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On turning five, Thomas began to receive sporadic tutoring from Mr. Brodie Innes, vicar of Down. Mr. Innes focussed on expanding Thomas’s reading and writing skills, and also introduced Thomas to basic arithmetic. Though Thomas learned to add and subtract, Mr. Innes had little talent for teaching. Recognizing his own limitations, he encouraged Emma to allow Thomas to join his sisters Henrietta (while she was still at home) and Elizabeth in the small schoolroom at Down House, where a series of daily governesses supervised the girls’ home schooling. As Emma Darwin held strongly that the “Devil finds work for idle hands,” the emphasis of the girls’ education was skewed towards embroidery and handicrafts. As one activity, Thomas made a number of flimsy Easter baskets. He had intended to present individual members of his family with an identical holiday gift but each basket was significantly and disappointingly distinct from its predecessor. Thomas would later conclude that such imperfect production was an important source of diversity in the world of artefacts.

Thomas also attended his sisters’ weekly Wednesday Drawing Class in the local village. Miss Mary Matheson, the teacher, was a diffident but well-intentioned spinster whose style of instruction was to emphasize accuracy over artistic interpretation. Although never hesitant to erase errant lines, she was genuinely supportive, and Thomas was a conscientious pupil. While Thomas was self-deprecating about his ability to draw, these early lessons came to useful advantage. He later produced his own illustrations for the manuscripts he authored.

If the weather was remotely tolerable, Thomas was excused from all lessons and allowed to play outside. Emma and Charles were permissive parents, and their sole stipulation was that Thomas remain in earshot of the one o’clock bell for lunch, the family’s principal meal of the day. Thomas would spend hours digging in the sandy soil of the kitchen garden and the orchard, deploying toy soldiers on the ample lawn, and inspecting the considerable number of birds’ nests in the trees that bordered the Sandwalk. A favourite sanctuary was a small abandoned summer house, just beyond the Sandwalk, where Thomas enjoyed drawing in chalk on its decaying wooden walls.

The only drawback to such activities was their solitary nature. For most of Thomas’s childhood, his brothers were either at boarding school or living away from home. On occasion, Parslow, the Darwins’ long-serving butler, would challenge Thomas to a game of quoits. Akin to horseshoes, this entailed tossing rings towards a spike in the ground some distance away. To Parslow’s irritation, Thomas’s throws were rarely accurate and he was prone to closing his eyes and simply hurling the rings as far as he could. This resulted in long, and at times fruitless, searches for the hard-to-find rings.

When available, Thomas’s favourite outdoor play-fellow was his father, but Charles seldom had the energy to engage in child-driven games. For more consistent fellowship, Thomas relied on the cows, pigs, and ducks that also resided on the eighteen acres upon which Down House stood. During Charles’s “pigeon phase,” Thomas spent considerable time in his father’s pigeon house, where he quickly learned to mimic a number of pigeon sounds, including their warning call of distress: coo roo-c’too-coo. Thereafter, and with the amused collusion of his father, Thomas would loudly sound coo roo-c’too-coo each time a member of the clergy called upon the Darwins. A forewarned Charles could then hurriedly retreat to his bedroom with an apparent exacerbation of any number of physical symptoms, much to Emma’s annoyance.

Thomas was also inclined to flee to his bedroom to avoid company and was generally perceived as shy. His smallish room was located on the second floor, one of the many bedrooms in Down House’s large three-storey structure, which had been altered and expanded over the years to accommodate the growing numbers of Darwins and domestic staff. One means to entice Thomas downstairs was the sound of a billiards game. Just prior to Thomas’s birth, a billiards table had been installed in the old dining room, and the game immediately became a favourite form of recreation for the entire household. It was Thomas’s task to methodically organize the balls at the beginning of each family tournament using a triangular rack that had been crafted expertly out of cork by Jackson, the Darwins’ groom.⁶ Charles often won, likely because Emma had instructed her sons “never to beat Papa.”

