Later in the day his children would often walk with him down the hill to the Big Woods, and do a little collecting as they went. “He seemed to know nearly all the beetles and was immensely interested when any of the rarer sort were found.” As he thought about evolution and adaptation in nature, he found points to study in the wild orchids of the neighbourhood and their intricate arrangements for pollination by the insects that fed on their nectar. Etty remembered that her father had “a kind of sacred feeling” about the orchids they found, and taught all his children “to have this peculiar feeling.” A special place above the quiet Cudham Valley where fly and musk orchids grew among the junipers, and birds-nest orchids flowered under the beech boughs, was known in the family as “Orchis Bank.”
In a book about country pursuits read by the children, the author suggested that “While there are boys and birds-nests, there will always be birds-nesting . . . It is an instinct, a second nature, a part and parcel of the very constitution of a lad.” Charles had the instinct from childhood. Francis remembered that he “always found birds’ nests even up to the last years of his life, and we, as children, considered that he had a special genius in this direction. In his quiet prowls he came across the less common birds, but I fancy he used to conceal it from me as a little boy, because he observed the agony of mind which I endured at not having seen the siskin or goldfinch or whatever it may have been.”
For the children, the main pattern of life was set by the seasons. Francis, as a child, found “something impressive and almost sacred” in the changes. The onset of winter was heralded for him by “the appearance of puddles frozen to a shining white; mysterious because the frost had drunk them dry in roofing them with ice, and especially delightful in the sharp crackling sound they gave when trodden on.” A “wicked groaning crack . . . ran round the solitary pond on which we skated, as it unwillingly settled down to bear us on its surface. It had a threat in it, and reminded us how helpless we were, that the pond-spirit was our master and had our lives in its grip. Another winter sound was the hooting of invisible owls, boldly calling to each other from one moon-lit tree to another.” At Christmas, ivy, holly, yew and other evergreens were brought inside to decorate the hearths.
In the spring, Francis remembered “the querulous sound of the lambs, staggering half-fledged in the cold fields among the half-eaten turnips beside their dirty yellow mothers.” On May Day the village children carried cherry boughs tied with bunches of flowers as they went from house to house singing and collecting pennies for the May Pole. After mid-summer the Darwin children would wake early one morning and learn from the sound of scythes being whetted that the mowers had arrived to harvest the hay. “The field had been a great sea of tall grasses, pink with sorrel and white with dog-daisies, a sacred sea into which we might not enter. But now we could at least follow the mowers, and watch the growth of the tracks made by their shifting feet, and listen to the swish of the scythes as the swathes of fallen grass and flowers also grew in length. There was something military in their rhythm, and something relentless and machine-like in their persistence.” Francis rode in the hay-cart and watched as the sea-green stack grew mysteriously in the corner of the field. “The inside of the hay-cart was enchantingly polished, and also full of hay-seed.”
After the hay harvest, high summer meant for Etty “the rattle of the fly-wheel of the well, drawing water for the garden; the lawn burnt brown, the garden a blaze of colour, the six oblong beds in front of the drawing room windows, with phloxes, lilies and larkspurs in the middle, and portulacas, gazanias and other low-growing plants in front; the row of lime-trees humming with bees, my father lying on the grass under them; the children playing about, with probably a kitten and a dog, and my mother dressed in lilac muslin, wondering why the black-caps did not here sing the same song as they did at Maer.”
With few friends in the village, the children loved visitors. When Charles’s older brother Erasmus came, they attached themselves to him all day and he drew demons and imps for them. “Uncle Ras” was very tall and slight, and his movements had a languid grace. Etty remembered his “long thin hands which were wonderfully clever and neat in all practical handiwork.” His face “lit up when he spoke, from a habitually patient and sad expression.” He was a lonely and unhappy man who endured chronic ill-health with opium and self-deprecating wit. Francis held him in great affection. Jane Carlyle enjoyed Erasmus’s sparse, sardonic comments, and her husband Thomas called him “a most diverse kind of mortal . . . He has something of [the] original and sarcastically ingenious in him; one of the sincerest, naturally truest, and most modest of men.”
