Follow the story of the Beagle voyage through Darwin’s notes, books, letters, and specimens, now in the collections of Cambridge University. The text, captions, and images from the Darwin Bicentenary exhibition A voyage round the world, held in Cambridge University Library in 2009, are available here.
In 1985, the Darwin Correspondence Project produced its first publication, A Calendar to the Correspondence of Charles Darwin: 1821–1882 (New York: Garland), which contained a detailed summary of every letter Darwin was then known to have sent or received. That edition is no longer in print, but a revised and updated edition was published by Cambridge University Press in 1994 and the entries in that form the basis for most of the letter summaries on this website. The printed Calendar is still a standard reference work for Darwin scholars.
This volume contains the complete texts of all the letters that the young naturalist Charles Darwin wrote and received while sailing round the world on the surveying ship the Beaglebetween 1831 and 1836. They start with letters written as a new and aimless graduate of Cambridge University before the offer of a place on the voyage had reached him, and go on to give a vivid first-hand account of his exciting and scientifically significant travels to South America, the Galapagos, and Australia. Find links to selected letters here and get a flavour of one of the most famous voyages ever made.
The letters in this volume span the years from 1825, when Darwin was a student at the University of Edinburgh, to the end of 1859, when the Origin of Species was published. The early letters portray Darwin as a lively sixteen-year-old medical student. Two years later he abandoned any idea of following his father in becoming a physician and transferred to Cambridge University to prepare for the ministry. His interests as an undergraduate at Cambridge, as at Edinburgh, were clearly outside the established academic curriculum.
The correspondence of Charles Darwin (F. Burkhardt, et al.eds, Cambridge University Press 1985–) is the definitive edition of all known surviving letters – more than 15,000 – written by and to Charles Darwin.
