Creation (Movie Tie-In) Page 15

  Matching envelopes followed, and Ellen then suggested: “Let us have the pens. And some quills too, mamma.” “Do you know how to make a pen, Ellen?” “No, mamma, not yet; but I want to learn very much.” Ellen’s mother bought some feather quills and steel nibs. Ellen then chose a plain ivory pen-holder. “I think it is prettier than those that are all cut and fussed, or those other gay ones either.” Next came a penknife to cut the quills, and the sealing wax. Ellen’s mother pointed to a tray of different colours, and told Ellen to choose her own. She made up an assortment of the oddest colours she could find. “ ‘I won’t have any red, mamma, it is so common.’ ‘I think it is the prettiest of all,’ said her mother. ‘Do you, mamma? then I will have a stick of red on purpose to seal to you with . . . You must not mind, mamma, if you get green and blue and yellow seals once in a while.’ ” Her mother then laid in a good supply of wafers of all sorts; and completed the case with an ivory leaf-cutter, a paper-folder, a pounce-box, a ruler and a neat little silver pencil; also some sheets of drawing paper, drawing pencils and an india-rubber.

  Annie had many of these things in her writing case, and may well have been allowed to make her own choices in a shop selling fancy stationery on a visit to London with her mother or Miss Thorley. The case itself is a small container covered in morocco leather, with a lock and key to fasten the hinged lid. On the lid is stamped “Writing Case” in gold lettering inside a red, blue, white and gold cartouche. There are four small compartments and one large one, all lined with dark blue paper decorated with gold stars. The two inner compartments have a lid for “Matches” and “Vignettes.” Annie had a number of sheets of letter-paper with red and blue edges and matching envelopes. She also had little envelopes with embossed and coloured flowers on the flaps, and pre-paid envelopes for the Penny Post with an embossed design. Other sheets of fancy stationery, with embossed patterns and cut to look like lace, said “Listen to me my love,” “I could love thee for ever and ever,” “Your health and happiness dearest,” “That is to be with you my sweet” and “Taking wine in the wood.”

  Annie kept a number of patent steel pen-nibs in the box, together with a wooden pen-nib holder. There are two goose-quill pens and a small penknife with a mother-of-pearl handle. The quills were probably cut by Annie with the penknife from feathers plucked from geese in the backyard. They have remains of ink on their tips. The steel nibs were harder and scratchier to write with, but they would have saved Annie the trouble of having to trim her nib again and again as she wrote.

  When an envelope had to be closed, sealing with wax was still the proper way; fastening the flap with a wafer was second best, and adhesive envelopes were a practical necessity for everyday mail. To seal her letters, Annie had two sticks of red sealing wax and a stick of green. She kept her wafers in a small circular cardboard box with gold-embossed decoration on the lid; the ones there now say in minute lettering “Write or Die,” “Am I Welcome,” “United,” “Dieu vous garde” and “Adieu.”

  Four of Annie’s letters survive. One was written on a piece of her fancy stationery; it was to Miss Thorley’s sister, and Annie wrote carefully, perhaps under her governess’s eye. “Dear Sarah, The other day Dick killed a rabbit in the orchard. Yesterday George and I went to Aunt Sarah to tea, and before that went a mushroom picking but only found one. It is very fine today. We are going to have a kitten. I have got a pencil with my name upon it. Etty sends her love to you. Goodbye. I remain your affectionate Annie Darwin.” Annie put the letter in a matching envelope with an embossed pattern of convolvulus, and sealed it with a little emerald wafer with a design of two love birds.

  Annie also made her own confident entries in two notebooks kept by the grown-ups in the household. Emma had a book of recipes, in which Annie entered hers for “Italian Vegetable Soop.” “The heart of 6 lettuces & cucumbers pared & cut in quarters. 1 Pint green pease, a little onion peper & salt to your taste. Put all together in a stew pan over a very slow fire for 2 hours. Then boil a pint of older peas in good broth gravy with a lump of sugar. Pass them threw a sive into the broth, then warm. Add a litle cram to the yolks of 2 eggs boild in, mix with the stewed vegetable and heat up all together.”

