ABSTRACT
O u t of the seeming darkness of pure isolated sensation the child-mind moves progressively towards that awareness of mutual relationship and relative value which is memory and self-consciousness. Charles Darwin spoke in agreement not only with modern psychology but also common sense when, asked as an old man which years of a child’s life he considered the most “ subject to incubative impressions,” he asserted: “ Without doubt, the first three,” going on to explain, in the words of his interrogator, “ that the brain at that period is entirely formedit is a virgin brain adapted to receive impressions, and though unable to formulate or memorize these, they none the less remain and can affect the whole future life of the child-recipient.” 1
It is unfortunate then, if inevitable, that this should always be the time concerning which least is recoverable-in Charles’s case, nothing at all. His own earliest memory went back barely beyond his fourth birthday, to an incident of sitting on his sister Caroline’s knee in the drawing-room at home, and being so startled by a cow unexpectedly running past the window that he jumped and cut himself on the knife Caroline was using to peel an orange. Immediately subsequent recollections were similarly trivial. For the most part the rooms and lawns of The Mount were his world, wherein father and mother, brother and sisters, maids and nurse were figures so primordially familiar as scarcely to be apprehended, but the fresher experience of a holiday by the sea, at Abergele near Rhyl, in the summer of 1813, imprinted itself as a series of detached pictures. A house dimly seen. A small shop, and the shopkeeper who gave him a fig-which delightfully turned out to be two figs-as fee for kissing his nurse-maid. A walk to a well, past a cottage where
1 Richmond Papers, 101. 43
a white-haired recluse was forthcoming with damsons. A broad ford, crossed in a carriage about whose wheels white foaming water washed alarmingly. But he was not sure whether it was he or Catherine who had been shut in a room for naughtiness, and in anger tried to break the windows. From visits to his Aunts Kitty and Sally at Parkfields he brought back little more than terror at the tales of a servant, Betty Harvey, who pictured to him, no doubt as a cautionary story, the dreadful deaths of little boys who ventured beside the canal, got on the wrong side of the towing-rope, and so were swept irrevocably to a watery end. Death could be but a word to him, but she communicated perhaps her own fear in her dramatic narrative.
