Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

In this autobiographical memoir, conceived as a gift for his children and grandchildren, and written “as if I were a dead man in another world looking back at my own life,” Charles Darwin admitted “that in many ways I was a naughty boy … I was much given to inventing deliberate falsehoods, and this was always done for the sake of causing excitement.” He boasted to another boy that he “could produce variously coloured polyanthuses and primroses by watering them with certain coloured fluids, which was of course a monstrous fable.” Even at that tender age he had begun to speculate on the variability of plants. His life-long absorption in the natural world was under way. He became a passionate collector of the bits and pieces of Nature that form the gritty detritus in the pockets of children everywhere. He was particularly mad for beetles, but his sister convinced him that it would be immoral to take a beetle’s life merely for collecting. Dutifully, he confined himself to gathering up only the recently deceased. He watched the birds and recorded his observations of their behavior. “In my simplicity,” he later wrote, “I remember wondering why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist.”

At the age of nine he was sent to study at Dr. Butler’s day school. “Nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind,” Darwin later wrote. Butler believed that school was no place for curiosity or excitement about learning. For that, Charles looked to a well-thumbed copy of Wonders of the World, and to the members of his family who patiently answered his many questions. As an old man he could still recall the delight he felt when an uncle had explained to him how the barometer works. His older brother, Erasmus—named after their grandfather—transformed the garden toolhouse into a chemistry lab and allowed Charles to help him with his experiments. This earned Charles the nickname “Gas” at school and an angry public rebuke from Dr Butler.

Charles was doing so poorly at school that when it was time for Erasmus to go off to Edinburgh University, his father decided to send Charles with him. The boys were supposed to study medicine. Here, too, Charles found the lectures oppressively dull. He couldn’t bear to dissect anything, and the experience of seeing a botched operation on a child, “long before the blessed days of chloroform,” was to haunt him for the rest of his life. But it was in Edinburgh that he first found friends who shared his passion for science.

After two sessions at Edinburgh, Robert Darwin became resigned to the fact that Charles was not cut out for a medical career. Perhaps he would make a good clergyman? Dutiful Charles had no objections, but just the same, he thought he should check up on Church of England dogma before agreeing to commit his life to instilling it in others. “Accordingly I read with care Pearson on the Creed, and a few other books on divinity; and as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our Creed must be fully accepted.”

Charles spent the next three years at Cambridge University, where he managed to get better grades. But still he felt a restless dissatisfaction with the curriculum. His happiest moments there were spent in pursuit of his adored beetles, now dead or alive.I will give a proof of my zeal: one day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.

It was as a beetle hunter that the first published reference to Charles Darwin was made. “No poet ever felt more delighted at seeing his first poem published than I did at seeing, in Stephen’s Illustrations of British Insects, the magic words, ‘captured by C. Darwin, Esq.’ ”