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To Leonard Jenyns   24 January [1862]1

Down Bromley Kent

Jan. 24th

My dear Jenyns

I have to thank you for two kind notes.2 I received the proof-sheets this morning—altered only a few words & forwarded by todays post to the Printers. I am heartily glad that you have undertaken this memoir of poor dear Henslow, & that your labours are over & that it will soon appear.—3 I shall read it with deep interest. His death has indeed been a cruel loss to many.—

I hope you keep well & tolerably happy. We lately have had a wretched household of invalids.—4 I often look back to the happy & unanxious days of Cambridge.—5

My dear Jenyns | Yours very sincerely | Ch. Darwin

Do you ever see F. Hope at Bath;6 if you do please give him my very kind remembrances.—

1
The year is established by the reference to Jenyns’s memoir of John Stevens Henslow (Jenyns 1862; see n. 3, below).
2
Letters from Leonard Jenyns, 31 December 1861 (Correspondence vol. 9) and 22 January [1862].
3
Jenyns’s memoir of his brother-in-law, John Stevens Henslow, (Jenyns 1862) was published in May 1862 (Publishers’ Circular 25: 223). CD’s contribution to this memoir is reprinted in Correspondence vol. 9, Appendix X (see also Collected papers 2: 72–4).
4
Many members of CD’s household had been ill with influenza (Emma Darwin’s diary (DAR 242)).
5
CD was an undergraduate at Cambridge when he first met Jenyns, at that time vicar of Swaffham Bulbeck, Cambridgeshire. They had a shared interest in entomology, occasionally going on entomological excursions together (see Correspondence vol. 1).
6
Frederick William Hope, the son of one of the Darwins’ Shropshire neighbours, had assisted CD with his early entomological collecting (see Correspondence vol. 1). He lived in London, but travelled for the sake of his health (Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London 6 (1862): xci). Jenyns settled in Bath in 1860.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-3410,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-3410