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THIS is the largest union catalogue of Darwin's handwritten manuscripts and papers ever published. It currently contains c. 33,000 records. It aims to record, eventually, all Darwin manuscripts in the world. If your institution keeps Darwin manuscripts not included here, please contact us. The catalogue is frequently updated.
Click here to see a sample entry from the catalogue.
The catalogue entries may be searched or sorted according to the following fields:
All Fields: searches all the textual (i.e. non tick box) fields in the database.
Identifier: the call number from each institution's catalogue, e.g. CUL-DAR80.B7 [At the moment this must be at least two digits long after the DAR number.] Entering less than the full number, e.g. CUL-DAR29, will bring up a list of all specific sub numbers of DAR29. See here.
Name(s): e.g. Darwin Charles Robert, or multiple names e.g. Darwin, Owen
After date: entering a date here restricts the set of returned results to those which are dated after the supplied date. The supplied date may be incomplete, in that it consists only of a year, or a year with month only, or a precise date in the form YYYY-MM-DD
Before date:
Title: searches the title or attributed title fields, e.g. 'Silliman's Jnl' 20: 177'
Description: a limited number of entries have descriptions, e.g. sketches of Darwin, his wife, grandson, and dog, by Albert Goodwin, draft Expression queries, etc.
Document type: correspondence, note, draft, abstract, figure, photo, printed, datasheet, legal, miscellaneous (clicking one of these links will display all records of that document type)
Storage types:Ticking one or both of these will limit a search to only those items whose text, image or both are available on Darwin Online.
See advanced search help for more detail.
Two date fields are used in the database. One is for online display and the other is used by the software and seach engine of Darwin Online. Previously the more informative dates used in the American Philosophical Society's catalogue were used in the displayed date field. However this was confusing to some users who assumed that the data in the present catalogue had not been normalized. To avoid confusion the displayed date field now gives the same normalized date format as the machine-read date field.
AL: autograph letter
ALS: autograph letter signed
APS: American Philosophical Society.
BL: The British Library, London.
CAL: Calendar of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin. (1985, 1994, online database)
CC: Christ's College, Cambridge (see also STAN below).
CUL: Cambridge University Library.
EDIN-MUR: John Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.
EH: English Heritage, Down House Collection.
ELGIN: Elgin Museum, Elgin, Moray.
JIC: John Innes Centre, Norwich.
KEW: Kew Gardens, London.
L: letter
LINCOLN: Lincolnshire Archives, Lincoln.
LINSOC: Linnean Society of London.
MV: di Gregorio and Gill, Charles Darwin's Marginalia. (1990-) V= volume. 3 Vols: Vol 1 (Books) published 1990 Vol 2 (Periodicals) Vol 3 (Abstracts and 'other') [2 & 3 in progress].
NBK: Barrett et al eds., Charles Darwin's Notebooks 1836-1844. (1987).
NHM: The Natural History Museum, London.
NCM: Norwich Castle Museum, Norwich.
NRO: Nottinghamshire Record Office.
NYBG: Charles Finney Cox Papers (PP), Archives, The New York Botanical Garden.
pmk: postmark
RGS: Royal Geographical Society, London.
RI: Royal Institution of Great Britain, London.
SA: Statsbiblioteket, Aarhus, Denmark.
STAN: David Stanbury collection, Old Library, Christ's College, Cambridge.
UBC: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
UCL: University College London.
UMZC: University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge.
UVa: University of Virginia Library, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, Charlottesville, Virginia.
WM: Wedgwood Museum, Barleston, Stoke-on-Trent (previously on loan to Keele).
wmk: watermark
ZSL: Zoological Society of London.
Identifier numbers, because they are used in computer file names and part of the permanent URL system, cannot contain spaces, colons and some other characters. When these occurred in the original catalogues they have been truncated or replaced with an underscore or full stop. Some identifier numbers were repeated in the original catalogues. As unique numbers for each entry are required by the software at Darwin Online bracketed decimal numbers (e.g. CUL-DAR262.22.2[.1]) have been added to make each number unique. These bracketed numbers do not appear on the original manuscripts.
In the future, provided sufficient funding can be secured, the catalogue will be enlarged with more detailed descriptions of each item.
Requests to reproduce manuscripts must be sent to the owner of the manuscript, not to Darwin Online. In most instances enquiries about this should be addressed to Adam Perkins, Curator of Scientific Manuscripts in the University Library (ajp21@cam.ac.uk or mss@lib.cam.ac.uk)
Acknowledgements
A portion of the unpublished electronic catalogue and Supplement of the Darwin Archive at Cambridge University Library (CUL) is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. The full catalogue may be consulted in the CUL Manuscripts Room, or downloaded here as a searchable PDF file. A marked up ascii text form of the complete catalogue was kindly provided, along with essential and helpful guidance, by its creator Nick Gill. Its content was last updated in June 2004 and is therefore not as definitive as that kept by the Library itself. However in the course of naming the scanned jpegs of the Darwin Archive according to the catalogue, numerous corrections, additions and clarifications or supplementary details have been added. The full CUL catalogue contains entries for items from the seventeenth century to the present day, circa 35% of which were owned or written by Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882). The subset provided in the Darwin Online manuscript catalogue excludes almost all items dated after 1883. Many non-Darwin items in the catalogue such as correspondence between family members during his lifetime have been retained. The other institutions named above also helpfully granted permission for a copy of their catalogues to be included. Adam Perkins kindly sent a copy of his Supplement to the Darwin catalogue at the Cambridge University Library. Many thanks are due to Mary Tilmouth, Candace Guite and Colin Higgins of Christ's College Library for their assistance with the David Stanbury collection catalogue.
Due to the helpfulness and cooperation of the following institutions the catalogue includes fully normalized records for some or all of the manuscripts from: the Darwin Archive at Cambridge University Library, UK, the American Philosophical Society, Cambridge University Zoology Museum, Cambridge University Sedgwick Museum, the British Library, Christ's College, Cambridge (including the Stanbury collection), University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, Kew Gardens, London, the Linnean Society of London, John Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, Lincolnshire Archives, Lincoln, Zoological Society of London, Elgin Museum, Elgin, Moray, Keele University Library, Staffordshire, the New York Botanical Garden, the State Library, Aarhus, Denmark, University of Virginia Library and University College London, and the Natural History Museum, London. The catalogue contains a number of interim entries for the manuscript collection of English Heritage (Darwin Collection at Down House) and c. 500 entries derived from the cross-references in the CUL catalogue here.1
John van Wyhe
16 April, 2008
1 The current omission of the Down House papers is not an oversight. A copy of the catalogue of manuscripts at Down House was first requested in 2004. A copy of the catalogue has not been received and therefore we have adopted temporary catalogue entries and interim identifier numbers for the English Heritage manuscripts reproduced with permission on this site: the Beagle field notebooks and Beagle diary.
© 2002-9 The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online Contact the Director: Dr John van Wyhe.
File last updated 15 June, 2009