Explore the letters
To help you get started, here are links to a few selected letters – some famous, some fun:
Darwin’s childhood:
Read what the 12-year-old Charles Darwin, in one of his earliest known letters, had to say about his standards of personal hygiene:
I only wash my fe[e]t once a month at school, which I confess is nasty, but I cannot help it, for we have nothing to do it with
At sixteen, Darwin went to study in Edinburgh with his brother Erasmus. On arrival, he reported to his father:
We have just been to church and heard a sermon of only 20 minutes. I expected from Sir Walter Scott’s account, a soul-cutting discourse of 2 hours & a half—
The Beagle voyage:
Read the letter from John Stevens Henslow in which Darwin, then a 22-year-old graduate, first heard about the opportunity to travel around the world on H.M.S. Beagle:
I have stated that I consider you to be the best qualified person I know of who is likely to undertake such a situation— I state this not on the supposition of yr. being a finished Naturalist, but as amply qualified for collecting, observing, & noting any thing worthy to be noted in Natural History.
Darwin wrote a letter to a friend while waiting to board the Beagle, combining reminiscences of University days in Cambridge – particularly the social life! – and gleeful anticipation of the voyage:
The scheme is a most magnificent one. We spend about 2 years in S America, the rest of time larking round the world
Darwin’s family and friends kept the long and detailed letters that he sent them during the five-year voyage. In this one, sent to Henslow in 1832, he describes Captain FitzRoy, seasickness, specimen-collecting, his first impressions of South America, and his revulsion at slavery:
The Captain does every thing in his power to assist me, & we get on very well.—but I thank my better fortune he has not made me a renegade to Whig principles: I would not be a Tory, if it was merely on account of their cold hearts about that scandal to Christian Nations, Slavery.
Family life:
Darwin eventually had a long and happy marriage to his cousin, Emma Darwin, but his first romance was with Fanny Owen, who lived near his family in Shropshire. Darwin heard the news of Fanny’s sudden marriage while he was on board the Beagle. Although he turned it off with a joke it seems he was hurt:
Well it may be all very delightful to those concerned, but as I like unmarried woman better than those in the blessed state, I vote it a bore.
Charles and Emma Darwin had ten children altogether, and his letters are full of references to their births, their games, their illnesses, and the help they gave him with his work. In 1854 Darwin wrote to a friend whose wife had just given birth:
Did you administer the Chloroform? When I did, I was perfectly convinced that the Chloroform was very composing to oneself as well as to the patient.
Three of those children died: two in infancy, and the other, Darwin’s dearly loved eldest daughter, Annie, at the age of 10. Letters from April 1851 follow Annie’s last illness. She died at Malvern where her father had taken her in hopes of a cure. The letters include this one from Emma, who had been left at home in the last stages of pregnancy:
Goodbye my own dearest. It is a dreadful period for all of us but except at post time my sufferings are nothing to yours.
Darwin’s health:
Many of Darwin’s letters refer to his own poor health. In one he wrote:
I have suffered from almost incessant vomiting for nine months, & that has so weakened my brain, that any excitement brings on whizzing & fainting feelings
Evolution:
Throughout his life (1809-1882) Darwin gathered data and discussed his theories about the natural world. Although he did not publish his theory of natural selection until 1859 in On the origin of species, his letters chart the development of these ideas from the days of the Beagle voyage onwards. One of the first of his scientific colleagues to be brought into Darwin’s confidence was Joseph Dalton Hooker. In 1844 Darwin famously wrote to Hooker that admitting to doubts about the immutability of species felt “like confessing a murder“. See the complete text of that letter here.
Alfred Russel Wallace, the man whose own theories about the evolution of species prompted Darwin to make his theory public, first wrote to Darwin in 1857, and Darwin encouraged him in his work (see letter 2192 ). For Darwin’s first reaction to discovering that Wallace’s ideas were so close to his own, read for example letter 2295 and letter 2306.
And here is Darwin describing an anonymous reviewer of Origin:
the manner in which he drags in immortality, & sets the Priests at me & leaves me to their mercies, is base. He would on no account burn me; but he will get the wood ready & tell the black beasts how to catch me.—
Draft in Darwin’s hand of a petition to the Secretary of the Post Office
(© Cambridge University Library)
“We the undersigned . . . respectfully request your attention to the arrangement for the delivery of our letters. Although but a small place we receive an average from 50 to 60 letters & newspapers &c. daily”
