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9 “Dreadfully Up-hill Work” on the Origin of Species and Treatments at Moor Park and Ilkley On 18 June 1858, Darwin stopped writing his big book because Alfred Wallace sent him what he described as “an essay containing my exact theory [natural selection].”1 He felt “forestalled”2 and as if he had lost his priority of many years,3 and he turned to Lyell and Hooker for advice. His two friends arranged that his and Wallace’s evolutionary writings—Wallace’s essay and excerpts from Darwin’s 1844 essay and an 1857 letter to Asa Gray—be publicly read at a 1 July 1858 meeting of the London Linnean Society. This public reading, however, made practically no impact on those who heard it.4 At this time, Darwin was troubled not only about the priority of his ideas but about several other events, the most distressing of which were illnesses in his family. At the end of June, his daughter Etty became seriously ill with an attack of diphtheria, and one of her nurses contracted this illness.5 As Etty and her nurse were recovering, his eighteen-month-old son, Charles Waring, fell ill with scarlet fever and died on 28 June.6 Four days later, Darwin expressed the grief he felt for his son by writing a brief yet heartfelt memorial. Recollecting that, although Charles Waring was “backward in walking & talking,” he was “intelligent & observant . . . of a remarkably sweet, placid & joyful disposition . . . [and] very affectionate.”7 However, one of Charles Waring’s nurses had contracted scarlet fever, and it was now feared that a scarlet fever epidemic might break out in Down House and village. “Fear,” wrote Darwin to Fox, “has almost driven away grief.”8 On 2 July, at the urging of Fox and others, Darwin moved most of his family out of Down to the home of his sister-in-law Sarah Elizabeth Wedgwood in Hartfield, Sussex. He wrote Fox that he and Emma would stay at Down “till Etty can move & I of course stay till nurse is out of all danger.”9 On 5 July, with the nurse recovering and Etty becoming stronger, he felt relieved and “more 70 / Chapter 9 happy.” On 9 July, he, Etty, and Emma joined their family at Hartfield. Since the feared epidemic of scarlet fever had become a reality in Down village, the Darwins then spent the early summer at several country houses.10 On 21 July, Darwin wrote to Fox, “we are all very fairly well,” while at the end of July, he told Hooker that “my stomach [has not yet] recovered all our troubles.”11 This probably refers to an increase in flatulence and was the only observation he recorded about his stomach during the troubles of June and July. Despite the personal and professional stresses of these months, with their feelings of grief, fear, and rivalry with Wallace, he had not suffered from a serious increase in physical illness. One reason for his relative stability of health was, as he expressed it, “the extraordinary . . . kindness” and support he had received from Lyell and Hooker.12 Early in August, when the fever epidemic had subsided, he and his family returned to Down. He was also interested and troubled by a much discussed June/July trial in London’s Court for Divorce, in which a husband, Henry Robinson, petitioned for a divorce from his wife, on the grounds of her having had an erotic relationship with Dr. Lane when she had been a patient at Moor Park in 1854. She had described this relationship in a diary that her husband discovered and read several years later and that he now brought to the London Court.13 Darwin followed the events of the trial as they were reported in the Times, which cited the sexual passages in Mrs. Robinson’s diary and gave evidence for and against their credibility. In a letter to Fox he wrote that the diary passages were probably an “invent[ed] story prompted by extreme sensuality or hallucination,” that the evidences suggested Dr. Lane to be innocent, and that it was a “most cruel case” which he feared would “ruin” Dr. Lane.14 Fox replied that he also believed Dr. Lane to be innocent (he had recently met Dr. Lane). Darwin wrote back, “I am profoundly sorry for Dr. L. & all his family to whom I am much attached.”15 On 3 July, the chief justice at the trial declared “no case had been established” against...

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