Down House
As Robyn and I stepped into our friend’s car, we left Knole—and the ghost of George Scharf—behind. I am always relieved to say goodbye to Scharf, although, as my weary colleagues can attest, and as my last entry makes clear—he has a way of returning even after the publication of the book about him. As my friend Walt drove skillfully and on the scary side of the road through the lanes of Kent, there was one last glimpse of a certain portly middle-aged gentleman: we saw the roof of a heavily gated Chevening, another of the great houses Scharf had visited regularly. “Chevening ,” said Walt, “that’s a government place. Spying.” As I settled back in my seat I made a vow that I would not write to the British government and ask to penetrate this maximum-security establishment.
Relieved of any academic responsibilities, I enjoyed, in anticipation, our visit to Down House, home in the mid nineteenth century, to Charles Darwin. I believe I put away my notebook. Although had happily agreed to the trip, this was not, despite the Victorian connection, primarily MY Thing. My biologist friend Kate, who had organized the outing, appeared to be even more thrilled.
I was not prepared to have Down House bring me to the verge of tears. I had not teared-up at Knole, even as I’d touched the Adams fireplace that had been part of George Scharf’s room, even as I’d seen by the placement of that room how welcome this son of an immigrant had been to the aristocratic family who owned the house. I had remained dry-eyed even Robyn and I realized that this placement allowed us entirely to rethink Scharf’s capacious understanding of friendship at Knole, at Chevening, and elsewhere. But this is not a story about George, as we called him. This was a story about Darwin, whom none of the five of us on this trip would ever presume to call Charles. It was Darwin’s house that made me cry on that splendid day of homing.
Circles
Down House is beautifully restored by English Heritage, a preservation and education organization founded in 1882 that also manages more ancient sites like Stonehenge. Its website notes that places like Down House were added to its list of holdings in the mid twentieth century—before that, the site notes, “country houses . . . were not really seen as heritage.” As part of the heritage industry, the organization aims to tell “the story of Britain,” and, in a very common idiom for this industry, to “bring history to life.” And it is life, of course, that is the central value, or commodity, at Down House—not just Darwin’s own life, which is featured in the museum’s documentation of Darwin’s family and accomplishments, but the fact that his home was “a ‘living laboratory’ where he could conduct hundreds of experiments on the natural world.” While all laboratories are, presumably, in some sense “living,” the point here is that Darwin’s daily life was entangled in the life of the plants and animals around him, a testament, surely, to his own theories of interspecies engagement.
I am, as a general rule, suspicious of history “coming to life,” particularly as part of the heritage industry. The link to Darwin’s work, and in particular, to the sustained poetry of Origin of Species, which I teach often, was, to be sure, compelling. I was surprised and moved by the traces of his scientific labors in his garden. Most moving of all, however, were the signs that he had included his children in the work of his life and home. In the garden at Down house I remember, although they are not mentioned in the online guide, a series of circles in the ground, one for each of Darwin’s living children. Darwin encouraged, perhaps expected, his children to visit these little plots several times a day over a period of time to observe the insect and plant life within the bounds of the circle, and to note changes in light, temperature, and moisture. This observation of microenvironments is a standard practice today: it is taught in courses on environment and ecology, but also sometimes in more human-centered anthropology and urban studies. Darwin may have been among the first to use this technique in his own work, constructing his famous “weed garden” to map competition among hardy plants. But it is the children gardens that made me appreciate how much Darwin’s scientific method was integrated into his daily life.
The circles reminded me, not only of the entanglement of species and environment for which Darwin was so famously to argue, but also of the entanglements of work and home, work and leisure. For all his fame in his own time and in ours, Darwin was essentially an amateur scientist, paying for much of his own work from inherited income. * Although his career can be said to have begun with his famous Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin was a homebody, making a place for his work that was essentially domestic. Thus the famous question attributed to his son George when he realized that a friend’s father did not have a study: “Where,” George asked his friend, “does he do his barnacles?” The piles of crustaceans piled up on the desk of an elegantly fitted study stand for me as an endearing shorthand for Victorian science, which blurred place (home, office) status (amateur, professional) and discipline (biology, ecology, anthropology). This blurring of taxonomies derives, I think, from a prior and more fundamental one: the mix of work and pleasure, of work as pleasure, that I felt so personally at Knole, and of which I was reminded in a different key by the visit to Down House. If the visit to Knole was in part for me about the pleasures of my own work, the visit to Down House reminded me of the fantasy that there should be no difference between the two.
