The Autobiography of Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin, 1887
His father predicted the boy would be a disgrace to the family, and his teachers thought him rather below average. At sixty-seven, Charles Darwin took an honest look at how that boy came to write On the Origin of Species. You will learn which habits he thought mattered most, which rule saved him from fooling himself, and what price he paid for his success.
Who it is for
For anyone who thinks of themselves as an ordinary person and wants to understand what great work really grows from. And for everyone curious about how Darwin thought.
I have worked as hard and as well as I could, and no man can do more than this.
A disgrace to all your family
“You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” That is what a father once said to his schoolboy son, Charles Darwin. The teachers agreed with him: the boy seemed quite ordinary to them, even a little below the common standard in intellect. Darwin remembered these words all his life, though he added that his father, the kindest of men, had said them in anger and not quite fairly.
At the end of May 1876, at sixty-seven, Darwin began writing his recollections. Almost every day he sat over them for about an hour in the afternoon. He wrote for his children and grandchildren: he himself would have been very interested to read even a short, dull sketch of how his grandfather thought and worked. And he decided to look at his life as if he were a dead man in another world looking back on it.
Darwin does not praise himself; he takes his life apart the way a scientist takes apart a find. How did a man of modest abilities, by his own estimate, manage to change scientists' views on important questions? He goes through everything that helped: passion, mentors, one long voyage, working habits, patience and honesty with facts. And he names the price that people usually keep quiet about.
Walk this road with him, from a beetle in his mouth to the book On the Origin of Species. Let's start with the school that Darwin called simply a blank.
School was a blank, the beetles were not
Darwin went to school in Shrewsbury, where almost nothing but ancient languages was taught. Every morning, during the service in chapel, he learned forty or fifty lines of Latin or Greek verse by heart, and two days later he could not remember a single line. “The school as a means of education to me was simply a blank,” he recalled.
His real education happened elsewhere. His elder brother set up a chemical laboratory in the garden tool-house, and Charles helped him, often late into the night. In Darwin's words, this was the best part of his schooldays: for the first time he saw in practice what experimental science means. The boys nicknamed him “Gas”, and the headmaster publicly rebuked him for wasting his time on useless subjects.
Then came Edinburgh, where his father sent him to study medicine. The lectures there were unbearably dull, and Darwin rushed out of two operations before they were over. He came alive in Cambridge, where he collected beetles. One day he tore some old bark off a tree, saw two rare beetles and seized one in each hand. Then a third appeared, a completely new kind, and he could not possibly let it go. Darwin popped one beetle into his mouth; it ejected an acrid fluid that burnt his tongue. Both were lost: the one in his mouth and the third.
Looking back, Darwin found in his schoolboy self only three promising qualities: strong and varied interests, great zeal for whatever interested him, and a keen pleasure in understanding complex things. None of them was measured by marks. That kind of fire cannot be lit to a timetable: it catches where a person is interested for their own sake, not where a lesson has been set.
The headmaster's mistake is easy to repeat today: to call your own or someone else's passion a waste of time. What follows is Livria's suggestion for putting this into practice, not Darwin's advice. Notice which activity makes you forget the time and keeps you up late into the night, the way he sat in the shed with his brother. Perhaps that is where your real learning is happening right now.
About the author
Charles Darwin (1809–1882), English naturalist, author of the theory of evolution by natural selection. He wrote his recollections in 1876 for his children, and they were printed after his death, in 1887.
All books by this author: Charles Darwin
Terms from the book
- FitzRoy
- Beagle
- naturalist
- Malthus
- natural selection
- Wallace
- Lyell
- Huxley
- Shakespeare
- Origin of Species: Darwin's main book, published in 1859. In it he argued that species of living beings change gradually and descend from common ancestors.
- Shrewsbury: An old town in the west of England, where Darwin was born and went to school.
- Henslow: John Stevens Henslow, professor of botany at Cambridge, Darwin's teacher and friend. It was from him that the letter came with the offer of the voyage.
- Sedgwick: Adam Sedgwick, professor of geology at Cambridge. In the summer of 1831 he studied the ancient rocks of North Wales and took Darwin with him.
- Cwm Idwal: A mountain valley in North Wales. Its slopes clearly show the traces of an ancient glacier: scored rocks and ridges of stones.
- Wedgwood: Josiah Wedgwood, Darwin's uncle, son of the founder of the Etruria pottery works. Darwin often went shooting on his estate.
- St. Jago: An island of the Cape Verde archipelago off the west coast of Africa, today's Santiago. Here Darwin first did geology on the voyage.
- Hooker: Joseph Dalton Hooker, English botanist and a friend of Darwin's. Together with Lyell he persuaded Darwin to print an extract from his manuscript alongside Wallace's paper.
- Glen Roy: A valley in Scotland known for the level bands along its slopes that look like roads. Agassiz explained them as the shores of a lake dammed by a glacier, and Darwin had to give up his sea explanation.
- Agassiz: Louis Agassiz, a naturalist who studied glaciers. His theory of a glacial lake forced Darwin to give up his own explanation of Glen Roy.
All terms
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