Three of the children died; the death of their beloved year-old daughter, Annie, broke their hearts. That loss could have driven them apart forever. But they fought for their marriage. Darwin worked for decades on his theory. He tried to make his argument as strong and solid as possible, and he also aimed not to offend. She was always his best and most trusted editor.
As she read the argument that essentially took God out of creation, she did not ask Charles to soften it at all. In fact, she helped him strengthen his book by making the language clearer. She also cleaned up his spelling and punctuation. She encouraged him not to approach religion in the same way he approached science. After he became famous, people often wrote to the sage of Down House and asked him what he believed about God.
Usually Darwin demurred. And he echoed Emma. Still, he often pointed to his friend, the American botanist Asa Gray, who was both an evolutionist and a theist.
Charles and Emma were married for 43 years. The rest of the Darwin children lived to adulthood, though their parents worried that several of them seemed particularly fragile.
To be fair to the Darwins, many children at the time died in the weeks after birth, even in families that were not lacking for food and shelter. Raising only seven out of ten children to maturity might have been about average for wealthy British families of their era. The available statistics are too spotty for a decisive judgment. After all, he should have known better. Regardless of how many scientific symposia Darwin was invited to attend, he rarely agreed to spend even a single night away from Emma.
Just as Darwin had feared, he and Emma did walk together almost every day. It also outlined how the mating preferences of animals within a species could influence natural selection. Not actually a book of theory, it catalogued a wide range of gestures and behaviors shared by animals and humans.
He also wrote about romance. He said that that insects achieve this expression by rubbing together certain body parts like wings or hind legs, thereby producing a sound much like a scream.
How can we explain this apparent lapse into poetic language? A host of studies have shown that emotions at the time that a memory is recalled can distort the memory. Darwin spent most of his married life very ill, plagued by heart palpitations, visual problems, and prolonged spells of vomiting that may have been due to a parasitic infection acquired from a bug bite in Argentina.
For the forty-three years of their marriage, Emma tended to him—and she did so while she tended to three dying children and seven healthy ones. Darwin worked at home. The sights and sounds of misery, anxiety, grief, and even of everyday joy were probably indelibly inscribed on his memory when he sat in his home study and wrote Descent and Expression.
She does not consider it too big a stretch to think that, with limbic systems and love-abetting neurotransmitters very much like those of humans, non-human great apes can love, at least in some ways. In other words, there is no sharp line between the human animal and the rest of the animal kingdom. It is a blurred line. Commenting about non-human great apes, Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal writes :.
All three species [orangutans, gorillas, and the chimps and bonobos of the pan species] face similar social dilemmas and need to overcome similar contradictions while going after status, mates, and resources. They apply their full brainpower to find solutions. True, our species looks farther ahead and weighs more options than the apes do, but this hardly seems a fundamental difference. When writing about mating, though, Darwin may have over-stated the complexity in the feelings that mammals, birds, and insects have for each other.
Mating animals surely know excitement and desire. But do insects hold onto feelings for each other after the mating is over?
Do carnivorous female spiders, for example, feel romantic love for their copulation partners as they devour them, post-coitus? Being enshrined as one of the timeless stars of British science was a well-deserved honor, for to this day his work profoundly influences all of the biological sciences. If Darwin was occasionally incautious in his choice of terminology, the damage to his reputation is no more than a few light scratches on an otherwise brilliant veneer.
And, who knows? In short, he wished to establish himself as a gentleman. Yet despite his best efforts towards this end, to the old country families he would always remain Jos Wedgwood, a potter's son. Emma was to look back on her childhood at Maer as one of happiness and tranquillity. Her aunt referred to her as 'the happiest being that was ever looked on. So close were the two that their elder sister Charlotte wrote: 'I always think of you as one person.
As she grew up she proved herself to be an intelligent and interested young woman. Her mother had a fairly relaxed view of formal education she subscribed to Mrs Somerville's view that children should not receive more than ten minutes instruction at a time, as all else after that would not be absorbed and Emma herself spent only one year at school.
However, Maer Hall itself provided a liberal education. Josiah Wedgwood had left a well-stocked library, covering topics ranging from science to the arts. Emma was famous for having read the entirety of Paradise Lost as a child.
