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CHARLES DARWIN IN SHREWSBURY

Charles Robert Darwin was born at The Mount, Shrewsbury, on 12 February 1809.

His father, Dr Robert Waring Darwin, had come to Shrewsbury in 1786 as a young man of 20 and had started to practice here with no more than £20 from his father and £20 from an uncle to begin with. He became known in the district when he disagreed with two established medical men on a diagnosis and was proved right. Ten years after his arrival, he was so well established that he could afford to marry and buy land at The Mount on which he built the present house. His wife was Susannah the eldest daughter of Josiah Wedgwood.

The Darwins had 6 children, of whom Charles was the second son and 5th child. Both parents were Unitarian, and there is a tablet to Charles in the High Street Chapel. However, Mrs Darwin is said to have attended St Chad's and Charles was baptised there on 17 November 1809. The font then in use was not the large one now in the new church: it was (in all probability) the small wooden one with china bowl which can be seen in Old St Chad's.

The Darwins took an interest in botany and zoology and the gardens at The Mount were filled with rare shrubs, trees and flowers. The Mount pigeons were noted for their beauty and tameness, the children had pet birds and animals. It was a strict household, though not abnormally so for the period. Charles wrote of his father 'he was generally in high spirits and laughed and joked with everyone — often with his servants —

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with the utmost freedom; yet he had the art of making everyone obey him to the letter', and he commented 'to give pleasure to others was to my father an intense pleasure'. On the other hand, he was unusually sensitive to the pain he had to witness, so that every road out of Shrewsbury came to have unpleasant associations to him and no doubt he often came home weary and irritable — a Wedgwood cousin Emma (Charles' future wife) thought he had little patience with boys, 'he was a fidgety man and the noise and untidiness of a boy were unpleasant to him' — when she stayed at The Mount, she was glad to see the Doctor leave the house and sorry when he returned.

Dr Darwin was a very big man, 6ft 2ins, and weighed something like 24 stone — a contemporary described him as 'farmer-looking' when he drove round in his yellow chaise. He treated the poor of Frankwell free, so that they 'flocked to his house for relief as a matter of right' but to save their pride he used to tell them they must pay for the medicine bottles! His Success with his patients was partly due to his sympathy and psychological insight, partly to his very accurate observation and exceptional powers of -memory — he often jumped to the right conclusion without exactly knowing how. Charles gives several instances of this in his Autoboigraphy [sic].

Charles was first taught by his bossy sister Caroline and then in the spring of 1817 when he was 8, he was sent to a day school kept by the Unitarian Minister, the Rev G Case, at No 13 Claremont Hill. This house still stands, unchanged. The schoolroom was at the back, looking out on St Chad's churchyard and Charles remembered watching the burial of a soldier. 'It is surprising how clearly I can still see the horse with the man's empty boots and carbine suspended to the saddle and the firing over the grave'. The burial register dates this episode as 23 August 1817, and the funeral that of William Matthews of the 15th Hussars.

A month before, Charles' mother had died after a period as an invalid, which had separated her from her younger children. Family grief put a taboo on any mention of her, and (as often happens in these circumstances) her 8 year old son remembered very little about her in later life. At the time he reacted to her death by stealing fruit from his father's kitchen garden. This had a high wall round it and was kept locked in the evening, but with the aid of neighbouring trees, Charles climbed to the coping and 'by fixing a long stick into the hole at the bottom of a rather large flower-pot and by dragging this upwards, pulled off peaches and plums which fell into the pot and the prizes were thus secured'. He used to give apples to the boys from a nearby cottage and was delighted when they told him they had never seen a boy run so fast!

In the summer of 1818 he went to 'Dr Butler's great school in Shrewsbury' as a boarder, thus having 'the great advantage of living the life of a true school-boy while on the other hand being so near home that he could run there between calling over and lock-up 'this 1 think was in many ways advantageous to me by keeping up home affections and interests'. Charles does not add, that life at the School was primitive in the extreme — only foot-pans in which to wash, 20-30 boys sharing a dormitory with a single window, damp beds and poor food. Even Dr Darwin was induced to ask for an extra blanket for Charles, who had recently recovered from scarlet fever, and got a very huffy reply from the Headmaster. Charles does criticise the purely classical curriculum as entirely useless to him; he had no linguistic ability.

