Charles Darwin’s daughter had an unusual hobby: Hunting phallic mushrooms

On a warm autumn day in the early 1900s, Henrietta Darwin, Charles Darwin’s eldest daughter, marched into the woods near her house on the outskirts of Gomshall, a rural English village about 30 miles southwest of London. Armed with a basket and a stick, her keen eyes scanned the damp, leafy undergrowth. At last, she smelled a rotten odor, and directed her gaze to the stench. There, a few feet away, she spotted her enemy: the stinkhorn mushroom. With its elongated shape protruding from the ground, the penis-shaped fungus oozed with a slime that smelled like carrion.

She dug it up, took it home, and burned it before anyone could see it. The unsightly mushroom could have corrupted her maids’ morals, or even their health. At least, that was the excuse she told her young niece Gwen Raverat, with a twinkle in her eye.

A fascinating woman in her own right, Henrietta Darwin was one of Charles Darwin’s 10 children. Although Raverat paints an interesting picture of Henrietta’s mushroom-hunting passion in her memoir Period Piece, Henrietta’s father, the famous naturalist and author of On the Origin of Species, deeply valued his daughter as a collaborator on some of his most important works.

A little-known collaborator on the works of Charles Darwin

Born in 1843, Henrietta was Darwin’s third daughter and the first to survive early childhood. As a young woman, she was raised in a household of curiosity and scientific engagement, and likely due to her father’s work on evolutionary theory, she wrestled with questions of free will, God, and the possibility of eternal life.

By her late 20s, she often edited her father’s manuscripts, in particular The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. This book was the first of Darwin’s works to apply his theory of evolution to the human species. For her efforts, Darwin wrote to her in 1870: “You have done me real service; but by Jove, how hard you must have worked, and how thoroughly you have mastered my MS [manuscript],” he wrote. “All this is as clear as daylight.”

Before becoming the famous naturalist, Charles Darwin abandoned a medical career and nearly became a priest. This photograph was likely taken around the time that Henrietta Darwin was around 11 years old. Image: Public Domain

He also wrote to her again in 1871, after The Descent of Man had been published: “Several reviewers speak of the lucid, vigorous style, &c. Now I know how much I owe to you in this respect.” He offered her a present worth 20 or 30 pounds, equivalent to over $1,500 today.

“She really did contribute”, says Dr. Alison Pearn, former associate director of the Darwin Correspondence Project: “That’s a huge amount of money. That’s quite a major thing.”

Given the time period, it’s easy to imagine that Henrietta was an outlier in her contribution to such important works. “The greatest danger is for us to repeat the traditional stereotypes of what we think the Victorians were like, without being aware that we are doing this,” says Dr. John van Wyhe, historian and director of The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, the largest published collection of Darwin’s private papers and manuscripts. “Was Henrietta’s help unusual? Maybe not as unusual as we think.”

Instead, Henrietta exemplifies the way in which many women were involved in the production of texts and scientific research at the time, particularly within upper-class families, such as the Darwins. “It was a family that generally talked a lot,” says Pearn. “And the women were as involved in that discussion as anybody else.”

The picture of Henrietta’s life can be established through many, in some ways wildly differing, sources. Alongside her formidable intellectual ability, she was clearly rather eccentric. This eccentricity is most obvious in the stories about “Aunt Etty’s” stinkhorn mushroom hunts described in Period Piece, an autobiographical memoir about the Darwin family, written from the perspective of Raverat, Henrietta’s niece.

What makes stinkhorns so special, or even morally hazardous?

Named Phallus impudicus by Carl Linnaeus in 1753, and meaning “shameless penis” in Latin, stinkhorns are widespread across Europe, North America, and even as far south as New Zealand. A common sight (or smell) in forests and gardens, they have a number of unique mycological features as well as several obscene and at times frightening folk tales associated with them.

Stinkhorns have two major differences from other mushrooms that make them both interesting and unusual. First, they emerge from eggs. In egg form, the tissues of the mushroom are compressed.

“It’s almost like a concertina, the musical instrument,” says Dr. Nik Money, mycologist and science writer. “You can see it in the egg, all of the beautifully woven tissues, and they’re just waiting, sort of like a spring.” Once water arrives, the egg absorbs it and expands quickly, in some cases in less than an hour. The growth of this mushroom is so strong, if allowed to expand in a closed jar, it will break the glass.

Secondly, the mushrooms spread differently than most fungi. Most mushrooms disperse their spores in the air to spread. But stinkhorns, in contrast, embed spores in the slime that covers the mushroom. The intense, carrion-like odor of the slime attracts insects, which then eat the slime and excrete it, with the spores later germinating in the excrement.

In various regions throughout Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries, stinkhorn mushrooms were associated with sexual and moral danger, the devil, as well as disease. In other places, including southern German regions like Thuringia, and Slavic countries like Montenegro, their phallic shape was also associated with fertility, and they were used as an aphrodisiac.

