Several letters refer to events at the British Association for the Advancement of Science held in Oxford, 26 June - 3 July 1860. Darwin had planned to attend the meeting but in the end was unable to. The most famous incident of the meeting was the verbal encounter between Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, and Thomas Henry Huxley in a discussion of Darwin's theories. This account of the meeting has been drawn from the Athenæum, which provided the most complete contemporary report and which Darwin himself read.

There are two extant versions of the abstract of Darwin's theory of natural selection. One was sent to Asa Gray on 5 September 1857, enclosed with a letter of the same date (see Correspondence vol. 6, letter to Asa Gray, 5 September [1857] and enclosure). It is in the hand of Ebenezer Norman, Darwin's copyist and includes minor alterations and corrections by Darwin. The letter and enclosure are in Gray's correspondence in the Gray Herbarium of Harvard University.

'As for Mr Darwin, he is entirely fascinating…' In October 1868 Jane Gray and her husband spent several days as guests of the Darwins, and Jane wrote a charming account of the visit in a sixteen-page letter to her sister. She described Charles and Emma Darwin, their daughter Henrietta, Down House and its grounds, the daily routine of the household, and her own part in one of Darwin's experiments.

Charles and Emma Darwin's eldest daughter, Annie, died at the age of ten in 1851. Emma was heavily pregnant with their fifth son, Horace, at the time and could not go with Charles when he took Annie to Malvern to consult the hydrotherapist, Dr Gully. Darwin wrote a memorial of his daughter just one week after her death. Annie's younger sister, Henrietta, recorded her own reactions in a poignant set of notes, which Emma Darwin kept.

On 11 November 1838 Darwin wrote in his journal 'The day of days!'. He had proposed to his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, and been accepted; they were married on 29 January 1839. Darwin appears to have written these two notes weighing up the pros and cons of marriage in the months immediately preceding his engagement.

In April 1838, Darwin began recording the titles of books he had read and the books he wished to read in Notebook C (Notebooks, pp. 319-28). In 1839, these lists were copied and continued in separate notebooks. The first of these reading notebooks (DAR 119) opens with five pages of text copied from Notebook C and carries on through 1851; the second (DAR 128) continues the list from 1852 to 1860, when, except for a few odd entries, the record ends.