Books on Charles Darwin's reading list

HUMBOLDT’s New Spain; Richardson's Fauna Borealis; Sciences Nat.in Geolog Soc.; F Cuvier on instinct; L Jenyns paper in Annals of Nat. History; Dr Royle on Himalaya type; Smellie Philosophy of Zoology; Lindley introduction to the Natural System

Starting in 1838 and continuing on and off until 1860, Charles Darwin jotted down in his notebooks the books he planned to read (he then sometimes went back and crossed out those he had finished). The list above is a verbatim selection of some of the early entries, among them James Cowles Prichard's 1813 five-volume, Researches into the Physical History of Man. Other major titles include Thomas Malthus on Population and Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. It was an eclectic mix which also featured Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Other books include various works by William Shakespeare (Hamlet, Othello, A Midsummer Night's Dream), Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, biographies of Wesley and Cicero, and Virgil's Georgics. As it was a personal list, not intended for publication, the notebooks also contain various comments: “Read Aristotle to see whether any of my views are ancient; Haller's Physiology — My Father thinks would contain facts for me; Pliny's Nat. Hist of world {Well skimmed}; Failed in reading Niebuhr's Rome; Swift. Stella's Journal amusing. Not all of these comments were entirely positive “Skimmed Pope & Dryden's Poems — need not try them again" and on Abraham Tucker's seven-volume, The Light of Nature, noted: "Skimmed a little of Tucker's light of nature. Intolerably prolix."

"When I see the list of books of all kinds which I read and abstracted, including whole series of Journals and Transactions, I am surprised at my industry," Darwin wrote in his autobiography.  On board HMS Beagle was a library of around 400 volumes, housed in Darwin's own cabin. Painstaking research has reconstructed much of it and turned it into a searchable online resource at darwin-online.org.uk. Among the titles are Milton's Paradise Lost, the Encyclopaedia Britannica (6th edition, 20 volumes), James Cook's account of exploring the Pacific Ocean and Sharon Turner's 1832 "The sacred history of the world, as displayed in the Creation and subsequent events to the Deluge, attempted to be philosophically considered in a series of letters to a son (2nd edition)". — The Independent