The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science 9780226551753

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The X Club

Published with support of the Susan E. Abrams Fund

The X Club Power and Authority in Victorian Science

Ruth Barton

The University of Chicago Press  Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2018 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2018 Printed in the United States of America 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­55161-­6 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­55175-­3 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226551753.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Barton, Ruth, 1945– author. Title: The X Club : power and authority in Victorian science / Ruth Barton. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017049912 | ISBN 9780226551616 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226551753 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: X Club (London, England) | Science clubs—England— London—History—19th century. | Science—England—History— 19th century. | London (England)—Intellectual life—19th century. Classification: LCC Q41 .B37 2018 | DDC 506/.0421—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017049912 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

In memory of my father and my sister Harold Douglas Barton, 1913–­1981 and Mary Stedman, 1947–­2005

Contents List of Illustrations  xi

Introduction: The X Club 1864–­92

1

I.1 Nine Men Who Wanted to Change the World  6 I.2 Historians of the X Club  11 I.3 Introducing This Book  32

Pa r t o n e  



1

Origins and Ambitions

37

Cultures of Science in Early Victorian England  39 1.1 Gentlemanly London Science  41 1.2 Science for Self-­Improvement: Frankland, Tyndall, and Hirst  58 Spencer and Huxley: The Science and Politics of Rational 1.3  Dissent 75 1.4 Spottiswoode at Oxford: A Liberal Education for a Christian Gentleman 96 1.5 Scientific Aspirations, Social Status, and Religious Beliefs  104



2

Making Careers  109 2.1 Finding Employment: Patronage and Pluralism  110 2.2 Scientific Expertise and Gentlemanly Status  135 2.3 A Taste for Campaigning  147 2.4 Friends  166

C o n t e n t s



3

Speaking for Nature  170 3.1 Defending Darwin and Expanding the Domain of Nature  172 3.2 Alliances: Naturalistic Science and Liberal Theology  185 3.3 The Science of Man: Ethnologists against Anthropologists  197 3.4 The Reader: A Liberal Alliance and Its Collapse  202 3.5 Friends and Conspirators  214

Pa r t t w o  



4

The X Club Established

225

Organizing Science  229 4.1 Specialist Societies  231 4.2 The British Association for the Advancement of Science: Representing Science to the Nation  246 4.3 The Royal Society: Power and Its Symbolic Uses  267 4.4 Men of Weight, of Craft, and of Party  285



5

Public Money and the Public Good  292 5.1 Science in the Curriculum I: Examination Successes  299 5.2 Science in the Curriculum II: Lobbying Failures  313 5.3 Money and Advice: The Reciprocal Relations of Science and Government 330 5.4 Hirst’s Career: Higher Education and London Life  341 5.5 Good and Influential Men  356



6

Claiming Cultural Authority  362 6.1 Self-­Images  365 6.2 Science Militant  370 6.3 Insiders: Scientific Men at Home among the Social Elite  383 6.4 Pulpits for Science  394 6.5 The Rhetoric of Scientific Authority  412 6.6 Sunday Lecture Societies: The Politics of Lay Sermons  427 6.7 Cultural Leaders  440

Retrospective     The Life, Work, and Times of the X Club  445

R.1 Phases of Power and Friendship, 1860–­1900  446

viii

C o n t e n t s

R.2  The X Club Program: The Authority and Independence of Science and Scientific Men  456 R.3 Victorian Science and Victorian Culture  460

Acknowledgments  467 Notes  471 Bibliography  547 Index  571

ix

Illustrations Figures I.1 George

Busk, a fit-­looking forty-­year-­old  4

1.1 Edward

Sabine, science reformer, lobbyist, and patron in the

1840s and 1850s  45 1.2 Railway

map of the United Kingdom, 1844 and 1854  64

1.3 Defford

Bridge, Worcestershire, which was rebuilt under Spencer’s

supervision 81 2.1 Joseph

Dalton Hooker as imperial botanist  113

2.2 John Tyndall, 2.3 William

July 1850  118

Thomson in 1854, Tyndall’s “scientific antagonist” at

British Association meetings  125 2.4 A cartoon

of a scientific soirée  136

2.5 Royal Institution 2.6 The young

lecture, 1855  139

John Lubbock, 1856  145

2.7 Hooker’s

letter to Huxley about the British Museum’s trustees  158

3.1 The title

page of the Natural History Review 179

3.2 William

Carpenter, physiologist, Unitarian, and X Club ally  189

3.3 Punch

cartoon of Disraeli as an angel  210

3.4 Ellen “Nelly” 3.5 A cannibal

Lubbock  218

butcher’s shop, the offensive engraving in Huxley’s

Man’s Place in Nature 221

i l l u s t r at i o n s

Sir John 4.1

Lubbock, banker, naturalist, ethnologist, and MP, in his

early forties  239 4.2 The presidential

address at the Bath British Association Meeting,

1864 250 4.3 Joseph

Dalton Hooker, ca. 1865  254

4.4 William

Spottiswoode, printer and mathematician, president of

the British Association, 1878  276 4.5 “Some

of the most distinguished fellows” of the Royal Society, a

composite portrait from the late 1880s  285 5.1 The “Brompton

Boilers,” the first museum building at South

Kensington 298 5.2 Huxley,

bearded, on his return from Egypt, 1872  310

5.3 The School

of Science, South Kensington  327

5.4 Sir Lyon

Playfair, scientific politician  335

5.5 Thomas

Archer Hirst  353

6.1 Cartoon

of John Tyndall, combative Irishman  374

6.2 The library

of the Athenaeum Club  386

6.3 Distribution

of food for the relief of Paris, 1871  393

6.4 Darwin

as Socrates  417

6.5 Sunday

Evenings for the People, the flyer for Huxley’s opening

lecture, 1866  429 6.6 Edward

Frankland in 1880  439

R.1 The subscription

portrait of Herbert Spencer, 1897  454

Tables 1.1 London’s

learned societies, 1847, ranked in order of membership

fees 48 2.1 Stacking

the council of the Linnean Society, 1851–­70  155

5.1 The growth

of science teaching under the Science and Art

Department, 1860–­82  303

xii

Introduction

The X Club 1864–­92 George Busk (1807–­1886) Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–­1911) Herbert Spencer (1820–­1903) John Tyndall (ca. 1822–­1893) Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–­1895) William Spottiswoode (1825–­1883) Edward Frankland (1825–­1899) Thomas Archer Hirst (1830–­1892) John Lubbock (1834–­1913)

I have lived with these nine men for decades. Some were easier to live with than others. Busk was calm and reliable. He was the man in the background who brought many of Huxley’s projects to completion. I like and admire Huxley, the witty, brilliant, egg-­dancing controversialist, but also effective committee man and administrator. He was thin-­skinned in his early years and, throughout his life, overready to find enemies. According to Marian Evans (George Eliot), who knew him for thirty years, he needed an enemy to attack; in later life, he found that controversy helped him to overcome depression. Huxley initially learned political strategy from Hooker, who had the benefit of birth into a botanical dynasty. Hooker, who had a strong sense of social and scien­ tific hie­rarchy, set high standards for scientific achievement and gentlemanly deportment. Although he was usually discreet and gentlemanly in public, he could be a harsh critic behind a friend’s back. Compared to Huxley, Hooker was

1

Introduction

privileged, but social tensions within his family left something of a chip on his shoulder. Tyndall, the brilliant experimentalist, flamboyant lecturer, and dinner party conversationalist, was often seen as Huxley’s alter ego. Although like Huxley in many ways, he was not an easy friend or colleague. He could be moody and self-­righteous and was unable to laugh at himself. Even Hirst, his admiring protégé, found him trying at times. I admire the self-­discipline that enabled him to rise from Irish village to London high society; I sympathize with the high psychological price he paid in de­ cades of headaches, indigestion, and insomnia; but I find his argumentativeness tiring and am unconvinced by his self-­righteous rationalizations for entering yet another controversy. Hirst could be ponderous and preoccupied with his own small affairs. Sometimes, perhaps, this could be explained and excused by his bad health. He was a loyal and forgiving friend. He was retiring, dignified, and, mercifully, unlike his better-­known X-­brothers, not argumentative. Frankland was more introverted than most of his fellows. (His biographer, Colin Russell, says there was a family scandal to hide.) His warm early friendships with Tyndall, Hirst, and Hooker cooled over time, for reasons over which I can only speculate. Spottiswoode, a wealthy businessman, was generous and sociable. He was a willing and effective supporter of many projects initiated by his friends, and often calmed the waters that they stirred up. He had a reputation as a witty dinner companion, but I saw little of this. I suspect that, until his untimely death, he helped to calm frictions within the Club. Lubbock was by far the youngest of the group, almost ten years younger than all but one of the others, but he was born to scientific and social leadership. Unlike many of his X Club fellows, who had struggled to find a place in science, Lubbock was blessed with wealth and self-­confidence. His social position made him useful in many group campaigns. His wife, Nelly, enjoyed his scientific friends, hence their large (and well-­staffed) country house became one of the social centers of the group. Finally, there was Spencer, “our dear Diogenes,” whose many quirky principles made life difficult for both his friends and himself.1 He became more self-­important and opinionated over time, and even his greatest admirers in the Club criticized him bitterly. Much can be explained by his emotionally bleak childhood and idiosyncratic upbringing, but that does not make him more likeable. These nine men formed a dining club at the end of 1864. They intended to meet monthly, from October to June. Their meetings in Lon-

2

The X Cl u b 1 8 6 4 – ­9 2

don’s fashionable west end continued for almost thirty years, until early 1892 when Hirst died. Spottiswoode and Busk had already died, most of the others were in decline, and those few who survived in good health had loose emotional ties to the group. In 1864 they were energetic and ambitious and, with a few exceptions, already warm friends. The formal club developed from two earlier friendship trios. Hooker, Busk, and Huxley were naturalists, each with experience as navy surgeons. Busk, the oldest by ten years, was fifty-­ seven. A decade previously, he had retired from medical practice to “devote himself” (as the Victorians said) to science. In 1864 he was pursuing his anatomical research and working tirelessly in the administration of many scientific societies. His earlier research had focused on microscopic organisms, but in the early 1860s he sought out sites of human prehistory and became an expert on the newly significant topic of craniometry. Hooker, second in age and first in scientific eminence, was forty-­ seven. He was acknowledged as the leading botanist in Britain and held the position of assistant director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew under his father, Sir William Hooker. He was also first in political skill. Over the preceding decade, he had often stirred up his friends to collaborate in various reforming and lobbying schemes. The idea of starting a club was his. Huxley was younger again, thirty-­nine, and after years of struggle had secure but modestly paid employment as professor of natural history in the Government School of Mines and naturalist to the Geological Survey. Huxley and Hooker felt that their being “well-­salted” by long scientific voyages made them brothers.2 Busk’s experience of the sea, as surgeon on the merchant navy’s hospital ship moored at Greenwich, was not in the same league, but he shared scientific interests and reforming ideals with Hooker and Huxley. These three had been friends for a decade. A second trio, Tyndall, Frankland, and Hirst, had been friends for even longer. All three were of modest birth and had developed their scientific interests through mechanics’ institutes and mutual improvement societies. Tyndall and Hirst had met twenty years previously, when employed in the same surveying company during the railway boom of the mid-­1840s. A few years later, when Tyndall took up schoolteaching during a decline in railway building, he met Frankland, another new teacher at the school. Tyndall absorbed scientific ambitions from Frankland, who had already been employed as a chemist for three years. In 1848 they went together to Germany to study for PhDs at the University of Marburg. Hirst absorbed these same scientific ambitions from Tyndall

3

Introduction

I.1

George Busk, a fit-­looking forty-­year-­old. Busk was still healthy and energetic in the early 1860s. He often took walking holidays with his younger friends, for example, with Huxley, Lubbock, and Tyndall to the Isle of Wight just before Christmas in 1862 (Hirst, Journals, 21 December 1862). Source: 1849 engraving by Thomas Maguire. © The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

and followed him to Marburg in 1850. In 1864 Tyndall (in his early forties) was well known in London society for his brilliant lecture demonstrations at the Royal Institution where, as professor of natural philosophy, he was gradually taking over the roles of the greatly respected Michael Faraday. He was also professor of physics in the Government 4

The X Cl u b 1 8 6 4 – ­9 2

School of Mines. Frankland (thirty-­nine) was lecturer in chemistry at Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital in London and Fullerian Professor of Chem­ istry at the Royal Institution; he made a substantial additional income from consulting. Hirst (thirty-­four) was barely established in a scientific career. After his wife of only a few years died in the mid-­1850s, he had spent two years visiting mathematicians in France and Italy. On returning to England he found employment as mathematical master at University College School. Only in 1865 was he appointed to a position worthy of his attainments, professor of mathematical physics at University College. These two groups of friends had met, in London or on holidays in Switzerland, in the mid-­1850s. As will be elaborated (chapter 2), Huxley and Tyndall became close friends in the early 1850s, and their friends were subsequently drawn into mutual acquaintance and friendship. Spencer (age forty-­four), Lubbock (thirty), and Spottiswoode (thirty-­ nine) were more recent members of the social circle. Huxley and Spencer, who shared philosophical interests and cultural backgrounds in radical provincial Dissent, had been good friends since the early 1850s. Spencer, who was on the fringes of scientific society—­never a member of a scientific society and seldom a contributor to scientific journals—­ had links to the worlds of journalism and radical literature. Huxley had introduced Spencer to Tyndall but chose not to introduce him to Hooker and Busk. Spencer had become acquainted with the other friends only in the 1860s. He was working on his grand Synthetic Philosophy, a develop­ mental interpretation of the entire universe. He had published the First Principles in 1862 and was busy, with advice from Huxley and Hooker, on Principles of Biology, which appeared in parts through 1864 and 1865. He was living on the remains of an inheritance, the proceeds of his writing, and contributions from friends and admirers. Lubbock and Spottiswoode were drawn into the social network in the early 1860s when they found themselves on the same side as Hooker, Huxley, and friends in a series of theological and scientific controversies. John Lubbock was the son of John William Lubbock, wealthy banker, Cambridge-­trained mathematician and astronomer, and, from 1840, Sir John, third baronet. Moreover, the Darwins were neighbors of the Lubbocks; Charles Darwin encouraged young John’s boyhood interest in natural history and mentored him as he began independent work in the 1850s. By 1864 the younger Lubbock’s reputation as a naturalist was well established. Like Busk, Lubbock was shifting his research interests from microscopic creatures, in his case to prehistoric archaeology. Because he had both social and scientific standing he was widely regarded—­in spite 5

Introduction

of his comparative youth—­as a suitable leader, even president, for scien­ tific institutions. In 1863, when controversies over race split the Ethnolog­ ical Society, twenty-­nine-­year-­old Lubbock had been asked to take the presidency. William Spottiswoode, an Oxford-­trained mathematician, was principal of Eyre and Spottiswoode, Queen’s Printers. He was a member of many scientific and learned societies and a well-­regarded administrator—­in 1864 he was active on the councils of the Royal Geographical Society, the Ethnological Society, and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a friend of some of the contributors to the controversial theological volume, Essays and Reviews, and with Lubbock’s help had tried to raise scientific support for the essayists. Spottiswoode was the last of the nine to enter the friendship circle and was known to only some of the others in 1864. The formal Club met for dinner from 1864 to 1892 but, informally, the X Club had a life of almost forty years. For at least five years before 1864 subgroups of the friends had engaged in coordinated action, and after 1892 there were rare revivals. The remaining members thought fondly of the few who were left, and forgot or forgave their failings.

I.1 Nine Men Who Wanted to Change the World Group biographies of scientists tend to the heroic mode. They have subtitles like “the friends who made the future,” “five friends whose curiosity changed the world,” and “four remarkable friends who transformed science and changed the world.” Some make nationalistic claims, for example in Darwin studies: “how four voyagers to Australia won the battle for evolution and changed the world.”3 Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators is more realistic in its claims: “how a group of hackers, geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution.” Group biographies of women and extended family groups are usually more interested in the ways in which their subjects are representative rather than world-­changing; the experience of the subjects is used to understand the culture and conventions of their times.4 This book rejects the heroic mode and shares features with such family histories as Barbara Caine’s Destined to Be Wives: The Sisters of Beatrice Webb. Between these extremes of fame and power there are many options. For example, group biographies of literary figures often seek to understand the nature of their creativity. Isaacson, similarly, analyzes what made his hackers and geeks so creative. He argues it was

6

The X Cl u b 1 8 6 4 – ­9 2

their ability to work together, and therefore his study bears on the larger question of how to be innovative. The power, representativeness, and close networking of the X Club members, combined with the density of their archives, similarly, enables this study of the X Club to move from microhistory to macrohistory and to become, also, a study of Victorian science and the place of science in Victorian culture. It is, I hope, a microhistory that generalists will find interesting.5 The X Club was, as James Moore claims, the “most powerful coterie in late-­Victorian science”—­although I would date that power earlier, from the late 1860s to the early 1880s.6 Members held institutional power within science and were given philosophical and scientific authority by a wide public. Organizationally, the most remarkable example of mutual power is the five years in the mid-­1870s when Hooker was president, Spottiswoode treasurer, and Huxley the biological secretary of the Royal Society, and the subsequent succession of Spottiswoode and Huxley to the presidency, making a continuous twelve-­year reign by the X Club. Equally important, they held positions of power in many other scientific and educational arenas at the same time. They were active in many educational institutions and in government inquiries into education. Four—­Huxley, Lubbock, Spencer, and Tyndall—­were nationally famous for presenting science and its implications (as they saw them) to general audiences. For many admirers and critics, they came to represent “the tendencies of modern thought.” No contemporary scientific group even tried to compete, although there are hints that small groups sometimes wanted to counter the power of the X. The Philosophical Breakfast Club of the preceding generation was in decline by the time the X Club formed. Although it was similar in having a philosophical or ideological program, it never sought networks of power in scientific institutions, and would not have been in direct competition.7 The gentlemen who had controlled the British Association in its early decades, however, had sought institutional power, and some were still active across a wide range of scientific societies. No scholar has presented evidence of their being formally networked, but Lieutenant Colonel Sabine certainly had power in the British Association, the Royal Society, and government circles for decades, and supportive friends can be identified. The informal group of northern physicists, mathematicians, and engineers around Sir William Thomson are the only contemporary group proposed as an opposition. Like the X Club, Thomson’s friends had many values and attitudes in common. Occasionally they publicly criticized what they saw as the excesses of “second-­rate Cockney

7

Introduction

philosophers” (as P. G. Tait called Huxley, Spencer, and Tyndall), but their institutional bases were in Scotland and they intervened in London institutions only occasionally.8 Equally important for this history, the members of the X Club represent a variety of social backgrounds, career pathways, and scien­ tific specialties. Together they illustrate the variety of career making in mid-­Victorian science, the ways in which entrance to science and roles within scientific institutions varied with social status, and the workings of power in scientific societies. While they represent a variety of regional and cultural origins, their mature careers were in London, hence, this book is about London science rather than British science; other places are viewed largely through the prejudiced eyes of the X-­members. For London, they provide a rich picture of gentlemanly scientific life. Religiously too, they are unrepresentative. Some are renowned as leaders of Victorian scientific naturalism; those who remained within the Church of England were unorthodox in their beliefs. This raises questions about the coherence of the X Club that are hard to answer unless something of the religious beliefs and the positions with regard to scientific naturalism of the quieter members can be determined. The first chapter seeks to identify the religious beliefs of our men in early adulthood in order to consider how close the liberal Anglicans were to those who were renowned for their “naturalism.” The interpretations of the X Club in this book are deliberately unheroic. Intellectually, some of these men are modern culture heroes who can be interpreted as brave and far-­sighted heroes who charged on, “battling” the forces of prejudice and ignorance, regardless of insults and personal disadvantage.9 One objection, but not my chief objection to the heroic mode, is that they are not entirely admirable by twenty-­first-­ century standards; they were men of their time. As Evelleen Richards demonstrates, they often used their science in the cause of racial, gender, and social inequality.10 My chief objection to the heroic mode is the conception of historical causation implied by claims that a few men changed the world. This is to ignore the conditions and movements that allowed, even enabled, particular actions or events to have large consequences. As Baron de Montesquieu, the great eighteenth-­century social theorist, put it, if the loss of one battle brings down an empire, then “some general cause made it necessary for that state to perish from a single battle.”11 Much the same point—­about successful individuals rather than collapsed empires—­is made by Janet Browne in summing up her approach to Darwin biography: figures like him “were the product of a complex interweaving of personality and opportunity with the 8

The X Cl u b 1 8 6 4 – ­9 2

movements of the times.”12 “Most powerful” coterie does not imply all powerful. The cultural weight of long-­established traditions and institutions, financial constraints, and opposition from occasional groups and assorted individuals meant that the X Club members often failed to achieve their ambitions. The X Club offers a window onto Victorian science and culture. By analyzing the ways in which the members were representative as well as famous and powerful, and placing the X-­men in their larger scientific and cultural context, the X Club and its members reveal much about the social structure of Victorian science and the place of science in Victorian culture. The depth of the archival sources is crucial. There are thousands of letters between the members and over a century in total of journal keeping. The power of the group and, sometimes, their frustrated desire for power mean that they were well placed to provide accounts of the internal operations of scientific institutions; because they represent diverse social backgrounds and scientific specialties they cover many aspects of Victorian science. These personal sources are sometimes elucidated by the minutes and attendance records of the committee meetings of scientific societies.13 The diverse sources enable the production of a deeply personal account of scientific politics. Letters also comment on personal quirks or one another’s scientific and philosophical theories. Some, for example, indicate differences in their understandings of agnosticism, which are relevant to scholarly interpretation. The cast of characters is large. The quieter members, the wives and families, and friends and allies are essential to this unheroic interpretation of the X Club. Too often Huxley, especially, is turned into a hero whose brilliance and energy made him successful in many forums.14 I have worked to include the lesser known members, to show the importance of Busk, Hirst, and Spottiswoode in supporting the activities that are often seen as achievements of Hooker, Huxley, or Tyndall. The work of the obscure members appears only when we dive deep into detail. The dynamics of personal relationships—­affection, respect, impatience, hurt feelings, and mutual support in hard times—­are also part of the group story. The families were important. In the background were six wives and, in 1864, about twenty-­five children. The wives gave emotional support, scientific assistance, and the dinner parties that strengthened friendships and facilitated networking. They translated letters and books and provided illustrations for their husbands’ lectures and publications; sometimes they gave similar support to the bachelors in the Club. The families were “a haven in the heartless world” for both their husbands 9

Introduction

and the bachelors. Tyndall, Spencer, and the widowed Hirst found sympathetic ears and relaxing recreation in conversation with their friends’ wives and in play with their children. The social life of the X-­members provides examples of friendships between men and women that enrich the limited literature on Victorian friendship. The importance of the wives to the social cohesion of the group is illustrated by the disintegrating consequences of the deaths of Sophie Frankland, Frances Hooker, and Nelly Lubbock in the 1870s and the subsequent entry of new wives, following the remarriages of Frankland, Hooker, and Lubbock. To a much greater extent than any previous work on the X Club, I examine the roles of collaborators, most notably, botanists and naturalists who joined X-­clubbers in reforming institutions of natural history; administrators and educators who joined in campaigns for science education; and liberal Anglicans, Unitarians, and other aspirants to cultural leadership whom X-­men joined in campaigns for Church reform and cultural change. Including allies, both within and outside science, shows something about how the X Club succeeded, the extent to which their various goals were shared with other groups up and down the social or­ der and, at times, why projects failed. Assessing the importance and sig­ nificance of the X-­men also requires knowing how they related to their predecessors and contemporaries. Here the goals and ambitions of Huxley and other X-­men are compared with those of their contemporaries. Many characters appear in multiple contexts and in this way, the rich interconnections among Victorian elites become apparent, and the personalities and priorities of the actors emerge. Considered only as biography, the rich account that emerges from collective biography vastly enhances what is known even about the well-­known members of the Club. Huxley’s successes are shown to depend on the work of his quieter X Club colleagues. Hooker’s concerns are shown to extend very widely into scientific politics and religious politics. New, insider perspectives on Spencer’s idiosyncratic personality emerge. Busk and Spottiswoode, who were previously almost unknown, are here shown to be significant actors in scientific and educational institutions. Others, such as Lubbock and Hirst, who have been known to specialists, are here embedded in larger developments in Victorian science and culture. The details of the X Club story throw a revealing light on many contested issues in the historiography of Victorian science. Some, but only some, aspects of the issues historians have identified as “professionalization” are shown to be important to the X Club members. Alternatives to the professional-­amateur dichotomy are discussed; in particular, 10

The X Cl u b 1 8 6 4 – ­9 2

comparison of the entrance of the different members to scientific socie­ ties suggests that birth had continuing importance in achieving scientific status. Close attention to the naturalistic orientations of all the members, particularly, greater attention to Lubbock and Tyndall, suggests that the defining features of “Victorian scientific naturalism,” as characterized by Frank Turner, should be formulated less rigidly than is customary. Examination of their shifting skeptical and agnostic arguments over time, and of their private and public statements, suggests a more complex origins story for agnosticism than Bernard Lightman’s emphasis on Mansel’s 1858 lecture, or Mark Francis’s 1850s “new Reformation” context. Their participation in elite culture, dining, and debating with poets and journalists, lawyers, Unitarians, and liberal elites in the Church of England, makes science less important in familiar secularization stories and places failed science-­and-­religion narratives in a broader con­ text. These major reinterpretations are introduced in the remainder of the introduction.

I.2 Historians of the X Club Widely regarded by scholars as powerful, and sometimes alluded to as the “famous” X Club, the X Club has indeed become famous to scholars of Victorian England, but in 1864 it was just another dining club, a common mode of sociability among middle-­and upper-­class London men. There were many clubs, more and less innocent, in the mid-­Victorian scientific world. The Philosophical Club of the Royal Society was well known as a club with an agenda. Founded in 1847 and limited to forty-­ seven members, its explicit purpose was to maintain the scientific emphases of the 1847 reforms. Its dinner meetings, held monthly before the regular meetings of the Royal Society, were both a locale for conversation on scientific matters (thereby modeling serious scientific conversation) and an informal scientific caucus.15 It was a society of equals in which the secretaryship circulated among all members. Little is known of some clubs, for example, the provocatively named Cannibal Club, founded by members of the Anthropological Society of London in the mid-­1860s.16 Some clubs were transient, existing as little more than hope and intention. The Thorough Club, founded at the 1862 British Association meeting, lasted only a few months. Its purpose was to promote “a thorough and earnest search after scientific truth particularly in matters relating to biology,” where “thorough” meant “free from the suspicion of temporizing and professing opinions on official grounds.”17 (This was 11

Introduction

to imply that many clergymen affirmed the Thirty-­Nine Articles dishonestly, or with silent qualifications, in order to keep their positons and incomes.) At the apolitical extreme was the College Council Club of the Royal College of Surgeons (founded in 1869), which was “only for social purposes such as dining together and in no sense for political or medico-­political purposes.” This explicit rejection of political purpose implies that such purposes were common. Even the convivial Red Lion Club (founded in 1839), whose members roared approval and wagged dinner-­suit tails at their annual dinner (held during British Association meetings), had the original purpose of protesting the cost and pomposity of the formal British Association dinners.18 It established a London “tribe” for regular dinners during the year. Many clubs in the wider intellectual world combined sociability and serious purpose. Alexander Macmillan, of the Macmillan publishing house, held informal “tobacco parliaments” at his London office on Thurs­day afternoons, from the late 1850s. Christian socialist friends and allies stopped by for conversation, tea and stronger beverages, and smoking. Huxley, Spencer, and Spottiswoode were among those who discussed the publishing world, social issues, and potential new titles with Macmillan.19 The Century Club (founded in 1865) was initiated by men who had excelled at Oxford and Cambridge and who were committed to university reform. Outside the university, they sought “political, social, and ecclesiastical reform.” Some were leader writers and journalists and some stood as parliamentary candidates. (Huxley, Spencer, and Tyndall were later members.) It met on two evenings a week for conversation and refreshments.20 Although operating on a much larger stage than the X Club, it was similar in having a programmatic commitment to reform. Thus there was nothing remarkable in establishing a private club with political purposes, and the X Club did not need to be secretive about its existence. Just what the purposes of the X Club members were is one of the central questions of this study: what did they want to achieve, what were their ambitions, and why were they so energetic? Scholarly interpretation of the intentions and objectives of the members has been complicated, and even mis-­directed, by the vague and contradictory accounts that they passed down to posterity. We never had any purpose, Huxley claimed in old age, when the friends discussed adding new members: The club has never had any purpose except the purely personal object of bringing together a few friends who did not want to drift apart. It has happened that these cronies had developed into big-­wigs of various kinds—­& therefore . . . had a good deal of influence in the scientific world. But if I had to propose to a man to join, and he were 12

The X Cl u b 1 8 6 4 – ­9 2

to say “Well, what is your object?” I should have to reply like the needy knife-­grinder—­ “Object, God bless you, sir, we’ve none to show.”21

Huxley’s summing up is characteristically witty and memorable, but mis­leading. Against Huxley’s claim of original innocence, Hirst’s report on the first meeting must be put in the balance: Besides personal friendship, the bond that united us was devotion to science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas. Amongst ourselves there is perfect outspokenness, and no doubt opportunities will arise where concerted action on our part may be of service. The first meeting was very pleasant and “jolly.” . . . There is no knowing into what this club, which counts amongst its members some of the best workers of the day, may grow, and therefore I record its foundation.

Friendship and jollity, yes, but also shared principles, and an expectation of concerted action. Hirst added, “Huxley in his fun christened it the ‘Blastodermic Club’ and it may possibly retain the name.”22 Against his later protestation of innocence, Huxley’s witticism hints at large purposes. The blastoderm, Spencer explained, when he told his father about his new club, is “that part of an ovum in which the rudiments of future organization first appear.”23 The implication is that, in 1864, Huxley expected the Club to lead the development of the body scientific. This name was ponderous and, probably, rather too revealing of their intentions. Someone suggested “Thorough Club,” but this was rejected, for its association with the failed 1862 club.24 The name, though, alludes to the concern that thought and conversation be free, not inhibited whether internally or externally by dogmatic orthodoxy. After a few months of an­ onymity, they chose the safer name of “X” Club, for the unknown quantity, suggested “I believe by the wife of one of the members, Mrs. Busk,” said Spencer; by “our mathematicians,” said Huxley.25 Already, we have two problems with Huxley’s memory. On the origins of the Club, there is no reason to doubt the contemporary records of Hirst and Spencer, both of which imply intentions beyond friendship, therefore Huxley’s later reconstruction can be disregarded. Regarding the name chosen, although Spencer’s “I believe” qualifies his certainty, “Mrs. Busk” is a specific memory. Against this, “our mathema­ ticians” seems only a plausible reconstruction. The issues raised by these conflicting accounts recur in writing X Club history. Huxley creates problems for historians of Victorian science in general, and for historians of the X Club in particular, because he has received more than 13

Introduction

his fair share of attention. He was so witty and quotable that his views are often selected to represent Victorian scientific men (or some lobbying subgroup among them) without inquiring into possible alternatives. Moreover, generations of scholars have more accessible information about Huxley than about almost any other Victorian scientific hero—­ with the conspicuous exception of Darwin. His articles were collected and republished, a loyal son wrote a readable Life and Letters that contains numerous extracts from letters, and all these volumes are widely available. The combination of Huxley’s attractive humor, his association with Darwinian controversy, an accessible biography, and scholarly reliance on predecessors has resulted in generations of historians investigating his achievements and neglecting many contemporaries.26 In the following chapters the importance of associates, within and outside the X Club, to “Huxley” campaigns will be emphasized. To return to the questions of the founding of the X Club and the choice of name: it would seem that Mrs. Busk suggested the name and that the members wanted to “organize” science, in some unspecified sense. The directions they sought are hinted at by Hirst’s description of their common bond as “devotion to science pure and free.” Free science, he elaborated, was “untrammelled by religious dogmas.” Pure science was not constrained by the demands of utility and money making. Later allusions by X Club members to their Club are no more helpful in determining its objectives. Much about their hopes and intentions can, however, be inferred from their previous collaborative actions. My previous analysis of their pre-­1864 “service” to science, which is ex­ tended in chapter 3 herein, demonstrates that Huxley’s just-­ friends claim is misleading.27 They had already been engaged in promoting the reputation of Darwin, extending evolutionary theory to “man,” defending clergy suspected of heresy, attempting (unsuccessfully) to sideline the anthropologists who, in their eyes, brought disrepute on science, and as they met for dinner were taking over a weekly paper in order to spread scientific knowledge and attitudes. Some of these projects, we can assume, were in the back of Hirst’s mind when he mentioned concerted action in the future. Huxley habitually underplayed the intentions and power of the X Club; even at the end of his life it was better not to admit what they had planned or done. By contrast, comments scattered through Spencer’s Autobiography exaggerate their influence.28 Given the vague, open-­ended sources and the wide range of pro­ jects in which the friends collaborated, it is not surprising that historians have offered diverse and conflicting interpretations of the Club’s goals and achievements. Modern studies of the X Club began with two, 14

The X Cl u b 1 8 6 4 – ­9 2

near-­simultaneous articles by Vernon Jensen and Roy MacLeod in 1970. The fragmentary records of Club discussions and the networks of high positions held by the X-­brothers convinced both that the group had been powerful. MacLeod believed Huxley—­that the Club began with no formal purpose—­but, implying that it became a conspiracy, he called it the Albemarle Street conspiracy after the street on which it met for dinner. At this stage of research though, proof was missing, although there were smoking guns. Jensen emphasized the strong friendships—­of the men with one another and, within Victorian mores, with the wives of one another. Ellen Busk was “the most intimate and trusted friend” that Huxley had in the early 1850s; he told her about his fiancée in distant Sydney.29 In spite of his emphasis on friendship, Jensen suggested that the Club had some more significant purpose than “preventing old friends from drifting apart”; they wanted, he wrote, “to further the cause of science.” Unpacking this evocative but unspecific phrase is a major task. A wide range of objectives fall under this slogan, objectives regarding scientific and educational institutions, the attitudes and beliefs of the public at large, and the social and intellectual position of science (in general) and of individual scientific men. Almost all subsequent interpretations of the X Club have been shaped by Frank Turner’s interpretations of Victorian science in a series of publications of the mid-­1970s. In accounts going back to his first elaboration of “scientific naturalism,” the X Club has been identified with the promotion of naturalistic interpretations of the universe. Many scholars have built on Turner’s work, most notably Bernard Lightman, in wide-­ ranging research on advocates and opponents of scientific naturalism.30 Turner, again, argued that scientists sought “cultural leadership,” and used X Club members as leading exemplars of scientific dissatisfaction with the lack of social recognition for the achievements and utility of science and medicine. My analysis of the prehistory of the Club interpreted their ambitions regarding their larger society in terms of cultural leadership.31 Turner, yet again, but building on much previous work by Roy MacLeod, identified the X Club as the vanguard of a professionalizing and anti-­amateur movement in mid-­Victorian science, and this interpretation too was widely taken up, by Lightman, by Adrian Desmond in his biography of Huxley, and many others.32 My account of the X Club’s power in the Royal Society, in paying more attention to scien­ tific institutions than to science in general culture, owed more to Mac­ Leod than to Turner. It demonstrated the close networking and political cunning that justified MacLeod’s ascription of conspiracy and argued, against Turner, that they were not anti-­amateur, for they installed the 15

Introduction

“amateur” printer-­mathematician, William Spottiswoode, in the chair of the Royal Society. Although Turner includes evolutionary theory as one of the theories characteristic of scientific naturalism, James Moore gives it much greater emphasis. His larger interpretation parallels Turner’s cultural authority thesis. The X-­brothers “plotted an aggressive campaign to reclaim nature from theology and to place scientists at the head of English culture. And behind them . . . stood the inspiring genius of Darwin.” He describes the X Club as “a Darwinian clique.”33 Building on Moore, but holding back from his grander claims about cultural ambitions, MacLeod’s 1999 reflect­ ions on X Club research propose “an evolutionary understanding of ‘Man’s Place in Nature’” as the common commitment of the Club members.34 All these interpretations have, to speak somewhat loosely for the moment, anti-­church or anti-­religion connotations, which some scholars emphasize as central to X Club objectives. Naturalism was against supernaturalism. When scientific men sought cultural authority, it was against the authority that clergy then held. Professionalization, as interpreted by Turner, was partly a strategy for edging out clerical amateurs—­ although because they were amateurs rather than because they were clerical. Although Moore himself has written persuasively against hypos­ tasized Science and Religion being at war, his language here puts X Club and clergy in confrontation. The X Club is usually identified as being, if not at war, at least in conflict with clerical authority.35 Quite apart from their relevance to the X Club, all these interpretations have been questioned and nuanced. The following discussion outlines the issues as raised by research on X Club members and introduces the interpretations that are developed in subsequent chapters. The Darwinism of the Darwinian Clique Promoting Darwin’s reputation and developing his theory in new directions was one of the issues that drew the X Club together (as will be shown in chapter 3). Nevertheless, the X Club was much more than a Darwinian clique. Its roots can be traced to pre-­Origin campaigns in the 1850s.36 Rather than Hooker campaigning for Darwin, before the Origin Hooker persuaded Darwin to join his lobbying networks for the reform of natural history organizations (see chapter 2.3). Darwin, I argue, was not the raison d’être of the Club, but one among many causes. Moreover, “Darwin” as defended by the X Club stands for the entire “Darwin­ ian” complex, including the developmental style of reasoning that preceded the Origin. 16

The X Cl u b 1 8 6 4 – ­9 2

The existence and importance of non-­Darwinian forms of evolutionary theory have been frequently argued. James Secord’s Victorian Sensa­ tion treats Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation as an important work in its own right, rather than an inadequate predecessor to Darwin. In Victorian Popularizers, Bernard Lightman shows that such grand developmental schema remained popular throughout the century. Peter Bowler’s often-­elaborated argument is summed up by one title, The Non-­ Darwinian Revolution: Darwin converted the Victorian world to evolution, but not to a Darwinian evolution. Even Huxley was not converted to natural selection. Many educated people accepted that the variety of forms of life had slowly developed but, rather than explaining this by the mechanism of natural selection, the majority appealed to some progressive tendency or directed process. Because Busk, Lubbock, and Huxley were active in the development of anthropological theories and institutions, the relationship of Darwin to evolutionary anthropology is particularly important in this book. The evolutionary anthropology and the new prehistoric archaeology to which Busk and Lubbock contributed in the 1860s were neither Darwinian in style of argument nor derived theoretically from Darwin, although, because they developed in the late 1850s and early 1860s, they have often been presumed to follow in some way from the Origin. Subtle and indirect relationships between these developments and the Origin have been identified by George Stocking in his authoritative Victorian Anthropology. Discoveries in prehistoric archaeology in 1858–­60 coincided with the Ori­ gin but were relatively independent, neither “caused” the other. (Rather, both were made possible by the mining, quarrying, and railway building that uncovered animal fossils and ancient human tools.) Geologists and antiquarians found evidence of a vastly longer human history than had previously been imagined. Most startling of the British finds was the mixture of chipped stone tools and fossilized bones of long-­extinct animals found in 1858 in the undisturbed floor of Brixham Cave in Cornwall. Although Brixham Cave offered no evidence of human transmutation, it created a “revolution in human time.”37 It pushed human history back toward the deep time of geology. When the Origin and Brixham Cave were considered together, supporters of transmutation could hope that evidence of even greater human antiquity might be found. Busk and Lubbock were involved in analyzing further prehistoric finds. As is well known, Darwin did not address the relationship of man to animals in the Origin. The obvious question for every reader was how to fill the fossil gap between ape and man. Stocking emphasizes that this was a new question, to which ethnologists replied with an “old answer.” 17

Introduction

They already had theories expounding a hierarchy of human races, and they “threw living savages into the fossil gap.” By assuming that the “most savage” groups represented the most primitive and ancient peoples, ethnologists created a developmental schema for man. This was not a Darwinian branching-­tree model in which human groups diverged and became more varied; rather, it was a typological schema in which all human groups went through similar stages of development, from savagery toward civilization (although some groups moved extremely slowly). Prehistoric archaeology added details to the story of development, but it was still essentially a theory of developmental stages. Stocking concludes that by the late 1860s there was a group of theorists following similar arguments: accepting the great antiquity of man and the link between man and some primate form, ranking savages in a hierarchy of development, and committed to “a naturalistic uniformitarian explanation.”38 Scientific Naturalism and Agnosticism Although the X Club has been identified with the philosophical position of scientific naturalism, the relevant research has focused on a small subgroup within the X Club, usually Huxley, Spencer, and Tyndall. (Lubbock, who could readily be included, is usually omitted.) This leaves open the question as to how well the relatively silent majority fit within the naturalistic movement. Recent research has been challenging in two ways, scientific naturalism has been problematized and, with specific reference to the X Club, Hooker has been interpreted as the “odd man out.” The view developed in this book is that the X Club as a whole can be identified with scientific naturalism, but that scientific naturalism first needs a looser definition. After close investigation of the quieter members, many of whom had unorthodox or tenuous Christian beliefs, I argue (in chapter 6) that all were committed to the project of expanding naturalistic explanation, which is the focus of my redefinition of “scientific naturalism.” Recent reinterpretations have produced polarizing oppositions. Schol­ ars who follow closely in Frank Turner’s steps use the label scientific nat­ uralists for the promoters of scientific naturalism and argue this was an actors’ category. Others go so far as to argue that the term, scientific naturalism, has become empty, that scientific naturalism was merely a polite strategy for avoiding conflict over religion.39 Here I situate my interpretation, which will be developed in chapter 6, between these two extremes. Over decades of summary, I submit, scientific naturalism has become oversimplified and overscientific. It has been reified into an ex18

The X Cl u b 1 8 6 4 – ­9 2

plicit doctrine. Here, I illustrate the process of simplification in order to provide a basis for a looser definition. In justifying his proposed name, Victorian scientific naturalism, Turner wrote, “The movement was scientifically naturalistic in that it derived its repudiation of supernaturalism and its new interpretations of man, nature, and society from the theories, methods, and categories of empir­ ical science rather than from rational analysis” (12). He associated this kind of naturalism with the science of the second half of the nineteenth century and distinguished it from the naturalistic rationalism of the preceding century. As evidence for the existence of a scientifically naturalistic movement, Turner offered three contemporary characterizations of modern (Victorian) scientific thinking, by James Ward, Herbert Spencer, and T. H. Huxley, that is, one critic and two advocates. Turner emphasized the Huxley version, and scholars have generally taken Turner-­Huxley as their starting point and overlooked the significant differences between the three. According to Ward, This naturalistic philosophy consists in the union of three fundamental theories: (1) the theory that nature is ultimately resolvable into a single vast mechanism; (2) the theory of evolution as the working of this mechanism; and (3) the theory of psychophysical parallelism or conscious automatism, according to which theory mental phenomena occasionally accompany but never determine the movements and interactions of the material world.40

Ward did not dignify naturalism with the adjective scientific; rather, naturalism was a philosophy. Moreover, only his second theory is at least as much scientific as metaphysical. The advocates summed up their philosophy in more scientific terminology. Turner paraphrased Huxley, the “three seminal theories of nineteenth-­century science . . . were Dalton’s atomic theory, the law of conservation of energy, and evolution. He went on to quote directly: The peculiar merit of our epoch is that it has shown how these hypotheses connect a vast number of seemingly independent partial generalisations; [and] that it has given them that precision of expression which is necessary for their exact verification. . . . All three doctrines are intimately connected, and each is applicable to the entire physical cosmos.

Then he conflated the Huxley statement with Spencer’s summary of the program of his synthetic philosophy. “Huxley and his fellow naturalistic 19

Introduction

writers, such as Spencer, employed these three theories ‘to interpret the detailed phenomena of Life, and Mind, and Society, in terms of Matter, Motion, and Force.’”41 Read closely, the Spencer and Huxley statements are not so obviously scientific as to justify unexamined ascription of “scientific” to their synthesizing project. Spencer’s list does not include the theory of evolution; rather, it would seem that he intended to explain evolution in terms of matter, force, and motion, as in his famous, tortuous formulation, “Evolution is definable as a change from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and the integration of matter,”42 a statement of doubtful scientific status. There are hidden ambiguities in Huxley’s prose, whether they are intended double meanings is uncertain. Huxley did not write “Dalton’s atomic theory,” but “that doctrine concerning the constitution of matter which, for want of a better name, I will call ‘molecular.’” Huxley used the circumlocution, primarily, to avoid commitment to atomism, but his statement could be read as an allusion to theories broader than chemical atomic theory, for example, claims about brain function and mind. Moreover, his concluding assertion that the doctrines are “intimately connected” sounds rather Spencerian and difficult to tie down to theories that have been exactly verified. Therefore, I suggest that the scientific nature ascribed to so-­called Victorian scientific naturalism should be bracketed as a claim for inves­ tigation, and that the specific scientific theories at the heart of natu­ ralistic interpretations of the cosmos should not be defined by any one list. Recent attempts to fit particular individuals to the Turner-­Huxley de­fi­ nitions support these proposals. Michael Taylor’s argument that Spen­ cer’s “evolutionary naturalism” had metaphysical roots supports my proposed bracketing of the scientific ascription. With specific reference to William Huggins, Robert Smith argues that the nebular hypothesis was a crucial theory for astronomers who argued naturalistically; moreover, the nebular hypothesis was important to Spencer, Huxley, and Tyndall.43 Desmond, it should be noted, has long recognized the importance of physiological psychology to the naturalistic program.44 The discussion of scientific naturalism in chapter 6 herein argues that the X Club protagonists sought naturalistic explanations, it interprets scientific naturalism as a project rather than a doctrine, and analyzes the varied ways in which the X Club men extended naturalistic explanation. Some problems of interpretation arise when scholars extend the category of scientific naturalism beyond those to whom Ward and other sophisticated philosophical critics at the end of the nineteenth century ap20

The X Cl u b 1 8 6 4 – ­9 2

plied it. Ward focused on Spencer, Huxley, and W. K. Clifford, all of whom had explicitly expounded their views in philosophical, although also polemical and rhetorical, terms.45 Turner originally included these men plus Tyndall, leading positivists, anthropologists who “extended the theories of science into the study of society,” and literary men “who advocated the cause of science” as chief representatives of scientific naturalism. But when Turner developed his argument about naturalistic science as a tool of professionalizers, he moved the positivists and literary men to an outer circle and made more of the X Club members and their scientific allies, many of whom had not publicly and unambiguously expressed their philosophical and religious views.46 The professionalization-­equals-­scientific-­ naturalism thesis assumes a unity to all the activities of Huxley, Spencer, and Tyndall (but most notably Huxley), and aligns all their associates under this same umbrella without specifying what that unity was. Thus, for example, Bernard Lightman uses the phrase “the institutions of scientific naturalism.”47 To some extent, as with Butterfield’s account of the Whig interpretation of history, such oversimplifications are a consequence of the need to summarize;48 even scholarly works must take some things as accepted. However, with the undermining of the professionalization thesis, the unity of scientific naturalism has become more problematic. It is time to return to the beginning. Given all these questions, Robert Young’s arguments about the signif­ icance of pre-­Darwinian sources for naturalistic understandings of the universe merit reconsideration. Writing at the same time as Turner, Young argued that “Darwin and Darwinism have become clichés for a much wider movement.”49 Darwin was one among many Victorians who argued in scientific terms for a naturalistic understanding of “the earth, life, man, his mind, and society.” Young emphasizes that the movement began well before Darwin, going back at least to his grandfather in the 1790s and including the extremely popular, anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation of 1844. Young also argues that Darwin’s Origin was not the most important work in the naturalistic tradition. Phrenology, which extended the uniformity of nature to the link between mind and brain, had already challenged free will and, by implication, moral responsibility. Therefore, Young argues, the “impact of Darwin” is really the impact of “a much wider naturalistic movement in psychology, social theory, and science and cannot be fruitfully studied in isolation.”50 Other arguments lead to the same conclusion: Spencer’s sources were pre-­Darwinian; the “Darwinism” of the X Club included Lubbock’s developmental history of humankind from savagery to civilization. With specific reference to Spencer and Lubbock, and in the light of Young’s 21

Introduction

arguments, the pre-­Darwinian sources of scientific naturalism should be acknowledged. Thus the “scientific” naturalism with which the X Club is associated cannot be isolated from Erasmus Darwin, phrenology, and Vestiges. The naturalism of the X Club has been indirectly linked to the non-­ Darwinian naturalism of Vestiges in Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman’s recent analysis of pre–­X Club uses of the label scientific natural­ ism.51 The term was first used by an American critic of Vestiges in midcentury, then used by British critics of Tyndall, Darwin, and allies in the 1860s, then in the 1870s spiritualists debated whether naturalism or scientific naturalism were apt self-­descriptions. Huxley used the label only in 1892. If he was aware of these predecessors, as Dawson and Light­man suggest, he did not acknowledge them. Rather, he created a respectable genealogy for scientific naturalism, which he identified with modern science. Modern science, he declared, followed in the tradition of the Renaissance because it shared the goal of “complete intellectual freedom.” He used the adjective “scientific” to emphasize that the Naturalism of his era was an advance on the Naturalism of the Renaissance (I follow his capitalization of major concepts). He went on: Naturalism had always been opposed to Supernaturalism; in “these latter days” (he used the language of biblical prophecy), Naturalism takes the form of Science, which is the young strong enemy of Supernaturalism. Thus, the Naturalism of the Renaissance has culminated in “the scientific Naturalism” of the latter half of the nineteenth century.”52 As Paul White points out, “scientific naturalism” had extremely “limited currency” among its supposed exponents.53 However, even if it is a long stretch to claim scientific naturalism as a term of self-­description for the X Club, it is not a misleading term and can be justified on pragmatic grounds.54 The name “scientific naturalist,” though, for advocates of what was later called scientific naturalism, introduces confusion. The term “naturalist” referred, until almost the end of the century, to someone who collected flora, fauna, or fossils and classified them into species and genera, and is used in this sense in the following chapters. Naturalists could be mere naturalists, scientific naturalists, or philosophical naturalists according to the quality and breadth of their work. I give only one typical example here from an 1875 obituary. When J. E. Gray, keeper of zoology at the British Museum, died, the Athenaeum obituary described him as “pre-­eminently a scientific naturalist” rather than a “popular writer.”55 Consequently, I avoid “scientific naturalist” as ambiguous. I prefer the adjective “naturalistic” over “scientific naturalism” in order to leave open the question of scientific status, and to de-­familiarize the old phrase so 22

The X Cl u b 1 8 6 4 – ­9 2

that we are stimulated to think anew. My aim in the subsequent discussion is not to define “scientific naturalism” and certainly not to decide who is or is not a “scientific naturalist” in the way these terms have been widely used. Rather, I seek to find the unifying themes, assumptions, arguments, and objectives of the X Club members (see chapter 6). I propose that their theories and theoretical ambitions can be labeled “naturalistic.” However, because the leading X Club members have been so closely associated with scientific naturalism by scholars of the last forty years, my discussion has implications for definitions with broader aims. The Social Structures of Victorian Science Professionalization has been one of the master narratives shaping interpretations of Victorian science. In the enthusiasm for the perspectives opened up by the social turn in history of science, Frank Turner’s 1976 argument that the apparent conflict between science and religion was rooted in the antagonism of the new professionals to the old clerical amateurs was widely taken up. Thus, among historians of science, although not in more popular interpretations, the professionalization narrative subsumed the science-­against-­religion narrative. The X Club was considered to be at the heart of a professionalizing movement that sought higher salaries, more paid positions, and greater social recognition for scientific men. There were early critics of professionalizing narratives. Morris Berman argued, as Jim Endersby has since elaborated, that gentlemanly independence, that is, an income that left one free to pursue scientific interests, was the ideal for most of the nineteenth century. Scientific employment was second best.56 Critics acknowledged that the pursuit of science changed, from (predominantly) an avocation for gentlemen to (predominantly) full-­time paid employment, but they warned that to label this as “professionalization” implies a teleological process. “Professionalization” is a “pseudo-­explanation,” wrote Roy Porter.57 Professionalization came about, but it was not something the X Club members, nor other scientific men, set out to achieve. I have long criticized the professionalizing interpretation of the X Club. Most obviously, the X Club included both gentlemanly “amateurs” and “professionals” paid to do scientific work; moreover, the amateurs were important to the success of many campaigns. The balance of interpretation shifted with the 2001 thematic issue of the Journal of the History of Biology, especially with the brilliant reversal of the X axis by Adrian Desmond, previously an exponent of the Turner interpretation. Desmond concluded that, rather 23

Introduction

than some overarching “professionalizing” goal, the changes that came to be called professionalization must be explained by “contemporary goals [and] localized strategies.” For example, the first important site of “professional” education in science was the South Kensington School of Science, which produced schoolteachers; the teachers were wanted by provincial industrialists and liberal politicians, who wanted British workers to be scientifically literate so that British industry was competitive with German industry.58 In place of professionalization I pay attention to the intertwined themes of hierarchy, class, and social status and to the interaction between scientific expertise and social status, which, I argue, was at the heart of achieving standing within science. My interpretation was originally stimulated by the work of Richard Bellon and Jim Endersby, both of whom show that being gentlemanly was fundamental to Hooker’s understanding of scientific life.59 Endersby argues that, for Hooker, gentlemanly standing was a new kind of aspirational gentility. Being a gentleman was not about birth but about character, courtesy, and honesty; whatever his birth, a man could become a gentleman. I have come to emphasize the continuing significance of gentlemanly birth for position within science. This is not to doubt that Hooker considered gentlemanly behavior crucial, nor to imply that gentlemanly manners was not a consideration in scientific society, but many contemporaries were not persuaded that manners mattered more than birth. Moreover, some of Hooker’s X-­brothers assessed gentlemanliness differently; Tyndall and Huxley, for example, were more concerned with being “manly” than “gentlemanly” (see chapter 2.2). Nor was social mobility through gentlemanly manners and associations new in midcentury. Many scientific men of the generation before the X Club were not wellborn and needed paid employment. It is sometimes assumed that the so-­called gentlemen of science who controlled the British Association in its early decades were born gentlemen, but, to take a few examples, G. B. Airy, Adam Sed­gwick, and William Whewell, were all from poor families; they had neither gentlemanly manners nor gentlemanly incomes when they entered Cambridge; through academic achievement they obtained college fellowships and, then, the positions that enabled them to marry, pursue science, and become gentlemen.60 Thus, rather than interpreting the early Victorian period as a transition from gentlemen of science to men of science, I argue for gradual change: the proportion of gentlemen by birth among “men of science” (a term in common use throughout the century) declined, being neither 100 percent at the beginning nor 0 percent at the end.61 The thesis elaborated in chapters 1–­4 is that in 24

The X Cl u b 1 8 6 4 – ­9 2

Victorian England (until at least 1880) scientific standing was achieved through an interaction of scientific achievement with social status. Over time, gradually and unevenly, increasing weight was given to scientific achievement and decreasing weight to birth and wealth in ascribing position in the scientific community. This interpretation extends previous analyses of leadership conflicts and reform movements in the Royal Society in the early nineteenth century and makes the X Club reformers continuous with the 1847 reformers.62 The ways in which the X Club members exercised power in scientific societies are examined, less to celebrate that power than to show how the Club operated. The resulting minutiae on how councils were elected and officers nominated in scientific societies leads to revealing indications about how social and occupational status were related to position in scientific societies. Modern usage is so different from Victorian usage that confusion usually results from using the words amateur and professional, and I therefore use alternatives for the purpose of clear discussion.63 In modern usage amateurs are judged inferior to professionals in skills and knowledge. In the Victorian world leisured gentlemen, who were amateurs in the sense that they followed their science for love and, sometimes, reputation, but not for money, were often the leading theorists. Moreover, professional, when used among scientific men, usually referred to those in the medical or legal professions who pursued science in their spare time. The term amateur was sometimes used in the mid-­Victorian period to refer to someone who was not in scientific employment, but not until late in the century did it carry any connotation of inferiority, unless qualified by some adjective such as “mere” amateur. An amateur could be “really scientific.” As Endersby has emphasized, Hooker regarded paid employment as socially inferior to gentlemanly independence. However, here again I consider that Hooker was not entirely typical. For men such as Frankland, Hirst, and Tyndall, scientific employment was a rise in the world. Although they recognized that they were socially inferior to independent gentlemen, they were proud of their success in finding scientific employment rather than self-­conscious over the constraints that made earning an income necessary. To avoid confusion, I avoid the label professional and use the terms salary-­dependent and specialist or expert, which draw attention to aspects of professionalization important in the Victorian context. Salary-­dependent, which almost speaks for itself, is used for scientific men dependent on their scientific occupation for income, but not for those who were employed in medicine, law, or schoolteaching outside science.64 Specialist 25

Introduction

and expert apply to those who could claim expertise in some area on the grounds of personal research. Many specialists were not salary-­dependent; most salary-­dependent men of science were specialists and experts, although in the Victorian period many scientific men (Spottiswoode, Lubbock, and Huxley are examples) had more than one specialty. As an alternative to professional, Bernard Lightman uses “practitioner” for “those who were engaged in conducting experiments or analyzing the nature of the natural world.”65 Specialist identifies a similar characteristic but places more weight on the extent of expertise and achievement than does prac­ titioner. A contemporary term, used by Huxley among others, would be scientific workers to cover those who produce new knowledge.66 I have previously argued against most professionalizing interpretations of the X Club, but I here acknowledge that other interpretive em­ phases fail to make sense of some of the X Club activism within scientific societies. Bernard Lightman has been particularly reluctant to give up professionalization narratives. He continues to describe Huxley as a pro­ fessionalizer, for example, as “the great champion of professionaliz­ ing science,” although he redefines Huxley’s goals as associating science with “expertise, laboratory research, and naturalism.”67 Expertise, which Lightman picks out, is one of the issues that is central in the analysis of the forthcoming chapters. Although professionalization provides neither an overarching narrative nor an explanation of changes in the social structure of Victorian science, the concept is not useless. It directs attention to shifts that, with hindsight, we recognize as significant: specialist journals, specialist training, employment, social recognition, for example. As Jack Morrell sums up the issue, the characteristics of professions, as described by sociologists, emerged slowly and incompletely in science and in no fixed order.68 X Club history suggests an order, at least for Victorian England. Of these conventional characteristics of professionalization, specialist publishing was the only issue of consistent concern to the X Club members. On the other hand, the demand for state support for science, long claimed to be characteristic of professionalizers and often attributed specifically to Huxley, is shown here (chapter 5.3) not to be characteristic of the X Club.69 In addition to employment status and social position, disciplinary distinctions and geographical differences feature in the following chapters, but here I do not differ from accepted interpretations. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Sir Joseph Banks ruled English science, the Linnean disciplines were more highly ranked than the Newtonian disciplines. This changed by the early Victorian period, and when Hooker entered science, he found botany at the bottom of the status ranking 26

The X Cl u b 1 8 6 4 – ­9 2

(although perhaps not as low as disciplines counted as applications of science).70 By the late Victorian period the status of the biological sciences was improved, although physics was secure in a long reign at the top of the hierarchy of the sciences. Geographically, except for chapter 1, this book focuses on London. By the later part of the century, science flourished in the northern provinces and in Oxford and Cambridge, but in very different ways. Sometimes I generalize to England, but even that requires caution; seldom is it safe to generalize from London to Scotland or Ireland. Who Were the Cultural Leaders? Turner’s cultural-­authority interpretation of mid-­Victorian days of prayer turned on his analysis of the public response to the Prince of Wales’ recovery from typhoid after special prayers had been said throughout the nation. In the public religious ceremonies and distribution of secular honors that celebrated his recovery, medical men, who had cared for him, were neglected; the clergy and the mayor of London were thanked and honored. Medical men were outraged. Turner argues that their indignation was more social than intellectual, a response to lack of public respect for their expertise rather than an expression of skepticism about prayer. He extended the argument to include scientific men alongside medical men, and interpreted the event as indicating “a clash between established and emerging intellectual and social elites for popular cultural pre-­eminence.”71 Scientific and medical men were challenging the traditional position of the clergy. Limitations to Turner’s account of these elites move interpretation in two quite different directions. Placing “scientists at the head of English culture,” as both Moore and Turner characterize X Club ambitions,72 leaves wide open the question, “which scientists?” The X Club men often presented themselves as leaders of a unified Science, but this was difficult to maintain when the most eminent physicists of the age often disagreed with them. Here Crosbie Smith’s research on William Thomson and his associates is important in countering overemphases on the X Club.73 It is often said that the X-­members were keeping out exponents of natural theology. This is too specific. X Club objections, alluded to frequently through the chapters below, were more often to clerical or dogmatic authority, especially any attempt to make science subservient to theological dogma, rather than specifically to natural theology. The scientific men that they wanted at the head of English culture were to be exponents of naturalistic science, but as Evelleen Richards makes 27

Introduction

clear, even naturalistic science was divided. Huxley and his allies in the Ethnological Society of London were, she argues, seeking hegemony for their particular interpretation of science.74 Thus, on the one hand, Science was not unified. Moving interpretation in a different direction, other scholars have looked outside history of science for a broader understanding of Victorian cultural elites. John Clark shows that Lubbock can be seen as one of Stefan Collini’s “public moralists” or as an exponent of Harold Perkin’s professional ideal, “the ideal of educated talent in the service of society.”75 Paul White has persistently argued that Turner and those who follow him exaggerate conflict between “Church” and “Science” and neglect the friendship and frequent cooperation between scientific and religious men. Scientific men, he argues, were embedded in a cultural elite that included men of letters and leading churchmen.76 White and Clark lead to T. W. Heyck’s Transformation of Victorian Intellectual Life and Collini’s Public Moralists on the changing cultural roles of men of letters and political thinkers in the Victorian period. These important studies of intellectuals77 do not make systematic reference to Turner’s work; rather, the specialization of modern historical scholarship produces divisions in the past among Victorian intellectuals.78 Almost a decade after Turner, Heyck focused his discussion of the role of intellectuals in Victorian society on men of letters, but used science in explaining their changing role. Up to the 1860s men of letters “accepted the role of cultural leadership” (50), with the most important of them being esteemed as moral guides (37).79 But the German model of specialist research, which was incorporated in the reformed universities and exemplified in the development of scientific disciplines, undermined the generalist role for men of letters, and literary advocates of aestheticism—­“art for art’s sake”—­undermined the moral purpose of literature, hence the public role of men of letters declined. Thus, in Heyck’s analysis, men of letters had the position that Turner attributed first to clergy and then to scientific men: “a position of cultural leadership which rested on their inclination and capacity to provide moral as well as intellectual guidance to the general public” (228). A decade after Heyck, Collini’s Public Moralists was a major contribution to scholarship on Victorian intellectuals. Collini sought to understand the ideals, identities, and public role of late Victorian “political thinkers”; his conclusion: they were “public moralists” who aimed to demonstrate to a broad public how moral values should guide both private and public life. Thus, three historians reach similar conclusions about the public roles of Victorian intellectuals, but the conclusions are about three different Victorian groups of intellectuals. Collini acknowl28

The X Cl u b 1 8 6 4 – ­9 2

edges that his political thinkers were identified as “men of letters” in the mid-­Victorian period but pays no attention to men of letters or men of science whose public voice cannot be identified as political. Of the X Club, only Spencer gains more than a passing reference, although Lub­ bock, as John Clark shows, also fits Collini’s model.80 Each scholar plowed the furrow of his own subdiscipline. Within history of science, Turner’s conclusion has been qualified by subsequent research. Turner himself identified a backlash in the next generation of scientific men, many of whom sought a via media between science and religion. Then, in 1993 he argued that the faith or non-­faith commitments of twentieth-­century historians led them to emphasize the secular at the expense of the orthodox, and reprinted the prayer article without the previous subtitle, “A Chapter in the Conflict of Religion and Science,” with its implication of essential conflict.81 A decade previously, James Moore had argued that the polarization implied by the warfare and conflict metaphors had not existed in the Victorian period, and further research provided additional examples. Most notably, Crosbie Smith has shown that the natural philosophers and engineers in the circle of William Thomson, whose scientific standing was in no way less than that of the X Club members, argued that modern physics allowed space for both divine intervention in the natural world and human free will, and that the universe was not the deterministic order of natural causes and effects proclaimed by Tyndall and Huxley.82 Just as some representatives of science defended aspects of orthodox religion, so some representatives of religion departed from orthodoxy. Some (A. P. Stanley, dean of Westminster Abbey, will become well known in chapter 6) were willing to accept the naturalistic account of the universe as authoritative, and modified their forms of prayer. These themes emerge in the analyses of chapters 3 and 6. When roused to lobbying and publicizing action in the early 1860s, the emerging X-­network often found common cause with the most liberal among the higher clergy, leading “public moralists” as identified by Collini, and var­ ious other members of the intellectual elite. Chapter 6 shows similar shared interests and friendships between scientific men and many other cultured gentlemen; however, it will become apparent that the intellectual divides were often deep and the controversies vigorous. The Church, Religion, and Secularization Religion had political, theological, and emotional importance among respectable Victorians. Politically, those who belonged to “the Church,” 29

Introduction

that is, the Church of England “by law established,” were privileged. It was not until 1868 that Parliament freed Dissenters from the obligation to pay a local rate for the upkeep of the local church building. Until 1871, the well-­endowed fellowships of Oxford and Cambridge colleges were open only to those who “conformed” to the practice of the Church of England and who were willing to affirm its Thirty-­Nine Articles. Fellowships gave good incomes to bright young men while they established themselves in a professional career. Such privileges embittered Church/ Dissent relations.83 Both Spencer and Huxley espoused anti-­Church arguments in their youth (chapter 1.3). I agree with Adrian Desmond’s argument that Huxley’s bitterness in controversy with theologians was, in part, an expression of Dissenting antagonism to Church privilege.84 Theology mattered intensely to the orthodox. Disagreements over doctrine and liturgical practice produced riots and heresy trials and divided families and friends. In chapter 1, where the early and shifting religious beliefs and experiences of the nine protagonists are identified, many varieties of doctrine and denominational affiliation are introduced, from rowdy primitive Methodists to the externally restrained, but dangerously tainted-­with-­Rome Tractarians; no attempt will be made to pro­ vide an overview here; rather, each group will be characterized in bio­ graphical situ. Other believers were “liberal” rather than dogmatic in theology, arguing that doctrine must change as knowledge changed. This position was often associated with German traditions in theology and with a redefinition of religious truth as being about feeling rather than doctrine. The emphasis on religious emotion, originating in German pie­ tism, shaped Methodism (and Tyndall often praised this warmth of emotion) but was particularly important in mid-­Victorian England, because, in association with German liberal theology, it allowed the theologically unorthodox to claim that they were truly religious. An extreme version of this romantic view of religion was espoused by Thomas Carlyle. According to Carlyle, the sensitive or religious person would feel the wonder of the Universe and be in awe at the power of Nature, but every effort to say something about “the Immensities and Eternities” merely clothed the reality and failed to grasp the essence. Tyndall and Hirst took up Carlyle’s vision with enthusiasm and remained Carlylean throughout their lives; Huxley espoused similar views but in a less committed, sometimes even strategic manner. When they made claims to be truly “religious” they were expressing this view, which they shared with liberal Christians, but which was largely rejected by the dogmatically

30

The X Cl u b 1 8 6 4 – ­9 2

orthodox.85 Because Huxley and Tyndall, especially, often used religious words in unorthodox ways, we must be alert for irony and double meanings. From the dogmatic point of view, if they did not believe orthodox doctrine they were clearly not Christian. Many of the X Club members, as will be shown, remained Anglican, but in this liberal tradition. Doctrines must change, every “man” must seek truth honestly, true faith should not be defined dogmatically, nor should affirmations of orthodoxy be required. Here X Club members agreed with liberal reforming members of the Church. Another liberal variant was to emphasize that morality was the essence of religion. This emphasis appears in Huxley and Lubbock, but not in Tyndall. Secularization has been one of the grand narratives widely used in history and sociology to make sense of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On the global scale, it is increasingly obvious that religion is not declining in the modern world, and both the reality of the process and the nature of the concept have been much debated. Various ways of conceptualizing secularization are useful in thinking about the X Club. At the political level, Jeffrey Cox and many others argue, secularization is a process that has occurred with regard to Christianity in western Europe—­rather than with all religion across the modern world. In the countries in which established confessional churches were pushed out of political power, secularization was a political process.86 In Britain devout Congregationalists, Unitarians, and Quakers campaigned against their civil disabilities. (We meet some of these campaigners in chapter 6.) The X Club were secularizers in this sense; they wanted a society in which no particular religion was privileged and no religious traditions imposed on citizens, and they made allegiances with many groups with similar political commitments. The members of the X Club were also seeking to change beliefs. The X-­publicists for science were specifically concerned with what can, by analogy, be called missionary or evangelistic work, persuading people to believe differently. Thomas Dixon, considering the individual and conscious intellectual level, argues that secularizing goals can be attributed to a theorist only if prior religious or irreligious beliefs can be established biographically.87 Chapter 1 provides this context for the X Club members. Equally important, secularization is a cultural phe­ nomenon. In his analysis of modern secularization, Charles Taylor fo­ cuses, not on explicit theories or beliefs, but on what he calls the “social imaginary” and the “cosmic imaginary,” how ordinary people imagine their surroundings.88 The leading publicists of the X Club hoped to change the cosmic imaginary of their contemporaries.

31

Introduction

I.3 Introducing This Book The founding of the X Club in November 1864 divides this book in two. Because identifying its purpose is one of the most difficult questions about the Club, it is essential to keep before and after the founding an­ alytically separate. Chapters 1 (before 1850) and 2 (the 1850s) are intro­ ductory and biographical, setting the social, familial, religious, and sci­ entific scenes, and considering the personalities of the protagonists, all of which are important in later interpretations. These chapters also introduce a central theme about the interplay of expertise and birth in the making of scientific careers, and provide the grounding for later consideration of the ways in which the X Club differed from the preceding generation of science lobbyists. Social status, as experienced by the protagonists, is a major theme in chapters 1 and 2. Their scientific and social origins were as varied as the Halifax Mutual Improvement Society and Balliol College, Oxford. Some were born to, the others aspired to enter gentlemanly London science. That they became friends in later life illustrates that, even in the status-­ conscious world of Victorian science, scientific achievement was a means of social mobility. Religion is another major theme, particularly in chap­ ter 1, where I seek to identify the ways in which the religious beliefs of these men changed from youth to early adulthood. Given the relationship of the X-­brothers to secularizing theories and movements, it is important to understand their religious positions, both theologically and politically. Gentlemanly London science is examined in both chapters 1 and 2. Its conventions and changing values are contrasted with those of science in other regional and social contexts in chapter 1. Chapter 2 focuses on the five men who wanted to make an income from science. It describes their early struggles to make careers and elaborates on London science as these ambitious young men experienced it. It goes on to discuss their early efforts at scientific reform when, led by Hooker, their growing scientific status and employment security gave them the freedom to move beyond self-­interest. The X Club was formed in response to numerous controversies in the early 1860s—­over recognition of Darwin’s achievements, the right to freedom of thought in theology, and the science and politics of race. Chapter 3 (1860–­ 64) is therefore crucial to questions of motivation and purpose. It shows how common ideals and new friendships drew the group together. The attempts by representatives of orthodox theology to set boundaries for scientific and theological thought provoked 32

The X Cl u b 1 8 6 4 – ­9 2

the network to form wider alliances and engage in public action. The network members began to associate science with issues of intellectual freedom and to see themselves as members of a great liberal party. The chapter emphasizes that they often cooperated with leaders of liberal opinion within and outside the church, shows how Hooker drew others into many schemes, and identifies the importance of Busk to some projects usually seen as Huxley projects. In many ways, the friends were operating as a lobby group just as effectively before the formation of the Club as after. Nevertheless, I restrict the title “X Club” to the formal Club and its nine members from November 1864 and use the term “X-­network” for the emerging group of friends and allies before 1864 and for the loose and changing groups of allies with whom the Club members collaborated after 1864. From this point the chapters are divided thematically according to major areas of X Club activity. Chapter 4 (“Organizing Science”) focuses on X Club aims and activity within the scientific community, especially within the British Association and the Royal Society, both of which societies represented science as a whole. Chapter 5 (“Public Money and the Public Good”) focuses on science and the state, with specific reference to science education and to the funding of research. The issues turn out to be subtle: the tension between the utility of science and its cultural value; the shifting balance between private individuals, wealthy corporations, and the state as sources of money. Chapter 6 (“Claiming Cultural Authority”) covers the vigorous campaigns of the most famous X Club members to present science and scientific men as authoritative guides to life and belief. It shows both the extent to which they were aggressively polemical and the issues over which they collaborated with religious, literary, and (a new insight) legal elites. For most members of the X Club their devotion to the organization of science, the extension of science education, and public enlightenment hindered their scientific research. Throughout these chapters, therefore, there is a constant question of motivation: why did they care so much? The book is about the X Club, not about the accumulated activities of its members, but the boundary between the two is not easily drawn. Sometimes, when the members stacked committees or coordinated their lobbying, one can clearly talk about X Club action. Nevertheless, even when individuals were apparently acting alone, other members were often in the background, encouraging, advising, or restraining. Some of this advice has left traces; much was never recorded. On the basis of frag­ mentary evidence, I have judged which spheres of individual activity might be included as supported by the Club. 33

Introduction

The conclusion, titled “Retrospective: The Life, Work, and Times of the X Club,” is an overview of the work of the X Club from its origins to old age, and also an account of the structures of Victorian science and the place of science in Victorian culture as revealed by the X Club. Two problems are signaled here. There is yet another side to the Huxley problem. Huxley did not speak straightforward truth. It is amazing, Walter Houghton long ago pointed out, that anyone ever believed “the honest, plain-­speaking, impartial, peace-­loving Huxley myth.”89 In private Huxley often used irony, and at times I disagree with previous interpretations because I read as irony what another scholar reads straight. In public Huxley was always a controversialist. He was evasive and manipulative; he redefined terms in order to bamboozle opponents. He once described an intended argument as “danc[ing] between the eggs.” To use a Huxley definition risks entangling oneself in shifting double meanings. Words were weapons, chosen for “controversial efficiency,” so that adversaries who opposed the definition or principle would entangle themselves in contradictions.90 Hence, when Huxley tells posterity that he chose the label “agnostic” for himself because he felt naked or embarrassed, like a fox without a tail, I do not believe him. As Lightman has emphasized, “agnostic” was a rhetorical strategy.91 An “egg-­dance” was, literally, a dance in which the competitor aimed to dance between eggs laid out on the ground without breaking any. Huxley could give a lecture on a highly controversial topic while presenting himself as innocent of any intention to offend or cause controversy. A notable example was his paper to the Metaphysical Society on the miracle of the resurrection. He would not like his paper to “be regarded as an offensive attack,” he claimed, indeed, his criticism of the claimed miracle cast no aspersions on the honesty of Christ, because this was not one of those miracles that he had “professed” to perform.92 Implying that the disciples were gullible or dishonest and the whole tradition false was, supposedly, not offensive. Huxley well knew that attacking the central miracle of orthodox Christian belief was about as controversial as he could get. Secondly, there are frustrating gaps in the surviving records. Some mem­ bers, especially Busk and Spottiswoode, are underrepresented. Many of Busk’s scientific papers survive but few letters. For Spottiswoode there are many letters on organizational topics but few that are personally revealing. Although Spottiswoode and Busk are shown here to be significant actors, the lack of personal sources makes it impossible to determine the motives and ambitions behind their activities. For Spencer, although the surviving manuscripts are few, his many idiosyncrasies provoked his friends to provide interpretations of his character and motives that 34

The X Cl u b 1 8 6 4 – ­9 2

usefully supplement and provide perspective on the self-­analysis of his Autobiography. Throughout the book I often use Victorian language when paraphrasing and summarizing. I use words like “man,” “savage,” and “primitive,” intending to leave all the Victorian ambiguities and value judgments implicit. Similarly, I often capitalize Nature and Science as the X-­clubbers themselves did, and often retain titles such as “Sir John” and “Mrs.” Busk, all without scare quotes. This practice evokes their world; moreover, there is no way to translate “man” or “savage” into acceptable modern equivalents without losing the Victorian meanings. The book is a study of the ways in which power was exercised and authority gained in Victorian science, and of the place of science in Victorian culture. It shows how hierarchies of birth and expertise interacted in establishing scientific standing. It shows how X Club members, often depicted as defenders of scientific standards, drew on the authority of birth and wealth when their projects were under threat. It shows how they claimed the achievements of Victorian industry for science, while denigrating engineers and presenting scientific men as motivated by love of truth rather than love of money. It seeks to identify the fault lines that underlay the united front that Victorian scientific men often presented to the public world. It locates the X-­men in wider cultural networks, dining with aristocrats, colluding with Unitarians and liberal Anglicans, while presenting themselves as on the side of “the workers.” It includes the personal and the political, it pays attention to idiosyncrasies of temperament and to conflicts of ideology, to warm friendships and to effective networking.

35

Pa r t O n e

Origins and Ambitions

O NE

Cultures of Science in Early Victorian England Although the X Club members established their careers and reputations amid the institutions of gentlemanly London science, they came from widely varying backgrounds. Here, the future members of the Club are located in the “scientific culture” in which their scientific interests developed. The chapter includes gentlemanly London, where science was a complex balance of polite culture, sociability, useful knowledge, and expertise; mechanics’ institutes and the culture of self-­improvement; science as worldview among rational Dissenters; science at Oxford and Cambridge as part of the education of a Christian gentleman. By “culture of science” I mean the practices, beliefs, and assumptions that characterized a scientific community. These include the social organization (societies, clubs, dinner parties, for example); forms of communication (journals, lectures); and shared goals and purposes (whether improving agriculture, spreading rationality, bringing glory to the Creator, or enjoying polite recreation) that characterized a group. The chapter pays particular attention to the shaping of values and aspirations in different sociocultural contexts. Other major themes in the chapter are family context and the shaping of personality and temperament, and the development in early adulthood of the religious beliefs of the nine men. The chapter starts with gentlemanly London science, the context that shaped the early ambitions and careers of Busk, Hooker, and Lubbock. In the clubs, specialist societies, and 39

c h a p t e r O NE

lecturing institutions of gentlemanly London science, employed experts mixed with the well-­born, cultured, and wealthy. As the center of English public life, commercial activity, and publishing, London drew in many middle-­class professionals. The growing number of national scientific institutions in London ensured that men of science were part of this London-­ ward movement. Secular London offered more varied routes to scientific success than were available elsewhere in Britain and (with the exception of Spencer) no matter from where they started the X-­men aspired to establish themselves in elite scientific and social London circles. Gentlemanly London science is therefore central to this book. Identifying the nature of gentlemanly London science and the changes already underway before 1850 is important as a background against which to understand the efforts of the ambitious young outsiders to enter London science in the 1850s and also to identify any differences brought about by the following decades of near-­tireless activity by the X-­network. The following three sections follow the X-­members whose scientific interests were established in very different contexts. The sections move from lower to higher in the social order and from the provinces toward the metropolis in the spatial order, thereby mirroring the movement of the X Club members and symbolizing the significance of London in British life. First, I follow the education and aspirations of Edward Frankland, John Tyndall, and T. A. Hirst, artisans in northern industrial towns, who found in science a means to improve their position in the world. The world of mechanics’ institutes and mutual improvement societies allowed them to move beyond that world. Next, moving up the social order, I group Herbert Spencer and T. H. Huxley together as representatives of a radical provincial dissenting science. Although their career paths diverged, there are interesting early and later parallels that throw a revealing light on the nature of their different visions of scientific knowledge and scientific authority. Then I discuss science at Oxford (with brief allusions to Cambridge) as represented by William Spottiswoode, the only member of the X Club to have an Oxbridge education. These four cultures of science are by no means an exhaustive account of British science. For example, to take London alone, there were also radical medical reformers, scientific showmen, and bohemian literary advocates of new worldviews and lifestyles who advocated different political programs and occupied different social spaces from gentlemanly members of elite scientific societies.1 I choose “cultures” rather than “spaces” to interpret my material. The close attention to specific locations required by an emphasis on spaces 40

c u lt u r e s o f s c i e n c e

does not work well for a group of nine people operating in lecture theaters, committee rooms, laboratories, dining rooms, and the difficult-­to-­ locate spaces of editorial and publishing activity.

