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Forebears and heirs: a sketch
Forebears and heirs: a sketch David Sharp
In a collection of Darwin material lies a privately printed document from 1888 on Charles Darwin’s ancestors, a painstaking inquiry drawing heavily on records of legal documents such as wills and property transfers. Confidence in information on the Darwin forebears arrives in the 17th century with a succession of William Darwins, one of whom married the daughter of a lawyer called Erasmus Earle, whose forename was to have several entries in the Darwin dynasty. The wife of this William’s son was heiress to Robert Waring, two other dynastic names. On the death of the next William, the younger brother, Robert (1682–1754; see fold-out insert) inherited. And with him, and in an age when such interests were taken up by enthusiastic amateurs rather than being the exclusive preserve of full-time scientists, we get the first glimpse of interest in science. Charles Darwin himself thought so, and a 1719 paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society refers to Robert Darwin as “a person of curiosity”, which we may take as a compliment. Less complimentary, to educated womanhood at least, was this Robert’s earnest but apparently unfulfilled wish that “From a wife that talketh Latine, Good Lord deliver me!” Of Robert’s four sons the eldest died a bachelor having written Principia Botanica, which ran to at least three editions. The youngest son was Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), a man who within two marriages and outside them fathered at least 14 children. Happily, for the pedigree constructor at least, not all of them had families of their own. One who did was Robert Waring Darwin (1766–1848), a very
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successful physician and shrewd businessman in Shrewsbury, where Charles was born in 1809. The young Darwin did poorly at school, in conventional academic terms at least. “…rather below the common standards in intellect”, his father thought, and “you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family”. So Darwin senior decided to send the wayward 16-year-old to Edinburgh to study medicine. Whatever we think of the paternal logic here, the change failed as a career move, and after just 2 years Darwin gave up on that idea. The father was not best pleased and being, in his son’s own words, strongly opposed to a life as an “idle sporting man, which then seemed my probable destination”, suggested the profession of clergyman via Cambridge University. The sporting persona lingered on at Cambridge, and Darwin rode, hunted, drank, and gambled, moving with a fast set of students “including some dissipated low-minded young men”. Writing to his family in 1836, he remarked “The only evil found at Cambridge was its being too pleasant”. He was also a founder member of the Glutton Club, dedicated to the consumption of “birds and beasts which were before unknown to human palate”, an unusual hobby for an evolutionary biologist in the making. At this point the father’s gloomy predictions must have seemed not far off the mark. Charles Darwin almost certainly exaggerated the playboy image, and in any case the phase did not last long. It was the influences of his cousin, beetle-collecting William Darwin Fox (1805–80) and the university’s professors of botany and geology (John Henslow and Adam Sedgwick) among others that set Darwin on a more serious path. And there were influential books too (Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne among them) to accompany a long-standing interest in natural history. Darwin might well have ended up as a victorian version of White, an enthusiastic naturalist in a country parish that did not make too many demands on his time. However, in 1831 via Professor Henslow came the invitation for Darwin to join HMS Beagle, unpaid. Without that, without the necessary financial independence, and without the persuasive arguments that his uncle Josiah Wedgwood II brought to bear on an otherwise very reluctant father, there might have been no Beagle voyage for Darwin and quite possibly no On the Origin of Species. In 19th century Britain a man’s family, his connections, and his income influenced choice of career but, as with evolution itself, chance had its part to play. Darwin’s financial position was comfortable. When Thomas Huxley, his public defender, ran into financial difficulties in 1873, he was rescued by a substantial collection of £2000 organised by several friends, Charles Darwin among them. Darwin could well afford it. Not long after his marriage in 1839 parental largesse, both Darwin and Wedgwood, gave him an income in excess of £1000 a year, worth more than £100 000 today. A loan from his father helped him buy and improve upon Down House with its large estate. On the death of Dr R W Darwin in 1848, Charles inherited a lot of money, estimated by one biographer at £45 000. And on his
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own death in 1882, his widow and seven surviving children were left very comfortably off. Darwin’s life may not have been free from stress but he never had need of a proper paid job as, say, physician or clergyman, the professions he was at one time pointed at. Several members of the extended Darwin family were to be associated with the eugenics movement in Britain. Darwin’s second cousin, Francis Galton, in effect founded the Eugenics Education Society in 1907, and was succeeded by Darwin’s son Leonard. Although Darwin did not go along with Galton on the need for a eugenics programme, he did write, in a note to his elder brother Erasmus: “I am inclined to agree with Francis Galton in believing that education and environment produce only a small effect on the mind of any one, and that most of our qualities are innate.” Via nature or nurture or a bit of both, six successive generations of the Darwin family Panel: Fellows of the Royal Society in six generations of Darwins Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) Physician, poet, philosopher, inventor, and evolutionary theorist in style of Lamarck. Author of Zoonomia and Phytologia. Robert Waring Darwin (1766–1848) Physician; son of Erasmus’ first marriage. Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882) Naturalist; son of R W Darwin. Francis Galton (1822–1911) Eugenist and polymath; grandson of Erasmus Darwin via his second marriage. George Howard Darwin (1845–1912) Mathematician and astronomer, University of Cambridge; son of Charles. Francis Darwin (1848–1925) Reader in botany, University of Cambridge; son of Charles. Horace Darwin (1851–1928) Inventor and founder of the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company; son of Charles. Charles Galton Darwin (1887–1962) Physicist, director of National Physical Laboratory; son of George Darwin. Richard Darwin Keynes (1919–) Neurophysiologist; son of Geoffrey and Margaret (née Darwin) Keynes; great-grandson of Charles. Horace Basil Barlow (1921–) Neuroscientist; son of Alan and Norah (née Darwin) Barlow; great-grandson of Charles.
