Down House, Kent, June-November 1858
The letter arrived on the eighteenth of June, and Darwin's world collapsed into it.
He sat in his study, the pages from Alfred Russel Wallace trembling slightly in his hands, and felt twenty years of careful work dissolving like morning frost. Wallace had done it. From the fever-dreams of the Malay Archipelago, a young naturalist had constructed the same theory Darwin had been hoarding since before the man was born.
On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type.
Natural selection. The struggle for existence. The survival of favorable variations. Wallace had written it all—had written it better, perhaps, than Darwin's own endless drafts, with their qualifications and hesitations and fear.
"Your words have come true with a vengeance," he wrote to Lyell that same day. "If Wallace had my manuscript sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract."
He posted the letter and sat alone as the June light faded, asking himself the question he had been avoiding for two decades.
What did he owe the world?
The children were ill.
Henrietta had been fighting diphtheria since the beginning of the month, and now the baby—Charles Waring, barely eighteen months old—had developed the flush and fever of scarlet fever. Emma moved between sickrooms with steady competence, but Darwin saw the fear in her eyes.
He should be with them. Instead he paced h…