Erasmus was close to Hensleigh and Fanny Wedgwood and their children. They kept a number of the drawings he made for them. One for Alfred, who was a year younger than Annie, showed monkeys, parrots and a giraffe at the zoo, with a snake, a lion looking threateningly at a grinning child in a plumed hat, and a strange toothed bird flying past. Erasmus once wrote to Alfred: “I have nobody to play with, so I hope very soon to see you again when you have done travelling about the country. What a great many places you have been to . . . you will be able to tell me very long stories indeed—one of those nice stories without any end to them.” Snow Wedgwood, Alfred’s elder sister, wrote many years later of their uncle’s “quaint, delicate humour, the superficial intolerance, the deep springs of pity, the peculiar mixture of something pathetic with a sort of gay scorn, entirely remote from contempt.”
Annie’s favourite was Joseph Hooker the young botanist. Once in the early years, he sent a cake from London for the family. When Charles wrote to thank him, he mentioned that Annie wanted to know whether it was “the gentleman what played with us so.” Hooker would come to stay for a week at a stretch, bringing his own work, so that Charles could put questions to him whenever he wanted. Hooker told William many years later that Emma did everything to make him feel at home. “Often I worked in the dining room . . . through which your mother often passed on her way to the store closet in the end, when she would take a pear, or some good thing, and lay it by my side with a charming smile as she passed out. Then in the evening she always played to me, and sometimes asked me to whistle to her accompaniment of some simple air!” He added, “There were long walks, romps with the children on hands and knees, music that haunts me still.” Francis remembered the children eating gooseberries with him in the kitchen garden. “The love of gooseberries was a bond between us which had no existence in the case of our uncles, who either ate no gooseberries or preferred to do so in solitude.”
For everyone in the family, reading and being read to was an essential part of everyday life, and there were books, periodicals and papers of different kinds in almost every room. Long letters came from sisters, brothers, cousins and friends; they were read aloud and passed round. Charles and Emma read the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly Review and the Athenaeum. Charles was often unhappy with The Times but could not manage without it. He once commented that it was “getting more detestable (but that is too weak a word) than ever. My good wife wishes to give it up, but I tell her that is a pitch of heroism to which only a woman is equal.”
Drawing by Erasmus Alvey Darwin for Alfred Wedgwood
Charles and Emma listed books to look at and noted what they thought of them. They bought books regularly from their old book-seller in London; they borrowed popular novels and books of travels from Mudie’s Circulating Library in New Oxford Street; they also took books out from the London Library in St. James’s Square, and they bought cheap “yellowbacks,” the paperbacks of the Victorian age, at the bookstall at London Bridge Station. They read Dickens’s novels and shared them with the children. Etty was nicknamed “Trotty Veck” after the old ticket-porter in The Chimes, who “trotted everywhere” and “loved to earn his money.”
Much of Annie’s reading was moral. The children had Maria Edgeworth’s Popular Tales with their rational, liberal and gently put lessons. The best-known story was “The Purple Jar” about a thought
less girl who pressed her mother to give her the beautiful jar which she had seen in an apothecary’s window, rather than a new pair of shoes. She found that the purple colour was in the water, not the glass, and her shoes wore out. “Oh mamma,” she said at the end, “how I wish that I had chosen the shoes—they would have been of so much more use to me than that jar; however, I am sure—no, not quite sure—but, I hope, I shall be wiser another time.”
Annie read Gulliver’s Travels, the Arabian Nights, The Last of the Mohicans and The Children of the New Forest. Emma had a small book of Madame d’Aulnoy’s Fairy Tales from her childhood, and the family had a taste for magic and enchantment which would have surprised many for whom Wedgwood was a by-word for seriousness, sobriety and reserve. Emma’s brother Harry, who had trained as a barrister but lived on his inheritance, wrote stories which were passed round the family. One tale of Eastern magic he called The Bird Talisman. Emma read it to her children and grandchildren, and our families have known and loved it ever since.
