Charles Robert Darwin was born in the village of Shrewsbury (England) on February 12, 1809, and he died on April 19, 1882. Shrewsbury, 160 miles northwest of London and close to the border of Wales, is approximately 4,000 miles from the United States of America and on that same day, the 16th President of the United States of America, Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was born in Kentucky.
As stated in the Abstract, or Executive Summary above, an attempt is made in this paper to point out the „human“ side of Darwin and he will be discussed within the context of his times. With that in mind, it is worth noting that since the „paper“ version of this paper was initially completed and distributed on January 31, 1995, it was exactly 156 years ago that date (January 31, 1839) that Charles Darwin had been married to Emma Darwin (née Emma ) for exactly two days. On January 30, 1839, Mr. and Mrs. Charles R. Darwin moved into a town house in the Bloomsbury area of London (12 Gower Street) but January 31, 1839 was not a good day for the newly married couple: Josiah Wedgwood III was married to Caroline Darwin, the older sister of Charles Darwin and on December 18, 1838 Sophie Wedgwood was born to this couple. On January 31, 1839 Darwin’s niece died and it has been written of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Darwin that „there could have been no sadder end to a happy month, and it clouded their first weeks together“ (Adrian Desmond and James Moore, 1991, Darwin: The Life of A Tormented Evolutionist, page 280).
Why this „trivial“ piece of information at the beginning of a scholarly paper? Simply to point out that Charles R. Darwin was a human being, who was born of woman, married a woman, had friends and relatives and cares and worries, grew old and eventually died. While his ideas and research may be viewed by some as somewhat unique, he was just as human as the writer (and reader) of this paper, burdened with all of the biases and paradoxes of the times and (therefore) limited by the known (and perhaps more important, unknown) information of the times. The point is strongly made, and noted below, that Charles Darwin went beyond the limitations that others saw and discovered something new: rules for living organisms, or natural selection. It has been written that „science“ or „creativity“ is to „see what everybody else has seen and then think what nobody has thought.“ This idea will be discussed further, for Charles R. Darwin was creative.
When Darwin was in his prime, he was slightly more than six feet in height, but as the years began to weigh on his bones, he took on a stoop which became characteristic of his appearance and it made him look shorter. While a young man, he had a ruddy complexion as well as a rounded chin and he was beardless, even though he wore his reddish-brown sideburns down to his jawline. Darwin enjoyed walking, running, and riding and in his later years he enjoyed having novels read aloud to him. Darwin like dogs, used snuff all of his life (writing that he „learnt the habit at Edinburgh“ University, in Scotland ), drank very little wine, and had brown eyes with slight purple speckles (Nora Barlow, 1958, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, page 84). Charles Darwin first grew a beard, as was the custom, when he was on board HMS Beagle on her circumnavigation of the globe in 1831-1836 but he shaved the beard before returning to England. Darwin began to grow his final beard in 1863 in order to avoid the burden of shaving and he also became entirely bald.
Darwin was one of six children born to Susannah Wedgwood (1765-1817). He had three older sisters: Marianne (1798-1858), Caroline (1800-1888), Susanne (1803-1866), as well as a younger one, Emily Catherine (1810-1866) and an older brother, Erasmus (1804-1881). Charles Darwin’s brother, Erasmus Darwin (named after their paternal grandfather, the eminent physician Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) had a tremendous amount of influence on Charles Darwin.
When Charles Darwin was 8 years old his mother, Susannah Wedgwood, died at the age of fifty-two (July 1817). Although he had very little recollection of her, a colleague of his once stated that he recalled when Charles Darwin was still a child, Darwin brought a flower to school, stating that his mother had taught him how „by looking at the inside of the blossom, the name of the plant could be discovered“ (In Thomas H. Huxley, 1896, Darwiniana Essays, page 254). This was not to suggest that the name was neatly stitched therein, but that Charles Darwin’s mother was teaching him the rudiments of the Linnaean system of classification. Until 1818 Emily Catherine and Charles Darwin were educated at home by their older sister Caroline; then Darwin began to attend a boarding school one mile from home. In his infancy in Shrewsbury, he had the nickname of „Babba“ and while a young teenager, his brother Erasmus wrote to young „Bobby.“ While on the HMS Beagle (when in his 20s), Charles Darwin was known as „Dear Old Philosopher“ to the Officers and was called the „Flycatcher“ by all!
Charles Darwin’s father, Robert Waring Darwin (1768-1848), was a prosperous and prominent physician in Shrewsbury and he did not see fit to re-marry after his wife’s death in 1817. Robert Darwin had the distinction of being the largest man that Charles Darwin ever observed: Robert Darwin was some six feet two inches in height, with a tremendous girth, and the last time he weighed himself he was at some 360 pounds (or 24 stone in the measurement
system of the day). Robert Darwin, incidentally, continued to gain weight after that time although it is written that he no longer weighed himself (Gerturde Himmelfarb, 1959, Darwin And The Darwinian Revolution, page 10).