Editor returns to CU to continue massive task of editing Darwin letters

By Lissa Harris

In scope and ambition, it is reminiscent of the 50-year effort to produce the 10-volume first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Only this project covers letters, not words: the correspondence to and from Charles Darwin.

The Darwin Correspondence Project began in 1974 and still is less than halfway through the great scientist's letters. Volume 13, covering the year 1865 (six years after publication of The Origin of Species), went to press in December. The editors estimate that the complete set will contain 32 volumes and will not be completed until 2024.

Dean

For the past seven years of the Darwin Correspondence Project's existence, Cornell visiting scholar Sheila Ann Dean has been an editor, with the painstaking job of preparing the massive correspondence to and from Darwin for publication. The daughter of a Cornell law professor, Dean grew up in Ithaca and attended Cornell for a year as an undergraduate in the early '70s.

Dean joined the project as a researcher at the University of Cambridge after receiving her Ph.D. in the history of science at Johns Hopkins University. Last year, she left Cambridge's hallowed halls to join Cornell's Department of Science and Technology Studies. While here, she will continue her work on the Darwin letters with her seven co-editors, five in England and two in the United States.

The Darwin project is jointly managed by the American Council of Learned Societies and Cambridge University Library. In addition to Cambridge, the project has offices at Bennington, Vt., at the home of the project's founder and director, Frederick Burkhardt, and at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Cornell president emeritus Frank H.T. Rhodes sits on the project's advisory board.

The many international funders include the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. A fund-raising campaign marking the 2009 bicentennial of Darwin's birth is now in progress to ensure the project's completion.

Although Darwin wrote extensively about the natural history and biology of organisms across the world, following his famous voyage to the Galapagos Islands as a young naturalist on the Beagle, he scarcely left his home in the village of Down in Kent. Increasingly, as his health worsened, he relied on letters from his colleagues to provide the raw material for his intellectual curiosity. The result, said Dean, is that he left behind one of the most voluminous correspondences in the history of science -- nearly 15,000 letters to date, with more being discovered every year.

Dean has spent enough time poring over Darwin's letters to give her an easy familiarity with his life, both as a scientist and as a private person. (In fact, when speaking of Darwin, she occasionally lapses into the present tense.)

"You gain such an intimate glimpse of his mind," she said. "And since it's a notably acute mind, it's exciting to see how he's putting things together. By 1859 he has developed this overarching idea that he is so fascinated by. Darwin will write about these tiny little details regarding a pigeon or an orchid in a letter, but then you begin to see how he's always relating the details to his grand and comprehensive theory of transmutation."

Although she is greatly enjoying being back in her native Ithaca -- and within walking distance of Cornell's "wonderful" libraries -- Dean already misses having access to Cambridge University Library's extraordinary Darwin Archive, which holds many of the original letters as well as Darwin's field notes and personal library.

"The Darwin Archive is so rich," she said. "It's not just the letters -- it includes Darwin's notes that he wrote when he was observing organisms and when he was running experiments. He would give scrap paper, sometimes important sheets like old drafts of The Origin of Species, to his children, and they would draw pictures on the back of them. You're always finding new things in the archive, sometimes items that are more significant than the catalogers had realized."

One of Dean's favorite letters from the recently published Volume 13 is from Darwin's good friend, the zoologist Thomas Henry Huxley, that seems, shrewdly, to foresee the Correspondence Project itself. At the time, Darwin had been working on a concept of heredity that he called "pangenesis" and was struggling to decide whether to publish it. He wrote to Huxley for advice and apparently received a discouraging reply (Huxley's letter is lost). However, in his next letter, Huxley was quick to reassure Darwin. He wrote: "Somebody rummaging among your papers half a century hence will find Pangenesis & say 'See this wonderful anticipation of our modern Theories -- and that stupid ass, Huxley, prevented his publishing them.'"

Darwin published a book that included pangenesis in 1868. More than 130 years later, Dean and the other editors of the Correspondence Project are still rummaging.