Thomas would also leave the security of his room on the sound of a secret knock. Thomas’s bedroom was directly beside larger quarters shared by Henrietta and Elizabeth. On hearing three taps in rapid succession, Thomas would dutifully open his door and descend partway down the staircase as his sisters furtively dressed in their mother’s jewels and wardrobe. The former were kept in a simple locked wooden box that first had to be quietly removed from their mother’s room. As the key fitted badly, Henrietta and Emma often resorted to violently shaking and bashing the box before it would open. Again, Thomas’s skills as a pigeon were required as he timed loud calls of coo roo-c’too-coo to mask the sounds arising from his sisters’ inept thievery. These calls had the unintended consequence of also sending his well-trained father scurrying to his room only to emerge some time later, uncertain as to whether any of his physical symptoms were still required. Otherwise, when not involved in such clandestine activities, Thomas preferred to spend long hours in his comfortable but cluttered room, reading, drawing, and, most satisfying of all, organizing his various collections.

From a young age, Thomas was an entrenched collector. Though he amassed all sorts of objects, his greatest passion was for accumulating buttons. These were organized by size, shape, and colour, and were sorted into trays and jars that Thomas appropriated from his father’s dissecting supplies. As Thomas’s expertise increased, he also began to identify each button on the basis of its composition. This was challenging, as many button materials closely resembled each other. Thomas taught himself to insert a fine, heated needle in the back of each button in order to smell for a distinct odour, such as the stagnant saltwater smell associated with tortoise-shell. The technique was time-consuming, but it allowed Thomas to sort and re-sort his buttons according to finer distinctions and also garnered his father’s admiration for his methodical perseverance.

Although Thomas was free to retire to his room as he wished, he was generally expected to spend evenings with other members of his family. After a relatively late and simple tea, it was the Darwins’ custom to gather in their large unpretentious drawing-room. This was a time for discussion, affable loitering, and two rituals, the first of which was the collective reading aloud of novels.⁷ Thomas’s favourite story was The Ugly Duckling as read by Henrietta. His eldest sister was masterful at impersonating the ducks whose dialogue animated the fairy tale. At one point in the story, a mother duck instructs her ducklings to “now bow your necks, and say ‘quack.’” Taking his cue, Thomas would dutifully bend his neck and boisterously “quack” along with Henrietta, much to the pleasure of the Darwin household.

Charles’s enjoyment of Thomas’s participation was twofold. Aside from revelling in Thomas’s joie de vivre, the transformation of a homely and unwanted baby bird into a graceful and beautiful swan was for Charles, above all, a “eugenics” parable.⁸ Although a swan’s egg had accidentally rolled into a duck’s nest, the ultimate superiority of the “ugly duckling” over the other barnyard ducks was predetermined by its genetic lineage. Charles, who supported the concept of selective breeding, saw Thomas’s enthusiasm for The Ugly Ducking as a sign he was a fellow eugenicist, one who recognized the importance of nature over nurture.

After the shared pleasure of reading, it was then time for backgammon, the second of the evening rituals. The games played by Charles and Emma were undertaken seriously, with Charles uncharacteristically boasting on one occasion, “Now the tally with my wife in backgammon stands thus: she, poor creature, has won only 2490 games, whilst I have won, hurrah, hurrah, 2795 games!” Although the children were expected to remain neutral, Thomas and his siblings would openly cheer their mother’s victories.

Following backgammon, Emma, a competent pianist, might then entertain the family by playing a number of classical pieces. This was an opportunity for Thomas to do his schoolwork, to read, or to quietly withdraw to his room. By half past ten, it was bedtime for Thomas and the entire Darwin household.

TWO
SCHOOL DAYS

At age ten, following the summer of 1868, Thomas was enrolled at Clapham, the school where each of his brothers (except William) had been educated. He remained there as a boarding student until the age of nineteen. As in other private boarding schools in Victorian England, lessons were confined predominantly to the study of classics. Instructional methods emphasized rote learning and verse-making. For most students, the tedium was only partially relieved by compulsory participation in the seasonal athletic programs (usually cricket, football, cross-country running, and fencing), the appalling and repetitive school meals, and time spent, after last bell, avoiding the abuses of senior boys.

