Darwin’s annotated copy of ‘On the Origin of Species’ goes to auction

After eluding scholars for decades, a copy of ‘On the Origin of Species’ with handwritten revisions by Charles Darwin has come to light and is due to be auctioned next month.

Christie’s put an estimate of £300,000 to £500,000 on the annotated book, which it said will allow for the ¿rst time a precise reading of Darwin’s exact revisions without the veil of reconstruction and translation … [it] provides an insight into his working method, and documents the further development of his ideas for his ‘big book’.

Darwin’s changes were made on a complete set of loose sheets from the third edition of his masterpiece, which he sent to his German translator for inclusion in the second German edition of ‘On the Origin of Species’ by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. The alterations were then incorporated into the fourth English edition and all subsequent versions of the book, meaning they remain the de¿nitive text of the seminal scienti¿c work, theguardian.com reported.

According to the auction house, the annotated sheets are thought to have been in the possession of the translator, H.G. Bronn, when he died in 1862. They were subsequently bound, and entered the possession of Darwin’s correspondent, the German paleontologist Melchior Neumayr. The volume has been in the hands of Neumayr’s descendants until now.

Scholars have known from Darwin’s correspondence that the annotations existed. In March 1862, he wrote, “I should like to make a few more corrections on clean sheets of the last English Edition,” adding in the next month: “I have compared the sheets of the third English edition with the second which was translated into German, and have marked with a pencil line all the additions and corrections … Where merely a few words have been altered I have underlined them with pencil: where a sentence has to be omitted I have marked ‘dele’.”

But Christie’s, which is including a letter from Darwin to Neumayr in the lot, said that “their whereabouts and even survival has remained a mystery”.

Christie’s specialist Meg Ford said the revisions made to the text “reàect[ed] Darwin’s ongoing re¿nement of his scienti¿c research and thinking”. One, in chapter 13, on classi¿cation, “encapsulates a discovery Darwin made while working on his book on Orchids in 1861-62, that is, exactly at the time Darwin was marking up these printed sheets to send to Bronn”.