JHB’s Darwin Collection

Since its founding in 1968, the Journal of the History of Biology has been a flagship outlet for Darwin studies. To date, JHB has published over 700 articles that either focus directly on Darwin or discuss how his work influenced biologists and biology.

Early in the journal’s history, this scholarship drew on the new availability of Darwin’s archive at Cambridge University. Since 1985, marked by the publication of volume 1 of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin,¹ studies of Darwin and Victorian science have been substantively enriched by the wealth of information included in letters to and from Darwin that were made available by the Darwin Correspondence Project (DCP). Founded in 1974 by Frederick H. Burkhardt, former president of the American Council of Learned Societies, the aim of the DCP was “locating and researching all known letters to and from Charles Darwin, [and] … publishing complete texts together with notes and appendices that make them comprehensible to the modern reader.”² After 37 years, and countless hours of meticulous work performed by several generations of editors, this year witnesses the conclusion of the DCP, marked by the publication of volume 30 of the Correspondence. As Sam Schweber noted in his JHB review of the first two volumes, the Correspondence is important “not only for depicting Darwin’s intellectual development within the context of his whole life, but also for understanding the cultural, economic, intellectual, and social context in which these developments took place.”³ It is an understatement to say that the history of biology and Victorian science more generally have been revolutionized by this mammoth scholarly enterprise.

JHB, with the support and encouragement of Springer/Nature, now marks this significant occasion by making available online a series of about one hundred selected classic as well as contemporary JHB articles on Darwin, published over a fifty-year span. Moreover, framing these digital materials are three new reflective historiographic essays that appear both online and in JHB volume 55 (2). Janet Browne expansively surveys recent trends in Darwin historiography; Paul White contrasts the aims of early Victorian “life and letters” projects with new approaches to using Darwin’s correspondence to construct scientific biographies; and Bernie Lightman offers creative suggestions about how Darwin’s correspondence is an invaluable resource for pedagogy, introducing students to using primary sources in historical analysis and interpretation. These well complement the articles in the Darwin Collection.

Our hope is that this collection of materials will better enable our readers—including historians of biology and biologists—to review for themselves past assessments as well as present directions in Darwin scholarship. Such an enterprise, like the DCP itself, could reveal important changes in ideas about Darwin and his work, but also suggest productive new directions in the disciplines of the history of biology and the history of science.