Creation (Movie Tie-In) Page 21

  Brodie and Bessy Harding were nursing Annie and helped wash her every morning. Bessy would have been up first; according to a guide to servants’ duties, “The youngest nurse or nursery maid usually rises about six o’clock to light the fire, and do the household work of the nursery before the children are up, perhaps about seven o’clock, at which time the head nurse is dressed and ready to bathe and wash them all over with a sponge and warm water; after which they are rubbed quite dry and dressed.” Each morning from 21 January, Annie was given the dripping sheet and spinal wash; every three or four days she was packed in a damp towel; once a week she was sweated by the lamp, and in a change of treatment from mid-February, perhaps after another letter from Dr. Gully, she also had a shallow bath and footbath every morning.

  In his daily notes on the treatment and how Annie responded, Charles chose from a set of phrases to say how she was feeling, ranging from “well very” through “well almost very,” “well,” “well not quite,” “good,” “pretty good” and “poorly a little” to “poorly.” From day to day he noted many “cries,” tiredness, coughs and the strength of the pulse. Annie’s nights were often “good,” but from time to time she was “good not quite,” “little wakeful,” “wakeful” or “wakeful and uncomfortable.” Observation and note-taking were second nature to Charles, but in watching Annie as he did, in varying the treatment and in noting the results, he was using his practice as a naturalist and experimenter in a desperate effort to work out what was affecting her, to help Dr. Gully find a pattern of treatment and cure. She still had no clear illness, but she could not shake off her persistent and distressing malaise.

  On a visit to London in early January, Charles called at the London Library in St. James’s Square and borrowed some books to read to Annie. Geneviève by Alphonse de Lamartine, the French Romantic poet and critic, was a simple story about the life of a poor woman in a village in the French Alps. Echoing Wordsworth, Lamartine believed that such tales “should be at once true and interesting”; they should describe “the lives, sufferings and joys of ordinary people,” and should be “written almost in their language, a species of unframed mirror of their own existence, in which they might see themselves in all their simplicity and in all their candour.” The Book of the Seasons by William Howitt, husband of Mary Howitt who had written Our Cousins in Ohio, offered a “calendar of nature” with notes on the plants, insects and animal life that could be seen each month through the year. In The Boy’s Country Book William Howitt set out “all the amusements, pleasures and pursuits of children in the country.” In a chapter on “Employments of the children of the poor,” he wrote how the life of all village children was far preferable to that of town children. “No, I have no pity for country lads in general. They have, it is true, to blow their fingers over turnip-pulling on a sharp frosty day . . . but, bless me! What are these things to a cotton mill!—to a bump on the bare head with a billy-roller, or the wheels of a spinning-jenny pulling an arm off!”

  Charles returned to his own reading about religion. His brother Erasmus, Fanny and Hensleigh Wedgwood and their friends were all talking about another book by Francis Newman which had just appeared. Phases of Faith was a close and clinical account of the slow decay and dismantling of his Christian beliefs, as he had questioned element after element and found each wanting. Charles had been following the same path as Newman since 1838, and found his book “excellent.” One of Newman’s points must have called Annie to mind and cut Charles to the quick. Newman argued that the Christian doctrine of eternal punishment had no clear Scriptural authority, and suggested that it posed intolerable moral difficulties. One was that every sin was “infinite in ill-desert and in result, because it is committed against an infinite Being.” “Thus,” he said, “the fretfulness of a child is an infinite evil!” On 24 January, Charles had noted that Annie had had “two little cries”; on 27 January, “late evening tired and cry” and the next day “early morning cry.” Each time Annie had recovered and was “well” shortly afterwards. There was no evil in Annie’s distress or her efforts to overcome it. The evil lay hidden in whatever it was that was afflicting her.

  During those weeks, Annie opened her mother’s diary, and put in three jottings. On 5 February, “I was unwell.” On 11 February, “Beautiful day. Children rode pony. Got up.” And on the page for 2 March, she wrote “Annie’s birthday.” She would be ten years old.

  January and February had been mild but the first day of March was cold, and snow fell that night. On Annie’s birthday, the family woke to brilliant sunshine. Annie was poorly at first but soon felt better. Emma had a book for her, and put it by her plate at breakfast. Willy had come home from Mr. Wharton’s the day before, and Annie played outside with him, “romping with him through the hedge in the Sand-walk.” Parslow gave Annie her first ride on Willy’s pony. She wanted to play in the open air, and her parents were glad for her to.

  But her cough returned during the following week and two days later she had ’flu. The weather was exceptionally stormy and there were heavy falls of rain. Charles stopped the water treatment, writing that Annie was “Poorly with cough and influenza.” He continued his notes on her illness with a string of dittoes for eight days, and stopped on 21 March. Annie must have made some recovery, because three days later, Charles took her and Etty with Brodie on the two-day journey to Malvern. Emma, now over seven months pregnant, had to remain behind with the others. She remembered Annie “lying on the bed with me” when she had ’flu. And on the day Annie left, “Sitting crying on the sofa.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE LAST WEEKS IN MALVERN

  Malvern—Sickness and fever—Charles’s arrival—

  Rally and decline—Death

  CHARLES, ANNIE, ETTY AND BRODIE travelled to London and stayed the night with Erasmus at his home in Park Street, close to Hyde Park. Etty remembered how, when she visited Uncle Ras as a child, “we came into that simply furnished, somewhat ascetic London drawing room, looking out on the bare street, knowing he was weary and ill, and had been alone, and would be alone again, and yet went away with a glow . . . There was no possibility of forgetting the respect due to an elder, but he met us so entirely on our own level, that in our intercourse with him we felt as free as if he were our own age.”

  The next morning they called on Fanny and Hensleigh Wedgwood, Effie and the other children, in their grand terraced house in Regent’s Park. There was talk of Dr. Gully and the water cure, and Annie gathered that a family of friends had gone to Malvern because the father, Alexander John Scott, wanted to try Dr. Gully’s water treatment. Mr. Scott was a charismatic preacher who had worked with Edward Irving, founder of the Catholic Apostolic Church, in the early 1830s. His wife Ann was sensible and liked by the Wedgwoods. Their daughter Susy was near Annie’s age, and Annie looked forward to playing with her.

  Charles always used to complain of the horrid sinking feeling he had at the beginning of a journey, but Francis remembered that his discomfort was “chiefly in the anticipation,” and once they were under way, Charles would enjoy the journey “to a curious extent” and “in an almost boyish way.” Charles, Annie, Etty and Brodie would have taken a “Growler” to Euston Station in the morning. This was a low-slung, four-wheeled one-horse cab which could take four people with luggage—“coarse, noisy, odoriferous and jumpy as regards the springs,” according to a writer of the time.

  The train brought them to Birmingham by lunchtime and they arrived in Worcester by late afternoon. The city streets were littered with handbills announcing the arrival of Wombwell’s Royal Menagerie “accompanied by its splendid brass band” on Thursday morning. The circus had “the largest elephant and rhinoceros in England, and the only full-grown Caffrarian lions” in a collection of “five hundred beasts and birds contained in fourteen large vehicles built expressly to convey them from town to town.” The vehicles were drawn by forty horses led by forty men. They would “parade through the principal streets, and afterwards be stationed
on the Upper Quay, where no doubt a goodly number of the admirers of nature will avail themselves of the opportunity of witnessing some of her noblest productions.”

  Charles, Brodie and the children passed through the city and took a stage coach to Malvern from one of the main hotels. When they arrived in the village, Charles found lodgings for them at Montreal House, a stucco villa on the Worcester Road. The landlady, Eliza Partington, knew them from their visit in 1849. On Thursday, Charles wrote to Fox: “I have brought my eldest girl here and intend to leave her for a month under Dr. Gully; she inherits, I fear with grief, my wretched digestion.” Annie wrote to her mother to say that they had arrived and were lodging with Miss Partington, but she had not yet seen Dr. Gully. The postal service between Malvern and Downe was quick and reliable. Letters handed in at the post office before half past six in the evening would be delivered to Downe by the local postman around noon the next day. Letters given to him then would reach Malvern the next morning.