1.1 Gentlemanly London Science Gentlemanly London science was in conflict and transition in the early Victorian period, and for at least a decade previously. When Sir Joseph Banks, long-­term president of the Royal Society, friend of the king, and unofficial government minister of science, died in 1820, many groups who had long been discontented renewed their reforming efforts. Coincidentally, but conveniently for my narrative, the Hooker and Lubbock families represent different phases of reform. J. D. Hooker’s father, Sir William (from 1836), whose career had been promoted by the patronage of Banks, represents pre-­reform values, but Hooker junior entered science in the reform era, and his conflicted ambitions suggest tensions within gentlemanly science. Lubbock’s father was one of the reformers of the 1830s who wanted expertise to count for more and rank for less in scientific institutions. Lubbock junior entered the reformed Royal Society in the 1850s but, as we shall see in chapter 2, rank smoothed his entry to scientific society. Busk spent his scientific energies in more obscure locations; his very obscurity can be taken as representative of hundreds of medical men, businessmen, and others who pursued scientific inquiries and supported the burgeoning specialist scientific societies of the metropolis. This section aims to evoke the world of gentlemanly London science, a world of clubs and societies in which few leading scientific men had paid employment in science, and landed gentlemen, lawyers and medical men, and businessmen devoted their considerable spare time to science. It tracks the changes and the continuities in London scientific life over half a century, from the height of Sir Joseph Banks’s fame and power to the reforms of 1847. London was an enormous, rapidly growing city, the largest city by far in Britain and the largest in Europe throughout the nineteenth century. Its population was almost one million in 1800, passed two million in the early 1840s, and three million in the mid-­1860s. For comparison, Paris was half the size in the 1840s and, Liverpool and Glasgow, the next-­ largest British cities, about 300,000. As the center of English public life and the center of a commercial empire, London had a proportionately larger and more varied middle class than most other British towns and a correspondingly varied cultural life, in which science was one element.2 41

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William Jackson Hooker (1785–­1865) entered the patronage network of science when he discovered a new moss near his home town of Norwich in 1805.3 A local naturalist named the moss after him; Dawson Turner, a banker and naturalist in nearby Yarmouth introduced him to the Linnean Society; and there he met Joseph Banks. Hooker determined to devote himself to botany, which was possible because, although born in modest circumstances, in 1806 he inherited substantial property from his godfather. He made botanical tours to foreign parts, married Turner’s daughter, Maria, and was elected to other leading learned societies, the Royal Society, Society of Antiquaries, and Horticultural Society.4 These societies, with the Royal Society, represent the polite interest in antiquities, aesthetic and horticultural interests in landscaping and new plants, and economic interest in agricultural improvement at home and colonial development overseas that characterized elite science under the Banksian regime.5 Reversals of fortune made it impossible for William Hooker to continue as a gentleman botanist. Unfortunate investments and the expense of publishing illustrated botanical works diminished his income and, after 1815, his growing family increased his requirements. He needed employment. Through Banks’s patronage he was appointed in 1820 to the Regius Chair of Botany at Glasgow. The move to Glasgow meant both intellectual isolation and loss of status; the landowner of 1806 had become an employee. Hooker was a reluctant migrant, always hoping to return to the south.6 Although diminished in social status and financial resources, William Hooker continued to take a gentlemanly role in science. From Glasgow, he maintained an orientation to the outside worlds of government ministers, European botanists, gardeners, horticulturists, and land improvers. He supplemented his meager university income by boarding and tutoring students and writing books and editing magazines on gardening and horticulture. Student numbers and, hence, his income from student fees grew. In a dense network of patronage and obligation, Hooker’s credibility spiraled upward. He lobbied government to appoint botanists to voyages of scientific exploration and recommended his ex-­students as appointees; other students emigrated and Hooker encouraged them by giving duplicates from his plant collections and good introductions; his grateful, well-­placed students sent him exotic plants; his herbarium became ever-­more impressive; and he appealed to the government for assistance in publishing descriptions of new species. His private herbarium attracted scientific visitors to Glasgow and diminished his isolation. Within botany Hooker attained a Banksian-­type influence.7 Hooker had 42

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both paid and unpaid assistants in this ceaseless letter writing, plant sorting, and publication. Both his wife, Maria, and his second son, Joseph, worked in the herbarium and proofread the gardening and horticultural magazines. Thus Joseph, born just before his father moved to Glasgow, grew up in a household conscious of having lost status, and in which hard work was required to overcome financial constraints. In spite of his physical distance from London, William Hooker was a founding member of the Athenaeum Club, established in London in 1824 to provide a forum where leaders in art, science, and literature could associate with gentlemen by birth. In 1836, he was knighted—­with the support of the Duke of Bedford, an ardent horticulturist and improving landowner, who had (in the evocative words of the Linnean obituarist) “honoured” Hooker “with his friendship and correspondence.”8 Joseph’s parents hoped that he would follow in the footsteps of both his father and his maternal grandfather. At age seven he was taken to his father’s botany lectures. He was brought up to be hardworking, conscientious, orderly, devout—­and ambitious. His mother in particular, hoped that he would follow in his grandfather’s footsteps. This could have been a heavy burden to bear but, although Joseph showed interest in other branches of natural history, he willingly followed botany. At the age of fifteen, in 1832, he entered Glasgow University, with his elder brother, William. Joseph remembered these years as unhappy. He spoke to friends of the lack of sympathy and encouragement he was given when a student in Glasgow.9 Nor did he have happy memories of Yarmouth and his maternal grandfather. Turner, apparently, was condescending toward his lower-­status but more expert son-­in-­law; Joseph considered that his grandfather’s poor advice had contributed to his father’s financial woes. On one occasion, when in Yarmouth to assist his grandfather with herbarium work, Joseph pointed out that a supposedly rare moss was actually a common species. When his grandfather was publicly sarcastic, Joseph ran away to an aunt in London.10 As a boy, Hooker had read illustrated travel narratives and dreamed of undertaking such adventures himself—­in the steps of Banks and Alexander von Humboldt. In 1838, when attending his first meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, he heard of an opportunity. Captain James Clark Ross, the eminent arctic explorer, was to lead a voyage to measure the earth’s magnetic field in the southern oceans. Voyages, which provided an opportunity to collect in exotic places, were the route to botanical fame. The enthusiastic young botanist was delighted when Ross told him he could have a surgeon’s position if he finished his medical training by the departure date. 43

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Joseph knew that, like his father, he would have to make a living from botany and that he could not hope to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps as “a naturalist with a fortune.” He could not afford to be “proud.”11 Hooker’s attitudes were contradictory. As Endersby presents him, Hooker accepted that paid employment lowered the social status of a gentleman, that is, he accepted the value system of his grandfather; he also insisted that manners rather than birth made the gentleman. His insistence that courtesy should govern scientific interaction was one of the ways in which he carried the older values into the new world of salaried employment. At the same time, he respected his father’s science over his grandfather’s. Expertise counted for more than gentlemanly status of the conventional kind. The tensions between the gentlemanly and expert ideals will appear at various points below in Hooker’s relationships with his X Club friends and is revealed in differences between his and his father’s expectations. William Hooker continued gentlemanly Banksian traditions. His person was handsome, his demeanor courtly. Although his expenses exceeded his official salary, he showed a gentlemanly generosity. He admitted any visiting botanist to the library and herbarium, which he kept up at his own expense. His son did not share this sense of the public responsibility of a gentleman but expected, instead, that public service should be adequately compensated by a publicly funded salary.12 In later life Joseph Hooker emphasized the generosity that his father took for granted. Sir William (from 1836) was a supportive father and a skilled manipulator of patronage, in both his own and Joseph’s interests. He contributed £50 for books and microscopes needed for Joseph’s botanical work on the Antarctic voyage. The younger Hooker was inclined to exaggerate the insufficiency of government support. His income soon covered the initial expenditure, for officers on the long and dangerous expedition were on double pay.13 On the four-­year voyage he collected plants in some of the bleakest places on earth. His father was both demanding and supportive. Sir William criticized drawings and collections not up to his standards, even when Joseph explained that the ship was tossing or the plants wet when collected.14 Nevertheless, in his absence Sir William nominated him for the fellowship of the Linnean Society and brought his work to the attention of powerful potential patrons. In his son’s absence, Sir William gained the position he had long coveted as head of the Royal Gardens at Kew. This position marked a shift in the Royal Gardens’ status from the private gardens of the king to public gardens funded by the state. The appointment occurred by time-­tested procedures, more characteristic of the passing world than the new. Powerful patronage and Sir William’s willingness to take a modest salary won 44

1.1 Sir Edward Sabine, science reformer, lobbyist, and patron in the 1840s and 1850s.

Sabine supported the Royal Society reformers in the 1840s and was an effective lobbyist for the Antarctic expedition that was the foundation of Hooker’s career. He was a patron to Tyndall in the early 1850s (chapter 2.1), but by 1870 he was the old guard (chap­ ter 4.3). Source: 1851 engraving by Thomas Maguire. Wellcome Library, London.

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him the position. The advantages of being located in London, the status that came from association with a “Royal” garden, and the hope of developing a national and imperial botanical garden made him willing to take a reduction in income.15 From Kew, he was invited to Buckingham Palace to discuss the progress of the expedition; he took the opportunity to show his son’s letters and drawings to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The Banksian learned empire had been largely dismembered when William Hooker returned to London in 1841.16 Experts from disciplines undervalued or neglected by Banks had set up new, more specialized societies. John William Lubbock was associated with the mathematical malcontents who valued expertise over polite knowledge and social status, and who resented Banks’s control of government patronage. Little has been written about Lubbock senior, and the fragmentary sources are sometimes contradictory, but it is clear that J. W. Lubbock was a person of importance in scientific politics and in the Cambridge tradition of mathematical physics.17 John William Lubbock and his mathematical mentors represented a return from the natural history to the mathematical sciences. As a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the early 1820s, Lubbock took up with enthusiasm the French mathematical methods then being advocated by Cambridge mathematicians as the means to revive the physical sciences in Britain. He applied Laplace’s probability theory to calculations of annuities and, later, applied analytical techniques to such problems as tides and the perturbations of planetary motion. In 1828 he became a member of the Astronomical Society, a center of mathematical expertise and opposition to Banksian gentlemanly traditions in science. In the Astronomical Society, Cambridge mathematicians joined scientific men from the army and navy and London mathematical practitioners of lesser social status to apply sophisticated mathematical techniques to large bodies of physical data.18 In 1829 he was elected fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). At this time Banksian traditions were under attack in the Royal Society of London. The reformers, who were arguing for the priority of expertise over broad gentlemanly learning, were outraged in 1830 when, without consulting the society’s council, the retiring president offered the presidency, as if it were his personal property, to the Duke of Sussex, brother of King William. The duke had the traditional qualification of being in a position to represent the needs of science to government, but the reformers wanted a scientific president. They persuaded the eminent but young astronomer, John Herschel, to stand against the duke, an extreme act of public opposition to a royal duke, which seemed to contemporaries to represent the radical democratic threats of the early 1830s.19 46

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Lubbock sided publicly with the reformers in this hotly contested election. Herschel lost, but Lubbock himself was elected treasurer, only one year after his election to the fellowship. Lubbock became de facto president, because the duke seldom attended council meetings and the treasurer, chosen for his business competence, was customarily deputy chair.20 On the council Lubbock maintained his reform credentials. David Brewster, the Scottish critic of Royal Society affairs, praised him as the “ablest member” of the Royal Society Council. He disturbed more moderate fellows by resigning the treasurership in 1835 as a protest at the duke’s nonattendance at council meetings and took the treasurership again only when the Duke of Sussex resigned in 1838.21 John William Lubbock was involved in many reforming movements and institutions. He was appointed first vice-­chancellor of the University of London, when that compromise institution was established in 1836 to examine and give degrees to students of the secular University College and the Anglican King’s College. He had both reform and traditional credentials, which probably made him acceptable to both the promoters of University College, who wanted higher education to be broadened in curriculum and free of religious tests, and the traditionalists who wanted university education to be a religious education. In 1832 he had briefly campaigned as a radical for the Cambridge parliamentary seat.22 On the other hand, he was Anglican and, as the heir to a baronetcy (he became Sir John in 1840) and a private bank, he had social standing and wealth of an acceptable kind. As London grew there were ever-­more professional men, men in business, and leisured gentlemen with scientific interests, and also a small but growing number of men employed in scientific positions. The growing numbers of potential members, as much as the growth of knowledge and the specialization internal to science, contributed to the growing number and diversity of learned societies in the metropolis. The societies are often listed in chronological order of founding, to illustrate the growth of specialist societies, but following David Allen’s insight that fees functioned as “symbols” of the social status a society saw itself as attaining, I have listed societies in order of cost of entry (see table 1.1).23 This order reveals the status hierarchy among the societies and shows that new specialist socie­ ties were more open to men of modest means than the older institutions. Fee differences were significant. Societies that wanted to be socially exclusive set their fees high. At or near the top are the four societies supported by Banks, the Royal Society, the Society of Antiquaries, the Horticultural Society, and Linnean Society. The founders of the Geological Society, although intending to challenge Sir Joseph’s control of science, 47

Table 1.1  London’s learned societies, 1847, ranked1 in order of membership fees

Society Royal Society of London 1660 Society of Antiquaries of London 1707 Horticultural Society 1804 Geological Society of London 1807 Linnean Society 1788 Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland Zoological Society of London 1826 Royal Botanic Society of London 1839 Royal Society of Literature 1823 Royal Geographical Society of London 1830 Royal Astronomical Society 1820 Entomological Society of London 1833 Numismatic Society 1836 Society for the Encour­ agement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce 1753 Statistical Society of London 1834 Microscopical Society 1839 Philological Society 1842 Botanical Society of London 1831

Admission fee

Annual fee2

Life membership

£10

£4

£60

8gs

4gs

40gs

6gs

4gs

40gs

6gs

3gs

30gs

£6

£3

£30

5gs

3gs

30gs

£5

£3

£30

5gs

2gs

20gs

3gs

2gs

20gs

£3

£2

£25

2gs

2gs

20gs

2gs

1g

10gs

1g

30s 2gs

20gs

2gs

20gs

1g

1g

10gs

1g

1g

10gs

1g

1g

7gs

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Table 1.1  (continued )

Society Chemical Society 1841 Ethnological Society of London 1843 Syro-­Egyptian Society 1844 British Archaeological Association 1843 Archaeological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 1843

Admission fee

Annual fee2

Life membership

£2 £2

£12

1g 1g

10gs

£1

£10

Sources: Hume, Learned Societies and Printing Clubs of the United Kingdom (1853). The num­ bers in Weale, London Exhibited in 1851 ([1851]), 537–­89, are slightly different; Morrell, “London Institutions and Lyell’s Career,” 135, identifies other societies. My thanks to Geoffrey Cantor and Jon Topham for drawing these sources to my attention. Notes: 1 The ranking is in order of cost to join, that is, admission fee plus annual membership fee. 2 One guinea (g) is £1.1s or 21 shillings. Some societies had lower rates for nonresident members. Only the resident rates are given here.

obviously did not intend to admit those without gentlemanly means. The enormous variety of subject matter is conspicuous; the downward trend in fees over time is equally noteworthy. Learned societies were becoming less socially exclusive. By the 1840s some did not charge entrance fees. Most of these societies met weekly or fortnightly. Meetings were dull by modern standards. Memoirs were usually read by the secretary; the titles of papers were not announced in advance; some secretaries did not read clearly; and there was no open discussion of the papers that had been read.24 It was a controversial innovation when the Geological Society decided in the mid-­1820s that all papers could be discussed at meetings. Some visitors attended “to see the fellows fight,” but the discussions were strictly private and no public reporting was allowed. Other societies were slow to follow suit. Many feared that discussion would become undignified, most notably the Linnean Society, which did not permit discussion until the 1850s (see chapter 2.3).25 By contrast, at the lowly Microscopical Society the formal meeting was always followed by an informal conversazione.26 London scientific society was an endless round of scientific societies, 49

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dinners with other gentlemen, lectures, receptions, soirées, and dinner parties. It would have been possible to attend lectures and meetings of scientific societies on five nights each week during the “season,” that is, from November to June. Then there were the dinners—­dinners before the Friday evening lectures at the Royal Institution, dinners of the clubs associated with some scientific societies, the annual dinners held by the elite scientific societies, and dinners with friends and acquaintances at one’s club. When Darwin was considering marriage, one of the disadvantages he listed was the loss of conversation with “clever men in clubs.” Darwin liked the elite Athenaeum Club where wealthy gentlemen and leading artists, authors, and scholars could associate. Its library was magnificent (see figure 6.2), its reading room took all the newspapers, its meals were cheap—­but membership, which was strictly limited, was six guineas per year in addition to the admission fee of twenty-­five guineas. For younger and poorer men of science there was the informal Red Lion Club, which had no premises and existed only through its rambunctious meetings. The rooms, especially the libraries, of scientific societies were also places where members went for scientific talk. Then there were the soirées and receptions. The president of the Royal Society was expected to invite all the fellows to his apartments three or four times a year. Wealthy men also held large receptions, for example, Charles Babbage gave regular grand soirées in the late 1830s.27 Those who wanted to do “scientific work,” that is, research, avoided the merely social round, but much science took place in informal social and domestic situations. On his return from the Beagle voyage, Darwin spent long hours in conversation with Lyell. The private locations were particularly important for scientific women. In the 1820s and 1830s Mary Somerville, Jane Marcet, and Mary Kater, their husbands, and leading scientific men talked science over dinners and performed experiments at evening parties.28 The allusions in biographies suggest that science was a highly social activity. It was embedded in a world where cultured ladies and gentlemen had expansive time for conversation and visiting. Over the nineteenth century public and formal institutional contexts came to dominate scientific activity but, as recent literature on “country-­house science” shows, even at the end of the century domestic contexts were not erased.29 In the commercial and professional circles of London attitudes were a great deal more secular, in the sense of this-­worldly, than at Oxford and Cambridge, nevertheless a polite Anglicanism ruled.30 The public culture of politeness required that unbelievers should not offend the feelings of the devout. The aging University College radical, William Sharpey, ad50

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vised the young geologist Andrew Ramsay to avoid talking heterodoxy as it would give offense.31 Some freethinkers found their social lives constrained by these conventions. Robert Brown, keeper of the Banksian herbarium at the British Museum, appeared withdrawn in society, William Hooker explained to his son, because he had “sceptical notions in religion” that inhibited his conversation.32 Liberal-­minded believers, like Herschel, expected that rigid orthodox beliefs would gradually change; in the meantime, they felt that open attack not only offended unnecessarily but also produced overreactions.33 The Hookers were devout evangelicals and Sir William and Lady Hooker trusted in a good God in the face of death. Their son’s beliefs became vague, even skeptical, although when and why is unrecorded. In the 1840s when first his brother and later a sister died, Hooker believed he would meet them again, in heaven. By the 1860s, Hooker had departed far from evangelicalism, although he still hoped that there was an afterlife in which the good would be rewarded. By midlife he was interested in comparative religion, which gave a relativizing perspective on all religions, but he kept his beliefs to himself to avoid bringing distress to his relatives.34 The niceties of social status were exhibited in the organization of learned societies. Societies at the top of the hierarchy had titled aristocrats as presidents; titled gentlemen, navy and army officers, and higher clergy served on their councils—­alongside more modestly born men with recognized expertise. In the lowlier societies, a president with an FRS or FLS (fellow of the Linnean Society) gave status and respectability to the society. The preeminent but middling-­born naturalist, Richard Owen, FRS, was the first president of the Microscopical Society. Different roles were suitable for different ranks of person. Secretaries were usually working men of science. No one expected titled gentlemen to do the mundane work of organization. Treasurers were often men of business. There were a small but growing number of paid positions in science in the early Victorian period. There had long been a few government positions, some scientific societies had positions for scientific employees, chemists had increasing opportunities with employment available in industry and sometimes within government, and there were a growing number of teaching and lecturing positions in London—­in teaching hospitals, military schools, university colleges, for example.35 These varied positions did not add up to a career structure in any science, but it became possible for ambitious young men to aspire to scientific employment. New positions and new institutions indicate the growing utility of science and a small shift from royal and private funding to state 51

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funding, but proprietorial and corporate funding remained important contributors to scientific employment. The largest employer of scientific expertise in Britain in the 1840s was the government-­funded Geological Survey. This was an ad hoc creation and did not represent government recognition of the benefits of applied science. Rather, the Geological Survey had its origins in the personal needs of Henry De la Beche, gentleman geologist, who successfully lobbied the government for assistance in producing geological maps of mining counties when his comfortable income from a Jamaican sugar plantation collapsed in the 1830s. From being given £300 for one year and the title of Geologist to the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain, De la Beche built up a semipermanent and independent Geological Survey, with himself as director on a salary of £500. The Survey employed field geologists in Wales and Ireland; in 1837, it established a Museum of Economic Geology (with staff) in London. This was “jobbery” on a grand scale. Like Sir William Hooker at Kew, De la Beche emphasized the economic and utilitarian benefits of his science when seeking increased support, but De la Beche was far more effective in building an empire.36 The geological knowledge available from his maps and from the specimens in the museum, would, he claimed, be useful in the discovery of minerals, the planning of town water supplies, and the adaptation of agriculture to soil type. By 1848 the Survey employed over twenty men at middle-­class salaries and at least a dozen assistants on working-­class weekly wages. The Geological Survey, and especially its museum, became the base for future government initiatives in science. A laboratory was added to the museum in 1839 and its curator was appointed chemist, with the task of analyzing mineralogical samples. An organic chemist was added in 1845 because Prime Minister Peel was enthusiastic about agricultural chemistry. Both chemists acted as consultants to government and provided private analyses on a commercial basis.37 De la Beche, who was scheming for a school of mines (discussed further in chapter 5 below), introduced occasional lectures at his museum. Scientific men in general believed that the English way of voluntary support for science was preferable to the government funding and centralized control that were characteristic of France.38 The Geological Survey remained anomalous. Most government support for science, other than for military purposes, was in the form of funding for limited-­term projects—­ exploring expeditions, and processing the data and collections from expeditions. The 1847 reformers of the Royal Society did not challenge voluntarism. Their concerns were not with government support but with raising the scientific standing of the Society. 52

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Changes in election procedures for both fellows and council were the chief reforms of 1847. The number of new fellows was limited to fifteen, and elections held only once a year. This resulted in more careful scrutiny of the scientific accomplishments of candidates. Formal rules for the election of council members were introduced to ensure greater turnover of members. Councils thereby became more representative; they were also given greater power in relation to the officers and president. It became customary to require that the president have both social status and scientific expertise. The first president elected after the 1847 reforms was an earl, the second a lowlier baron; both were working astronomers. The Royal Society reformers represented both gentlemanly and business expertise. The leading reformers were William Grove, a patent lawyer and researcher on electro-­chemistry, and Leonard Horner, president of the Geological Society, an ardent supporter of educational and factory reform, who was independently wealthy. Another reformer was Colonel Sabine of the Royal Artillery, a leader of the geomagnetic crusade—­which had promoted Ross’s Antarctic expedition—­to collate geomagnetic data from worldwide observations. On his election as secretary of the Royal Society in 1827, Sabine had been granted leave of absence from military duties by the Duke of Wellington. Apart from seven years when he was recalled for active service in Ireland, Sabine continued his scientific pursuits and received regular military promotion until he retired from the presidency of the Royal Society in 1871 as General Sir Edward Sabine, KCB.39 Another leading reformer was J. P. Gassiot, a wealthy wine merchant and, like Grove, an investigator of electro-­chemistry. Thus a lawyer, a wine merchant, a wealthy social reformer, and a military officer were leaders in the Royal Society reforms. This active social world in which the devotees of science pursued research and gave their time to the administration of scientific societies was the world in which Busk, Hooker, and Lubbock established scientific careers. (Sabine, Grove, and Gassiot remained active in London science and reappear in later chapters.) George Busk was one of the hundreds of busy gentlemen who sustained London scientific life and who have sunk into historiographical obscurity. That he survives historiographically is largely due to his X Club associations. He was a son of Robert Busk, a British merchant in Saint Petersburg, and Jane Westly, the daughter of a customhouse clerk in Saint Petersburg. After school in Yorkshire, Busk trained as a surgeon through a long, six-­year apprenticeship and in London teaching hospitals. In 1832, he became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons and was appointed surgeon to the Seamen’s Hospital Society, which had been founded for the relief of merchant seamen. He worked from the 53

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society’s hospital ship, the Grampus (later replaced by the Dreadnought), which was moored at Greenwich. From the knowledge of botany and anatomy and the skills in dissection gained from his medical education, Busk, like many medical men, developed scientific expertise. His social and medical status was sufficient for him to be elected one of the first fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1843. Also in that year, on his thirty-­sixth birthday, he married Ellen Busk, a cousin on his father’s side.40 The records of family friends show her to have been an intelligent and independent-­minded woman. Busk’s engagement with scientific society began in the lowly Microscopical Society, many members of which were from the lower levels of the medical profession. His scientific interests seem to have developed during his early years of medical practice, for his first recorded scientific publications date from 1841. His research took advantage of his Greenwich location. He became an expert on the Polyzoa genus of small marine creatures and studied some of the diseases presented by his seamen patients. In 1839 he was a founding member of the Microscopical Society, became editor of the society’s journal in 1842, and served as president from 1848 to 1850. In 1846 he became a fellow of the Linnean Society, and in 1850 his achievements were recognized by election as FRS, with the impressively large number of thirty signatures of support on his election certificate.41 Thus his scientific career shows a rise, socially and scientifically, in the hierarchy of scientific societies.42 In the early 1850s his interest in Polyzoa brought him into association with Huxley, and his positions as an examiner for medical qualifications brought him into association with Hooker, as will be discussed in chapter 2. Busk was sufficiently wealthy that he did not need to develop an extensive medical practice, hence he had time to give to the administration of scientific societies and in the mid-­1850s was able to retire from the Seamen’s Hospital Society. From that time Busk was a conscientious secretary, editor, referee, and council member for many scientific societies, while continuing his own research program. His motives and ambitions are entirely hidden but, as later chapters show, he was crucial to many of the projects of Hooker and Huxley. Little personal information survives—­he was a dull lecturer and, according to Huxley, he lacked self-­confidence.43 There is no direct information on his religious beliefs or practice. Adrian Desmond interprets the Busks as freethinkers, given their acceptance of Huxley’s skepticism, but free thinking cannot be equated with atheistic or even agnostic conclusions. “In thy light shall we see light,” a quotation from the Psalms, is on Busk’s gravestone.44 This may be an allusion to life after death, which was sometimes the “mini54

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mal remnant of conventional religiosity” as Helmstadter illustrates, or to the light of knowledge.45 Thus for the Busks, as for Hooker, we can conclude only that they held some beliefs in common with Christian tradition. It is clear from further allusions (see chapters 3.3 and 4.2) that they were not orthodox in their beliefs. Hooker returned to England in 1843. He was put on half pay and given a sinecure appointment to a queen’s yacht (a total of about £136), and Sir William appealed privately to Captain Ross to assist in gaining an Admiralty grant for publishing the botany of the voyage. The expense of illustrations—­Sir William estimated five hundred at £2 each—­ put the project beyond any private funding. The Admiralty paid £1,000 and increased Hooker’s salary to £200 per year.46 Thus, through his father’s mastery of clientage, Hooker gained an increased income and an opportunity to publish a reputation-­enhancing work. From the mid-­1840s Sir William worked to secure Kew as his son’s inheritance. He schemed “to induce Lord Lincoln to form a Museum” and then an herbarium to provide employment for Joseph. As Richard Drayton aptly sums up his arguments, Sir William translated “private and professional desiderata into questions of the public interest.” To gain a museum, he displayed his personal collection of “the economic products of the vegetable kingdom” to the visiting Commissioners of Parks and Forests. If publicly available at Kew, he represented, such a collection would be of service to physicians, merchants, manufacturers, dyers, among others, as well as instructing the public. The commissioners were persuaded; in 1847, a building was converted into a Museum of Economic Botany. Once the existence of the museum was known, gifts of vegetable products rapidly accumulated, appearing to confirm the national utility of botany and of Kew.47 Meanwhile, Hooker sought other positions. He applied for the Edinburgh chair of botany in 1845 but, to the astonishment of his relatives, friends, and colleagues, was passed over. In the short term, he obtained a position at the rapidly growing Geological Survey—­through his father. Sir Henry De la Beche asked Sir William to recommend a botanist for the Geological Survey and, unsurprisingly, Sir William recommended his son.48 Reforming liberal governments were not interested in Kew as a scientific institution. They saw the gardens as a public park that, by providing healthy recreation and beautiful plants, would improve “the people.” Sir William responded appropriately to their expectations, extending opening hours, for example. His annual reports emphasized the public benefit, demonstrated by the increasing numbers of visitors, from 9,000 in 1841 to almost 180,000 in 1850. Equally important, he courted the great who came to see showy exotic plants: the queen visited regularly; the Duchess 55

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of Gloucester and her children “commanded” his attendance twice in one week, he reported to his father-­in-­law. Joseph was angry at the time his father stood about waiting for aristocratic guests to arrive.49 Although he often disagreed with his father’s deferential ways, the younger Hooker learned from him the art of clientage. In 1847, to renew his reputation and dignity after the Edinburgh failure, he sought appointment to another expedition, this time to the botanically rich tropics. His botanical reputation was confirmed when early in the year he was elected FRS—­with twenty signatures on his nomination certificate.50 Hooker wrote carefully to Captain Ross seeking his support for the new expedition, for of the three floras expected from the Antarctic voyage, only the Flora Antarctica was finished. Hooker emphasized what he had already accomplished—­and how much of his own and his father’s money had gone into the projects.51 At the end of 1847 he left for India, traveling, courtesy of the Admiralty, on the ship carrying the young Lord Dalhousie, the new governor general, to India. On the journey, he became friendly with Lord and Lady Dalhousie and was invited to stay with them at Government House in Calcutta.52 Sir John Lubbock, like Sir William Hooker, wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. He believed that the mathematical sciences were superior to the natural history sciences, but in spite of his best efforts, young John showed no facility for mathematics and a strong interest in natural history. “My eldest boy shows little turn for figures but a most decided turn for natural history,” he told his friend, Herschel.53 The conventional upper-­class education that Sir John chose for his son—­a prep school followed by Eton—­ provided no stimulus to science. John Lubbock had initially been educated at home by his mother, a cultured woman who educated her young children herself. John, the eldest, was much in the company of adults; he took religion, goodness, and natural history seriously. To the consternation of his teachers at Eton, young Lubbock wrote a Latin exercise on “The Bee,” a most unclassical topic. Undeterred by the unsympathetic environment, Lubbock pursued his natural history interests in his considerable free time. He had private encouragement from Charles Darwin who lived about a mile from the Lubbock family estate of High Elms, near Farnborough in Kent. Darwin, for example, persuaded Sir John to give the boy a microscope on his eleventh birthday.54 John Lubbock’s scientific education began more systematically only when he left Eton, at the early age of fourteen, in 1848. His departure was largely due to ill health. At the beginning of 1849 the fourteen-­year-­old joined the Royal Institution, and through its lectures he received a broad scientific education. Lecture notes remain, recording the courses he at56

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tended in the winter sessions from 1849 to 1851. His first lecture was the last in Faraday’s celebrated series of lectures to children on “The Candle.” Lubbock then regularly attended educational courses: palaeontology, three courses on chemistry, including a series of laboratory lectures, three courses on physiology, and one course on “the geographical distribution of organized beings.” Thus, although the splendid Friday evening lectures for fashionable audiences were the public face of the Royal Institution, it maintained its serious, less conspicuous, educational function. Lubbock also attended more general-­interest lectures—­for example, Pettigrew on an Egyptian mummy in March 1849 and Murchison on “The Distribution of Gold” in March 1850—­but the Royal Institution was more important to him for its educational functions than as rational entertainment. At home in Kent there was time for rabbit shooting, for ice skating and balls in winter, and for whole days of cricket in summer.55 By 1852 young John Lubbock was studying more independently and attending fewer lectures. He set a study schedule, just as did ambitious young men in lesser circumstances. On days when he was neither at the bank nor diverted by social activities, he planned to give about eight hours to study, of which at least half was natural history, two hours to religious observance, and left six and a half hours for sleep. Lubbock’s day began: get up, dress, “say my Prayers, read the Psalms and Chapters and go to Papa with my mathematics, which takes about ten minutes before breakfast.” (This was to check the mathematics that he had studied for an hour the previous evening.) After breakfast: reading natural history, household prayers, “work with microscope,” and more reading. After lunch there was usually a break, then: poetry, political economy, tea, “more science” (unspecified), natural history, history, whist, history, mathematics, sermons, German (he had learned French as a child), prayers, bed. Even when the schedule was not maintained, Lubbock fitted in some science, for example, between dressing and going downstairs to the Seven Oaks ball, he read “a paper of Busk’s on Volvox for an hour.”56 Lubbock’s reading program in natural history gradually developed into independent research. Some of his early work was in collaboration with Darwin, which suggests that an apprenticeship-­ style induction to research was added to his earlier Royal Institution education. Darwin taught the young Lubbock how to illustrate specimens, and in the scheduled hours of “microscope work” Lubbock prepared illustrations for Darwin’s barnacle book; his first publications (three articles in the Natural History Magazine in 1853) were descriptions of various Crustacea species collected on Darwin’s Beagle voyage. In 1854, he was describing Crustacea species from arctic regions and from the Cape of Good Hope 57

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for a British Museum catalog.57 Lubbock’s links with the Darwin family were both social and scientific. He was only five years older than the Darwin’s eldest son. Early in 1853 he spent an evening at the Darwins’, dancing and playing cards; about a month later, after attending a Tuesday morning service at Down Church, he “went to see Mr Darwin for a little advice” on the proofs of one of his Crustacea papers.58 There was a naive seriousness and entire absence of cynicism in the political and religious views expressed by Lubbock in these years. He described, with approving tone, a school where “church principles” were instilled. He tried to attend morning service daily, especially during Lent, and taught Sunday School in 1853–­54. Visiting relatives in the north of England he recorded uncritically their opinion that high wages only increased drunkenness and therefore did the poor no good.59 Yet he read widely and without prejudice: George Combe on The Relation of Science and Religion, John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, G. H. Lewes, Physiology of Common Life. His conversations covered all the topics of the day—­phrenology, table turning, French novels, and Kossuth (the Hungarian nationalist). One of the few topics on which he recorded his own opinion had particular interest to him as a naturalist. In a late-­night conversation with his young male cousins on the mutability of species, “we all agreed that it seemed probable they might change into one another.”60 His journals express an uncritical conservatism on social and political issues, an undogmatic piety in religion, and an open curiosity about the natural world. Hooker and Lubbock both experienced the benefits of education in intellectual families—­their fathers, their mothers, and their fathers’ friends contributed to their learning. Their economic circumstances, by contrast, were entirely different. Hooker needed employment and Lubbock did not, but his scientific opportunities were also constrained. John Lubbock might do “good work” in natural history, Darwin predicted, but only if he could resist the pull of “great wealth, business and rank.”61 Lubbock did not resist, and to the disappointment of many scientific friends he later sought a parliamentary career. In the 1850s, though, as will be discussed in chapter 2, Lubbock, Hooker, and Busk were advancing their scientific reputations in London.

1.2 Science for Self-­Improvement: Frankland, Tyndall, and Hirst Socially, culturally, and geographically those X Club members whose origins were furthest from gentlemanly scientific life were John Tyndall, 58

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born in County Carlow, Ireland, circa 1822;62 Edward Frankland, born in Lancashire in 1825; and Thomas Archer Hirst, born in Yorkshire in 1830. For each of them science became a route to achievement and status. That they succeeded was due to immense self-­discipline, the encouragement of patrons, and the opportunities provided by mechanics’ institutes, mutual improvement societies, polytechnics, reading rooms, and mechanics’ magazines. Although many historical accounts focus on the larger and longer-­lasting mechanics’ institutions, the institutions of self-­ improvement were highly varied, and small, informal, even transient societies were often as significant in stimulating ambition and providing education as larger institutions, as both Ian Inkster and David Vincent emphasize.63 Moreover, as the examples of Tyndall, Frankland, and Hirst illustrate, the Mechanics’ Magazine and private reading were also important means of education. Frankland and Hirst were both youthful apprentices when they joined local institutions of self-­improvement; for Tyndall the Mechanics’ Magazine was important in his self-­education; for all three the mentors who encouraged them and loaned books were crucially important. When I use the phrase mechanics’ institute culture I refer to this whole range of institutions, formal and informal, with their associated social and individual practices, and the ideals and ambitions that encouraged both members and isolated individuals to persevere. The mechanics’ institutes and related institutions, which flourished throughout England from the 1820s, were especially successful and popular in the West Riding of Yorkshire and in Lancashire, where Frankland, Hirst, and Tyndall were located.64 Although originally intended to acquaint mechanics and artisans “with branches of science of practical application in their trade,” the majority of students were very young workingmen and youths who had insufficient elementary education to benefit from scientific and technical classes.65 Thus, in practice, the chief achievement of these institutions was teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic to those whose elementary education was minimal. The higher classes, in such subjects as drawing and design, mechanics, chemistry, and French, were attended by skilled mechanics and also by young clerks and warehousemen of the middling orders.66 Frankland, Tyndall, and Hirst were atypical products of mechanics’ institute culture in that all three had secondary education; they were the kind of young men for whom the institutes were intended. Even for those who were well prepared, as Vincent emphasizes and as the lives of Frankland, Tyndall, and Hirst exemplify, rising in the world through education required self-­denial, self-­discipline, and good luck. Their detailed personal journals provide a rich account of mechanics’ 59

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institute culture: hard work, the recreation of young men, rising ambitions, financial constraints, political and religious controversy. Although younger than Tyndall, Frankland’s scientific interest started earlier, and this account therefore begins with Frankland in the mid-­1830s. Edward Frankland had his earliest contact with mechanics’ institutes at about age ten when he began borrowing books from the Lancaster Mechanics’ Institute library. Frankland was from a modest artisan background. His mother had been a domestic servant, his stepfather was a cabi­netmaker—­stepfather, because Frankland was illegitimate. Fear that his secret would be discovered was a lifelong psychological burden. However, because Frankland’s biological father paid an annuity to his mother that provided for his education, Frankland’s parents had ambitions for their son. He was sent to good schools and learned both French and Latin. His parents believed that a classical education would bring greater opportunities, but Frankland was more interested in the objects and processes of the natural world than in literature. For example, from books borrowed from the Mechanics’ Institute library he conducted tricks and experiments with electricity at home. Medicine was a possible career but the family doctor advised the Franklands that establishing Edward as a surgeon would cost £1,000. The annuity was only about £60 a year, so on his fifteenth birthday Edward Frankland entered a six-­year apprenticeship with a Lancaster pharmacist.67 Frankland learned little science as an apprentice pharmacist, but he found encouragement in his scientific pursuits through patrons associated with the Mechanics’ Institute. His master sold drugs, food, and paint. From the physical work of grinding materials for paint and medicines, Frankland progressed to serving drugs and groceries in the store and, in his final years, to pulling teeth and prescribing. Outside work hours Frankland was able to learn some chemistry through the support and patronage of two local medical men, Christopher Johnson and his son, Dr. James Johnson, who were supporters of the Mechanics’ Institute. The Lancaster Mechanics’ Institute was essentially a library, with only occasional lectures. The Johnsons set up a private laboratory and lecture room and encouraged local druggists’ apprentices to study chemistry textbooks and perform for themselves the experiments described. James Johnson gave occasional experimental demonstrations, and the Johnsons and other local medical men gave occasional chemical lectures at the Mechanics’ Institute. Frankland worked long and regular hours, and his diary mentions few diversions beyond chemistry. Frankland’s life was also shaped by his conversion to evangelical Christianity toward the end of his apprenticeship. Previously he had at60

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tended the large Congregational Chapel in Lancaster and observed the outward practices of conventional piety. For unrecorded reasons, in late 1843 he turned to the more introspective and demanding practice of the evangelical movement. He felt guilt for his sins and experienced conversion. He became a formal member of the chapel fellowship, a Sunday School teacher, and a regular attendee at chapel services. The patronage of the Johnsons gave Frankland life-­changing career opportunities. Having made it possible for him to learn some chemistry during his apprenticeship, they now suggested that Frankland should seek further training in chemistry, and they successfully sought a position for him. Christopher Johnson was a man of broad culture, well-­informed on the state of British science. He knew that Lyon Playfair, a chemist trained under the famous Justus Liebig at the University of Giessen, had recently been appointed organic chemist at the Museum of Economic Geology in London. Johnson recommended his protégé to Lord Lincoln, head of the Commission for Woods and Forests, which administered the museum, and to the Conservative MP for Lancaster, whose London house was only two doors from Playfair’s laboratory. These approaches were successful, and Frankland left Lancaster for London to become a pupil of Lyon Playfair. This cost about £80 a year, £30 to Playfair for tuition and £50 to the museum for chemicals.68 Association with Playfair brought Frankland to the center of British chemistry. Educated at the universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Giessen, Playfair had returned to England in 1842 and had rapidly come to the attention of useful patrons. A position had been found for him at the Geological Survey in London. In late 1845, when Frankland arrived at his laboratory, Playfair was so busy with government inquiries—­the cause of the potato blight in Ireland being the most urgent—­that Frankland was trained in the techniques of analytical chemistry by Playfair’s assistant. In 1846, Playfair accepted an additional position as professor of chemistry at the Putney College of Civil Engineering—­and offered Frankland an assistant’s position. Playfair paid Frankland £50 per year to prepare experimental demonstrations for his lecture course on applied chemistry; in addition, by attending the lectures Frankland gained a systematic introduction to chemistry; he passed the course examination.69 Frankland’s training continued through association with Playfair’s other assistants. He learned organic chemistry and techniques of gas analysis from Hermann Kolbe, a Gottingen-­and Marburg-­trained chemist, who was Playfair’s assistant in investigating the causes of fire-­damp explosions in coal mines. In 1847, he published two articles jointly with Kolbe and joined the Chemical Society. 61

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Frankland was now advancing in the world. In the summer of 1846, when he visited Lancaster, he was invited to lecture on chemistry at the Mechanics’ Institute. His reputation spread to the neighboring town of Preston. George Edmondson (1793–­1863), who ran an unconventional Quaker school there, asked Frankland to give him chemistry lessons so that he could expand the school’s chemistry curriculum.70 New opportunities opened up. In May 1847, he traveled with Kolbe to the University of Marburg, where he spent three months working on organic chemistry in the laboratory of Professor Robert Bunsen. He returned to England in September to teach chemistry at Edmondson’s new school, Queenwood College, in Hampshire. At Queenwood Frankland became a close friend of the new mathematics teacher, John Tyndall. At that time, Tyndall had no explicit ambitions for a scientific career. In mid-­1847 he had spent about eight years as a surveyor, and his ambition was to be a railway engineer. Tyndall was born Irish and poor, although Protestant rather than Catholic. His parents, however, were from educated landholding families and had ambitions for their son. He learned sufficient mathematics and mensuration to obtain a position with the Irish Ordnance Survey. In 1842, as the Irish Survey wound down, he was fortunate to be transferred to the Preston office of the English Survey. Within a year, he had lost his position, dismissed for protesting against the inefficient administration of the Survey and the poor treatment of its Irish members.71 After a month of searching for employment and continuing protest he returned home to Leighlin Bridge, County Carlow, where, apart from occasional contracts for property surveys, he was largely unemployed for eight months.72 During this time the extroverted, flirtatious, and politically aware young Irishman began to record more serious ambitions in the journal that he began late in 1843. When his journal opened, he was deciding between duty and pleasure. “I knew that Conscience would embitter all its sweets if I relinquished for the transitory pleasure of the dance the substantial advantages to be reaped from a good lecture [on electricity at the Preston Mechanics’ Institute]—duty was triumphant—to the lecture I went.”73 While unemployed in Ireland he disciplined himself to use his time in systematic self-­improvement. He began taking the Mechanics’ Magazine. It was both educational and provided, as its projectors hoped, a reading community. He read its articles carefully and sent a query to its correspondence column. It gave, he wrote, “the greatest pleasure and the soundest instruction.”74 He returned to the study of French—­which he had started previously in order to read foreign engineering works. Reading Craik’s Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties 62

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encouraged him to persist.75 He set himself a regular study schedule of French and logarithms; he tried chemical experiments.76 The search for employment was dispiriting; Tyndall discussed possible immigration to North America with many friends; a local confidant, Bernard Boyle, the dean of Leighlin, constantly encouraged him to persevere.77 Tyndall’s self-­education was not confined to physical science. In addition to his French studies, he read new novels, war histories, travel books, and the classics—­Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Voltaire, for example. He later explained that he had “endeavoured . . . to render myself fit for the companionship of cultured men.” He started writing a novel.78 In the mind of this ambitious young surveyor there was no disjunction between useful knowledge and polite accomplishments. Nor was political activism inconsistent with self-­improvement. From Ireland, Tyndall wrote to newspapers—­sentimental poetry, letters on public health, letters on the mismanagement of the Survey, all under different noms de plume. After his return to England he wrote to newspapers on the Irish famine and tried, unsuccessfully, to raise a subscription among Irish surveyors working in England to alleviate distress in Ireland.79 Tyndall’s journal reveals a young man stimulated by broadening intellectual and cultural worlds, confident in his own abilities, and optimistic that the world could be improved. For him, the libraries, lectures, and discussion classes of mechanics’ institutes were means for overcoming the constraints of poverty. In August 1844, as railway building boomed, Tyndall obtained employment in a surveyor’s office in Preston. Tyndall experienced the uncertainties, pressures, and excitement of the railway mania (figure 1.2). He moved on as jobs collapsed; worked seventy-­hour weeks, often at hard physical labor; was threatened by landowners; and rushed to London by special express trains to appear before parliamentary committees.80 Tyndall was enthusiastic about mechanics’ institutes. He had joined the Preston Mechanics’ Institute late in 1842, soon after his arrival in England. He joined the Halifax Mechanics’ Institute in mid-­1845 a few months after gaining a position as surveyor under the Halifax civil engineer, Richard Carter. Visiting Manchester in 1847, he looked enviously at the recently improved building of the Manchester Mechanics’ Institute: “Would to God we could realize something of the kind in Halifax.”81 As he moved about northern towns he attended a variety of institutions and lectures; for example, a lecture on the history of astronomy at the Cannon Street Institution in Preston. In London, he caught “snatches of a lecture on water” illustrated by oxyhydrogen microscope at the Polytechnic. “Snatches of a lecture” could hardly have been educationally beneficial, but Tyndall recorded that the evening was “delightful 63

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1.2 Railway map of the United Kingdom, 1844 and 1854. The extension to the network was

largely the result of the railway-­building “mania” of 1845–­47. Source: Adapted from David Turnock, An Historical Geography of Railways in Great Britain and Ireland, 78.

as usual.” Contemporaries considered that the lectures were less educationally beneficial than regular classes, but they greatly raised interest in a subject and hence stimulated individual study, as was shown by the increased borrowing of library books on lecture topics. Moreover, “snatches” of a lecture, when attended in congenial company, could reas64

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sure an ambitious mechanic that he was not alone and encourage him to persevere in private study.82 Owenism, Methodism, and Chartism were all part of the rich mix of social, political, and religious discussion, reading, and lectures recorded by Tyndall. Tyndall talked—­to strangers on trains (from clergymen to pretty young ladies), to friends, to farmers’ sons met while surveying. He discussed repeal of the corn laws, Genesis and geology, and, in one lengthy conversation, the “merits of Robert Owen, the truth of the Scriptures, the beauty of nature.” He went to lectures on temperance, on state education, and “a thrilling discourse . . . on the necessity of progress.”83 When unemployed in Ireland Tyndall had regularly attended Church of England Sunday services, morning and evening, but he was already questioning orthodox beliefs, as concerned comments from friends reveal. In England, he became a consumer of sermons and anti-­sermons. He tried everything from Owenite socialist lectures to Ranters’ meetings, Puseyites to anti-­Catholic Irish Presbyterians.84 He heard the infamous Mrs. Emma Martin lecture at the Owenite Hall of Science on “Christianity detrimental to human happiness” and “The inutility of divine worship.” He described her neat black dress, the opening hymn “very nicely sung” on the beauties of nature, and Martin’s bold and sarcastic style. He summarized the lectures in his journal and concluded that her arguments “could be successfully opposed.”85 Similarly, he recorded his opinions of more orthodox preachers and sermons (two on most Sundays) in his journal. He liked a “warm” emotive style and practical advice, and became increasingly critical of all dogmatic expressions of theology. His personal beliefs were moving from orthodoxy to a doctrinally vague religion of emotion. He appreciated the sincerity and warmth of Methodist experience but not the rigidity of Methodist doctrine. In his opinion the “Shadowy intimations of Scripture” could not be neatly embodied in doctrinal forms. Speculations over dogma diverted attention from the importance of Scripture as a moral guide and inspiration.86 Tyndall’s indignation was strongest against the doctrine of “human depravity” and its political and social implications: “the sermon degenerated into the hackneyed whine of being unable to do anything of ourselves to help ourselves, of our incurably perverse natures.”87 His rejection of the doctrines implying human incapacity was linked to his increasingly explicit attachment to the politics of human progress. In Tyndall’s political vision, the world was divided into advocates and opponents of human progress. During the 1847 election while supporting the Chartist candidates in Halifax, Tyndall tried to rouse support for a temporary newspaper: “The cause of human progress labours under 65

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great disadvantages in Halifax. Its supporters have no public organ to represent their opinions.”88 He believed that human progress required more than the universal manhood suffrage and ballot boxes the Chartists advocated. Individual improvement was also necessary; new social structures would then emerge gradually. In his journal, he copied stirring extracts from an article by the Italian nationalist, Giuseppe Mazzini, in the reformist People’s Journal: I am a democrat wishing to advance, and to make others do the same in the name of . . . Tradition, Progress, Association. . . . I believe in the eternal progression of life, and consequently of intelligence and sentiment. . . . I do not believe that it is given to any man whoever he may be, to improvise at any given hour a perfect plan for the organization of humanity. . . . The people feel by the heart better than all the small falsified intelligences of our day, that provided they obtain but a corner in the territory of mind all the rest will be given to them.89

This was a romantic political philosophy that stressed the natural development of society, appealed to the feeling of the people, distrusted the rational plans of elite theorists, and emphasized the power of community. Education would provide a beachhead, a “corner in the territory of the mind,” from which further social advances could be made. Similarly, George Combe argued that social change could be expected only after three generations of education: “While this change is in progress the only remedy for an intelligent and moral member of the lower class, is to endeavour to enter into the middle order”—­Tyndall copied this into his journal, suggesting that he identified himself as one of these “intelligent and moral” persons.90 Tyndall’s enthusiasm for the now-­obscure Whittington Club is revealing of his vision of social and personal progress.91 The club was promoted by the playwright, journalist, wit, and advocate of progress Douglas Jerrold. Tyndall was attracted by the stirring democratic language of the proposal he read in mid-­1846, in the first issue of Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper: “We write to the clerks, the shopmen, the young and intelligent operatives of London. . . . They are of the people—­of the middle and lower class masses—­of that ‘order’ before which all others must ultimately give way. For we are now our own rulers.” Jerrold, like Combe, believed that education was essential if “the people” were to govern themselves. The true revolution is the “slow and bloodless” one of gradual intellectual improvement. Jerrold called for “a college suited 66

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to mercantile, to industrial young life.”92 Tyndall followed the utopian proposal as it developed in each issue of Douglas Jerrold’s. By the end of October there were five hundred members, and the first general meeting resolved upon a name and objectives: “that the object of the Whittington Club and Metropolitan Athenaeum be to unite the advantages of a literary institution with the comforts and conveniences of a club.” Tyndall hoped that the young men of Halifax could establish a similar institution.93 The Whittington Club proposals suggest an easy association of both operatives and clerks, science and literature in a common movement, based on the belief that intelligence strengthened by education was essential for social progress. Over these years, Tyndall increasingly looked to Thomas Carlyle as his religious, moral, and political guide. He made lengthy extracts from Carlyle’s books in his journal. Past and Present, which he read twice in mid-­ 1844, was “first rate.” Three years later, Carlyle had become “a beacon to guide me amid life’s entanglements.”94 Carlyle’s romantic emphasis on feeling as fundamental in both religious and political life made more systematic the pervasive popular “cult of the heart,” which Tyndall already accepted. “Common feelings” unite mankind; preaching, teaching, and, especially, poetry, can communicate these feelings and hence arouse the listener or reader to action.95 Tyndall was persuaded by Carlyle’s denigration of mass movements and praise of self-­culture. Carlyle’s morality of work and duty reinforced his ambition. Most crucially, in Carlyle’s natural supernaturalism Tyndall found an interpretation of religion that satisfied his desire for some higher meaning, while freeing his intellect from all theological formulations. There was an inner truth in religion, even when the doctrines that clothed it were false. This permitted new interpretations to be given to old doctrines. Carlyle transmuted the doctrine of creator-­God to man-­as-­worker. Tyndall sought to guide younger men in self-­improving pathways. He urged one protégé to action: “Work—­ Work—­Work is man’s great business here . . . assimilated to the ever-­active never-­tiring essence of the Deity himself.”96 Hirst was one of the younger men in Tyndall’s Halifax circle who had shown signs of the ideals and discipline needed for moral and intellectual self-­improvement and to whom Tyndall acted as mentor. His experience, like Frankland’s, illustrates the educational functions that mechanics’ institutes could have for younger artisans and mechanics. Hirst, who was descended on both sides from families well established in the Yorkshire woolen industry, was born to more comfortable circumstances than either Frankland or Tyndall. But financial problems following his father’s death, when Hirst was about twelve, restricted his opportunities. 67

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In 1845 at age fifteen he was apprenticed to Richard Carter, civil engineer, of Halifax. Tyndall, who was chief surveyor in Carter’s busy office, barely noticed the new apprentice. Hirst’s journal records his transformation from a fun-­loving young surveyor to an earnest, introspective advocate of self-­improvement. In 1845, when he began work with Carter, the short entries emphasize his leisure activities. Hirst and other young, middling-­class men of Halifax played games, drank, and made music together; they read novels; and they attended concerts, church, occasional lectures, and a circus. In mid-­1847, as surveying work declined, Carter suggested that his younger apprentices spend their spare time in study—­he recommended geology and loaned Hirst Gideon Mantell’s Wonders of Geology. A month later Hirst finished his reading and note taking on Mantell: “the first book of really useful information I ever read through, and hope it will prove the first of a long series.”97 Serious reading opened up a new world of thought and ambition to Hirst. Encouraged by both Carter and Tyndall, Hirst began to read widely, attend lectures enthusiastically, discuss serious subjects with his friends, and participate in the local institutions of mutual improvement. His geological reading rapidly advanced from Mantell to Charles Lyell. He read biographies and serious periodicals—­the People’s Journal, Reynold’s Miscellany (inferior to the former he decided), and Douglas Jerrold’s Magazine in his first month of serious reading. He rose early to study French.98 With his friend Jemmy Craven, he joined the Halifax Mutual Improvement Society and was persuaded to teach a mathematics class. Again with Craven, he joined the Halifax Mechanics’ Institute and attended its weekly discussion class which, over the next few months, discussed “Man’s Relation to Society,” astrology, and philosophical necessity. Hirst led the discussion on the topic “It is the duty of the State to Educate the People.”99 By the close of 1848 Hirst was more critical of his local institutions and more focused in his personal objectives. In the New Year, he resigned from the Institute’s Reading Rooms and set up a private laboratory with Craven. Although he admitted that he had benefited from the discussion class, he was frustrated by the Mechanics’ Institute’s focus on rudimentary instruction for those with little education, and accused it of being “the most insipid affair possible.” He was among those who proposed the amalgamation of the Mechanics’ Institute with the Mutual Improvement Society.100 He remained active in the amalgamated institution, especially in the discussion class (renamed the Franklin Society) until his departure from Halifax in August 1850. His diary records politi68

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cal and philosophical discussions and a growing range of study classes to meet the needs of those who, like himself, had been more fortunate in their early education.101 Meanwhile, Tyndall had left Carter’s employment. In mid-­1847 he accepted an offer of £150 per year to teach engineering and surveying at a new Quaker school. Employment was insecure as the railway mania declined, and Tyndall was willing to take a drop in salary for more secure employment, although he still intended a career in engineering.102 He was impressed by the headmaster’s commitment to human progress and his ambitions for the school: Edmondson “is a man of enlarged understanding and fully joins in the onward movement of the day—­he intends to make Queenwood College ‘No 1.’ ” The rural Hampshire site of Queenwood College had previously been occupied by Harmony Hall, an Owenite socialist community that had collapsed in 1845. The property was particularly suitable because it had a grand three-­story building and a farm, and Edmondson intended to introduce farming to the curriculum. Queenwood was unusual in combining both science and vocational subjects with a more general education. The forty pupils of 1847 fell into two groups—­younger boys, under fifteen, receiving a general education, and “the farmers,” receiving both a scientific and a vocational education related to agriculture, surveying, and engineering.103 Tyndall and Frankland met in early September 1847 when Frankland arrived at Queenwood, direct from Marburg. It was the beginning of “one of the most eventful years of our lives.”104 Frankland opened up the world of science to Tyndall; Tyndall opened a world of religious and philosophical debate to Frankland. They were employed to teach science. The curriculum they developed for the boys included the operation of the steam engine, surveying, the design of railway lines, “passage of a railway bill through parliament,” hardness of water and its removal, ventilation, a wide range of industrial applications of chemistry, and botanical and chemical topics relevant to agriculture.105 Pupils learned chemistry in a laboratory, and in his spare hours Frankland used the laboratory to pursue his own research. There was also a school Mutual Improvement Society that met weekly on Saturday evenings. Conversation among the school staff ranged widely over religious, political, and scientific topics. In this environment Frankland’s religious certainties, which had survived London and Marburg, were shaken. A fellow teacher introduced him to Tom Paine.106 Tyndall’s undogmatic religion of the heart was less directly antagonistic to Christian beliefs but equally undermining of orthodox certainties. The journal that Frankland began on 1 January 1848 recorded his changing beliefs (labeling 69

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some previous beliefs as “prejudices”) and new openness to discussion, and was an expression of the introspective form of self-­improvement he was learning from Tyndall. On his twenty-­third birthday Frankland wrote: What progress have I made? am I a more useful member of society? . . . the past year has been to me an eventful one, my circumstances have changed, many opinions and prejudices which I held at the commencement of it have evaporated, others have taken their place may not these also be in turn displaced? the sentiments of all who give themselves the trouble to think are in a state of change.107

His religious views were sufficiently changed that a northern friend or relative wrote in concern, enclosing a religious tract.108 Frankland, like Tyndall, became a consumer of sermons rather than a committed member of a chapel or church. However, he did not follow Tyndall’s Carlylean enthusiasms, even after receiving Heroes and Hero-­Worship as a birthday gift from Tyndall. He described Tyndall’s enthusiasm for German idealist philosophers as “metaphysical lucubrations.”109 The conversations of Frankland and Tyndall with the other staff over meals and with the people they met on long rambles through the countryside indicate a great variety of unorthodoxy among the middling orders of society. Vestiges of Creation was widely discussed, although only after its publication in cheap format in 1847.110 A fellow teacher argued that human embryological development supported Vestiges. Frankland discussed the book with a local watchmaker. During a long Sunday walk, Tyndall and Frankland came to the conclusion “that Palaeontology had not yet been studied to such an extent as to afford data for the formation of a good development theory.”111 Vestiges was only one element in the rich discussion broth. One of their Owenite landlords argued for a materialist account of human nature, and was opposed by Tyndall. Another Owenite visitor advocated communism and socialism. The Quaker Edmondson represented some aspects of orthodox theology. He criticized the long Sunday rambles taken by Frankland and Tyndall on Sabbatarian grounds.112 The Queenwood years expanded Tyndall’s scientific horizons and shifted Frankland’s religious horizons. They enthusiastically attended each other’s school lectures and recorded what they had learned in their journals. By the winter of 1847/48 they were getting up early, at four or five in the morning, to study together.113 By the summer of 1848 they had decided to pursue formal studies in Germany and began regular German lessons. In early October, they paid their farewell visits before leaving for the University of Marburg. Tyndall visited his friends, proté70

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gés, and the Mechanics’ Institute in Halifax; Frankland visited Playfair, who approved his study plans but advised him to return to England.114 Germany appealed to both Tyndall and Frankland not only for its science but also for its philosophy. It was a country where learning was valued and the search for truth taken seriously. German thought, they hoped, would once again reform the world, as it had at the Reformation.115 At Marburg they studied both science and philosophy. Frankland began work in the chemistry laboratory of Professor Robert Bunsen, took a wide range of other science courses, and completed his doctoral degree within the year with a research project on the metallic ethyl compounds. Tyndall, less prepared either scientifically or linguistically than Frankland, enrolled in introductory courses in chemistry, physics, and calculus. In his second year, he decided to advance in physics. As he completed his dissertation on screw surfaces in late 1849, he began research on diamagnetic phenomena with the newly appointed professor of physics, Hermann Knoblauch. Tyndall and Frankland also had many long philosophical and religious conversations, they studied Kant with Theodor Waitz, the young philosophy professor, and read both Fichte and the Bible with religious seriousness.116 As their religious and philosophical disagreements became more explicit, the closeness of their friendship was disturbed. Tyndall preferred the idealist philosophers, Schlegel and Fichte, to Kant: “Frankland will of course dissent from me, this must be expected.” Frankland wanted proof, whereas Tyndall believed that truth was felt and experienced. He quoted Schlegel: “God does not allow his existence to be proved. . . . As life generally so also this supreme life must be learned and concluded from every man’s own experience; it must be adopted with the vividness of a feeling.”117 As Tyndall came to feel alienated from Frankland, he found a growing closeness to the much younger Hirst. From Marburg, as from Queenwood, Tyndall wrote to Hirst and other protégés, often addressing them as “My dear Boys” or even “My Sons.” He proffered advice on their studies, such as “dont allow your discussions to interfere with your studies.”118 The fatherless Hirst regarded the ten-­years-­older Tyndall as his guide and mentor or, in the flowery style that became characteristic of his increasingly introspective journal, “my angel of mercy, my guiding star.”119 Tyndall’s star led Hirst to Carlyle. Early in 1849, at about the time he became critical of the Halifax Mechanics’ Institute, Hirst read the long-­recommended Heroes and Hero-­Worship. In conversion-­like language he wrote to Tyndall that the book had done him “a power of good”: “I feel a different being to what I was. I have got a glimpse of that 71

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religion that exists apart from logic . . . that mysterious ‘heart business’ you tried to drive into me.” At last, Hirst wrote, he could see that the creeds were but “symbols of this Religion.”120 Tyndall experienced the universe as sublime and mysterious and interpreted his experience in pantheistic and transcendental categories. Emerson and Carlyle are pantheists “in the highest sense,” he told Hirst. God is one with the universe: “I think the universe is best illustrated by a human body. All are but parts of one stupendous whole / Whose body nature is and God the soul.” Man and vegetables are, alike, permeated with this universal spirit. This “transcendentalist” view of the universe, which sees beyond the phenomena and discerns the life principle within the whole, can, Tyndall told Hirst, sustain moral life and ethical feeling, unlike a mechanic view.121 This ethical vision gave both meaning to scientific activity and a moral framework for the ambitions of Tyndall and Hirst. Following Carlyle, they accepted work as a sacred discipline by which man was to be perfected but, rejecting Carlyle’s critique of science, they followed science as their “work.” Work was Carlyle’s secular equivalent to the Calvinist’s “calling.” Hirst felt called apart from his convivial companions, as he recorded in his journal: “my course is different to theirs, my goal is different, and so must be my journey.” His work, he finally decided, was not in surveying, and he set off for Marburg to follow science (and Tyndall), determined to persevere through the “immense quantity of work” that lay before him.122 Tyndall pursued science with Puritan discipline. In Marburg, even in winter, he often rose at 5:00 a.m. and began his day with an icy bath; he renounced most sociability. When Frankland went to a ball at Christmas of 1848 Tyndall recorded that he “took a lonely walk in the evening.” For Frankland, having neither a transcendental nor an orthodox theology, science was more narrowly about personal success and ambition, and the pursuit of science did not require such asceticism. In this romantic idealist vision of the universe, science provided neither metaphysical truth nor meaning. Carlyle’s critique of science guided both Hirst and Tyndall: “science has done much for us: but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Ne-­science, whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film.”123 In his last lecture to the Queenwood boys, Tyndall distinguished between scientific inquiry and finding meaning: What are sun, stars, science, chemistry, geology, mathematics, but pages of a book whose author is God! I want to know the meaning of this book, to penetrate the spirit of this author and if I fail then are my scientific achievements apple rinds without a core.124 72

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Thus, at the beginning of his scientific career, Tyndall’s vision of science was not associated with the materialism for which he later became notorious. Nor was his vision of the universe deterministic. In the late 1840s he constantly stressed the power of mind over matter in his lectures to the Queenwood boys: “Every great machine was primarily an idea”; “There is a wondrous power in the soul of every boy . . . the power . . . proceeds from the mind not from the body.” When he urged himself or his protégés to action he assumed the power of the will.125 In spite of their emphasis on the need for individual action, Tyndall and, following him, Hirst remained committed to the politics of human progress. From Germany Tyndall continued to follow the fortunes of the Whittington Club and the misfortunes and maladministration of Ireland.126 Hirst was introduced to reforming journalistic circles through G. S. Phillips, another northern disciple of Carlyle. George Searle Phillips, who wrote under the pen name of January Searle, was secretary of the outstandingly successful Huddersfield Mechanics’ Institute and a supporter of the Truth Seeker and the People’s Journal. Hirst began writing for the Truth Seeker himself and used his connection with Phillips to place the articles and letters that Tyndall had continued to submit to English newspapers and magazines. Hirst was also reading more radical religious and political works—­he admired G. H. Lewes and wrote enthusiastically to Tyndall about a new “very able” paper, the Leader, started in mid-­ 1850. Hirst expressed his support for its aims and revealed the extent of Phillips’s connections with radical London literary circles. The Leader, he told Tyndall, is conducted by a party with whom both of us have much sympathy—­I mean that pecu­ liar class to whom Carlyle has imparted some of his energy. He will write occasionally for it himself, Lewes, Thornton Hunt, Linton, Ballantyne, & Phillips are other contributors that I know of.127

Through Phillips, Hirst submitted articles by Tyndall to the Leader, and for these Tyndall was well paid. For all three, Frankland, Tyndall, and Hirst, self-­discipline, economic fortune, and the encouragement of patrons united to support their rise in the world.128 At crucial points patrons provided advice and encouragement: the Johnsons for Frankland; a superior in the Irish Survey and the dean of Leighlin for Tyndall; Carter and Tyndall for Hirst. All three young men had, in Tyndall’s anti-­materialistic terminology, “moral energy.” They could work long hours and forgo sociability. When one of his protégés fell by the wayside, Tyndall observed: “he . . . does not possess 73

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sufficient moral energy to look his faults in the face and trample on them.”129 Many working-­class readers lacked this drive, and most were more constrained by economic disadvantage. The £60 annuity allowed Frankland to have early ambitions. Hirst inherited an annuity of £150 on his mother’s death in 1849—­sufficient to make loans to Tyndall and to live independently in Europe.130 Tyndall was an experienced surveyor when wages were high. Saving this money and, then, living on the savings required self-­discipline and Malthusian-­style restraint. As Hirst set off for Marburg he noted regretfully that he was forgoing “domestic happiness and pleasure.” “Romantic attachments” sometimes tempted Tyndall from this ambitious path; Frankland noticed that he was “always interested in good looking girls.”131 Problems with drink or managing money, early or unfortunate marriages, and financial bad luck prevented many able young men from realizing their potential. In varied ways, the institutions of self-­improvement helped each of these young men in their first steps toward scientific careers. Through the libraries, lectures, classes, and publications associated with the institutions of self-­improvement they found education, a stimulus to ambition, and an encouraging community of fellows. Although Frankland, Tyndall, and Hirst were atypical beneficiaries of mechanics’ institute culture, their successes illustrate the openings offered by teaching and journalism that many self-­improvers exploited to a more limited extent. Some self-­improving workingmen set up local schools; some gained reputations for literary contributions, most often poetry; some chose political action and became leaders of trade union or other radical movements; but most were unable to alleviate the hardship of their working lives.132 For Frankland, Tyndall, and Hirst, teaching was a step toward a higher achievement rather than a summit. Tyndall could perhaps have turned to a literary career, for he supplemented his income by journalism in the early 1850s. Hirst contributed to local journals but his writing style was tortuous and long-­term success would have been unlikely. Frankland, who never tried journalism, was the luckiest with his patrons. Through the Johnsons he met Playfair, and Playfair’s patronage ensured a continuing place in British chemistry. He gained a PhD in June 1849, and visited Liebig at Giessen, before returning to England early in 1850 to, again, assist Playfair at Putney.133 Tyndall spent six months researching with Knoblauch; then, in June 1850, his “pilgrimage” at an end, his savings well spent, he returned to England to seek his scientific fortune. When no scientific employment eventuated, Hirst offered him a loan and, better, offered payment for trans­ lating German articles into English for the Philosophical Magazine.134 74

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Thus, when Hirst left on his Marburg pilgrimage, Tyndall returned to Germany to further his research on diamagnetism in the physics laboratories of Marburg and Berlin. He returned to England in mid-­1851 to his old position at Queenwood in the hope that “some thing worth while” in science would soon turn up in England.135 Hirst followed in Tyndall’s footsteps, studying mathematics, physics, and chemistry in Marburg for two years, and completed a thesis on a geometrical topic by mid-­1852. As his middle-­class inheritance made it unnecessary to find immediate employment, Hirst remained in Germany, visiting mathematicians in Gottingen and Berlin. He did not return to England until July 1853 when, Tyndall having at last obtained a scientific position in London, Hirst took Tyndall’s place teaching mathematics, elementary physics, and surveying at Queenwood. Thus, in the early 1850s Frankland, Tyndall, and Hirst arrived in turn at the fringes of London science, having advanced far beyond their Mechanics’ Magazine, mechanics’ institute, and mutual improvement beginnings.

1.3 Spencer and Huxley: The Science and Politics of Rational Dissent Spencer and Huxley were both shaped by a culture of rational Dissent that flourished in many provincial towns. Science, as Spencer and Huxley first encountered it, was a philosophical vision of a law-­bound, deterministic universe. The assemblage of technical skills, theories of occupational relevance, and rational entertainment that made up science for Frankland, Tyndall, and Hirst were given significance for Spencer and Huxley by a metaphysical framing. This vision of science and nature was shaped by the rationalist beliefs that were increasingly prominent in Old Dissent, which was tending to theological and political radicalism. In these traditions, the principles of religion and of society were subject to human judgment; tradition and revelation had no authority over reason and experience.136 The universe was governed by law, laws established—­it was allowed—­by a Creator, but a Creator who did not intervene to produce miracles for local benefit. Although Spencer and Huxley started in similar geographical and cultural locations, their careers rapidly diverged. Both were sons of schoolmasters, and both were from the Midlands. Spencer grew up in Derby and Huxley (from age ten) in Coventry. Spencer had strong links with rational Dissent: his Methodist-­Quaker father, William George Spencer, was secretary of the Derby Philosophical Society, the society founded 75

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only two generations before by the free-­thinking, free-­living Erasmus Darwin, eminent physician and poet of evolutionary progress.137 The Huxley family was Anglican but, as a youth in Coventry, Huxley’s reading and conversation introduced him to Unitarian conceptions of a law-­governed universe, and to Dissenters’ criticisms of the established Church. Although Huxley and Spencer’s participation in science took different forms, both were committed to deterministic and naturalistic accounts of the universe when they met in London in the early 1850s. Huxley’s radicalism in politics and determinism in science had been reinforced through his medical training in the highly politicized medical environment of the metropolis in the early 1840s. Among medical reformers in the 1830s and 1840s, as in Erasmus Darwin’s Derby Philosophical Society, new science and reform politics were linked. Driving ambition and the need to make an income led the young Huxley to seek specialist expertise as a way to reputation and career. Spencer, by contrast, was more financially secure, and able to maintain the broad, generalist curiosity of small-­town, Midlands provincial science. His fellows were railway surveyors and engineers, politicized Dissenters, and, when he moved to London, literary radicals. Among the literary radicals, he found another community of alternative science, who shared his interests in developing a naturalistic philosophy and a secular politics. I discuss the paths of Spencer and Huxley in turn, drawing attention to their common commitment to naturalistic and deterministic science, identifying the diverse contexts that sustained these commitments, and emphasizing the contrasting styles of science that they pursued. Methodism and the Derby Philosophical Society would seem to have little in common, but Methodism as practiced by Herbert Spencer’s father was much attenuated from Wesley’s rigorous piety and orthodox theology. J. D. Y. Peel describes Spencer’s “dual inheritance” as scientific and liberal deism, with the “moral residue of evangelicalism.”138 Spencer’s account of his origins neglected the deism, transformed the moralism, and interpreted his life as an expression of the “independence” characteristic of Dissent in general and his family in particular. His nonconformity was, he believed, inherited, from his anti-­establishment and schismatic Methodist forebears, but his Autobiography provides strong evidence for his independence being learned from, even taught by, his idiosyncratic and argumentative father and uncles.139 Both Paul Elliott and Mark Francis argue that Spencer exaggerated his nonconformity, and all biographers emphasize that he grossly exaggerated his independence as a thinker. On this issue, and many others, his Autobiography and his official Life and Letters present a carefully cultivated image and have 76

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to be read against the grain. My emphasis here is on his early life, its emotional bleakness (as emphasized by Mark Francis), his introduction to science through his father, and his religious experiences and beliefs.140 The Derby Philosophical Society and the wider Derby philosophical community were significant, Elliott has shown, for Spencer’s development. The Derby Philosophical Society was one of the many philosophical societies that flourished in English provincial towns in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The small Derby Philosophical Society (founded in 1793) was similar to its larger Manchester and Birmingham cousins. Medical men, manufacturers, and Unitarians were conspicuous in its membership. Although never as active as the larger, more famous societies, its meetings were similar. Members conversed, demonstrated experiments, read papers to one another, and ate supper together. They started a library, which became the most important continuing feature of the society. Through Erasmus Darwin, who had been a member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham and who was made a corresponding member of the Manchester society, the Derby philosophers maintained links with other societies. In Manchester, by the 1840s a more specialized and serious style of science appeared, overtaking the broad curiosity and broad motivations that directed the founding generation.141 Derby science, as practiced by George Spencer and learned by Herbert Spencer, does not show this tendency to expert knowledge and specialization. The Spencers were enthusiastic about curiousities, for example, a balloon made by a local farmer from a calf’s amnion, which was strong enough to carry a penknife. In the early 1840s father and son were involved in a new “Literary and Scientific Society,” at which members read a wide variety of papers to one another.142 The radical politics, deist religion, and evolutionary science characteristic of the late eighteenth-­century society continued on into George Spencer’s day. The society’s associations with Unitarians and “political Dissenters” continued. William Strutt, Unitarian manufacturer and friend of Erasmus Darwin, who was president from Darwin’s death until his own death in 1830, publicly expressed skepticism about “creation.”143 The Strutts were leaders of “organized Radical Liberalism” in Derby, for example, William Strutt’s son, who was MP for Derby, was supported by local Chartists in the 1840s. Sir Francis Darwin, son of Erasmus, was a member in George Spencer’s time. In personnel, in philosophy, and in politics the Derby Philosophical Society was, as one critical contemporary emphasized, “remarkably enduring, continuous, and uniform.” Thomas Mozley, son of a member of the society and ex-­pupil of George Spencer, described the members as “Darwinians.”144 Elliott shows that 77

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members respected the memory and theories of their founder and most famous member and argues that, through his father, Herbert Spencer became acquainted with the evolutionary theories of Erasmus Darwin. Spencer senior was a schoolmaster, inventor, and minor capitalist. He made sufficient money to invest in housing and support his younger brother, Thomas, at Cambridge, but, shortly after Herbert’s birth, illness and financial misfortune struck. George Spencer suffered a breakdown and his investment in lace-­making machines failed. From that time, his chief income came from tutoring. He tutored private pupils, both girls and boys, in penmanship, mathematics, and scientific subjects. He was a quirky character, with none of the urbane sophistication or literary skills of Erasmus Darwin. One of his hobbyhorses was that language would be improved if there was an unambiguous vocabulary, with each word always employed for the same thing. In spite of such hobbyhorses, he was an innovative teacher. For example, he espoused the principles of Pestalozzi in adapting his teaching to the development of the child; wrote a discovery-­type approach to geometry, Inventional Geometry; and encouraged his son to observe nature closely. George Spencer was a well-­ known member of the Derby philosophical community. As secretary of the Derby Philosophical Society he was responsible for its library, and he was also a member of the Methodist book committee, where he persisted in trying to persuade his fellows to buy more science books for the Methodist Library. He was a great talker on ethical and political topics and, according to Mozley, “all the elders agreed that he discussed speculative questions instead of giving his main attention to teaching.”145 The resources of local libraries, his father’s classes, speculative debate, and a variety of local schools all contributed to young Herbert acquiring wide and miscellaneous knowledge. He had no formal school lessons until age nine, but was allowed to wander the countryside, collecting birds’ eggs, observing insects, and fishing. Discipline at home was neither firm nor consistent, for Herbert, the only surviving child from nine births, was spoiled by his mother, and his father’s illness left him habitually irritable.146 At school Herbert ignored the lessons that bored him. He gained some knowledge of physics and chemistry by assisting his father in preparing and presenting scientific lessons, in particular he assisted with the operation of an electric machine and air pump. He learned some mechanics at his Uncle William’s school. He heard itinerant lecturers on chemistry and, at age eleven, on phrenology. He read widely and unsystematically by browsing the journals and borrowing the books of the Derby Philosophical Society, Methodist and Mechanics’ Institute libraries. The attitudes to nature and knowledge that his father inculcated 78

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were more significant in the long term than the miscellaneous information the young Spencer acquired. Spencer learned to interpret the world in terms of natural causes. His father’s constant question was, “I wonder what is the cause of so-­and-­so?” and he presumed that the answer would be in terms of natural rather than supernatural agency. He also presumed that the answers might be available to relatively uninformed inquiry, for he often asked Herbert, “Can you tell me the cause of this?” His loyal son described this mode of teaching as “‘self-­help’ carried out in all directions.”147 Mozley satirized George Spencer’s individualist and anti-­authoritarian assumptions: he expressed a “constant repugnance to all living authority and a suspicion of all ordinary means of acquiring knowledge.”148 Such an education neither introduced a tradition to be learned nor bred respect for expert knowledge. Rather, it encouraged an extreme confidence in individual private judgment. Young Spencer’s religious and political education was, similarly, anti-­ authoritarian. When Herbert was ten his father decided that the Methodists were over-­subject to the authority of their ministers and withdrew from attendance at the Methodist Chapel for quieter sitting with the Quakers on Sunday mornings. Herbert accompanied his father on Sunday mornings, attended Methodist services with his mother on Sunday evenings, and at other times listened to his father and uncles earnestly debating theological, political, and scientific topics.149 Spencer’s education took a more systematic turn when, at age thirteen, he was sent to live with his Anglican uncle and aunt. They wanted to take in a nephew as they had no children of their own, and Spencer’s parents hoped that their intractable son would benefit from the firmer discipline of his uncle.150 The Reverend Thomas Spencer, a clergyman at Charterhouse Hinton near Bath, supplemented his meager living of £80 by tutoring and, with his wife, boarding a small number of pupils.151 Uncle Thomas Spencer, who had been a member of the evangelical party at Cambridge, was more conventional than Spencer’s father in his theology, but idiosyncratic and activist in his politics. In his parish, he was an ardent supporter of all kinds of reform and improvement. The parliamentary debates of 1834 had turned him from a defender of paupers into an enthusiast for the new Poor Law. Most remarkable for an Anglican clergyman, he was an opponent of the corn laws, which kept up the price of corn and hence benefited landowners and clergy, whose income depended on crop prices and land values.152 Young Herbert lived in his household under rigid discipline for three years. He studied Latin, Euclid, algebra, physics, French, Greek, trigonometry, and, during vacations in Derby, chemistry. Gradually he developed a modicum of self-­discipline 79

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and diligence, but resisted learning what he called the “arbitrary” rules of grammar for any other language.153 Herbert Spencer, an opinionated young man of sixteen, returned to Derby to seek a career in mid-­1836, happy to escape the regimentation of his uncle’s household. He had invented an improvement on the air pump, he told his father. He had already appeared twice in print: an article on the shape of salt crystals and a letter entering into debate on the new poor law had appeared in the new Bath Magazine early in 1836. For about a year Spencer stayed at home. Pushed by his father to find employment, he tried schoolmastering for a few months until, late in 1837, he was offered a position in engineering, which, he rapidly decided, was more suited to his inclinations than schoolmastering.154 Over the following twelve years, Spencer spent about half his time as a railway engineer, interspersed with periods attempting to make an income from invention or from journalism. Fortunately, his father and uncles had useful connections. Spencer learned his engineering apprenticeship-­style. He began at £80 per year, doing surveying and administrative tasks under Charles Fox, an ex-­pupil of his father and his Uncle William. Fox was in charge of the London end of Robert Stephenson’s London and Birmingham Railway. After a year, Spencer moved on to a better-­paying position at the Gloucester and Birmingham Railway. He was initially a draftsman; eighteen months on he became engineering secretary to the chief engineer, Captain W. S. Moorsom. Spencer and his colleagues were a mixture of ignorance and self-­confidence. Typically, they had a club that met bimonthly to discuss engineering topics. Spencer’s first presentation, which he described at the time as “one of the most complete papers” ever read to the club, was, he later admitted, an entirely misguided method for setting out the curves on railway lines. Spencer may have known little, but his fellows knew less, and Moorsom had a reputation for “slovenly” methods. Based on his experience on the London–­Birmingham line, Spencer suggested that there was a serious deficiency in the proposed design of the railbed for the Gloucester–­Birmingham line. The arrogant young man was ignored, but time proved him right.155 Spencer’s interests went far beyond his immediate occupational needs. Like Tyndall and Hirst, he pursued self-­improvement. In 1840, after attending chemistry lectures in Worcester, Spencer and a friend devoted two evenings a week to chemical experiments. But Spencer, unlike Tyndall and Hirst, expected at the same time to contribute to the sum of knowledge, and he chose to send his engineering contributions to the Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal rather than to the Mechanics’ Maga-

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Defford Bridge, Worcestershire, which was rebuilt under Spencer’s supervision, after one of the wing walls collapsed. Colleagues nicknamed Spencer “Defford” because he worried so much about the rebuild. Source: 1839 engraving by E. T. Dolby (published by Clerk and Co.); from Michael Darby, Early Railway Prints (London: HMSO, 1974), 33.

zine, in which, he considered, good articles were associated with trash. His method for designing skew arches had been published the previous year. He designed a “velocimeter” for measuring the speed of trains (which was published), and an instrument for measuring the tractive force of a steam engine (which remained unknown). In his employment, he began to develop expertise in bridge design (figure 1.3).156 Engineering took Spencer out of his idiosyncratic family environment and into the company of other young men, and the occasional young woman. While he maintained his interests in self-­improvement, invention, and philosophical speculation, his social experiences broadened. His closest companions were other young men of dissenting background, but he had to mix more broadly, for example, with the more upper-­class young men employed in the Gloucester and Birmingham Railway. Spencer felt uneasy with their gaiety and (as he described it) “randomness of living.” He reassured his ever-­watchful father that his closest friend was also a “steady” young man.157 Spencer’s philosophical interests and argumentative nature were noted by his friends and superiors. His capacity for argument was described by one friend, in terms that his later X Club friends would have supported, as a “facility for building up a formidable theory on precious slight foundations.”158

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His father inquired about Herbert’s religious beliefs. Spencer senior seems not to have been an atheist (although so accused by Mozley), nor even a deist, but a theist, convinced that there was some kind of personal deity. In his letters, he repeatedly inquired about the nature of his son’s religious feelings, and Spencer junior repeatedly turned these inquiries aside, unable to satisfy even the undogmatic standards of his father.159 Looking back on his youth, Herbert Spencer wrote that “the expressions of adoration of a personal being . . . never found in me any echoes.”160 From when he left home in 1837, Spencer spent his Sundays, as he spent Saturday afternoons, on excursions and rambles. Unlike Frankland, Tyndall, and Hirst, Spencer was not concerned about the relations between Genesis and geology, and easily took up a naturalistic geology.161 Nor was he interested in a Carlylean religion of the heart; having never had a Methodist or evangelical warmth of religion he did not need a replacement. He read Carlyle and Emerson in the 1840s but was already set in a more rationalistic approach to religion, ethics, and political theory.162 The inventing enthusiasm of Spencer and his father illustrates their extreme self-­confidence and their participatory, individualistic style of science. Spencer senior valued inventiveness; he had, he wrote, taken “never-­ceasing pains” to develop young Herbert’s “inventive powers.”163 Both father and son hoped to become wealthy through their inventions. Continual disappointment did not dim their hopes. When his railway employment ceased in the spring of 1841, Spencer returned to Derby to assist his father perfect his “electro-­magnetic engine.” There was great optimism at the time about the potential of battery electric power, but Spencer gave up the experiments on reading an article in the Philosophical Magazine (circulated among members of the Derby Philosophical Society), which argued that an electromagnetic engine would always be less efficient than a steam engine.164 Among the many failures was one minor success: in 1847–­48 Spencer made about £70 from a binding pin that held sheets of papers together in pamphlet form. In spite of his numerous disappointments, Spencer did not regret his lack of academic training. He believed that absence of academic discipline left “greater freedom of mind.”165 Until engineering opportunities returned in the railway mania of the mid-­1840s, Spencer pursued invention at home in Derby, became active in radical dissenting political movements, and tried to make a career in “literature.” Friends advised that political activity would damage his engineering career, but he ignored them.166 When his early efforts to make money in journalism failed, Spencer returned to inventing in the opti82

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mistic hope of making sufficient money from inventions to sustain a literary life. Unlike so many young men trying to get ahead, Spencer was averse to overwork. When employed in railway work he was inclined to protest if the daily hours were too long; overwork, he insisted, was bad for one’s health. When unemployed in Derby his schedule of study included three hours for exercise each day, four hours for mathematics, two hours for French, and one and a half hours for his journal. He learned Hullah’s method of singing and joined a glee club. (Frankland did much the same in Lancaster a few years later.)167 Spencer entered journalism through the political associations of his Uncle Thomas, who was himself a writer of political pamphlets. In mid-­ 1842, after a year of unsuccessful invention, self-­education, and recreation in Derby, Spencer was seeking an income. Stimulated by a visit to his aunt and uncle, he began writing against government interference. Thomas Spencer gave Herbert an introduction to his friend Edward Miall, the editor of the Nonconformist, and Miall published a series of letters by Spencer arguing against government interference, whether in commerce, care for the poor, education, or sanitary matters. He started from the principle of natural law, learned from his father and reinforced by phrenology: “Everything in Nature has its laws. . . . Mind has its Laws as well as matter.” Optimistically, he asserted that the laws of society have a “self-­adjusting principle,” therefore “natural evils will rectify themselves”; the only role for government is “to protect person and property.”168 The Nonconformist was the journalistic organ of the “advanced” Dissenters, those who were advocating causes such as franchise extension and church reform.169 In 1842 Spencer became the secretary of the Derby branch of the Complete Suffrage Union (CSU) and became Derby delegate to the meeting in Birmingham at which the “complete suffragists” and moral force Chartists tried to negotiate a common program that would unite “the people” against gentry and aristocracy.170 The negotiations failed but the political-­activist friends of his uncle whom he met there provided useful introductions at later stages of his journalistic career. A year later Spencer went to London with the hope of establishing himself in a literary career. He wrote on contemporary political issues and on phrenology. He was active in dissenting causes, for example, in Miall’s Metropolitan Anti-­State Church Association, set up to campaign for the disestablishment of the Church of England. Disappointingly few of his pieces were published, and even fewer brought any remuneration: he published his earlier letters to the Nonconformist as a pamphlet but sales did not cover costs. Having earned only seven shillings and 83

