Creation (Movie Tie-In)

by Randal Keynes

  At the time, Charles was being brought up by his elder sisters Caroline and Susan. They admired Rousseau’s Swiss follower, Johann Hein rich Pestalozzi, who had pioneered teaching children through participation and discovery. “The child must be led to see for himself that which he is to learn, and not to take it upon the mere authority of the teacher.” When Caroline and Susan set up an infant school for the children of the poor neighbourhood near their house in Shrewsbury, they equipped it with the toys and learning apparatus that Pestalozzi recommended.

  When Charles and Emma had their own children to bring up, they read Levana, a well-known book by another follower of Rousseau, the German Romantic novelist Jean Paul Friedrich Richter. He wrote about childhood with a sensitivity and appreciation equal to Rousseau’s. In a chapter on “the joyousness of children,” he asked: “Should they have anything else?” He suggested that “Play is the first poetry of the human being . . . Never forget that the games of children with inanimate playthings are so important because for them there are only living things.” A parent who has a piano should call his children together “and let them every day for an hour hop and turn by his playing, in pairs, in rows, in circles . . . and always in any way they like. In the child happiness dances; in the man, at most, it only smiles or weeps.” On quarrels and argument, “Never let the contest of parental and childish obstinacy take place.” And on discipline, “A serious punishment of a child is scarcely so important as the quarter of an hour immediately succeeding, and the transition to forgiveness.”

  Charles and Emma’s approach with their children was undemanding and liberal; they saw little value in discipline and learning by rote, but wanted to encourage their children to think for themselves. Etty remembered “rejoicing in this sense of freedom.” “Our father and mother would not even wish to know what we were doing or thinking unless we wished to tell.” But if one of the children did want to tell, Charles would make them feel that their opinions and thoughts were valuable to him. “He cared for all our pursuits and interests, and lived our lives with us in a way that very few fathers do . . . He always put his whole mind into answering any of our questions.”

  Charles was eager that his children should share his interests but felt strongly that he should not force them to. George wrote that “he never tried to make us take an interest in science . . . When however we freely exhibited any wish to learn, there was no amount of trouble which he would not take, and the result was of course far more powerful than if it had been at his urging.” Charles once commented to a friend that giving specimens to children in order to give them a taste for natural history “would tend to destroy such taste. Youngsters must themselves be collectors to acquire a taste; and if I had a collection of English Lepidoptera, I would be systematically most miserly and not give my boys half-a-dozen butterflies in the year.” But Francis remembered “the pleasure of turning out my bottle of dead beetles for my father to name, and the excitement, in which he fully shared, when any of them proved to be uncommon ones.” Charles wrote to Fox about Francis’s collecting: “My blood boiled with old ardour when he caught a Licinus—a prize unknown to me.” Another time he wrote: “I feel like an old war-horse at the sound of the trumpet, when I read about the capturing of rare beetles. Is this not a magnanimous simile for a decayed entomologist?”

  Charles explained to Etty and George how the steam engine worked, and at one time when George was eight or nine, Charles read Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Optics with him every day. Mrs. Marcet was a well-known writer for children; the Wedgwoods and Darwins had known her in London in the 1820s. The Conversations on Optics was part of her Conversations on Natural Philosophy, which were widely read and went into many editions alongside her Conversations on Chemistry and Conversations on Political Economy. One striking point about Mrs. Marcet’s books is that she wrote her often highly technical dialogues equally for girls and boys. In her Conversations on Optics, the teacher, Mrs. Bryan, helped the twelve-year-old Emily instruct her young sister Caroline in the natural sciences, showing that they were not too difficult “when familiarly explained.” She covered physics and optics with careful explanations of the principles involved, explaining, for example, how colour was a property of the light reflected from objects, not of the objects themselves. Caroline commented: “What a melancholy reflection it is, that all nature, which appears so beautifully diversified with colours, should be one uniform mass of blackness!” Mrs. Bryan replied: “Is nature less pleasing by deriving colour as well as illumination from the rays of light; and are colours less beautiful, for being accidental, rather than essential properties of bodies?”

