This is a complete list of the known letters exchanged by Darwin and Joseph Dalton Hooker.  Most of the originals are in the Darwin Archive at Cambridge University Library, and you can see images of those alongside the transcriptions both on this site, and on the Cambridge University Digital Library.  The other major repository of Joseph Hooker’s papers is the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew.

No single set of letters was more important to Darwin than those exchanged with his closest friend, the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker 

The 1400 letters exchanged between Darwin and Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) account for around 10% of Darwin’s surviving correspondence and provide a structure within which all the other letters can be explored.  They are a connecting thread that spans forty years of Darwin’s mature working life from 1843 until his death in 1882 and bring into sharp focus every aspect of Darwin’s scientific work throughout that period. They illuminate the mutual friendships he and Hooker shared with other scientists, but they also provide a window of unparalleled intimacy into the personal lives of the two men. 

Their correspondence began in 1843 when Hooker, just returned from James Clark Ross’s Antarctic expedition, and already an admirer of the older man, was approached about working on Darwin’s collection of plants from the Beagle voyage. Just the previous year Darwin had written out his first coherent account of the main elements of his species theory, and within a few months Hooker was admitted into the small and select group of those with whom Darwin felt able to discuss his emerging ideas. In perhaps his most famous letter of all, Darwin wrote to Hooker in January 1844 of his growing conviction that species “are not … immutable” – an admission he likened, half jokingly, to “confessing a murder”. When Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) sent Darwin a letter in 1858 outlining an almost identical theory to his own, it was Hooker, together with Charles Lyell, who engineered the simultaneous publication of papers by both men, and secured Darwin’s claim to the theory of “modification through descent” by means of the mechanism Darwin called “natural selection”.

It was also to Hooker that Darwin, writing furiously in the succeeding months, sent batches of the manuscript of On the Origin of Species for comment, and Hooker continued to be a sounding board for successive publications.

Much of the most important experimental work conducted by Darwin after the publication of Origin was on variation and adaptation in plants, in particular the mechanisms by which various plants are nourished, reproduce, and colonise. Hooker, who after ten years as assistant director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, succeeded his father as director in 1865, was perfectly placed to provide Darwin with exotic species, and to help him build vital global networks of well-informed correspondents.

Hooker was a frequent visitor to Darwin at his home in Downe, Kent, and became a great favourite of Darwin’s children. The two men shared their experience of attending the birth of their children: Darwin advocated the use of chloroform which he thought as “composing to oneself as well as to the patient”. It was to Darwin that Hooker wrote just an hour after the death of his six year-old daughter, Maria, knowing that his friend, who had lost both a ten year-old daughter and a baby son, would all too clearly understand his grief. Those letters are amongst the most poignant in the collection.

Of the many hundreds of letters that passed between Darwin and Hooker all but a handful of those that survive are in the Cambridge Darwin archive. Darwin’s son Francis incorporated many extracts in two published editions of his father’s letters, in 1888 and 1902, the second of which he dedicated to Hooker “in remembrance of his lifelong friendship with Charles Darwin”. At some time between those two editions, Hooker returned Darwin’s letters to the family, retaining copies for himself; those copies now form part of the Hooker archive at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Both sides of the original correspondence, bound into several large volumes, arrived in Cambridge University Library, in 1948, together with the bulk of the Darwin archive, following transfer of ownership from the Darwin family, supported by funding from The Pilgrim Trust.

Being able to see the original letters complements the transcriptions and contextual notes. An original can reveal the state of mind of the writer, in particular anxiety or agitation (as in the letter about the death of baby Charles for example with enlarged, untidy writing and deletions), or uncertainty.  And they can capture the formality or informality of their relationship with the recipient. 

The use Darwin made of the information in letters is also obvious, for example in his annotations to Hooker’s comments on the first edition of Origin, which he also methodically crossed through as he used them to revise the later editions.

And letters written in pencil suggest Darwin was unwell – you can’t use an ink dip pen lying down. 

“Top Ten” letters

Developing a theory:

Letter 729, Darwin to J. D. Hooker, [11 January 1844]: Darwin cautiously reveals to Hooker, who he has only been corresponding with for a few months, his conclusion that species are not immutable. It is, he says, “like confessing a murder”.

