Introduction to the Darwin Manuscript Catalogue

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THIS is the largest union catalogue of Darwin's handwritten manuscripts ever published. It is intended to eventually record all Darwin manuscripts in the world. If your institution keeps Darwin manuscripts not included here, please contact us. The catalogue is frequently updated.

Due to the helpfulness and cooperation of the following institutions the catalogue includes fully normalized records for some or all of the manuscripts from: the Darwin Archive at Cambridge University Library, UK, the American Philosophical Society, Cambridge University Zoology Museum, Cambridge University Sedgwick Museum, the British Library, Christ's College, Cambridge, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, Kew Gardens, London, the Linnean Society of London, John Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, Lincolnshire Archives, Lincoln, Zoological Society of London, Elgin Museum, Elgin, Moray, Keele University Library, Staffordshire, the New York Botanical Garden, the State Library, Aarhus, Denmark and University College London. The catalogue contains a number of interim entries for the manuscript collection of English Heritage (Darwin Collection at Down House).¹

Click here to see a sample entry from the catalogue.

The manuscript entries may be searched or sorted according to the following fields:

Identifier: the call number from each institution's catalogue, e.g. CUL-DAR80.B7 [At the moment this must be at least two digits long after the DAR number.] Entering less than the full number, e.g. CUL-DAR29, will bring up a lost of all specific sub numbers of DAR29. See here.

All Fields: searches all the textual (i.e. non tick box) fields in the database.

Name(s): e.g. Darwin Charles Robert, or multiple names e.g. Darwin, Owen

After date: entering a date here restricts the set of returned results to those which are dated after the supplied date. The supplied date may be incomplete, in that it consists only of a year, or a year with month only, or a precise date in the form YYYY-MM-DD

Before date:

Title: searches the title or attributed title fields, e.g. 'Silliman's Jnl' 20: 177'

Description: a limited number of entries have descriptions, e.g. sketches of Darwin, his wife, grandson, and dog, by Albert Goodwin, draft Expression queries.

Document type: correspondence, note, draft, abstract, figure, photo, printed, datasheet, legal, miscellaneous

Storage types:

Available full text

Available digital images

Ticking one or both of these will limit a search to only those items whose text, image or both are available on Darwin Online.

See advanced search help for more detail.

Two date fields are used in the database. One is for online display and the other is used by the software and seach engine of Darwin Online. Previously the more informative dates used in the American Philosophical Society's catalogue were used in the displayed date field. However this was confusing to some users who assumed that the data in the present catalogue had not been normalized. To avoid confusion the displayed date field now gives the same normalized date format as the machine-read date field.

Abbreviations used in the catalogue

AL: autograph letter
ALS: autograph letter signed
APS: American Philosophical Society
BL: The British Library
CAL: Calendar of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin. (1985, 1994, online database)
CC: Christ's College, Cambridge
CUL: Cambridge University Library
EDIN-MUR: John Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh
EH: English Heritage, Down House Collection
ELGIN: Elgin Museum, Elgin, Moray
KEELE: Keele University Library, Staffordshire; W/M= Wedgwood Mosley collection
KEW: Kew Gardens, London
L: letter
LINCOLN: Lincolnshire Archives, Lincoln
LINSOC: Linnean Society of London
MV: di Gregorio and Gill, Charles Darwin's Marginalia. (1990-) V= volume. 3 Vols: Vol 1 (Books) published 1990 Vol 2 (Periodicals) Vol 3 (Abstracts and 'other') [2 & 3 in progress].
NBK: Barrett et al eds., Charles Darwin's Notebooks 1836-1844. (1987).
NYBG: Charles Finney Cox Papers (PP), Archives, The New York Botanical Garden
pmk: postmark
SA: Statsbiblioteket, Aarhus, Denmark
UBC: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
UCL: University College London
UMZC: University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge
wmk: watermark
ZSL: Zoological Society of London

Identifier numbers, because they are used in computer file names and part of the permanent URL system, cannot contain spaces, colons and some other characters. When these occurred in the original catalogues they have been truncated or replaced with an underscore or full stop. Some identifier numbers were repeated in the original catalogues. As unique numbers for each entry are required by the software at Darwin Online bracketed decimal numbers (e.g. CUL-DAR262.22.2[.1]) have been added to make each number unique. These bracketed numbers do not appear on the original manuscripts.

In the future, provided sufficient funding can be secured, the catalogue will be enlarged with more detailed descriptions of each item.

Requests to reproduce manuscripts must be sent to the owner of the manuscript, not to Darwin Online. In most instances enquiries about this should be addressed to Adam Perkins, Curator of Scientific Manuscripts in the University Library (ajp21@cam.ac.uk or mss@lib.cam.ac.uk)

Acknowledgements

A portion of the unpublished electronic catalogue and Supplement of the Darwin Archive at Cambridge University Library (CUL) is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. The full catalogue may be consulted in the CUL Manuscripts Room, or downloaded here as a searchable PDF file. A marked up ascii text form of the complete catalogue was kindly provided, along with essential and helpful guidance, by its creator Nick Gill. Its content was last updated in June 2004 and is therefore not as definitive as that kept by the Library itself. However in the course of naming the scanned jpegs of the Darwin Archive according to the catalogue, numerous corrections, additions and clarifications or supplementary details have been added. The full CUL catalogue contains entries for items from the seventeenth century to the present day, circa 35% of which were owned or written by Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882). The subset provided in the Darwin Online manuscript catalogue excludes almost all items dated after 1883. Many non-Darwin items in the catalogue such as correspondence between family members during his lifetime have been retained. The other institutions named above also helpfully granted permission for a copy of their catalogues to be included. Adam Perkins kindly sent a copy of his Supplement to the Darwin catalogue at the Cambridge University Library.

John van Wyhe

16 April, 2008

¹ We have not received a copy of the catalogue of the manuscripts at Down House and therefore have adopted temporary catalogue entries and interim identifier numbers for the English Heritage manuscripts reproduced with permission on this site: the Beagle field notebooks and Beagle diary.

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Terms of Use. These materials may be freely used for non-commercial purposes and distribution to students; republication in any form requires written permission. Contact: Dr John van Wyhe.

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File last updated 28 August, 2008