  When the postman brought Annie’s letter to Downe, Miss Thorley had left to join the children in Malvern, and Emma wrote back to Annie the next day: “I was very glad to have your nice letter and to learn that you are at Miss Partington’s. It is most unlucky Dr Gully being gone out . . . When Miss Thorley comes, you had better ask her to take you to see Susy Scott. It is very nice for you Mrs Scott being there and I dare say Susy will often walk with you.” Thinking back to the family’s walks around Malvern in 1849, Emma ended her letter: “I should so like to see St Anne’s Well and the hills. It makes me quite thirsty to think of it.”

  Montreal House stands on the other side of the road from the Lodge where the family had stayed before. At the Lodge, the children had played in the garden climbing up the steep slope to the Malvern Hills; at Montreal House the garden fell away below, and they looked out over the distant patchwork of the Severn Vale. In 1999, I met an elderly lady who had lived and worked in the house as a young maid in the 1920s when it was kept as a boarding house by her aunts. She remembers the large light kitchen in the basement with a red-tiled floor which she scrubbed, and a massive black range which she black-leaded every day. There were twelve rooms for the guests on the three floors above. On the ground floor there were two private rooms, a drawing room and a dining room; on the first and second floors, two rooms faced the hill rising to the west, and two had the wide view to the east out over the river plain. The stairs were at the back of the house and there was a small lift to deliver food from the kitchen to the upper floors. The lower part of the garden was planted with neat rows of vegetables which could be seen from the bedroom windows.

  After settling the children and Brodie in their lodgings, Charles returned to London on Friday. He stayed with Erasmus in Park Street, and on Sunday they called again on Fanny and Hensleigh. Fanny’s half-sister Mary Rich and the Wedgwoods’ Aunt Fanny Allen were staying with them, and both mentioned the brothers’ visit in letters to others. Aunt Fanny wrote that Charles was looking well, and “there is something uncommonly fresh and pleasant in him.” Thomas and Jane Carlyle also came to the house, and Ruskin’s Stones of Venice was discussed. Mary wrote: “Charles Darwin dined here yesterday looking so well, and in excellent spirits, and agreeable as he always is . . . Poor Annie, their eldest girl, has been very far from well for some time, and they have just sent her with the governess to Dr Gully to try the water cure, which was of so much use to her father.”

  The Great Exhibition was due to open in London at the beginning of May, and interest was growing. Newspapers and periodicals advertised special maps and guides to the metropolis, describing and celebrating it as a proper setting for the grand display of the “Works of Industry of All Nations.” But the journalist Henry Mayhew struck a note of harsh discord in his London Labour and the London Poor, which appeared in instalments in the early months of the year. His aim was to reveal the true nature of life for the many hundreds of thousands of people who lived in poverty in the parts of London that the guides glossed over. He found people prepared to tell him about themselves, and printed their words, often almost as they spoke. Charles read the book when he arrived back at Down. The life of one small girl whom Mayhew had talked to was strikingly different from Annie’s. The child was an eight-year-old watercress girl who, as Mayhew wrote, “had entirely lost all childish ways, and was, indeed, in thoughts and manner, a woman. There was something cruelly pathetic in hearing this infant, so young that her features had scarcely formed themselves, talking of the bitterest struggles of life with the calm earnestness of one who had endured them all.” After hearing about her daily work, bargaining fiercely with people as needy as herself to get her watercress at a price on which she could hope to make a profit, and then taking it through the streets to sell to passers-by for whatever she could get, Mayhew talked to her about the parks, and asked whether she ever went to them. “ ‘The parks!’ she replied in wonder, ‘where are they?’ I explained to her, telling her that they were large open places with green grass and tall trees, where beautiful carriages drove about, and people walked for pleasure, and children played. Her eyes brightened up a little as I spoke; and she asked, half doubtingly, ‘Would they let such as me go there—just to look?’ ” Mayhew commented that “All her knowledge seemed to begin and end with watercresses, and what they fetched.”