Of course, this fantasy worked in the Victorian period as it does today only for a very few. While not hugely wealthy, Darwin was what Victorians called an independent gentleman, with the space and leisure to germinate his talents. Not only did he have the time to work on what he loved, he had the time to think about it. Origin of Species was famously shelved for ten years, as he considered its impact on the world and on his family; although he rushed it into print in 1859 (he thought of it as an abstract of a longer work) the rushing was a response to a possible scoop by a fellow scientist. He was financially independent of the book’s success. He was, in fact, largely free to think, inscribing that freedom into the construction (by others) of his beloved “sandwalk” or “thinking walk” in the garden, which he paced many times each day while pondering scientific questions at every scale
Darwin, also—and this is crucial to understanding upper-class Victorian life— had the leisure to be ill. Plagued throughout his life by gastric complaints, and by what we would now diagnose as clinical depression, Darwin had the opportunity to spend months at a time in the fascinating world of Moor House, a sort of therapeutic spa in which he submitted to treatments that involved leeches, cold showers, and low-key but inspirational conversations with other patients or “guests,” many of whom were also well-known Victorian figures in the arts and sciences.
Studies
Darwin also, of course, took to himself the considerable privileges of gender. And here we might return for a moment to the study—or at least to its threshold. Where might a woman “do her barnacles?” Virginia Woolf, lover of Vita Sackville-West, whose gender, as I mentioned in my last post, barred her from inheriting Knole, would write that women cannot hope to be authors unless they have 500 pounds a year and a room of their own. She attributes what she saw as a simple dearth of women authors to the fact that they were never allowed to be alone, that they were always called away from their work by household duties. Even those women who wrote and published books were damaged by their domestic environments and the exigencies of domestic life. Their work suffered, according to Woolf, on the level of the sentence. Jane Austen, Woolf claims, controversially, was the exception, the only one whose writing was uninjured by the fact that it must be put away when visitors came or when there was housework to do.
Although Woolf apparently imagines the room of her own outside the house, the study, an indicatively male space for so many hundreds of years, is worth thinking about, perhaps in the interests of time, in the world of Austen and adaptations of her work. In Pride and Prejudice, for example, the study is a library, where Mr. Bennet, writer of nothing, and with no recorded interest in barnacles, retreats from his family—although he allows Lizzy, his favorite daughter, to enter. It is hard to know what Mr. B. is doing in his carefully segregated space, although various filmic adaptations show him in there, agonizing over his financial accounts—and the fact that he cannot provide for his daughters in death. There are similar scenes, with more writhing on the part of the paternal figure, in Patricia Rozema’s depiction of Sir Thomas Bertram, similarly in despair about finances. (It is also here that, in the film version, he hides his sketches of his own physical and sexual abuse of the slaves whose labor supports his own stately home of Mansfield Park.) Men sometimes retreat to their studies, that sign of masculine power, to be bedeviled by their failed masculinity. Nonetheless, they guard the entrance, making exceptions perhaps for a favorite daughter who will never have a study (or any other room) of her own. As for wives, they can—to an extent—manipulate gendered space: think of Charlotte who gives her annoying husband, Mr. Collins, the best (front) room for his study so that he will not be tempted to enter her parlor.
A memory returns to me. My now husband and I are about to be married. We are both academics, both on the tenure track, but untenured. He has found an apartment for us in the D.C. area within a reasonable distance of his place of work. My job is in the Boston area; it will be a commuter marriage. For the first year after the wedding, however, I will be on a fellowship and living in the apartment full time. My mother- in-law tours the empty apartment with us, comes upon the second bedroom. “Is this what Scott will choose for his study?” she asks. Scott will have an office at his university. I will be frantically writing a book from home. My mother-in-law knows this, has always been respectful of my work, thinks of me, for better or for worse, as what she calls a “career woman.” The study, though, is his, and his to choose. We stand on the threshold of the empty room with its disturbingly white wall-to-wall carpet upon which I imagine spilling coffee when I write. “ I think I’ll be the one to mostly use it this year.” We go on to inspect the closets, of which the realtor has said to Scott: “Your wife will just love these.”