Each student’s stay at Clapham was associated with an individual casebook (or student file). Under the date September 14th, 1868, Thomas’s name stands in the General Admission Register: “Thomas Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, of Down” along with the modest, albeit misleading, description of his father’s occupation — “country gentleman.” Within his student file, still housed along with those of his classmates in the National Archives of England, cursory identifying data is followed by the headmaster’s brief yearly note, each dated on or around June 1st, from 1869 to 1877 inclusive.

The annual notes for each student were virtually identical, and those written in the first few years of Thomas’s enrollment by a Mr. Pritchard are hardly illuminating.

“June 1st, 1869. Thomas has passed the year’s examinations and is eligible for advancement. Pritchard.”

“June 1st, 1870. Ibid.”

“June 1st, 1871. Ibid.”

In autumn, 1871, a Dr. Wrigley was appointed the new headmaster and, perhaps due to a newcomer’s enthusiasm, a more substantial note next appeared in Thomas’s casebook.

“June 3rd, 1872. Thomas is a quiet and obedient boy of avrage [sic] ability. Isolated but cooperative when approached. Hardworking, honest, and upright. Eligible for advancement. Wrigley.”

Wrigley’s assessment confirmed Charles and Emma’s fears. Although doubtlessly pleased with Dr. Wrigley’s positive estimation of Thomas’s character, the two had privately hoped that, once enrolled at Clapham, Thomas might engage in the typical male camaraderie of adolescence. Until then, they had attributed Thomas’s solitary nature to a lack of social opportunity. To Charles and Emma’s disappointment, however, Thomas remained uninterested in acquiring close friends even when surrounded by boys his age. “Still alone but not lonely,” as a resigned Emma reported to Aunt Fanny.

After his initial note, Wrigley’s annual entries succumbed to the formulaic. Thomas continued to be promoted annually, and in his final year at Clapham, he capably passed the entrance examinations for Cambridge. Charles and Emma seemed content with Thomas’s consistent, if unremarkable, school performance. Based on Emma’s correspondence, Thomas’s single frustration was his inability to find like-minded hobbyists. “The children are well … As for Thomas, he is still at Clapham. He seems to have inherited a dislike of Greek and Latin, but otherwise attends to his work seriously. Charles and I were not surprised that his efforts to start a Button Club failed to attract a single fellow. Yet overall, he has been quite contented there.”⁹

Although Clapham was a boarding school, it was located just six miles from Down House and, due to this proximity, Thomas routinely returned home for weekends during school terms, as well as for summer recesses. By now he was also viewed as sufficiently mature to assist his father’s research. Although overshadowed in significance by his “species” work, Charles Darwin was then conducting a series of botanical experiments, often with the aid not only of his gardener and under-gardener, but of his family as well. Their laboratory, initially the extensive garden at Down House, was later supplemented by the addition of a small hothouse.

Throughout the early 1870s, Thomas played an essential role in confirming his father’s discovery that the plant Drosera (more commonly known as the sundew) was capable of trapping and, seemingly, digesting insects. Charles had noticed the sundew, “when properly excited”, secreted a substance analogous to an animal’s digestive fluid. In the experiments required to substantiate this observation, it was Thomas’s task to “excite” the plants. At first, Thomas chose to leave raw meat on the sundew’s sticky glandular tentacles. By chance, Thomas then discovered that emotional encouragement enhanced the sundew’s secretions. His technique progressed from rather crude facial distortions to more effective gentle caresses of the plant’s uppermost stem, sometimes cooing as he did so. His father’s book, Insectivorous Plants, in which Charles acknowledged Thomas’s contribution, was published in 1875. Thomas subsequently assisted with the experiments his father conducted on the formation of vegetable mould as well as those related to the fertilization and movements of various plants.¹⁰

When time allowed, Thomas continued to enlarge his button collection. To his regret, one ill-advised acquisition led to a rare fraternal altercation. After removing a great horn button from his brother Leonard’s new jacket, and substituting a small, glued piece of cardboard, Thomas was angrily confronted by the usually even-tempered Leonard. Thomas immediately apologized and reattached the original horn button using stiff copper wire. “As good as new!” according to Emma. Nevertheless, Leonard now mistrusted Thomas and, for the next few months, insisted on hiding all his clothes under an old chesterfield in the drawing-room.

