DARWIN’S DAUGHTER DEAD

Evening Star, Issue 19788, 11 February 1928, Page 21

DARWIN’S DAUGHTER DEAD

Mrs Litchfield, whose death at the age of eighty-four 'has just been recorded, was Henrietta, the fourth and eldest surviving child of Charles Darwin. She had outlived nearly all her friends of her own generation. As a young woman, before her marriage, she helped her father in his work. As recorded in his biography, it was when the proofs of his books arrived at the “ slip ” stage that he began seriously to consider the question of stylo. His sentences had a way of getting themselves inverted, ami ho welcomed suggestions in the disentangling of them. It was at this stage that his daughter came to his aid, and she herself wrote of it:—“T do not think that ho ever used to forget to tell me what improvement ho thought I had made, and he used almost to excuse himself if he did not agree with any correction." The late Mr Richard Buckley Litchfield, to whom she was married in 1871, was one of the founders of the Working Men’s College; she took a great interest in it, and helped it in various ways. Besides a little memoir of her husband she edited ‘ Emma Darwin : A Century of Family Letters,' beginning with the letters of a remarkable sisterhood, the Misse’s Allen, of Cresselly, one of whom was her grandmother, Mrs Joshia Wedgwood’ arid coming down to the death of her mother, Mrs Charles Darwin, in ISD6. A memoirist in ‘ The Times ’ adds: “Her father once wrote to her of her childhood‘ How proud I was when you would come in and sit on my knee, and _ there you sat for a. • long time, looking as solemn as a little judge. - That judicial solemnity of expression remained with her, as it seems to me, all her life, but it was constantly broken and lighted up by a smile of equal charm and sincerity'. It may bo permissible to say that there have been few more acute minds and no warmer hearts among the number of those who 1 rest in unvisited tombs.’ ”