(nee Wedgwood) 

2 May 1808 – 2 October 1896

Emma Darwin at Macaw Cottage: A Tribute by Patricia Fara

In early Victorian Bloomsbury, Emma Darwin typified the intellectual inhabitants of Gower Street’s quiet residential area. An unusual number of documents about her survive because twenty years later, her husband became spectacularly famous. But at the time, her experiences were similar to those of many married women living in the neighbourhood. 

When Emma Darwin moved to 12 Upper Gower Street in 1839, she was so appalled by the yellow curtains, blue walls and red furniture that she called it Macaw Cottage. Newly married to her cousin Charles, she belonged to a large circle of intellectual women scattered around London and beyond. Inevitably, at first she did not always fit in easily: when a wedding gift arrived from the eminent feminist campaigner Harriet Martineau, she was less than enthusiastic to find out that it was a selection of her own books. But Emma was thrilled when, soon after her own arrival in Bloomsbury, her brother and his wife Fanny took a house four doors down the street. 

Emma’s relatives and acquaintances often commented on her natural easy-going manner – ‘there never was a person born under a happier star,’ gushed a fond aunt. She adopted a relaxed attitude towards tidiness and housekeeping – her childhood nickname had been Miss Slip-Slop – and occasionally she was criticised for avant-garde behaviour such as letting her maid go out without a bonnet, or not reprimanding her son for acquiring a Cockney accent from the servants. Her favourite evenings were spent at concerts or the theatre, where she might enjoy the latest West End play by Edward Bulwer-Lytton or else venture out in a family group for a pantomime at ‘the Tottenham theatre – very low’ to see ‘the most dreadful blood and murder thing with a gibbet on the stage.’ 

Initially an inexperienced hostess, Emma plucked up the courage to throw dinner-parties for London’s scientific stars. To her great relief, she soon discovered that conversational wives could be relied upon to relieve the tedium of uncommunicative men. In a triumphant letter to her mother, she wrote that ‘notwithstanding those two dead weights, viz. the greatest geologist and the greatest botanist in Europe, we did very well and had no pauses. Mrs. Henslow had a good, loud, sharp voice which was a great comfort and Mrs Lyell had a constant supply of talk.’

Dining with Emma, Mrs Mary Lyell must have felt disconcerted to find herself in the same house where she had lived with her parents a few years previously. Mary and her five sisters had benefitted from the excellent education provided by their father, Leonard Horner, a renowned geologist and social reformer who was then warden of University College; he even took his daughters to meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Several of these Gower Street girls grew up to practise science. For instance, Katharine became a botanist who published on ferns under her own name, travelling round India to collect different samples that are now conserved at Kew Gardens and elsewhere, while Mary specialized in geology.

Mary and Katharine Horner belonged to an extended network of scientific families that, resembling a royal dynasty, encouraged marriage between ambitious young researchers and their older colleagues’ daughters. Having spent their childhood absorbing scientific information and techniques, these wives could prove indispensable for their husbands, who only too often claimed all the credit. For example, the daughter of Emma’s loud-voiced Mrs Henslow was snapped up by a suitor who became one of England’s most famous botanists, Joseph Dalton Hooker. His bride Frances was, he commented, ‘much cleverer than I’ – which is perhaps why she undertook the hard work of translating large French books into English for him to edit.

Similarly, when Mary Horner became engaged to one of Emma’s dinner-party ‘dead weights’, the geologist Charles Lyell, she studied German so that she could translate learned papers and then read them aloud to her short-sighted husband. Their love affair had begun at a party held by one of London’s most famous mathematicians – Mary Somerville, later celebrated as ‘Queen of the Sciences.’ The Lyells’ honeymoon was effectively a European field trip, and during their childless marriage Mary gradually became responsible for drawing scientific illustrations, editing articles and classifying their specimens. In particular, she became the couple’s expert on shells, a crucial source of evidence for establishing different stages of the earth’s long history. After recruiting her maid as an assistant, she remarked that ‘I have taught Antonia to kill snails and clean out the shells and she is very expert.’Emma Darwin was the emotional mainstay not only of her many children but also of her husband, who teetered from one crisis of chronic invalidism to the next throughout his life. Disconcertingly for modern readers, although they were both fervent abolitionists he declared himself to be her slave, and was exceptionally dependent on her. An intelligent, well-educated woman, early on in their marriage Emma wrote Charles a long letter explaining why she disagreed with his scientific bids to eliminate God from the world of knowledge; religion could, she advised, provide him with consolation in the face of life’s tragedies. And on Sundays, in the absence of any religious worship at University College, she insisted that they go to services at King’s College church on the Strand. 

Emma had two babies while she lived in Gower Street and was pregnant with the third by the time that they left for a house in the country. She disliked the smoke and bustle of London; moreover, the garden was narrow, and the only sizeable place for the children to play was the fenced-off area in Gordon Square, to which she had the key. As some compensation, she could spend time with her close neighbour – her sister-in-law Fanny Wedgwood – and her children. ‘We find it a constant pleasure having them so near,’ wrote Emma; ‘They often walk in to drink tea with us, and vice versa.’

Fanny enjoyed the reputation of being ‘very clever, full of information, yet loving fun as much as a child,’ but she was also a kind and generous woman: ‘I never saw so sweet a temper or any one so truly obliging and free from selfishness,’ wrote a female relative. She later ran a distinguished literary salon in London as well as serving on the Council of Bloomsbury’s Bedford College for Women. 

Emma must have met Fanny’s oldest daughter, Frances Julia, who had been born during a snowstorm and was known as ‘Snow’ her entire life. An extraordinarily precocious child, she had begun composing poetry when she was only six years old. Like Fanny’s friend Harriet Martineau, Snow suffered from chronic deafness, and she exchanged several letters and stories with the older woman. As an adult, she pursued a successful literary career that included examining the compatibility of Christianity and evolution; even so, like many single women of the period, Snow was obliged to spend time caring for elderly relatives and looking after other women’s children.

These surviving snippets of information illustrate how Upper Gower Street offered a lively, friendly environment that encouraged intellectual exchange and stimulated its younger inhabitants into pursuing successful careers. 

Further reading

Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

Patricia Fara, Pandora’s Breeches: Women, Science and Power in the Enlightenment (London: Pimlico, 2004).

Patricia Fara, A Lab of One’s Own: Science and Suffrage in World War I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, 2019).

Edna Healey, Emma Darwin: The Inspirational Wife of a Genius (London: Headline, 2001).