“There once was an old hermit, who lived in a hut near the source of the Ganges. He was very kind to all birds and beasts; and they were so accustomed to him that the very wild beasts were neither afraid of him nor would hurt him. One day, as he sat by the stream watching two daws that were flying about and playing together in the air, one of the birds happened to fall into the water, which was very rapid, and was swept away by the stream, and would have been drowned if the old hermit had not run to its help, and, stepping into the water, pulled out the daw with his hooked staff. He laid the bird in the sun, and as soon as it was dry the two daws both flew away to a high rock, just above where the Ganges rises. The hermit saw them fly into a little cave, halfway up the rock, and presently come out again, and fly back towards him; they alighted close to him, and one of them laid a ring down at his feet. He picked it up and put it on his finger, and he was immediately astonished to hear the daw speak to him and say . . .”
While Uncle Harry told his tales of oriental magic, Charles was exploring another world, real but also vividly imagined, with Annie, Willy and Etty. During the 1840s, Charles lived in fear that his wealth might be destroyed in a financial crisis. Many people at the time thought of emigration, and parents would read books like Captain Marryat’s The Settlers in Canada with their children as a way of thinking through the idea with them. In 1850, Charles wrote to his former servant Syms Covington who was then settled in Australia: “You have an immense, incalculable advantage in living in a country in which your children are sure to get on if industrious. I assure you that, though I am a rich man, when I think of the future I very often ardently wish I was settled in one of our colonies, for I have now four sons (seven children in all, and more coming), and what on earth to bring them up to I don’t know. A young man may here slave for years in any profession and not make a penny. Many people think that Californian gold will half ruin all those who live on the interest of accumulated gold or capital, and if that does happen I will certainly emigrate.” He wrote to his cousin Fox around the same time that he fancied most “the middle states of North America.”
Charles read in The Emigrant’s Manual about “those vast districts of prairie and woodland watered by the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio, and their tributaries.” “The attraction of the prairie consists in its extent, its carpet of verdure and flowers, its undulating surface, its groves, and the fringe of timber by which it is surrounded . . . Although Ohio has already become so populous, it is surprising to the traveller to observe what an amount of forest is yet unsubdued.”
Charles bought a book for children, Our Cousins in Ohio, which gave a vivid impression of the life the family might be able to enjoy there. The boy and girl in the book,Willie and Florence, lived with their parents in a homestead on the banks of the Ohio River. The author, Mary Howitt, a London Quaker, based their story on letters from her sister who had emigrated to America and settled in Athens, Ohio. The homestead was a large house with grounds just like Down House, but the surroundings were described as an earthly paradise on the edge of a wilderness. Beyond the family’s pasture and a neighbour’s wood was an “unbroken portion of the primeval forest . . . left uncleared . . . for fire-wood.” “Here grew hickory, maple, birch, and walnut trees—the splendid American linden—the red-bud or Judas tree, by the budding of which the Indian, in olden time, regulated the sowing of his corn. The wild clematis, sweet-briar, and American hawthorn, were among its abundant undergrowth; and here also were thickets of blackberries, which produced such splendid fruit as English children can form no idea of.” In a wood near their home the children found “the toothwort, a beautiful waxen-like flower with extremely elegant leaves; the snake-wort and the poke-weed; and here rabbits, chippy-monks or ground-squirrels, and snakes, abounded.” Annie knew the strange albino toothwort growing in the undergrowth of the Sand-walk copse, but some of the other plants she could only dream about. “In passing one deep-wooded hollow, the fragrant pine-apple odour of the pawpaw came so strong and rich that they stopped the carriage and Willie and his father went down to gather them.” Other plants, though familiar to Annie in the garden at Down, sounded magical in the wilds of Ohio. “Here and there, the trunks and arms of gigantic dead trees would be wreathed with Virginian creepers of the most intense scarlet, often starting forth from the very thickest of the forest, like a fantastic scarlet tower.”
