Read Online The Reluctant Mr. Darwin by David Quammen - Free Book Online Page B

landscape around it, neither of which were impressive to a young woman raised on a fancy Staffordshire estate; but she figured she could adjust to it. The first major event in the new location was cheery, when Emma gave birth to a girl, their second daughter, christened Mary Eleanor. The next came like a bad omen, three weeks later, when the baby died. They buried Mary Eleanor in the Down churchyard. Now, in a grim way, they were rooted here.
    The village Down later became Downe, with a spelling change meant to make it more distinctive. Darwin transmogrified himself, too, though not in order to stand out. On the contrary, he settled into village life as though it were a witness protection program. Assuming the trappings of a minor country squire, he planted flowers, bought a few milk cows, started an orchard, hired a handyman, took a seat on the parish council, established his private workspace in a study filled with books and files, and commissioned renovations for the rest of the house. Outside one window he attached an inconspicuous mirror, angled so that he could see people coming up the drive before they saw him. Visitors were hell on his weak gut, plus they cost him time that he needed for work. He didn’t want company, except in very limited doses and on his own controlled terms. Lively chat made him excited and excitement made him sick. His study included a little lavatory nook behind a curtain, where he could vomit. From now on, most of his scientific conversations would be conducted through the mail.
    He’d always been an exceptionally good letter writer, in a letter-writing age. Telephones didn’t yet exist, after all, and any literate Victorian necessarily scrawled lots of missives to family, colleagues, and friends. Having a dinner party? Invitations went by note. Gossip and professional chat were largely epistolary, even among those who lived not far apart. After the move to Down House, Darwin took that a step further. Self-sequestered inside both his home and his sense of frail health, he became very dependent on written correspondence and very disciplined in his use of it. He wrote letters for friendship, letters for business, letters for love (to his “dear old Titty” or his “dear Mammy,” as he variously called Emma, when they were apart), letters for good deeds and scientific politicking, letters asking parental advice and (later, with his sons away) giving it, letters for the sheer joy of prattle, and most of all, letters seeking scientific information. He peppered friends, acquaintances, and strangers with questions, requests for data, little assignments of experimentation that they might perform for him if, ahem, it wasn’t too much trouble. He was unctuous and apologetic, but demanding.
    What color are the horses of Jamaica? he wrote to a bureaucrat who’d once owned an estate there. Can you help me with an identification of certain rock specimens? he wrote to a professor of mineralogy at Cambridge. Your ideas about classification are airy and confused, he told George Waterhouse, the Zoological Society curator who had agreed to work on his Beagle mammals, and who subscribed to a system of arranging similar species in neat circles, as though the deity had strung each genus into a closed loop like a pearl necklace. Darwin’s language to Waterhouse was cordial, but his position was firm. The problem with those circles, he explained, was that they meant nothing and went nowhere. Darwin’s own view, a controversial one he’d been keeping discreetly unspoken, was that “classification consists in grouping beings according to their actual relationship , ie their consanguinity, or descent from common stocks.” That is, the underlying principle is transmutation. Saying so to Waterhouse, who wasn’t among his closest friends, reflected Darwin’s impatience to share his secret with someone . And then, in late 1843, he exchanged his first letters with