Charles and Emma (21 page)

But Charles wanted his argument to be airtight, indisputably right, and for that he needed time. He kept studying the pigeons just as he had the barnacles; he kept amassing notes; and he kept retching in the curtained-off privy in his study. Maybe he wasn't ready, after all.

“I rather hate the idea of writing for priority,” Charles wrote back to Lyell the next day. “Yet I shd be vexed if any one were to publish my doctrines before me.”

 

By 1856 Charles was breeding his own pigeons—Squire, the other pigeon fanciers nicknamed him, referring to the country gentleman that he was. It was a term of respect. Charles wasn't a dilettante; he was serious about the breeding and created his own new lines of pigeons. He was also continuing his own line; Emma was pregnant again. At forty-eight, she was quite old to be having a baby in the medically perilous nineteenth century. She had a tiring and uncomfortable pregnancy. Etty, who turned thirteen in September, read to her mother to help her pass the time.

The baby, Charles Waring Darwin, was born on December 6, 1856. Charles wrote to his cousin Fox telling him about the birth of their last child. He also told him, “I am working very hard at my Book, perhaps too hard. It will be very big & I am become most deeply interested in the way facts fall into groups. am like Croesus overwhelmed with my riches in facts. & I mean to make my Book as perfect as ever I can.”

This new little Darwin had a happy and placid temperament. Charles and Emma showered love and attention on him, and he loved them back. He also had a special fondness for Parslow, which pleased Charles no end. Whenever Parslow came into the room, baby Charles would stretch out his arms to be picked up. But usually the baby just lay in Charles's lap, staring up at his father's face with pleasure and equanimity. It soon became clear to Emma and Charles that something was wrong. Etty later said that the baby was born “without its full share of intelligence.” Still, Emma and Charles were more relaxed about him than they had been about their other children—he was certainly going to be their last, and they enjoyed their moments with him. Charles described the baby as “backward in walking and talking, but intelligent and observant.”

In the summer of 1858, Charles Waring was a year and a half old. At an age when his sisters and brothers had been talking and toddling around, he still lay docilely in his parents' laps. In a world in which survival depended on the ability to fight, Charles Waring would have lost. But with loving parents to take care of him, his future, though maybe not as bright and promising as his brothers', seemed secure.

On June 3, 1858, Emma wrote in her diary that it had been blazing hot for a week. But by June 8, it was lovely weather. Visitors came and went, as usual mostly family—Charles's sister Catherine, Emma's sisters Elizabeth and Charlotte. George had the measles but they had him stay at school because scarlet fever was sweeping through the countryside. Charles was busy working on his species book—he had hundreds of pages written—though he still was in no rush to get it done. He agonized over the earthquake his theory would cause.

On June 18, Emma wrote in her diary, “Etty taken ill.” She had a sore throat and felt very weak. While that was not in and
of itself serious, it could progress into something dangerous. Etty had been sickly since she was thirteen, two years before. (At that time she was told not to get up for breakfast but to take it in bed. She had breakfast in bed for the rest of her life!) Charles and Emma were always worried when one of their children was ill, but it hit them especially hard when it was one who was already sickly. It was so much more likely that a sickly child would die from even a common illness.

Charles knew that he was seeing up close, in his family, what he was thinking about and writing about in his study. Right there in front of him was the “struggle for existence” that he was writing about in his book. But here he was seeing it in his beloved children. Again.

On that same day, June 18, the post brought a diversion. But it was not a welcome one. It was a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace, a young naturalist who was currently traveling around the world collecting specimens just as Charles had done. The two had corresponded before. But this letter was a shock. It included an essay Wallace had written called “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type.”

Charles read it immediately. He was shocked and upset. Lyell had been right in urging him to get on with publishing his views. This essay was so close to Charles's theory as to make him very uncomfortable. Wallace had many of the same ideas Charles had had for years, and Wallace also had gotten some of them from reading Malthus's
Essay on Population.

Charles sat down at his desk and wrote to Lyell so that the letter would go out the same day: “Your words have come true with a vengeance that I shd. be forestalled. You said this when I explained to you here very briefly my views of ‘Natural Selection' depending on the Struggle for existence.—I never
saw a more striking coincidence, if Wallace had my M.S. sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as Heads of my Chapters.”

Charles wasn't ready to publish, but he certainly did not want someone else to come first. What was he going to do?

Wallace had not asked Charles to publish his essay, but Charles thought perhaps he was duty bound to arrange for publication. Wallace had asked him to send the essay to Charles Lyell, which Charles did. He told Lyell that he would send it to a journal if Lyell thought he should. He worried that “all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed.” But he also felt that it might not hurt his book. “Though my Book, if it will ever have any value, will not be deteriorated; as all the labour consists in the application of the theory.” He told Hooker about Wallace's paper, too.

But his immediate concerns lay with Etty and the other children. Scarlet fever was hitting the area hard; some children in the village were already seriously ill. Later they would realize that they should have packed up the family and left, but they couldn't have moved Etty, anyway; she was too sick.

Five days after receiving the letter from Wallace, on June 23, baby Charles got sick with a fever. And it was now clear that Etty had diphtheria, a disease that was new to England. It had come from France in epidemic proportions just that year. There was no cure, and it could be fatal.

Charles stuck to his routine as much as possible, but when he walked on the Sandwalk he worried. He worried about Etty and the baby, about George sick at school with measles, and about Wallace's essay. Emma worried with him about the children; Lyell and Hooker worried with him about Wallace. He wrote to Lyell almost every day during this week. On June 25, he wrote that “there is nothing in Wallace's sketch which is
not written out much fuller in my sketch copied in 1844”—the one he had given to Emma in case of his sudden death—“and read by Hooker some dozen years ago.” He had also sent the sketch to Asa Gray, the American botanist, about a year earlier “so that I could most truly say & prove that I take nothing from Wallace.” He wrote Lyell that he would be “extremely glad now to publish a sketch of my general views in about a dozen pages or so. But I cannot persuade myself that I can do so honourably.”

