Charles Darwin: Evolution and the story of our species

12 Feb 1809

Born into a free-thinking family

Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, the fifth of six children of wealthy and well-connected parents.

The young Charles had a quietly Christian upbringing, but his family life was one of openness to new ideas. His grandfathers had both been important figures of the Enlightenment: Josiah Wedgewood, industrialist and anti-slavery campaigner, and Erasmus Darwin, a doctor whose book ‘Zoonomia’ had set out a radical and highly controversial idea – that one species could ‘transmute’ into another.