Charles Darwin was born in 1809 to an upper-middle-class medical family. He was destined for a career in either medicine or the Anglican Church but never completed his medical studies: his future changed entirely in 1831 when he joined HMS Beagle as a naturalist. On returning to England in 1836 he began to write up his theories and observations which culminated in a series of books, most famously On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. He died in 1882 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.Joe Cain is Senior Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Biology at University College London (UCL). His expertise is in the history of evolutionary studies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Darwin and historical memory.