Charles and Emma (10 page)

And the more he looked at animals and people, the more he came to believe we are all related. He watched a dog and a horse and a man yawn and wrote that it “makes me feel how much all animals are built on one structure.” Not because God had made everything from a pattern, as some people thought, but because we all evolved from the same pattern.

His work was going better than the house hunting. When he complained to Emma, she wrote that she would come to help. “I quite approve of your plan of furnishing a bit of the house first & getting into it how we can & then furnishing at our leisure,” she wrote. And she knew he needed some of her guidance. “I think it would be quite insulting to take the house in Bedford Place just opposite the Horneritas,” she wrote to him. Charles had made amends, somewhat, with the Horner girls and their parents, but it would be too awkward to run into them all the time on the block where they lived.

Emma left Maer and arrived in London by train. She stayed with Hensleigh and Fanny, and spent days walking up and down the streets with Charles looking for a home.

Neither of them cared too much about how a house looked. They were more concerned with price—it should be affordable—and that it have the number of rooms they needed, including a study for Charles, as well as quarters for servants. They also wanted a decent-sized yard. Finding a piece of land in London wasn't easy. “Some London houses,” Dickens wrote in
Nicholas Nickleby,
“have a melancholy little plot of ground behind them, usually fenced in by four high
whitewashed walls, and frowned upon by stacks of chimneys: in which there withers on, from year to year, a crippled tree…People sometimes call these dark yards ‘gardens;'…No man thinks of walking in this desolate place.” But Charles really needed to walk and to pace in order to think things through, and they had both grown up in the country and loved green and flowers and trees, so they made a good-sized garden a priority.

Finally, on Gower Street, near University College, Charles and Emma found a house that would do. It wasn't perfect—it was garishly decorated—but it had the right number of rooms and a decent yard that they would be able to see when they sat in the back of the house. Emma wrote to Aunt Jessie and Sismondi that the house had “a front drawing-room with three windows, and a back one, rather smaller, with a cheerful look-out on a set of little gardens, which will be of great value to us in summer to take a mouthful of fresh air; and that will be our sitting-room for quietness' sake. It is furnished, but rather ugly.”

The house was tall and skinny, like all the houses around it. It had four floors; a cook and other servants could stay in the attic and in the basement. Its blue walls clashed with the yellow curtains. Blue and yellow reminded them of a parrot; they dubbed it Macaw Cottage. By the end of December, Charles wrote triumphantly to Emma, who was back at Maer, “Gower Street is ours, yellow curtains and all.”

Besides the awful curtains, there was a dead dog decomposing in the garden. After the dog was removed, Charles would move in and get things ready for Emma's arrival. He couldn't wait.

“But why does joy, & OTHER EMOTION make grown up people cry.—What is emotion?” Charles wrote in his “N”
notebook, looking at himself. And then, “A man shivers, from fear, sublimity, sexual ardour.—a man cries from grief, joy & sublimity.”

To Emma he wrote, “I long for the day when we shall enter the house together. How glorious it will be to see you seated by the fire of our own house.”

 

Chapter 12

Heavy Baggage, Blazing Fires

 

I take so much pleasure in the house, I declare I am just
like a great over-grown child with a new toy; but then, not like
a real child, I long to have a co-partner and possessor.

—C
HARLES TO
E
MMA
, J
ANUARY
20, 1839

 

C
harles got out of bed early on December 30, 1838, unable to sleep. He could move into Macaw Cottage in just two days. He had planned to have a quiet day of work, but by eleven o'clock in the morning, he realized that was not going to happen. He rang for Syms Covington.

“I am very sorry to spoil your Sunday,” he told his manservant, “but begin packing up I must, as I cannot rest.”

“Pack up, Sir, what for?” asked Covington, his eyes wide with astonishment.

“As if it was the first notice he had received of my flitting,” Charles reported to Emma.

