Gaskell, Elizabeth.

8vo, new edition with illustrations, presentation copy, inscribed on front endpaper ("Leonard  Darwin | from E Darwin | August 1882"), autograph letter signed by Darwin's widow Emma to her son George loosely inserted, discussing this copy (19 May 1882, in later envelope), further family inscription on upper paste-down ("This book was a great favourite of Charles Darwin's and the last book to be read aloud to him...M.K."), contemporary calf, marbled endpapers and edges, rebacked preserving portion of original spine, some spotting

presented to Emma and Charles Darwin's eighth child Leonard Darwin, inscription; thence by descent

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The last book to be read to Charles Darwin before his death. The recipient is probably the evolutionist's fourth son, the soldier, politician and economist Leonard Darwin (1850-1943). 

After a series of attacks and seizures Darwin had died in great suffering at Down House at around 4pm on 19 April 1882, aged 73. Aptly enough, Gaskell's last and very assured novel Wives and Daughters, partly set in the scientific community, is very aware of the new currents of scientific thought then making waves in society, and makes great use of the themes of classification and natural history.

Roger Hamley, the hero of Wives and Daughters, is loosely based on Darwin himself, who was a cousin of Mrs Gaskell's. She told her publishers that "Roger is rough, & unpolished – but works out for himself a certain name in Natural Science, – is tempted by a large offer to go round the world (like Charles Darwin) as naturalist' (Letter 550, to George Smith, 3 May 1864). In her introduction to the Barnes & Noble 2005 edition of  Wives and Daughters, Amy M. King states that "Roger is patently modeled on Charles Darwin" (p. xxxvii). Darwin's recent biographer Janet Browne writes that "Darwin's fictional counterpart was a shyly agreeable character, a naturalist and traveller returned, a man whose heart was given to the loving investigation of nature, an experimenter who respected his subject matter" (Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, 2002, p. 191).

Darwin himself was extremely fond of Mrs. Gaskell's novels, as recorded by his son Francis: "He was extremely fond of novels . . . and would anticipate the pleasure of having a novel read to him. . . . He could not enjoy any story with a tragical end:  for this reason he did not keenly appreciate George Eliot. . . . Walter Scott, Miss Austen, and Mrs. Gaskell were read and re-read till they could be read no more..."
(The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, volume 1)

The letter by Darwin's widow Emma (4pp., 8vo, Down, 19 May 1882, a month after the naturalist's death) is to their second son , the astronomer and mathematician George (later Sir George) Howard Darwin (1845--1912), explaining that "I should like you to have Wives & D. very much..." (however the present copy is inscribed to his brother Leaonrd, three months later). It also mentions his eldest brother William (the banker, and executor of the will), his sister Henrietta, and his nephew Bernard (Emma and Charles' first grandson, later the golf writer, whom they brought up after his mother died shortly after childbirth). On Down House a month after her husband's death, Emma remarks: "This place looks so pretty & gay & the days so fine; but almost all taste seems gone out of it...".