Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin is one of the main protagonists of the book. He gets slightly more coverage than his wife Emma Wedgwood Darwin. Darwin was born in 1809, the youngest of six children, at the Mount in Shrewsbury. Heiligman describes him as “a good catch” as he was tall, athletic, and fit with gray eyes and a “ruddy complexion,” with a “pleasant face” (7-8). Heiligman begins the book with Charles’s indecision over marriage - manifested in the Marry/Not Marry list - a real artifact from Charles’s past. She structures the rest of the book around this symbol, using the list as a hypothesis and the rest of the book to confirm or negate this hypothesis. This is both an example of Charles’s process and how science was a part of every part of his life. It is also a gendered flip as often the decision...