Syms Covington, who had been working for Charles ever since the
Beagle,
would not be staying on after the marriage.
He was off to Australia, with Charles's blessing and help. But now he worked with Charles, arranging the specimens and packing them for the move. Charles sorted “a multitude of papers”—including his notes on scraps of paper, envelopes, and Athenaeum stationery, and his readings. He had piles of scientific papers he had read or was planning to read; books he needed to get to, which he listed in his notebooks: Buffon on varieties of domesticated animals and Smellie and Flemming on the philosophy of zoology; Bevan on the honeybee, Paxton on the culture of dahlias; Cuvier on instinct. He had his secret notebooks to move with him, to keep close by, and he had field notebooks from the voyage, notebooks that listed all of his specimens and where he got them, the fossil vertebrates and invertebrates, plant fossils, stuffed birds, mammal fossils, mammals, and fish.

The next day, Charles and Syms began to pack in earnest: the books, clothes, linens, pots and pans, all the specimens. By three thirty on January 1, they had filled two large horse-drawn vans with “goods, well and carefully packed.” Charles was moving into Macaw Cottage with an abundance of baggage, much of it heavy. He wrote to Emma, “I was astounded, and so was Erasmus, at the bulk of my luggage, and the porters were even more so at the weight of those containing my Geological Specimens.”

Charles and Syms carried by hand “some few dozen drawers of shells,” so the shells wouldn't shatter. By six o'clock they were in the house and by eight they had a meal of eggs, bacon, and tea. Charles felt “supremely comfortable.”

There were so many specimens everywhere that the house looked like a museum. Over the next few days, the two men moved as many crates of specimens as they could into one of the front attic rooms, and Charles dubbed it the Museum. He
wanted the rest of the house to be a home for Emma; he did not want the science to take over completely.

Charles exulted in his new home. It was only a hundred yards from Regent's Park, where he and Emma could go walking together. And now that the dead dog was gone, he assured her, “The little garden is worth its weight in gold.” It was very narrow, but it was ninety feet long, big enough for Charles to pace in every day. He spent the next days working, setting up the house as best he could, hiring a cook and other servants—consulting with Emma and his sisters and Fanny. He also started receiving wedding gifts. One puzzled him: “My good old friend Herbert sent me a very nice little note, with a massive silver weapon, which he called a Forficula (the Latin for an earwig) and which I thought was to catch hold of soles and flounders.” But Erasmus, who knew these things, told him it was for asparagus. Harriet Martineau sent some of her own books to help start their library, and Henslow brought Charles a silver candlestick. Mrs. Henslow offered to give him advice on household matters.

In between setting up, he found time to make some notebook jottings, too. Once again he analyzed Specimen Number One, Charles Darwin. “What passes in a man's mind. When he says he loves a person—do not the features pass before him marked, with the habitual express emotions, which make us love him, or her.—it is blind feeling, something like sexual feelings…” What else influences love, he wondered. Is it affected by other emotions? He thought of Emma and was eager, lonely, and frustrated.

His frustration grew when he read a letter from Emma postponing the wedding five days. “You will have a few days more time on your hands than you expect my dear Charley as the marriage must be fixed for the 29th instead of the 24th (I always said
about
the 24th) I am afraid you will be rather
vexed at this but I hope you will have the Drs maxim that I
must always
be in the right properly impressed on your mind.” She
was
right about one thing—it did vex him.

For her part, Emma was vexed when he referred to the house as “his,” not “ours,” and she told him so. She also told him that she did not approve of Lyell's idea that he and Charles should dine every evening at the Athenaeum Club, leaving the wives at home alone. Apparently Henslow told him he should take many solitary walks, too. Emma was not eager to move to London and be left alone all the time: “I must say looks as if you meant to give in a good deal, to Mr Lyells plan of the Athenaeum. If you follow Mr Henslows advice about walking & Mr Lyells precepts about dining I shall see quite…little of you…These excellent steady old friends of yours have a good deal to answer for in corrupting your mind.”

Charles had no intention of leaving Emma alone; he wanted to be with her as much as she wanted to be with him. Even though he reassured her, Emma still was not happy with Lyell, and especially not with the way he treated his wife, who just sat quietly and did not say much. Emma decided not to read his book, as she had been planning to do.

