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by Bill Bryson

  For many the ordeals of early childhood were a modest warm-up for the stress of life in private schools. Rarely can hardship have been embraced with greater enthusiasm than in the English private school in the nineteenth century. From the moment of arrival pupils were treated to harsh regimens involving cold baths, frequent canings, and the withholding from the diet of anything that could be remotely described as appetizing. Boys at Radley College, near Oxford, were so systematically starved that they were reduced to digging up flowerbulbs from the school gardens and toasting them over candles in their rooms. At schools where bulbs were not available, the boys simply ate the candles. The novelist Alec Waugh, brother of Evelyn, attended a prep school called Fernden that seemed to be singularly devoted to the ideals of sadism. On his first day there, his fingers were thrust into a pot of sulphuric acid to discourage him from biting his nails, and soon afterward he was required to eat the contents of a bowl of semolina pudding into which he had just vomited, an experience that understandably dimmed his enthusiasm for semolina for the rest of his life.

  Living conditions at private schools were always grim. Illustrations of school dormitories from the nineteenth century show them as being all but indistinguishable from the equivalent spaces in prisons and workhouses. Dormitories were often so cold that water froze overnight in jugs and bowls. Beds were little more than wooden platforms, often with nothing more for warmth and padding than a couple of rough blankets. Every night at Westminster and Eton some fifty boys were locked in together in vast halls and left without supervision till morning so that the weakest were at the mercy of the strongest. Junior boys sometimes had to rise in the middle of the night to begin polishing boots, drawing water, and engaging in all the other chores required of them before breakfast. It is little wonder that Lewis Carroll said in later life of his schooldays that nothing on Earth would induce him to repeat that experience.

  Many boys were flogged daily, some twice a day. Not being flogged at all was a cause for celebration. “This week I did much better at arithmetic and didn’t have the birch once,” one boy wrote home happily from Winchester in the early 1800s. Floggings generally consisted of three to six strokes delivered on the run with a whiplike birch, but occasionally greater violence was done. In 1682, a headmaster at Eton had to resign after killing a boy. A remarkable number of young men developed a taste for the whistle and sting of a spanking—so much so that whipping for pleasure became known as le vice anglais. At least two nineteenth-century prime ministers, Melbourne and Gladstone, were devoted flagellants, and a Mrs. Collet in Covent Garden ran a brothel that specialized in providing sex with a smack.

  Above all, offspring were expected to do as they were told, and to continue doing so long after they had reached their majority. Parents reserved to themselves the right to select marriage partners, careers, modes of living, political affiliations, style of dress, and almost any other consideration that could be dictated, and frequently reacted with financial violence when their commands were disregarded. Henry Mayhew, the social reformer, was cut off when he declined to submit to his father’s instructions to become a lawyer. So, too, one after another, were six of his seven brothers. Only the seventh was keen to be a lawyer (or perhaps just keen to have the estate); he dutifully qualified and so inherited the lot. The poet Elizabeth Barrett was disinherited for marrying Robert Browning, who was not only a penniless poet but—the horror of it—the grandson of a publican. Similarly, the horrified parents of Alice Roberts disinherited her when she could not be dissuaded from marrying the indigent son of a Roman Catholic piano tuner. Fortunately for Miss Roberts, the man was the future composer Edward Elgar, and he made her rich anyway.

  Sometimes disinheritance was provoked by rather more trivial considerations. The second Lord Townshend, after years of being annoyed by his son’s effeminacy, abruptly struck the hapless fellow from the will when he wandered into the room one day wearing pink ribbons on his shoes. Also much spoken of was the case of the sixth Duke of Somerset, known as “the Proud Duke,” who required his daughters always to stand in his presence and reportedly disinherited one of them when he awoke from a nap and caught the ungrateful wretch sitting.

