Charles and Emma by Deborah Heiligman

to do.
    Emma was not one to sit by quietly and not say much. “By the way now we seem to be clearing old scores,” she wrote to Charles, “they told me at Shrewsbury that you had the audacity to call me ‘little baggage’! but I won’t believe it till I hear it with my own ears, (& then I advise you to take care
of your
own ears).”
    Charles, for his part, also wanted to come clean. He warned her about what she was really in for with this man devoted to his specimens and his thoughts. After a lovely visit to Maer a few weeks before the wedding, he told Emma that she would have to humanize him. Five years on the voyage and the last two spent working so hard had made him toomuch of a brute, and he hoped that Emma would “soon teach me there is greater happiness than building theories and accumulating facts in silence and solitude.”
    Charles was so preoccupied with his thoughts that he forgot to show up for a dinner he had been invited to attend. Maybe it was his instinct for survival—the dinner was at the Horners’ house. The family waited around the table for him while he sat happily alone at the Athenaeum, reading and eating his dinner as he had taken to doing. “I made a very stupid mistake yesterday,” he wrote to Emma. “I utterly forgot the invitation & kept the whole party waiting whilst I was quietly at dinner here.—I had to send a very humble note this morning, & backed it by calling, and had a very pleasant sit.”
    It wasn’t just work that preoccupied him; it was the thought of Emma:—“My own dear future wife.” The letters flew back and forth, daily or even twice a day. Emma, uncharacteristically for her, was also romantic and sentimental. She was almost embarrassed by her enthusiasm. “I am rather ashamed of writing to you so soon again but if I disguise my writing in the direction I am in hopes the post master at Newcastle will think it is somebody else.” She wrote with candor, letting Charles see who she really was, just as he was doing with her: “Today the Miss Northens are coming very early & I shall have to do a prodigious quantity of friendship with Ellen who adores me extremely & will want to know all about every thing & my chief aim will be to tell her nothing about any thing. I shall treat her like your sisters do the Owens pretend to be very open & carefully never tell anything.”
    And although (perhaps because) she found it difficult to talk about religion in person, Emma once again wrote to Charles. On January 23, less than a week before the wedding, she wrote about her concerns.
    You need not fear my own dear Charles that I shall not be quite as happy as you are & I shall always look upon the event of the 29th as a most happy one on my part though perhaps not so great or so good as you do. There is only one subject in the world that ever gives me a moments uneasiness & I believe I think about that very little when I am with you & I do hope that though our opinions may not agree upon all points of religion we may sympathize a good deal in our feelings on the subject. I believe my chief danger will be that I shall lead so happy comfortable & amusing a life that I shall be careless & good for nothing & think of nothing serious in this world or the next.
    Â 
    This world or the next.
She wasn’t letting go.
    On the day they had originally set for the wedding, January 24, 1839, Charles was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, which was a rather important milestone in his career, but he didn’t even mention it in a letter to Emma. Instead he told her that he had had a bad headache for two days and two nights. He was afraid he wouldn’t be well enough to get married, but the train to Shrewsbury “quite cured me.” He arrived at the Mount to get ready for the wedding, and wrote to her at Maer. She had asked him to, afraid that it would be the last letter she ever got from him, for once