Going public:

Letter 2297  and letter 2298, 29 June 1858:On 28 June 1858, just a few days after Darwin received Alfred Russel Wallace‘s essay outlining the same mechanism for species change as his own, Darwin’s baby son, Charles Waring Darwin, died of scarlet fever.  The following day, distracted by grief, Darwin sent two letters to Hooker who was in the midst of arranging for Darwin’s work on species change to be read at a meeting of the Linnean Society together with Wallace’s, and thus to secure Darwin’s claim as originator of the theory of natural selection. “It is miserable in me” Darwin wrote “to care at all about priority”.

The writing of Origin and its reception:

Hooker was one of the few to whom Darwin sent manuscript of On the Origin of Species for comment – with close to disastrous results when Hooker’s children used some of it for scrap paper.    Darwin wrote to Hooker in triumph once it was finished, “You cannot think how refreshing it is to idle away whole day, & hardly ever think in the least about my confounded Book, which half killed me.”, and indignantly about the response of the old fogies of Cambridge. 

Letter 2852 includes Hooker’s description of the famous 1860 Oxford meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science when the Bishop of Oxford denounced the ideas in Origin,  and 2853 is Darwin’s delighted response.

Darwin later regretted using the word “creation” in the second edition of Origin.

Friendship, gossip, and shared jokes:

Letter 3480: Hooker started a running joke in their correspondence about the British aristrocracy being the result of natural selection. 

Letter 3537 and 3597: When Hooker had his family silver stolen by a man who had chatted up his maidservants, he asked the Darwins to recommend an old and unattractive cook.  Darwin replied that he wished natural selection had resulted in neuter humans who would not flirt.

Letter 3890: Hooker suggests they should give up science and just write gossip. There is a good example in a letter in which Darwin speculates that a lady of their acquaintance might be an illegitimate daughter of his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin.

Hooker sometimes made fun of Darwin’s appearance: he addressed one letter to his “Glorified Friend” after receiving a photograph of Darwin that reminded him of an image of Moses.

Fatherhood:

On attending the births of their children, when both men administered chloroform to their wives, see letters 1573 and 1576.  The birth of one of Hooker’s sons interrupted the writing of one letter, and Darwin teased him for reporting it so casually.

Grief and loss:

Both men also lost children.  Hooker wrote to Darwin within an hour of the death of his six year old daughter.    And it was to Hooker that Darwin expressed his grief at the loss of his daughter-in-law, Amy, who died in childbirth.

Novels and politics:

The two families shared their views on literature and often recommended books to oneanother, and commented on the politics of the day. 

Hooker and Darwin had rather different attitudes to the American Civil War.  Hooker took a hardline view on protecting British economic interests and fell out with their mutual friend, the Harvard botanist Asa Gray (see for example letter 3395); Darwin’s views were chiefly coloured by his staunch opposition to slavery.   The letter in which Darwin discusses this most openly also demonstrates how completely entwined the public, scientific, and personal are in their letters: it also continues the joke about the aristocracy, is rude about Darwin’s one-time friend and bitter opponent, the palaeontologist Richard Owen, and contains Darwin’s completely accurate prediction that there must be a moth with an exceptionally large proboscis as the necessary pollinator of the recently discovered orchid Angraecum sesquipedale.

Hooker on travel:

Hooker’s descriptions of trekking in India are in his archive at The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (see letters 1247 and 1319), but you can see Darwin’s reaction on hearing Hooker had been imprisoned in Sikkim, and Hooker’s comparison of the Himalayas and the Swiss alps.

Letters|Selected Readings

Darwin’s first reflections on human progress were prompted by his experiences in the slave-owning colony of Brazil, and by his encounters with the Yhagan peoples of Tierra del Fuego. Harsh conditions, privation, poor climate, bondage and servitude, could impede human progress or cause degeneration. In the “Fuegians”, Darwin thought he had witnessed man in his most “primitive wildness” (letter to Henslow, 11 April 1833). They represented both the yawning gap between wild and domesticated humans, and the unsettling proximity of the savage and the civilized. The Beagle carried three Yahgans who had been taken from their homeland by Robert FitzRoy several years earlier as part of a missionary enterprise. Darwin was struck by the progress that had been achieved through their forced migration to England: “in contradiction of what has often been stated, three years has been sufficient to change savages, into, as far as habits go, complete & voluntary Europeans” (Diary, p. 143). But he was also shocked by their rapid reversion to the primitive state, once they had been returned to their native land.

