Researchers spent 18 years finding every book, article, pamphlet and magazine the naturalist owned, revealing the staggering size of his private collection.
In introducing the collection, Dr. John van Wyhe, founder of Darwin Online, explains that Charles Darwin’s vast personal library, which he used to create his world-changing scientific work, was gradually dispersed after his death in 1882.
As a result, scientists generally assumed that the collection was limited to the 1,480 books known to have survived at Cambridge University and Darwin’s home, Down House.
But van Wyhe says this is now only 15 percent of the printed items Darwin owned during his lifetime; it actually included 13,000 volumes and 7,350 titles. After meticulously identifying each of these works, the Darwin Online team has published a 300-page catalog listing the entire collection, with nearly 9,300 links to digitized copies of the works.
Among the many sources used to fill the enormous gaps in Darwin’s library were his original handwritten catalogs, which filled 56 paper boxes and contained frustratingly abbreviated references that researchers then had to make sense of to identify the works cited.
“Each of these ambiguous records required its own detective story to uncover the publication that Darwin said was in his library,” van Wyhe says.
A further 426 missing books were later identified from a 426-page handwritten catalog of Darwin’s library prepared for him in 1875.
The resulting collection of publications was extraordinary both in its size and the breadth of subjects covered. According to Van Wyhe, most of the works in the Darwin Library are, unsurprisingly, on scientific subjects, particularly biological and geological.
However, Wyhe notes that many of them are works on topics such as farming, animal breeding and behavior, geographical distribution, philosophy, psychology, religion and history, travel and language. For example, Darwin’s library now includes many works by philosophers John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte, as well as the writings of Charles Babbage, who first introduced the concept of a programmable computer.
Other surprising records include an 1832 road atlas of England and Wales and a book of artworks called Sun Pictures.
“Darwin’s sources include papers with alarming titles such as ‘Anatomy of a four-legged chicken’ and ‘Epileptic guinea pigs’. Just browsing through the list will give a modern reader a sense of how extensive, erudite and often interesting Darwin’s interests and sources were.”
If you’re intrigued by all this, be sure to take a look at Darwin’s collection for yourself.
IFL Science. February 12, 2024.
