Darwin's personal library put online
Notes and comments scribbled by Charles Darwin on the pages and margins of his own personal library have been made available online for the first time.
Darwin’s personal scientific library, the majority of which is held at Cambridge University Library, has been digitised in a collaborative effort involving Cambridge, the Darwin Manuscripts Project at the American Museum of Natural History, the Natural History Museum, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
The digitisation project was jointly sponsored by Jisc and National Endowment for the Humanities through a transatlantic digitization collaboration grant.
In total, Darwin’s library amounted to 1480 books, of which 730 contain abundant research notes in their margins. These annotated books are now in the process of being digitized. The first phase of this project has just been completed, with 330 of the most heavily annotated books launched online at the Biodiversity Heritage Library for all to read .
Alastair Dunning, programme manager at Jisc, said: "Digitisation not only creates online version of books, but reveals the annotations and notes that are unique to each book and its owners. So with this website, jointly supported by the NEH in the US and Jisc in the UK, we can see the flashing thoughts, hasty scribbles and cherished opinions that underpinned the development of Darwin's thought."
University Librarian librarian Anne Jarvis said: “The Darwin collections are among the most important and popular held within Cambridge University Library. While there has been much focus on his manuscripts and correspondence, his library hasn’t always received the attention it deserves – for it is as he engaged with the ideas and theories of others that his own thinking evolved.”
Because Darwin’s evolutionary theory covered so many aspects of nature, reading served him as a primary source of evidence and ideas. Darwin once complained that he had become a ‘machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts’.
The pages of Darwin’s Library, smothered as they are in his tantalizing scrawl, give us a direct view of the great Darwinian intellectual machine in action. With the Charles Darwin Library online, now everyone can retrace how Darwin systematically used reading to advance his science.
Most of Darwin’s personal library rests at Cambridge University Library and at Down House. Although the majority of the books are scientific, some are humanities texts on subjects that Darwin transformed into scientific topics.
The series of transcriptions accompanying each page allows everyone to see which passages Darwin found relevant to his work, stimulated his thinking, or just annoyed him as he read the work of others.
For example, his friend Charles Lyell wrote in his famous Principles of Geology that there were definite limits to the variation of species. Darwin wrote alongside this: “If this were true adios theory”.
The online transcribed marginalia relies on the work of two scholars, Mario A. Di Gregorio and Nick Gill, published in the 1990s and now greatly enhanced by Gill. Finally, in addition to images of the books and transcribed jots, the information is fully indexed so that people can search for topics and ideas relevant to their interests or work.
Images courtesy of Cambridge University Library.
Find out how Jisc is supporting other translatlantic projects through its digitization grants