Charles put a notice in the “Deaths” column of The Times. “On the 23d inst., at Malvern, of fever, Anne Elizabeth Darwin, aged 10 years, eldest daughter of Charles Darwin, Esq., of Down, Kent.” The gravestone bore a roundel with the emblematic letters for Jesus, “IHS.” While most other inscriptions in the churchyard quoted Scripture or referred to the Christian faith in other ways, Annie’s read simply:
ANNE ELIZABETH
DARWIN
BORN MARCH 2. 1841.
DIED APRIL 23. 1851.
A DEAR AND GOOD CHILD
Fanny’s maid had taken Etty with Fanny’s children from London to Leith Hill Place. Joining Uncle Joe and Aunt Caroline’s three daughters, they were seven children in all. Aunt Caroline asked Fanny to tell Charles that Etty seemed very comfortable and at ease with the others. “I will take the greatest care of all the dear little set and they shall never be long out of my sight or hearing.” On Wednesday, she wrote: “They are all gone cowslip-gathering in the fields . . . Etty seems quite content and excellent friends with all the cousins.” Delphine Bonehill, the Wedgwoods’ seventeen-year-old half-Belgian, half-English nursery governess, was in charge, but she made herself unpopular because Aunt Caroline told her to speak French and “all the children were too full of play to bear the trouble.”
Charles, Emma and Fanny wanted their children to face death and understand it, but whether the young ones would show their feelings was uncertain and the parents watched carefully. Etty came back to Down from Leith Hill Place on Friday, and Emma saw her “quiet grief.” Charles was grateful “to see her show so much feeling about Annie, crying and quite sobbing when she heard she had asked for her.” Fanny gathered from her maid that the twelve-year-old Effie “cried very much when she went to bed” the night the news came. She cried again when Etty left Leith Hill Place, but after a short time went out of doors with the others and seemed cheerful and happy. Later, she went to talk with Aunt Caroline, and “asked some particulars which made her look again very low.”
On Saturday, Charles wrote to Miss Thorley’s mother: “I must beg permission to express to you our deep obligation to your daughter and our most earnest hope that her health may not be injured by her exertions. I hope it will not appear presumptuous in me to say that her conduct struck me as throughout quite admirable. I never saw her once [yield] to her feelings as long as self restraint and exertion were of any use. Her judgement and good sense never failed; her kindness, her devotion to our poor child could hardly have been excelled by that of a mother. Such conduct will, I trust, hereafter be in some degree rewarded by the satisfaction your daughter must ever feel when she looks back at her exertions to save and comfort our poor dear dying child. I earnestly hope that her health will be pretty soon established. My wife joins in kindest remembrance to yourself.”
Brodie came back to Down, but found that she could not recover her composure after Annie’s death. She was sixty years old and needed to rest after her working life of care for others; Charles gave her an annuity and she returned to live in her home town of Portsoy in northeast Scotland. She kept in close touch with the Darwins and Thackerays, and came south often for long visits to both families.
Fanny returned to her life with Hensleigh among their liberal friends in London. In a few weeks, she was lobbying for the Italian republican Giuseppe Mazzini who was then seeking support in England. Aunt Jessie wrote to Elizabeth with alarm: “Underneath that refreshing quiet, that delicious calm, Fanny has a lava of living fire that has made her give battle to all the governments of Europe under the banner of Mazzini. She is of his Committee in London! How could Hensleigh permit it? It is so contrary to the modesty of her nature to associate her name with such notoriety that I am sure she will suffer.” But purpose and confidence in her judgement were also part of her nature, and Hensleigh did not intervene.
For parents in the 1850s, the loss of a child was not the utter shock it may be for parents now, because death in childhood was a fact of life. But when it came, the pain was deep in other ways, and Christian faith offered challenges as well as consolations. There were different ways of facing up to loss depending on one’s understanding and beliefs, and the feelings of close family and friends.
