Monday 19 October, 2026

Darwiniana This plaque greets visitors to Christ’s, the Cambridge college where Charles Darwin was an undergraduate. Last Friday I’d been invited to lunch there by a friend who is a Fellow of the college, and afterwards she asked if I’d like to see the sitting room in his set, which had been restored to the state it might have been in 1828-1831, when he was a student. So we walked up the stairs in G staircase and there it was, complete with his gun in a rack above the mantlepiece. The earliest photograph of the sitting-room was taken by J. Palmer Clark in 1909. It looks rather drab — which is what I was expected to see when I climbed the stairs on Friday. Instead I found a much glossier apartment than I had anticipated. Had it been tarted up for the tourists, I wondered? In 2006, the college had decided to embark on an impressively-researched scholarly restoration of the room drawing on research by John van Wyhe and Jo Poole into contemporary documents ranging from Darwin’s letters…