Charles Darwin tea towel

The quote on our tea towel comes from Darwin's 'Journal of Researches' in which he recorded his revulsion at the appalling treatment he saw meted out to slaves while on his travels in Brazil as a young man aged 27. Darwin witnessed incredibly inhumane treatment of slaves in that country and was incensed that "these deeds are done and palliated by men who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his will be done on earth!" He rejected the arguments often put forward to mitigate slavery by comparing slaves to the poor:

"It is often attempted to palliate slavery by comparing the state of slaves with out poorer countrymen; if the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”

Charles Darwin went on to clash with church authorities when in 1859 he published his ground-breaking work ‘On the Origin of Species.’ In it, he proposed a radical theory of evolution by natural selection. This was a major challenge to the foundations of western civilisation, one that made us re-think our place in the world. In 1871, he transformed our world-view once again through his ‘The Descent of Man’, arguing that humans shared a common ancestor with apes. His propositions were initially met with outrage from members of the Church of England, but this did not stop his work from becoming best-sellers, and by the 1870s the scientific community and much of the general public had accepted evolution as a fact.

In Darwin's lifetime, his writing was translated into German, Danish, Dutch, French, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Spanish and Swedish. He was one of the most influential figures in human history, speaking across time and space. This tea towel honours his radical work.