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In 1876, Charles Darwin wrote a short account of his life for his children and grandchildren. He describes his childhood, his boredom at school and in…
In 1876, Charles Darwin wrote a short account of his life for his children and grandchildren. He describes his childhood, his boredom at school and in medical studies at Edinburgh, which he abandoned after watching operations without anaesthetic, his passion for collecting beetles at Cambridge, the invitation to sail on the Beagle that changed his life, and the long years of work at home in Kent that led to his theory. He also reflects honestly on his loss of religious faith and on how his mind had become 'a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts', at the cost of his love of poetry and music.
Context and significance
This edition, by his son Francis Darwin, was published in 1887 in the Life and Letters, with some passages on religion left out that were later restored. It is a modest and moving self-portrait. The voyage is told in The Voyage of the Beagle, and the theory in On the Origin of Species.
About the author
Charles Darwin (1809–1882) left medical school in Edinburgh because he could not bear to watch operations, and studied at Cambridge to become a clergyman. Instead, at twenty-two, he joined the five-year voyage of HMS Beagle, described in The Voyage of the Beagle, which gave him the observations of a lifetime.
Back in England he worked for twenty years at his country home in Kent before a letter from the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who had reached the same idea, pushed him to publish On the Origin of Species in 1859. He went on to write The Descent of Man and books on barnacles, orchids and earthworms, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.