Emma Darwin: A Victorian Life
After Charles Darwin's world-changing HMS Beagle voyage, he found a loyal protector and editor when in 1839 he married Emma Wedgwood (1808–1896) as he sought to document his naturalist and revolutionary scientific ideas. The authors (James is an anthropologist at the University of Rhode Island; Kent is a freelance writer) give us the family's life from the viewpoint of the "lively and outspoken" Emma, as derived from two volumes of her letters and daily notations. The events they describe include the family's campaigns against slavery and vivisection. Darwin became increasingly agnostic while Emma was religious (their passel of children were spiritually indifferent), but they lived in mutual respect and upper-class comfort through much of the Victorian era. In spite of Emma's concentration on her children and extended family, she passionately followed politics and global concerns such as the American Civil War and Irish unrest. The authors' casual diagnosis of physical and mental ailments mildly mars an otherwise excellent portrait of the English elite during the age of British scientific discovery. 22 b&w illus.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.