Darwin Correspondence Project - The letters

The letters
Historical significance of the lettersDarwin‘s correspondentsExplore the letters
Historical significance of the letters
Darwin‘s correspondence provides us with an invaluable source of information, not only about his own intellectual development and social network, but about Victorian science and society in general.  This website contains details of around 14,500 surviving letters.
Letters form the largest single category of Darwin‘s working papers and were one of the most important means by which he gathered data and discussed ideas. They provide a remarkably complete picture of the development of his thinking, throwing light on his early formative years and the years of the voyage of the Beagle, on the period which led up to the publication of The Origin of Species and the subsequent heated debates. In the 1860s and 1870s, Darwin was also busy with botanical investigations, studying adaptations in orchids, different types of sexual reproduction in other plants, the origin of climbing plants, and the physiology of insectivorous plants. The letters illustrate how this work, and his studies of human descent, sexual selection, and the expression of emotions, all contributed to the refinement of the theory presented in Origin.
Darwin discussed all these ideas in correspondence with other notable scientific figures such as the geologist Charles Lyell, the botanists Asa Gray and Joseph Dalton Hooker, the zoologist Thomas Henry Huxley and the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, and the letters contribute to our understanding of their own work and opinions. The letters also provide equally valuable insights into the lives and work of many men and women who would otherwise be unknown. Darwin maintained widespread contacts in Britain and overseas with gardeners and nurserymen, diplomats, army officers, colonial officials, and naturalists, who provided him with observations on the fauna, flora, and peoples of the world. The correspondence also reveals the extent to which his children and other members of his family helped collect evidence that Darwin hoped would support his transmutation theory.
Through his letters, Darwin may also be placed firmly in the context of his time, not just as a great scientist and thinker, but also as a Victorian gentleman, who shared the daily domestic occupations and concerns of his class. He was an affectionate husband and father, who worried about the welfare and education of his children and was continually anxious about his own health and that of his family; he was an opponent of slavery and a supporter of local charitable works; a careful investor, and a generous friend and patron.
For a detailed account of Darwin‘s life up to the late 1860s, see the introductions to the printed volumes, available onlinehere
Darwin‘s correspondents
Darwin exchanged letters with nearly 2000 people during his lifetime. These range from well known naturalists, thinkers, and public figures, to men and women who would be unknown today were it not for the letters they exchanged with Darwin.  Search thecomplete list of correspondents.
Here are links to just a few of Darwin‘s correspondents:
Emma Darwin, Charles Darwin’s cousin, whom he married in 1839.
John Stevens Henslow, the Cambridge professor of botany who first suggested to Darwin that he join the Beagle voyage.
Robert FitzRoy, captain of the Beagle.
Joseph Dalton Hooker, Director of the Botanic Gardens, Kew, and for forty years Darwin’s closest friend and confidant.
John Murray, Darwin‘s publisher.
Lydia Becker, suffragist and botanist. 
Charles Lyell, geologist.
George Eliot, novelist.
Charles Kingsley, clergyman and author.
Henry Holland, physician to Queen Victoria.
Mary Elizabeth Barber, colonial settler and diamond prospector.
John Scott, Edinburgh gardener.
Alfred Russel Wallace, whose own discovery of the mechanism by which species evolve prompted Darwin to publish his theory of "natural selection".
Explore the letters
Advanced search will allow you to find letters by correspondent, by date, subject, or even by the occupation of the author.  To find out more see thesearch tips.
To help you get started, here are links to a few selected letters - some famous, some fun:
Childhood:
Read what the 12-year-old Charles Darwin, in one of his earliest known letters, had to say about his standards of personal hygiene:
"I only wash my fe[e]t once a month at school, which I confess is nasty, but I cannot help it, for we have nothing to do it with".
Read the whole letterhere
The Beagle voyage:
"I have stated that I consider you to be the best qualified person I know of who is likely to undertake such a situation— I state this not on the supposition of yr. being a finished Naturalist, but as amply qualified for collecting, observing, & noting any thing worthy to be noted in Natural History."
Read the letter from John Stevens Henslow in which Darwin, then a 22-year-old graduate first heard about the Beagle voyage,here.
"The scheme is a most magnificent one. We spend about 2 years in S America, the rest of time larking round the world"
- Darwin in a letter to a friend written while waiting to board the Beagle, combining reminiscences of University days in Cambridge - particularly the social life! - and gleeful anticipation of the voyage. Read the letterhere
Darwin‘s family and friends kept the long and detailed letters that he sent them during the five-year voyage. In this one, sent to Henslow in 1832, he describes seasickness, specimen-collecting, his first impressions of South America, and his revulsion at slavery - read ithere
Family life:
"Well it may be all very delightful to those concerned, but as I like unmarried woman better than those in the blessed state, I vote it a bore".
Darwin eventually had a long and happy marriage to his cousin, Emma Darwin, but his first romance was with Fanny Owen, who lived near his family in Shropshire. Darwin heard the news of Fanny‘s sudden marriage while he was on board the Beagle. Although he turned it off with a joke it seems he was hurt. Read the letterhere
Emma and Charles Darwin had 10 children altogether and his letters are full of references to their births, their games, their illnesses, the help they gave him with is work. In 1854 Darwin wrote to a friend whose wife had just given birth:
"Did you administer the Chloroform? When I did, I was perfectly convinced that the Chloroform was very composing to oneself as well as to the patient."
Read the complete letterhere
Three of those children died: two in infancy, and the other, Darwin‘s dearly loved eldest daughter, Annie, at the age of 10. Letters from April 1851 follow Annie‘s last illness. She died at Malvern where her father had taken her in hopes of a cure. The letters include this one from Emma, who had been left at home in the last stages of pregnancy:
"Goodbye my own dearest. It is a dreadful period for all of us but except at post time my sufferings are nothing to yours."
Read the complete letterhere
Health:
Many of Darwin‘s letters refer to his own poor health. In one he wrote:
"I have suffered from almost incessant vomiting for nine months, & that has so weakened my brain, that any excitement brings on whizzing & fainting feelings"
Read the letterhere
On the origin of species:
Throughout his life Darwin kept working, gathering data and discussing his theories about the natural world. Although he did not publish his theory of natural selection until 1859 in On the origin of species, his letters chart the development of these ideas from the days of the Beagle voyage onwards. One of the first of his scientific colleagues to be brought into Darwin‘s confidence was Joseph Dalton Hooker. In 1844 Darwin famously wrote to Hooker that admitting to doubts about the immutability of species felt "like confessing a murder". See the complete text of that letterhere
Alfred Russel Wallace, the man whose own theories about the evolution of species prompted Darwin to make his theory public, first wrote to Darwin in 1857, and Darwin encouraged him in his work (see letter2192 ). For Darwin‘s first reaction to discovering that Wallace‘s ideas were so close to his own, read for example letter2295 and letter2306
And here is Darwin describing an anonymous reviewer of Origin:
"the manner in which he drags in immortality, & sets the Priests at me & leaves me to their mercies, is base. He would on no account burn me; but he will get the wood ready & tell the black beasts how to catch me.—"
Read the full text of the letterhere.