Charles and Emma: Chapters 9–16

Miss Emma Wedgwood, the sister of Hensleigh Wedgwood, and of the elder brother who married my sister, so we are connected by manifold ties, besides on my part by the most sincere love and hearty gratitude to her for accepting such a one as myself.

All over the countryside in Shropshire and Staffordshire, in London, as well as in Geneva, where Aunt Jessie lived, family and friends were exulting in the news.

He wrote to Charles, “It is a marriage which will give almost as much pleasure to the rest of the world as it does to yourselves—the best auspices I should think for any marriage.”

He told her he would leave the timing up to her but that he would be in agony “until I am part of you—Dearest Emma, good-bye.”

He made another human-animal connection: “Lascivious women are described as biting: so do stallions always.”

A person who blushes in the dark is proverbially a most modest person.

She was glad he had told her of his doubts, even though his father had advised him not to say anything.

But “if a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.”

He was vehemently antislavery, as was their Wedgwood grandfather, Josiah, who had campaigned against slavery from 1787 until his death in 1795.

He wrote, “These deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth!

For Charles to go against God and religion was to go against the established social structure.

If God had not ordained the hierarchy everyone lived by, then England could tumble into chaos.

And Charles—a polite man, a conservative in the sense that he did want to conserve the British way of life, a man who did not want to hurt anyone—certainly did not want to be responsible for chaos.

Erasmus takes it to heart even more than I do, and declares I ought to end all my letters to you, ‘yours inconsolably.’

He had grown up with the Ten Commandments— including “Thou shalt not bear false witness”—and with the injunction to love your neighbor as yourself.

Thomas Carlyle thought about these questions, too, and he wrote what would become a motto of the Victorian era: The dilemma was that they were becoming “destitute of faith, yet terrified of skepticism.”

But nothing, not his mother's death, not his feelings of awe in a Brazilian rain forest, had given him a faith in the afterlife the way Fanny’s death had done for Emma.

“It is a beautiful part of my theory that domesticated races ... are made by precisely the same means as species.”

He had his secret notebooks to move with him, to keep close by, and he had field notebooks from the voyage, notebooks that listed all of his specimens and where he got them, the fossil vertebrates and invertebrates, plant fossils, stuffed birds, mammal fossils, mammals, and fish.

“By the way now we seem to be clearing old scores,” she wrote to Charles, “they told me at Shrewsbury that you had the audacity to call me ‘little baggage!' but I won’t believe it till I hear it with my own ears, (& then I advise you to take care of your own ears).”

She wrote with candor, letting Charles see who she really was, just as he was doing with her: “Today the Miss Northens are coming very early & I shall have to do a prodigious quantity of friendship with Ellen who adores me extremely & will want to know all about every thing & my chief aim will be to tell her nothing about any thing.

There is only one subject in the world that ever gives me a moment's uneasiness & I believe I think about that very little when I am with you & I do hope that though our opinions may not agree upon all points of religion we may sympathize a good deal in our feelings on the subject.

Neither one liked pomp and ceremony, so the service was quick and attended only by a few members of their close family.

“We ate our sandwiches with grateful hearts for all the care that was taken of us, and the bottle of water was the greatest comfort,” Emma reported in a letter to her mother.

For the newlyweds there was much to absorb and to get used to, going from single to married, and without a honeymoon for a transition.

He had kept a 770-page diary while on the voyage; the book was culled from that.

Were his stomach upsets, heart palpitations, fatigue, and bouts of giddiness symptoms of something that might be fatal?

While she tended to the running of the house, hiring and firing cooks and other servants, planning meals that might help settle Charles’s stomach, while her body cradled and nourished their developing child, Charles was in his study with his specimens, writing in his notebooks, and honing his arguments.

She told him she thought he was unduly influenced by other people, especially his older brother, Erasmus, “whose understanding you have such a very high opinion of & whom you have so much affection for, having gone before you.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

They weren’t lined up in a God-made hierarchy, either; they had all descended from the same remote ancestor.

I attended to this point in my first-born infant... and I was convinced that he understood a smile and received pleasure from seeing one, answering it by another, at much too early an age to have learnt anything by experience.”

He called it “descent with modification,” and he used the term “natural selection” for the mechanism of change.

He wrote, “An individual organism placed under new conditions [often] sometimes varies in a small degree.

“He so filled every instant of my life, that now my feeling of desolation passes all description.”