Like piecing together a puzzle: Science historian John van Wyhe on ‘rebuilding’ Darwin’s library

In 2006, van Wyhe set up Darwin Online, a comprehensive repository of the naturalist’s publications, notebooks, journals and manuscripts, as well as of writings on him. It currently contains 76,200 transcribed manuscript pages of writings by the naturalist, and tens of thousands of archival records (including letters, diaries and notes and other writings left behind by people who lived and worked with him), with more material still being added.

This February, to mark the evolutionary biologist’s 215th birth anniversary, the website also released a 300-page catalogue that serves as an updated list of the contents of Darwin’s personal library (in an effort supported by and building on the University of Cambridge’s Darwin Correspondence Project, with additional support from the department of biological sciences at National University of Singapore, the British Society for the History of Science and Charles Darwin Trust, among other institutes).

The catalogue contains 7,400 titles (an earlier catalogue listed fewer than 1,500).

Finding the new titles was like putting together a giant puzzle, sometimes with the wrong pieces, van Wyhe says. (Read on for more on how this was done.)

What continues to intrigue him about Darwin, he adds, is that centuries ago, he was so curious and open to new ideas that he was able to correct a major error in how we viewed the world, and our place in it. Today, van Wyhe says, as we grapple with new technology, right-wing fanaticism and a climate emergency, the ability to stay focused on the big picture is something we could draw from him.

Excerpts from an interview.

What first drew you to Darwin specifically?

When I was about 29 and a doctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, I read that Darwin kept his theory secret for 20 years and thought that this was so mysterious, fascinating and romantic — this idea that for so many years, it was this one man who knew how life really worked, when no one else did yet.

This is a scientist who was not theoretical and abstract; he was hands-on with the natural world. At this time, nearly 25 years ago, a lot of historians were studying Darwin through his writings and through their readings of that era. But I felt that we were not thinking enough about the natural world that he spent years studying physically.

Retracing his footsteps in Tahiti, (where the HMS Beagle stayed for about 10 days and where Darwin first started understanding the formation of coral atolls), was hugely important to me.

How was Darwin Online born, from this initial interest?

It had a very sudden beginning. After finishing my PhD, I was on a research fellowship, studying Darwin and other areas of Victorian science, at the National University of Singapore. This was in 2002. There were no original books by or on Darwin at the library then. So I thought, “That’s okay, I’ll just look them up online.”

Not only could you find very little about Darwin, but a lot of the versions of books that had been made available online were unreliable. There were hardly any first editions.

I started thinking that we should have one website on which scholars could find all Darwin’s writings, drawn from credible sources. And with what material I had then, I set up a pilot website. It was called The Writings of Charles Darwin on the Web.

When I got back to Cambridge a year later, I began talking to some of my mentors and colleagues about the initiative. Eventually, I got funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to develop the project at the University of Cambridge. Since then, I have worked with an assistant historian of science and volunteer editors, archivists, libraries and private collectors, to put the repository together.

You’ve said that it took 18 years to reconstruct Darwin’s vast personal library…

For the last few decades, Darwin’s library was said to consist of about 1,480 books. But we knew that his family gave away many. Over the years, researchers have come upon obscure references in his writings, as well as in notes by his wife, Emma Darwin, to titles that were once part of his library, but were not among those 1,480 books. So, we knew there were likely some missing titles.

It was daunting piecing together his personal library. The trick was to know where to look — in his papers and scribbled notes, in auction catalogues from the past 100 years, in letters written to him or by him, even his wife’s diaries.

But it was hugely exciting, the process. It felt like piecing together a detective story or a puzzle. Sometimes, we realised his own notes were wrong. For instance, he mentions a title in the catalogue that sounds like an article that turns out to be a chapter in a book. So, we were essentially working with an incomplete puzzle, and often misleading puzzle pieces.

Were there many surprises, on the eventual list?

I think the more mundane, ephemeral titles made for interesting surprises. For instance, he had a coffee table book from 1872, titled Sun Pictures, A Series of Twenty Heliotype Illustrations of Ancient and Modern Art.

There’s also an 1832 road atlas of England and Wales, titled Paterson’s Roads; an 1826 article by ornithologist John James Audubon, titled Account of the Habits of the Turkey Buzzard (Vultur aura); and a treatise on investments from 1852.

I think, in many ways, the list of these 7,400 titles, available online, allows anyone with even a passing interest in Darwin to scroll up and down and see just how diverse his resources were. In a way, this helps to fill out the picture of him as a whole human being, rather than just a distant scientist and theorist.

Is there something you believe Darwin’s work can bring to conversations today, amid a sixth extinction, the climate crisis, the dawn of AI, war, inequity and growing divisiveness?

A big part of all that we know and understand about the natural world, we owe to Darwin. So he’s going to remain a great source of inspiration for a long time. Every generation has a lot of great scientists but how many remain as relevant and deeply influential as him, nearly 200 years on?

He showed us how to look at the big picture: that living things change over time, they diversify. We keep forgetting that big picture; we keep assuming he was only focusing on the relationship of humans with apes or monkeys.

I would say that Darwin had a deep perspective of time that is hard for most people to imagine. Life has been going on for so long that compared to that time scale, the problems you’ve mentioned seem to shrink a bit. We need to be able to take a step back and assess where we’re headed in the long run.

I often go back to these words of his from The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871): “It has often and confidently been asserted, that man’s origin can never be known: but ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”