I have just been reading Emma Darwin by Edna Healey. Most of what I had read about her before left me with the impression that she was something of a country mouse of a cousin, but far from it. She was well travelled & well connected & had a lively mind; she even managed to get on well with, & be admired by, Thomas Carlyle.
She & Charles were the kind to indulge in ‘cousinly badinage’ in their letters to each other while they were engaged – their pet names for each other had that slight edge which can be disconcerting to an outsider (though considered by others to be infinitely preferable to the kind of sickening childish names adopted by others which often clog up the newspaper columns on Valentines day). Two of Emma’s pet names for Charles were curmudgeon & toad.
A third came in the letters she addressed to Dear Nigger; even in later years she often wrote to Dear N.
This could have been part of a private family language in use in such a large & intertwined group such as the Darwins & Wedgewoods, much like the Glynnese adopted by the Glynnes & Gladstone tribe.
It might have been adopted as a way of teasing the Charles who had returned tanned & weatherbeaten from his voyage on The Beagle – though the Richmond portrait of him shows a fair young man with a slight, though disconcerting & unnerving resemblance to Richard Dawkins.
She & Charles were the kind to indulge in ‘cousinly badinage’ in their letters to each other while they were engaged – their pet names for each other had that slight edge which can be disconcerting to an outsider (though considered by others to be infinitely preferable to the kind of sickening childish names adopted by others which often clog up the newspaper columns on Valentines day). Two of Emma’s pet names for Charles were curmudgeon & toad.
A third came in the letters she addressed to Dear Nigger; even in later years she often wrote to Dear N.
This could have been part of a private family language in use in such a large & intertwined group such as the Darwins & Wedgewoods, much like the Glynnese adopted by the Glynnes & Gladstone tribe.
It might have been adopted as a way of teasing the Charles who had returned tanned & weatherbeaten from his voyage on The Beagle – though the Richmond portrait of him shows a fair young man with a slight, though disconcerting & unnerving resemblance to Richard Dawkins.
Or it could just be part of the complex history of the N word in English English, used genuinely to indicate affection, albeit of a sometimes condescending kind, dropped eventually from polite usage (even in things like the name of shoe polish & children's nursery rhymes) when circumstances changed, & the offence it was causing became clear.
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