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sixpence from literary work in six months and borrowed many times more from his father, Spencer returned to Derby.171 This time he hoped to make his living from a type-­founding invention; he would realize a fortune, he believed, if only he could find someone with at least £5,000 to invest. With the income, he planned to start a periodical, The Philosopher. In ardent Enlightenment language Spencer’s draft prospectus proclaimed a new era of inquiry and reason and the near-­end of prejudice, “antiquated authority,” and “unmeaning custom.172 There seem to have been no limits to Spencer’s interests and con­ fidence. He wrote an article (published in the Civil Engineer’s and Architect’s Journal) on the strength of girders. He began writing a long poem. He wrote articles (never published) on the “quantity” and “intensity” of electricity and two (which were published) on phrenological categories. He developed Spencer senior’s shorthand system. The Philosophical Magazine published his article on the relationship between animals and plants in which he alluded to the causes of “progressive development” of animals and plants.173 This breadth of ambition and unbounded self-­confidence was in large part a product of his father’s educational methods. Spencer was twenty-­three years old when he returned from London to Derby to be, once again, dependent on his parents. Over the following five years he ventured briefly into political journalism, returned to engineering during the railway boom, and repeatedly came up with new but uncommercial inventions. A brief journalistic venture in 1844 uncovered the problems he might have if he sought employment within the networks of radical Dissent. Spencer was appointed subeditor of the Pilot, a new Birmingham paper published by men associated with the CSU. The paper, although organizationally independent, was to represent the views of the advanced Dissenters—­manhood suffrage, anticorn laws, church disestablishment.174 Spencer was in political agreement with the CSU but personal contact revealed fundamental religious disagreements. Devout leaders of the CSU were shocked at young Spencer’s rationalism. If politically radical Dissenters could not work closely with Spencer then his potential areas of employment were further limited. By 1848 he was sufficiently discouraged by his prospects that he considered immigration to New Zealand, but this would be to give up his greatest ambition. He was writing a book, and confidently thought it would offer useful new ways to understand society. He chose poverty and the hope of making a literary reputation in “the civilized world” over comfort and the expectation of marriage in New Zealand.175 At last, in 1848, Spencer had a lucky break. Uncle Thomas recommended him to James Wilson, proprietor and editor of the Economist. 84

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Wilson was an ardent free trader who, having entered parliament in 1847, needed assistance with the paper. He offered Spencer one hundred guineas, supplemented by accommodation at the office, to subedit the Economist. Spencer accepted, calculating that most of the subeditorial work could be done in the last three days of each week, and that he would therefore have time to continue writing his book.176 He stayed at the Economist for five years. In London Spencer began to move outside nonconformist circles. At first his social circle was small. He had a few friends from engineering days and regularly visited his Aunt and Uncle Thomas after they moved to London in 1849. He joined the Whittington Club, not from commitment to its objectives but because it was a convenient place to buy his dinner, and he found its library and newspaper room useful.177 Also nearby was the establishment of the radical publisher John Chapman. Chapman ran his business downstairs and a boardinghouse and ménage à trois on the upper floors at 142, The Strand. In 1850, when Chapman was publishing Spencer’s book, he invited Spencer to his weekly soirées. Spencer met London’s literary avant-­garde—­literary ladies, advocates of free thought, and notorious converts out of orthodox Christianity. G. H. Lewes, a witty, Frenchified author and actor, became a friend, and in the spring of 1851 he and Spencer began going on excursions together. Later in 1851 Spencer met Marian Evans who, like himself, had come from the Midlands and was seeking to establish herself in literary London. She was celebrated in radical circles for her scholarly translation (published by Chapman) of D. F. Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu. This offered, against both orthodox believers and rationalists, a mythical interpretation of the gospels. Evans boarded in Chapman’s establishment and, when Spencer met her, was working with Chapman on plans for the Westminster Review, which Chapman was in the process of buying. By early 1852 Spencer and Evans were constant companions, and there were rumors that they were engaged. However, although Evans was deeply attached to Spencer, he did not reciprocate the feeling; he admired “the greatness of her intellect” and enjoyed her company but, as he tactlessly explained, was not attracted because she was not beautiful.178 The Westminster circle was a useful social network for an aspiring radical writer. Chapman had a network of liberal-­minded financial backers who funded his purchase of the Westminster Review and who sometimes backed individual books. He had been able to publish Spencer’s Social Statics because a supporter guaranteed £200—­to be repaid after two years by Spencer, hopefully from the proceeds of sales. Strong financial backing allowed Chapman to pay contributors about ten guineas a sheet when he 85

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took over the Westminster. He was impressed by Spencer, who reminded him of his younger self, and asked him to write an article for his first number.179 Lewes, who was an experienced writer and acquainted with many editors, could offer useful advice and introductions and also had his own editorial patronage to dispense. Lewes and his close friend Thornton Hunt had started a weekly paper, the Leader (founded in 1850). The paper was going to lead public opinion. Their masthead quotation from Alexander von Humboldt announced that they were on the side of History: “The one idea which History exhibits as evermore developing itself into greater distinctness is the Idea of Humanity.” The Leader advocated universal suffrage, cooperative socialism, equal rights for Roman Catholics, and reform of the divorce law.180 Atypically for an early Victorian paper, contributors were not required to conform to a party line, but Spencer was so fearful of being associated with the socialism of the Leader that he published his pieces anonymously under the title, “Haythorne Papers.” Lewes treated Spencer well. He reviewed Social Statics at length in the Leader in 1851 and paid Spencer a guinea a column for a series of six essays in 1852–­53.181 Marian Evans, although new to London’s literary circles, also had patronage to dispense. As Chapman’s “uncredited assistant editor” she provided the intelligence, organization, and tact that revived the Westminster’s intellectual stature. Spencer contributed four more articles to the Westminster under her brief assistant editorship.182 Through Chapman, Lewes, and Evans, Spencer met a wide variety of “progressive” political and religious thinkers beyond his previous circles of devout Dissenters. Throughout the country, such groups of unorthodox, middle-­class thinkers were in contact. George Combe, the Edinburgh phrenologist, and Robert Chambers, the Edinburgh publisher, visited Chap­ man when they came to London. The Brays, Evans’s freethinking Coventry friends who had introduced her to Chapman, were also friends of Chambers and Combe. Combe’s phrenology, Comte’s positivism, and necessitarian or deterministic theories were widely espoused in these circles. Unitarians and “advanced thinkers” among the Anglicans joined the literary radicals to pursue common political and social goals. Only by uniting would they be strong enough to achieve any reform. The Reverend Edmund Larken, for example, was the chief funder of the Leader, and the Reverend Mark Pattison from Oxford was a reviewer for the Westminster,183 but there was little personal connection between Spencer’s devout nonconformist radicals and the circles of his new literary friends. Spencer was gaining respect in wider circles. A Manchester industrialist who was advising on Chapman’s purchase of the Westminster in 1851 hoped that Spencer would be a regular contributor. Spencer’s social circle 86

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and social activities expanded. He met establishment figures who supported unorthodox ideas and liberal causes. Spencer was surprised by the Reverend Charles Kingsley, whom he met at a picnic. “No one would suspect” him of being a clergyman. He was “jolly” (Spencer’s Uncle Thomas had left him with different expectations of clergymen) and seemed to believe in “the development hypothesis,” for he said that higher creatures than man would yet be evolved.184 In this circle, Spencer was free to develop his arguments without being tested against orthodoxy. In the 1840s and 1850s many freethinkers chose not to express their views in respectable circles for fear of being labeled “infidels” and classed with dangerous demagogues who would overthrow Church and state. Aware of these constraints, Lewes invited his Leader contributors to unite in a conversation club where frank, entirely confidential discussions could take place.185 Confidentiality was essential. When Spencer debated the existence of God with his uncle in London, a report of the debate reached Spencer’s father, and Herbert had to explain himself: I hold that we are utterly incompetent to understand the ultimate nature of things, or origin of them, as the deaf man is to understand sound, or the blind man light. My posi­ tion is simply that I know nothing about it, and never can know anything about it, and must be content in my ignorance. . . . If the existence of matter from all eternity is in­ comprehensible, the creation of matter out of nothing is equally incomprehensible. . . . I am content to leave the question unsettled as the insoluble mystery.186

Here Spencer expressed views that he later formalized in the concept of “the Unknowable.” Lewes had reached similar conclusions about the limits of human knowledge but was less of a pure rationalist. Unlike Spencer, Lewes allowed a space for religious feeling and for intuition; nevertheless, for Lewes as for Spencer, science, “the positive knowledge of finite minds,” encompassed all that finite beings could know.187 These ideas were widely discussed in the Chapman and Leader circles, as Mark Francis and Michael Taylor have elaborated, but here I emphasize that they were not initiated in the early 1850s. When they met, Spencer, Lewes, and Evans found they already had much in common. Spencer was already committed to finding laws of nature, sought to explain all phenomena by natural causes, looked for developmental explanations, espoused a minimalist state, and avoided fundamental religious question by an agnostic appeal to the limits of human knowledge. To adapt Taylor, these London circles “provided intellectual legitimacy to some of Spencer’s most powerful assumptions” and “assisted him in rationalizing 87

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ideas he had already adopted” from his father or his uncle.188 Spencer’s friends pushed him to broader sympathies, for example, they admired both Carlyle and Comte. Tyndall and, as we shall see, Huxley had come across new conceptions of religion through their reading of Carlyle, but Spencer had not previously taken Carlyle seriously.189 Carlyle’s pronouncements upon the “Immensities” and “Necessities” of the universe and Comte’s appreciation for the social cohesion engendered by shared beliefs resonated with Lewes. Spencer respected neither Carlyle nor Comte and, when others claimed to see similarities between his work and Comte’s, insisted rather too loudly on his own complete independence. In spite of these differences Spencer and Lewes found much in common. Both believed a science of society to be possible. They were particularly interested in theories of development and discussed the anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Spencer acknowledged that he gained an interest in psychology and in philosophy more generally from reading Lewes’s Biographical History of Philosophy, a widely read popular work that was outselling even Vestiges.190 The evolutionary philosophy of universal development that characterized Spencer’s mature work emerged slowly and in fragmented form in the 1850s. In 1851, through reading W. B. Carpenter’s Principles of Physiology, Spencer first became acquainted with Karl von Baer’s generalization that the development of the embryo was a development from homogeneity to heterogeneity.191 A decade later, Spencer generalized von Baer’s principle to the universe. The development of the homogeneous to the heterogeneous is the law of all development—­from the solar system to human societies. This grand evolutionary vision came about slowly. In his 1852 article on the “Development Hypothesis” Spencer’s argument was analogical: by slow and continuous change a seed becomes an oak tree, a circle an ellipse and then a parabola, a human ovum an infant and then a man. Slow development of species is therefore more conceivable than creation out of nothing. His almost-­coincident publication of “A Theory of Population” argued that population pressure led to progress in human societies, but did not discuss development. On Spencer’s self-­analysis, he first used von Baer’s theory in “The Philosophy of Style” (October 1852 in the Westminster Review) where, from the principle that heterogeneity was superior to homogeneity, he came to the conclusion that greater heterogeneity or variety was a mark of progress in art.192 Spencer and Lewes were on the edge of the gentlemanly London science; they were admirers, students, and informed observers, but not “workers,” as those who performed investigations described themselves. Lewes, who was a self-­conscious critic of the emerging expert science, 88

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is a useful foil in unpacking Spencer’s attitudes. In spite of the independence inculcated by his father, Spencer was more deferential to the experts than was Lewes, who outspokenly criticized “men of specialties” in the Leader in 1851. They “amass ‘facts’” but forget that facts should be “stepping stones” to a philosophy that deals in processes and causation. Lewes praised Richard Owen for his demolition of Lyell’s “obstinate” arguments against progressive development and for publishing it in the widely read Quarterly Review. In Lewes’s vision, scientific discussion should be accessible to the public and relevant to the development of a larger philosophy.193 Spencer used science to build a philosophy and, like Lewes, admired Owen, who was at the height of his power and fame in the 1850s. In 1851 Spencer attended Owen’s course on comparative osteology as he wanted to understand morphology. But he was less philosophically aware than Lewes of the difference between his interests and those of expert men of science. He wanted scientific affirmation of his work. He, or his editors, sent copies of his early essays on development and on the population theory to “leading thinkers,” and Spencer hopefully awaited their judgments. The “Development Hypothesis” from the Leader, for example, was sent to Owen, Lyell, and Sedgwick, among others.194 Spencer reported proudly to his father that Owen and Edward Forbes had good opinions of his “Theory of Population” article. Perhaps, though, Owen was merely polite. “It was a very good article,” he wrote, but as he “had read it rapidly” he could not give a decisive opinion.195 Much lower down the scientific hierarchy than Owen and Forbes was a young assistant surgeon in the navy. Spencer wanted to know more about a paper that Mr. T. H. Huxley had read to the British Association on “the Ascidians.” Spencer wrote to Huxley, enclosing his population paper to explain his interest; Huxley called to see Spencer and thus their acquaintance began.196 Huxley, the ambitious specialist, and Spencer, the all-­embracing generalist, nevertheless had common commitments and objectives: anti-­Establishment politics, a purely naturalistic science, a philosophy to support this science. Thomas Henry Huxley was born into a middle-­class, Anglican family that was sinking downward in the social order. His schooling began at a preparatory school in Ealing, just west of London, where his father, George Huxley, taught mathematics. This once-­proud school was in decline; when it closed in 1835 the family moved to George Huxley’s native Coventry, and Tom, the youngest of six children, did not attend school again. The family was dragged down and split apart by poverty, mental instability, and scandal, but Tom Huxley fought his way back, 89

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through medicine, to middle-­class respectability and a career in science. His route to respectability and security left him aware of the deprivations of poverty and exposed him to the reforming politics of Dissenters, campaigning against the privileges of the established Church, and poor medical practitioners, campaigning against the privileges of the fellows and members of the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons. He also became acquainted with the rationalist theology of Unitarians and the materialist theories expounded in London’s alternative medical schools.197 Huxley’s story has become well known through Adrian Desmond’s evocative biography. I emphasize here the cultural embedding of the visions of science he encountered, and the subsidiary theme of privilege and disadvantage that runs through this chapter. Coventry, where Huxley spent his youth, was the town where Marian Evans gave up her strict evangelical faith and found intellectual companionship among Unitarians, freethinkers, and phrenologists. Huxley was too young and too poor to move in those circles, but through reading and in conversation with the occasional mentor willing to discuss religion and politics with a precocious youth, he became acquainted with the controversial issues of the day. Dissenters were as numerous as Anglicans in Coventry, and Tom Huxley took up their grievances. He argued, against his parents, that the Church had no right to make Dissenters pay the annual church rate and, further, that there ought not to be an established Church.198 Although Huxley did not attend school again, his family had cultural resources. He read scientific works from his father’s bookshelves and learned modern languages from his sisters. A favorite book from his father’s library was James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth, an account of the slowly orderly formation of geological phenomena. Huxley also read of the operation of law in the social world. In the library of George May, a young, radical-­thinking businessman, he found Southwood Smith’s Divine Government. According to Smith, the Deity had created the world by law, all was planned from the beginning, the result of laws “steady and invariable” in their operation. Humankind should not expect the Deity to intervene in the natural order to protect individuals from pain and disappointment; rather, individuals who adjust their behavior to avoid pain and suffering will achieve a higher good.199 Huxley debated moral and philosophical issues with May. Could morality be defined by a cost-­ benefit analysis of pleasures and pains as advocated by utilitarians? Was human choice included within the deterministic system of natural law? Was there a “soul” that put man outside nature? The youthful Huxley tried out a fence-­sitting monism, suggestive of his later agnosticism, pro90

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posing to May that matter and soul might be essentially the same: “it cannot be proved that matter is essentially—­as to its base—­different from soul.” May responded to Huxley’s monism with a materialist quip—­the soul is the “perspiration” of matter.200 Huxley’s experiences of poverty and participation in political and metaphysical debate deepened when he became a medical apprentice. Wandering around Coventry and its environs (hit by depression in ribbon manufacturing in 1837) and, then, as a medical apprentice, he saw dep­ rivation much worse than his own family’s poverty. Huxley’s two elder sisters married medical practitioners, and both couples moved to London. Huxley, who at age thirteen had already been apprenticed to John Cooke, husband of his eldest sister Ellen, followed them to London, where Cooke apprenticed him to an East End doctor, Thomas Chandler, early in 1841. Huxley’s patients in the East End and, later, at Charing Cross Hospital, suffered from diseases caused by filth and malnutrition, from injuries on building sites, and from personal violence. Others endured deformities and neurological malfunctions. Huxley was appalled at the squalor and brutality and, as Desmond describes him, felt guilty at his own comparative comfort.201 His experiences reinforced his rejection of the social order that produced these horrors. Both Cooke and Chandler were connected with alternative and reforming medical circles, and through them the young Huxley became acquainted with reforming medical politics, alternative medical practices, and, once again, materialist philosophies. Outside the world of elite, gentlemanly science, materialism and determinism were widely discussed by lecturers and students in London’s private medical schools, as Adrian Desmond has shown. Some medical radicals even used French theories of transmutation to argue for democracy, that is, progress from the bottom up in the social world. Democracy in medicine was a hot issue. The most radical reformers demanded that the medical profession be open to all, without differentiation of status between physicians, surgeons, lowly apothecaries, and the new rank of general practitioners. In the 1820s the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) and the consultants in teaching hospitals sought to close down private medical schools that, by giving lectures to apothecaries and general practitioners, assisted them to obtain the RCS licenses to practice as surgeons. Reformers were outraged at this effort to keep poorer men out of the profession and keep up the consultants’ lecturing fees.202 Cooke belonged to this alternative medical world. When Huxley began his apprenticeship in Coventry, Cooke was editing the medical lectures of the flamboyant John Elliotson. Elliotson preached materialism—­ 91

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thoughts are produced by the brain as bile by the liver; and he denigrated Christian faith—­useful only as consolation for the miserable. Cooke had come to London to teach at Sydenham College, one of the few surviving private medical schools. Huxley hoped that he could get into the medical school of the secular University College. Bitter and ambitious, he wanted to climb out of the social world of poverty; he wanted success and acknowledgment for himself, and a social system that made a space for those without the privileges of birth. Tom Huxley gradually worked his way up the medical ladder. Through the spring and summer of 1841 he studied Latin, Greek, history, chemistry, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, German, physiology, and physics. He read widely from the Penny Cyclopaedia and David Hume’s History of Great Britain to Johannes Müller’s Elements of Physiology. He built an electromagnet and later tried chemical experiments with batteries, much as Frankland was doing in the same years in Lancaster. Every moment not taken up in his apprenticeship was given to study. By October he was ready to begin medical lectures and enrolled at Sydenham College. He vindicated his family’s hopes by winning certificates of merit and a botany prize in his first year. Secretly, he was studying for the botany prize of the Apothecaries Company and in the summer of 1842 won its silver medal for botany. His aspirations shifted from University College to the new medical school at Charing Cross Hospital when he heard that the hospital offered a few free places to the sons of destitute gentlemen. Huxley’s prizes and medal, supported by testimonials of his father’s respectability, convinced the hospital managers of his worthiness and, in October 1842, Huxley entered the hospital school. Charing Cross Hospital brought Tom Huxley to the borders of gentlemanly science. It took him away from the world of materialists and medical reformers, but did not remove him from the horrors of poverty. Daily dissections (using the corpses of paupers) were an essential part of the training; texts, they were taught, were unreliable. Thomas Wharton Jones, expert embryologist, and fellow of the Royal Society of London since 1840, taught physiology. Huxley learned techniques of microscopy and the latest cell theory; he was fascinated by the development of the embryo. His other favorite teacher was George Fownes who, fresh from Liebig’s laboratory at Giessen, was teaching that organic substances could be made from inorganic chemicals. Charing Cross Hospital was a philanthropic, Anglican establishment, and both Fownes and Wharton Jones were devout Anglicans who saw the wisdom and goodness of God in nature. His teachers raised his ambitions although he did not follow their philosophy. Huxley expected to find law behind it all: “To explain a 92

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Physiological fact means in a word to deduce its necessity from the physical and chemical laws of Nature.”203 He read the latest books in the Library of the Royal College of Surgeons and shunned the reputedly dissolute life of medical students for long hours at the microscope. He won medals for physiology and chemistry in the hospital examinations in 1843 and, in 1845, a gold medal for anatomy and physiology in the University of London medical examinations. He discovered a previously unnoticed membrane that sheathed human hair follicles and was encouraged by Wharton Jones to publish. Increased debts accompanied these proud achievements, for the scholarship covered only Huxley’s fees. Huxley borrowed money from his eldest brother, a successful businessman, and from brother-­in-­law Cooke. He dreamed of an academic career (like Wharton Jones and Fownes) but when he graduated from Charing Cross Hospital in 1845 he was too young to obtain the Royal College of Surgeon’s license, and he needed an income. When a friend suggested that he join the navy’s medical service, Huxley, having no patron to act as an advocate and intermediary, wrote directly to the physician general of the navy, Sir William Burnett. Hence, in March 1846, Huxley became an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy at 7s 6d a day. His lack of patronage illustrates his social distance from the young Joseph Hooker. At the Haslar Naval Hospital near Plymouth, Huxley’s new head, Sir John Richardson, had noted the credentials of his new recruit and offered him a position on Captain Owen Stanley’s surveying expedition to Australia and New Guinea. The expedition had explicitly imperial purposes—­to survey coasts, reefs, and seas in order to select sites for settlements and identify safe routes for shipping—­but Stanley assured his assistant surgeon that he would be encouraged to collect. Stanley was from an aristocratic Whig family, son of the Bishop of Norwich and brother to A. P. Stanley, the Oxford reformer. He described Huxley to friends as a “very good naturalist” and introduced him to leading London men of science—­Richard Owen, Hunterian Professor at the College of Surgeons, J. E. Gray of the British Museum’s Natural History Department, Edward Forbes of the Geological Survey. Gray advised him to collect invertebrates; Forbes advised on the techniques of deep-­sea dredging; Owen emphasized the importance of dissecting fish brains. As the navy did not provide scientific equipment, Huxley spent his first pay check on a microscope and books.204 In early December 1846 the brilliant, ambitious twenty-­ one-­ year-­ old assistant surgeon sailed from England on the HMS Rattlesnake. His researches were guided by his ambition to make a career in science. 93

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Specialization, he had decided, was crucial. Building on his skills in microscopy and the riches of his marine location, he decided to specialize in small, delicate sea creatures, the ill-­described Radiata of Cuvier’s fourth great family of animals. Huxley had the advantage that when one specimen rotted he could almost always obtain another from his dredge. He built up series of drawings of related species and genera. His first written paper, based on dissection of many specimens, showed that the French description of the poisonous jellyfish, the Portuguese man-­of-­ war, was incorrect. Huxley was always ready to advance his own reputation by emphasizing the errors of others, but the Portuguese man-­of-­war (Physalia) also had a larger significance. Because each individual seemed to be a colony of smaller individuals it raised philosophical questions about the nature of individuality. Huxley dealt in big questions. He was not interested in collecting and naming new species. Nor was he meticulous in his descriptions.205 Rather, his observations were directed to larger issues, such as the principles of classification and the nature of animal individuality. He was fascinated by the structural theories of comparative anatomy, the “philosophical anatomy” that proposed that there were common structural patterns shared by creatures belonging to related species, genera, and even families. Huxley constantly sought structural patterns. He found that jellyfish had a common two-­layer stomach structure, but differed enormously in how the tissues were folded. He appealed to embryology to reinforce the similarities: the embryos showed a common pattern in that the same part at one stage developed into the homologous organs of a later stage. Anemones and sea nettles, he found, had the same double membrane structure as jellyfish. Some individuals were particularly puzzling. Were delicate complex sea nettles a single complex individual or a colony of many diverse individuals?—­ the former, said Huxley. Some species had two forms—­ alternation of generations it was called—­but Huxley said the buds were not a separate form of the salps but merely detached reproductive organs.206 Between the long months at sea, the Rattlesnake visited many ports: Huxley condemned Roman Catholicism in Madeira, was shocked by slavery in Rio de Janeiro, gloried in the tropical beauty of Mauritius, and lost his heart in Sydney. His modest birth and dire poverty did not matter in the convict society; the dashing young surgeon in his dress uniform was welcome at any ball, and the dark Huxley fell for a fair Australian. Henrietta Heathorn was cultured and educated (she read German) and had been in Sydney only three years. From then on Huxley’s voyage was divided sharply into weeks or months in Sydney with Nettie (as he called her), and longer months at sea without her. Although of94

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ten sunk so deep in melancholy that he withdrew from both social and scientific activity, Huxley survived extreme heat, humidity, bad weather, bad food, close quarters, irrational discipline, the deaths of patients and companions, and bitter loneliness and fear. The final trial was saying farewell to Nettie. In mid-­1850, after its fifth visit to Sydney, the leaky Rattlesnake began its winter voyage back to England. Huxley revealed his hopes and fears in the journal he left with Nettie on each return to Sydney, and in his letters to Nettie and to his favorite sister, Lizzie. Combative, proud, and ambitious in public, Huxley was sensitive, self-­doubting, and deeply emotional in private. The young man who was revising the theories of leading naturalists described himself as a “hotch potch of knowledge and ignorance, fact and fiction.” Huxley had the introspective conscience, although not the theology, of evangelicalism. Ambitious and independent, he despised himself for the vanity that “formed half the stimulus to my exertions.” He wanted to be recognized on merit alone, but how to succeed without using patronage? Resenting his dependence, he nevertheless took up Captain Stanley’s offer to send his first article to the Bishop of Norwich for communication to the Linnean Society. He planned to send his wide-­ranging comparison of many species and genera of Radiata to Sir William Burnet not, he tried to tell himself, to draw himself to Sir William’s attention, nor because Sir William was a fellow of the Royal Society and could therefore communicate the paper to the Society, but because “I owe the old man much.”207 His contradictory ideals and hopes were poured out to Nettie. Desmond explains the contradictions by reference to the family psyche and Huxley’s own bitter struggle to succeed; Paul White interprets the tensions as arising from Huxley’s creating himself as a “man of science”; both agree that Nettie was an anchor for his contradictions. She had an emotional intensity to match his, but without his inner conflicts and swings of mood. Huxley described himself as “weak as a woman” and praised Nettie’s “earnestness and truth and firm kind goodness.”208 Huxley’s mother had hoped that Nature would lead her doubting son to God, but neither Nature nor Nettie’s efforts at persuasion shook Huxley’s religious uncertainties. In Mauritius on the voyage out to Australia he had written, “Morals and religion are one wild whirl to me.” Nettie was devout and deeply concerned about Huxley’s morally justified unbelief. Her “Hal” (as she called him) tried to reassure her by appealing to the biblical principle that God judges motives not actions: “the Almighty search[er] of hearts can alone be the efficient judge.” He tried to persuade her to see it in his secularized way: to be “truthful and earnest” in a lengthy search after truth is better than to adopt “fashionable error” in order to gain some 95

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position or respectability.209 As they both knew, certain kinds of respect and financial advantage were available only to those who professed Anglican beliefs. Huxley’s own beliefs remain obscure. He portrayed himself as still seeking, but it would seem that he had already rejected orthodoxy. He wished to be perceived as religious, but this was the sense of religion that he had found in Carlyle, an emotive feeling for Truth and Beauty and Nature. Volumes of Carlyle were his parting gift to Nettie.210 Huxley returned to London in November 1850, anxious to learn whether the letters and articles he had sent back to experts and potential patrons for communication to scientific societies had been noticed. He was overjoyed to find that two had been published in full, and others recorded by abstracts. The scientific men who had advised him in 1846 again offered support. The navy gave him leave on half pay while he wrote up his collections for publication, but Huxley feared that he would be recalled to active service before he obtained a better position. He wanted employment urgently. He was expected to contribute to his parents’ support, and he had to pay off his outstanding student debts be­ fore he could afford to marry.211 Radical and reforming groups in the Midlands and in London provided comparable contexts for the careers of Spencer and Huxley. Both learned a science that was naturalistic and deterministic; both were early introduced to anti-­Establishment politics. But their career paths were conspicuously different. Huxley determined to specialize. This was the way to scientific success, it seemed to him. Spencer did not consider specialization. He wrote articles on politics, phrenology, electricity, and everything else. He invented machines and new languages. He was an engineer and a journalist. In the tradition learned from his father, knowing everything and explaining everything was possible. It is a puzzle that Huxley and Spencer became close friends. James Secord has argued that the new experts, such as Huxley, wanted to separate science from the speculations and second-­ hand science of the journalists.212 Spencer’s later membership of the X Club suggests that this division was not absolute. The shared backgrounds of Spencer and Huxley in the politics, theology, and science of radical Dissent may contain elements of an explanation for Spencer’s presence.

1.4 Spottiswoode at Oxford: A Liberal Education for a Christian Gentleman In Spottiswoode’s time the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge educated gentlemen for the service of Church and state. In the 96

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mid-­nineteenth century over half the graduates took Holy Orders in the Church of England. This was the pathway to careers in the Church, to schoolmastering in elite schools, and to college tutorships and fellowships in the universities. Others followed “a private career as country gentleman” and smaller numbers entered the higher professions, the civil service, or political life.213 Spottiswoode was unusual among Oxford undergraduates in coming from a business family and taking up business on graduation. The formal curriculum did not aim to fit men for specific occupations but was focused on Latin and Greek literature, which served, in the approving words of an 1850s committee, “to open, to invigorate, and to enrich the mind.” Men trained in this way, it was believed, would be superior to those who “devoted themselves to the special studies of their calling.”214 Breadth of reading and the acquisition of useful information were unimportant when compared with the intellectual “power” to be gained by reading and translating the great classics. A “liberal” education that cultivated the faculties of the mind would prepare one for any higher occupation. Mathematics, especially Euclidean geometry, had a place in this system of liberal education, for mathematics was held to develop the reasoning powers. The formal curriculum was only part of an Oxbridge education. Daily chapel in college was compulsory, and the most devout attended twice daily.215 Professorial lectures on the sciences and other non-­examinable subjects were optional, but in Spottiswoode’s time few students attended any science lectures.216 Outside formal classes the more serious undergraduates discussed controversial modern authors, such as John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte. Conversation and debate were important; students could learn the art of public speaking and prepare for public life by debating contemporary political issues in the unions.217 Other students, especially the wealthier, wiled away their time in gambling, drinking, and horse riding, and often slept through chapel.218 However, whether “reading men” or “pass men,” Oxford and Cambridge students acquired social graces and made useful friendships. As an 1853 novel described it, a young man would meet many “of his own class,” and would develop the “self-­reliance which will enable him to mix at ease in any society, and feel the equal of its members.”219 Consequently, leading men in the church, in government, and in the professions knew each other well from their days in small, close college societies. This elite was small, restricted by religion and by money. At Oxford matriculating students had to affirm the Thirty-­ Nine Articles of the Church of England before the head of their college; at Cambridge, this 97

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“subscription” to the articles was not required until graduation. This was a cause of growing bitterness through the 1830s and ’40s among the excluded Dissenters.220 Most Dissenters were also excluded by money. At a time when adequate upper-­middle-­class incomes were between £500 and £1,000 most Oxford students spent over £200 per year. Although various kinds of scholarships were available, they often covered only a small proportion of costs or were tied to particular regions by the founders’ gifts.221 William Spottiswoode was born in 1825 into this wealthy, Anglican governing elite. His father, Andrew Spottiswoode (1787–­1866), was the principal of Eyre and Spottiswoode, King’s Printers, and also a partner in the family printing firm of A. and R. Spottiswoode. The family fortune, status, and parliamentary ambitions had been established by Andrew Spottiswoode’s maternal grandfather William Strahan (1715–­ 85), who had expanded a small printing business into publishing and, in 1766, purchased a share in the patent of King’s Printer and, he proudly recorded, made “the Name of Printer more respectable than ever it was before.”222 On taking over the family businesses in 1819, Andrew Spottiswoode and his brother Robert installed steam printing presses. Also in 1819, Andrew Spottiswoode married Mary Longman of the wealthy Longman publishing family. The businesses continued successfully. William Blackwood, publisher, described the Spottiswoode company as “one of the most respectable houses in London” and sent work to Spottiswoode’s because they got it done quickly.223 Shortly after William’s birth, Andrew Spottiswoode entered Parliament in the Tory interest. He educated his sons, William (presumably named after his successful great-­grandfather) and George (born 1827) as gentlemen: Eton, Harrow, and Oxford. When William Spottiswoode matriculated at Balliol College, Oxford, in May 1842, Balliol was recognized as the most scholarly of the Oxford Colleges.224 Balliol had seventy-­three undergraduates, which was moderately large by Oxford standards.225 A contemporary of Spottiswoode’s described the student body as having a greater “proportion of reading men to idlers . . . than anywhere else at Oxford.” Fashionable youths, typical of Harrow and Eton, were balanced by scholarship students from Scotland and serious, idealistic students from Thomas Arnold’s Rugby.226 At Balliol there was some mixing across the social boundaries, with friendships between reading men and members of the “fast set,” and between scholarship students (often from poorer clerical families) and “commoners” (the paying students of gentry status).227 Spottiswoode bridged these divides, for he both kept a horse, the kind of expensive recreation that characterized the “fast set,” and had examination success. According to a friend to whom Spottiswoode occasionally loaned his strong hunter, he “rode but 98

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little himself and did not read much in an orderly way.”228 In his first year he was reproved by the master for his unstudious habits and for frequent late-­night returns to college. In later years, the master often recorded his classical exercises as “indifferent” and urged him to spend more time on classics and less on mathematics.229 The increasing scholarly reputation of Balliol arose from changes in admissions policy and in teaching style. From 1827 scholarships were filled by open competition and scholarly criteria were given greater weight in admission decisions. In the mid-­1830s the tutors, following Oriel reforms, began to pay more personal and pastoral attention to their ablest students in the hope of raising both scholarly and spiritual aspirations.230 As tutors supervised undergraduates more closely, the more personal relationships that resulted led to friendships between tutors and undergraduates. Spottiswoode became a friend of the lecturer in mathematics and logic, Frederick Temple, who later achieved fame as Headmaster of Rugby, Bishop of Exeter, Bishop of London, and, finally, Archbishop of Canterbury. Spottiswoode also became a lifelong friend of Benjamin Jowett, a new tutor in 1842, who remained at Oxford for life as tutor and, later, Master of Balliol.231 Spottiswoode had success in mathematics rather than classics. On his own account his interest in mathematics developed at Oxford. Professor W. F. Donkin (Savilian Professor of Astronomy), he said, “first inspired me with a sense of the magnificence of mathematics,” but Spottiswoode attributed his continuing interest to “the energy and encouragement of my tutor,” Frederick Temple.232 Temple had graduated earlier in 1842 with a double first in classics and mathematics. Under Temple, Spottiswoode had an excellent mathematical education but, like most honors students, he also paid to “cram” with a private coach in his final year. He gained a first class in mathematics, and won both the Senior University and Johnson’s Mathematical Scholarships.233 Thus, the future businessman became a mathematician under the tutorship of a future archbishop in the unreformed and unscientific University of Oxford. There is no fuller record of what Spottiswoode learned at Oxford, or of his beliefs and interests. His life must therefore be approached indirectly, through the lives of his friends and contemporaries. Although, as college records make clear, he had little commitment to classical learning, he would have attended the usual classes: weekly visits to a tutor for Greek and Latin composition; daily, sometimes twice daily, catechetical-­ style lectures, in which tutors covered the set texts, usually reading line by line.234 Occasionally tutors diverted from grammatical analysis. Temple, for example, paused in his reading of Lucretius to comment 99

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on the Lucretian philosophy, and discussed Immanuel Kant and Auguste Comte in the course of his lectures on Aristotle and scholastic logic. Jowett, appointed tutor in 1842, discussed Socrates and Plato in his Greek lectures, recorded giving a lecture on “the Atomic philosophy” about 1845, and was enthusiastic about Hegel.235 Conversation probably ranged widely. Temple was an admirer of S. T. Coleridge’s reconstruction of theology, and was reading the Scottish skeptics, Edward Gibbon and David Hume, during the 1840s. Thus, although the colleges aimed to produce Anglican gentleman, students were not cocooned from philosophical challenges to Christian orthodoxy. Jowett’s friend and contemporary, Benjamin Collins Brodie, who went from Balliol to the University of Giessen in Germany to study chemistry in the early 1840s, had become a Comtean positivist while at Balliol.236 Given Spottiswoode’s friendships with Jowett and Temple it seems likely that he would have been introduced to the ideas of Plato, Kant, Comte, and Coleridge; perhaps also Lucretius, Gibbon, Hume, and Hegel. The greater threat to Anglican orthodoxy at Oxford in the early 1840s was from within the Church. Spottiswoode’s undergraduate years coincided with the final bitter stages of Tractarian controversy during which Oxford debated not belief and unbelief but the boundaries of orthodoxy. From their first “Tract for the Times” in 1833, the Tractarians had been calling for a catholic via media between Protestantism, especially in its evangelical form, and the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church. The Reformation had gone too far they claimed, and the Church of England should emphasize its catholic, inclusive nature and what it held in common with the Roman Church.237 At the same time, but with little popular acceptance, there was a revival of latitudinarianism, expressed most publicly in Thomas Arnold’s Principles of Church Reform (1833). Arnold’s proposed reforms would take the Church in the opposite direction to the Tractarians’ reforms. He wanted the Church to be truly national as a way of making the nation Christian, and proposed that the Church should be reformed by broadening its formularies to include as many of the Dissenters as possible. The essence of Christianity was a way of life. Arnold, who was Headmaster of Rugby, preached a devout, undogmatic, moralizing Christianity to his schoolboys. Oxford in general and Balliol in particular were maelstroms of religious controversy. In the Balliol common room, A. C. Tait (later Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury) was the chief representative of Arnold’s position. Jowett’s friend, A. P. Stanley, ex-­Rugby and ex-­Balliol, a fellow and lecturer in University College, also represented Arnold in dis100

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cussions. Stanley, who appears frequently in the following chapters, had a reputation as a liberal, in the political sense, for his willingness to open the university to Dissenters.238 The most powerful advocate of Tractarianism or Newmanism was the ebullient and brilliant W. G. Ward, lecturer in mathematics and logic (he reappears in chapter 6). Ward was a powerful personality, clumsy in body, but “a mathematical genius, blessed with a magnificent singing voice and boundless good humour.”239 In the late 1830s those in the Balliol common room were entertained by brilliant, friendly debates between Ward and Tait. Ward had been a disciple of Arnold, had then been attracted by Jeremy Bentham and J. S. Mill, and later again turned to Newman. He was one of the younger Tractarians whose excesses brought the movement to crisis. Debate became more polarized with the publication of Tract 90 early in 1841. Published anonymously but written by Newman, Tract 90 argued that the Thirty-­Nine Articles, which defined Anglican doctrine, were consistent with the central doctrines of the Catholic faith. This seemed to imply that Roman Catholic doctrine could be legally taught within the Church of England. Even Tait and the latitudinarians who wanted Anglican doctrine to be inclusive regarded Tract 90 as dangerous and unacceptable and said so publicly. Ward then entered public controversy with two tracts ostensibly defending Newman, but sounding even more Roman by referring to the “darkness of Protestant error” and claiming that the decrees of the Counter-­Reformation Council of Trent could be made consistent with the Thirty-­Nine Articles.240 The reaction at Balliol led to Ward’s resigning his logic and mathematics lectureships. Then, when Thomas Arnold died suddenly in mid-­1842, Tait left Oxford to become Headmaster of Rugby. Thus the chief controversialists within Balliol were removed from daily college life. Although Ward retained his college fellowship and remained a friend of the other fellows, it was considered that he maintained a safe distance from the undergraduates. Spottiswoode arrived at Balliol in 1842, just after this first Tractarian crisis; controversy blew up again in Spottiswoode’s third year and reached a crisis in 1845. The controversies were (probably) important in Spottiswoode’s life, for not only were leaders of the debate located in Balliol but friendships were also developing between Spottiswoode and the Balliol fellows who were chiefly involved. When reminiscing of the 1840s, Jowett remembered Ward, Stanley, and Spottiswoode being among the common friends of himself and Temple.241 Thus, although Ward was quarantined from undergraduates, Spottiswoode might have met him. There was widespread suspicion that Newman and his associates were moving toward Rome. Undergraduates were discouraged from attending 101

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Newman’s sermons (college dinner hours were even changed to clash with service times).242 The second Tractarian crisis began with the publication in mid-­1844 of two books representing the extremes in Church policies. First, was Stanley’s Life of Thomas Arnold, expounding Arnold’s latitudinarian vision of a Christianity that included “all who love truth and goodness.”243 This was upstaged almost immediately by the publication of Ward’s Ideal of a Christian Church. Ward’s ideal required an ascetic saintliness. He attacked the principles of the Reformation. Protestantism would lead in the long run to unbelief and Comtism, Ward argued. Only the Roman Catholic Church provided a firm basis for religious certainty, and the spiritual disciplines that conscience needed.244 Oxford was in uproar. The central issue was the interpretation of the Thirty-­Nine Articles, to which Ward had subscribed both as a matriculating student and on ordination. Now he said that they were consistent with Roman doctrine and that they must be interpreted “non-­ naturalistically” because no consistent literal interpretation was possible. The vice-­chancellor and heads of the colleges wanted to condemn specific statements in Ward’s book as inconsistent with the Articles, strip Ward of his degrees, and permanently remove confusion by requiring subscription to the Articles in the sense in which they were first published—­as if that could be known. Few agreed with Ward, even Tractarian associates found him unwise and “aggravating,”245 but many within the university wanted to defend freedom of interpretation and thought it unjust, even illegal, to deprive him of his degrees. Ward was tried before Convocation, the body of all MA graduates of the university. On 13 February 1845, amid snow and slush, 1,300 Oxford MAs, the vast majority angry, conservative country clergymen, gathered to hear the case. Ward defended himself, arguing that every clergyman present had interpreted the Articles for himself. The book was condemned by a large majority, then, by a narrow majority, Ward was formally “degraded” of his degrees. Jowett felt as if he had “witnessed an execution.” The undergraduates waiting outside felt excitement rather than tragedy. Ward was cheered as he left the Sheldonian Theatre; the vice-­chancellor greeted with hisses and snowballs. Ward was escorted back to Balliol by sixty to seventy cheering undergraduates.246 Very likely Spottiswoode was among them. All the Balliol fellows voted for Ward on both issues. They were genuine defenders of liberality of interpretation where differences were sincerely held. They were also aware that rigid interpretations of the Articles could be used in the future against themselves. The shifting theological emphasis among latitudinarians is marked by a shifting language, from 102

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“latitudinarian” to “liberal.” In the mid-­1840s Jowett used both terms for himself and Stanley.247 Latitudinarian had meant inclusive churchmanship, emphasizing the central beliefs held in common and allowing liberty of conscience, but as Jowett and Stanley were aware, the German philosophies and recent biblical criticism that they were reading made it more difficult to agree on even the central, common beliefs. An unsympathetic contemporary described the latitudinarians as those who would remove all tests in order to leave “an unlimited field for their speculations.”248 This avoidance of dogmatic forms and emphasis on freedom of thought came to be identified as “liberal” theology. At about this time Spottiswoode faced a more personal crisis. Perhaps he had been hoping for a scholarly career, or at least for a period as an Oxford fellow or tutor, for he gave a short course of lectures at Balliol on the geometry of three dimensions, but about 1846 his comfortable prospects collapsed: “intelligence reached him of the entire collapse of his father’s fortune through unwise speculation.”249 Andrew Spottiswoode resigned his share in the queen’s patent to his elder son, and William Spottiswoode left Oxford for business life in London.250 He returned occasionally—­to give a series of lectures, to reside for three weeks in order to meet the residency requirement for the MA, and as examiner in mathematics in but rebuilding the business became his immediate the later 1850s251—­ concern. When Spottiswoode visited Oxford in the later 1840s the issues had changed. With the power of Tractarianism spent, university reform, the contentious issue of the 1830s, returned to the top of the agenda. Spottiswoode’s friends, Stanley, Jowett, and Temple, were “conservative reformers.” They wanted reform from inside to prevent the imposition of more unwelcome reforms from outside. Opening the universities to Dissenters and to able young men of the middling orders, broadening the curriculum, and raising academic standards were major objectives. These required more fundamental changes: reconsideration of subscription, strengthening the professoriate, and overriding the wills of founders in order to change scholarship and fellowship regulations. Such changes challenged the independence of colleges and the nature of Oxford as a religious institution. Internal resistance to the financial changes necessary for reform was so effective that a Royal Commission was appointed, with Stanley as secretary and Tait a member. Spottiswoode graduated from Oxford as a liberally educated Christian gentleman, although not quite as Oxford tradition desired. His liberal education was less focused on the classics and his religion less dogmatic than was typical of Oxford graduates in the 1840s. The story 103

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of Spottiswoode’s Oxford life constructed here is supported by the records of his later life. He had departed from the Toryism of his father. His friends were reforming liberals in university and Church and, as we shall see, Spottiswoode supported Church reform, university reform, and education reform. He expressed his underlying, theologically liberal orientation to life and learning in the dedication to his 1847 collection of mathematical articles, Meditationes analyticae: “To those who love to wander on the shore till the day when their eyes shall be opened and they shall see clearly the works of God in the unfathomed ocean of truth.”252 Spottiswoode’s humility about current knowledge was consistent with a theological liberalism that refused to narrowly define orthodoxy and truth in the present. Almost twenty years later (chapter 3.2), he sought to defend his friends Temple and Jowett when they were suspected of heresy. Debates over the interpretation of the Articles and the breadth and inclusivity of the Church continued and were issues of importance in the development of the X Club. While reviving the fortunes of Eyre and Spottiswoode, Spottiswoode maintained broad scholarly interests. He joined the Royal Astronomical Society in 1852 and was elected FRS in 1853. In the mid-­1850s he produced his most important mathematical work on the contact of curves and surfaces, but much of his early mathematical work was directed to proving known results by different methods, and Royal Society referees often queried its significance. The preface to Meditationes analyticae explained, “Some of the papers are entirely original; some are partly taken from foreign Memoires.”253 He translated Jewish literature from German into English and joined the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Geographical Society. Spottiswoode, like Busk, was one of the numerous gentlemen who sustained London’s scientific institutions, but he was not a clearly focused expert.

1.5 Scientific Aspirations, Social Status, and Religious Beliefs Gentlemanly London science became more open to outsiders over the first half of the century. As illustrated by their lower fees, most of the newly established learned societies were less elitist than the established societies favored by Banks. In the Royal Society, the 1847 reforms ensured that the assessment of potential fellows gave more weight to scientific merit and less to social status. This is not to say that social standing no longer mattered. The entry and membership fees of high-­ranking socie­ ties kept out many scientific men who lacked private incomes, and, as 104

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elaborated in the next chapter, entrance to scientific society was easier for the wellborn than those of modest birth. The style of London scientific life remained gentlemanly. Receptions, soirées, dinners, and clubs were as much a part of scientific life as the reading and discussion of research papers. For our men, though, the importance of publication is noteworthy. For those in or oriented toward metropolitan institutions, science was about investigation, discovery, and the communication of results through conversation, formal presentation, and publication. Publication was important. Lubbock published his first articles in 1853 at age eighteen or nineteen. Hooker was about twenty when he contributed descriptions of plants to his father’s Icones Planatarum, edited from Glasgow but published in London in 1837. Busk was older, in his thirties, as his earlier publications were on medical topics.254 As the biographies illustrate, science was pursued for different purposes and had different meanings in these diverse social locations. In general, at Oxford science was secondary to classics and was expected to support a Christian vision of creation, but even in supposedly conservative Oxford, many alternatives were taken up. Spottiswoode chose mathematics over classics early in his Oxford career. He also was keen to publish, but his Oxford education had not given him the same clear research focus as Hooker and Lubbock had obtained from their mentors. The London gentlemen expected to contribute to science. Frankland, Tyndall, and Hirst initially pursued science to improve themselves and enhance their employment opportunities. The education available through the institutions of mutual improvement enabled them to move beyond that world. Chemistry, chosen by Frankland, was an easier route to scientific standing than many other sciences because, being so closely connected with industry, chemists were less elitist and more open to all-­ comers. For all three, moving sideways, to education in Germany, was a crucial career move, for outside the English class structure they could gain acceptance and come back to England with enhanced status. They returned to seek scientific employment in a system with few paid positions. The difficulty of obtaining paid employment is the chief theme of chapter 2, the dynamic of expertise and social status that shaped their prospects a subtheme. Huxley and Spencer were less socially disadvantaged than Tyndall, Frankland, and Hirst, and surer that they deserved a place in the sun. Science, as they first encountered it among politically radical Dissenters in Midlands towns, was a means by which to develop a naturalistic metaphysic and epistemology. For Spencer, science was a component of a worldview that united politics, theology, and religion in a vision of 105

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law-­bound nature. Huxley retained something of this vision but chose a different career path, taking up the pursuit of science as specialized expertise. As we shall see in chapter 3, he kept the pursuits separate, while encouraging Spencer in his unifying ambitions. Spencer’s slow steps to acceptance by, but not in, the scientific community are elaborated in chapter 3. The scientifically ambitious men from outside the gentlemanly circles of the metropolis rapidly took on metropolitan values. While still a medical student, Huxley, encouraged by one of his teachers and aspiring to follow a similar career, published his first article at age twenty. Frankland was about twenty-­two when he published his first article, jointly with Kolbe, and joined the Chemical Society. Science was a means of social mobility. In making careers in science, Frankland, Hirst, Huxley, and Tyndall moved upward through the social strata. Endersby justly emphasizes the struggle to find suitable employment, which Hooker had in common with these men from the lower middle class; in my judgment, the social differences were more significant than the similarities.255 Hooker’s father was Professor Hooker, a founding member of the Athenaeum Club; he became Sir William and was invited to visit Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, where he was able to show off his son’s drawings of the Antarctic. It is inconceivable that the fathers of Frankland, Huxley, and company would ever have been offered knighthoods. In finding employment, Hooker had the advantage of his father’s networks. His anxiety about paid employment being of lower status than gentlemanly independence shows, I suggest, the values of his grandfather. For Frankland, Hirst, Huxley, and Tyndall, a career in science was a rise in social status, from apothecary, laboratory assistant, surveyor, schoolteacher, and surgeon to lecturer and professor. Lubbock, Spottiswoode, and Busk were higher in the social order. Lubbock had a secure social position, but even apparently secure positions could be lost. Spottiswoode was heir to a large fortune—­until it was lost by “unwise speculation.” He left Oxford and put aside his mathematical ambitions to rescue the Queen’s Printer side of the family business. He did not marry until aged thirty-­six; perhaps his financial circumstances were difficult in the 1850s. For Busk we have a similar lack of personal information. In later life, he was wealthy enough to live on Harley Street and he had well-­placed relatives, but on personal matters, such as whether his wife brought significant money to the marriage and why he also did not marry until age thirty-­six, no hints remain.256 Leading scientific men mixed easily with representatives of the arts and literature or of government in these social forums. Hooker, Spot106

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tiswoode, and the younger Lubbock moved with self-­confidence in the circles of gentlemanly London science that Huxley, Tyndall, Frankland, and Hirst aspired to enter. Social mobility brought many stresses. As we shall see, Hirst was self-­conscious about his regional accent and Tyndall aware that his Irish birth was a social disadvantage. Busk was more reticent, satisfied with communicating his research in the Microscopical Society rather than ambitious for the Royal Society. These men came from families that took religion seriously, with the possible exception of Busk, of whose early life nothing is known. Christian belief was important and much discussed in their family and friendship circles. This does not mean that orthodoxy ruled. Even at Oxford, the alternatives debated ranged from Comtism to Roman Catholicism and many moved, like Spottiswoode, to a liberal, undogmatic Christianity. At Queenwood and in the Hampshire countryside the range of debated positions was wider, Owenite socialism, Vestiges, and Carlylean transcendentalism, for example. Generally, though, in polite society the unorthodox were expected to avoid offending orthodox opinion, and the orthodox sometimes felt obliged to persuade unorthodox relatives and friends of the error of their ways. Frankland, Hirst, Spencer, and Tyndall all faced in­ quiries from relatives and friends. Most of the members of the group were deeply devout in early life, with Spencer the only certain exception. Although often in transmuted forms, religious sensibility remained important for many members of the Club. In the following chapters, we find some members of the X Club keeping silent to avoid causing concern to their relatives, some in­ sisting that although unorthodox in their doctrinal formulations, they were deeply religious in “feeling,” and some engaged in controversial direct criticisms of orthodoxy. Tyndall, Hirst, and Huxley followed Carlylean reinterpretations: religion was about feelings of awe and wonder at the universe; dogma was irrelevant—­and false; honesty in belief was crucially important. Frankland moved in a different direction—­he wanted “proof” rather than “feeling.” In later years in London, Frankland became a Unitarian. Spottiswoode, Lubbock, and Hooker remained Anglican, but were very liberal in their theologies. Lubbock was devout, and remained devout in practice, but his theology was entirely nondogmatic, for example, in the early 1850s he was open to transmutation. For Hooker, Christian doctrines were to be understood as historical developments and in relation to other religious traditions. Spottiswoode was prepared to allow freedom of belief within the Church of England. What little is known of Busk suggests that he retained some Christian beliefs. The issues that rocked Oxford remained controversial for decades and 107

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engaged the attention of the X-­friends: the interpretation of the Thirty-­ Nine Articles and the right to freedom of thought were issues of concern in the 1860s. Although some of our men still believed some Christian doctrines, we cannot be sure which doctrines or in what way; all were on the side of freedom of belief. Religion in general, and the old universities in particular, have often been charged with obstructing the progress of science through dogmatic prejudice, Huxley’s claim that he found a sign “No entry. By Order, Moses,” being a memorable accusation. The example of Oxford during Spottiswoode’s undergraduate years suggests that the old universities were more flexible and varied institutions than allowed by popular stereotype. While there were theologically dogmatic opponents of science, they were not the only opposition to the expansion of science teaching. As will become apparent in chapter 5, the ideal of a liberal education, which entrenched the classics and a narrow range of mathematical sciences, was widely held. Given the slowness of curriculum change at Oxford and Cambridge, London’s university colleges and the teaching institutions that developed around the Geological Survey were important alternatives in higher education; they also offered hope of employment for aspirants to scientific life. The getting of employment is at the heart of the next chapter.

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TWO

Making Careers Most of the future X Club members were in London by the early 1850s. Frankland and Tyndall returned from Germany, Huxley from Australian seas, and Hooker from northern India in 1850 and 1851. Busk and Spottiswoode were settled in occupations that gave them time to pursue science as an avocation. Lubbock, still only fifteen years old, was being inducted into both science and the family banking business. Spencer was also in London, but was an observer and synthesizer of science rather than a working participant. Hirst spent most of the 1850s on the Continent and did not begin to seek scientific employment in Britain until 1859. In this chapter, the focus is on London. The X-­men considered, even applied for, positions in such places as Toronto, Sydney, Edinburgh, Cork, and Oxford; Frankland took a position in Manchester; but increasingly they decided that the benefits of London outweighed higher incomes elsewhere. However, before they had the luxury of such choices, they had to make middle-­class incomes in London. Hooker, Frankland, Huxley, and Tyndall, all of whom were seeking paid employment in science, are the focus of the first section. Their close friendships were forged as they supported one another in their struggles to obtain paid employment. Through their experiences the making of scientific careers in midcentury is examined, demonstrating the roles of patrons, the practice of “pluralism,” and the ways in which the British Association and the Royal Society could be used in establishing a reputation and a career. Scientific recognition brought increased social status and social challenges to Frankland, Huxley, and Tyndall. The second section analyzes the dynamic 109

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of scientific expertise, social status, and individual temperament revealed in the different early career trajectories of the friends. The lower born suffered social insecurities and had difficulty learning gentlemanly codes of social behavior; the higher born entered scientific society with contrast­ ing ease. Signs of the campaigning zeal that marked the later X Club be­ came apparent in the late 1850s. Friendship and mutual support moved to collaboration as, with growing financial and emotional security and increasing scientific status, the friends sought to reform scientific institutions and mold public attitudes to science. The third section shows how Hooker was the leader in the earliest reforming schemes.

2.1 Finding Employment: Patronage and Pluralism Scientific employment was hard to find in the 1850s. Positions were few, most were ill-­paid, and many were for limited terms only. Salaries were low because the positions were not expected to occupy the full time of their incumbents. Also, it was assumed that the typical aspirant would have support from his family or from an Oxford or Cambridge fellowship in the early stages of his career. In science, poorer young men, like Huxley and Tyndall, without family money or Oxbridge privileges, had to assemble incomes and obligations: a lectureship or curatorship at one institution, an examinership for another, occasional journalistic pieces or translation work, consulting work (for chemists) or cataloging work (for naturalists). In order to marry, an unprivileged young man needed the security of a permanent position, together with an assemblage of these other positions. “Pluralism,” a derogatory word among Church reformers, whose standards of piety required that a parish take the full time of its incumbent, is an apt description of acceptable employment patterns in science, where supplementary positions seldom implied neglect of one’s primary responsibilities. The networks that were later formalized in the X Club developed in London in the 1850s as Hooker, Huxley, Tyndall, Frankland, and, from 1859, Hirst, sought scientific employment. The naturalists, Hooker and Huxley, found common interests with Busk and with W. B. Carpenter, an eminent physiologist at University College. Huxley and Tyndall discovered that they shared lowly backgrounds and great ambitions and each introduced his closest friends to the other. Acquaintance slowly became friendship. These friendships met psychological needs, especially for the social outsiders who needed encouragement and reassurance as

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they faced new and awesome experiences when learning to make their way in gentlemanly London. Another kind of friend was essential to making a career. The patron-­ friend was an established gentleman in the scientific community. He kept an eye out for promising young men, he proffered advice, and he had networks of well-­placed patron-­friends whom he could lobby or who would consult him when positions were available. Hooker, who had grown up under the tutelage and patronage of his father and grandfather, had the continued advantage of Sir William’s networks through the 1850s. Frankland had been fortunate to obtain his first position in 1845 under Playfair, for Playfair was at the center of patronage networks in chemistry. Huxley had benefited from the advice of his medical brothers-­in-­law and, then, from the networks of Captain Owen Stanley, but now Stanley was dead, and his ambitions went beyond the circles of his brothers-­in-­law. However, many of the men who had given advice as he prepared to depart on the Rattlesnake voyage remembered him and supported his entry into gentlemanly London science. Tyndall was bereft of useful patrons. To make a reputation he had to have original papers published and, also, meet the right people in face-­to-­face interaction. He made his “useful ac­ quaintances” through attendance at British Association (the BA) meetings.1 Hooker In 1851 the younger Hooker already had a high reputation in scientific circles as a botanist, and a broader reputation as an intrepid and learned explorer and a collector of exotic plants. Sir James Ross’s official account of the spectacular and dangerous Antarctic expedition had made Hooker’s name known, in British colonies as much as in Britain. During Joseph’s absence in India Sir William had kept his achievements before the horticultural and botanical communities by using his own Kew Journal of Botany to publish regular extracts from Joseph’s letters home. Most notably, demonstrating his mastery of the art of clientage, Sir William had publicized the new rhododendron species his son had collected. Species were named after powerful potential patrons and their relatives—­ for example, Lady Dalhousie—­and the three large, magnificently illustrated volumes, The Rhododendrons of Sikkim-­Himalaya, were effusively dedicated to a royal princess who lived near Kew. Part II, “in handsome imperial folio with 10 beautifully coloured plates,” was advertised at twenty-­five shillings. Plants and volumes alike appealed to wealthy enthusiasts for ornamental gardening. Even misfortune brought fame. The

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Times reported, with imperial arrogance, that “Dr. Hooker, the eminent botanist,” had been captured by the “petty potentate,” the raja of Sikkim. Subsequent reports of Hooker’s release and arrival home kept his name before readers of the Times.2 Hooker, although needing employment like Frankland, Tyndall, and Huxley, had many advantages. He had already established a scientific reputation—­he was, after all, nearly eight years older than Frankland and Huxley—­and he had the patronage of his father and his father’s “friends.” His need was not as urgent as Huxley’s and Tyndall’s, for Sir William was able and willing to support the son of whom he was so proud, and he knew his own value—­he felt himself above a colonial post at the botanical gardens of Ceylon in 1849.3 However, he sought independence, for, at age thirty-­three, he planned to marry Frances Henslow, his fiancée of four years. As an assistant surgeon on leave from the navy, Hooker was granted half pay and, in addition, Sir William and the Reverend Professor John Henslow (professor of botany at Cambridge and rector of the wealthy parish of Hitcham) each settled £100 per year on the couple, making a total of £262. This was not enough to set up an independent middle-­class household, and Hooker was seeking additional sources of income.4 The incomes to which Hooker, Frankland, and their friends aspired indicates that they saw their futures among what Theodore Hoppen identifies as the “exclusive” middle class.5 Despite his reputation and achievements there was no clear pathway to a career in botany for Hooker. He was hoping for government support to sort and publish his Indian collections and to finish his work on the flora of Van Diemen’s Land, Australia, and New Zealand but the Admiralty turned down his request for full pay as a full surgeon while finishing the southern floras, so father and son focused their efforts on the Indian material. Always ready to claim that his work was of public benefit and therefore deserved public support, Joseph wanted to approach the Department of Woods and Forests (who had supported his collecting in India) for £400 per year to sort and classify the collections. Sir William, who sought assistance on the basis of need rather than right, advised a more modest request of £200.6 The government was approached from multiple directions. At the British Association meeting, which Hooker attended in July, the General Committee passed a motion calling on either the government or the East India Company to aid “the speedy publication” of the “important and exten­ sive botanical collections” and observations made in India by Hooker and his companion, Thomas Thomson. In spite of the Rhododendrons, this recommendation failed to move either government or company. The pres112

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2.1

Joseph Dalton Hooker as imperial botanist. An allegorical vision of Himalayan people bringing tributes of plants and flowers to Hooker. Different versions, based on an 1849 drawing, exist. Friends raised subscriptions in order to print one hundred copies of this version in Hooker’s honor. Source: Mezzotint, ca. 1854, by William Walker after Frank Stone. From John Gilmour, British Botanists (London: Collins, 1946), 39.

idents of the Royal Society, the Linnean Society, and the Geological Society made joint representations on Hooker’s behalf. Sir William resorted to old-­fashioned clientage. He petitioned Lord John Russell, prime minister and son of the Duke of Bedford, and sent the Rhododendrons book as a gift to Lady Russell.7 Hooker junior was anxious about his future, and even 113

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considered applying for a position at the British Museum as mineralogy keeper, but in the short term he supplemented his income by editing jurors’ reports from the Great Exhibition. Early in 1852 the short term was secured when the Department of Woods and Forests granted £400 a year for three years to write up the Indian collections—­both Bellon and Drayton credit Sir William (and Russell) with the outcome. Hooker continued to worry about the future. In the last year of his grant, as he contemplated the imminent birth of a second child, he even considered moving from Kew to London and taking up journalism.8 Sir William was scheming for Joseph to succeed him at Kew, but his efforts had thus far failed. His grand plan was to expand the scientific side of Kew in order to justify the employment of a scientific assistant (namely, Joseph) in the short term and, in the long term, to ensure that his successor was a scientific botanist ( Joseph again) rather than a gardener. He had obtained a Museum of Economic Botany and now sought an herbarium. His strategy was to manipulate the government into funding an herbarium by having his friend, George Bentham, publicly offer to leave his large personal herbarium to the Crown provided that it could be maintained at Kew. Sir William’s hopes rose and fell as governments and ministers changed. In 1854 the government, of which Lord John Russell was a member, capitulated, and agreed to build a permanent herbarium, and in 1855 a grand new two-­story herbarium and library was completed; Dr. Joseph Hooker was appointed assistant director of the Gardens. Sir Wil­ liam’s annual reports began to emphasize the scientific role of Kew. As well as the numbers of public visitors to the Gardens he listed the eminent botanists who visited the herbarium and library.9 Sir William’s campaign appealed as much to personal property rights and inheritance as to impersonal expertise, and Bellon considers that the younger Hooker accepted it as his rightful inheritance.10 The award of a Royal Medal to Dr. Hooker by the Royal Society in 1854 could assure the public and the government that the appointment was also justified by merit. The herbarium appeared to bring Hooker junior a secure future; Andrew Ramsay, his associate from Geological Survey days, thought so, but Endersby considers that Kew was not yet a stable institution.11 Frankland Frankland, although well below Hooker in the social order, obtained a position more readily. There were more paying positions for chemists than for botanists, because chemists were widely employed in industry. At New Year 1850, as Frankland was settling in at the University of Ber114

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lin, he received an urgent letter from Playfair. The professor of practical chemistry at Putney College had resigned and Playfair had the principal’s permission to offer the position to Frankland. The income was low but he would have a laboratory in which to work. Such openings were rare, advised Playfair, and once in England Frankland would become better known and therefore be well placed when a better position became available. If interested, Frankland “must instantly set off.”12 Within two weeks he had begun teaching: chemistry, physics, and “applied chemistry and metallurgy.” He took up some practical investigations, such as analyses of the Thames water, and took over Playfair’s investigation of the heat values of different coals. Frankland also found time to continue his investigations into the organo-­metallic compounds.13 The kind of opportunity for which Frankland and Playfair hoped arose within months. Owens College, newly established in Manchester, adver­ tised for full-­time professors in four areas—­classics, mathematics and nat­ ural philosophy, mental and moral philosophy, English language and literature—­and part-­time appointees in four subjects where they expected lesser demand—­botany, zoology, and geology (all under one appointment); chemistry; German; French. The conventional application process required that candidates supply testimonials (which were not confidential) from as many supporters as they could find. Frankland supplied thirty, which was not a large number by contemporary standards, but the German supporters were headed by Liebig, who wrote, “I look upon Dr. Frankland as one of the most talented young chemists in Great Britain.”14 Frankland, who also had the local advantage of being from Lancashire, gained the chemistry chair amid strong competition. Chemistry had been assessed as a half-­time position, with a salary of £150 per year, supplemented by two-­thirds of the student fees.15 On the strength of this (and the secret annuity), Frankland married Sophie Fick in February 1851, and the couple took a house in Manchester. The opening of Owens College and the professors’ inaugural addresses were important events in Manchester. Frankland addressed his audience, which included most of the younger and active members of the Manchester scientific community, “On the Educational and Commercial Utility of Chemistry.” He claimed for chemistry the educational benefits conventionally claimed for classics and mathematics—­chemistry was an “invaluable discipline for the faculties of youth,” that is, chemistry would provide the same educational benefits as traditional university studies. He also assured the commercial and industrial leaders of Manchester that chemistry would be useful to their sons: he would constantly bring out the useful applications of chemistry in his teaching. Finally, he added that 115

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chemistry provides “bright glimpses of the Deity,” thereby reassuring the devout that, although Owens College was an entirely secular institution, their sons would not be led into atheism and infidelity by the study of chemistry.16 As a professor in the new college, Frankland was a person of status in Manchester. He met the mayor within a few weeks of his arrival, joined the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society and the Manchester Photographic Society and advised the Duke of Argyll on nickel extraction from ores on his land. He tried to maintain good relationships with diverse groups. He attended the local parish church and was also active in the National Public School Association, which campaigned for a system of secular education. He performed worthy public service. The mayor invited him to join the books subcommittee of the Free Library. Frankland could not afford to spend his spare time in unpaid public service, but these positions brought him into contact with potential clients and patrons. Frankland explained to the Duke of Argyll: “My position at Owens College is not so good as to make me independent of professional fees yet I feel a delicacy in making a charge in the present instance.” He was satisfied to have been “of real service to your Grace.”17 Undoubtedly, the “friendship” of the duke was worth more than the foregone fee. Frankland rapidly established a wide range of paid consulting work in Manchester and beyond. This was carried out in the college’s laboratory, completed in August 1851, which Frankland had helped to design. In addition to a student laboratory with individual tables for forty-­two students (an overestimate of future growth), he had a private laboratory and specialist spaces, for example, for experiments with noxious gases.18 He analyzed fertilizers for landowners and coal for coal-­gas companies; he appeared as an expert witness in court cases. As time went on he became more explicit about fees, more ambitious about fee levels, and tried to tie his clients into consultancy arrangements. In 1852 he offered to give advice on pollution control to a firm near Bristol: five guineas a day for the first two days, three guineas thereafter. The next year he suggested at one hundred guineas a that he become their consulting chemist—­ year.19 Frankland also supplemented his income by giving lectures at the Royal Institution in London—­fifty-­five guineas for a course of ten lectures on technological chemistry in 1853.20 Frankland’s research attainments had helped to gain him the position at Owens but once appointed he neglected research for consultancy. He had however written up the important investigations that he had begun in Marburg and Putney. His early investigation of organo-­metallic compounds, for which he was elected FRS in 1853, had led him to reflect 116

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on the systematic patterns in combining weights, and he developed the concept of “atomicity,” the number of atoms of other elements with which an atom of a specified element could combine.21 Student numbers at Owens College did not grow as hoped, but Frankland was doing well from agricultural, industrial, and legal clients. By 1855 he had two children, a cottage at Lake Windermere, and £1,800 to invest. He felt he could now afford some time for research. “I am . . . pitching commerce to the devil as much as I can afford & working hard at my researches,” he told Tyndall.22 Chemists had more opportunities for money-­making than researchers in most other areas of science and therefore the temptation to desert research for consultancy was ever-­present. In later years Frankland’s money making was looked on unfavorably by his X Club friends. His association of commerce with the devil suggests that, whatever his practice, in this period he accepted the convention that original research had higher value than money-­making applications of science. Tyndall and Huxley Tyndall did not have even Frankland’s modest advantages and had to work much harder to get established. He was poor and unknown in British science when, after completing his dissertation at Marburg, he made his first foray into British scientific circles in the summer of 1850. Tyndall wrote in advance to the eminent Michael Faraday of London’s Royal Institution (RI), visited the proprietors of the Philosophical Magazine to whom he had submitted a long memoir, and planned to attend the meeting of British Association for the Advancement of Science in Edinburgh.23 Meeting Faraday was a strategic move, for not only had Faraday done research on the strange magnetic phenomena that Tyndall was investigating, he was also the admired doyen of British physical philosophers. Faraday’s patronage was a prize to be sought. The British Association, which was open to all-­comers, was the forum through which Tyndall sought to establish his reputation. His move from outsider to insider can be followed through his participation in the meetings of the mathematical and physical section of the association. In 1850 Tyndall felt a sense of social achievement merely to read his name “in the published list, in the respectable company of Sir David Brewster and others.” By 1855 he had arrived, socially and scientifically, when Brewster publicly referred to him as a “distinguished member” of the association.24 Tyndall (figure 2.2) described his first British Association meeting as an “ordeal.” His future depended on how well he, a complete outsider, could perform before this unknown audience. His time at the meeting was 117

2.2

John Tyndall, July 1850. Chalk portrait, by Hirst’s friend Henderson, made when Tyndall visited Halifax on his way to the Edinburgh British Association meeting. Source: © The Royal Society.

