From John Lubbock   14 October 1863

15, Lombard Street. E.C.

14 Oct 1863

My dear Mr. Darwin

I have undertaken to write a little notice for the N.H.R. of Huxley’s Lectures to working Men on O. of S.1

If I remember right the Record was particularly ridiculous about you2   Can you give me a reference to the article or by chance lend me the thing itself. Any hints or references to any particularly good or bad point in any review of you would be thankfully accepted.

I hope that you are better, but heard a poor account of you yesterday from Hooker.3 You have of course heard of the loss which he, poor fellow, has had;4 we are going together to St. Acheul on Saturday,5 but I expect to be back on Monday.

I am longing for a good talk with you, & am dear Mr Darwin with kind regards to Mrs Darwin & all your family,

Yours affec | John Lubbock

C Darwin Esq

I send this to Down, having forgotten your present address6

1
The notice of Thomas Henry Huxley’s six lectures to working men (T. H. Huxley 1863a) appeared in the January 1864 number of the Natural History Review ([Lubbock] 1864).
2
Lubbock refers to the anonymous review of Origin in the tri-weekly, evangelical Record on 12 December 1860, p. 4. The readership of the Record is described in the Newspaper press directory 1863. There is an annotated copy of the review in the ‘Scrapbook of reviews’ (DAR 226.1: 139).
4
Hooker’s six-year-old daughter, Maria Elizabeth, had died on 28 September 1863 (see letters from J. D. Hooker, [28 September 1863] and 1 October 1863).
5
A site near Amiens, France, where prehistoric flint implements were found. See also letter from J. D. Hooker, 23 October 1863 and n. 4.
6
According to Emma Darwin’s diary (DAR 242), CD had returned to Down from James Smith Ayerst’s hydropathic establishment in Malvern Wells, Worcestershire, via London, on 14 October 1863.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-4320,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-4320