Marriage, First child

Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution
by Randal Keynes

In a chest of drawers bequeathed by his grandmother, author Randal Keynes discovered the writing case of Charles Darwin's beloved daughter Annie, who died at the age of ten. He also found the notes Darwin kept throughout Annie's illness, the eulogy he delivered at her funeral and provocative new insights into Darwin's views on nature, evolution, and the human condition.

Chapter 1

A child's writing case. The pale yellow ribbon curled inside is stitched with small glass beads. The goose-feather quills have dried ink on their tips, and the sealing wax has been melted over a candle flame. On the ribbon and the quills lies a fold of paper with a thick lock of fine brown hair. On the paper is written "April 23rd 1851." And on a leaf torn from a pocketbook is a map of a churchyard: "Annie Darwin's grave at Malvern."

The writing case was Annie's, and is filled with her things. She was Charles and Emma Darwin's first daughter. She died when she was ten. Charles wrote a "memorial" of her, and Emma kept the case to remember her by. It was passed down to my father, one of their great-grandsons.

I came across the case one day when I was looking through a box of family odds and ends. I was struck by a note in Charles's untidy scrawl. He had headed it "Anne" and wrote how she felt every day and night during her last months. She was often well but he noted when she was distressed. "Late evening tired and cry." "Early morning cry." "Poorly in morning." It was haunting to sense how he had been watching her day after day, night after restless night.

I found other traces of Annie's life in Charles and Emma's notebooks and letters. In the pages that follow I piece together a jigsaw of her childhood, and tease out some of Charles and Emma's feelings and ideas through the years after her death. I draw links with Charles's thinking about human nature, both before and after her short life. He learnt from his feelings for her about the lasting strength of the affections, the paradox of pain, the value of memory and the limits of human understanding.

There is one idea at the heart of my account. Charles's life and his science were all of a piece. Working at home on things he could study there, spending every day with his wife, children and servants, living at a time when science meant knowledge and understanding in the broadest view, and dwelling on issues that bear directly on the deepest questions about what it is to be human, he could not keep his thinking about the natural world apart from feelings and ideas that were important to him in the rest of his life.

This book explores Darwin's life with his family and his thinking about human nature in the interweavings around Annie and her memory.

Macaw Cottage

Marriage, First home in London,
First child, Annie's birth, Infancy

When at twenty-nine Charles Darwin thought about marrying, he took a piece of paper and wrote: "This is the question." Under "Not Marry" he jotted down: "Freedom to go where one liked-choice of society and little of it. Conversation of clever men at clubs. Not forced to visit relatives and to bend in every trifle-to have the expense and anxiety of children-perhaps quarrelling-loss of time...How should I manage all my business if I were obliged to go every day walking with my wife. Eheu! I never should know French, or see the Continent, or go to America, or go up in a Balloon." Under "Marry" he noted: "Children (if it please God), constant companion (and friend in old age) who will feel interested in one." He weighed all the points for and against, and made up his mind. "My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one's whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, and nothing after all. No, no, won't do. Imagine living all one's day solitarily in smoky dirty London house. Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, and books and music perhaps...Marry-Marry-Marry. Q.E.D."

A few days later, in July 1838, he visited his uncle, Josiah Wedgwood II, at his home, Maer Hall, near the Wedgwood factory in Staffordshire. Josiah's daughter Emma was there. She was a year older than Charles and had been a companion to him since childhood. She was lively and attractive and had been courted by many young men, but she was now looking after her elderly mother who had lost her mind, and faced the prospect of remaining single. Charles had met her in London earlier in the month, and they now had a long talk together by the fire in the library. He decided that he wanted her to be his wife. She was very happy in his company, and felt tentatively that if he saw more of her, he might really like her. When he proposed three months later, she accepted him eagerly. She went straight to her Sunday school for the village children after the "important interview," but "found I was turning into an idiot, and so came away." She wrote to her Aunt Jessie Sismondi: "He is the most open transparent man I ever saw and every word expresses his real thoughts." He was "the most affectionate person possible." Like many of the Wedgwood family, she often found it difficult to show her feelings. She felt it was a great advantage to have the power of expressing affection, and was sure that he would "make his children very fond of him."

Charles and Emma lost no time in planning for the future. They agreed to live in London while Charles was tied there by his scientific work, and the next month he was back at his lodgings in Great Marlborough Street, house-hunting anxiously. Emma wrote to him from Maer: "It is very well I am coming to look after you, my poor old man, for it is quite evident that you are on the verge of insanity and we should have had to advertise you-'Lost in the vicinity of Bloomsbury, a tall thin gentleman &c. &c., quite harmless. Whoever will bring him back shall be handsomely rewarded.'"

After the five years from 1831 that he had spent on HMS Beagle, sailing round the world as ship's naturalist, and his two years back in London since then working on his collections and findings from the voyage, Charles was looking forward to this change in his life. A few days before their wedding he wrote to Emma: "I was thinking this morning how on earth it came that I, who am fond of talking and am scarcely ever out of spirits, should so entirely rest my notions of happiness on quietness and a good deal of solitude; but I believe the explanation is very simple, and I mention it, because it will give you hopes that I shall gradually grow less of a brute." During the voyage, "the whole of my pleasure was derived from what passed in my mind, whilst admiring views by myself, travelling across the wild deserts or glorious forests, or pacing the deck of the poor little Beagle at night. Excuse this much egotism. I give it to you, because I think you will humanise me, and soon teach me there is greater happiness, than building theories and accumulating facts in silence and solitude." Charles had been thinking about matters of great importance to him. The theories he had been building were parts of the idea he was forming about the origin of species. He was having to work "in silence and solitude" because he recognised how fiercely his ideas would be attacked as soon as he revealed them to anyone, and he could not risk an argument until he was sure of his ground. His hope that Emma would humanise him was a deep wish that she could draw him out of his lonely work into the company and care of a close family circle.

Copyright © January 2002, Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc. Used by permission.

About the Author

Randal Keynes is a great-great grandson of Charles Darwin. He is also a descendant of the economist John Maynard Keynes.