wrote Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood, an extended family memoir that places Thomas’s childhood (and health) in a helpful context. According to Gwen, all but one of Thomas’s siblings suffered from nervous difficulties. Elizabeth was “very stout and nervous,” Henrietta had “been an invalid all her life” and was portrayed as having an insane fear of germs; Francis seemed to have “no spring of hope in him,” Leonard “inherited the family hypochondria in a mild degree,” Horace “always retained traces of the invalid’s outlook,” while Gwen’s father, George, had “nerves always as taut as fiddle strings.”
Henrietta was the most disturbed: “When there were colds about she often wore a kind of gas-mask of her own invention. It was an ordinary wire kitchen-strainer, stuffed with antiseptic cotton-wool, and tied on like a snout, with elastic over her ears. In this she would receive her visitors and discuss politics in a hollow voice out of her eucalyptus-scented seclusion, oblivious of the fact that they might be struggling with fits of laughter.”
In accounting for his children’s astonishingly poor health, Charles Darwin blamed himself. He was certain they had inherited what he viewed as his constitutional weakness: various and often ill-defined symptoms that began shortly after his travels aboard the Beagle as a young man. Charles’s most consistent and distressing complaint was gastric discomfort associated with retching, chiefly at night. If severe, his stomach pains were accompanied by alarming, hysterical fits of crying. Charles also experienced uncomfortable cardiac palpitations as well as eczematous skin eruptions. At times he was incapacitated, enduring at least three episodes of prolonged sickness.
Charles’s diverse ailments were a constant worry to his family and he, in turn, fretted incessantly over the health of his children. He became particularly anxious following the death of his son Charles Waring, who had been born one year prior to Thomas and died June 28th, 1858, during a scarlet fever epidemic. Deeply affected by the loss, Charles became panic-stricken that Thomas would also fall ill. For the remainder of that year, an exhausted Charles monitored Thomas’s breathing during the night. When finally challenged by Emma, Charles cited the nocturnal habits of the Indian Telegraph plant, explaining that circadian rhythms could significantly stress breathing patterns. Emma was unconvinced and forbade Charles from further disturbing both his and Thomas’s sleep.
Despite his ill health, Charles Darwin maintained a relentless and rigid work schedule. Each day, as a rule, he was in his study, quietly reading, writing, and attending to correspondence, or carefully dissecting the latest specimen to arrive by post. While Charles professed to require absolute solitude while working and wished to be interrupted only in urgent circumstances, he in fact welcomed his children’s playful intrusions. Thomas would peek in and, with his father’s assent, tiptoe quietly across the study to read silently by the fireplace. Charles would often take such opportune moments to instruct Thomas on the use of various scientific instruments. At age eight, Thomas was reported by Emma to have looked up from his father’s dissecting microscope and said, “Do you think, Papa, that I shall be this happy all my future life?”
Throughout his childhood, Thomas also joined his father on the Sandwalk, a “thinking path” Charles had built behind Down House. Thomas and Charles enjoyed the constitutionals they shared round its circuitous course, which was named for the sand used to dress its surface. One summer, Charles grew curious about the bees that disturbed their otherwise contemplative walks. In the guise of a game, he recruited Thomas and his brothers to track the bees’ movements. After dispersing his sons around the Sandwalk, Charles instructed each to yell out “Bee!” as one flew by. Charles would reposition his assistants in accordance with these cries and, in time, the bees’ regular lines of flight were determined. Thomas was adroit at sightings and would fearlessly tear after the bees as they flew by. An agitated Charles, fearing Thomas might be stung, would quickly redirect his youngest son back to his original post.
Even with Charles’s persistent anxiety over Thomas’s health, the two enjoyed an affectionate relationship. It was Emma, however, who attended more directly to Thomas’s day-to-day needs. She was forty-nine when Thomas was born (Charles was forty-eight). Undeterred by the risks associated with pregnancy at her advanced age, and often restricted to bed rest due to her pronounced morning sickness and fatigue, Emma tolerated her confinement with Thomas without complaint. Thomas’s earlier than anticipated birth was precipitous. Finding his wife suddenly in labour, and with Henrietta and Elizabeth at his side, an apprehensive Charles had administered chloroform as they waited for the local doctor to arrive. An over-sedated Emma was virtually unconscious when Thomas was delivered.
In between doting on Charles, raising her other children, and supervising a large household staff, Emma cared for Thomas in her characteristically pragmatic fashion. Resurrecting storybooks she had written years before as a young Sunday school teacher, Emma also served as Thomas’s first tutor. It was from such simple Bible stories that Thomas was taught both reading and religion — what Charles fondly referred to as his wife’s abridged version of the three Rs. Thomas’s religious instruction was of central importance to Emma. Even as a toddler, it was compulsory that a scrubbed and well-dressed Thomas walk with Emma, and all those siblings then at home, to the local church. After services, Emma would exchange pleasantries with the other families in the small adjoining churchyard. Although Emma encouraged Thomas to play with the other children, he preferred to linger at her side, “Alone, but not lonely,” according to Emma.
Thomas also participated from an early age in his mother’s charitable affairs. Revered by the parish community, Emma quietly supported those who were ill or in financial need. Each week, with Thomas as her “assistant,” she prepared homemade remedies that were then dispensed to grateful congregants, often with an accompanying food basket. Many of her medicinal recipes were based on prescriptions first written by Thomas’s physician grandfather, Dr. Robert Waring Darwin. Although all her generous parcels were appreciated, a particular favourite with the parishioners was Emma’s potent gin cordial laced with opium.
Thomas proved helpful in the kitchen, at first retrieving the various ingredients from the “physic cupboard” that Emma would carefully weigh and measure. As he grew older, he took direction from both Emma and Mrs. Evans, the family cook who served the Darwins for many years. One of Thomas’s early chores was to assist Mrs. Evans in the scullery, a small room beside the kitchen where the dishes and kitchen utensils were scrubbed. Despite difficulty in reaching the top-most drawers, Thomas’s responsibilities soon included returning the cleaned cutlery and serving pieces to the large antique sideboard that ran the length of the Darwin dining room.
In addition to their impressive Wedgwood dinner service,5 the Darwins also owned a large and eclectic assortment of serving utensils, as Emma often entertained her extended family. A number of these implements, such as marrow forks and cream ladles, were curious in appearance and Mrs. Evans would challenge Thomas to identify their purpose as the two worked together. Though only four years old, Thomas immediately recognized that a u-shaped, narrow-bladed set of tongs was used to serve asparagus. Not even his father had initially appreciated their function. Many years before, the piece had been mailed to Charles as a wedding gift from his friend J. M. Herbert. In the accompanying letter, Herbert, in an effort to be amusing, only drolly stated the enclosed gift was a representative of the genus Forficula (a reference to the common earwig, an insect that the silver utensil apparently resembled). To reward Thomas’s unexpected acumen, Mrs. Evans insisted thereafter on serving him the first portion of roasted asparagus whenever she prepared the seasonal vegetable. Though Thomas disliked asparagus and would have far preferred priority for Mrs. Evans’s gingerbread, he graciously accepted the asparagus as the gift he knew it to be.
On turning five, Thomas began to receive sporadic tutoring from Mr. Brodie Innes, vicar of Down. Mr. Innes focussed on expanding Thomas’s reading and writing skills, and also introduced Thomas to basic arithmetic. Though Thomas learned to add and subtract, Mr. Innes had little talent for teaching. Recognizing his own limitations, he encouraged Emma to allow Thomas to join his sisters Henrietta (while she was still at home) and Elizabeth in the small schoolroom at Down House, where a series
