Charles worked on living and fossil barnacles, hard parts in boxes, and soft parts preserved in “spirits of wine.” He used two microscopes, one simple and one compound, with wooden blocks to support his wrists while he was dissecting. The compound microscope was of the kind familiar to us with lenses mounted in a cylindrical tube, but he always preferred the simple one with a single lens. While he was working on the barnacles, he got a London manufacturer to make a simple microscope to his special design; he found it ideal for his work, and the manufacturer sold the model for many years later as “Darwin’s Dissecting Microscope.”
In June 1851, Charles described his technique to a dentist in Swansea who had sent him drawings of his own dissections of barnacle larvae. “I have been accustomed to preserve the results of most of my minute anatomical researches . . . in common water without any spirits, with a bit of thin glass over the object . . . and gold size all round the rough edge; objects thus prepared will sometimes keep for a long time . . . Every cirripede that I dissect I preserve the jaws &c &c in this manner.” Four drawers of Charles’s slides of barnacle parts are now kept in a polished oak cabinet in the basement of the Museum of Zoology in Cambridge. He placed each specimen in a drop of water on a glass slide and made a temporary or permanent mount with a thin glass cover slip and a seal as he wanted. He sealed the temporary mount with gold size or asphaltum, which discoloured with age. For a permanent mount, he carefully dehydrated the specimen with alcohol and an aromatic oil, placed it finally in Canada balsam, and sealed it under a cover slip with gold size or asphaltum. The balsam bottle with its glass rod and domed lid would have been a familiar sight on the table.
The main difficulty for Charles in his survey was how to group different kinds of barnacle in the initial classification. Plant and animal taxonomy were central concerns for natural historians. Carl Linnaeus’s System of Nature had appeared in 1735, and Baron Cuvier’s Animal Kingdom in 1817. Professor Owen was developing Cuvier’s approach to reveal ever more interesting and complex links between the structures of different organisms, both living and fossil, and to suggest principles on which a sound classification should be based. Both Cuvier and Owen rejected the idea of common descent and believed that the likenesses between species reflected Divine design. Owen developed an idea of archetypes and functional homologies to show that animals conformed to general plans, but he found that the shared elements and “design” they displayed were often varied and obscure, and he had to admit that Nature was “not so rigid a systematist as man.”
Charles had little use for Professor Owen’s abstractions, and wrote to a friend in 1843 that he had long felt that the problem of taxonomic groupings lay “in our ignorance of what we are searching after in our natural classifications.” Linnaeus had confessed profound ignorance and most writers since had said that the aim was “to discover the laws according to which the Creator has willed to produce organised beings.” “But what empty high-sounding sentences these are. It does not mean order in time of creation, nor propinquity to any one type, as man. In fact it means just nothing.” Charles went on to declare his own view, that “classification consists in grouping beings according to their actual relationship, i.e. their consanguinity or descent from common stocks.” Many animals would show similarities that were due to other factors, and it would always be difficult to identify true relationships for a proper natural classification, but “I know what I am looking for.”
When Charles tackled the barnacles, he worked out an “archetypal cirripede” with all the common features of the group, but instead of presenting it as Professor Owen would have done, as a Platonic ideal, God’s blueprint, he made it a common ancestor, and looked to see whether all existing species could be placed on a branching family tree as descendants from it by gradual changes from that earlier common form. The work that Annie watched her father carry on from day to day at the window in his study was one of the first careful explorations of a part of the natural world on the understanding that organisms had evolved. As Charles dissected and examined each specimen, he was testing his theory in a precise and determined way, taking hundreds of organisms that showed marked similarities but also bewildering variations and transformations, focusing on the minutest details of their anatomy and seeing whether he could group them as first, second, third and fourth cousins in a single family tree. If he was right to assume that they had all evolved by variation from a common ancestral form, he should be able to classify them according to their family relations. If he was wrong, it should be immediately obvious that some other factor was involved.
Barnacles posed two main challenges to the taxonomist: the extreme variety between different species, and the transformations they went through from larva to adult. Charles found that he could make sense of both. He suggested, for instance, that the ancestor had a body with seventeen segments. The three segments of the genus Alcippe were the three front ones, and the fourteen behind had wasted away in the course of evolution, while Proteolepas had the last fourteen segments and had lost the front three. He wrote to Hooker in 1848 that he was becoming “rapidly a complete cirripede in my mind.” He had worked out that the shell of a Balanus, and even the whole peduncle and shell of Lepas, were “the three anterior segments of the head, wonderfully modified and enlarged so as to receive the fourteen succeeding cephalic, thoracic and abdominal segments.” He declared: “I know of no more surprising metamorphosis, and it is perfectly clear and evident.”
When Charles looked at the antennae of larvae and adults, he found that they were used by the larva for locomotion and touch, and in the adult they became organs for attachment to the surface on which the barnacle lived. In all these ways, by looking carefully at anatomically linked structures in different species, and by considering the possibility that organs could change their form and their function over time or waste away if they lost their use, Charles found that it might be possible to explain the extraordinary range of forms in the different species as a series of transformations of the ancestor’s original structure. The explanation worked.
