Charles Darwin’s bills from his student days at Christ’s College 
Cambridge have recently been discovered and can now be viewed online.
The bills give some fascinating insights into his comfortable existence at the university before he set off on the gruelling five-year voyage that would transform biology and science’s view of the world.
Darwin was a student at the college from 1828-31, and the bills reveal many intimate details from his time there, such as how he paid five and a half pence a day to have extra vegetables with the basic ration of meat and beer in the college dining hall.
Rooms and staff
They also show that he occupied one of the most expensive sets of rooms for an undergraduate. The bills reveal Darwin’s accounts and his dealings with local tradesmen including a barber, grocer, tailor, hatter, chimney sweep and much more.
A large army of staff that he hired to help with the daily chores included a scullion (dishwasher), a laundress and a shoeblack (someone who cleans shoes).
Besides the hired help, Darwin could also rely on the college “gyp” – the Cambridge nickname for a valet or servant.
Socialising
With so much help and just two hours of mathematics and classics lectures each morning, Darwin also had plenty of time for private study, doing his scientific hobbies, collecting beetles, shooting, and socialising with his fellow students.
“They played cards and drank wine at night, just like students always have,” the university’s Darwin scholar Dr John van Wyhe told reporters.
After leaving Cambridge, Darwin set sail on the Beagle and developed his theories on evolution that would later be published in his legendary book “On the Origin of Species”.
Learn more
View Darwin’s Cambridge archives, which were published this morning on the website Darwin-online.org.uk.
