The year 1875 was a difficult one for Charles Darwin. The bitter and protracted dispute with his former protégé St George Mivart, prompted by the latter's slanderous attack on Darwin's son George in an anonymous review in July 1874, dragged on into the new year. In January Darwin and his closest supporters in the controversy, Thomas Huxley and Joseph Hooker, determined to ostracize Mivart from polite society, and even seemed ready to similarly ‘cut’ John Murray, Darwin's publisher of more than thirty years, who had allowed Mivart's malignant notice to appear in his Quarterly Review. This was only the most rancorous of many controversies that engulfed Darwin throughout 1875, ranging from the gendered ethics of vivisection to local parish politics, and in the painted portrait by Walter William Ouless that serves as a frontispiece to this volume of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin the familiar white-bearded paterfamilias looks considerably more pensive and weary than in previous images. Notably, Darwin sought to release his tensions during the so-called Mivart affair in the act of writing, telling Hooker, ‘I will write a savage letter & that will do me some good, if I do not send it!’ (p. 16). Certainly, 1875 was a year full of writing for Darwin: he completed a new book on Insectivorous Plants, published in July, as well as new, much revised, editions of On the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants and The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, published in November 1875 and February 1876 respectively.

These forms of writing and revision, though, were far from therapeutic to Darwin. He had long been diffident about his literary abilities, noting ruefully in a letter from 1861 that he had to ‘labour very hard & slowly at every sentence … style to me is a great difficulty’ (Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 9: 1861 (1994), pp. 363–364). By 1875 this had degenerated into a hyperbolic, almost hysterical, distaste for writing, with Darwin claiming, in January, that he was ‘slaving away solely at making detestably bad English a very little less bad’ (p. 30), and, the following month, responding to an enquiry about his progress on Insectivorous Plants, ‘You ask about my book & all I can say is that I am ready to commit suicide: I thought it was decently written, but find so much wants rewriting’ (p. 61). Such disenchantment with the banalities of writing was, of course, a familiar rhetorical posture amongst Victorian literary professionals, men of science as much as journalists and novelists. Indeed, the notoriously dyspeptic man of letters Thomas Carlyle visited Down House on three occasions over the summer of 1875, with Darwin regarding his characteristically contemptuous opinion on various literary matters as ‘that of a depressed, almost despondent, yet benevolent man’ (p. xxv). Darwin's own almost suicidal aversion to writing, expressed with a new urgency and incessancy in his letters from 1875, feels more authentically visceral, and certainly had very real practical and economic implications for his publishers. In July Robert Cooke, the business partner of the now un-‘cut’ Murray, chided Darwin over Insectivorous Plants, ‘You are to blame. You took such a desponding view of your new work that you made us over cautious & we printed but 1250 Copies, & lo & behold we have sold some 1700 Copies!!!’. Darwin, quickly responding, ‘I must own that I thought 1250 wd. have lasted for eternity’, could not quite discard his diffidence even in the face of such encouraging sales (p. 248).

As with the still festering controversy provoked by Mivart's attack on his son George, Darwin's activities in 1875 were very much a family affair. Despite his own poor health, George managed to get his equally ailing father embroiled in a new dispute over animal language with the Oxford philologist Max Müller, while the family's cousin Francis Galton began developing a new theory of hereditary transmission, although Darwin, as he told Galton in November, had difficulty in ‘fathoming your meaning’ and ‘cannot yet follow all your reasoning’ (pp. 433, 436). More helpfully, George's younger brother Francis assisted his father with the especially troublesome processes of writing and revision, having become Darwin's secretary and amanuensis two years earlier in 1873. After his father's hyperbolic protestations about slavery and suicide, Francis seems to have injected some much-needed levity into the rigours of literary composition, signing off one letter ‘Your affect son F.D./The Proofmaniac’, surrounded by a comical array of copy-editing symbols (p. 171).

A facsimile of the page containing Francis's droll sign-off is included alongside the transcription of the letter (on p. 172), and this latest volume of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin shares the same high production values, attention to detail and scholarly scrupulousness evident in all its predecessors. Amongst the six appendices, for example, are a list of all the periodical reviews of Insectivorous Plants and a hugely valuable account of Darwin's dealings with the question of vivisection, including the text of his testimony to the Royal Commission on the vexed issue. The monumental Correspondence project is now reaching the more difficult and wearied final years of Darwin's life, but it has lost none of its own vitality.