Darwin Charles - Autobiographies

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

CHARLES DARWIN was born into an upper-middle-class medical family in 1809. He was destined for a career in either medicine or the Anglican Church. However, he did not complete his Edinburgh medical education and after leaving Christs College, Cambridge, in 1831, his future was entirely changed when he joined HMS Beagle as a self-financing, independent naturalist. On returning to England in 1836 he began to write up his theories and observations which culminated in a series of books, most famously On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection of 1859. He married his cousin Emma Wedgwood in 1839. In 1842 they moved to Down House in the north Kent countryside where Darwin lived for the rest of his life. During this time he was socially reclusive and continually ill. He died in 1882 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

MICHAEL NEVE was born in Tokyo in 1949. He graduated in history from Christs College, Cambridge, in 1971 and is currently based at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London. He teaches and researches the history of psychiatry and the history of the life sciences. With Janet Browne he co-edited Darwins Voyage of the Beagle, also for Penguin Classics.

SHARON MESSENGER was born in Cirencester in 1971. She graduated in social history from the University of Liverpool in 1992 and completed her Ph.D. in 1999. She is a research officer at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London.

CHARLES DARWIN

Edited by MICHAEL NEVE and SHARON MESSENGER
With an Introduction by MICHAEL NEVE

PENGUIN BOOKS

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An autobiographical fragment first published in 1903, and Recollections first published in 1887
First published in Penguin Classics 2002
8

An autobiographical fragment copyright Cambridge University Press, 1986
1876 May 31 Recollections of the Development of my Mind and Character copyright George Pember Darwin, 2002
Editorial material copyright Michael Neve and Sharon Messenger, 2002

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the editors have been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-193534-8

I should like to thank both colleagues and students at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, with special thanks to Dr Janet Browne. Darwin is fortunate to have her as a biographer. Paul Keegan, late of Penguin Classics, set up the project and Robert Mighall and then Laura Barber at Penguin kept me at it. John Sturrock exchanged his ideas on the language of autobiography with me when he was writing on that subject some years ago and I gained a great deal from him. Thanks to all. Caroline Essex was a meticulous proof-reader in the final stages of this edition. Dr Sharon Messenger, also based at the Wellcome Trust Centre at UCL, started out doing research assistance but had her own perceptions of Darwins memoirs and ended up a most agreeable combination of researcher and co-editor. For revealing and often very funny conversations about telling stories of ones own life, and what a father in particular might best leave in and best leave out, special thanks to Flora and Georgia Neve and to Sarah and Grace Benton.

Grateful acknowledgements are made to the Cambridge University Press for permission to use the printed Fragment, to the Syndics of Cambridge University Library for access to and the reprinting of DAR 91: 5662, and to George Pember Darwin, and for the Recollections to the Syndics of Cambridge University Library and again to George Pember Darwin.

In the year 1879, having already begun to make additions to the autobiographical recollections he had started in the spring and summer of 1876, Charles Darwin wrote to a fellow scientist whom he trusted. Trusted with that most delicate of tasks translation. Julius Victor Carus was a zoology professor at Leipzig and a translator of both Darwin and Darwins friend and ally T. H. Huxley. The delicacy of the business of translation mattered acutely to Darwin, because he did not wish such translations to risk controversy, or to exaggerate the materialist and radical tone of his works and thereby encourage social and political debate. Carus could manage that neutrality of tone. But Darwin made one thing clear to his German colleague. He would never dream of publishing his autobiography.

Darwin was indeed working on an account of himself, or rather himself as embodied in his writings, but it absolutely was not meant for the public eye. Famously connected to the scientific account of evolution by means of natural selection, and an evangelical proponent of its truth, Darwin in the twenty-first century is less well known for a range of other studies in natural history and for an enormous personal correspondence. Less well known, one might say, as a writer of more than the one book, the