Mary Howitt gave a full account of the good life for the settlers in Ohio, and the harder lot of the “movers”—farmers from Indiana with loads of wheat to sell in the city, and others moving back after failure. She also wrote sympathetically about the many former slaves who had bought their freedom or escaped along the Ohio from the slave states to the south, and had settled in shanty towns around the towns and homesteads.
When Charles noted that he had read the book, he referred to it as “life in Ohio.” It was another life to talk about with the children.
Charles and Emma had also to think of formal education for their sons and daughters. Both Darwins and Wedgwoods had a long-standing interest in advanced approaches. Charles’s grandfather Erasmus had been interested in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s revolutionary ideas in Émile and had sought him out when David Hume brought him to England in 1766 to escape from his enemies. Rousseau argued that children were naturally good, against the orthodox Christian view that they were corrupted by sin from birth. He suggested that we should “love childhood; promote its games, its pleasures, its amiable instinct.” Children should be taught through their own experience rather than by instruction. “Nature wants children to be children before becoming men.” Education in what he called the “age of nature,” up to twelve, should be “purely negative,” not teaching virtue or truth but allowing the child to run free in the country and securing his natural goodness and understanding from vice and error. Rousseau had many practical suggestions: one was that if a child was afraid of the dark you should not try to reason with him, but should help him to conquer his fear with games. Build a labyrinth of tables, chairs and screens; hide little prizes in it, and “let your child be laughing as he enters the dark; let laughter overtake him again before he leaves it.”
Erasmus Darwin read Émile with many of his scientific friends, and when his daughters asked him to sketch out a plan for a girls’ boarding school they set up in 1794, the scheme he offered reflected a number of Rousseau’s themes. In one passage which Charles quoted in an essay he wrote about his grandfather, Erasmus suggested that “a sympathy with the pains and pleasures of others is the foundation of all our social virtues,” and it could best be encouraged by example and “expressing our own sympathy.”
The Wedgwoods were more serious and analytical. Charles and Emma’s uncle Tom Wedgwood had met the radical philosopher William Godwin in 1797 and explained to him his proposal for a “nursery for genius” in which infants would be sheltered from the “chaos of perceptions” in normal life, so that the first sense-experiences could be simplified and rendered intense. Tom drew his ideas
from the associationist psychology of David Hartley. The children would be kept in rooms with plain grey walls and offered “one or two vivid objects” from time to time to see and touch. Mutual friends had told Tom that two young men, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who were living in Devon at the time, were “disengaged” and might be suitable as superintendents of the nursery. Tom got to know them both well but they were working on their Lyrical Ballads, and were not prepared to help in the experiment.
The next year,Tom’s brother Josiah II, Emma’s father, drew up a plan for his governess to follow with his children. He had no time for Tom’s theories, but based his scheme firmly on Rousseau’s sensibility and his practical approach. Emma, her brothers and her sisters were “allowed to act in an unrestrained manner without rules and precepts,” as their father felt that “every act of interference does harm” to a child’s nature. “The children may be taught to exercise their faculties by inducing them to answer their own questions, either experimentally, or by having the subject so presented to them that the inference shall be sufficiently clear without its being drawn for them.” One comment of Josiah II’s was characteristic in its relaxed tone and quiet challenge. “Toads, newts, lizards, frogs, beetles, worms &c are innocent, and it is adding very unnecessarily to the evils of life to teach a child to consider them as disgusting objects.” Josiah II noticed that Elizabeth had a fear of wolves in the deep evening shadows of a long room upstairs, and wrote cheerfully: “Try Rousseau’s plan of sports in the dark.” A few years later, when Emma was ten, a visitor observed the effects of “the Wedgwood education.” Emma and her sister Fanny were “happy, gay, amiable, sensible, and . . . not particularly energetic in learning.”
Creation (Movie Tie-In) Page 13
