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To Henry Fawcett   20 July 18611

2. Hesketh Crescent | Torquay

July 20th

My dear Sir

Nothing would have given me more pleasure than seeing you at Down, but as the above address shows, we are away from home.2 We shall remain here 5 or 6 weeks longer having come here on account of my daughter’s health & my own.—3

You could not possibly have told me anything which would have given me more satisfaction than what you say about Mr Mill’s opinion.—4 Until your Review appeared I began to think that perhaps I did not understand at all how to reason scientifically.—5

I thank you cordially for your very kind note. Perhaps at some future time you may be in our neighbourhood & we may have the pleasure of meeting.— I am forced to write in a great hurry as I must send some other letters by this Post—

My dear Sir | [Yours sincerely Charles Darwin]6

Footnotes

1
The year is established by the address; the Darwins stayed at Hesketh Terrace in Torquay in July and August 1861 (see Correspondence vol. 9). A fragment of this letter, from a published source, was published in Correspondence vol. 9.
2
Fawcett had written to CD to acknowledge CD’s letter thanking him for his review of Origin in Macmillan’s Magazine (see Correspondence vol. 9, letter from Henry Fawcett, 16 July [1861], this volume, Supplement, letter to Henry Fawcett, 6 December [1860], and Fawcett 1860).
3
Henrietta Emma Darwin was suffering from the after-effects of what was thought to have been typhus fever (see Correspondence vol. 8, letter to J. D. Hooker, 11 May [1860] and n. 5).
4
Fawcett had told CD about a conversation he had had with John Stuart Mill in which Mill endorsed the logic of CD’s reasoning in Origin (see Correspondence vol. 9, letter from Henry Fawcett, 16 July [1861] and n. 3, and this volume, Supplement, letter to Henry Fawcett, 6 December [1860] and n. 6).
5
Both Adam Sedgwick and Samuel Wilberforce in their reviews of Origin had criticised CD’s method of reasoning ([A. Sedgwick] 1860 and [Wilberforce] 1860). Fawcett’s review published in Macmillan’s Magazine (Fawcett 1860) countered these criticisms.
6
The signature has been excised, and ‘Yours sincerely Charles Darwin’ has been added in an unknown hand.

Bibliography

Correspondence: The correspondence of Charles Darwin. Edited by Frederick Burkhardt et al. 29 vols to date. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985–.

Fawcett, Henry. 1860. A popular exposition of Mr Darwin on the origin of species. Macmillan’s Magazine 3 (1861): 81–92.

Origin: On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. By Charles Darwin. London: John Murray. 1859.

[Sedgwick, Adam.] 1860. Objections to Mr Darwin’s theory of the origin of species. Spectator, 24 March 1860, pp. 285–6. [Reprinted with revisions in ibid., 7 April 1860, pp. 334–5.]

[Wilberforce, Samuel.] 1860. [Review of Origin.] Quarterly Review 108: 225–64.

Summary

"You could not possibly have told me anything which would have given me more satisfaction than what you say about Mr. Mill’s opinion." [See 2868.]

Letter details

Letter no.
DCP-LETT-3215A
From
Charles Robert Darwin
To
Henry Fawcett
Source of text
Karpeles Manuscript Library Museums
Physical description
AL(S) 3pp

Please cite as

Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 3215A,” accessed on 26 April 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-3215A.xml

Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 9 and 18 (Supplement)

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