Charles and Emma Darwin had no favourites among their children, excepting perhaps Annie who died when she was only ten years old, but it is difficult to believe that they did not have a special feeling for Francis, their third son, for it was he whose life and spirit was closest to theirs. It was not just that Francis was the biologist among their children. He and his parents shared similar feelings; he shared his father's love of dogs, and he shared his mother's love of music – she played the piano each day at Downe, while he graduated from the penny whistle of boyhood, to the flute and then the bassoon of adult life. And it was Francis who was the first of Charles and Emma's children to marry, and the first to make them grandparents. These first shared joys, followed so soon by Amy's death, forged unique bonds between the parents and their third son. It was fitting then that it was Francis who became his father's biographer.

In the years after Charles's death, Francis presented to the world a sanitized version of his father's life. The first of a series of publications was the Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887), a book strictly censored by other members of the Darwin family. Edited by Francis, it was based on Charles's autobiography, plus a selection of his letters. Francis also supervised the reprinting and, in some cases, the extensive revision of Charles's publications. The bulk of this work fell into the six years, 1882– 8, immediately after his father's death; these were the same years in which Francis was writing and delivering both new lectures and practical teaching in Cambridge, caring for son, Bernard, marrying Ellen and becoming a father for a second time.

The professional lives of academics, particularly of scientists, tend to be calibrated by the dates of their publications, which can be misleading when those lives are viewed in retrospect. There is often a lengthy gestation period between the framing of a question, the conception of an investigation and its culmination in a printed article.