Charles and Emma by Deborah Heiligman Page A

structure. If his theory became well known, and popular, it could topple British society on its head. If God had not ordained the hierarchy everyone lived by, then England could tumble into chaos. And Charles—a polite man, a conservative in the sense that he did want to conserve the British way of life, a man who did not want to hurt any-one—certainly did not want to be responsible for chaos.
    As for Emma, she did not know why Charles had to reject God. While she and her family always questioned the status quo, she didn’t think you had to deny the existence of God. And she desperately wished Charles wouldn’t either. Although she did feel somewhat relieved because he had read Jesus’s farewell to his disciples, she was still concerned about the void between them.
    For Charles, marrying Emma made his religious doubts real and tangible. As real as the person who would be lying in the bed next to him.

 
    Chapter 11
    A Whirl of Noise and Motion
    Â 
    I quite agree with you in the happiness
of having plenty to do.
    â€”E MMA TO HER UNCLE J. C. DE S ISMONDI , D ECEMBER 1838
    Â 
    D ay after day, at the end of a morning spent deep in thought—it was late November and he was now able to get a little work done—Charles would come out of 36 Great Marlborough Street into the yellow autumn fog. “I have seen no one for these two days,” he wrote to Emma, “and what can a man have to say who works all morning in describing hawks and owls, and then rushes out and walks in a bewildered manner up one street and down another, looking out for the words ‘To let.’” Up and down Regent Street, Oxford Street, and Cavendish Place. Maybe he would find a home near where Lyell and the former Mary Horner lived on Harley Street; or maybe he would find a house in Chelsea, where Thomas and Jane Carlyle had moved a few years earlier. To the east was Russell Square, and to the north was the area around the newuniversity, University College London, which was known as the godless university, where great men were thinking great thoughts—but were not being trained, as at Cambridge and Oxford, for the church.
    Everywhere he walked in London he had to avoid horse manure (one hundred tons left each day) and mud, and the street sweepers who swept it all away, as well as the hansom cabs and personal horse-drawn carriages—barouches, landaus, broughams, and curricles—rolling through the streets. He endured the “whirl of noise and motion,” as Dickens characterized London in his then-current serial,
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby,
which everyone was gobbling up in
Bentley’s Miscellany,
a literary magazine.
    Charles was desperate to find a house. After talking it over, he and Emma had agreed that they would begin their lives together in London, for Charles still had much to do in the city. As secretary of the Geological Society, he listened to debates about the significance of fossils. Many of the geologists argued against an evolutionary theory that one of his old Edinburgh professors, Robert Grant, proposed. Grant’s theory mostly came from one that had been suggested by a Frenchman named Jean-Baptiste Lamarck late in the previous century. Charles agreed with much of what Lamarck had to say, especially that the environment in which an animal lives causes it to change. And he enjoyed listening to the debates. But he knew that he had more to contribute and would have even more to contribute if he could get more analysis of his specimens—those that were already out with experts and those that still needed to get to other specialists. To do this, he had to be in London, especially so he could use his considerable charm to convince the experts to hurry up.
    Maybe later Charles and Emma would move out to thecountry, for the ease and quiet. But for now they would stay in town, and they needed to find a place to live—his rooms on Great Marlborough Street