Ryan Byrd’s Ramblings

Besides being a naturalist, geologist, and troublemaker, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was also a prolific letter writer. He exchanged over 14,500 letters with nearly 2000 people during his lifetime — with people like the geologist Charles Lyell, the botanists Asa Gray and Joseph Dalton Hooker, the zoologist Thomas Henry Huxley and the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace.

Not content with just letters, Darwin also jotted down his thoughts in notebooks. From those writings he published the Journal Of Researches (1839), The Descent Of Man (1871), The Zoology Of The Voyage Of HMS Beagle (1838-43) and the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th editions of the Origin Of Species.

Cambridge University has digitized some 50,000 pages of text of notes and letters and books from Darwin and made them all available online. At this very moment, you could be downloading the text of the Origin of Species.

Among all these scribblings, exists a small scrap of paper upon which Charles listed his pros and cons of getting married. The year was 1838 and Charles, 29, already back from his five year world voyage on the Beagle, was contemplating marriage to his cousin Emma Wedgwood, an attractive woman nine months his senior. Fiercely logical, Charles produced a cost-benefit analysis of the situation. He divided the paper into two columns, “Marry” on the left, and “Not Marry” on the right and this is what he wrote:

Marry

• Children (if it Please God)
• Constant companion (and friend in old age) who will feel interested in one
• Object to be beloved and played with. Better than a dog anyhow
• Home, & someone to take care of house
• Charms of music and female chit-chat
• These things good for one’s health—but terrible loss of time
• … it is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, and nothing after all—No, no, won’t do
• Imagine living all one’s day solitary in smoky dirty London House
• Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire and books and music perhaps
• Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Great Marlboro Street, London

Not Marry

• Freedom to go where one liked
• Choice of Society and little of it
• Conversation of clever men at clubs
• Not forced to visit relatives and bend in every trifle
• Expense and anxiety of children
• Perhaps quarreling
• Loss of Time
• Cannot read in the evenings
• Fatness and idleness
• Anxiety and responsibility
• Less money for books etc.
• If many children forced to gain one’s bread (But then it is very bad for one’s health to work too much)
• Perhaps my wife won’t like London; then the sentence is banishment and degradation into indolent, idle fool

He studied the list before concluding, “Marry, Marry, Marry Q.E.D.” Less money for books, fatness and idleness and loss of time notwithstanding, Darwin proposed to Emma and they were married a year later.