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To Robert Monsey Rolfe   10 November [1858]1

Down Bromley Kent

Nov. 10th

My dear Lord Cranworth

I beg leave to acknowledge & thank you for the draft for 10100 for the Down charities.2

We are very much obliged for your kind invitation for Saturday; not to accept your & Lady Cranworths kindness is a real loss of pleasure to me, but I find by dear-bought experience that going out at present knocks me up for so many days, that I must forego the pleasure.— I can only hope that I shall not always be compelled to live the life of a hermit.

With our best thanks pray believe me | Your Lordships | Truly obliged | Charles Darwin

1
Dated by the mourning border on the stationery used by CD after the death of Charles Waring Darwin in June 1858.
2
This sum was entered in CD’s Account book (Down House MS) on 12 November 1858 and paid out to the Down Coal and Clothing Club on 17 November. The Down Coal and Clothing Club account book (Down House MS) lists regular donations from the ‘Lord Chancellor’, the office that Rolfe occupied from 1853 to 1858 and from 1865 to 1866.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-2357,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-2357