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constrained by his budget. He traveled third class to Edinburgh, stayed at the Temperance Hotel, and paid £1 for associate membership, rather than the full £2 membership, which included a copy of the Report. The meetings were leisurely affairs. On arrival on Thursday Tyndall learned that if his paper was not scheduled for Friday he would have to stay on until Monday, for Saturday was set aside for excursions and there were, of course, no section meetings on the Sabbath. Fortunately, the section secretaries could meet Tyndall’s request to schedule his paper for Friday. He was gratified to be told that the paper had excited great interest, but, less reassuring, one committee member remarked that he disagreed on “certain points of importance.” Tyndall read Emerson that evening to help overcome his “terror.”25 The critic was the brilliant, loquacious and self-­confident William Thomson (figure 2.3) who, although younger than Tyndall, was already professor of natural philosophy in the University of Glasgow. Although awed by the company, Tyndall was not deferential. In his paper, on the relationship of diamagnetic force to crystalline structure, he argued, against the recent proposals of Julius Plücker and Faraday, that no new kind of “magne-­crystallic” force was required to explain the complex experimental results.26 He described the scene in the same long letter to Hirst. When Tyndall’s paper was announced he stumbled nervously toward the rostrum where he found himself placed with Lord Wrottesley and Sir David Brewster to his left, “two Professors of my own age perhaps [Thomson and G. G. Stokes of Cambridge]” to his right, and ladies whose “mild brown eyes” were fixed on him directly in front. He recovered his equanimity and settled into speaking. Lengthy discussion followed the paper. Professor J. D. Forbes of Edinburgh, president of the section, initially defended Plücker but was persuaded by Tyndall’s reply. Thomson made a long speech, praising “the beauty and ingenuity” of Tyndall’s experiments, but doubting that the results were valid for all his experimental substances, and defending the interpretation of Faraday (who was not present in Edinburgh). Tyndall began his response with the argument that he had discussed his differences with “Mr. Faraday” who had encouraged him to follow his convictions. This was to represent himself as on the same side as Faraday, the side of conviction and truth seeking. As Thomson continued his questions, Brews­ter intervened on Tyndall’s side and described Thomson’s alternative “supposition” as “exceedingly improbable.” When the session broke up, the door keeper congratulated Tyndall on maintaining his position against Thomson, and representatives of the Athenaeum and the Literary Gazette asked for abstracts of his paper. He left Edinburgh the next morning, well-­satisfied with his performance and with having paid for only two nights’ accommodation. 119

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Tyndall found no scientific employment in England so returned for further research in Bunsen’s laboratory in Marburg. He survived on loans from Hirst, translation work (at £2 per sixteen pages) for William Francis of the Philosophical Magazine, and occasional journalistic pieces.27 His ambitions were now fixed on a scientific career. At the end of 1850 he had been offered the position of English master at the Huddersfield People’s College, an ambitious project to provide college-­level education in Yorkshire, but turned down this opportunity to support social progress in northern towns. His ambitions were neither literary nor local nor radical.28 From Marburg he maintained contact with Faraday, sending him a copy of his paper, “On the Laws of Magnetism.” When Faraday responded with warm thanks and thoughtful comment, Tyndall copied the entire letter into his journal.29 He needed such encouragement for he deeply felt his outsider status in England, whereas in Germany he felt accepted. At Easter he moved to Berlin where he noted, approvingly, a lack of class consciousness. He was welcomed by the physicists, given space in Gustav Magnus’s laboratory, and elected a foreign member of the Berlin Phys­ ical Society.30 Tyndall felt that he now had a “certain scientific name” but, rather than waiting for scientific employment in England, as Francis advised, he took up Edmondson’s offer to return to Queenwood—­and hoped that something better would come up. In spite of his additional four years of experience and education he returned to his 1847 starting salary of £150.31 From the security of this modest position, Tyndall sought to extend his reputation and obtain scientific employment. Huxley returned to England at the end of 1850 almost as apprehensively as Tyndall, although he had the advantage of prior connections in London scientific circles and knew that some of his memoirs and letters had been published through Bishop Stanley and Edward Forbes. Forbes proved to be a generous patron. Within two weeks of his arrival he took Huxley to dine with Sir Roderick Murchison, Sir Charles Lyell, and other leading gentlemen of the Geological Society. Richard Owen, the leading comparative anatomist in Britain, who had given advice before his departure, assisted with recommendations. When the Admiralty gave him a sinecure appointment as assistant surgeon assigned to “special service” on the Fisgard, the flagship moored at Greenwich32—­and six months’ leave, Huxley admitted to an old shipmate that it was Owen’s letter to the First Lord of the Admiralty that had obtained the position for him. With Forbes looking after his certificate, Huxley was elected FRS just after his twenty-­sixth birthday, younger even than William Thomson who was elected at the same time.33 In spite of this success Huxley was deeply frustrated. His ambition was to build a scientific reputation by publish120

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ing a book based on his Rattlesnake collections. But while scientific men at the Admiralty praised the project, they offered no financial assistance toward the expensive illustrations, nothing beyond the half pay normally given to naval surgeons on shore leave. Hooker (see chapter 1.1) had been treated more generously when he returned from the Antarctic voyage. Huxley wrote bitterly to Nettie that even “great distinction and reputation” in science did not provide “bread.” He had not seen Nettie for a year and could see no end to their separation.34 Both Huxley and Tyndall planned to attend the 1851 Ipswich meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, although not to advance science, Huxley ironically commented, “but to be ‘advanced’ myself.”35 The scientific proceedings were greatly disrupted by a visit from Prince Albert, which reduced Huxley’s audience to twenty. The committee meetings, where Forbes was looking after his interests, were more successful for him. Forbes initiated a recommendation that went from the Committee of Section D (for natural history), to the Committee on Recommendations, to the General Committee. Hence, “having had brought to their notice the zoological and anatomical investigations made by Mr. T. H. Huxley,” and believing those researches “to throw new light on the structure and history of tribes of animals hitherto imperfectly understood,” the General Committee resolved to ask Her Majesty’s Government for a grant toward their publication. The General Committee recommended support for both Huxley and Hooker, but the recommendation for Hooker, which emphasized that the materials were in danger of decay, was more urgent.36 Huxley noted enviously that Hooker was sitting with his fiancée.37 Tyndall’s second British Association experience was more congenial and more useful than his first. At Ipswich he was not entirely alone but traveled and lodged with William Francis. The audience for his diamagnetism memoir was small, but Tyndall was satisfied because the memoir was well received and Faraday, who had not joined the exodus to welcome Prince Albert, was present. Also, he made “useful acquaintances.”38 He met G. B. Airy, the Astronomer Royal, and was noticed by Lieutenant Colonel Edward Sabine, secretary of the Royal Society, general secretary of the association, and president-­elect for the 1852 meeting in Belfast. Such men could assist his entrance into elite scientific circles and his search for scientific employment. Sabine (figure 1.1) was Tyndall’s most useful patron in these early years. He offered to sponsor Tyndall’s nomination for the FRS so that (Sabine was doubly optimistic) Tyndall could be elected before he left for Toronto, where he was applying for a chair of physics. When the Royal 121

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Society Council recommended Tyndall for election, Sabine assured him that the Society would look favorably on an application for £50 to support his experiments. Tyndall’s application for the money was successful but he lost the Toronto chair to an applicant with local patronage. A few months later Sabine invited Tyndall to act as a secretary for Section A at the Belfast British Association meeting.39 Tyndall was overwhelmed by this recognition. To the first offer he replied effusively, in Carlylean terms, that he would regard it as his “religious duty” to repay the debt to science that an FRS would establish.40 Huxley, meanwhile, urgently sought ways to supplement his navy half pay. The government did not act on the British Association’s recommendation. Even the FRS cost money—­more than one month’s salary for the entrance fee and the first year of membership. Huxley cataloged sea squirts for the British Museum, wrote articles for encyclopedias, and found translation work with William Francis. Early in 1852 he was invited to give a lecture to a fashionable Friday evening audience at the Royal Institution. This was the first lecture Huxley had ever given, and he decided to take the difficult abstract topic of “animal individuality” and argue, against Owen, that the thousands of offspring that budded off some of his small sea flukes and medusae were not separate creatures, but merely parts of the original creature, even though they could move and reproduce independently. Just two weeks before the lecture date his mother suddenly died, but after the funeral Huxley worked on. The lecture was not a success and was not followed up by further invitations. In 1852 Huxley also worked with George Busk to translate a German text on the microstructures of human organs. They hoped to make £180.41 In this discouraging period Busk and his wife, Ellen, became Huxley’s intimate friends. Friendship between the brash, ambitious young Huxley and retiring, equable, twenty-­years-­older Busk was, in many ways, the at­ traction of opposites, but they shared common scientific and social inter­ ests. Busk was an expert microscopist and “philosophical anatomist” with an interest in the strange phenomenon of alternation of generations. He had early recognized Huxley’s potential: in a 1849 article in the Microscop­ ical Society’s Transactions he drew readers’ attention to Huxley’s “excellent and most valuable paper” on the medusae.42 Huxley found that he could discuss religion freely with the Busks. He confided in Ellen Busk about both his religious skepticism and his distant fiancée.43 Tyndall also found companionship with other outsiders. William Francis, of the printing and publishing firm Taylor and Francis, was both friend and patron. Francis had a wide circle of scientific acquaintances, but he was on the edges of the scientific status system. Although he had gained a 122

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German PhD under Liebig, he had given up original research for publishing. As an editor, he was engaged in commerce, and he had no significant family connections—­or no known connections, for it was not generally known that Francis was the natural son of Richard Taylor, of a respectable Unitarian family, and founder of the publishing company.44 Heinrich Debus, a German and fellow Marburg graduate, who taught chemistry at Queenwood, was also a scientific and social companion to Tyndall. Huxley seems to have recognized Tyndall as a fellow outsider. He became a companion and offered warm support. In December 1851, he was one of the first to sign Tyndall’s Royal Society nomination certificate and, in May, was quick to congratulate Tyndall on his election. Tyndall replied effusively that his pleasure at the honor was “given its own particular radiance” by Huxley’s letter. Huxley—­unlike Sabine—­guessed at Tyndall’s pride at the honor and trepidation at the new social experiences. In June he accompanied Tyndall and introduced him at his first Royal So­ ciety meeting.45 The careers of Tyndall and Huxley moved in parallel. Similar opportunities brought similar hopes, achievements, and disappointments. Both missed chairs at the new university in Toronto; Tyndall was preparing to apply for a chair in Cork when Francis told him that the incumbent had withdrawn his resignation; both hoped for chairs at a new university in Sydney and were disappointed. Tyndall was unsuccessful in an application for a chair at Queen’s College, Galway; Huxley unsuccessful at Aberdeen and King’s College, London—­but turned down a lectureship at a struggling private medical school in London.46 They gained supplements to their incomes and useful titles in 1852 when Francis appointed them editors, for natural philosophy and zoology respectively, of Scientific Memoirs, a series established to publish translations of important foreign scientific articles. Tyndall stayed on at Queenwood and worried that the time spent translating for Francis reduced his time for original work—­although he admitted it made him well acquainted with German research.47 Huxley was awarded a Royal Medal by the Royal Society in November 1852, but honor brought no change to his employment. He translated for Francis and with Busk, and considered giving up science for doctoring in Sydney.48 Nevertheless, both Huxley and Tyndall were proud of their successes against the odds. Huxley wanted to succeed on his merits, without patronage. He explained proudly to his sister that his election as FRS came without any “intriguing.” Forbes had not used his influence (because he had not expected Huxley to be elected at the first attempt), and Huxley himself had not asked “for a single name” on his nomination certificate.49 123

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But patronage was essential to the making of a career, and Huxley frequently accepted Forbes’s assistance whereas, by contrast, he came to bitterly resent the patronage of Owen. Huxley summarized the politics and personalities of London science for William MacLeay in Sydney: “Owen is both feared and hated. . . . The truth is, he is the superior of most, and does not conceal that he knows it.” The sociable Forbes, who was “earnest, truth-­seeking, and thoroughly genial,” had, in Huxley’s opinion, far more influence than Owen. Nevertheless, Huxley conceded, Owen had been “very civil to me.”50 Everyone found Owen contradictory. When Owen wrote Huxley a strong, generous testimonial, Huxley was outraged at what he perceived as the “condescension” with which Owen had given his assistance. Forbes urged Huxley not to take it personally. Owen is “one of the oddest beings I ever came across,” he admitted, but he “has very much that is good and kind in him.” Forbes attributed Owen’s “eccentricities” to his ill health. Owen’s biographer, Nicolaas Rupke, suggests that Owen was generous to those lower in the system who did not challenge his preeminence, but bitter, even petty, against those, like Huxley, who challenged him.51 Tyndall continued to use the British Association (BA) to make a place for himself. Although reassured by growing recognition, he was discontented when he measured himself against Thomson and Stokes. In 1852 when the BA met in Belfast, Thomson was president of Section A—­in recognition of his Belfast birth. Tyndall again took offense at “my old scientific antagonist” (figure 2.3). On the first day Thomson cut short discussion of Tyndall’s paper because time was pressing; on the second day Thomson’s own paper was so long that Tyndall had only a small, tired audience left. Tyndall reflected in his journal: “Thomson I believe is a decent soul at bottom but he is greatly afraid of [sic] his fame. I think it will never be extraordinary.” Stokes, who had been complimented by Sabine “in the most flattering manner,” seemed to Tyndall to be “a proud fellow.” Tyndall would have liked friendship with Stokes, but read as pride what was probably habitual reserve. (Years later he added a self-­critical note to these journal entries.) The stresses of the meeting were relieved by occasional informal friendly meetings: he walked one evening with his new friend, Huxley, and “felt glad at heart” when Emil du Bois-­Reymond, a friend from Berlin days, arrived.52 In the year after the Belfast BA meeting Tyndall’s social and scientific positions were transformed. The transformation began with an invitation, such as Huxley had received, to lecture at the Royal Institution (RI). Henry Bence Jones, a manager of the RI, wrote in October 1852 that he had mentioned Tyndall’s name to the RI secretary as someone “likely to give a good course of lectures”; the letter that followed from the sec124

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2.3

William Thomson in 1854, Tyndall’s “scientific antagonist” at British Association meetings. Source: Obituary, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, series A, vol. 81 (1908), opp. p. xxxii.

retary asked Tyndall to give a Friday evening lecture. Bence Jones, a wealthy physician, had acquired German research culture as a student of Liebig and was working to strengthen the research activity at the Royal Institution. On a recent visit to Berlin he had heard of Tyndall from Du Bois-­Reymond, and no doubt he had discussed Tyndall with Faraday 125

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who could recommend him as a lecturer having heard him speak at Ips­ wich.53 Tyndall was by this time an experienced lecturer. He had teaching experience at Queenwood and often gave lectures around the Hampshire countryside. But respectable audiences in provincial towns were quite different from a Royal Institution audience. Before giving his own lecture, Tyndall was invited to London to experience a Friday evening lecture by Faraday. He was invited to dinner with some of the leading Germanizers—­Bence Jones, Playfair, Hofmann, and the wealthy paper manufacturer, chemist, and photographer of astronomical phenomena, Warren de la Rue. Then there was the lecture in the steeply tiered theater filled with ladies and gentlemen in evening dress; the white-­haired Faraday at the broad front bench illustrating his lecture with carefully crafted experiments (see figure 2.4). Finally, there was a reception where scientific, landed, and commercial elites met.54 Three weeks later Tyndall was in Faraday’s place. “I feel a satisfaction in this lecture; I feel a pride in climbing up among the high ones of this earth,” Tyndall admitted in his journal as he prepared for his great opportunity.55 Tyndall, who was an excellent experimentalist, spent the Friday practicing his experiments, before joining the pre-­lecture dinner party at the home of the Royal Institution secretary. The guests were thoughtfully selected, Huxley and the congenial Forbes, the geologist John Phillips (another of modest birth), Bence Jones and De la Rue (again), and Charles Wheatstone of both King’s College and the Royal Institution. Then, back to Albemarle Street where, promptly at nine, the Duke of Northumberland introduced Tyndall to the fashionable audience. The lecture was on the demanding subject of diamagnetism. Applause punctuated the lecture and bravos were added as Tyndall finished and retreated to his corner chair. Faraday walked forward to shake his hand, even though Tyndall had publicly disagreed with Faraday’s interpretations of diamagnetic phenomena. The duke followed. A confusing round of introductions culminated with the compliment from Samuel Whitbread, the brewer and ex-­MP, who had never, he said, even in the House of Commons, heard anything “to surpass your lecture to night.”56 Science, society, and industry had given their approval. Tyndall’s conspicuous success at the Royal Institution led to further invitations to lecture and numerous offers and rumors of offers of paid employment. Everyone gave advice. Huxley teasingly advised him to alter the “molecular condition” of his mind so as overcome his “confounded modesty” (teasing, because Huxley well knew that Tyndall did not share his materialism). More seriously, Huxley urged him to “fly high.” There would probably be openings at the Royal Institution and the London Institution, and “the most influential people” at the Mu126

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seum of Economic Geology “want you there.” A few days later Huxley wrote again: Tyndall should be “looking to Faraday’s place” at the Royal Institution, but there could be delays in getting there. In the meantime, he should “cultivate Playfair” who was to be science secretary of a new Department of Science and Art. Huxley also passed on Forbes’s recommendation to accept the London Institution in the short term. But the Royal Institution moved rapidly. Within a month Tyndall was invited to give a course of four lectures (with £5 for each) and another evening lecture.57 Lecture courses were an important part of the Institution’s work, and competence in the educational lecture genre was therefore an essen­ tial test for a potential professor of the Royal Institution. Meanwhile De la Rue and J. P. Gassiot, who wanted to “elevate the character” of the London Institution by establishing research there, offered Tyndall a professorship at £200, with an assistant, and additional funds to support experiments. Tyndall wanted to accept professorships at both the Royal and London Institutions, but both regarded a professorship as establishing a special relationship with their institution. He could give lectures elsewhere, but not become a professor. By late May he had formal offers from both institutions. Both offered £200 a year, but the Royal Institution promised future increases. Other positions were offered: teaching at Clapham College School, and tutoring the sons of Dr. Pritchard, Sir John Herschel, and Airy. Tyndall accepted the Royal Institution position, largely for the benefits of being associated with Faraday. In July he was formally appointed “Professor of Natural Philosophy.”58 Hirst returned to England to take Tyndall’s place at Queenwood, and Tyndall prepared to move to London. There were now more employment offers than Tyndall could accept. He gave a short course at the London Institution each year, but he did not follow up the schoolteaching and tutoring offers, nor an 1854 offer of a lectureship at Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital. With the advice and support of Faraday, he declined writing a school physics text for Playfair and a lecturing position at the School of Mines.59 The Royal Institution’s standards for lecturing were high. Tyndall spent many hours preparing the experiments for his own lectures, especially the Friday evening “Discourses,” and was a stern critic of those of others. Tyndall demanded clear exposition and effective illustrations, but he also wanted something passionate that appealed to the listeners’ deeper feelings. Faraday’s style stirred Tyndall’s emotions; he could “feel his power­ ful spirit as it glowed beneath his utterance & made it deep and musical.” By contrast, in spite of Whewell’s “vast reading & acquirements,” we “did not see the life & faith of the man shining through his sentences.” It is 127

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difficult to interpret Tyndall’s ideals. Perhaps what he called “powerful spirit” is what we now call enthusiasm or passion for the subject, but for Tyndall the passionate commitment had a religious aspect—­it drew others to follow. Tyndall’s high standards meant that he suffered enormous stress. Worrying in advance and dissatisfaction in retrospect brought in­digestion and headaches. After listening to one lecture he revealingly observed: “There was but little life in the matter, such a man is destined to live longer than I. He seemed perfectly satisfied with his own performance whereas had I been in his place I should certainly have had the headache.”60 Both Frankland and Huxley admitted to similar stresses from lecturing.61 In spite of his London location and associations with influential men of science, Huxley was still without secure employment in 1853 when Tyndall moved to the Royal Institution. Through his contact with Herbert Spencer, Huxley added journalism to his cataloging, illustrating, and translating. They were both interested in the metaphysical implications of science—­although they had chosen different routes to pursue this interest. Science was grist to Spencer’s metaphysical and political mill, and he attended many scientific lectures, for example, Tyndall’s first lecture at the Royal Institution. Huxley introduced Spencer to Tyndall as “ein Kerl der speculirt,” that is, a fellow who speculates.62 Spencer introduced Huxley to his friends in avant-­garde publishing circles. Huxley met Lewes and began attending the weekly soirées of the publisher, John Chapman, who had just bought the Westminster Review. Huxley’s philosophical and religious unorthodoxy were well fitted to Chapman’s ambition to advance public thinking. Chapman asked him to review science books—­at twelve guineas for sixteen pages each quarter. Huxley honed his writing style and spread his opinions in these pieces. In the first he labeled the “Development Hypothesis” (advocated by both Spencer and Lewes) a speculation; damned Lewes for mere book knowledge of science; and used the example of an eminent judge defending spiritualism as evidence of the failure of mathematical and classical education and the need for education in the inductive sciences. Evans, who was doing most of the Westminster editorial work for Chapman, wanted Chapman to intervene and pull such a “purely negative” review of Lewes, but Chapman ignored her recommendation and paid his ill-­natured reviewer.63 Huxley’s luck turned in 1854. It seemed like ill fortune when the navy ordered him to active service at the beginning of the Crimean crisis, but when he resigned rather than comply he became eligible for a publication grant from the Royal Society—­and received £300. In May, the Royal Institution gave him a second chance at lecturing. Huxley hoped 128

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it would demonstrate to the managers his suitability for the position of Fullerian Professor of Physiology, which was about to become vacant. Although Tyndall thought that he went too quickly over the difficult parts, Huxley was appointed a year later. Meanwhile, Huxley took all the lecturing that was offered: twenty-­six lectures in Edward Forbes’s natural history course at the School of Mines (starting May), a shorter series for the Department of Science and Art (starting June), and another at the London Institution (starting July). When Forbes was appointed to the Edinburgh chair Huxley was appointed Lecturer on General Natural History in the School of Mines in his place. He wrote to Nettie telling her to come. Two hundred pounds a year was secure. To this could be added fees from other lectures, royalties from books, student fees, and miscellaneous other payments, making, Huxley estimated, a total of £500. By October he had so much work that he appealed to Tyndall to help with his Westminster column. Tragedy brought him another position at the end of the year. Forbes, Huxley’s close friend and loyal patron, died suddenly in Edinburgh, a few months before his fortieth birthday. Although he wanted to live in London, Huxley was attracted by the £1,000 in salary and £600 in fees that the Edinburgh chair was worth. He was persuaded to apply, but when Sir Henry De la Beche, head of the Geological Survey, agreed to create an additional position for him—­naturalist to the Geological Survey—­at £200 a year, Huxley stayed in London.64 By 1855 the worst of the struggle and uncertainty was over for both Huxley and Tyndall. Huxley married in mid-­1855. Meanwhile, Tyndall, who had put off thoughts of marriage in order to pursue science, began to seek a companion who met his “ideal of womanhood.” He saved his first £100 and, advised by Francis, deposited it in a joint stock bank. With Huxley’s marriage, closer friendships developed over dinner parties at the Huxley house. The effusive Tyndall was soon on first name terms with “brother Hal” and “sister Nettie.” Through Huxley he became closer to Hooker, whom he liked—­“he is able and earnest: A truthful sincere soul.”65 (Typically, Tyndall assessed persons on both scientific and moral grounds.) In 1855 and 1856 he still spent time with Francis and Debus but he also belonged to a circle of higher-­placed, reform-­minded scientific men, of which Huxley, Hooker, Busk, and Andrew Ramsay of the Geological Survey, were central members.66 Frankland joined this cir­cle when he moved to London. The Lure of London In Manchester Frankland was becoming dissatisfied. He complained to friends that his students were ill-­prepared and interested only in the most 129

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basic of industrial procedures. In general, student numbers at the college had not grown as hoped, and in the 1857–­58 session had dropped back to the level of 1852–­53. Robert Kargon, historian of Manchester science, explains the decline by economic depression in the late 1850s, but at the time local men sought local explanations: youths were insufficiently prepared for entrance, the parents of Manchester did not sufficiently value education, or the college should provide an education better adapted to local interests.67 In London both Bence Jones and Tyndall were looking out for Frankland’s interests. In addition to his role as a manager of the Royal Institution, Bence Jones, a physician at Saint George’s Hospital, had standing in the medical community. In July 1857, he heard that the lecturer in chemistry at Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital had resigned and immediately informed Frankland, whom he knew through his lectures at the Royal Institution. Frankland assured Bence Jones of his interest and wrote formally to James Paget, the professor of anatomy at the hospital. Meanwhile, Bence Jones had the position tied up. He had communicated with both Paget and the appointment committee, and assured Frankland that “Mr. Paget will get his colleagues to recommend the committee to elect you on the 20th of this month lecturer at St Bartholomew’s.” Frankland could expect at least £250 from the hospital teaching: £130 for three lectures a week from October to March, and student fees approximating another £130 for four practical classes taught weekly from May to June. He would be free to take private pupils and to employ assistants at his own expense. Frankland resigned from his Manchester position in August 1857 and returned to London. A more secure institution, London lo­ cation, higher base income, and better students were all on the side of the new position. He accumulated other employment: collaboration with Hof­ mann on the purification of water from the Thames, collaboration with Tyndall to measure London’s air pollution, consulting on explosives, and lecturing on chemistry and physics at the Royal Indian Military College (the East India Company’s military college) at Addiscombe.68 London had many advantages. James Nasmyth, a wealthy engineer and astronomer who had retired from Manchester to Kent the previous year, welcomed Frankland to the south with the assurance that he would now be “often in contact with first rate men in other departments of science.”69 In addition to the vigor of scientific life the large professional population gave breadth and variety to intellectual life more generally. Tyndall appreciated that London offered the freedom to choose friends. His close friends, Frederick and Juliet Pollock, were cultured freethinkers to whom he could freely express his opinions.70 Tyndall’s London life was 130

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an endless round of social dinners and scientific meetings, but in smaller cities Tyndall would likely have had to choose between self-­censorship and scandalizing some part of the company by his heterodoxy. When, following Forbes’s death, Huxley considered applying for the Edinburgh chair of natural history, he feared the heavy teaching demands of the position. He risked becoming a “mere pedagogue” rather than a “genuine worker”—­and he perceived Presbyterian Edinburgh as characterized by Sab­ batarian gloominess. Other Londoners were similarly hesitant about Edinburgh. Richard Owen feared the teaching demands. He told the Duke of Argyll that he was not willing to teach both winter and summer courses in Edinburgh because he needed to be in London for “at least” five months each year. To Londoners, their city was the center of  English intellectual and cultural life, or, as Tyndall described it, “close to the heart of England.”71 Edinburgh, though, was tempting, to Tyndall. When opportunities arose in Edinburgh in 1854 and 1859 Hirst urged its benefits. The University of Edinburgh was superior to the RI “in a scientific point of view,” Hirst told him in 1854, when Tyndall considered applying for the chair of natural philosophy there. In Hirst’s opinion, too much of Tyndall’s effort went into entertaining fashionable audiences at the RI. The potential to develop a research school made a chair at Edinburgh “the highest and most useful position in Great Britain.” Tyndall agreed, but he chose his friends and the freedom of London over the educational opportunities offered by Edinburgh.72 Tyndall, who had only recently been appointed professor of natural philosophy (following Stokes) at the School of Mines, hoped he would be able to found a research school of experimental physics in London. Having attended one of Tyndall’s first lectures, on electricity, Hirst was excited by the opportunities. He contrasted the audiences: “students” at the School of Mines, “amateurs” at the Royal Institution; the lecture was not brilliant “but instructive.” This was a compliment, intended as a contrast with the Royal Institution. “This is the position I have long wished to see John occupy & I have no doubt that he will establish there a school which will be known hereafter.”73 Yet in spite of their admiration for German research no member of the X-­network established a research school. Hirst, Huxley, and Tyndall were offered and continued to turn down positions in the provinces, in Scotland, and at Oxford for the more congenial “free” atmosphere of London. Tyndall declined an Oxford chair of physics in 1865 because six months residence was required each year.74 Hirst declined chairs at Owens College in 1865 and the Royal College of Science for Ireland in 1867. Only chairs out of London paid well, he observed, but he had already “sacrificed much in order to stop in London” and £400 per year did not tempt him to move 131

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to Ireland.75 Huxley turned down two positions at Oxford in 1881. He could not see himself as a Don, “nor your mother as a Donness,” he told one son, and Oxford would restrict his freedom—­so he felt.76 The X-­men promoted science in education at all levels and (see chapter 5.1) trained teachers, but they did not have research students. In spite of their early commitment to research this was seldom where their main energies went. Tyndall was diverted by the admiration of the fashionable world. Huxley turned his energies to shaping public attitudes and government policy, and training schoolteachers. Although Frankland continued in teaching positions, consulting always competed for his time. Hooker, who did not share the general X Club admiration for German ways, saw no benefit to specialist education. Rather, the best education for a naturalist joined a liberal education to train the mind and hands-­on field experience.77 Hirst himself, after a few years teaching at University College in the 1860s, sought a position that left more time for research. Frankland’s social life in London reveals how the X-­network was developing. Tyndall enjoyed weekend walks with his old friend and frequent family dinners. Through Tyndall, Frankland had previously met Huxley and Hooker when all were on holiday in Switzerland in the summer of 1856. Within a week of Frankland’s arrival in London, Tyndall took him to call on the Huxleys and the Hookers. By early 1858 Frankland and Hooker had introduced their wives to each other. Tyndall was a friend to the entire Hooker family. Frances Hooker started reading Emerson and Carlyle after discussions with Tyndall. The circle of friends was not exclusive. Tyndall often met Andrew Ramsay, one of Huxley’s colleagues at the Geological Survey, over dinner with the Huxleys or the Hookers, and was sometimes invited to the Ramsays’ house. Ramsay might have been drawn more fully into the friendship circle had not his wife, Louisa, been “alarmed” at the open manner in which Huxley spoke of his “want of faith.” In 1856 she insisted that they pull out of a summer trip to Switzerland with the Huxleys and Tyndall.78 W. B. Carpenter, who had become a friend and patron of Huxley, became a friend of Frankland, partly through their shared Unitarianism. The joys and tragedies of family life were shared. Frankland and Tyndall visited the new Huxley baby in 1858. Tyndall enjoyed playing with the three Frankland children, aged between two and five in 1858. Busk (figure I.1) and Tyndall took Huxley climbing in Wales in December 1860 after the death of his four-­year-­old, Noel.79 Although the friends had secure primary positions by the mid-­1850s, they were still pluralists, as Russell and Desmond emphasize in their respective biographies of Frankland and Huxley. Most held additional 132

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lectureships and examinerships. Hooker’s earliest reform scheme was to use his friends’ and his power as examiners to shape the natural history curriculum, as will be discussed later in this chapter. When Hirst returned to England in mid-­1859 the X-­network was more extensive than when Frankland arrived in 1858. Hirst had stayed at Queenwood for three years after replacing Tyndall in 1853. At the end of 1854 he married Anna Martin, whom he had met in Marburg, but his happiness turned to tragedy, for she soon showed signs of advanced consumption. He resigned from Queenwood in 1856 to take Anna to warmer parts of Europe and was devastated when she died in Paris in mid-­1857. Hirst stayed on, working with mathematicians in France and Italy, and living on the £150 annuity he had inherited from his mother. On his return to England he was taken by Tyndall to meet Francis, the Franklands, the Hookers, and the Huxleys. Hirst felt himself to be an outsider in these groups. Although he was a recognized mathematician, he was younger than Tyndall and his friends, shy, self-­conscious about his country accent (a class marker that would not have existed when he was speaking French and Italian), and overshadowed by the exuberant Tyndall.80 “These acquaintances I make through John are of a peculiar kind,” Hirst reflected. Nevertheless, he was getting to know the wives. Nettie Huxley fitted his ideals of womanhood better than Ellen Busk: the latter is a tall thin lady with a face not very prepossessing at first. She is however quick and intelligent and has a self-­possessed rather blunt and honest manner. Compared with Mrs Huxley however her mind is not of so high an order, and she has not Mrs Huxley’s depth and warmth she is more purely intellectual and material.

This must be interpreted in the light of Hirst’s liking for gentle, rather than blunt and self-­possessed women and his Carlylean appreciation for feeling over intellect, especially in women.81 A decade later (see chap­ ter 5.4) he spoke more warmly of Ellen Busk. Notably, Hirst’s conversation with the women covered the philosophical question of suffering: We were speaking of the influence of physical pain on humanity, of the compensation due to those who life here is but a succession of tortures. . . . Mrs B. insisted that compensation must be sought in another life.

This does not counter Huxley’s experience of Ellen Busk giving a sympathetic ear to his religious skepticism, but shows that, like Hooker, she believed in life after death. However, we should note, she did not emphasize 133

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future punishment as a motivation for good behavior in this world, as conventional thinkers would have done. The conversation, Hirst recorded, also covered the new journal, Macmillans.82 By 1861 Hirst was more at home with Tyndall’s friends—­he was, for example, doing mathematical calculations for Hooker.83 Tyndall, though, was often distant or irritable. It seems that he did not want his soul-­friend, to whom he had conveyed every ideal and every fear, to be his shadow in metropolitan life. Nevertheless, when the Huxleys moved to get away from the house that reminded them of little Noel, Hirst and Tyndall agreed to set up house together for the last year of the lease. Hirst found this difficult. Tyndall was often engaged elsewhere when Hirst was expecting to see him. He was moody—­“in one of his black humours”—­but Hirst persuaded himself that Tyndall’s “noble qualities” outweighed “his excentricities.”84 Hirst’s journal reveals Tyndall’s social networks. Frankland, Hooker, Huxley, Ramsay, Spencer, and Busk got regular mention; Tyndall went on walking holidays with Huxley and Busk (and left Hirst behind); Spencer appeared in company with Huxley and Tyndall but not with the wider group. One outsider who was not part of the X-­network was the Jewish mathematician, J. J. Sylvester. Hirst warmed to Sylvester but did not take up his invitation to share lodgings. The social network can be identified as Huxley, Hooker, Tyndall, Busk, Frankland, and Ramsay, with Spencer and Carpenter more loosely connected. By the late 1850s Hooker, Tyndall, Huxley, and Frankland all had secure positions in London and, with supplementary lectureships and examinerships, were able to maintain a comfortable although far from luxurious middle-­class lifestyle. Their positions in the Royal Society indicate that they were established men of science: each had served at least once on the council; Hooker, Huxley, and Frankland had been awarded Royal Medals; Tyndall had twice been chosen as Rumford lecturer. They felt their own power and were recognized by others. Patrons had been essential to their advance from apprenticeship to mastership in science; also, the friendship of one another had helped them make their way uncertainly in gentlemanly society. Without the advice and assistance (and sometimes the machinations) of Sir William Hooker, Playfair, Sabine, Faraday, Forbes, and Bence Jones, they would not have been so well posi­ tioned. Not only were they accepted in scientific society; they were also accepted in elite society as is elaborated in the next section. Also, as they acquired scientific position and status they were able to direct the further development of science; the early leadership of Hooker in scientific politics is the subject of the following section. 134

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2.2 Scientific Expertise and Gentlemanly Status Awareness of social hierarchy was all pervasive in Victorian science as in Victorian society. Newspaper reports of scientific events, for example, listed the persons present in order of precedence. The list of guests at a soirée given in 1852 by the Earl of Rosse, president of the Royal Society, began with two dukes, followed by ten earls, seven barons, and four foreign ambassadors. All these individuals were named. Then came the baronets and knights (also named), followed by thirteen named “gentlemen” (of whom Faraday was one) and “&c,” which included everyone else. This long list was followed by a one-­sentence account of what happened at the soirée: “There was a large exhibition of numerous objects of scientific interest”85 (figure 2.4.). While demonstrating the omnipresence of hierarchy, this guest list also demonstrates that scientific expertise allowed the successful man of science to mix with the wellborn. Scientific expertise, like other forms of cultural achievement, could raise one’s social status. Huxley gave a view from below of another of the Earl of Rosse’s soirées: “Prince Albert was there and all the scientific nobs.” Such events could be useful. Sir Roderick Murchison shook hands with Huxley and offered assistance in obtaining a government grant for publishing his collections.86 The careers of Frankland and Tyndall as described in the previous section indicate how scientific standing could bring social standing and access to socially elite circles. This section develops this theme by looking specifically at the interaction of scientific and social status in the 1850s, using John Tyndall and John Lubbock as examples. Tyndall and Lubbock represent contrasting positions in the social hierarchy, and their entrances to gentlemanly London science illustrate how different were the routes of the wellborn and the middling. Tyndall started from a lowly position, being both poor and Irish, and rose rapidly in the social world when his employment at the Royal Institution brought him into close association with the wealthy and great. Also, his journal and his letters to Hirst provide rich sources on where he went, whom he met, and how he felt about every achievement and every slight. In addition, because he discussed his feelings and reactions with Hirst and Faraday, both of whom responded with advice, varying interpretations of the minutiae of social interaction are recorded. Lubbock, by contrast, was born to social and scientific status. Along with money, land, and title he inherited scientific connections. Like Tyndall, he is a convenient example for the historian because he kept a detailed journal in which he 135

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2.4 A cartoon of a scientific soirée. The cartoon gives a view of some typical “objects of

scientific interest,” but, unlike the Royal Society soirées of the period, this soirée is not crowded. Source: William M’Connell, in G. A. Sala, Twice Round the Clock (1859; rpt., Leicester: University of Leicester Press, 1971).

recorded what he did, whom he met, and the ways in which social life and scientific activity interacted. the Royal Society and the Royal Institution—­ Two institutions—­ demonstrate particularly clearly the association of high scientific achievement and high social status. In these institutions, social and scientific elites mingled, and the more lowly born experts could acquire social status. At ordinary meetings, at soirées and dinners, and on committees the lowly mixed with the titled, and this social exchange often continued in private, informal occasions.87 Through the 1850s Tyndall was highly conscious of how far he had risen from his lowly Irish background. Not only at the Royal Society and the Royal Institution, but even at the British Association, he had a strong sense of moving up in the world. At the Belfast BA in 1852, he reflected that, when he last visited Ireland, the British Association had been “a distant solar system,” now he mingled with its “magnates.” Overwhelmed by how far he had risen, he recorded the great men he had seen or spoken 136

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with. Lucien Bonaparte, Prince of Canino (younger brother of Napoleon III, and philologist) was sitting only three seats away “on the same bench” at the presidential address. He was ultrasensitive to possible slights. Sir David Brewster, he felt, had been avoiding him throughout the even­ ing reception—­he had “always” been cold toward him. But only the next morning Brewster shook hands, “asked in a most friendly manner how I did.” As the meeting ended, Tyndall tried to convince himself not to care whether ignored or befriended by Brewster: “The melting of Sir David pleased me for a moment, but it pleases me no longer . . . there is no difference between him and me.”88 Here, as so often, Tyndall wanted to reject class values but constantly caught himself giving in to them. On election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, Tyndall was even more conscious of “the height to which I have attained.” When, shortly after his election, Sabine appeared surprised to learn that he was an Irishman, Tyndall’s social insecurities overcame him. Sabine had supported his Royal Society candidature and was writing testimonials in support of his many applications for scientific positions. Tyndall seems to have feared that, if Sabine knew the full story, he might judge Tyndall socially unfit for these positions and presume that he had deliberately hidden his origins. Tyndall felt it his “duty” to inform Sabine of his lowly family background—­although he felt no such obligation to inform him of his dismissal from the Ordnance Survey for political agitation. Not that he agreed that he was lower, but “knowing how the world judges” he felt he should tell Sabine of his lowly origins. Tyndall began with his father, “a poor man, who made a livelihood by selling leather and shoes.” But in character he was a gentleman: “a man of more inflexible integrity and intrinsic truthfulness of heart I have never met.” Tyndall then described his own aspirations and career. His summing up distinguished what mattered to himself and what he feared might matter to others. Character, culture, and hard work might be found wanting when weighed against birth: For the last ten years the tendency of my life as regards social position has been an upward one, but in no case have I . . . purchased a single advancement by other than honourable means. . . . I have endeavoured, with what success I know not, to render myself fit for the companionship of cultured men. . . . [It] now remains for me to make the experiment whether a man with nothing but naked character to recommend him, may . . . find the doors to an honourable activity open to him.89

What did it take to make oneself “fit for the companionship of cultivated men”? “Polished manners” and “sociable disposition” had helped 137

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to make the German musician and astronomer, William Herschel, socially acceptable in the late eighteenth century. Good manners and sociability remained important, as Endersby shows, also courtesy, dignity, avoidance of controversial issues, and, within science, politeness in disagreement. Conversational skill was another mark of the Victorian gentleman.90 Tyndall’s high valuation of conversational skill is shown by his observations to Hirst on their mutual friend Heinrich Debus: “He thinks it incumbent on him to say something in company, and this requires a certain tact acquired by practice—­he has never been used to company and he knows nothing of conversational tactics.” Tyndall implied that he had developed his own conversational tactics by careful observation of others. Tyndall also read widely, which, Secord emphasizes, was a basis for conversation. In 1844, when Tyndall had pursued self-­improvement in his months of unemployment in Ireland, his reading had included Chaucer, Shakespeare, Voltaire, recent novels, travel books, and history. In London he often attended the opera with Francis.91 As Tyndall’s comments on Debus’s failings indicate, the lowly born aspirant to scientific society had to put effort into learning the social subtleties of polite society. Tyndall greatly admired and closely identified with Faraday. Faraday had risen from a lowly background to great eminence in science and was therefore an encouraging role model. He demonstrated what could be achieved through “toil, courage, and humility” (wrote Tyndall) and gave Tyndall hope that he also could follow a career in science without the benefits of birth.92 Faraday was universally admired for the modesty and kindness that accompanied his scientific success. He belonged to the Sandemanians, a small sect that had broken away from the Presbyterians, and he maintained the simple Sandemanian style of life. Faraday’s deeply moral assessment of life with its opportunities and temptations resonated with Tyndall’s Carlylean puritanism. Faraday had spent sixty-­ three years in “the world,” Tyndall reflected, “without being stained by its mud.”93 Faraday pursued science for love of science rather than for fame, social status, or wealth and, Tyndall felt, put moral and spiritual values above scientific achievement. Faraday, whose own social origins were lowly, understood Tyndall’s social sensitivities. Early in the first series of Friday evening lectures after Tyndall’s appointment to the Royal Institution, Faraday publicly affirmed Tyndall’s status by conducting him into the lecture theater where he paused at the front bench and discussed the apparatus set up for the evening’s demonstrations, paused again on the way to his seat to introduce Tyndall to the famous natural philosopher, Sir John Herschel, and then rearranged the name tags to seat Tyndall next to himself—­all before the 138

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2.5 Royal Institution lecture, 1855. Michael Faraday is presenting a Christmas lecture; Prince

Albert and two of his sons are in the audience. Source: 1856 engraving, after a painting by Alexander Blaikley. Wellcome Library, London.

large and growing audience (“from Dukes downwards”). Tyndall understood this public recognition as a “baptismal act” marking his inclusion in the RI. As a Sandemanian, Faraday was against distinctions of rank. Tyndall was overwhelmed when Faraday chose his company over that of greater men on the journey to the Liverpool British Association meeting in 1854. Faraday chose to travel second class with Tyndall, rather than join Sir Roderick Murchison and other grandee friends in the neighboring first class coach. Tyndall also found in Faraday a warmth of feeling and directness in conversation that he missed in the cool politeness and diplomacy of Sabine and many other gentlemen.94 The combination of scientific achievement, social status, and fashion­ able ladies at the Friday evening lectures of the RI initially overwhelmed Tyndall (figure 2.5). He recorded whom he sat with and whom he met. At a lecture by the preeminent naturalist Richard Owen, Tyndall sat between Faraday and the Duke of Argyll. He was invited to numerous dinner parties and receptions by people associated with the Institution. Tyndall was as­tounded to learn that Henry Bence Jones (the RI secretary) made £50 139

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to £150 a week from his medical practice. He became close friends with Frederick and Juliet Pollock. Pollock, an RI manager, was an eminent and cultured lawyer and heir to a baronetcy. The Pollocks shared Tyndall’s love of poetry and gave him an introduction to the Tennysons (Lord Alfred and his wife Emily). Another RI manager, Lord Ashburton, invited Tyndall to a house party at his Hampshire estate, where Tyndall met Carlyle.95 All this went to the head of the Irish ex-­surveyor who had given up so much to pursue his dream of a career in science. His friends had thought him a fool, Hirst reminded him.96 Through these years Tyndall recorded his hopes and fears, joys and resentments, in his journal and in his letters to Hirst. They reveal a contradictory mixture of pride, claims to be above worldly vanity, condemnations of pettiness, and ultrasensitivity to any real or imagined slight. Before leaving Germany to return to England and Queenwood he expressed his Carlylean ideals: scientific success can be converted into “nutriment for my proper manhood.” “Manhood,” by which Tyndall meant following one’s vocation against every difficulty, without care for fame or wealth or the opinion of others, was his seldom-­achieved goal. At every stage of his career—­first BA meeting, election as FRS, first RI lecture—­ Tyndall tried to conform his pride to a Carlylean ethic. He enjoyed not the height to which he had risen, he tried to tell himself, but his “successful struggle against an acknowledged difficulty.” Hirst expressed Tyndall’s own Carlylean ideals when he looked forward to Tyndall demonstrating “how scientific fame and pure manliness can combine themselves in one person.”97 True manliness was demonstrated by self-­discipline and hard work, carried out for the sake of truth, not for reward and fame. At every setback or quarrel Tyndall affirmed his own righteousness and superiority, but Faraday or Hirst would often remind him of the higher claims of duty and conscience. When Tyndall’s equanimity was dependent on whether or not Brewster noticed him, Hirst warned him that he was becoming dependent on the opinion of others: Could it be that the “allurements and temptations” of science “may be demanding too much of thee”? Perhaps its demands are “tending to swamp the man in the philosopher.” Tyndall accepted Hirst’s assessment. He copied the letter into his journal and resolved to model himself on Faraday.98 Tyndall believed that he could find the same source of strength, “although we approach it by different routes.” Faraday’s Sunday exercises “refreshed his soul”; Tyndall could gain moral force through experience of the Divine in Nature, reading great literature, or reflecting on great men. Tyndall iden­ tified with Faraday’s religion; there is “a remarkable coincidence in our

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modes of thought.” He felt close to Faraday, whom he described as his “scientific father.”99 In every interchange with William Thomson (figure 2.3), Tyndall’s pride and insecurity undermined his resolutions to be high-­minded. At the 1855 British Association meeting he crossed swords with Thomson over what were Faraday’s views on the polarity of bismuth. Tyndall wrote to Faraday that there had been some “unpleasantness” in an exchange between himself and Thomson. Thomson had questioned him with “an unfair degree of partisanship” and he had “possibly” been partisan in reply. “Now” (he was writing a week after the event), he had “almost forgotten” the incident. Tyndall was trying to put himself in as good a light as possible. His journal account, written a week earlier, described Thomson’s criticism as “arrogant” and recorded that his own heated response angered Thomson’s supporters. Tyndall would have liked to forget and suppress the incident, but could not, because the exchange had been reported—­“misrepresented” he told Faraday—­in the newspapers. Faraday was not taken in by Tyndall’s effort to minimize the exchange. He reassured Tyndall that he had seen no papers and gently advised him that it was easy to misinterpret the intentions of critics: although he had often been “heated in private when opposed, as I thought, unjustly and superciliously” (Faraday was guessing Tyndall’s interpretations), he had found that it was better, for the long term, not to reply in kind. He advised Tyndall to “be slow to feel pique; quick to see good will.”100 In later decades there were more ideological differences between Tyndall, Thomson, and their respective friends, but in the mid-­1850s I suggest that the conflicts arose chiefly from the combination of Thomson’s exuberant self-­confidence and Tyndall’s insecurities. The bad feeling seems to have been almost entirely on Tyndall’s side, for after the bismuth discussion Thomson invited Tyndall to have dinner with himself and Liebig.101 Giving Tyndall an opportunity to meet the great Liebig was a friendly act. In spite of having Faraday as an exemplar, Tyndall accepted so many invitations from the rich and the great that his scientific work suffered. Faraday neither gave nor attended dinner parties, he told Tyndall. This was not a religious avoidance of high life, as was widely thought, but to give himself time for his scientific work.102 But Faraday had a wife and nieces to provide a warm social environment, unlike Tyndall. Tyndall was lonely. He was invited to many dinner parties: “His company is greatly sought, I believe for his conversational powers,” observed Hirst when he arrived in London in 1859. While enjoying sharp debates and high society, he also enjoyed family sociability. He ate dinner often with the Faradays and

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their nieces, and he played with Bence Jones’s children. Tyndall’s journal records many developing friendships with women that ended in disappointment.103 He was welcome as a conversationalist at dinner parties, but the combination of lowly Irish origins, flamboyant idiosyncrasies, and religious heterodoxy made him less welcome as a suitor. Tyndall, like Huxley, prided himself on being independent, on not having sought favors. As he was about to take up the Royal Institution professorship Tyndall congratulated himself that his position had been achieved “honestly by fair means.” He had not “sought” the Royal Society or the Royal Institution, or the society of “the great and eminent”; he had “stood at no man’s door craving admittance.”104 Rather, all had been freely offered, leaving him with obligations to no man, only, as he had told Sabine, to Science. Both Huxley and Tyndall interpreted independence to mean that one never compromised for the sake of truth, and never softened one’s opinion in order to avoid offending someone. To both Tyndall and Huxley, the polite evasions of gentlemanly conversation verged on hypocrisy; whereas to many gentlemen (Hooker for one) their blunt truthfulness seemed impolite. Tyndall’s contrasting experiences of negotiations with Sir Henry de la Beche, director of the Geological Survey, and the wealthy wine merchant J. P. Gassiot, exemplify the changing Victorian codes of manliness, from “gentlemanly politeness” to “manly simplicity,” that John Tosh has analyzed.105 Gassiot was a manager at both the Royal Institution and the London Institution. Like so many wealthy men who pursued science as an avocation, Gassiot had extremely good apparatus, and he generously loaned his electrical apparatus to Tyndall; he nominated Tyndall for the Royal Medal of the Royal Society. Tyndall felt at ease with Gassiot and Faraday. He could speak openly without fear of giving offense or of gossip being passed on to others: we had “frank, manly, trusty” conversation.106 By contrast, communication with De la Beche was indirect and confusing. De la Beche visited Faraday to ask about Tyndall receiving an appointment at the School of Mines, and asked Faraday to ask Tyndall to call on him to discuss an appointment. Faraday told De la Beche that as he was seeking Tyndall, rather than vice versa, he should do the calling. Some weeks after the two had met, when De La Beche asked Tyndall for a response to his proposal, Tyndall replied that he could not give a response without having a clear statement of the hours of duties and the income. The problem seems to be that, rather than negotiating directly, De la Beche tried to read hidden meanings into Tyndall’s responses and expected Tyndall to interpret and hint. A few days later Tyndall wrote to Hirst, “I think I shall get a reputation here for straightforwardness for I 142

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have commenced with the resolution to venture plain, manly commonsense and truthfulness in opposition to the diplomacy of the world.”107 Although Tyndall did not mention Sir Henry in this letter, the “diplomacy of the world” seems to be a reference to the tortuous negotiations he was recording in his journal at this time. The manliness that Tyndall and Hirst saw themselves representing was, as Tosh says, earned by “mastering the circumstances of life”; it was an expression of independence, driven by the “promptings of the inner self” rather than a response to social expectation.108 Tyndall’s interaction with De la Beche provides a particularly clear example of the kind of politeness that outsiders to gentlemanly codes did not understand. To some extent Huxley, as interpreted by Paul White, fits Tosh’s dichotomy. Huxley praised “frankness” and “honesty” against what he saw as condescending and patronizing politeness. Huxley used the same Carlylean language as Hirst: Forbes had “not merged the man in the man of science.” Huxley constructed his moral ideal of a “man of science” against an older image of gentlemanly behavior.109 Through science Tyndall moved in high social circles, but, as is clear, he was often ill at ease and uncertain how to interpret social interactions. In spite of his efforts to prepare himself for gentlemanly society, he often misjudged the tone acceptable in gentlemanly London. The effusive emotionality of his Irish and romantic styles of expression often seemed to others to be either ridiculous or self-­promoting. In 1859, Airy wrote scathingly of Tyndall to his friend James Forbes in Edinburgh: “Tyndall and Murchison are now the divinities of West London society.”110 It was no compliment to be compared with the self-­promoting Murchison. Even the admiring Hirst thought Tyndall had become “more egotistical” and warned him that others considered him “conceited, vain, [and] pretentious.”111 Although Tyndall was atypical in his Carlylean effusiveness, it is clear from the journals and letters of Hirst and Huxley that they suffered similar insecurities and reactive defensiveness. Lubbock’s entrée to science was quite different. The social and scientific were inextricably mixed as the young John Lubbock entered the scientific community. When, at age nineteen in 1853, he attended his first BA meeting he had already published papers under the tutelage of Darwin and had met other eminent scientific men through his parents. In 1852 on a visit to Cambridge with his parents, Lubbock had met his father’s collaborator, the Reverend Professor William Whewell, and Charles Kingsley, clergyman, novelist, and enthusiast for natural history.112 Later that year a weekend visit from the Herschel family to the Lubbocks at High Elms gave him time with “Loo” Herschel 143

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(one of the many young ladies whom he liked “very much”) and sci­ entific sociability: “Mr Darwin and Mr Innes [the Downe vicar] dined to meet Sir John Herschel.” Two weeks later young Lubbock accompanied his parents to dinner at the Darwins’ house to “meet Sir Charles and Lady Lyell and Dr. and Mrs Hooker.” Lubbock’s interest in paleontology was stimulated when, the next morning, he accompanied “Sir Charles and Dr. Hooker” on an investigation of the gravel pits on the Lubbock estate.113 The following year Lubbock expanded his meager fieldwork experience when he joined Lyell and Joseph Prestwich, a successful businessman and geologist, on a geological trip to Thames Valley sites. A few days later, accompanied by “Mr. Kingsley” and following the advice of Prestwich on likely locations, Lubbock found the well-­preserved skull of an arctic musk ox in the Thames Valley. This confirmation of an ice age reaching the south of England was a reputation-­building find. Richard Owen asked to borrow the fossil for display in his museum at the Royal College of Surgeons.114 Although Lubbock was part of all these scientific-­cum-­social visits, his junior status is indicated by the formal address he always used for his father’s friends and colleagues. He addressed Darwin as “Mr. Darwin” throughout his life, and “Dr. Hooker” became “Hooker” only in 1861. Changing modes of address indicate changing relationships. By 1858 both Huxley and Busk addressed Lubbock as “My dear Lubbock.” This informality shows friendly collegiality in contrast with the more formal addresses of previous years—­Huxley’s “My Dear Mr Lubbock” of 1856 and Busk’s “Dear Mr Lubbock” of 1857.115 John Lubbock was proud of his achievements and, like Tyndall, recorded significant steps in his scientific career in his journal. At the 1853 British Association meeting, he recorded, “I made a remark in the Zoological Section.”116 Unlike Tyndall he was at home in the scientific world and his financial security did not depend on how he performed. Quite literally, Lubbock was part of the ruling class, although his specific areas of authority were still quite small. It was taken for granted by his parents, by himself, and by his contemporaries that he was a suitable person to participate in public discussions, preside over organizations, and perform useful public service. He began locally, first taking up the role of a man of learning with a lecture on “The Wireworm” to the villagers of Down in 1850.117 He could expect to follow in his father’s footsteps in science and in the wider world. In the mid-­1850s, the young Lubbock was given increased responsibility and independence. Early in 1854 his father began to pay him for his work—­£150 a year—­and Lubbock began to keep personal accounts. 144

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2.6

The young John Lubbock, 1856. Source: Courtesy of the Lubbock family. © Lord Avebury.

Over the first two years these identify approximately £65, over 20 percent of the total, spent on “Books &c.” At the end of 1854, when Sir John’s brother, George, withdrew from the bank, Sir John took his two elder sons into partnership.118 The first of Lubbock’s many leadership roles in science came shortly before his twenty-­first birthday, when he was elected to the Council of the Entomological Society. At about this time Lubbock took rooms in London and began to stay in town two nights a week in order 145

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to attend meetings of scientific societies: the Royal Society, the Royal Institution, and the Microscopical or Geological Societies, in addition to the Entomological. For example, early in 1855 he attended a Friday evening lecture at the Royal Institution by Airy on his experiments to measure the density of the earth. Lubbock arranged to meet Louisa (“Loo”) Herschel the following week to hear Owen’s lecture on apes.119 Alongside science, Lubbock’s journal entries indicate his interests in banking and young ladies (Di, Nelly, and Sib appeared often in 1854–­55 in addition to Loo). Lubbock worked his way up the ladder of scientific societies. He joined the Zoological Society in 1851 (more likely for admission to its Zoologi­ cal Gardens than for its scientific meetings) and at about the same time he was elected to the Entomological Society, on Darwin’s nomination. The next year, before he had accomplished any geological work, he asked Sir Charles to nominate him for membership of the elite Geological Society of London—­and Lyell obliged, with pleasure he said. At the end of the year the scientific returned full circle to the social. When Lyell wrote to congratulate Lubbock on his election to the Geological Society he also invited him to dinner.120 Membership of scientific societies had quite different functions for Lubbock than for poorer men. For Tyndall and Huxley the honor of being elected fellow of the Royal Society had economic value because it would be an advantage when applying for scientific employment. They did not join lesser societies in the early stages of their careers. In 1858 Lubbock was elected a fellow of both the Linnean and the Royal Society. All this was expensive but Lubbock could afford to “compound,” which, as one contemporary put it, was considered “more respectable” than paying an annual subscription. When he entered the Geological Society he paid thirty-­six guineas, six guineas for the entrance fee and thirty guineas for life membership.121 Huxley, who had met Lubbock at Darwin’s in 1856 and had been impressed with his potential, offered to support his nomination for the Royal Society fellowship, but Lubbock did not need his assistance, for Owen was looking after his certificate.122 Lubbock was elected FRS in 1858 at age twenty-­four, two years younger than Huxley at election. The contrasts between Tyndall’s and Lubbock’s experiences are enormous. Lubbock’s entry into scientific society was smoothed at every turn by the network of eminent family friends who offered, or whom he could ask for, support or guidance. The most eminent naturalists of the time, Darwin, Lyell, and Owen, were his sponsors as he entered scientific soci­ ety. The examples here, most especially of the Geological Society, indicate that the scientific criteria for entrance were not as demanding for the well­ born as for the lowly. 146

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2.3 A Taste for Campaigning Hooker attained positions of influence in the scientific community before Huxley, Frankland, or Tyndall, for he was both older than they were and had a privileged beginning to his career. He was elected to the Council of the Linnean Society in 1851 and the Councils of both the Geological Society and the Royal Society in 1852. While his younger friends were still seeking to establish their scientific reputations and careers and find their ways in London society, Hooker began to initiate schemes for reforming natural history and, occasionally, natural science more generally. For the next decade, while protesting overwork and preoccupation with Kew, he was constantly scheming, lobbying, and proposing projects to his friends: to use the examination system to redirect the teaching of natural history, to turn the Linnean Society into an institution that supported serious research, to get scientific men into the gentlemanly Athenaeum Club, and to start a popular scientific journal. The following discussion of these campaigns reveals the extent of Hooker’s activities and concerns, identifies his collaborators, and demonstrates that Hooker was an effective networker and skilled strategist. Hooker’s natural history campaigning was a significant step toward the X Club. Huxley is often seen as the master campaigner and leader of the X Club, but in these early campaigns Hooker appears as leader, Busk as crucial supporter, and Huxley as apprentice. My argument in this section is that the campaigning skills of the X Club were developed in natural history campaigns, and that the extension of Hooker’s concerns beyond natural history was crucial for the later establishment of the X Club. Hooker had learned the art of persuasion and developed his ideas on the organization of science in interaction with older men of high scienti­fic status and long organizational experience. He had learned gentlemanly codes of behavior and skills of clientage from his father, but he rejected some of his father’s old-­fashioned ways, in particular, he rejected the no­ blesse oblige of Hooker senior. His father, he considered, too often spent his limited resources in supporting science for public benefit. Sir William, for example, opened his private library and herbarium to every botanist, local or foreign, who requested access. He asked for government support only when his own purse was insufficient. His son thought that the gov­ ernment ought to pay for any science, which was, ultimately, for the public good. As Richard Bellon has emphasized, Hooker mixed with many other eminent, older naturalists who gave him advice. Charles Lyell, for exam­ ple, told him that being on the council of three scientific societies at one 147

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time was too much public service. Hooker was also in close contact with his father-­in-­law, the Reverend Professor Henslow, and George Bentham, who had moved to Kew in 1854 after donating his large herbarium to the institution. When elected to positions of potential influence Hooker was not overawed by the honor but was a critical observer who wanted to use his time effectively.123 He hated the petty conflicts over honors that preoccupied the Royal Society Council, he told Huxley.124 Tyndall, by contrast, made use of his first term on the council in 1857 to nominate Frankland for a Royal Medal, and when the medal was awarded wrote proudly to Hirst of the part he had played.125 Frankland, supported by Huxley, used his first term (1858 and 1859) to campaign against the award of a Copley Medal to James Forbes, rival to Tyndall over theories of glacier motion.126 Hooker well knew that he belonged to an elite among botanists. He was a philosophical botanist, interested in generalizing across space and time.127 There were a host of botanical collectors, from “dabblers” (as Darwin called the least theoretical of naturalists), to experts on a local region, or a particular genus. Hooker was critical of the limited knowledge and leisurely habits of many plant collectors. The worst, in Hooker’s opinion, were those who identified new species on the basis of local specimens in ignorance of the similar specimens found in distant places because they were unaware of the patterns of similarity across continents and islands. Hooker was a biogeographer of global range. His personal collecting covered Scotland, the Antarctic, and the Himalayas; the Kew herbarium enabled him to compare and classify plants on a worldwide scale.128 In addition to his strong sense of hierarchy in knowledge and competence, Hooker distinguished botanists by their motives. There were two classes of botanist, those who “worked from [the] love of science,” that is, they pursued the problems that fascinated them and engaged in the activities they themselves enjoyed, and those who “worked for the love of science.” The latter were motivated by the good of science; they put themselves out to do what the advance of science might require, whether institutionally or intellectually. Hooker perceived himself as working neither for private monetary interests nor for private delight in plants, but for the good of science and hence also for the public good. As Drayton makes very clear, the Hookers were skilled at conflating personal interest and the public good. Hooker Jr. loved plants; he enjoyed botany; he needed a gentlemanly income. He had learned to align his personal interests with those of his fellow botanists and the imperial state, and persuaded himself that public interest dominated. Nevertheless, there was some truth in Hooker’s self-­perception; in the lobbying 148

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and reforming campaigns analyzed here, Hooker can only occasionally be accused of self-­interest. The Power of Examiners Examining brought valuable supplements to incomes, but Hooker early learned that examiners had power that could be used for the “good of science,” the grand ideal that he upheld. The national systems of competitive examination, which were being introduced in the 1850s, allowed examiners to shape curricula even when, like Hooker, they did no teaching. Hooker had strong opinions as to how botany and the other natural history sciences should be taught. He decried rote learning: botany was an observational science that should be taught from plants rather than books. Also, in the tradition of liberal education, he argued that examinations should test reasoning rather than memory. His model of teaching came from Henslow, who emphasized observation over book learning at all levels of education, from his medical students at Cambridge to the children in his country parish to whom he gave botany lessons.129 From 1853, as examiner for the gold medal in botany of the Society of Apothecaries, Hooker began to frame examination questions on these principles. In 1854, when the East India Company introduced competitive examinations as the means of selecting medical officers for the Indian Army, Hooker was one of the four initial examiners. This appointment expanded the field of candidates sitting his examination papers from a few ambitious medical apprentices to every aspirant to the Indian Army Medical Service; if medical schools wanted their students to stand a chance of passing they had to adapt their curricula to the questions asked by Hooker and his colleagues. When selection through examination proved effective in the lower-­status, Indian service, the British Army and the Royal Navy medical services also introduced selection by examination. Hooker continued as botany examiner for the Indian service for twelve years; Busk became examiner in physiology and anatomy for all three services. Hooker later looked back with satisfaction on what they had achieved: “the system of competitive examinations for the Medical Officers of the Indian Army . . . produced most extensive and important reforms in the Medical Schools (after they had abused us well for our pains!).”130 In 1856, when the War Office appointed Huxley as examiner in natural science to would-­be officers of the Royal Engineers and Royal Artillery, Hooker saw an opportunity for wider influence on the curriculum. He suggested to Huxley that botanists and zoologists combine to propound a “strictly scientific” system for teaching elementary science. Huxley 149

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should develop a teaching program for zoology to complement the series of large botanical diagrams that Henslow was preparing for use in elementary schools. Then, wrote Hooker with assurance, “we have suf­ ficient command over the public, as examiners in London, and as confi­ dential advisers of examiners and professors elsewhere, to ensure the cordial reception of such a system.”131 Hooker felt that, in London, he and his allies were at the center of the examining system. The Linnean Society In the same period, Hooker was dissatisfied with the Linnean Society and the provision for natural history in London scientific societies. The Royal Society served the physical scientists well but few natural history papers were read before it, and the elite Linnean Society, founded in the late eighteenth century for the natural history sciences, was near moribund.132 An extreme example of the degeneration of the society was its treatment of a learned and lengthy memoir on the plants of the Malabar region, presented to the society by a retired East India Company surgeon in 1821. Reading (by the secretary) took place at thirty-­one meetings over the following thirty years, continuing long after the death of the author. According to the undiplomatic official history, on fourteen occasions it “was the only pabulum provided.”133 Partly in response to dissatisfaction with the Linnean Society, various groups had broken away—­ microscopical, entomological, and zoological, for example—­ and each published its own journal. Such fragmentation meant there was no forum where naturalists regularly met one another. Publications were also fragmented: “our publications . . . are sown broadcast over the barren acres of Journals and other periodicals which none of us can afford to buy and then weed,” complained Hooker.134 In 1853, there was hope for reform when the eminent, but eighty-­ year-­old, president of the Linnean Society, Robert Brown, retired. Brown was widely regarded as the greatest botanist in Europe, but his habits of work and style of science had been formed in the era of Sir Joseph Banks. On Hooker’s interpretation, Brown worked for private interest rather than public good—­he resented Brown’s selfish reluctance to share his knowledge and specimens. He and Bentham agreed to support the new president, Thomas Bell, in his plans to revive the society if he would also support their schemes. Bell wanted more members and more stimulating meetings. He introduced discussion following the reading of papers and a presidential address at the annual meeting.135

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Such innovations were suspect. Many members feared that discussion would become quarrelsome debate. Brown, who remained on the council, opposed all reform—­out of “senile obstructiveness” some said—­and was supported by the secretary, J. J. Bennett, who had been his devoted assistant in the Banksian herbarium at the British Museum for quarter of a century. Bell, who had been secretary of the Royal Society for the preceding five years, had a high reputation for both science and administrative capacity, but he was reluctant to offend either Brown or Bennett and wanted (Hooker believed) to “shift the responsibility” for battling them onto him and Bentham.136 Hooker and Bentham had often discussed the needs of botany, thus when Bell asked for support they already had their own objectives. Their plans focused on publications. They wanted to replace the annual Transactions, with its expensive quarto format, by a quarterly journal, in octavo, divided into botanical and zoological parts. More rapid publication would aid those who wanted to establish their own priority and keep up to date with the work of others. For Hooker personally, his biogeographical interests made it especially important to find articles on the flora of all regions of the world so that he could, for example, compare Arctic and mountainous flora.137 Concentration of papers by specialty would make it easier to find relevant articles and reduce the cost of subscription, as naturalists could choose to take only one of the parts. They hoped that more rapid publication with clearly focused content would also attract more contributors and hence that the Linnean publications would attract a higher proportion of good articles and become the journal of choice for experts, thereby making subscription even more worthwhile. Bentham and Hooker used both threats and promises to strengthen Bell’s resolve. Bentham would neither contribute papers nor assist with editing unless such changes were made; Hooker would recommend the society to friends only when the changes were made. They also had a “very important & deep laid” scheme to improve the library. The new journal, they proposed, should carry reviews of books; this would increase the interest and value of the journal and “induce authors & publishers to give books to the Society.” Although Hooker wanted the Linnean publications to be split into zoological and botanical parts, he did not want to divide the society. He wanted to meet with anatomists, physiologists, and zoologists—­he mentioned Busk, Carpenter, Darwin, and Huxley—­as well as botanists.138 Change was slow, and opposed by Bennett who, as secretary, was responsible for editing the journals of the society. At the council meeting

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that voted the publication changes, when Bennett “burst into tears” in an effort to sway the council, Hooker became so angry that he would have liked “to have punched his fat head.” (This is the Hooker whom Huxley recognized as built on the same “high pressure tubular boiler principle” as himself.139) Soon after this heated meeting Hooker stepped down from the council, but Busk and Bentham stepped up. Hooker grumbled at the slow progress and wrote to Huxley of his vision for a new society with a good library, “well stocked with periodicals,” and meetings “worth going out for.” He talked of starting a new society, but he was not free to leave the Linnean because the changes he and Bentham wanted were being put in place.140 A quarterly Journal, in cheaper format and with separate botanical and zoological parts, began in 1856, although the annual Transactions continued. In 1857 Busk was appointed undersecretary with responsibility for the zoological part of the publications, while Bennett continued to edit the botanical papers. With the process of reform in place, Bentham began to contribute his papers to the Linnean journals.141 Reform had been so slow that Bentham had almost given up, Hooker later told Asa Gray. In his judgment, Bentham did not “feel [him]self to be a servant of Science” but, like Brown, worked out of personal interest. Hooker perceived himself as being more committed than Bentham to reform the Linnean Society—­for “the good of science.”142 In 1858, there was a move to remove the anomaly of having two editors, one with the title of secretary and the other merely “undersecretary.” This took three years because, as Bell later revealed, Busk deferred to Bennett’s sensibilities: “Mr. Busk kindly consented to act as Zoological Secretary under the title of under-­secretary until the retirement of Mr Bennett.” Meanwhile, meetings became more interesting. The number of papers and other communications read at meetings increased, the “conversational discussions” (Bell’s euphemism avoided all hint of argument) were successful, the proportion of zoological papers increased, and Bell frequently reported “an almost unprecedented number” of new members in his anniversary addresses. In 1860, he announced that the society was free of debt for the first time since the society had purchased the Linnean herbarium thirty years previously.143 Hooker, Bentham, and Busk, with Bell, can be credited with these changes. They served frequently on the council (see table 2.1), attended assiduously, served on subcommittees, and consulted one another constantly. Bentham, Busk, and Hooker kept up the pressure to improve publications. They sought to further speed up publication by requiring monthly council meetings and monthly reports to council on “the progress of the Society’s publications and papers in hand” (moved by Hooker, 152

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4 February 1858),144 and to improve quality by requiring proofs to be sent to authors (moved Bentham, seconded Busk, 5 May 1859). These motions imply that papers had been slow to be published and proofreading inadequate. In the long term their success had unintended consequences. Asa Gray teased Hooker in 1856 over his “famous good plan . . . to have all botanists publish in one journal instead of scattering them every where.” With “less than 200 pages pr. annum!” the Proceedings had become a bottleneck.145 The library was also a focus of their reforming attention: a librarian should be employed (17 March 1857); a subcommittee (which included Bentham and Hooker) was set up to superintend the arrangement of the society’s books (17 June 1858); and a Library Committee was formed to report on the purchase of books (1 December 1859). The status of the society was also increased when the government gave Burlington House for the accommodation of the leading scientific societies. Association with the preeminent Royal Society was particularly effective in increasing the status of the Linnean Society from 1857.146 As he had promised Bell, Hooker introduced his friends to the society. He even persuaded eminent friends to serve on the council. Darwin and Carpenter were elected to the council in 1858, Lyell in 1859 (see ta­ ble 2.1).147 Hooker discussed Linnean affairs before meetings with his allies, for example, Hooker and Henfrey (professor of botany at King’s College) invited Busk, Carpenter, and Huxley to meet for dinner at 5:30 p.m. before the council meeting of 17 March 1857, the meeting at which it was agreed to employ a librarian.148 Only Henfrey and Busk were on the council at this time, so the meeting seems to have been an opportunity for Hooker and his friends to give advice on Linnean affairs. Huxley was not then a fellow of the society, possibly because the Linnean fees were high—­£6 for entrance plus £3 per year. He occasionally attended and Busk “communicated” a paper by Huxley in 1857. He was elected a fellow in December 1858, then, in an unusual move, which must have been carefully orchestrated, the council decided to admit him to the society without payment of the admission and annual contribution fees “in consideration of the distinguished eminence” of his contributions.149 In 1860 Huxley followed Lyell and Carpenter on the council, and did his time in support of Hooker, Busk, and Bentham. Table 2.1 shows the known collaborators and probable allies of Bentham and Hooker on the council for the 1850s and 1860s. Busk, I suggest, was the most important of Hooker and Bentham’s allies, for it was his unrewarded, untrumpeted, competent editing of the zoo­ logical papers that enabled Bentham and Hooker’s publication plans to 153

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be carried out. In his final presidential address, Bell affirmed the success of the changes in publication format. The introduction of the quarterly Journal, he said, had “contributed greatly to raise the character of the Society, to extend its usefulness” and to attract “many a good working naturalist” to join. In the diplomatic and circumlocutory style characteristic of all his presidential addresses, Bell admitted how strongly the changes had been opposed: The innovation was so considerable, and that too in a body so eminently conservative as ours, that this proposal excited much attention, and was discussed with the freedom, and, at the same time, with the deliberation, which so important a change demanded.150

When Bell retired in 1861, Bentham and Hooker gained effective control of the Linnean Society and were no longer hindered by Bell’s reluctance to offend. It was decided that, following Bell, a zoologist, the next president should be a botanist. Huxley and Hooker exchanged opinions. Huxley thought it should be either Hooker or Bentham; Hooker did not want the position for himself: You know my prejudice against professional Scientifics being Presidents of these heter­ ogeneous bodies; & in favour of independent men who make a bond of union between Science as represented by the Society & the outer world—­& who if really scientific, are so as amateurs. Bentham is one such.151

The Bentham-­Hooker party, put in power at the elections of 1860 and 1861, remained in power for a decade. Bentham was president from 1861 to 1874; Busk was zoological secretary from 1860 to 1869 (having been in the position in all but name since 1857) and then on the council until 1879; Hooker was on the council continuously from 1860 to 1873 (table 2.1). The other two officers were probably collaborators. W. W. Saunders, entomologist and businessman, who had often voted in support of the initiatives of Hooker and Bentham, became treasurer in 1861 and remained until 1873. Frederick Currey, a botanist and lawyer, who was botanical secretary from 1860 to 1880, supported Huxley’s Natural History Review from 1861 (see the next chapter), which makes him a likely ally. Another ally in the 1860s was John Lubbock who first sat on the Linnean Council in 1862. Bentham, Busk, and Hooker set the directions of the Linnean Society until the mid-­1870s, when disaffected members protested at the limited representation of members on

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Table 2.1  Stacking the council of the Linnean Society: Allies of Hooker and Bentham on the council, 1851–­70 18511

1852

Pres. Officers Council

2 JDH Busk

JDH

1853

1854

1855

1856

1857

1858

1859

1860

Bell

Bell

Bell

Bell

Bell Busk

Bell Busk

Bell Busk

JDH

JDH

Busk Bnthm Hnfry Sndrs

Busk Bnthm Hnfry Sndrs

JDH Sndrs

JDH 1 Bnthm Cptr Drwn Sndrs

Lndly Bnthm Cptr Lyell Sndrs

Bell Busk 2 Crry JDH Bnthm Hxly Sndrs

1861

1862

1863

1864

1865

1866

1867

1868

1869

1870

Pres.

Bnthm

Bnthm

Bnthm

Bnthm

Bnthm

Bnthm

Bnthm

Bnthm

Bnthm

Bnthm [–­1874]

Officers

Busk Crry

Busk Crry

Busk Crry

Busk Crry

Busk Crry

Busk Crry

Busk Crry

Busk Crry

Crry

Sndrs

Sndrs

Sndrs

Sndrs

Sndrs

Sndrs

Sndrs

Sndrs

Sndrs

JDH

JDH

JDH

JDH

JDH

JDH

JDH

JDH

JDH

Lbbck

Lbbck

Lbbck

Lbbck

Lbbck

Busk

Crry [–­1880] Sndrs [–­1873] JDH [–­1874] Busk [–­1879]

Council

Lbbck

Sources: Reports of the Anniversary Meeting (usually held on the birthday of Linnaeus, 24 May) were printed in Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London. These list officers and new members of Council. Five new members were elected and five rotated off the council each year. Those to be removed were decided at a council meeting in early May; see “Council Minute Book,” No. 3 and No. 4 (Linnean Society Archives). Notes: 1 Each column represents those elected at the annual meeting in May to serve until May of the following year (with the exception that Bentham was chosen in June 1858 to replace Robert Brown, who had died). 2 Full names for abbreviations (reading from top left, across then down): Thomas Bell, George Busk, Frederick Currey, J. D. Hooker, John Lindley, George Bentham, W. W. Saunders, Arthur Henfrey, W. B. Carpenter, T. H. Huxley, Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell.

the council, and the lack of change (revealed clearly in table 2.1) in the preceding decade. Hooker’s efforts to maintain control in the 1870s and 1880s are discussed in chapter 4.1 below.152 The British Museum’s Natural History Collections Hooker and his naturalist allies were again moved to joint action when the reorganization of the nation’s natural history collections came to scientific and public attention in mid-­1858. Anthony Panizzi, keeper of the printed books and head of the British Museum, proposed moving

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the natural history collections out of the museum site in Bloomsbury, with one option being that the botanical collections go to Kew. When scientific men rallied to assert the interests of science, Hooker could not properly take any leading public role because the interests of Kew were so clearly involved. In these circumstances, Huxley became Hooker’s lieutenant for scientific reform, while consulting constantly with Hooker and Hooker’s friends. The proposal to move the natural history collections was a response to a severe shortage of space at Bloomsbury. As bones, skins, rocks, fossils, and the handiwork of modern “savages” and ancient civilizations poured in from around the world, there was barely time to unpack, let alone sufficient space to display or store the riches acquired. The “grand masses of ancient art,” such as the Elgin marbles and gods of Nineveh, which flooded in from Mediterranean and near-­eastern excavations were especially problematic, and were sometimes even stored outdoors on the portico. Richard Owen, appointed to the new position of Superintendent of Natural History in 1856, wanted more space for the collections in his care. Panizzi’s preferred solution was to move the natural history collections out, get rid of the ethnological collections and the mediaeval, British and Irish antiquities, leaving prints, books, manuscripts, and “pagan and classical art” behind.153 Action seemed likely in mid-­1858 when Robert Brown, curator of botany, died. Sir Joseph Banks had bequeathed his botanical collections to the British Museum on condition that Brown be appointed curator for life. In the dirty atmosphere of Bloomsbury and under the care of the aging Brown the plants had deteriorated. Now the trustees were free to take up the recommendation, made ten years earlier, that the Botanical Department be abolished on Brown’s death. Panizzi was in a hurry; only four days after Brown’s death, he wrote to the Treasury Lords asking if it was now “expedient” to remove the botanical collections from the mu­seum. Two days later, on 16 June, a subcommittee of the British Museum Trustees met and began taking evidence from leading naturalists. Owen, Lindley, and both Hookers agreed that the botanical collections should go to Kew because Sir William’s vastly richer herbarium was the de facto national herbarium and because the atmosphere at Kew was cleaner than that of Bloomsbury.154 The new conservative government, elected in early 1858, was keen to act. Hooker expressed his views more fully in an impassioned letter to Huxley. He did not trust the judgment of the trustees. Only four knew anything of science and only one was a naturalist: Murchison and Buckland were geologists and “Geology is not Nat. Hist.”; Wrottesley (presi156

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dent of the Royal Society) was a “physicist”; which left the MP Sir Philip Egerton who, although “a most excellent man” and a naturalist, “will take no active part except under great pressure” and “has no weight in the House.” “We [the naturalists] have no man of weight or of craft, no party, no watchword.” Not that Hooker had any clear proposal. His chief aim was to keep the collections “out of the K.[ensington] Gore people’s clutches.” Perhaps they should get in first and propose a new museum for “birds and beasts” near the Zoological Gardens. He assured Huxley that Kew did not want the British Museum Herbarium: I do truly say that we at Kew do not want the Brit. Mus. Herbarium here at any price; it is no use to us, and if it be the means of breaking up the Brit. Mus. Nat. Hist. collections, or withdrawing support from them, I shall deeply regret its coming here; but as an honest man I must say (with every working Botanist) that it is for the interests of Botanical Science it should come here; it would take 22 years and as many thousand pounds to make the B. M. Herbarium anything like ours here. . . . Besides which, a working herbarium cannot be kept clean enough to work with in London; it must, if worked with, be exposed for hours daily to dust by great portions at a time.

Hooker regretted that naturalists had not “agitated long ago for a full representation of Natural History in the Trustees—­now there is absolutely but one—­Egerton!”155 The punctuation and scrawl of this long letter (figure 2.7) reveals the passion that Hooker usually kept under control in his public life. Sir Roderick Murchison, gentleman geologist and trustee of the Athenaeum Club, who had been elected a trustee of the British Museum in order to represent natural history, did his best. He got up a memorial in which he tried to represent the concerns of all “Promoters and Cultivators of Science,” including botanists. Initially, all were agreed that natural history, with the possible exception of botany, should remain with the antiquities. Murchison’s memorial argued that expansion of the Bloomsbury site could provide the required space, that workers in the natural history collections needed access to the library, and that because the natural history objects were the more popular part of the collections they should remain near the center of population. In addition (although Murchison was of no marked piety), the memorial argued against the proposal that the natural history collections be moved to different locations because only in association with one another could “the harmony which pervades the whole” of Nature be displayed. This argument from unity was undermined by a concession that it might be “expedient” that the ill-­cared-­for botanical collection go to Kew. The memorial received 157

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2.7 Hooker’s letter to Huxley about the British Museum’s trustees. His impassioned scrawl

expresses his indignation. Source: College Archives, Imperial College London.

wide and rapid support. Discussion began in mid-­June, and in early July, when it was presented to the government, Murchison had 114 signatures including members of both houses of Parliament, the presidents of the leading scientific societies, and (as the Daily News reported) “nearly all the leading men of science.” Darwin had signed, although, he told Murchison, he was doubtful about the removal of the botanical collections to Kew because there was no certainty of Sir William’s collection, which was private property, remaining at Kew.156 Other reasons against removal were not publicly mentioned. South Kensington, the likely site for any new museum, was not only a distant suburb, inaccessible by public transport (as was emphasized), but it was also associated with Henry Cole’s Department of Science and Art, widely looked down on as a civil service rather than a scientific institution. Its initial buildings were an ugly joke (see figure 5.1). Scientific men were also afraid that, because the governing elite was more interested in antiquities than in natural history, a separate museum for natural history would be inadequately supported. “The real secret of our anxiety,” Hooker admit-

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ted, “is . . . that we would lack support as a National Museum of Nat. Hist. except we huddled our collections under the wing of art—­this gives our cause a bad look.”157 While the memorial was still circulating, it was rebutted by the Quarterly Review. According to the Quarterly, the museum was the result of an unplanned accumulation of disparate gifts—­stuffed birds, books printed in Iceland, and volcanic productions of Mount Vesuvius among others—­ and was in danger of becoming “a gigantic warehouse of unpacked gifts.” The Quarterly described, at length, the storage problems that arose from the complete failure of the many expansions to the building to keep up with the mass of new acquisitions. Treasures were decaying in unsuitable storage. A cell in Newgate prison was “more cheerful, more airy, and more commodious” than the underground vaults where the natural history collections were kept. The Quarterly praised the judgment of Panizzi and supported his proposal to separate the works of nature from the works of man. It pointed out the inconsistency of the memorialists in allowing that the botanical collections could go to Kew while asserting that the grand unity of nature must be maintained, claimed that illuminated missals were more popular than large skeletons, and astutely identified the real concern of the naturalists as the fear that natural history would lose status and money if separated from antiquities. Its culminating argument was that the dignity of natural history and the “honour and distinction” of Owen would be best represented in an independent museum. Those who opposed separation were enemies of science.158 In spite of the large number of signatures and Murchison’s efforts at consultation, some were critical of the memorial. Henfrey was “disgusted” that the memorial had been signed by astronomers, physicists, and geologists “who have no acquaintance with Nat. Hist.” Only one-­third of the signatures were those of naturalists, therefore the memorial did not represent expert judgment. Also, Murchison had revised the memorial, deleting the section recommending removal of the botanical collections to Kew (probably in response to the Quarterly’s criticism).159 The argument was more consistent, but botanists were aggrieved that he had not first consulted them. By September, when it seemed certain that the government would separate the Departments of Natural History and Antiquities, Hooker and Huxley were considering action: “Surely Lindley & Bentham & Henfrey & you & I with Busk & Carpenter could put our shoulders together and get something done,” wrote Huxley to Hooker. But what should be done? Huxley and Hooker exchanged opinions: both were against

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putting the collections under South Kensington governance; both thought that the zoological and paleontological collections would be well placed near the live animals at Regent’s Park. Huxley would have allowed, with what seems like self-­interest, the economic zoology collection to go to the Museum of Economic Geology, which was associated with the School of Mines. Hooker accepted that the plant collections should move to Kew and become the National Herbarium but suggested that “a Botanical collection, illustrating Plant life” be developed at the new natural history museum. In spite of all this private activity, Hooker did not intend to enter the public discussion: “I am far too deeply personally interested in the matter to take any public part with decorum.” Huxley hoped that “light will arise” from discussion at the forthcoming British Association meeting.160 By the time of the meeting, Owen, who was president that year, had also retreated from the position of Murchison’s memorial. In his presidential address, he appealed to empire and science to justify a new, spacious museum. Given Britain’s great empire, enterprising travelers, and hardy settlers, foreign naturalists expected a rich and varied collection of exotic animals in the national museum. Also, the advance of “philosophical zoology” required the display of the gradations of type exhibited across each class, including both living and extinct members, regardless of the size of the individuals. Owen added that the curators should be required to give lectures on their collections and suggested that the successes of Kew and of the Museum of Practical Geology were due to the organizational structure by which a director was answerable directly to a government department rather than to an intermediate body of trustees. Hooker and Huxley were not swayed by his argument and, after the meeting, began to move for a break-­up of the natural history collections. Rupke interprets this as “jealous duplicity” because their institutions (Kew and the Museum of Economic Geology) would have benefited from the reorganization. Although Huxley and Hooker may well be guilty as charged, the antagonism to a South Kensington location, expressed by Huxley and Hooker in their private letters, is sufficient to explain their opposition to Owen’s proposed museum. Hooker’s private letter to Huxley (quoted above) is unequivocal about not wanting the Banks herbarium at Kew. Carpenter, though, was bitterly anti-­Owen: Owen was so arrogant that any museum of which he was director should have a supervisory board of scientific men.161 Nevertheless, if, as seems likely, the Kew herbarium gained the government support that had previously gone to the British Museum’s herbarium, then Kew might have benefited

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from the Hooker-­Huxley proposal for reorganizing the natural history collections. Hooker, Huxley, and their allies decided that another memorial was needed. As Hooker felt that he could not take any public part with propriety, Huxley became chief public activist, but worked in close consultation with Hooker and his friends. In late September both Huxley and Henfrey drafted testimonials that were circulated and discussed. These proposed that zoology, mineralogy, and botanical collections be separated and that, within each category, research and display collections also be separated. Huxley’s draft brought out the needs of naturalists more clearly but, advised Carpenter, the form of Henfrey’s was more “likely to conciliate favourable attention.” Darwin, who had signed Murchison’s memorial, was reluctant to shift ground. Natural history should “stick to the mummies and Assyrian Gods,” which ensured the popularity and funding of the museum, for the gentry and governing classes were “profoundly ignorant and contemptuous” of science. He considered that the recommended separation of display and research collections could occur at Bloomsbury. Both Hooker and Darwin warned against any hint of expansion, for this would create “alarm” that more money would be required by the proposed arrangements. Bentham, known for his care with words, drafted a revised memorial.162 Darwin, whose name was wanted, held out. South Kensington would be a “great evil” for, although scientific men would visit, the “masses” of eastern and central London would not. He recommended consulting Lyell: “his would be a powerful name, & such names go for much with our ignorant governors.” Darwin gradually and reluctantly capitulated when he was assured that movement of the collections was inevitable, the only choice being over what went where.163 The Bentham-­Huxley memorial, which was presented to the chancellor of the exchequer (Disraeli) in late November, was signed by the professors of botany at Dublin (William Harvey, an associate of Hooker), Cambridge (Henslow), University College (Lindley), and King’s College (Henfrey), and by Bentham, Busk, Carpenter, Darwin, and Huxley. To ensure that the ill-­informed recognized the weight of the names, titles and honors were listed. Darwin, for example, was “F.R.S., L.S., and G.S.,” Bentham, “V.P.L.S.” An astute reader would have noticed that Oxford and all of Scotland were unrepresented. Even more significant—­for he was in London and had been consulted by Hooker, Lyell’s name was missing. Back in June, when both Owen and Darwin had allowed that the museum’s herbarium might go to Kew, Lyell had been against any break-­up of the collections and he had remained firm.164

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It is noteworthy that the same cast of actors was involved in the second natural history memorial as in the Linnean Society reform. Bentham, Henfrey, Carpenter, and Darwin (with Huxley and Hooker) debated the content of the second museum memorial; Busk signed and therefore probably took part in the discussion, although he is not mentioned as taking part in the drafting; Darwin was a reluctant supporter; Lyell was missing, but not because he had been left out. When Hooker had to move off center stage, Huxley took a leading public role, although he had much to learn about conciliatory negotiation, as Carpenter’s comment on his first draft of the memorial illustrates. After signing, Darwin was uneasy at the secrecy with which the memorial had been produced. He heard that Murchison was aggrieved at not having been informed of the counter-­memorial. It seemed “underhand,” Darwin thought; it was not gentlemanly to embarrass Murchison by letting him appear ignorant when he had previously taken a leading public role. Hooker had a diplomatic meeting with Murchison to sooth his hurt feelings and wrote a lengthy letter justifying the action and admitting to Murchison that he shared responsibility for and fully agreed with the naturalists’ memorial.165 By December Huxley perceived himself as a co-­leader with Hooker in the defense of natural history: “I see nothing for it but for you & I to constitute ourselves into a permanent ‘Committee of Public Safety’ to watch over what is being done & to take measures with the advice of others when necessary.” Huxley told Hooker of the initiatives he had taken: he had sent copies of the memorial to Prince Albert (who was a British Museum trustee), to Sir James Clark (the queen’s physician); and to various editors—­including Robert Chambers of Chambers’ Journal and the Reverend Whitwell Elwin, of the Quarterly Review. In a subsequent long conversation, Elwin had assured Huxley he would write a supportive article.166 The uncertainty and lobbying dragged on for years, and Huxley and Hooker exchanged many further outraged letters. My purpose here is not to follow the story of museum politics to its resolution two decades later with a grand new Natural History Museum at South Kensington, but to demonstrate the existence and effectiveness of Hooker’s networks at this early stage. He collaborated with older botanists, some of whom had been friends of his father (such as Lindley, Bentham, and Henslow), with eminent geologists and naturalists outside botany (Lyell and Darwin), with medical men (for example, Paget and Busk), and with younger, salary-­dependent men of science (most notably, Huxley). The British Museum lobby shows Huxley learning political skills through involvement in Hooker’s networks. 162

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Significantly, these networks were in operation before Darwin’s publication of the Origin of Species in November 1859. Darwin appears here as a supporter of Hooker rather than the well-­known story in which Hooker was a supporter of Darwin. Even before Darwin began writing the Origin Hooker had gathered around himself a network of naturalists who were involved in collaborative campaigns to reform education in natural history and to organize natural history institutions in the interests of specialist researchers: societies with active members providing informed discussion, specialized journals, rapid and accurate publication, good libraries, and accessible, well-­kept museum and herbaria collections.167 Science and the Outer World Although Hooker’s dominant concern was for natural history, he occasionally took up broader concerns. Two issues, discussed briefly here, show that he wanted recognition for science and scientific men in elite culture and appreciation for science and scientific reasoning in the broader culture. Hooker’s participation in the affairs of the Athenaeum Club illustrates the extent of his interest in maintaining links (alluded to in his letter on the Linnean presidency) between “science” and “the outer world.” The Athenaeum Club had been founded in 1824 with the purpose of encouraging interaction between cultured gentlemen and leading artists and authors. It achieved this mixing by having two categories of membership. There were 1,200 “ordinary” members—­landed gentry and aristocrats, bishops and higher clergy, members of Parliament, leading lawyers, university men—­elected on gentlemanly criteria although assumed to have specifically cultural interests, and there were a small number of men elected for their cultural attainments under “Rule II.” While ordinary members were elected by ballot, Rule II empowered the committee to elect, each year, nine members “of distinguished eminence in Science, Literature, or the Arts, or for Public Service.”168 The Athenaeum, representing both social standing and cultural achievement, was the organizational embodiment of cultural authority, and Hooker wanted this recognition and influence for science.169 For scientific men the Athenaeum was even more selective than the Royal Society: nine Rule II entrants a year (to be shared with art and literature) against fifteen for the Royal Society. (Election on the grounds of scientific eminence usually came only after the candidate had become FRS.) Hooker did not want to leave decisions to others. Hooker himself 163

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had been elected in 1851, seven years after first being nominated in 1844. In 1856, he wanted to nominate Huxley, who had the required eminence in science, but he and Darwin decided that there was a serious risk that Owen (a member since 1840) might charge Huxley with ungentlemanly behavior. To lose would look bad. However, in 1858 when Huxley was nominated by Sir Roderick Murchison, who was a trustee of the Athenaeum, he escaped Owen’s censure and got in easily.170 Huxley’s success made Hooker optimistic that further men of science might be elected under Rule II. He advised Huxley on strategy for getting Tyndall and Busk elected: “the less we say of such matters the better—­ only if you have an opportunity of poking fun at Murchison . . . do not lose it, but talk sagely & confidentially of Busk & Tyndall.”171 Over the next ten years, election to the Athenaeum marked the upward social mobility of the X-­network: Busk (1859), Tyndall and Frankland (1860), and Hirst (1866) were elected under Rule II.172 For Lubbock (1857) and Spottiswoode (1859), who were not elected under Rule II, social status carried more weight than scientific recognition. Most notably, Lubbock was elected at the very young age of twenty-­two and before he was FRS. Spencer (1868) was the last to be elected. Hooker sometimes acted for even broader interests. On Huxley’s election, Hooker urged him to pay up quickly so that he could vote in the forthcoming election to “help to swamp the Parsons & get Buckle in.”173 After the 1857 publication of the first volume of his History of Civilization in England, Henry Buckle was the “literary lion of the day” and a welcome guest at cultured dinner parties.174 Clerical members of the Athenaeum threatened to blackball him for the heterodoxy shown by his anti-­providential interpretation of history. Hooker, who had argued with Buckle at a dinner party, described him as “the damndest bore I ever met, & what is more, the most obtrusive & offensive one.” He had challenged Buckle’s concepts of induction and deduction and when frustrated by the argument described himself as “sneak[ing] away as I should from a treacherous savage, looking over my shoulder to see if he followed.” Although denigrating Buckle’s intellect and character, he was nevertheless prepared to support his election to the Athenaeum in order to counter those who would assess gentlemanly and intellectual standing by theological criteria. Buckle’s supporters won, Lyell informed Hooker: 264 white balls and only 9 black balls, “a good demonstration in favour of freedom of opinion.”175 Hooker also told Huxley that an outstanding young artist was likely to be blackballed because he was a wine merchant, but did not suggest any special action to defend the respectability of commerce. Thus, through the gentlemanly Athenaeum 164

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Club, Hooker sought to ensure that science gained social recognition and social influence, and opposed those who would make religious orthodoxy a requirement for respectability. Another scheme in which Hooker took a leading role was a plan for a quarterly “Scientific Review,” modeled on the status quarterlies and aimed at the general middle-­class public. In Victorian England, every group had its journalistic “organ.” The Edinburgh Review, Quarterly Review, and Westminster Review represented the three great political traditions, Whigs, Tories, and radicals. Every branch of the Church, every variety of Nonconformity, and, increasingly, every variety of free opinion had its journalistic organ from the Unitarian Prospective Review (a quarterly) to the Methodist Magazine (monthly) and low church Record (weekly). By the 1850s there were also many more middle-­brow magazines that often mixed fiction and improvement. Looking back, the journalist John Morley thought that through journalism “the heretics” obtained “more powerful pulpits” than those traditionally occupied by the orthodox.176 Journalism was particularly important for radical intellectuals who, being outside Church and Chapel, had neither endowments nor pulpits. Hooker’s enthusiasm for popular journalism was short-­lived, but his friends took up the cause of reaching the public through journalism. On a winter Sunday afternoon in early 1858, Tyndall and Huxley called on Frankland before visiting Hooker at Kew, where they “argued upon the desirability of a new scientific review” as they promenaded in the gardens.177 After further discussion the following Sunday, Hooker undertook to discuss the project with John Murray, the publisher. By the time Hooker saw Murray they had already had second thoughts about the time and energy that would be expended in writing and persuading others to write a quarterly review of science. Murray confirmed their doubts by pointing out more difficulties: weekly papers were replacing quarterlies; a purely scientific review would not appeal to the general public whose attention they wished to secure; a well-­paid editor was a necessity; and “there must be a staff of promising contributors and also promised contributions, and all contributors must be wellpaid.”178 Having no financial backing, and apprehensive at the time that might be required, they gave up the scheme. That Hooker approached Murray suggests that Hooker was at the center of this scheme. A few months later, when Huxley proposed a scheme for “working the public up for Science,” Hooker wanted nothing to do with it. Nevil Story-­Maskelyne, professor of mineralogy at Oxford, with the support of Ramsay and Huxley, had negotiated a deal with the editor of the weekly Saturday Review, “organ of sceptical conservatism.” If they 165

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could guarantee a regular supply, the editor would publish a fortnightly scientific article—­and place it in a good position between the leaders and the reviews. Huxley listed the proposed contributors: Sylvester for mathematics, Tyndall for physics, Maskelyne and Frankland for mineralogy and chemistry, himself and Hooker for biology, Ramsay for geology, and Warrington Smyth for technology. It doesn’t “ask too much [work] of anyone” Huxley assured Hooker, only one article each, every three months. Hooker declined. From brief consideration of a “Scientific Review” he had concluded that research was a higher priority. “I quite feel the want of such a class of articles as you propose,” he told Huxley, but writing them would be “at the expense of original work, & we should thus ‘seek in certain ill, uncertain good.’ ”179 Their motive was public improvement. The proposed writers were all salary dependent and might have been attracted by hope of supplementary income, but Huxley did not mention the page rate. Tyndall shared Huxley’s hope that journalism would be effective: “I think it may become a very important agency and exercise a salutary influence in this quack-­ridden country.” The widespread enthusiasm for “table tapping” as a means of communicating with the spirit world was decried by many scientific men in the 1850s, in particular, Faraday and Carpenter had written against spiritualism. The purposes hinted at in their letters suggest that Huxley and Tyndall wanted not merely to spread scientific information but also to rouse enthusiasm for science, and, because they believed that spiritualism was fraudulent and that science carried with it a scientific way of reasoning, they were convinced that familiarity with science would increase skepticism at the claims of table-­turners and other quacks. Their belief that science would change ways of reasoning is elaborated in later chapters in relation to larger projects. The Saturday Review project was carried through, and for the next few years (see the following chapter) Huxley and Tyndall made ideological and political use of the opportunities it offered. The invitation from Maskelyne shows that Huxley was recognized by the Oxford-­based Saturday Review men as a publicist for science and a competent writer.

