Jackson - Darwins Odyssey: The Voyage of the Beagle

Dr Robert Darwin was angry with his youngest son, Charles. It was the summer of 1831, and the youngest of the Darwin boys looked as if he was wasting his life. You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family, the Doctor shouted at Charles. Many years later, looking back on this outburst, Charles had to agree that his father had not been exaggerating: He was very properly vehement against my turning [into] an idle sporting man, which then seemed my probable destination

As far as Dr Darwin could see, his son was a three-time failure, who had daydreamed his way through school, dropped out of a medical course in Edinburgh and then spent most of his time at Cambridge riding and hunting by day and drinking and gambling at night. He was not, perhaps, downright stupid, but neither was he all that clever. Charles recalled years later in his Autobiography: I believe I was considered by all my masters and by my Father as a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect.

More dismaying than his sub-average mental ability was Charless refusal to settle down to pursue a gentlemanly profession. Guessing that neither the Army nor the Law would suit Charles, Dr Darwin lit on the final alternative for the sons of the prosperous: he wanted him to become a clergyman. Charles made only mild objections to this plan, but he was making no effort to study the works of theology that he would need to master. In the summer months following his graduation from Cambridge in 1831 he had done little else but loll around the family house or venture out to destroy large quantities of rural wildlife with his gun.

In many respects, Dr Darwin was quite right. Charles had indeed idled at his formal studies, he had not shown many signs of mental acuity, and he was not burning with ambition to become a parson. But what his father had not noticed was how passionately Charles had been pursuing his hobbies entomology, botany, geology and other aspects of natural history. At most, Dr Darwin thought that the undemanding life of a parson would give his son plenty of leisure time to enjoy such pursuits; indeed, some of Englands leading naturalists were clergymen. Many of the countrys scientists were still, as they had been for generations, gentleman (and occasionally lady) amateurs wealthy in their own right, or blessed with virtual sinecures. It would have astonished him to learn that his son would become respected around the world as the greatest naturalist of his century, or of all time. Fortunately, he lived long enough to take pride in some of his sons astounding accomplishments.

By a quirk of history, Charles Darwin was born on the same day as another giant figure of the nineteenth century, Abraham Lincoln: 12 February 1809. Charless grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (1731 1802), had been a famous man of his day, not only as a highly successful medical doctor but also as a natural philosopher the word scientist had not yet been coined and a poet, who used verse as the medium for advancing his various theories. Erasmus, a humane and agreeable man, had propounded a theory of evolution in fact, one of the most famous of the theories of evolution that had been in the air during the late eighteenth century.

Erasmus Darwins third son, Robert Waring Darwin (1766 1848), dutifully followed the course set for him by his father and, after medical studies in Edinburgh and Leyden, settled in the provincial town of Shrewsbury, about 160 miles from London. He soon established himself as a prosperous physician and shrewd businessman, and went on to become one of the wealthiest men in the county. Some of his success was due to his unusually sensitive bedside manner. He discovered that quite a few of his patients would get better if he simply sat quietly and listened to them an antecedent of later types of talking cure.

Robert Darwin built The Mount, a large house near the river, and in 1796 married Susannah Wedgwood, the oldest daughter of Josiah Wedgwood. The Wedgewood family had grown rich and world famous from their pottery manufacturing business, and there had long been social close ties between the two families, who were also related. They shared Whig politics, supported reforming causes and were ardent voices in the battle against the slave trade. Charles maintained these political allegiances throughout his life.

As a young boy, Charles was doted on by his two older sisters, who grew ever more protective and possessive of him after his mother died in June 1817, when he was eight years old. Some biographers have speculated that this early experience of loss was at the root of the many illnesses that afflicted him from his thirties onwards; but others have argued that he was given more than enough affection to see him through his bereavement, and that while it is probable that his torments were psychosomatic, their cause needs to be sought elsewhere perhaps in his early guilt at disappointing a father who had made high demands of him.