William Erasmus Darwin

Who was William Erasmus Darwin?

William Erasmus Darwin was the first-born son of Charles and Emma Darwin, and the subject of psychological studies by his father. He was educated at Rugby School and Christ's College Cambridge, and later became a banker at Grant and Maddison's Union Banking Company in Southampton. In 1877 he married an American Sara Price Ashburner Sedgwick. William was a great believer in university education being available to all, and championed the establishment of a university college in Southampton in 1902. The Darwins had no children of their own, and after his wife died, William devoted himself much to his nieces Gwen Raverat, Frances Cornford, and Margaret Keynes. William died on 8 September 1914 at Sedbergh in Cumbria. Raverat remembered him fondly as an eccentric and entirely unselfconscious man in her childhood memoirs Period Piece.

There is a story about him at my grandfather's funeral at Westminster Abbey. He was sitting in the front seat as eldest son and chief mourner, and he felt a draught on his already bald head; so he put his black gloves to balance on the top of his skull, and sat like that all through the service with the eyes of the nation upon him.