Charles Darwin's book about his grandfather Erasmus Darwin is curiously fascinating. Many people see Charles Darwin (1809–1882) as the most influential man of the last three centuries in bringing about a durable change in world-views. Indeed he was a strong candidate a few years ago for ‘Man of the Millennium’.

You might therefore expect that all the books written by Charles would by now have been published in full. That is not so. His Life of Erasmus Darwin was shortened by 16% before publication in 1879, and several of the cuts were directed at its most provocative parts. The cutter, with Charles's permission, was his daughter Henrietta – an example of the strong hidden hand of meek-seeming Victorian women.

This first unabridged edition includes all that Charles originally intended, the cuts being restored and printed in italics.

The subject of the book, Dr Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), has grown in stature during the twentieth century and is now seen as having achieved more in a wider variety of fields than anyone since. He was famous as a physician in the English Midlands for thirty years, and after his massive treatise on animal life, Zoonomia, was published in 1794, he was recognized as the leading medical author of the decade. And this happened when he was already securely in place as the leading English poet of the 1790s, or perhaps, as Coleridge said in 1797, ‘the first literary character of Europe’.