Some people whom Emma and Charles knew declared firm confidence in Christ’s salvation as an assertion of human faith and will against the unknown. Mrs. Carter, the Baptist minister’s wife who lived along the lane into the village, died in extreme pain a few months after Annie. A friend gave an account of her last hours in a Baptist periodical, The Earthen Vessel. “Being troubled with continued retchings, her strength rapidly declined, and her sufferings were very great indeed, arising from inward convulsions. So great was the pain, that her countenance was at times distorted with it; and a truly distressing scene it was to witness, more especially as she drew near the borders of the eternal world; the hosts of hell were marshalled, and permitted to have their last attack . . . But at length the powers of darkness were foiled, the hosts of hell were put to flight, and suddenly a heavenly ray overspread her pallid countenance, and with her hands and eyes upraised, she appeared to be conversing with invisible beings; after which she bid us all affectionately adieu; saying, ‘I am going to Jesus.’ And then turning to her husband, as if to tell him what she saw, with her hands still upwards, and her lips moving; but mortal speech had failed, the battle had been fought, and the victory won.”
Lady Lubbock in the grand house on the other side of the village had voiced the same assurance in her orthodox Anglican piety when her young daughter was close to death with scarlet fever. “I consider children so entirely from Heaven that I could not or at any rate ought not to repine should my Heavenly Father see fit to recall one of his gifts, and my poor Mary is so sweet and gentle that I feel as if she was in a fit state for a world of purity.”
One “advanced” Unitarian divine suggested that the grief of loss itself had value. The Reverend John James Tayler was a prominent figure in the north London circles in which Hensleigh and Fanny Wedgwood moved. He was a close friend of Francis Newman, and co-editor with James Martineau of the Prospective Review of “free theology.” His Christian Aspects of Faith and Duty appeared in 1851, and Emma noted the title in her diary for 1852. In a chapter on the “Blessings of sorrow,” he suggested that “Christianity in the highest sense is the Religion of Sorrow. It baptises the heart with a holy sadness, and prepares it for the descent of the Spirit of God.” He explained that “a crippled and suffering child, looked at from without, seems the heaviest of domestic afflictions. Yet once confided to our care, what an object of tender interest it becomes! What gentle and holy affections hover over it!” When a child dies, “the heart then learns the deep blessing of sorrow.” Those who have experienced the grief of loss and “seen the mortal breath pass from the pale lips” of a child, “know well that in such an hour, whatever faith is latent in the heart, comes forth in all its strength, and rises up to the demand of our wants, and enables us to say in the depth of heavenly trust, ‘Father, thy will be done.’ Never are the beloved so dear, never so inseparable from our inmost spirit, never can we so little conceive the possibility of their perishing from us for ever—as in the moment when death throws his dark veil between us and them, and faith glows into intensity under the breath of affection.”
Other people’s religion pointed to Divine punishment as well as salvation. The conviction that death was due to sin, either the victim’s, or another person’s or Adam’s, was deeply ingrained and gave a fearful twist to the pain of a bereavement for any who felt that they or others might be to blame in some way. When in 1850 William Gladstone, the future prime minister, lost his four-year-old daughter Jessie to tubercular meningitis, he wrote in his journal how he believed her suffering and death were bound up with universal moral issues. “It was, I must own, a heavy trial to flesh and blood to witness her death-struggle; to see that little creature who had never ‘sinned against the similitude of Adam’s transgression,’ paying the for
feit of our race . . . What a witness was before us to the immensity of sin and the wide range of its effects, when she was so torn by their force.” In 1856, months after the desolating loss of five of his six daughters to scarlet fever, Dean Tait of Chester, who later as Archbishop of Canterbury played a part in reconciling Anglican beliefs with the science of the time, was tormented by a belief that his family’s tragedy was a divine chastisement for his sin of worldliness. He feared that his sin “necessitating this judgement” had caused the deep grief for his wife.
