Part 2

Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution
by Randal Keynes

(Page 2 of 5)

But he could joke about the difficulties she would have. After spending a morning with his friend, the geologist Charles Lyell, he wrote to her: "I was quite ashamed of myself today; for we talked for half an hour unsophisticated geology, with poor Mrs Lyell sitting by, a monument of patience. I want practice in ill-treating the female sex. I did not observe Lyell had any compunction. I hope to harden my conscience in time: few husbands seem to find it difficult to effect this."

He found a house for them in Upper Gower Street, a long terrace on what was then the northern edge of London. The street led to the recently founded University College with its teaching hospital across the road, and a school whose pupils played in the grounds in front of the main building. University College was known as "the Godless College." Under the guidance of the Whig politician Lord Brougham and other progressive reformers, it gave literary and scientific education to students of all backgrounds and denominations. The main building with its grand ten-column portico was modelled on a temple in Athens. Together with the monumental Euston Arch (now sadly destroyed), St. Pancras New Church, the Royal College of Surgeons and the great colonnade of the British Museum, University College gave the neighbourhood the distinctive high-minded tone of the "Greek" revival. The imposing new buildings stood for progressive enterprise, free inquiry and the life of the mind. The people who commissioned them felt they were constructing a "brave new world." In his "Ode to Liberty," Shelley had written of Athens with its "crest of columns" set on the will of man "as on a mount of diamond."

Many of the hospital's patients were poor people from the crowded slums immediately behind the smart terraces and public buildings of the neighbourhood. Charles Dickens said at a fund-raising dinner that the hospital represented "the largest liberality of opinion. It excludes no one patient, student, doctor, surgeon or nurse because of religious creed. It represents the complete relinquishment of claims to coerce the judgement or the conscience of any human being." Like his namesake, Charles Darwin made regular donations.

The Darwins' neighbours in the terrace were well-to-do professionals-surgeons, lawyers, artists, a publisher and a famous Shakespearean clown. Emma's brother Hensleigh Wedgwood lived a few doors away with his wife Fanny, daughter of Sir James Mackintosh, who was one of the governors of University College and known as the "Whig Cicero." The mews at the back of the long narrow gardens were tenanted by coachmen, stable keepers and their families.

The house Charles found had a kitchen and a room for the manservant in the basement, the dining room and a study for Charles on the ground floor, the main drawing room on the first floor and a small back room with a bay window looking out over the garden. The family bedrooms were on the second floor, and the cook and maids slept in the attic rooms. Charles planned to move in before the wedding, and jotted in his notebook: "Remnants of carpets; mat for hall...white curtains washed; two easy chairs; blinds in red rooms washed." The yellow curtains in the drawing room clashed with the blue paintwork and the furniture, and there was a dead dog in the garden. Charles kept the yellow curtains but had the dog removed, and looked forward to walking in the garden. He was grateful for the plants and the open air, but the atmosphere was poisoned by the smoke of the city. A physician who lived nearby wrote that the trees and bushes in the squares and gardens were stunted and often died. "If you pluck a branch from one of them, your fingers are smeared with soot...By the time a person has been in the streets two or three hours, the glory of the laundress and the clear-starcher is laid, not in the dust, but in smoke, which forms itself into myriads of flocculi, designated 'blacks,' and the blacks are by no means capricious, for they stick most assiduously to ladies' and gentlemen's dresses, if the weather be more than ordinarily dense."

Charles looked forward to Emma's arrival. "Is it not our house?" he wrote to her. "What is there, from me the geologist to the black sparrows in the garden, which is not your own property?" Thinking back in later years, he often laughed over the house's ugliness. Remembering splendours in the tropical forests of South America, he called it "Macaw Cottage" because the furniture in the drawing room combined all the macaw's colours "in hideous discord."

Charles moved in on the last day of December. His servant Syms Covington, who had been his assistant on HMS Beagle, helped him load two large vans with his "specimens of natural history." A few dozen drawers of shells were carried by hand. He wrote to Emma that one of the front attics was quite filled, and was to be called the Museum. "I wish I could make the drawing room look as comfortable as my own studio; but I dare say a fire and a little disorder will temporarily make things better."

Charles and Emma were married at Maer in January 1839. Emma wrote that on their first Thursday together in London they "went slopping through the melted snow to Broadwood's," where they tried a pianoforte and asked if it could be delivered to their home. On Saturday they walked out again and as they came back met "a pianoforte van in Gower Street, to which Charles shouted to know whether it was coming to No. 12, and learnt to our great satisfaction that it was. Besides its own merits, it makes the room look so much more comfortable...I have given Charles a large dose of music every evening."

When the schoolchildren were not playing in the college grounds, the neighbourhood was quiet. There were no shops or pubs on the street, and the road between University College and the hospital was a private right-of-way with gates that were often closed at night. Charles and Emma heard a strange "wailing whistle" from time to time, a sound of the new railway age from Euston Station. Locomotives approaching on the London & Birmingham Railway did not run down the last falling mile to the terminus because they could not manage the steep return climb. The carriages were uncoupled and rolled down on their own. They were hauled back up on a continuous chain drawn by two stationary steam engines at the top of the long incline, and staff at the station would signal that they were on their way by blasts on a great organ pipe operated by compressed air.

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.