Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin was born on 12 February 1809 at The Mount in Shrewsbury.¹ He was the fifth child of the physician Robert Waring Darwin and Susannah Wedgwood.² On his mother's side, the Wedgwoods were pioneers of the pottery industry.³ His paternal grandfather was the renowned physician, poet and natural philosopher Erasmus Darwin.³ That grandfather, a freethinking physician and poet, had published his own ideas on evolution in Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life.¹ He grew up in Shrewsbury with three older sisters, Marianne, Caroline and Susan, an older brother, Erasmus Alvey, and a younger sister, Catherine.³ His mother died when he was eight, and he was cared for by his three elder sisters.¹ The household was led by their father, an outsize character who prospered both in his medical practice and in business.³

He hated the rote learning of Classics at the traditional Anglican Shrewsbury School, where he studied between 1818 and 1825.¹ He described the school as 'narrow and classical'.² Science was then considered dehumanizing in English public schools, and his dabbling in chemistry earned him a headmaster's condemnation and the nickname 'Gas' among his schoolmates.¹ His father took him away from the school early, on 17 June 1825.⁴

His father, considering the 16-year-old a wastrel interested only in game shooting, sent him to study medicine at Edinburgh University in 1825.¹ On 22 October 1825 Darwin matriculated with his brother Erasmus at the University of Edinburgh and registered for medical courses; his first lecture came on 26 October.⁴ He loathed anatomy and was sickened by pre-chloroform surgery.¹ At the Edinburgh Museum he was taught to stuff birds by John Edmonstone, a freed South American slave.¹ Robert Edmond Grant, a radical evolutionist and disciple of Lamarck, became his mentor.¹ In the winter of 1826 he met the naturalist and Lamarckian Robert Grant and examined marine animals with him, and on 10 November he was elected to the Plinian Society.⁴ On 27 March 1827 he read papers on marine animals to the Plinian Society, and left Edinburgh in April.⁴ In May 1827 he visited Paris with his Wedgwood cousins, his only time in France.⁴ At both universities natural history interested him more than his regular studies.⁵

His freethinking father, judging the church a better calling for an aimless naturalist, switched him to Christ's College, Cambridge.¹ On 15 October 1827 he was admitted to Christ's College, though he did not move there until January 1828, reading for an ordinary degree, the usual preliminary for theological training, which he never undertook.⁴ He took his horse, indulged his drinking, shooting and beetle-collecting passions with other squires' sons.¹ He sat his BA exam in January 1831 and was astonished to be ranked 10th out of 178 candidates.² Adam Sedgwick took him to Wales in 1831 on a geologic field trip.¹ Returning to Shrewsbury from Wales in August 1831, he found a letter from Henslow inviting him to join the Beagle voyage.⁴

In August 1831 Darwin was invited to join HMS Beagle on a surveying voyage to South America.⁵ His father objected, but his uncle, Josiah Wedgwood II, persuaded him otherwise.⁴ Darwin sailed as a self-financed gentleman companion to the 26-year-old captain, Robert FitzRoy, rather than as a lowly surgeon-naturalist.¹ FitzRoy's was to be an imperial-evangelical voyage: he planned to survey coastal Patagonia to facilitate British trade and return three Christianized Fuegians to Tierra del Fuego.¹ Darwin equipped himself with weapons and books, including the first volume of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, which FitzRoy gave him, and advice on preserving carcasses from London Zoo's experts.¹ The Beagle sailed from England on 27 December 1831.¹

It became a five-year voyage around the world.⁶ Darwin made his first landing on a tropical shore at St Jago, Cape Verde Islands, on 16 January 1832, and began filling his field notebooks.⁴ From February 1832 to May 1834 the Beagle surveyed the east coast of South America, and in December 1832 the ship arrived in Tierra del Fuego.⁴ In March 1833 Darwin encountered slavery in Brazil, and he later met the native people of Tierra del Fuego.⁵ That December Henslow printed extracts from his letters.⁴ The Beagle visited the Cape of Good Hope from 31 May to 18 June 1836, and after calls at St Helena, Ascension, Brazil and the Azores dropped anchor at Falmouth on 2 October 1836; Darwin returned home to Shrewsbury on 4 October.⁴ Five years of surveying and collecting had made him a geologist and collector.⁴

