The Evolution of Inanimate Objects: The Life and Collected Works of Thomas Darwin. Harry Karlinsky
outburst. At seven months of age, Thomas glared fiercely when his nurse inadvertently dropped the bottle from which he was feeding. Gums clenched, Thomas briefly raised his hands as if to strike the offending nurse, but quickly reverted to passivity. The first indication of Thomas’s sense of injustice and morality soon followed. At eight months of age, Thomas refused to kiss an older sister, possibly Henrietta, when she declined to share her last piece of liquorice.
A notable feature of the entire diary (which ended when Thomas was eighteen months of age) is the frequent comparisons found within its entries. On the more pedestrian level, the timings of Thomas’s developmental milestones were consistently cross-referenced to those of his brothers and sisters. In general, Thomas’s progression was roughly equivalent to that of his siblings. Thomas did, however, show a much earlier aptitude for drawing, a fine motor skill he acquired when only fifteen months of age.
The far more interesting correlations were Charles Darwin’s whimsical comparisons of Thomas’s development to a diverse range of plants and animals. Insectivorous plants were more excitable, iguanas more agile, and rhododendron seeds much hardier. The most unusual inference was when Thomas’s melodious intonation of “Oh, Oh!” was deemed analogous to the musical utterances of the short-beaked tumbler pigeon.
Throughout Thomas’s infancy, Charles also subjected his youngest son to an ongoing series of experiments that were conducted with the assistance of the other Darwin children. To test Thomas’s startle response, Charles recruited Francis to play his bassoon from variable distances and directions. To test Thomas’s reflex withdrawal, Elizabeth was instructed to stimulate specific areas of Thomas’s limbs and torso with strips of blotting paper. Thomas tolerated the attention with good humour.
Always inquisitive, Charles’s conjectures and theories eventually became too much for Emma. Shortly after Thomas had begun breastfeeding, Charles noted that Thomas would protrude his lips whenever Emma’s bosom approached within five to six inches. After excluding any correlation with vision or touch, Charles generated a list of alternative explanations that included a possible association to the position in which Thomas was cradled when about to be fed. Although Thomas seemed unfazed, Emma could not bear the delay in feeding occasioned by Charles’s constant requests for Emma to withdraw her breast, reposition Thomas in her arms, and to again thrust her by then oozing breast towards Thomas. An exasperated Emma requested Charles to refrain from attending further breastfeeding sessions, a maternal injunction he amenably recorded and obeyed.
Though not intended as such, Charles’s notes concerning Thomas amount to an engaging biographical sketch of an infant, publishable immediately as an independent manuscript had Charles wished to do so. Instead, he characteristically delayed publication and chose to include selected observations of Thomas in a much later work titled The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, printed in 1872. Here, Charles’s meticulous surveillance of Thomas and the other Darwin children aided his delineation of thirty-four distinct emotional states in man. A careful reading of Expression of the Emotions reveals that depictions made under the headings of “Meditation,” “Self-Attention,” and “Shyness” pertained to Thomas. Though circumscribed in nature, Thomas’s three appearances within Expression of the Emotions convey a thoughtful and sensitive child.
Figure 2. Photographs Used to Depict Suffering and Weeping. In Darwin, C. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: John Murray, 1872.
Plate 1 with six vignettes of babies. CUL location S382.d.87.1. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
The evocation of “Shyness” is particularly poignant. After a week’s absence to obtain treatment at Dr. Lane’s hydropathic establishment,3 Charles was touched by Thomas’s response on his return home. Just seventeen months of age, Thomas initially averted his eyes and attempted to hide his face in his mother’s dress as Charles warmly greeted Emma and his other children. After hesitating briefly, Thomas then reached out to hug his elated father.
Other early glimpses of Thomas can be found within his mother’s correspondence. When younger, Emma frequently exchanged letters with many of her Darwin and Wedgwood relatives, particularly her Aunt Fanny Allen. At first, Emma enjoyed describing the activities of her children, especially William, Annie, and Henrietta. By the time Thomas was born, however, Emma’s writing had begun to take on a reserved and less personal quality. Emma’s earliest mention of Thomas occurred in association with his first birthday.
Down, Friday Dec 10th [1858]
My dearest Aunt Fanny,
It was so pleasant to receive your affectionate letter on this special date. Our dear Thomas is one year old today. His brothers and sisters adore him; he is so delicate and quiet. Yet still I am tired and drained. How thankful I will be when the children no longer require such constant care and attention. Even then I suppose Charles will never want to be alone. My poor Charles. His stomach aches again and he has been very uncomfortable.
Yours, E. D.
The letter would prove typical of much of Emma’s subsequent correspondence in which Thomas’s brief appearances were quickly eclipsed by details of Emma’s fatigue or the ill health of Charles or another child. At other times, Emma failed to mention any of her children altogether and instead addressed such details as household accounts, recent visitors, or the latest novel she had read. One exception was a letter Emma wrote many years later to her granddaughter Gwen (née Darwin) Raverat.4 After thanking Gwen for a recent visit, Emma discloses that Gwen’s stay evoked memories of her own children when they were young and the unusual games they would play. She then recounts in detail one amusement that was invented by Henrietta. It required hunting the stinkhorn toadstool exclusively by scent. Emma describes a young blindfolded Thomas as exceptionally adept at sniffing his way around the unmown meadow behind Down House until, “with a sudden leap,” he fell upon his “pungent” prey. The only other mention of Thomas within the letter is a brief reference to his death: “Tragically, your Uncle Thomas died of tuberculosis while travelling in Canada at age twenty-one.”
In confiding in Gwen Raverat, Emma may have been responding to her granddaughter’s interest in hearing such family anecdotes. Although Gwen never met her Uncle Thomas (she was born in 1885), she later 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