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Religion
Summary
Design|Personal Belief|Beauty|The Church Perhaps the most notorious realm of controversy over evolution in Darwin's day was religion. The same can be said of the evolution controversy today; however the nature of the disputes and the manner in…
Bartholomew James Sulivan
Summary
On Christmas Day 1866, Bartholomew Sulivan sat down to write a typically long and chatty letter to his old friend, Charles Darwin, commiserating on shared ill-health, glorying in the achievements of their children, offering to collect plant specimens, and…
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- … often passing news and gossip, and and was one of the few people whose visits Darwin encouraged. In …
4.7 'Vanity Fair', caricature
Summary
< Back to Introduction A letter to Darwin from his publisher John Murray of 10 May 1871 informed him, ‘Your portrait is earnestly desired – by the Editor of Vanity Fair. I hope Mr Darwin may consent to follow the example of Murchison – Bismark [sic] …
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- … behind. His face was ruddy in colour, and this perhaps made people think him less of an invalid than …
William Winwood Reade
Summary
On 19 May 1868, an African explorer and unsuccessful novelist, William Winwoode Reade (1838–1875) offered to help Darwin, and started a correspondence and, arguably, a collaboration, that would last until Reade's death. After a first 1861 tour of…
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- … book by HG Wells, George Orwell, and, even, Sherlock Holmes. People are sometimes surprised to find …
2.15 Boehm terracotta bust (NPG)
Summary
< Back to Introduction The sculptor Edgar Boehm donated this terracotta bust of Darwin to the National Portrait Gallery in February 1887. It is closely associated with his seated statue of Darwin in the Natural History Museum: not an original model…
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- … and were only gradually augmented by portraits of famous people who had died recently. This was nine …
Volume 29 (1881) is published!
Summary
In October 1881, Darwin published his last book, The formation of vegetable mould through the action of worms: with observations on their habits. A slim volume on a subject that many people could understand and on which they had their own opinions, it went…
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- … on their habits. A slim volume on a subject that many people could understand and on which they …
Darwin in letters, 1858-1859: Origin
Summary
The years 1858 and 1859 were, without doubt, the most momentous of Darwin’s life. From a quiet rural existence filled with steady work on his ‘big book’ on species, he was jolted into action by the arrival of an unexpected letter from Alfred Russel Wallace…
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- … As with Darwin’s study of poultry and pigeons, many other people were drawn into his researches. …
- … He writes as one who has given his theory to the world for people to make of it what they will. ‘You …
- … to W. D. Fox, 24 [March 1859] ). Yet he desperately wanted people to accept his work. It was now …
About the letters
Summary
Correspondence was a vital tool for Darwin in collecting the data to substantiate his theories, and for discussing those theories with colleagues; the letters are very much a part of Darwin's scientific archive. He lived at just the right time for an…
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- … establish the threads of the conversations, identify all the people, all the organisms and …
Darwin in Conversation exhibition
Summary
Meet Charles Darwin as you have never met him before. Come to our exhibition at Cambridge University Library, running from 9 July to 3 December 2022, and discover a fascinating series of interwoven conversations with Darwin's many hundreds of…
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- … 9 July – 3 December 2022 Milstein Exhibition Centre, Cambridge University …
Jane Gray
Summary
Jane Loring Gray, the daughter of a Boston lawyer, married the Harvard botanist Asa Gray in 1848 and evidence suggests that she took an active interest in the scientific pursuits of her husband and his friends. Although she is only known to have…
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- … you on the Nile— I am afraid you will think us very stupid people not to have done more. But it is …
Dramatisation script
Summary
Re: Design – Adaptation of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Asa Gray and others… by Craig Baxter – as performed 25 March 2007
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- … he ever got in his life. In the presence of nearly 1000 people. I spoke only once, the last of all, …
- … influence in England desires to have us a weak and divided people, and would do a good deal to …
- … eyes open with astonishment and asked HORACE: Did people formerly really believe that …
- … To this he shrugged his shoulders with pity for the poor people who ‘formerly’ believed in such …
- … us old souls. GRAY: 137 Some young people here, of Mrs. Gray’s family take to …
- … no one in England will speak for years in favour of the people governing themselves. [Hooker says] …
- … of old age. You get left so alone, especially childless people, like Mrs Gray and I. But we slip …
Benjamin Renshaw
Summary
How much like a monkey is a person? Did our ancestors really swing from trees? Are we descended from apes? By the 1870s, questions like these were on the tip of everyone’s tongue, even though Darwin himself never posed the problem of human evolution in…
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- … times quite savage. Unusually hairy people have often been the subject of …
Darwiniana – Preface
Summary
—by Asa Gray These papers are now collected at the request of friends and correspondents, who think that they may be useful; and two new essays are added. Most of the articles were written as occasion called for them within the past sixteen years, and…
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- … to naturalists, and not much less so to most thinking people. The first appeared between sixteen and …
2.22 L.-J. Chavalliaud statue in Liverpool
Summary
< Back to Introduction At about the time when a statue of Darwin was being commissioned by the Shropshire Horticultural Society for his native town of Shrewsbury, his transformative contributions to the sciences of botany and horticulture were also…
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- … inspire visitors to Sefton Park, ‘especially the younger people’. They fell into two alternated …
Darwin in letters, 1867: A civilised dispute
Summary
Charles Darwin’s major achievement in 1867 was the completion of his large work, The variation of animals and plants under domestication (Variation). The importance of Darwin’s network of correspondents becomes vividly apparent in his work on expression in…
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Clémence Auguste Royer
Summary
Getting Origin translated into French was harder than Darwin had expected. The first translator he approached, Madame Belloc, turned him down on the grounds that the content was ‘too scientific‘, and then in 1860 the French political exile Pierre…
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- … none whatever!! It is really curious to know what conceited people there are in the world”. …
What is an experiment?
Summary
Darwin is not usually regarded as an experimenter, but rather as an astute observer and a grand theorist. His early career seems to confirm this. He began with detailed note-taking, collecting and cataloguing on the Beagle, and edited a descriptive zoology…
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- … Admiralty, and other institutions encouraged more and more people to observe, and to send ‘facts’, …
That monstrous stain: To J. M. Herbert, 2 June 1833
Summary
Darwin did not consider himself to be a particularly good writer, but many of his letters contain not just a wealth of information, but also beautifully expressed descriptions and impressions that would be the envy of any essayist or novelist. Such is the…
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- … experience of seeing the conditions suffered by enslaved people informs his powerful and eloquent …
Darwin, cats and cat shows
Summary
One of the more unusual invitations Darwin received was to be a patron of the Crystal Palace cat show, the first nationwide cat show in Britain. The man who first came up with the idea for the show, Harrison Weir, was one of Darwin’s correspondents, as…
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- … Although whimsically cautioning Weir against it in case people refused to go and admire ‘ a lot of …
Casting about: Darwin on worms
Summary
Earthworms were the subject of a citizen science project to map the distribution of earthworms across Britain (BBC Today programme, 26 May 2014). The general understanding of the role earthworms play in improving soils and providing nutrients for plants to…
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- … earthworms, and the variety of strange things he persuaded people to do. Darwin concluded …
