by MATTHEW SWEET
When he became a father, Charles Darwin began taking notes on the emotional development of his children. Such record-making was part of the rhythm of the household. He logged the weather, his farts and sneezes, and the behaviour of the earthworms he kept in a jar on the piano. His offspring were too compelling a source of data to ignore.
Willie was his first-born. Darwin tickled his feet with a spill of paper and watched for laughter. Annie arrived 14 months later. Darwin observed the moment when she first responded to her own reflection in the polished case of his fob watch; and her consternation when a wafer biscuit became stuck to her hand. It was the crying, though, that most aroused his curiosity. Darwin kept a careful record of these outbursts, noting when eyes were dry, when filled with tears – and concluded that though we may wail from the moment we emerge from the womb, it takes time to develop the facility for weeping. “I first noticed this fact”, he wrote, “from having accidentally brushed with the cuff of my coat the open eye of one of my infants, when 77 days old, causing this eye to water freely; and though the child screamed violently, the other eye remained dry, or was only slightly suffused with tears.” Crying, he decided, “required some practice”.
Darwin collected most of these data in the 1840s, when his children were young. It was the calmest decade of his life. The voyage of the Beagle was behind him; he had settled with his wife, Emma, in Down House, a comfortable villa in rural Kent. The reading public was devouring the published account of his South American travels, which detailed his tortoise-steak dinners on the Galapagos, his excavation of a fossilised giant sloth and his reflections on the human specimens he encountered on the way. On his desk lay the notes for “On the Origin of Species”. When it appeared in 1859, the book erupted like a cultural Krakatoa. Over 150 years later, we are still living through its aftershock. It looms so large that we are inclined to forget its author’s other published work. Most of all, perhaps, the book nourished by his domestic explorations in Kent, and which, through more subtle channels, also exerted a profound effect upon the future.
“The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” (1872) compared the emotional subjects with whom Darwin shared his home with ones he had encountered on his travels – and hundreds more he would never meet. In a spectacular example of Victorian crowdsourcing, he fired off hundreds of letters and questionnaires to correspondents all over the world. He implored a biologist in Brazil to tell him whether South American monkeys wrinkled their eyes “when they cry from grief or pain”. From a phalanx of missionaries and doctors he drew reports on the weeping habits of the Australian Aboriginals. James Brooke, the Rajah of Sarawak, supplied emotional intelligence on the Dayaks of Borneo. Tristram Speedy, guardian to Prince Alamayu Simeon of Abyssinia, gave a long-distance lesson in east African passions.
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