Read Online Charles and Emma by Deborah Heiligman - Free Book Online

the signs back in May during that visit.
    Even Elizabeth was happy, for she liked Charles very much. It must have been hard news for her to take, though. She was sure she wouldn’t get married. And it meant she would be left at home to take care of their aging father and ill mother. Bessy had been sick for quite a while; she slipped in and out of dementia. But when they told her, and she understood, she was thrilled, too.
    Emma reported to Aunt Jessie, “Indeed I was so glad to find that all of them had been wishing for it and settling it. It is a match that every soul has been making for us, so we could not have helped it if we had not liked it ourselves.”
    And yet Emma and Charles spent the whole day feeling rather miserable at the shock of their engagement; they were both astonished at the suddenness of their decision. They didn’t tell anyone else in the house until the evening, when they went into Hensleigh’s bedroom.
    As they gathered, Emma learned that Hensleigh’s wife Fanny had suspected what had occurred. They had a “large party talking it over till very late.” Hensleigh—he of the box and child—had given Charles serious pause about getting married. But now Charles would be joining him in the juggling of domestic life. Back in London, he talked with Hensleigh about science and religion, working out his thoughts about transmutation of species, about God, and about natural selection. Hensleigh, like Emma, was a theist. But he was also a scholar. He was a philologist, looking at how language evolves over time.
    Late into the night, Emma was “seized with hunger.” The servants were asleep, but, as she wrote to Aunt Jessie, “Hensleigh went down to forage in the kitchen and found a loaf and 2 lb. butter and a carving knife, which made us an elegant refection.”
    They ate bread and butter to celebrate their engagement.
    Charles wrote in his diary on November 11, 1838, “The day of days.” The next day Charles and Emma had a few little talks, which put them both a bit more at ease. Then Charles and Catherine went back to Shrewsbury so he could ask his father’s permission as well.
    Having finally proposed and been accepted was a huge relief to Charles. After all those tumultuous months, filled with turbulent thoughts, anxiety attacks, and headaches, it was finally settled. He would marry. His wife would, he hoped, sit next to him on the sofa, take care of him, and anchor him.
    When he was traveling around the world on the
Beagle,
Charles was wretchedly seasick almost every day he was on board the ship. He lived for the times he could get off the rolling, rocky seas and onto solid land. Emma might not be passionate like his old girlfriend, Fanny Owen, was; she might not be sophisticated the way the Horner girls were, but she was brilliant and she was open-minded and she was unflappable. She could be his solid land in the tumultuous seas of his heretical thoughts.
    At Shrewsbury, Dr. Darwin couldn’t have been happier with Charles’s choice. He wrote to his brother-in-law Jos that the marriage gave him great happiness. For days he walked around the Mount telling Charles that he, too, had “drawn a prize!” just as Josiah said Emma had.
    Everyone in the extended circle of family and friends was thrilled. Letters flew back and forth praising the match. One friend wrote, “It is very like a marriage of Miss Austen’s, can I say more!” But the plot was very different. In Jane Austen’s novels there are star-crossed lovers who have impediments thrown in their way—by their parents, society, or their own doubts. There are issues of class, suitability, or inheritance.There is much buildup to the engagement, and then the book ends quickly with a happy wedding.
    With Charles and Emma, there was very little buildup, very little—if any—flirting before the engagement. There was no denial, no star-crossed agony leading