House museums #26: Down House, Home of Charles Darwin

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Charles Darwin faced the occasional interruption from a passing gondola when working in his study.

The naturalist’s children would play with a stool on casters in the room where he wrote On the Origin of Species (1859), says Tessa Kilgarriff, curator of collections and interiors for English Heritage. “They mounted the footstool, got one of his walking sticks and pushed themselves around the room like a gondolier,” she says.

The overlap between Darwin’s scientific and family lives is a recurring theme during a tour of his former home in south London, where he lived for 40 years.

“The unique thing about Down House is the fact that every room and everyone who lived in the house was part of Darwin’s work in some way,” says Kilgarriff. To help in his simple, observational experiments, he enlisted the cook, his butler and his children, who would keep an eye on the bumblebees buzzing along the hedgerow. The garden, where Darwin’s study of the number of species living on a small patch of lawn is recreated, was his “living lab”.

In 1839, about two years after returning from the second voyage of the HMS Beagle — whose scientific observations helped inspire his theory of evolution by natural selection — Darwin married his cousin Emma Wedgwood. Both were grandchildren of the English potter Josiah Wedgwood. The couple moved from central London to the outskirts of the village of Downe, then part of Kent, in 1842 to accommodate their growing family. They had 10 children in total, with seven surviving to adulthood.

Darwin described Down House’s peaceful, rural location as “absolutely at [the] extreme verge of [the] world”. He was less impressed by its architecture, calling the Georgian property “very ugly”. Nevertheless, it suited their needs, expanding through extensions as the family grew.

The children’s maple-wood and horsehair “gondola” remains in the study, alongside the armchair specially made for their 6ft father and boosted up on the legs of an iron bed frame and set on casters to allow him to move between tables. The arms are worn where he rested his writing board.

Display cases upstairs include a pistol he took aboard HMS Beagle and two notebooks from his five-year voyage. A reconstruction of his cabin features a Pepper’s ghost (a theatrical illusion) of Darwin.

This “slightly austere, bearded Victorian figure” had a playful side, says Kilgarriff. He commissioned a carpenter to make a polished wood slide to fit across eight of the hall stairs for the children, who would slide down on cushions. The slide is displayed in the former nursery.

The house “got bashed around a lot”, according to Kilgarriff. “In the family accounts you can see Emma constantly repainting, or getting bits of the carpentry fixed because the children have knocked another spindle out the stairs. You really get the sense of it being a living, breathing family home.”

Darwin died here, aged 73, in 1882. The house became a school following Emma’s later death and then a museum from 1929, with Darwin’s family returning many of his belongings. A walking stick is back in the study, perhaps once a young gondolier’s oar.

english-heritage.org.uk

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