle, sailing round the world as ship’s naturalist, and his two years back in London since then working on his collections and findings from the voyage, Charles was looking forward to this change in his life. A few days before their wedding he wrote to Emma: “I was thinking this morning how on earth it came that I, who am fond of talking and am scarcely ever out of spirits, should so entirely rest my notions of happiness on quietness and a good deal of solitude; but I believe the explanation is very simple, and I mention it, because it will give you hopes that I shall gradually grow less of a brute.” During the voyage, “the whole of my pleasure was derived from what passed in my mind, whilst admiring views by myself, travelling across the wild deserts or glorious forests, or pacing the deck of the poor little Beagle at night. Excuse this much egotism. I give it to you, because I think you will humanise me, and soon teach me there is greater happiness, than building theories and accumulating facts in silence and solitude.” Charles had been thinking about matters of great importance to him. The theories he had been building were parts of the idea he was forming about the origin of species. He was having to work “in silence and solitude” because he recognised how fiercely his ideas would be attacked as soon as he revealed them to anyone, and he could not risk an argument until he was sure of his ground. His hope that Emma would humanise him was a deep wish that she could draw him out of his lonely work into the company and care of a close family circle.

  But he could joke about the difficulties she would have. After spending a morning with his friend, the geologist Charles Lyell, he wrote to her: “I was quite ashamed of myself today; for we talked for half an hour unsophisticated geology, with poor Mrs Lyell sitting by, a monument of patience. I want practice in ill-treating the female sex. I did not observe Lyell had any compunction. I hope to harden my conscience in time: few husbands seem to find it difficult to effect this.”

  He found a house for them in Upper Gower Street, a long terrace on what was then the northern edge of London. The street led to the recently founded University College with its teaching hospital across the road, and a school whose pupils played in the grounds in front of the main building. University College was known as “the Godless College.” Under the guidance of the Whig politician Lord Brougham and other progressive reformers, it gave literary and scientific education to students of all backgrounds and denominations. The main building with its grand ten-column portico was modelled on a temple in Athens. Together with the monumental Euston Arch (now sadly destroyed), St. Pancras New Church, the Royal College of Surgeons and the great colonnade of the British Museum, University College gave the neighbourhood the distinctive high-minded tone of the “Greek” revival. The imposing new buildings stood for progressive enterprise, free inquiry and the life of the mind. The people who commissioned them felt they were constructing a “brave new world.” In his “Ode to Liberty,” Shelley had written of Athens with its “crest of columns” set on the will of man “as on a mount of diamond.”

  Upper Gower Street by George Scharf in 1840

  Many of the hospital’s patients were poor people from the crowded slums immediately behind the smart terraces and public buildings of the neighbourhood. Charles Dickens said at a fund-raising dinner that the hospital represented “the largest liberality of opinion. It excludes no one patient, student, doctor, surgeon or nurse because of religious creed. It represents the complete relinquishment of claims to coerce the judgement or the conscience of any human being.” Like his namesake, Charles Darwin made regular donations.

  The Darwins’ neighbours in the terrace were well-to-do professionals—surgeons, lawyers, artists, a publisher and a famous Shakespearean clown. Emma’s brother Hensleigh Wedgwood lived a few doors away with his wife Fanny, daughter of Sir James Mackintosh, who was one of the governors of University College and known as the “Whig Cicero.” The mews at the back of the long narrow gardens were tenanted by coachmen, stable keepers and their families.

  The house Charles found had a kitchen and a room for the manservant in the basement, the dining room and a study for Charles on the ground floor, the main drawing room on the first floor and a small back room with a bay window looking out over the garden. The family bedrooms were on the second floor, and the cook and maids slept in the attic rooms. Charles planned to move in before the wedding, and jotted in his notebook: “Remnants of carpets; mat for hall . . . white curtains washed; two easy chairs; blinds in red rooms washed.” The yellow curtains in the drawing room clashed with the blue paintwork and the furniture, and there was a dead dog in the garden. Charles kept the yellow curtains but had the dog removed, and looked forward to walking in the garden. He was grateful for the plants and the open air, but the atmosphere was poisoned by the smoke of the city. A physician who lived nearby wrote that the trees and bushes in the square
s and gardens were stunted and often died. “If you pluck a branch from one of them, your fingers are smeared with soot . . . By the time a person has been in the streets two or three hours, the glory of the laundress and the clear-starcher is laid, not in the dust, but in smoke, which forms itself into myriads of flocculi, designated ‘blacks,’ and the blacks are by no means capricious, for they stick most assiduously to ladies’ and gentlemen’s dresses, if the weather be more than ordinarily dense.”

  Charles looked forward to Emma’s arrival. “Is it not our house?” he wrote to her. “What is there, from me the geologist to the black sparrows in the garden, which is not your own property?” Thinking back in later years, he often laughed over the house’s ugliness. Remembering splendours in the tropical forests of South America, he called it “Macaw Cottage” because the furniture in the drawing room combined all the macaw’s colours “in hideous discord.”

  Charles moved in on the last day of December. His servant Syms Covington, who had been his assistant on HMS Beagle, helped him load two large vans with his “specimens of natural history.” A few dozen drawers of shells were carried by hand. He wrote to Emma that one of the front attics was quite filled, and was to be called the Museum. “I wish I could make the drawing room look as comfortable as my own studio; but I dare say a fire and a little disorder will temporarily make things better.”

  Charles and Emma were married at Maer in January 1839. Emma wrote that on their first Thursday together in London they “went slopping through the melted snow to Broadwood’s,” where they tried a pianoforte and asked if it could be delivered to their home. On Saturday they walked out again and as they came back met “a pianoforte van in Gower Street, to which Charles shouted to know whether it was coming to No. 12, and learnt to our great satisfaction that it was. Besides its own merits, it makes the room look so much more comfortable . . . I have given Charles a large dose of music every evening.”

  When the schoolchildren were not playing in the college grounds, the neighbourhood was quiet. There were no shops or pubs on the street, and the road between University College and the hospital was a private right-of-way with gates that were often closed at night. Charles and Emma heard a strange “wailing whistle” from time to time, a sound of the new railway age from Euston Station. Locomotives approaching on the London & Birmingham Railway did not run down the last falling mile to the terminus because they could not manage the steep return climb. The carriages were uncoupled and rolled down on their own. They were hauled back up on a continuous chain drawn by two stationary steam engines at the top of the long incline, and staff at the station would signal that they were on their way by blasts on a great organ pipe operated by compressed air.

  Charles might also have heard, or thought he heard, or sensed, cries from the operating theatre in the hospital across the road. The surgeon, Robert Liston, had been a well-known figure at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh when Charles studied medicine there twelve years before. Charles had given up his medical studies, partly because he was distressed by patients’ suffering during operations without anaesthetic. At University College Hospital, Liston continued to improve the methods that had gained him his reputation at Edinburgh. His great skill was speed, essential for any major surgery because of the trauma of pain and loss of blood. He could amputate a leg in under thirty seconds. A case-book for his operations, with doodles of cut-throat razors on the cover, is still kept in the medical school. In January 1840, a country girl aged nineteen was admitted with a tumour of the right lower jaw. “The patient being seated in a chair, Mr Liston extracted the lateral incisor tooth . . . The jaw was then partly sawn through and its division completed with the cutting pliers . . . The operation lasted eight or nine minutes and was borne with the most heroic fortitude by the patient.” Six years later, effective anaesthetics came into use. In 1846, Liston performed the first operation under ether in London, and a newspaper proclaimed: “We have conquered pain!”

  But the wailing whistle and patients’ cries were some way away. Charles found the stillness in his new study a welcome contrast to the many noises he had had to put up with in Great Marlborough Street. He wrote to his cousin and close friend William Darwin Fox, a clergyman in Cheshire: “If one is quiet in London, there is nothing like its quietness—there is a grandeur about its smoky fogs, and the dull distant sounds of cabs and coaches.” Emma, though, remembered “how the passage of a rattling cab seemed in the night a matter of eternity.”

  Two days after Charles and Emma’s wedding, his elder sister Caroline lost her six-week-old baby. Emma’s sister Elizabeth wrote: “She does her utmost not to yield, but she is very unwell, and I never felt greater pity for anyone in my life.” Caroline’s husband Josiah Wedgwood III was now running the factory for his father with some reluctance. Elizabeth wrote bitterly that the loss of their child would make him “not so unwilling to go as usual to his employment, but what poor Caroline will find to do I cannot think; for the last so many months the thoughts of this precious child and the preparations for it have occupied her in an intense way that I never saw in anyone else.”

