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Darwin Correspondence Project

Publications

‘. . . a work of magisterial scholarship, meticulous in every respect.’ Quarterly Review of Biology

The Darwin Correspondence Project is locating and researching all known letters to and from Charles Darwin, and is publishing complete texts together with notes and appendices that make them comprehensible to the modern reader.

The Project published a first comprehensive descriptive guide to Darwin’s letters, A Calendar of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin: 1821-1882 in 1985. The first volume in the complete chronological edition of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin was published by Cambridge University Press in the same year; the edition will ultimately comprise 30 volumes. Volumes 1 to 8 of the main edition are also available in paperback as a special Anniversary set published for Darwin’s bicentenary in 2009.    Letters covering the period of the young Darwin’s voyage round the world are also available in an illustrated standalone volume, Charles Darwin: the Beagle Letters (Cambridge University Press 2008), and there are two volumes of selected letters, Origins, covering the years up to the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, and Evolution, covering the years between 1860 to 1870.

The introductions to all the published volumes can be read here in the Darwin's Life in Letters section of the website.  Year by year, these are building into a fascinating and detailed account of every aspect of Darwin's working and family life.