In Descent of man 2: 327, Darwin wrote:

It was a surprising thing to write at a time when there was already much discussion of the social disadvantages faced by women; their lack of education, their exclusion from the professions and politics, their legal disabilities. Darwin's own beloved Jane Austen had pointed out, through her heroine Anne Elliot in Persuasion, ‘Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove any thing.’ How could Darwin be unaware of the social bias that doomed most women to underachievement, and the bias of perception that caused even high achievers to be considered second rate compared with men?

Darwin knew of plenty of talented women through his correspondence and in his daily life. There were women scientists who corresponded with Darwin and sometimes even made a living of sorts in science. Darwin's letters also bring to light the participation of women in science in less public ways, as editors, observers, collectors, supporters, and popularisers. This activity is not always very evident in published works of Victorian science. This book seeks to throw light on the lives of the women around Darwin: what they were doing in science and other fields, and what kind of conversations they were having about women's rights and women's education.

Women were less active in the field of zoology they were in botany. Many of the observations Darwin was sent were from amateur observers, rather than from people who had made a special study of the subject. Most people in the Victorian period lived closely with animals; horses were used for transport, and dogs and cats might be pampered pets or semi-independent household companions; even an invalid might have a bird for entertainment. Darwin's comments on animal behaviour, in Variation under domestication, Descent of man, and Expression of the emotions, attracted much interest. The analogies Darwin drew between human and animal behaviour struck a chord with many; and women in particular drew conclusions about human treatment of animals. Where Darwin's female correspondents made formal studies of animals, they were on insects, barnacles, and earthworms. The correspondence on animals has therefore being divided into two chapters: Companion animals and Insects and angels, ‘insect’ being the popular term for any small, apparently insignificant, creature. (No reflection is made on the actual companionableness of insects—John Lubbock had a pet wasp— or on the usefulness of companion animals; the distinction, which is admittedly loose, points only to a difference of approach.)

The following account of learned behaviour in a dog came from Jane Loring Gray, the wife of Darwin's Harvard correspondent, Asa Gray:

Editing provided a useful entry point into the world of science for women, even though this work was not usually acknowledged in print. For instance, Arabella Burton Buckley worked as Charles Lyell's secretary from 1864 (when she was 23) until his death in 1875. According to an article in a shortlived Liverpool journal, Research: a monthly illustrated journal of science, she was taken on as an amanuensis because of the clearness of her handwriting, but she became a secretary and indispensable literary assistant. She ‘not merely wrote Sir Charles's letters after his instructions, and ordered his very extensive scientific correspondence, but when a new edition of any of his works was called for she drew illustrations, re-cast passages, made précis of information in new works, corrected the proofs, and compiled tables and indexes’ (Research, 1 February 1889, p. 130). After Lyell's death, Buckley went on to have a distinguished career as a scientific author (see chapter 10) and lecturer.

In default of paid assistants, it was common for men of science to ask female friends and relatives to help. Sometimes help came unasked: Darwin's first editors were his sisters. Caroline Darwin, who was nine years older than him, educated him before he went to school in Shrewsbury at the age of 8. ‘I doubt whether this plan answered,’ wrote Darwin later; ‘she was too zealous in trying to improve me’ (‘Recollections’, p. 356). In this letter written to Darwin on the Beagle in 1833, however, Caroline is very guarded in her criticism:

Darwin's female friends, relations, and correspondents didn't tend to mount scientific expeditions of the sort that led men to write to Darwin for advice; nevertheless, in the quest for health, accompanying husbands to foreign postings, or decamping with their families to new homes abroad, they did travel, and sent back their impressions.

The female traveller who was closest to home was Henrietta. After suffering a great deal of illness in her youth, Henrietta recovered enough to take several trips to Europe. Emma worried, ‘I only hope you may not turn into a regular travelling old maid living abroad’ (DAR 219.9 73). She wrote long letters home (‘I find it decidedly trying to read yr descriptions’, wrote her forthright friend, Elinor Bonham Carter). She always travelled in company with a friend or a relation, staying at guest-houses patronised by other English people, and at a pinch a brother or servant could be dispatched to Paris or Calais to bring her home if the party broke up leaving her unchaparoned. Nevertheless, by 1870 she declared to Emma, ‘an idiot cd travel alone in France’ (DAR 245: 40). In 1866, she was travelling in France with Elinor, who had been unwell and wanted to go abroad. In this letter of 4 June, she describes a train wreck near Arles to Emma.

