Creation (Movie Tie-In)

by Randal Keynes

  The grave as little as my bed.

  At the beginning of October, Charles bought a canary for Annie and Etty. The way to teach a bird to sing was to place its cage in a room by itself and drape it with a cloth. A short tune should then be whistled or played on a flute or bird-organ, five or six times a day. The canary would take a few months to learn. While the children played with their pet, Charles watched with his own interests. He had been reading books about caged birds and talking to bird fanciers ever since he recognised the importance of the Galapagos finches for thinking about the origin of species. The marked differences of appearance and character between the different breeds of “canary finch” were a point for his argument that such variations were the raw material for natural selection. He was interested to know the results of crossing canaries with other species, “mule-breeding” in the phrase of the fanciers who made a hobby of it. He was intrigued by how some birds learnt songs by imitation, and suggested that the “singing of birds, not being instinctive, is hereditary knowledge like that of man.” He was also intrigued by reports of canaries singing to their reflection in a mirror. Putting a mirror in your bird’s cage to encourage it to sing was a trick many cottagers in Downe would know. For Charles there were parallels with his experiments with Jenny the orang, Willy and Annie ten years before. What did the bird make of its reflected image? Why did it sing to it? Out of rivalry or love? How to guess?

  Picture in the Darwin children’s scrap book

  By early autumn, Charles and Emma had recognised that Annie had an illness of some kind which she was not managing to shake off, but she had no clear symptoms pointing to any particular cause for her distress. One recognised treatment for a delicate child was sea-bathing. Charles had once written to a friend whose children were ill, that “the sea will do all good.” A medical encyclopaedia of the time said that bathing was an effective treatment for “languor and weakness of circulation,” “many of those symptoms usually called nervous,” and “a listless and indolent state of the mind.” “A sudden plunge into the ocean causes the blood to circulate briskly, and promotes the heat of the body.” The treatment also worked through “the free exposure of the body to the bracing sea-breeze.”

  In the first week of October, Miss Thorley took Annie and Etty to spend a few weeks at Ramsgate on the Kent coast. The town was served by the new London & South Eastern Railway and was, in a vaunting description of the time, “one of the most elegant resorts for sea-bathing in the kingdom.” The stone east pier reaching out into the English Channel was “perhaps the finest marine parade in the universe: and here, in fine weather, on the departure, but more surely on the arrival of the steam-vessels, it is daily graced with an assemblage of fashion and beauty perfectly startling to those who see it for the first time. The sands . . . are considered as fine as any in existence, if not finer.” In the summer a tent on the beach was “supplied with newspapers, magazines, and books, on easy terms. Chairs on the beach are allowed to subscribers, and at a small gratuity to non-subscribers. Donkeys and light vehicles are in constant attendance, caparisoned gaily, if not gorgeously: and the whole scene bears an exceedingly animated and joyous aspect.”

  The rules of modesty made sea-bathing a delicate and laborious procedure. Bathers gathered in the bathing room on the promenade. A guide to Ramsgate explained: “As most of the company prefer the morning for bathing, a slate is put up in the lobby to receive the names of the bathers, who take their turns in entering their machines, which are carried by horses a convenient depth into the sea, under the conduct of careful guides. At the back of the machine there is a door through which the bathers descend a few steps into the water, and an umbrella of canvas being contrived to fall over them, it conceals them from public view. The pleasure and advantage of this salubrious exercise may be enjoyed in a manner consistent with the most refined delicacy.” A lady or child taking a machine with a guide would be charged 1s 3d. The price for two or more young children with a guide was 9d each. A writer described a conversation in the bathing room. “Most of the company had talked over their own case, which invalids are particularly fond of doing, and all had given a judgement on the sea; but in general so contradictory, that had I formed my opinion on others, it would have amounted nearly to this—that it thinned and it thickened the blood—it strengthened it—it weakened it—made people fat—it made them lean—it braced—it relaxed—it was good for everything—and good for nothing. ‘It will wash you all clean however,’ says a gentleman in the gallery, ‘if it does nothing else.’ ”

