As rejection letters go, it would have taken some beating. The publishers of Charles Darwin’s seminal work, On the Origin of Species, considered turning down his manuscript and asking him to write about pigeons instead.

The near-miss was unearthed in 150-year-old correspondence between Darwin’s publisher, John Murray, and a clergyman, the Rev Whitwell Elwin. Elwin was one of Murray’s special advisers, part of a literary panel that was the Victorian equivalent of a modern focus group.

He was asked by the London publisher for his opinion of Darwin’s new work, which challenged Old Testament ideas of Creation. Unsurprisingly for a man of the cloth, Elwin disapproved. Writing back from his rectory in Norwich on May 3, 1859, he urged Murray not to publish. Darwin’s theories were so farfetched, prejudiced and badly argued that right-thinking members of the public would never believe them, he said. “At every page I was tantalised by the absence of the proofs,” Elwin wrote, adding that the “harder and drier” writing style was also off-putting.

He suggested that Darwin’s earlier observations on pigeons should be made into a book as “everybody is interested in pigeons”. He enthused: “The book would be received in every journal in the kingdom and would soon be on every table.”

Fortunately, Murray chose to ignore the advice. He went on to publish On the Origin of Species. The rest, as they say, is history.

The letters are among more than 150,000 literary items that form the vast John Murray archive, a collection of documents from some of the greatest thinkers of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.

Built up over seven generations of the publishing family, and valued at £45 million, the collection is now housed at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh.

It includes manuscripts, private letters and journals from such figures as Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Benjamin Disraeli, Sir Walter Scott, David Livingstone and Darwin.

It was offered to the nation last year at the reduced price of £31.2 million and was bought with the help of the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Scottish Executive. However, there was a £6.5 million shortfall.

Since the archive moved from London to Edinburgh last March, more than £1.5 million has been raised by anonymous private donations, ranging from “£5 to just under £1 million”, said Giles Dove, the national library’s director of development.

But £5 million is still needed to meet the asking price, which must be paid in full within 3½ years.

Sir Sean Connery and the Edinburgh author Ian Rankin joined the library in announcing a public appeal yesterday to raise the final balance. Sir Sean, who visited the archive last summer, said that it was of “world-class importance”. A library spokesman refused to say whether the actor had made a donation.

Rankin, who will speak at the Edinburgh fundraising launch tonight, said that the archive was a “vast and unique treasure trove”, and one of the most important literary collections in the world.

A public exhibition featuring 11 writers from the John Murray archive will open at the National Library of Scotland at the end of June.

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