Around twenty years ago, maybe a little longer, I discovered Project Gutenberg. Back in those dark ages, pre-Kindle, no one had yet manufactured and marketed a reliable and functional e-book reader. Creating digital copies of books back then was done using OCR scanning or, heaven forbid, retyping from print copies. But it worked. PG had, by the time I discovered it, a large library of digitized books. A whole library on your computer, at your fingertips! I was in heaven.

I downloaded a number of books in rich text format (Word format not being an option). One of those was The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. 1. I loaded the RTF into Word and formatted it for compact printing but comfortable reading—a nice blend. I never printed it, however, not knowing when I might read it. In the last year I discovered a Kindle feature where you can upload any text file to your Kindle device. I tried that with several files, including this one.

I wanted to read this because I’ve already read a fair amount about or by Darwin. I read Origin of Species about three years ago (reviewed on this blog). And many years ago I read Irving Stone’s The Origins. Plus I’ve read several other articles about him. So in May sometime, having finished other reading projects, I pulled this up on my phone’s Kindle app and began reading it. I set it down several times, finally getting into a rhythm of reading a good number of pages. I finished it about two weeks ago.

It’s a good book. Not stellar, but good. It was compiled by Darwin’s son, Francis Darwin. Volume 1 covers up to and including publishing The Origin of Species, but not his life afterwards. The book is more biography than it is letters. That was a downer, as I was looking forward more to letters than to biography. The bio portion was a little bit lackluster. Francis Darwin arranged this topically rather than chronologically. I generally prefer chronological biographies. So I found the biography portion generally uninteresting.

The letters were also arranged a little bit topically, though with a nod to chronology. The letters written from The Beagle, the boat Darwin sailed on his famous voyage around the world, were quite interesting. As were the letters in the years following that voyage.

The letters in the two decades between the voyage and publishing Darwin’s famous book were mostly good. Many included the scientific names of species Darwin was studying. Those were somewhat hard to read, but interesting if you could skim past all the names. All together, they told a story of a man who was sick most of his life, but still managed to get a fair amount of work done and publish things that the scientific community embraced, followed by the rest of the world.

This is a book I’m glad I read, but probably will never read again. I don’t remember if I downloaded and formatted Vol 2, but I’m not going to go looking for it right away on my computer. As for Vol 1, I give it 3 1/2 stars, marked down for the biology section, with the letters section not stellar enough to pull the whole book up to the 4-stars category.