At Home - Bill Bryson [232]
Of course Darwin did get to go in the end, and a big part of the reason his father relented was an odd but crucial factor in the lives of many upper-class people: marriage within the family. Marrying cousins was astoundingly common into the nineteenth century, and nowhere is this better illustrated than with the Darwins and their cousins the Wedgwoods (of pottery fame). Charles married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood, daughter of his beloved Uncle Josiah. Darwin’s sister Caroline, meanwhile, married Josiah Wedgwood III, Emma’s brother and the Darwin siblings’ joint first cousin. Another of Emma’s brothers, Henry, married not a Darwin but a first cousin from another branch of his own Wedgwood family, adding another strand to the family’s wondrously convoluted genetics. Finally, Charles Langton, who was not related to either family, first married Charlotte Wedgwood, another daughter of Josiah and cousin of Charles, and then upon Charlotte’s death married Darwin’s sister Emily, thus becoming, it seems, his sister-in-law’s sister-in-law’s husband and raising the possibility that any children of the union would be their own first cousins. What all this meant in terms of relationships between nephews, nieces, and the next generation of cousins is very nearly beyond computing.
What it produced, rather unexpectedly, is one of the happiest family groupings of the nineteenth century. Nearly all the Darwins and Wedgwoods seem to have been genuinely fond of one another, which is a very good thing for us, because when Darwin’s father expressed misgivings about the Beagle voyage, Darwin’s uncle Josiah was happy to intercede on his behalf and to have a word with Charles’s father, his cousin Robert. What’s more, Robert was persuaded to change his mind because of his respect and affection for Josiah.
So, thanks to his uncle and a tradition of keeping genes within the family, Charles Darwin did go to sea for the next five years and gathered the facts that allowed him to change the world. And that takes us conveniently, if a little unexpectedly, to the top of the house and the last space we will pass through.
* We can’t be sure that this room in the Old Rectory ever actually was a nursery. It is another of the afterthought rooms not included on Edward Tull’s original plans, so there are no blueprint labels to guide us. But its modest dimensions and position next door to the main bedroom strongly suggest that it was intended as a nursery rather than just an additional bedroom, which raises yet another intriguing and unanswerable question about the bachelor Mr. Marsham’s hopes and intentions.
• CHAPTER XIX •
THE ATTIC
I
In the eventful summer of 1851, while crowds flocked to the Great Exhibition in London and Thomas Marsham settled into his new property in Norfolk, Charles Darwin delivered to his publishers a hefty manuscript, the result of eight years of devoted inquiry into the nature and habits of barnacles. Called A Monograph of the Fossil Lepadidae, or, Pedunculated Cirripedes of Great Britain, it doesn’t sound like the most diverting of works, and wasn’t, but it secured his reputation as a naturalist and gave him, in the words of one biographer, “the authority to speak, when the time was ripe, on variability and transmutation”—on evolution, in other words. Remarkably, Darwin hadn’t finished with barnacles yet. Three years later he produced a 684-page study of sessile cirripedes and a more modest companion work on the barnacle fossils not mentioned