The Darwin Correspondence Project
Pictures from German and Dutch photograph albums sent to Charles Darwin in 1877. Image credit: English Heritage Trust.
The Darwin Correspondence Project was an independently funded research team, jointly managed by Cambridge University Library and the American Council of Learned Societies, and affiliated to the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in Cambridge.
We located and researched letters written by and to Charles Darwin (1809–1882), and published complete transcripts together with contextual notes and articles. Darwin's letters are an essential resource for understanding the development of his own ideas, and are an important source for the lives and work of more than 2000 correspondents and others mentioned in the letters.
A 30-volume print edition of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (Cambridge University Press, 1985–), was completed in 2023, and contains more than 15,000 letters, around 9000 of which are in Cambridge University Library's Darwin Archive. The letters are also made available to read and search on this website. Images of original letters are being incorporated through collaboration with Cambridge Digital Library.