Making of Expression of Emotions

The expression of emotions was something that interested Darwin long before he published on it. He spent almost forty years thinking, taking notes and inquiring about the expression of emotions, gathering observations and anecdotes from the most remote places on earth as well as from his own domestic surroundings.

Darwin wanted to show that most expressions are innate in humans and that shared expressions are evidence of common descent not just of all human races, but of humans and other animals.

As Paul Ekman writes in the introduction to his modern edition of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, the book is “a most fascinating example of Darwin’s attempts to obtain more systematic evidence on the question of universality”.

Charles Darwin to his sister Susan Elizabeth Darwin (1838)

As early as 1838, Darwin had begun to record and make observations on expressions, noting the behaviour of animals as well as the development of children – both his own and those of his friends. Just weeks before her marriage to Charles, Emma Wedgwood was also contributing.

Penny magazine of the society for the diffusion of useful knowledge, (3rd February, 1838)

Picture of Jenny, the orang-utan observed by Darwin.

Emma Darwin (Emma Wedgwood) to Charles Darwin [20th–21st January, 1839]

'I have not been able to catch her in a reflecting mood, to make yr observation but she told me a fact which I think quite worthy to go down in your book along with the baby’s nods & winks viz. that when she coughs very sharply in the dark sparks come out of her eyes as if she had received a blow.'

The baby was Hensleigh Wedgwood’s son Ernest, born in 1838.