  In April, Emma found that she was pregnant. In August she noted in her diary: “Half way now, I think, from symptoms.” She and Charles were living a full life, visiting and receiving many friends including their cousin Dr. Henry Holland and his wife, the Lyells, Thomas and Jane Carlyle, the mathematician Charles Babbage (known in the family as Baggage), Professor Richard Owen of the Royal College of Surgeons and Harriet Martineau the writer. Charles and Emma went together to the Zoological Gardens, to Handel’s Messiah and Bellini’s La Sonnambula. They sampled sermons at a number of churches, and attended the Unitarian Chapel in Little Portland Street, another new “Greek” building, where Hensleigh and Fanny Wedgwood worshipped. The minister, James Tagart, preached the future triumph of Unitarian Christianity, rejecting the doctrine of the depravity of human nature and emphasising social concord, domestic piety and fraternal union.

  When Emma was due to give birth, her sister Elizabeth came to be with her, and Charles engaged a doctor to attend. There were different views at the time about childbirth and the pain of delivery. Some considered “the endurance of pain during delivery essential to the fulfilment of the primaeval curse, consequent upon the temptation and fall of our first mother, Eve.” But one obstetrician wrote that childbirth was a natural process and suggested that “no sentiment is more pregnant with mischief than the opinion which almost universally prevails, that this process is inevitably one of difficulty and danger.”

  Another obstetrician suggested how the doctor should cope with the shyness of a young lady having her first child. “In the case of a woman who has been long married, and has borne children before, there is no difficulty or delay on the score of delicacy. The nurse brings you towels and hog’s lard at once . . . But a newly-married woman dislikes and dreads the examination; and, therefore, you sit down by the bedside, and talk to her about other things. Presently the nurse asks how the baby is lying; and this makes the lady anxious about it. A pain comes on, and you relieve it by putting your hand on the sacrum. When the next pain comes on, introduce one or two fingers of the other hand into the vagina; ascertain that the passages are all right; and the arch of the pubis, and the outlet of the pelvis, natural. Then feel for the os uteri . . .” After the delivery, the doctor should tie the umbilical cord, place a cap on the baby’s head and hand it to the companion who would have a flannel or woollen shawl to wrap the child in. “Do not stay to nurse your patient . . . for it alarms her, and you get bothered.”

  Charles and Emma’s first child was born on 29 December. It was a boy, and he was christened William Erasmus, both Darwin family names. They called him Doddy first, then Willy as he grew into childhood. Charles wrote to his cousin Fox: “What an awful affair a confinement is; it knocked me up, almost as much as it did Emma herself.” He mentioned in another letter that he had become a father. “The event occurred last Friday week: it is a little prince.” On
10 February, Emma wrote in her diary: “Baby smiled for the first time.” And the next day, as she thought of spring flowers in the dirt and cold of the London winter, “Baby made little noises. Got the hyacinths.” Charles wrote to Robert FitzRoy, his captain on HMS Beagle, about “my little animalcule of a son.” This word was a naturalist’s term for living organisms so small that they could not be seen by the naked eye; FitzRoy might have thought of the creatures that Charles had fished eagerly from the sea onto the deck of HMS Beagle, and studied so intently with his microscope in the poop cabin.

  Charles was surprised by his absorption in his son. He wrote to Fox in June: “He is a charming little fellow, and I had not the smallest conception there was so much in a five-month baby. You will perceive by this, that I have a fine degree of paternal fervour.” “He is a prodigy of beauty and intellect. He is so charming that I cannot pretend to any modesty. I defy anybody to flatter us on our baby, for I defy anyone to say anything in its praise, of which we are not fully conscious.”

  Emma was to have eight more children in the next twelve years. Her life was a treadmill of pregnancy, delivery, suckling, weaning and waiting for the next conception. After bearing her fifth child, she wondered if she might have “the luck to escape having another soon,” but Charles does not seem to have appreciated her feelings. Shortly afterwards she wrote about the possibility of “having a respite” for another year, but her sixth child was conceived five months later.