The Unfinished Letter

Down Street, in the village of Downe in Kent, there was a house called Down House, and in a study lined with books, a man who had been ill for most of his adult life was sitting among twenty years of notes. Charles Darwin was forty-nine years old in the spring of eighteen fifty-eight. He had returned from his voyage on the Beagle more than two decades earlier, carrying specimens and observations that had led him, slowly and reluctantly, to a conclusion he could not fully bring himself to publish. He knew what he thought. He had written a two-hundred-thirty-page sketch of the theory in eighteen forty-two. He had expanded it to two hundred thirty pages again in eighteen forty-four and shared it with his friend Joseph Hooker with a note that compared telling someone about it to confessing a murder. He understood what the theory implied. He was not ready for what it would do. So he worked on barnacles. He gathered more evidence. He wrote letters.