Charles Darwin: voyaging

As Irvine Loudon has remarked, many Georgian doctors made more money from their non-medical activities than from medicine. In Robert Darwin's case, it was from the changing world of canals, roads and loans for capital enterprises. It was not until his second year at the University of Edinburgh that Charles Darwin became aware that his father was rich and that he need not depend upon medicine for a career. Or, for that matter, the Church either. It was Robert Darwin who paid some £1,800 for his son's circumnavigation of the globe on H.M.S. Beagle between 1830 and 1836, as well as subsidizing the purchase of Down House in Kent in 1842. When his father died in 1848, Charles Darwin inherited £51,000, thus ensuring him a life of comfort as a country gentleman. To Alfred Tennyson the unchanging law of the universe was change itself, a conceit that Janet Browne happily exploits in this expansive and charmingly-written analytical account of Darwin's life up to May 1856 when, at last, he began the big book, Natural selection. Potential readers who want to know whether it is worth time and expense to read yet another biography of Darwin can be categorically reassured. While eschewing any dogmatic feminist perspective, what charms, delights, informs and transforms our understanding of Darwin in Browne's original treatment is the womanly, and family, perspectives that she brings to bear on her male subject. Browne notes the affinity between the Shrewsbury home and the characters of a Jane Austen novel; Charlotte M Yonge also springs to mind. Effectively brought up by older sisters, Browne suggests that Darwin's adult fears for his own health and that of his children were echoes of the trauma he experienced with the sudden death of his mother when he was eight. When forced to leave the loving family atmosphere of home to board at Shrewsbury school, Darwin withdrew into a shell from which he never entirely escaped. Eight years' experience as an editor of Darwin's correspondence has given Browne a happy familiarity with Regency and Victorian history; exploiting this, together with her expertise as a zoogeographer, she is able to view Darwin's slow development of a theory of evolution as a product of Darwin and his society, and show that Darwin himself was a much more complex person than the later transparent autobiography suggests. Browne avoids polemics and exchanges with Darwin's many other biographers, and …