To J. D. Hooker 27 October [1872]1
Down, | Beckenham, Kent.
Oct. 27
My dear Hooker
I thank you much for your answers; & now I want to beg one other address, if you know it, viz Mrs. Barber somewhere in S. Africa: she gave me information on Expression: write address on Post card, & if I do not hear, I shall understand you do not know it.—2
Your letter printed in Nature seems to me excellent & how you could have written so quietly is wonderful to me.—3 Owen’s conduct makes me grind my teeth: I long to meet him to have the pleasure of cutting him dead.
Did mortal man ever read such a sentence as the last: it is quite unintelligible, except that it implies a base insinuation against you, that you have defrauded the Government.4 It makes it, if possible, worse coming from him, who notoriously did so little public work at the College of Surgeons.—5 What an utter blackguard he is.—
Yours affectionately | Ch. Darwin
Footnotes
Bibliography
Correspondence: The correspondence of Charles Darwin. Edited by Frederick Burkhardt et al. 29 vols to date. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985–.
Expression: The expression of the emotions in man and animals. By Charles Darwin. London: John Murray. 1872.
ODNB: Oxford dictionary of national biography: from the earliest times to the year 2000. (Revised edition.) Edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. 60 vols. and index. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2004.
Rupke, Nicolaas A. 1994. Richard Owen, Victorian naturalist. New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press.
Summary
Asks for address of a Mrs Barber somewhere in South Africa.
JDH’s letter in Nature [6 (1872): 516–17] is excellent, and wonderfully quiet.
Severely criticises Owen’s conduct.
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-8579
- From
- Charles Robert Darwin
- To
- Joseph Dalton Hooker
- Sent from
- Down
- Source of text
- DAR 94: 235–6
- Physical description
- ALS 3pp
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 8579,” accessed on 1 September 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-8579.xml
Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 20