before his eyes – such was Charles Darwin’s father. Miss Meteyard, in her “Group of Englishmen,” 1871, gives a vivid picture of the old doctor, his acknowledged supremacy in Shrewsbury, his untiring activity and ubiquity, his great dinner parties, his liberal and rather unpopular opinions, tolerated for the sake of his success in curing his patients. His face, powerful, unimpassioned, mild, and thoughtful, was always the same as he rolled through the streets and lanes, for he sat “as though carved in stone.” His love of children was marked. “He would address them in his small, high-pitched falsetto voice, and if their answers pleased him he would reply; and occasionally, lifting them on to a chair or table, he would measure their heads with his broad hand, as though reading character, and mentally prognosticating their future fate.”
The successful doctor bought a piece of land near the Holyhead road, and built on it a large square house, of plain architecture, which from its charming position, a hundred feet above the Severn, received the name of “The Mount.”2 Having thus provided the nest, in 1796 he brought home his wife, Susannah Wedgwood, eldest daughter of the celebrated potter, to whom he was married at Marylebone Church on April 18th.
The character and education of Charles Darwin’s mother is a matter of considerable interest, notwithstanding that her death when he was only eight years old cut short her opportunities of influencing him. She was born at Burslem in January, 1765, and a year after her father describes her as a “fine, sprightly lass:” she became his best-beloved child. She was partly educated in London, under the eye of her father’s partner, the accomplished Thomas Bentley, in whose heart she won as tender a place as in her father’s. Later she continued her education at home with her brothers, under good tuition. Many visits were exchanged between the Darwins and the Wedgwoods, and old Erasmus Darwin became very fond of Miss Wedgwood. By the time of her marriage she was matured by much intercourse with notable people, as well as by extensive reading, and from her experience of London society and varied travel in England was well fitted to shine as the county doctor’s wife. From her father, who died in 1795, she had doubtless inherited, in addition to a handsome fortune, many valuable faculties, and probably she transmitted more of them to her son Charles than she herself manifested. Josiah Wedgwood, over whose career it would be delightful to linger, is well described by Miss Meteyard in words which might be precisely applied to Charles Darwin, as “patient, stedfast, humble, simple, unconscious of half his own greatness, and yet by this very simplicity, patience, and stedfastness displaying the high quality of his moral and intellectual characteristics, even whilst insuring that each step was in the right direction, and firmly planted.” A truly experimental genius in artistic manufacture, Wedgwood foreshadowed a far greater experimental genius in science.
Before her famous son was born, however, Mrs. Darwin’s health had begun to fail, and in 1807 she wrote to a friend: “Every one seems young but me.” Her second son (four daughters having preceded him) was born at The Mount on February 12, 1809, and christened “Charles Robert,” at St. Chad’s Church, Shrewsbury, on November 17th following. No doubt her declining health emphasised her attachment to home pursuits, to quiet reading, to the luxuriant garden, and to her numerous domestic pets. The beauty, variety, and lameness of The Mount pigeons was well known in the town and far beyond. Mr. Woodall states that one of Darwin’s schoolfellows, the Rev. W. A. Leighton, remembers him plucking a plant and recalling one of his mother’s elementary lessons in botany. Too soon however the mother was taken from The Mount; she died in July, 1817, when Charles was between eight and nine years old.
The eldest son of Dr. Robert Darwin, on whom the grandfather’s name of Erasmus had been bestowed, is notable as the intimate friend of the Carlyles. “He had something of original and sarcastically ingenious in him,” says Carlyle, in his “Reminiscences,” “one of the sincerest, naturally truest, and most modest of men… E. Darwin it was who named the late Whewell, seeing him sit, all ear (not all assent), at some of my lectures, ‘The Harmonious Blacksmith.’ My dear one had a great favour for this honest Darwin always; many a road to shops, and the like, he drove her in his cab, in those early days when even the charge of omnibuses was a consideration, and his sparse utterances, sardonic often, were a great amusement to her. ‘A perfect gentleman,’ she at once discerned him to be, and of sound worth and kindliness, in the most unaffected form.” He died in 1881, aged 77, leaving no memorial to the public of his undoubtedly great abilities. Like his younger brother, he was a member of Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he graduated M.B., in 1828.
