finds work for idle hands,” the emphasis of the girls’ education was skewed towards embroidery and handicrafts. As one activity, Thomas made a number of flimsy Easter baskets. He had intended to present individual members of his family with an identical holiday gift but each basket was significantly and disappointingly distinct from its predecessor. Thomas would later conclude that such imperfect production was an important source of diversity in the world of artefacts.
Thomas also attended his sisters’ weekly Wednesday Drawing Class in the local village. Miss Mary Matheson, the teacher, was a diffident but well-intentioned spinster whose style of instruction was to emphasize accuracy over artistic interpretation. Although never hesitant to erase errant lines, she was genuinely supportive, and Thomas was a conscientious pupil. While Thomas was self-deprecating about his ability to draw, these early lessons came to useful advantage. He later produced his own illustrations for the manuscripts he authored.
If the weather was remotely tolerable, Thomas was excused from all lessons and allowed to play outside. Emma and Charles were permissive parents, and their sole stipulation was that Thomas remain in earshot of the one o’clock bell for lunch, the family’s principal meal of the day. Thomas would spend hours digging in the sandy soil of the kitchen garden and the orchard, deploying toy soldiers on the ample lawn, and inspecting the considerable number of birds’ nests in the trees that bordered the Sandwalk. A favourite sanctuary was a small abandoned summer house, just beyond the Sandwalk, where Thomas enjoyed drawing in chalk on its decaying wooden walls.
The only drawback to such activities was their solitary nature. For most of Thomas’s childhood, his brothers were either at boarding school or living away from home. On occasion, Parslow, the Darwins’ long-serving butler, would challenge Thomas to a game of quoits. Akin to horseshoes, this entailed tossing rings towards a spike in the ground some distance away. To Parslow’s irritation, Thomas’s throws were rarely accurate and he was prone to closing his eyes and simply hurling the rings as far as he could. This resulted in long, and at times fruitless, searches for the hard-to-find rings.
When available, Thomas’s favourite outdoor play-fellow was his father, but Charles seldom had the energy to engage in child-driven games. For more consistent fellowship, Thomas relied on the cows, pigs, and ducks that also resided on the eighteen acres upon which Down House stood. During Charles’s “pigeon phase,” Thomas spent considerable time in his father’s pigeon house, where he quickly learned to mimic a number of pigeon sounds, including their warning call of distress: coo roo-c’too-coo. Thereafter, and with the amused collusion of his father, Thomas would loudly sound coo roo-c’too-coo each time a member of the clergy called upon the Darwins. A forewarned Charles could then hurriedly retreat to his bedroom with an apparent exacerbation of any number of physical symptoms, much to Emma’s annoyance.
Thomas was also inclined to flee to his bedroom to avoid company and was generally perceived as shy. His smallish room was located on the second floor, one of the many bedrooms in Down House’s large three-storey structure, which had been altered and expanded over the years to accommodate the growing numbers of Darwins and domestic staff. One means to entice Thomas downstairs was the sound of a billiards game. Just prior to Thomas’s birth, a billiards table had been installed in the old dining room, and the game immediately became a favourite form of recreation for the entire household. It was Thomas’s task to methodically organize the balls at the beginning of each family tournament using a triangular rack that had been crafted expertly out of cork by Jackson, the Darwins’ groom.6 Charles often won, likely because Emma had instructed her sons “never to beat Papa.”
Thomas would also leave the security of his room on the sound of a secret knock. Thomas’s bedroom was directly beside larger quarters shared by Henrietta and Elizabeth. On hearing three taps in rapid succession, Thomas would dutifully open his door and descend partway down the staircase as his sisters furtively dressed in their mother’s jewels and wardrobe. The former were kept in a simple locked wooden box that first had to be quietly removed from their mother’s room. As the key fitted badly, Henrietta and Emma often resorted to violently shaking and bashing the box before it would open. Again, Thomas’s skills as a pigeon were required as he timed loud calls of coo roo-c’too-coo to mask the sounds arising from his sisters’ inept thievery. These calls had the unintended consequence of also sending his well-trained father scurrying to his room only to emerge some time later, uncertain as to whether any of his physical symptoms were still required. Otherwise, when not involved in such clandestine activities, Thomas preferred to spend long hours in his comfortable but cluttered room, reading, drawing, and, most satisfying of all, organizing his various collections.
From a young age, Thomas was an entrenched collector. Though he amassed all sorts of objects, his greatest passion was for accumulating buttons. These were organized by size, shape, and colour, and were sorted into trays and jars that Thomas appropriated from his father’s dissecting supplies. As Thomas’s expertise increased, he also began to identify each button on the basis of its composition. This was challenging, as many button materials closely resembled each other. Thomas taught himself to insert a fine, heated needle in the back of each button in order to smell for a distinct odour, such as the stagnant saltwater smell associated with tortoise-shell. The technique was time-consuming, but it allowed Thomas to sort and re-sort his buttons according to finer distinctions and also garnered his father’s admiration for his methodical perseverance.
Although Thomas was free to retire to his room as he wished, he was generally expected to spend evenings with other members of his family. After a relatively late and simple tea, it was the Darwins’ custom to gather in their large unpretentious drawing-room. This was a time for discussion, affable loitering, and two rituals, the first of which was the collective reading aloud of novels.7 Thomas’s favourite story was The Ugly Duckling as read by Henrietta. His eldest sister was masterful at impersonating the ducks whose dialogue animated the fairy tale. At one point in the story, a mother duck instructs her ducklings to “now bow your necks, and say ‘quack.’” Taking his cue, Thomas would dutifully bend his neck and boisterously “quack” along with Henrietta, much to the pleasure of the Darwin household.
Charles’s enjoyment of Thomas’s participation was twofold. Aside from revelling in Thomas’s joie de vivre, the transformation of a homely and unwanted baby bird into a graceful and beautiful swan was for Charles, above all, a “eugenics” parable.8 Although a swan’s egg had accidentally rolled into a duck’s nest, the ultimate superiority of the “ugly duckling” over the other barnyard ducks was predetermined by its genetic lineage. Charles, who supported the concept of selective breeding, saw Thomas’s enthusiasm for The Ugly Ducking as a sign he was a fellow eugenicist, one who recognized the importance of nature over nurture.
After the shared pleasure of reading, it was then time for backgammon, the second of the evening rituals. The games played by Charles and Emma were undertaken seriously, with Charles uncharacteristically boasting on one occasion, “Now the tally with my wife in backgammon stands thus: she, poor creature, has won only 2490 games, whilst I have won, hurrah, hurrah, 2795 games!” Although the children were expected to remain neutral, Thomas and his siblings would openly cheer their mother’s victories.
Following backgammon, Emma, a competent pianist, might then entertain the family by playing a number of classical pieces. This was an opportunity for Thomas to do his schoolwork, to read, or to quietly withdraw to his room. By half past ten, it was bedtime for Thomas and the entire Darwin household.
TWO
SCHOOL DAYS
At age ten, following the summer of 1868, Thomas was enrolled at Clapham, the school where each of his brothers (except William) had been educated. He remained there as a boarding student until the age of nineteen. As in other private boarding schools in Victorian England, lessons were confined predominantly to the study of classics. Instructional methods emphasized rote learning and verse-making. For most students, the tedium was only
