Charles Darwin. 2 May 1880

Charles Darwin (1809-1882).

Autograph letter signed (‘Ch. Darwin’) to [Henry Nottidge] Moseley, Down, Beckenham, Kent, 2 May 1880.

Two pages, 203 x 125mm, bifolium, headed notepaper. Provenance: by descent.

Extending an invitation to visit alongside Darwin's cousin, the Victorian polymath Francis Galton. ‘If you are disengaged will you give us the pleasure of seeing you here on Sunday the 9th. The Galtons & Andrew Clark [Darwin’s physician and friend] will be here. Your best plan will be, if you can come, will be to start from Charing X by the 5.21 train on Saturday evening, which reaches Orpington a little before 6 o’clock & I will endeavour to send a carriage to meet you’, or there are further options for travel by coach.

Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) and Charles Darwin shared a grandfather in the physician and Midlands Enlightenment thinker, Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) – the two branches of the family were not close, but the half-cousins renewed their acquaintance in adulthood after Darwin wrote in 1853 with compliments on Galton’s Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa. Galton went on to become a regular visitor at Down House; the correspondence of the two scientists contains frequent reference to their shared research interests and exchange of scientific papers. Galton was electrified when he read his half-cousin’s 1859 work On the Origin of Species: while Darwin touches only fleetingly on the potential implications of exploring variation in human populations, Galton devoted much of his working life to the study of heredity and eugenics, a term he invented in 1883. It is through his writing on the topic that the phrase ‘nature versus nurture’ was popularised.

Not published in the Darwin Correspondence Project.

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