The Darwin Online project at the National University of Singapore (NUS) publishes for the first time today: Charles Darwin’s personal Address Book. It offers an astonishingly personal glimpse into the life and work of the great scientist.
In addition to scans of the entire notebook, Darwin’s hard-to-decipher handwriting has been expertly transcribed and meticulously edited. Hundreds of editorial notes and links reveal the identities of the abbreviated entries and where they were mentioned in Darwin’s thousands of pages of publications and handwritten notes.
The small leather notebook is only 48 pages long but contains about 500 entries. It was begun by his wife Emma Darwin shortly after their marriage in January 1839, when the Darwins began their married life together in London. Darwin proceeded to write almost all further entries there and after the family moved to the village of Down in 1842. He continued to use the Address Book throughout his lifetime.
New contacts beyond Darwin’s surviving correspondence
What is perhaps most interesting is that there are so many people, businesses, and other items not otherwise known in the vast literature on Darwin, especially after the 50 year-long Darwin correspondence project, which produced 30 meticulously edited volumes. It is usually forgotten that although the Correspondence of Charles Darwin includes 15,000 letters to and from Darwin, these are the surviving letters, and unknown thousands of others once existed.
Darwin’s Address Book is a remarkable piece of social history which contains much more than names and addresses. For example, it records unique references to articles in the Gardeners’ Chronicle that Darwin used for research. There are rat poison recipes since his small estate included stables and outbuildings. There are recipes for cleaning animal skeletons, making paste, and ordering peat to grow experimental plants in his greenhouse. Other notes are for medical treatments, a washer-dryer, a lawn mower, weighing scales, and buying a fireworks display for his village.
Rich network includes breeders, tradesmen, the Queen’s optician, and an address in Singapore
Several entries for pigeon breeders include some that were not previously documented. Darwin’s tailors are also included with a note for his shirts – “38 chest”. There are also prices for products Darwin needed, such as scientific labels, clay for his garden, and clues about alternative medical treatments using an electric battery and the ‘water cure’. He had the address of the father of Oscar Wilde and the social reformer Octavia Hill, amongst other surprises. One late entry is for an optician, Dixey & Son, who also provided eyewear to Queen Victoria and, later, Winston Churchill, and is still in business today. Its records were destroyed during WWII, hence the firm had no idea that Darwin was one of their clients.
There is even a note on the word rate of Darwin’s copyist, Ebenezer Norman, who copied many rough drafts such as the sketch of Darwin’s theory of evolution sent to American botanist Asa Gray in 1857. This was later included in the Darwin / Wallace papers in 1858. This prompted the publication of Darwin’s epoch-making On the origin of species published on 24 November 1859.
Particularly interesting to find is the address “Wallace A. R. Ternate. Hamilton, Gray & Co Singapore”. This was Alfred Russel Wallace’s shipping agent in Singapore from 1854 to 1862, effectively his ‘home base’ during eight years of collecting in Southeast Asia. Items sent to the address were forwarded to whichever island he was working on. In one of the most famous episodes in the history of science, Wallace independently conceived a similar theory of evolution by natural selection, and their views were read before a scientific society together in 1858 – the first public announcement of this world-changing new view of life on Earth.
The notebook remained in the family after Darwin’s death, along with most of his papers and manuscripts. In 1942, the majority was given to Cambridge University Library. In 1948, the Address Book was thought more appropriate for the public museum at his former home, Down House, and it remains there safely preserved today.
Historian of science Dr John van Wyhe from the Department of Biological Sciences at the NUS Faculty of Science, said, “It’s incredible that this little treasure-trove of details by Darwin has remained unpublished until now. It offers fascinating new insights into his life and the way he worked.”
Since 2005, the Darwin Online project, formerly at the University of Cambridge and now at NUS, has transcribed and edited virtually the entirety of the Darwin Archive as well as all of Darwin’s publications and reconstructed his complete library which was launched online to international acclaim in 2024.
The Address Book will be published online here:
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