  What is often striking—and indeed depressing—is how freely parents withheld not funds but affections. Elizabeth Barrett and her father were intensely close, but when she declared her intention to marry Robert Browning, Mr. Barrett immediately terminated all contact. He never spoke or wrote to his daughter again, even though her marriage was to a man who was gifted and respectable, and based on the deepest bonds of love. In the mystifying world that was Victorian parenthood, obedience took precedence over all considerations of affection and happiness, and that odd, painful conviction remained the case in most well-heeled homes up until at least the time of the First World War.

  So on the face of it, it would seem that Victorians didn’t so much invent childhood as disinvent it. In fact, however, it was more complicated than that. By withholding affection to children when they were young, but also then endeavoring to control their behavior well into adulthood, Victorians were in the very odd position of simultaneously trying to suppress childhood and make it last forever. It is perhaps little wonder that the end of Victorianism almost exactly coincided with the invention of psychoanalysis.

  Defying a parent was so profoundly unacceptable that most children, even in adulthood, would simply not engage in it. A perfect illustration of this is Charles Darwin. When as a young man Darwin was offered the chance to join the voyage of HMS Beagle he wrote a touching letter to his father explaining precisely why and how desperately he wished to go, but took pains to assure his father that he would withdraw his name from consideration if the idea made his father even briefly “uncomfortable.” Mr. Darwin considered the matter and declared that the idea did make him uncomfortable, so Charles, without a peep of protest, withdrew his name. The idea of Charles Darwin not going on the Beagle voyage is to us unimaginable now. To Darwin, what was unimaginable was disobeying his father.

  Of course Darwin did get to go in the end, and a big part of the reason his father relented was an odd but crucial factor in the lives of many upper-class people: marriage within the family. Marrying cousins was astoundingly common into the nineteenth century, and nowhere is this better illustrated than with the Darwins and their cousins the Wedgwoods (of pottery fame). Charles married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood, daughter of his beloved Uncle Josiah. Darwin’s sister Caroline, meanwhile, married Josiah Wedgwood III, Emma’s brother and the Darwin siblings’ joint first cousin. Another of Emma’s brothers, Henry, married not a Darwin but a first cousin from another branch of his own Wedgwood family, adding another strand to the family’s wondrously convoluted genetics. Finally, Charles Langton, who was not related to either family, first married Charlotte Wedgwood, another daughter of Josiah and cousin of Charles, and then upon Charlotte’s death married Darwin’s sister Emily, thus becoming, it seems, his sister-in-law’s sister-in-law’s husband and raising the possibility that any children of the union would be their own first cousins. What all this meant in terms of relationships between nephews, nieces, and the next generation of cousins is very nearly beyond computing.

  What it produced, rather unexpectedly, is one of the happiest family groupings of the nineteenth century. Nearly all the Darwins and Wedgwoods seem to have been genuinely fond of one another, which is a very good thing for us, because when Darwin’s father expressed misgivings about the Beagle voyage, Darwin’s uncle Josiah was happy to intercede on his behalf and to have a word with Charles’s father, his cousin Robert. What’s more, Robert was persuaded to change his mind because of his respect and affection for Josiah.

  So, thanks to his uncle and a tradition of keeping genes within the family, Charles Darwin did go to sea for the next five years and gathered the facts that allowed him to change the world. And that takes us conveniently, if a little unexpectedly, to the top of the house and the last space we will pass through.

  * We ca
n’t be sure that this room in the Old Rectory ever actually was a nursery. It is another of the afterthought rooms not included on Edward Tull’s original plans, so there are no blueprint labels to guide us. But its modest dimensions and position next door to the main bedroom strongly suggest that it was intended as a nursery rather than just an additional bedroom, which raises yet another intriguing and unanswerable question about the bachelor Mr. Marsham’s hopes and intentions.

