Like piecing together a puzzle: Science historian John van Wyhe on ‘rebuilding’ Darwin’s library

A new catalogue features 7,400 titles, up from fewer than 1,500. van Wyhe, founder of Darwin Online, discusses the surprising finds, and how they were made.

John van Wyhe, 52, a science historian and senior lecturer at the National University of Singapore, has been studying Charles Darwin’s life, his choices and what drove him, his letters and the vast library he left behind, for three decades.

An etching of Darwin’s study at Down House in Downe, England, commissioned shortly after his death. (Darwin Online)

Since his undergraduate years, it has fascinated van Wyhe that evolution, “a process that takes thousands of years and can’t immediately be seen,” was unravelled by this one man, “who was able to question what he was seeing, and recognise

“Over the years, researchers have come upon obscure references in his writings, in notes by his wife, Emma Darwin, and titles that were once part of his library. So, we knew there were likely some missing titles,” says John van Wyhe, who set up Darwin Online in 2006.

It was daunting piecing together his personal library. The trick was to know where to look — in his papers and scribbled notes, in auction catalogues from the past 100 years, in letters written to him or by him, even his wife’s diaries.

But it was hugely exciting, the process. It felt like piecing together a detective story or a puzzle. Sometimes, we realised his own notes were wrong. For instance, he mentions a title in the catalogue that sounds like an article that turns out to be a chapter in a book. So, we were essentially working with an incomplete puzzle, and often misleading puzzle pieces.

Were there many surprises, on the eventual list?

I think the more mundane, ephemeral titles made for interesting surprises. For instance, he had a coffee table book from 1872, titled Sun Pictures, A Series of Twenty Heliotype Illustrations of Ancient and Modern Art.

There’s also an 1832 road atlas of England and Wales, titled Paterson’s Roads; an 1826 article by ornithologist John James Audubon, titled Account of the Habits of the Turkey Buzzard (Vultur aura); and a treatise on investments from 1852.

I think, in many ways, the list of these 7,400 titles, available online, allows anyone with even a passing interest in Darwin to scroll up and down and see just how diverse his resources were. In a way, this helps to fill out the picture of him as a whole human being, rather than just a distant scientist and theorist.

Is there something you believe Darwin’s work can bring to conversations today, amid a sixth extinction, the climate crisis, the dawn of AI, war, inequity and growing divisiveness?

A big part of all that we know and understand about the natural world, we owe to Darwin. So he’s going to remain a great source of inspiration for a long time. Every generation has a lot of great scientists but how many remain as relevant and deeply influential as him, nearly 200 years on?

He showed us how to look at the big picture: that living things change over time, they diversify. We keep forgetting that big picture; we keep assuming he was only focusing on the relationship of humans with apes or monkeys.

I would say that Darwin had a deep perspective of time that is hard for most people to imagine. Life has been going on for so long that compared to that time scale, the problems you’ve mentioned seem to shrink a bit. We need to be able to take a step back and assess where we’re headed in the long run.

I often go back to these words of his from The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871): “It has often and confidently been asserted, that man’s origin can never be known: but ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”