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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 20 May 2022

Taken: 19 May 2022

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Charles Darwin, A New Life •
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Down House

Down House
DOWN HOUSE IN 1872, after Darwin's many additions



www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/the-house-where-darwin-lived-4277158

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
In mid-July (1842) Charles and Emma returned to London to prepare for their coming move to the country. This move, which they had decided on two years earlier, was dictated mainly on grounds of Charle’s health and in accordance with strong medical advice. There were other reasons as well. Charles loved observing animals and plants and was eager to start experiments in connection with his species work, which could only be done in the country. Moreover, both he and Emma disliked living in the Great Wen and welcomed the prospects of fresh air. After house-hunting for some time in Surrey, they had eventually decided on Down House, on the Down House, on the outskirts of the village of Downe (The name of the village is spelt with “e”, the house without) near Oprington in Kent. Although agreeably isolated, it was only fifteen miles from St. Paul’s and therefore reasonably accessible. The drive to the nearest railway station, over eight miles, was undesirable long; but with ten miles more and frequent trains the total journey time, Charles estimated would be about two hours. ~ Page 246

In a long letter of 24th July 1842 to his sister Cathrine, intended also for his father’s eyes, Charles gives a detailed description of the location and surrounding countryside, referring to the house itself only toward the end

Village about 40 houses with old walnut trees in middle where stands an old flint church and the lanes meet. -- inhabitants very respectable. Infant school -- grown up people great musicians -- all touch their hats as in Wales, and sit at their open doors in evening, no high-road Leads through village. -- The little pot-house, where we slept in a grocers-shop and the land-lord is the carpenter -- so you may guess the style of the village -- There are but butcher and baker and post office. A carrier goes weekly to London and calls anywhere for anything in London, and takes anything anywhere -- On the road to the village, on fine day scenery absolutely beautiful: from close to our house, view, very distant and rather beautiful -- but house being situated on rather high table-land, had somewhat a desolate air -- There is most beautiful old farm-house with great thatched barns and old stumps, of oak-trees like that of Shelton, on field off. -- The charm of the place to me is that almost every filed is intersected (as alas is ours) by one or more extraordinary rural and quiet with narrow lanes and a high hedges and hardly any ruts -- It is really surprising to think London is only 16 miles off. -- The house stands very badly close to a tiny lane and near another man’s field -- Our field is 15 acres and flat, looking into flat-bottomed valleys on both sides, but no view from drawing-room, wh: faces due South except our own flat field and bits of rather ugly distant horizon. -- Close in front, there are some old (very productive) cherry-trees, walnut-trees, -- yew, -- spanish-chestnut, -- pear -- old larch, scotch-fir and silver fir and old mulberry-trees make rather a pretty group -- They give the ground an old look, but from not flourishing much also give it rather a desolate look. There are quinces and medlars and plums with plenty of fruit, and Marelles-cherries, but few apples. -- The purple magnolia flowers against house: There is really fine beech in view of our hedge. -- the kitchen garden is a detestable slip and the soil looks wretched from quantity of chalk flits, but I really believe it is productive. The hedges grow well all around our field, and it is noted piece of Hay-land . . . Page 246/247
3 years ago. Edited 3 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Charles Darwin ~ A New Life
3 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/the-house-where-darwin-lived-4277158

Charles Darwin lived with his wife, children and servants in Down House, a Georgian manor 15 miles south of London in the Kent countryside, for 40 years—from 1842 to 1882. Like all close-knit families, they did not just live in this house, they created a remarkable home here. Emma and Charles adapted Down House and the 20 or so acres of its grounds, extending the building and gardens continually, so they could nurture a large family and a community within it, built on routines, mutual respect, adaptation, tolerance, affection and good humor.

In his book Art Matters, the art theorist Peter de Bolla claims that we must attend to what paintings “know,” what knowledge they contain in themselves that is separate from what their makers might have known; coming back to visit Darwin’s house last fall, in rich autumnal sunshine, I wondered what Down House might know, not just about Darwin and his family but about kinship and community.

