charles_darwin

CHAPTER 2
THE LIFE OF CHARLES
DARWIN
The Ordinary and Extraordinary Life
of Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin was born on 12 February 1809 in Shrewsbury,
an ancient market town near the Welsh border in the county
of Shropshire, the most westerly county in the West Midlands.
Before Darwin, the town’s most famous resident was Robert Clive,
the man who led the British conquest of India in the eighteenth century.
In the first twenty years of the nineteenth century, the town
had a population of approximately 16,000. Shrewsbury, although it
had a comparatively small population, was the county town of
Shropshire, the most rural of the English counties. The rural character
of the county and Shrewsbury’s importance were two of the reasons
why Darwin’s parents chose to live there. By the time Darwin
was born, Darwin’s father had a flourishing medical practice that
covered the town and the surrounding area. Darwin’s interest in
and love of nature can be traced to the surroundings of his early
childhood.
These simple facts about Darwin’s life are well known. In fact,
so much is known about Darwin’s life that it is easy for anyone reading
his life story for the first time to be overwhelmed and underwhelmed.
Darwin was an extraordinary man and a great scientist. He
was the author of the best-known theory in biology and he did all of
this without completing a university degree or any extended formal
training in science. And yet there is much about Darwin that was
very ordinary; in fact, some aspects of Darwin’s life are so ordinary
as to be banal. He lived for many years in a small village outside
London; compared with the hustle and bustle of the city, he lived in
the middle of nowhere. He worried about the health of his children