Hello, and welcome to Lost in the Archives. This week’s post is one that celebrates less well known women during Women’s History Month 2024. Last weekend was Mothering Sunday in the UK, the day in early spring in which mothers are celebrated, and traditionally gifts of flowers or plants are given by their children. This week’s post is about Susannah Wedgwood Darwin (1765-1817), the mother of Charles Darwin (above is the earliest known portrait of him, proudly holding a potted plant). Susannah’s early influence on her naturalist son is often overlooked, but her vital presence was connected to happy memories of his childhood garden in Shropshire, and the close attention to plants and flowers that she taught him.
In September 1833, twenty-four-year-old Charles Darwin was in Buenos Aires, Argentina, staying at the home of the British merchant Edward Lumb, his wife Elizabeth, and their children. After almost two years of adventures on the HMS Beagle, followed by many months of travelling around South America, Charles felt suddenly homesick in this English family home for the people and places he had left behind. ‘It is now the Spring of the year, & every thing is budding & fresh, but how great a difference between this & the beautiful scenes of England,’ he wrote to his older sister Caroline.
I often think of the Garden at home as a Paradise; on a fine summers evening, when the birds are singing how I should enjoy to appear, like a Ghost amongst you, whilst working with the flowers.— These are pleasures I have to view, through the long interval of the Pacific & Indian oceans.
Darwin’s ‘Garden at home’ was at The Mount, near Shrewsbury in Shropshire, where Charles Darwin and his sisters had grown up. This much-loved garden was a subtle but distinct presence throughout the great naturalist’s life. In The Ghost in the Garden: in search of Darwin’s lost garden (2021) the academic and writer Jude Piesse explores the Shropshire garden’s ‘foundational’ influence on Darwin’s writings. ‘If a place can be said to follow a man, then the garden at The Mount followed Darwin to the last,’ she writes.
Pigeons and a garden paradise
Long before he explored the world for almost five years on the Beagle, the hours that Charles Darwin spent exploring his garden as a young boy helped to make him the naturalist he became. He and his sisters were brought up in rural Shropshire by their father Robert Darwin, a medical doctor, and their mother Susannah Wedgwood Darwin (1765-1817), a keen amateur botanist. Charles spent a happy early childhood in the garden climbing trees, fishing, collecting birds’ eggs and pebbles and playing with his sisters, and examining flowers and plants with his mother.
Susannah Darwin also happened to be a keen pigeon-breeder. Over forty years after her death, Darwin paid indirect tribute to her in The Origin of Species (1859), writing: ‘Few would readily believe in the natural capacity and years of practice requisite to become even a skilful pigeon-fancier.’ The birds she and her husband bred at The Mount were famous in the surrounding counties, and although Susannah referred to them in her correspondence as her ‘doves’, almost everyone else knew them as ‘The Mount pigeons’. There is little in science to distinguish between doves and pigeons.
Sadly, a deep shadow fell over the family’s life in 1817 when Susannah died after years of illness. ‘My mother died in July 1817, when I was a little over eight years old,’ Charles Darwin later wrote.
‘and it is odd that I can remember hardly anything about her except her death-bed, her black velvet gown, and her curiously constructed work table. I believe that my forgetfulness is partly due to my sisters, owing to their great grief, never being able to speak about her or mention her name; and partly to her previous invalid state.’
Although he had no conscious memory of his mother, Darwin’s former schoolmate W. A. Leighton recorded that it was Susannah who taught her young son ‘how by looking in the interior of a blossom he could ascertain the name of the plant.’ It’s likely that she was trying to teach Charles about Linnaean classification, and her insistence on the ‘close-up view’ of flowers and plants played a significant part in his scientific education. He would attend to such tiny yet crucial differences in plants and other species for the rest of his life.
