Charles Darwin at Cambridge: The Letters to William Darwin Fox

Just over three years after the arrival of William Darwin Fox in Cambridge, another young man of nineteen arrived, in early 1828, who was destined to cause one of the biggest upheavals of the Nineteenth Century. Charles Darwin did not come directly from school as Fox did; he had left Shrewsbury School at the age of sixteen and had joined his elder brother Erasmus in Edinburgh, with the intent, largely on his father’s side, of becoming a physician, like his grandfather, his father and his brother. However, young Charley, as his sister’s called him, was honest enough to own up that the blood and gore did not suit him for that kind of life, and as it was determined that that also excluded a military career, the remaining profession for a gentleman of the age was chosen, that of a clergyman.