For years, Charles Darwin's personal library had been rumored to contain around 1,480 books, which was the total of surviving items found in the two main collections preserved by the University of Cambridge and Down House. However, after further digging, researchers have found out that this number only comprised about 15% of Darwin's total original collection of books, publications, journals, and papers.
According to John van Wyhe, the lead academic who took great pains to track down and catalogue all the pieces of Darwin's original collection, there were more than 7,400 titles across 13,000 volumes and items, which proves just how extensive a researcher Darwin was.
These include publications in a wide range of subject matters including biology, geology, farming, animal husbandry, geography, philosophy, psychology, and religion among others. Most of the works were written in English, but Darwin also had copies of works written in other languages such as German and French.
It took over 18 years for the Darwin Online project to fully reconstruct the entirety of Darwin's collection, and now, they have an index of more than 9,700 links to copies of the works that Darwin had. Some of the interesting finds that van Wyhe and his team notes is that Darwin actually had copies of works by John Stuart Mill and August Comte, as well as Charles Babbage and Paul Du Chaillu's Explorations and adventures in equatorial Africa.
Although most of Darwin's collection were scientific in nature, he was a wide reader and also had in his possession other works outside the realm of scienctific or academic literature. The team notes that Darwin once had a book on chess which was sold in 1889. Just recently, in 2019, a Darwin family copy of Elizabeth Gaskell's 1880 novel Wives and daughters had been up for auction.
Darwin also had a book about finances titled A treatise on investments by Robert Arthur Ward, which most likely helped him take care of his wealth, investing the money he received from his inheritance and publications into assets like land, securities, and even investing in railroad projects.
Apart from the collections maintained by Cambridge and those kept at Down House, the Darwin Online team also traced and located the original sources of thousands of clippings, pamphlets, and other titles which were referenced in the Darwin Archive but whose author, publication, or date was unknown.
(Image credit: John van Wyhe/Darwin Online)