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tree contain fellows of the Royal Society (panel), an unusual achievement even if the honour was more easily earned in the 18th century. The contributions to science of Darwin’s father were unspectacular to say the least, but he was elected FRS at the tender age of 22 on the strength of a single paper on ocular spectra. The Darwin lineage has its share, no more or less, of medical catastrophes but if Charles Darwin’s mysterious chronic illness had any hereditary element at all its penetrance, happily for succeeding generations, seems to have been very weak. Nonetheless, an entertaining memoir from a shrewd young Darwin, the painter Gwen Raverat, noted that William was “the only one of the five sons entirely free from hypochondria” and that in Charles Darwin’s home “it was a distinction and a mournful pleasure to be ill”. In the 19th century a woman would spend a significant part of her married life being pregnant. Large families were common, even with the high childhood and maternal mortality rates of the time; marriage between cousins was frequent; and names were respectfully but sometimes confusingly reused. So, after only a couple of generations, a genealogical map from that era can be very challenging. With many such families we would, a few generations further on, be looking not at a tree but at an impenetrable forest. Neither the Darwins nor the families with which they became connected (notably the Wedgwoods) were exempt from these complex patterns, but with our Darwin the lines of succession are simplified by the fact that though Charles and Emma (née Wedgwood) had ten children, three of them died young, two never married, and three of the other five produced just nine children between them (another died at birth). With one exception, these grandchildren were born too late for Darwin to have known them. Darwin genes mingled with Wedgwood ones by way of three Wedgwood/Darwin marriages, including Charles’. There are also links with Galton (via Erasmus Darwin’s second marriage) and John Maynard Keynes (via George Darwin’s daughter, Margaret, who married the economist’s brother). The composer Ralph Vaughan Williams was related too, being a grandson of the Wedgwood/Darwin union of Josiah III and Caroline, and Francis Darwin’s third wife was the sister of Vaughan Williams’ first one. In time, marriages brought in the scientific dynasties of Huxley and Adrian too. The eldest son of Charles Galton Darwin married a great-grand-daughter of Thomas Huxley while Richard Keynes married a daughter of the first Lord Adrian. As the generations pass, the science becomes less prominent but several later descendants of Charles Darwin have achieved distinction in the arts. For example, Francis Darwin’s son Bernard was a golf writer, his daughter was a poet, and his grandchildren include a principal of the Royal College of Art (Robert Vere Darwin) and a potter (Ursula Mommens). Today the living descendants number over 100. You will find one (a Keynes and one of Darwin’s great-great-great-grandsons) in the cast list for the current Chronicles of Narnia films, and Emma Darwin, a great-greatgrand-daughter, is a novelist, while her sister Carola Darwin is a singer. Some
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kinship with nature does survive. Sarah Darwin, a great-great-grand-daughter, is involved with a conservation project for the Galapagos Islands; in 2005 she with six other Darwin descendants from three generations joined with others in a re-run of a plant species count that Darwin himself had done on the Down House estate. The number had fallen from 142 in Darwin’s time to 116. What would Charles Darwin have made of that? Lancet 2008; 372: S40–44
Further reading Barlow N, ed. The autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882 with original omissions restored. London: Collins, 1958. Bowlby J. Charles Darwin: a biography. London: Hutchinson, 1997. Burke HF. Pedigree of the family of Darwin. 1888. http://www.darwin-online.org.uk/pdf/1888_Pedigree_ A163.pdf (accessed July 20, 2008). Desmond A. Huxley: evolution’s high priest. London: Michael Joseph, 1997. Olby R. Charles Darwin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Raverat G. A Cambridge portrait. London: Faber and Faber, 1952.