2.4 Friends This chapter has followed the individuals who made up the X-­network in their struggles to find employment in the 1850s, their growing friendships, and the ambiguities of their social status. It has also identified Hooker as a leader in political activism in the late 1850s. Their early 166

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careers illustrate the importance of patrons in making careers and the extent of pluralism among scientific men. Although Frankland, Hooker, Huxley, and Tyndall had secure employment by 1860, they were far from well off—­by the upper-­middle-­class standards to which they aspired. Examinerships were especially useful in supplementing basic incomes; Tyndall and Huxley held secondary lectureships; through chemical consulting, Frankland was better off. Journalism sometimes paid well but by 1860 their involvement in journalism was more for the cause of public improvement than for the additional income. The friendship network in 1859 included Huxley, Tyndall, Busk, Hooker, and Frankland. This was the nucleus of the X Club. Busk, older and richer than the others, is an anomaly in many ways. Unlike the ambitious younger men, he was socially retiring, modest, and, it would seem, of a placid temperament. But he shared their reformist orientation and was a reliable, hardworking, often-­crucial supporter of many projects. Spencer, Spottiswoode, Lubbock, and Hirst were not part of the social network of the late 1850s. Spencer was a friend of Huxley and Tyndall but not linked into their specialist scientific networks. There are no traces of links between Spottiswoode and the individuals of the X-­network. Lubbock was on friendly terms with Busk and acquainted with Huxley and Hooker but was not part of their social networks. Hirst was also on the fringes. He accompanied Tyndall on many walks and informal visits in late 1859 but felt on the edge when Tyndall met up with Huxley, Hooker, and Busk. As the records of Hirst and Tyndall illustrate, wives and children were part of the social network. I have emphasized the interaction of social status, scientific expertise, and temperament. The wellborn easily found suitable patrons. Lubbock’s social and scientific pedigrees gave him a ready entrée into scientific society. Once at the RI, Tyndall mixed in high social circles; his use of these opportunities brought social mobility, but he was never quite at home in elite society. He was frustrated by the evasions of gentlemanly codes of politeness, his personal insecurity led to his misinterpreting many social and professional interactions, and he seems not to have realized the distance between being welcome at dinner and welcome as a son-­ in-­law. Hooker, born to both social and scientific standing, was more aware of these subtle distinctions. He was a master of public politeness, while making outspoken criticism in private correspondence; he mixed easily with the great. The network of reforming naturalists around Hooker overlapped with the social network of the nascent X Club. Hooker appears here as an excellent networker, subtle strategist, and energetic campaigner in 167

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natural history institutions. These Hooker projects are significant for the X Club. When Hooker could not properly take a public role in the campaign over the British Museum natural history collections, the energetic and outspoken Huxley served his apprenticeship under Hooker and his experienced collaborators. In the early 1860s (discussed in the next chapter) Hooker was again a leading figure in many of the collaborative projects and campaigns—­in spite of his continuing declarations about the priority of research; Huxley became as important and effective as Hooker in initiating campaigns; and Busk remained a loyal and reliable supporter whose hard work kept various schemes on track after the first enthusiasm had waned. Equally significant for the X Club story, two examples have shown that Hooker’s concerns were broadening in late 1850s. Hooker’s ambitions for a “Scientific Review” and his actions over Athenaeum Club elections show him organizing in the service of larger social goals. The concerns for public enlightenment, the social standing of scientific men, and freedom of thought in public life that underlay these campaigns, were major commitments of the mature X Club. Election to the Athenaeum Club marked their upward social mobility into elite intellectual circles, giving them informal access to circles of power and influence and placing them among the cultural leaders of the nation. Scientific recognition, gentlemanly standing, and influential connections were all needed in the scientific and religious controversies of the early 1860s that drew Spencer, Lubbock, and Spottiswoode into the social and schem­ ing network and undermined Hooker’s repeated resolution to eschew so­ciety. Participation in cultural politics was a moral duty. As Huxley re­ minded Hooker, their scientific standing brought them “duties . . . to the outside world, and to Science.”180 This overview is from the vantage point of hindsight. If, at the end of the 1850s, a farsighted colleague or wife had predicted that a dining club would be formed around Hooker, he or she could not have predicted the membership of the X Club. Hooker, Huxley, and Busk would have been included, but then Hooker’s naturalist collaborators might have been added—­Carpenter, Bentham, perhaps even Darwin and Lyell. Perhaps the physical scientists, Tyndall and Frankland, would have been included, but Ramsay the geologist, a frequent dinner companion, would have seemed just as likely, and more so than Hirst or Spottiswoode. No one who knew Hooker well would have believed that he would ever commit himself to eat dinner regularly with Herbert Spencer. Spencer’s pompous style and a priori mode of reasoning were anathema to Hooker with his broad and accurate knowledge of the entire field of natural history. 168

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In these collaborations of the later 1850s one can identify germs of the X Club, first, in carefully planned campaigns to reform natural history and, second, in campaigns that went beyond the specialist concerns of the naturalists to what they described as “advancing the cause of Science.” The cause of science, as conceived by Hooker and his allies in the late 1850s, included the interests of scientific workers and also broader cultural goals. The active, researching naturalists wanted interesting meetings, specialist, well-­produced journals, and access to well-­kept collections. Hooker also wanted a broader cultural influence. He wanted to ensure that scientific men were recognized among the social elite of the Athenaeum Club, and he wanted to protect freedom of opinion against those who made dogmatic orthodoxy a criterion of respectability. Membership of the Athenaeum gave social recognition to scientific merit, a recognition useful to those who wanted to be spokesmen for science. Hooker’s friends were beginning to seek this spokesmen role in the late 1850s. Hooker, Frankland, Huxley, and Tyndall wanted to spread “scientific,” naturalistic understandings of nature, and skeptical attitudes to the nonnatural among the general public. The next chapter examines the broadening of the network and the issues that drew them together in the early 1860s.

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Speaking for Nature By the 1860s the men of the X-­network had achieved both scientific and social recognition and most had secure, although modest, incomes. With scientific reputations, social connections, and relative financial security, the friends had more personal and social resources to devote to reforming campaigns than in the 1850s. Hirst, having only just arrived in London after years on the Continent, was on the edge of the network, but once he had been elected FRS in 1861 he felt more at home in Tyndall’s social circles. Many causes stirred the network of friends and allies to joint action and drew Lubbock, Spencer, and Spottiswoode into the network. Defending Darwin is only the best known of their causes. They pursued new leads that might fill the gap that Darwin had left between apes and humans; started a new natural history journal; and tried to push the Royal Society to honor Darwin with its major award, the Copley Medal. Within a year of the publication of the Origin, the much more controversial Essays and Reviews, a collection of theological essays, appeared. When the essayists were publicly criticized by the English bishops, Anglican gentlemen called in scientific experts to lead the defense of “honest inquiry,” against what was implied to be dishonest conformity. This campaign linked Spottiswoode into the networks around Lubbock and Hooker. Controversies over theology continued, with divisions becoming apparent in the scientific community. Then, with the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, theories of race became especially contentious. The extent to which political principles could be based on race was fought out between two 170

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scientific societies, the Anthropological and Ethnological Societies of London. Huxley and Busk followed Lubbock and Spottiswoode into the ethnological, humanitarian side in these controversies. For narrative clarity, the following discussion is divided thematically. The next three sections discuss, in turn, Darwinian issues, theological controversy, and controversies over race. The naturalists of the X-­network together with Spottiswoode were active in these areas of controversy when they met to start their club in November 1864. While engaged in all these controversies, members of the X-­network found another journalistic project that roused their hopes of shaping public opinion. In 1864 they had the opportunity to purchase a weekly paper, the Reader (founded in 1863), which offered the opportunity to bring science before a general audience. The broad alliances the project required and the rapid collapse of these alliances indicate where the X-­network placed themselves in political and social debate and the tensions within such broad alliances. They collaborated with other learned elites, from the universities, the professions, and especially the Church. Even while collaborating, as if on equal terms, they were beginning to claim for “Science,” and therefore for men of science, a uniquely authoritative position on human origins, woman’s place, and racial hierarchies. On these issues, they faced contending claims to authority, not only by theologically orthodox Christians but also by other “liberals” (as they identified their position) and by other groups within science. Friendship networks developed alongside campaigning networks, but not in complete parallel. The final section of the chapter shifts to a chronologically ordered account of the development of the friendships and collaborations that were formalized in the new club of November 1864. The section, which completes part 1, shows how old friendships, new social networks, and opposition to shared enemies drew the friends together. Throughout this chapter, the narrative includes a wide cast of actors—­ members of the growing X-­network, scientific allies, theological allies, and scientific and theological opponents. The degree of polarization on many issues is remarkable, although this was not a stereotypical science-­ against-­religion polarization. When the wide cast is included, it becomes remarkable how many actors turn up in more than one context; some reappear in later chapters. The depth of detail here allows considerable development of my previous account of the formation of the X Club. The range of allies identified avoids overemphasis on the power of the X Club itself or on the activities of its more conspicuous members. Close attention to friends and allies provides an answer to the question of who 171

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was not in the X Club,1 and the networks of association identified begin to reveal the social structures of Victorian intellectual life.

3.1 Defending Darwin and Expanding the Domain of Nature From November 1859 controversies over Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species gave a new focus to the naturalists in Hooker’s networks and brought Lubbock into closer association with Huxley and Hooker. Criticism of Darwin, even the possibility of criticism, brought out Huxley’s fighting instincts. He assured Darwin that he was sharpening his “claws,” ready to attack anyone who abused or misrepresented him. Huxley wrote reviews for the Times, the Westminster Review, and the new Macmillan’s Magazine, and gave one of his regular Royal Institution lectures on the Origin.2 The leading opposition reviews were by Richard Owen in the Edinburgh Review and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in the Quarterly Review. Hooker and Carpenter wrote supportive reviews in lesser locations, Hooker in the Gardeners’ Chronicle and Carpenter in the Unitarian National Review. The Times review was a lucky coup for Huxley. The regular Times writer, who had received the book but knew nothing of science, was advised to seek Huxley’s assistance, hence the Times gave its readership an ardent pro-­Darwin review. Darwin was astounded that the Times gave over three columns to science, puzzled because it read like Huxley but Huxley was not a writer for the Times, and delighted because it would do greater “service to the cause” than a dozen reviews “in common periodicals.” It was not a scientific piece, Huxley allowed, but even if the “educated mob” who read the Times rejected Darwin’s theory, he would make them respect the man: “whatever they do, they shall respect Darwin & be d—­—d ­ to them.”3 As Darwin’s wittiest, most aggressive, and best-­known defender, Huxley earned the nickname of Darwin’s bulldog, but the nickname exaggerates Huxley’s identification with Darwin. Unlike Hooker, Huxley did not appreciate the power of natural selection in explaining a wide variety of phenomena, such as the geographical distribution of species. Darwin was sometimes disappointed with his defender: “He gave no just idea of natural selection,” Darwin protested to Hooker after Huxley’s Royal Institution lecture. Darwin regarded natural selection as the centerpiece of his theory but, in the style of Darwin’s inductivist critics, Huxley argued that Darwin had failed to show that natural selection had ever produced a new species. There might be other, equally important processes of change (Huxley inclined to saltations or leaps) hence natu172

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ral selection was merely the best theory currently available. A possible natural explanation of transmutation suited his program quite as well as an actual natural explanation; both made an intervening God unnecessary and thus extended “the domination of Science” to new regions of thought.4 Nor was Huxley a one-­man support team. Hooker, who had been privy to Darwin’s developing theory since 1844, gave more effective support to the theory of natural selection. Busk quietly turned his research interests to topics that supported the transmutationist program. Lubbock, who had immense personal loyalty to Darwin, also gave early public support to the new theory. This aligned him with Hooker and Huxley and separated him from Richard Owen, with whom he had previously been on friendly terms. The 1860 British Association Meeting at Oxford “Huxley’s defeat of Wilberforce” at the 1860 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science has achieved legendary status in the grand narrative of inexorable secularization, in which Darwin and Huxley are heroes and the Oxford British Association meeting a major battle in the “war” of rational science against dogmatic religion. But local studies have shown the unreliability of grand narratives in this incident, as in many others. The reinterpreted incident is important in the X Club story, for it places Hooker and Lubbock in the limelight alongside Huxley. As James Moore has emphasized, Wilberforce was a dignified fifty-­seven-­ year-­old bishop representing a powerful established Church; his opponent was a brash thirty-­six-­year-­old naturalist who was claiming the right to explain origins—­even though many eminent naturalists disagreed with him. Frank James has focused most closely on local aspects of the debate. It was not “Huxley’s defeat” but a defeat by Huxley, Hooker, and Lubbock. Nor was the defeat a foregone conclusion. Local clergy, James argues, were prepared to side with “Huxley” because they disliked their bishop. Rather than being a world-­historical event, the “famous” debate begins to look like a local squabble or, as Lyell described it at the time, a “shindy.”5 Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, was “one of the most eloquent men in England,” a Tory, and a member of the Linnean Society.6 Given his local eminence and his scientific interests, it was entirely appropriate that he had been appointed a vice president of the British Association for 1860. He could be expected to participate in discussions in Section D, the section for zoology and botany. The large nonspecialist portion of British Association audiences usually found greatest interest and entertainment 173

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at the geological and geographical sections, but in June 1860, after seven months of public discussion over Darwin’s book, Section D attracted the biggest crowds. There had been heated controversy, with Owen and Huxley on opposite sides, over the degree of difference between the cerebral structures of gorillas and humans and some joking about pedigrees “not registered in the Herald’s College.”7 Hooker, meanwhile, had been wandering around Oxford, talking to friends and avoiding the meetings. Busk and Lubbock, but not Carpenter, were also in Oxford. The exchanges came to a head on Saturday, June 30. The bishop intended to “smash Darwin,” it was rumored, in the discussion following a paper by John William Draper, of the City University of New York, on “The Intellectual Development of Europe Considered with Reference to the Views of Mr. Darwin and Others, That the Progression of Organisms Is Determined by Law.” Darwin’s chief supporters were not planning to attend. Huxley was tired of meetings and controversy and was planning to join his family—­until Robert Chambers, who had been attacked by the bishop at the last British Association meeting in Oxford, back in 1847, pleaded with him to stay. Hooker had walked along with a friend and attended, he said, only because he had become bored with doing nothing.8 Reports of the meeting are contradictory on details. Draper spoke for over an hour (some thought an hour and a half), and the large audience (estimates ranged from 400 to 1,000) became restless. They had hoped for better entertainment. When, at last, the lecture finished, discussion began quietly with a question about the application of Darwin’s theory to the Greek classics: the questioner doubted that later Greek literature was superior to the earlier. Next, Sir Benjamin Brodie, aged seventy-­ seven, eminent physician and ex-­president of the Royal Society, spoke against Darwin’s theory. Then the bishop took his turn. Hooker described the occasion to Darwin: “Sam Oxon got up & spouted for half an hour with inimitable spirit[,] uglyness & emptyness & unfairness.” He “ridiculed you badly & Huxley savagely.” The high point of the ridicule, which Hooker did not record, was a question about Huxley’s own descent. Perhaps the bishop asked whether Huxley would prefer a monkey “for his grandfather or his grandmother,” perhaps there was no mention of gender, but Huxley saw an opportunity both to take the high moral ground and to make fun of the bishop. Huxley responded to Wilberforce’s scientific arguments, but the high point of his response was a jibe about descent that everyone, even those who could not hear clearly, remembered. Some heard him say he would “rather be an ape than a bishop,” others that he would “rather be descended from an ape than a bishop.” Huxley recollected a 174

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subtler riposte: “would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence, & yet who employs these faculties & that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion—­I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.” At this point, according to Huxley, there was “inextinguishable laughter,” but, on Hooker’s account to Darwin, Huxley did not “command the audience.” Hooker’s anger at the bishop overwhelmed his fear of public speaking: “I swore to myself to smite that Amalekite Sam . . . if my heart jumped out of my mouth.” Following Admiral Fitzroy (who spoke against his former Beagle companion) and Lubbock (for Darwin), Hooker was given his opportunity. He stood jammed up against Wilberforce’s elbow and “there & then I smashed him amid rounds of a[p]plause—­I hit him in the wind at the first shot in 10 words taken from his own ugly mouth.”9 While modern allusions are usually to “Huxley’s defeat” of Wilberforce, other victors were identified at the time. Huxley shared the credit: “Lubbock and Hooker spoke after me with great force & among us we shut up the bishop & his laity.” Hooker told Darwin that he, Hooker, was thanked and congratulated by the clergy that evening, “for they hate their bishop,” and was flattered by the ladies. Wilberforce and his friends thought that he had won. Lyell (who had not been at the lecture) summarized the reports he had heard for Darwin: the crowd began on the bishop’s side but “were quite turned the other way, especially by Hooker.”10 Twenty years later, Hooker abetted Francis Darwin and Leonard Huxley in writing himself out of the story for, to his older self, his account to Darwin seemed “a braggart epistle.”11 Thus, in writing from the Darwinian side, Huxley’s victory has become the dominant narrative. Leonard Huxley reconstructed the event as a turning point in his father’s career (when “he first made himself known as a dangerous adversary in debate”) and a fierce battle in the “open clash between Science and the Church.”12 The “open clash between Science and the Church” is no more reliable a gloss than Huxley as victor. As Frank James emphasizes, many local clergy laughed with Huxley and cheered on Hooker because they disliked their bishop. Adrian Desmond emphasizes that the Church was divided; liberals opposed high churchmen like Wilberforce; the Oxford vice-­ chancellor thought that Wilberforce “got no more than he deserved.” The following day Frederick Temple’s sermon on science and revelation showed that he and Wilberforce were no more agreed on the nature of revelation than were Huxley and Owen on chimpanzee brains.13 There was no unified Church fighting a unified Science. 175

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The fighting language stands out in the private accounts. Darwin, Hooker, and Huxley all used language that emphasized polarization and conflict.14 Hooker “hit [Sam] in the wind at the first round.” Darwin wrote to Lyell, “it seems generally admitted that Huxley smashed Owen,” and, more moderately, “our side” did well at Oxford; across the Atlantic, Asa Gray “has been fighting nobly.” Both Hooker and Huxley used the resonant language of the Old Testament to identify the enemies of transmutation with the Amalekites, the enemies of God’s chosen people. A few months after Oxford, Huxley urged Hooker to look after his health: “I can’t do without you these twenty years We have a dint of a lot to do in the way of smiting the Amalekites.”15 But Darwin and Huxley were fighting different battles. Darwin wanted “my doctrine” to be taken seriously and, ultimately, to become the basis for a new understanding of the development of species. He advocated transmutation by natural selection rather than any kind of directed change, whether Lamarck’s, Chambers’s or Owen’s kind (although he later made some allowances to Lamarck). Hooker, similarly, was defending natural selection, but as part of a campaign to make natural history more “philosophical,” based on broad and explanatory principles, rather than preoccupied with finding and naming new species.16 Huxley saw Darwin as an effective new weapon. In the Westminster Review he wrote suggestively that “every philosophical thinker” hails Mr. Darwin’s book “as a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism.” Huxley perceived himself as fighting not only for transmutation, not even primarily for transmutation, he was fighting a larger battle on the side of liberalism. Clever metaphors and ad hominem definitions were characteristic of Huxley’s rhetoric. Those who disagreed with him about the significance of Mr. Darwin’s book were not “philosophical thinkers,” that is, not careful and objective reasoners able to determine the larger implications of their evidence. In the Westminster, Huxley was writing for self-­identified radicals and liberals. From their position, the Origin mattered because it was a weapon in a larger war. The Origin was a powerful weapon, like the new accurate Whitworth guns used in the Crimean war, because it had eliminated any need to appeal to creative power to explain the variety of living forms and hence removed what had been one of the strongest arguments for a Creator.17 The publication of the Origin coincided with a “revolution in human time.” For decades, occasional lone investigators had claimed to find signs of an ancient human prehistory, for example, Boucher de Perthes in France had been finding chipped stone tools deep in river gravels in the Somme Valley. Claims about human antiquity were not taken seriously in England until the discoveries at Brixham Cave in 1858.18 Lubbock and 176

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Busk were caught up in the enthusiasm for finding further evidence of human antiquity. They traveled to the Somme together to see Boucher de Perthes’s finds in 1860, and visited the Northern Museum of Antiquities and many Danish kitchen middens in Denmark in 1861. Lubbock, who could afford to visit Europe frequently, made many return visits in the early 1860s. He saw most of the drowned “Swiss lake dwellings,” originally constructed on piles on the edges of lakes, the caves in the Dor­ dogne with animal engravings on the walls, and went to Scotland to see kitchen middens.19 As Stocking emphasizes, these finds suggested a long human prehistory that could fill the gap between animals and modern humans, the gap that Darwin had not discussed but that every reader noticed. Busk was also engaged in working out the implications of these finds. After decades of research on small and very small creatures (usually published in journals of microscopy), Busk began publishing on human cranial measurements in 1861.20 The Natural History Review When offered editorship of the Natural History Review (NHR) in mid-­ 1860, Huxley saw it as an opportunity to establish a scientific journal with a broad Darwinian program. The NHR, which had been founded in Dublin in 1854, combined two journalistic genres: proceedings and review. It reported the meetings of the various Dublin natural history societies, provided summaries of articles published in foreign-­language journals, and reviewed books and articles on natural history topics. Circulation was under two hundred, perhaps even under one hundred, and E. Perceval Wright, the proprietor and chief editor, proposed that the NHR move to London and offered Huxley the position of chief editor.21 Huxley leaped at the opportunity and wrote enthusiastically to potential supporters. Considering “the state of the times” (he was writing only a few weeks after the end of the Oxford British Association meeting) and “the low condition of natural history journalization,” this was a fine opportunity for “young men with plastic minds,” that is, those able to adjust their thinking to the new directions opened up by Darwin’s theory. Huxley invited George Rolleston (an anatomist whom he had supported for a chair at Oxford) and Lubbock to join him as coeditors on the zoological side and asked Hooker’s assistance in finding an editor on the botanical side. He asked Darwin, Lyell, and Hooker for support and advice. The review would be useful, he assured them. Its tone would be “mildly episcopophagous” (that is, bishop-­eating) and would give Darwin, Lyell, and Hooker an opportunity for “slaying” their “adversaries.”22 177

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Lubbock joined enthusiastically; Rolleston declined; and Hooker, Lyell, and Darwin advised strongly against the project. Hooker, with his long experience of assisting with his father’s journalistic projects, was “aghast . . . at your being Editor with all you have to do.” He cautioned Huxley at the responsibilities of a journal: “the burden of the thing will fall on yourself.” A paid editor would be essential, Hooker insisted. Darwin was not so completely antagonistic, but he advised both Huxley and Lubbock that they should not take up the project if it would prevent their own original work. Reviews do great good, he admitted, aware how much the reception of the Origin depended upon favorable reviews (such as Huxley himself had written), and tempting to one who reviewed as well as Huxley but, he came down against the proposal; reviews have only temporary significance whereas original work by researchers of Lubbock or Huxley’s capacity and breadth would have “perennial” significance. Also, there were practical problems—­a review confined to one subject would have a low circulation and hardly be financially viable. Huxley ignored the warnings and went ahead—­as his friends seem to have expected, for, even while advising against the project, Hooker promised to “cock-­a-­doodle-­do” in support and Darwin wrote to Lyell that it would probably be “a first-­rate production.”23 The new prospectus came out in November.24 Huxley had found ten coeditors, six from London and four from Dublin: Lubbock; Busk; Carpenter; Philip Sclater, lawyer, ornithologist, and secretary of the Zoological Society; two botanist-­associates of Hooker, Daniel Oliver, librarian and assistant curator of the Kew Herbarium, and Frederick Currey, lawyer and botanical secretary of the Linnean Society; plus Wright (the previous editor), J. Reay Greene, C. Wyville Thomson, and Robert McDonnell of Dublin (figure 3.1). Hooker took no formal responsibility, but he often attended editors’ meetings. The editors represented specialties, from histology and embryology to paleontology and geographical distribution; in addition, archaeology, which was not identified specifically, was prominent from the beginning. The program was ambitious. In addition to being a review journal (which both Darwin and Hooker had agreed was needed), the new NHR would include original articles and a “bibliographical record” of papers read and works of natural history published in the preceding quarter. Two audiences were intended, “working Naturalists” and “that large and increasing number of persons who take an interest in the results of the investigations of the professed Naturalist.”25 Huxley hoped the bibliographies would be so good as to become “indispensable” to working naturalists and thus ensure subscriptions from experts. The other sections 178

3.1

The title page of the Natural History Review. The logo, with its Galileo quotation, was not specific to the NHR but one of a number used by Williams and Norgate. Source: Courtesy of Ross Galbreath.

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would offer, “to all whom it might concern, a means of discussing the general problems suggested by the progress of biological investigation in a philosophical spirit, and solely with reference to scientific considerations.” This statement hinted at the program of the new series. “General problems”—­readers might have thought of the origins of plants and animal species, the relationship of man to apes, and the antiquity of man—­would be discussed in a philosophical spirit with reference to scientific considerations (and therefore without reference to metaphysical or theological considerations). The masthead (figure 3.1) alluded to the most dramatic (but mythical) story in the hagiography of science battling religion, with a medallion inscribed “e pur si muove,” the words supposedly muttered by Galileo upon his condemnation by the Inquisition. Darwin praised the prospectus and subscribed; Lyell persuaded the Athenaeum Club to subscribe.26 In the NHR Lubbock, Huxley, and Busk directly addressed the topic of “man,” filling the gap that Darwin had so deliberately left in the Origin. The NHR became the chief location for Lubbock’s writing on the antiquity of man and for Huxley’s claims of ape-­man correspondences. Lubbock summarized and assessed the conclusions of the European archaeologists in articles on Danish kitchen middens (1861), the evidence of human antiquity from the Somme Valley (1862); the “ancient lake habitations” of Switzerland (1862); the shell mounds of Scotland (1863); and cave men (1864). He also reviewed five books on North American archaeology and Lyell’s Antiquity of Man in 1863.27 Busk’s growing expertise in craniometry is evident in his contributions to the NHR. For volume 1, Busk translated a paper by D. Schaffhausen of Bonn, “On the Crania of the Most Ancient Races of Man,” to which he added, “Remarks, and Original Figures, Taken from a Cast of the Neanderthal Cranium.” His “Remarks” began with an assertion, slightly hedged, of human antiquity: “The fact of the geological Antiquity of Man has apparently been fully established.”28 The question now was the degree of similarity between ancient and modern man, and to this end he published his sketches of the Neanderthal skull and compared them with the outline of a chimpanzee skull. These were not mere woodcuts but plates and a pasted-­in photographic reproduction. Huxley was clearly willing to spend money on the topic. As usual, most of Busk’s contributions were inconspicuous. He was, for example, helping to coordinate the production of the specialist bibliographies by the coeditors.29 During this period, Darwin and Hooker expressed increasing antagonism to Richard Owen but they did not take up Huxley’s invitation to slay adversaries in the NHR. Slaying adversaries could be left to Huxley. 180

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His article in the first number of the new series took up his disagreement with Owen over brain structure. After numerous examples, Huxley concluded that the brain of the “orang-­outang” was more similar to the human brain than to the brains of lower apes and monkeys. Two months later, Rolleston discussed the orang-­outang brain at even greater length.30 With great caution he mentioned neither Owen nor Huxley, but it was clear to informed readers that his conclusions supported Huxley. Hooker and Darwin contributed on less stirring subjects—­the cedars of Lebanon and the insects of the Amazon, for example.31 Darwin wanted to maintain gentlemanly politeness toward Owen, but as he became more indignant he expressed his feelings not only to Hooker but also to Huxley. He enjoyed the “hits against Owen” in the NHR. “I believe I hate him more than you do,” he told Huxley.32 Not surprisingly, the NHR was perceived as representing the views of “one party.” The prospectus had advertised that the NHR would be open to all scientific opinions, but the editors made only occasional efforts to publish anti-­Darwin views, and this combined with anti-­Owen articles and Huxley’s definition of “scientific” made the NHR a party organ.33 Darwin acted as an intermediary, assuring Asa Gray in Boston that Huxley wanted a strong anti-­Darwin article and that the NHR would be worthy of a critical review by Gray’s mathematician friend, Chauncey Wright. When the article arrived, however, Huxley and Darwin considered it “too general, too metaphysico-­theological” and not natural historical enough for the NHR.34 Huxley’s principle of limiting discussion of “man” to natural history was not a neutral principle. These narrow scientific boundaries were criticized by John Balfour, professor of botany at the University of Edinburgh, who had been a fellow student with Darwin in Edinburgh. After Huxley had lectured in Edinburgh on the “zoological relations of men to monkeys,” Balfour wrote to Darwin, objecting to Huxley’s assumption that any conclusions about man could be reached on a purely zoological basis. All man’s “intellectual and moral” functions must be taken into account in determining “his” zoological classification, argued Balfour. “We are not entitled to leave these out of our consideration even viewing the matter zoologically. . . . [Man] is a religious animal & has a conscience.” On this view, zoological classification would require the metaphysical and religious discussion that Huxley excluded (and Darwin again agreed with Huxley).35 Another effort at balance was made toward the end of 1861, this time by Lubbock, who asked Rolleston for an anti-­Darwin review. But Rolleston replied that he could add nothing to what he had already published.36 181

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There were many other problems. Huxley was pleased with the substance but not with the form of the first issues: “Thanks to that infernal printer”—­they were still using a Dublin printer—­the first number “appears to be as vilely edited as it is possible to imagine.” He transferred the printing to a London printer, close by the publishers, and the ever reliable, obliging Busk took charge of the proofs.37 But even when the publishers and Busk were close by, things still went wrong. Darwin and Hooker were regular readers and exchanged frank comments with each other. Hooker held Huxley responsible for every fault. The issue of July 1862 he considered “a sad falling off & the last page is disgraceful for errors & misprints: poor Oliver is quite down-­hearted about it—­they all seem afraid of Huxley who has undertaken sole responsibility of Editorship, which he is not up to & has not time for.” Early in 1863 Hooker allowed that “the Review is much better than usual,” but—­“confound them”—­he noticed that the index on the last page of the issue belonged to the end of the previous volume. “It is too bad of Huxley.”38 Not only was the proofreading poor, Hooker also considered that the NHR was a hybrid genre. It combined reviews for a general audience with more specialized, original articles for experts. The anatomical plates were unsuitable for a general audience and unnecessarily expensive.39 Nevertheless, Hooker produced an article each year, and wrote an occasional review. Darwin, by contrast, was full of praise. He agreed that the NHR was “a Hybrid” and that “original illustrated papers” should not appear in a review, but in his opinion the illustrations would not offend female sensibilities and the reviews were “good for the general reader.” He guessed at the authorship of anonymous pieces, praised the usefulness of the bibliographies and wondered at how much work they must take, and complimented Lubbock on his well-­written articles.40 After three years Huxley was ready to give up. It took too much work—­as he had been warned—­and he was out of sympathy with the majority of his coeditors over proposed changes that, he considered, would destroy the NHR’s scientific character. Oliver and Sclater would take over from Huxley as editors in chief, Hooker told Darwin, and the structure would conform more closely to the review genre from the beginning of 1864.41 The proportion of space given to reviews increased from less than a third to over a half. The proportion of original papers, previously the largest section of the NHR, halved, dropping from around a half of the whole to under a quarter.42 This met the criticism, strongly put by Oliver, who was active in the Linnean Society, that in publishing original papers the NHR was diverting material away from scientific societies.43 The regular bibliographies, which were invaluable to researchers 182

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but time consuming to produce, were given up. Very likely it was this change that Huxley criticized as diminishing the scientific character of the NHR. The bibliographies were replaced by “Proceedings of Scientific Societies” and a very brief “Miscellanea” section. The Darwinian character continued under the new editors. Oliver was a correspondent of Darwin and worked with Hooker at Kew. Sclater had become “heretical” on species in 1861.44 Lubbock and Huxley continued to contribute and Darwin remained enthusiastic: the January 1864 issue was “the best that has appeared by the standard of what interests me”; the July 1865 number was “very good.” Hooker told him it would not last beyond the end of the year. Circulation had reportedly reached seven hundred, the level at which Huxley thought he would be able to pay contributors, but, as the new editors were paid, covering costs now required a higher circulation.45 Thus ended yet another, but not the last, of Huxley’s journalistic projects. The repeated efforts of Huxley and his friends indicate the importance they attached to shaping public opinion. The Copley Medal for Darwin Meanwhile, since 1862, members of the X-­network had been trying to get the Royal Society’s premier award, the Copley Medal, for Darwin. Others within the Society resisted this recognition of the author of the Origin. Darwin was nominated, unsuccessfully, by Carpenter and Lubbock in 1862 and 1863. In 1863 some council members, to avoid any hint of approval of Darwin’s theory, nominated Adam Sedgwick as an alternative candidate. Colonel Sabine, the president, was extremely concerned at “the efforts of a very strong party” to have the Copley Medal awarded to Darwin “expressly on the ground of his conclusions as to the ‘Origin of Species,’”—­even though Darwin’s supporters had strategically avoided mention of the Origin in the formal nomination. Privately, Sabine admitted that he made “a decided interference in the independence of the votes of Council members” to get Sedgwick elected.46 In 1864 Lubbock and Carpenter had retired from the council, but the pro-­ Darwin party was still well represented. This time Busk, seconded by Hooker’s friend Hugh Falconer, nominated Darwin for the Copley. Falconer had been a surgeon with the East India Company and director of the Calcutta Botanical Gardens. In his retirement, he ranked with Owen as an expert on mammal paleontology and contributed regularly to the NHR. In order that voting for Darwin not be perceived as approval of the Origin, Falconer and Busk played down its relevance to the award. Falconer wrote that “this great essay” was “a strong additional claim” for 183

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awarding the Copley to Darwin.47 By implication, then, the basic claim excluded the Origin. This time Sabine, Owen, and other opponents had not found an alternative candidate strong enough to unify a majority against Darwin; thus, Darwin was awarded the Copley in 1864. Three years of work did not produce the symbolic value for which Darwin’s supporters had worked. Both Darwin and Sabine undermined their efforts. As befitted a gentleman, when Darwin was told that he had been awarded the Copley Medal, he replied that he cared less for the award than for the kind feelings of his friends, which it represented. But the friends were not merely expressing kind feelings. Falconer wrote to Darwin that the award had a double significance, it represented “due appreciation for yourself” and “a determined protest” against “the profession of religious against scientific faith” (the context is explained below). He appealed to Darwin to “nurse yourself up” so that he could support this stand at the presentation. Darwin, however, feared that the evening out would make him “very ill” and declined to appear as the figurehead of scientific faith.48 Then, in making the award, Sabine undermined its symbolic value by announcing that the Origin was “expressly excluded” from the grounds of the award. At the end of the speech Huxley challenged the exclusion and asked for the council minutes to be read. Busk and Falconer both protested to Sabine, and Huxley entered into a lengthy correspondence with the long-­suffering secretary, G. G. Stokes, over exactly what had been said. In some reports of the meeting the speech was “corrected,” but the widely read Athenaeum reported that the award excluded the Origin.49 In spite of Huxley’s claims about the Origin as a Whitworth gun there is no sign that Tyndall, Frankland, or Hirst felt engaged in “battles” over the book. The us-­and-­them mentality exhibited by Huxley, Hooker, and Darwin (although less by Lubbock and Busk) contrasts with Hirst’s mild interest in Darwin’s book. Hirst interpreted the Origin as a “book on the development theory,” that is, in the tradition of Vestiges, and read Huxley’s “well-­written article” in Macmillan’s Magazine “with great interest.” Hirst also attended Huxley’s Royal Institution lecture and was stirred by Huxley’s “noble peroration.” According to Huxley, the origin of species was but one issue disturbing settled opinion; it was but one “sign of the times.” Together the signs pointed to “revolutions in thought and practice” greater than the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Huxley added legal to religious metaphor: the man of science is “the sworn interpreter of nature in the high court of reason.”50 This grand vision stirred Hirst even though he did not engage in controversies over the Origin. Frankland and Tyndall also appear not to have been engaged 184

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in Darwinian “battles.” Tyndall recorded social engagements with Busk and Lubbock, with Huxley and Spencer, and with Huxley and Hooker, but although Darwinian issues may have been discussed they were not important enough to be recorded. Nor was Spencer treated as an ally in the Darwinian controversies. In spite of being close to Spencer, Huxley did not invite his engagement in the NHR. This supports Michael Ruse’s interpretation of Huxley’s advocacy of evolution as a theory in the public domain, “a secular religion,” which he kept separate from his professional biological interests.51 Spencer’s grand theories were too metaphysical for the “scientific” emphasis Huxley was presenting in the NHR. The Reformation and Whitworth gun metaphors show that Huxley had larger visions where Spencer’s work had a place. He saw Spencer’s philosophical project as a weaving together of “the loose notions that are floating about more or less distinctly in all the best minds.”52 The following sections demonstrate that his friends also had many goals beyond the narrowly scientific.

3.2 Alliances: Naturalistic Science and Liberal Theology Even as the NHR excluded theology and metaphysics from the discussion of general questions in biology, Lubbock, Hooker, Huxley, and Busk were active in theological controversy, as if their scientific position gave them authority to pronounce on theological matters. Two theological publications of the early 1860s created greater public disquiet than Darwin’s Origin of Species. First, in March 1860, there was the innocuously titled Essays and Reviews, a collection of seven essays questioning traditional Christian doctrine. The religious public was shocked, less by the repeated argument that theology must be reinterpreted and its spiritual essence distilled from the now-­unbelievable literal accounts of Scripture, than by the fact that most of the authors were ordained clergy of the Church of England. Six Oxford-­educated clergymen, who had sworn agreement with the Articles of their Church and conformity to its liturgy, and one Cambridge-­educated layman argued, between them, that miracles were impossible, that some Christian doctrines were immoral, that doctrine changes over time, and that the Bible should be interpreted like any other ancient book. Essays and Reviews outsold the Origin—­22,000 copies compared with 4,000 in two years. Two of the authors were formally charged with heresy.53 The case was proceeding slowly through the courts when an even more shocking assault—­by a bishop—­was made on orthodoxy. Bishop 185

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Colenso of Natal had told Zulu converts that the Old Testament was not considered to be true in all its details, and taught that its vengeful God was not the loving God of Christian belief. The straightforward questions of his converts led Colenso, who had been a mathematics teacher, to examine the factual accuracy of the first five books of the Old Testament, known collectively as the Pentateuch. In the first volume of Colenso’s Pentateuch, published in October 1862, he used arithmetic and common sense to demonstrate that the numbers of people and animals reported at different times and places could not be accurate, for example, if one considered how many animals would have been killed for food and sacrifices then insufficient remained for transport.54 The implication was that readers must, similarly, judge for themselves the moral authority of Old Testament texts. Ten thousand copies of Colenso’s Pentateuch, at six shillings each, sold instantly.55 Essays and Reviews The controversies over Essays and Reviews brought Spottiswoode into the campaigning network. Spottiswoode had links to the essayists from his days at Balliol College (see chapter 1.5). The first essayist, Frederick Temple, who was headmaster of Rugby School, had been Spottiswoode’s mathematics tutor. The seventh essayist, Benjamin Jowett, was professor of Greek at Oxford, and a Balliol tutor of twenty years’ standing. The outcry against the essayists intensified after a review in the Westminster accused them of advocating “neo-­Christianity” rather than Christianity. If they were honest they would cease “prevaricating,” say they did not believe, and resign their positions. Wilberforce, who was the first bishop to speak publicly against the book, led the Church’s attack. He warned the clergy of his diocese that the “very foundations of the faith” were being undermined. In December, a meeting of Oxford Convocation provided an opportunity for a large body of clergy to express their unease. A memorial was drawn up appealing to the Archbishop of Canterbury and his bishops to drive out these doctrines from the Church. While the supporters were collecting signatures, Wilberforce was reviewing Essays and Reviews for the Quarterly. His anonymous review, which declared that the book tended to “infidelity,” if not atheism, took the January 1861 issue of the Quarterly into five editions.56 In response to the increasing outcry from the orthodox, the English and Welsh bishops produced a letter of reassurance (drafted by Wilberforce), ostensibly addressed to one group of petitioners. The recipient 186

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immediately sent it to the Times, which published it on 16 February. The bishops cast doubts on the honesty of the essayists and hinted at charges of heresy: “We cannot understand how their opinions can be held consistently with an honest subscription to the formularies of our Church, with many of the fundamental doctrines of which they appear to us essentially at variance.” They were giving “grave consideration,” they assured the souls in their care, to whether the publication should be examined by Synod or by ecclesiastical courts. Eight thousand clergy had added their voices by the time the memorial, launched in Oxford in December, was presented to the archbishop in March. It appealed to the bishops to act against the essayists.57 A. P. Stanley, friend of Temple and Jowett, was one of the few defenders of the essayists, and even he considered the project had been unwise. In the Edinburgh Review he sought to moderate the debate and called for a respectful consideration of the essayists’ arguments.58 Spottiswoode and Lubbock were leading participants in a plan to rouse support for the essayists among men of science. Within two weeks of the publication of the bishops’ letter, Spottiswoode and Lubbock, having consulted Lyell and Huxley in London and Jowett and Stanley in Oxford, drafted a “memorial” expressing thanks to Temple, the first essayist. The address regretted the censure of the book by the bishops, and continued: Without committing ourselves to the conclusions arrived at in the various Essays, we wish to express our sense of the value which is to be attached to enquiries conducted in a spirit so earnest and reverential, and our belief that such enquiries must tend to elicit truth, and to foster a spirit of sound religion. Feeling as we do that the discoveries in science, and the general progress of thought, have necessitated some modifications of the views generally held on theological matters, we welcome these attempts to establish religious teaching on a firmer and broader foundation.59

The wording made clear that the signers were not committing themselves to any particular—­ possibly heretical—­ conclusions, they were merely supporting “earnest and reverential” inquiry in order to establish religious teaching more firmly. (Conservative churchmen would have replied that such inquiry was not reverent and that true Christian teaching already had a firm, and quite different, foundation.) Identifying the modifications in theology as due in part to discoveries in science justified the involvement of scientific men; they were not merely expressing opinions on matters on which they were ill-­informed. Lubbock attached a list of supporters who had already signed and on 187

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27 February began sending the memorial to further potential supporters. This was standard procedure with memorials. “Good” names would reassure others that they would be in respectable company. We have, Lubbock told Hooker, Lyell, Huxley, Busk, Darwin, Carpenter, Spottiswoode, A. P. Stanley, Leonard Horner (president of the Geological Society and father-­in-­law of Lyell), and Philip Sclater (NHR editor and secretary of the Zoological Society). Lubbock was stretching the truth. Although he fully agreed with the memorial, Carpenter had warned Lubbock that his name might do more harm than good: Unitarians such as he had recently been described as “direct natural enemies of the Church of Christ.”60 If the memorial was to gain further scientific support and appear persuasive to the larger public, it was important that the names be weighty and representative. Hooker criticized Lubbock’s list of supporters as narrow: “they represent the young progressionists in Science, their opinions are of no weight in religious matters.” The list might even prevent many other naturalists from signing at all, and without the names of men of “older standing and opposite tendencies” (he mentioned Owen and Herschel) would give “outsiders” the impression that scientific differences influenced religious views. Hooker counseled delay until the excitement had died down, though perhaps they could give their names privately. Lubbock was impatient: “it is sadly irksome to do nothing while the battle of freedom is being fought,” in a few months when the issue has been decided it would be too late for a memorial to be effective, “the great Liberal Party should stand by their guns & their friends.”61 But he was gaining little support for the memorial. The eminent and always-­ cautious Herschel regarded the book as “an assault against the religious peace of the community.” Waiting for “the silent & quiet growth of sound & just views upon the divine oeconomy” through reflection and reading was, he told Lubbock, a safer route to true belief than supporting religious “agitation.”62 With Herschel opposed to publicizing religious disagreements and Hooker fearful that the memorial would draw attention to divisions within science, Lubbock reluctantly withdrew his proposal. Hooker was anxious over what would happen next. The essayists’ position “as public professors of the faith of the Church of England and holders of its benefits” was “extremely critical.”63 Although they differed over strategy, Hooker and Lubbock both hoped that the essayists and other “liberal and thoughtful” clergy would not be forced to leave the Church. Lubbock was optimistic that the Church would change: “Surely,” the canons and Act of Uniformity will be modified. “Any thing half so old as either must be susceptible of improvement.”

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3.2

William Benjamin Carpenter, physiologist, Unitarian, and X Club ally. Carpenter was often a supporter of Hooker and Huxley campaigns, but he turned down an invitation to join the X Club. Source: 1868 photograph by Ernest Adams; Wellcome Library, London.

Some months later Lubbock was seeking donations for an “essay fund” toward the legal costs of the essayists, an alternative mode of support that Hooker had suggested.64 Raising money was easier because it did not require the supporters to make their names public. Bishop Colenso With the publication of Colenso’s Pentateuch in October 1862, orthodox panic increased. The techniques of attack and defense used in the controversy over Essays and Reviews were sharpened. The bishops sent an address

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to Colenso, which was made public in the Times. The list of episcopal signatures was longer than it had been against the essayists because the English bishops had obtained support from Irish and colonial bishops, but the bishops were not unanimous. Some names, for example, Connop Thirlwall of Saint David’s, were missing. In many dioceses, orthodox clergy pressed their bishops to give leadership on the issue and sent memorials affirming their own orthodoxy and honesty. The Times gave publicity to the orthodox cause by printing clergy appeals and the bishops’ responses.65 Jowett was also under attack at Oxford, where the Tractarian professor of Latin, E. B. Pusey, was bringing charges of heresy against his fellow professor in the vice-­chancellor’s court. Dozens of letters to the editor were written, the Times issued successive editorials (not always for orthodoxy) and, behind the scenes, on the defense side, reforming lawyers, Oxford liberals, scientific men, and parliamentarians were discussing Jowett, Colenso, and, more generally, Church reform. But the “absurd terror” that had taken over orthodoxy made any discussion of reform difficult.66 Colenso, on being deposed from his seat by the Bishop of Cape Town, had returned from Natal to England. He spent much time in London scientific society; we can assume he was unwelcome in most clerical company. Early in 1863, the Times reported him attending a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society (along with the gorilla hunter, M. du Chaillu; the Bishop of Saint David’s; and the usual array of ambassadors, aristocrats, and senior military and naval men) and Huxley’s lectures at the Royal College of Surgeons.67 Colenso became acquainted with most members of the X-­network: Huxley met Colenso in February; Hooker invited Lubbock to Kew to meet Colenso in March, and then joined Colenso at the Lubbocks in April; Hirst joined “the renowned Bishop Colenso” and the Lubbocks over dinner at the Busks in July.68 Some of these meetings may have been purely social, but some were certainly for talking strategy. Throughout this time Hooker, Lubbock, and Huxley were promoting Church reform through formal memorials and discussing other means of supporting Colenso and Jowett. Lyell, Carpenter, and Spottiswoode were also involved. Colenso himself was the initiator of a petition for Church reform. Probably he discussed it when he and Huxley had “a quiet talk” with Henrietta Powell, the widow of the Reverend Professor Baden Powell, the third essayist.69 Two lawyers, James Fitzjames Stephen, who had acted for the essayists, and John Westlake, helped Colenso draw up the memorial. It petitioned the government to provide a “remedy” for the

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intellectual and moral dilemma confronting clergy. The Thirty-­Nine Articles and the liturgy contain statements generally regarded as “inconsistent with established truths of history and science.” Hence, “the clergy tend to be regarded by the laity as untrustworthy religious teachers [for affirming what they do not believe] and many men of piety and learning are deterred from becoming candidates for Holy Orders.”70 The claim that the most pious (who, it was implied, would have the most tender consciences) and learned of potential candidates were those most likely to avoid ordination was an important emphasis in the argument. The parliamentary guardians of the established Church should be concerned that the Church was being weakened by the loss of suitable candidates and the increasing distrust of clergy by laity. Westlake hoped for support from university, scientific, and professional men—­the “educated classes” he called them—­and advised Lyell and Lubbock on procedure. The memorial began well. On one early version, the names included Sir James Clark, the queen’s physician; Sir Roderick Murchison, gentleman geologist and committee man; Erasmus Darwin, gentleman; Rev. Fred­erick Farrar of Harrow; and James Spedding, the Bacon scholar, in addition to those Hooker described as the “young progressionists” and Darwin “party.” But some of those who had initially signed became doubtful, and Hooker, who was collecting signatures at the request of Lyell, failed to gain any additional names.71 Lyell and Westlake remained enthusiastic but Lubbock persuaded Hooker that caution was necessary. There were many problems. No suitable member of Parliament could be found to present the memorial: radical Dissenters who advocated Church disestablishment were obviously unsuitable, a churchman with no heterodox associations was required, but sympathetic churchmen did not want to present Westlake’s petition as it would count against any bills they were already supporting. Hooker decided that appealing to the government to “do something” would be ineffective unless accompanied by a specific recommendation for action. Lubbock suggested supporting Lord Ebury, who was promoting a bill to amend the Act of Uniformity, but Ebury warned Lubbock that the mere mention of support from scientific men would “frighten half the House of Lords out of their propriety.”72 Westlake hoped that Oxford and London would unite, but the Oxford supporters of Jowett decided not to join the Londoners.73 Hooker and Lubbock discussed alternatives: a request to Colenso not to “leave us,” a subscription for Jowett, a statement supporting “freedom of enquiry and thought.”74 More modest proposals also failed. Carpenter, who thought that freethinking was the right of freethinkers, but

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not the right of those who accepted the benefices of the established Church, suggested that Colenso be nominated for the Athenaeum Club, as was customary for colonial bishops. This would affirm that respectability was not subject to theological test. Lyell and Huxley urged Lubbock, who was on the Athenaeum Committee, to attend and ensure that Colenso’s “gentlemanly” and scholarly credentials were recognized. But even the Athenaeum Committee rejected Colenso.75 Allowing one’s name to be used to defend heterodoxy took courage in the early 1860s. Busk thought that few would be willing to join him in signing the Temple memorial: “I shall be very curious to see how many are prepared to encounter martyrdom.” Lyell was more optimistic regarding the Colenso memorial. He thought that an initial list of “good names” would encourage “the timid” to join.76 But for those less financially or socially secure than Lyell, the risks were greater. It was not only easier to keep quiet rather than scandalize one’s family and friends and subject oneself to concerned inquiries, but the heterodox still risked social ostracism. Hooker was willing to give money to a Colenso defense fund but refused to have his name published as a supporter: “my poor mother would so take it to heart,” he explained to Darwin.77 Even Tyndall had learned that conversational caution was necessary in polite society. One of his reasons for staying in London was the number of friends among whom he could speak freely. Colenso was naive, Tyndall suspected: he is “brave and means well” but “little knows what is in advance of him.” Tyndall, who was no longer interested in the specifics of theological debate, hoped that freedom of opinion would be increased: “If he augments our liberty he will do good service, whatever may be the fate of his own reasonings.”78 Theological controversy reached another high point early in 1864. When the two essayists charged with heresy were found guilty by the Church’s Court of Arches, they had appealed to the higher, secular court, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Its judgment, given in February 1864, was that the opinions expressed by the two accused essayists were not inconsistent with the formularies of the Church of England, that is, with its Prayer Book and Thirty-­Nine Articles. Eleven thousand clergy and 137,000 laypersons signed protesting memorials on the side of orthodoxy.79 At the same time, on the Colenso front preparation was being made for an appeal to the Privy Council. The Bishop of Cape Town had deposed Colenso from his office, but Colenso was preparing to appeal (represented by James Fitzjames Stephen and Westlake) on the purely civil grounds that the Bishop of Cape Town had no jurisdiction over him. A “Colenso fund” for the defense was being raised and yet

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another declaration—­defending Colenso and supporting “freedom of opinion”—­was proposed. The declaration seems not to have got beyond a suggestion, but the Colenso fund was successful and by early April had reached £2,000.80 Among the fragmentary records are some familiar names: Hooker, Lyell, Darwin, and Lubbock were subscribers to and Lubbock was one of the three treasurers of the Colenso fund. Hooker subscribed on the principle of supporting freedom of opinion, although he mistrusted Colenso’s judgment: “I consider him sanguine and unsafe.” Once the Privy Council appeal was over Hooker considered that Colenso should retreat to dignified retirement rather than continue to hold his bishopric, which would “breed intolerable confusion.”81 Colenso confirmed Hooker’s assessment of his character when he insisted on his legal rights: there were two competing bishops and two cathedrals in Natal until his death in 1883. These theological controversies were of particular concern to those members of the X-­ network who were connected to the established Church. Hooker and Lubbock, especially, spent their energies in fruitless campaigns. The principles about freedom of inquiry and discussion that underlay their activity were of wide concern as the next controversy over a memorial illustrates. “Students of the Natural Sciences” Success for the scientific defenders of freedom of thought came only when some scientific supporters of orthodoxy provoked a backlash. In the outcry against the Privy Council decision for the essayists, a new group claiming to represent science entered the debate, offering a declaration that Nature and Scripture could not be in contradiction and affirming that apparent contradictions, if not due to faulty interpretations of Scripture, would be dissolved with the progress of physical science. This “Declaration of the Students of the Natural Sciences” was initiated by a group of chemists of High Church sympathies associated with the Royal College of Chemistry. It was not a purely reactionary measure, Hannah Gay argues, but an attempt to prevent an antiscience backlash from Anglican conservatives. The leading proponent was Herbert McLeod, Hofmann’s young lecture assistant at the Royal College of Chemistry and official chemist to the School of Mines. The declaration asked “the Bishops and Clergy in Convocation assembled,” who were about to debate Essays and Reviews, to maintain a “harmonious alliance” between “Physical Science

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and Revealed Religion.” After revision to remove the specifically Anglican context, it was circulated widely among members of scientific societies for signature.82 The proponents began by seeking eminent supporters, but even when both Owen and Faraday turned them down, they did not reconsider the project. Whether it was their inexperience with memorials, or because they were modeling their memorial on the enormous petitions for orthodoxy, the proponents of the declaration sought numbers rather than weight. In the most recent study of the declaration, Hannah Gay emphasizes the youth of its proponents. Herbert McLeod was twenty-­three and his collaborators were also in their twenties. The promoters of the declaration did not have Hooker’s finely honed sense of how such a project would be interpreted. As the campaign for signatures became more public and the list of supporters grew longer, opposition became public. By June the declarationists were approaching such unlikely supporters as Huxley, who replied that he thoroughly disapproved of the declaration. In June also, opposition became public. Opponents criticized it as an attempt to produce a register of orthodoxy. Many said the names lacked weight; some attacked McLeod directly as having no authority in science. Sir John Herschel had privately declined to sign in May when his son, Alexander, a friend of McLeod, had asked for his support.83 In September, as the campaign for signatures continued, Herschel went public in the Athenaeum, a journal of educated opinion. He condemned the declaration as a “mischievous” attempt to increase the discord in the Christian world. Sir John Bowring, a devout Unitarian and a longtime Benthamite, published his response in the same issue of the Athenaeum. Bowring agreed with the spirit of the declaration, but (then came the sting) the time had come when “we should endeavour to emancipate ourselves from the tyranny of all dogmatizing creeds—­all enforced confessions, all foregone conclusions, all compromising declarations.” Hooker preferred Bowring’s letter; it showed up Herschel’s as “a poor affair.” Hirst received a request for his signature at about the same time and declined curtly, just before attending the British Association meeting in Bath.84 At Bath, with Lyell as president, the Darwin-­Colenso party was in the ascendancy. Lyell’s presidential address alluded approvingly to Darwin. Colenso attended and was warmly welcomed. “Some clergy actually shook hands with him,” Hooker reported to Darwin. In the sections, Colenso was greeted “with hearty applause” when he entered a room, and he was put on the committee of Section A (mathematics)—­“for his good arithmetical work,” Hirst ironically suggested. Hirst recorded with satis194

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faction “the applause with which every protest against fettering science by religious dogmas was received.” He believed that Colenso had given scientific men courage to express their opinions openly.85 Hirst overlooked the difference between supporting heterodoxy in theology, which earlier memorials promoted, and the refusal to constrain science by orthodox theology that was being expressed at Bath. This was a significant shift, for many scientific men, even those who would not defend Colenso and the essayists, reacted against the attempt in the declaration to impose a test of orthodoxy on themselves. The editor of the local Bath Chronicle, though, was unhappy at the tone of the meeting. He accused a “dangerous clique” of using the association to promote “heretical teachings.”86 These issues were of immense concern to members of the X-­network. Given Spottiswoode’s friendships with Temple and Jowett, his involvement is not surprising. Nor is Lubbock’s participation. Although his theology was very liberal (for example, every doctrinal formulation was “capable of improvement”), he was a devout believer and had been brought up to exercise leadership. Hooker’s participation is more unexpected. In part, he acted because Lyell, whom he revered, asked him to act, but in Hooker’s correspondence with Lubbock it is clear that he considered the issues important. Hooker wanted the Church to broaden its formularies in order to retain “liberal and thoughtful” men and was often outspoken against efforts to enforce dogmatic orthodoxy.87 Huxley’s motives were probably different again—­he could not resist a fight, but also, he was beginning to be regarded by others as a useful ally. Spottiswoode and Lubbock, for example, consulted Huxley along with Lyell over their planned memorial in support of the essayists. Although their social roles and positions were different, Hooker, Lubbock, and Spottiswoode were reformers who stood within the Church. Busk and Carpenter were also involved. Tyndall and Hirst, who no longer had formal religious affiliations, were not involved in the projected memorials, but they were interested observers, and Hirst became indignant when the Students’ Declaration threatened scientific freedom. Only for Frankland and Spencer are there no traces of engagement.88 Such phrases as “liberal opinion” and “freedom of thought” were weighted with significance for the X-­men, and I have long puzzled over the phrases, seeking to elucidate that weight. Lubbock identified with a larger liberal movement, and, like Huxley, he used the language of war and battle. Lubbock perceived himself and, by implication, Hooker as belonging to the same “great liberal party” as the essayists. Liberalism was about freedom. Lubbock was fighting “the battle of freedom.” “Free inquiry” was a phrase that appeared in the correspondence among the 195

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members of the X-­network and in the legal defenses of the essayists. The objectives of Huxley, Hooker, Lubbock, Carpenter, and Hirst went beyond claiming freedom from theological constraint for science (Darwin’s Origin, for example) and beyond claiming respectability for the heterodox (such as Buckle). Huxley, Hooker, Lubbock, and Spottiswoode, at least, also wanted to claim freedom for theology and for theologians within the Church of England. Although he hesitated over how to support the essayists in 1861, by 1863 Hooker wanted action: “I regard it as very important that a joint expression of opinion should emanate from the like of us, & in a way that would give strength comfort & encouragement to such men as Jowett Colenso &c &c.” Hooker was concerned that some previous allies were criticizing the essayists and Colenso; the broad church appeared to be cracking apart. Such differences, Hooker believed, “perplexed” the public. Could not everyone unite on the “principle of freedom of enquiry and thought,” he asked Lubbock.89 Freedom of thought had social importance in Victorian England, as William Lubenow argues. With the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts and the Emancipation Act of 1828 and 1829, Dissenters (including Unitarians) and Roman Catholics were given full civil rights. Liberal values replaced, or should have replaced, confessional values in public life. Theological orthodoxy could no longer be a test of respectability, according to Lubenow. The new “regime of social worth” required “honesty,” and honesty required freedom to reach one’s own conclusions. Dishonesty or “prevarication” was a charge brought by many radicals against clergy in general; they were not—­could not be—­honest in subscribing to the dogmatic formularies of the Church. It was agreed that questioning should be “reverential,” rather than scoffing in the tradition of Voltaire or Tom Paine. “Earnest and honest” inquiry (as the draft memorial for the essayists put it), which was presented as more honest than unthinking agreement, was the new intellectual value. Liberal values also required gentlemanly politeness to those with whom one disagreed. But although the political underpinning of confessional values had been removed, the examples here show how slowly liberal values took root in polite society, even in the Athenaeum Club.90 It took threats to get Buckle into the Athenaeum; a heretical bishop was unacceptable. Earlier shifts in confessional values are symbolized by the court judgment that redefined blasphemy law (Christian doctrines may be questioned soberly, but not in scoffing style) and Tennyson’s praise for “honest doubt” (“There lives more faith in honest doubt / Believe me, than in half the creeds”).91 Those who dared to defend the essayists and Colenso revealed and contributed to further shifts in public values. 196

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In joining the Church reformers, Hooker, Lubbock, and their allies were engaging, as members of the larger learned community, in public life on the side of “liberal” opinion and of “Liberal” politics. Westlake was seeking support for Church reform from those he described as “the educated class” and “the intellect of the country.” Scientific men were one group, alongside historians, university men, literary scholars, professional men, and clergy, whom Westlake expected to support Church reform—­which was one of the common goals of the political liberals. Keeping the Church established while broadening the theological subscription required of its clergy was one of the issues that united the moderate reformers whom J. P. Parry identifies as “whig-­liberals.”92 Members of the X-­network who were connected to the established Church, whether directly or through their families, supported broadening the constitution of the Church. As scientific men, they might argue that biology and geology had made some traditional beliefs untenable; in calling on parliament to reform the Church they were taking a broader public role and allying themselves with political liberals.

3.3 The Science of Man: Ethnologists against Anthropologists While producing the Natural History Review, promoting Darwin, and defending liberal theologians, the naturalists of the X-­network also became engaged in controversy between the competing practitioners of ethnology and anthropology. The Ethnological Society of London (founded in 1843) studied everything about so-­called primitive peoples. Ethnology, strictly defined, was the “science of the history of nations or races.” Its central problem was to reconstruct the differentiation of human races since the Flood (the biblical time scale was usually assumed) by identifying relationships of similarity and dissimilarity between different human groups. Although most weight was given to similarities between languages, customs, material culture, and anatomy were all indicators, thus the subject matter of ethnology could range widely. European peoples were included in the grand history, but in practice the Ethnological Society focused its attention on peoples without a written history. Even the study of the literate cultures of the empire was institutionalized independently in a series of Asiatic societies (first in the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal). In the 1850s the Ethnological Society was in decline, but in the early 1860s it was revitalized by new members, some representing the new interest in prehistoric archaeology and others, mostly medical men, emphasizing anatomical comparisons. Tensions between 197

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the interests of new and old members led to the formation of a breakaway group, the Anthropological Society of London, in 1863.93 At the split, Lubbock, Busk, and Huxley joined the Ethnological Society. Spottiswoode was the crucial link. The Oxford-­trained mathematician, with a gentlemanly interest in antiquities and travel, was the only member of the X-­network active in the governance of the Ethnological Society of London (ESL) before the split. Busk and Huxley had read papers before the society in the previous two years, Busk’s being a proposal for measuring racial differences through craniometry.94 Spottiswoode was active across a wide spectrum of London science. By 1860 he was a fellow of the Royal, Royal Astronomical, Royal Geographical, and Royal Asiatic Societies; in 1861 he joined the ESL and became treasurer to the British Association for the Advancement of Science; in 1862 he became a secretary for both the Royal Geographical Society and the Ethnological Society. When the ESL was in crisis Spottiswoode turned to Lubbock for help. Lubbock was elected to the society at the same meeting at which James Hunt, president of the new Anthropological Society of London (ASL), resigned as foreign secretary of the ESL. Only four months later Lubbock was elected president, bringing social and scientific stature to the society through his patronage.95 Lubbock turned to his friends for support, and Huxley responded: I am very glad to hear from Busk that you are to be the new president of the Ethnological Society. Of course under these circumstances I shall become a member and do my best to help you though, as you know, that help is likely to be little enough—­Let Rolleston and Flower and all the good men and true know of your intention.96

Lubbock must have needed their support for, at the meeting at which Huxley and Busk were elected members of the society, they were nominated for the incoming council. Spottiswoode stepped down to become an ordinary member of council and Francis Galton, the gentlemanly traveler, who was a friend of Spottiswoode and a fellow secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, was nominated in Spottiswoode’s place as secretary.97 This gave Lubbock at least four supporters on the council. It is initially surprising that the Darwinian naturalists supported the Ethnological Society rather than the Anthropological Society. What was Huxley doing with the gentlemanly travelers and philologists of the ESL rather than with the comparative anatomists of the ASL? What did Busk’s anatomical studies of crania and skeletons have to do with ethnology as traditionally understood? Although it was not apparent to an outside observer at the time, the two societies were divided by the 198

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politics of race and by morals and manners. The ESL had its origins in Quaker humanitarianism. After the abolition of slavery, the abolitionists had formed an Aborigines Protection Society (founded in 1837). The Aborigines Protection Society (APS) believed that better understanding based on correct information would result in better treatment of aboriginal people by sailors and colonists. Some members, who wanted to give more time to studying the languages and cultures that were disappearing, founded the ESL in 1843, but although the activities of the new society were different, the members maintained the humanitarian and protectionist attitudes of the APS. In contrast, the ASL claimed to be strictly scientific and not bound by the unscientific assumptions of the ethnological tradition. James Hunt, who led the breakaway, later described the ethnologists as suffering from “religious mania” and “rights-­ of-­man mania,” but, at the time, he claimed neutrality and accused others of trying to split ethnologists into two parties, monogenists and polygenists.98 Hunt’s “Introductory Address on the Study of Anthropology,” given at the first meeting of the new society, was designed to attract members and hid the race-­based political views of the leading members of the new society. Ethnology has outgrown its origins. Anthropology is a new and broader science that had previously been hindered by “popular superstition” (5).99 It will take “the whole nature of Man” for its subject matter” (11) rather than only the history of different races. Anthropology will include the relationship of man to the lower animals (2) and the mental and moral characteristics of different human groups (3). It is time to “give up all dogmas, and confess our ignorance . . . [of] the laws regulating man’s origin and development” (13). Neither monogenesis nor polygenesis has been proved. Hunt abhorred the possibility that any member might ever prostitute the objectives of the society by espousing polygenism in order to justify slavery (4). Facts were now needed. “Our duty is simply to seek for truth by patiently collecting data, then carefully and humbly endeavour to decipher the meaning and import of those facts.” In spite of the odium which may be cast at us we must not “attack the religious conviction of any one” (19). Hunt concluded by quoting Huxley’s hero, Edward Forbes: “The highest aim of man is the discovery of Truth” (20). Hunt’s rhetoric was almost as stirring as Huxley’s and appealed to the same principles: rejecting dogma and superstition, confessing ignorance, collecting facts, manfully following one’s duty, and humbly seeking Truth. Hunt also called for government assistance to set up an ethnographic museum and university action to teach anthropology (12–­13). 199

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Spottiswoode was an insider. When he gained Lubbock’s support he would have been aware of the divisive issues that had been discussed at ESL council meetings. In 1862, there had been a dispute about the engravings illustrating an article on Sierra Leone; a subcommittee set up to investigate took a year to report. Stocking suggests that there was a bitter dispute over the representation of the people, who were freed slaves. Should they look handsome (by European conventions) or semi-­ human? Another divisive issue was an 1860 decision to permit “ladies” to attend meetings. The supporters of women’s participation hoped to make the ESL more like the very popular Geographical Society. However, the presence of women would restrict the men’s topics of discussion. Those who wanted to discuss anatomical and physiological topics, for example Richard Burton, the collector a phallic symbols and student of erotica, argued that scientific discussion would be inhibited. Huxley indeed would have agreed that women should be excluded. Even at the Geological Society, where the subject matter was unlikely to inhibit open discussion, he had previously opposed the admission of women.100 Initially the ASL was successful, although critics later said the numbers were inflated by the number of certificates of membership sent to recipients who never paid up. Huxley received an honorary membership certificate but then he received the first issue of the Anthropological Review, where he found a highly critical review of his Man’s Place in Nature (“instead of writing a serious and painstaking work he has published three very incomplete essays”) followed by a second critique in the form of a letter to the editor. Only ten years previously, the letter pointed out, Huxley had claimed that the theory of progressive development was not consistent with the facts of geology; his metaphysic was advanced materialism; and his diagrams of skulls were misleading.101 Huxley returned his diploma on the high moral ground that he did not wish to associate with a society that attacked “my friend, Professor Rolleston.” In private he described the attack on himself as impertinent and the society as “absurd.”102 Increasingly, the Anthropological Society became associated with scandalous behavior. In 1865, its discussion of the effects of missionary activity on non-­European cultures incensed the missionary societies of England. The Bishop of Natal’s participation in a subsequent defense of missionary work would hardly have reassured the critics. A savage skeleton displayed in its window scandalized passers-­by; and its Cannibal Club (which met in a restaurant near Leicester Square) used a mace in the form of a Negro head.103 Such scandalous behavior brought science into disrepute. It undermined the claims of those such as Huxley and 200

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Lubbock that secular, scientific ethics and morality were as high-­minded as theological ethics and morality. When they dissented from established opinion it was in “a reverent spirit.” In spite of Hunt’s claims to not tread on the beliefs of anybody, the Cannibal Club reveled in irreverence and impropriety. Rolleston described Hunt as “that ignorant and impertinent Charlatan.” Huxley blamed Carter Blake, who was “a jackal” of Owen’s, and attacked Blake as bitterly as he had been attacking Owen. Hooker thought Huxley should ignore them. His responses were “undignified” and picking quarrels with “such cattle” as Blake and Hunt only magnified their importance.104 Condescension was an inadequate response. The Anthropological Society was more active and intellectually lively than the Ethnological. Many members transferred from the ESL to the ASL, some joined the new and remained in the old, and many new members joined the Anthropological Society. Within a year, it was as large as the Ethnological Society and after two years was more than double the size, with some five hundred members.105 It was not a fringe group. Richard Owen, who had been made an honorary member, often attended and participated in the discussion of papers. The respectable antiquarian and paper manufacturer, John Evans, was a member of both societies. The societies were not as far apart as the bad feeling between the leading members of each suggested. Richard Burton, one of the more notorious members of the ASL, remained a member of the Ethnological Society and read two papers at ESL meetings in 1865. Busk read a paper to the ASL in 1863, shortly after he was elected to the ESL council.106 The opposition of Ethnological and Anthropological presented the X-­ network with some difficult problems. Keeping the Ethnological Society alive was the immediate, but lesser problem. Lubbock was a conscientious president. Although Huxley never and Busk seldom attended council meetings, both, with Lubbock, were active in reading papers before the society and hence contributed to its intellectual survival. Under Lubbock, and continuing under subsequent presidents, papers on antiquities, skulls, and skeletons were presented. The more difficult issue was that the Anthropological Society confronted the X-­network with another group claiming to speak for science, and using the same rhetoric. Accusations of preconception and fear were turned on themselves. The Anthropologicals claimed that their racially based policies represented the scientific approach to political and social questions. Leading Anthropologicals, while accusing the Ethnologicals of attachment to the “unproven” theory of monogenesis, accepted polygenesis and based their arguments for essential human inequality on innate and permanent race differences. On these grounds they 201

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defended slavery, arguing that the “wicked” war in America demonstrated widespread ignorance of the conclusions of anthropological science; explained the Irish problem as a result of Irish racial characteristics; and, in 1866, defended the governor of Jamaica’s brutal suppression of a black uprising. They opposed all melioristic theories and policies grounded on moral and political principles. Human equality is a chimera, Hunt claimed, and social science must be based on the “facts of human nature” rather than mere philanthropy.107 The members of the X-­network who were members of the Ethnological Society were not radical democrats nor protectors of aborigines, but they were liberals on social issues. The existence of rival societies both claiming the authority of science undermined the impartial image both sides tried to present. It was a “scandal,” admitted Huxley in private, while Hunt publicly preached the importance of unity: “All personal quarrels between scientific men do an injury to the cause of truth, by showing that we are not above the petty feelings and jealousies of theological sects.”108 Over the next eight years Huxley, Lubbock, and Busk worked to limit and control the Anthropologicals’ contributions to the British Association, to give what they called “proper direction” to anthropology, and to reunite the societies. The controversy, as Evelleen Richards has argued, was a struggle for hegemony, with each group claiming that it represented the impartial and objective scientific study of “man.” The scientific differences between the groups were relatively small. The Darwinians took up the argument of A. R. Wallace that although human groups had a common origin this was so far back that the varieties were almost separate species. Both sides used the facts of biology to justify social and moral principles. The Darwinian Ethnologicals were a little more democratic and liberal, and a great deal more concerned with propriety than the Anthropologicals.109 It was not their science, but their residual humanitarianism and deep commitment to respectability that joined them to the Ethnological Society. Nevertheless, they regarded the public quarrels as such a serious scandal to science that they later worked to reunite the societies, as will be discussed in chapter 4.