Yet more important perhaps was the freethinking and questioning approach that Emma inherited from her parents. One family friend remembered that: 'I never saw anything pleasanter than the ways of going on of this family, and one reason is the freedom of speech upon every subject; there is no difference in politics or principles of any kind that makes it treason to speak one's mind openly, and they all do it.
Although he had not managed to instil his passion for pottery into his sons, Josiah had ensured that they grew up with humanitarian ideals. Josiah himself had been a supporter of the early stages of the French Revolution though he abhorred the bloodshed into which it later descended and his children and grandchildren would also demonstrate a commitment to liberal ideals — in particular towards the campaign for the abolition of slavery.
Charles Darwin was the son of Emma's Aunt Sukey. The two cousins had known each other since childhood. Charles along with his brother and two sisters spent much time at Maer Hall. It was a sharp relief to the constraints of their life at Shrewsbury, where the death of their mother in had left their father bereft and volatile.
His black moods terrified the young Charles, who grew increasingly close to his uncle Jos. Yet despite these close familial connections there is little to suggest that there was any great early attachment between Emma and Charles.
On the 17th April , shortly before his voyage on the Beagle, Charles stayed with the Wedgwoods. Yet he paid Emma no particular attention. He was at this time in love with a neighbour, Fanny Owen.
He wrote: 'as all the world knows [she] is the prettiest, plumpest most charming personage that Shropshire posseses [sic], aye and Birmingham too. Emma herself was at this time engaged with other matters. She became close to her aunt, Sarah Wedgwood, who herself was closely involved in the anti-slavery campaign. Jos shared her concern, and Bessy, along with her daughters, established a Ladies' Society at Newcastle — 'but we don't meet with much success among the higher gentry.
The set below them…is much more impressible. Although she afterwards stated that she and her sister Charlotte 'don't mean to mention the name of a bazaar for the next three years' she in fact went on to organise similar events for foreign concerns, for Greek and Italian refugees, and for the campaign to abolish slavery. Emma also enjoyed the pleasures of Midlands society.
Balls, visits to London, concerts in Birmingham and entertaining at Maer all gave her great pleasure, and she was known as an attractive and cheerful young woman. She had her admirers, and turned down several offers of marriage. One tried to appeal to her love of music by claiming to be an expert flautist, but when his playing did not impress his 'tootlings', along with his interest in her, were dismissed. By the time that Charles Darwin returned from the voyage of the Beagle in it seemed that Emma, aged twentyeight, was destined for a life of Victorian spinsterhood.
One event in Emma's early life was to have a profound effect on her character. In a cholera epidemic was sweeping the country, and this was certainly uppermost in her mind when her sister Fanny was taken ill in August. Fanny died after two weeks' illness. Her death changed her younger sister. She became more serious, and more devout. The Unitarian faith in which she had been brought up now became a real comfort to her.
A diary entry made shortly after Fanny's death demonstrates the depth of her despair, and the strength of the faith she turned to. God will help me I know if I pray sincerely. Oh God help me pray to thee in spirit and in truth. Charles visited the family at Maer shortly after his return from the Galapagos.
Emma's subsequent letter to her aunt offers one of the first insights into her thoughts of him: 'We enjoyed Charles's visit uncommonly…Charles talked away most pleasantly all the time we plied him with questions without any mercy.
The group included Catherine Darwin, Charles's sister. Yet despite the brevity of contact between them, Emma had begun to develop enough of an attraction towards the now studious and strong willed Charles. After her engagement she confessed to one of her Allen aunts that 'I was not the least sure of his feelings…and the week I spent in London on my return from Paris, I felt sure that he did not care for me.
Charles was also turning his mind towards matrimony. In he approached the issue in a typically methodical manner. He wrote up a list of arguments for and against marriage. In the arguments against, he noted that marriage would potentially lead to loss of freedom, being forced to visit relatives, and quarrelling. The arguments for marriage included children, the charms of music and 'female chit-chat' and a companion — one that would be, in any case, 'better than a dog'.
The 'arguments for' column was longer and so Charles decided to marry. Yet whilst Emma was a desirable choice he was not entirely confident of her affection. She was close to his brother Erasmus and she had already turned down a number of suitors. He was also worried that she would find his studious nature and scientific interests boring. However Emma had lost her heart to the young Charles. For Emma's eldest sister Elizabeth, who had taken the role of running the household as Bessy became increasingly ill, the day was a bittersweet one.
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