These stories were reprinted in Scottish and English botanical texts, and Henrietta would have known about the obscene ideas connected with the mushroom.

A 16th-century European medical concept originally from Greece, the “doctrine of signatures”, held that “the shape or the form of a plant would give you some indication of how God meant us to use them for medicine,” says Money. “When you look at the phallic form, clearly this might [have been perceived to] have Viagra-like properties.”

Similarly, in folk stories told by Ozark hillfolk in rural Missouri, the stinkhorn was a good omen, used to facilitate finding love: “If a virgin touched the stinkhorn to her vulva, it was a sure sign that she’d get the man she wanted.”

In other myths across Europe and North America, stinkhorn eggs were known as “devil’s eggs” or “witches’ eggs” (Teufelsei or Hexenei in German, œuf du Diable in French). In Massachusetts, the mushrooms were known as the “death baby.” It was thought that if a stinkhorn was found near the home, a death was imminent in the family.

In Gerard’s Herbal, an illustrated botanical text from the English Renaissance, the mushroom (top right) is described with “the title Fungus virilis penis erecti forma, which we English [call] Pricke Mushroom”. The image of the stinkhorn was even printed upside down, as Dr. Nik Money suggests, to avoid any risk of offense. Image: Public Domain

John Ramsbottom, a British mycologist born in 1885, writes that in France, in 1926, members of the sect Notre-Dame des Pleurs attacked a clergyman (who they believed to be possessed) for casting spells on birds to fly over the sect-leader’s garden, “where their droppings gave rise to fungi of obscene shapes which emitted such appalling odours that those who breathed them were smitten with horrible diseases.”

Why protect the morals of the maids?

While these spooky and vulgar stories were certainly widespread, Raverat somewhat satirically notes that Henrietta burned the stinkhorn to protect the “morals of the maids,” and admits that Henrietta did it mostly for fun.

Nonetheless, the idea that moral corruption could cause illness was a common belief at the time. With the potential risks from such a mushroom (albeit likely known by Henrietta to be overblown), it wasn’t altogether far-fetched that she might destroy them for the benefit of someone else.

In general, upper-class families were seen as responsible for protecting their servants from both physical illness and moral corruption. “And there was a widespread perception that maids could be easily corrupted,” says Pearn. “After all, this is a period where there’s no birth control, and where pregnancy was a disaster.”

It was not a question of puritanism, but rather a matter of preserving the existing, functioning social order, and looking out for those who were more at risk. “I tend to be very suspicious of this modern stereotype [of prudishness],” says van Wyhe. Pearn agrees, explaining, “It was more of a class thing and morals between classes, than a generally prudish or unscientific kind of view.”

Regardless of the reason for her behavior, Raverat writes of Henrietta with love and fondness, including as the great inventor of such an “exhilarating and wholesome sport” as stinkhorn hunting: “To us she only showed her immense interest in everything in the world, her vitality, her affection,” writes Raverat. “We all laughed at her and we all adored her.”

Her nephews, too, viewed Henrietta in a particularly fond light. “They definitely had a very affectionate sense of her being an eccentric,” says van Wyhe.

Henrietta Emma Litchfield (nee Darwin) and her older brother, William Erasmus Darwin, walk together outside in a photograph probably taken around 1905. Image: Public Domain

A lasting contribution in both science and family

Later in life Henrietta Darwin, now Litchfield, worked on portions of The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (1887), and put together an edited collection of her mother’s letters (1904), which was highly regarded. One review states: “It is impossible, in a single article, to do justice to Mrs. Litchfield’s volumes; they bring us into the closest touch with wise and attractive personalities and at the same time they record facts of great scientific interest.”

Henrietta also had a particular fondness for befriending young women, and disseminating scientific works and sharing knowledge with them. “In some cases she gave them a leaf from the rough draft of On the Origin of Species,” says van Wyhe.

Henrietta was a thoughtful, interesting person, and contributor to some of the most important early works of evolutionary science. She was far from the only woman involved in the sciences in Victorian England.

“There were an enormous number of women right up into the last century, up into the 20th century,” says Pearn, “who could have done so much more.”

It seems that Raverat agreed, for in her eyes at least, her Aunt Etty “could have ruled a kingdom with success”, one far greater than her domain of little mushrooms, her nostrils twitching in her search through the forest, ready to pounce upon her prey.

In That Time When, Popular Science tells the weirdest, surprising, and little-known stories that shaped science, engineering, and innovation.

Related 'That Time When' Stories

Inventor Beulah Louise Henry’s unstoppable rise to becoming ‘Lady Edison’

Beef tea was all the rage in the 1800s

The CIA once trained cats to be Cold War spies

The only person to win an Olympic medal and a Nobel Peace Prize

Andrew Jackson’s White House once hosted a cheese feeding frenzy

Windshield wipers’ overlooked female inventor

The post Charles Darwin’s daughter had an unusual hobby: Hunting phallic mushrooms appeared first on Popular Science.