From W. P. Garrison   4 October 1879

The Nation,1 5 Beekman Street (P.O. Box 25), | New York,

Oct. 4. 1879

Dear Sir:

By this mail I send you a little book compiled (originally for the benefit of my children) from your “Journal of a Voyage”, and which I hope you will regard less as an unauthorized appropriation of your labors, than as an humble tribute to your surpassing services to mankind.2 Though the publishers have been very liberal in carrying out my wishes in regard to the manufacture of the book, it still falls short of my ideal in the illustrations. I was particularly disappointed in not being able to give the portraits of your former colleagues, Captains King and Fitzroy, but I sought in vain to obtain them and others on both sides of the Atlantic.3

Craving, as I do, your indulgence for the liberty thus taken with your writings, I feel a delicacy in expressing the full extent of my admiration for your genius, and for your extraordinary success in redeeming the human mind from error. It may gratify you more to learn that during the last illness of my father, the late William Lloyd Garrison, I had the pleasure of calling his attention to your remarks on the subject of slavery, which I have carefully preserved in my abridgment, and which shed, for him, a new and welcome light on your character as a philanthropist. In combating the enemies of freedom in this country, he emancipated himself from that theology the destruction of which is perhaps your highest title to the honors of your own time and the blessings of posterity.4

Believe me, with sentiments of profound esteem and gratitude, | Yours faithfully, | Wendell P. Garrison

Dr. Charles Darwin.

1
Garrison was literary editor for the Nation, a US periodical.
2
Garrison’s edited abridgement and rearrangement of Journal of researches was published under the title What Mr. Darwin saw in his voyage round the world in the ship ‘Beagle’ (C. R. Darwin 1880). It included two prefaces (one for parents and one for children) and 100 illustrations, and was divided into four sections: animals, humans, geography, and nature. Garrison also enclosed memorials of his father, William Lloyd Garrison (see letter to W. P. Garrison, 16 October 1879).
3
Philip Gidley King was a midshipman and Robert FitzRoy was commander of HMS Beagle during CD’s five-year voyage.
4
For CD’s strictures on slavery, based on his experiences in Brazil, see Journal of researches 2d ed., pp. 20–1, 24–5, and 499–500, and C. R. Darwin 1880, pp. 113–16; see also A. Desmond and Moore 2009. W. L. Garrison was a prominent US abolitionist and religious reformer; he died in May 1879 (ANB).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-12248,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-12248