The Evolution of Inanimate Objects: The Life and Collected Works of Thomas Darwin. Harry Karlinsky
hobbyists. “The children are well … As for Thomas, he is still at Clapham. He seems to have inherited a dislike of Greek and Latin, but otherwise attends to his work seriously. Charles and I were not surprised that his efforts to start a Button Club failed to attract a single fellow. Yet overall, he has been quite contented there.”9
Although Clapham was a boarding school, it was located just six miles from Down House and, due to this proximity, Thomas routinely returned home for weekends during school terms, as well as for summer recesses. By now he was also viewed as sufficiently mature to assist his father’s research. Although overshadowed in significance by his “species” work, Charles Darwin was then conducting a series of botanical experiments, often with the aid not only of his gardener and under-gardener, but of his family as well. Their laboratory, initially the extensive garden at Down House, was later supplemented by the addition of a small hothouse.
Throughout the early 1870s, Thomas played an essential role in confirming his father’s discovery that the plant Drosera (more commonly known as the sundew) was capable of trapping and, seemingly, digesting insects. Charles had noticed the sundew, “when properly excited”, secreted a substance analogous to an animal’s digestive fluid. In the experiments required to substantiate this observation, it was Thomas’s task to “excite” the plants. At first, Thomas chose to leave raw meat on the sundew’s sticky glandular tentacles. By chance, Thomas then discovered that emotional encouragement enhanced the sundew’s secretions. His technique progressed from rather crude facial distortions to more effective gentle caresses of the plant’s uppermost stem, sometimes cooing as he did so. His father’s book, Insectivorous Plants, in which Charles acknowledged Thomas’s contribution, was published in 1875. Thomas subsequently assisted with the experiments his father conducted on the formation of vegetable mould as well as those related to the fertilization and movements of various plants.10
When time allowed, Thomas continued to enlarge his button collection. To his regret, one ill-advised acquisition led to a rare fraternal altercation. After removing a great horn button from his brother Leonard’s new jacket, and substituting a small, glued piece of cardboard, Thomas was angrily confronted by the usually even-tempered Leonard. Thomas immediately apologized and reattached the original horn button using stiff copper wire. “As good as new!” according to Emma. Nevertheless, Leonard now mistrusted Thomas and, for the next few months, insisted on hiding all his clothes under an old chesterfield in the drawing-room.
It was during this period of tension that Thomas turned to coin collecting, a new interest sparked by a welcome discovery. Sometime in early 1869, when out for a hike with Horace, Thomas came across what he believed were two ancient British coins. Encouraged by their father, the two brothers reported the find, published on February 25th, 1869, in the London Numismatics Monthly Intelligencer. Accompanying the submission was Thomas’s confident pencil sketch of the two coins.
COINAGE OF THE ANCIENT BRITONS AT DOWN
We wish to report that one of us (T. D.) has recently found on Keston Common in the parish of Down, six miles from the village of Bromley, two very old coins, which we believe to be of ancient British origin. One, which appears the older, depicts the image of a head on its obverse; on the reverse there are a chariot and four horses (Fig. A). The depictions on the second coin are much less detailed. On the obverse there is now only a laurel wreath; a single horse on the reverse (Fig. B). As Keston Common is so close to London, we have thought that you might like to include this little notice in the Intelligencer.
Horace Darwin and Thomas Darwin, Down,
Kent
Figure 3. Two Ancient British Coins (Illustrations by Thomas Darwin, from “Coinage of the Ancient Britons at Down,” 1869).
Drawing by Catherine MacDonald.
The published report indicated the coins were found in Keston Common, a lowland heath located about two miles from Down House. This setting was to take on a more ominous connotation for Thomas just a few months later. Some years before, his father had been prescribed horseback riding for therapeutic purposes and had found the grasslands and fields of the nearby common a convenient place to ride. Although his ill health persisted, Charles enjoyed the exercise until one day in early April, 1869, when his “quiet cob Tommy stumbled and fell, rolling on him and bruising him seriously.” Thomas witnessed the misadventure and was traumatized. Shaken, he retreated into his bedroom for a number of days, consoling himself with repeated games of shadow puppets. Thereafter, he had an aversion to horses and experienced significant anxiety in their presence. Although Charles Darwin never raised the matter with either Emma or Thomas, he was privately convinced the earlier rocking horse incident was responsible for his son’s brief, but otherwise puzzling, regression.
When not working or in school, Thomas’s adolescence was also characterized by the social milestones and activities of a large Victorian family. The happier occasions included the marriages of three siblings: Henrietta Emma to Richard Buckley Litchfield in 1871; Francis to Amy Richenda Ruck in 1874; and William Erasmus to Sara Sedgwick in 1877.
In 1876, the birth of Thomas’s first nephew (Bernard) was followed by the tragic loss of Bernard’s young mother who, just one week later, died of puerperal fever. Afterwards, Thomas’s widowed brother Francis returned to Down House with his young son. Although the baby was a great joy to the entire household, Bernard had a particular affinity for Thomas, an affection that was shared. Together, they would search for gooseberries in the woods surrounding Down House so that Grandmamma Emma could make her much-loved gooseberry cream. Thomas would also spend long hours gently pushing Bernard on the swing that Thomas’s Uncle Erasmus (known as Uncle Ras) had suspended between two yew trees years before.
Figure 4. Charles Darwin on His Horse Tommy.
CUL location-MS. DAR.225:116. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
One favourite family anecdote concerning Thomas and Bernard involved a secret potion. Charles had once taken pleasure in astounding a very young Thomas with variously dyed polyanthuses and primroses that he produced by watering the plants with coloured fluids. It became Uncle Thomas’s responsibility to educate his nephew in similar manner. A triumphant Bernard was then allowed to present these alchemic concoctions to his father Francis and to Grandmamma and Grandpapa. Even Charles Darwin feigned amazement and would beg to learn from a pleased and proud Bernard how such transformations had been achieved.
Thomas and Bernard’s mutual joy was Polly, a rough white terrier and cherished Darwin family pet. Generally docile and content to remain indoors, Polly would sit serenely for hours, staring out the drawing-room window. On sighting Thomas and Bernard in the gardens, however, she would madly bark and race around the drawing-room, mollified only on reuniting with her glimpsed masters. Such enthusiasm was deemed worthy of description by Charles Darwin, and Polly’s contortions are reported in much greater detail under the heading of “Exuberance” in the second edition of Expression of the Emotions, published posthumously in 1890.11
Throughout Thomas’s youth, the Darwins occasionally undertook brief family holidays, in Emma’s hope that a change of scenery would improve her husband’s frail health. Journeys of note involving Thomas included a trip to Torquay in June and July of 1861; a house in Malvern Wells in the autumn of 1863; six weeks in Dimbola Lodge, Isle of Wight, during the summer of 1868; and time spent in Caerdeon, in North Wales, in the summer of 1869. In 1872, Thomas travelled independently to Staffordshire where he summered with his Wedgwood relations. There, he worked during the day at the Etruria Works Pottery, founded by his maternal great-grandfather Josiah Wedgwood I. It was then common for boys his age to carry moulds from the potters to the stoves — tedious and dangerous employment. Other risks also had to be considered. Emma, for one, was extremely concerned that Thomas, only fifteen, might be prematurely attracted to one of many first cousins he met during this visit. By her count, there were already four first cousin marriages involving the Darwin and Wedgwood families, including Emma’s own marriage to Charles. As