Charles Darwin: The Concise Story of an Extraordinary Man

8. Correspondence

[ 45 ] eigHt v฀ Correspondence Darwin HaD intenDeD to get to London for a night or two each month, so he would not become a “Kentish hog.” But the eight-mile carriage ride to the railroad station was too much for his ill health. He reveled in the isolation of Down. He spent each day working in his study and enjoyed family activities as a restful diversion. He carried out his Joseph Dalton Hooker, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens , Kew. He was Darwin’s closest friend, confidant, and correspondent and a Fellow of the Royal Society. (British Museum) [ 46 ] communications with scientists via letters—lots of them. The Darwin Correspondence Project (see appendix C) has found about 14,500 letters to and from Darwin and 2000 of his correspondents; Darwin himself wrote about 7000 of them. He kept up a lifelong correspondence with Charles Lyell, and Joseph Dalton Hooker, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew Gardens), was another long-time friend and advisor with whom Darwin exchanged about 1400 letters. Zoologist Thomas Henry Huxley was a third favorite correspondent , who later became known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his staunch defense of Darwin’s ideas. Darwin’s inner circle thus included the greatest geologist, botanist, and zoologist of the day, and we can trace the development of his ideas from these letters. In 1844 he wrote to Hooker that “I am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.” ...