Unlike most of his contemporaries, Charles Darwin had actually seen slavery in operation and witnessed the trade in slaves while in South America during his travels on board HMS Beagle in the 1830s. These experiences had reinforced the strong anti-slavery sentiment with which he had been brought up, and throughout his life Darwin was a committed anti-slavery man. The use of the N-word in jest, whether imbibed from the culture of anti-slavery or the popular culture of minstrelsy or perhaps from both, was, it seems, an accepted joke within a family whose abolitionist credentials were
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