When it came to the hope for eternal life, many Christian believers faced critical uncertainties. The Anglican Church and most Dissenters looked to Holy Scripture as the main authority and guidance on matters of faith, but the Bible had little to say about what happened after death and much of what it said was vague, figurative and inconsistent. Richard Whately wrote regretfully in his View of the Scripture Revelations Concerning a Future State of “the brief, dry, unpretending, uncircumstantial manner, in which a future state is everywhere spoken of by the sacred writers; a manner eminently unfitted to excite the passions, to amuse the imagination, or to gratify curiosity.” The point was also made to children. Ann and Jane Taylor wrote in one of their Hymns for Infant Minds:
. . . where my living soul would go,
I do not and I cannot know:
For none was e’er sent back to tell
The joys of heaven, or pains of hell.
Within the Wedgwood circle, Emma’s Aunt Jessie had felt deep uncertainties when her husband died in 1842. She had written to Emma that if she could have had “firm faith that he was only passed from the visible to the invisible world, and already lives and is waiting for me, oh what happiness it would be.” But “Alas, my faith seems all hope only and no firmness, and in such discouragement as mine, even hope itself cannot wear her cheerful face.” Fanny Wedgwood’s father, Sir James Mackintosh, was troubled by similar worries after the death of a friend. Listening to an uninspiring sermon at the man’s funeral, he found that the reasons for the “venerable and consolatory” belief in the immortality of the soul had previously seemed strong and sound to him, but “in the preacher’s statement they shrunk into a mortifying state of meagreness,” and thoughts occurred to him “which I should be almost afraid to communicate to any creature.”
Others who accepted Christian teaching on the afterlife still found when a loved one died that they were overwhelmed by a sense that the death was final. Frederick William Robertson, a liberal Anglican clergyman admired by Emma, preached in 1852: “Talk as we will of immortality, there is an obstinate feeling that we cannot master, that we end in death; and that may be felt together with the firmest belief of a resurrection. Brethren, our faith tells us one thing, and our sensations tell us another.” The feeling undermined faith and prayer. “Everyone who knows what Faith is, knows too what is the desolation of doubt. We pray till we begin to ask, Is there one who hears, or am I whispering to myself? We hear the consolation administered to the bereaved, and we see the coffin lowered into the grave, and the thought comes, What if all this doctrine of a life to come be but the dream of man’s imaginative mind?” Men spoke of faith “as a thing so easy,” but Robertson, who had at one time suffered grave doubts about his beliefs, declared firmly that “To feel faith is the grand difficulty of life.” For many believers there was “cold dark watching,” “struggle when victory seems a mockery to speak of,” and “times when light and life seem feeble, and Christ is to us but a name, and death a reality.”
By contrast with all Christians, some freethinkers among the Darwins’ friends welcomed the idea that death was the end. Harriet Martineau wrote in Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development that she agreed with Mr. Atkinson on “the fallacy of all arguments for a conscious existence after death.” People took their wish for a life after death as evidence for it; “the desire itself is a factitious thing,” and “many (and this I know) do not desire it at all.” Her friend, Charles’s brother Erasmus, was almost certainly one of those she was thinking of.
When a child died, the feelings and difficulties for Christian believers were especially strong. Elizabeth Birks, a devout evangelical, came to terms with the deaths of her father and her sister Frances in eager faith that they would find bliss in Heaven, but when her baby son died suddenly in 1854 she wrote to her sister: “I did not know the parting would be such a pang—a peep into a gulf I had not looked down before. It is something very different from our former losses; something all my own; part of my daily life.” She came to accept “God’s chastening hand resting on us” but three months later she found, “I dare not at times trust myself with what brings back to me my baby. My child in heaven I can think of, but not the baby I have lost.”
For people without a clear Christian faith, two of William Wordsworth’s so-called “Lucy” poems suggested a way in which a young girl might be seen as living in nature, and a kind of consolation might be found in seeing her death as a natural event. In the first he wrote:
Three years she grew in sun and shower,
Then Nature said, “A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;
This Child I to myself will take . . .”
Myself will to my darling be
Both law and impulse: and with me
The Girl, in rock and plain,
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain . . .
. . . hers shall be the breathing balm,
And hers the silence and the calm
Of mute insensate things.
. . . and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face . . .
Thus Nature spake—The work was done—
How soon my Lucy’s race was run!
She died, and left to me
This heath, this calm and quiet scene;
The memory of what has been,
And never more will be.
In “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” he used words of physical science to describe the girl after her death.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
One father who saw the death of a child as a natural happening found it all the more difficult to accept for that. Alfred Tennyson’s first child was stillborn on Easter Sunday 1851, three days before Annie died. At the birth Tennyson “heard the great roll of the organ, of the uplifted psalm” in the chapel next door to their home.
Little bosom not yet cold,
Noble forehead made for thought,
Little hands of mighty mould
Clenched as in the fight which they had fought.
He had done battle to be born,
But some brute force of Nature had prevailed
And the little warrior failed.
Emma and Charles’s family and friends, knowing her faith and probably having some idea of his doubts and the difficulties between the two, offered what consolations they could, but spoke with care. In all the letters of sympathy that Emma and Charles kept, only his sister Catherine made one brief reference to the idea that Annie had entered a better life in Heaven. She wrote to Charles: “No little dear could have had a happier life, except her health, until her little innocent spirit was called above.” She wrote to Emma: “I can only hope that God may comfort you in your great sorrow,” but did not suggest how He might.
There were two suggestions that Christian belief might be a consolation in other ways. Catherine wrote that Emma’s prayers might comfort her, and a close family friend, Ellen Tollet, believed there was “a mysterious consolation in the act of meekly submitting our will to His.” In writing those words, she was echoing Emma’s own hope, which she had de
clared so tentatively to Fanny, that she would be able to “attain some feeling of submission to the will of Heaven.”
A few consolations depended on other things than Christian faith. Catherine and Emma’s sister Charlotte Langton suggested that Emma and Charles could take comfort in the thought that they had done “everything in the world to make her happy.” Catherine also wrote: “It is an infinite mercy that your darling did not suffer. That would have been such an addition.” She hoped that Emma’s own “wonderful love and thought for others” might support her through the “grievous trial.” And Caroline suggested that Emma’s approaching confinement was perhaps “the best thing for her.”
Everyone agreed that time and memory were the best hope for recovery. Catherine wrote to Emma that there was “no comfort but time.” Erasmus wrote: “It is all bitterness to you now, but tender memories will survive and it will not be all loss.” Fanny wrote of pain and pleasure. “It will be long before you will be able to conquer that feeling of longing which is so bitter, and yet there will be something on the other side, the recollection of herself as she always was, bright, happy and loving. How difficult and how sad are all these comparisons, and yet one cannot help perpetually having them before one.”
These various beliefs and uncertainties were the background for Charles and Emma’s thinking and understanding with each other. When they wrote to each other during the last few days of Annie’s illness, the couple often used words which suggested that God had foreseen and possibly in some way influenced the outcome. Emma wrote at one point “How I do thank God” for her improvement. On another occasion she pleaded “God grant that dreadful sickness may keep off.” And after the end, “I do feel very grateful to God that our dear darling was apparently spared all suffering.” Just as Erasmus had written to Fanny Wedgwood when Dr. Darwin died in 1849, Charles also now referred to God as a kind figure overlooking human life and mitigating pain. He wrote: “God only knows the issue,” and “God only knows what miseries would have been in store for Annie had she lived.” At other times, he thanked God that she did not suffer, that she was not worse, that she had not been sick, and that he had hardly ever cast a disapproving eye on her. He said “God bless” Emma and Fanny; he exclaimed “God help us”; he wished that God would preserve and cherish Emma, and he said that if diarrhea did not come, “I trust in God we are nearly safe.”
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