Ɛpsilon

From J. D. Hooker   18 June 1867

Kew

June 18/67.

Dear Darwin

I shall be in town on Thursday, & will try & hit your lunch time if your Brother will kindly allow me.1

I do hope you may be able to run down here too. I am turning into a Landscape Gardener, getting up cheerfully at 6 & before it, & sleeping like a Plough-boy in consequence, or rather in spite of it.—2 I have been reading Tate’s? Review in N. British,3 & wish I was not so confoundedly lazy & I would answer it. Also I have read “Mount Sorel” & Ben D’Izzy’s political life of Lord G. Bentinck4—& this is the sum of my acquisitions in Science polite Literature & Politics for the past 9 months— it is a blessed retrospect—for which I am sufficiently thankful:— bad science—bad novel,—bad political Economy— what more can a man want, that does not feed on bread alone.

Mrs Hooker will “beat you up” or “run you down” these terms being synonymous, if you will let her one day this week5

Ever yrs affec | J D Hooker

1
Hooker refers to Erasmus Alvey Darwin, at whose house in Queen Anne Street CD stayed when he was in London. Hooker and CD did not meet (see letter to J. D. Hooker, [23 June 1867]).
2
Hooker was director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. On his work there after his appointment in 1865, see R. Desmond 1995, pp. 225 ff.
3
Hooker probably refers to Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin’s anonymous discussion of CD’s transmutation theory in the North British Review ([Jenkin] 1867). Hooker was probably guessing that the anonymous author of the article was Peter Guthrie Tait, a physicist who had published articles in the North British Review (see Wellesley index). For CD’s opinion of the article, see the letter to Charles Kingsley, 10 June [1867].
4
Hooker refers to Anne Marsh-Caldwell’s Mount Sorel; or the heiress of the De Veres ([Marsh-Caldwell] 1845) and Benjamin Disraeli’s Lord George Bentinck: a political biography (Disraeli 1858).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-5570,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-5570