The Beagle departed Lima on 7 September 1835 for the Galapagos Archipelago, where Darwin spent 16 September to 20 October exploring.⁴ Walking on Chatham Island, Darwin met two large tortoises, each of at least two hundred pounds, and they seemed to him like antediluvian creatures.⁷ Looking at the gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of the archipelago's birds, he reflected that one species might have been taken and modified for different ends.⁷

His first book after the journal of the voyage was on the structure and distribution of coral reefs.⁴ The theory itself was not handed to him on the islands: the bird specimens were identified in London by the naturalist John Gould.⁴ He formulated his theory in private in 1837–39, after returning from the voyage, and gave it full public expression only two decades later, in On the Origin of Species.¹

In March 1837 Darwin took lodgings in Great Marlborough Street, London.⁴ He arranged for his Beagle specimens to be identified, began publication of The Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle (1838–43), and became friendly with the geologist Charles Lyell.⁴ He gave papers at the Geological Society of London.⁴ In July 1837 Darwin opened his first notebook on the transmutation of species.⁴ Its most famous page carries the branching tree-of-life sketch headed with the words 'I think'.⁴ On 28 September 1838 he read Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population.⁴ He finished a paper on the geology of Glen Roy in Scotland, and in the last weeks of the year moved to a house in Gower Street, London.⁴ On 11 November 1838 he proposed marriage to his cousin Emma Wedgwood.⁴

Darwin married Emma Wedgwood on 29 January 1839.⁴ That same year he published his Journal of Researches, later known as Voyage of the Beagle, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.⁴ He and Emma eventually had ten children, seven of whom reached adulthood.⁴ Emma and the children assisted him in research, writing and correspondence, and even occasionally served as research subjects.³ In the summer of 1842, with Emma six months pregnant with their third child, the Darwins moved into Down House in the village of Downe, Kent, on 24 September.⁸ The remodelled house and its extensive gardens became his open-air laboratory, where he developed his theory of evolution by natural selection and wrote the Origin.⁸ In the spring of 1843 he began improving the property, commissioning the architect Edward Cresy to add a full-height bay window with views across the garden.⁸ On a visit to Maer in 1842 he made a brief pencil sketch of his theory of 'descent with modification'; by 1844 he had expanded it into a longer Essay, with a memorandum asking Emma to publish it if he should die unexpectedly.⁴ In October 1846 he began his eight-year study of barnacles.⁴ In March 1851 the eldest daughter, Annie, was taken to Malvern, where she died of fever on 23 March, aged ten.⁴ Three of the ten children died young: Mary within weeks of the move to Down in 1842, Annie in 1851, and Charles Waring of scarlet fever in 1858.⁸

In June 1858 a letter arrived from Alfred Russel Wallace, who was collecting specimens in Indonesia, enclosing an essay on species and varieties that mirrored Darwin's own theory of natural selection.⁴ Darwin wrote that he had never seen a more striking coincidence.⁴ Extracts from the two men's writings were presented by Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker at the Linnean Society of London on 1 July; neither Darwin nor Wallace attended.⁴ The work was later published as 'On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties' in the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society, Zoology, volume 3, pages 45–62.⁹ Events moved so fast that Wallace was not notified of the joint presentation until afterwards, but he responded courteously.²

The rush had a longer history: in April 1856 Darwin had invited Huxley and other naturalists to a weekend party to discuss his ideas on the origin of species.² Lyell, fearing he might be pre-empted, urged him to write for publication, and the 'abstract' took shape on the Isle of Wight.² As he told readers in the Origin, he had been induced to publish partly because Wallace, studying the natural history of the Malay archipelago, had arrived at very nearly the same conclusions about the origin of species.¹⁰

