In 2020, we facilitated the institutional acquisition of a remarkable collection under the Acceptance in Lieu scheme: the collection of autograph letters and manuscripts formed by Margaret Elizabeth Keynes (1890-1974) – the youngest daughter of Sir George Howard Darwin and the granddaughter of Charles Darwin.
Assembled over the course of seven decades, this collection started with manuscripts which the nine-year-old Margaret Darwin gathered from her father’s correspondence in 1899 – including letters by scientific luminaries such as Charles Darwin (which document his daughter Henrietta Darwin’s role as an editor of his works), and T.H. Huxley (‘Darwin’s Bulldog’), who illustrated one letter with a caricature depicting Darwin as a scientific saint attracting pilgrims from far and wide.
Assembled over the course of seven decades, the collection started with manuscripts which the nine-year-old Margaret Darwin accumulated from her father’s correspondence in 1899 – including letters by scientific luminaries such as Charles Darwin (which document his daughter Henrietta Darwin’s role as an editor of his works), and T.H. Huxley (‘Darwin’s Bulldog’), who illustrated one letter with a caricature depicting Darwin as a scientific saint attracting pilgrims from far and wide. (This letter featured in the seminal 2022 exhibition at Cambridge University Library, ‘Darwin in Conversation’ – see our review here.)
The letter featured in Cambridge University Library’s seminal 2022 exhibition ‘Darwin in Conversation’ – click the image above to read our full exhibition review
As time passed, correspondence from Margaret’s own circles of friends and family joined the collection, including charmingly illustrated childhood letters by her sister, the celebrated artist Gwen Raverat.
Margaret Keynes’ autograph collection, comprises about 1,000 items and is, as the Arts Council’s report stated, ‘remarkably extensive […; it] has samples from Victorian and Edwardian public figures and intellectuals, ranging from Charles Darwin (her grandfather) to Sir John Betjeman, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Octavia Hill, Rudyard Kipling, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, Sir Ernest Shackleton, Dame Ellen Terry, Anthony Trollope, Alfred Russel Wallace, Leonard Woolf and WB Yeats. There is also a plethora of autographs from the Royal Family and political figures, including numerous Prime Ministers and kings’.
And quite apart from anything else, the collection includes important material relating to the Darwin and Keynes families, their friends, and their associates. It is a rich resource which provides new and apparently unpublished letters by Darwin, and a very large number of manuscripts by and about his wife, their children, and their grandchildren, illuminating the domestic and professional lives of Emma Darwin, Sir George Darwin, Francis Darwin, Gwen Raverat, and others across two centuries.
After Margaret Keynes’ death in 1974 her autograph collection passed to her son Stephen John Keynes OBE, FLS (1927-2017), the founder and chairman of the Charles Darwin Trust, whose executors sought the advice of Type & Forme. The collection has now joined the world-leading Darwin collections of Cambridge University Library.
I am delighted that this important collection, so carefully put together and preserved by my grandmother, can now be studied by scholars for the first time, and in the context of Cambridge’s remarkable Darwin collections. My family and I could not have thought of a better permanent home for this collection.
Elizabeth Keynes, daughter of Stephen John Keynes OBE, FLS