3.4 The Reader : A Liberal Alliance and Its Collapse In 1864 while engaged in shaping ethnology, supporting liberal theologians, and defending Darwin (although withdrawing from the NHR), members of the X-­network found another journalistic project that roused 202

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their hopes of shaping public opinion. The Reader had been established by the Christian socialists early in 1863 as a weekly review of “Literature, Science and the Arts.” The friends had been occasional contributors under its first science editor, Norman Lockyer. Its broad content offered an opportunity to bring science before a general audience. At the end of 1864 when some of the Christian socialist proprietors wanted to sell out, members of the X-­network joined in enthusiastically, but the alliance with Christian socialists soon collapsed. Within a year, the Reader had been on-­sold to a member of the detested Anthropological Society.110 The Reader project brought Spencer into the campaigning network. The project indicates the broad alliances the X-­men sought, the tensions in those alliances, and their deep desire to reach a larger public through journalism. The Reader was part of the mid-­Victorian boom in periodical publishing that followed taxation changes in the 1850s. Changes in printing and paper-­making had lowered general publishing costs, and many taxes had already been reduced when, first, the advertisement tax (1853), then the stamp duty (1855) and paper duty (1861) were abolished.111 The stamp duty had been introduced in 1819 to make potentially seditious newspapers too expensive for working-­class readers. It applied to every copy of any periodical containing news and published more often than once a month. Its abolition made dailies and weeklies more viable. With many enthusiastic but inexperienced promoters and intense competition, many of the new periodicals failed, the worst within weeks. The Reader’s history illustrates the uncertain fortunes of publishing ventures. Founded in January 1863, it was sold in late 1864, sold again in mid-­1865, and ceased in January 1867, having lasted four years. Members of the X Club were among the proprietors and editors in its second, shortest phase. The Christian socialists had enjoyed brief notoriety in the early 1850s when, in the aftermath of Chartism and the decline of Owenism, they had promoted workingmen’s associations and cooperative societies. Socialism in the 1840s meant cooperation in opposition to the principle of competition or, as Robert Owen put it, the social principle rather than the competitive principle.112 By the later 1850s, only a few individuals were still active supporters of working-­class associations and the trade union movement, and the Christian socialists focused their efforts on education. They had already established the Queen’s College for Women (1848) and the London Working Men’s College (1854). J. M. Ludlow, the strongest socialist and one of the few non-­Anglicans among the Christian socialists, was the first editor of the Reader. He gave lectures on India at the Working 203

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Men’s College but was not heavily involved in teaching as he regretted that the movement’s emphasis had shifted from cooperation to education. Thomas (Tom) Hughes, a proprietor of the Reader, and famous as author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, taught boxing at the college. Both Ludlow and Hughes were lawyers. Ludlow, who had been educated in France and was familiar with French socialist theory and practice, was an expert on the legislation needed to protect friendly societies and other working-­ class associations. He and Hughes gave legal advice to trade unions and cooperative societies. John Westlake, who appeared earlier in this chapter as a legal representative for Colenso and a campaigner for Church reform, was a Christian socialist. He taught mathematics at the Working Men’s College and was listed as an early contributor to the Reader. The majority of the regular long-­term contributors to the Reader identified with the Christian socialists.113 Most of the leading Christian socialists were linked to the broad-­church movement within the Church of England. Hughes, for example, had been a pupil of Thomas Arnold at Rugby School and wrote Tom Brown’s Schooldays in honor of Arnold.114 Members of the X-­ network had associations with Christian socialists. “The Spottiswoodes,” that is, William Spottiswoode and his brother George, attended conversaziones at the Working Men’s College in 1860 and 1861. George Spottiswoode was, like his brother, a printer, a partner in the printing firm of Spottiswoode and Company. He was a devout lay churchman, active in many Church charities, and the company did printing work for many Church-­related organizations.115 Although certainly not a Christian socialist, Huxley had many links with members of the movement. His interest in workingmen’s improvement through education brought him into association with Frederick Maurice at the Working Men’s College and Alexander Macmillan, the Christian socialist publisher. Also, J. Llewellyn Davies, Christian socialist and Reader activist, was rector of the London church that Nettie Huxley and the children attended.116 Journalism was a means of promoting serious reflection among the educated. The notice on the front page of the first issue of the Reader advertised its high-­minded purposes. The Reader “will strive to judge fairly and impartially of all works that come before its tribunal.” It would not be accused of puffing its own authors, as many journals were suspected of doing, for it would be “totally unconnected with any publishing firm.” Although Alexander Macmillan of the Macmillan publishing company gave advice, the Reader was published by the Bohn bookselling company. Macmillan thought that signed reviews encouraged responsibility in reviewing, but the habit of anonymity died hard. The Reader introduced a novel compromise between anonymity and signed 204

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acknowledgment by publishing lists of contributors and then permitting individual authors to identify themselves by signature, initials, or pseudonym or to remain anonymous.117 After the first few issues, the Reader developed a standard format. First, a lead article filling one page (in three columns), then about ten pages of reviews of books, articles, and journals, covering both English and foreign works. “Miscellanea” followed, one to two pages of news and commentary, mostly on literary and publishing topics but sometimes, taking up the freedom offered by the removal of the stamp duty, on political issues. Although reviews of books on science and the arts were included in the first predominantly literary section, the Reader also had sections, following “Miscellanea,” specifically for Science, Art, Music, and Drama. This structure was similar to that of the long-­running intellectual weekly, the Athenaeum (founded in 1828). The initial difference was the addition of a lead article before the chief reviews; an emerging difference was the emphasis given to science, which gradually expanded from about two pages in mid-­1863 to about six pages in mid-­1864. A “Scientific Summary” reported on lectures and publications of particular interest, correspondence was occasionally published, and under the title of “Learned Societies” the regular meetings of an increasing number of scientific societies were reported. The Art, Music, and Drama sections were usually less than a page each. The whole was surrounded by six to ten pages of advertising. The science editor of the Reader was a young man, not quite thirty, who had only recently become a cultivator of science. J. Norman Lockyer (1836–­1920) had arrived in London in late 1857 to take up a position as a clerk in the War Office. Wimbledon, where Lockyer chose to live, was a center of Christian socialism. Both Hughes and Ludlow, who jointly owned a house, lived there. Through association with the Christian socialists in his local parish, Lockyer became interested in both publishing and science. One of Lockyer’s friends had a telescope in his Wimbledon garden, and in 1861 Lockyer bought an identical telescope and began regular observation of the corona of the sun. His first science article was published in 1864. He was an excellent choice for the position of science editor of the new review. In addition to the obvious requirements of interest in science and association with Christian socialists, Lockyer’s employment—­at the lowest grade of clerk, at the War Office in peace time—­made few demands on his considerable energies. He was an excellent organizer and, Ludlow found, “not above taking advice.”118 Lockyer wrote the weekly column on science. As time went on he added feature articles. Astronomical subjects appeared frequently, also human prehistory and fossils, and glaciers and alpine geology. 205

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At the beginning of 1864 the Reader promised to expand its scientific content: The very inadequate manner in which the progress of science, and the labours and opinions of our scientific men,

are recorded in the weekly press, and the want of a weekly organ

which would afford scientific men a means of communication between themselves and with the public, have long been felt. They have been the subject of special consideration lately, by some of the leaders of Science in London.119

The proprietors of the Reader therefore planned to give eight pages to science each week. The secretaries of the scientific societies would support this expansion by providing “an official weekly record” of the work done in learned societies; the “Transactions of Continental and Amer­ ican Academies” would continue to “be copiously noted”; and scientific workers would themselves assist to give a “full weekly summary of scientific progress.” In order to add the Royal Society to the “Scientific Societies” column, Lockyer gained permission to attend its meetings, but over time he found that the secretaries of many societies were willing to contribute summaries of proceedings. To outsiders the Reader seemed to be flourishing. Darwin praised its “resumés of all branches of science” to many of his correspondents. Even Hooker, usually so ready to find fault, agreed.120 As the proportion of the paper given to science increased, a greater variety of contributors were involved. Most articles were unsigned, but those that can be identified represent diverse schools of thought. Apart from Lockyer, the two most active scientific contributors in the first, Christian socialist phase were C. Carter Blake, a protégé of Owen and member of the Anthropological Society, and J. Beetes Jukes, Huxley’s colleague and friend in the Irish Geological Survey. Of the X-­network, Lubbock had been listed as a contributor in the first volume; Busk, Frankland, Huxley, and Tyndall had each contributed one or two articles in 1864, well before the purchase was mooted.121 But the Reader had problems. It was losing money and the proprietors wanted to sell out. Four thousand copies were being printed weekly, but only half were being sold, with the rest being given away. Although this had been good initial advertising, continuing the practice over two years eroded the profits. Lockyer, who wanted to save the paper as a scientific paper, approached various acquaintances for help. Herbert Spencer was sympathetic to Lockyer’s goals and joined the cause enthusiastically. He canvassed his associates, whether literary, scientific, or wealthy, and succeeded in gaining promises for over £1,000. Spencer approached Tyndall, Lubbock, and Francis Galton and remem206

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bered with pride that “I succeeded in inducing Mr. Mill to become a proprietor.” Many bought one share, but Spencer’s friend, Henry Huth, was willing to buy five shares at £100 each, provided that the “character of the paper, as an organ of free opinion” was maintained. This gave Spencer clout at a meeting to decide future policy. Tyndall initially turned down Spencer’s request, because he wanted to be free, if only occasionally, to “fire shots” at both Spencer and J. S. Mill (military metaphors were endemic). However, by mid-­October he was writing for the Reader and persuaded Hirst also to contribute. Huxley was involved by the end of October, when he and Tyndall approached Tyndall’s friend Pollock, asking him to assist with the literary side of the Reader.122 By early November, when the chief proprietor had agreed to sell for £2,250 (or perhaps £2,500) and Lockyer and Spencer had commitments of about £2,000, the new proprietors prepared a prospectus and sought further investors. They were hoping to raise £3,500 or even £4,000 in shares of £100, enough to leave some working capital after buying the paper. Tyndall appealed to his wealthier associates, Sir Henry Holland and Dr. Henry Bence Jones of the Royal Institution, and Sir John Herschel. Lubbock advised Darwin, who had received a prospectus, that his help was needed.123 Some of the Christian socialists remained active. Hughes and the theologian, J. Llewellyn Davies, each took a share, meetings were held at Hughes’s rooms, Hughes insisted that Ludlow was needed, and Davies became theological editor.124 There was much confusion in the early stages of the reorganization. The purchase was agreed and the first issue under the new ownership published before the list of editors was finalized. According to Frederick Pollock, sometimes described as general editor and sometimes as literary editor, the first issue under the new proprietors was 10 December 1864. Huxley and Tyndall, however, were active contributors before that date, and two weeks later the list of editorial responsibilities was still not finalized. At the time, the confusion was worrying. Tyndall blamed Spencer and Lockyer, who had “committed us too speedily.” We “must now face the problem—­the Journal is needed, and we must make it pay.” Hughes feared that they had bought a “pig in a poke” and warned Huxley that it would need “careful management, and above all plenty of give and take and pulling together to pull our pig out of the poke.”125 One problem was that the about-­to-­be proprietors were not coordinating their planning. Spencer, Hughes, Huxley, and Tyndall, for example, had all been approaching potential—­but different—­subject editors. On 12 November Spencer listed his proposed editors, including Llewellyn Davies for theology; J. E. Cairnes, a political economist and 207

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antislavery associate of Mill, for politics and political economy. Spencer hoped to “induce” Lewes to undertake philosophy, psychology, and ethics. Three days later at a meeting in Tom Hughes’s rooms Lewes was listed for fiction and poetry; Spencer and E. E. Bowen, a master at Harrow and contributor to the Saturday Review, for philosophy, psychology, and theology. Then Lewes, on entreaty, agreed to take “all the literature and Philosophy” before thinking better of it and withdrawing. In late November, the positions were still not fixed. Tom Hughes recommended that Lockyer do the general editing, but some accounts describe Pollock as the general editor. By mid-­December Huxley was representing “science,” and he was assisted by Tyndall, Spottiswoode, and Lockyer, who had bought a share each. Huxley did not have a spare £100 but his work was being counted toward a share. Lubbock and Busk had each purchased a single share but took no editorial roles.126 Hirst proudly recorded his contributions in his journal.127 Hooker was a jaundiced observer: Huxley has taken the scientific editorship I am told; but he never stuck to any thing of that kind long, & I have no hopes of it’s succeeding under him—­he is far too good for such work, & has no aptitude for it—­: no man can write such good articles upon Science as he can, but he is no caterer for the public, & never can be: he wants breadth of sympathy.128

Joining science to literature and art had the advantage that the “lighter contents” would help to “carry science into circles where . . . no science has been read,”129 thereby avoiding the audience problem of both the proposed “Scientific Review” of 1858 and the NHR. It also required the scientific men to shed the cloak of impartiality and declare party affiliations. In the Reader Darwinians were associating with Christian socialists and the liberals around J. S. Mill. In canvassing Mill’s support Spencer described the Reader as “an organ of scientific thought and conscientious literary criticism” promoted by “those who have at heart the advance of liberal opinion.” He asked for Lubbock’s assistance “as a means of strengthening the scientific interest” in the proprietorship and “as further guaranteeing the maintenance of an advanced position on theological and other general questions.” “Advanced” theology meant not subject to dogmatic constraints. At the first X Club dinner on 3 November, Spencer brought up the Reader for discussion: “provided a liberal editor is appointed” the members agreed to give it “hearty support.”130 In the Reader we find the same identification with “liberal” opinion and “freedom of opinion” as was apparent in the defense of the essayists 208

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and Colenso, but this time liberal social opinions were included under the rubric.131 In the already-­quoted rhetoric of Huxley, Lubbock, Spencer, and their associates, “liberal” implied freedom of inquiry and thought (Hooker), free opinion (Huth), freedom of association even for workers (Hughes and Ludlow), all with significant qualifications. Free thought should be reverent and honest rather than of a skeptical, scoffing Voltairean sort; disputes between employers and workers should be solved by negotiation not strikes. Liberals assumed progress while avoiding all hint of revolution: society could be improved, the Articles could be improved (Lubbock), the working class could be improved, equality of opportunity did not mean equality of outcomes, and universal male suffrage was not practicable in the near future. Few liberals were ardent democrats—­neither unskilled and uneducated laborers, nor women, nor Irish Catholics were ready for full equality—­but education would improve the opportunities of individuals from such groups. Even on these few principles there were divisions among the proprietors of the Reader, for example, Mill was one of the few Victorians who emphasized disadvantage rather than inferiority. Huxley’s bitter wit and controversial propensities almost blew the project up before it restarted. In early December, before the paper had legally changed ownership, “Scientific Notes” satirized Disraeli in a report on his speech to the Oxford Diocesan Society for the Augmentation of Small Livings, the much-­quoted speech in which Disraeli said: “The question is, Is man an ape or an angel? Now, I am on the side of the angels.” The anonymous reporter (Huxley, not Lockyer) turned metaphor into biological theory to make Disraeli look ridiculous: it was “wonderful” that Disraeli had found “a scientific theorist whose wild dreams have led him to conceive man as an angel.” “Most wonderful” was Disraeli’s belief “that he is himself ‘on the side of the angels.’”132 This was gratuitous satire with an anti-­Semitic edge. Gratuitous, because Disraeli was in opposition and there was no election in the offing. Anti-­Semitic, because the unlikelihood of Disraeli being on the side of the angels seems to arise from his being a converted Jew. Huxley did not like Jews, Hirst had noted five years previously, when Huxley’s jokes at Jewish expense had made him uneasy. Hooker enjoyed the Reader’s joke, but Pollock found the report offensive.133 Tyndall tried to mediate between his friends—­the outspoken self-­made man and the urbane Oxford-­educated son of a baronet. He wanted the good opinion of Pollock but his sympathies were with Huxley. Huxley’s article showed “noble truthfulness and strength,” Tyndall wrote to Pollock. “Plain speaking backed by knowledge . . . is our greatest need.”134 Pollock was, temporarily, placated. 209

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3.3

Disraeli as an angel, Tenniel cartoon in Punch, 1864. Source: Charles Graves, Mr. Punch’s History of Modern England, vol. 2 (London: Cassell, 1921), 215.

Only four weeks on Huxley alienated many more collaborators by a lead article that attacked Disraeli again, while on its way to making claims for the unbounded intellectual authority of science. Huxley belittled Disraeli’s literary capacity, impugned his honesty, and used him to illustrate the ignorance of science among statesmen. Disraeli’s novels were the product of “versatile cleverness” rather than “genius,” his speeches “simulated earnestness,” and, most offensively, Huxley implied that Dis210

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raeli had “little faith enough in most things” and used the “‘church cry’ for electioneering purposes.” Only then did Huxley get to the substance of his leader, the attitude of Church and state toward science. He took his text from the same speech to the Society for the Augmentation of Small Livings. Disraeli had allowed that philosophers had a useful role in adding to the comforts and conveniences of life. This, implied Huxley, exhibited low and unworthy motives, it was “patronizing Science for its froth and scum.” Next, he attacked the “liberal prelates” who sought compromise with science. With grand polarizing rhetoric Huxley claimed to speak for all men of science: “Science exhibits no immediate intention of signing a treaty of peace with her old opponent, nor of being content with anything short of absolute victory and uncontrolled domination over the whole realm of intellect.” He concluded that theology was but a branch of science. His Christian socialist collaborators were left with “religion,” which “has her unshakeable throne in those deeps of man’s nature which lie around and below the intellect.”135 Few were satisfied with the metaphorical space that Huxley had left them, and many objected to his style. The lead article had been anonymous, but Huxley’s friend Rolleston at Oxford guessed Huxley’s authorship and wrote that he was “compelled” to withdraw his support from “certain sections of the Liberal Party & certain periodicals.” Hooker objected more to the style than the content and sounded off to Darwin: Have you read Huxleys (I suppose) slashing leader in todays Reader. it is uncommonly able &c: but as usual with him, he goes like a desert whirlwind over the ground scorching blasting & suffocating all opposing objects, & leaving nothing but dry bones on the ground. The vegetation he withers was one of vile weeds to be sure, but vile weeds are green, & all is black after him.

Darwin disagreed. He thought the article “excellent”—­“none of us could see its ‘withering & desolating’ effects.” He sent his compliments to Huxley, who gratefully replied: “I am glad you liked it—­the more so as it has got me into trouble with some of my friends—­However the revolution that is going on is not to be made with rose water.”136 The umbrella of liberalism was splitting. Huxley was scoffing when Disraeli was his target; he lost both gentlemanly politeness and the “reverence for truth” that he claimed was characteristic of science. He was also rushing ahead, trying to bring on a revolution in thought rather than allow gradual change. There were other disagreements. Some of the collaborators wanted less literary matter, but Pollock argued—­and Mill supported him—­that this 211

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section promoted sales because it interested many potential readers. On the other hand, Spencer was unhappy at Pollock’s reviewing. In March when a full meeting of the proprietors was held, the news was grim. Pollock announced that he would retire from the editorship. George Spottiswoode’s company, which had taken over printing the Reader in early January, had already relinquished the contract—­only two months after starting. To what extent the withdrawals were a response to what Tyndall called “plain speaking” is unclear, but George Spottiswoode may well have objected to associating his company, which did much Church printing, with Huxley’s leader. The Reader’s financial directors, that is, those proprietors who were taking financial rather than editorial roles, recommended selling up, but were outvoted. Tyndall still believed that “with proper management” the paper “would undoubtedly be a success.”137 He was sufficiently optimistic that, with Huxley, Mill, and Spencer, he agreed to write regular leading articles. Considerable editorial reorganization took place, implying that Pollock had not been the only editor to resign. Most surprisingly, Huxley became theological editor. Colenso, in what was surely an unrepresentative opinion, rejoiced. Spencer appealed to Lyell, Herschel, and Darwin to send an occasional brief letter “announcing such interesting novelties as admit of being understood by the general public, and [thinking perhaps of young female readers] are of a fit nature to be quoted from our columns.”138 Another low point came in May when a reviewer attacked the Edinburgh Review. Such “slashing attacks to right and left, with very insufficient production of evidence to justify the vituperation,” Mill protested to Spencer, were becoming characteristic of the Reader. Spencer wanted contributors to sign their articles but—­Mill made his views very clear—­many writers would not like to be associated with the “unlimited number of angry and vindictive writers” who filled the Reader’s pages. Mill included himself. The writer picked out for attack in the review of the Edinburgh was a personal friend, and Mill was himself currently writing an article for the Edinburgh. Unsurprisingly, Longmans, the Edinburgh publisher, withdrew all advertising from the Reader.139 A few supporters remained, but their efforts failed to save the Reader. Hooker, at last, contributed two articles, Tyndall wrote one of his promised leaders, and Hirst loyally continued his efforts.140 Hooker and Darwin continued to discuss the content, and then, in September, the rumors disclosed that the Reader had been sold. Lyell told Hooker that the Reader had been “sold to the Anthropologicals.” Hooker, who was ill, had his wife write to Darwin: “if true, Joe thinks it a great disgrace to all parties concerned.” Darwin inquired of Wallace, who saw the af212

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fair quite differently. The Reader has changed hands, he replied, “& I am inclined to think for the better.” The new owner, Mr. Bendyshe, is the “most talented man” in the Anthropological Society. Wallace saw no sign of the paper being made into the sectional paper that Darwin feared. The old Reader had been dull; recent leaders have a more readable and popular style. Wallace outlined what he knew of the Reader’s problems: the editors were mediocre, there was disunity among the proprietors, and capital was insufficient to pay good writers. Hooker grumbled: “I thought the old Reader bad enough & this is worse in as much as it has less real Science.” He did not like the articles that Wallace thought brilliant; the last number had given excessive space to books published by the Anthropological Society; the recent condemnation of the British Association for refusing to establish an Anthropology section was also evidence (in Hooker’s eyes) of bias.141 Another ally of Huxley wrote sympathetically: “I am grieved to hear that you have given the Reader bound over unto Satan.”142 Obviously the ethnological/anthropological division remained bitter, but Hooker’s judgments on the Anthropological Society should no more be taken at face value than the Anthropologicals’ judgments of Huxley. The Reader was the last attempt by members of the X-­network to found a journal of their own. They did not give up journalism but, after 1865, they contributed to journals founded and run by others. There was Macmillan’s Magazine (founded in 1859) for educational and general articles; the Fortnightly Review (founded in 1865) for more controversial pieces; and Nature (founded in 1869 by Macmillan) for scientific discussion and lobbying. They had learned, at last, that journalism ate up time and that the audience for a scientific journal was small. Also, they had learned how hard it was to cooperate, even with those with whom they shared many ideals and goals. One of the few who benefited from the Reader project was Lockyer. He gained a network of useful connections among scientific men and became acquainted with Alexander Macmillan, publisher and Christian socialist. In the life of the X Club the Reader was significant for bringing Spencer into the campaigning circle. He had been a friend, first of Huxley, then of Tyndall, Hirst, the Busks, and the Lubbocks, but had been outside the previous collaborative projects. In the Reader Spencer was at the center. Although Huxley, Lubbock, and Spottiswoode had independent connections with the Christian socialists, it was Spencer who took up Lockyer’s campaign and who brought together so many of the new proprietors into a viable organization. The Reader also reveals something of the ambitions and personalities 213

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of the X-­men. Once again, they took up journalism in an evangelistic effort to promote scientific thinking (a topic that is elaborated in chapter 6 below). Huxley’s ability to offend is remarkable. But Huxley, with Tyndall and Spencer, considered that “plain speaking” was essential in their historical moment.

3.5 Friends and Conspirators The above accounts of the publishing, lecturing, letter writing, and committee activities of the networks of agitators and reformers give an impression of unceasing activity, especially by Huxley, Busk, and Lubbock. It is therefore surprising that Hirst reported, “we regarded [Hooker] as our founder.” Hooker, the caustic observer and cautious friend, who avoided scientific societies himself and urged others to keep to research and eschew public education and scientific controversy, was the person who proposed forming a club, which added a monthly meeting to their calendars. Hooker as founder goes against a long tradition, originating in Leonard Huxley’s biography of his father, that Huxley was the founder. Hirst, however, was unlikely to be mistaken, for the X Club came to be the center of his social life.143 This section of the chapter moves back from thematic to chronological structure to show how the informal networks developed into the formal club. The strong networks among the naturalists are already clear. What is required here is to trace the ways in which the physical scientists were involved with the naturalists, and to identify Hooker’s concerns. Friendship and conspiracy came together in the Club. Conspiracy is a strong word; sometimes they were merely allies, but sometimes they were secretive and conspiratorial. As I interpret it, the X Club developed in the early 1860s from groups of friends who became allies and conspirators, and from allies and conspirators who became friends. This section takes up the story about 1860 (where chapter 2 ended) with a network of conspirators (naturalists and medical men) about Hooker and an overlapping network of friends (Huxley, Busk, Hooker, Tyndall, Frankland). In the late 1850s cross-­disciplinary alliances formed three times among the small group of friends: first, Hooker, Huxley, Tyndall, and Frankland planned to start a scientific “review” for a general audience; when that project faded Huxley, Tyndall, and Frankland joined up with Maskelyne, Ramsay, and others to produce science columns in the Saturday Review; in the same period Hooker was scheming over how to get his friends

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elected to the Athenaeum.144 Then, in the early 1860s, Darwin’s Origin gave new salience to issues in biological theory. Controversies over transmutation, the origin of man, and race differences expanded the network of naturalists about Hooker; having opponents gave them a stronger sense of identity. Theoretical and ideological interests were added to the concerns over the teaching of natural history and the organization of societies to meet the needs of researchers that had motivated Hooker’s previous campaigns. Huxley was already a good friend of Hooker, of Busk and of Carpenter; Lubbock and Busk were friends. As this chapter has shown, in the early 1860s, Huxley became as important as Hooker as an organizer of campaigns, and Lubbock’s loyalty to Darwin led him to oppose Owen and drew him into closer association with Huxley, Hooker, and Carpenter. At the Oxford British Association meeting Huxley, Busk, Hooker, and Lubbock were representing Darwin against Owen and Wilberforce. Next, Huxley, Busk, Lubbock, and Carpenter—­with Hooker in the background—­were producing the NHR. Lubbock, Busk, and Huxley were promoting the scientific study of man—­through archaeology and prehistory, craniometry, and comparative anatomy respectively. From 1863, Lubbock, Busk, and Huxley, with Spottiswoode—­in the role of gentleman-­traveler—­were active in the Ethnological Society of London. Hooker’s friend Hugh Falconer, Carpenter, and the Oxford-­based Rolleston were active in some of these campaigns. Although he did not participate in any of the naturalists’ campaigns Tyndall was seen as an ally by Huxley. Just after writing his Times review of the Origin, Huxley wrote to Hooker: “May you & I & Tyndalides & one or two [more] bricks be in as good fighting order in 1861 as in 1860.”145 Tyndall had joined in the scheme to contribute fortnightly scientific columns to the Saturday Review (chapter 2.3). The aim was not merely to educate the public with information but to persuade about ultimate meanings and implications of a naturalistic and deterministic science. When Tyndall planned to include a chapter of metaphysical speculations on the relationship of mind and body in his first book, Glaciers of the Alps (published in July 1860), “friends” (Huxley perhaps) advised against it. Tyndall had, instead, published “Physics and Metaphysics” anonymously in the Saturday Review. Five years previously he had spoken confidently of the power of mind over matter; in 1860, he explored materialism. In “Physics and Metaphysics” he asserted that “every thought and feeling has its mechanical correlative.” On the brain side of the parallel there was mechanical determinism but—­Tyndall took up the agnostic strategies of his friends, Huxley and Spencer—­“when we endeavour to pass by a similar process

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from the phenomena of physics to those of thought . . . we stand at length face to face with the Incomprehensible.” Brain was part of the mechanical deterministic order uncovered by physics; brain and mind were correlated, thoughts and feelings corresponded to molecular processes; but Tyndall avoided asserting materialist principles. Beyond physics, he said, a “mighty Mystery” looms.146 This was the first hint of the ambiguous mix of materialism and idealism that later made Tyndall infamous. Two years on, almost a year after the Oxford BA meeting, Tyndall used arguments about deterministic natural law to attack Bishop Wilberforce from a different angle. His collection of essays, Mountaineering in 1861 (published March 1862), included a controversial piece on prayer. Tyndall argued that natural laws are not “at the mercy of man’s volition” and encouraged his Protestant readers to smile at the naïveté of a young Swiss Catholic priest who told Tyndall that he was off to “bless the mountains.” Tyndall then sprang his trap. Prayers for fair weather or for rain, such as were said in England, were just as inconsequential as the blessing of mountains. People prayed, he argued, when they were ignorant of the causes in operation. He praised those English clergy who were wise enough to understand the determinism of the laws of nature and to realize the futility of praying for changes in weather or changes in health. Tyndall mentioned no names—­but it was Bishop Wilberforce who had led the call for prayers to be said for the harvest during the bad summer of 1860, and one of the “courageous” clergymen who refused to say such prayers and hence, in Tyndall’s gloss, encouraged a “manly and intelligent” attack on the “real causes of disease and scarcity” was the Reverend Charles Kingsley, who had participated in the early Christian socialist movement.147 Prayer on such matters, Tyndall implied, was dishonest, childish, or ignorant. As these two examples demonstrate, Tyndall joined Huxley and Hooker in the battle for free thought, but on another front. The Busks and the Lubbocks were crucial in expanding the network and strengthening social ties in the early 1860s. They had larger houses and more domestic help than the Huxleys and the Hookers, and hence could invite guests more often and in larger groups. Hooker, who had previously been important to the growth of the network, was avoiding society, although not quite as strictly as he claimed. He told Huxley that the only society he attended was the Linnean, but he also attended meetings of the Philosophical Club, for he reported on them to Darwin.148 In addition he took time from his research agenda to promote liberalization within the church, especially when called on by Lyell. In the early 1860s, Nettie Huxley and Frances Hooker suffered shattering bereavements and poor health.149 The Busk and Lubbock households 216

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provided alternative meeting places where allies could become friends, concerns could be expressed, and proposals for action tried out on friends who might become allies. The wives and children were equally important for the emotional well-­ being of the unmarried men who had no close family ties—­no sisters, cousins, sisters-­in-­law, nephews, or nieces nearby. In November 1860 Tyndall’s idolization of Ellen Lubbock began when he met the Lubbocks over dinner at the Busks: “talked long with Mrs Lubbock” (figure 3.4). Only the next week he was invited to dine with the Lubbocks. The young Lubbock family was expanding rapidly, and the next year, when a fourth baby was on the way, they moved from High Elms, the family home, to set up an independent household at Chislehurst—­which had a direct railway connection with London. Tyndall visited within a month of their moving in. By 1862 he visited frequently, and Lubbock joined Busk, Huxley, and Tyndall on many walking holidays (see figure I.1). Tyndall, who had delayed marriage for self-­improvement, was lonely. Now that he could afford to marry, the families who welcomed him to dinner did not welcome him as a suitor for their daughters. Tyndall fell in love with Ellen Lubbock and expressed his adoration in a manner structured by Victorian mores. He defined his affection for the Lubbocks as brotherly and sisterly—­as he had done for the Huxleys in the mid-­1850s. Tyndall developed a teasing, flirtatious, and condescending tone in his correspondence with Ellen Lubbock. Letting her know that Pollock had praised “John’s lecture” was one excuse for writing. Pollock’s assessment was unprejudiced whereas, Tyndall allowed, that his own praise might be “a subjective delusion”: “Do you know what subjective means? Ten to one you do not.” He sent his love “to all the children.” Ellen Lubbock was doing a chalk portrait of Tyndall.150 She was a vivacious and witty woman who became increasingly willing to push the bounds of Victorian propriety. It was probably Ellen Lubbock who submitted a valentine, “The Ice Flower to PR-­F-­SS-­R T-­ND-­LL,” to the Reader. This played on Tyndall’s lecture on the beautiful shapes of ice crystals: Within the ice, / In strange device, A sleeping beauty, I / Thy coming wait, At happy date, / To bring my destiny.151

Through the Busks and the Lubbocks, Spencer and Hirst, who had no links with the campaigning networks around Hooker and Huxley, became part of the social networks. In 1860 to 1862 Hirst often accompanied Tyndall on visits to Busk or Huxley or Hooker, but his links were 217

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through Tyndall, and independent friendships were slow to develop. As previously discussed, Hirst felt his marginal position; he felt left behind when Tyndall visited mutual friends without him. Spencer was even more on the fringe of the group than Hirst in 1860. Huxley had introduced Spencer to Tyndall, who in turn introduced Spencer to Hirst, but Spencer was not drawn into the network of natu-

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Ellen “Nelly” Lubbock in the mid-­1860s. Ellen Lubbock was at the social center of the X Club; her death in 1879 contributed to its decline. Source: Courtesy of the Lubbock family. © Lord Avebury.

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ralists. It was an expert scientific network; it seems that even Huxley who admired Spencer did not count him as a naturalist. Admittedly, the friends of the late 1850s (Busk, Carpenter, Frankland, Hooker, Huxley, Tyndall, but not Ramsay) were early subscribers to Spencer’s “Synthetic Philosophy,” but that was formal support for a philosopher who acknowledged the authority of science rather than a sign of friendship.152 Notably, Spencer did not contribute to the Natural History Review. In the early 1860s the Busks cultivated Spencer, but Hooker avoided social contact. He sent Spencer a copy of his Australian Flora—­but through Huxley. Hooker did not share Huxley’s admiration for Spencer. Spencer was a “water spout” that he would like to turn off, he told Darwin. He particularly disliked “his treating all his speculative conclusions as realized facts. . . . The man is I think often out of his depth.” To find his assistance acknowledged in the preface to Spencer’s Principles of Biology was an embarrassment, for Hooker did not want to be associated with Spencer’s style of reasoning: “Much of it seems to consist in clothing biological science in the language of physical science.” Closer acquaintance did not change Hooker’s opinion. He described Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy, to which he had subscribed, as “noisy vacuity.”153 Both Spencer and Hirst, like Tyndall, met the Lubbocks through the Busks, having previously met the Busks through Huxley. Once they were part of the Lubbocks’ networks they had a congenial location for frequent, friendly sociability. Spencer enjoyed visiting the Busks and, he admitted, “their four daughters.” At the Busks in 1862 he met the Lubbocks; the Lubbocks invited him to join Spottiswoode and his wife on a Sunday visit where, as he later reported to his father, he met Sir John Lubbock (that is, Lubbock’s father) at dinner.154 This was the beginning of regular visits. The following year he spent a weekend at the Lubbocks with the Huxleys and Tyndall and was going again the next weekend, he told his father proudly, because Lady Lubbock “is dying to see me.”155 Although both Spencers claimed to live without reference to conventional social hierarchies, this social acceptance was a reassuring sign of intellectual recognition. A year later Hirst followed the same pattern. On his second visit to the Busks he met the Lubbocks, and was immediately invited to visit the following Sunday, and then invited again for the following week. Hirst described the experience: “Lubbock is a thoroughly good fellow about my own age. . . . His house is elegant and graceful, his delight is to surround himself with eminent men, and to give us town birds a healthy Sunday recreation.” Hirst played croquet and talked with the Busks. He was invited regularly—­and as an independent person, not merely as a 219

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friend of Tyndall. Hirst had counted Mrs. Busk and Mrs. Huxley as his “two best lady friends,” but by the end of 1863 he shared Tyndall’s adoration of Nelly Lubbock: “I am becoming more and more fond of both Lubbock and his charming wife. The latter is indeed a rare soul, my ideal of gentle force of character and of transparent guileless nature.”156 In this same period, the Hookers and Lubbocks were establishing friendly relations and this, I suggest, was crucial to the development of the X Club. Hooker’s initial interaction with Lubbock over the essayists and Church reform was functional, not social. Their relationship shifted when Lubbock spent a day at Kew early in 1862: “I am as much charmed as you are with him” Hooker told Darwin. He hoped that Lubbock would bring his wife to visit.157 The Hookers traveled to Switzerland with Lubbock that summer. Hooker, like Darwin, Busk, and Huxley, came to respect Lubbock’s science. Hooker’s liking for the Lubbocks, combined with the Lubbocks’ broad sociability, provided a forum for the expanding network to meet. Hooker had high standards both for scientific expertise and for gentlemanly behavior. He was often critical of his friends, although, with gentlemanly politeness, he said nothing to their faces. To Darwin he was outspoken: Frankland’s glacial theory was absurd; Tyndall had become dogmatic; Huxley had no common sympathy, and Man’s Place in Nature was a “coarse-­looking little book” (figure 3.5); Ramsay and Tyndall should read more rather than try to publish so much. Even Busk occasionally failed: his discussion of the Gibraltar Caves at the Philosophical Club had been “incoherent.”158 By 1862 and 1863, when Hooker discovered his admiration for the Lubbocks, Spencer and Tyndall were regular guests at Lamas, the house in Chislehurst to which the Lubbocks moved in 1861. By 1864 Hooker, Hirst, and Huxley had joined the guests. Spottiswoode was also among the visitors in 1864 but seems to have been little noticed by members of the X-­network. Tyndall and Huxley were on the Royal Society Council with Spottiswoode and Williamson in 1861; Lubbock and Tyndall with Spottiswoode and Carpenter in 1862. Tyndall and Huxley seem not to have sought out Spottiswoode, but Hirst, as a fellow mathematician, was more interested. Hirst initially criticized Spottiswoode’s mathematics for its mundane subject matter, but spoke more warmly in 1863 after enjoying the social acceptance that an invitation to Spottiswoode’s house represented: Spottiswoode is a genial, gentle man whom I like very much. There is not much energy about him but great suavity of manner and I should imagine quiet force of character. He gives the impression of one who would not for the world wound another’s feelings; one 220

3.5 A cannibal butcher’s shop, the offensive engraving that provoked Hooker to describe

Man’s Place in Nature as a “coarse-­looking little book,” fit neither for a gentleman’s table nor a young lady’s eyes. This superfluous illustration shows that Huxley could be as offensive as the members of the Anthropological Society to Victorian mores. Source: Man’s Place in Nature (rpt., CE 7:74).

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who would purchase peace and good fellowship at any price short of untruthfulness to himself. . . . [His] house is large and elegant.159

In 1864 Hirst recorded meeting the Spottiswoodes, as well as the Busks, Spencer, Hooker, and Huxley at Lamas. Frankland was the exception who seems not to have been a Sunday guest at the Lubbocks, but he was in contact with most other members of the X-­network. He walked with Hirst and Tyndall, the Hookers and Huxleys invited him to dinner, and once, at least, he attended an “at home” at the Busks. References to Frankland indicate the existence of another social circle composed of more middling-­born, salary-­dependent men of science. When Tyndall and Hirst visited or walked with Frankland it was often in the company of Alexander Williamson and Andrew Ramsay. Hirst sometimes mentioned the presence of Ramsay and Williamson as fellow dinner guests at both the Hookers and the Franklands.160 Williamson, professor of chemistry at the secular University College and a positivist, shared many of the secularizing and reformist goals of the X-­network. Andrew Ramsay was a leading member of the Geological Survey and an associate of Huxley. Like Huxley, his family had been poor, and family circumstances had limited his opportunities. Moreover, Ramsay was associated with Frankland, Huxley, and Tyndall in the expanding science examination system of the Department of Science and Art (to be discussed in chapter 5). By mid-­1864, then, there were four overlapping groups: the scheming naturalists (Hooker, Huxley, Lubbock, Busk, Carpenter, supported sometimes by Falconer and Rolleston) active in defending Darwin and expanding the domain of naturalistic science; the Church reformers (Hooker, Lubbock, Spottiswoode, Huxley, occasionally Carpenter, and Lyell who urged the others to action) who collaborated with theological liberals to seek greater freedom of thought; the salaried men of science (Hooker, Huxley, Frankland, Tyndall, Ramsay, Williamson) who occasionally collaborated in efforts to spread scientific knowledge to “the public”; and the Lubbock guests (Busk, Spencer, Tyndall, Hooker, Huxley, Hirst, and a host of others) who walked and talked in the country on Sunday afternoons. The existence of other close associates demonstrates that there was nothing predetermined about the membership of the Club. Accidents of health meant that Carpenter turned them down. Spencer was present only because the plan to take over the Reader coincided with the founding of the Club. The “Declaration of Students of the Natural Sciences” provided a new focus of concern in the latter half of 1864. It symbolized the power 222

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of Anglican orthodoxy and revived the friends’ fears of dogmatic constraints upon scientific inquiry. This was an issue for the physical scientists as well as for the naturalists. The previous collaborative projects of the naturalists continued: reforming the Ethnological Society and sidelining the Anthropologicals, a last effort to keep the NHR going, promoting Darwin for the Copley Medal for a third time, while the Colenso affair rumbled on. The declaration, which began circulating in midyear, renewed concerns about the relationship of science to dogmatic theology. Every scientific man had to decide whether to sign it, ignore it, or respond with outrage. Some expressed their indignation in the Letter columns of the Reader. The Reader was thus serving as the kind of forum for educated debate that the friends had sought to achieve previously, and not surprisingly the opportunity to take over the Reader appealed to many of them—­although not Hooker. The Reader brought Spencer into the campaigning network. These projects were interconnected. In both the NHR and in the Ethnological Society, Huxley, Lubbock, and Busk were extending human history backward and bringing humans closer to the apes. The declaration gave the award of the Copley Medal to Darwin enhanced symbolic value. Falconer appealed to Darwin to receive it in person because it represented “a determined protest against those who had sought to set religious against scientific faith—­lately put forward by [the promoters of the declaration,] Stenhouse Brewster & Co.”161 But Darwin was no martyr and declined to appear. He could leave the defense of scientific faith to his friends in the new Club. Darwin bought a share in the Reader and made a contribution to the Colenso defense fund,162 but his priority was the development of his theory and he refused to spend his energy in public campaigns or in the administration of scientific societies. By contrast, the energetic activism of the friends of the X-­network is remarkable: countering the intrusions of theological orthodoxy into public life, shaping public opinion through journalism, and setting the agenda for a reoriented science of ethnology.

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The X Club Established Eight men, Busk, Frankland, Hirst, Hooker, Huxley, Lubbock, Spencer, and Tyndall, met for dinner on 3 November 1864. They resolved to form a club; it would meet on the first Thursday of each month during the parliamentary session (from October to June), when upper-­class Londoners were in town and when scientific societies held regular meetings. Meeting on Thursdays allowed members to proceed after dinner to the 8:30 p.m. meeting of the Royal So­ ciety, and meeting on the first Thursday avoided clashes with the dinners of the Philosophical Club of the Royal Society, which were held on the fourth Thursday before the regular Royal Society meetings.1 Initially they dined at Saint George’s Hotel in Albemarle Street, on the route between the Royal Institution and the Royal Society. At the inaugural meeting these eight decided to invite two additional members, Carpenter and Spottiswoode. Hirst and Tyndall conveyed the invitations in person, during their regular weekend walks together. Spottiswoode agreed to join; Carpenter turned them down, probably because he was suffering from rheumatism so severe that he was on leave from the University of London. Early in 1865 a potential tenth member was discussed and Busk was deputed to invite James Fergusson to join.2 Fergusson, an architectural historian and critic, was a friend of Hooker, and also known to Busk and Spottiswoode, but given that there is no previous mention of his involvement in X-­network schemes, he seems an inexplicable choice.3 “X” Club was chosen after “Blastodermic” and “Thorough” Club were rejected as names. “X,” said Spencer, 225

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“committed us to nothing,” and it gave away nothing about their intentions.4 A brief note, “x = 6,” sent on a postcard, reminded members of the next meeting.5 The members resolved to have no rules, but a modicum of organization was necessary. They elected a treasurer who kept records of meetings, collected the dinner payments, and sent out notices for forthcoming meetings. Clubs were places of commitment and community, thus attendance was expected, and all members, whether or not they were present, paid an equal share of the dinner expenses.6 Like the Philosophical Club, the X Club was a society of equals: members took turns at chairing meetings; the treasurership circulated, changing about every four years.7 The club records are brief, the names of those present and the cost of dinner being the only information recorded consistently. There was no agenda. The brief minutes show that they often discussed the affairs of scientific societies, especially the British Association and the Ro­yal Society, which represented science as a whole. At the first meeting, they agreed to support the Reader, an example of the joint action that Hirst expected to characterize the Club.8 Spencer wanted discussion on scientific and philosophical topics, but more often the conversation was wandering and witty. Conversation was a highly valued Victorian art. Tyndall’s ready flow of conversation gained him numerous dinner party invitations. Huxley’s wit made him good company, even when his friends were the butt of his jokes. He once claimed to know the plot of a tragic novel Spencer had begun to write—­“a beautiful theory killed by an ugly fact,” alluding to Spencer’s a priori mode of reasoning.9 Spottiswoode matched Huxley in witty conversation. According to one observer, “Mr. Spot­tiswoode and Professor Huxley were the life and soul” of “these hi­larious meetings.”10 Sometimes guests were invited. Those listed in the first decade indicate a continuing interest in theological controversy, science publishing, and Darwin: the Bishop of Natal and “Mr Wilson,” one of the essayists who had been tried for heresy (6 April 1865); E. F. Youmans, the publisher who promoted Spencer’s works in North America (1 November 1866); Darwin (5 March 1868). Members occasionally introduced foreign scientific men as guests. In the early years, treasurers sometimes noted topics of conversation: in March 1865 they discussed renewing the proposal that Colenso should be accepted as a visitor at the Athenaeum, but the minutes provide no indication of what was discussed when Colenso was present, nor of whether the members talked scientific theory or scientific politics with Darwin. Sometimes discussion was philosophi-

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cal, for example, “the merits of Bacon as the originator of the me­thod of induction” (7 February 1867). When David Masson, Christian socialist and first editor (1859–­70) of Macmillan’s Magazine, dined, Masson and Spencer “fought the battle of the ladies” (5 May 1870), presumably with Masson on the side of women’s capacities and rights. Spencer, who became treasurer in 1872, kept only sparse notes, and topics of conversation were not consistently recorded again until Huxley became treasurer in 1885.11 Like most Victorian clubs, the X Club was for men; women were only occasionally admitted as guests. For ten years, the X Club had a summer meeting in June to which wives were invited. The postcards read “x’s + yv’s.”12 They often picnicked at Maidenhead on the upper Thames; in June 1868, they went to Oxford where they dined at Balliol and boated on the river; and on one of the last summer excursions they went to Windsor. At Maidenhead in 1866 they expended their playful wit on giving the men nicknames: Xquisite Lubbock, Xcellent Spottiswoode, Xperienced Hooker, Xalted Huxley, Xcentric Tyndall, Xemplary Busk, Xpert Frankland, Xtravagant Hirst and, for Spencer, who was absent, Xhaustive Spencer. The 1874 summer excursion was canceled and the tradition not revived, probably because the social circle had been broken, first by the death of Sophie Frankland in January 1874, followed by the death of Frances Hooker in November that year.13 The monthly meetings of the X Club continued in spite of the deaths of Spottiswoode and Busk in 1883 and 1886 respectively, but by the mid-­1880s most of the remaining members were declining in health and energy. In 1864 they were fighting fit. The friends intended to take concerted action on the sorts of issues that had already brought them into alliances. They were committed to “science, pure and free,” as Hirst put it. Often in the preceding five years they had collaborated to defend the freedom of thought—­to defend not only science but also theology from attempts to impose dogmatic conformity. Free science, as understood by the X-­men, was naturalistic science, as is elaborated in chapter 6. Extending the domain of naturalistic science to areas widely considered as the domains of philosophy or theology, as illustrated in chapter 3, was at the heart of the priorities of the mature club. Their commitment to “pure” science is much less apparent. The only previously noted action under this head was Huxley’s bitter attack on Disraeli when he suggested that science was valuable because it was useful. Nevertheless, an emphasis on purity of motive, on seeking “truth” rather than “profit,” remained part of their agenda (see chapter 6.4 below) and sometimes

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divided them from colleagues. Not all their chief concerns are encompassed in Hirst’s slogan. Their concern with scientific publishing (shown above in their Linnean Society activities) is shown in chapter 4 to be a continuing preoccupation. The most encompassing of their ambitions, revealed across the diverse arenas of X Club activity covered in the following three chapters, was to place science at the heart of public culture by shaping understanding of the nature and value of science.

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Organizing Science Basking in the reflected glory, an American guest of the X Club wrote proudly to his wife of his new acquaintances: I am only two months in London, and am already hand in glove with the best part of the Royal Society. This “X Club” that I dined with last Thursday, is the most powerful and influential scientific coterie in En­ gland. . . . They have dictated the affairs of the British Association for three years past. Hooker is President of the Royal Society; Huxley is Sec­ retary; and Spottiswoode is Treasurer. So you see they are an influential set of chaps, and there are ever so many fellows in England who would have thought it a great thing to be invited to dine with them.1

The guest, John Fiske, was an American disciple of Spencer, who was no doubt the source of this this self-­important account of X Club power. “Dictated” the affairs of the British Association was an exaggeration, as was “hand in glove.” Moreover, in the Linnean Society, another domain of X Club power, a serious challenge was under way. The X Club was powerful, especially in the early 1870s, but not all powerful. This chapter examines the power of the X Club in the two locations identified by Fiske (or Spencer) as most remarkable and in two specialist societies, the Linnean Society and the Ethnological Society of London, in which previous chapters have shown them to be active. Much of the chapter recounts electioneering details: the lengths to which they went, from secret manipulation to blatant use of power, to get themselves and their allies elected and to keep out those opponents they regarded as inadequate or 229

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even damaging representatives of science. Electioneering casts a revealing light on the operation of power in Victorian scientific societies, and provides entertaining stories that are revealing of the personalities involved. Identifying the principles and policies that guided them and the goals for which they worked is often more difficult but is important for understanding the X Club. The chief general areas of concern and action identified in the chapter are specialist publishing and the public image of science. Their attention to publishing standards is an expression of an issue that has been associated with “professionalization.” “Public image” is a phrase that captures a wide range of their preoccupations: that science be respectable, dignified, accessible to merit, independent—­ against various alternatives: the association of science with unseemly politics or morals; any implication that science needed an imprimatur from social status, theological orthodoxy, or commercial utility. Numerous ways in which these concerns played out are elaborated and, in the process, strong disagreements within the scientific community are iden­ tified in the chapter. In spite of their brevity, the X Club minutes show that the politics of scientific institutions, especially of the British Association and Royal Society, was a recurrent concern in the first decade of its existence. Dissatisfaction with the “present unsatisfactory mode” of electing the Council of the Royal Society was expressed in 1865 and 1866 and on the second occasion Frankland, Hirst, and Spottiswoode, all of whom were current council members, “expressed their intention of bringing the subject before the Council as soon as possible” (2 November 1865 and 3 May 1866). “One of the principal topics of conversation” in February 1867 was the president of the British Association for 1868: “We all requested Hooker to allow himself to be nominated.” The following month the constitution of Section D, the Biology Section of the Association, was discussed. In 1866 Section D had been divided into departments of zoology and botany, physiology, and anthropology, but, due to ongoing controversy over anthropology, these subdivisions were under constant reconsideration until at least 1871.2 In March 1871 the Club agreed to propose Airy as the next president of the Royal Society and then moved on to discuss the section presidents for the next British Association meeting. From the perspective of a later century, one expects that the X Club would have been secretive about some of these discussions, but they dined openly at Saint George’s Hotel in Albemarle Street or (after 1868 when Spencer was elected) at the Athenaeum Club. Such dining clubs were sufficiently common in Victorian London as not to require secrecy, but members were circumspect about their projects. Huxley was especi­ 230

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ally cautious while secretary of the Royal Society in the 1870s. There was “jealousy” of the X Club, Huxley told his disciple and ally Michael Foster: “When I was Secretary the one thing I was most careful to avoid was the appearance of desiring to exert any special influence.”3 This is a cu­ riously qualified statement. The officers of the society had influence by virtue of their offices. Exerting influence was therefore acceptable, but special influence was not, and it was the appearance of wanting to exert influence, not the actuality of exerting influence that Huxley avoided. There are occasional references in contemporary letters and in newspapers to the power of cliques, some of which seem to be directed at the X-­network, if not at the X Club. A Bath newspaper referred to “a dangerous clique” using the British Association to promote “heretical teachings” at the 1864 Bath meeting, that is, the meeting at which Colenso was being promoted, and during which the “Declaration” was circulating. In 1868 Sabine wanted to prevent “factions” in the Royal Society Council challenging the power of the officers—­this being just the kind of presumption the X Club saw the need to challenge.4 One of the few direct criticisms of the Club’s operations came from the Jewish mathe­ matician, J. J. Sylvester. As a Jew, Sylvester was even more of an outsider than Hirst, Huxley, or Tyndall. When Hirst had arrived in London, Sylves­ ter had made friendly overtures to him, but came to distrust him as an “inveterate plotter,” forever engaged in meetings with “a cabal with whom he is mixed up.”5 After Tyndall’s death, Huxley tried to play down suspicions of improper influence by recounting a conversation between “two scientific distinguished colleagues” in the smoking room of the Athenaeum Club: “ ‘I say, A. do you know anything about the x Club?’ ‘Oh yes, B, I have heard of it. What do they do?’ ‘Well they govern scientific affairs, and really, on the whole, they don’t do it badly.’ ”6 The ignorance of Huxley’s colleagues suggests that this story comes from very late in the life of the Club; his letter to Foster is a more reliable account of how the X Club was regarded during its years of power. The accounts of X Club action in this chapter show that the suspicions of clique, faction, cabal, and special influence were fully justified.

4.1 Specialist Societies In 1864, when the X Club formed, networks of X-­men and their associates were in effective control of the newly controversial Ethnological Society of London (ESL) and of the elite, gentlemanly Linnean Society. Controlling the Ethnological Society could give little satisfaction to the 231

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X Club members, for the much more active Anthropological Society of London (ASL) was politically and personally offensive. The leading mem­ bers of the ASL held Huxley up to ridicule and claimed that the true sci­ ence of man justified slavery. These petty insults and illiberal policies, added to open theoretical disagreements, were a scandal to science. In the Linnean Society everything was proceeding in a much more gentlemanly manner—­until 1873 when controversy erupted and the control of Hooker and his friends was challenged. Other societies could be included, for example, the Geological Society of London. Through the 1860s and early 1870s Huxley was active in its affairs.7 Busk, Hooker, and Lubbock occasionally served on the council, but more interesting, because unexpected, is the involvement of Tyndall and Hirst. Huxley called on both Hirst and Tyndall (an occasional attendee at the regular meetings8) for support when, in his 1869 presidential address, he responded to Sir William Thomson’s provocative claim that a great reform in “geological speculation” had become necessary. For the previous decade, Thomson had argued that mathematical considerations demonstrated that earth and sun were much younger than assumed by geologists; geologists and, by implication, Darwinian transmutationists, had grossly overestimated the geological time scale. Tyndall made a speech at the anniversary dinner, which followed the ad­ dress, and Huxley later asked for Hirst’s assistance when checking the proofs; he could afford no mathematical errors when he challenged  Thom­ son.9 In the Ethnological Society and Linnean Society, X Club collaboration was particularly intensive. Huxley, Busk, and Lubbock were active in reforming the publications of the Ethnological Society and reuniting the Ethnological and Anthropological Societies. In the Linnean Society, Hooker was constantly active, either directly himself or through Busk and Lubbock whom he lobbied to carry out his projects. The Ethnological and Anthropological Societies The desire to establish the credibility of the Ethnological Society as the location for the study of “man” and counter the unseemly politics and manners of the Anthropological Society was one of the campaigns that brought the X-­men together (chapter 3.3). As Evelleen Richards and Efram Sera-­Shriar show, there were significant similarities between the two groups. Their sciences had roots in transcendental anatomy, which sought common patterns among species, and Busk and Huxley agreed with the Anthropologicals in valuing anatomical over philological evidence regarding ethnological relationships. Both sides advocated social 232

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and political policies on the grounds of what they claimed to be biological facts, but their facts and political conclusions were different. The political issue of the early 1860s was slavery: the inner circle of the ASL justified slavery on the grounds that the Negro was a different species, and the ASL provided convenient cover for representatives of the Confederate states of the American South who wished to influence British opinion.10 In contrast, the X Club men were liberal in their politics and deeply respectable in style. In 1865 Huxley made two incursions into public debate on racial differences. “Emancipation—­Black and White” appeared (anonymously) in May in the rapidly declining Reader. Huxley argued that the lesser brain size of the negro ensured his biological inferiority to the white man. (White women, he argued on similar grounds, were also inferior.) The North had won the Civil War but “no rational man” expects “our dusky cousins” (a tilt against polygenesis) to reach “the highest places in the hierarchy of civilisation.” Although referring in Spencerian style to “the laws of social gravitation,” Huxley went on to appeal to “the moral law, that no human being can arbitrarily dominate over another without grievous damage to his own nature.”11 His argument relied on his readers being willing to accept his conjoining apparent biological fact and supposed moral law. “On the Methods and Results of Ethnology,” which appeared a month later as the opening article in recently established Fortnightly Review, was a carefully argued Darwinian compromise between monogenesis and polygenesis. Huxley began by taking the side of the anthropologists on the method of classifying races. He argued that anatomy was a more reliable guide to racial (or, in modern terminology, ethnic) relationships than language because a people could change its language but anatomy could change only slowly. He then proceeded to classify the races of the world by anatomical characteristics. His final move followed A. R. Wallace, who had argued before the Anthropological Society the previous year that Darwin’s theory reconciled and combined “all that is good in the Monogenistic and Polygenistic schools.” Man had arisen from some antecedent species of ape at a very distant time and after many migrations and intermixtures had adapted to many different environments and conditions of life, so as to form “persistent modifications.”12 Thus, there was a single origin, argued Huxley, but he refused to label current human groups as either “varieties” or “species” because this was the point at issue. A Darwinian addendum followed: if sterility between some human groups was found it would be evidence for the truth of Darwin’s views. Huxley was offering a compromise between both 233

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ethnology-­anthropology and monogenesis-­polygenesis, but if the empirical findings supported the large ethnic differences claimed by the supporters of polygenesis then, he insisted, they equally supported Darwin. Theoretically, Huxley was not far from the science of the Anthropologicals. Politically, though, Huxley and Lubbock were poles apart from the leading Anthropologicals. The American Civil War had ended in April, but theories about race became politically germane again when, in October 1865, Governor Eyre of Jamaica brutally suppressed a local riot. Eyre’s troops shot, flogged, and executed hundreds of poor black workers. Eyre declared martial law in the affected area, had a local leader whom he suspected of instigating the riot removed to that area, where he was illegally court-­martialed and speedily hung. The dominant view was that Eyre put down the revolt “with laudable vigour” and protected British women from unspeakable horrors. A minority of liberal intellectuals accused Eyre of murder. J. S. Mill and his associates established the Jamaica Committee to campaign for prosecution. From the X Club, Huxley, Frankland, and Spencer joined, as did Darwin and Lyell, and Tom Hughes from the Reader coalition. Lubbock, who had parliamentary ambitions, agreed with the Jamaica Committee but kept this unpopular opinion private. By contrast, Eyre was a member of the ASL, which organized a meeting in his defense.13 Between 1866 and 1870 Huxley led a series of attempts to reunite the two societies. The public quarreling was “a scientific scandal,” he told Hooker.14 Lubbock was bitter against the Anthropologicals, and Huxley had often to persuade Lubbock to cooperate when he tried to smooth relationships between the two societies. Huxley first intervened in 1866 to assist the Anthropologicals obtain a department for anthropology within the Biology Section of the British Association (BA). Since 1851 ethnology had been grouped with geography in Section E. Geography was so popular that the anthropologists felt there was insufficient time for their papers, besides, anthropological papers were not always appropriate to the large and mixed-­gender audience that geography attracted. The anthropologists believed their requests for an “anthropology” section were being blocked by the ethnologists who had influence within the association. Hunt blamed John Crawfurd, who had been president of the ESL at the ASL breakaway, and Sir Roderick Murchison, friend of Crawfurd and trustee of the association, for keeping anthropology out in 1865.15 Huxley appealed to Lubbock before the 1866 BA meeting: “It will grieve me very much if you continue to object to the establishment of this [anthropology] division [of Section D].” Huxley appealed to Lubbock not to let “personal considerations” (Lubbock had been insulted 234

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by the anthropologists, although not as openly as Huxley) stand in the way of putting an end to the “scandal.”16 The crucial issue was the good reputation of Science. Huxley became, albeit briefly, popular with the Anthropological Society. Hunt credited the “exertions of Professor Huxley” with the formation of a “science of man” department within Section D, but used the BA meeting to identify monogenesis as “illogical Darwinism.” The ASL Council sent its thanks and resolved to invite Huxley to succeed Hunt as president.17 Huxley however made it clear to both Hunt and Lubbock that although he was willing to be president of an amalgamated society he would not accept the presidency of either alone. Huxley felt “very strongly,” he told Lubbock, “the desirableness of uniting the scattered and more or less rival forces” of ethnologists and anthropologists.18 When negotiations for a merger under Huxley as president fell through, Hunt wrote personally expressing his regret. But only a few weeks later Hunt satirized Huxley at the inaugural meeting of the Manchester Anthropo­ l­ogical Society: Some men would say there was very little difference between the lower races of men and the higher apes; some would say there was very little difference between the lower and higher races of man. It was, therefore, necessary to be thoroughly loyal to fact. . . . There had actually risen a disease which was termed negromania. Persons suffering from it treated with the utmost contempt all who differed from them. . . . Even scientific men were sometimes afflicted with the disorder. He heard, only on pass­ ing through London, that a very eminent anatomist had had another attack, and actu­ ally gone and joined the Jamaica Committee. (Laughter.) This was Professor Huxley; and it was said that he intended to propose that they should prosecute M. du Chaillu for shooting gorillas. (Laughter.)19

Defending gorillas from the French collector of gorilla skins and defending the freed slaves of Jamaica from Governor Eyre were equally ridiculous in the eyes of Hunt and his audience. This incident, among others, increased Huxley’s distrust of Hunt. Huxley’s repeated efforts to bring reconciliation between the socie­ ties show the depth of his concern over scientific quarrelling in public. Personally, Huxley did not like the anthropologists; he expressed satisfaction on hearing that they had made “fools of themselves in a most effectual way” at the 1867 BA meeting. But although Huxley’s personal and political loyalties were to the new leaders of the Ethnological Society, he was increasingly critical of the operation of the ESL. The aged Crawfurd, who had returned to the presidency in 1865, was no longer 235

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capable of leading the society. The Anthropological Society, unlike the Ethnological Society, was “alive and vigorous” and “under proper direction may become a very valuable organization—­and I don’t know any one [Huxley told Lubbock] better calculated to give it proper direction & keep the folk in order than yourself.”20 When Crawfurd died in mid-­1868, Huxley again took up the project of amalgamation. He accepted the presidency of the Ethnological Society, he explained at an X Club meeting, in order to bring about “the fusion of that body and the Anthropological.”21 Earlier attempts at amalgamation had foundered on disagreement over names before collapsing in the polarization created by the Eyre affair.22 Each society wanted its own name for the amalgamated society. Murchison (Crawfurd’s friend) had previously appealed to Huxley: perhaps “with your ingenuity” you could suggest a name acceptable to both sides. The 1868 amalgamation proposal was that the new society would have the rules of the ESL and the name of the ASL, but Ethnologicals choked over the name “anthropological” and the Anthropologicals rejected compromises such as the “science of man” and “ethnological and anthropological studies.” The Ethnologicals were also uneasy at inconsistencies in the financial information from the ASL, and negotiations collapsed once again.23 The rumors of financial irregularities in the ASL became public accusations later in 1868. Hyde Clarke, who had joined both the ESL and the ASL since his recent return from exotic travels in east Asia, was invited to stand for the council of the ASL. Before accepting the invitation, he investigated the rumors that the ASL had debts for which members of the council could become personally liable; he then hung out the society’s dirty washing in a series of letters to the Athenaeum. The financial affairs were in a bad way because, Clarke claimed, the ASL was paying the publishing costs of the Anthropological Review, of which Hunt was the proprietor, and numerous nonpaying fellows of the society were being supplied with its publications.24 The ASL held a meeting to expel Clarke but failed to get the 75 percent majority required; Huxley’s source within the ASL described the fellows as “a very rough lot.”25 Meanwhile, Huxley and Busk had plans, focused on publishing, to bring the Ethnological Society closer to their ideal of a lively and efficient society. From the beginning of Lubbock’s presidency, Lubbock, Busk, and Huxley had been presenting papers at meetings of the society. These individual contributions to scientific life were supplemented by proposals for organizational change. At an ESL Council meeting in late 1865, a committee was set up to discuss proposals made by Huxley and Busk re-

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garding the publications of the society. The result was a new series of the Journal of the Ethnological Society, which appeared in 1867. In 1868 when amalgamation negotiations again collapsed Huxley turned his energies to putting “new life” into the Ethnological Society. He wanted, much as Hooker had done in the Linnean Society in the mid-­1850s, to convert the annual Transactions into a quarterly journal. This would allow greater variety of material, such as “translations and critical matter,” in addition to the papers presented at society meetings. After putting his proposals to the Ethnological Society Council, Huxley reported to Hooker, “they seem quite inclined to go with me.” He proposed finding “some sharp fellow who is fighting his way,” that is, a young version of himself, to edit it.26 Hooker responded that he was happy to join the society “so long as you are free of the Anthropologists.” Although Hooker believed public controversy brought disrepute on science, and sought public unity over public controversy, he regarded the Anthropological Society as beyond the pale: “I always regarded the Anthrop. Soc. as a sort of Haymarket [a center of prostitution] to which the demi-­monde of Science gravitated with wonderful precipitancy and unanimity.” In 1868, with the Anthropologicals excluded, Hooker joined up and supported the meetings.27 Huxley also introduced organizational changes. The duties of the offi­ cers were defined to ensure meetings were efficiently run, and ethnology was divided into five sections representing the variety of ethnology and anthropology as practiced: biology, comparative psychology, sociology (“the study of man as a social being”), archaeology, philology.28 Signifi­ cantly, as Richards demonstrates, under his presidency, the council decision of 1860 permitting women to attend meetings was reversed. Huxley agreed with the ASL members that the presence of ladies hindered serious discussion.29 In the negotiations over reunification Huxley appears statesmanlike, whereas Lubbock was bogged in antagonism to the label “anthropology,” and Hunt was offensively insulting and two-­faced. In a sympathetic account, William Brock acknowledges and partly excuses Hunt’s “fiery” temper as “youthful combativeness”—­Hunt was only thirty when he founded the Anthropological Society.30 (Lubbock, at twenty-­nine when he took the presidency of the ESL, was slightly younger.) Huxley has a well-­justified reputation as an outspoken controversialist, but this dispute shows him to be widely respected. Friedrich Max Müller, professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, was pleased that Huxley had “taken in hand” the Ethnological Society: “something ought to be done to raise the standard of ethnological and anthropological research and there is no one who can do it as well as you.”31

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The frank letters exchanged between Huxley and reforming members of the ASL show that they trusted one another not to break confidences. John Beddoe, who took the chair of the ASL in 1869 with the aim of resuming the negotiations, warned Huxley that the ESL’s “new list of officers . . . will hardly be regarded, by the members of the Anthropological Society, in the light of an olive branch.” Worse, Hyde Clarke had been appointed to represent the ESL in negotiations: “the Anthropologicals generally would as soon sit in Council with Old Hornie himself.” Somehow, Huxley removed Clarke and negotiations proceeded with one man less on the ESL side. Beddoe freely expressed his suspicion that the Ethnologicals’ real objection to “anthropological” was not wanting “to appear to be beaten” on this much-­fought-­over point. “I wish you could bring your malcontents to reason on the point of name. If you did, the union which would result would surely be reckoned by public opinion as not the least of your achievements.”32 Late in 1870 Huxley succeeded. He came up with a compromise name, the Anthropological Institute, which differentiated the new organization from the old. He persuaded leading Ethnologicals, such as Lubbock, to give up their opposition to the “anthropology” label. However, after all Huxley’s work, it was Lubbock who became president of the reunited societies. Although Huxley was trusted by the moderates among the Anthropologicals, he was unacceptable to a few leading members. Huxley stood aside for Lubbock who, Beddoe assured him, would be acceptable, thus, in 1871 the new Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland was established under Lubbock’s presidency.33 The council was divided evenly between old Anthropologicals and old Ethnologicals, Huxley, Busk, and Lubbock’s friend, Augustus Lane ­Fox, were the vice presidents representing the ethnological side. On amalgamation, publication formats had to be renegotiated, publishing ambitions being constrained by the debts that the ASL brought to the union. After months during which almost every meeting of the Anthropological Institute Council discussed publications, Busk moved that the Journal contain sufficient sheets to print all the papers recommended for publication with any vacant space “to be filled by miscellaneous matter.” A year later this was specified more precisely: the publications committee, of which Lubbock and Huxley were members, was allowed “discretion” to fill up to two and a half sheets with “reviews, ab­ stracts, etc.”34 This was a strictly limited discretion, constrained by finan­ cial circumstances. Finally, it was Busk who held the Anthropological Institute together. Lubbock later had a reputation as conciliatory, even fence sitting, but 238

4.1 Sir John Lubbock, banker, naturalist, ethnologist, and MP, in his early forties.

Lubbock’s social and scientific status made him a suitable president of many scientific societies. His positions included the presidency of the Ethnological Society of London, 1863–­65, the Anthropological Institute, 1871–­73, and the Linnean Society, 1880–­85. Source: Courtesy of the Lubbock family. © Lord Avebury.

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throughout the negotiations between the Ethnologicals and Anthropologicals Lubbock had to be conciliated. At the end of the 1871, when his proposals for the 1872 council were outvoted, Lubbock resigned in a huff, claiming that he could not remain in the presidency if he did not have the confidence of the council. Council then passed a unanimous vote of confidence in “Sir John Lubbock as President” and sent Captain Bedford Pim, a defender of Eyre and mover of one of the anti-­Lubbock motions, to placate and negotiate. The issues in 1872 were more damaging. Lubbock presented the 1872 council with a slate of members to resign and new candidates to fill the vacancies, but the Anthropologicals, who thought it was their turn for the presidency, outvoted the Ethnologicals. When the Ethnologicals managed to overturn this decision by stacking the next council meeting, some of the old Anthropologicals were so bitter they withdrew and attempted to found a new society.35 In these repolarized circumstances Busk was elected president of the Anthropological Institute. He attended regularly, chairing almost every council meeting for the two years of his presidency. Although on the council, Lubbock seldom appeared at meetings and Huxley never. Busk (until 1880) and Huxley and Lubbock (until 1885) remained on the council, but Busk was the only one who continued to attend. Individual X-­members played very different roles in the anthropological disputes and institutions. Huxley was out front in attacking the Anthropologicals’ science and manners. But he was also a leader to whom people outside the dispute appealed for action, a negotiator whom people on both sides trusted, and an administrator with proposals for how to make the society more efficient. He put personal feelings aside to achieve the amalgamation. Lubbock was less abrasive, and made fewer enemies, but, at this stage of his career, was liable to take personal offense. Busk was constantly active in the background—­always willing to help, neither offending nor being offended. Huxley and Busk, together, presented ideas about the publications of the society in 1865. When a new ESL Council was being put together after Crawfurd’s death in 1868, the secretary proposed minimizing the offense given to members aspiring to prominent council positions by asking Busk to step down from vice president to council as “he will probably not mind.” In 1866 when Lubbock promised Huxley that he would not “destroy the harmony” between ethnological and anthropological parties at the forthcoming BA meeting, he also promised jokingly to “check Busk’s irrepressible pugnacity.”36 Busk could be relied on to turn up, stand down, or take the presidency as needed.37 When amalgamation was achieved, Michael Foster, Huxley’s friend and disciple, offered congratulations—­and advice. Huxley might now 240

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turn his attention “to those other less important perhaps but still useful matters—­original work principles of biology &c &c for which your friends as well as yourself think you are fitted.”38 But Huxley was busy in many other societies. He had finished a term as president of the Geological Society in January 1870, was president of the British Association (1870–­71), took up a demanding position as biological secretary of the Royal Society in late 1872 and, as will be discussed in the next chapter, was becoming active in educational and scientific policy areas, for example, he took up positions on the Royal Commission on the Advancement of Science and the London School Board in 1870. He had no time for original research or book writing. The Linnean Society We have come to expect institutional reform and the promotion of theories allied to Darwinian evolution from X Club members, but in the 1870s they took a remarkably different role in the Linnean Society. In the 1850s, as described above (chapter 2.3), Hooker, Bentham, Busk, and their allies had made the meetings and publications of the Linnean Society more efficient and more useful to experts. But by the 1870s Bentham, Hooker, and their friends had become the kind of oligarchy that they had previously opposed in the Linnean Society and that the X-­men continued to challenge in other societies. Rank-­and-­file dissatisfaction with the leadership of the Linnean Society became open in 1873 when Bentham proposed that a fellow of the society be appointed, and paid, to do editorial work. A young council member, thirty-­year-­old Henry Trimen, an assistant in the Botanical Department of the British Museum, protested that it was unconstitutional to pay a fellow for work done for the society and that there would be no need for this expenditure if the officers were more assiduous in attending to the society’s affairs. Bentham’s response to the criticisms exacerbated the dissatisfaction. His solution was to make the employment of a fellow constitutional by changing the offending bylaw and making “one or two other alterations” at the same time. Bentham gave notice of the proposed changes and set the voting date for his slate of changes as the society’s ordinary meeting of 15 January 1874. Assuming that his recommendations would be approved without question, he proposed that the changes be approved collectively, and reacted high-­handedly when William Carruthers, curator of botany at the British Museum, moved that the changes be considered individually. Even after “an hour’s disagreeable talk,” Bentham 241

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refused to accept the motion and ruled that the changes would be voted on as a whole. He narrowly won the vote, but at the cost of alienating the opposition. Carruthers and twelve other fellows wrote to the council in protest, announcing their intention of reopening the question at the next ordinary meeting. The official minutes of this next meeting were so inaccurate that twenty fellows signed an alternative account in a letter of protest. According to the alternative minutes, Carruthers (again) had moved that the bylaw changes of 15 January were illegal and Bentham had refused (again) to accept the motion. In the consequent bitter exchanges, Bentham resigned.39 Busk and Trimen both regretted that Bentham had not allowed a vice president with more conciliatory attitudes to chair the meeting.40 Hooker’s instincts were to defend Bentham. Although he had but re­ cently taken up the chair of the Royal Society, he was preoccupied with Linnean affairs in January and February of 1874. He drafted and redrafted an account of the January meeting for circulation to fellows in order to present Bentham in as good a light as possible. Hooker suspected that the criticisms came from a “faction” led by British Museum opponents of Kew. In the early 1870s the British Museum botanists feared that Kew had “imperialist designs” on the British Museum’s botanical collections. The Devonshire Commission on the Advancement of Science had been collecting evidence on the Kew and British Museum herbaria and discussing whether the nation needed both; Bentham and Carruthers had each written anonymous lead articles in Nature claiming priority for their respective herbaria as the national herbarium.41 Hooker checked out the institutional affiliations of the protesting fellows, entering them alongside the thirteen signatures on his copy of the first letter of protest. Only four of the thirteen were at the British Museum, and the seconders of Carruthers’s motions were not British Museum staff. Obviously, dissatisfaction went beyond the museum.42 The dissidents saw Hooker as part of the problem. Faced with the closing of ranks among the old guard, Trimen and fifteen other dissenting members called a Special General Meeting to propose new bylaws designed to prevent rule by an oligarchy: the term of the president to be limited to two to three years, the five council members to retire each year to be chosen on the basis of both longest service and least attendance, the vice presidencies not to be treated as permanent positions.43 Among their obvious targets were Bentham, who had been president for fifteen years (since 1859), and Hooker, who had been a council member and vice president continuously from 1861 (see table 3.1). Busk had been zoological secretary for twelve years from 1857 to 1868 and then 242

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council member and vice president for five years, but because it was customary for secretaries and treasurers of scientific societies to hold office for long periods, his position was not so open to criticism. The dissidents’ proposals conceded the original cause of debate, that an assistant secretary be appointed, but insisted on the right of fellows to ask questions at meetings (which Bentham had ruled against). The conciliatory Busk was to take the chair, in Bentham’s place, at the Special General Meeting. Behind the scenes, Hooker advised Busk to give little encouragement to the protesters. Do not commit the council to any specific opinion on which bylaws require revision he recommended: “just ask for objections and say that the Council will consider them.” Many fellows say that the current bylaws have served their purpose well and that “as gentlemen we want to be guided by their spirit and not by their letter.” The immediate objective must be to “crush the faction.”44 Hooker was expecting the majority of fellows to trust the good intentions of the council members; only those who were ungentlemanly, he implied, would demand the letter of the law. After consulting with Lindley, Hooker had his friend Richard Strachey (who had collected plants in the Himalayan region while in Indian army service) move that the society obtain a legal opinion as to whether the change of bylaws passed at the meeting of 15 January was legal (to counter the accusation that Bentham’s controversial decisions had been illegal), and that if they were legal that decision be allowed to stand.45 Hooker’s expectation that the fellows would show deference to Bentham and trust in the council, and his appeal to gentlemanly behavior, exemplifies the gentlemanly code that, Jim Endersby has emphasized, guided J. D. Hooker’s scientific life. Whether Busk followed any of Hooker’s advice is not clear from the extant records. Although unwilling to take the presidency himself (and unable to while president of the Royal Society in the mid-­1870s), Hooker tried to exert his authority over the Linnean Society by proxy. After Bentham’s resignation Hooker appealed to Busk to take the presidency—­assuming that his nomination would deliver it: “I cannot but disregard so far the refusal to be nominated which you have once and again given me, as to ask you to reconsider the matter in the light of the present emergency.” Busk, usually so obliging in supporting his friends, refused again and recommended George Allman.46 He gave no reasons, but he was in his late sixties, was just completing a two-­year term in the demanding presidency of the Anthropological Institute, and was active in the affairs of the Royal College of Surgeons. Perhaps, even, he sympathized with the dissidents and disagreed with Hooker’s hierarchical style. When Busk 243

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refused to stand, Hooker lost control of the Linnean Society. George Allman, who had recently retired from Edinburgh’s Regius chair of Natural History, was elected president and St. George Jackson Mivart, the ex-­ Darwinian who had, in the eyes of Huxley and Hooker, turned traitor, became zoological secretary, a position he held for six years.47 In the early 1880s Hooker again tried to control the Linnean Society through his friends. At the 1880 elections Busk, not wanting Mivart, proposed a slate headed by Hooker, but Hooker persuaded Lubbock to stand in his place.48 As president, Lubbock was subject to constant advice, lobbying, and warnings from Hooker, usually relating to the editing of botanical material in the Journal. “I am aghast” wrote Hooker, when Lubbock had been in the chair only a few months, “at a proof of Watt’s paper which Daydon Jackson has sent me; if it appears in its present form it will disgrace the Society in the eyes of all Europe.” The society cannot “be worked botanically” without a scientifically competent botanical secretary.49 Quality of publications was a constant concern of Hooker. Back in the 1850s Hooker had worked toward the society having two secretaries, representing zoology and botany. The reasons behind Hooker’s objections to Jackson are unclear. The position of botanical secretary had always been held by “a distinguished botanist & gentlemen,” he told Lubbock. Jackson, he implied, did not fit this tradition, he “cannot read a paper intelligently, still less edit one.” But was Hooker accusing Jackson of botanical incompetence or, also, of ungentlemanly social status? Jackson did not have a university education; perhaps his Latin was inadequate for reading and editing papers.50 Lubbock, who was about to remarry, wanted to resign. Hooker leaned on him to take just one more year. He assured Lubbock that “no one else is as acceptable as you” as president, and urged him to remain in office until a competent botanical secretary was appointed. “I am old and feeble,” too old to take up reforming again, Hooker insisted. Two years later when Lubbock proposed that Hooker take the presidency, Hooker explained his decision: “Botany will be better advanced by my passing the rest of my days in the study,” a judgment implying that he estimated the potential contributions to science of Busk or Lubbock as less than his own. Equally revealing, he would not take up the Linnean presidency because the president “has a social as well as a scientific position to maintain.”51 As director of Kew he had combined the social responsibilities of his various public positions, but in his retirement, he did not intend to maintain a social position, whereas Busk and Lubbock had always entertained more grandly.

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Hooker kept up the pressure on Lubbock. In 1885 Hooker warned Lubbock that some eminent fellows were so dissatisfied that they were considering forming a separate Botanical Society and that, although he was not taking part in the movement, he would “feel free” to retire from the Linnean and join the new society. A week later he wrote again, urging action. Lubbock replied that he had not ignored Hooker’s advice but had found that many fellows “were strong supporters” of Jackson and, for the first time, reacted to Hooker’s pressure tactics: “I should never have accepted the Presidency if I had thought that you should have made my insisting on Mr. Jackson’s retirement a condition of your remaining a member of the Society.”52 Hooker continued to pressure Lubbock. If Lubbock could find a good botanical president to succeed him, or a zoological president and a good botanical secretary, Hooker would accept a vice president’s position “if offered.” Then the situation became delicate. Hooker heard that both Carruthers and W. T. Thiselton-­Dyer, his son-­in-­law, were willing to stand, but Thiselton-­Dyer only on condition there was no opposition. Hooker accepted his son-­in-­law’s demand rather than give a level playing field to the British Museum’s botanical curator. He wanted Lubbock to persuade Carruthers to stand down. He used flattery: “I am sure that the esteem for you in the Society is so perfect that no one could carry out an intricate piece of business with more certain success if you put your back into it.” Hooker did not win these proxy campaigns. In 1886 Carruthers of the British Museum followed Lubbock as president of the Linnean Society; Daydon Jackson continued as botanical secretary to 1902.53 Thus, after decades of sparring and with the indirect assistance of Lubbock, the British Museum botanists defeated the Kew botanists. Stacking the council was a tactic for gaining and maintaining power favored by X Club members—­in the Ethnological Society, the Anthropological Institute, and the Linnean Society. Once they had achieved power within the Ethnological Society they worked by persuasion and example to raise intellectual standards and make the society’s publications more useful to researchers. In the Anthropological Institute, when Anthropologicals and Ethnologicals clashed after two years of compromise, power was measured by numbers. For many years following, Huxley and Lubbock were sleeping members of the council, seldom attending but available if called on in an emergency. The X-­men also used the authority that came with a presidential position, most notably, Huxley used his position in the Ethnological Society of London to negotiate amalgamation between Ethnological and Anthropological Societies.

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The incidents recounted in this section reveal different sides of our protagonists’ characters. In his negotiations with the Anthropologicals, Lubbock appears quick to take offense and had to be persuaded by Huxley or even mollified by Captain Pim. Huxley, whom Hooker had criticized for his ungentlemanly attacks on Richard Owen and who remained capable of offensive insults, here appears statesmanlike. He overlooked personal insults to achieve a greater good in the reunification of the Ethnological and Anthropological Societies. Unlike Huxley and Lubbock, Busk was active in quieter but effective ways. As shown previously, he was hardworking, obliging, and willing to undertake demanding tasks. New sides to Busk are apparent in the Linnean and Anthropological disputes of this chapter. He was an effective committee man, slow to take offense, and a peacemaker. It is particularly noteworthy that, although he was a reliable supporter of many projects, he was not an uncritical follower. He showed a steely resistance when being pushed by Hooker. He remains, however, a shadowy figure, for although he resisted Hooker’s pressuring to take the Linnean presidency we can only speculate about his reasons. Hooker’s role in these disputes exemplifies his gentlemanly conception of science. He decried public disagreement in the Ethnological and Linnean Societies. In the latter, he worked hard to dampen down disagreements and ensure respect for eminent but aging botanists. His vision of science was hierarchical. A decade earlier he had acted at Lyell’s behest in controversies over freedom of opinion, but Busk and Lubbock were less willing to be Hooker’s lieutenants. As in earlier chapters, Hooker appears here as a political strategist and expert networker. He drew older botanists, India hands, and the X Club into his campaigns, but his X-­brothers did not always share his goals.

4.2 The British Association for the Advancement of Science: Representing Science to the Nation Fiske’s proud 1873 claim that his new friends had controlled the British Association (BA) for three years’ past was an exaggeration; Roy Mac­Leod’s more moderate scholarly assessment is that the X Club “was one epicentre of influence.”54 From the mid-­1860s to the late 1870s the X-­men were remarkably conspicuous in BA affairs, but they were not in control. Spottiswoode and Hirst were officers of the association, Spottiswoode as general treasurer from 1861 to 1874 and Hirst as one of the two general secretaries from 1866 to 1871. Five of the X-­men occupied the very public position of president: Hooker in 1868, Huxley in 1870, Tyndall in 1874, 246

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Spottiswoode in 1878, and Lubbock in 1881. Many served as presidents of the specialist sections and presenters of evening lectures. In these positions, they shaped the scientific agenda of the meeting and spoke for science to the larger public. The powerful trustees of the association, though, were men of the preceding generation (until Lubbock’s appointment in 1872), and notable other presidents were not X Club allies. In alternate years, the presidents usually represented different scientific and religious positions, for example, G. G. Stokes of Cambridge and William Thomson of Glasgow were presidents in 1869 and 1871, respectively. Sometimes us-­and-­them judgments were expressed, as when Tyndall, having heard that the 1879 Sheffield meeting was “reactionary,” told Spottiswoode that he did not “grudge them their innings.” The president was George Allman, whom Busk had recommended for the Linnean presidency. Allman was not purely reactionary—­he had espoused a grand evolutionary vision in his presidential address, but he had embarrassed Huxley—­“his face was a wonder to behold”—­by discussing bathybius, the chemical precipitate misidentified by Huxley as a primitive form of deep-­sea life.55 Tyndall identified the speech of “that exceedingly clever, amusing, and wrongheaded man,” Samuel Haughton, as reactionary. Haughton, who was professor of geology at Trinity College Dublin, was an effective administrator of many Dublin scientific institutions but was an anti-­Darwinian. Significantly also, the president of the Biology Section was St. George Jackson Mivart, the “traitor” to Darwin. This section follows the involvement of the X Club men in the BA, in particular, it examines the use of presidential addresses in “Darwinian” and in broader, more philosophical controversy. The British Association had been founded in the 1830s to encourage communication among men of science, especially among those in different parts of the country. It also used the authority of large numbers and a united front to publicize the needs and benefits of science and make representations to government. Another major objective of the BA was to give direction to scientific activity. Leaders surveyed the state of their field and identified areas where investigation was needed. Research was encouraged by setting up committees to undertake investigations and providing them with money for their inquiries. Scientific sociability was an important aspect of the meetings. A balance had to be maintained between serious science and the activities that attracted the large numbers of locals needed to make the meetings a financial success. Many wives and daughters accompanied their scientific men, a custom that increased the numbers attending but contributed, some leaders felt, to a dilettantish atmosphere.56 247

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By the 1860s and 1870s the X-­men were among the leaders of the association. In the 1850s they had attended out of self-­interest, hoping to make scientific reputations or gain financial assistance. In the following decades, they had grander ambitions. They used the platform that the association provided as an opportunity to represent science to the nation. By the 1860s, the system of committees of inquiry, through which BA-­funded research projects were coordinated, was adapted to policy inquiries. As will be discussed in the next chapter, the X-­men were active in many committees set up to investigate ways of improving and promoting the teaching of science. The gate-­keeping function of the leaders of the BA remained important, especially in the Biology Section (D) where controversy over Darwinian and race issues flourished. The presidents of the section and of its physiology and ethnology (or anthropology) departments were responsible for controlling discussion and, as many newspaper reports make clear, often silenced speakers whom they judged unscientific. By the 1860s the president of the association was expected to speak for science to the public, rather than chiefly to the cultivators of science. The presidency “is an office that affords an excellent stage from which to address the public,” wrote Francis Galton, a close contemporary observer. The presidential address was printed in full in leading newspapers, extracted in many others, and widely discussed. Over time presidents became more adept at using the presidential address for political and ideological purposes. The convention was that the president survey the progress of science, or of his particular science, over the previous year, but observations on desirable funding arrangements or religious implications were often added. The address was a major commitment even for those presidents who were skilled public speakers; perhaps especially for those who had the greatest ambitions for their address. Scientific men feared the magnitude of the task but, as William Brock observes, the position was a conspicuous public honor that leading scientific men were reluctant to decline. As Galton put it, the presidency also “carried considerable responsibilities” and opened opportunities to do “very useful work.”57 If a president was to make the most of these opportunities he needed committee skills and supporters. Tyndall initially declined the invitation for 1874 but Huxley wrote persuasively: “It is a physic you will have to swallow one day or another. Be a good boy and take it at once.”58 Evening lectures during BA meetings and the developing custom in the 1860s of section presidents giving addresses also provided opportunities “to address the public” and gain a public reputation. There were two evening lectures and, from 1867, a lecture for the “operative classes.” 248

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Given their reputations as lecturers, we would expect to find Huxley, Tyndall, and Lubbock in these lists, but other X-­members also gave evening lectures, most surprisingly, Hooker gave an evening lecture in 1866. Others were given by Tyndall (1862 and 1870), Lubbock (1874), Huxley (1874 and 1881), and Spottiswoode (1875 and 1881). Tyndall was invited to give the first lecture to workingmen and women in 1867, Huxley followed in 1868, Lubbock in 1870, and Spottiswoode in 1872. The annual meeting was the public face of the association. The president for the year was the personal representative of science, and the meeting was described as “his” meeting. The scientific quality of the meeting depended on the support that he could attract from leading scientific men. In collaboration with section presidents, he invited foreign guests who added greatly to the scientific interest of the meetings. Members of the association, even if they criticized the toll of time and energy taken by the week-­long BA meetings, often participated from loyalty to or respect for the president. “Our Duke and his supporters have left us rather hungry in matters scientific,” wrote Spottiswoode to Hooker, the president-­elect, after the 1867 meeting, but “we” mean “if all goes well, to muster in force around you next year.”59 The X-­brothers supported one another, but also contributed under other presidents. Tyndall hoped to attend the Bradford meeting in 1873, as “I should like to support [Alexander] Williamson.”60 Support was expressed physically. The president did not stand alone on the platform when he gave his address. The local worthies and eminent scientific men who were his vice presidents and section presidents sat around him on the platform and, as figure 4.2 illustrates, their ladies sat with them. The specialist sections were the focus of the scientific proceedings. Experts attended their special section; local enthusiasts migrated from section to section to hear the big names—­although as neither papers nor discussions on them were given time limits the program could give only the order of presentations and not the starting times. Lighter entertainment was offered in the evenings—­receptions, soirées, dinners, concerts sometimes, and lectures on topics of wide interest. Supporting all this activity was a cumbersome administrative structure. Local committees were responsible for the evening entertainments, excursions to sites of scientific interest, and finding accommodation for the thousands of guests. The association was dependent on the work of local committees and the hospitality and financial support of the local community, but the gentlemen who controlled the association in its early decades introduced rules that minimized local input into the program and policies of the association.61 249

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4.2 The presidential address at the Bath British Association Meeting, 14 September 1864.

