Darwin Correspondence Project

The Darwin Correspondence Project is locating and researching all known letters to and from Charles Darwin, and is publishing complete texts together with notes and appendices that make them comprehensible to the modern reader. The first comprehensive descriptive guide to Darwin’s letters, A Calendar of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin: 1821-1882, was published in 1985. The first volume in the complete chronological edition of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin was published by Cambridge University Press in the same year.

In 2011, the project received $8.2 million in grants from the Evolution Education Trust, the Mellon Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the late Isaac Newton Trust. These awards assured publication of the entire 30-volume collection, with the final volume available by 2022.  In addition to these funders, prior support for the Project was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and other donors and funding agencies. ACLS currently manages US-held Project funds and assists staff in Cambridge in long-range planning and budgeting.

The project’s website offers a full-text search of over 7,000 of Darwin’s letters and information on an additional 8,000.

The Darwin Correspondence Project was founded in 1974 by the late Frederick H. Burkhardt, president emeritus of ACLS, who served as general editor of the project until his death in 2007.