Charles Darwin* Read Free

following the lead of his idol, Ras, who recommended books and encouraged his taste in literature.
    One day his father gave him two treasures—illustrated books from his personal library. One was on insects, the other on stones and minerals. Charles found his father, who was an imposing, sometimes stern man, a bit scary, but also called him “the kindest man I ever knew.” Wandering among the orange trees, flowers with glorious scents, and vegetable beds, Dr. Darwin shared his interests with Charles. Sometimes he took his son out in his yellow carriage on his rounds to patients—a tight squeeze for Charles next to his bulky father.
    His happy world broke apart when frail Susannah died as Charles was turning eight. In later years he said he had hardly any memory of his mother. He himself called this memory lapse “odd,” as have many historians, unless it was the first example of his later flair for banishing a painful subject from his mind.
    Dr. Darwin never remarried and continued to run his family as a tight ship, becoming even more overbearing.
    It was around this time that Charles developed what he called “a passion for collecting.” Collecting was a popular gentlemanly pursuit, but he went all out, with bugs and worms, especially beetles, live and dead; as well as shells, birds’ eggs, butterflies, pebbles and minerals, and more. At age nine his goal was to know something about every single stone on the path to the front door. A few years later, he took up bird watching with vigor. In fact, a friend once said he was “all eyes,” and Ras teased him about “those telescopes you call eyes.” (Darwin himself thought he was all nose—he was self-conscious about it until the end of his life.)

    At nine, he was sent away to the private boys’ boarding school in the center of town, where Ras had been going for the past three years. Shrewsbury Grammar School was a little over a mile away, fifteen minutes from The Mount, but it was another world.
    The school trained rich boys to enter a university like Cambridge or Oxford. The older boys carried loaded guns and sometimes threatened each other, the food was terrible, beatings were frequent, the blankets on Charles’s bed were always damp, and for years afterward he could summon up the memory of the stench of some thirty chamber pots underneath the boys’ beds.
    At Shrewsbury, only the classics were taught—Greek and Latin, ancient history and geography. There were no science classes. The beliefs of the Church of England lay behind everything that was taught in school, so everyone would have taken for granted the Bible’s description of the origin of the world. It was created in six days and populated with all the animals looking then the same way they still did in current times. The creation of Adam and Eve was the pinnacle of God’s work.
    Charles was not a good student. Once the headmaster even yelled at him and humiliated him in front of the whole school for wasting his time. But for almost seven years, he was stuck at Shrewsbury School. “Nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind.”
    He desperately wanted to be outside, lifting up stones to discover insects, inspecting the surface of a pond, exploring with Ras. He actually ran away from school whenever he could—dashing home after attendance was taken, racing back for nighttime lockdown. If he’d been caught he would have been expelled. That would have made his father very angry.
    When Ras took up chemistry, Charles did too. A revolution was taking place in chemistry. One of the pioneers was Joseph Priestley, who, about thirty years earlier, had been one of the discoverers of oxygen, and had published a history of electricity. The Darwin brothers knew all about Priestley—their own uncle Josiah Wedgwood had helped to fund Priestley’s research, partly for business reasons, since Wedgwood was looking for advances in glazes and clays.
    The brothers took over a toolshed in the back