Charles Darwin* (2 page)

On both sides, his family was full of accomplished movers and shakers keenly interested in all new developments in science and technology.

Robert, his father, was a larger-than-life doctor
—
he weighed over three hundred pounds. He treated wealthy patients but made twice as much from his shrewd investments. He donated money to many buildings in the village, like the town hall, the jail, the infirmary, the lunatic asylum (as the hospital for the mentally ill was known). Dr. Darwin made a point of attending services at the Anglican church that his patients went to
—
the Church of England was the official religion of the country, the backbone of England’s social order. But in private he and all his family were more freethinking. Some of them
—
including Dr. Darwin’s wife—were even Unitarian, a branch of Christianity that emphasized the importance of reason.

Charles’s mother, Susannah, was a more shadowy figure. She was one of the prominent Wedgwoods. Her father was Josiah Wedgwood, immensely wealthy from the pottery company that bore his name. Wedgwood china was used by the royal family and anyone who wanted to be fashionable. Susannah Darwin was well educated, a breeder of fancy pigeons, and a serious gardener. She may have been the first one to explain the parts of plants to young Charles. But she was frequently ill, at the mercy of constant stomach problems.

He was mostly cared for by his three older sisters, whom he called the “sisterhood.” His earliest memory was of sitting in his sister Caroline’s lap as she peeled an orange for him. The sisters spoiled him but also tried to keep him in line, scolding him for not washing often enough, making sure he knew his Bible.

Charles’s other grandfather was Erasmus Darwin, a well-known doctor/poet/inventor/all-around genius. He cofounded the Lunar Society, which met on nights with a full moon. In British scientific circles, it ran a close second place to the all-important Royal Society. These were science clubs for wealthy gents. Josiah Wedgwood was also a member, interested mainly in chemistry that would improve his glazes and clays.

Science was not quite an academic discipline yet, but it was getting there. Still called “natural philosophy,” it was considered a fine gentlemanly pursuit along with riding and shooting. (The term “scientist” first appeared in 1834 during Charles’s sojourn aboard the
Beagle
.) When Erasmus Darwin wasn’t writing flowery verse about the love lives of plants, he wrote an epic medical tract,
Zoönomia
, in which he actually speculated about the idea that species were not fixed, as described in the Bible.

Charles’s favorite relative was his gifted brother, also named Erasmus, older by almost five years. They shared all the same interests and genuinely liked each other, Charles struggling to keep up with “Ras” as they dashed along the paths encircling the village.

Charles’s first lessons came from Caroline, eight years older, in a room overlooking the gardens. She taught by prodding and criticizing, and he recalled later that he always walked into the schoolroom wondering, “What will she blame me for now?” At eight he started at the local day school run by the Unitarian preacher.

Charles enjoyed inventing secret codes. He also made up elaborate stories “for the pure pleasure of attracting attention and surprise.” He played hoaxes, claiming to see rare birds when he hadn’t, and once tricking a friend at school into believing that he could make flowers bloom in different colors by watering them with specially colored water. He craved admiration, though he outgrew the need to lie.

Everyone remembered him as quiet, easy to get along with, a boy who avoided conflict. He had a mild stammer and, for several years, a special problem pronouncing words starting with “w.” He could often be found underneath the dining room table, reading
Robinson Crusoe
and other favorites. He was a big reader, following the lead of his idol, Ras, who recommended books and encouraged his taste in literature.

One day his father gave him two treasures—illustrated books from his personal library. One was on insects, the other on stones and minerals. Charles found his father, who was an imposing, sometimes stern man, a bit scary, but also called him “the kindest man I ever knew.” Wandering among the orange trees, flowers with glorious scents, and vegetable beds, Dr. Darwin shared his interests with Charles. Sometimes he took his son out in his yellow carriage on his rounds to patients—a tight squeeze for Charles next to his bulky father.

His happy world broke apart when frail Susannah died as Charles was turning eight. In later years he said he had hardly any memory of his mother. He himself called this memory lapse “odd,” as have many historians, unless it was the first example of his later flair for banishing a painful subject from his mind.

Dr. Darwin never remarried and continued to run his family as a tight ship, becoming even more overbearing.

It was around this time that Charles developed what he called “a passion for collecting.” Collecting was a popular gentlemanly pursuit, but he went all out, with bugs and worms, especially beetles, live and dead; as well as shells, birds’ eggs, butterflies, pebbles and minerals, and more. At age nine his goal was to know something about every single stone on the path to the front door. A few years later, he took up bird watching with vigor. In fact, a friend once said he was “all eyes,” and Ras teased him about “those telescopes you call eyes.” (Darwin himself thought he was all nose—he was self-conscious about it until the end of his life.)

At nine, he was sent away to the private boys’ boarding school in the center of town, where Ras had been going for the past three years. Shrewsbury Grammar School was a little over a mile away, fifteen minutes from The Mount, but it was another world.

The school trained rich boys to enter a university like Cambridge or Oxford. The older boys carried loaded guns and sometimes threatened each other, the food was terrible, beatings were frequent, the blankets on Charles’s bed were always damp, and for years afterward he could summon up the memory of the stench of some thirty chamber pots underneath the boys’ beds.

At Shrewsbury, only the classics were taught—Greek and Latin, ancient history and geography. There were no science classes. The beliefs of the Church of England lay behind everything that was taught in school, so everyone would have taken for granted the Bible’s description of the origin of the world. It was created in six days and populated with all the animals looking then the same way they still did in current times. The creation of Adam and Eve was the pinnacle of God’s work.

Charles was not a good student. Once the headmaster even yelled at him and humiliated him in front of the whole school for wasting his time. But for almost seven years, he was stuck at Shrewsbury School. “Nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind.”

