A NOTE ON EDITIONS

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was published in November 1859 in London by the firm of John Murray. The publisher’s advertisements indicate that the most likely date of publication was Thursday, 24 November. This first edition is nowadays mostly seen only in rare book collections. Several modern reprints of the first edition text are available in different formats, including on the internet. The first edition has also been reproduced in the twentieth century as an exact photo-facsimile, the most well known being edited and introduced by the biologist Ernst Mayr and published by Harvard University Press in 1959. All quotes in the present volume, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from this facsimile.

The second edition was produced very soon after the first, on 7 January 1860. Darwin managed to make a few significant corrections. Three thousand copies were printed, making this the largest edition issued in Darwin’s lifetime. Six editions were published by the time of his death in 1882, each one with corrections and alterations. The third edition (1861) is interesting because Darwin added a short ‘Historical Sketch’ in which he described other evolutionary theories. In the fifth edition (1869) he first used the expression ‘survival of the fittest’. The sixth edition, issued in 1872, is usually regarded as the last that Darwin corrected. He intended it to be a popular edition. It was printed in smaller type and cost much less. It was extensively revised and included a whole new chapter in which he answered criticisms. Most modern copies of the Origin of Species are based on this edition.

At the same time, editions were published by Appleton in New York. These do not completely match the English ones in content because Darwin often supplied corrections and other material either in advance or after each London edition. Translations were issued in eleven different languages during Darwin’s lifetime and he tried to supervise each one, not always successfully. The first French and German translations did not satisfy him and he sought out new translators, hence later editions in those languages are closer to Darwin’s original intentions. The book has received detailed bibliographical attention from Richard Freeman in The Works of Charles Darwin: An Annotated Bibliographical Handlist (2nd edn, Folkestone, Dawson Archon Books, 1977). A sentence- by-sentence analysis covering the changes made to all editions in English in Darwin’s lifetime was published by Morse Peckham, The Origin of Species: A Variorum Text (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959).