Emma Darwin gets her place in the sun

19/03/2007

 For the first time, the small pocket diaries of Emma Wedgwood Darwin (1808-1896) wife of Charles Darwin, can be seen by the public at Darwin Online. Previously known only to a few scholars of the Darwin Archive at Cambridge University Library, Emma’s diaries are have been made available through the kindness of their owner, Professor Richard Darwin Keynes.

The pocket diaries provide a wonderful historical resource as a social document of prosperous middle-class life in the Victorian era. The first diary is dated 1824, when Emma Wedgwood was sixteen, a lively and attractive young woman, shortly to participate in a European tour with her sisters and parents, Josiah and Bessy Wedgwood. She married Charles Darwin, her first cousin, in January 1839. The final diary in the collection records the last year of her life.

There are sixty diaries in total covering the years 1824, 1833-4, 1839-45 and 1848-96. Emma recorded many events such as visits and visitors, dinners and the health of her family including her husband Charles Darwin. Janet Browne, in her introduction to Emma's diaries online, says: "Emma Darwin used these little books to make notes of appointments, important family events, a seemingly endless succession of illnesses and remedies, primarily relating to her children and husband, visits to and from relatives and friends, concerts to attend, minor expenses, charitable activities and other daily memoranda.

"Indeed, they take the reader right to the heart of family life. On her marriage Emma first lived in London and then in 1842 moved to a large country house in Kent, where she ran a substantial household, comprising seven children (of the ten children born to Charles and Emma), with associated resident staff in the house, including a cook, parlour maid, nursemaids and a procession of governesses.

"Emma frequently hosted house parties of relatives, and entertained visiting scientists who came to consult, advise or pay homage to Darwin. These activities, sometimes amounting to ten or fifteen guests in the house, somewhat contradict Darwin’s comments about living a retired life in the country. In more personal terms, Emma's diaries also record in abbreviated form the ebb and flow of Darwin’s ill health and the extended illnesses of the children, including the death of their daughter Anne in 1851."