  A book of medical preparations and dosages was kept in the medicine cupboard. Annie must sometimes have had the difficult task of purging her younger sisters and brothers, and she seems to have managed, like her mother, with a carrot rather than a stick. She wrote: “If you boil Castor Oil with an equal quantity of milk, sweeten with a little sugar, and stir it well and give it when cold, children will never suspect it to be medecine, but will like it almost as well as custard.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  FAITH, CRICKET, AND BARNACLES

  Villagers—Animals—Church and Dissent—Charles’s

  doubts about Christianity—Barnacles

  WALKING IN THE VILLAGE, Annie met the girls and boys she had played with since early childhood, but as she grew, she became the young Miss Darwin, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Darwin, gentlefolk of independent means. Charles had no place with Sir John Lubbock in the “squirearchy” of landlord and tenant, but the Darwins were respected customers of the village shopkeepers, the blacksmith, miller, brewer and carpenter. Charles went to meetings of the parish vestry which set the rates for poor relief. In one year his gifts to charities and poor people he was supporting amounted to £62; he spent £34 on beer for the household, and £15 on “science.” All three sums were small in relation to his total income; of the £3,250 he received that year, he spent only £1,900 and reinvested the rest.

  According to Etty, her father liked the “friendly recognition he met with” in the neighbourhood, and he remarked with pleasure on the many people he did not know who used to nod to him “in a friendly way.” “There was always a great deal of curtseying and grinning of the children in the village; I think he sometimes used to give them pennies, but it was more his friendly greeting.” Charles talked with the young labourers who came to work at Down House, and when Annie was nine, he encouraged a group of them to form a Friendly Club which for a monthly contribution provided payments in sickness and on death. The club met every month in a pub called the George and Dragon, opposite the church, and Charles acted as their treasurer. They had to calculate their benefits carefully, and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge provided tables of sickness and death rates on which to base their sums. According to the society’s manual, “Frugality and providence give to a man a moral independence, and a happiness of which a mere pauper can scarcely form an idea.” It was appropriate that Charles, who had rejected the view that God had a special providence for each person, should help his neighbours in this way to make one for themselves.

  The members of the Friendly Club were keen cricketers, and Charles provided a pitch in his meadow for them to play on. In the Kent countryside in the 1840s, cricket was a game for the villagers, and all the children of the parish watched with admiration and excitement. James Pycroft, author of The Principles of Scientific Batting, wrote: “The game is free and common as the light and air in which it is played.” Social precedence was suspended as “the cottager stumps out his landlord.”

  Emma visited the “deserving poor” in the parish, and provided bread for the hungry and medicines for the sick. She took Annie and Etty with her to show them how needy villagers lived and what kinds of help charitable gentlefolk should give. One of her concoctions for poor women “weak after lying, or with pains in the back” was a gin cordial with peppermint, laudanum, sugar, bitters and wine. She was generous but businesslike. When I gave a talk to Downe Women’s Institute in 1999, I was introduced to an elderly lady who told me that her mother-in-law came from a poor family and Mrs. Darwin had paid for her schooling in the 1890s, on the understanding that she would work for her as a housemaid during the summer months.

  The treatment of animals was a concern for the Darwins in village life. There were working horses and donkeys, dogs and cats; pigs being reared for slaughter; sheep,
goats and cattle, geese and chickens; farmyard vermin, and the rabbits, squirrels and hedgehogs in the fields around. Some villagers had songbirds in cages, and there was talk of cock-fighting and badger-baiting, both recently outlawed but carried on in private gatherings. Many people treated their animals with indifference to their pain, or wilful cruelty, but a strong current of care had been flowing in evangelical and liberal circles for some years. Children’s books like the Wedgwood cousins’ Cobwebs to Catch Flies reflected that feeling, and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals led a campaign for humane treatment which was supported by many prominent figures. The society’s inspectors carried out many prosecutions before local magistrates. Their efforts were widely welcomed among the “respectability,” and in 1840 Queen Victoria made the society “Royal.”

