Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 1Darwin, Charles
History
Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 1
Darwin, Charles
Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882; Naturalists -- Great Britain -- Biography; Naturalists -- Great Britain -- Correspondence
Robert Waring, the father of Charles Darwin, was born May 30, 1766, and
entered the medical profession like his father. He studied for a few
months at Leyden, and took his M.D. (I owe this information to the
kindness of Professor Rauwenhoff, Director of the Archives at Leyden.
He quotes from the catalogue of doctors that "Robertus Waring Darwin,
Anglo-britannus," defended (February 26, 1785) in the Senate a
Dissertation on the coloured images seen after looking at a bright
object, and "Medicinae Doctor creatus est a clar. Paradijs." The
archives of Leyden University are so complete that Professor Rauwenhoff
is able to tell me that my grandfather lived together with a certain
"Petrus Crompton, Anglus," in lodgings in the Apothekersdijk. Dr.
Darwin's Leyden dissertation was published in the 'Philosophical
Transactions,' and my father used to say that the work was in fact due
to Erasmus Darwin.--F.D.) at that University on February 26, 1785. "His
father" (Erasmus) "brought ('Life of Erasmus Darwin,' page 85.) him to
Shrewsbury before he was twenty-one years old (1787), and left him 20
pounds, saying, 'Let me know when you want more, and I will send it
you.' His uncle, the rector of Elston, afterwards also sent him
20 pounds, and this was the sole pecuniary aid which he ever
received...Erasmus tells Mr. Edgeworth that his son Robert, after being
settled in Shrewsbury for only six months, 'already had between forty
and fifty patients.' By the second year he was in considerable, and ever
afterwards in very large, practice."
Robert Waring Darwin married (April 18, 1796) Susannah, the daughter
of his father's friend, Josiah Wedgwood, of Etruria, then in her
thirty-second year. We have a miniature of her, with a remarkably sweet
and happy face, bearing some resemblance to the portrait by Sir Joshua
Reynolds of her father; a countenance expressive of the gentle and
sympathetic nature which Miss Meteyard ascribes to her. ('A Group of
Englishmen,' by Miss Meteyard, 1871.) She died July 15, 1817, thirty-two
years before her husband, whose death occurred on November 13, 1848. Dr.
Darwin lived before his marriage for two or three years on St. John's
Hill; afterwards at the Crescent, where his eldest daughter Marianne
was born; lastly at the "Mount," in the part of Shrewsbury known as
Frankwell, where the other children were born. This house was built
by Dr. Darwin about 1800, it is now in the possession of Mr. Spencer
Phillips, and has undergone but little alteration. It is a large, plain,
square, red-brick house, of which the most attractive feature is the
pretty green-house, opening out of the morning-room.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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