Charles Darwin by Krull Kathleen & Kulikov Boris

Author:Krull, Kathleen & Kulikov, Boris [Krull, Kathleen & Kulikov, Boris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Childrens, Ages 8+, Science, Biography, History, Retail
ISBN: 9781101444320
Google: g6Sa-cisotYC
Goodreads: 10710566
Publisher: Viking Children's
Published: 2010-10-01T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Confessing a Murder”

THE URGE TO mate won out. And he didn’t look far for someone to mate with. After calling on her a few times, Darwin chose to marry his first cousin, thirty-year-old Emma Wedgwood, daughter of Uncle Josiah, and a friend since childhood. After the proposal, she felt “bewildered” and he had a headache. But her answer was yes.

Darwin didn’t want an intimidating wife. Emma, however, was well educated for a woman of her day, could speak four languages, and had even studied piano with the famous composer Frédéric Chopin. Emma was exceedingly pleasant, a natural born caretaker. “I think you will humanize me,” he wrote her, “and soon teach me there is greater happiness than building theories and accumulating facts in silence and solitude.”

Plus the union kept both their fortunes in the family. Prone to nightmares about being penniless, Darwin felt safe knowing that, if he had a future family to support, Emma’s money meant his lifestyle would never have to change. He could still put all the time he wanted into his studies.

As for Emma, she called him “the most open, transparent man I ever saw . . . sweet-tempered.” A nice guy. So nice that she could blot out their differences concerning religious faith. Against his father’s advice, he confessed to her his doubts that the Bible’s version of the history of the earth could be taken literally. Emma, a devout Unitarian, calmly decided that while she regretted the “painful void” between them, she could agree to disagree, in a sort of don’t-ask-don’t-tell way.

After a small wedding in January 1839 at a church near her country estate, they shared sandwiches and a bottle of water on the train to London.

That same year, Darwin’s journal, popularly known as The Voyage of the Beagle, was published. (It appeared first as one volume in FitzRoy’s account and was so popular that it was then published separately.) In his book, Darwin speculated about those Galápagos finches: “Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.”

Captain FitzRoy never liked the book—since the voyage he had become even more religious, and he was appalled at Darwin’s science. The two men were becoming increasingly estranged.

But as a well-written and spellbinding travel book, the Voyage was hugely popular with everyone else and is still read for pleasure today.

Darwin was working hard, not terribly focused, distracted by his own reproductive success. While living in London, he and Emma had two children, William Erasmus and Anne Elizabeth. He viewed them like a scientist would—a very fond scientist. William was his “little animalcule of a son.” He started drafting a natural history of babies, with detailed notes on his son’s first year. Every little thing about his children fascinated him—the first smile, blinking, what their tears meant, the acquisition of language, how they reacted when tickled

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