The Editions of the Origin of Species

One of the problems when trying to read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is the evolution of the text through six editions. This is the result of Darwin’s interaction with his critics, his own reworking of this theory and its wording, his corrections, etc. The sixth and final edition will end up being about 150 pages longer than the first, with fifteen chapters instead of fourteen. All in all, about seventy-five percent of the text was reworked through the six editions.

According to many specialists, Darwin’s changes and interaction with this critics, positive and negative, led to a text that lost the clarity of the original. Furthermore, in the fifth edition, Darwin modified his theory to give less importance to natural selection. If this constant rework was considered a plus for long, this is not the case today. Which edition to read then? If in the past many preferred to read the sixth edition, Darwin’s final formulation, preference often goes today to the first edition (or the second since it is basically a corrected first edition).

But one wonders whether reading On the Origin in its first edition is to give justice to Darwin and his final formulation of his theory. After all Darwin himself says that he was convinced that he gave to much credit to natural selection and the survival of the fittest in the first editions of his work. His also grants, rightly or wrongly so, that he did not “consider sufficiently the existence of structures, which, as far as we can at present judge, are neither beneficial nor injurious; and this I believe to be one of the greatest oversights as yet detected in my work.” Consequently, he says, he modified his text in the fifth edition (Descent of Man, 81 Penguin edition, 61 original). To read the first edition only or as the genuine Origin of Species is thus to lose the benefits of the corrections and emendations that Darwin himself deemed necessary.

Editions of the Origin of Species

Text and pictures of the scanned editions can be downloaded from Darwin Online. The best tool available to compare the different editions is Morse Peckham, The Origin of Species: A Variorum Text, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959.

A variorum is available on line.

There are thus six editions of the Origin. In my opinion the best way to read the book is to read the first edition and then to use the Variorum (which does not include the extra chapter of the sixth edition) to have an idea of the evolution of the work. It would be interesting to see how the changes through the editions shaped the reception of the Origin and Darwin’s theory.

(Sources: Daniel Becquemont, “Notes sur les éditions françaises et anglaises de L’origine des espèces,” Darwin: L’origine des espèces, Paris, 1992, GF-Flammarion, 37–41; Michèle and Christ Kohler, “The Origin of Species,” pages 332–51 in The Cambridge Companion to the "Origin of Species", gen. ed. Michael Ruse and Robert J. Richards, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009; Morse Peckham. The Origin of Species: a Variorum Text. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959.)