It was during this period of tension that Thomas turned to coin collecting, a new interest sparked by a welcome discovery. Sometime in early 1869, when out for a hike with Horace, Thomas came across what he believed were two ancient British coins. Encouraged by their father, the two brothers reported the find, published on February 25th, 1869, in the London Numismatics Monthly Intelligencer. Accompanying the submission was Thomas’s confident pencil sketch of the two coins.

COINAGE OF THE ANCIENT BRITONS AT DOWN

We wish to report that one of us (T. D.) has recently found on Keston Common in the parish of Down, six miles from the village of Bromley, two very old coins, which we believe to be of ancient British origin. One, which appears the older, depicts the image of a head on its obverse; on the reverse there are a chariot and four horses (Fig. A). The depictions on the second coin are much less detailed. On the obverse there is now only a laurel wreath; a single horse on the reverse (Fig. B). As Keston Common is so close to London, we have thought that you might like to include this little notice in the Intelligencer.

Horace Darwin and Thomas Darwin, Down,

Kent

Figure 3. Two Ancient British Coins (Illustrations by Thomas Darwin, from “Coinage of the Ancient Britons at Down,” 1869).

Drawing by Catherine MacDonald.

The published report indicated the coins were found in Keston Common, a lowland heath located about two miles from Down House. This setting was to take on a more ominous connotation for Thomas just a few months later. Some years before, his father had been prescribed horseback riding for therapeutic purposes and had found the grasslands and fields of the nearby common a convenient place to ride. Although his ill health persisted, Charles enjoyed the exercise until one day in early April, 1869, when his “quiet cob Tommy stumbled and fell, rolling on him and bruising him seriously.” Thomas witnessed the misadventure and was traumatized. Shaken, he retreated into his bedroom for a number of days, consoling himself with repeated games of shadow puppets. Thereafter, he had an aversion to horses and experienced significant anxiety in their presence. Although Charles Darwin never raised the matter with either Emma or Thomas, he was privately convinced the earlier rocking horse incident was responsible for his son’s brief, but otherwise puzzling, regression.

When not working or in school, Thomas’s adolescence was also characterized by the social milestones and activities of a large Victorian family. The happier occasions included the marriages of three siblings: Henrietta Emma to Richard Buckley Litchfield in 1871; Francis to Amy Richenda Ruck in 1874; and William Erasmus to Sara Sedgwick in 1877.

In 1876, the birth of Thomas’s first nephew (Bernard) was followed by the tragic loss of Bernard’s young mother who, just one week later, died of puerperal fever. Afterwards, Thomas’s widowed brother Francis returned to Down House with his young son. Although the baby was a great joy to the entire household, Bernard had a particular affinity for Thomas, an affection that was shared. Together, they would search for gooseberries in the woods surrounding Down House so that Grandmamma Emma could make her much-loved gooseberry cream. Thomas would also spend long hours gently pushing Bernard on the swing that Thomas’s Uncle Erasmus (known as Uncle Ras) had suspended between two yew trees years before.

Figure 4. Charles Darwin on His Horse Tommy.

CUL location-MS. DAR.225:116. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

One favourite family anecdote concerning Thomas and Bernard involved a secret potion. Charles had once taken pleasure in astounding a very young Thomas with variously dyed polyanthuses and primroses that he produced by watering the plants with coloured fluids. It became Uncle Thomas’s responsibility to educate his nephew in similar manner. A triumphant Bernard was then allowed to present these alchemic concoctions to his father Francis and to Grandmamma and Grandpapa. Even Charles Darwin feigned amazement and would beg to learn from a pleased and proud Bernard how such transformations had been achieved.

