Thoughts in a Haystack

Charles Robert Darwin was born on February 12, 1809, the same day as Abraham Lincoln across the Atlantic. He died on April 19, 1882. Unlike the future president, there was no log-cabin birth for the man who is known as the "father of evolution." The Darwins were an upper-middle-class family living in the town of Shrewsbury, in the British Midlands. Charles's father Robert was a physician like his father, Erasmus. In those days, physicians were university-educated men with significant social status. Robert Darwin was also a very canny money man, acting as a link between aristocrats, with money needs and land to mortgage, and the new crop of businessmen being produced by the industrial revolution, looking for safe places to park their cash. But the real source of Darwin's wealth came from his mother's family. Charles's maternal grandfather Josiah Wedgwood was the founder of the pottery firm that bore his name, and had become one of the richest magnates of his day. Charles further secured his financial independence when, in 1839, he married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, the daughter of Josiah's oldest son, also called Josiah Wedgwood.

Early Years

The background and the money tell us much about Charles Darwin and his place in British society. He was not an aristocrat, but he was a gentleman, with a very secure background and expectations. As a child and grandchild of the world of business and technology, he would be properly educated, starting with one of England's leading private schools; he was going to be committed to a world of change but not revolution (manufacturers appreciated societal stability); he would be liberal in a nineteenth-century sense, which meant being strongly against slavery but prepared to let the working classes labor for minimal wages as the political economy of the day demanded; and he probably would be religious but not obsessively so. The Darwins were Anglicans, something important where the elite English universities, Oxford and Cambridge, were concerned because membership in that state church was a necessary condition for graduation. The Wedgwoods were "dissenters" or "nonconformists," being Unitarians, which meant that they believed in God but denied the Trinity, thinking Jesus just a good man and not divine.

Charles was the fourth of five children. Although his mother died when he was young, his childhood was happy, with two older sisters taking charge of the care of their younger siblings. Father Robert was a large and rather forbidding person, but Charles respected him greatly. As a child, Charles did not seem particularly gifted academically, perhaps excusable in a world where education consisted of huge amounts of translation from and into Greek and Latin, interspersed with solving geometry problems from Euclid. But he was fascinated by the world of nature, and living in rural Britain was ideal training for a future naturalist. This was helped by frequent visits to Maier Hall, the home of the Wedgwoods. Uncle Josiah was a man of learning and understanding, a great favorite of the whole Darwin family. As Darwin got older, his visits with the Wedgwoods included learning to ride a horse and to become a good shot with a hunting rifle, which were skills that served him well in unexpected ways later in life. No one could have then imagined that he would someday be a provider of fresh meat to a ship's crew camping out on the unpopulated shores of South America or ride across the wild pampas of Argentina with gauchos as companions.

 

- Michael Ruse, Introduction, The "Origin" Then and Now: An Interpretive Guide to the "Origin of Species", David N. Reznick, Princeton University Press. (2011)