After the voyage, Darwin began to question the inevitability of progress. In his private notebooks, he modeled evolution after a tree of life or coral that was “irregularly branched” (Notebooks, B21), rather than linear, and with numerous dead ends. Fitness was relative to the conditions of existence which sometimes favored simpler forms or more instinctive behaviors: “absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another” (Notebooks, B74). The tendency toward increased complexity and variety, he suggested, was a bi-product of the abundance of life; retrogression was also possible, and was evident in some animal classes.

After the publication of Origin of Species, many of Darwin’s supporters continued to believe that descent was propelled by an inward force or directed by design, while others such as Charles Lyell and Alfred Russel Wallace placed limits on natural selection as applied to human development. Another major point of controversy was the origins and unity of the human species, with researchers in ethnography and physical anthropology divided over theories of ‘monogenism’ and ‘polygenism’ and related questions about the supremacy of ‘white races’, the expansion of European empires, and the extinction or extermination of other peoples and cultures.

When Darwin wrote about the human races and the evolution of the ‘higher’ intellectual and moral faculties in Descent of Man, he drew on recent anthropology, comparative anatomy and zoology, surveys of ‘primitive culture’ and philology, as well as his own observations on human and animal behavior accumulated over three decades. Darwin argued forcefully for the unity of the human species, remarking that the dispute between monogenists and polygenists will “die a silent and unobserved death” when evolution is generally accepted (Descent 1: 235). He also employed the prevailing concept of civilization with its implied ranking of peoples, past and present, regarding their political, material, and technological advances as manifestations of their intellectual and moral powers. The “grade of civilization”, he wrote, “seems the most important element in the success of nations” (Descent 1: 239). The implications of Darwinian theory for progressive, racial, and racist theories of human nature would remain one of the most controversial subjects of debate through the end of the nineteenth century and beyond.

Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802); from Ernst Krause (1879), Erasmus Darwin (with a preliminary notice by Charles Darwin)

How do new species arise?  This was the ancient question that Charles Darwin tackled soon after returning to England from the Beagle voyage in October 1836. Some naturalists, such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the medical writer Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin’s grandfather), had thought that new species of animals and plants emerged through a progressive evolutionary force beginning with the spontaneous generation of life.  The astronomer John Herschel had called it ‘the mystery of mysteries.’  Others believed such subjects were beyond the bounds of science.  Recording his observations and increasingly bold thoughts in a series of private notebooks, the young naturalist began exploring the world of animal and plant breeders, in the hope that their practical knowledge would shed fresh light on the problem. 

In September 1838, Darwin realised a crucial (and cruel) fact: far more individuals of each species were born than could possibly survive. What led some deer to die during a harsh winter, and others to survive and reproduce?  Darwin’s answer was that some were better adapted for particular circumstances than others.  Within each species of animal or plant, it was possible to find a remarkable range of variation: no two individuals were the same.  Only the best adapted would survive to reproduce and pass down their characteristics to the next generation.  A slightly heavier coat, a better ability to run from predators: these could make all the difference. Over a long period of time, these tiny changes would accumulate, thus leading to new species.

Charles Darwin, sketch of primate origins (dated 21 April 1868); MS CUL DAR. 80: B91r © Cambridge University Library

This is what Darwin, through an analogy with ‘artificial selection’, came to call the principle of ‘natural selection’. As he explained in On the Origin of Species (1859), nature was like the breeders whose works he had studied so carefully.  A skilled breeder would select individuals with tiny but desirable variations, and allow only those to produce offspring.  Continued over many generations, this process could produce differences as wide as those between the Great Dane and the dachshund.  Nature, Darwin realised, worked in the same way, but more rigorously and over a far longer time scale.  As Darwin recalled at the end of his life, ‘being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence. . . it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved & unfavourable ones to be destroyed.  The result of this would be the formation of new species.’   Death, Darwin had unexpectedly realized, was the secret to the great tree of life. 

Darwin made his discovery not in isolation on the Galapagos or on the Beagle voyage, but as a twenty-nine year old bachelor living in cheap housing in London.  This was ‘modern Babylon’, the largest city the world had ever known. It is not surprising, then, that Darwin reached his insight while thinking about people.  As part of a broader interest in metaphysics, psychology and economics, he read Thomas Malthus’s controversial Essay on the Principle of Population (6^th edition, 1828); Malthus argued that famine and disease were necessary to keep human populations in check.  Although for tactical reasons humans are mentioned only briefly in Origin, Darwin did publish his full thoughts in The Descent of Man (1871), his last great theoretical work on species.