When Darwin made notes in 1838 about what he intended to do with the rest of his life, the question of whether or not to marry was a critical one. ‘If not marry’, he mused, ‘Travel. Europe, yes? America????’. ‘If marry’, he continued, further down the page, ‘means limited, Feel duty to work for money. London life, nothing but Society, no country, no tours, no large Zoolog. Collect. no books.’ On another sheet, he wrote with qualified optimism of the advantages of marriage: ‘Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one,— object to be beloved & played with.— —better than a dog anyhow’, while still noting the ‘terrible loss of time’. On the side of the single life, he wrote, ‘Freedom to go where one liked— choice of Society & little of it.— Conversation of clever men at clubs— Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle.— to have the expense & anxiety of children— perhaps quarelling— Loss of time.’ The risk that marriage would distract him from his scientific interests seems to have been uppermost in his mind, but at some point a sort of emotional spasm occurred: ‘My God, it is intolerable to think of spending ones whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all.— No, no won't do.— Imagine living all one's day solitarily in smoky dirty London House.— Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps’. (DAR 210.8: 1 and 2.)

Shortly after that, Darwin proposed to Emma Wedgwood and was accepted.

Darwin was right to see marriage and his future career as inextricably entangled, but seemed unaware that his family could be an asset rather than a liability, although that in fact was the case for him and was a fairly normal state of affairs among contemporaries of his own rank in life: unless of course he was joking. His notes on marriage seem bleakly comic. The Darwins and Wedgwoods were so steeped in Jane Austen that it's difficult to imagine Darwin writing them without an occasional wry smile at himself.

Botany was a popular subject for women in the nineteenth century. The materials were readily accessible for home study, and it was thought to be a good way of encouraging women to go outside and get some exercise and fresh air. It was, furthermore, an important subject; medical students studied botany as an essential part of their syllabus (materia medica, the raw material of medicines), and the increasing importance of empire, together with new experimental approaches such as Darwin's, rendered it cutting-edge. Of more than six hundred letters exchanged by Darwin and female correspondents, the largest number, after letters about family matters, are about botany. These range all the way from observations carried out on his behalf by nieces, to exchanges with other specialist botanists. This chapter only has room for a fraction of the letters available, and concentrates on four correspondents: Dorothy Nevill, Lydia Becker, Mary Treat, and Sophie Bledsoe Herrick.

Lady Dorothy Nevill had a notable garden at Dangstein near Midhurst, Sussex. She specialised in the cultivation of orchids, pitcher-plants, and other tropical plants. Her head gardener was James Vair, and since in her letters and autobiography she always minimises her own knowledge and accomplishments, it is difficult to assess how expert she was herself. Joseph Hooker wrote, ‘She was not the frivolous character she paints. She was thoroughly interested in the rare plants of her noble garden’ (Nevill 1919, p. 66). She was a tireless correspondent, supplied Darwin with many plants, and read his books. Darwin first wrote to her in 1861.

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.

In his research for Expression of the emotions in man and animals, Darwin approached friends, relatives, and correspondents for information. He had a questionnaire printed that his correspondents could send further afield, since he was interested in human expression around the world. Mothers in particular were asked for information about expression in infants. Often the responses to Darwin's questions are now as interesting for the light they shed on race, class, and the respondents’ lives as for the subjects in which Darwin was principally interested.

Darwin's niece Frances Julia (Snow) Wedgwood contributed many observations, some of them drawn from her reading in Latin and Greek. The following, however, concerns the observations of her friend Jane Gourlay in a Lock Hospital. Little is known of Jane; she was tutor to the children of the nephew of Thomas Erskine, Snow's religious mentor, in Scotland, and taught at a school in Edinburgh. The Lock Hospitals were developed for the treatment of syphilis. (The name of these hospitals was derived from the Lock Lazar House of Southwark, but the origin is otherwise unclear.) They catered mostly for working-class women, and moral education would have formed part of the programme. It is not known which Lock Hospital Gourlay visited; if it was in a port or garrison town, the girl she visited might have been detained under the Contagious Diseases Acts, which allowed women suspected of being prostitutes to be detained and examined for signs of disease against their will. Darwin had evidently asked Snow for some literary quotations about the expression of shame; Snow sent a few via Henrietta, and then added: