CHARLES DARWIN CORRESPONDENCE PROJECT 1974

 

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History of the Project

The Darwin Correspondence Project was founded in 1974 by an American scholar, Frederick Burkhardt, with the aid of Sydney Smith, a zoologist in the University of Cambridge (UK). They originally set out to locate, research, and publish summaries of all letters written by Charles Darwin (1809-82), the most celebrated naturalist of the nineteenth century.  Following a pilot project it was decided to include letters written to Darwin as well as those written by him – an unusual step for a collection of correspondence at the time, and one now widely followed – and to publish complete transcripts in chronological order.

Since then, the Project has had a staff of researchers and editors in both the UK and US, those in the UK being based in Cambridge University Library, which houses the largest single collection of Darwin’s manuscripts, and his own library of books and journals. The Darwin Archive in Cambridge includes around 9000 letters. In 2009 the Project opened a satellite branch at Harvard University.

It took ten years to carry out a systematic search for additional material, to obtain copies, and to transcribe all known letters into an electronic format. This resulted in the creation of the extensive computerised archive which now forms the basis for editorial work, and of the resources on this website. The letters were provisionally dated – less than half have a complete date written on them by the sender – and the identification of unknown correspondents attempted. To date, the project has located, both in libraries and in private collections, a total of more than 15,000 letters exchanged by Darwin with nearly 2000 correspondents around the world between 1821 and his death in 1882. New letters continue to be discovered, and the Project is now engaged in an active hunt for others so that the corpus will be as comprehensive as possible.

Find out more about the Project from our podcasts.

The Project's founding editor, Frederick Burkhardt

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Podcasts

On the letters themselves and on Darwin’s network of correspondents

• Terry Molloy (also known as Mike Tucker from the BBC Radio series The Archers, and Davros in Dr Who) reads excerpts from Darwin’s letters at the Darwin 2009 Festival at Cambridge University.   A full set of podcasts from the festival is available on YouTube.
• Shelley Innes and Alison Pearn talk about Darwin’s World Wide Web; the podcast was made by the British Council and is also available from the Darwin Now website.
• Jim Secord and Alison Pearn discuss Darwin and gender on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s hour, July 2009.
• Janet Browne on Darwin and the Beagle, with Q&A by Janet, Jim Secord and Alison Pearn at the launch of Charles Darwin: the Beagle letters at the University Club, New York City, in November 2008.
• Do blondes have more fun?: Alison Pearn talks to Radio New Zealand about the serious science underlying Darwin’s interest in the hair colour and marital status of Bristol hospital patients, as he developed his theory of sexual selection.   Download the programme from August 2008.
• Darwin and dark matter: Alison Pearn is a guest of the Guardian Science Weekly team and  talks about Darwin the scientist, Darwin the student, Darwin the dad, and even Darwin the comedian, amongst other things.  This programme announced the first letter transcriptions to go online in 2007.
• Charles Darwin – in his own words: Alison again, this time with the Naked Scientists.

Darwin and Darwinism

• Global Darwin: Jim Secord on the international reception of Darwin.  Darwin College Lecture Series, 3 February 2009.
• Darwin: the genius of evolution: Jim Secord and Alison Pearn join Jim Moore, Steve Jones, and others, in a special series of In our time programmes with Melvyn Bragg, originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 2009.
• Darwin’s faith: Paul White interviewed by the Guardian’s James Randerson in July 2007.
• Debating Darwin: Paul White on the debate between science and religion, and Darwin’s own views of the implications of his theories.
• The audio guide to Charles Darwin: evolutionary writings: Jim Secord talks you through his anthology of Darwin’s own major publications and the responses to them.
• The secret history of Victorian evolution, a research seminar on the background to evolutionary debate in first half of the 19th century given by Jim Secord, the Project’s Director,  at the Faraday Institute, University of Cambridge, 13 May 2009.
• Darwin and the ancient earth: dinosaurs and the ‘deep past’ in the 19th-century imagination.  Why was the young Darwin’s fascination with geology so important for his later work? And why was prehistory so popular in early-nineteenth-century Britain? A podcast with Jim Secord, Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project and Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, to complement the exhibition ‘Endless Forms’ at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (16 June – 4 October 2009).
• Whose Darwin is the true Darwin?: Paul White at the Royal Society in March 2007  on the battle over Charles Darwin’s legacy and the implications of his theory, its relevance to current debates about evolution, and the importance of Darwin’s correspondence to our understanding of his role.
• Hunting the Beagle: Jim Secord and Alison Pearn look at some of the letters and papers from the Beagle voyage as part of a BBC Radio 4 series by naval historian Robert Prescott.  9 January 2009. [July 2010: this recording is no longer available on the BBC website.  We are pursuing the possibility of hosting deleted BBC audio files ourselves and will restore the link if we are able to access an alternate version.]
• All things considered (since Darwin’s era, following science got complicated): Jim Secord in an NPR programme celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s On the origin of species,  on who read it (and who could afford to buy it…)

