Charles Darwin was born 200 years ago on the 12 February 1809 into a life of privilege and education. The father of the theory of the survival of the fittest was to discover that bringing up his own family came with its share of joys and challenges.
Charles Darwin’s Background
Charles Darwin's family were prominent and wealthy society members. His father Robert Darwin was a wealthy Shropshire physician and Charles and his brother Erasmus were expected to follow suit. Darwin had other ideas. His epic voyage on the Beagle (1831-1836), as the onboard naturalist, changed the course of his life and led him on the path to his theories of evolution. Thereafter, Darwin’s daily musing and detailed studies of the natural world took place surrounded by his large and involved family. The result was the publication of a large body of scientific tomes including the Origin of the Species (1859)
His Marriage
Darwin was a man who enjoyed the process of collecting and cataloguing. By the end of the early 1830s, his cost benefit analysis of marriage convinced him that the advantages far outweighed the disadvantages. Darwin married his first cousin, Emma Wedgewood (1808-1986) in 1839. An inauspicious start to marriage perhaps but Emma and Charles became devoted to each other.
Marrying a first cousin, although not uncommon, was a source of concern to Darwin. He feared that his chronic ill health and both families perceived predisposition to physical and mental abnormalities would be inherited by his own children. This led to a lifelong fascination with in- breeding and the evolutionary implications. He even tried, unsuccessfully, to incorporate a question on first cousin marriages (and the offspring) on the 1871 national census.
Perhaps it was the excitement and significance of his forthcoming marriage that prompted him, but in the summer of 1938 Darwin started recording the events of his life in a journal.
His Children
His children featured in his writings almost daily. Charles and Emma had 10 children - 6 boys and 4 girls:
- William Erasmus (1839-1914)
- Anne Elizabeth (1841-1851)
- Mary Eleanor (1842-1842)
- Henrietta Emma (1843-1929)
- George Howard (1845-1912)
- Elizabeth (1847-1926)
- Francis (1848-1925)
- Leonard (1850-1943)
- Horace (1851-1928)
- Charles Waring (1856-1858)
Seven children survived to a ripe old age. Two died in infancy. Mary Eleanor only survived 3 weeks and Charles Waring succumbed to scarlet fever at two years old. Darwin was a loving and caring man, unlike the distant father figures of the time, and was particularly devastated by the premature deaths of three of his children. The loss of his beloved eldest daughter Anne aged 10 was extremely difficult for a man who’d viewed her as a perfect example of human physical and moral attributes.
Working en famille
In 1842, Darwin moved his growing family out of London to Down, a hamlet 16 miles out of London on the South Downs. His travelling days were behind him and his own chronic, largely un-diagnosed, health problems meant that Darwin left Down house infrequently over the next 40 years. It was here that Charles Darwin found his refuge.
The house and its 15 acres of land became his laboratory and the experiments conducted here led him to confirm his emerging thoughts on evolution. His children were not expected to follow the Victorian maxim ‘children should be seen but not heard’ and the house was filled with the cries of children playing. No room was out of bounds. Darwin’s enthusiasm for family life overlapped with his work, with the children involved in studies ranging from those on the flying paths of honey bees to understanding the diversity of human facial expressions.
Keeping Darwin’s Memory Alive.
As adults, Darwin’s children were active in keeping his work and the family archives alive following his death in 1882. For example, Francis Darwin, a reader in Botany, edited several volumes of Darwin’s prodigious output of correspondence and Henrietta prepared two volumes of her mother’s letters. That trend has continued to the present day with Randal Keynes, Darwin’s great- great- grandson, and his enlightening book on Darwin’s favourite child - Annie's Box: Charles Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution (2002, Fourth Estate UK).
Sources
Desmond A, Moore J and Janet Browne. Charles Darwin. The Very Interesting People series. 2007. Oxford University Press (UK).
Downe House Audio tour – March 2009.
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