Details of Charles Darwin’s vast personal library, from a paper on epileptic guinea pigs to the Elizabeth Gaskell novel he adored, are being published in their entirety for the first time.
The project involved nearly two decades of painstaking, detective-like work to locate the thousands of books, journals, pamphlets and articles in the naturalist’s library.
John van Wyhethe academic who led the “overwhelming” effort said it showed the extraordinary scope of Darwin’s research on the work of others.
“It also shows how insanely eclectic Darwin was,” Van Wyhe said. “There’s this big sea of things that could be an American or German news clipping about a duck or invasive locusts. That was the fun part, not the formal books, but the other things… all of which merge to make the theories and publications make what we all know.”
The 300 page catalog published by Darwin online details of 7,400 titles over 13,000 items including journals, pamphlets and reviews.
Some of the books date from Darwin’s school days such as Oliver Goldsmith’s A history of England (1821), which he won as a prize, or his headmaster’s textbook on ancient geography.
Researchers have sometimes used auction records to piece together stories.
For example, an auction sale record reveals that Darwin had a copy of an 1826 paper by the ornithologist John James Audubon, “Account of the habits of the Turkey Buzzard (Vultura aura), especially with a view to exploding the opinion generally entertained of its extraordinary power of smell“.
In 2019, a copy of Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1880 novel Wives and Daughters appeared at an auction. A note in it reads: “This book was a great favorite of Charles Darwin and the last book that was read aloud to him.”
Previous lists of what was in Darwin’s library only covered about 15% of what was actually in it, said van Wyhe.
The new list shows that Darwin had tomes on a dizzying array of subjects, including biology, geology, philosophy, psychology, religion, farming, art, history and travel.
More than half of the works are in English and the rest in languages including German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and Danish.
One of the items is a German magazine containing the first known photograph of bacteria.
Other papers in the library have titles such as “The Anatomy of a Four-Legged Chicken,” “Epileptic Guinea Pigs,” and “The Hateful or Colorado Grasshopper.”
The project includes a virtual reconstruction of the library, with 9,300 links to copies of works available for free.
No one, his supporters say, has influenced our knowledge of the natural world more than Darwin.
His 1859 masterpiece, On the Origin of the Species, laid out the theory that explains how life on Earth evolved. It is seen as a book that changed the world, one that mattered then and matters now.
Van Wyhe, a historian of science at the University of Singapore and the director of Darwin Online, said it all showed that Darwin was “not an isolated figure working alone, but an expert of his time building on the sophisticated science and studies and other knowledge of thousands of people.
“The size and range of works in the library show the extraordinary extent of Darwin’s research into the work of others.”
The library publication coincides with what would have been Darwin’s 215th birthday on February 12.
Much material has been written about Darwin, but this is the first time that his library has been detailed in its entirety.
Van Wyhe said: “Now that we’ve done it, I wonder ‘why wasn’t this boy many years ago’? Darwin is someone who has been written about more than most historical figures… there are jokes about it, we call it the Darwin industry.”