  Erasmus lent Charles a book by his friend Harriet Martineau which had just appeared. Her Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development was an enthusiastic exchange of ideas with Henry Atkinson, a wealthy man who believed that phrenology and mesmerism offered the key to understanding the human mind. He argued for a materialist view of mental activity, and insisted that “philosophy finds no God in Nature.” Miss Martineau welcomed his freethinking, and the book caused a great stir among people interested in issues of faith and doubt. Charlotte Brontë wrote to a friend: “It is the first exposition of avowed atheism and materialism I have ever read; the first unequivocal declaration of disbelief in the existence of a God or a future life I have ever seen . . . Sincerely, for my own part, do I wish to find and know the Truth; but if this be Truth, well may she guard herself with mysteries, and cover herself with a veil.” Atkinson had written: “Man has his place in natural history . . . his nature does not essentially differ from that of the lower animals . . . he is but a fuller development and varied condition of the same fundamental nature or cause.” Miss Martineau praised his courage in looking into human nature with no prejudices about the dignity of man, and no worries about how his ideas might undermine it. “The true ground of awe is in finding ourselves what we are.”

  The last day of March was enumeration day for the ten-year National Census, so just as everyone had been listed where they were living or staying a few days before Annie’s christening in June 1841, they were now to be recorded again ten years on. On the Thursday when Charles was in Malvern, the local newspaper had reported that every householder had received a schedule to fill in for the enumerator. When the day came and the forms were collected throughout the country, they showed Charles back in London staying with Erasmus; Emma at Down House with the servants and her four youngest children, and Willy with his fellow pupils at the vicarage in Mitcham. At Montreal House in Malvern, Eliza Partington was listed with her cook, the housemaid, four lady guests and their ladies’ maid. Annie, Etty and Brodie were not named, probably because the form had been filled in before they arrived.

  As Annie and Etty settled in and went out to the places they remembered in the village and on the Malvern Hills, they found the spring season well under way. According to the local newspaper, farmers at their meetings were remarking that the season was “particularly abundant and lucky for lambs.”

  On the following Thursday, the local newspaper reprinted a report from The Gardener’s Chronicle headlined “Safety of Dr Hooker.” “We are happy to announce by the last Indian mail, Dr Hooker and his friend Dr Thomson arrived safely from Chittagong. We have had frequent occasion to speak of the important and dangerous travels o
f the former of these gentlemen, from which the most valuable contributions to physical geography and natural science are to be expected. We understand that Dr Hooker’s collections, which are on their way home by the Cape of Good Hope, are equally remarkable for their interest and great extent.” Annie and Etty had not seen Hooker for three years, but they knew all about his adventures from his long letters to their father. He had been away since November 1847 collecting plants and surveying on the northern edge of British India, in the high Himalayan valleys of Sikkim, Nepal and Tibet. He had mapped the mountains of Sikkim and found extraordinary numbers of plants, including twenty-five new species of rhododendron. Botanists and geologists in England had been reading his reports, and plant specimens that had been shipped back were being studied eagerly at Kew. On the last leg of his journey he had explored the orchid-rich tropical jungles and bare uplands of the Khasi Hills in Assam; head-hunters were roaming in the higher hills, and had taken thirty heads from one village a week before he arrived. He had now reached safety in Calcutta and was at last on his way back to England. In his last letter to Charles he had sent his “best remembrances” to the children. Annie and Etty could look forward to his stories when he came to Down, and would then be able to press him to tell them about the elephants, tigers and Naga warriors, bridges of creepers over mountain chasms, orchids, butterflies and the great white peaks to the north.

  That day in Malvern,Annie and Etty were both happy. Etty wrote to their mother on a piece of fancy notepaper embossed with floral patterns, “My dear Mama—we are going to buy the combs this morning. Yesterday I fell down twice. We bought som orangs this morning. Yesterday we bought some canvas, and I and Annie are making a pattern out of our own heds. We saw the Marsdens playing in a garden. There are a great many ladies in this house. Will you send my mits. I remain your aff Etty.” Brodie had made the little pocketbook she gave to Annie by embroidering a pattern on a piece of wire mesh, and she probably helped the two children stitch their own patterns on their pieces of canvas. The Marsdens were the children of James Marsden, one of the three water doctors whose portraits were displayed around the village. His daughter Lucy was twelve, Emily was eleven, Marian ten, Rose seven and Alice six. The “great many ladies” who so impressed Etty must have been the four lady guests on the census return.