In June 2025 the London Auction House Bonham’s offered for sale a small collection of letters, which it transpired had once been the property of Dr Erasmus Darwin’s young friend William Strutt FRS. He was the son of the pioneering textile manufacturer, Jedidiah Strutt, and was a prolific inventor of practical devices. He was responsible for the creation of the first fire-proof Cotton Mill at Belper and the design of the ground-breaking Derbyshire General Infirmary.
This little monograph examines the significance of this small bundle of letters, which the late Dr Desmond King-Hele FRS had been unable to trace when compiling The Collected Letters of Erasmus Darwin for Cambridge University Press in 2007. The first of them show Erasmus Darwin soliciting advice from the wives of some of his most distinguished local friends and acquaintances in respect of his Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools, to assist his two illegitimate daughters (‘The Misses Parker’) in setting up a school in a former public house which he purchased for them in Ashbourne. Then there is a letter which has never previously been seen in its entirety, in which Darwin proposes to William Strutt a series of experiments they should carry out using the latter’s newly acquired ‘electric apparatus’. The largest part of the bundle, however, relates to Darwin’s obituary. In addition to draft notices, poems, laudatory obituaries, and proposed inscriptions, there was a controversy engendered by what was perceived as a lengthy, hostile and indeed defamatory ‘Biographical Notice’ in the Monthly Magazine. The bundle of letters shows the efforts of his son, Dr Robert Waring Darwin, to coordinate a decisive rebuttal of this article. The final letters in the cache show the continuing friendships between the Darwins and the Strutts, after the deaths of Erasmus and William Strutt’s wife Barbara.
This collection was acquired at auction by the Erasmus Darwin Foundation in Lichfield, and is now displayed in the refurbished Library of Erasmus Darwin House.
Published by Quandary Books 2025. ISBN 978-1-913253-31-8
Pages: iii, 45; with b/w and colour illustrations