Charles and Emma (12 page)

Not everything can be proven, Emma reasoned, but that does not mean something that cannot be proven is wrong. Belief comes from a different place than science. Charles had written about this very idea in his notebooks before the wedding—“Belief allied to instinct.” Emma prayed for him: “May not the habit in scientific pursuits of believing nothing
till it is proved, influence your mind too much in other things which cannot be proved in the same way, & which if true are likely to be above our comprehension.” We humans cannot prove everything; we cannot understand everything, Emma told her husband. Yet that was just what he was trying to do, in his study.

“I should say also that there is a danger in giving up revelation,” she wrote. Don't forget what Jesus did for us and for the rest of the world, she begged him. She did not mean to say that she was right and he was wrong; she had, after all, grown up in the freethinking atmosphere of Maer, where all sides were openly discussed. “I do not know whether this is arguing as if one side were true & the other false, which I meant to avoid, but I think not.” She was asking him to leave the door open.

Just as Dr. Darwin had predicted would happen, she was in agony over her husband's lack of faith. As Charles's father had warned, “Things went on pretty well until the wife or husband became out of health, and then some women suffered miserably by doubting about the salvation of their husbands.” Emma told Charles that he should pray, that she now realized that acting morally was not enough. She wrote, “I do not quite agree with you in what you once said—that luckily there were no doubts as to how one ought to act. I think prayer is an instance to the contrary, in one case it is a positive duty & perhaps not in the other. But I dare say you meant in actions which concern others & then I agree with you almost if not quite.”

Again Emma asked him not to answer, but to think about her letter; “It is a satisfaction to me to write it.” She asked him to have patience with her about this issue. And with tenderness she wrote, “Don't think that it is not my affair & that it
does not much signify to me. Every thing that concerns you concerns me & I should be most unhappy if I thought we did not belong to each other forever.”

She ended her letter with love, and thanked him for all the affection he gave her. His love, she told him, “makes the happiness of my life more & more every day.”

Charles read the letter and cried. He was as in love with her as he could be; he wanted so much to make her happy. Alone in his study, he was committed to his theory of natural selection, the theory that would leave God out of creation. But he was committed to Emma, too, and so as he examined lily hybrids and dog breeds, as he worked out a new theory about how coral islands had evolved, he also agonized over the religion question and over the effect his work was having, and would have, on her. He felt—literally—sick to his stomach.

Yet even with the emotional pain it caused him, Charles thought Emma's letter was beautiful. “Every thing that concerns you concerns me” went both ways. He kept the letter safely preserved always. Sometime later he wrote at the edge of it:

 

When I am dead, know
that many times, I
have kissed and cryed
over this. C.D.

 

Chapter 15

Little Animalcules

 

The baby performed his first smile to-day, a great event.

—E
MMA TO
A
UNT
J
ESSIE
, F
EBRUARY
7, 1840

 

T
he summer of 1839 was one of anticipation—happy and anxious. Emma and Charles anticipated the arrival of their first child, and Charles anticipated the reaction to his first book. They both felt sick much of the time, too. Emma suffered from morning sickness and other discomforts of pregnancy; Charles had headaches and was often nauseated.

They went to the country to get some fresh air and visit their families. At the Mount “Charles got some of his father's good doctoring,” Elizabeth wrote to Aunt Jessie. Although he had been quite healthy and robust on the voyage—save for the seasickness and a few bouts with illness—Elizabeth blamed his ill health on that long trip. She told her aunt that he “is much better again, but I suppose he is feeling the effect of too much exertion in every way during his voyage and must be careful not to work his head too hard now.” But Charles would not put work aside unless he had to.