In the two decades following his insights of the late 1830s, Darwin undertook research on virtually every aspect of his theory. He soaked seeds in salt-water to study the possibility of long-distance transport in the oceans; raised pigeons to understand the effects of crossing; and worked on the classification of barnacles, which reinforced his appreciation of just how much variation there is in nature.

While Darwin waited to publish his ideas, the problem of species became the subject of ferocious public debate. The journalist Robert Chambers’s anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published in 1844, moved discussion of evolution out of medical dissecting rooms and the radical freethinking press, into Victorian homes. Vestiges suggested that a law of development could explain everything from the orgins of the solar system to the human mind.

Reading Vestiges and inspired by Malthus, in 1858 the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace came up a species theory remarkably similiar to the one that Darwin had been elaborating for so long. The work of both men was announced in 1858 at a meeting of the Linnean Society of London, and Darwin immediately set to work on what became On the Origin of Species. Wallace went on to produce many important scientific works, particularly on the geographical distribution of species and the questions raised by what he generously termed ‘Darwinism’.

Origin, published in 1859, transformed the public controversy about species and creation. Even those who were not fully convinced–like the ambitious young man of science Thomas Henry Huxley–recognised Darwin’s theory as the first attempt to tackle the problem that could not simply be dismissed as idle speculation. In large part this was because natural selection provided (as Darwin later said) a ‘theory to work by’, one that suggested practical possibilities for research in the laboratory and field.

Drawing from Charles Darwin (1875), Insectivorous Plants, p. 3.

In part, this was because of Darwin’s own status as a man of science. For the rest of his life, Darwin continued to publish books and papers relating to his theory. Besides two volumes on human evolution, he wrote extensively on variation in domesticated animals and plants, and explored topics ranging from orchids and earthworms to carnivorous plants and the expression of the emotions. Much of this work was conducted through correspondence, and his ability to call on supporting evidence from all over the world gave the theory unprecedented scope and power.

From the beginning, Darwin was aware of the complexities of the questions he was attempting to solve.  For him, natural selection was always only the most significant among the many factors that led to new species.  The apparent effect of the environment had to be explained, as did the impact of changes on the reproductive organs, and differences between the sexes.  Generation and heredity are thus significant elements in his theories, both in the opening chapters of the Origin and in Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), which developed his much-criticized theory of inheritance (‘pangenesis’).

Today, natural selection remains at the core of discussions about species, and evolution is central to scientific fields ranging from population biology and psychology to laboratory genetics and genomics.  Like any successful theory, natural selection has been transformed, questioned and developed over the century and a half since it was first proposed.  But the basic insight has survived, to a degree that is almost unprecedented in the history of science.  As Darwin recognised from the start, understanding natural selection is also essential to understanding our own origins and destiny: thinking about species involves thinking about ourselves.

Related Resources:

Abstract of Darwin’s theory

The writing of “Origin”

Alfred Russel Wallace’s essay on varieties

This letter, sent by Charles Darwin’s wife, Emma, to their son William, is in the Darwin Archive of Cambridge University Library (DAR 219.1: 49).  Although it will not be published in our edition of Charles Darwin’s Correspondence, we have been given permission by the Darwin family to publish the text online as part of the ‘Darwin & Gender‘ educational resource material. 

Sunday

My dear William

I think we shall certainly have the boys on Saturday so that if you can come it will be very nice. Horace has several attacks in the course of the day  generally but they are so much milder that he is on the whole making progress.

Jones is gone & he & Papa parted on terms of high consideration as ‘He had treated him quite like a gentleman.’ Horace’s devotion to Miss L. is got to such a pitch that I don’t know what he will come to. He can’t bear to sit on diff^t side of the table at meals so that he often gives up the fire side for  the sake of sitting by her. I am actually going to have the drawing room painted & papered. Papa thinks it a most unnecessary expense. I don’t know how much of the hall & stair case must be done as the boys spoil the paint so much. Papa is correcting the press of the orchis’s & he gets Hen. to read it  over to see whether she understands it & she finds it not easy. Last week she was 4 days at Sudbrook Park & found it very amusing seeing her old friends again. M^rs Moin her particular was there. She went to Kew & Hampton Court but such bitter East wind that it was no use going any where. I send you a nice letter of Godfrey’s which you may burn.