  Annie liked to name the precise colours of things she found, and often imitated her father by matching objects with the colour samples in a small book he had used for describing specimens during his travels on HMS Beagle. Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours edited by Patrick Syme, a flower painter in Edinburgh, gave a set of colour samples with names, and for each, offered a list of examples in different parts of the natural world, animal, vegetable and mineral. Charles would have been able to show Annie the minerals from his collection of specimens. Many of the other things she knew in the garden and countryside around the house. For wine yellow, Syme offered the body of a silk moth, white currants and saxon topaz. For tile red he gave the breast of the cock bullfinch, the shrubby pimpernel and porcelain jasper; for ash grey he offered the breast of the long-tailed hen titmouse, fresh wood ashes and flint, and for bluish black, the crowberry, black cobalt ochre and a large black slug.

  Charles was anxious that his boys should receive the formal instruction they would need to enter a profession, but he was unhappy with the emphasis in the school syllabus on Latin and Greek. When Willy went to Rugby School, Charles believed he could see the “contracting effects on his mind of his very steady attention to classics: formerly I think he had more extended interests, and cared more for the causes and reasons of things.”

  In the 1840s, most daughters of wealthy households were educated at home because boarding schools for girls, though they had been popular in the 1820s, had come to be seen to be dangerously unhealthy. A leading physician wrote that “A delicate girl submitted to such a discipline cannot escape disease. While school-boys have the advantage of a play-ground, or enjoy their recreation at pleasure in the open fields, the unfortunate inmates of a female boarding-school are only permitted to walk along the foot-paths in pairs, in stiff and monotonous formality, resembling . . . a funeral procession.”

  Annie and Etty’s education was Emma’s responsibility, but she took as little trouble about their instruction as her parents had taken about hers. Etty commented that “Our education as far as book learning was concerned was not what would now be considered to be of an advanced type; my mother was somewhat easy-going about what we learnt, and to get the best possible teaching was not a great object with her.”

  When Willy was six, he was “getting on a little with his reading,” and Emma enjoyed teaching him with Annie. She felt she should engage a governess, but was anxious about the idea. Her Aunt Jessie recognised “the melancholy, the discomfort, and discontent of keeping a governess,” and suggested there was no hurry. “We English lay much too great stress on bringing children forward in learning, by which we give them longer lessons than their little heads can take in, and only serve to weary the poor teacher . . . The learning that profits our understanding is of our own acquiring, therefore later.”

  Emma waited another year and a half after Aunt Jessie’s advice before engaging a governess, but when she was pregnant with Francis in the summer of 1848, she decided that the time had come. A nineteen-year-old girl, Catherine Thorley, came from Tarporley, a village in Cheshire, where her father had worked as a solicitor for the Tollet family of Betley Hall, close friends of the Wedgwoods and Darwins. He had died when he was twenty-eight and Catherine was five, and the family had moved to London. Catherine was the eldest child, with three sisters and a brother. The position of the gover
ness in Victorian households was a difficult one. Her main task was to teach the “accomplishments” of a gentlewoman—needlework, etiquette, music, French and dancing, in preparation for entering the adult world. To be able to do so with assurance, she herself had to be genteel, but by accepting payment for her work, she put herself in a clearly inferior position. Many young women became governesses because their fathers had died leaving the family unprovided for. In 1848, Lady Eastlake wrote in the Quarterly Review that a governess remained “a needy lady whose services are of far too precious a kind to have any stated market value, and it is therefore left to the mercy, or what they call the means, of the family that engages her.” Charles paid Miss Thorley £50 a year, an average amount, neither generous nor miserly.

  Annie was close to Miss Thorley; she used to go with her when she went to see her family in London, and they may have had a special understanding because each was the eldest girl in her family with brothers and sisters to look after. Miss Thorley’s next sister, Sarah, remained with her mother while the others also became governesses. According to Etty, Sarah was “mad,” but nothing more is known about her.

