5 Charles Darwin – The Early Years
Charles Darwin, born in 1809, was the fifth child of Robert Darwin, a prosperous
local doctor living in Shrewsbury, the county town of Shropshire. Charles was also
the grandson of Erasmus Darwin, one of the most famous men in England, who was
not only a doctor but also a noted poet, inventor and natural scientist. Erasmus Darwin
formed the Lichfield Botanical Society which, despite its name, comprised only three
men, to translate the works of the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus from Latin into
English. This took seven years and the result was two publications: A System of
Vegetables between 1783 and 1785, and The Families of Plants in 1787. Erasmus
Darwin was also one of the first people to suggest that existing species might have
evolved from earlier life, an idea which he expressed in verse:
Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs’d in oceans pearly caves;
First, forms minute, unseen by spheric glass
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.
Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature, 1803Charles Darwin remembered his childhood as very happy even though his mother,
Susannah Wedgwood, died when he was only eight years old. His three older sisters
took over his early education and doted on their little ‘Bobby’. On his tenth birthday
he was sent off to a nearby boarding school but would run home when his lessons were
over to spend a delightful hour or two with his sisters. The young Darwin showed a
special interest in the world of the fields around him. He joined the Victorian mania for
collecting natural history specimens and he found beetles, butterflies, rocks, fossils,
ferns, flowers, all to be taken home, described, catalogued and displayed in cabinets.
Such was his interest in the natural world that he wrote, ‘I could not understand
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