charles_darwin

16
CHARLES DARWIN AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
and grandchildren. He enjoyed listening to his wife read novels
aloud. He acquired a penchant for playing billiards. Darwin was very
much a common man.
Any biographer of Darwin faces the difficulty of capturing the
greatness and the ordinariness of his life. His biographers know, for
example, what Darwin was reading on certain days of his life
because he kept a log. They know how Darwin felt about his family,
his friends, his work, and the criticisms of his theories because he
wrote hundreds of letters. They know what Darwin was writing and
when because he kept a log of that, too. They know when Darwin
was or felt too ill to work because he also kept track of his health,
sometimes in minute detail, in his diary. They even know how much
Darwin loved his favorite dogs, Bob and Polly, because he wrote
about it in two of his books, The Descent of Man and The Expression
of the Emotions in Man and Animals. 1 Biographers of Darwin have a
great deal of material at their disposal.
One reason why his biographers know so much about Darwin
is due to Darwin himself. Darwin wrote a short autobiography for
his wife and children in 1876, which he added to in 1881. Then
there are his more than twenty major books. Add to these more than
a hundred articles and the numerous letters he wrote and received.
This is an impressive corpus from which biographers can find plenty
of details about Darwin’s personal life and his scientific thought.
While he was alive, feature articles written about his life and
work appeared in popular journals and magazines, such as Contemporary
Review, Edinburgh Review, Punch, and Vanity Fair; soon after
his death, Darwin’s relations starting writing about him as well.
Francis Darwin, who had worked with his father on his research into
the movement of plants in the 1870s, became the first major editor
of Darwin’s works. The first published copy of Darwin’s autobiography
appeared in the three-volume The Life and Letters of Charles
Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter (1887).
Nora Barlow (1885–1989), Darwin’s granddaughter, continued
the family tradition. Most notably, she put back the material taken
out by her uncle in the first autobiography; the ‘‘new’’ book was published
in 1958 with the title The Autobiography of Charles Darwin,
1809–1882. Other books such as Charles Darwin and the Voyage of
the Beagle (1945) and Darwin and Henslow: The Growth of an Idea.
Letters, 1831–1860 (1958) expanded the knowledge of the wider scientific
community in which Darwin operated.
And then there are the biographies of Darwin, short and long,
written by a wide range of people from journalists to historians of
science. Whether it is Sir Gavin de Beer’s analysis of Darwin’s life as