Charles Darwin’s recreated bedroom reveals ‘more personal side’

The bedroom in which Charles Darwin died has been recreated after more than a century, English Heritage has said.

Working from family letters, a detailed inventory, descriptions from the time, paint analysis and research into mid-Victorian interior design, the charity has closely matched the original appearance of the room at Down House, Kent, in the late 1850s.

Visitors will now be able to see the room where Darwin, father of evolutionary biology, died in 1882, and for 20 years before that enjoyed reading and resting, recovered from illnesses and looked out on his garden experiments from the bay window.

Down House was home to Darwin and his family for 40 years. It was there that he worked on his most famous books, including On the Origin of Species, which put forward the theory of evolution, and conducted experiments in his garden or “outdoor laboratory”.

The bedroom was originally his wife Emma’s room, where she gave birth to and nursed their 10 children, but after the death of their tenth child from scarlet fever in 1858, Darwin moved in to share the newly redecorated room.

English Heritage said the recreation of the room, which was dismantled and dispersed more than 100 years ago, as it would have been when Darwin used it, gives new insights into the leading 19th century scientist.

Glimpses of his life include the non-scientific books he read – he kept a copy of Mark Twain’s The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by his bedside – his taste for Old Master prints, his illnesses and the role Emma played in supporting him.

English Heritage curator Sarah Moulden, said: “Darwin may have travelled the world but Down House is where he did his thinking and writing.

“On the Origin of Species would not have existed were it not for the rooms, the landscape and the gardens at Down.

“But Darwin’s bedroom and its recreation reveal a more personal side to the great scientist.

“We want people to flick through the novels that Emma read aloud to Charles, we want them to try on night clothes in the closet next door, and we want them to look out of the bay window onto the extensive garden ‘laboratory’, just as he once did.”

The bedroom will open to the public on Thursday.

READ MORE

High points galore along the Yorkshire Heritage Coast

Climate change threatening World Heritage sites including Orkney’s Stone Age treasures