  Etty considered Miss Thorley a “dull but worthy girl.” She “had no gift for teaching nor for making me care for her. I well remember how I despised her for never saying in answer to a question ‘I don’t know’ but always trying unsuccessfully, as far as I was concerned, to hide her ignorance. I used to consider, before trying to get something cleared up, whether it was likely she would know or not. As soon as the blessed hour of twelve struck and I had hardly banged the door before rushing off, she always began one of the best known and most whiny ‘songs without words’—always, always the same, so that it still rings in my ears.” Etty herself was a headstrong and difficult child, and she was fiercely direct in conversation. On one occasion “mild Miss Thorley” gave notice because her authority was “not sufficiently upheld.” It must have been Etty who challenged her. Miss Thorley was eventually persuaded to stay, but she had been prepared to make a stand.

  Miss Thorley joined in when Emma played with the children. Once, when Willy had just returned to boarding school, Emma wrote to him: “Everyone (but the stair carpet which you nearly wear out in a month) is very sorry to lose you . . . Mr Lewis has made a sliding board for the children and they enjoy it very much. They put it on the stairs and I have taken a slide or two, and so has Miss Thorley.” The staircase slide became another family fixture. Francis’s son Bernard wrote: “This toy, to use an unworthy and inadequate name, has had a place in every Darwin household, but I have never seen one anywhere else. It consists simply in a long strip of polished wood with protecting edges and a small flange at one end by which it can be hooked on to any step of the staircase that the slider, in his timidity or bravery, desires. It is possible to invent various feats of fancy sliding—sitting, standing, or head-first, but the ultimate test of skill and courage was always ‘eight steps standing.’ ”

  While many governesses were kept firmly on the edge of their master and mistress’s life, Miss Thorley shared Charles and Emma’s reading; she helped Charles in his work and he appreciated her company. He once wrote to Hooker: “Miss Thorley and I are doing a little botanical work for our amusement, and it does amuse me very much, viz. making a collection of all the plants, which grow in a field, which has been allowed to run waste for fifteen years, but which before was cultivated from time immemorial; and we are also collecting all the plants in an adjoining and similar but cultivated field, just for the fun of seeing what plants have arrived or died out.” Ten days later, he added: “If ever you catch quite a beginner, and want to give him a taste for botany, tell him to make a perfect list of some little field or wood. Both Miss Thorley and I agree that it gives a really uncommon interest to the work, having a nice little definite world to work on, instead of the awful abyss and immensity of all British Plants.”

  Charles described this study in the first version of the work that was eventually to become The Origin of Species. His point was to show “the degree of diversity in our British plants on a small plot.” “142 phanerogamic plants were here collected by a friend during the course of a year; these belonged to 108 genera, and to 32 orders out of the 86 orders into which the plants of Britain have been classed.” It was remarkable for a man of science to acknowledge his children’s governess as “a friend” in this way. Her collection was valuable to Charles as it gave strong support for his insight that “the greatest amount of life can be supported by great diversification of structure.” Linked with his notion of divergence between species, the idea became one of the keys to our present understanding of the importance of biodiversity in all thinking about the protection of natural habitats.

  Annie started learning to sew long before Miss Thorley came, but Miss Thorley helped her with her needlework. Sewing was practical; embroidery was an accomplishment, and needlework was one of the few demanding occupations to which a lady could devote time and attention in daily life. Every lady would have a piece of “company work” in hand, making something for the household, a gift, or a piece of some kind for the “deserving poor.” Annie had a “lady’s companion,” a little fitted case containing a thimble, needles and cotton, and a pair of scissors. She had a workbox for other things, with a needlebook made out of pink silk with small leaves cut from a cotton printed fabric appliquéd on the cover. When she was nine she made another silk-lined booklet with paper leaves for her five-year-old cousin Hope. Inside she drew trees, houses, plants in pots, a dress and a girl. Hope later remembered the intense pleasure it gave her. Annie also did bead-work with small glass beads bought in folds of paper from a milliner. In her writing case there is an unfinished piece, the pale yellow ribbon embroidered with blue and gold beads in a zigzag pattern, possibly for a bookmark, purse or pincushion.

