ABSTRACT
What makes Watson a renegade? Darwin to Joseph Hooker, 27 June 1845
Early Life and Personality
Shrewsbury is about forty miles southwest of Congleton. Like Watson, Charles Robert Darwin was from an upper-middle-class family. Bom in 1809, he was five years younger than Watson. Both lost their mothers before leaving home, but Darwin was only eight when he lost his.1 Neither father remarried; in both families older sisters assumed the mothering functions for the younger children. Charles was a younger son but was bom into a family that did not practice primogenture (the Darwins being liberal Whigs). His older brother, Erasmus Alvey Darwin (1804-81), who was bom and died in the same years as Watson, was Charles’s closest childhood friend, and they remained close as adults. Sister Caroline, Charles eventually decided, had been ‘too zealous in trying to improve me’, and he would wonder when he entered a room where she was: ‘What will she blame me for now?’ Charles’s response to her admonishments was to ‘[make] myself dogged so as not to care what she might say’, and he expressed no hatred toward her.1 2 As a child, he also was fond of the family gardner, John Abberley.