They are so happy & so open that Ellen Tollet says it is like Adam & Eve in Paradise.

Goodbye my dear old Man yours | E. D.

Darwin was endlessly curious about the workings of the natural world and formed a vast network of correspondents who helped to further his understanding. Darwin’s letters provide exciting opportunities for teaching in a subject specific or cross curricular context.  The school learning packs offer interactive activities ranging from dissecting owl pellets to drawing nineteenth century satirical cartoons.

Our aims:

Through these resources we want to:

• encourage curiosity for the natural world and enthuse pupils with a passion for discovery
• explore a glimpse of British nineteenth century life
• examine the language and meaning as expressed in the letters
• understand how Darwin’s ideas changed the way we view the world 

Discussion Questions | Images

Caricatures provide intriguing insights into both ideals and transgressions of gender. The following six images show caricatured representations of nineteenth-century men and women of science. They provide insight into the boundaries of what was deemed ‘acceptable’ behaviour for nineteenth-century men and women and encourage us to think about the complex ways in which gender ideals were – and still are – circulated and policed. The images also highlight the complexity of the gendered status of science which, at different points in time and space, was coded as a pursuit that was at once masculine and feminine, masculinising and femininising.  

Associated selected readings.

Images

A Lady of Scientific Habits	A Lady of Scientific Habits (early nineteenth century) Composite caricature of ‘A Lady of Scientific Habits’, by KORA. Reproduced with the permission of the owner.
The Entomologist (1830)	The Entomologist (1830) Composite caricature of a male entomologist, by G. Spratt. Lithographed by G. E. Madeley and published by Charles Tilt (1830). Reproduced with the permission of the owner.
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1873)	Elizabeth Garret Anderson (1873) Caricature of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson from F. Waddy, Cartoon portraits and biographical sketches of men of the day, (1873).
Lydia Becker (1877)	Lydia Becker (1877) Caricature of Lydia Becker from Comus, No. 4, (October 28th, 1877) “Women who distinguish themselves exhibit traits in their character which have gained for them the status of “masculine women”. You have only to glance at the portrait…to see at once that Miss Becker exhibits in her face and features all those distinguishing parts which being to the countenance of man. We cannot help thinking that if Miss Becker had been called to a life of domesticity and maternity she would have felt that woman has a far higher and holier mission in life, in increasing the comforts of home, in nurturing and training her offspring and in all the duties prompted by wifely affection which renders the arduous work of the breadwinner lighter and more pleasant”.
Clémence Royer (1881)	Clémence Royer (1881) Caricature of Clémence Royer from Les Hommes D’Aujord’Hui, 44:170 (1881). Royer is shown reading a copy of her new book, Le Bien et la Loi Morale.
Caricature of John Lubbock (1882)	Sir John Lubbock (1882) Caricature of John Lubbock from Punch’s Fancy Portraits, (19th August, 1882).

Discussion Questions|Letters

In 1859, popular didactic writer William Landels published the first edition of what proved to be one of his best-selling works, How Men Are Made. “It is by work, work, work” he told his middle class audience, “that you rise out of things and into men”. As we have seen elsewhere, during the nineteenth century Natural Science had an uncertain gendered identity; was it manly work or a feminine leisure activity? In the correspondence we find a community of men keen to align Naturalism with the laborious world of work.

As this selection of correspondence will show, in letters exchanged between male Naturalists we often find Natural Science envisaged as a physically and morally laborious pursuit which draws less on intellect and feeling than it does on manly reserves of perseverance, energy, determination and pugnacity. In describing what they did using the language of labour, Darwin and his male colleagues asserted both to themselves and to one another the manliness both of Natural Science and Natural Scientist.

Associated selected readings.

Discussion Questions|Letters

A conflation of masculine intellect and feminine thoughts, habits and feelings, male naturalists like Darwin inhabited an uncertain gendered identity. Working from the private domestic comfort of their homes and exercising feminine powers of feeling and aesthetic appreciation, Darwin and his male colleagues struggled to meet the polarised masculine ideals of Victorian ‘separate spheres‘ gender ideology.   

Associated selected readings.