“My whole soul is absorbed with worms just at present!”
To , 23 November 1880, when Darwin was working on his final publication . Published the following year, just six months before he died, it shows that he retained an undiminished, almost childlike passion for his research. Shelley Innes
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To , 29 June 1858. Darwin was famously absent from the meeting of two days later when, in a hastily written paper, natural selection was formally presented to the world. His correspondence at the time is, however, dominated by a domestic crisis. Scarlet fever had hit his family, taking the life of his youngest child, baby Charles. Alison Pearn
“If any man wants to gain a good opinion of his fellow men, he ought to do what I am doing: pester them with letters”
. In 60 years of letter-writing, Darwin badgered nearly 2000 people into exchanging more than 15,000 letters with him, many providing detailed observations of plants, animals and people from all over the world. His correspondents discussed both his ideas and theirs, helping to shape his published works. Today the letters are a window not only into Darwin’s life and mind, but also into the lives of these, often otherwise unknown, collaborators. Alison Pearn