Annie's Box - Charles Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution

Randal Keynes

Riverhead Trade

2002

448 páginas

14h 56m

ISBN-10: 1573229555

Annie was Darwin’s first daughter, who died at the age of ten in 1851. Her box – actually her writing case – passed to Randal Keynes’ father, who was Charles Darwin’s great-grandson. The box contained mementoes and some notes by Darwin recording the fluctuating state of Annie’s health in the months before her death. Investigation of the box and its contents led Keynes to explore the lives of Annie and of the Darwin family in general. His book is, in effect, a joint biography of Annie and her father which seeks to uncover the joys and the heartaches of Victorian family life and to throw light on Darwin’s increasingly pessimistic image of nature and human origins.

Annie was her father’s favourite child and both he and his wife, Emma, were devastated by her premature death (probably, Keynes concludes, from tuberculosis). The death of a young child was still all too common in Victorian times, and two of Darwin’s closest colleagues – Thomas Henry Huxley and Joseph Dalton Hooker – went through the same trauma. Keynes explores the functioning of the Darwin family as it coped with the trials and tribulations of raising children in such uncertain times. This is an extremely personal and often moving account which throws much more light than most biographies on this side of Darwin’s life. The agony of losing Annie was compounded in Darwin’s mind by the thought that she might have inherited his own poor constitution. Keynes tells us about the illnesses of both the father and the daughter, throwing light on the medical practices of the time as well as the widespread conviction that characters are indeed passed on from one generation to the next.

A major theme of Keynes’s book is the correlation between Darwin’s personal life and the development of his theory of evolution. He is not the first to notice that following Annie’s death Darwin became much less tolerant of traditional Christian beliefs and far more open to the view that nature was a scene of relentless struggle and suffering. In the early stages of his theory’s development, he had tried to retain at least an element of the old belief in a benevolent Creator. But Annie’s death seemed to highlight the purposelessness of nature, its sheer indifference to personal values and human feelings. No more would Darwin compromise with the past: natural theology was dead for him, and he would develop his theory in a way that would throw down the gauntlet to those who were still trusting in the old platitudes. Keynes may not be the first to explore this growing sense of pessimism, but his personal involvement with the family and its tragedy has allowed him to write an evocative and effective account of this classic example of the way in which scientific thinking can be influenced by personal and social factors.