How to read (rather than read about) Charles Darwin

 

Christmas Day at Port Desire, 1833, by the expedition draughtsman, Conrad Martens

We are reading Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), which skilfully blends travelogue, notes on geology and zoology, as well as climate, ethnography, and even recent politics. Darwin writes in a wonderfully accessible way, but his book, although intended for a general audience, was published over 175 years ago, and so not surprisingly, many of the names, ideas, and thinking within it are now superseded: names of species, for example. Darwin’s epic journey was so wide-ranging that the details of the journey are fascinating in their own right, but the fact that Darwin was able to identify birds, plants, mammals, and insects, as well as making educated guesses about the formation of rocks, means that he combines a unique eye-witness account with an inspiring intellectual curiosity. He is not lecturing, but sharing with us what he has read (he appears to have done his homework before every field trip, so he has an idea of what he expects to see), but also what it means. For many of the rock formations or fauna and flora he has to guess, but his thought process is compelling. We can make it even more of a gripping experience by comparing what he thought with what is currently known

Unfortunately, this is where reading Darwin becomes challenging. Quite what did he see? Exactly where did he go? I am a general reader, but the Voyage is probably among the top 20 science books for general readers. (The Internet tells me Darwin’s Voyage is the 226th greatest nonfiction book of all time, which is some honour – one day I will look at the 225 above it). But I get no help from the edited editions I have been reading. Where is a good annotated edition? What do I mean by annotated?

• It should include a reasonably detailed map that shows where Darwin went. It is surprisingly difficult to recreate exactly where Darwin travelled from the text of the Voyage, because he frequently went back as well as forward.
• It should include a chronology. The original text simply states “June 1” or whatever, so I lose track of what year I is.
• It should explain differences in terminology – for example, all the names of individual islands in the Galapagos are now referred to by Spanish, not English names. So Darwin’s Albemarle Island is today Isabela Island, and so on. That’s fine, and Wikipedia provides both names, helpfully. But none of the editions of the text I have looked at provide the modern equivalents. 

The Arden edition of Shakespeare, Hamlet (1899). There is a clear division of text, textual variants, and editorial notes, which cover both problems of word meanings ("bruit") and encyclopedic background ("Wittenberg")

Here is an annotated edition of a literary text, one of the most famous annotated editions: the Arden edition of Shakespeare, one volume for each play. The interested reader can consult on the same page explanations of unusual words in the text; even if the modern-day editor cannot solve all the problems, he or she can at least indicate potential explanations. Amazingly, there seems to be no equivalent for Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle.

The actuality of the Beagle journey is that there are several sources, a mixture of journals and letters done during the voyage, as well as accounts written after the end. Captain FitzRoy wrote an account, for example, and Darwin kept more than one journal. Some editions make use of this material. I tried three editions.

Penguin Classics edition (1989)

The Penguin Classics edition, edited and abridged by Janet Brown and Michael Neve (1989) has two editors credited, yet the text appears to be without any annotations. Darwin writes, for example, about a kingfisher in the Cape Verde Islands, which he calls Dacelo jagoensis, but the genus Dacelo, according to Wikipedia, applies only to four species of the Australian/New Guinea bird the Kookaburra. Has nobody checked to see which bird Darwin was referring to? Darwin’s visit to the Cape Verde region includes visits to Praya (modern Praia) and to St Paul and St Jago. Where are they? Wikipedia is my friend, but it doesn’t answer every question I have. 

Better than the Penguin edition is The Voyage of the Beagle: The Illustrated Edition, published by Zenith Press, and copyright Quarto, 2015 (presumably a packaged title that was then published by a US publisher). This edition is based on the second edition of Darwin’s book, and is also abridged (but you only discover this on page 481). But here again, while an attempt has been made to include some illustrations (which vary wildly from standard picture agency shots to drawings by the official artist on the voyage) yet I have found no annotations of the text itself. This is tantalizing indeed, for it is clear from the illustrations that someone knowledgeable has identified the modern name for a species described by Darwin – yet they have not identified that the modern and old names are of the same thing. Two completely different names are used in close proximity, for example, the Galapagos land iguana is described as Conolopholus subcristatus in a photo, then, two lines further down, as Amblyrynchus Demarlii by Darwin. They are presumably describing the same thing.

Neither of these two editions includes a usable map or chronology. Nor does the third edition, The Beagle Record (Cambridge, 1979), although this tries to do something rather different. It contains selections from the various letters and journals by the participants, plus a wonderful collection of contemporary images. However, here again, no attempt is made to link old and new species names.   

Do editions of classic science texts not include annotation? I was astonished to read on the endpaper of The Beagle Record an ecstatic endorsement for an edition of Charles Darwin’s Natural Selection by R C Stauffer: 

I cannot praise highly enough the meticulous work of Stauffer … in rendering the text right down to the details of Darwin’s misspellings … Stauffer has even attained the ideal of scholarly selflessness by adding not a word of commentary on ideas or concepts … What can I say except that Natural Selection is a joy to read?

This comment is by none other than Stephen Jay Gould. A joy to read it may be, for scholars as familiar with the literature as Gould. While there are any number of books about Darwin, where are the texts of Darwin’s words, made accessible for the common reader? I would quite enjoy a word or two of commentary on ideas and concepts. Or am I alone?