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Charles Darwin (1809–1882)

Darwin was a naturalist who spent decades accumulating evidence before publishing, who described On the Origin of Species as “one long argument,” and who followed what he called a golden rule: recording counter-evidence at once, before he could forget it. The theory of evolution by natural selection, developed across Origin, The Descent of Man, and a long sequence of monographs on orchids, climbing plants, insectivorous plants, and earthworms, is treated at the Darwinism subject page. This page is about the man and his working life.

Life

Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury on 12 February 1809 into the linked Darwin and Wedgwood families — a wealthy, Whig, abolitionist provincial-gentry network that shaped him throughout. His grandfather Erasmus Darwin had been a physician, natural philosopher, and proto-evolutionist; his mother Susannah was a daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, the potter and abolitionist. She died when Darwin was eight. His father Robert, a prosperous physician, financed his career.

Sent to Edinburgh in 1825 to study medicine, he abandoned it — the revulsion at surgery without anaesthetic was real. Transferred to Christ’s College, Cambridge to read for the clergy, he fell in instead with the natural-history circle around the botanist John Stevens Henslow and the geologist Adam Sedgwick. Through Henslow, he was invited as gentleman naturalist on HMS Beagle under Captain Robert FitzRoy: December 1831 to October 1836, circumnavigating via South America, the Galápagos, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, and the Cape. The voyage was the formative event of his life.

Back in London he married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood in January 1839. They moved to Down House in Kent in 1842, where he lived the rest of his life. Ten children; three died young. Annie’s death from probable tuberculosis in 1851, aged ten, was the deepest blow of his life and pivotal in his loss of religious faith. Chronic ill health from the late 1830s onward — the cause never definitively established; candidates include Chagas disease contracted during the Beagle voyage, psychosomatic anxiety, lactose intolerance, and Crohn’s disease. The question remains open.

The transmutation notebooks opened in 1837. He read Malthus in September 1838 and recognised the selection mechanism — “At last gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable,” he wrote to Hooker in January 1844. A pencil sketch in 1842, an essay in 1844 — both shelved. He spent 1846 to 1854 on barnacles, producing four authoritative volumes that established his credentials as a working systematist. He began his “big species book” in 1856, urged by Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker.

In June 1858 a letter arrived from Alfred Russel Wallace, working in the Malay Archipelago, containing the selection mechanism Darwin had been sitting on for twenty years. Lyell and Hooker arranged for Darwin’s earlier papers and Wallace’s letter to be read jointly at the Linnean Society of London on 1 July 1858. Wallace, for his part, accepted the arrangement and remained on good terms with Darwin; the fairness of the arrangement to Wallace has its own scholarly literature. On the Origin of Species was published on 24 November 1859 — 1,250 copies, sold out the first day.

Darwin died at Down House on 19 April 1882. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, near Newton.

The major works

Journal of Researches (1839), later known as The Voyage of the Beagle — the observations of a young naturalist; his first public book, which established his name.

The barnacle monographs (1851–54) — the long work he himself credited as decisive training: “I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before,” he wrote to W. D. Fox in 1852.

On the Origin of Species (1859) — his “one long argument.” The book he had withheld for over twenty years.

The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) — humans placed inside nature; sexual selection introduced as a second mechanism alongside natural selection.

The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) — continuity of emotional expression across species; one of the earliest uses of photography in scientific argument.

The botanical monographs — orchids (1862), climbing plants (1865), insectivorous plants (1875), the power of movement in plants (1880) — sustained late-career work that is often underweighted in popular accounts.

The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms (1881) — his last book, on earthworms, characteristically patient and small-scale. Decades of observation condensed into a quiet argument about the cumulative work of small agents.

Autobiography (written 1876–82, published 1887 by his son Francis; unexpurgated edition by Nora Barlow, 1958) — essential primary source for his own account of his life and intellectual development.

The theory in summary

Natural selection — the differential survival and reproduction of organisms with heritable variation, acting without foresight or design — is the mechanism Darwin proposed for the origin of species. The theory, its development across his works, its reception, and its subsequent history are treated at the Darwinism subject page.

Method

Darwin’s working method was accumulative rather than deductive. He gathered evidence across decades, corresponded with hundreds of specialists, and spent years on single organisms — barnacles, orchids, earthworms — building the observational base that made Origin possible. In his Autobiography he described “a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones.” The long delay before publishing was a feature of this way of working, not a defect of nerve.

Context and contemporaries

The relationships that shaped his work: Henslow, who got him onto the Beagle; Lyell, the geological mentor and lifelong friend whose Principles of Geology Darwin took on the voyage; Joseph Hooker, the botanical confidant and closest correspondent; Thomas Henry Huxley, the public defender Darwin himself could not be; Asa Gray, the American botanist and theological interlocutor; and Wallace, the co-discoverer. The Wedgwood family ties were both his support network and his political-moral background — Josiah Wedgwood’s “Am I not a man and a brother?” medallion was part of the furniture of Darwin’s world.

Darwin was vigorously opposed to slavery throughout his life. His experience of slavery in Brazil during the Beagle voyage, described in his journals with horror, was formative. Desmond and Moore’s Darwin’s Sacred Cause (2009) argues that anti-slavery convictions shaped his species thinking; that is one reading among others.

His loss of religious faith was gradual, deepening especially after Annie’s death. He eventually described himself as agnostic — Huxley’s term. He was cautious in public and declined invitations to speak as an anti-religious campaigner. Emma remained a believer; the marriage held this difference throughout.

On race, Darwin’s record is complicated. He opposed slavery passionately and consistently. Some passages in The Descent of Man — ranking of peoples, civilisational-stage thinking, assumptions of racial hierarchy — reflect Victorian categories that his contemporaries shared and that his abolitionism did not displace. Both are part of the record.

“Survival of the fittest” was Herbert Spencer’s phrase, not Darwin’s, though Darwin adopted it in later editions of Origin. The label “Social Darwinism” was applied later — Richard Hofstadter gave it broad currency in the mid-twentieth century. Darwin himself did not advocate the political programmes — laissez-faire economics, eugenics, colonial expansion — that came to bear his name. The reception and misuse history is treated at the Darwinism subject page.

Where Darwin stops

Darwin was a Victorian naturalist working with the categories of his time. His mechanism — variation, inheritance, selection — is powerful and specific; the questions it does not address are equally specific. How variation arises at the molecular level he could not know (Mendelian genetics was rediscovered only in 1900, the structure of DNA established in 1953). Whether selection is the only source of biological order is a question that has continued after him. And the extension of evolutionary thinking into culture, economics, and politics, which began in his lifetime and accelerated after it, carries his name but not always his thought.

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.

— On the Origin of Species, closing passage (1859)

See also: Darwinism · Mutualism · Van Beneden