Abstract
Almost any modern reader’s first encounter with Darwin’s writing is likely to be the “Historical Sketch,” inserted by Darwin as a preface to an early edition of the Origin of Species, and having since then appeared as the preface to every edition after the second English edition. The Sketch was intended by him to serve as a short “history of opinion” on the species question before he presented his own theory in the Origin proper. But the provenance of the “Historical Sketch” is somewhat obscure. Some things are known about its production, such as when it first appeared and what changes were made to it between its first appearance in 1860 and its final form, for the fourth English edition, in 1866. But how it evolved in Darwin’s mind, why he wrote it at all, and what he thought he was accomplishing by prefacing it to the Origin remain questions that have not been carefully addressed in the scholarly literature on Darwin. I attempt to show that Darwin’s various statements about the “Historical Sketch,” made primarily to several of his correspondents between 1856 and 1860, are somewhat in conflict with one another, thus making problematic a satisfactory interpretation of how, when, and why the Sketch came to be. I also suggest some probable resolutions to the several difficulties.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Barrett, Paul. et al. (eds.). 1987. Charles Darwin’s Notebooks 1836–1844. British Museum and Cornell University Press, NY
Beatty, John. 1985. “Speaking of Species: Darwin’s Strategy,” in Kohn ed., 1985, pp.␣265–282
Browne Janet 1995. Charles Darwin: Voyaging. Princeton: Princeton University Press
Browne Janet 2002. Charles Darwin: Power of Place. New York: Knopf
Burkhardt, F.H. et al. (eds.). 1985–present. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Darwin, Charles. 1872 [1997]. Origin of the Species, 6th edition. Lightbinders, Inc. CD-ROM edition (2nd) of Darwin’s works, compiled and edited by M.T. Ghiselin
Darwin, Francis. (ed.). (1959) Life and Letters of Charles Darwin. New York: Basic Books
Desmond Adrian, Moore James. 1991. Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist, New York: Norton
Freeman R.B. 1977. The Works of Charles Darwin: An Annotated Bibliographical Handlist 2 Folkstone, Kent: Dawson and Archon Books
Ghiselin M.T. 1969. The Triumph of the Darwinian Method, Berkeley: University of California Press
Gould, S.J. 2002. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Greene, Marjorie and Depew, David. 2002. The Philosophy of Biology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 190
Hodge M.J.S. 1977. “The Structure and Strategy of Darwin’s “long argument” British Journal for the History of Science 10, 237–245
Hull David. 1973. Darwin and His Critics, Harvard: Harvard University Press
Kohn, David. (ed). 1985. The Darwinian Heritage. Princeton: Princeton University Press
Lyell, Charles. 1830–32 [1990]. Principles of Geology, 3 vols, with a new introduction by Martin J.S. Rudwick. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press
Lyell, Charles. 1830–32 [1997]. Principles of Geology. Edited with an introduction by James Secord. London: Penguin
Mayr, E. 1991. One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and The Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Ospovat Dov. 1981. The Development of Darwin’s Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Peckham, Morse. (ed). 1959. The Origin of Species By Charles Darwin: A Variorum Text. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press
Porter Roy. 1976. Charles Lyell and the Principles of the History of Geology. British Journal for the History of Science, 9, 91–103
Porter Roy. 1982. Charles Lyell: The Public and Private Faces of Science. Janus 69:29–50
Secord, James. 1985. “Darwin and the Breeders: A Social History,” in Kohn, ed., 1985, pp. 519–542
Stauffer, R.C. (ed.). 1975. Charles Darwin’s Natural Selection. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Wallace A.R. 1905. My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions. 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
How Darwin came to settle on the title “Historical Sketch” for the Preface to the Origin is not certain, but a guess may be ventured. When he first submitted the text to Asa Gray in February 1860 he called it simply “Preface Contributed by the Author to this American Edition” (Burkhardt et al., eds., vol. 8, 1993, p. 572; the collected correspondence is hereafter cited as CCD). In fact he had thought of it as being properly called a Preface much earlier, perhaps as early as 1856, as will be seen in what follows. It came to be called “An Historical Sketch of the Recent Progress of Opinion on the Origin of Species” only in the third English edition, April 1861. This is the title it retained thereafter, with the exception of an addition to the title in the sixth English edition, “Previously to the Publication of the First Edition of this Work” (Peckham, 1959, pp. 20, 59). The word “sketch,” on the other hand was one of two words Darwin commonly used in private correspondence to refer to the book that would later become the Origin, the other word being “Abstract,” and both signifying that Darwin thought of the work as being a resume rather than a full-fledged study (e.g., letter to J.D. Hooker, May 9 1856, CCD vol. 6 p. 106; letter to Baden Powell January 18 1860, CCD vol. 8 p. 41; letter to Lyell 25 June 1858, CCD v. 7, 1991, pp. 117–8; letter to Lyell May 1856, CCD, v. 6 p. 100). The most likely source of the title “Historical Sketch” for Darwin’s Preface is Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology in which, beginning with the third edition (1834), Lyell added titles to his chapters, calling chapters 2–4 “Historical Sketch of the Progress of Geology” (Secord, in Lyell [1997], p. xlvii; for other uses by Lyell of this expression, cf. Porter, 1976, p. 95; idem 1982, p. 38; and Lyell, 1830 [1990], p. 30). Further parallels between Lyell’s Introduction and Darwin’s “Historical Sketch” in terms of content and strategy are suggested below.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Johnson, C.N. The Preface to Darwin’s Origin of Species: The Curious History of the “Historical Sketch” *. J Hist Biol 40, 529–556 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-006-9118-0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-006-9118-0