The Reluctant Mr. Darwin by David Quammen Page B

(published in 1839), and a father of two, thanks to Emma. He had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, Britain’s foremost scientific club. But he was still stuck in an ugly little row house in filthy, raucous London, and still slogging his way through the less glorious, more technical publishing chores that had followed from the five-year expedition. As for his transmutation theory, nothing. Nothing published, anyway. Nothing written except those disjointed notes and an occasional coy hint, in a letter to a friend, that he was working on the question of species and varieties. To his close colleague Lyell he had let drop his doubt that species have a divinely decreed beginning. In his Journal he had mentioned the Galápagos mockingbirds and finches, different species on different islands, but declined to speculate further on such a “curious subject.” He wanted to tell people about his theory, and he didn’t. It wasn’t ready. He wasn’t ready. He had finished with his transmutation notebooks, three years earlier, and let them sit. Among his more overt reasons for inaction on the “curious subject” were that he had been too hectically busy and too often sick.
    The mysterious vomiting, headaches, and other knockdown symptoms continued to afflict him intermittently. He had resigned from his secretaryship of the Geological Society, citing bad health, a legitimate excuse but also one that allowed him to immerse himself more fully in his own work. Intellectual hobnobbing was fine for those with the stomach; he found it literally nauseating. He was over the loneliness he’d felt aboard the Beagle , satiated with the sort of chirpy socializing his brother enjoyed, and had begun the process of retreating from London scientific circles into a reclusive life of research, writing, and invalidism. His marriage to Emma, entered in such a pragmatic and passionless spirit, had started developing toward what it would eventually be: an extraordinarily close mutual devotion and an asymmetric dependency, with her serving as his chief nurse and protectress. Even before the later children (eight more of them) arrived, those roles were enough to keep Emma busy—and, it seems, satisfied. She didn’t need to function as her husband’s intellectual sounding board, or as his transcriber, or his copyeditor, to feel fully engaged with his life.
    Besides, there was still that “painful void” between his thinking and her beliefs, which neither of them cared to accentuate. They knew that their disagreements about God, scripture, creation, and afterlife were wide and irresolvable. Three years earlier, not long after their marriage, Emma had written Charles an earnest letter, describing her struggle to come to terms with his science-driven impiety. She was ambivalent, she admitted. She wanted to feel that “while you are acting conscientiously and sincerely wishing and trying to learn the truth, you cannot be wrong.” On the other hand, she couldn’t always give herself that comfort. She worried that “the habit in scientific pursuits of believing nothing till it is proved” had blinded him to the importance of revelation. She wondered whether Charles hadn’t been unduly influenced by his careless, doubting brother, Erasmus. She warned him gently of the danger to his immortal soul if, rejecting dogma, betting against orthodox views of spiritual reward and punishment, he was wrong. “Everything that concerns you concerns me,” Emma wrote, “and I should be most unhappy if I thought we did not belong to each other for ever.” He didn’t want her to be perpetually unhappy, not in this life, let alone any other. So he preferred to let the matter drop—at least until he published his theory, whenever that might be.
    But he never forgot her letter. He saved it among his private papers, in fact, and occasionally pulled it out to reread.
    For the