Epilogue This has been the story of two “Victorian” gentlemen. Gentlemen that seem, in many ways, to characterise the age and its ambiguities. Both aspired to be country clergymen, following up at the same time, their bent to be naturalists. And if it was not for the offer of passage on the second voyage on the Beagle, Darwin might have ended up there. Yet the offer of the Beagle voyage did materialise and changed Darwin for the rest of his life. He went away on the voyage as a young man, accept- ing, like Fox, the norms of his upbringing and the societal pressures to fit into one of the avenues of professional life available in early nineteenth century England. The long and exacting voyage somehow acted as a trigger, which set Darwin on another course. Yet this reasoning is not sufficient to explain the man. Many other men were recruited into similar trips by the British Navy, at this time, to go out and map the world, both in geographical and natural history ways: T H Huxley and J D Hooker, amongst them. And of these, only Darwin saw the path ahead and stuck to it. And, of course, A R Wallace, who came from a very different stratum of society with a different background of experience, also came to very similar conclusions about organic evolution. William Darwin Fox on the other hand, Darwin’s second cousin and from very similar bloodstock, saw his role in life as the country parson and stuck to that through thick and thin. We do not know why Fox chose the Church as his profession. His great great grandfather, Timothy Fox, had been a clergyman; though after he was dispossessed of his living in the Restoration, he had a hard time, and his descendents chose to be active merchants in Derby. From Fox’s diaries at Repton School one would not have seen a path in the Church as the vocation of such a child. Fox loved outdoor sports, especially game shooting, he had drunken parties and he had girl friends. Nevertheless he entered Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1824, intending, as most other undergraduates of the time, to enter the Church of England. His Diary for the next two years shows that he continued in all these normal activities of students of the time. And in the case of the opposite sex, it seems that his interest intensified, with Fox having two girlfriends for much of the time – until the family priest inter- vened and the family governess was sent away. It is also possible that there was an illegitimate offspring from the girl friend that he referred to as ␾␣␯␯␫ (Fanny) and 421 422 Epilogue the illness that Fox suffered in 1825/26 had many of the symptoms of a venereal disease (Chapter 2 and Appendix 4). Then, in 1828, Fox met Charles Darwin and was transported into a new world of natural history. Beetles were the catalyst that seem to have fired both their imagina- tions and their life long friendship. Soon, however, Fox had to leave this cosy Cambridge circle and take up a curacy in the counties. We know very little about this period of Fox’s life since there are no diaries of the time. It came about a year before Darwin went away on the Beagle. We do know for certain that it all came to a halt in early 1832, with a serious lung infection, for which Fox had to recuperate, first at his father’s country house at Osmaston Hall, Derby, and then on the Isle of Wight. It was there that Fox met and fell in love with his wife-to-be, Harriet Fletcher. That marriage lasted a happy 8 years until Harriet died in 1842, probably from tuberculosis after having had 6 children. Now, Fox was distraught and turned to his sister-in-law for consolation. Here we have some of the most quintessentially torn feelings ever written down. Fox was not allowed by the rules of the Church of England to marry his sister-in-law, however much he was attracted to her. From the letters in Appendix 5, this agonising affair went on for some ten years, until discovered by his second wife, Ellen. Yet the second marriage survived, with Ellen producing 12 children. Fox, from all his writings, was a Christian, believing in Christ and the second coming, when all believers would be resurrected and reunited with their lost part- ners. Yet at the same time it is clear that hot blood ran in his veins and, in his profession of country clergyman, he risked offending Victorian propriety. One must ask therefore why he acted as he did? And even more perhaps, one must ask why he left a clear trail in his diaries and personal letters of his personal “lapses”? Of course, this makes him so much more an interesting human being, in retrospect. But why write it all down? He could so easily have removed the few offending passages in his diaries or thrown away the incriminating letters, as he obviously did with many others. Perhaps like Samuel Pepys, without a soul mate to whom he might unburden his innermost thoughts, he wrote in his diaries to get something “off his chest” about the human condition for a later audience. Fox’s contribution for us now is, therefore, a magnificent diary of a student at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in the early nineteenth century, as the times moved from the freer, Georgian times of the Enlightenment to the more religious and sanc- timonious Victorian era. This is the incomplete, but for all that sufficient tale of a man of these times, torn between spiritual, human, family and societal pressures. If he had no one to turn to except his diaries and a possible audience beyond the grave to whom to unburden his soul, so much for that! By some strange series of events it did emerge in a later age. Is there a whisper here, perhaps, from beyond the grave, concerning Fox’s life- long friend, Charles Darwin? If there is it is a very muted one, for Fox wrote no incriminating things about Darwin in his extant Diaries. That still leaves the putative diary of Fox, in 1828, covering the time that he and Darwin were together at Christ’s College. Did this diary ever exist at all? The answer is unclear. It is very probable that Fox did keep a diary for that year [and a Epilogue 423 fragment does exist; see Appendix 5]. If it did exist it would now be a very valuable object - and the fact that it has not turned up suggests that it was either lost or destroyed. Either way we can conclude, by comparison with the Fox Dairy, from 1824-26, that it would show a life of the student Darwin very similar to that lived by Fox; not exactly saintly but typical for a student of the times, with a life of drinking, gambling, breaking out of college at night, etc, etc. And what of the flesh and blood on the bones of Charles Darwin? Are we to believe that up to the age of nearly thirty, when he married, he had no girl friends or sexual encounters? It is possible, but the Fox record suggests otherwise. And we know from the Darwin-Fox letters, and elsewhere, that there was Fanny Owen (Letters #5 & #7) and that he admired a number of other women! Darwin was so very good in laying down a paper trail of scientific correspon- dence, so voluminous as to snuff out the scent for anything more interesting. His family after his death, also engaged in redressing his image. It was not until the 1920s and 1930s, and in some cases later, that this sanitization was stripped away and the public could read about what Darwin had actually written, for instance, on religion. If material was thrown away concerning a rich inner life, then we are all the losers. Our knowledge and respect for Fox is not lessened to know that he was a full and complicated human being. The same would be true for Charles Darwin. In the absence of a shread of evidence either way on Darwin, we should do well to remember that, as we elevate him to an iconic figure of the nineteenth century, he was, also, human. Appendix 1 The Fox Materials and Their History There are four known sets of Fox papers that belonged either to Charles Darwin or William Darwin Fox: I. The letters of Charles and Emma Darwin to William Darwin Fox in the College Library, Christ’s College, Cambridge (155) and associated letters (7), not in the College Collection (a total of 162 letters). II. Those materials in the Crombie family (currently under the guardianship of Gerard Crombie, Norwich) and largely deposited in the University Library, Cambridge. III. Those materials in the possession of The Woodward Library, University of British Columbia [Fox/Pearce (Darwin) Collection]. IV. Letters from Fox to Darwin in the Manuscript Room, University Library, Cambridge (DAR 77, 83, 84, 85, 86, 99, 110, 164). The letters from Charles and Emma to William Darwin Fox in the College Library, Christ’s College, Cambridge and associated letters (a total of 162 letters) Of these letters, 155 are held in the College Library, Christ’s College, Cambridge. Of the remainder, 5 are held in the Library of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 1 is held in the Smithsonian Museum and 1 in the Ryde Museum, Isle of Wight.