Blush Unseen

"Whenever there is intense blushing," wrote Charles Darwin in 1872, "there will be some, and often great, confusion of mind."

The modest Victorian himself was confused on one point: just how far down did a blush extend? A Frenchman had once told him that some bashful artists' models blush clear to their toes, but that hearsay evidence was not scientific enough for the great fact collector. Darwin wrote to his friend and portraitist Thomas Woolner, begging the advice of "a cautious and careful English artist" on the subject. Thanks to him, Darwin was able to state that "with English women, blushing does not extend beneath the neck and upper part of the chest," but Woolner got little credit for his work on this scientific milestone.

By last week Woolner's poetry and sculpture (including his first triumph, Eleanor Sucking the Poison from the Arm of Prince Edward*} were mostly forgotten, but officials of the parish church at Hadleigh, Suffolk, still remembered his reply to Darwin and its implication of rather thoroughgoing research. They turned down a memorial offered by Woolner's aging daughters, because "any man who is asked to do things like that is not suitable to be commemorated in a church tablet." To clear his parish of any possible suspicion of complicity, Churchwarden W. Jones told the consistory court at Bury St. Edmunds : "Woolner's connection with Hadleigh was entirely fortuitous. He happened to be born there."

*According to Ptolomaeus Lucemsis, a medieval chronicler, Eleanor of Castile, wife of England's Edward I, gave the first aid after an assassin's attack at Acre in 1270.

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