Free Charles and Emma by Deborah Heiligman

Elizabeth’s place and realized that she probably would not have rejoiced if it had been her sister who was leaving. She felt guilty and wanted to push the wedding off a little bit to help ease the transition for all the Wedgwoods.
    But Charles couldn’t wait, and he couldn’t help himself. After he signed his name, he wrote, “Remember life is short, and two months is the sixth part of the year, and that year, the first, from which for my part, things shall hereafter date.” He told her he would leave the timing up to her but that he would be in agony “until I am part of you—Dearest Emma, good-bye.”
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    After another visit to Maer, and more talks by the fire, Charles went back to London. He found it impossible to concentrateon work, though he did try. All he wanted to do was find a house for them. On November 23, 1838, he wrote to Emma, “I positively can do nothing, & have done nothing this whole week, but think of you & our future life.—you may then, well imagine how I enjoy seeing your handwriting…It is a very high enjoyment to me, as I cannot talk to you, & feel your presence by having your own dear hand within mine.”
    He
was
able to write in his notebooks, especially to explore his own emotions and feelings. In his “M” notebook, where he had written about his pre-proposal anxiety attack, he now analyzed jealousy. Where did those horrible feelings come from? Again thinking of man as a part of the animal kingdom, he realized that “Jealousy probably originally entirely sexual.” A man, an ape, a blue-footed booby tries to attract a female to mate with. He becomes jealous if there is competition and he fails “to drive away rival.”
    And in another private notebook, his “N” notebook, bound in rust-colored leather, he analyzed his body and new sensations he was having from those geese by the fire, which likely were no longer just intimate
talks.
“Sexual desire makes saliva to flow,” he wrote, and added later, “yes, certainly.”
    He had a “curious association” thinking about his newfound romantic life. He thought of watching a family dog, Nina, “licking her chops.” Though kissing Emma had to be better than kissing a dog, anyhow, he could not help but make the connection to people kissing. He wrote, “ones tendency to kiss, & almost to bite, that which one sexually loves is probably connected with flow of saliva, & hence with action of mouth & jaws.” He made another human-animal connection: “Lascivious women are described as biting: so do stallions always.”
    He continued, “No doubt man has great tendency to exertall senses, when thus stimulated.” And he read up on the subject and quoted a certain Professor Bell, who said there was a connection between smell and sexual desire and the feelings one gets when listening to beautiful music. Charles thought that listening to music could be rapturous, religious even.
    Thinking about love and sexual desire, he returned to a favorite theme—how are we humans like animals? He thought about dogs, how mother dogs licked their puppies partly to clean them, but also to show affection. “This habit probably originated in the females carefully licking their puppies—the dearest object of their love—for the sake of cleansing them…Thus, the habit will have become associated with the emotion of love.”
    No wonder Emma’s friend Ellen Tollet wrote to her, “You two will be quite too happy together, and I hope you will have a chimney that smokes, or something of that sort to prevent your becoming quite intoxicated.”
    Charles
was
getting carried away, intoxicated. His intense feelings were offset by tentativeness, though. He felt shy: “Shyness is certainly very much connected with thinking of one-self…blushing is connected with sexual, because each sex thinks more of what another thinks of