Sir Charles Lyell, the president, is center stage in the splendid and spacious Bath Theatre. The Norwich Drill Hall, where Hooker spoke in 1868, was not as splendid, but, according to the Leeds Mercury (14 September 1868, p. 3), local worthies and “a large number of distinguished scientific men” sat around him on the temporary dais. Source: Illustrated London News, 24 September 1864. Reproduced with the Permission of Special Collections, Leeds University Library (Newspapers ILL).

The ultimate decision-­making body of the association was the General Committee, membership of which was restricted to those who had published at least one scientific paper. Business came to the General Committee in the form of reports from special committees set up in previous years, recommendations made by the London-­based council, which conducted business between annual meetings, and recommendations from the sectional committees that met during the annual meetings. A gate-­keeping Committee of Recommendations vetted the recommendations coming forward from sectional committees to the General Committee, thereby minimizing public controversy in the large General Committee meetings.62 When complex or contentious proposals came 250

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before the General Committee they were usually referred to the council, council usually set up a committee, which reported back to council, which then made a recommendation to the General Committee of the following year.63 Through these circuitous processes decisions were made on the place, president, and sectional presidents of future meetings and the formation of new sections or subdivision of old ones; the proceeds of the meetings, a result of generous local support, were redistributed as grants for scientific inquiries; and other committees to inquire into science policy matters were established. To leading scientific members of the association the distribution of grants to committees of inquiry and the use of committees and inquiries to pressure public bodies and lobby government were at least as important as the scientific proceedings of the meeting. Considerable power lay with or somewhere within the unwieldy coun­ cil, especially, says Brock, with members resident in London who could attend meetings at short notice. The council, which was chaired by the president of the year, included the section presidents and vice presidents of the association for that year; the three trustees and both present and former semipermanent officers—­that is, general treasurer, general secretaries (two from 1862), and the paid assistant secretary; the immediate past president, president elect, and three auditors; and numerous “ordinary” members making a total of seventy to eighty. Trustees, who were elected for life, had considerable power if they had energy for the affairs of the association, as did former semipermanent officers who could continue active on council for as long as they chose. The trustees in the 1860s were Sir Roderick Murchison (from 1856 until his death in 1872), Lieutenant General Edward Sabine (general secretary until 1859 and trustee from 1859 until his death at age ninety-­four in 1883), and Sir Philip de Malpas Grey Egerton (1861–­81). Lubbock replaced Murchison in 1872 and Spottiswoode replaced Egerton in 1881 but, the dominance of X Club members was brief as Spottiswoode died in 1883.64 There were two loci of power in the association, the trustees and semipermanent officers who had long-­term power, and the president and section presidents who had great influence over their particular meeting. The X Club first had influence through Spottiswoode and Hirst, who were semipermanent officers of the association. Spottiswoode had been appointed general treasurer in 1861, well before he had connections with the X-­network, but when well known as a successful businessman with scientific interests. In 1866 Hirst was approached by Murchison: “Sir Roderick Murchison spoke to me about the General Secretaryship of the British Association which he, Sabine, Galton, and Spottiswoode wish me to 251

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accept,” that is, the invitation was made in the names of two trustees and of the general secretary and general treasurer whom he would be joining. Hirst spent five years as general secretary. The position involved numerous meetings of council and committees of council throughout the year, and intense work for about ten days beginning a few days before each annual meeting. “My position of General Secretary is becoming no joke,” Hirst noted early in 1867, after a month in which he had attended three meetings on BA matters, and a dinner with Murchison.65 But the position was one of considerable power, for example, the general secretaries recommended the names for section presidents to the council, which in 1869, at least, accepted the recommendations without change. In the old days, said Galton, the general secretary had been expected to “consult a few of the more eminent persons at first.” In 1868 and 1871 the X Club was consulted, but such collaboration was noted only twice. The X Club was also powerful in the years when one of their number held the presidency: 1868, 1870, 1874, and to a more limited extent in 1878 and 1881. Hirst remained active on the council of the association for at least a decade after resigning his general secretary position. His journal is a revealing record of the quiet exercise of power. When X Club power was declining, it was Hirst who nominated Lubbock for the presidency in 1881, and who carried him against Alexander Williamson’s counter-­nomination of H. J. S. Smith, the Oxford mathematician.66 The X Club was active in Hooker’s nomination for the presidency of the 1868 meeting and in making “his” meeting a success. The BA Council usually discussed the place and president for future meetings about eighteen months ahead of time, so that they could make recommendations to the General Committee. Early in 1867, Hirst and Tyndall, who were both on the council, took a Sunday walk to Kew, where they tried but failed “to induce Hooker to accept the Presidentship” at Norwich in 1868. Hooker was a suitable president for a Norwich meeting, as the Hooker family was associated with Norwich and Norfolk. Although flattered by the invitation, Hooker was not easily moved from his resolve. Later that week at the X Club meeting when the whole Club pressured Hooker to accept nomination, “he declined on the ground that it would interfere too much with the scientific work he had in hand.” His friends countered with the argument that men of scientific eminence had to stand against the tendency to appoint presidents, such as the Duke of Buccleuch, for their social eminence. Within the month Hooker gave in, largely because botanists also urged him to accept the position.67 As Endersby emphasizes, Hooker was always conscious of the need to improve the scientific standing and public profile of botany. 252

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Hooker’s X-­brothers interested themselves in the plans for the Norwich meeting. At the X Club meeting of November 1867, Hooker reported the “contemplated” names for section presidents and Francis Galton, Hirst’s fellow general secretary, was invited to attend the forthcoming February Club dinner to discuss “the presidents of sections & other matters relating to the next meeting of the BA.” Unsurprisingly, X Club members and close associates of Hooker had major roles at the Norwich meeting: Tyndall was president of Section A (mathematics and physics), Frankland of B (chemistry), Rev. Miles Berkeley68 of D (biology) with W. H. Flower for the subdepartment of physiology; Fergusson (the James Fergusson who had been invited to join the X Club) gave one of the evening lectures and Huxley the lecture to the operative classes.69 Lubbock had already been appointed one of the vice presidents by the local committee. The X Club went to Norwich en masse. Frankland, Huxley, Tyndall, and Hirst were there. Busk, Lubbock, and Spottiswoode attended with their wives. Sociability was important. These wealthier scientific couples usually lodged together, sometimes accompanied by the salary-­dependent men. At Norwich, the X Club party included the Colviles (home from India) and the Hamiltons. This large group all had dinner together before proceeding to Hooker’s opening address.70 At the close of the address Huxley and Tyndall gave fulsome votes of thanks, comparing Hooker to Darwin.71 Hooker hated public speaking, but his friends thought he gave a mag­ nificent address: “dear old Hooker came out in great force as he always does in emergencies,” Huxley told Darwin.72 Hooker praised and defended his friends and politely criticized or ignored his and their foes. He welcomed the members of the International Congress of Pre-­historic Archaeology, which was meeting concurrently in Norwich “under the Presidency of Sir John Lubbock, himself a master of this branch of knowledge” (lix), and he ignored the anthropologists who were lobbying (unsuccessfully) for recognition as an independent section within the association. The archaeologists pursued their studies “in a scientific spirit, and in due subjection to scientific methods” (lix) pronounced Hooker. Having identified the greatest recent advances in botany as being in the area of physiological botany, he then ascribed all the most important recent work to Darwin (lxvi–­lxviii) with one addition—­“Mr. Herbert Spencer’s observation on the circulation of the sap and the formation of wood in plants.” This was an example, Hooker said, of what could be done “by an acute observer and experimentalist” who though having no particular botanical knowledge, was “thoroughly instructed in scientific methods” (lxviii). 253

4.3 Joseph Dalton Hooker, ca. 1865. His scientific eminence and scientific inheritance made

him a useful front man in campaigns to have science represented by scientific rather than social eminence. Source: © Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

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Then there were the foes. Hooker entered into debate over the natural history collections of the British Museum by criticizing the trustees for their neglect of botany, and adding that, as trees reduced dust, the ideal site for a natural history museum would be “the townward end of one of the great parks” (lxiv)—­a description of the South Kensington site, just south of Hyde Park, then being developed as a center of scientific education. Richard Owen, curator of the Natural History Collections, was damned with faint praise. Hooker praised all the keepers and curators at the British Museum and singled Owen out for his earlier work at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. There was much else. Hooker responded to the Athenaeum’s claim that “Mr. Darwin’s theory is a thing of the past” (lxx) and then took on the astronomers’ claims that “the age of the inhabited world as calculated by solar physics, is . . . wholly inconsistent with Darwin’s views.” In an outright attack on the reliability of astronomers’ calculations, he asked: “Are these speculations . . . to be depended upon?” and challenged Whewell’s claim that astronomy is a perfect science: “No science is really perfect, certainly not that which lately erred nearly 4,000,000 miles in so fundamental a datum as the earth’s distance from the sun” (lxxii; emphasis added). Customarily, the president made concluding references to the Creator. Hirst’s brief assessments of the 1869 lectures illustrate the conventions. Stokes’s presidential address was “clear and scientific, orthodox conclusion lame and ‘clap-­trappish.’” W. A. Miller did better in his lecture to two thousand workingmen: “Lecture good but a little beyond the audience. Conclusion pious and warmly applauded.” In contrast, Lockyer’s evening lecture on solar physics was “neither clear nor pious.”73 Hooker’s was a modern piety: there are truths common to physical and spiritual inquiry (he cited Disraeli); the search for the “whence and whither” of human existence is an “unquenchable instinct of the human mind”; the reconciliation of science and religion will come from recognition “that the power which the universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable” (he quoted “one of our deepest thinkers, Mr. Herbert Spencer”). Finally, Hooker found hope in a poetic reconciliation between Darwinian chance and a transcendent being: “The seeming chance that cast us hither, / Accomplishes His whence and wither.”74 Hooker’s arguments were part of larger concerted X Club campaigns. He defended Darwin and took up the issue of natural history collections, which had recently been the subject of an enquiry by a BA committee.75 In praising Lubbock he took the side of ethnology in its controversies with anthropology.76 There are echoes of his X-­brothers in many of the opinions Hooker expressed. His argument against astronomy’s 255

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perfection was one that the young Lubbock had used against his astronomer father. The praise of Spencer and the references to scientific method sound like Huxley. “Unquenchable instincts” was a Carlylean phrase that could have come from either the cited poet or Tyndall. The resonances indicate the extent to which Hooker shared the views of his more vocal friends. As he expected, he was criticized for quoting Spencer and for asserting the power above to be inscrutable.77 The whole meeting was a great success. Tyndall and Frankland gave presidential addresses in their sections.78 Hooker wrote with pride and warm affection to “Dear old Tyndall” after the meeting: “I did chuckle to find my beloved friend equally the beloved of the [Anglo-­Catholic] Guardian,” which praised the “noble periods of Prof. Tyndall’s thoughtful address,” contrasting them with “the unfinished and fragmentary character of the President’s address.” Hooker was delighted with the success of the meeting: Joking apart . . . I think it [your “On Scientific Materialism”] is about the completest thing of its kind I ever read, and wondrous subtle. Yours and Berkeley’s addresses were much the best of the lot, then came Fergusson’s lecture [on Buddhist Temples] then Huxley’s Chalk and then Huxley’s paper on races of mankind. These were I think the crowning pieces of the meeting and I do not think any previous meeting could produce 5 such contributions and if you add Mr [Magee’s] sermon and the music at the Cathe­ dral and the Mayor’s déjeuner . . . it really makes a splendid total.79

Tyndall had argued, in one of the first public expressions of his dualist philosophy, that the materialist explanations of science did not provide full understanding of the world. Although he advocated mechanistic accounts of the phenomena of life, including the development of the chicken from the egg and the activity of the brain, he then asserted that mechanistic explanation is but “one half of our dual truth.” Consciousness is something entirely different from matter; the feeling that there are mysteries beyond knowledge is a “power in the human soul.”80 Huxley’s celebrated lecture to workingmen and women, “On a Piece of Chalk,” came only fifth in Hooker’s listing. It is noteworthy that Hooker enjoyed the Cathedral service, which he attended in the company of Tyndall, Spottiswoode, Hirst, and his botanist-­clergyman friend, Miles Berkeley. Hooker loved flowers; he told Darwin that the Anthem, “What though I know each herb and flower,” brought tears to his eyes.81 Hooker’s was an attenuated Christianity, far removed from the evangelicalism of his parents. Throughout his life, he was interested in comparative religion. He rated highly Fergusson’s lec­ 256

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ture on “some curious discoveries in India of the simultaneous worship of the Serpent and the Tree.”82 The appearance of these symbols in another religious tradition undermined the uniqueness of the Christian story of a Fall; moreover, the serpent and tree, which were associated with sin in Christian tradition, were worshipped in Fergusson’s examples. Hooker was unconcerned by this relativizing perspective. Although four of their number were presidents in later years, the X-­men were never again as active as they had been in the support of Hooker. Even Frankland, who usually protected his summer vacations, was present. Tyndall, who often left early to guard his health, stayed for the entire meeting. Only Spencer was missing. In his Autobiography Spencer emphasized the enjoyment gained from attending the BA in the company of his X Club friends. This is a typical Spencerian reconstruction of the past. He did not attend when Hooker was president; in 1870, he heard Huxley’s presidential address and Tyndall’s evening lecture, but he and Tyndall then left early to holiday together; he attended Tyndall’s meeting in 1874; missed Spottiswoode’s presidency in 1878, and attended in 1881 when Lubbock was president—­chiefly because he had been offered local hospitality.83 The 1870 meeting at Liverpool was Huxley’s meeting. The BA Council had approved Huxley’s nomination eighteen months ahead of time, but when the council recommendation came to the 1869 General Committee there was a move to overturn the nomination. Dr. W. A. Miller, treasurer of the Royal Society, professor of chemistry at the Anglican King’s College, proposed that the meeting be at Edinburgh rather than Liverpool. In Hirst’s opinion his intended follow-­up motion was that William Thomson be elected as president (on the grounds of being Scottish), all this being a strategy for keeping Huxley out of the chair. But Liverpool won by 6 votes—­Liverpool 91 and Edinburgh 85—­and Huxley was elected, “unanimously,” Hooker assured him.84 Huxley’s meeting was a success. When not busy with secretarial duties, Hirst dined with the Spottiswoodes, the Lubbocks, and the Hamiltons. Hooker and the Busks, it seems, were absent, and Tyndall arrived only in time for his own address. Hirst heard all the major lectures: Huxley’s presidential address he pronounced a success, Tyndall’s evening lecture on the Scientific use of the Imagination “was regarded by all as a chef d’oeuvre of philosophical eloquence,” and Lubbock’s lecture to the “operative classes” on Savages was “very successful and well attended.”85 Tyndall used his address to develop hints about scientific reasoning made in his 1868 address on “Scientific Materialism.” In a series of mixed metaphors Tyndall had hinted that theory construction in science was 257

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the result of “genius” or “spiritual insight,” which took the investigator into a “penumbral region” where knowledge “casts a faint light beyond its own immediate boundaries.”86 In 1870 he elaborated these metaphors into a concept of scientific imagination, which takes the observer beyond “the boundary of mere observation” (103). He developed the idea with reference to his theory that the color of the sky was explained by the interaction between light and very small particles of matter, invisible even under high-­powered microscopes. The center of his scientific argument was that invisible particles of matter explain the colors of the sky. He went on to assert that Darwin’s reasoning, which, similarly, combined “observation, imagination, and reason,” was scientific (127). Then in a cunning rhetorical move he asked if his audience wanted him to continue to more speculative topics—­the “unformed notions which are floating . . . in the modern speculative scientific mind” (128). Tyndall judged that the audience wanted him to continue. He mentioned the nebular hypothesis and the question of whether life belongs to matter; he claimed that at the core of the “hypothesis of Natural Evolution” stands the notion that “human mind itself—­emotion, intellect, will, and all their phenomena—­were once latent in a fiery cloud” (131); he argued that this was not an absurd notion but plausible if we regard spirit and matter not as opposites, one “all-­noble, the other all-­vile . . . [but] as two opposite faces of the self-­same mystery” (131–­32). Tyndall developed these themes in his controversial address at the Belfast BA. What made the Belfast address so much more controversial than the Liverpool address will be discussed below. Huxley, meanwhile, chose the controversial but scientific topic of spontaneous generation for his presidential address. In France, Pasteur claimed to have shown that minute germs were the source of disease and putrefaction, that life comes only from life, and that the spontaneous generation of life from non-­living matter did not occur. Radical medical evolutionists in England, to whom spontaneous generation appeared to be the missing link in a fully naturalistic evolutionary theory, had taken up the arguments of Pasteur’s opponents. It was widely considered that Huxley had supported spontaneous generation in his identification of “protoplasm” as a simple form of “living matter” from which all living beings were composed.87 By 1870 Huxley’s personal position was awkward. Tyndall had begun defending Pasteur and germ theory, and was being attacked by medical experts for stepping far outside his sphere of expertise; openly atheistic advocates of evolution were promoting spontaneous generation. In his thorough analysis of spontaneous generation controversies, James Strick describes Huxley as walking a “tightrope.” 258

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He had to permit the emergence of life from non-­life in the past, but in the present, he wanted to maintain the respectability of evolutionary theories and the scientific reputation of his good friend John Tyndall. In his Liverpool address Huxley took an agnostic position on spontaneous generation, as he so often did on difficult matters. He could see “no reason for believing that the feat” of producing life from non-­life had yet been performed (lxxxiii). Analogical reasoning led him to expect that “living protoplasm” came from not-­living matter in a remote era, but this belief, he admitted, is “an act of philosophical faith” (lxxxiv). To use his BA presidential address for a major public intervention in the controversy allowed Huxley to present his interpretation at length and gave him an immense audience.88 Huxley’s lecture was structured as a history of the idea of germs. Along the way, he made characteristic moral and political points. The “improvers of natural knowledge” were a “noble army” marching against our common enemy, “Ignorance” (lxxiii). Science would bring enormous practical and financial benefits; scientific investigators were moral exemplars. The study of grubs and molds, started centuries earlier, had brought unforeseen financial benefits to wine grower and vinegar maker, and the hope of saving the lives of tens of thousands of innocent children. Lives are saved by conquering disease, further evidence that “the people perish for lack of knowledge.” (Tendentiously, Huxley used this biblical quotation to claim that scientific workers fulfilled the inner meaning of Scripture.) Human misery would be alleviated and welfare promoted by the “diligent, patient, loving study of all the multitudinous aspects of Nature, the results of which constitute exact knowledge, or Science” (lxxxix). Hirst thought that “a more harmless address was never delivered.” “Poor Dr. Miller,” who had tried to prevent Huxley’s nomination as president, had been put under restraint after acting wildly on the train from London to Liverpool. He “considered himself ordained . . . to combat the heresy of Tyndall and Huxley.” Hirst reported sympathetically that Miller’s collapse “cast a gloom on us all. He is a thoroughly upright . . . man of science completely wrecked by religious mania.”89 Although friendly sources emphasize the success of the meeting, it was not a complete triumph for Huxley. At the General Committee meeting Huxley, in the chair, responded abruptly to a suggestion from an ASL member. Fellow Anthropologicals were angry, and when Owen appeared hesitantly at a side door, they saw an opportunity to get even. They began cheering him, the whole assembly joined in and, one of the Anthropologicals later recalled, Owen entered with smiles while Huxley scowled.90 259

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The following year the president was Sir William Thomson, eminent Scottish physicist and proponent of the limited age of the earth. It is instructive to identify some of the ways in which Thomson used his address for polemical and scientifico-­political purposes. Thomson’s somewhat rambling address was not crafted with the skill and style of a Huxley or a Tyndall. He began with a history of the association, gave an impressionistic survey of the scientific advances of the year by “picking out some that have struck me as notable,” before taking up Huxley’s conclusion that “life proceeds from life, and only from life.” Thomson’s address was not without cunning. He used scientific heroes to score political points. Sir John Herschel, the last founding member of the association, had died only a few months earlier. Thomson praised Herschel’s work on harmonic analysis, which, he pointed out, was the method that would allow the BA’s Committee on Tides to solve the problem of predicting not only high and low tide but also the height at intermediate times (lxxvi). This committee, of which Thomson himself was secretary, was the recipient of yet another generous research grant from the BA at the later General Committee meeting.91 Thomson, like Hooker, talked up the work of his friends, twice praising the work of his friend and collaborator, P. G. Tait. (What “a scratching of Tait,” Hooker observed.)92 Thomson indirectly challenged Tyndall, who was a fervent defender of the German physicist J. R. Mayer, by explaining why he did not accept Mayer’s theory of solar heat (c). Then, as a step toward his conclusion that “all beings depend on an ever-­acting Creator,” Thomson took on Huxley: I confess to being deeply impressed by the evidence put before us by Professor Huxley, and I am ready to adopt, as an article of scientific faith, true through all space and through all time, that life proceeds from life, and from nothing but life. How, then did life originate on earth? . . . If a probable solution, consistent with the ordinary course of nature, can be found, we must not invoke an abnormal act of Cre­ ative Power. (civ)

Thomson appealed to the analogy of new oceanic islands formed by volcanic eruptions. In the ordinary course of nature (he did not mention Darwin but most of his audience would have recognized the argument), islands acquired plant, insect, and bird life by wind transport, sometimes over long distances, from already populated islands and continents. Similarly, Thomson suggested, life must have arrived on earth from elsewhere, brought perhaps by meteoric matter produced by the col­lision of 260

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larger bodies. This hypothesis, he allowed, may be “wild and visionary; all I maintain is that it is not unscientific.” As a parting shot he quoted Sir John Herschel in support of his own view that recent zoological “speculations” (the word Hooker had used of astronomy in 1868) “did not sufficiently take into account a continually guiding and controlling intelligence” (cv). The X Club members were often in controversy with Thomson and his North British physicist and engineering associates. Crosbie Smith first identified an informal “North British” circle around Thomson and the issues that divided them from the London-­based, secularizing X Club. Thomson’s associates from Scotland and the north of England were interested in and made money from the applications of their sciences. They used their science to support theism and free will. From the Second Law of Thermodynamics they argued that the earth had a beginning and would have an end, and that minds could intervene in the course of nature by directing, although not creating, energy.93 Thomson, his engineering partner Fleeming Jenkin, and his collaborator P. G. Tait marshaled physical and mathematical arguments against the geologists’ exceedingly extended time scale, and hence they argued that evolution must have proceeded at a faster rate than the Darwinian theory of natural selection allowed. Transmutation must have been directed by some higher power. There were also regional and national aspects of the tensions. The northerners were often neglected in the distribution of the Government Grant administered by the London-­based Royal Society, and the Scots especially resented the work of their countrymen being overlooked from the south. Hooker and Huxley joked about Thomson’s theory of “God creating by cockshy,” and the theory was “jeered at” in the press, but Hooker and Huxley respected Thomson. “I like what I have seen of Thomson much,” Huxley told Hooker: He is, mentally, like the scene which lies before my windows grand and massive but much encumbered with mist—­which adds to his picturesqueness but not to his intelligibility—­Tait worships him with the fidelity of a large dog. . . . I cannot say I greatly admired the address. It wants cohesion and resembles a flash of his own aerolite more than anything else—­bright points in the midst of much nebulosity.94

Hooker agreed. He had been a fellow student with Thomson and remembered him as “the youngest and cleverest” in the mathematics class at Glasgow. Hirst, who tried at times to smooth relations between Tyndall and Thomson, had successfully nominated Thomson for membership of 261

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the Athenaeum Club the previous year. He enjoyed dinner with Thomson at the end of the BA meeting but made no mention of the address in his journal.95 The disagreements between secular X Club Londoners and theistic engineering northerners took their most bitter forms in disputes between Tait and Tyndall. These disputes came to a head in the eighteen months before Tyndall’s presidency of the 1874 Belfast meeting of the BA.96 They exchanged insults in Nature as the 1873 BA meeting took place. When Tait accused Tyndall of having become a great popularizer, but at the expense of scientific accuracy and authority, Tyndall accused Tait of “ignoble spite” and not having “the manhood” to acknowledge he committed wrong. Hooker was appalled at the damage to the dignity of science. In Hooker’s view, if Tyndall’s letter had been published sooner the BA Council might not have followed through with his nomination as president of the Belfast meeting. Tyndall’s friends were worried that at Belfast he would again provoke damaging controversy. Hooker and Spottiswoode consulted; it was, they agreed “impossible either officially or unofficially to advise Tyndall.”97 Rather ominously, Tyndall had suggested to Huxley that he might be less “tender” in his address because there had been a local movement against his presidency.98 The dispute between Tyndall and Tait continued into 1874. Huxley often advised Tyndall not to respond in haste to Tait, and discreetly offered advice on the presidential address: “I wonder if . . . you are going to be as wise and prudent as I was at Liverpool. . . . Let my example be a burning and a shining light to you. I declare I have horrid misgivings of your kicking over the traces.” But Tyndall did not intend to follow Huxley’s indirect mode of attack and replied that his first aim was “to be true to myself.”99 The address was as controversial as Tyndall’s friends had feared. Oliver Lodge, a young physicist who was present, felt that the atmosphere became “more and more sulphurous as the materialistic utterances went on.” He summed up the lecture as “the chief pronouncement of the materialism of the nineteenth century.”100 “Violent exception” was taken to one sentence in particular: “I prolong the vision backward across the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that Matter, which we, in our ignorance, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of every form and quality of life.”101 Finding the origin of life in matter was hardly more extreme than Tyndall’s 1870 assertion that “the human mind itself—­emotion, intellect, will, and all their phenomena—­ were once latent in a fiery cloud.” Crossing the boundary of experimen262

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tal evidence was precisely what Tyndall claimed was an essential part of scientific theorizing in his 1870 lecture on “Scientific Imagination.” Thus the conclusions of the Belfast address, although expressed provocatively, were not fundamentally different from the conclusions of Tyndall’s previous major philosophical lectures before the BA. The wider world was outraged. “Every pulpit in Belfast thundered at me,” Tyndall told Hirst. Hundreds of pamphlets were written against the address.102 The accepted explanation has been that Tyndall’s address was controversial because, as president of the British Association, he spoke in the name of science. The address was “an abuse of his office,” said one contemporary critic.103 As has already been emphasized, presidents often finished their addresses with large theological or philosophical assertions about God or matter or scientific method. Tyndall had done so in the past, but in his previous two BA lectures his metaphysical and epistemological claims were addenda to scientific case studies. Huxley, Lubbock, and Spottiswoode gave evening lectures: Huxley’s, “On the Hypothesis That Animals Are Automata and Its History,” increased the outcry; Lubbock’s selectionist discussion of “Common Wild Flowers in Relation to Insects” made no confrontational metaphysical or religious claims; Spottiswoode’s popular lecture, “On the Colours of Polarized Light,” was completely safe.104 Tyndall was widely accused of atheism and materialism. Undoubtedly some of the accusers were young and unsubtle (like Lodge) or narrowly orthodox. A few theologically or philosophically sophisticated readers and auditors grasped Tyndall’s subtleties. The Duke of Argyll assured Tyndall that he had taken no part in the “outcry” against the address, which he considered had been “greatly misunderstood.” In Argyll’s opinion, “its tendency is rather to spiritualise matter than to materialise Thought.”105 Modern scholarship recognizes, as did a few contemporaries, that Tyndall was not a materialist. Rather, he has been identified as a “pantheist,” “transcendental materialist,” or “an idealist who saw matter pantheistically.”106 Whatever the label, it is agreed that his affirmation that the phenomena of human consciousness are inexplicable in a materialist metaphysic counters the materialist identification. Even if the majority had recognized the subtle differences, they would hardly have been placated, for pantheism was no more acceptable to orthodoxy than materialism. Gowan Dawson proposes a further explanation, guilt by association. Given the Victorian associations of atomism and materialism with immorality and the way Tyndall framed his address, he argues that the Victorian misunderstandings are explicable. The core of Tyndall’s address was a history of materialism, with specific reference to the classical 263

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atomists, Lucretius, Democritus, and Epicurus. Only the year before the Belfast address, when Walter Pater had argued that art was to be valued for the sensual pleasure it gave, he had been accused of espousing the Epicurean philosophy of “eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” Moreover, Pater and his fellow aesthetes published in the Fortnightly Review, the location favored by Huxley and Tyndall for their most controversial essays.107 Tyndall’s association of Darwin and Lucretius would not have commended Darwin to his hearers. For Lucretius: “Nature is seen to do all things spontaneously of herself without the meddling of the gods”; Darwin (along with Bruno and Goethe) rejected “the notion of a creative power, acting after human fashion.”108 Thus, Dawson argues, Victorians were almost programmed to identify atomism with atheism and immorality; also, as I have argued above, Tyndall’s pantheistic language about “cosmical life” and “Mystery” was clearly unorthodox. Although a few friends congratulated Tyndall, most thought the address inappropriate from the president’s position. Hirst was among the few who approved. Lyell admitted that criticisms could be made, but praised Tyndall’s “manly and fearless out-­speaking.” Lubbock was silent, even in the privacy of his journal. He praised Huxley’s address but, apparently, disapproved so strongly that he did not mention Tyndall’s. Similarly, Hooker told Darwin that Huxley’s address was outstanding and was silent about Tyndall’s.109 After Belfast, the BA meetings at which X-­men presided were a welcome anticlimax. The association itself was in decline. Such large general meetings, pronounced the Times, were no longer necessary because there were so many periodicals and magazines, both technical and general, in which the papers and lectures could have been published. Also, Brock suggests, the growth of university and state employment in science made the BA less necessary as a lobbying body.110 The energies of the X-­men were waning as they aged. The presidency of Spottiswoode in 1878 illustrates these issues. Few of his X Club friends were at the Dublin meeting to support Spottiswoode in 1878. Only Huxley, as president of the Anthropology Department of Section D, occupied a public position. Tyndall, who had initially agreed to give an evening lecture, was in poor health. Spottiswoode’s address was poor (Hirst judged), perhaps because Spottiswoode was unwell. Many audience members could not hear and left early.111 This was a far cry from the addresses of Hooker, Huxley, and Tyndall. Those who left early would have heard part of a history of the association, including a plea for continued scientific support by “our best men” (6). The major part of his address outlined important anti-­ intuitive 264

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recent advances in mathematics—­ imaginary numbers, multidimensional space, and non-­Euclidean geometries. But Spottiswoode began with a curious apology: he felt “diffidence in accepting the post” because “your choice has fallen on one outside the sphere of professional Science” (1). Presidents often expressed diffidence, but Spottiswoode’s self-­identification needs emphasis because the X Club has so often been taken to represent professionalizing science. And Spottiswoode was not only president of the British Association but also was about to become, through the efforts of his X Club brothers, president of the Royal Society, as is discussed in the following section. Interspersed throughout Spottiswoode’s address were comments on the function of presidential addresses that were indirect defenses of Tyndall’s Belfast address. “Of the nature and functions of the Presidential address this is perhaps neither the time nor the place to speak,” Spottiswoode suggested (8), but then went on to stress the variety of previous addresses. “The nature of the subjects which may fairly come within the scope of such a discourse” had been much debated but, he claimed, there is “no pattern or precedent which the President is bound to follow” (9). Spottiswoode offered two chief defenses of Tyndall’s address. First, as the presidential address was not discussed by the members nor any formal opinion expressed, the association cannot be considered to be “in any way committed to its tenour or conclusions” (9). This was an argument against the criticism that the president must represent scientific opinion. Then, still without direct reference to Tyndall’s address, he argued against the criticism that Tyndall had departed from science to personal opinion. Although “knowledge is distinct from opinion [and] from feeling,” the boundary between known and unknown is not “permanently fixed” (10). Spottiswoode himself then departed into romantic Tyndallian rhapsodies: the scientific explorer “must look steadfastly and with hope into the misty vision, until the very clouds wreath themselves into definite forms”; he must “listen patiently and with sympathetic trust to the intricate whisperings of nature . . . until . . . he can pick out a few simple notes to which his own powers can resound”; and he “should give utterance to some of the subjective impressions which he is conscious of receiving from regions beyond.” And the listeners should “listen calmly, and temperately” and discriminate between “matters of fact and matters of opinion” (10). Spottiswoode thus argued that the speaker should follow his own “noblest powers” (32), that the association was not committed to agree, and that the hearers were responsible to exercise discrimination. When Lubbock took the presidency of the Jubilee meeting in 1881, his X-­brothers turned out more or less together for a last time. Hirst 265

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(who had nominated him for the position) and Busk were ill, but Huxley and Spottiswoode gave evening lectures. Hooker, who was president of the Geography Section (E), had accepted in order to support Lubbock.112 To honor fifty years of achievement, the plan had been for all sections to be chaired by previous presidents of the association. Hooker was customarily associated with Section D, but Richard Owen was filling that position (which demonstrates his continuing reputation [see figure 4.5], and further illustrates that the BA was not controlled by the X Club). Hooker, who had long been a supporter of the Royal Geographical Society, was therefore asked to take Section E. As already mentioned, Spencer was present because he was offered congenial hospitality. Tyndall did not attend. His involvement in public affairs had declined rapidly after the Belfast address, although to what extent this was due to the indignant abuse showered on him, to declining health, or to his changed per­ sonal circumstances from 1876, when he married, is undecidable. Lubbock’s address was a safe and lengthy account of the progress of science since 1831. Imperiously, he took all of Europe as his field and, with the help of various friends, covered all sciences. Frankland contributed the section on the progress of chemistry and Spottiswoode that on mathematics. Of course, Lubbock praised Darwin and included prehistoric archaeology, but not in ways that were controversial in 1881. His sweeping but uncontroversial conclusion was that “to science . . . we owe the idea of progress.” He added some warnings: progress may be endangered by military ambition, over-­interference by the state, or tendencies to anarchy and socialism.113 These were positions shared by his X-­brothers and many other scientific men. The campaigning zeal of previous X Club presidents was not apparent in Lubbock’s address. It is clear from the examples covered that members of the X Club used the platform provided by the BA presidency, by its evening lectures, and by the addresses to sections to push the boundaries of naturalistic science and to discuss what they believed to be the philosophical implications of scientific thought. Even Hooker, the paradigmatic expert, departed from science to allude to the meaning of human existence and “inscrutable” powers in the universe. Spottiswoode may not have agreed with Tyndall, and did not discuss Darwin even indirectly, but in vague, overblown metaphors—­such as “the intricate whisperings of nature”—­he personalized nature. The British Association was a major site for Darwinian controversy. Papers given before learned societies avoided Darwinian discussion because, as Frederick Burkhardt shows, the Victorian conception of scientific method emphasized the accumulation of facts and rejected “specula266

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tion.” This convention did not extend to presidential addresses, as is illustrated by Huxley’s addresses at the annual meetings of the Geological Society, but in the BA discussion went much further. The BA sections had much less control over papers than had learned societies. Chairmen tried to close down “unscientific” discussion, but not until 1877 did sections have the power to reject papers submitted.114 Thus, as was common, in 1869 two clergymen read papers in Section D on objections to Darwinism. The section officers used their limited power to determine that not even the customary abstract of these contributions would be printed. In contrast, John Lubbock’s paper, responding to the Duke of Argyll’s argument that savagery was explained by degeneration from civilization, was printed in full.115 Research on the papers presented to Section D and the discussions that took place is needed but, clearly, controversy was more open in the BA sections than in any learned society. In the BA presidential addresses, long tradition allowed perorations on the metaphysical and religious implications of science. Hooker, Huxley, Spottiswoode—­and their opponents—­made use of this tradition; Tyndall pushed it far beyond customary boundaries.

4.3 The Royal Society: Power and Its Symbolic Uses In the Royal Society, as in the Ethnological, Anthropological, and Linnean Societies, the X-­brothers were deeply concerned over who held power, but in the Royal Society they had greater difficulty in getting themselves and their allies elected. For the Royal Society, as for the British Association, the president represented Science, but the contests were more intense both because there were fewer positions and because the presidency of the Royal Society, which stood “at the head of science,” had greater symbolic significance. Fellows of the society had conflicting, strong opinions as to what was required in the representative of science. This section shows how X Club members manipulated elections to get themselves into power—­most notably in the elections of Spottiswoode as treasurer in 1870, Huxley as biological secretary in 1872, Hooker as president in 1873, and Spottiswoode as president in 1878—­and identifies the priorities and principles that lay behind their campaigns. Royal Society elections—­to the fellowship, for medals, and to the coun­ cil—­were a recurrent topic of conversation at X Club meetings. Council elections were the fundamental concern as council members both nominated and voted on the award of medals and made the “house list” of fifteen names recommended for election to the fellowship each year. In 267

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late 1867, after regular expression of dissatisfaction with the procedures for election of council members, the Club resolved that “the subject of the Royal Society Council should form the subject of consideration at the October meeting of the Club each year,” that is, just before the official list was discussed and voted on at council.116 Despite these intentions and occasional interventions by those X Club members on the Royal Society Council, little was achieved in their first five years of meeting. X Club members were elected to the council, as they had been before they had formed their club, sometimes as many of three of them were on the council, but they remained unhappy with electoral procedures. There were rules and conventions governing elections. Although, nom­ inally, all positions were filled by election every year, the five officers—­ president, treasurer, two secretaries, and foreign secretary—­usually remained in office for long periods, the secretaries often for more than ten years. The 1847 Statutes required that ten members retire each year, and the convention was that five of the incoming members should have served previously and five be new to the council. These procedures, which were intended to balance experience and openness, gave great power to the long-­serving officers because ordinary council members served only one or two years at a time. Through close collaboration X Club members could overcome the lack of continuity that limited the effectiveness of ordinary council members. They could make life difficult for the president, but they could not overcome the power of the officers. Although the fellows elected, the current council members nominated their successors. Each member of the council gave their personal list of ten names to the senior secretary, the officers then met and produced a house list, which list was discussed and modified at the council meeting. It was expected that this list would show balance across the various specialties. In the opinion of Sabine, president in the 1860s, this procedure gave too much power to “factions” on the council. He would have preferred that the president and officers made a list that council members could then discuss. This tendency by the officers to keep control of society affairs was just the sort of practice that was unacceptable to the X-­men. In December 1867 Huxley, the only X-­member on the new council, succeeded in raising the issue of nomination procedures, which the Club members had wanted to challenge for at least two years.117 His motion, seconded by Hooker’s botanist colleague, Dr. Thomas Thomson, “that the Secretaries be requested to draw up a statement of the manner in which the last nomination of Members of Council took place, and that this statement be entered on the Minutes,” was lost.118 If the process had been made explicit then it could have been discussed. 268

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X Club members and other fellows of the society were dissatisfied with the length of time that Sabine had been in office. Sabine was in his eighties and had been president since 1861, but there was difficulty in finding a replacement. Someone of high scientific attainments and high social status, who was willing to undertake the onerous duties, was required. In 1868 Sabine considered resignation, but the Duke of Argyll declined the presidency. The X Club discussed potential replacements and deputed Huxley and Tyndall to sound out Lyell and the Astronomer Royal, G. B. Airy, respectively. Meanwhile, the X-­men suggested to other fellows that no one should occupy the office for a long period and that natural history had been neglected. These apparently objective criteria allowed critics to avoid personal criticism while advocating for change. The Royal Society was more useful to physical scientists than naturalists, as Hooker often complained. Physical sciences dominated the Philosophical Transactions of the society and physical scientists dominated the council.119 Hooker’s solution, expressed only privately, was that the Royal Society and the Linnean Society should combine their publications and then divide them into two series as the physical and biological publications of one body.120 This would have given the Linnean Society a status equal to the Royal Society, a judgment that might have appealed to Sir Joseph Banks but that would have been controversial by the 1860s. Adequate representation of naturalists was only one criteria and not the most important one for the X Club lobbyists, as is shown by their considering Airy as a potential replacement for Sabine, and campaigning for Spottiswoode’s election as treasurer. Tyndall, Busk, and Huxley played parts in Spottiswoode’s election as treasurer in 1870. The declining health of W. A. Miller, treasurer since 1861, had become apparent in the violence of his anti-­Huxley and Tyndall sentiments expressed at the Liverpool BA; he died shortly after the meeting. Miller’s friends would have felt the sad irony that his death allowed Huxley and Tyndall greater influence in Royal Society affairs. Only two days after Miller’s death Huxley wrote to Tyndall: “you being on Council must look sharp after the appointment of his successor.” Lubbock would be the best and fittest replacement, advised Huxley, and if you “forward his name at once no-­one can possibly oppose him.” Tyndall preferred Spottiswoode, but Huxley, who had already approached Lubbock, countered: “Under many contingencies Lubbock would be the more useful man and carry greater weight,” besides, Lubbock would be willing to make sacrifices in order to follow in his father’s footsteps.121 The X Club discussed the nomination a few days later. No decision is recorded, but Tyndall began working for Spottiswoode’s election. Busk sounded 269

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out Sabine’s friend, J. P. Gassiot: he had heard his name mentioned he told Gassiot, as were the names of Sir John Lubbock and William Spottiswoode; Busk expressed his preference for Lubbock. Gassiot assured Busk that “under no circumstances” would he consider nomination. He had previously declined, and he was old (in his seventies) and tired.122 Such networking was one of the strengths of the X Club. Huxley saw the opportunity; Tyndall had the official position from which he could initiate action, although he stepped outside the convention that nominations be made by an officer rather than an ordinary member of council; Busk could make friendly inquiries (his age gave him a different set of friends than Tyndall); and Spottiswoode had the qualities required for the position. He was one of the best and fairest of chairmen. . . . I have seen none [among scientific men] who were his superiors . . . in the art of what I may call constructive, as distin­ guished from destructive criticism, for he had peculiar skill in detecting and eliminating the faulty elements in any proposed scheme, and in reinforcing the good ones. Thus, although he did not speak much in council, he was regarded as one of the most valued members of every committee on which he was ever called to serve.123

These were the claims of Francis Galton, fellow secretary and fellow schemer with Spottiswoode in the Royal Geographical Society. Even making allowance for the exaggeration characteristic of obituary statements by friends, it would seem Spottiswoode was an excellent committee person and chairman. Because the Royal Society treasurer usually chaired the council if the president were absent, it was important that he have committee skills as well as business acumen. In spite of the prompt action of Huxley and Tyndall, which was intended to preempt other nominations, there was open opposition to Spottiswoode. When Sabine explained to Gassiot that he was intending to take the presidency for only one further year, and appealed to his old friend to help smooth that year, Gassiot agreed to accept nomination. Gassiot was one of the 1847 reformers, an electrical researcher and wealthy wine merchant, who had initiated the Royal Society’s Scientific Relief Fund in 1859 to support scientific men who had fallen on hard times. He was both a competent businessman and sensitive to the changing status of scientific men. He and Sabine had supported Tyndall in his earliest years in British science, but Tyndall did not allow past loyalties to constrain him. Busk and Tyndall colluded against Gassiot and Sabine. Gassiot wrote to Busk “in confidence” explaining his change of mind; Busk told Tyndall; and Tyndall wrote a disingenuous letter to Gassiot trying to persuade 270

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him to withdraw. According to Tyndall, “some distinguished Fel­lows of the Royal Society” (translated: Huxley and the X Club) had spoken to him about a replacement for Miller, suggesting first Spottiswoode and later Lubbock (the politic reordering allowed Tyndall to present himself as following the initiative of others); he was supporting Spottiswoode only because “intimate friends” of Gassiot (that is, one friend, Busk) had assured him that Gassiot did not want the position (as if he would otherwise have left the position to Gassiot). Instead of backing down Gassiot calmly replied that he would accept the council decision as to what was best for the society. With irony-­laden politeness, Gassiot gave permission for Tyndall to see (and circulate if he wished) the private letter he had written Busk and firmly closed the correspondence: but “let you and me have no further correspondence about it.”124 Conflict became public at the council meeting of 27 October 1870 when Sabine nominated Gassiot and Tyndall nominated Spottiswoode for the treasurership. Tyndall spoke of the need for younger men—­“new blood”—­on the council and argued against delaying this generational change for another year. When the vote was taken the fourteen council members present split evenly. Alexander Williamson of University College added to the unease of the president’s friends when he proposed that the council take notice of an 1848 resolution that the term of the president be limited to four years. Sabine, who had already served nine years, then declined nomination, and the council adjourned. Council reconvened a week later to seek some resolution. By then Sabine had withdrawn his resignation, having been assured that Spottiswoode would be able to work closely with him. After what was privately described as “a rude scene,” Sabine was nominated president and Spottiswoode treasurer. Sabine absented himself from the council meetings, leaving the chair to Spottiswoode. Gassiot—­reliable, generous, and gentlemanly—­ was so distressed by “the imputation that he coveted the post” that he published an account defending himself.125 He looked ill for months. Hooker was not active in this campaign and he might not have approved of its harshness. In Hooker’s opinion Sabine’s “really great sci­ entific merits” and “his indomitable perseverance” were insufficiently appreciated.126 Hooker was appreciative, because, without Sabine’s persevering lobbying, the Ross Antarctic Expedition, which laid the foundations for his own scientific career, might never have taken place.127 Given Hooker’s general insistence on respect for scientific elders, he might have deferred to Sabine’s wishes for one year. The following year the Club members were heavily involved in the election of Sabine’s successor. The meetings at which the presidential 271

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position was discussed were chaired by Spottiswoode. William Grove, Lord Salisbury, and Lord Rosse had all been mentioned for the presidency. Many fellows preferred a nobleman as president. The X-­men however sought an active researcher, and at the X Club meeting of March 1871 agreed to propose Airy, whom Tyndall had sounded two years earlier, as next president. Although almost as old as Sabine and also a representative of the physical sciences, Airy had the advantage that he was willing to take a limited-­term presidency. Airy was neither an aristocrat nor wealthy; he was dependent upon his Astronomer Royal salary; moreover, he was a critic of Sabine and probably happy to assist in unseating him. It was probably also relevant to the X-­members that Airy had been willing to sign the memorial in support of Essays and Reviews. The status of a “royal” position of two-­centuries’ standing may have made him acceptable to fellows of more traditional values.128 In mid-­March the council invited Airy to accept nomination as the next president and, because he had intimated that his financial resources were insufficient to maintain the social obligations of the office, resolved that in future the soirées would not be at the expense of the president. While the appointment was in process, Airy made further requests for financial assistance, which made “an unfavourable impression” on some council members.129 Gentlemen did not show such concern about money. The choice of Airy was a compromise even though the decision was unanimous. “Mr. Stokes dreads Huxley’s being President” (the assistant secretary reported) “and so accepts Airy.”130 Airy was going deaf, which limited his effectiveness in the chair. In Hirst’s opinion: He conducted business well on the whole but being deaf, he could not consult with Council as much as a President should do. It was jokingly remarked that “our new President was deaf on both sides, our Senior Secretary deaf on one side, and blind on the other and our Junior Secretary generally dumb.”131

William Sharpey, the aging senior secretary, retired the following year; Airy spent only two years as president; the notably silent junior secretary, G. G. Stokes, stayed on to become president, but only after twice being sidelined by the X Club and its allies. Almost a year before his retirement Sharpey approached Huxley about taking his place as biological secretary. Huxley was willing to be nominated—­Sharpey reported to the assistant secretary in January 1872, and the news spread. Fellows calling in to the society’s rooms expressed their opinions to the assistant secretary, who acted as an informal polling officer. Only in May was the position mentioned in the council 272

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minutes when Busk gave notice that at the next council meeting he would move for Huxley’s nomination as secretary. In June Busk moved and Hirst seconded Huxley’s nomination. Fellows continued to express their opinions to the assistant secretary: “Dr. Beale delivered himself of a growl”; “Mr. Busk and Mr. Savory express their full satisfaction.” There was no formal opposition and Huxley was elected unanimously at the 1872 anniversary meeting.132 Like Sharpey maneuvering for Huxley, the X-­members took early initiatives in their effort to install Hooker in the presidency. A year before the election the X Club discussed “whether the time has not come for bringing forward Hooker.”133 They moved quickly and effectively to forestall any other nomination. The Duke of Devonshire, chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and chair of the Royal Commission on “the Advancement of Science” then sitting, was mentioned as a potential president. Should his candidacy become formal it would be inappropriate to support an opponent. Hooker did not want the position, but framed it as his “clear duty” to accept. Duty, because the council’s wish was “well considered,” his scientific friends were unanimous, the botanists (again) regarded his acceptance “as a duty to their science,” and his relations thought he owed it to his father’s name.134 In late February 1873 the council resolved to ask Hooker to accept nomination as the next president. Richard Strachey, Hooker’s ex-­India friend, who had returned to Britain in 1871 after an engineering career that led from the Indian army to massive civil engineering projects, was collaborating closely with the X Club. He had warned Hooker of the feeling on council that “scientific” presidents should serve limited terms because they would not have time to give to the affairs of the society; Spottiswoode, as treasurer, wrote the formal invitation.135 The large number of fellows who wanted a nobleman had failed to organize early enough, but the strength of feeling on the council was such that only three-­quarters supported Hooker’s nomination. It was reported that the foreign secretary, W. H. Miller, resigned when Hooker was elected because he did not want Hooker as president.136 The reformers of 1847 had wanted presidents with both scientific standing and “worldly ability.” Noble presidents brought the advantage of ready access to government ministers through the House of Lords. When Hooker retired the chief obstacle to X Club schemes was the long-­ serving secretary G. G. Stokes, who held the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge. Keeping Stokes out of presidential office in 1878, and again in 1883, required great subtlety because he had scientific stature and had served the society conscientiously as secretary for over twenty years. He was reliable, hardworking, and scrupulously fair and careful in his 273

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refereeing of papers, but his administrative style was to attend to details rather than principles. Sabine had once commented privately that although Stokes’s scientific ability made him eminently suitable for the presidency, he had not “the governing faculty”;137 the joke about the junior secretary being dumb indicates his public persona. The X-­men and many other fellows feared that the society would stagnate under his leadership. Stokes, for example, supported the tradition of having a titled president: “For a combination of exalted social position with the highest moral and intellectual qualities the Duke of Devonshire stands pre-­eminent.”138 Negotiations over Hooker’s successor as president began in 1877, a year before the election. Stokes could have expected nomination as it was the turn of physical science for the presidency and he was the longest serving of the officers. However, Hooker and Huxley, president and junior secretary respectively, tried to put Stokes in a position where modesty demanded that he should disclaim interest. Stokes wrote to his father-­in-­law that Spottiswoode had “the advantage of a fortune which would enable him to show hospitality to distinguished foreign savants.”139 To Stokes, as also to Huxley, one of the advantages of his position as secretary was the salary of £200. The Cambridge professor, successor to Sir Isaac Newton in the Lucasian Chair, could not easily afford to take the presidency of the Royal Society because the social expectations of the position assumed independent wealth. In this context, Spottiswoode, member of the X Club, represented gentlemanly wealth and learning. Spottiswoode also had the advantage over Stokes that his supporters were politically astute. With Spottiswoode leaving the treasurer’s position, Lubbock was a potential replacement, but no one nominated him. Huxley, who had recommended him in 1870, and H. J. S. Smith, their Oxford colleague on the Devonshire Commission, agreed that Lubbock was too busy with banking and parliamentary business.140 John Evans, a wealthy paper manufacturer and antiquarian, was nominated, although from outside the X Club there were doubts that an antiquarian counted as sufficiently scientific for the modern Royal Society.141 The last significant election for X Club power was Huxley’s succession to Spottiswoode. When Spottiswoode died in office in mid-­1883, no X-­ men were officers of the society, Huxley having resigned as secretary in 1881. Michael Foster, who had succeeded Huxley as biological secretary in 1881, and John Evans, the treasurer since 1878, consulted Hooker, the only living past president, over the temporary vacancy. Hooker, unsurprisingly, preferred Huxley to Stokes, and Foster and Evans pressed Hux274

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ley to accept. A special council meeting, called for early July when the society was usually in recess, appointed Huxley as temporary president. Many urgent private consultations over the permanent position took place. There were at least four potential candidates: Evans, the treasurer, who was businesslike; Stokes, the senior secretary; Huxley, the ex-­ secretary; and Sir John Lubbock who, although he had not previously held office in the Royal Society, had scientific, social, and parliamentary standing. Younger fellows were putting their views to Foster, who pressured Huxley to stand. Some older fellows pressured Stokes to stand in order to keep Huxley out. It would have been appropriate for Huxley, as a biologist, to follow Spottiswoode, but he was overworked and had retired from the secretary’s position because he felt there could be a conflict of interest between his employment by government and the independence that the officers of the Royal Society should display in advising government. Hooker appealed to Huxley not to “throw aside all possibility of the Presidency. I regard the Society’s position as very critical.” He had consulted his wife, who told him he must not pressure Huxley, in consideration of his poor health. Huxley and Hooker made blunt assessments of their friends: “Lubbock won’t do” (Hooker promised to give his reasons in person), “Frankland won’t do,” Evans would be too hard to replace as treasurer. They would have liked to promote Tyndall but he had so many enemies he might lose an election, and he lacked judgment: “Johny would upset the coach in his first drive” in negotiations with government departments. Hooker suggested Huxley consult his wife: “these women have a curious 6th sense not given to men.”142 Huxley’s friend, Foster, played the major role in his nomination. With considerable political skill, Foster made it difficult for Stokes to say he wanted the position; gained the agreement of the other officers, Williamson and Evans, that Huxley was the better candidate; and presented Stokes with a fait accompli.143 Huxley was elected president in November 1883. In this succession of elections, the X Club was steadily less involved. At Spottiswoode’s election as treasurer in 1870 and Hooker’s election as president in 1873 the entire Club was involved. Sharpey, the senior secretary, took the initiative in Huxley’s election as secretary but both Busk and Hirst were active in the formal nomination process in 1872. By 1878, when Spottiswoode, rather than Stokes, followed Hooker in the chair of the society, X Club power was so extensive that it is not possible to distinguish X Club action from the traditional power of the officers of the Royal Society. The three officers who were X Club members made the decision.144 The X Club members were as confident as Sabine had been that they had the good of the society at heart. Five years on the 275

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4.4 William Spottiswoode, printer, mathematician, president of the British Association in 1878,

and about to become president of the Royal Society, described himself as “one outside the sphere of professional science.” In supporting Spottiswoode over Stokes for the Royal Society presidency, his X Club friends chose wealth, dignity, liberal principles, modest mathematical achievement, and amateur status over a retiring personality, conservatism, and mathematical brilliance. Source: Illustrated London News, 7 September 1878.

X Club, as club, was unimportant in the election process. When Spottiswoode died, younger men were rising to power in the Royal Society; Hooker was consulted as a past president; Hooker chose to consult Huxley but there was no Club discussion, and Huxley and Hooker could not have expressed their opinions of their friends without giving offense. 276

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Huxley’s election was a Pyrrhic victory for Foster and the X Club. Like some of the elderly and noble presidents of earlier decades, Huxley’s health was in decline. He offered his resignation in October 1884, before he went abroad on his doctor’s orders, but the council declined to accept and hoped he would return “invigorated.”145 On his return six months later he was still suffering bouts of severe depression. Huxley took the chair again, but the X Club was no longer a power bloc on the council. Frankland was active on Royal Society committees, Hooker served on the Soirée Committee and the Government Grant Committee, but the new initiatives were coming from Michael Foster, while Stokes continued his conscientious labors. Foster was promoting higher-­quality engravings in the Philosophical Transactions, smoking in the society’s room, free cigars at soirées, and a room for conversation and writing for fellows. When Huxley offered his resignation again in October 1885, the council accepted with “great regret” and resolved to ask Stokes to accept nomination. “This honour,” one congratulatory letter remarked, had been due to him “for several years past.”146 Hooker’s presidency had shifted the conventions. In 1878 Henry Smith of Oxford, Huxley’s colleague on the Devonshire Royal Commission, wrote that “the office would no longer in any way be suitable for our old chief, the Duke of Devonshire.”147 Stokes’s supporter in 1885 was taking for granted that scientific expertise was an essential criterion, although just twelve years earlier Stokes had identified “exalted so­cial position” and high moral and intellectual qualities as qualifying the duke for the position. The X-­members devoted enormous energy to gaining power in the Royal Society. It is less clear why they cared so much, and what they did with their power. The records are patchy, hypothetical questions about what would have happened had they not collaborated with one another are almost impossible to answer, but on the basis of surviving records four issues can be identified: they were concerned with representing the status and dignity of science; with ensuring respect for Darwin and controlling the interpretation of Darwinian theory; with giving advice to government; and with establishing the infrastructure of research—­that is, libraries, journals, indexes to the literature, access to equipment, and the collection and publication of systematic data. Ensuring a solid infrastructure for research was a concern they shared with the 1847 reformers and most fellows of their own generation. Both their conception of the status and dignity of science and their determination to defend Darwin distinguished them from many contemporaries. My suspicion is that their interest in advising government arose 277

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from their dissatisfaction with the influence of geologists (such as Murchison) and the earlier dominance of the physical scientists.148 Under their watch, naturalists were appointed to astronomical expeditions, and the enormously expensive oceanic Challenger expedition was carried through.149 The Royal Society, standing at the head of scientific societies, had a unique role as public representative of science. Therefore, the Royal Society, more than any other scientific society, had to be concerned with the symbolic significance of its actions. Most important, the Royal Society represented Science. The intellectual autonomy of science—­the “pure and free” science that the X Club was founded to defend—­was to be expressed through its institutional arrangements. To the X-­members, Science was not to be legitimated by aristocratic or church patronage, nor by commercial or industrial usefulness. Science, the activity of scientific research, was “the search for Truth.”150 Science, the result, was objective knowledge. Therein lay its honor and its legitimacy. In his person, the president of the Royal Society represented Science to British society, and he must therefore be eminent for his science. The noble presidents of midcentury had often been eminent in science, and the proposed Duke of Devonshire was an excellent administrator who did much to advance science by reforming science education, but the tradition of noble presidents gave the false impression that science itself was not enough. In the naturalistic worldview espoused by X Club members, science was its own legitimation. In the 1860s the president was expected to have both scientific eminence and “worldly ability.” Lord Rosse, a Royal Society president in the 1850s, and chair for many years of the BA’s parliamentary committee, stressed that there should be men on the council who knew how to approach civil servants and cabinet ministers. A president in the House of Lords was well placed for these tasks and gave the society “political weight.”151 This may have been pragmatism rather than deference, but Huxley interpreted it as “aristocratic flunkeyism.” He reminisced to Hooker, “When you and I were youngsters we thought it a great thing to put an end to the aristocratic flunkeyism which reigned in the Royal Society.” They used their considerable worldly abilities to establish the independent standing of Science. Under Hooker the presidency itself carried political weight, as Hooker described it to Huxley, “I found P.R.S. to be a great power with the ministers.”152 Under Hooker the Royal Society became more open to men of high scientific attainments but modest incomes, and less open to the highborn

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with only passing scientific interests. First, in 1873–­74 Hooker’s friend, Richard Strachey, spearheaded a campaign to limit the election of highborn gentlemen without scientific credentials. Previously, members of “the privileged classes,” defined as princes, peers, privy councilors, and some foreign princes, could be both nominated and elected to the society at the one meeting. Strachey initiated discussion over these privileges at a Philosophical Club meeting in March 1873, shortly after dining with the X Club. A special committee appointed the following year, the first year of Hooker’s presidency, recommended a drastic restriction of the privileged classes, entitled to instant election, to privy councillors and “Princes of the Blood Royal.”153 In a revealing move, at the same time as he was squeezing out the privileged classes, Hooker offered nomination as FRS to his friend, the philosophical representative of science, Herbert Spencer. Spencer turned down nomination; he felt that the society should have nominated him earlier when it would have been useful to his career. Hooker and Huxley exchanged indignant letters. Spencer did not understand: the FRS was an acknowledgment of achievement, not for promotion purposes. “Our dear Diogenes not only insists upon [living] in his own tub, but constructs that habitation out of the thorniest materials he can lay his hand upon.”154 Clearly, Hooker’s earlier criticism of Spencer had waned; his praise for Spencer in his 1868 BA address was not an aberration; in these middle years he respected Spencer. Ten years later Spencer was a different story, but here we stay with the Royal Society. Hooker addressed the nature of the fellowship again, in the last year of his presidency, when a reduction of the annual fee and the removal of the entrance fee made the society more open to poor men. This major initiative had its origins in an investigation into the rising expenditures of the society. A Finance Committee, chaired by Spottiswoode, recommended an increase in fees—­from £4 to £5, but this was unacceptable to Hooker. The “President and officers” requested that the report be reconsidered, and the committee reconvened with Hooker in the chair. The result was a recommendation, approved by the council, “That a fund called the ‘Publication Fund’ be formed for defraying the expenses of the Society’s publications.” Another committee was established and, with Hooker again in the chair, recommended that the entrance fee, previously £10, be abolished and that the annual fee be reduced to £3.155 Hooker, who was personally canvassing to raise the required endowment of £10,000, reported, in his final presidential address of 30 November 1878, that the total had been raised.156 Hooker’s personal

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life history and his acquaintance with many local botanists made him sensitive to the financial stringencies of many scientific men. His friend, the clergyman-­botanist and schoolmaster Miles Berkeley, was elected FRS the following year at age seventy-­six.157 The fee reduction, a major achievement of Hooker’s presidency, was an important step following on from the 1847 reforms in making “FRS” a less ambiguous sign of scientific eminence. Increasingly, election as FRS was a scientific honor. Some scientific men thought the society was becoming too exclusive and proposed increasing the number elected annually. This proposal was rejected under Hooker’s presidency.158 The Royal Society had been “intellectually inclusive, but socially exclusive” under Banks, now it was socially inclusive and intellectually exclusive.159 Other initiatives of Hooker’s presidency show a concern with the relationship between science and its publics. Under Hooker notices about elections and other Royal Society affairs were “communicated to the public papers.” This cut down gossip but also implied that the Royal Society was a public institution rather than a private club.160 Legally the Royal Society was a private body, but in Hooker’s mind the Royal Society had a responsibility to represent science to the public. Not that the public was to participate in Royal Society affairs. The Royal Society, unlike the British Association, was to be admired from afar. A proposal of 1867 that the public be invited to ordinary meetings of the Royal Society had been rejected by the council.161 Hooker’s interest in the soirées of the society, both during and after his presidency, exhibits his concern with reputation and public image. Under Hooker the society’s soirées remained elite affairs, but they were reported to the public. The soirées are revealing of the financial affairs and social role of the Royal Society and its presidents. The Soirée Committee was set up in 1871 when Airy became president and, for the first time, the society was to pay for the soirées, instead of their being the president’s soirée at the president’s expense. Earlier in the century there had been as many as four soirées a year, and the extensive obligations to entertain fellows and foreign guests had been a burden, even on wealthy presidents. Thus, one reason against Stokes being president, in Sabine’s eyes, had been that “his pecuniary sources are insufficient.”162 Hooker entertained at Kew, making use of the splendid gardens. Huxley’s solution, on accepting the presidency, was to “give greater responsibilities to the vice-­presidents.”163 The soirées represented a gentlemanly tradition in science in which leading men of science had large houses and matching incomes.

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Under Hooker the dignity of the soirées was maintained but efforts were made to reduce costs and diversify audiences. In 1875 the Soirée Committee, chaired by Hooker, recommended that in addition to the annual soirée, at which about five hundred gentlemen viewed scientific instruments and supped on tea, coffee, wine, and ices, there be two simpler receptions to which fellows could bring guests. Then, in 1876 the Soirée Committee recommended that there be a conversazione to which ladies might be invited. This daring departure from tradition was to be paid for by the society, but the invitations were to be sent out in the name of the president only. The experiment was repeated in 1877 but, because the society was then in a state of financial stringency, wealthy members of the Soirée Committee guaranteed to cover the expenses.164 From 1878 the ladies’ conversazione became an annual event for which the society paid, as it paid for the two receptions and the more elaborate annual soirée. Hooker was concerned that these events be marked by both social dignity and scientific seriousness. He argued against a conversazione being held at South Kensington in conjunction with the Loan Collection of Scientific Instruments because the guest list would be large. In Hooker’s opinion, Royal Society conversaziones should be “very select” and invitations limited to “persons (whether ladies or gentlemen) who have decided scientific proclivities or are connected with scientific workers by close ties.”165 The public, however, was expected to admire from afar, and the Soirée Committee was always interested in what the newspapers reported of its soirées. Hooker remained on the Soirée Committee from its establishment in 1871 to the early years of Stokes’s presidency. This seems a somewhat frivolous interest for someone who always pleaded the priority of research. When Hooker retired from the presidency in 1878, he withdrew from the council and most of its committees, the exceptions being the Government Grant Committee and the Soirée Committee. Why he was so concerned is unclear. Perhaps he did not trust his successors to ensure that conversaziones and receptions remained “very select”; perhaps, as Richard Bellon suggests, it shows his commitment to the importance of “friendly contact” among the scientific men.166 Little has been said here of the scientific activity of the X Club members in the Royal Society. Most of their collaborative activity was concerned with symbolic meanings and scientific organization. As individuals, they were active in the more scientific work of the society. Busk, in particular, was a thorough referee. They were not pushing Darwinian issues in the society because, as noted previously, the Royal Society wanted empirical

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papers containing “new facts,” rather than new theories (judged “speculations”) about old facts. There were just two areas in which the X-­men acted to promote or control discussions related to transmutation and evolution. In the Philosophical Club of the Royal Society different conventions of acceptability operated and X Club members initiated discussion on topics related to human prehistory.167 Although Huxley often won debates by brilliance and cunning, he occasionally resorted to the naked use of power, most notably over spontaneous generation. As discussed in regard to Huxley’s 1870 British Association address, in the 1870s Tyndall and Huxley were defending the germ theory of Louis Pasteur and attacking those local scientific men who argued that spontaneous generation was taking place in the present. Charles Bastian, the leading proponent of spontaneous generation, suspected that Huxley used his inside position as Royal Society secretary to delay, reject, or edit his manuscripts. The extent of Huxley’s responsibility is hard to determine. The chief problem Bastian faced was that referees, almost all of whom were associates of Huxley or Tyndall, took interminable times to report on his papers, while contributions by Tyndall and other opponents of spontaneous generation were rapidly refereed and accepted. In general, Stokes, although mathematical secretary, oversaw all the refereeing for the Philosophical Transactions. Huxley admitted to introducing editorial changes in a Bastian paper (and the Royal Society Council supported him), but to what extent he was responsible for the choice of referees and the balance of decision making is unclear.168 Thus, it appears that it was the networks of influence and loyalty, as much as naked use of power, that hindered Bastian getting a fair hearing. The X Club’s last major promotion of Darwin through the Royal Society was getting Darwin’s body buried in Westminster Abbey. This was a result of coordinated action by Spottiswoode, in his role as president of the Royal Society, Lubbock as parliamentary representative of science, and Francis Galton, who could claim to represent the Darwin family. The request to the dean of Westminster for an Abbey burial had to come from the president of the Royal Society; Lubbock collected signatures from a range of parliamentary colleagues on a Friday afternoon; Francis Galton, a Darwin cousin and a friend of Spottiswoode, Hooker, and Tyndall, negotiated with the family. Hooker, who was close to the family, had little enthusiasm for public ceremonial. James Moore’s argument, that the secularizing men of science “needed” Darwin as a new model of middle-­class saintliness, is given more empirical content by Dawson’s identification of the common accusation that naturalistic science

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implied atheism, and atheism brought immorality. Darwin’s impartiality, moderation, patient industry, calmness, and domestic happiness, so much praised, implied that evolutionary theory did not lead to immorality. Darwin’s burial in Westminster Abbey was the most remarkable achievement of Spottiswoode’s presidency. The X Club was lucky that Darwin died when one of their number was president, for if Stokes had been president Darwin would not lie in Westminster Abbey. In addition to this grand symbolic achievement, Spottiswoode’s pres­ idency was marked by efficient administration. The needs of active researchers for communicating results and establishing priority were recognized. Papers were not allowed to accumulate, saved for some future empty day, but were read and published more rapidly. The secretaries summarized papers when there were too many on the list, leading to more intelligent and pertinent discussion (the official reason given in Spottiswoode’s anniversary address) but also adapting them to the capacities and interests of unscientific fellows (mentioned only in private). Spottiswoode was sensitive to the changing social environment. He recommended that meetings be moved from evenings to late afternoon to take account of the increasing distances that fellows traveled to their homes.169 These changes represented the interests of scientific workers, but Spottiswoode also accepted the philanthropic responsibilities of traditional wealth. De le Rue, Spottiswoode, and William (Wilhelm) Siemens (of the telegraph manufacturing company) each contributed £500 to Hooker’s Donation Fund; Spottiswoode and Siemens offered contributions toward an electric lighting system for the society’s rooms.170 Spottiswoode was remembered for his administrative skills. At the council meeting after his death, his “unfailing courtesy, judgement and discretion” were recalled.171 In their emphasis on the independent status of science, and in their promotion of Darwin, the X-­men differed from some other scientific men. But they were also active in uncontroversial projects. Like most of their fellows they were committed to building the infrastructure for scientific research. There is no suggestion in the extant records that the X-­men represented a lobby group in either the Library Committee or the Government Grant Committee, and it took no special strategies to get them elected. Rather, they were elected because they were willing to do the work and because, living in London, they could attend meetings regularly. They were reelected because they turned up and did their share of the work. The X-­men served long years on the Library Committee, overseeing the purchase of books, supervising the preparation of the

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society’s Catalogue of Scientific Papers, and deciding with which societies to exchange publications. By their work on uncontroversial issues, and their positions in lesser societies, they established their credentials as reliable committee men and as potential nominees for positions of greater responsibility and power. Given this record of the collusion and achievement by the X-­men in the Royal Society, we can conclude that Huxley’s care to avoid “the appearance of desiring to exert any special influence” arose not from innocence but from guilt. Huxley, elected biological secretary at the end of 1872, joined Spottiswoode, who had been treasurer for two years, and Busk, Hirst, and Hooker who were also on the council in 1872–­73. At the end of 1873, through X Club efforts, and against the wishes of many fellows who wanted a noble president, Hooker was elected president. For five years, Hooker was president, Huxley biological secretary, and Spottiswoode treasurer; then for another three years Spottiswoode was president, Huxley secretary, and another three or four X Club members and close allies were on the council. This was an enormous accumulation of power in a small group. The chief outcomes of this power were to make the Royal Society more open to poorer men and less open to the titled and to get Darwin buried in Westminster Abbey. The chief principle for which they inconsistently stood was the independent dignity and authority of science. Science did not need legitimation by any other, supposedly higher, authority; no one needed to vouch for it on cultural, religious, or commercial grounds. Therefore, the president of the Royal Society should represent Science alone. However, in choosing Spottiswoode over Stokes as president, they chose a wealthy businessman of moderate mathematical achievement over a poor Cambridge professor of outstanding mathematical achievement. Perhaps it was mere personal friendship when they campaigned for Spottiswoode over Stokes, but the vigor of their persistent opposition to Stokes suggests to me that there was more at stake and that they were reacting, overreacting one could say, to Stokes’s religious and political conservatism. Probably, to some extent, they were guided by the traditional criteria of “worldly ability,” which Stokes lacked. Michael Foster summed up his later presidency as “not of the initiative kind.”172 In 1883, although Huxley was elected to the presidency, the X Club as a lobby group was in decline; its power came from the authority of individual members rather than from intense networking and consultation within the group. But for almost twenty years they had worked to control the symbols of scientific attainment as represented by the fellowship, the soirées, and the presidency of the Royal Society. 284

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4.5 “Some of the most distinguished fellows” of the Royal Society, 1880s. Four X Club mem­

bers are included in this composite portrait: Huxley and Tyndall in front center, Hooker seated second from left, and Frankland standing directly behind Owen. Some of their opponents are equally prominent. Owen in the front, center right, is at least as conspicu­ ous as Huxley and Tyndall; Stokes, seated far left, is more prominent than Hooker. Stokes is identified as president, hence the compilation dates from 1886–­90, after Spottiswoode’s death. Source: Wellcome Library, London.

4.4 Men of Weight, of Craft, and of Party The accumulated complaints, lobbies, and petty politics presented in this chapter throw a revealing light on the mundane operation of Victorian learned societies. The governance structure was similar in most societies.173 Officers served long terms and had heavy responsibilities, especially secretaries, who were usually responsible for publications as well as for correspondence. When dissatisfaction was expressed over excessive length of service, and hence excessive power, it was usually directed at presidents and council members rather than at secretaries and treasurers, whose work, it seems, was recognized and appreciated. Societies learned from one another. When, at last, disgruntled members of the conservative Linnean Society proposed limits on the time that members of the council served, they copied those introduced decades earlier by the Royal Society. 285

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Within the Royal Society the X Club accepted some electoral conventions and succeeded in changing others. They accepted the strict limitation on the number of fellows elected, which, as the numbers of nominations increased, ensured that the fellowship increasingly became a mark of elite status in science. Men of business continued to be chosen as treasurers—­and men of business who had standing as men of science could be found—­but social standing and wealth were no longer requirements for the presidency. After decades of controversy, from the 1830s to the 1870s, and under generations of reformers, of whom the X-­men were the most recent, it was agreed that the president of the society should be chosen for his scientific standing. The British Association, with its national and itinerant mode of op­ eration, had an entirely different organizational structure from the metropolitan societies. In the BA, there were long-­term and short-­term locations of organizational authority. In the long term, the trustees and semipermanent officers, both present and past, had enormous power as they served indefinitely on the council. Murchison, Sabine, and Egerton, trustees in the 1860s and 1870s, held positions of authority in many organizations and each was the focus of complaints by X Club members at various times. If Spottiswoode had lived longer the X Club might have held long-­term power in the British Association. Hirst and Lubbock, who remained on the General Committee, were less ideologically driven. Their alliance resulted in an act of mutual promotion: Hirst nominated Lubbock as president of the 1881 anniversary meeting. In earlier years, the combination of lecturing ability and administrative position brought short-­term power to the friends. They occupied many important symbolic positions in the decade from the mid-­1860s to mid-­ 1870s. Controversy flourished at the British Association. Although London learned societies kept discussion focused on facts rather than “speculations,” British Association custom permitted wide-­ranging disputes in the sections, especially over “Darwinism” in Section D. Nevertheless, there were unspoken constraints. Comparison with other BA lectures and addresses has shown that Tyndall’s Belfast address was unusual in that it did not have a scientific, informational core. Many addresses included political, philosophical, and religious perorations; Tyndall’s Belfast address was controversial not only because his conclusions were extremely unorthodox, but also because the entire address was devoted to metaphysical argument. Murchison and Egerton were among the inadequate trustees of the British Museum who had evoked Hooker’s frustration at the political weakness of the naturalists in 1858: we have no “man of weight or of 286

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craft.” The studies of this chapter show that by the 1870s the X Club members had become men of weight, of craft, and of party. Most notably they were men of craft. The electioneering skills they exhibited in nominating and electing one another are impressive. They acted quickly, before others could organize in opposition or before other nominations were rumored. They exchanged confidential information—­and their diverse networks gave them usefully diverse sources of such information. They used allies when they did not want to be seen as initiators. Through the strength of their networks, opponents were often isolated. They stacked committees. In later years, when their authority was more widely established and some of their viewpoints more widely accepted, they were often sleeping members of councils, attending, it would seem, only if called upon. In the British Association, most committees were too large to be stacked, but the X-­men nominated one another and were nominated by others for positions that brought power or status, whether semipermanent committee positions or annual, public positions. To some extent they obtained these positions by hard work competently performed in previous positions, but, clearly, their effectiveness required both craftiness and close networking. By the 1860s X Club members, most notably Hooker and Lubbock, were also men of “weight.” Weight indicated, metaphorically, that one man counted for more than another man. Weight could come from birth, from accumulated positions, and from personal qualities such as dignity and grace, the gentlemanly manners that Endersby emphasizes. Airy would be “genial,” the Royal Society’s assistant secretary expected, but he lacked Sir Edward’s “grace and manner.”174 Hooker was the front man put up first by his X-­brothers both for the BA presidency in 1868 and the Royal Society presidency in 1873. Hooker was the most eminent of contemporary British botanists, but his scientific reputation did not by itself make him electable, especially to the Royal Society presidency in 1873, when many fellows still desired to be represented by a noble president. But the Hooker name, his father’s knighthood, his own position as director of the “Royal” Botanic Gardens, his gentlemanly demeanor (even if he also was not as gracious as Sabine), and the loyal support from botanists delighted at the recognition of their science, all helped to gain Hooker the presidency. Thus, although some council members abstained from supporting Hooker’s nomination, they did not set up a candidate in opposition. Lubbock had weight, as Huxley advised Tyndall in 1870, Lubbock carried greater weight than Spottiswoode. Lubbock was Sir John. Referring to him as Lubbock, as conventional in modern history writing, 287

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hides his status. In all formal Victorian contexts, he was “Sir John.” It was a modest title, but when his parliamentary position in the House of Commons, his father’s reputation as a reforming treasurer of the Royal Society, his own early reputation as a naturalist of promise, and his position in the vanguard of prehistoric archaeologists in the early 1860s were added, Lubbock had weight. He would be listened to with respect. Over time Lubbock’s reputation among his friends declined. Although Hooker wanted him in the presidency of the Linnean Society, his first reaction in 1883 was that Lubbock would not do for the Royal Society presidency. Spottiswoode also had weight, arising from the gentlemanly standing of his family, his Balliol connections, and, perhaps, his business success. His dignity and efficiency in committees increased his standing over time. He had proved his worth in many lesser societies (and at the Royal Institution, as will be discussed in chapter 6) before being elected treasurer and then president of the Royal Society. He was elected not only because the X Club manipulated Stokes out of the presidency, but also because others found him competent and dignified. The positions of Huxley and Tyndall in scientific societies were significantly different. The public-­at-­large often conflated them: both were brilliant lecturers, of modest social origins, with controversial opinions on religious topics. But Huxley had administrative and leadership capacities that Tyndall lacked. Huxley clearly had “the governing faculty.” Max Müller and Murchison, neither of whom was ideologically close to Huxley, appealed to him to take action over the scandal of the Anthropological Society. Stokes dreaded Huxley being president of the Royal Society because he recognized that it was likely. Through the many examples here, Huxley appears as a brilliant speech maker and effective negotiator. By the mid-­1860s the witty controversialist, whom Hooker so often criticized for ungentlemanly manners, was widely respected. Hooker reported to Darwin after the 1868 BA meeting that Huxley “made a sad mess of it by twice offending the clergy, totally without cause or warrant,—­once at the Prehisto[ry] Congress, when he likened them to Bulls of Basan [a biblical allusion to those who attack God’s people] and again at the Red Lion Club, when they got up and left the room!”175 Others, even traditional gentlemen like Murchison, were prepared to overlook such improprieties. Huxley’s brilliance made him useful to many causes; allies needed him. Tyndall, by contrast, became a liability in the 1870s, even to his most loyal friends. Tyndall’s offensive insults against Tait, followed by the ill-­judged Belfast address, and the impatient outbursts that punctuated his advice to government depart288

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ments, demonstrated lack of judgment. He was less crafty than Huxley and, in their Royal Society campaign, unwisely allowed Gassiot to infer that Busk had not kept his confidence. Busk, Hirst, and Frankland took less conspicuous roles in scientific societies. Busk and Hirst were reliable administrators, Busk being remarkably willing to take up arduous secretarial and editorial positions. Busk did not have the persona needed for such public roles as president of the British Association or the Royal Society, but he had the scientific and social status to act as president of lesser societies. Moreover, he was a peacemaker, acceptable, most notably, to both sides as chair of the meetings held to resolve disagreements in the Linnean Society. Hirst was similarly hardworking and obliging (as becomes clear in the next chapter).176 Frankland also appears seldom in the campaigns described here. He was on the Royal Society Council in the period of frustration in the mid-­1860s and from 1895 to 1899, when the era of X Club power was over, he occupied the high-­status position of foreign secretary. His biographer suggests that Frankland’s illegitimacy held him back from public positions. The X Club members were also men of party, or “persons united in maintaining a cause.”177 They worked closely together until the early 1880s, and often drew others into their scheming. Most notably in this chapter, Richard Strachey has appeared in two contexts, as a supporter of Hooker in the Linnean controversy of 1874 and in the Royal Society in 1873–­74, arguing that the election of princes and peers be strictly limited and supporting Hooker’s election to the chair. Like so many of Hooker’s friends, Strachey was an old India-­hand. When, at the end of 1874, Hooker suggested that the X Club consider adding a tenth member, he proposed Strachey, his loyal supporter in two societies. Spencer proposed Francis Galton who had been allied with the X Club in the administration of the British Association and was developing his research on human heredity. The decision was delayed to the next meeting; when Hooker, whose wife had died, was absent, the issue dropped off the agenda.178 The most difficult question concerning the X Club is to identify the cause or objectives for which they worked. Although they never explicitly formulated a program or set objectives, they clearly had some shared objectives, but these were multifaceted and not easily summarized, nor were they always specified in advance. Hooker’s campaign to reduce the Royal Society fees began only after a committee chaired by Spottiswoode recommended raising the fees. Hooker told the society that he had long wished to see a reduction in fees,179 but he cannot have communicated 289

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this aim to Spottiswoode; nor did Spottiswoode have Hooker’s sensitivity to the financial stringencies of others. As many of the examples of this chapter illustrate, the X Club members were concerned with the public representation of science. Maintaining public respect required personal dignity, politeness in mutual exchange, an avoidance of extreme positions, and an element of distance from the hoi polloi. The ASL failed on most grounds. Among themselves there were clear differences of degree in the application of these principles, especially when one set of principles conflicted with another. Their most noteworthy emphasis, which clearly divided them from many contemporaries, was that science needed no external validation, whether from religious, social, or commercial authority. This was closely related to their intellectual agenda, discussed more fully in chapter 6, that science be fully naturalistic. Their ideals were sometimes in conflict, most notably over the presidential nomination for the Royal Society in 1878. They were not always consistent. Hooker’s gentlemanly deference at times conflicted with his reforming zeal. He showed extreme distrust of Murchison in the 1850s, but at other times he expected younger men to show respect for those whom he regarded as grand old men of science. In contrast, when Tyndall led the campaign for change in the Royal Society—­which led to Hooker’s election as president—­he refused to delay in order to show respect for Sabine and Gassiot, patrons to whom he owed personal loyalty. Avoiding extreme positions, especially on controversial political and religious issues, left much room for disagreement. Tyndall and Huxley often thought that speaking out was necessary when others, such as Hooker and Lubbock, thought discretion more desirable. From the 1850s to the 1880s quality and efficiency in scientific pub­ lishing was a preoccupation of the X-­men, perhaps the only preoccu­ pation that can be identified with the conventional understanding of professionalization. This process needs to be understood in terms of contemporary goals. They wanted to be aware of relevant articles, hence bibliographies were needed. Next, they had to have easy access to the journals; this required more narrowly focused specialist journals, to which they could subscribe, and good libraries in which they could find those journals to which they could not subscribe. They needed help with reading and accessing foreign works: book reviews, abstracts, translations, and, again, good libraries. They wanted rapid publication—­in order to establish their own priority, but also to be up to date with the work of other researchers. They wanted high-­quality illustrations that would be informative for experts. These were not controversial party 290

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principles, although Hooker’s preoccupation with editing standards was extreme.180 Hooker’s criticisms—­of publication standards, of Huxley’s manners, and, later, of Lubbock’s science—­should be taken with grains of salt. It is clear here and in chapter 3 that others, even those, like Darwin and Murchison, committed to gentlemanly traditions, did not share his judgments. Herschel, Lyell, and many men of the preceding generation were almost as naturalistic and secular as Huxley and Tyndall in their personal opinions, but, partly because it caused offense and partly because it was ineffective, they did not attack orthodox beliefs directly. Herschel thought old forms should be allowed to drift away (chapter 3.3 above). Lyell argued that in his slow and partial acceptance of Darwin’s Origin he would carry more people with him than Lubbock, whose arguments were less persuasive because he did not feel the problems,181 but Lyell praised Tyndall’s fearless speaking out in the Belfast address. The composite portrait of the Royal Society (figure 4.5) places Huxley and Tyndall center stage, alongside Owen, in spite of the unnecessary offense they gave to others. In later years, there were more cracks in the X Club party. In the 1860s and 1870s they stood for a fully naturalistic science, for the independent authority of science without deference to other social authorities, for efficiency in publishing, and in contradictory ways for respectable, gentlemanly science.

