“Letter writing as an instrument of Scientific discourse: the correspondence of Charles Darwin”

Like many scholars of his time, for Charles Darwin (1809-1882), written correspondence constituted both an important mode of discourse for general social interaction and a specific text genre through which scientific research was discussed and conducted (see Gotti 2003: 112). He made frequent use of letters, conducting much of his relations with the scientific community at a distance. From the seclusion of Down House (Downe, Kent), he could engage actively in the academic and public debate on evolution both through his supporters such as Thomas Huxley and Joseph Hooker in Britain and Asa Gray in the USA, and through direct correspondence with scholars and general readers on both sides of the evolution debate. Among Darwin’s correspondents were people from widely different social backgrounds - something no doubt facilitated by the 1840 reform of the Royal Mail and the introduction of the so-called Uniform Penny Post. Such interaction contributed directly not only to the diffusion of Darwin’s theories, but also, in many aspects, directly to their formulation, as seen in the numerous amendments in the five subsequent editions to the first edition of On the Origin of the Species (henceforth Origin) of 1859. Darwin’s correspondence then represents an example of the genre of letter writing that is to be found not at the periphery of a scientific enterprise but at its centre. In this paper, we analyse a corpus of the correspondence of Charles Darwin (taken from that published in edited form as Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (Vols I and II); More Letters of Charles Darwin (Vols I and II)) from the general perspective of text genre (Swales 1990) and of register analysis (Halliday et al, 1964), the latter being especially relevant given that, as Nevalainen and Tanskanen (2007) show, letter-writing is a form of social interaction which has, from its beings, always been highly context-sensitive. We look at Darwin’s Letters from the perspective firstly of linguistic complexity, then from the point of view of the interpersonal elements that they display. Finally we analyse the lexis and terminology employed to refer to aspects of Darwin’s theories of the origin of life and descent through modification. Comparison is made both between the various types of letters written by Darwin and between Darwin’s correspondence and a reference corpus of his other works.