On the Origin of Species was published in London on 24 November 1859 by John Murray; on publication day Darwin was taking the water cure in Ilkley, Yorkshire.⁴ The 1,250-copy print run was oversubscribed, and Darwin started corrections for a second edition.² It was immediately a best-seller, but opinion on its argument for evolution was divided.⁵ The volume is framed as a single long argument, and its conclusion is stated plainly: species are not immutable.¹⁰ Its central term, the struggle for existence, was used in a broad and figurative sense, including the dependence of one being on another and success in leaving progeny.¹⁰ By the sixth and last edition, rewritten to answer arguments by St George Mivart, the book used the word 'evolution' for the first time.² Six editions followed, the last of them in 1872.²

It was a book written for the reading public, stripped of academic references.² The book's cause was championed by Huxley, who was confrontational and somewhat polarised the debate, while Darwin backed him and excused himself from combat because of illness.² He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1839 and awarded its Royal Medal in 1853.¹¹ In 1864 he received the Copley Medal after being nominated three years running; the Origin of Species was omitted from the award.² The book has deeply influenced modern Western society and thought.¹

Darwin did not stop with the Origin.⁴ Over the next two decades he published a sequence of books that carried the argument into orchids, domesticated animals and plants, the descent of man, the emotions, insectivorous plants, flowers, and finally earthworms.⁴ His last book, on the formation of vegetable mould through the actions of worms, was published on 1 May 1881.⁵

The Origin is a book of argument, and some of its sentences have outlived their century.¹⁰ A few of the most quoted lines, from the book and from a letter written years before, are given here as Darwin wrote them.¹⁰

Darwin was himself an agnostic, and he was accorded the ultimate British accolade of burial in Westminster Abbey.¹ The telegram that settled the burial asked the Dean of Westminster whether it would be acceptable to a very large number of his fellow-countrymen that Darwin should be buried in the Abbey; the Dean recalled that he did not hesitate and telegraphed that his assent would be cheerfully given.¹² In his funeral sermon the Bishop of Carlisle remarked that there is no necessary conflict between knowledge of nature and belief in God.¹²

His health was often poor, but he went on working.¹² In the late 1850s, while writing the Origin, he had taken over a corner of the kitchen garden for 'experimental beds'; in the early 1860s a hothouse was built adjoining the greenhouse, and the results of his investigations went into an 'Experiment Book' begun in 1855 and kept until 1867.⁸ In 1862 he began to grow a beard after an episode of ill health.⁴ In 1877 Cambridge awarded him an honorary LLD.⁴ In 1881 his brother Erasmus died, and that year Darwin published his last book, on worms, arranged a civil list pension for Wallace, and gave money to Kew Gardens for the publication of Index Kewensis.⁴

He died on 19 April 1882, aged seventy-three.⁴ At the funeral on the morning of 26 April 1882 the coffin was borne through the Abbey cloisters, followed by Darwin's five sons; among the pall-bearers were Sir Joseph Hooker, Alfred Russel Wallace, the US ambassador James Russell Lowell and the Royal Society President William Spottiswoode.¹² He was buried in the north aisle of the nave, next to the astronomer Sir John Herschel and a few feet from Newton.¹² In 1888 a bronze memorial roundel with a life-sized relief bust, the work of the sculptor Boehm and funded by a Darwin Memorial Fund, was erected in the north choir aisle near the grave; its inscription says simply DARWIN.¹² Christ's College calls him most famous as the father of evolutionary biology and originator of the theory of natural selection.⁶ His theory of evolution by natural selection became the foundation of modern evolutionary studies.¹ Writing in Nature, Mark Pagel judged that the theory of evolution by natural selection had prospered across its first 150 years, providing a consistent account of species as highly adapted and rare survivors in the struggle for existence.¹⁴ In 2009 Christ's College marked the bicentenary of his birth by opening his student rooms to the public.⁶ His writings and manuscripts are published as a free scholarly edition in The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, edited by John van Wyhe.¹⁵ His letters live on in the standard edition of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, published by Cambridge University Press.¹⁶