Anne Darwin
Anne Elizabeth "Annie" Darwin (2 March 1841 – 23 April 1851) was the second child and eldest daughter of Charles and Emma Darwin. According to biographers, she was a delightful child who brought much happiness to her parents. Eminent Darwin scholar E. Janet Browne writes of her:
- "Anne was... the apple of her proud father's eye, his favourite child, he confessed to" Fox. "More than any of the other children she treated him with a spontaneous affection that touched him deeply; she liked to smooth his hair and pat his clothes into shape, and was by nature self-absorbedly neat and tidy, cutting out delicate bits of paper to put away in her workbox, threading ribbons, and sewing small things for her dolls and make-believe worlds."
In 1849, Anne caught scarlet fever along with her two sisters, and her health thereafter declined; some authorities believe that she suffered from tuberculosis. In vain pursuit of help from Gully's water cure, Charles Darwin took his daughter to the Worcestershire spa town, Great Malvern. She died in Montreal House on the Worcester Road, and is buried in the Great Malvern Priory Church yard.
Her death at age ten was a terrible blow for her parents. Charles wrote in a personal memoir "We have lost the joy of the household, and the solace of our old age.... Oh that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly we do still & and shall ever love her dear joyous face."
Read more about Anne Darwin: Annie's Box
Famous quotes containing the words anne and/or darwin:
““... Anne has a way with flowers to take the place
Of what she’s lost: she goes down on one knee
And lifts their faces by the chin to hers
And says their names, and leaves them where they are.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.”
—Richard Dawkins (b. 1941)