Tag: Charles Darwin

Origin of Species

Origin of Species

In February, Valentine’s Day, we’re celebrating the 120th anniversary of Horbury’s Carnegie Free Library. This 1902 reprint of The Origin of Species might have been part of the original stock, although as it has been trimmed and rebound there are no original labels or stamps to confirm that.

Darwin

With its photogravure sepia-toned portrait of Darwin as the frontispiece, it’s identical to the book that I borrowed from Horbury Library when I was a student at Batley School of Art in 1968.

Tree of Life diagram from ‘Origin of Species’

At that time I was trying to read through some of the ‘great books’ – Greek myths (in a two volume compilation by Robert Graves), the Bible, Plato’s Republic, etc – and I took it as my holiday reading when I visited, for the first time, my French penfriend, Philippe, in le Havre.

Reading on a train.

It wasn’t the best choice for what turned out to be a 40-hour stint without sleep on my return journey by ferry to Southampton and train:

I attempted to Read Origin of the Species but heard voices and saw faces in the corridor out of the corners of my eye and the spaces between the type on the page formed figures suggested by the narrative”

Ruskin on Drawing Trees

Ruskin

A special guest artist in the Bilberry Wood comic today: instead of drawing my version of Ruskin’s illustration from Elements of Drawing, I dropped in a scan of his original.

Darwin

But I redrew Charles Darwin’s sketch of his Tree of Life. This is the inking stage, colour to follow.

Mr Darwin Welcome

Tour of Walton Park rough‘Mr Darwin Welcome. Delighted you have come to Yorkshire’ is the opening caption, spoken by Charles Waterton from the top branches of an elm tree to Darwin, then in his mid-thirties, midway between the voyage of The Beagle and the publication of The Origin of Species.

It’s a complex double-page spread but you’ve got to start somewhere so this very rough rough suggests how we can slot in the main aspects of a tour of Waterton’s sanctuary for wildlife at Walton Park. You could really extend this one tour into a twelve page comic story in its own right but that’s all the space we have for the last forty years of Waterton’s life.

I would so like to have heard a discussion between Darwin and Waterton about the Nondescript, Waterton’s enigmatic ape-man creation. Did it give Darwin the idea for his Descent of Man?!

And here’s another Darwin/Waterton which regrettably we’re unable to follow up in this brief comic strip biography. Here’s Darwin recalling his medical student days in Edinburgh;

‘I heard Audubon deliver some interesting discourses on the habits of North American birds, sneering somewhat unjustly at Waterton. By the way, a negro lived in Edinburgh, who had travelled with Waterton and gained his livelihood by stuffing birds, which he did excellently; he gave me lessons for payments, and I used often to go sit with him for he was a very pleasant and intelligent man.’

Charles Darwin, Autobiography

Charles Darwin, drawn for a student project in 1975 on the graphic design course at Leeds College of Art.
Charles Darwin, drawn for a student project in 1975 on the graphic design course at Leeds College of Art.

young darwinAlso in Darwin’s autobiography there’s a passage which echoes Charles Waterton’s childhood. Darwin recalls; ‘To my deep mortification my father once said to me “You care for nothing but, shooting, dogs and rat catching and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”‘

He and Waterton had so much in common!