In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a man of outstanding talent might sometimes achieve success even if his origins were humble, but he stood a much better chance of success if from birth he was assured of financial security and a good social position. The Darwins were blessed with both security and position. They had no need of patronage. Their exceptional talents were free to blossom in whatever sphere of endeavour they chose, their comfortable well-regulated lives being disrupted only by ill health and, occasionally, by an untimely death.

Plants were a hobby for Erasmus Darwin, the busy general practitioner in Lichfield, a small town in the English Midlands some fifteen miles from the city of Birmingham. They formed an essential part of the studies of Charles, the gentlemen natural scientist, secluded in his large house in the quiet countryside of Kent, and they were the basis of a profession for Francis, the laboratory scientist who did his best work in a university environment. The transition during those two centuries from Erasmus the theorizer to Francis the experimenter mirrored changes happening in the wider world of botany, and happening too in most of the nascent sciences. The significance of those changes is explored in later chapters, but first we need some perspective. This chapter explores the personal lives of Erasmus, Charles and Francis because, as for all men, the twists and turns of their careers, their triumphs and failures, were rooted in the background of their family, in the human cycle of birth, marriage and death.

The Darwins’ capacity to regulate and control their lives stemmed from the family's modest wealth which was itself derived from ownership of estates in Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire since at least the seventeenth century. Indeed, ownership may have stretched much further back for the family was granted heraldic arms in the sixteenth century. This pattern of squiredom was disturbed early in the eighteenth century by one Robert Darwin who tried his hand, rather unsuccessfully, as a lawyer in London before retiring to Elston, just north east of Nottingham, to adopt a life of relative indolence.