  On the beach, there was “a strange hum of human voices wherever you wend your steps; while shouts arise from the boys who urge their horses seaward and landward.” The bathing women would help unwilling children to enter the water by singing to them. “Here is a blue-dressed dipper doing what she can to assuage the fears of some delicate girl, whose plump and robust mamma has resolved that she should bathe.” Hawkers went “hither and thither with cheap and gaily-coloured books for all ages; wooden spades for the children’s favourite manufacture of ‘sand-pies’ and hills; sand shoes for delicate feet of both sexes; and shells of divers hues, and forms, and gay iridescence, with seaweeds and corallines in rich variety and abundance.”

  A fortnight after the children had arrived with Miss Thorley, Charles and Emma came to join them. Emma remembered afterwards Annie’s “bright face on meeting us at the station.” They had a windy walk on the pier and bathed twice. Etty made doll’s shoes out of seaweed on the beach, and walked with her father, who “entered into daily life with a youthfulness of enjoyment which made us feel we saw more of him in a week of holiday than a month at home.” The children also collected shells. A booklet of the time with pictures of each kind that could be found on the beach showed knotty cockles, white and beaked piddocks, truncated gapers, Sandwich beauties, keeled worm shells, pig cowries and potted trumpets. Poor women made a living by collecting and selling the scarce kinds, and boys on the fishing boats hawked shells which came up in their nets. Annie and Etty found piddocks, limpets, tellins and scallops, and Charles would have been able to help name them, remembering all the shells he had collected and listed with Syms Covington during the Beagle voyage.

  For Charles, the days in Ramsgate were a release from his work at his dissecting microscope, but there were crustings of barnacle shells on the stonework of the pier to remind him of it. Pickings on the Sea-shore, a guide to the natural history of the beaches of Kent and Sussex, quoted a poem by Jane Taylor about a naturalist walking on a seaside promenade.

  Now ’tis high water, and with hundreds more,

  He goes to catch a breeze along the shore;

  Or pace the crowded terrace, where one sees

  Fashion and folly, beauty and disease.

  Then one, perchance, who differs from the rest,

  As much as—O, too much to be express’d;

  He, Nature’s genuine lover, casts his eye,

  Lit up with intellect, on sea and sky,

  Drinks in the scene, and feels his bosom swell

  With what he could not, what he would not tell.

  Two days after Charles and Emma arrived at the lodgings, Annie developed a fever and headache. A mattress was fetched so that she could sleep in her parents’ room. The next morning there was a fierce autumn storm which battered the house all day. Charles, Etty and Miss Thorley left for home, and Emma followed them with Annie a few days later when Annie was fit enough to travel.

  Annie now was seriously unwell; Charles and Emma’s concern for her was filling their minds and they needed the best advice they could find. Although Charles was willing to follow Dr. Gully’s instructions for his own treatment, he had reservations about his judgement on others’ illnesses because of the water doctor’s interest in clairvoyance, homoeopathy and other unorthodox treatments. Charles wrote that homoeopathy was “a subject which makes me more wrath, even than does clairvoyance: clairvoyance so transcends belief, that one’s ordinary faculties are put out of
question, but in homoeopathy, common sense and common observation come into play, and both these must go to the dogs, if the infinitesimal doses have any effect whatever.” Charles may have been afraid that Dr. Gully would suggest both for Annie. “It is a sad flaw, I cannot but think, in my beloved Dr Gully, that he believes in everything. When his daughter was very ill, he had a clairvoyant girl to report on internal changes, a mesmerist to put her to sleep, an homoeopathist . . . and himself as hydropathist!”

  So Charles and Emma looked first to orthodox medicine. At the beginning of November, just a week after they came home from Ramsgate, Emma took Annie to London to see Dr. Henry Holland, who had attended at Annie’s birth. Emma noted later that Annie’s “nights became worse about this time.”