  • CHAPTER XIX •

  THE ATTIC

  I

  In the eventful summer of 1851, while crowds flocked to the Great Exhibition in London and Thomas Marsham settled into his new property in Norfolk, Charles Darwin delivered to his publishers a hefty manuscript, the result of eight years of devoted inquiry into the nature and habits of barnacles. Called A Monograph of the Fossil Lepadidae, or, Pedunculated Cirripedes of Great Britain, it doesn’t sound like the most diverting of works, and wasn’t, but it secured his reputation as a naturalist and gave him, in the words of one biographer, “the authority to speak, when the time was ripe, on variability and transmutation”—on evolution, in other words. Remarkably, Darwin hadn’t finished with barnacles yet. Three years later he produced a 684-page study of sessile cirripedes and a more modest companion work on the barnacle fossils not mentioned in the first work. “I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before,” he declared upon the conclusion of the work, and it is hard not to sympathize.

  Fossil Lepadidae was not a huge seller, but it did no worse than another book published in 1851—a strange, mystically rambling parable on whale hunting, called simply The Whale. This was a timely book since whales everywhere were being hunted to extinction, but the critics and buying public failed to warm to it, or even understand it. It was too dense and puzzling, too packed with introspection and hard facts. A month later the book came out in America with a different title: Moby-Dick. It did no better there. The book’s failure was a surprise because the author, thirty-two-year-old Herman Melville, had enjoyed great success with two earlier tales of adventure at sea, Typee and Omoo. Moby-Dick, however, never took off in his lifetime. Nor did anything else he wrote. He died all but forgotten in 1891. His last book, Billy Budd, didn’t find a publisher until more than thirty years after his death. Although it is unlikely that Mr. Marsham was acquainted with either Moby-Dick or Fossil Lepadidae, both reflected a fundamental change that had lately overtaken the thinking world: an almost obsessive urge to pin down every stray morsel of discernible fact and give it permanent recognition in print. Fieldwork was now all the rage among gentlemen of a scientific bent. Some went in for geology and the natural sciences. Others became antiquaries. The most adventurous of all sacrificed homely comforts and often years of their lives to explore distant corners of the world. They became—a new word, coined in 1834—scientists.

  Their curiosity and devotion were inexhaustible. No place was too remote or inconvenient, no object unworthy of consideration. This was the era in which the plant hunter Robert Fortune traveled across China disguised as a native gathering information on the growing and processing of tea, when David Livingstone pushed up the Zambezi and into the darkest corners of Africa, when botanical adventurers combed the interiors of North and South America looking for interesting and novel specimens, and when Charles Darwin, just twenty-two years old, set forth as a naturalist on the epic voyage that would change his life, and ours, in ways that no one could then begin to imagine.

  Almost nothing Darwin encountered during the five years of the voyage failed to excite his attention. He recorded so many facts and acquired such a wealth of specimens that it took him a decade and a half just to get through the barnacles. Among much else, he collected hundreds of new species of plant, made many important fossil and geological discoveries, developed a widely admired hypothesis to explain the formation of coral atolls, and acquired the materials and insights necessary to create a revolutionary theory of life—not bad going for a young man who, had his father had his way, would instead now be a country parson like our own Mr. Marsham, a prospect Darwin dreaded.

  One of the ironies of the Beagle voyage was that Darwin was engaged by Captain Robert FitzRoy because he had a background in theology and was expected to find evidence to support a biblical interpretation of history. In persuading Robert Darwin to let Charles go, Josiah Wedgwood had been at pains to stress that “the pursuit of natural history … is very suitable to a Clergyman.” In the event, the more Darwin saw of the world, the more convinced he became that Earth’s history and dynamics were vastly more protracted and complicated than conventional thinking allowed. His coral atolls theory, for one, required a passage of time far beyond any allowed by biblical timescales, a fact that infuriated the devout and volatile Captain FitzRoy.

