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.

The Darwins at Down House

Though contented with my lot, I'd rather like to have been a son of that noble being Charles Darwin, and to have grown up in the ordered but often playful atmosphere of the house he lived in with his wife Emma and their children from 1842 until his death 40 years later. Yes, there were the all too familiar tragedies of Victorian child mortality - the death of ten-year old Annie is so sensitively covered in that underrated wonder of a film Creation, while Charles Waring Darwin only lived for two years. But by and large it must have been marvellous to grow up under the wing of so clear-sighted and enthusiastic a lover of the natural world, a genius who always had time for good people and his own children.

Maybe I sentimentalise overmuch. But nothing in Darwin's lucid and loveable Recollections leads me to believe otherwise, and Down House is an enchanting place, now in the not over-fussy care of English Heritage. 'I was pleased', he writes in that short, modest autobiography, 'with the diversified appearance of the vegetation, proper to a chalk district, & so unlike what I had been accustomed to in the midland counties; and still more pleased with the extreme quietness and rusticity of the place.'

That pertains even now; the many half-term visitors last Thursday seemed to be absorbed into the calm atmosphere. I went on a day-trip with friend Clare and her two children. It was - ah, how short-lived - a mild and eventually sunny early Spring day. We walked there from the very fringes of south-east London suburbia, getting out of the train at Orpington station, with a first stop at the village of Farnborough. There the sprawl finally stops just as you reach the church on the hill with its huge ancient yew and fanciful gravestones (here are the children, delighted to find their family name on several tombs, reading an inscription).



Sadly the church was locked, as was the one in the even prettier village of Downe itself (the 'e' was added in 1850 to distinguish it from its Irish counterpart).


We took a steady amble there via fields, woods and lanes, past clumps of snowdrops by the stables of High Elms (now one of many golf courses in the vicinity) with a pretty clock tower


loving the lichen, the catkins and the old man's beard.




They've done a fine job at Down House of explaining the great man's extraordinary life in a series of exhibitions upstairs, which are worth spending a long time mulling over before you descend to the recreated family rooms. Briefly a girls' school, which moved premises in 1921 but kept its name, the grounds only passed into English Heritage hands in 1996 and were reopened to the public two years later. Thanks to co-operation with many other Darwin-related institutions, chiefly the Natural History Museum, they lodge many of his most treasured notebooks, specimens, books and tools of the trade here. Clearly the most impressive room is the study, rather dark and sombre as it faces east, as opposed to the rooms on the west side (chiefly the Drawing and Dining Rooms) which thanks to sundry extensions and alterations allowing big windows are flooded with light. No photos to be taken inside, reasonably enough, so I've taken English Heritage's silence on reproducing a study shot as consent, hoping that a link to their website will suffice.


The areas around the not especially attractive Georgian-plus house, inevitably, are the highlight, above all the elegant blue-painted greenhouses in the kitchen garden.


It's exciting to see the kind of specimens Darwin worked on so significantly, bearing in mind that not only did he write On The Origin of Species and Descent of Man at Down but also many of his groundbreaking papers on plants: on the fertilisation of orchids (1862)


on climbing plants (1864 - below is a pitcher plant in the greenhouse)


and on insectivorous plants (1875), having studied Drosera near Hartfield, which led him to cultivate dozens of specimens on the greenhouse benches.


'At present he is treating Drosera just like a living creature', wrote the long-suffering and critical Emma at that time, 'and I suppose he hopes to end in proving it to be an animal.' He did, more or less: 'it has always pleased me to exalt plants in the scale of organised beings', he writes in the Recollections, and sums up his achievement in the insectivorous field: 'The fact that a plant should secrete when properly excited a fluid containing an acid & ferment, closely analogous to the digestive fluid of an animal, was certainly a remarkable discovery.'



After the wonders of the greenhouse, we then had just enough time to follow in the footsteps of Darwin's daily circuits around the Sandwalk at the western fringe of the garden. But I think I'll save the beauties of the trees along that route, their trunks glowing in the silvery-brown afternoon sunlight of late February, for another time.