  For some who supported the cause, kindness to animals was purely an “extension of humanity to the brute creation,” showing the quality of your compassion by stretching it beyond mankind. Charles and Emma, on the other hand, had no doubt that animals felt pain just like humans. Emma’s certainty was a feeling or intuition like her Christian faith. Charles had developed the idea as a central theme in his view of man’s common nature with animals. On this subject, they could speak to their children with one voice.

  When he saw cruelty, Charles could not restrain his anger. Francis remembered his father returning one day from his walk pale and faint from the agitation of arguing violently with a man he had seen ill-treating his horse. Charles was also prepared to take neighbours to law. One, a gentleman farmer, was said by some villagers to have allowed some of his sheep to die of starvation. Legal actions against gentry were rare, but when Charles heard about the matter, he went round the whole parish, collected all the evidence himself, had the case brought before the magistrates, and secured a conviction. Willy always remembered his father’s action, and how as a child he had been “immensely impressed.”

  Annie’s world was firmly Christian. Etty wrote that in their childhood, their mother “was not only sincerely religious . . . but definite in her beliefs. She went regularly to Church and took the Sacrament. She read the Bible with us and taught us a simple Unitarian Creed, though we were baptised and confirmed in the Church of England.”

  A prayer book used by Unitarians at the time told parents that a daughter should be told to love and do good to all people, “because all are equally the children of God with herself, and the objects of his fatherly kindness and care: that she is not born only for herself but for others; to serve her country and mankind by promoting truth and virtue, and the public good.” Joseph Priestley, the chemist and Dissenting minister who was a close friend of Charles and Emma’s grandfa thers, Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood, set out a simple Unitarian Creed in his Catechism for Children and Young Persons. “Jesus Christ was a person whom God sent to teach men their duty, and to persuade and encourage them to practise it.” “How doth God govern the world by his providence?” “He suffers nothing to come to pass, but what tends to promote his design of making mankind virtuous and happy. His providence extends to the meanest creatures that he has made, and even a sparrow falls not to the ground without his will.”

  Priestley dealt with the problem of suffering. “If nothing come to pass without the will of God, why doth he suffer storms and tempests, pain and sickness, which occasion such distress and misery to his creatures?” “The evils and miseries of which we complain are intended for our good, though we are not always sensible of it. They are the corrections of a wise and affectionate parent.” While Charles had abandoned the idea that pain and suffering had any Divine purpose for the individual victim, Emma always believed that suffering was linked to sin, and may have given their children Priestley’s mysterious and gentle message.

  Emma taught the children to pray and gave them the poems of Ann and Jane Taylor which dwelt on goodness and grace, things of beauty and their loss, in simple language and rhythms that made them the most popular verses of their time. The two sisters wrote in a poem “for a very little child” that

  . . . God looks down from heaven on high,

  Our actions to behold;

  And he is pleased when children try

  To do as they are told.

  In one unflinching poem “about dying,” a child asked:

  “Tell me, Mama, if I must die

  One day, as little baby died,

  And look so very pale, and lie

  Down in the pit-hole by its side?”

  Willy and Annie understood clearly what this meant, because every Sunday as they walked to the church door, they passed the family grave where Emma’s “little baby” Mary had been buried in the family’s first weeks at Down. Jane Taylor suggested that children should face up to death. “Let not young persons think this subject inapplicable to them. For, not to mention the uncertainty of life at every age, it is of the highest importance to be early impressed with just ideas of death and futu rity; that it may become a subject of familiar and agreeable reflection, rather than of dread and terror.”