Charles had not intended to publish his sketch—he was waiting for the whole book to be done. Could he do so now, honorably, when Wallace was closing in on him? “I would far rather burn my whole book,” he told Lyell, “than that he or any man shd think that I had behaved in a paltry spirit.”

Charles was tormented by this decision. Although their views were not identical, they were virtually the same. “I could send Wallace a copy of my letter to Asa Gray to show him that I had not stolen his doctrine. But I cannot tell whether to publish now would not be base & paltry.”

The next day, June 26, Etty was very weak but seemed to be getting better. The baby, though, had a high fever, and, as Charles wrote to Lyell, “What has frightened us so much is, that 3 children have died in village from Scarlet Fever, & others have been at death's door, with terrible suffering.”

This letter was a PS to the one the day before. He wrote it to tell Lyell that he felt his first instinct had been right: He should not publish anything now. But he needed Lyell's guidance, because distraught as he was about this as well as his children, he could not make a decision himself. “I have always thought you would have made a first-rate Lord Chancellor,” he told his friend, and “I now appeal to you as Lord Chancellor.”

How could he think clearly when their sweet baby was suffering? Charles and Emma took turns rocking him,
comforting him as best they could. He was miserable; they were miserable. To watch their usually happy, placid baby cry in pain was horrible. To watch another child of theirs suffer was almost more than they could bear.

By the next day, they were certain the baby had scarlet fever; “Baby worse,” Emma wrote in her diary. Their nurse Jane also seemed to have the disease. When the doctor came to visit, he declared that the baby was not dangerously ill. Charles reported the situation in a letter to William Fox. But before Charles could even seal that letter for the post, the baby took a turn for the worse. Charles wrote a PS: “Since this written our Baby has become suddenly most ill…the doctor can only say there is yet some hope.”

This was all too familiar. At least this time Charles and Emma were together.

And this time it was quick.

In her diary on June 28, next to where she had already written “G. holidays”—George was scheduled to come home from school—she wrote, “Death.” Their youngest child had died.

Charles wrote to Hooker, “It was the most blessed relief to see his poor little innocent face resume its sweet expression in the sleep of death. Thank God he will never suffer more in this world. Poor Emma behaved nobly and how she stood it all I cannot conceive.”

Charles himself was done in; he had no ability to focus on the Wallace crisis. Lyell and Hooker took matters into their own hands. They decided that Charles should send them a paper, and they would present it together with Wallace's essay to the Linnaean Society in London.

On June 29, the day after the baby died, Charles wrote to Hooker, “I am quite prostrated & can do nothing but I send
Wallace & my abstract of abstract of letter to Asa Gray.” He sent Hooker the sketch of 1844, the exact copy that Hooker had read before. Charles hoped “that you may see by your own handwriting that you did read it.” As if Hooker could have forgotten.

Charles could not bear to look at the draft right now. It was too much, on top of the baby's death, to think that his years of work could be upstaged. He still felt badly that he was so worried about establishing priority, of ensuring that all would know that he was the first of the two men to have the idea. But it must be done. A perfectionist, he added a note with the sketch: “This MS. work was never intended for publication, and therefore was not written with care.—C.D. 1858.”

And then Charles turned his attentions away from his study, back into his home life. He and Emma had a baby to bury.

 

Chapter 25

The Origins of
The Origin

 

I fear I shall never be able to make it good enough.

—C
HARLES TO
J
OSEPH
H
OOKER ON WRITING
WHAT HE CALLED HIS
A
BSTRACT
,
T
HE
O
RIGIN OF
S
PECIES

 

O
n July 1, 1858, Emma wrote nothing in her little diary. There was no need to; a mother never forgets the date of her child's funeral. Charles Waring Darwin was buried in the cemetery at the churchyard at Down where Mary Eleanor lay. Etty later said that after their original sorrow, Charles and Emma had a sense of relief. What would his future have been? But at the time they were heartbroken; they had adored him. And they knew there would be no more babies.

On the very same day as the funeral of Charles Waring Darwin, the Linnaean Society fit in an extra meeting. The joint paper of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace was read in a stately room on Piccadilly Street in London. Wallace had no knowledge this was happening; he was too far away, in
Ternate, Indonesia, for them to let him know in time. He would find out three months later.

The title of the paper was “On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection. By CHARLES DARWIN, Esq., F.R.S., F.L.S., & F.G.S., and ALFRED WALLACE, Esq. Communicated by Sir CHARLES LYELL, F.R.S., F.L.S., and J. D. HOOKER, Esq., M.D., V.P.R.S., F.L.S, &c.”

Lyell and Hooker wrote, as an introduction, “The gentlemen having, independently and unknown to one another, conceived the same very ingenious theory to account for the appearance and perpetuation of varieties and of specific forms on our planet, and both fairly claim the merit of being original thinkers in this important line of inquiry; but neither of them having published his views, though Mr. Darwin has for many years past been repeatedly urged by us to do so, and both authors having now unreservedly placed their papers in our hands, we think it would best promote the interests of science that a selection from them would be laid before the Linnaean Society.”

The members of the society present, sitting in wooden churchlike pews, heard Charles's theory spelled out in a short but painstaking manner. His essay began with the notion that

 

all nature is at war, one organism with another, or with external nature. Seeing the contented face of nature, this may at first be well doubted; but reflection will inevitably prove it to be true. The war, however, is not constant, but recurrent in a slight degree at short periods, and more severely at occasional more distant periods; and hence its effects are easily overlooked. It is the doctrine of Malthus applied in most cases with tenfold force.