Darwin: The theory years

Abstract

The period from January of 1837 to December of 1846 -the period covered by these two volumes of the Darwin correspondence -encompasses by all measures the most creative era of Darwin's scientific life. Freshly returned from five years aboard the HMS Beagle, in December of 1836 Darwin moved to Cambridge to sort the materials collected during the five years away from England. From all available evidence -and this is now considerable -he was at that time still some months away from the conceptual developments which would move him in the direction of a novel version of transformism. 1 A decade later, Darwin was comfortably ensconced as the master of Down House, married, with a growing family, with his mature natural selection theory polished off in a preliminary form, an accomplished geologist, and just on the edge of turning a minor paper on an aberrant parasitic barnacle into an eight-year inquiry which would establish him as a foremost invertebrate zoologist. The main outlines of Darwin's development in this period have been so often told that they almost cease to provoke interest. These two volumes of the correspondence, presenting 532 (76% of total) previously unpublished letters, fill in many details, and flesh out Darwin-as-person with intimate details of his personal and family life in this creative decade. Along with the issuing of the re-edited early notebook covering essentially the same period, the Darwin industry has produced as rich a documentary history as exists on any major scientific figure during their primary theoretical years. The scholarship that has gone into these volumes leaves little to be desired -indeed it is standard-setting. Useful appendices translate the foreign language letters, details are found on every individual mentioned, the relevant portions of the pocket Journal for the years covered are presented, the early autobiographical sketch of 1838, the "Old and