Charles and Emma by Deborah Heiligman Read Free Book Online Page B

least idea of anything more.
    â€“M AUD DU P uy D ARWIN, WIFE OF G EORGE D ARWIN , J UNE 1887
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    O n the voyage, Charles had been vigorous and brave. He withstood horrible seasickness, weathered harsh conditions, witnessed a battle in Bahía Blanca, Argentina, and experienced an earthquake in Valdivia, Chile. “There was no difficulty in standing upright, but the motion made me almost giddy,” he wrote about the earthquake. But now, back in London in 1838, he truly was scared. The thought of marriage and of Emma terrified him and gave him serious headaches. He knew she was religious, and he was consumed by the fear that his secret idea would go against her beliefs.
    Charles had been spending hours at the London Zoo watching Jenny, an orangutan. The zoo had recently acquired her; she was the first orangutan the zoo had, and was one ofthe first apes in England. On an unseasonably warm March day, Charles had observed Jenny in her cage in the giraffe house. The keeper showed Jenny an apple but, teasing, didn’t give it to her. Then, Charles wrote to one of his sisters, Jenny “threw herself on her back, kicked & cried, precisely like a naughty child.”
    Watching Jenny, Charles asked himself questions: How much was an ape like a child? How similar were people and animals? Does an orangutan have the same emotions we do? If so, how closely are we humans related to animals? He kept going back to the zoo to watch Jenny. That autumn he wrote in a new notebook, one marked “Expression” and labeled “N,” that “children understand before they can talk, so do many animals.—analogy probably false, may lead to something.”
    He was careful not to jump to conclusions, but he saw what he saw: “Jenny was amusing herself—, by getting out ears of corn with her teeth from the straw, & just like child not knowing what to do with them, came several times & opened my hand, & put them in—like child.”
    Like a child. What would it mean about God’s creation if apes and humans were related? In the religious worldview, there was a hierarchy of living things, from the lowliest of the low, animals like lice or slugs, to fish and birds and cats and apes, up to human beings, who were at the top—but not as high up as angels. Charles was beginning to think that people were more closely related to orangutans than to angels, if angels existed at all.
Like a child.
People and apes must be related, and if so, they must have a common ancestor. But how did the common ancestor change to create humans and apes? If species do change, as Charles felt certain they did, how was that happening? What was the mechanism that drove this change?
    Charles, like Emma, was a voracious reader, and as he read in a wide range of subjects, from philosophy and theology to history and political theory, he was reading with a purpose—to understand the natural world and, most specifically, the origin of species.
    On September 28, 1838, two months after his visit to Maer, Charles opened another notebook (he wrote in many at once). This one was red leather, with a “D” on the front. In gray ink, on pages edged in green, he wrote about something he’d read.
An Essay on the Principle of Population
was written by the economist Thomas Robert Malthus in 1798. Malthus’s essay was about society, and about people, most especially about how poor people succumb in an environment where there are limited resources. He argued that without disease, famine, and poverty, the human population would grow too fast. People need food; people need sex. If there is more population growth than the food supply can accommodate, something must and will happen to reduce the population.
    People still discussed and argued about what Malthus had to say, especially about the problems of poverty. Were workhouses the answer, as Malthus said? Should the poor be given charity, or should they be left to fend for