Early in 1817, the closing year of his mother’s life, Charles Darwin was placed at school with the Rev. George Case, minister of the Shrewsbury Unitarian church, to which the Darwins were attached, in this resembling the Wedgwoods. At midsummer, 1818, however, the boy entered Shrewsbury Grammar School, then under Samuel Butler, afterwards Bishop of Lichfield. Classics, as ever, formed the staple of the instruction there afforded, and proved but little to the future naturalist’s taste. Unfortunately for the repute of English schools, Charles Darwin was little benefited by his schooling; and Euclid, then an extra subject, constituted, to his mind, the only bit of real education Shrewsbury school gave him. Seventy years later, the study of mother earth and her teeming productions, which Darwin made so attractive, is still but scantily represented in the instruction afforded by our great schools.
Thus out of sympathy with the prevalent studies, the youth showed no fondness for his schoolfellows’ sports. He was reserved, frequently lost in thought, and fond of long solitary rambles, according to one schoolfellow, the Rev. W. A. Leighton; another, the Rev. John Yardley, Vicar of St. Chad’s, Shrewsbury, remembers him as cheerful, good-tempered, and communicative. One of the recorded incidents of his boyish days is a fall from the old Shrewsbury wall, while walking in a “brown study.” Even at this early period he was fond of collecting objects which many schoolboys delight in, such as shells and minerals, seals, franks, and coins; and the mechanical aptitude derived from both the Darwins and the Wedgwoods was manifested by keen interest in mechanism. One especially remembered youthful treat was when his uncle Josiah Wedgwood explained to him the principle of the vernier. No doubt the pigeons, the exotics, the shrubs and flowers of his father’s grounds impressed themselves indelibly on the boy’s mind and unconsciously prepared him for his future. Schooldays were for him fortunately not protracted, for in 1825, at the age of sixteen, he went to Edinburgh University, where his father and grandfather had likewise studied, with the idea of devoting himself to medicine. The youth of sixteen was well equipped with the results of long thinking and observing rather than with book-learning, and was prepared to play an independent part without noise and show, assimilating that which commended itself to his mind, and rejecting that which found no appropriate soil in him, in a manner characteristic of genuine originality.
CHAPTER II
WHEN Charles Darwin went to Edinburgh, the university was not in one of its palmiest periods. The medical professors failed to attract him to their profession, and two years of Edinburgh satisfied him that medicine should not absorb him. With natural history the case was different. Its attractiveness for Darwin increased. He found congenial companionship in the Edinburgh Plinian Society, and Mr. W. F. Ainsworth relates (in The Athenæum, May 13, 1882) that Darwin and himself made frequent excursions on the shores of the Firth of Forth in pursuit of objects of natural history, sometimes visiting the coasts of Fifeshire, and sometimes the islands off the coast. On one occasion, accompanied by Dr. Greville, the botanist, they went to the Isle of May, and were both exceedingly amused at the effect produced upon the eminent author of the Scottish Cryptogamic Flora by the screeching of the kittiwakes and other water-fowl. He had actually to lie down on the greensward to enjoy his prolonged cachinnation. On another occasion the young naturalists were benighted on Inch Keith, but found refuge in the lighthouse.
Darwin was now not merely a collector and exploring naturalist, but he observed biological facts of importance. On the 27th of March, 1827, he made a communication to the Plinian Society on the ova, or rather larvæ, of the Flustra or sea-mat, a member of the class Polyzoa, forming a continuous mat-like colony of thousands of organisms leading a joint-stock existence. He announced that he had discovered in these larvæ organs of locomotion, then so seldom,
“The house is seen,” says Mr. Woodall, “from the line immediately beyond the low tower of St. George’s Church. Visitors who make a pilgrimage there, after crossing the Welsh Bridge, follow the main street until St. George’s Church is passed, and the continuous line of houses ceases. The next carriage drive, on the right, cutting in two a lofty side-walk, is the entrance to The Mount. A short street of new houses, near St. George’s Church, has been called ‘Darwin Street;’ as yet the only public recognition in the town of the greatest of Salopians. A memorial of a more private character has been placed in the Unitarian Chapel, in the form of a tablet bearing the following inscription: – ‘To the memory of Charles Robert Darwin, author of “The Origin of Species,” born in Shrewsbury, February 12th, 1809. In early life a member and constant worshipper in this church. Died April 19th, 1882.’ Mrs. Darwin, we believe, was not strict in her adhesion to the communion in which she had been brought up, but often attended St. Chad’s Church, where Charles and his brother were baptized.”
