Darwin's correspondence provides all of us with an invaluable source of information, not only about his own intellectual development and social network, but about Victorian science and society in general.
The site has over 5000 complete transcriptions of the letters and summaries of over 14,500 in total, written from the age of 12 until his death in 1882. Over 10 years a dedicated team collected, catalogues and transcribed this amazing collection and when the website was launched in 2007 it had over 17 million visitors in its first week.
Since its inception the project, and it's founders, has been honoured to receive a 2002 Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education, 2003 Thomas Jefferson Medal for Distinguished Achievement in the Arts, Humanities, or Social Sciences, 1997 Founders' Medal of the Society for the History of Natural History and many more.
This collection provides us all with a unique viewpoint to see how mankind has evolved in the last 200 years.
I first reported on this web site in May 2007 in Issue 18 of the pre-cursor to this blog the weekly pdf magazine "Joomla Weekly News"