Charles Darwin

Anyone beginning to learn about Charles Darwin (b. 1809–d. 1882) will sooner or later need to reckon with the vast body of writings by him and about him. This bibliographic guide aims to help newcomers find their way to the best of classic and recent scholarship. As the major episodes and achievements of Darwin’s life organize the main part of this guide, it is well to start with a brief biographical sketch. Born and educated in the English town of Shrewsbury, Darwin attended Edinburgh University medical school and then Cambridge University, where he received clerical-scientific training. Next came five years traveling around the world aboard HMS Beagle (1831–1836), followed by several years of intense geological publishing and private theorizing from a base in London. It was in this period that Darwin developed many of his distinctive ideas about the evolution or, to use the vocabulary of the day, “transmutation” of species, including the two most important: that living and fossil species belong to a branching “tree of life;” and that much of the evolutionary change propelling the gradual growth of this tree is due to a process that Darwin called “natural selection.” The decades from 1842 to 1882, spent largely at Down House in Kent with his wife Emma and their ever more numerous children, were immensely productive, domestically contented, physically trying (due to a mysterious illness), and—after the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859—scientifically controversial. From start to finish, it was a life of great privilege. Darwin’s grandfathers were the pottery magnate Josiah Wedgwood and the physician, poet, and scientific (indeed evolutionary) thinker Erasmus Darwin. In an era when no one in Britain could study for a university science degree, young Charles received the best scientific education available, especially from the naturalist Robert Grant at Edinburgh and the geologist Adam Sedgwick and botanist John Stevens Henslow at Cambridge. Darwin’s costs on the Beagle voyage were covered courtesy of his wealthy father, Robert. On returning from the voyage, Darwin moved easily among the London scientific elite, becoming close with Charles Lyell, whose books on gradualist geology Darwin had absorbed. Nor did it hurt that, between Darwin family money and the Wedgwood family money that came with marriage to Emma (his first cousin), Darwin was very rich, leaving him free—when not undone by illness—to devote himself fully to his scientific pursuits.