Charles found other surprises under the microscope: strange sexual arrangements which were full of meaning for someone taking an evolutionary view, but could only seem ludicrous to someone looking for evidence of the wisdom of God in Creation. Early in his speculations about the origin of species, he had guessed that separate sexes had evolved from hermaphroditic forms. He recognised that different patterns of reproduction might be important for the inheritance of variations, and was always watching out for evidence of change and its effects. Most barnacles were hermaphroditic, but a few had separate males and females, and Charles was intrigued to find that his first little orange barnacle had two penises for no reason that he could see. In 1848, he found some unidentifiable parasites in a species of the genus Scalpellum. When he found that hermaphroditic species of the genus Ibla had extra microscopic males to complement their male organs, he looked again at the Scalpellum parasites and discovered that they also were minute males. He wrote to Hooker about his discovery, saying that he never would have made it had not his species theory convinced him that a hermaphroditic species must pass into a species with separate sexes “by insensibly small stages, and here we have it, for the male organs in the hermaphrodite are beginning to fail, and independent males ready formed.” He went on: “You will perhaps wish my barnacles and species theory al Diabolo [to the Devil] together, but I don’t care what you say; my species theory is all gospel.”
In September 1849, Charles wrote to Lyell about another barnacle he had found with separate sexes in which the female had “two little pockets, in each of which she kept a little husband.” He mentioned the hermaphrodites with complemental males, noting that one had “no less than seven of these complemental males attached to it. Truly the schemes and wonders of nature are illimitable.” In his eventual book, he summarised what he had found out about these strange forms and concluded: “In the series of facts now given, we have one curious illustration m
ore to the many already known, how gradually nature changes from one condition to the other—in this case from bisexuality to unisexuality.” He felt he had seen evidence of evolution at work, that he could trace part of the route along which one of the fundamental features of natural life had come into being.
The leading populariser of microscopy at the time was Philip Gosse, the father of Edmund Gosse, who described his extraordinary upbringing in his memoir Father and Son. Philip was a naturalist who made a living in the 1850s writing about marine life for a popular readership. He combined a deep and absorbing interest in the natural history of the English and Welsh coastline with a Christian faith that bewildered his son in its strength and simplicity. He greatly admired Charles’s work on barnacles and included a chapter on the remarkable metamorphoses of their larvae in Tenby, a Sea-side Holiday. In his later Evenings at the Microscope, which was published just before The Origin of Species, he described how the free-floating larvae attached themselves to a rock and changed to their adult form. “And this is a most wonderful process; so wonderful, that it would be utterly incredible, but that the researches of Mr Darwin have proved it incontestably to be the means by which the wisdom of God has ordained that the little Water-flea should be transformed into a stony Acorn Barnacle.”
Charles would not have suggested to Annie that the fixing of the barnacle had been ordained by the wisdom of God, but he would have been delighted by Gosse’s final comments. “Marvellous indeed are these facts. If such changes as these, or anything approaching to them, took place in the history of some familiar domestic animal; if the horse, for instance, were invariably born under the form of a fish, passed through several modifications of this form, imitating the shape of the perch, then the pike, then the eel, by successive castings of its skin; then by another shift appeared as a bird; and then, glueing itself by its forehead to some stone, with its feet in the air, threw off its covering once more, and became a foal, which then gradually grew into a horse . . . should we not think them very wonderful?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
WORLDS AWAY FROM HOME
Leith Hill Place—Chester Terrace—Etruria—Malvern
AWAY FROM DOWN, Annie knew other family worlds through visits to her Wedgwood cousins. Uncle Joe lived the life of a country gentleman in Surrey; Uncle Hensleigh was a man of letters in London, and Uncle Frank managed the Wedgwood works in the Staffordshire Potteries.
Their father, Josiah Wedgwood II, had wanted to hand the works over to Joe, the eldest son, but Joe had no wish to take on the burden and sold his share in the partnership to Frank, his youngest brother. With the proceeds Joe bought Leith Hill Place in Surrey, a Georgian mansion with a four-hundred-acre estate on the south slope of Leith Hill, the highest point in southern England. When Emma first saw the house, she felt it was “really grand-looking, but I think rather too high for comfort when it grew very cold, and the house is somehow just like the open air.”
Uncle Joe was elderly, silent and autocratic. His wife, Aunt Caroline, was Charles’s elder sister and had brought him up after their mother died. Like Uncle Joe, she was a figure of awe for the children. Sophy, the eldest child, had been Annie’s closest cousin since they were baptised together at Maer in 1841. Margaret, known as Greata, was two years younger, and Lucy was born three years after her. Sophy and Greata were tall and large-eyed, musical and closely attached to each other, but anxious and painfully shy with others. Emma wrote after one visit during Annie’s childhood: “Sophy has still some odd morbid feelings, chiefly about anything relating to Heaven or God, but Caroline has persuaded her with great screwing up of her courage to stay in the room while she repeats a very short little prayer. It is too much to expect her to venture on saying a prayer for herself yet.”