Sofas
Back to Darwin. So far, I have, well, romanticized Darwin’s sense of connection between what we call life and what we call work. After writing about the gendered privileges of studies, I reminded myself of the anxiety Darwin himself felt about the relation between the two—and how this anxiety figured into his decision to marry and his assumptions about what having a wife and family would mean. In a pair of notes to himself in, with the headings “Marry” and “Not Marry,” Darwin sets out the pros and cons of having a wife after already having proposed to his cousin, Emma Wedgwood. Under “Marry” he writes:
Children—(if it Please God) [14] — Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one,— object to be beloved & played with.— —better than a dog anyhow.— [15] Home, & someone to take care of house— Charms of music & female chit-chat.— These things good for one’s health.— [16] but terrible loss of time. —
God, it is intolerable to think of spending ones whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all.— No, no won’t do.— Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House.— Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps— Compare this
vision with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro’ St.
For those of us who can get past his concession that a wife would be “better than a dog,” (after all, Emma does win the competition!) I would emphasize Darwin’s own emphasis on the space and time of marriage. Darwin imagines an alternative to the “smoky” rooms of his bachelor apartments on Great Marlborough street where the softness of the sofa and the softness of the wife sitting on it blur into an ideal of domestic bliss. This conjugal idyll is interrupted, though, by Darwin’s anxiety about time: “Music &female chit chat,” although good for health are “a terrible loss of time.”
We can diagnose, at a distance of many years, not only time anxiety, but a temporal panic that interrupts the yes/no structure of his note. “Not marry” begins with the positives associated with the decision to remain single:
“Freedom to go where one liked— choice of Society & little of it. — Conversation of clever men at clubs— Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle.— to have the expense & anxiety of children— perhaps quarelling— Loss of time. — cannot read in the Evenings— fatness & idleness— Anxiety &
responsibility— less money for books &c— if many children forced to gain one’s bread.— (But then it is very bad for ones health[19] to work too much)
Look what has happened in this confusing note; the “Not” in “not forced to visit relatives” confusingly continues to govern his next thought, so we must understand him to be saying: “[NOT] to have the expense & anxiety of children and “[NOT] to experience “Loss of time.” Perhaps he is remembering the scene on the sofa when he indicates another negative this time expressed as a “not”: “Cannot read in the Evenings.” In so logical and rational a writer, it is perhaps surprising that this particular taxonomy is not logically consistent nor, despite the recourse to reasoned thinking, particularly rational. Perhaps these notes do not make sense because he has already proposed to Emma: marriage is a foregone conclusion; he is already subject to its temporalities.
Another way of thinking about Darwin’s dilemma may be simpler: is marriage good or bad for (male) work? (Darwin also interposes the question of whether he can do better work in the country or in London, which depends to some degree on whether his wife insists on being in the city.) On the one hand, marriage is good, it seems, for men’s health, and health is good for work. On the other, it detracts/distracts from work, swallowing up evenings and days in visits and chit chat.
Darwin, like many of us, fantasized about his future home life—where he would live, and with whom. Unlike many of us, Darwin was able to live out that fantasy through the power of talent, inherited wealth, male privilege, and cheap labor. If he wanted a “thinking walk,” he had only to think it and have it built. If he wanted to be alone with his barnacles, he had only to shut the door of his study. Finally, despite his misgivings, he probably did not experience home life was an impediment to work. He built (or rather imagined and had built) his home around himself, to his own exacting measure. As we read about life during the pandemic, about the “Zoom nooks” and covered patios that the wealthy now require, we see in a more prosaic form the animating fantasy of Down House: that work and other aspects of life can be seamlessly embodied in the ever more expensive forms of homing.
*George Scharf alert! George Scharf’s father, George Scharf senior, was hired by Darwin to illustrate some of his lectures. The senior Scharf contended that Darwin underpaid him, asserting for the only time I could find, the fact that he was an artist and thus deserving of more respect.