A rare manuscript containing a passage from Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is to be sold at auction in November.
The document, which is expected to fetch between £530,000 and £700,000, is said to be the most significant autograph manuscript by Darwin to have appeared at auction.
In 2015, On the Origin of Species was voted the most influential academic book ever written, in a public poll.
In the 163 years since the work was published, some of Darwin’s notes and manuscript leaves have survived. But autographs by Darwin – who was known for obsessively revising his publications and discarding pages from working drafts – were extremely rare.
According to the the auction house Sotheby’s, the manuscript was mistaken as a leaf from a working draft of the third edition of On the Origin of Species.
It was written by Darwin in the autumn of 1865, four years after the publication of the third edition of Origin of Species, in response to a request from Hermann Kindt, the editor of the Autographic Mirror. Kindt had written to Darwin requesting a sample of his handwriting to reprint it in his magazine, which focused on the pre-eminent figures of the age, Sotheby’s said.
Darwin provided him with the manuscript leaf that will now be auctioned. It was, according to the auction house, a “rare gesture from a man with notoriously inscrutable handwriting” who often signed his name in abbreviated letters.
“Charles Darwin’s revolutionary text On the Origin of Species succeeded in creating a Book of Genesis for the modern age and it would be difficult to overstate the seismic impact it had not only on 19th-century science and culture but also on subsequent thinkers and generations,” said Richard Austin, of Sotheby’s.
“We are proud to offer the most significant autograph manuscript by Darwin to come to auction, continuing Sotheby’s longstanding track record of offering the most important documents and artefacts in the history of thought.”
The auction will also feature other examples of Darwin’s seminal work, such as a first edition of On the Origin of Species and a rare copy of On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties, a paper by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.
The Age of Wonder auction will take place online from 25 November to 9 December.
