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 spring of 2011, the project received $8.2 million in grants from the Evolution Education Trust, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the late Isaac Newton Trust. These awards will enable publication of the entire collection, ultimately comprising 32 volumes, by 2022.
The project’s website, at www.darwinproject.ac.uk, 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 Frederick H. Burkhardt, president emeritus of ACLS, who served as general editor of the project until his death in 2007. ACLS is pleased to accept contributions in memory of Dr. Burkhardt to support The Correspondence of Charles Darwin; see Ways of Giving.