Introduction to the special collection: The expression of the emotions in man and animals

The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals was published on 27 November 1872. It was one of Darwin ’ s speediest publications, written in a four-month period between checking the proofs of The Descent of Man and preparing the sixth (and final) edition of The Origin of Species (Browne, 2014). As such – as Janet Browne has pointed out – the key to The Expression of the Emotions is to recognise that it is very much a sequel to The Descent (Browne, 2014). Indeed, it was originally intended to be just a single chapter in the latter, but Darwin had amassed such a large amount of material that a book-length survey seemed preferable – not least because he was aware of how much controversy and criticism The Descent was likely to generate. The Expression of the Emotions was therefore a way steal a march on his prospective critics, and show that ‘ even the most “ human ” of human characteristics were, at root, derived from animals ’ (Browne, 2014: 309). Not only did The Expression of the Emotions further advance Darwin ’ s arguments that humans were an evolved species, but the book also represented an advance in scientific illustration – the book contains a number of photographs that captured the play of expression across a face in a single frozen image. These images allowed Darwin to pinpoint the particular patterns of muscular contrac-tion that were key to our recognition of our emotional expressions, and offered him the means to draw clear parallels across the animal kingdom.