He desperately wanted to be outside, lifting up stones to discover insects, inspecting the surface of a pond, exploring with Ras. He actually ran away from school whenever he could—dashing home after attendance was taken, racing back for nighttime lockdown. If he’d been caught he would have been expelled. That would have made his father very angry.

When Ras took up chemistry, Charles did too. A revolution was taking place in chemistry. One of the pioneers was Joseph Priestley, who, about thirty years earlier, had been one of the discoverers of oxygen, and had published a history of electricity. The Darwin brothers knew all about Priestley—their own uncle Josiah Wedgwood had helped to fund Priestley’s research, partly for business reasons, since Wedgwood was looking for advances in glazes and clays.

The brothers took over a toolshed in the back garden. This was their official “laboratory” for performing simple experiments as outlined in their copy of William Henry’s
Elements of Experimental Chemistry
. They analyzed minerals, coins, crystals in various stones and minerals, tea leaves, and the effects of the sun’s rays on various things, using household items like sewing needles to create simple tools.

Equipment was a problem. They started off with a thermometer, fireproof china (courtesy of Uncle Josiah), and a lamp that supplied the flame for heating gases and chemicals. They had vast plans for more, but their penny-pinching father kept them on a tight leash. Arguing with Dr. Darwin was generally pointless. Whenever the brothers did get money from him, they called it “milking the Cow,” and spent hours debating what to buy, drooling in shops that sold test tubes, minerals, blow pipes.

Their favorite occupation was to set off explosions. But they were also ambitious, trying to duplicate the experiments of Robert Boyle, one of the founders of modern chemistry, the author of
The Sceptical Chymist
. They hoped to isolate a new element, like Humphry Davy, who several years earlier had discovered sodium and potassium and helped identify the elemental nature of chlorine and iodine.

They did succeed in manufacturing nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, first discovered by Priestley. Taking laughing gas was a craze at the time. Charles’s nickname became “Gas.” He also did experiments on the gaslights at school, until the headmaster found out and gave him a lecture, complete with a pull on his ears.

Dr. Darwin had decreed that both of his sons were to follow him into medicine. It was a blow when Ras departed for Cambridge University, leaving Charles behind. For three long, lonely years, Charles struggled on at Shrewsbury School on his own.

Every weekend he rushed home to work in the lab. The two brothers exchanged long letters, Ras offering advice about the lab from a distance. “If the Cow is not utterly consumed at the next milking,” he suggested, “it would be a very good thing to buy as many of the large green, stoppered bottles as possible.”

By 1825, Ras was about to graduate from Cambridge. Now he would continue his medical studies with a year of practical work. Dr. Darwin couldn’t help notice that his younger son was not doing at all well at Shrewsbury. He decided to pull sixteen-year-old Charles out of school ahead of time and send the pair of them to Edinburgh University in Scotland.

The Darwin brothers—together again—were off to become doctors.

CHAPTER TWO

Sickened by Blood

ODDLY ENOUGH, NO degree was required for practicing medicine in Darwin’s day. In fact, Charles, like Ras before him, spent his sixteenth summer as a sort of junior doctor, helping his father treat the poor of Shrewsbury. He had up to a dozen patients of his own, mostly women and children not sick enough for the hospital. He’d note symptoms for his father to identify, then would make up the prescriptions himself. Some potions were iffy at best—a baby with a cough might be given a mixture of opium, sherry, and brown sugar—and harmful at worst.

Dr. Darwin was convinced that Charles had the makings of a brilliant doctor. He thought his son had a talent for “exciting confidence” in patients, which he believed was the key to medical success. His son was much less sure about his future in medicine, but one seldom questioned Dr. Darwin.

Now Charles was at Edinburgh University, a hub of science, to study medicine and follow in the wake of his brother, father, and grandfather. It was exciting to be in big, bustling Edinburgh. The first year he hung out exclusively with Ras, attending some of the same lectures, eating meals with him. Ras set a record for borrowing more library books than any other student, and Charles was close behind. He also bought a copy of
A Naturalist’s Companion
by George Graves, to use along the Scottish seaside. The brothers went for regular Sunday nature walks to fishing villages on the Firth of Forth, examining tide pools, looking for interesting shells and stones, buying oysters covered with tiny creatures to dissect.

But as for medical school—not much to like. At Edinburgh, the professors’ income depended on how many students signed up for their courses, which meant that classes were like popularity contests. Teachers competed and feuded with each other in unscholarly ways. Classes were noisy free-for-alls, with students stamping their feet to show agreement, hooting their disapproval, using trumpets and peashooters when particularly irked.

Darwin was highly critical of most of his professors. One was “so very learned that his wisdom has left no room for his sense.” Of another he wrote, “I dislike him and his Lectures so much that I cannot speak with decency about them.” The classes themselves—anatomy, surgery, midwifery, chemistry, materia medica (today’s pharmacology), and natural history—he either found “intolerably dull” or dismissed as “useless.”

Visits to the operating theater traumatized him. Patients screamed in agony as amputations and other procedures were performed without anesthetic. The most upsetting was when the patient was a child—witnessing such operations “haunted” him for years. For the rest of his life, the sight of blood made him severely sick to his stomach.

He unenthusiastically passed his courses, but it was a lot more satisfying to be outside in the fresh air, collecting, riding. Also, he took up shooting with a vengeance, so eager that he kept his special hunting boots by his bedside, ready to go at a moment’s notice. In an odd (for someone who loved nature) but utterly fashionable way, he was an avid hunter—rabbits, rats, pigeons, partridges, pheasants—killing as many as three animals a day.