A portrait of Susannah
In her excellent 2018 article, ‘Susannah Wedgwood Darwin: A Portrait’, Professor Nancy H. Ramage gives a detailed and wonderfully vivid account of Susannah's life, sparked by the miniature portrait of her that was acquired by the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge in 2012. As Ramage writes in her article, Susannah Darwin ‘deserves our respect and admiration for being the strong character that she was in her own right, despite her lifelong struggle with ill health.’
I thoroughly agree, so was delighted to read about the 2024 symposium ‘Susannah Darwin at The Mount: Hidden Maternal Histories’ held in at Darwin House (previously The Mount) in Shrewsbury, discussing her ‘as a historically important figure in her own right rather than someone to be viewed in exclusive connection with male lineages and contexts’ and focussing on her gardening, dove-breeding and other activities.
It’s moving to discover that Charles Darwin did not see this beautiful miniature of his mother until 1881, the year before he died. He was 76 years old when it was discovered amongst his late brother Erasmus' possessions. At first he felt little connection to the tiny portrait, having no memory of his mother’s appearance apart from the black velvet dress. Being a scientist, he depended on proof, so was doubtful that the artist had painted a true resemblance of Susannah, then aged 28, just before she married.
‘He had been unable to recall her face, and when he saw the likeness, he worried if it had been prettified by the artist,’ Ramage writes. ‘Charles turned to his older sister Caroline, who, nine years his senior, remembered their mother well. He inquired if it really looked like her, and was reassured that it did. He was much moved, and treasured the portrait.
There is a portrait of Charles Darwin aged 31, at about the same age that Susannah’s portrait was painted. He looks very like his mother.
Loving a ghost
Reading about Susannah Darwin this week, I was reminded of something that the 20th-century philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote. His own mother died when he was just two years old, and in the second volume of his Autobiography (1968) he describes how, although he could not remember his mother, he gradually became aware that her presence had never left him:
‘I have loved a ghost, and in loving a ghost my inmost self has become spectral. I have therefore buried it deeper and deeper beneath layers of cheerfulness, affection and joy of life.’
Although she did not live to see her youngest son’s great achievements, Susannah Wedgwood Darwin remained as a presence in his life and work. Years later, Charles Darwin re-created elements of the garden at The Mount at his own family home, Down House in Kent. There was a ‘Sandwalk’ path for meditative walking, a pigeon loft, and much else; it was both a living laboratory for his plant and insect experiments, and a place that his own children could explore and enjoy, and where his mother Susannah was a welcome ghost.
Sources
To read Darwin’s 1833 letter and many others free online, visit the Darwin Correspondence Project. A detailed artist’s map of the garden at The Mount can be seen at the Cambridge University Library website here, with an illustration of how the garden looked in 1867, featuring plants grown from seeds brought back on HMS Beagle by Charles Darwin from South America in 1836. After publishing The Garden Diary of Doctor Darwin (Unicorn, 2021), pictured above, the author Susan Campbell generously donated the manuscripts of Robert and his sister Susan Darwin’s garden journals to Cambridge University Library.
The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882, edited by Nora Barlow (unexpurgated 1958 edition).
Nancy H. Ramage, “Susannah Wedgwood Darwin: A Portrait,” Ars Ceramica No. 30 (2014, published 2018) pp. 3-11.
In this short film ‘Darwin’s mother and the miniature’, Darwin's great-great-grandson Randal Keynes explains why finally seeing this miniature of his mother was so significant for the great naturalist, and why portraits of loved ones were so important to both the Wedgwood and Darwin families.
what a delight to discover she was a pigeon fancier!
Loved this, thank you. Have read on Darwin here and there, and yet all of this was new -- I've only seen his mother mentioned as the link with the Wedgwoods, as you have in in a quote in here.
May I use this as an occasion to mention a Darwin-related book that I loved, and don't see mentioned so often? It's the poet Ruth Padel's "Darwin, A Life in Poems," which takes bits of his prose, including letters, and turns them into prose poems. One of those books that's so enjoyable that you try to get everyone to read it when you first encounter it.