  Annie was not kept in her bedroom or the nursery, but carried on her life around the house and garden as best she could. One day in late November, she and Etty went to see their Great Aunt Sarah who had taken a house called Petleys in the village, to spend her last years close to Emma. She was the last surviving child of the first Josiah Wedgwood, “tall, upright and thin” according to Etty. She was an austere figure who had impressed Samuel Taylor Coleridge when they met in the 1790s, but found it difficult to show any warmth of feeling for anyone, and devoted her life to religion and good works. She once wrote: “It is my misfortune to be not of an affectionate disposition, though affection is almost the only thing in the world I value.” She kept several pairs of gloves by her, “loose black ones for putting on coals and shaking hands with little boys and girls, and others for reading books and cleaner occupations.” Her three servants, Mrs. Morrey, Martha and Henry Hemmings, were Etty and Annie’s good friends, and Etty remembered that “whenever life was a little flat at home, we could troop off, crossing the three fields that separated our house from Petleys, sure of a warm welcome from them.” Mrs. Morrey’s gingerbread was like no other Etty ever tasted, and Martha would sing them songs “which only gained by repetition.”

  Aunt Sarah paid no attention to her garden, but the flowers that grew there seemed to Annie and Etty to have “a mysterious charm.” Every autumn, the children picked small wild plums called bullaces in the hedge of her little field. That November afternoon, Annie found some to eat, but she could not remember their name, as she wrote to Effie the next day.

  During the following week Brodie gave her a present, a little pocketbook which she had made herself, embroidered with flowers and leaves in chenille and silver thread, and tied with a red silk ribbon. Annie started a diary on the first page, and wrote:23. Cicely wrote to me. Went Aunt S. Rainy morn. but fine afternoon.

  24. Very rainy all day.

  25. Cold but rather fine morn.

  26. Thremomiter 46.

  27. Greata wrote to me.

  Was Cecily writing from Barlaston and Greata from Leith Hill Place because Annie was ill?

  Annie replied to Greata on a piece of fancy notepaper from her writing case. “We have got a new pony. It is rather a little one. I think your donkey sounds a very nice one. I should like to see your little white guinea-fowl. Are all the little turkeys sold? On Sunday it was raining dreadfully, and the pit in the sand walk was full of water. Is your swing taken down? Ours has been taken down a long while. Have the calfs grown much bigger since I was at Leith Hill? I suppose they have.”

  Annie and Etty arranged their shells from Ramsgate, and Charles gave them a handful more from the collection he had brought back from the Beagle voyage. It had been in store ever since Syms Covington copied a list of the specimens at their lodgings in London over ten years before. Charles had tried to find an expert conchologist to describe them, but no one had been interested. If no scientist wanted to examine the shells, the children could now have some of them to look over with their sharp young eyes.

  When any of the children were unwell, Charles and Emma were “unwearied in their efforts to soothe and amuse” them. Etty remembered that when she was ill, “my father played backgammon with me regularly every day, and my mother would read aloud to me . . . I remember the haven of peace and comfort it seemed to me . . . to be tucked up on the study sofa, idly considering the old geological map hung on the wall.” She remembered her father sitting in the horsehair armchair by the corner of the fire. When a child was ill, while the others had their tea in the schoolroom, the sick one was allowed to have hers with Charles and Emma in the study, with their old blue teacups on the mahogany Pembroke table.

  During November, when Annie came into the study, Charles was working on a collection of barnacles that Covington had sent him from Twofold Bay on the coast near where he had settled in New South Wales. When Charles wrote to thank him for them, he explained: “I have received a vast number of collections from different places, but never one so rich from one locality. One of the kinds is most curious. It is a new species of a genus of which only one specimen is known to exist in the world, and it is in the British Museum.” Charles named the species Catophragmus polymerus, and wrote later in his monograph on barnacles that the genus was remarkable among barnacles of its kind, “from the eight normal compartments of the shell being surrounded by several whorls of supplemental compartments or scales: these are arranged symmetrically, and decrease in size but increase in number towards the circumference and basal margin. A well-preserved specimen has a very elegant appearance, like certain compound flowers, which when half open are surrounded by imbricated and graduated scales.” He may have shown Annie the beauty of the flower-like form.

