Marriage
She accepted Charles' marriage proposal on 11 November 1838 at the age of 30, and they were married on 29 January 1839 at St. Peter's Anglican Church in Maer. Their cousin, the Reverend John Allen Wedgwood, officiated.
After a brief period of residence in London, they moved permanently to Down House, located in what was then the rural village of Down, around 16 miles (26 km) from St Paul's Cathedral and approximately two hours by coach and train to London Bridge. The village was later renamed Downe.
Charles and Emma raised their 10 children in a distinctly non-authoritarian manner, and several of them later achieved considerable success in their chosen careers: George, Francis and Horace became Fellows of the Royal Society.
Emma Darwin is especially remembered for her patience and fortitude in dealing with her husband's long-term illness. She also nursed her children through frequent illnesses, and endured the deaths of three of them: Anne, Mary, and Charles Waring. By the mid 1850s she was known throughout the parish for helping in the way a parson's wife might be expected to, giving out bread tokens to the hungry and "small pensions for the old, dainties for the ailing, and medical comforts and simple medicine" based on Dr. Robert Darwin's old prescription book.
Emma often played the piano for Charles, and in Charles' 1871 The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin spent several pages on the evolution of musical ability by means of sexual selection.
Read more about this topic: Emma Darwin
Famous quotes containing the word marriage:
“We lov’d, and we lov’d, as long as we could,
Till our love was lov’d out in us both;
But our marriage is dead, when the pleasure is fled:
‘Twas pleasure first made it an oath.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)
“It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession; with totally differing aims the method is the same on both sides.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you’ve made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors—neutral gray.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)