Darwin Correspondence Project podcasts

Darwin dramatisation:
A complete performance of Re: Design, a dramatisation of Darwin’s correspondence with his friend and supporter, the American botanist Asa Gray.
A reading of Re:Design translated into German by the Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften and performed in collaboration with the Gorki Theatre at a Darwin Bicentenary event  „Die Evolution empfängt ihre Kinder“, Salon Sophie-Charlotte .
Interviews with:

Emily Ballou, a writer of novels and screenplays, and a prize-winning poet. Her book The Darwin Poems, which explores aspects of Darwin’s life and thoughts through the medium of poetry, was recently published by the University of Western Australia Press.

Simon Conway Morris, professor of evolutionary paleobiology at the University of Cambridge and the author of books on early evolution (The Crucible of Creation, 1998) and evolutionary convergence (Life’s Solution, 2003). He discusses a wide range of issues, from the evidence of design in nature, to the status of Darwinism in modern biology, to the role that science can play in a reenchantment of nature.

John Hedley Brooke,  President of the Science and Religion Forum as well as the author of the influential Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 1991). He has had a long career in the history of science and religion, and was the first Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford.

Randal Keynes, a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, and the author of Annie’s Box (Fourth Estate, 2001), which discusses Darwin’s home life, his relationship with his wife and children, and the ways in which these influenced his feelings about nature and religion.

Tim Lewens, a philosopher of biology at Cambridge who has recently written books on the language of design in science and philosophy (Organisms and Artifacts, 2004), and on the role of Darwin and Darwinism in modern philosophy (Darwin, 2007).

The Darwin Bicentenary: three major collections of podcasts made by the University of Cambridge for 2009

The Darwin 2009 Festival:  From 5-10 July 2009, in its 800th anniversary year, the University of Cambridge hosted a major international festival to mark 200 years since Charles Darwin’s birth and 150 years since the publication of On the origin of species. Combining science, arts, and the humanities, over 100 outstanding thinkers, authors, artists, and performers debated and celebrated the enduring influence of Darwin’s ideas.  See and hear interviews and lectures recorded during the festival.

Endless Forms: A series of audiovisual podcasts exploring Charles Darwin’s life, work, and legacy, released by the Fitzwilliam Museum to complement the exhibition Endless Forms. Science and art met in this ground-breaking exhibition to reveal an unusual and previously unexplored aspect of Charles Darwin’s legacy – the impact of his theories upon artists of the late nineteenth century.

Darwin:   Darwin College, Cambridge, hosts a major annual public lecture series, and for 2009 the theme was – Darwin.    You can hear all eight lectures by leading authorities across many different fields, including Rebecca Stott, English scholar, novelist, and author of Darwin and the barnacle; Janet Browne, historian and Darwin biographer; Steve Jones, geneticist and popular science writer; and Jim Secord, Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project.

Here are some links to podcasts by and about the Darwin Correspondence Project team, and also to three major collections made by Cambridge University for Darwin’s bicentenary. There is a complete list of the podcasts on this site, and individual podcasts are also linked from relevant pages.

If you spot any bad links please let us know.