The Darwin Correspondence Project was an independently funded research team, jointly managed by Cambridge University Library and the American Council of Learned Societies, and affiliated eith the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in Cambridge.


Its purpose was to locate and research letters written by and to Charles Darwin (1809–1882), and publish complete transcripts together with contextual notes and articles.


It produced the Calendar of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin (1985; second edition 1994), the 30-volume print edition of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (Cambridge University Press, 1985–2023), a number of subsidiary publications and a freely accessible website (https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk) hosting a complete database of letter transcriptions and associated materials.


It was founded in 1974 by an American scholar, Frederick Burkhardt, with the help of Sydney Smith, a zoologist in the University of Cambridge, and of Fred's wife, Anne Schlabach Burkhardt. They set out to locate all letters written by Charles Darwin, and originally aimed to publish only summaries. Following a pilot project it was decided to include letters written to Darwin as well as those written by him – an unusual step for a collection of correspondence at the time – and to publish complete transcripts in chronological order.


Since 1975, the Project had a staff of researchers and editors in both the UK and the US, those in the UK being based in Cambridge University Library, where the largest single collection of Darwin’s manuscripts is housed together with his own library of books and journals.


The first ten years of the Project were spent carrying out a systematic search for additional letters, obtaining copies, and transcribing all known letters into an electronic format. (New letters have continued to emerge throughout the life of the Project.) This resulted in the creation of the extensive electronic archive that formed the basis for the editorial work that resulted in both the printed volumes of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, and, in due course, the resources on the website.