A voyage round Charles Darwin

His home and interior lives have almost as much to fascinate us as the five years he spent travelling the globe on the HMS Beagle (pictured above at Tierra del Fuego by the ship's artist, Conrad Martens). What's not to love about Charles Darwin, unless you happen to be a creationist? Sensitive, kind, scrupulous in both his professional and private capacities, an optimist despite personal tragedies ('according to my judgment, happiness decidedly prevails'), a careful master of the most lucid prose and above all a man human enough to admit that Homo sapiens might not be best equipped to understand 'the mystery of the beginning of all things', which is why he was 'content to remain an Agnostic'.  

The religious question is set out with all his customary clarity and humanity in a few vital pages of his 1876 'Recollections', helpfully included in the Darwin reader which has been my bible in recent months. But to learn even more about the man in all his wonderful variety, I can't recommend too strongly the selective biography written by his great-great-grandson Randal Keynes. I've been wanting to read it since being so very moved by the film which took it as a basis, Creation, a subtle masterpiece which hasn't as yet had the acclaim it deserved (being banned in large parts of the USA didn't help). The title of the book has gone through various metamorphoses, from the infelicitous Annie's Box to Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution and now plain Creation. 

Which will do, though the emphasis still remains on the heartbreak of his ten-year-old daughter Annie's death at Malvern in 1851. Keynes nevertheless manages to weave in all the major events and writings, giving them just enough space and context (we learn about everything from the Victorian attitude to the afterlife, the philosophy of Hume and the darker side of society to children's novels and bathing devices). 

Daguerreotypes clearly didn't do the Darwin family's simian features a favour - nobody ever looks relaxed or happy in them, and clearly Annie's smile lit up a room. What I find most touching of all about Darwin's many depressions after losing her is that in 1863, virtually unable to move and watching the tendrils of a plant growing in his study, this most articulate of men could hardly string a sentence together. And yet, in speechless grief at the death of his beloved Joseph Hooker's daughter, he did manage after weeks to pen a note: 'My dear old friend, I must have pleasure of saying this. Yours affect[tionatel]y C. Darwin'. 

We all know the cruel reductionism of the press when difficult and complex ideas first lodge in the consciousness of the general public. Yet of course Darwin's did, and continue to do so, with scientists agreeing that even his unprovable hunches turn out to have been correct. On the Origin of Species really is that miracle of miracles, a scientific study to be read and understood by everybody - perhaps in that respect only Freud is comparable, another master writer - not least because as David Damant reiterates, Darwin spent so many years long polishing its prose and taking care with how he communicated what he had to say.  And I do love the man from everything I read, not least because of the big and happy family full of offspring who don't seem to have had a harsh word for him later in life. Zooming down the wooden staircase slide at Down House, always being welcomed into papa's study and having the wonders of nature painstakingly explained wouldn't have been a bad childhood. But thank God child mortality rates aren't what they used to be. In this privileged land, at any rate. 

Five times round the Sand-walk

Four of us only managed the one circuit when we visit the Darwins' Down House in the Weald of Kent over a week ago, just before the gardener came to tell us that closing-time approached, but the great man habitually walked around his 'thinking path' five times a day at noon, striking the iron tip of his walking-stick rhythmically on the ground.


The Sand-walk was very much Darwin's intellectual property, as granddaughter Gwen Raverat wrote in her childhood memoir Period Piece:

It was a path running round a little wood which he had planted himself; and it always seemed to be a very long way from the house. You went right to the furthest end of the kitchen garden


and then through a wooden door in the high hedge, which quite cut you off from human society. Here a fenced path ran along between two great lonely meadows, till you came to the wood. The path ran straight down the outside of the wood - the Light Side - till it came to a summer house at the far end [it's been replaced by a sheltered seat]; it was very lonely there; to this day you cannot see a single building anywhere, only woods and valleys [still true].


The path then turns to the left and loops along what Raverat as a child called 'the Dark Side, a mossy path, all along the trees, and that was truly terrifying'. She cites a hollow ash and an elephantine beech tree as the biggest horrors of the place.



Clearly more of a comfort in the 1890s was the mulberry tree which grew up against thw windows of the nursery: 'the shadows of the leaves used to shift about on the white floor, and you could hear the plop of ripe mulberries as they fell to the ground'. Too early for that in late February, but the gnarly skeleton of the propped-up tree is impressive in itself.



One more arboreal specimen impressed us before we headed back for the suburbia of Orpington - the one at the very centre of Downe village. I was too preoccupied with sorting out a timetable crisis - the youngest member of our party didn't have the energy to walk back another three and a half miles the way we come - to check out what it was, but clearly it's a beauty, even if the shoots have that peculiarly living quality Darwin notes in his insectivorous plants.



The bus situation may have been in a state of confusion, but the last kindness of the day was the driver ushering me on when my Oyster card - yes, we were still on the London fringes - had run out of juice. It was curious to see, and be seen by, the suburban world in the disguise of a respectable putative father, to find out how much nicer most people are to you - in this country, at any rate - if they think you're a family man with wife and kids in tow than if you happen to be two men, obviously a couple, together. Sad but true, though I don't think it pertains in the metropolis proper.