Revision of Permission to publish Darwin letters has been granted from Wed, 2013-01-02 13:55

Firstly, Happy New Year and Happy Wallace100 from all three of us at the Wallace Correspondence Project! This year is going to be extremely busy for us thanks to the Wallace anniversary and because it is the final year of Phase 1 of the WCP. Our three year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation runs out in November this year, so we are seeking funds for Phase 2 of the project. We estimate that by the end of the year the project will have completed only about 25% of the work which needs to be done on Wallace's correspondence - so the bulk of it still lies ahead!

Some project news:-

January 2013 sees the official launch (on the 24th) of Wallace100 and our digital archive of Wallace's correspondence - Wallace Letters Online - and the NHM's IT team is currently working hard to iron-out the remaining problems with the website and online database.

The project received some great news just before Christmas, which was that Mr William Huxley Darwin has kindly given the project permision to publish images and transcripts of letters by Charles Darwin and other members of the Darwin family. This means that Wallace Letters Online will include the complete surviving Darwin-Wallace correspondence in full for the first time. Previous published compilations of the Darwin-Wallace letters (i.e. Darwin (1893), Marchant (1916)) were incomplete and the published transcripts were often edited and some suffered from important omissions of text.

References

Darwin, F. (Ed.). 1893. Charles Darwin; His Life Told in an Autobiographical Chapter and in a Selected Series of His Published Letters. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 365 pp.

Marchant, J. (Ed.). 1916. Alfred Russel Wallace; Letters and Reminiscences. London & New York: Cassell and Co. 2 vols., 507 pp.