Padel performs prizewinning poetry
Charles Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter Ruth Padel read a selection of poems from her book Darwin - A Life in Poems at the Sedgwick Museum last night as part of the Cambridge University Festival of Ideas.
She explored the personal and emotional dimensions of Darwin’s life and work from his early passion for collecting as a child to the publication of On the Origin of Species.
Ruth revealed the familial relationships that Darwin had with his father, uncle, wife and children and how these significant others influenced and shaped his scientific work in her introductions to the poems. This intimate portrait of Darwin’s hopes and fears at each stage of his prolific life was much appreciated by the audience.
With her emphasis on Darwin’s debt to the geologists Charles Lyall and Adam Sedgwick and the inspiration he took from geological forms, Ruth’s performance could not have enjoyed a more fitting setting.