Darwin Correspondence Project

The Darwin Correspondence Project, founded in 1974, was an independently funded research team, jointly managed by Cambridge University Library and the American Council of Learned Societies, and affiliated to the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in Cambridge.

It located and researched letters written by and to the evolutionary scientist, Charles Darwin (1809–1882), and published complete transcripts together with contextual notes and articles. Darwin’s letters are an essential resource for understanding the development of his own ideas, and are an important source for the lives and work of more than 2,000 correspondents and others mentioned in the letters.

A 30-volume print edition of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (Cambridge University Press), was completed in 2023, and contains more than 15,000 letters, around 9,000 of which are in Cambridge University Library’s Darwin Archive. The letters are freely available to read and search on www.darwinproject.ac.uk.