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www.thelancet.com Darwin’s Gifts December 2008
In a collection of Darwin material lies a privately printed document from 1888 on Charles Darwin’s ancestors, a painstaking inquiry drawing heavily on records of legal documents such as wills and property transfers. Confidence in information on the Darwin forebears arrives in the 17th century with a succession of William Darwins, one of whom married the daughter of a lawyer called Erasmus Earle, whose forename was to have several entries in the Darwin dynasty. The wife of this William’s son was heiress to Robert Waring, two other dynastic names. On the death of the next William, the younger brother, Robert (1682–1754; see fold-out insert) inherited. And with him, and in an age when such interests were taken up by enthusiastic amateurs rather than being the exclusive preserve of full-time scientists, we get the first glimpse of interest in science. Charles Darwin himself thought so, and a 1719 paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society refers to Robert Darwin as “a person of curiosity”, which we may take as a compliment. Less complimentary, to educated womanhood at least, was this Robert’s earnest but apparently unfulfilled wish that “From a wife that talketh Latine, Good Lord deliver me!” Of Robert’s four sons the eldest died a bachelor having written Principia Botanica, which ran to at least three editions. The youngest son was Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), a man who within two marriages and outside them fathered at least 14 children. Happily, for the pedigree constructor at least, not all of them had families of their own. One who did was Robert Waring Darwin (1766–1848), a very
S40
www.thelancet.com Darwin’s Gifts December 2008
successful physician and shrewd businessman in Shrewsbury, where Charles was born in 1809. The young Darwin did poorly at school, in conventional academic terms at least. “…rather below the common standards in intellect”, his father thought, and “you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family”. So Darwin senior decided to send the wayward 16-year-old to Edinburgh to study medicine. Whatever we think of the paternal logic here, the change failed as a career move, and after just 2 years Darwin gave up on that idea. The father was not best pleased and being, in his son’s own words, strongly opposed to a life as an “idle sporting man, which then seemed my probable destination”, suggested the profession of clergyman via Cambridge University. The sporting persona lingered on at Cambridge, and Darwin rode, hunted, drank, and gambled, moving with a fast set of students “including some dissipated low-minded young men”. Writing to his family in 1836, he remarked “The only evil found at Cambridge was its being too pleasant”. He was also a founder member of the Glutton Club, dedicated to the consumption of “birds and beasts which were before unknown to human palate”, an unusual hobby for an evolutionary biologist in the making. At this point the father’s gloomy predictions must have seemed not far off the mark. Charles Darwin almost certainly exaggerated the playboy image, and in any case the phase did not last long. It was the influences of his cousin, beetle-collecting William Darwin Fox (1805–80) and the university’s professors of botany and geology (John Henslow and Adam Sedgwick) among others that set Darwin on a more serious path. And there were influential books too (Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne among them) to accompany a long-standing interest in natural history. Darwin might well have ended up as a victorian version of White, an enthusiastic naturalist in a country parish that did not make too many demands on his time. However, in 1831 via Professor Henslow came the invitation for Darwin to join HMS Beagle, unpaid. Without that, without the necessary financial independence, and without the persuasive arguments that his uncle Josiah Wedgwood II brought to bear on an otherwise very reluctant father, there might have been no Beagle voyage for Darwin and quite possibly no On the Origin of Species. In 19th century Britain a man’s family, his connections, and his income influenced choice of career but, as with evolution itself, chance had its part to play. Darwin’s financial position was comfortable. When Thomas Huxley, his public defender, ran into financial difficulties in 1873, he was rescued by a substantial collection of £2000 organised by several friends, Charles Darwin among them. Darwin could well afford it. Not long after his marriage in 1839 parental largesse, both Darwin and Wedgwood, gave him an income in excess of £1000 a year, worth more than £100 000 today. A loan from his father helped him buy and improve upon Down House with its large estate. On the death of Dr R W Darwin in 1848, Charles inherited a lot of money, estimated by one biographer at £45 000. And on his
www.thelancet.com Darwin’s Gifts December 2008
S41
own death in 1882, his widow and seven surviving children were left very comfortably off. Darwin’s life may not have been free from stress but he never had need of a proper paid job as, say, physician or clergyman, the professions he was at one time pointed at. Several members of the extended Darwin family were to be associated with the eugenics movement in Britain. Darwin’s second cousin, Francis Galton, in effect founded the Eugenics Education Society in 1907, and was succeeded by Darwin’s son Leonard. Although Darwin did not go along with Galton on the need for a eugenics programme, he did write, in a note to his elder brother Erasmus: “I am inclined to agree with Francis Galton in believing that education and environment produce only a small effect on the mind of any one, and that most of our qualities are innate.” Via nature or nurture or a bit of both, six successive generations of the Darwin family Panel: Fellows of the Royal Society in six generations of Darwins Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) Physician, poet, philosopher, inventor, and evolutionary theorist in style of Lamarck. Author of Zoonomia and Phytologia. Robert Waring Darwin (1766–1848) Physician; son of Erasmus’ first marriage. Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882) Naturalist; son of R W Darwin. Francis Galton (1822–1911) Eugenist and polymath; grandson of Erasmus Darwin via his second marriage. George Howard Darwin (1845–1912) Mathematician and astronomer, University of Cambridge; son of Charles. Francis Darwin (1848–1925) Reader in botany, University of Cambridge; son of Charles. Horace Darwin (1851–1928) Inventor and founder of the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company; son of Charles. Charles Galton Darwin (1887–1962) Physicist, director of National Physical Laboratory; son of George Darwin. Richard Darwin Keynes (1919–) Neurophysiologist; son of Geoffrey and Margaret (née Darwin) Keynes; great-grandson of Charles. Horace Basil Barlow (1921–) Neuroscientist; son of Alan and Norah (née Darwin) Barlow; great-grandson of Charles.
