At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Defying a parent was so profoundly unacceptable that most children, even in adulthood, would simply not engage in it. A perfect illustration of this is Charles Darwin. When as a young man Darwin was offered the chance to join the voyage of HMS Beagle he wrote a touching letter to his father explaining precisely why and how desperately he wished to go, but took pains to assure his father that he would withdraw his name from consideration if the idea made his father even briefly “uncomfortable.” Mr. Darwin considered the matter and declared that the idea did make him uncomfortable, so Charles, without a peep of protest, withdrew his name. The idea of Charles Darwin not going on the Beagle voyage is to us unimaginable now. To Darwin, what was unimaginable was disobeying his father. Of course Darwin did get to go in the end, and a big part of the reason his father relented was an odd but crucial factor in the lives of many upper-class people: marriage within the family. Marrying cousins was astoundingly common into the nineteenth century, and nowhere is this better illustrated than with the Darwins and their cousins the Wedgwoods (of pottery fame). Charles married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood, daughter of his beloved Uncle Josiah. Darwin’s sister Caroline, meanwhile, married Josiah Wedgwood III, Emma’s brother and the Darwin siblings’ joint first cousin. Another of Emma’s brothers, Henry, married not a Darwin but a first cousin from another branch of his own Wedgwood family,...