At Maer Hall, he proudly gave Elizabeth a copy of his book, his first literary child, as he called the
Journal.
She wrote her aunt that “his journal is come out at last along with two other thick volumes…but I have not had time to read it yet.” Charles was eager for her to read it; he was eager for everyone to read his book. He had also given copies to Erasmus, Uncle Josiah, Henslow, Lyell, and Hensleigh. But he was, of course, most concerned about how critics and the reading public would react. When he received his author's copies he saw that FitzRoy had added a volume with a religious polemic arguing against Charles's geological findings—that the earth was formed gradually and was still being formed. After reading Charles's section in the page proofs of the book, FitzRoy quickly had written a chapter called “A Very Few Remarks with Reference to the Deluge,” in which he argued for the biblical account of creation and the flood. Charles was furious at his captain, and Lyell agreed with him. Charles told his sister Caroline that Lyell said “it beat all other nonsense he has ever read on the subject.”

Charles knew he owed a considerable amount of his success to FitzRoy. The captain not only took a chance by choosing him as his companion on the voyage, he also had supported him as he collected his specimens, and even helped him send back some of them at the Crown's expense. But given this latest development, Charles said he didn't think he could see much of his old captain anymore.

On the home front, other than illness, all was going well. Emma and Charles were close, content, and devotedly in love. After a visit, Elizabeth wrote to Aunt Jessie that Emma was “so entirely happy in her lot, with the most affectionate husband possible, upon whom none of her pleasant qualities are thrown away, who delights in her music and admires her
dress.” Elizabeth was so taken with this that she told Aunt Jessie she was going to start dressing better herself. She made a plan to go to London to visit Hensleigh and Fanny, who had moved to Gower Street, four doors away from Emma and Charles.

When Charles started getting reactions to his book from reviewers as well as from people he knew, he relaxed. As it turned out, almost everyone liked the
Journal of Researches
and many loved it—his expert friends
and
reviewers in journals and papers. Charles had a natural flair for writing—his charming, funny, and modest voice shone through—and he painted the scenes of his travels so well that his readers felt as if they were right there, looking at the cliffs and mountains, the coasts and the plains, the flora and the fauna. One reviewer called him a “first-rate landscape-painter with a pen.” Charles put himself in the first paragraph, as if to extend a hand and say, Come, walk with me. Describing his first stop, Porto Praya on St. Jago (now Santiago), an island in the Cape Verde Islands, he wrote, “The scene, as beheld through the hazy atmosphere of this climate, is one of great interest; if, indeed, a person, fresh from the sea, and who has just walked, for the first time, in a grove of cocoa-nut trees, can be a judge of any thing but his own happiness.” It was extremely unusual for an Englishman to have such an adventure, to explore faraway lands, and now in his book Charles took his readers with him on the adventure. In the first pages, he introduced them to a land quite different from the green English countryside. He wrote of St. Jago, “The island would generally be considered as very uninteresting; but to anyone accustomed only to an English landscape, the novel prospect of an utterly sterile land possesses a grandeur which more vegetation might spoil. A single green leaf can scarcely be discovered over wide tracts
of the lava plains; yet flocks of goats, together with a few cows, contrive to exist.”

The publication of the
Journal
made his name among England's reading public. Scientists were impressed with his work as well. He had spent as much time on land as possible and threw himself into the collecting, making every moment and every step into new territory count. He had much to report in his book, including his fossil discoveries, and discoveries of previously unknown species. But he didn't report everything. He didn't report that as he reviewed some of his finds on the journey home, he began, tentatively, to explore the idea of the transmutation of species.

In the book, he wrote, “In the thirteen species of ground-finches, a nearly perfect gradation may be traced, from a beak extraordinarily thick, to one so fine, that it may be compared to that of a warbler. I very much suspect, that certain members of the series are confined to different islands…” In a later edition, he would go on to say more, but just a little bit more, about how “one species had been taken and modified for different ends.” He was hinting here, in print, about the transmutation of species, about how new species were created, by adapting to their surroundings, by the means of natural selection. But he was just hinting.

FitzRoy's volumes did not get as positive a reception as Charles's, so the publisher released Darwin's volume as a separate book without telling him or compensating him financially. The new single volume by Charles Darwin, the humble and articulate guide, was a huge popular success. It made money for the publisher, and although Charles did not receive any income from it, he was proud of the book. He said later, “The success of this my first literary child always tickles my vanity more than that of any of my other books.”

