A poetic vision of Darwin
Wednesday March 5th. BRLSI joined forces with Bath Literary Festival to bring acclaimed scholar and poet Ruth Padel, great- great granddaughter of Charles Darwin, to the Elwin Room.
Jointly promoted with Bath Literary Festival, a large audience enjoyed a rare treat with a visit by classical scholar, poet and journalist Ruth Padel, reading from her latest book: Darwin, A Life in Poems. Recited with beautiful clarity and calm, sensitive nuance, Padel’s words gave us a privileged and touching insight into the long and complex life of Charles Darwin that was a moving tribute from his attentive and articulate great, great granddaughter.
From Darwin’s distaste for the Chapel School in Shrewsbury, thoughts from the year his mother died, and his newt collecting, we travelled soon to Edinburgh where his medical studies found in him a hatred of operations and the thought of pain. He far preferred the company of the oyster-fishers of the Firth of Forth, and learning how to stuff birds from John Edmundson, a freed slave, engaged for these instructions at £1 an hour. Sent then by his frustrated father to Cambridge to study for the Church, he again preferred the company of botany professor John Stevens Henslow, and Sidgwick’s expeditions to North Wales.
Then came the Beagle. Several excerpts set in 1832 depict his impatience to know the names of all the rocks from which the pebbles came, his familiarity with the works of Alexander von Humboldt (naturalist and explorer of S America), his infatuation with the pods and racemes of tamarind. Like blood, he is possessed by chlorophyll, and by the discovery of new insects, ‘like giving to a blind man eyes’.
By the spring of 1835 he is in Chile, witnessing the ungainly run of ostriches in their black and white skirts, the horrors of the ‘kissing bug’, pestillential insects and the perniscious livelong sicknesses they spread with their proboscis. Many, many notebooks: first to note, next to think – about species, and species change? The human mind is shaped by its animal past; our passions are derived from our descent. Our grandfather is Satan, in the form of a … baboon. Worries about belief. Father’s advice: if you have any doubts, don’t tell the wife – advice he was to ignore, and thus sow much distress in his ailing wife, but most fortunately she got better.
In 1851 a dying child, noon, a peal of thunder, expiry without a sigh. Extinction, survival of the fittest. Later, 1858, a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace about his ideas on evolution. Haste to publish On the Origin. 1859, priced 15/-, the first edition sells out in a day. Several later editions and many other publications follow. Then at the end, his London friends send down for him a shiny coffin, bound for Wesminster. The village carpenter rails, ‘he only wanted a plain box of rough-sawn planks’.
With such simple, moving images, and many others, Ruth Padel shared her personal insights into her illustrious, if private, forbear.
Martin Sturge
Darwin and Beyond Programme Manager.
Jointly promoted with Bath Literary Festival, a large audience enjoyed a rare treat with a visit by classical scholar, poet and journalist Ruth Padel, reading from her latest book: Darwin, A Life in Poems. Recited with beautiful clarity and calm, sensitive nuance, Padel’s words gave us a privileged and touching insight into the long and complex life of Charles Darwin that was a moving tribute from his attentive and articulate great, great granddaughter.
From Darwin’s distaste for the Chapel School in Shrewsbury, thoughts from the year his mother died, and his newt collecting, we travelled soon to Edinburgh where his medical studies found in him a hatred of operations and the thought of pain. He far preferred the company of the oyster-
Then came the Beagle. Several excerpts set in 1832 depict his impatience to know the names of all the rocks from which the pebbles came, his familiarity with the works of Alexander von Humboldt (naturalist and explorer of S America), his infatuation with the pods and racemes of tamarind. Like blood, he is possessed by chlorophyll, and by the discovery of new insects, ‘like giving to a blind man eyes’.
By the spring of 1835 he is in Chile, witnessing the ungainly run of ostriches in their black and white skirts, the horrors of the ‘kissing bug’, pestillential insects and the perniscious livelong sicknesses they spread with their proboscis. Many, many notebooks: first to note, next to think – about species, and species change? The human mind is shaped by its animal past; our passions are derived from our descent. Our grandfather is Satan, in the form of a … baboon. Worries about belief. Father’s advice: if you have any doubts, don’t tell the wife – advice he was to ignore, and thus sow much distress in his ailing wife, but most fortunately she got better.
In 1851 a dying child, noon, a peal of thunder, expiry without a sigh. Extinction, survival of the fittest. Later, 1858, a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace about his ideas on evolution. Haste to publish On the Origin. 1859, priced 15/-
With such simple, moving images, and many others, Ruth Padel shared her personal insights into her illustrious, if private, forbear.
Martin Sturge
Darwin and Beyond Programme Manager.
© Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution 2008 • Contact Us
Ruth Padel - a life of her great-great grandfather in poems, beautifully read for the BRLSI/Bath Literature Festival audience.
EVENT REPORT - DARWIN, A LIFE IN POEMS
Ruth Padel with BRLSI Trustee Betty Suchar (left) who introduced the evening, and BRLSI Darwin and Beyond Programe Manager Martin Sturge.
