Emma Wedgwood and Charles Darwin married in January 1839, set up a home in London, and celebrated the birth of their first child, William in December the same year. Over the next seventeen years, Emma bore nine more children (Annie, Mary, Henrietta, George, Elizabeth, Francis, Leonard, Horace, and Charles Waring), three of whom did not survive to adulthood (Annie, Mary, and Charles Waring). In 1842, the Darwins moved their family to Down, a small village in rural Kent, but within easy reach of London by railway. Emma and Charles ran a relaxed household, but were fairly conventional in their approach to education and health. Like many Victorians, they recorded details of their daily life, so anecdotes and observations found in diaries and notebooks combine with their letters to provide a picture of middle-class Victorian parents living in their semi-rural home. For Darwin himself, matters of family life merged seamlessly into research questions about the expressions of emotions and the early stages of human development.

Many middle-class Victorian families were preoccupied with health, and the Darwins were no exception. Charles's ill health is well known, but Emma also suffered regularly from illness, especially in association with her pregnancies and confinements. Details of Emma's pregnancy woes, from headaches to toothaches, found their way onto the pages of her diary, but it is clear from the letters she and Charles wrote each other that Emma didn't suffer in silence. Confinement was not an easy or safe event for Victorian women, and with the majority of births happening at home, it was very much a domestic affair. During the period in which Emma was regularly pregnant, maternal mortality in England and Wales was between 5.8 and 4.5 per 1000 live births, as compared with 0.082 in 2008 (Anderson 1990).

When Emma was pregnant with Mary and went to visit her family at Maer in Staffordshire, taking William (Doddy) and Annie with her, Darwin wrote to her from London on 9 May 1842.