Emma was not one to sit by quietly and not say much. “By the way now we seem to be clearing old scores,” she wrote to Charles, “they told me at Shrewsbury that you had the audacity to call me ‘little baggage'! but I won't believe it till I hear it with my own ears, (& then I advise you to take care
of your
own ears).”

Charles, for his part, also wanted to come clean. He warned her about what she was really in for with this man devoted to his specimens and his thoughts. After a lovely visit to Maer a few weeks before the wedding, he told Emma that she would have to humanize him. Five years on the voyage and the last two spent working so hard had made him too
much of a brute, and he hoped that Emma would “soon teach me there is greater happiness than building theories and accumulating facts in silence and solitude.”

Charles was so preoccupied with his thoughts that he forgot to show up for a dinner he had been invited to attend. Maybe it was his instinct for survival—the dinner was at the Horners' house. The family waited around the table for him while he sat happily alone at the Athenaeum, reading and eating his dinner as he had taken to doing. “I made a very stupid mistake yesterday,” he wrote to Emma. “I utterly forgot the invitation & kept the whole party waiting whilst I was quietly at dinner here.—I had to send a very humble note this morning, & backed it by calling, and had a very pleasant sit.”

It wasn't just work that preoccupied him; it was the thought of Emma:—“My own dear future wife.” The letters flew back and forth, daily or even twice a day. Emma, uncharacteristically for her, was also romantic and sentimental. She was almost embarrassed by her enthusiasm. “I am rather ashamed of writing to you so soon again but if I disguise my writing in the direction I am in hopes the post master at Newcastle will think it is somebody else.” She wrote with candor, letting Charles see who she really was, just as he was doing with her: “Today the Miss Northens are coming very early & I shall have to do a prodigious quantity of friendship with Ellen who adores me extremely & will want to know all about every thing & my chief aim will be to tell her nothing about any thing. I shall treat her like your sisters do the Owens pretend to be very open & carefully never tell anything.”

And although (perhaps because) she found it difficult to talk about religion in person, Emma once again wrote to Charles. On January 23, less than a week before the wedding, she wrote about her concerns.

You need not fear my own dear Charles that I shall not be quite as happy as you are & I shall always look upon the event of the 29th as a most happy one on my part though perhaps not so great or so good as you do. There is only one subject in the world that ever gives me a moments uneasiness & I believe I think about that very little when I am with you & I do hope that though our opinions may not agree upon all points of religion we may sympathize a good deal in our feelings on the subject. I believe my chief danger will be that I shall lead so happy comfortable & amusing a life that I shall be careless & good for nothing & think of nothing serious in this world or the next.

 

This world or the next.
She wasn't letting go.

On the day they had originally set for the wedding, January 24, 1839, Charles was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, which was a rather important milestone in his career, but he didn't even mention it in a letter to Emma. Instead he told her that he had had a bad headache for two days and two nights. He was afraid he wouldn't be well enough to get married, but the train to Shrewsbury “quite cured me.” He arrived at the Mount to get ready for the wedding, and wrote to her at Maer. She had asked him to, afraid that it would be the last letter she ever got from him, for once they were married they did not expect to be spending time apart. “The house is in such a bustle,” Charles told her, “that I do not know what I write. I have got the ring, which is the most important piece of news I have to tell.”

Finally, on Tuesday, January 29, Charles, with the ring, and Emma in a green silk dress, went to the church at Maer. Emma was thirty, Charles would turn thirty in two weeks. Neither one liked pomp and ceremony, so the service was quick and attended only by a few members of their close family. Emma's mother, Bessy, was too sick to leave her bed, and Erasmus did
not even come in from London. Charles's sister Caroline and Emma's brother Josiah were there, but their infant was very ill, which set a pall over the whole day.

The group went back to Maer Hall, where Emma quickly changed out of her fancy clothes, and the two newlyweds said their farewells. Emma tried to say good-bye to her mother, but Bessy was still asleep. This was actually a great relief to Emma, who had been worried that her mother was lying there feeling terrible for missing the ceremony.