Ɛpsilon

To B. W. Richardson   [before 30 May 1879]1

I have been brought to the conviction from the very large experience of my father and grandfather, which has extended over a century, that no cause has led to so much suffering and inherited ill-health as the consumption of alcohol.2

Incomplete

1
The date is established by the fact that Richardson alluded to CD’s views on alcohol, in association with those of his father, Robert Waring Darwin (1766–1848), and his grandfather Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), in his inaugural address to the British Medical Temperance Association (B. W. Richardson 1879, p. 13), on 30 May 1879.
2
In his inaugural address to the British Medical Temperance Association, Richardson wrote that Erasmus Darwin was earnest in his support of the principles of temperance, and added, ‘the illustrious representative of the name of Darwin to this day maintains the principle in unbroken line’. CD quoted Richardson’s remark about Erasmus Darwin in Erasmus Darwin, p. 58, following his own discussion of Erasmus’s views on alcohol. In B. W. Richardson [1882], a later temperance work, Richardson said that CD wrote the letter to him from which this extract came ‘a few years ago’.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-9223F,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-9223F