The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals usually been viewed in its relationship to Darwin's conception of "natural selection" as the central mechanism of evolutionary development, which he probably grasped some time around September 1838. These notes have a tentative and fragmented quality, especially in Darwin's descriptions of conversation with his father (a successful doctor with a special interest in psychiatric problems) about recurring patterns of behaviour in successive generations of his patients' families. Darwin was anxious about the materialistic drift in his thinking – and of the disrepute which this could attract in early Victorian England – at the time, he was mentally preparing for marriage
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals West Yorkshire. Darwin corresponded intensively with James Crichton-Browne, the son of the phrenologist William A. F. Browne and now the medical director of the Wakefield asylum. At the time, Crichton-Browne was preparing his extremely influential "West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports", and Darwin remarked to him that "The Expression" "should be called by Darwin "and" Browne". Darwin also drew on his personal experience of the symptoms of bereavement and studied the text of Henry Maudsley's 1870 Gulstonian lectures on "Body and Mind". He considered other approaches to the study of emotions, including their depiction in the arts – discussed by