A couple of weeks ago, when I reserved us a slot for a visit to the Fitzwilliam Museum, I also booked us tickets for a guided tour of the correspondence of Charles Darwin ( a Cambridge grad, of course) at the Cambridge University Library. Today, was the day for our 10:00 am tour, and it gave us a chance to see a little bit of the library as well as some of the Clare College campus that we walked through to get to the library.
The exhibit is called Darwin Conversation and is being staged to celebrate the end of a 48 year effort to collect, date, identify, and publish correspondence both to and from Charles Darwin. There is a lot! There are 15,000 known letters exchanged by Darwin with nearly 2,000 correspondents between 1821 and 1882. The 30th volume of this correspondence is now in print. Any new material will just be digitized and placed on the Cambridge University Library website.
Just a note that while Cambridge University Library has the largest collection of Darwin’s manuscripts, the correspondence collection effort actually began in the States headed by Frederick Burkhardt who served as a Trustee of the New York Public Library.
The tour was interesting, and our guide, who serves/served on the Darwin Correspondence Project was very informative.
on our walk to the library
note the stacked book sculptures as barricades in front.
(just in time for the opening of the exhibit)
with a note to the librarian that just said, “Happy Easter, X.”
with which Darwin sent and received correspondence.
from Santiago to San Fernando, Chile.
Apparently, he was able to successfully follow it.
As today is also Remembrance Day, we thought that stumbling on the site below was fitting, and we heard the bugles being played somewhere when we walked out of the library at 11.
Bob and I then headed into the city center where Bob grabbed a sandwich for lunch, and I continued on to Hill Road for a massage.
Peckish Travels 