Ksiazka:
Annie's Box: Charles Darwin, his Daughter and Human Evolution
Autor ksiazki: Randal Keynes

Autor recenzji: Claudia FitzHerbert
30 April 2001

Darwin as a softie

On the tragic death of the naturalist's beloved eldest daughter

DEAD children often acquire a mythic status in family lore, providing a 
focus for the youthful musings of their collateral descendants. Randal 
Keynes, the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, "must have" (to use
one of his own often-used formulations) been brought up on the sad story of 
Annie Darwin, the naturalist's beloved eldest daughter who died in 1851,
at the age of 10. Both Charles and Emma Darwin mourned the unusually 
sunny-sounding child for the rest of their lives, although religious 
differences prevented them from grieving together.

Charles Darwin, indeed, despite being the most loving husband and father 
imaginable, was cut off from his children as well as his wife on the 
subject of his Annie. "I should never have ventured to say her name to 
him," recalled Henrietta Darwin, the daughter next in age. (There were 10 
children in all, but only seven surviving. One died as a baby, and another 
at the age of two.) This admission is all the more striking in that Etty, 
as she was known, had been the most obviously traumatised by her sister's 
death as a child, and had grown up to be extremely close to her father.
Yet still they could not, did not, speak. Keynes speculates that Darwin shut 
Etty out for fear of having to answer questions about seeing Annie again
in the life to come.

It was Etty who discovered the box of the book's title after her mother's 
death in 1896. The gravely Unitarian Emma Darwin had filled her dead 
daughter's leather writing case with keepsakes of her life: some 
embroidery, a silk needlecase, trinkets, ribbon, quills, half-used sticks 
of sealing wax, a piece of paper with the date of her death and another 
with a map of the churchyard where she was buried. Annie's Box had become 
her mother's box of boxed-up memories.

Keynes's justification for making a book of the box is that Annie Darwin 
has long been credited with a place in the evolution of Evolution. The 
simple version has it that Charles Darwin had been wrestling with atheism 
for years when Annie's death toppled him over the edge. It was only then 
that his essay on the origin of species, which had lain mouldering in a 
drawer for 15 years while the author summoned up the strength to face the 
fuss, was taken out and dusted down and sent to press.

Keynes himself refrains from making so straightforward a case for Annie's 
significance. (The dates don't really deliver: Darwin's doubts had
hardened into agnoticism by 1848, when his unbelieving father died, while he never 
actually signed on the atheist line. As for the essay - it was not 
published until 1859, a full eight years after Annie's death.) What Keynes 
does instead is to use the almost certainly consumptive death of Annie as
a starting point for a wide-ranging and fondly inconclusive essay about 
Darwin's life and work. In some ways this book is Annie's Box filled again 
- in a perhaps not dissimilar spirit of impotent piety.

At his best, Keynes gives us charming glimpses of Darwin family life at 
Down House in Kent, where shoals of double cousins came regularly to stay 
(the marriage between Emma Wegwood and Charles Darwin was the fourth in
two sets of first cousins). Charles and Emma appear to have been unusually 
relaxed parents: downstairs rooms were commandeered for play while the 
upstairs nursery was always empty. Darwin's work - on barnacles mainly, 
while Annie lived - went on without fuss in his study. The children 
assumed, as children do, that other fathers were just the same. One of 
Annie's younger brothers, sent to play with the children of the 
neighbouring squire, was heard to ask where her host "did his barnacles".

Keynes is good, too, on the unhappy gulf between husband and wife, for all 
that they came from the same prosperous inbreeding free-thinking stock. "I 
should be most unhappy if I thought that we did not belong to each other 
for ever," Emma wrote in a note, early on in the marriage. "When I am
dead, know that many times I have kissed and cried over this. C D," replied 
Charles, on a fold of the carefully preserved piece of paper. It was the 
best that he could do: Darwin's evasions began at home.

But the author is much less convincing in his occasional attempts to 
portray Darwin as a scientist first and father second. In fact, all the 
evidence points the other way. "His sympathy with the grief spoiled his 
observation," wrote Francis Darwin of his father's attempts to "observe 
accurately the expression of a crying child". There is little in this book 
to explain the mind that lighted on the theory of natural selection. How 
much more interesting that Darwin was sometimes too much of a softie to
see things as they were. It seems likely that Annie's death taught him nothing 
but sorrow. 

Oryginal:
http://www.booksonline.co.uk/booksol?ac=004944065141737&rtmo=VDkw3S8K&atmo=rrrrrrrq&pg=/01/4/28/boann28.html

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