  Eventually, of course, Darwin devised a theory—survival of the fittest, as we commonly know it; descent with modification, as he called it—that explained the wondrous complexity of living things in a way that didn’t require the intervention of a deity at all. In 1842, six years after the end of his voyage, he sketched out a 230-page summary outlining the theory’s principal elements. Then he did an extraordinary thing: he locked it away in a drawer and kept it there for the next sixteen years. The subject, he felt, was too hot for public discussion.

  Long before Darwin came along, however, people were already finding things that didn’t accord with orthodox beliefs. One of the first such finds, in fact, was just a few miles down the road from the Old Rectory in the village of Hoxne, where in the late 1790s a wealthy landowner and antiquary named John Frere discovered a cache of flint tools lying alongside the bones of long-extinct animals, suggesting a coexistence that wasn’t supposed to happen. In a letter to the Society of Antiquaries in London, he reported that the tools were made by people who “had not the use of metals … [which] may tempt us to refer them to a very remote period indeed.” This was an exceedingly keen insight for the time—too keen, in fact, and it was almost completely ignored. The secretary of the society thanked him for his “curious and most interesting communication,” and, for the next forty years or so, that was the end of the matter.*

  But then others began finding tools and ancient bones in puzzling proximity. In a cave near Torquay in Devon, Father John MacEnery, a Catholic priest and amateur excavator, uncovered more or less incontrovertible evidence that humans had hunted mammoths and other creatures now extinct. MacEnery found this idea so uncomfortably at odds with biblical precepts that he kept his findings to himself. Then a French customs officer named Jacques Boucher de Perthes found bones and tools together on the Somme plain and wrote a long and influential work, Celtic and Antediluvian Antiquities, which attracted international attention. At much the same time, William Pengelly, an English headmaster, reexamined MacEnery’s cave and another in nearby Brixham and announced the findings that MacEnery was too distraught to share. So by midcentury it was becoming increasingly evident that Earth possessed not just a lot of history but also what would come to be known as prehistory, though that word wouldn’t be coined until 1871. It is telling that these ideas were so radical that there weren’t yet even words for them.

  Then in the early summer of 1858, from Asia, Alfred Russel Wallace famously dropped a bombshell into Darwin’s lap. He sent him the draft of an essay, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type.” It was Darwin’s own theory, innocently and independently arrived at. “I never saw a more striking coincidence,” Darwin wrote. “If Wallace had my manuscript sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract.”

  Protocol required Darwin to step aside and allow Wallace full credit for the theory, but Darwin couldn’t bring himself to make such a noble gesture. The theory meant too much to him. A complicating factor at this time was that his son Charles, aged eighteen months, was gravely ill with scarlet fever. Despite this, Darwin found time to dash off letters to his most eminent scientific friends, and they helped him contrive a solution. It was agreed that Jose
ph Hooker and Charles Lyell would present summaries of both papers to a meeting of the Linnaean Society in London, giving Darwin and Wallace joint priority for the new theory. This they duly did on July 1, 1858. Wallace, far away in Asia, knew nothing of these machinations. Darwin didn’t attend because on that day he and his wife were burying their son.

  Darwin immediately set to work expanding his sketch into a full-length book, and in November 1859 it was published as On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. It was an immediate best seller. It is almost impossible now to imagine how much Darwin’s theory unsettled the intellectual world, or how desperately many people wished it not to be so. Darwin himself remarked to a friend that writing his book felt “like confessing to a murder.”

  Many devout people simply couldn’t accept that the Earth was as ancient and randomly enlivened as all the new ideas indicated. One leading naturalist, Philip Henry Gosse, produced a somewhat desperate alternative theory called “prochronism” in which he suggested that God had merely made the Earth look old, to give people of inquisitive minds more interesting things to wonder over. Even fossils, Gosse insisted, had been planted in the rocks by God during his busy week of Creation.

  Gradually, however, educated people came to accept that the world was not just older than biblically supposed but also much more complicated, imperfect, and confused. Naturally, all this undermined the confident basis on which clergymen like Mr. Marsham operated. In terms of their preeminence, it was the beginning of the end.