For Annie, the excitements of Leith Hill Place were all out of doors. There was a swing in the garden, and it was said that thirteen counties could be seen from the tower at the top of the hill. Next to the home farm there was a four-acre kitchen garden enclosed by a high brick wall with glasshouses and potting sheds. In the woods to the west, Uncle Joe and Aunt Caroline planted rhododendrons and azaleas from the Himalayas, and on the common to the north the children could sometimes see kangaroos leaping through the bracken. The animals were kept there by the Evelyn family, lords of the manor and enthusiastic naturalists.
Sophy shared all four grandparents with Annie. They were two shakes of the same genetic dice, but they could not have been more different. When Sophy was in her thirties, her Uncle Frank said: “I never met anyone silenter.” She lived a frugal, miserly and increasingly eccentric life, making do on oranges and biscuits and insisting that others should too. According to one story told of her, she once found a bottle of the bitter medicine ipecacuanha when clearing out a cupboard; there was one dose left and she swallowed it, saying “A pity to waste a good emetic.” After visiting Leith Hill Place in 1880, Emma wrote to George: “Poor Sophy strikes one anew every time one sees her as utterly dead, and quite as much dead to mother and sisters as to the outsiders. I felt the house with that long dark passage and no carpet so depressing, and wondered how they would ever get through the winter.” But Sophy’s music was important to her, and when her nephew Ralph Vaughan Williams was a small child in the household, she gave him his first lessons at the piano.
Hensleigh and Fanny Wedgwood had moved with their six children from Gower Street to a house in Chester Terrace, the grandest of the imposing stucco buildings in Regent’s Park. They led an active social life in a circle of friends that included Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Martineau, Leigh Hunt, Thomas and Jane Carlyle, Robert Browning, John Ruskin, Florence Nightingale and Richard Monckton Milnes. Their daughter Snow, precocious and reflective, was encouraged in her writing by Harriet Martineau and befriended by Elizabeth Gaskell and Florence Nightingale. For Annie, eight years younger, the house was a place from where she could go out with Snow’s younger brothers and sisters to enjoy the excitements of the great city: the Zoological Gardens, the exhibition halls, the shops and the pantomime.
In the first days of January 1849, while Charles and Emma stayed with the younger children at Down, Willy, Annie and Etty came to London. The three were taken to Claudet’s photographic studio in the Adelaide Gallery to sit for their portraits. At a guinea each in their red morocco leather and velvet cases, the three daguerreotypes cost the equivalent of £150 today. Willy was wearing a tight jacket with check trousers and waistcoat. The cut of his jacket was slightly old-fashioned but the check pattern of his trousers and waistcoat was up to date. Annie and Etty took their turns in the studio armchair, wearing matching loose dresses with crochet collars. When sisters were dressed to match as they were, it was common for the two fabrics to be of different colours. Etty’s hair was cut simply and brushed firmly down like Willy’s. She looked quite directly and unselfconsciously at the photographer and his apparatus. Annie was quite different, with her rich brown hair elaborately plaited and looped for the occasion. She held herself upright and still, tensely aware that her picture was being taken.
Uncle Frank lived with his wife and seven children at the Upper House in Barlaston, seven miles from the Etruria works in Staffordshire. The neighbourhood was one of the first landscapes of the Industrial Revolution, dominated by coal mines, iron foundries, pottery kilns and canals. Uncle Frank had tried to sell the works by auction in 1844, but trade was bad and when the property failed to reach its reserve, he took on the business and ran it conscientiously for the next thirty years. He was reckoned by his workmen to be a fair and good employer, partly perhaps because he left them to manage things largely as they wanted. He was cast in the same Wedgwood mould as his eldest brother, but had a warmth and sense of duty that Uncle Joe lacked. While others in the family joined the Church of England for social respectability, he remained true to the Unitarian faith of his grandfather, Josiah I, and fellow liberals in manufacturing and trade. He lived very simply, with plain wooden furniture and no carpet in his bedroom. The children were
shy like Sophy and Greata. Among them, Cecily, though three years older than Annie, was her special friend.
The Wedgwood factory at Etruria, next to the Trent and Mersey Canal, had a place in the history of manufacturing. In the late 1700s, Josiah Wedgwood had pioneered mass production there, producing long runs of “useful” and “ornamental” ware of consistently high quality for ever-growing markets in Britain and overseas. But his works were not “dark Satanic mills.” When Josiah II gave evidence to a parliamentary committee on children working in factories, he explained that his buildings were “very different from those of cotton works, and other manufactories in which machinery supplies the power. They are very irregular, and very much scattered, covering a great space of ground, and, in general, only of two storeys in height.” They were a rabbit warren of yards and passages, kilns, workshops and drying rooms for the different stages of manufacture. One of Annie’s London cousins called them “that nasty old pot shop.”
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