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Amazon Review
Annie's Box contains the brief life and premature death of Annie, Charles Darwin's eldest daughter, and opens up to present a humane, warm portrait of the most revolutionary of evolutionary thinkers. The key here is perhaps "premature": Annie was only 10 years old when she died, probably of tuberculosis, yet her death made Charles even more acutely conscious of the elimination of the weakest as he formulated his "big species book", The Origin of Species. Darkly he even pondered, along Lamarck's lines, whether he had contributed to her death by passing on characteristics he'd acquired during his lifetime, for he was a generally sickly man. The other question raised was one of divine influence, and Annie's death caused him to ask hard questions about his faith. Another daughter, Etty, remembered him mentioning her only twice again for the rest of his life, yet 35 years on from her death, in 1851, he intimately recalled for an article her first smile at eight weeks old. The box in question was a writing case, into which were put Annie's "childish things" when she died, such as her writing equipment, her embroidery, some letters and some notes. And, of course, the family's grief. Great-great-grandson Randal Keynes' handling of his material is exemplary, drawing on the memoirs of Darwin's children, family papers, letters and a host of scholarship. The evocative picture described is unique to the Darwin family, but it's also very much a picture of its time. Infant mortality was commonplace in the mid-19th century, yet Keynes draws out the intense, prolonged mourning felt by Darwin and wife Emma for Annie, despite having many subsequent children. With a supporting cast including Charles Dickens, Joseph Hooker, Alfred Wallace Russel, TH Huxley, and George Eliot, Keynes presents a poignant yet unsentimental account, laying out Darwin's thinking with commendable and precise acumen, yet suggesting most persuasively how his personal circumstance rippled the deep water of his theories. --David Vincent
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