Charles Darwin
1809 · 1882
“He watched the world closely, and it opened for him.”
Kept by Here After All · open to visitors
Their story
Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England, in 1809. As a young man he sailed as naturalist aboard HMS Beagle, and for five years he collected, measured and wondered his way around the world.
What he saw on that voyage, and puzzled over for twenty years after, became On the Origin of Species. He wrote it plainly and carefully, knowing how much it would unsettle, and it changed how we understand our own place among living things.
He worked from a quiet house in Kent, tending his garden, his earthworms and his many children, patient to the very last. He died in 1882 and lies in Westminster Abbey.
A tribute, kept by Here After All.
Standing here now
You are standing at Charles's plot. Whoever arrives will see you here.
Words spoken here stay only with those standing here. Nothing is recorded.
Remembrances
Where the family and those who loved Charles gather, post, and return. Visitors may leave a tribute in the family's keeping.
HMS Beagle in the Straits of Magellan, from the illustrated edition of his voyage journal. Five years at sea made the naturalist.
The first sketch of an evolutionary tree, Notebook B, 1837, with the words I think set above it.
Finches of the Galapagos, drawn by John Gould. Their small differences pointed toward a very large idea.
The title page of On the Origin of Species, first edition, London, 1859.
The young Darwin, a watercolour by George Richmond around 1840, soon after the Beagle came home.
Darwin in old age, after John Collier's portrait of 1881.
HMS Beagle beached for repairs on the Santa Cruz River in Patagonia, after Conrad Martens.
A South American bird, drawn by John Gould for The Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle, 1841.
The study at Down House in Kent, where On the Origin of Species was written.
"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth..."