Annie's Grave
- Debbie Challis
- Sep 8
- 4 min read
Last week, I took down my exhibition Holiday Sketches from the Portico Library and returned Mary Severn Newton’s art-work. I had a lovely day or so staying with the private collector and his wife and discussing all things Mary Severn. They completely spoilt me and took me out and about, including to see Great Malvern Priory. We paid a visit to Annie Darwin’s grave, were a copy of the book Annie’s Box. Charles Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution by Randall Keynes is placed, as well as the more usual flowers. I had lent a copy of this book to them as I found it helped explain some of Mary’s work.
Anne, or Annie, was the eldest daughter of the scientist Charles Darwin and his wife Emma. She died not long after her eleventh birthday at Malvern on 23 April 1851. Darwin was with his daughter while she was
having water-cure treatment there (or Hydropathic Treatment), miles from her home in Kent. Darwin had taken a house overlooking Great Malvern and the hills. Her mother Emma was heavily pregnant with their fifth son Horace and needed to stay at home. ‘Annie’s Box’ was Anne’s writing box in which her mother put Anne’s things after she died. It was discovered about twenty-five years ago by the Darwin family and now on display at the Darwins’ home, Down House in Kent; a property owned by English Heritage.
Anne’s writing case was not a box made with the intention of retaining memories but was repurposed by Emma to store her daughter’s letters, embroidery and a cream ribbon attached to tiny glass beads. These were all things belonging to her daughter and part of her identity. A descendant of the Darwins, Randall Keynes imagines Emma placing Annie’s things together ‘in the box, their simple meanings added to each other’. These things give Anne herself, a girl on the cusp of adolescence, an identity. ‘Annie’s Box’ does not record a changing child but one who would never now change, except in the imaginations of those who loved them. Keynes, who has written extensively on this box, has argued that Annie’s death had a profound effect on Darwin, undermining any vestiges of his faith in a benevolent God, and so he finally published his evidence for evolution. This evidence exposed the cruelty of the natural world in the survival for existence.
Infant and childhood mortality was equally high across society until the 1890s. Before Anne’s death, the Darwins had already suffered the loss of their second daughter Mary, who had been born soon after their move to Down House in October 1842. Mary died three weeks after her birth and was buried in the local churchyard. Seven years after Anne’s death, Emma and Charles had another loss when their youngest son Charles Waring died of scarlet fever at the age of two years old. Charles Waring was their tenth and last child and born to Emma when she was 48. From the description of his personality and learning difficulties, it is thought that Charles Waring had Down’s Syndrome. In her amusing memoir of Victoriana Period Piece (1952) Gwen Raverat, one of Emma and Charles’ grandchildren, describes the collective Darwin family hypochondria that she witnessed as a child. Yet, the roll call of women dying in childbirth, including Charles Darwin’s own mother and his daughter in law Amy Ruck, as well as the loss of three of his own children, explains some of their terror of illness.
One of the works by Mary that I had borrowed for Holiday Sketches was of a girl, holding a white flower, sat by her brother’s grave. Traditionally, white flowers were given in sympathy for bereavement, and would symbolise innocence and pace. This was a mourning portrait and accompanied another painting by Mary of the girl and her older brother, while he was still alive but looking very poorly. The boy held an empty bird cage and the girl holds a bird. The bird symbolises the soul of the dying boy and that she is holding it signify the ‘winged soul’ and eternal life. The frame is damaged but shows two birds at the top. The last portrait is by an unknown artist, from 1862, shows the girl 5 years older with a younger female sibling. The three portraits are united again.
I wrote for the exhibition that:
This image may seem mawkish, or even morbid, to modern eyes. But infant mortality was high amongst all classes until the 1890s - this would have been made as a remembrance. An art object that acted as a way for grief to be made visual and (hopefully) assist those left living.
Annie's box acted in a similar way for Emma Darwin, especally as her daughter was buried 100s of miles from home.
With thanks to Peter and Sarah-Ann.
References:
Brian Iles (2009), Malvern Through Time, Amberley Publishing Ltd.
Randal Keynes (2002), Annie’s Box. Charles Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution, London: Fourth Estate, 193.
Gwen Raverat (1952), Period Piece, London: Faber
