The Complete Correspondence of Charles Darwin

Abstract

C HARLES Darwin was born on February 12, 1809, and died onApril 19, 1882 (Browne 1995, 2002). Darwin’s maternal grandfather was Josiah Wedgwood, founder of the pottery works that carried his name. He was also the paternal grandfather of Emma Wedgwood, Darwin’s first cousin and future wife. This meant that Darwin, upper middle class when the British Empire was at its zenith, was very rich. Unlike others, for example, his “bulldog” Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin never had to worry about paid employment. Indeed, he went as an undergraduate to theUniversity of Cambridge, with the intention of becoming an Anglican clergyman, a respectable job with little hard work if one could afford a curate to do all of the everyday tasks. As it happens, at Cambridge, Darwin fell among the scientists—John StevensHenslow, the botanist, Adam Sedgwick, the geologist, andWilliamWhewell, generalman of science who was the future author of The History of the Inductive Sciences (1837) and The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840). Thoughts of a clerical life faded, especially after Darwin was offered and accepted a position of (what