  All the days of the week were the same for Charles, but Emma saw “keeping Sunday” as a duty. She held prayers for the household and the family went to the morning and afternoon services in the church. They had a large pew lined with green baize near the clergyman’s desk. The parish clerk, John Osborne the village wheelwright, gave them “the full flavour of his tremendous amens,” and Francis played with the india-rubber threads of his elastic-sided boots, gently tweaking them like miniature harp-strings. There were silverfish in the prayer books and among the cushions, and Francis watched them move like minute sardines running on invisible wheels.

  The church had a small choir in which Mr. Osborne sang bass and Parslow sang tenor with the Lubbocks’ footman. They had a barrel organ to accompany the “chants” to which they sang the canticles. Their book of chants had a setting for the Athanasian Creed, and Emma with her Unitarian beliefs must have winced when the villagers intoned the mysteries of the doctrine of the Trinity on the appointed days. “And yet there are not / three e/ternals: but / one eternal. / As also there are not three incomprehensibles, nor three / uncre/ated: but one uncreated, and / one in/compre/hensible.”

  During the Sunday service, Emma insisted on one small assertion of the family’s independence. When the congregation turned towards the altar to recite the Creed, the Darwins “faced the other way and sternly looked into the eyes of the other church-goers.” Francis commented: “We certainly were not brought up in Low Church or anti-papistical views, and it remains a mystery why we continued to do anything so unnecessary and uncomfortable.” After the service, the children would come out of church cold and hungry. People would stand about the porch, Sir John Lubbock in a fluffy beaver hat and the labourers in their green or purple smock-frocks.

  We think of the village church in Victorian England as one of the sturdiest pillars of the accepted social order. But Downe, like many other villages, was riven by disagreements, doctrinal and political, and one of the places where they were shown most clearly was in and around the pulpit. During Annie’s childhood, Mr. Innes, the vicar, was an assertive young High Churchman. Charles once went to a vestry meeting “to defy Mr Innes and all his works,” and Emma hated him for what she saw as his bigotry, saying that it made her feel “desperately vicious against the Church.”

  A book of sermons preached by Mr. Innes at Downe in 1851 gives a flavour of what Annie heard each Sunday. On Innocents’ Day he spoke about children and their nature. They were “wayward, and prone to evil; yet are there signs of good in them, marks which tell us they have lately come from a pure and holy God, and that an element of good is theirs, as well as a liability to sin.” He also preached urgently about death, judgement and the afterlife. “And what a fearful question it is! Heaven or Hell! We do not know indeed what are the joys of the one or the pains of the other . . . Neither can we form an idea of the lot of the condemned. Body and soul in torment, the worm that never dies, the fire that i
s never quenched, the bitter remorse of a too late awakened conscience.” A time would come “in the eternal death of every condemned being, when he will have suffered as much torment as has been endured by every sufferer and every criminal in this world.” But then, “the punishment is no nearer to its end than it was at the beginning, for all the time that is past is nothing in the ages of eternity.”

  Mr. Innes was losing his congregation to Dissent and indifference. A book for children that he gave as a prize to his Sunday school pupils described Dissenters as “those unhappy persons who . . . have become guilty of the dreadful sin of schism.” In 1851, a National Ecclesiastical Census was held, and while nonconformist ministers in the neighbourhood willingly declared their attendance on the census day, no figures were given for the parish church. At the end of the year, Mr. Innes looked out over his congregation and preached gloomily that “the same seats in the ale house are still filled by the same drunkards: the same oaths are heard, the same obscene jests and filthy conversation goes on.” The year had been “troubled and stormy” for the church. “There is always great mischief in controversy and theological disputes.” Argument might lead to good but was dangerous for the uneducated. “They are led to talk about things they do not understand, and question and dispute when they require to be taught; and to consider religion to consist of subtle questions and fine drawn distinctions . . . instead of a true faith, showing itself in practical holiness.”