Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin once dropped out of medical school, ate his way through an odd menu of animals, and still rewrote the story of life from a quiet Kent village.
Published
Quick Facts
- Born
- 12 February 1809, Shrewsbury, Shropshire
- Died
- 19 April 1882, Down House, Kent; buried in Westminster Abbey
- Famous for
- The theory of evolution by natural selection
- Landmark book
- On the Origin of Species, published 24 November 1859
- Voyage
- Five years aboard HMS Beagle, 1831–1836
- Home
- Down House in Downe, where he lived from 1842
- Family
- Married his cousin Emma Wedgwood in 1839; they had ten children
- Other books
- The Descent of Man (1871), The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)
The medical dropout who joined a ship
Charles Darwin was meant to be a doctor. His father, a successful Shrewsbury physician, sent him to Edinburgh University in 1825, but the young Darwin found surgery without anaesthetic unbearable and walked away from medicine. The next plan was to become a country clergyman, so he went to Cambridge. There he spent far more time collecting beetles than studying, and he was delighted to find a rare one in each hand and popped one in his mouth when a third appeared. It was his botany professor, John Stevens Henslow, who helped put him on the ship that changed everything. In December 1831, aged 22, Darwin sailed from Plymouth on HMS Beagle as a gentleman companion to Captain Robert FitzRoy. The voyage was meant to survey coastlines. It lasted almost five years.
Finches, tortoises and a slow-burning idea
The Beagle took Darwin to South America, the Galápagos Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia and beyond. He filled notebooks, shipped home crates of fossils and specimens, and saw giant extinct mammals buried in South American cliffs. The popular tale is that the Galápagos finches gave him a eureka moment. The truth is slower. He did not even label the finches by island at first, and it was only after returning, with help from the ornithologist John Gould, that the pattern of related species began to make sense. By 1838 he had grasped the core idea: living things vary, more are born than survive, and the ones best suited to their surroundings pass on their traits. He called it natural selection.
Twenty years of keeping quiet
Darwin did not rush to print. He knew his idea would unsettle a Victorian world that tended to see species as fixed and created. He wrote a private sketch of the theory in 1842 and expanded it in 1844, then spent years on barnacles, studying them in remarkable detail. He was spurred into action in 1858, when the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay arriving independently at the same idea. Papers from both men were read to the Linnean Society in London that July. Then came On the Origin of Species on 24 November 1859. The first print run reportedly sold out on its first day. Darwin barely mentioned humans in it, but readers instantly got the point.
The quiet life at Down House
In 1842 Darwin moved his growing family to Down House, in the Kent village of Downe. He rarely left. He suffered for decades from bouts of sickness and exhaustion that doctors never pinned down. His routine was strict: walks, work, rest, letters. He paced a gravel path at the edge of his land, known as the Sandwalk, and used it for thinking. He kept up an enormous correspondence with naturalists around the world. He also experimented at home. He studied earthworms for decades, tested how seeds could survive seawater, and examined climbing plants and carnivorous sundews. His final book, in 1881, was about earthworms, and it sold very well.
Quirks and appetites
At Cambridge Darwin joined the Gourmet Club, a group that aimed to eat unusual animals. On the Beagle voyage he sampled armadillo and puma, and reportedly tried a giant tortoise and rhea along the way. He was a devoted father who let his children roam his study, and he made careful notes on his baby son William's expressions, which fed into his later book on emotions. He also made a famous pros-and-cons list about whether to marry, with "children" and "a nice soft wife on a sofa" among his points.
Where you can still find him
Darwin died in 1882 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, near Isaac Newton. Down House is now preserved as a museum, and you can still walk the Sandwalk and see his study. His hometown of Shrewsbury celebrates him with a statue outside the old library building where he went to school, and his name is on a university college in Cambridge. The Natural History Museum in London carries his legacy in its halls, with a statue of Darwin overlooking the main hall. Modern biology, from genetics to medicine to conservation, is built on the idea he spent twenty years quietly testing.
Notable people
- Charles Darwin
- Alfred Russel Wallace
- Robert FitzRoy
- John Stevens Henslow
- Emma Darwin
- John Gould
- Josiah Wedgwood II
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