  When Annie was only one, Charles had noted in his “natural history of babies” how neatly she took hold of pens, pencils and keys “in the proper way.” When she was six, Emma taught her to write, and she gave her a diary, The Regal Pocket Book, for her seventh birthday. Annie made one entry in confident joined-up writing—“Erney and Charles Parker came”—but after then kept the book unmarked, with its chromolitho graphs of the new Houses of Parliament, two Beefeaters in front of Windsor Castle, the Queen of Portugal and the Virgin and Infant Saviour after “Permegiano.” Later that year, when Charles was staying in Shrewsbury, Annie sent him a note which he asked Emma to tell her was “very nicely written.”

  It was generally felt that a writing-master was required to teach the finer points of a good writing hand. Charles engaged John Mumford, the village schoolteacher, to coach Willy and Annie. He was “young and active and efficient,” and probably used Mulhauser’s method, which was approved by the government for use in elementary schools. The manual for the method started the pupil off with the task of writing out “Peace, joy and happiness are only to be gained by the way of duty” and carried on in the same tone. The instructions echoed infantry drill in their precision, with “1st Position,” “2nd Position—take distances,” “3rd Position—right arm extended,” “4th Position—take pens,” “5th Position—write”; then “Stop writing,” and “Arms at ease.”

  Annie’s formal handwriting was distinctive. Emma and Etty both had well-rounded and “good free-running hands” of the kind “usually adopted by ladies” according to a handbook of the time. Annie varied her tilt from word to word and added little curls to some letters. Her spelling was wayward and she sometimes missed out letters and words, but she enjoyed writing without being tidy and correct. She doodled and jotted freely on scraps of paper in pencil and crayon, but letters to cousins and friends had to be written in ink on special notepaper, enveloped neatly and closed with a wax or wafer seal. Letter-writing was an essential accomplishment because it gave you a way of communicating with people outside the household; the person who received your letter might pass it round to others, and they would all judge you from it. For the Darwin children
in their lonely life at Down, letters were particularly important as they were their only window into the world of friendships beyond the household and the village.

  Annie’s writing case was not a child’s toy, but a small version of a grown-up’s possession, one of the first signs that the little girl would soon be growing into a young lady. An American book for children which first appeared in 1851 gives a vivid picture of what the case and the things Annie kept in it would have meant to her. Elizabeth Wetherell’s The Wide, Wide World was one of the most popular novels of the time, an evangelical story of a little girl, Ellen, in New York whose mother died of tuberculosis and who eventually found faith and happiness with kind people in the country. Emma had a copy which she read to her grandchildren in the 1890s, and the story must have rung true to her.

  “The Cow” copied by Annie

  In the first chapters, Ellen’s mother had to leave her to travel to Europe to try to regain her health. She sold her jewelled ring to buy her daughter three things to treasure—a beautiful Bible, a workbox for embroidery and a writing case. For Ellen, filling the writing case, with all the choosing of small things involved, was a part of the pleasure of the gift. Ellen’s mother took her to a large fancy store. It was the first time Ellen had “ever seen the inside of such a store; and the articles displayed on every side completely bewitched her. From one thing to another she went, admiring and wondering; in her wildest dreams she had never imagined such beautiful things.” Her mother first chose a case, “perfect in its internal arrangements” but empty. The shopman provided a choice of letter-paper, large and small. “Ellen looked on in great satisfaction. ‘That will do nicely; that large paper will be beautiful whenever I am writing to you, mamma, you know; and the other will do for other times when I haven’t so much to say.’ ”