A friend on Facebook clicked “like” on an American Museum of Natural History story about youthful doodles covering original Origin of the Species pages. So I have to admit that Facebook is sometimes good for leads.
The museum reported, “We may have Charles Darwin’s children to thank for the surviving handwritten pages of the naturalist’s ‘On the Origin of Species’ manuscript. Most of the original 600 pages are lost, and of the 45 pages that exist today, many were repurposed by Darwin’s brood of 10 children as art supplies.
” ‘Darwin was done with those pages — he was throwing away sections of his draft and not caring about it because the book was published,’ said Darwin Manuscripts Project Director David Kohn.”
McKenna Stayner at the New Yorker magazine has more on the Darwin story, adding that the family lived at Down House “in rural Kent, England. … They had ten children … and Down House was by all accounts a boisterous place, with a wooden slide on the stairs and a rope swing on the first-floor landing. …
“What may seem like sacrilege now—turning the only handwritten copy of a seminal work of science into scratch paper—appears to have been normal then. Once Darwin had sent a fair copy of the manuscript off to his publisher, John Murray, he made the rest of his changes to the book directly on the galley proofs, and evidently he wasn’t precious about the originals. Paper being a hot commodity, the children co-opted the pages for themselves.”
And that, O, Best Beloved, is how some of Darwin’s original thinking got preserved for posterity.
Pretty talented children, if you ask me, with some of their father’s interest in animals and birds. Check out these pictures.
Art: Darwin’s children
From the American Museum of Natural History and Cambridge University Library.
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