Darwin wrote or received some 14,000 letters that are still in existence in libraries the world over, and there must have been as many again now lost to posterity.
Holy smokes. 14,000 is roughly equal to the total number of emails – spam or otherwise – that have populated my Gmail inbox since I started the account in 2006.
If you send a letter every single day, it would take 38+ years to reach 14,000.
My back of the envelope calculation tells me that in the 23 years between when he returned from the Beagle voyage to when he published On the Origin of Species, he was sending or receiving on average about 3-4 letters per day. Not only that but he was also writing a manuscript that would exceed 300,000 words (the final, trimmed-down version of On the Origin of Species was 200,470 words), equivalent to about five full blown novels.
Darwin was spending as much on his postage as he was on his butler: about $1,500 per year in today’s dollars.
Who the heck was he writing to? Browne says that by far the largest number of letters were exchanged with his five closest scientific friends. Otherwise, the largest group of his correspondents were German-speaking naturalists, more than 100 different individuals(!). And there’s more:
He hunted down anyone who could help him on specific issues, from civil servants, army officers, diplomats, fur-trappers, horse-breeders, society ladies, Welsh hill-farmers, zookeepers, pigeon-fanciers, gardeners, asylum owners, and kennel hands, through to his own elderly aunts or energetic nieces and nephews. Many of his letters went to residents of far-flung regions—India, Jamaica, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, China, Borneo, the Hawaiian Islands.
This is humiliating. I live in the age of instant and free messaging and I am put to shame by a reclusive scientist who died 130 years ago.
I feel better, though, knowing that his prolific letter-writing was a significant part of what made Darwin Darwin.
Systematically, he turned his house into the hub of an ever-expanding web of scientific correspondence. He relied on letters for every aspect of his evolutionary endeavor, using them not only to pursue his investigations across the globe but also to give his arguments the international spread and universal application that he and his colleagues regarded as essential footing for any new scientific concept. They were his primary research tool. Furthermore, after the Origin of the Species was published, he deliberately used his correspondence to propel his ideas into the public domain—the primary means by which he ensured his book was being read and reviewed.
This has made me curious to compare the correspondence statistics for folks like Darwin, Einstein, Newton, Freud, Pavlov, and LeBron James. I just might be geeky enough to do it.
It also makes me wonder, how would a modern day Darwin have used email? Would he have been shooting off emails like the 4th of July? Or would he have used it at all?
Of course email can be used however you like, but maybe it is too noisy of a medium to transmit Darwin-esque intellectual signal. I wonder if email suffers from the same curse as blogs in that the culturally-assumed informality constrains it to something less than “serious.”
The problem may not even be cultural. I read a lot of blogs – my number of Google Reader subscriptions currently stands at a ridiculous 1,042 – but despite the quality of the signal many of these blogs produce, I find that I am still more influenced by books, even the relatively crappy ones. There is something considerably different about the experience of sitting down in a quiet place, just you and the book, with no blog posts to turn to next, and no free Internet porn just a click away. For whatever irrational or rational reason, the printed page in a quiet room allows me to absorb the material much more fully than anything I read online, no matter how well it is presented.
But how well the material is absorbed is just one aspect of the intellectual progress equation, with other ones being things like speed, cost, and signal. And so maybe, despite its downsides, email may still have been Darwin’s medium of choice. I don’t know.
I just hope for the sake of romanticism it wouldn’t’ve been Facebook.
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See also:
1. The evolution of the book on evolution
2. Charles Darwin contemplates marriage
