The evolution of a theory
Janet Browne, Charles Darwin Voyaging . Volume 1 of a Biography. Jonathan Cape, London, 1995. Pp. xiii + 605, 86 illustrations and maps, £25. ISBN 0 224 04202 5 A new era has opened for biographers of Charles Darwin with the prospective availability of the whole of his extant correspondence, meticulously edited by the members of the Darwin Correspondence Project at the Cambridge University Library, set up in 1975 by Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith. Nine volumes have been published so far, covering the years from 1821 to 1861, and the remaining 10,000 letters listed in A Calendar of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin are planned to follow in future volumes at intervals of about 10 months. Janet Browne, as one of the original Assistant Editors of the Project, was in a good position to take advantage of the hitherto untapped evidence in many of Darwin’s personal and scientific letters, and has made very effective use of it in writing the first instalment of a biography that covers the initial development of his thinking about evolution in a much more satisfactory fashion than any of its predecessors.