LONGLISTED FOR THE WELLCOME TRUST BOOK PRIZE 2012While carrying out historical research at an Ontario asylum, psychiatrist Harry Karlinsky comes across a familiar surname in the register. Could the “Thomas Darwin of Down, England” be a relative of the famous Charles Darwin?In a narrative woven from letters, photographs, historical documents and illustrations, what emerges is a sketch of Thomas’s life – the last of eleven children born to Charles Darwin. It tells of his obsession with extending his father’s studies into the realm of inanimate objects – kitchen utensils, to be precise. Can the theory of evolution be aplied to knives, forks and spoons?In this stunning factitious biography, Karlinsky presents us with the tragically short life of Thomas Darwin, leaving the reader to decide how much is fact and how much is fiction.
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Harry Karlinsky. The Evolution of Inanimate Objects: The Life and Collected Works of Thomas Darwin
The Evolution of Inanimate Objects
Harry Karlinsky
Dedication
CONTENTS
PREFACE
[10th October 1879]
ONE. DOWN HOUSE
TWO. SCHOOL DAYS
THREE. CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY
FOUR. LONDON ASYLUM
FIVE. SPECIES AND VARIETIES
SIX. RUDIMENTARY CHARACTERS
SEVEN. THE PASTRY FORK
EIGHT. HYBRID ARTEFACTS
NINE. BUCKE — DARWIN LETTERS
TEN. DR. BUCKE’S DIARY
ELEVEN. ONE STEP FURTHER
THOMAS DARWIN: A BRIEF CHRONOLOGY
SOURCES FOR QUOTATIONS
AUTHOR’S NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Copyright
About the Publisher
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The Life and Collected Works of Thomas Darwin (1857-1879)
A Novel by
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In confiding in Gwen Raverat, Emma may have been responding to her granddaughter’s interest in hearing such family anecdotes. Although Gwen never met her Uncle Thomas (she was born in 1885), she later wrote Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood, an extended family memoir that places Thomas’s childhood (and health) in a helpful context. According to Gwen, all but one of Thomas’s siblings suffered from nervous difficulties. Elizabeth was “very stout and nervous,” Henrietta had “been an invalid all her life” and was portrayed as having an insane fear of germs; Francis seemed to have “no spring of hope in him,” Leonard “inherited the family hypochondria in a mild degree,” Horace “always retained traces of the invalid’s outlook,” while Gwen’s father, George, had “nerves always as taut as fiddle strings.”
Henrietta was the most disturbed: “When there were colds about she often wore a kind of gas-mask of her own invention. It was an ordinary wire kitchen-strainer, stuffed with antiseptic cotton-wool, and tied on like a snout, with elastic over her ears. In this she would receive her visitors and discuss politics in a hollow voice out of her eucalyptus-scented seclusion, oblivious of the fact that they might be struggling with fits of laughter.”