Once Emma died, in 1896, 14 years after her husband, the house was rented out to tenants and spent some time as a girls’ school, but from the late 1920s various attempts were made to preserve it as a monument to Darwin. An institution called English Heritage acquired Down House in 1996 and restored it; it is open to visitors year-round and now has a small museum, a shop and a parking lot. Though it was the home of a wealthy country squire, it was always a family house, not at all showy, and its curators have kept it that way. There’s a large hallway with cupboards built to store tennis rackets and boots and old manuscripts. Off it branch high-ceilinged family rooms: a billiards room, Darwin’s study, a drawing room, a dining room. Upstairs is a school room and bedrooms and, on the third floor, servants’ quarters. The high windows have solid-panel shutters that fold back into their frames, so the boundary between inside and outside seems permeable; trees and green are visible everywhere through glass; light pours in.

A few years after Darwin had established a life here and become the father of the first four of his ten children, he wrote to his friend Robert FitzRoy, captain of the research vessel HMS Beagle, with delight: “My life goes on like Clockwork, and I am fixed on the spot where I shall end it.” It was a kind of private joke, one that FitzRoy probably didn’t get. Darwin’s head was full of barnacles at the time—he was trying to map and understand the entire group and would continue for another eight years, so when he wrote “I am fixed on the spot where I shall end it,” he was thinking of himself as a barnacle that had glued itself to a rock now that its free-swimming days were over.
7 weeks ago. Edited 2 weeks ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
The routines were not just Darwin’s; the house ran like clockwork, too. Emma made sure of that. Everyone worked to time and in time. Yet it was also a liberal house, always slightly untidy, muddied from the passing of children and their dogs and cluttered with the saucers and jars of perpetual natural history experiments.

Darwin needed this house to be a refuge. Though he was sometimes gregarious and social, he suffered from a debilitating illness that made him uncomfortable among strangers. The symptoms, which included nausea, vomiting and flatulence, embarrassed him. Scholars still disagree on the cause of Darwin’s condition: Some say it was a tropical disease contracted on the Beagle voyage; others argue that it was anxiety-related or an allergic reaction to food. Despite his illness, Darwin would need to go up to London—to attend events, dinners, meetings and to buy equipment such as dissecting scissors or a new microscope, or to order wallpaper with Emma or to see the monkeys at the zoo with the children—but living only 15 miles away he could be back quickly. And at home, he could retreat into his study, where he had everything he needed behind a little screen—pills, bowls, towels, hot water—and where he could give himself up to his illness.

Darwin’s study is darker than the other rooms, a cave, a sanctuary, a room for thinking, reading, writing and dissection. It has been reconstructed just as it was when Darwin used it: a delightful jumble of original furniture rescued by the family from attics and storerooms, surfaces cluttered with bottles, books, microscopes, even the spool young George made for his father’s string. The room brilliantly recreates the “general air of simpleness, makeshift, & general oddness” that his son Francis fondly remembered. Here is the mirror that Darwin had placed so that he could spot unwanted visitors approaching up the drive and slip away if he needed to. Here is the low stool with casters that he used to spin himself from one desk where he dissected in front of the window to another where he took notes or wrote up labels—the stool the children were allowed to use for their games, punting themselves around the living room with long poles. Here is the rotating table containing his dissecting equipment, forceps, ink, small bottles, rolls of string, sealing wax and small squares of sanding paper. It made me want to rummage in the drawers, unstopper the bottles to smell the preserving fluids, look down the microscope, sit in that sagging chair.

The children were allowed into the study occasionally, as long as they did not disturb their father for too long. They came looking for bits of string or glue or sometimes to smuggle their father the snuff he loved but which Emma rationed. Through the 1840s and ’50s it was a room given over almost entirely to barnacles—dissected, preserved, fossilized—piled high with white pillboxes in which Darwin kept the hundreds of labeled specimens sent to him from collectors all over the world; some are still there. When George visited a friend during this time and was told his friend’s father did not have a study, he asked incredulously: “But where does your father do his barnacles?”
The father in Down House did barnacles and he did bees and he did carnivorous plants and he did worms. And if the father did them, so did the children. These children were willing and happy assistants to their attentive father, fascinated by his explanations of the natural world. As soon as they were old enough, they were recruited to oversee certain experiments—to observe seeds growing on saucers arranged on windowsills, or to play music to worms, or to follow and map the flight path of the honeybees across the Down House gardens. They were also the subject of his studies; he watched them play and laugh and cry, keeping notebooks full of observations of the young human animals they were.
2 weeks ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Charles Darwin and Emma
2 weeks ago.

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