Uncle Tom Wedgwood and all

Readers of Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage will remember that its author set out to write a life of D.H. Lawrence and somehow it never got written. In the course of the story, however, we travel to many of the scenes where Lawrence lived and wrote, and a hilarious  journey it is. Emma Darwin, namesake and descendant of Charles Darwin’s wife, alludes to Dyer’s book at the end of this charming ramble round her family.

It begins with a conversation with her agent. Inevitably, the agent wants her to play safe and to write a straight biographical account of the marriage of the famous Victorian biologist. This author, the present-day Emma Darwin, is resistant to the idea, and believes that there is room for a fictional account. There certainly would be room for many a play or novel on this theme, I should have thought, whether you concentrated on Charles’s psychosomatic illness or on the deep religious differences between the devoted pair. But Emma decides against such an idea, and soldiers on in time. The rest of the book takes you through many of the branches and twigs of her family tree.

Should she write a novel about Charles Darwin’s grandfather, the doctor, poet and inventor Erasmus Darwin, who was a key figure among the Lunar Men, that brilliant circle of (largely nonconformist) scientists, technological pioneers and businessmen, such as Joseph Priestley, Josiah Wedgwood, James Watt and Matthew Boulton?

Or what about Tom Wedgwood, Charles and Emma Darwin’s uncle, the pioneer of photography and friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge? A wonderful story, there. Poor Tom, he picked up the opium habit from Coleridge and bang went any chance of his learning how to fix photographic images on to paper.