Thomas and Bernard’s mutual joy was Polly, a rough white terrier and cherished Darwin family pet. Generally docile and content to remain indoors, Polly would sit serenely for hours, staring out the drawing-room window. On sighting Thomas and Bernard in the gardens, however, she would madly bark and race around the drawing-room, mollified only on reuniting with her glimpsed masters. Such enthusiasm was deemed worthy of description by Charles Darwin, and Polly’s contortions are reported in much greater detail under the heading of “Exuberance” in the second edition of Expression of the Emotions, published posthumously in 1890.¹¹

Throughout Thomas’s youth, the Darwins occasionally undertook brief family holidays, in Emma’s hope that a change of scenery would improve her husband’s frail health. Journeys of note involving Thomas included a trip to Torquay in June and July of 1861; a house in Malvern Wells in the autumn of 1863; six weeks in Dimbola Lodge, Isle of Wight, during the summer of 1868; and time spent in Caerdeon, in North Wales, in the summer of 1869. In 1872, Thomas travelled independently to Staffordshire where he summered with his Wedgwood relations. There, he worked during the day at the Etruria Works Pottery, founded by his maternal great-grandfather Josiah Wedgwood I. It was then common for boys his age to carry moulds from the potters to the stoves — tedious and dangerous employment. Other risks also had to be considered. Emma, for one, was extremely concerned that Thomas, only fifteen, might be prematurely attracted to one of many first cousins he met during this visit. By her count, there were already four first cousin marriages involving the Darwin and Wedgwood families, including Emma’s own marriage to Charles. As Emma confided to her Aunt Fanny Allen, “There is such a strong inclination on both sides of Thomas’s family to marry first cousins.”

Emma suspected that Thomas’s affections would be most vulnerable while attending the large family dances held at Maer Hall, the Wedgwood’s country home. Thankfully, at least from Emma’s perspective, Thomas had once attended a dancing class with his sisters Henrietta and Elizabeth. Just seven, and the only boy, Thomas had been forced to wear baggy velvet knickerbockers that ended above his knees. After class, Emma found him sobbing outside on the curb-stone. The unpleasant association remained with Thomas and it was a relieved Emma who wrote to Aunt Fanny that, “Thomas, having never taken to dancing, has resisted all overtures to join his cousins on the dance floor. Hurrah, hurrah!”

Figure 5. Etruria Works

on the Trent and Mersey Canal. Photo taken in 1898 by one of the employees. Accessed from the “Home of the North Staffordshire Potteries” website, maintained by Steven Birks. Copyright holder unknown.

Charles was also worried that Thomas might be captivated by a first cousin, but not because Thomas was too young. Based on his readings and his botanical experiments, Charles had become aware that in-bred plants frequently perished or otherwise fared poorly when forced to compete with other plants. Fearing that the ill effects of inbreeding also applied to other species, and that his and Emma’s children were thereby at-risk, Charles lobbied to have the Census Act of 1871 address the prevalence of cousin marriages. After this effort proved unsuccessful, Charles then encouraged his son George to statistically examine whether concerns about cousin marriages were justified.¹² To assist his research, George conscripted Thomas’s services for the entire summer of 1873.

It became Thomas’s task to identify all same-surname marriages announced in the Pall Mall Gazette (between the years 1869 and 1872) and as they appeared in the pedigrees of Burke’s Landed Gentry. There were a number of confounding variables, as not all same-surname marriages reflected marriage between cousins, and different-name first cousin marriages were not identified. Nevertheless, Thomas’s meticulous gleanings allowed his brother to cautiously estimate the proportion of cousin marriages in the general population. George then examined data addressing the death rate amongst the offspring of cousins as well as whether first cousin marriages had any effect on the production of insanity or idiocy. Although he felt the prevailing concerns regarding first cousin marriages were exaggerated, George regrettably concluded that he, Thomas, and all others in similar hereditary circumstances were indeed at greater risk for various ill-defined maladies.

Whether the above analyses dissuaded or redirected Thomas’s amorous inclinations, if any, is unclear. As Thomas grew older, however, the nature of Emma’s concern shifted. She began to wish Thomas would show more interest in the daughters of various acquaintances, worrying that Thomas might ultimately choose the “companionship of clever men at clubs over female chit-chat in the drawing-room.”

In summary, Thomas Darwin’s adolescence appears to have been relatively benign. School was tolerable, and Down House was, in general, a quiet but easeful residence, punctuated with moments of activity stemming from the comings and goings of his older siblings, the stays of Aunt Fanny or other congenial relations, and the occasional visits of his father’s scientific friends. At age nineteen, with the monotony of Clapham successfully behind him, an apparently healthy Thomas left home for Cambridge.