Biography | Charles Darwin — Buried in This Nave, a Few Feet from Newton

The family first planned a grave in the churchyard at Down.

Darwin had died at Down House on 19 April 1882, aged seventy-three.

Twenty Members of Parliament wrote to the Dean of Westminster on 21 April asking for a place in the Abbey.

Dean George Granville Bradley was in France.

He telegraphed his assent.

Sir John Lubbock, a neighbour and pall-bearer, told William Darwin he would personally have preferred Down, and then accepted the national request.

The coffin reached the Abbey on the evening of 25 April and lay overnight in the chapel of St Faith.

The funeral was on 26 April 1882.

Pall-bearers included Thomas Huxley, Joseph Hooker, Alfred Russel Wallace, William Spottiswoode as President of the Royal Society, and James Russell Lowell, the American minister.

The grave is in the north aisle of the nave, close to the choir screen, a few feet from Isaac Newton.

It is not in Poets' Corner.

The Carrara stone reads only the name and the two dates: born 12 February 1809, died 19 April 1882.

Visitors still look for him among the poets.

He is with the men who measured the world.

Photo: Grave of Charles Darwin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons