Behind the scenes at the Darwin Correspondence Project

Darwin Correspondence Project visit

This was a fantastic opportunity, not usually available to members of the public, to go behind the scenes at the Cambridge University Library, home to around 9000 letters including those written to Charles Darwin as well as those written by him. 

The Project was established in 1974 with the intention of locating, researching and publishing summaries of all letters written by Darwin. To date, more than 15,000 letters between Darwin and more than 2,000 correspondents have been identified in libraries and private collections. The team of archivists and editors have published 18 volumes of the correspondence thus far and anticipate there will be 30 volumes in total.  In addition, the full texts of the letters are made available online at http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk

We were privileged to have the opportunity to closely view letters and manuscripts written by Darwin and the archivists were at hand to turn the pages for us.  Fortunately, there were transcripts of most of the letters as Darwin’s handwriting was terrible! In addition to the pages of his writing and their responses, the letters contain drawings and many footnotes and annotations that Darwin added later when he used the correspondence as reference materials for his books.  Darwin’s methods for filing his correspondence included colour coding passages according to subject; the Project team remarked that Darwin had been quite an archivist himself.

We were also introduced to some of Darwin’s correspondents, such as Fritz Müller with whom Darwin corresponded about crustaceans, and James Crichton-Browne who was superintendent of the West Riding Lunatic Asylum with whom he discussed human emotions.

The collection certainly brings home the effort required of Darwin and his correspondents to acquire information.  Although local postal systems were arguably faster then than they are today, a letter could take weeks to travel across the world, so Darwin had to ensure that he had asked all the questions he needed answering.  It certainly renewed our appreciation of the speed of email.

One of the manuscripts we viewed was related to research that Darwin undertook, asking various subjects a number of questions about facial expressions.  It seems that Darwin took any opportunity to expand his research, as a number of entries in the list of answers were from dinner guests and family friends; it was apparent that he rarely passed up an opportunity to add to his research.

As well as providing an insight into Darwin the scientist, the visit gave us glimpses of Darwin the man.  A page from an early draft of ‘The Descent of Man’ was only preserved because one of his children had made a crayon drawing on the back and it was this that Darwin had saved, not his writing.

In conversation with one of the archivists, I asked if Darwin’s personality came through in his writing.  The response was that it certainly does and the archivists have developed quite an affection for him during the time they have been working on the project.  It’s fair to say we all came away sharing that affection as well as huge respect for the dedication and passion of all those working on the Darwin Correspondence Project.

Amanda Burton