To Henry Fawcett   20 July 18611

2. Hesketh Crescent | Torquay

July 20th

My dear Sir

Nothing would have given me more pleasure than seeing you at Down, but as the above address shows, we are away from home.2 We shall remain here 5 or 6 weeks longer having come here on account of my daughter’s health & my own.—3

You could not possibly have told me anything which would have given me more satisfaction than what you say about Mr Mill’s opinion.—4 Until your Review appeared I began to think that perhaps I did not understand at all how to reason scientifically.—5

I thank you cordially for your very kind note. Perhaps at some future time you may be in our neighbourhood & we may have the pleasure of meeting.— I am forced to write in a great hurry as I must send some other letters by this Post—

My dear Sir | [Yours sincerely Charles Darwin]6

AL(S)

1
The year is established by the address; the Darwins stayed at Hesketh Terrace in Torquay in July and August 1861 (see Correspondence vol. 9). A fragment of this letter, from a published source, was published in Correspondence vol. 9.
2
Fawcett had written to CD to acknowledge CD’s letter thanking him for his review of Origin in Macmillan’s Magazine (see Correspondence vol. 9, letter from Henry Fawcett, 16 July [1861], this volume, Supplement, letter to Henry Fawcett, 6 December [1860], and Fawcett 1860).
3
Henrietta Emma Darwin was suffering from the after-effects of what was thought to have been typhus fever (see Correspondence vol. 8, letter to J. D. Hooker, 11 May [1860] and n. 5).
4
Fawcett had told CD about a conversation he had had with John Stuart Mill in which Mill endorsed the logic of CD’s reasoning in Origin (see Correspondence vol. 9, letter from Henry Fawcett, 16 July [1861] and n. 3, and this volume, Supplement, letter to Henry Fawcett, 6 December [1860] and n. 6).
5
Both Adam Sedgwick and Samuel Wilberforce in their reviews of Origin had criticised CD’s method of reasoning ([A. Sedgwick] 1860 and [Wilberforce] 1860). Fawcett’s review published in Macmillan’s Magazine (Fawcett 1860) countered these criticisms.
6
The signature has been excised, and ‘Yours sincerely Charles Darwin’ has been added in an unknown hand.

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

3.3 must] above del ‘have to’

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-3215A,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-3215A