  Emma took Annie to London again in early December for a second visit to Dr. Holland. It is not known what he said, but Charles and Emma were left with their worries. A few days later, Emma noted in her diary: “Annie began bark.” The cough may have prompted Charles to make a note in the family book of medicines. “Annie’s gargle—Alum 2 drachma to pint of water.” Alum was a sulphate of aluminium and potassium; it had a sweetish but astringent taste.

  When Dr. Holland, one of the leading physicians in London, could not help, Charles set aside his reservations about Dr. Gully and wrote for his advice. Annie’s illness was now chronic and Dr. Gully claimed that his water treatment was especially suitable for chronic conditions. Neither Charles’s letter nor Dr. Gully’s reply survives, but it appears from Charles’s notes during the following months that Dr. Gully suggested a course of water treatment for Charles to give to Annie, and they agreed that she should come to Malvern in the spring for Dr. Gully to see and treat her himself.

  Charles was at the time giving himself daily treatment under Dr. Gully’s guidance, and he noted its effects carefully on foolscap sheets so that he could report them to Dr. Gully. In late January, he took a fresh sheet; he headed it “Anne,” and set columns across the page for the day and date, the treatment given, Annie’s condition during the day, and how she was during the night.

  Dr. Gully’s instructions for Annie were elaborate, and Charles used six of his special methods in a regular sequence. Dr. Gully explained the methods in his books with a show of medical science, portraying the patient’s body as a physical mechanism, finely tuned but only precariously balanced by the influence of nervous forces, and needing to be corrected by external adjustment of the influences. The first method was the “dripping sheet,” a wet sheet, slightly wrung out, wrapped around the body and then rubbed vigorously for five minutes. The aim was “to stimulate the nervous and circulatory systems of the body.” Dr. Gully wrote that “to very delicate persons I often apply, in the first instance, only friction of the trunk and arms with a wet towel; dry and dress those parts, and then have the legs rubbed in like manner.”

  The “spinal wash” was a process invented by Dr. Gully which was particularly suitable for delicate persons. A wet towel was rubbed “up and down the length of the spine, not waiting until it is warmed by the patient’s body, but constantly changing the water in the towel, so as to renew the shock of the cold as long as possible.” Dr. Gully explained that the treatment “clears the head when it is confused, pained,
or lethargic; it gives alacrity to the limbs, and spreads over the skin a sense of comfort which is due to the stimulus propagated along its nerves.”

  “Packing” in damp towels and sheets was supposed to “reduce excess of blood in one organ in order to send sufficient to another.” The patient was wrapped up for an hour to an hour and a half. Dr. Gully wrote that the treatment was “one of the most agreeable, because one of the most soothing, of all the water remedies. By it, the nerves proceeding from the brain and spinal cord to the skin, and which are morbidly sensitive in all chronic diseases, are relieved, for the moment, from the irritation of the air.”

  The “shallow bath” and the “footbath” included rubbing and washing. “The feet and hands, the soles and palms especially, contain an accumulation of animal nerves and of blood vessels . . . in order to bind them by the closest sympathies with the great centres of thought and volition, so that their applications and movements may be accurately directed by the mind.”

  The last method, “sweating by the lamp,” was in Dr. Gully’s view “rightly esteemed one of the most effective means of arousing torpid and obstructed viscera into activity, by throwing an immense amount of irritation on the exterior surface.” Joseph Leech wrote in Three Weeks in Wet Sheets how he sat on a chair and was draped with a tent of sheets for which he served as the pole. A lamp containing spirits of wine was placed under the chair and lit. “For two or three minutes I felt as though I were more likely to roast than melt.” He began to think of “a martyrdom in singed blankets . . . when suddenly, as though it could bear no more, the skin opened its pores . . . and I ran like a shoulder of mutton before the fire.”