Shrewsbury School had been founded in 1552 and was still housed in 16th and 17th century buildings opposite the Castle. These buildings are now the Shrewsbury Library and outside them is a bronze figure of its most famous scholar. Charles from being a little boy had a passion for collecting and his mother had encouraged his taste for natural history and botany. He remarks that none of his sisters or brother were collectors and that collecting might have made him 'a systematic naturalist, a virtuoso or a miser' — at the time, it seemed to his family more likely that he would waste his life on sport. He was devoted to shooting and loved angling; he took long solitary walks. His brother was keen on chemistry and 'made a fair laboratory with proper apparatus in the toolhouse in the garden and I was allowed to aid him as a servant in most of his experiments. He made all the gases and many compounds. The subject interested me greatly and we often used to go on working till rather late at night. This was the best part of my education at school, for it showed me practically the meaning of experimental science. The fact that we worked at chemistry somehow got known at school, and as it was an unprecedented fact, I was nicknamed Gas. I was also once publicly rebuked by the Headmaster Dr Butler for thus

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wasting my time over such useless subjects'.

He was introduced to geology by 'an old Mr Cotton in Shropshire who knew a good deal about rocks' and pointed out to him the 'well known erratic boulder in the town of Shrewsbury called the bellstone, so that later Charles records 'I felt the keenest delight when I first read of the action of icebergs in transporting boulders'.

The Bellstone is still to be seen, just inside the precincts of the Morris Hall, opposite the entrance to the market.

It was in Shropshire too that Charles first realised the importance of worm action in raising the level of soil over ruins, as at Viriconium, and in burying anything dropped on the surface of a field, as at Battlefield - this led in the end to his study of earthworms.

At the age of 16, Charles left Shrewsbury School for Edinburgh where he was to study medicine. He found the lectures incredibly dull.

After two years, his father became convinced he would not make a doctor, and sent him to Cambridge with the intention that he should be a parson. Charles himself thought he would enjoy a Country living, with time to give to natural history as a hobby. But during his last year at Cambridge he read Humbolt's Personal Narrative and Sir John Herschel's Introduction to the Study of Natural Philosophy and these 'stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science. No one or a dozen other books influenced me nearly so much as these two'.

As Charles had come up to Cambridge at Christmas 1828, he still had to fill in two terms after passing his final examination in 1831; and was persuaded to study geology. That August, Professor Sedgwick was visiting North Wales and stayed a night at The Mount; Charles told him of a labourer who claimed to have found a tropical shell in an old gravel pit nearby. 'He at once said (no doubt truly) that it must have been thrown away by someone into the pit; but then added, if really embedded there, it would be the greatest misfortune to geology, as it would overthrow all that he knew about the superficial deposits of the Midland counties. Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them'. Charles accompanied Sedgwick on his tour and learnt a good deal; what struck him, looking back, was that 'neither of us saw a trace of the wonderful glacial phenomenon all around us' in Cwm Idwal, because at that moment they were only searching for fossils.

He returned to Shrewsbury to find that letter waiting for him that was to change his life - the invitation to go as a naturalist on a voyage of the Beagle.

Charles was eager to go, his father objected, but allowed himself to be persuaded by Charles' uncle Josiah Wedgwood into giving consent. So Charles was out of England from the end of 1831 to October 1836 and only visited Shrewsbury occasionally afterwards. The voyage on the Beagle may have been the cause of the ill health which dogged the rest of his life; it certainly made him into a scientist.

In a letter he wrote in 1864, Charles Darwin stressed the need for complete accuracy and wrote 'by no means modify even in the slightest degree any result'. This is how he worked, testing each observation again and again. But he did all his observations with the minimum of equipment, and it is pleasant to know that when he was a scientist of world renown 'his chemical balance dated from his childhood experiments with his brother in the garden shed'.

Charles' mother died when he was eight years old, in 1817, and was buried at Montford 42 miles west of Shrewsbury. His father was also buried there in 1848. Charles Darwin died in 1882 aged 73 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. The Shropshire Horticultural Society erected a bronze statue in memory of him in 1897; it stands in front of the old Shrewsbury Grammar School.

[photographs:]

Shrewsbury Library: the school building where Charles Darwin was educated

Bronze statue of Charles Darwin situated outside Shrewsbury Library

Tombstone of Charles Darwin's father at Montford Bridge, Shrewsbury

Sources -

The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882, edited by his grand-daughter Nora Barlow (1958)

'Charles Darwin' by Edward Woodall, in Trans. Shrop. Arch. Soc. (1885). Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution. Gertrude Himmelfarb (1959). Letter by Charles Darwin sold at Sothebys 16 March 1964

'The Darwin Letters at Shrewsbury School' by Sir Gavin de Beer, in Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London (1968)