The Portable Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin was born in 1809 in Shrewsbury, England, to a wealthy intellectual family, his grandfather being the famous physician Erasmus Darwin. At Cambridge University he formed a friendship with J. S. Henslow, a professor of botany, and that association, along with his enthusiasm for collecting beetles, led to “a burning zeal,” as he wrote in his Autobiography, for the natural sciences. When Henslow obtained for him the post of naturalist on H.M.S. Beagle, the course of his life was fixed. The five-year-long voyage to the Southern Hemisphere between 1831 and 1836 would lay the foundation for his ideas about evolution and natural selection. Upon his return Darwin lived in London before retiring to his residence at Down, a secluded village in Kent. For the next forty years he conducted his research there and wrote the works that would change human understanding forever. Knowing of the resistance from the orthodox scientific and religious communities, Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859 only when another naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, independently reached the same conclusions. His other works include The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) and Recollections of My Mind and Character, also titled Autobiography (1887). Charles Darwin’s Diary of the Voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle was published posthumously in 1933. Darwin died in 1882; he is buried in Westminster Abbey. More by Charles Darwin

Duncan M. Porter received his BA and MA from Stanford and his PhD from Harvard in biological sciences. He has worked for the University of San Francisco, Washington University, and Virginia Tech, as well as the Missouri Botanical Garden and the Smithsonian Institution. He is professor emeritus of biological sciences at Virginia Tech. More by Duncan M. Porter

Peter Graham received his PhD from Duke University. He was given the Clifford Cutchins Professorship from 2000 to 2005 and was a Jane Austen Society of North America Traveling Scholar from 2009 to 2010. His books include Darwin’s Sciences with Duncan M. Porter, Don Juan and Regency England, and Jane Austen & Charles Darwin: Naturalists and Novelists. More by Peter Graham