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tree contain fellows of the Royal Society (panel), an unusual achievement even if the honour was more easily earned in the 18th century. The contributions to science of Darwin’s father were unspectacular to say the least, but he was elected FRS at the tender age of 22 on the strength of a single paper on ocular spectra. The Darwin lineage has its share, no more or less, of medical catastrophes but if Charles Darwin’s mysterious chronic illness had any hereditary element at all its penetrance, happily for succeeding generations, seems to have been very weak. Nonetheless, an entertaining memoir from a shrewd young Darwin, the painter Gwen Raverat, noted that William was “the only one of the five sons entirely free from hypochondria” and that in Charles Darwin’s home “it was a distinction and a mournful pleasure to be ill”. In the 19th century a woman would spend a significant part of her married life being pregnant. Large families were common, even with the high childhood and maternal mortality rates of the time; marriage between cousins was frequent; and names were respectfully but sometimes confusingly reused. So, after only a couple of generations, a genealogical map from that era can be very challenging. With many such families we would, a few generations further on, be looking not at a tree but at an impenetrable forest. Neither the Darwins nor the families with which they became connected (notably the Wedgwoods) were exempt from these complex patterns, but with our Darwin the lines of succession are simplified by the fact that though Charles and Emma (née Wedgwood) had ten children, three of them died young, two never married, and three of the other five produced just nine children between them (another died at birth). With one exception, these grandchildren were born too late for Darwin to have known them. Darwin genes mingled with Wedgwood ones by way of three Wedgwood/Darwin marriages, including Charles’. There are also links with Galton (via Erasmus Darwin’s second marriage) and John Maynard Keynes (via George Darwin’s daughter, Margaret, who married the economist’s brother). The composer Ralph Vaughan Williams was related too, being a grandson of the Wedgwood/Darwin union of Josiah III and Caroline, and Francis Darwin’s third wife was the sister of Vaughan Williams’ first one. In time, marriages brought in the scientific dynasties of Huxley and Adrian too. The eldest son of Charles Galton Darwin married a great-grand-daughter of Thomas Huxley while Richard Keynes married a daughter of the first Lord Adrian. As the generations pass, the science becomes less prominent but several later descendants of Charles Darwin have achieved distinction in the arts. For example, Francis Darwin’s son Bernard was a golf writer, his daughter was a poet, and his grandchildren include a principal of the Royal College of Art (Robert Vere Darwin) and a potter (Ursula Mommens). Today the living descendants number over 100. You will find one (a Keynes and one of Darwin’s great-great-great-grandsons) in the cast list for the current Chronicles of Narnia films, and Emma Darwin, a great-greatgrand-daughter, is a novelist, while her sister Carola Darwin is a singer. Some
www.thelancet.com Darwin’s Gifts December 2008
S43
kinship with nature does survive. Sarah Darwin, a great-great-grand-daughter, is involved with a conservation project for the Galapagos Islands; in 2005 she with six other Darwin descendants from three generations joined with others in a re-run of a plant species count that Darwin himself had done on the Down House estate. The number had fallen from 142 in Darwin’s time to 116. What would Charles Darwin have made of that? Lancet 2008; 372: S40–44
Further reading Barlow N, ed. The autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882 with original omissions restored. London: Collins, 1958. Bowlby J. Charles Darwin: a biography. London: Hutchinson, 1997. Burke HF. Pedigree of the family of Darwin. 1888. http://www.darwin-online.org.uk/pdf/1888_Pedigree_ A163.pdf (accessed July 20, 2008). Desmond A. Huxley: evolution’s high priest. London: Michael Joseph, 1997. Olby R. Charles Darwin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Raverat G. A Cambridge portrait. London: Faber and Faber, 1952.
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www.thelancet.com Darwin’s Gifts December 2008