Part 4

Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution
by Randal Keynes

(Page 4 of 5)

After the experience of her first pregnancy, Emma wanted to be prepared for the next delivery. There were four signs to watch for: missing a period, which was referred to in polite conversation as "ceasing to be unwell," morning sickness, changes in the breasts, and feeling the baby move, which was known as "quickening." After one or more of the signs, the due date was calculated by "the reckoning"-counting forty weeks from three days after the last menstruation. Emma marked her periods in her diary with a special cross, and when she missed one just seven months after Willy was born, she numbered forty weeks forward from three days after the last cross.

She suffered morning sickness a month later, but by then she had Charles to care for as well as herself. He became ill while they were staying with her parents at Maer in August, and from then until November she noted his symptoms in her diary every day. This "Maer illness," as he later called it, was the first long and serious attack of the disorder which was to dog him for the rest of his life, and for Emma it eclipsed her own discomfort. Charles had been healthy and lively as a young man. He had suffered acutely from sea-sickness on HMS Beagle and was laid low by fever a few times, but otherwise was one of the hardiest and most energetic members of the ship's company. By the time he married Emma he was already showing signs of his later illness, and she wrote: "I shall scold you into health." But he could not recover by an effort of will. Among his recurring symptoms were a state of languor and discomfort in which he found he could not work, swimming of the head, dying sensations and black spots before the eyes, spasmodic stomach pains, wind and vomiting, bouts of eczema and boils.

While at Maer, Charles was unhappy to be so ill and weak, and spent many hours in the nursery with his baby son. Emma's daily notes record a rich diet for Charles's delicate digestion. "Pulse 60, oysters and artichokes...pulse 52, partridge and pudding... very good day, hare, oysters, pulse about 54." One day, she wrote: "Turtle did not agree."

In the twenty-first week of her second pregnancy, Emma felt the child move in her womb, and wrote "quicken" in her diary. A week later, as Charles was recovering from his illness, the family returned home to Macaw Cottage. The novelist Maria Edgeworth, who knew the Wedgwoods and Darwins through her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, paid a call on Emma and Charles after Christmas. She wrote to a friend: "Mrs Darwin is the youngest daughter of Jos Wedgwood, and is worthy of both father and mother, affectionate and unaffected and, young as she is, full of old times. She has her mother's radiantly cheerful countenance even now, debarred from all London gaieties, and all gaiety but that of her own mind, by close attendance on her sick husband."

When Emma was nearly eight months pregnant, a fifteen-year-old girl, Bessy Harding, came from Maer to be Willy's nursemaid. Emma was in discomfort and preoccupied, and found it difficult to look after her child. She wrote later that in the weeks before her second confinement, "I could take so little notice of the little boy that he got not to care a pin for me, and it used to make me rather dismal sometimes."

As the days passed, Emma continued to jot symptoms in her diary. "Very languid...Great lassitude..." But the words "At his work" show that once again it was Charles she was watching, not herself.

Emma's sister Elizabeth had come again to be with her for the birth. In her thirty-eighth week, Emma made a small sign of how she felt in her diary. On the first of March she drew a pencil doodle of a fancy pigeon, a "pouter" with a huge inflated crop. The next day, she wrote "confined," and Annie was born.

It seems to have been a difficult birth. Emma and Charles's cousin Dr. Holland attended. Emma was ill afterwards and a nurse, almost certainly from University College Hospital, came to help. A wet-nurse was also engaged. She was probably chosen from the daily advertisements in The Times. The day after Annie was born, a notice appeared in the "Want Places" column. "As wet-nurse, a young woman from the country, with her first child, who has a good breast of milk, and has been confined a week." Most who advertised had their own infant at the breast, but some did not. A few days later, a notice appeared: "As wet-nurse to take an infant to nurse to whom every attention will be paid, a respectable female who has just lost her own child."

There was a strong feeling at the time that it was natural and right for a mother to breastfeed her own child, and women in society who chose to avoid the bother were criticised harshly. Mothers who were unable to breastfeed may have felt the reproach in obscure ways. A doctor wrote: "It may be called a fixed law of nature that a healthy woman should suckle her offspring." Not to comply with this "arrangement of Providence" was to forgo the first reward after the pain of childbirth. "It is plainly intended to cherish and increase the love of the parent herself, and to establish in the dependent and helpless infant from the first hours of its existence those associations on which its affections and confidence afterwards will be most securely founded. The evidence of design is manifest. So long as the child is unborn, no milk is secreted in the mother's breast, but no sooner does she give it birth, than this fluid is prepared and poured forth, admirably fitted in its qualities for the rapid growth of its delicate organism." The doctor made a link with animals to drive his point home. "Animals, even those of the most ferocious character, show affection for their young; they do not forsake or neglect them, but yield them their milk and watch over them with the tenderest care. Woman, who is possessed of reason as well as instinct, must not manifest a love below that of the brute creature."

Emma had some difficulties caring for Annie during the first weeks after the birth, but after two months, she felt quite well and able to nurse her. "The baby too, which began by being a very poor little thing, is now thriving and smiling very sweetly. I believe Elizabeth thought me a very unnatural mother while she was here, and I think she did care more for it than I did, but I like its company very much now." Emma was returning to normal life, playing again on the piano and enjoying being able to "play with the little boy and walk about and do what I like, without always thinking about oneself which is very tiresome."

She jotted down in the back of her diary some piano music to buy: sonatas by Clementi and Beethoven's Diabelli Variations. She had learnt the piano as a child, and when George IV's wife Mrs. Fitzherbert visited her school in the 1820s, she was chosen to play a piece as the best pupil. At one time she had lessons from Chopin. Charles now paid for her to receive lessons from Ignaz Moscheles, the Czech virtuoso who had taught Mendelssohn and was one of the foremost pianists of the day. His style was incisive and he disliked the flamboyant romanticism of Chopin and Liszt. Emma had a crisp and fine touch, and it was said that she played always with intelligence and simplicity. But "she could endure nothing sentimental, and 'slow movements' were occasionally under her treatment somewhat too 'allegro.'"

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.