 

* * *

The last week of December 1839, Emma was ready to give birth. A few days before she was confined (as they called going into labor), Charles got sick again, with bad headaches and an upset stomach. He was terrified of the childbirth, for good reason. He was also terrified of seeing Emma in pain. There was not much he could do to help, and there was no anesthesia to use. He wrote later to his cousin and good friend William Darwin Fox, “What an awful affair a confinement is: it knocked me up almost as much as it did Emma herself.”

So when Elizabeth arrived at Gower Street to help her sister with the birth, she had two patients to deal with—Emma and Charles. But Emma's delivery was the priority. William Erasmus Darwin was born on December 27, 1839. Emma and the baby survived. So did Charles. Elizabeth wrote to her parents to tell them the good news. Her mother answered immediately: “It cost me a good cry, but such tears are precious…remember my love and blessing to both parents of the welcome stranger, who will, I hope, be as great a comfort to them as their predecessors have been to us.” It seems to be the last letter Bessy ever wrote.

William was a joy to Emma and Charles. They called him Mr. Hoddy-Doddy or Doddy. Charles looked upon Doddy not only as a “little prince,” as he wrote in a letter to a naturalist friend, but also as “a prodigy of beauty and intellect,” as he wrote to his cousin Fox. Emma was, as usual, less sentimental than Charles. She wrote to Aunt Jessie after she regained her strength that she was able to enjoy “my baby, and a very nice looking one it is, I assure you. He has very dark blue eyes and a pretty, small mouth, his nose I will not boast of, but it is very harmless as long as he is a baby.” He seemed to have gotten Charles's nose.

Not even that bothered the proud papa. Charles was so thrilled that he put aside his anger and wrote to FitzRoy about the birth of his son. “I find as you always prophesied would be the case being married, a very great happiness…My little animalcule of a son, William Erasmus by name is also very well. He is 8 weeks old tomorrow, and has learnt to smile.” Charles also did not lose the opportunity to tell FitzRoy that he was going to keep on working on his scientific theories: “I have nothing to wish for, excepting stronger health to go on with the subjects, to which I have joyfully determined to devote my life.”

He continued to work on his book about coral reefs; he continued to make notes in his notebooks, and he continued to review his specimens, both preserved (in spirits of wine) and squalling. How could he not use his first child as a research subject? He watched William to see when he would smile, what he looked like when he cried, when tears formed. He had begun a new notebook right after the baby's birth. “During first week,” he wrote, Doddy “yawned, streatched himself just like old person—chiefly upper extremities—hiccupped—sneezes, sucked, surface of warm hand placed to face seemed immediately to give wish of sucking, either instinctive or associated knowledge of warm smooth surface of bosom.—Cried & squalled, but no tears.”

To Doddy all of this seemed like good attention—most of the time. When Doddy was about four months old, in the interest of science, Charles tried to scare the baby: “I made in his presence many odd noises and strange grimaces…but the noises, if not too loud, as well as the grimaces, were all taken as good jokes; and I attributed this at the time to their being preceded or accompanied by smiles.” He got other people into the experimentation, too. “When a few days over six months old, his nurse pretended to cry…I saw that his
face instantly assumed a melancholy expression, with the corners of the mouth strongly depressed.” Doddy had never seen a grown-up person cry, and had rarely seen other children cry. So it seemed to Charles “that an innate feeling must have told him that the pretended crying of his nurse expressed grief.” and that he empathized with her.

Charles was not all science by any means: He bathed the baby, kissed him, hugged him, walked him when he cried; he was anything but the stereotypical distant father so often portrayed in Victorian literature. He hated to watch his baby cry. “His sympathy with the grief spoiled his observation,” one of his other sons later wrote about him. So his worries about loss of time when he had children were unfounded—he could be a scientist and a father at the same time.