Darwin Correspondence Project

Letters revealing a unprecedented episode of incandescent anger on Darwin’s part will be published for the first time in the next volume of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin, out next month. The volume contains more than 600 letters from 1874. The target of Darwin’s fury was the Catholic zoologist St George Jackson Mivart who had [...]

It is very good news that the Wedgwood archive and pottery collection  has been bought for the nation.  The Darwins and Wedgwoods were so intermarried, it was a Wedgwood family joke that the Darwins were more Wedgwood than Darwin. Charles thought he and his wife, Emma Wedgwood (also his cousin) were rather ‘degenerate descendants of [...]

The Natural History Museum of Denmark has just discovered a collection of barnacles sent by Charles Darwin to Japetus Steenstrup in 1854 as a thank you gift – a “very inadequate return” (Letter 1589, 7 Sept [1854]) – for the many cirripede specimens that Steenstrup had sent him. Among these was one which turned out [...]

The Project was recently contacted by the owner of an important Darwin letter that contains a rare instance of the key expressions “natural selection” and “struggle for existence” in correspondence. The letter was addressed to Thomas Rivers, a nurseryman in Hertfordshire and a leading authority on roses and fruit trees. Darwin initiated the correspondence in [...]

When the US football team lost to Belgium in the stadium in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, they could have consoled themselves with the reflection that Darwin didn’t altogether enjoy it either.   Bahia was the place where he first set foot on South American soil when HMS Beagle landed there in February 1832, but a knee injury [...]