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Origins: Selected Letters of Charles Darwin, 1822-1859. Anniversary edition. (Selected Letters of C. Darwin)

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Now that the entire collection of Charles Darwin's letters that have survived is available on the web one might wonder why one would need a selection of them in printed form. In fact, however, Darwin is known to have exchanged at least 14500 letters with around 2000 different correspondents, and although the whole collection is a supremely valuable resource for the serious scholar it is hardly digestible for the more casual reader, who needs some preselection to whet the appetite for a more detailed examination.

This first collection covers the years from 1822, when Darwin was a schoolboy, to the end of 1859, when the first edition of his best-known book, The Origin of Species, was published. It thus covers the essential period of the years leading up to the publication of the theory of natural selection, and contains much valuable information about his thoughts at that time. In particular, although Darwin's diffidence about publishing is well known, and he might never have taken the leap if he hadn't learned of the parallel development of similar ideas by Alfred Russel Wallace, his correspondence makes it clear that he wasn't diffident about the idea of natural selection itself -- he just worried that he hadn't developed the argument sufficiently to convince a broad public.

Not the least valuable component of this collection is the excellent foreword by Stephen Jay Gould, which supplies a very readable introduction to the context in which the letters were written.