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Public Money and the Public Good “Government should do only what private initiative cannot do.” This principle, repeated by numerous witnesses before the Devonshire Commission on “Scientific Instruction and the Advancement of Science,” made proper obeisance toward laissez-­faire while asserting that some desirable objectives could not be achieved by private initiative. John Stuart Mill’s classic midcentury statement on the limitations of laissez faire also allowed exceptions: “Laisser-­faire, in short, should be the general practice: every departure from it, unless required by some great good, is a certain evil.”1 Few Victorians disagreed with the principle. The application of the principle was wide open to debate. Many men of science were proud of the independence of English science, proud that so much had been achieved through private initiative and voluntary effort. Historiographic interest, though, has focused on the lobbyists for increased state support, on Charles Babbage and the decline of science movement in the 1830s, and on Alexander Strange, Lyon Playfair, and other advocates of “endowment” whose lobbying in the late 1860s led to the appointment of the Royal Commission on Scientific Instruction and the Advancement of Science. The lobbyists were noisy. and historians have tended to accept that their demands, even if self-­ interested, were warranted in the circumstances. The X Club has often been placed in the vanguard of such campaigns for increased state support for scientific research and science education.2 The chief findings of this chapter are that, while 292

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the majority of the X Club members were enthusiasts for the expansion of science education at all levels of the curriculum, they were not leading supporters of state aid. Hooker and Tyndall were skeptical about the benefits of government support, and Huxley, when part of the British Association deputation lobbying for a Royal Commission of inquiry, said that he disagreed with many of his colleagues, and “avowed that, personally[,] he was not in favour of direct aid to scientific education from the State.”3 This counters a generation of X Club historiography. Careful re-­reading and interpretation are required. As a counterbalance to the focus on reformers, there is an alternative, overlooked historiography, which avoids the unhelpful dichotomy of reformers wanting more money versus reluctant laissez-­faire governments and counters the tendency to judge, from the vantage point of later centuries, that Victorian support for science was inadequate. Four mutually reinforcing essays, published together under the title of The Patronage of Science (1976), avoid the Whiggishness that dominates many allusions to the funding of science in the Victorian era. Roy MacLeod warns historians to be wary of the accounts of lobbyists: our analyses must not assume “that the case for supporting science was manifestly clear to anyone who took the trouble to consider it.” State support was not as miserly as the lobbyists implied, and there were many modes of support intermediate between the individual and the state. William Brock counters the assumption that the German system of state support, which the lobbyists idealized, was the only effective system for the support of science. Britain had a wide “spectrum of science patronage,” he emphasizes, which included wealthy private individuals, publishers, proprietorial institutions, and scientific societies in addition to the state. Brock and MacLeod identify a range of government departments that supported scientific activity, most especially the Treasury, the Admiralty, and the War Department. Donald Cardwell shows that Manchester science was effectively supported by local industry for the entire Victorian period. Moreover, Jack Morrell argues that when compared with the tortuous legal system and the problems of public health the support of science was a minor public issue.4 Although Peter Alter, in his later account of science and the British state, acknowledges the variety of patronage in the mid-­Victorian period, his analysis is undermined by the Whiggish assumption that “a public science policy involving systematic encouragement of science based on long-­term planning” is a good thing; he aims to explain how such a policy came about. His view of the Victorian situation is overdependent on the complaints of the loudest lobbyists (who showed “awareness of 293

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crisis”), thus he overlooks the variety of opinion among lobbyists and the actual use of science in government departments.5 On science education the historiography is more extensive but, of necessity, fragmented, as was the education itself. Because education in science was spread across diverse institutions and directed to a great variety of strategic, economic, and social goals there was no system for the historian to investigate. A. S. Bishop’s excellent study of the development of educational administration in Victorian Britain follows three different organizational structures that were gradually integrated.6 For science there were a host of independent institutions and networks. The fortunes of the public institutions with which X Club members were most closely involved—­the Department of Science and Art, the School of Mines, the Geological Survey, and such lesser-­known institutions as the schools of naval architecture—­were linked to the development of South Kensington in the aftermath of the Great Exhibition (see figure 5.1). Among the many studies of the art institutions at South Kensington that were published during the 2001 sesquicentenary of the exhibition, Bonython and Burton’s biography of Henry Cole is especially useful,7 but there is no overview of the science side of South Kensington and no modern biography of Lyon Playfair, Cole’s initial partner, representing science, at the Department of Science and Art. There is no study, modern or otherwise, of the Devonshire Commission, which inquired into the state of science education and scientific research a decade on from the establishment of South Kensington as a site for science and art. Given the daunting size of the volumes of evidence, it is not surprising that few scholars have attempted to read beyond the eight official reports of the commission. Those that do—­the chapter by Jack Meadows in his study of Norman Lockyer and a few pages in Cardwell’s account of the “organi­ sation of science” in England—­provide insight into the extent of agreement or disagreement among scientific men on the issues canvassed. Bernard Lightman identifies further subtleties through his examination of both the evidence given and questions asked by Huxley (who was one of the commissioners). Further, broad, systematically comparative studies are needed.8 Maurice Crosland’s recent study of the funding of science before 1850 is a valuable addition to the limited literature on science and the Victorian state. He argues for putting less emphasis on Babbage and “declinist” arguments and more on David Brewster and Scottish lobbies for “reform.” He emphasizes that different attitudes were taken toward funding individual investigators, institutions, and projects. The Scots, with their

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more democratic traditions, wanted support for persons, through pensions for example. The English were deeply ambivalent over pensions, which, to them, implied loss of gentlemanly independence; economic independence, they believed, was required for intellectual and political independence.9 Brewster (of Edinburgh) wanted pensions that would enable researchers without scientific employment or private wealth to continue their work; Babbage, the wealthy Londoner, wanted grants to support projects, specifically, the building of his calculating machine.10 British governments had long been willing to give large one-­off grants for projects, most notably projects with strategic or imperial benefits; by contrast, they were reluctant to commit to any recurrent funding of institutions. At midcentury the government made the unprecedented step of offering, through the Royal Society, £1,000 per year to assist individual researchers with the purchase of materials and equipment for specific projects. The British Association, although initiated as a reforming body, continued this kind of funding. It gave large grants to assist the researches of its own members, usually to those who were already eminent. Crosland’s nuanced distinctions between different kinds of support and different Scots/English preoccupations can be followed into the post-­1850 period. In the early 1870s witnesses before the Devonshire Commission were no longer satisfied with the support of projects; the chief concern was the support of institutions, with many witnesses ambivalent over the support of individual persons. How could scientific institutions be best supported, should government provide buildings or ongoing salaries, or both? Was it appropriate to pay salaries to outstanding researchers, or was more modest assistance with the costs of research a more “efficient” use of government money? And, the underlying question, should support for research come from government? Did not institutions with enormous endowments have public responsibilities? As will be seen below, and in extension of Crosland’s findings pre-­1850, the English and Scots witnesses differed in their emphases. Through the century there was a broadening of what was considered to be state interest. While acknowledging the principles of laissez-­faire, Mill argued that even the necessary functions of government were “considerably more multifarious” than was commonly realized. In addition to the long-­accepted areas of justice and defense, governments must make provision for those unable to act on their own behalf, and undertake large projects “done for the general interests of mankind or of future generations” that would be of little benefit to the persons who could perform

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them. Governments might also go beyond their necessary functions and make provisions that “conduce to general convenience.”11 By the 1830s, national commercial benefit had been accepted as a reason for government support. The British government had been persuaded to establish a central state-­funded “School of Design” to train teachers, on the grounds that, if future workmen learned drawing and principles of design in elementary school, British manufactures would be better able to compete with French manufactures.12 We have seen that Sir William Hooker persuaded his political masters to establish a Museum of Economic Botany (1847) to encourage more effective exploitation of the vegetable products of empire, and his contemporary, Henry De la Beche, built a geological empire—­Geological Survey (1835), Museum of Economic Geology (1837), chemical laboratory (1839), and organic chemistry laboratory (1845)—­founded on claims that knowledge of minerals, rocks, and soils would benefit the British economy.13 In 1848, with the support of Robert Peel and Prince Albert, De la Beche was given permission for a purpose-­ built Museum of Practical Geology with space for the geological collections and, his long-­held ambition, a school of mines. Because no systematic government oversight of either education or science had been planned, because each scientific project or scientific institution supported was treated as an individual case, the resultant in­stitutions were a collection of piecemeal, ad hoc interventions that formed no coherent system and seemed to represent no consistent policy.14 Following the success of the Great Exhibition, public enthusiasm for science and industry allowed institutional innovation and reform. The profits of the exhibition were used to purchase land at South Ken­ sington as a location for new institutions and, under the patronage of Prince Albert, with the support of Lyon Playfair and Henry Cole, his chief lieutenants in organizing the exhibition, efforts were made to bring order to the administrative chaos of scientific and educational institutions and to make a space for science education. The tortuous process of institutional change is central to the X Club story in this chapter because the new institutions were the major vehicles for the innovations in science education in which Frankland, Hirst, and Huxley were leading participants. In many ways the Royal Commission on Scientific Instruction and the Advancement of Science, known as the Devonshire Commission after its chair the seventh Duke of Devonshire, is at the center of the chapter. It marked a shift in the kind of funding sought by science lobbyists, from funding particular projects to funding institutions. The lengthy reports of the Devonshire Commission and the even lengthier volumes 296

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of evidence given by the witnesses before it are important sources. They identify the nature of science education and the sources of support for both research and education in the 1860s and the commitments and plans of the scientific men, provincial educators, and civil servants who appeared before it. The appointment of the commission, which was announced in May 1870, was the culmination of diverse lobbies, for more science to be taught in public schools, for technical education to counter the relative decline in British industrial leadership, and for state support of scientific inquiry. X Club members were active in these lobbies, especially through the British Association, which supported all three. “Scientific instruction and the advancement of science”: the Devonshire Commission had two areas of inquiry. Members of the X Club were deeply concerned with the expansion of science education. They were active across almost the entire range of educational provision in the latter half of the century, from elementary schools to universities, from evening classes for working-­class adults to public schools for rich youths. They examined—­for the new Department of Science and Art, the University of London, and many other bodies. They lobbied and made speeches. They sat on committees. Their purpose in all this activity was to expand the teaching of science. They challenged the dominance of classical languages and literature in the public schools and ancient universities and aligned themselves with those who argued for modern languages and commercial subjects, but, I will emphasize, whatever their youthful assertions, in their mature lobbying they argued that both science and literature were necessary to a liberal education. They argued for a more open system, for opportunities for workingmen and working-­class children to learn more than the three Rs of reading, (w)riting, and (a)rithmetic. In speaking of “they,” I seek to see past the towering presence of Huxley and the omnipresence of Lubbock. The chapter shows the extent of activity by other X-­men, especially Spottiswoode and Hirst and, in contrast, Hooker’s lack of support for popular education.15 Moreover, by paying attention to allies and institutional locations I point to “tactical allegiances” and “untidy contingencies” that, Sophie Forgan and Graeme Gooday emphasize, counter “myths of Huxley’s quasi-­omnipotence in educational affairs.”16 Two sections emphasize X Club commitment to expanding the place of science in education. Their effective use of the examination system of the Department of Science and Art is analyzed in the first section; their efforts to persuade government, educationists, and the public-­at-­large that science and science education were public goods, deserving public support in the second section. 297

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5.1

The “Brompton Boilers,” the first museum building at South Kensington. The temporary, industrial-­style, cheap and ugly building reinforced the prejudice of cultural elites against the project of Henry Cole to make this distant horticultural site a center of education in science, art, and design. The three long sheds, clad in corrugated iron, looked like three steam boilers lying on their sides and were dubbed “the Brompton boilers” by the Builder. Uglier representations were produced by some artists. Cole tried to give the site more cultured associations by renaming his part of Brompton as South Kensington. Source: “The South Kensington Museum,” Illustrated London News, 27 June 1857. Reproduced with the Permission of Special Collections, Leeds University Library (Newspapers ILL). Note: See Burton, Vision and Accident, 48, and Gooday, “Premisses,” on the significance of location.

The second part of the Devonshire Commission’s brief was to investigate the provision for “the advancement of science,” in particular, what government should do to encourage scientific inquiry. The collusion among Club members, which is conspicuous on many educational matters, did not occur in lobbies for the endowment of research. Moreover, like many other lobbyists, the X-­men were arguing not only for state support; equally important, corporate bodies with great endowments, such as the old universities and the London trade guilds, should use their wealth to support science. The third section below compares the views of X Club members with those of other scientific men and public figures on the question of who should pay for the support of scientific research and science education—­and through what structures support should be organized.

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The fourth section takes a more personal perspective on education reform. Hirst, who is so often in the background of X Club activity, appears in this chapter as a significant actor. In following Hirst’s career, a revealing light is cast on friendships among the X-­network and on gentlemanly London life. The chapter deals in both the personal and the political. Personal antagonisms and self-­interest impinge on institutional histories. In addition to reinterpreting the stance of the X Club to government support for science, this chapter is a contribution to the history of science education and the history of science policy more generally. By showing the interconnections between the Department of Science and Art, the School of Mines, and the Geological Survey, it links the development of the School of Science at South Kensington in the 1870s with the ambitions of Playfair in the 1850s, and identifies many other allies with whom Huxley worked. It outlines the major policy issues canvassed before the Devonshire Commission and identifies the extent to which scientific men and other interest groups agreed or disagreed on these issues.

5.1 Science in the Curriculum I: Examination Successes The examination system of the Department of Science and Art (DSA) was the most effective and wide-­ranging of the many education schemes in which X Club members were involved. Well before they formed their club, members of the X-­network had been interested in using examinations to reform education (chapter 2.3). More often, though, in those early years, members of the network examined for the extra income it brought them rather than from reforming zeal or desire to serve the public good. In the 1860s they could afford to be less self-­interested. The long involvement of Huxley, Tyndall, Frankland, and Hirst in the DSA system demonstrates a commitment to expanding science teaching at lower levels of the education system and had important consequences for education at higher levels. The summer courses, which were introduced in 1869 to train teachers for DSA classes, became the foundation for expansion into advanced science teaching. X Club members were engaged in many other reforming schemes. For example, from 1866 Lubbock was on the council of a Middle Class Schools Association, which established a City of London school with an in­ no­vative curriculum for boys entering commerce; Hirst became an exam­ iner for the school. Lubbock and Huxley were active in the workingmen’s

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college movement, initiated by the Christian socialists. In 1868–­ 69, Tyndall and Huxley were on the council of a body planning to set up an international college with a modern curriculum. In the 1860s most members of the X Club were active in the proliferating BA committees established to investigate multifarious aspects of education and lobby for the inclusion of science in curricula. They took on further projects in the 1870s. In 1870, Huxley was elected to the first London School Board; Busk, Lubbock, and Tyndall were on his campaign committee.17 Hirst and Spottiswoode were founding members of the Association for the Improvement of Geometrical Teaching (1871), which aimed to replace syllogistic Euclidean arguments by intuitive and empirical approaches in teaching geometry. This can be seen as a project to separate mathematics teaching from the classical tradition.18 Some of the schemes promoted by X Club members were failures (the International College disappeared with few traces); others had local significance (for example, the London Middle Class School). The examination system of the DSA was successful on a national scale. The science side of the DSA had almost been a failure, partly if not largely due to the personal and institutional rivalries produced at its establishment. On the one hand, there was De la Beche’s empire. In 1851 the promised Government School of Mines and of Science Applied to the Arts was established, members of the Geological Survey were appointed professors in the school, and De la Beche’s directorship was extended to the School of Mines.19 On the other hand, in 1852 a Department of Practical Art was created to administer the Schools of Design and, most significant, Cole, a long-­term critic of art education and the Schools of Design, was appointed superintendent of general management.20 Both De la Beche and Cole were satisfied, but further restructuring disturbed their empires. Playfair had long had the patronage of Robert Peel, an enthusiast for agricultural chemistry, who was behind the expansion of the Geological Survey to include an organic chemistry laboratory and the appointment in 1845 of Playfair as its organic chemist. Although nominally under De la Beche, Playfair operated relatively independently, taking students and acting as “the government’s consultant chemist.” In 1853, when Prince Albert turned his attention to science, the Department of Practical Art was expanded to become the Department of Science and Art and Playfair appointed secretary for science to work in collaboration with Cole. It was envisaged that the science side, following the example of art, would train teachers in special schools and provide teachers to any school wanting to set up a science class. Next, the Geological Survey, 300

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Museum of Practical Geology, School of Mines, and a variety of other institutions were transferred to the Department of Science and Art, now renamed the Science and Art Department, and the government took over the Royal College of Chemistry as a chemical laboratory for the School of Mines.21 In 1856–­57, another administrative shift took place: the Science and Art Department was moved from Board of Trade control to sit alongside the Department of Education, which had long been under the administration of a committee of the Privy Council, known as the “Committee on Education.”22 The administrative restructuring set up a conflict between science education represented by Playfair and mining education represented by De la Beche, which was played out over the following decades. Playfair gained from the changes; Cole and De la Beche lost. Cole, who had unwillingly taken science into his domain and shared directorship with Playfair in 1853, was even more reluctant to have his department alongside the lowly Education Department under the Committee of Council. His sense of demotion was nothing compared to De la Beche’s indignation. He resented his institutions being placed “under an office devoted primarily to education” and deeply resented reporting to a “former subordinate”—­namely, Playfair. De la Beche and those staff of the Geological Survey and School of Mines who were most closely associated with mining did not cooperate with Cole and Playfair. They wanted a school for mining engineers and mine managers rather than a general school of applied science. Playfair and Cole found De la Beche obstructive and dreamed of a “revolution” at the School of Mines.23 Cole, Huxley, and Frankland took up Playfair’s ambition for a school of science and promoted it successfully before the Devonshire Commission. Under Cole the South Kensington site and its museums developed conspicuously (see figure 5.1), art teachers were trained in schools of art, art classes flourished in elementary schools, and a museum of educational objects was created, but science floundered. When, in 1858, Playfair resigned from the DSA to take up the chair of chemistry at the University of Edinburgh, the School of Science had few students, and only four science schools were associated with the DSA. The lord president of council threatened to abolish “Science” from its name unless the department could show that it was providing science teaching where it was needed.24 Ten years on the DSA supported science teaching in eight hundred schools.25 After 1860 the DSA, more than any other body, was effective in expanding science teaching in schools and night classes. Following the president’s threat, Cole proposed that the science side follow the art 301

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side, which had, in 1856, introduced payment to teachers on the basis of their pupils’ results in examinations as a means of encouraging drawing classes in elementary schools. This was to shift government support from training teachers to rewarding teachers for the examination successes of their pupils, thereby joining the Benthamite technique of “payment on results” to the popular Victorian machinery of examinations.26 Captain John Donnelly of the Royal Engineers, who after commanding the sappers preparing the museum site at South Kensington gradually became involved in the administrative work of the department, was appointed inspector for science in 1859. Donnelly, who was only twenty-­five at his appointment, drove the expanded examination system.27 Huxley, Tyndall, Frankland, and Hirst were among the examiners who contributed to its success. The payment-­on-­results scheme, which was publicized by a science teacher paid to tour the country, was successful beyond all expectations. Qualifying examinations for teachers were held first in November 1859, followed by examinations for pupils in June 1860. Qualified teachers would be paid £3, £2, or £1 per student, according to the levels of achievement of each of their pupils. The promised payments stimulated the setting up of science schools and classes. In May 1860, shortly after the new system was announced, about five schools and five hundred students were in the DSA system. From 1861 there was rapid growth, with the number of schools teaching science and the number of students in classes doubling every two to three years: from 70 to 120 to 300 to 900 schools and from 2,500 to 5,500 to 15,000 to 38,000 students in the years 1862, 1865, 1868, and 1871 (see table 5.1). The numbers of examination scripts in each subject grew, new subjects were added and previous subjects split, higher levels of achievement were added for each subject.28 The most popular subjects in the early 1870s were elementary geography, magnetism and electricity, mathematics, and animal physiology (just under 10,000 pupils).29 The cost of the popular geography subject was a problem, and it was replaced by “Physiography” in 1877 when, at last, as discussed below, Huxley wrote a suitable text. Using state aid to stimulate private initiative was a utilitarian strategy, which had become agreeable to the laissez-­faire principles of tax payers and government. The early annual reports of the department emphasized how much was obtained for a small government expenditure. “There are now 237 certificated Science teachers,” announced the 1863 report, who, “excepting five or six” who had gained certificates before 1860, “have been educated without any expenditure of public money by Department.”30 But the rapid growth in classes and pupils suggested that 302

9 38 70 75 91 120 153 212 300 523 799 908 948 1,182 1,336 1,299 1,426 1,348 1,297 1,355 1,391 1,360 1,403

Year

1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1871 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880 1881 1882

500 330 2,543 3,111 4,666 5,479 6,835 10,230 15,010 24,865 34,283 38,015 36,783 48,546 53,050 52,669 57,988 55,927 57,230 59,519 60,871 61,117 68,581

-­ c. 650 1,239 1,581 2,095 2,633 3,150 4,920 7,092 13,234 17,722 19,962 21,678 27,024 30,391 30,685 33,289 35,342 40,086 38,615 39,083 44,641 50,621

Numbers of students: taught, examined1

1,000 1,943 2,671 3,644 4,592 5,466 8,213 13,112 24,085 34,413 38,098 39,383 56,577 61,796 62,308 69,162 65,047 62,608 67,031 69,187 72,300 76,063

725 72% 1,480 76% 2,127 80% 2,894 79% 3,371 73% 3,562 65% 6,013 75% 8,649 66% 14,550 60% 18,690 54% 22,105 58% 27,806 71% 35,100 62% 38,198 62% 43,192 69% 46,332 67% 44,681 69% 40,549 65% 41,746 62% 45,173 65% 48,598 67% 50,741 67%

Numbers of exam papers: worked, passed, pass-­rate

£1,299 £50 19s 6½d £2,666 £52 £1.0.10d £3,241 £62 £1.0.10d £3,077 £44 15s 3d c.£3,500 £38 13s 0d £5,002 £40 14s 6d £8,000 £41 15s 7d £12,726 £44.13 16s 10d £17,016 £35 13s 7d £20,115 £27 11s 8d £18,830 £21 9s 10d £25,201 £26 13s 8d £33,027 £26 13s 7d £36,769 £26 13s 10d £42,474 £29 16s 1d £42,591 £26.10 14s 8d £41,462 £26.10 14s 10d £37,220 £24.15 13s 0d £38,054 £23.16 12s 10d £40,229 £23.13 13s 2d £43,519 £24.14 14s 2d £45,376 £24.10 13s 3d

Payments2 on results: total, per teacher, per eligible student

Sources: Annual reports of the Science and Art Department, 1861–­83, as printed in Parliamentary Papers. The 1869 results are the corrected results announced in the 1871 report. Notes: 1 The numbers are for all students taught and examined. The students for whom payment was made (that is, from the requisite social classes and taught by certified teachers) was a smaller number. The difference was negligible in the early 1860s, but rose (to 7% in 1870 and 11% in 1880) as middle-­class students were attracted to the DSA system. 2 Large sums of money are rounded. The total amount of money distributed by the DSA was greater because, in addition to the payments on results to teachers, the department gave prizes to students and grants to schools for equipment.

-­ -­ -­ -­ 114 -­ -­ -­ 780 1,456 2,200 2,584 2,803 4,231 4,432 4,106 4,931 4,635 4,049 4,564 4,932 4,839 4,881

Level of provision: number of schools, number of classes

Table 5.1  The growth of science teaching under the Science and Art Department, 1860–­82: numbers of classes, students, and examination papers; payments made

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the utilitarian carrot had been too large and juicy. Payment on results averaged £52 per teacher in 1862 and £62 in 1863 (table 5.1). Growth was unintentionally promoted by the concurrent introduction of payment on results into elementary education, in the “Revised Code” of 1861. The Revised Code included dis-­incentives to teaching anything beyond the three R’s. Some elementary teachers who had previously taught science sought to supplement their incomes by teaching science in evening schools for the DSA system; it seems that as many as a half of the teachers paid in the DSA system were also teaching in the elementary system.31 To reduce the rapid growth in cost, the rules were constantly changed through the 1860s. An upper limit on the total payment to any individual teacher was announced in 1863, and reduced in 1864. As a result the average payment per teacher dropped to £44 (in 1864) and then £38 (1865), but, with few exceptions, total payments climbed, from £3,200 in 1863 before the cuts, to past £12,000 in 1868, and on and up (ta­ble 5.1). Payments per pupil were cut in 1868 and again in 1869. Schools were required to charge fees to pupils in 1873.32 As table 5.1 shows, each of these strategies cut the payments per teacher and the cost per pupil, but, with only a slight falter, the totals went on climbing because there were more teachers, teaching more classes and more pupils. Cole and Lowe, utilitarians both, praised the efficiency of the system. Cost per head was declining, they emphasized, from approximately £1 in the early 1860s, to about twelve shillings in 1869. But it was hard to keep down and hovered around thirteen and fourteen shillings in the late 1870s. The standing of the examinations was guaranteed by the scientific status of the examiners, who thus contributed to the expansion of the science classes. Cole and Donnelly looked first to professors and lecturers in the School of Mines, which was also administered by the DSA, for their examiners. The subjects of examination established in 1859 were practical and decorative geometry, mechanical physics, chemistry, experimental physics, geology and mineralogy (applied to mining), and natural history. With the exception of geometry, these corresponded precisely with the expertise of staff in the School of Mines. Tyndall examined in experimental physics from 1859 until 1868, while he held the chair of physics in the School of Mines. Frankland inherited the position of examiner in both organic and inorganic chemistry (into which chemistry had been divided) when he was appointed to Hofmann’s chair at the Royal College of Chemistry in 1868. Andrew Ramsay of the Geological Survey and School of Mines examined in geology and min-

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eralogy from 1859 and, when the subject was split into its component parts, continued in geology into the 1870s. Huxley examined in natural history from 1859, and when it was divided in 1864 into animal physiology, zoology, and botany he took the first two.33 As the system expanded Cole and Donnelly had to go outside the School of Mines for examiners. Hooker declined Cole’s request to take up botany in 1864. Hooker held research as a higher priority than educational and publicizing activities and, as will be discussed below, was skeptical about school boys’ passion for science. Hirst was more willing to interrupt research for educational activities and by the late 1860s was examiner in “the higher mathematics.”34 Examining was demanding, especially as numbers grew. Officers of the Royal Engineers were used to run the examinations and the marking proceeded with military discipline.35 All results had to be finalized within a month of the examination date. Frankland, who had high numbers in inorganic chemistry, used his laboratory assistants at the Royal College of Chemistry as markers from the beginning. Tyndall often called on Hirst for assistance, for example, in 1865 Hirst marked 590 student papers and “looked over” the examination paper for teachers. By the 1870s teams of assistant markers were employed for the larger subjects—­one marker for every thousand papers at one shilling a paper, that is, £50 for the thousand—­and a schedule of meetings between assistants and examiner was set in advance. Huxley was assigned six assistants in 1872 to help mark 5,900 papers in animal physiology. Even with assistance the demands on an examiner in a popular subject were high because he was expected to mark 20 percent of the total papers as a check on his assistants. Both Huxley and Frankland continued on for many years with the help of assistant examiners. Frankland had Henry Roscoe as assistant from 1877, and by the early 1880s Michael Foster was doing most of the work for Huxley, even though Huxley was still the official examiner. After 1885 Huxley described himself as a sleeping partner, but he kept a close watch on the examination questions even after his official retirement.36 Examiners, like the assistant markers, were well paid. Donnelly argued that the examiners had to be the best men available in order that teachers could have confidence in the system, and good pay was necessary to persuade the “best men” to do work of a “laborious and repulsive nature.”37 The honorarium for botany in 1864, which Hooker turned down (and which excluded marking payments), was £63.38 Payments to teachers were made only on the results of pupils “of the industrial classes.” Those occupational groups for whom science was

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seen as useful and who were considered to need financial encouragement were listed as: artisans or operatives; coastguards and policemen; clerks and shopmen; and small shopkeepers, tradesmen, and manufacturers (where “small” meant neither paying income tax nor employing labor outside the family). Thus the pupils encouraged were from upper-­working-­and lower-­middle-­, or, in R. S. Neale’s evocative phrase, “middling”-­class families.39 Children of unskilled workers were not expected in the system. Middle-­class students were attracted in increasing numbers, but they were ineligible to earn payments for their teachers. By the late 1870s approximately 10 percent of the students examined were middle class.40 Although the DSA system stimulated science teaching in elementary, secondary, and night schools, the vast majority of the successful students were above school age and were studying in night classes. The pass rates, which were recorded by age, show that half the candidates were over seventeen, that is, well beyond school age, and in these older groups pass rates were near 60 percent. Among younger candidates pass rates were poor.41 Taking both age and social class into account, the claim that the DSA system brought science to the industrial classes was justified.42 Whether they found the knowledge gained useful for their occupations is an entirely different question. When questioned by the Devonshire Commission, Cole’s opinion was that artisans took up classes “for relaxation rather than relevance.”43 While payment on results encouraged teachers, the DSA also awarded prizes, medals, and, in the later 1860s, scholarships and exhibitions to successful students. These were intended to encourage the most promising students from “the industrial classes” to continue their education. Additional support came from the machine tool and armaments manufacturer, Joseph Whitworth, who, like Playfair, was concerned that education was not supporting British industry. In 1868 Whitworth began awarding scholarships of £100 a year, for two to three years, for students to study mechanical engineering. They were administered by the DSA, and Whitworth, who was a friend of Cole, was seen as a supporter of the DSA.44 One of the concerns of the X-­friends was that science should not be “crammed,” that is, that teachers should not stuff pupils with half-­ understood facts to be regurgitated in an examination. Hooker had complained in the 1850s that the characteristic errors of medical candidates in botany examinations revealed that they had learned only from books rather than from plants. In their examiner’s reports and in their discus-

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sions at the Devonshire Commission, Huxley and Frankland were particularly insistent on the evils of cramming.45 Science, they emphasized, should be learned by observation and experiment. Huxley, Frankland, and their colleagues responded to the inadequate teaching by introducing teacher training. Frankland, who had laboratory space available at the Royal College of Chemistry, made the radical innovation of offering teachers a laboratory course. In the summer of 1869, Frankland, Huxley (with the support of Michael Foster), and Guthrie (Tyndall’s successor as examiner in experimental physics) introduced the first one-­week teacher training courses for science teachers, although only Frankland had access to a laboratory for students at this time. Two hundred and fifty teachers came to London for these courses, which were scheduled in successive weeks so that teachers could attend more than one course. The teachers were so appreciative that the Committee of Council approved, and even paid for, expansion. In 1871 Frankland taught 120 teachers, forty a week for three weeks as his laboratory could accommodate only forty students at a time. Huxley’s courses extended over six weeks in the nearly finished South Kensington laboratories; he was granted £520 for laboratory demonstrators and assistants and £230 for equipment and materials.46 The summer courses gradually expanded. By 1874 there were three weeks of practical courses in four subjects: chemistry; biology; mechanics; and “sound, magnetism, and electricity.” The ambitious teachers in lower-­grade schools and the self-­ improving artisans who were teaching in the DSA system leaped at the chance of learning from the experts. Not only were the courses free, but also travel to and from London was paid, plus a “maintenance allowance” of thirty shillings a week.47 The number of applications rapidly increased to exceed the space available, for example, in 1874 when 550 teachers ap­plied only one-­third of the applicants were accepted. Nevertheless, the number of teachers receiving training in the summer courses was high in proportion to the number of teachers paid through the DSA system: of the 750 teachers who received payments for student results in 1870, as many as one-­third had attended the 1869 teachers’ courses.48 Moreover, Frankland and Huxley, their colleagues and assistants produced textbooks for the thousands of students and teachers aspiring to pass the department’s examinations. Six thousand copies of Frankland’s Lecture Notes (1866) sold by 1876 in spite of there being about six competitors. Guthrie’s Magnetism and Electricity (1873), which outlined the experiments for his schoolteachers, had sold 20,000 copies by 1885. Huxley and his demonstrators turned their experience of teaching

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schoolteachers into a laboratory manual, A Course of Practical Instruction in Elementary Biology (1874). It went through thirteen editions in fourteen years, until in 1888 it was overtaken by more recent publications.49 Huxley, with Roscoe and Balfour Stewart, both of Owens College, edited for Macmillan a series of “Science Primers” aimed at pupils at elementary levels. The books were small octavo volumes, of about one hundred pages, priced between ninepence and one shilling. Macmillan planned print runs of ten thousand to allow for the enormous market among DSA aspirants, and financial arrangements were correspondingly generous.50 Even Hooker contributed. He described his Botany as “the rashest and most profitable of my undertakings.” It was reprinted annually from 1876 until 1890 and then at less frequent intervals on into the twentieth century.51 Macmillan waited seven years for Huxley’s promised Physiography (1877), but Macmillan made a profit when it had seventeen reprintings in the following twenty years, largely because the subject was immediately introduced to the department’s examinations to replace the expensive subject of physical geography. Michael Foster, Huxley’s disciple and assistant, was entrusted with Huxley’s own subject, Physiology (1874). Huxley certainly did not have time to write it; he failed to write his introduction to the series until 1880.52 Other members of the X Club wrote books for popular audiences, but these were not so closely identified with subjects in the DSA curriculum and hence did not have the captive audiences to produce comparable record-­smashing publication histories. Huxley had contributed a volume on Lessons in Elementary Physiology (1866) to an earlier Macmillan series, Macmillan’s School Class Books, texts intended for higher grade schools and public schools. Elementary Physiology was also a publishing success but, at three hundred pages rather than the hundred pages for ninepence typical of the Science Primer series, was too demanding for the typical student preparing for DSA examinations, although perhaps useful to the teachers.53 Huxley’s Science Primers: Introductory, presented themes characteris­tic of his popular lectures. The book had three sections. In the first, “Nature and Science,” he emphasized the existence of laws of nature, the importance of these laws as a guide to conduct, and identified science as “perfected common sense.” In the second section, “Material Objects,” he used a case study of water to introduce the range of topics covered in the entire series. The third section, “Immaterial Objects,” asserted that sen­ sations, emotions, and thoughts, that is, mental phenomena, must be studied in the same way as material objects.54 He thereby claimed psychology

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for naturalistic science but in this context made no claim about social phenomena. Huxley put a high priority on his examining and teacher training work for the DSA. Although he broke down from overwork at the end of 1871 and went on a three-­month convalescent tour to Egypt, he took up the teachers’ course again on his return, rejecting Tyndall’s advice to guard his health. It was “of the utmost importance” that he should continue the lectures to teachers, Huxley told Tyndall: “They are the commencement of a new system of teaching which if I mistake not will grow into a big thing and bear great fruit and just at this present moment (nobody is necessary very long) I am the necessary man to carry it on.”55 The administrative location of the DSA kept it away from the conflicts between Church and Chapel that bedeviled efforts to reform elementary education. When, at the beginning of payment by results in science, Huxley told Cole that their efforts to improve scientific education “were the most important ever taken against Parsonic influence,” he was not referring to the curriculum but to organizational structure. In the ancient universities and public schools most of the teachers were ordained. In the elementary education system Church and Chapel vied for influence; any change that benefited the schools of one side was bitterly opposed by the other. The Department of Science and Art was organizationally distinct from the Education Department, and did not depend on ordained teachers; it was an institutional evasion of “Parsonic influence.” Although Cole was a churchman, devout enough to read family prayers, he shared Huxley’s desire to reduce clerical influence; reducing “Parsonic influence” appealed to all the X Club members, whether free thinking or pantheistic agnostics, Unitarians or reforming churchmen.56 The biblical allusions that colored Huxley’s prose reveal his further expectations of science education. Huxley’s claim to Tyndall that the lectures would “bear great fruit” was an allusion to the parable of the sower. When sown on “good ground” the seed of science, like the seed of Christ’s parable, would bear fruit “thirtyfold, sixtyfold and a hundredfold.”57 In Huxley’s rhetoric, teaching science was preaching a new truth. He understood science education as a secularizing force that would counter the religious emphases of conventional education and described his teachers as “scientific missionaries” who would “convert the Christian Heathen of these islands to the true faith.”58 Roscoe, similarly, turned science into the true faith and Christians into heathens. He urged Huxley to get a move on with writing the “Introductory” for Macmillan’s series: it is “now necessary for us to meet the coming struggle with the Christian Knowledge

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Huxley on his return from Egypt. Nettie did not recognize her husband when, sunburned and bearded, he returned in April 1872, from his voyage to Egypt. Most friends disliked the beard, and he wore it for only a short time. Source: Carte de visite, London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company.

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Society and other sinners who are pirating our ideas.”59 At the heart of Huxley’s scientific belief system was the commitment to explaining all phenomena by natural causes.60 The Christian heathen would be converted from belief in supernatural causes to belief in natural causes. Here, as so often, Huxley’s goals are expressed more clearly than those of his allies, but Huxley expected Tyndall to understand his allusion to bearing fruit, and Roscoe shared his delight in reversing orthodox identifications of sinners and saints. The implications of this religious rhetoric and the extent to which these purposes were shared are discussed further in chapter 6.1. The DSA system had an impact beyond its target groups, as the example of Oliver Lodge (1851–­1940) illustrates. Lodge, who had a grammar school education, left school at age fourteen to learn his father’s pottery business. While working during the day he studied for the DSA exams. It was “exhilarating” to pass well, he remembered. Students moved easily between the different London institutions. Lodge’s scientific education continued through a mixture of Royal Institution lectures, a South Ken­ sington teacher training course, informal lectures at King’s College, and formal enrollment at University College. He gained a London doctor of science in 1877 and was appointed professor of physics and mathematics at the new University College Liverpool in 1881.61 My emphasis here has been on the size of the DSA examination system and its institutional location rather than any specific content. As Adrian Desmond has emphasized, in his teacher training Huxley’s curriculum was shaped by the tradition of comparative anatomy rather than by Darwinian evolution. Huxley’s students dissected series of plant and animal types in order to identify structures; transmutation was not a topic for the laboratory.62 James Elwick has recently complicated this image of an unpolemical Huxley. Some of the topics in his syllabus, carried “naturalistic or even materialistic” metaphysical assumptions as, for example, “the living body considered as a machine,” and, as discussed, his introductory text, implied that all phenomena were governed by natural law.63 How such assumptions were incorporated into examination questions and whether any other examiners inserted metaphysical positions into textbooks and laboratory science are topics awaiting investigation. Hooker, though, included evolutionary theory in his elementary botany text. His 124-­page text included two pages headed “Origin of Species.” There are two methods of accounting for the variety of plant species, wrote Hooker, “independent creation,” which is a “purely speculative” and uninformative method, and “evolution,” which, “whether true wholly or in part only, is gaining adherents rapidly, because most of the 311

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phenomena of plant life may be explained by it.”64 Further inquiry is required to identify how these theoretical and metaphysical commitments were embodied in questions. Frankland framed questions carefully so that some could not be answered unless the pupils had seen experimental demonstrations (although this does not imply that the pupils performed experiments themselves).65 The controversial aspects of the curriculum and the texts were a very small part of the whole. The significance of the institutional separation of the Department of Science and Art from religious politics, and the deep belief of Huxley and Tyndall that scientific “attitudes” would be absorbed as empirical science was learned (discussed further in the next section), indicate that, quite apart from particular curricular issues, they held high hopes for the results of the DSA exam system. Only some X-­ men were active in the DSA. Huxley, Tyndall, and Frankland were active because they were employed in the School of Mines; Hirst took up the position of mathematics examiner when he was employed at University College; Hooker wrote the successful botany text—­but declined to become examiner. Commitment to the DSA shifted the allegiances among the X-­men. Most notably, Huxley and Donnelly became close friends and Huxley and Lubbock moved apart. Donnelly was frustrated when Lubbock ignored the achievements of the DSA. In an 1886 speech Lubbock had claimed that the “recent stimulus” to technical education had “no doubt been very greatly due to the City and Guilds of London Institute.” “He ought to know better,” protested Donnelly to Huxley. Because “many people think him a great light . . . this persistent ignoring is damaging.” He appealed to Huxley to “enlighten him a little.”66 To sum up, X Club members made major contributions to science education through the Science and Art Department. As eminent scientific men willing to act as examiners at lowly levels, Tyndall, Hirst, Huxley, and Frankland, the latter two for decades, contributed to the standing of the examination system and the science education of tens of thousands of children and young men. By 1880, 60,000 students were taught and 40,000 examined (table 5.1). Moreover, the texts written for and supported by the DSA classes had an impact beyond those classes. Teacher training in science developed in symbiosis with the examination system for students. Frankland and Huxley, with Guthrie, led the move to laboratory training for teachers, which led on to practical work in schools. From 1869 and as laboratory space permitted, with their loyal assistants, and their colleagues in other subjects, they gave laboratory courses to

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teachers each summer—­and the Science and Art Department paid. Each year hundreds of hopeful teachers took higher examinations in the DSA system in order to be eligible for payment-­on-­results, and hundreds attended summer courses at South Kensington in order to improve their skills. Teaching science offered teachers in lowly schools a means of supplementing low incomes. Seven hundred and fifty teachers received payments for student results in 1870, 1,700 in 1880 at an average across the decade of about £25 per teacher (table 5.1). All this was kept at a distance from parliamentary control and religious controversy.

5.2 Science in the Curriculum II: Lobbying Failures Huxley, Frankland, and their fellow X Club members had their greatest successes in inserting science into the curriculum at the lower levels of education, as described in the previous section. Lesser results at higher levels of education were not due to lack of interest or effort but to the opposition of old elites and the inertia of large systems. Because there was more talk and less action over the teaching of science in public schools and the nature of science education appropriate to universities, we learn more about X Club goals and ambitions from their relative failures than from their successes. Examination of X Club involvement in the education committees of the British Association (BA) shows how they supported one another and how they collaborated with other interest groups. Analysis of speeches, letters, committee reports, and evidence presented before royal commissions reveals their goals and ambitions, especially on the crucial issue of the place of science in a liberal education. The X Club members used the BA committee system to promote science teaching at all levels of schooling. Both the 1864 report of the Clarendon Commission into the public schools and the 1868 report of the Taunton Commission into endowed schools had recommended that natural science become part of the “regular course of study.” Through its standing Parliamentary Committee the BA was lobbying government to act on these reports. The BA also appointed innumerable ad hoc committees on education topics in the late 1860s and early 1870s—­for example, on curriculum development, or on methods for promoting science education. Huxley and Lubbock were already sitting on the Devonshire Commission when, in 1871, Busk, Hirst, Huxley, Lubbock, Spottiswoode, and Tyndall were appointed members of a twenty-­man committee to investigate a proposal to improve science teaching in the highest grade

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of secondary schools through leaving examinations.67 The enthusiasm of the British Association and the X Club for committees was boundless. The British Association Committee on Science Education in Schools Science education in public schools came to a focus at the 1866 British Association meeting. No action had yet been taken on the Clarendon Commission report of 1864. The Parliamentary Committee reported to the General Committee in 1866 “that another session of Parliament has been allowed to pass away without any step being taken by the Legislature to promote the study of science in our great public schools.”68 Criticism by a public-­school insider reinforced concern. The Reverend F. W. Farrar, a classics master at Harrow, read a paper on “The Teaching of Science at the Public Schools.” Farrar glossed his criticism by identifying genuine “difficulties” faced by schools wanting to introduce science—­ these included lack of agreement among scientific men about a program of studies, no adequate textbooks, and the time taken by the rest of the curriculum. The difficulties “did not in the least arise from the prejudice of public-­school masters” against science, or so he said in public.69 Two sectional committees took up his concerns and, in typical BA fashion, referred the issue on to the General Committee, which referred it on to the council of the association, which set up a committee to consider “the best means for promoting Scientific Education in Schools.” Its thirteen members included Spottiswoode, Hirst, Huxley, and Tyndall. The committee on science education in schools permits close analysis of the X Club’s modes of operation and educational goals because there are numerous traces of both its formal and informal processes. Hirst’s journal, Huxley’s correspondence, X Club minutes, the memoirs of Farrar, and the official reports of the British Association combine to form a revealing study of the X Club at work.70 Most members of the X Club were active in the subsequent discussions. Even before the resolution from the General Committee came to the BA Council, Huxley had contacted Farrar to discuss the membership of the proposed committee. There is no record of discussion at a Club meeting but we can presume that, at the least, Huxley consulted with Spottiswoode (general treasurer) and Hirst (the junior general secretary) who had standing on the council. BA committees were seldom small. As was customary, the committee appointed by council included ex-­officio appointees—­the four general officers of the association (Spottiswoode;

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Hirst; Francis Galton, the senior general secretary; and George Griffith, the assistant secretary); the three trustees (Murchison, Sabine, and Grey Egerton). Four schoolmasters (including Farrar himself and J. M. Wilson, science master at Rugby) and two scientific men (Huxley and Tyndall) were added.71 This made a total of four X Club members in a committee of thirteen, three of whom (the trustees) may have been inactive. Organizational power rested with the general officers, thus, early in December 1866, Hirst and Griffith met with Spottiswoode at his house to consult about the committee. Ten days later the first meeting was held—­also at Spottiswoode’s house. Hirst met other committee members socially, for example, he met Farrar over dinner at Spottiswoode’s house. Tyndall, Huxley, and unnamed others, plus Spencer, visited Farrar at Harrow to discuss science education. Farrar and Wilson drafted a report that was then revised by a subcommittee of Tyndall, Farrar, Wilson, Griffith, Hirst, and Huxley—­over dinner at Huxley’s house.72 The full committee met twice in March—­at the Royal Institution on both occasions. The report “on the best means for promoting Science Education in Schools” was then presented to the BA Council, ready for the August meeting of the association.73 With the report completed, the chief activity over the next two years was lobbying. At the General Committee meeting in August 1867, it was resolved that the president of the association (the unscientific Duke of Buccleuch was useful as a member of the House of Lords) be asked to convey the report on promoting science education in schools to the president of the Privy Council.74 When there was still no legislative action in the 1867–­68 parliamentary session, the General Committee instructed the council of the association to prepare a petition to the Houses of Lords and Commons, “praying them without loss of time” to pass legislation that would “remedy the defects” in secondary education. The petition emphasized that “the study of Natural Science” provided both a liberal education—­“a means of disciplining the mind”—­and was “useful for the purposes of life.” It should therefore form part of the education “in all Secondary Schools.” It concluded by appealing to British pride: the “quality and range of the subjects of study” in secondary schools was “incommensurate with the needs of a well-­organized state.”75 The Royal Institution supported the lobby by inviting Farrar to lecture “On Some Defects in Public School Education” in February 1867, and “On Education in Public Schools” in January 1868. In the 1867 lecture Farrar argued that an education confined to Greek and Latin was an anachronism. There would be plenty of time for teaching science, he

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argued, if “the extravagant value” attached to the composition of Greek and Latin verse was reconsidered.76 It is unlikely to be coincidence that Spottiswoode, an old Harrovian, was treasurer of the RI in the late 1860s, and a member of the committee that invited lecturers. When the Public Schools Act was at last passed in 1868, Lubbock joined the action. The act recommended that “the introduction of the elements of natural science into the regular course of study is desirable . . . and practicable.”77 Lubbock was appointed by government to the executive commission established to oversee the implementation of the act. He was not yet an MP, but his title and his Eton background gave him the standing from which to argue for more science in public school curricula. To his X-­ brothers, Lubbock’s position was another opportunity for influence. With blithe confidence that it had the power to do so, the Club resolved “to add Lubbock’s name to the BA Comtee on Scientific Education, in order that he might consult that Comtee on points arising in the Pub. Sch. Comtee.” Whether or not this was effected—­the published reports of the association do not record Lubbock’s appointment—­the friends acted immediately. Ten days after the Club resolution and two weeks before the next meeting of the BA Committee, Huxley and Hirst went to High Elms on a Sunday afternoon to meet the headmasters of Eton and Winchester—­ with whom Lubbock had traveled to Switzerland on Public Schools Commission business in the summer. They discussed “the introduction of Science into their schools.”78 The extent of X Club involvement in this single committee and in the wider public debate is astonishing. As general treasurer of the British Association, Spottiswoode oversaw the early committee process and, as Royal Institution treasurer, was probably involved in subsequent invitations for Farrar to lecture at the RI. These lectures increased public awareness and controversy. Hirst as a general secretary of the BA, and Huxley and Tyndall as association activists with reputations as brilliant lecturers were all involved in the drafting of the BA report. Through Lubbock and Spottiswoode, the public-­school-­educated members of the X Club, Hirst, Huxley, and Tyndall, met reforming masters from the leading public schools. And through Huxley and Tyndall the elite schoolmasters met and took advice from Spencer, the dissenting, provincial opponent of privilege and decorative knowledge.79 Only Frankland, Hooker, and Busk are unmentioned in the records of this committee. Yet the outcome of all this activity was disappointing, even to Lubbock, who tended to look on the bright side. Throughout the early 1870s, Lubbock was collecting information on teaching hours per subject at various public schools, and the ideal hours as proposed by advo316

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cates of science education. There are dozens of extant letters.80 Moreover, he had support within some of the public schools, for example, at Harrow (Farrar until 1871 and Griffith from 1865) and Rugby (Wilson), and science was directly represented on most Boards of Governors after the 1868 Public Schools Act gave the University of London and the Royal Society rights of nomination to the boards of public schools. Spottiswoode represented science on the Harrow board of governors, and Busk represented the University of London at Charterhouse.81 Perhaps (I speculate) Lubbock was so confident that facts and common sense would be sufficient that he spent insufficient effort in persuading and lobbying. As the Public Schools Commission came to an end in 1874, Lubbock reflected in his journal: “We have revolutionised the Public Schools. . . . On the whole I am well satisfied with what we have done, but I am disappointed that more Science is not taught.”82 If Lubbock admitted disappointment, then every other advocate of science was surely also disappointed. There were, of course, other committees and other organizations through which members of the X Club lobbied and examined and, importantly, other lobbyists. Lyon Playfair, who had been a juror at the 1867 Paris Exhibition, returned to conduct a campaign for technical education. His well-­publicized warnings that British industrial supremacy was under threat because she was falling behind continental nations in technical skill and education aroused wide public debate. Hundreds attended a Society of Arts conference on technical education, held to promote Playfair’s concerns. Educators, from Lord Granville, chancellor of the University of London, to representatives of the Huddersfield Mechanics’ Institute, mayors of northern, industrial towns, eminent engineers, and leading men of science turned up to discuss the issues he had raised. The society established a standing committee on technical education, which appointed a subcommittee of twelve with power to add to their number. Huxley was among the original twelve; Frankland and Hirst, along with such eminent men as the Archbishop of York, among those added. The resultant “scheme of Technical Education calculated to promote the Advancement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce of this country” was presented to the society in July 1868. The government had already, in March 1868, set up a Select Committee “on Provision for Instruction in Theoretical and Applied Science to the Industrial Classes,” chaired by MP and ironmaster, Bernhard Samuelson, who was himself active in the Society of Arts lobby.83 Clearly, many eminent men were concerned by the state of scientific and technical education and wished their voices to be heard. The X Club was one group among many. 317

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Ideals and Ambitions What got the X Club men to these positions and why were they so energetic in the cause of science education? To some extent they were just in the right place at the right time. Huxley, Tyndall, and Frankland held positions in the state-­supported School of Mines and were therefore associated with Cole and the DSA before the examination system started. They had teaching experience below the university level—­at the School of Mines, Queenwood College, and University College School. Their belief in the transformational power of education sustained their activism. Education could change attitudes and create opportunities. Also, they had strong views about the failings of the current system and how it should be improved. Increasing the place of science in education was one of the three aims that Lubbock laid out in 1870 at the start of his parliamentary career. All this meant they were willing to give time and energy to educational causes. Initially they were ambitious and enthusiastic reformers, eager to take positions of potential influence. When appointed to committees they were active members with ideas to contribute. Social position (Lubbock and Spottiswoode) and scientific achievement (Huxley, Tyndall, Frankland, and Hirst) gave them authority, and every position increased their credibility, making them even more suitable for further committees and more authoritative as spokespersons on science education. In addition, Huxley and Lubbock were excellent speech makers. Huxley was witty and stimulating; Lubbock’s homiletic style was less witty but also less confrontational and consistently appealing to a wide audience. He could be counted on to congratulate, praise, and encourage everybody. Both received endless invitations to give lectures and addresses and preside over committees. Only Hooker stood apart from this educational activity. Not only did he set research as his priority and carry heavy administrative responsibilities at Kew, but also his views of human nature made him less optimistic about the benefits of education. Huxley, Lubbock, and Tyndall all thought boys were excited by science. Citing his Queenwood experience, Tyndall assured an early audience that boys were curious about everything around them. They want to know the causes of things: “Who implanted the desire? Certainly not man.” Lubbock was even more certain that children sought knowledge, and was more willing than Tyndall to invoke the divine: “Children are inspired with the divine gift of curiosity. . . . Their minds are bright, eager, and thirsting for knowledge.”84 318

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Hooker dissented. In old age he reminisced: “Tyndall used to say you had only to shew boys scientific experiments to make them love science. Bence Jones was nearer the mark when he said, ‘all the boys care for and call Chemistry is a blaze, a bang, and a stink.’”85 Children were naturally curious; Huxley, Frankland, and Lubbock also believed in education as a means by which bright boys could rise in the world. Frankland assured the Devonshire Commission that “boys of obscure origin” had “distinguished themselves” in the Science and Art Department examinations. Bernhard Samuelson questioned him closely, arguing that many self-­educated men had succeeded in manufacturing and implying that the machinery of the DSA exams achieved little more. Frankland responded firmly that many men of comparable abilities had not had the opportunity to develop their talents and had been “lost to the nation.” In his commissioner role, Lubbock asked many Scottish witnesses about the opportunities in Scottish universities for men from “humble stations” and tried to lead them into criticisms of English universities.86 Huxley, as is well known, advocated for a unified education system, so that elementary education could be a step on “the ladder from the gutter to the university.” Although Huxley’s practice did not match his egalitarian rhetoric, compared with Hooker he was optimistic about working-­class potential. Hooker explained his views to his radical clergyman friend La Touche: “You must not think that I oppose Education of the laboring Classes, but I should like it conducted towards the future life of the average.” The three Rs and some technical subject would be sufficient for the vast majority of pupils.87 Such class-­based judgments had led Darwin to teasingly label Hooker a “jolly old Tory.”88 Science Essential to a Liberal Education The most widely used arguments for the place of science in the higher curriculum claimed equivalent value with the classics: the study of science, like that of the classics, trained the mind; and science, like classics, was a part of general culture. In earlier discussions Spencer and Huxley sometimes directly attacked “literary” education, but from the late 1860s the representatives of science claimed only that science and literature were equally important branches of learning. The British Association’s report began with the half-­truth that “there is already a general recognition of Science as an element in liberal education” in English, Scottish, and Irish universities and in various secondary schools and examination systems, but the teaching of science could be made “more effective.”89 The demand for equality was expressed most explicitly in the Devonshire 319

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Commission’s  report on  Scottish and Irish universities. “We have  assumed,” the commissioners wrote, “that there are certain kinds of knowledge and certain forms of intellectual discipline which constitute the essential elements of general Culture, and fall under the two heads of Lit­ erature and Science. We have further assumed that means should be taken to ensure the possession of this general culture by all persons who receive a University education.” Once this general culture was attained the student should be permitted to “devote his attention exclusively” to his chosen special subject, within either literature or science.90 This was a two-­ cultures argument for both-­ science-­ and-­ literature rather than either-­science-­or-­literature. The scientific witnesses agreed that science students needed literary culture for breadth, but the part of the argument that performed useful work was that, equally, classics and divinity students needed scientific culture for breadth. Similarly, advanced study in science was as valid as advanced study in literature. The claim for science being equal with “literature” (that is classical literature) tended to dichotomize the curriculum and overlook the social and moral sciences, modern languages and literatures, history, and music. It was frequently and vaguely claimed that science attracted “minds” that did not have literary capacities and that even those with an aptitude for literary culture found science “a valuable element” in their education.91 In the British Association report and in the individual speeches and lectures of Tyndall and Huxley, the “scientific culture” that was deemed to be an essential part of general culture was associated with the understanding and practice of scientific reasoning. In an early lecture “On the Importance of the Study of Physics as a Means of Education,” Tyndall claimed that physics, like classical languages, provided forms of “mental exercise” that “trained the mind” and improved “the mental faculties.” Physics, like all science, teaches patient inquiry, honesty, self-­renunciation (by abandoning “all preconceived notions”), and “disciplined thinking.” The student uses both induction and deduction; “he” learns to reason from effects to causes and from causes to effects; he “compares, abstracts, and generalizes”; but also he continually checks his conclusions and even learns to suspend judgment. Huxley, similarly, claimed that science produced both intellectual and moral qualities: the processes of observation, experiment, induction, and deduction practiced in natural history gave intellectual discipline to a student; also, Huxley’s natural history, like Tyndall’s physics, required courage, patience, and self-­denial.92 Huxley, especially, embellished this argument over the following decades. Even at the lowlier levels of the DSA examination system, it was

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claimed that science education had transformed thinking. When asked what the DSA examinations had achieved, both Huxley and Andrew Ramsay, professor of geology in the School of Mines and examiner for the DSA, insisted that the DSA examinations were mind changing. Minds were “very considerably opened”; people became “able to think”; all education “tends to develop intelligence.”93 The arguments about science training the intellectual faculties were developed at greatest length in the British Association report on “the best means for promoting Scientific Education in Schools,” which masters from public schools and X Club members had discussed in committee and informally over dinners. Schools ought to include some training in science, first, because science provides “the best discipline in observation and collection of facts, in the combination of inductive with deductive reasoning, and in accuracy both of thought and language.” Scientific training, the report emphasized, was different from mere scientific information. Scientific training would inculcate “the scientific habit of mind,” that is, the habit of reasoning from observed facts rather than authority. All scientific disciplines alike—­experimental physics, elementary chem­ istry, botany—­could provide effective scientific training. “The study of experimental physics involves the observation and colligation [ John Stuart Mill’s term] of facts, and the discovery and application of principles. It is both inductive and deductive. It exercises the attention and the memory, but makes both of them subservient to an intellectual discipline higher than either.” Chemistry was described in similar terms—­it exercises “the memory and reasoning powers . . . [and] teaches the student to gather by his own experiments and observations the facts upon which to reason.” Botany, also, “preeminently” admits of being taught in “true scientific method” because boys can start from their present knowledge of fruits, trees, and flowers “and arrange and criticise it.”94 Throughout, the emphasis on facts implied that science had an objective grounding, and the representation of science teaching as a process proceeding from facts, obtained through observation and experiments, to general ideas and principles presumed a strictly inductive method.95 All such reports were, of course, compromises. From the British Association Report to the Devonshire Commission there was a dilution of argument resulting from the broadening of participation. The balance of science and literary culture proposed for universities, public schools, and higher secondary schools was a political accommodation for many of the advocates of science. In other places and circumstances their emphases were different. For example, the Middle Class Schools Association, of

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which Lubbock was a member, considered that literary culture could be attained equally well through the study of English literature as through classical literature. In addition to various sciences, its senior school curriculum included English literature, French and German languages, but no classics.96 Playfair made it clear to the Samuelson Committee that he recommended classics only because “the universities themselves are so thoroughly imbued” with the view that Latin is essential to mental culture “that you would not get them into an educational system that did not include Latin.” Like the Middle Class Schools Association, he considered that modern literature and languages could replace the classics.97 Science and Moral Education Huxley, following Spencer, argued in numerous lectures that the most valuable consequence of scientific training was the recognition of the basis of morality in the laws of nature. In the 1850s he already saw science as an authoritative source of moral guidance for the lower orders: I want the working classes to understand . . . that they are to be clean & temperate & all the rest—­not because fellows in black with white ties tell them so—­but because these are plain & patent laws of nature which they must obey—­“under penalties.”98

By the time of the British Association Report, Huxley had developed more directly the political implications of his laws of nature: “there lies in the nature of things a reason for every moral law, as cogent and well-­defined as that which underlies every physical law.” An ill-­paid workman would be helped to calm his discontent if he had learned that “it is better . . . that he should starve than steal.”99 Huxley tried to persuade Samuelson’s Select Committee that the social sciences should be taught in schools, especially to “the operative classes,” but his was a lone voice.100 On the London School Board, Huxley succeeded in getting “Social Economy” recommended in a curriculum. As chair of the board’s Curriculum Committee, Huxley succeeded in persuading, first, his committee and then the full board to include science topics in the list of essential subjects. The syllabus listed: “Systematised object lessons, embracing, in the six school years, a course of elementary instruction in physical science, and serving as an introduction to the science examinations which are conducted by the Science and Art Department”; and, Huxley’s preoccupation, “Social Economy.”101 His contribution to the

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curriculum was significant because the London curriculum was publicized by the Devonshire Commission and by Lubbock in Parliament. The Second Report of the Devonshire Commission recommended that English schoolchildren should have the same levels of science instruction as “has long been given” in German and Swiss primary schools and added, approvingly, that the London and Liverpool School Boards had both made physical science and social economy essential subjects in their schools. It printed the London School Board’s Scheme of Education in a lengthy note, making it accessible to other school boards.102 There was no legislative outcome, and, as always, it is easier to find out what was advocated than what was done; thus, the extent of Huxley’s success in getting physical science and social economy taught in elementary schools is unknown. Science and Technical Education: A School of Mines or a School of Science? The lobby that led to the Samuelson Committee was about the contribution of education to British industry, and the Samuelson Committee was preoccupied with the relation of technical education to industrial progress. The balance of the evidence, and the conclusion of Samuelson’s Report, was that workmen needed elementary education rather than science education, but that British industry would be strengthened if manufacturers and managers had more thorough instruction “in the principles of their arts.”103 The Devonshire Commission revisited these issues; indeed, Samuelson’s appointment to the commission ensured that the prior inquiry was continued. Witnesses were asked whether industry would most benefit from the scientific training of workmen, of foremen, or of managers. They were closely questioned as to the sort of technical education that was currently offered and what should be offered. Witnesses, from Scotland to London, were practically unanimous that the British apprenticeship system, when combined with appropriate education, was better than continental polytechnics. The Devonshire Commission therefore focused on science and higher education. Its reports addressed only one aspect of technical education, the relationship of the School of Mines to the South Kensington developments that were already under way. This came under the question of whether government money was being used “efficiently.” Within the School of Mines there had long been division over the movement, started by Playfair, and promoted by Huxley in the 1860s, to

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turn the School of Mines into a general science school.104 The commissioners, especially Sharpey and Huxley, asked many leading questions of representatives of the School of Mines (occupying crowded premises in Jermyn Street off Piccadilly) and the School of Naval Architecture (under construction at South Kensington): had the School of Mines been envisaged as a purely mining school at its founding? Did their specialty share a general science foundation with other specialties, which would make it more “efficient” to have a single school teaching the common core? Was it inconvenient for the School of Mines students to get to Oxford Street for their chemistry lectures? How many specialists had their school graduated, that is, was there a need for the specialty? The not-­so-­hidden agenda was to form a science school, under one administration and on one site (namely, South Kensington), uniting the pure science part of the School of Mines, chemistry from the Royal College of Chemistry, and mathematics from the Royal School of Naval Architecture.105 The ultimate plan was to have the School of Mines also move to South Ken­ sington, separating it from the Geological Survey and its museum, that is, from the geological empire that had been built by De la Beche and Murchison. Witnesses were bitterly divided. Cole presented the commissioners with reasons to move the School of Mines away from the Geological Survey: there was not adequate space for both in Jermyn Street—­some students had even been refused admission; the two institutions were so different they should not have a common head. Indeed, Cole told the commissioners, he would go further, he had proposed to the Samuelson Committee that the three institutions, School of Mines, Royal College of Chemistry, and Royal School of Naval Architecture, all be amalgamated. The Reverend Joseph Woolley, inspector general of the Royal School of Naval Architecture, saw benefits to a general school: shared preliminary courses in a polytechnique (he used the French term) would produce an “economy of public money” in preparing students for all government departments.106 (Significantly, he assumed the state educated only those who would serve the state.) Opposition came from Murchison, from many of the mining professors, and from Williamson who saw it as more government favoritism. Who had approved building such a large laboratory at South Kensington (see figure 5.3), Williamson asked, without any consultation with scientific bodies? Murchison, in his late seventies and suffering from the effects of a stroke, berated the commissioners and the government for considering “dismembering” the School of Mines without consulting him.107 The agenda of commissioners Huxley and Sharpey was that this gen324

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eral science school would be a training school for science teachers, in addition to teaching the preliminary years for students of the Schools of Mines and Naval Architecture. Arguing the need for teacher training was a step in the campaign and, for this purpose, the DSA’s recently initiated summer courses for teachers were useful evidence. The experimental courses were treated as a model by the Devonshire Commission and promoted by strategic questioning. Witnesses from the Scottish universities were often asked, by Huxley and Sharpey especially, if they had facilities for running similar summer courses in their institution.108 But while the Devonshire Commission commended these short courses for teachers, its long-­term plans for teacher education were much grander. Huxley, in his witness role, pushed the agenda further when he claimed that training schoolteachers was more important to the country than having a School of Mines. When the First Report of the Devonshire Commission recommended the setting up of such a “School of Science,” the Times identified it as “Prof. Huxley’s plan for founding an imposing National College of Science” at South Kensington.109 Although an experienced expert witness in courts of law, Frankland was occasionally caught out in his attempts to defend both the proposed school of science and its teacher training function. On his first appearance before the Devonshire Commission in his role as DSA examiner, Frankland admitted that the laboratories under construction at South Kensington were for teacher training (788–­90). Frankland praised the first DSA teacher training courses, but Samuelson pushed him to make a difficult choice: given the limits of government funding, which was the more important, elementary chemistry broadly taught (that is, the DSA system) or advanced instruction for managers (which the Samuelson Committee had recommended)? When Frankland reluctantly came down on the side of advanced training, Huxley intervened (803–­4) with the irrelevant argument that without employment for the graduates there would be no students in the advanced courses. On his second appearance as witness, as representative of the Royal College of Chemistry, Frankland was well prepared with information and Huxley with Dorothy Dix questions. Frankland proved the value of the College of Chemistry, which was also the chemical laboratory for the School of Mines, with a list of the positions held by 366 ex-­students. He assured the commissioners that any expansion on the Oxford Street site would cause unwelcome nuisance to wealthy neighbors (5698). He distanced himself from Williamson’s accusation of secretive decision making by attributing responsibility to his predecessor (5702, 5756). The Oxford Street building would not be wasted because the overcrowded 325

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Mining Record Office could move in (5721–­25). Were the new laboratories large enough for a College of Chemistry? If the buildings “were entirely devoted to chemistry” they would be about equal to the laboratories recently built at Bonn and Berlin by the Prussian government (5704). Shifting ground from German research models, and prompted by Huxley, Frankland again described his recent short summer courses for teachers and announced that using the new laboratories for training chemistry teachers would be a most excellent use (5757), that he would also take pupils as at the present site, and that there would be space to conduct government investigations (5766–­72). Huxley set up a question on chemistry teaching in elementary schools, giving Frankland the chance to emphasize that the proposed nine months teacher training would be required for all levels of teaching, because it requires “almost a better training” to teach the elementary parts to beginners than to teach later classes (5854). No, to the Duke of Devonshire, chemistry does not make such rapid progress in Great Britain as in Germany or France—­and he provided statistics. Why is this? Because we lack suitable buildings for conducting research (Frankland was supporting the lobby for government-­funded laboratory buildings) and because we have no research requirement for any degree (5866–­69). Yes, to Samuelson, this weakness does impact on the progress of manufactures because it makes it “more difficult to establish manufactures upon new inventions” (5884). In its first report, the commission recommended that, in order “to render their teaching thoroughly efficient,” the Royal School of Mines and the Royal College of Chemistry be reorganized as a single institution; that the new institution be accommodated in the South Kensington buildings “now nearly completed”; and that to the establishment be added a mathematics professor and laboratories and laboratory assistants for “practical instruction” in physics, chemistry, and biology. This approved what Cole, Donnelly, and Huxley had been planning, but the commissioners constrained the ambitions of the South Kensington imperialists, with the recommendation that “no additional buildings” and no renovations to temporary buildings be undertaken at South Kensington without a “further Report . . . from this Commission.”110 The process of decision making over South Kensington remains unclear—­almost as much as it was to the disgruntled Williamson. The new South Kensington building, which was begun in 1866 for the Royal School of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering (formed in 1864 under the DSA and the Admiralty), was much larger than required for its small number of students. A museum building had also been ap-

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proved but, to the surprise of the incoming Liberal government in 1868, this included large laboratory spaces. Revealingly, Woolley thought that some of the laboratory space had been intended for the School of Chemistry (948), and in notes supplied to the Devonshire Commission, Cole referred to the school as “the School of Navigation and Science, now building at South Kensington.”111 Lowe (the supportive vice president of council had become an authoritarian, cost-­cutting chancellor of the exchequer) stopped all building in 1869 and asked for an account of what had been done and how it matched what had been approved. Treasury was justifiably suspicious. Cole had previously proved his capacity to hide projects within budgets. The new building was the largest on the South Kensington site, and it seems that only one of its four stories was required by the School of Naval Architecture. In 1870 Lowe put all future building under the Office of Works and its notoriously tough first secretary, Acton Ayrton.112

5.3.

The School of Science, South Kensington, the imposing building that Cole managed to have erected without the full knowledge of officials and competing institutions. Source: College Archives, Imperial College London.

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In 1872, while the Devonshire Commission was still sitting, the Royal School of Mines split, in a partial expression of the recommendation of the First Report. The laboratory sciences went to South Kensington with its laboratories, leaving the mining subjects in Jermyn Street with the Geological Survey and its museum. There was plenty of space at South Kensington, for the School of Naval Architecture was moving to the new Naval College at Greenwich. This was a lobbying success, twenty years after Playfair had begun to plan and lobby. It was a decade before the “Normal School of Science” was formally established, but, in the 1870s, under Huxley and Donnelly, the science schools at South Kensington had already become, in Desmond’s words, “the driving force of change”—­for state-­funded science education without reference to strategic, industrial, commercial, or religious interests.113 Behind the science schools was the booming examination system of the Science and Art Department, which provided employment for the graduating science teachers. Hirst was also tied into this complex of changes when, in 1873, he was appointed director of studies of the reconstituted Royal Naval College at Greenwich. Achievements What, then, did all their efforts to insert science in the education system achieve? The endless committees of Huxley, Lubbock, Spottiswoode, Hirst, and Tyndall; the astute questions of commissioner Huxley and his frequent ally, Sharpey; the setting and marking of examination papers by Huxley, Frankland, Hirst, and Tyndall? Not much, as Lubbock admitted, in the public schools. As MacLeod and Moseley observe, public schools and the university colleges that produced the schoolmasters “reinforced each others’ conservatism” in their reluctance to take up science.114 Many of the British Association committees, including the Committee on the Best Means for Promoting Scientific Education in Schools, achieved little. The contributions of the X-­men were at lower levels, to science teaching in elementary schools, night schools, and “third grade” secondary schools. “The English nation will not take science from above so it must get it from below,” wrote Huxley to Hooker, with medical allusions for his fellow navy surgeon: “if we cannot get it [the nation] to take pills [we] must administer our remedies par derrière.”115 The School of Science at South Kensington was a success from below. It did not provide liberal education for gentlemen, the kind of education that the X Club members, reforming masters in public schools, Playfair, William Thomson, and Oxford reformers alike agreed should be found 328

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in the first-­grade schools and in universities. Although, for a minority of students, South Kensington was a stepping-­stone to Oxford, the specialist science education of the School of Science was intended for the more middling sorts who aspired to become schoolteachers. In spite of their association with the School of Mines and the Royal College of Chemistry, the X Club members were not campaigners for technical education. Like so many of their contemporaries they were doubtful that the applications of science could be taught. Frankland emphasized that British industry suffered from lack of scientific research but, like most contemporary men of science, had no specific recommendations on how to move from theoretical knowledge to inventions. The establishment of the South Kensington science schools to provide a foundation for later specialist education, as argued by Huxley and Frankland among others, reduced the size and status of the specialist School of Mines. Only in the 1880s did further inquiries and commissions result in action on more explicitly technical education. Most members of the X Club were active in the lobbies, committees, and examination schemes described here. Hooker, who was skeptical over boys’ interests and capacities, usually stood aloof. Spencer, who was outside formal organizational structures, played only a minor part, but that a surprising one when he met with public-­school masters. Busk, whose only teaching experience was three years as Hunterian Professor at the College of Surgeons, was seldom involved in education campaigns (although he was a member of Huxley’s school board election committee). Huxley stands out—­as examiner for the Department of Science and Art, in British Association committees, on the London School Board, as Devonshire commissioner, at the Royal Society of Arts, as campaigner for a School of Science, and in a host of other positions not mentioned here. Lubbock was remarkably active, for example, as spokesman for science in Parliament and as a royal commissioner, but his effectiveness requires examination.116 As has become apparent in this section, Hirst, Spottiswoode, and Tyndall were involved in many of the education committees of the British Association; Frankland was an expert witness for the school-­of-­science scheme before the Devonshire Commission and remained active at South Kensington as teacher and examiner. The big question is why were they so energetic. They wanted more science taught, but not because it was useful for manufacturing, nor, primarily, because it should be part of a liberal education, nor, solely, because it could be a means of social progress for working people (although this was important to Lubbock and Frankland at least). Behind their activism there was an evangelistic ambition to change ways of 329

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thinking, which will be analyzed in chapter 6. Science develops the reasoning powers of pupils and students and, they believed, habituates their minds to seek natural causes for phenomena.

5.3 Money and Advice: The Reciprocal Relations of Science and Government The lobby that led to the Devonshire Commission was about government support for scientific inquiry, but other issues were added: support for science education (moved within the BA), and how government could best obtain advice on scientific matters (apparently added by the commissioners). The Devonshire Commission gave most of its time to scientific instruction; only two reports of the total eight dealt with the issues of government support for scientific inquiry and, conversely, channels for the provision of scientific advice to government, to which I now turn. In spite of the laissez-­faire principles of the government and scientific pride in “independent,” individualist traditions, before 1850 the state had been persuaded to support geology, chemistry, and drawing and art education for claimed national economic benefits, as was discussed earlier in the chapter. The British state was more likely to intervene in colonies and regions, such as Ireland and India, where local elites did not share the strategic, commercial, and religious interests of Britain. As the Devonshire Commission summed it up, in founding the colleges of the Queen’s University in Ireland, “the State did not adopt the principle of Assisting and Stimulating Local Efforts, but made itself responsible.”117 It is therefore not surprising that the first proposals for systematic state intervention were made by an officer of the Indian Army. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Strange had worked on the hugely expensive Indian Trigonometrical Survey. He retired from the Indian Army in 1861 and returned to England where he was employed by the India Office on the design and construction of surveying instruments. Thus the projects on which he worked required long-­term commitments to high levels of funding. Strange was familiar with Playfair’s lobby for better technical education, for he had been a fellow juror at the Paris Exhibition and had attended the Society of Arts conference that pushed forward the technical education lobby.118 He moved the debate from education to research when he presented a paper to the 1868 British Association meeting arguing that state intervention was necessary “to secure the progress of physical science.”

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The BA immediately appointed a committee of fourteen (including Tyndall, Frankland, Hirst, and Huxley) to determine if there was “suf­ ficient provision for the vigorous prosecution of Physical Research” in the country, and if not, what should be done. The committee reported to the council that provision was “far from sufficient” and recommended that “the full influence of the British Association for the Advancement of Science should be at once exerted to obtain the appointment of a Royal Commission” to determine current provision in detail and to advise how this could best be improved.119 The recommendation was endorsed by the General Committee at the 1869 BA meeting, but with the significant addition that any such inquiry should “extend itself to the action of the State in relation to Scientific Education.” This was a response to a request from Alexander Williamson and W. H. Miller, professors of chemistry at University College and of mineralogy at Oxford respectively, that the council investigate “whether government had been impartial” in its support for higher education—­a hint at the dissatisfaction felt by some scientific men outside the government-­supported institutions at what appeared to them to be unfair competition.120 From its founding in 1831, the BA had sought to exert influence on government. The Royal Society had used personal networks to commu­ nicate with government, most notably, the president had traditionally been chosen for his links to power elites. The BA operated on more mod­ ern, democratic principles. It relied on the size of its lobbies and made its views known through memorials and written appeals rather than through quiet conversations with powerful individuals. Nevertheless, both organizations sought government support only for specific expensive projects. It is ironic that Hooker, who represented the new men in the Royal Society context, believed in the old ways of acting. A few men in the right place at the right time, he thought, would be more effective than large numbers.121 On this occasion the BA chose to exert its influ­ ence by sending a large deputation of council members to call on Earl de Grey and W. E. Forster, the lord president and vice president of the Privy Council, to ask for a royal commission “to enquire into the action of the State towards science and its effects.” Hirst, who attended, thought the deputation “badly managed”; in his opinion, it “produced little or no effect.” It was led by Stokes, president of the association in 1869–­70, who lacked appropriate public presence and political skill.122 According to the Times report, Stokes and seventeen additional members of the British Association Council urged the appointment of a royal commission “to inquire into the relations of the State to

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scientific instruction and investigation.” Stokes contrasted government support for astronomical and meteorological observations, and for the acquisition and display of “natural objects” in the British Museum with the lack of support for “experimental observations.” The current Royal Society grant, he explained, was used “to defray the cost of instruments or chymicals” but not the time of the investigator. This was inadequate for extensive investigations, and many scientific men proposed a “national institution” for scientific researches, a kind of open-­access laboratory for all properly accredited researchers. His second point was science education. The funding of the British Museum and the South Kensington institutions mixed “both art and science,” he emphasized, and it was most desirable to know how much of that money went to science education, whether it was well used, and whether more government aid was needed. Also, it was quite unknown whether “the amount of science taught by the various establishments was quite worthy of the country.” The force of the requests was diminished when Stokes refused to express the opinion of the deputation on these issues. A full inquiry was necessary, he said, in order to determine scientific opinion. Forster and Grey immediately sniffed disagreement. Stokes reassured Forster that there was “no doubt in the minds of the deputation as to the propriety of State aid,” but everything else seemed open to opinion. Earl de Grey diplomatically assured the deputation that his colleagues “would give the most careful consideration to any representation from so influential a body as that now before him”—­but, as for himself, he could not see that the proposed subject of inquiry was as broad and as important as was customary for a royal commission. Huxley then spoke up. Although the organization of state action could be improved, he believed that present state assistance to science education was effective. Most of his colleagues, he admitted, disagreed and thought that the state should intervene more in education but, in Huxley’s opinion, this would lead to “decorated and endowed idleness.” A royal commission would probably remove much dissatisfaction. This was hardly a persuasive argument for an extensive inquiry. A few other individuals also expressed personal views before the delegation departed.123 Hirst blamed Stokes for bad management, although Huxley had surely been more undermining of the need for a commission. Huxley’s satisfaction with existing state assistance to science education can be recognized as satisfaction with the system that had produced over 2,000 science classes, teaching 34,000 children and youths, at a cost to the state of only £20,000 (table 5.1). His allusion to “decorated idleness” will be explicated shortly. Against Hirst’s expectations, the Liberal government proclaimed a 332

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Royal Commission in May 1870. The BA deputation’s arguments may have been weak, but the BA was not alone in its representations. Playfair’s lobby for technical education, the subsequent Samuelson Committee Report of 1868, and pressure from the Society of Arts, which supported both Playfair and Strange, all contributed to a sense that there were problems that must be addressed.124 Members of the commission represented a range of public service, social and scientific standing, and parliamentary and administrative experience. Potential conflicts of institutional interest were balanced. From the House of Lords came the Duke of Devonshire (Chancellor of Cambridge and one-­time second wrangler, who had voted for the Reform Bill as a young man) and the young Whig Marquess of Lansdowne (only one year out of Balliol College, Oxford). Both aristocrats had intellectual credibility as well as social standing; the duke also had major industrial interests. Two commissioners were chosen from the Commons: the industrialist Bernhard Samuelson, who had chaired the Select Committee on Scientific Instruction in 1868; and Sir John Lubbock, the new MP who represented scientific and banking interests in the House. Sir James Kay-­Shuttleworth, a “brilliant civil servant,” who had been the first assistant secretary to the Committee of Council on Education, had experience of administrative reform. Three representatives of science had standing in the Royal Society, Stokes (Cambridge, junior secretary of the Royal Society) and W. A. Miller (King’s College, treasurer of the Royal Society) were conservative, and William Sharpey (University College, senior secretary of the Royal Society) was a reformer. T. H. Huxley (School of Mines, Department of Science and Art), the fourth representative of science, represented a different institutional location and brought his well-­known administrative acumen to the commission. When Miller died in 1870 he was replaced by the more liberal H. J. S. Smith, Oxford mathematician.125 Scotland was not represented. One might ask why Lyon Playfair, science lobbyist and a recently elected parliamentary representative for Scottish universities, was not appointed.126 The secretary was J. N. Lockyer, War Office clerk and editor of the new journal, Nature. He was paid £300 per year, the others served gratis. The Devonshire Commission investigated education more closely than research. Only two reports, the fourth and the eighth, dealt with the funding of scientific research apart from its connection with teaching. Frankland, Hooker, and Spottiswoode were called to give evidence on the means by which scientific advice could best be given to government and government best support the expansion of experimental researches. In addition, Hooker gave evidence on Kew and the British Museum, scientific institutions funded by government. 333

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Scientific men might agree that state aid was acceptable, as Stokes assured the lord president of council, but state aid had to be justified in particular circumstances, not in general. Although attitudes were shifting, this was not a simple shift from “individual” to “state” provision. These terms hide the extent of corporate, local, and public provision between the extremes of private or individual provision and state provision, and this variety left much room for differences of opinion, even among the lobbyists. In its Eighth Report the Devonshire Commission appealed to high authority to justify state aid. It quoted Lord Derby: I am, as a general rule, very strongly in favour of individual effort, and very decidedly against the application of State funds to any purpose that can be accomplished without them; but I think that if there is any exception to that which I venture to call a sound and wholesome rule, it is in the case of scientific research, because the results are not immediate, they are not popular in character, and they bring absolutely no pecuniary advantage to the person engaged in working them out.

Excessive demands were seen to be counterproductive. Lord Derby’s conclusion was “all the more weighty from the limitations by which he guards it,” the commission pronounced.127 Derby expected private individuals and public bodies to do their part. One controversial issue was whether endowments, perhaps made many centuries earlier, could be redirected to purposes not conceived by the benefactors. In 1875, as the Devonshire Commission published this, its last, report, Derby spoke on the endowment of scientific research in his annual address as rector of Edinburgh University. He commended wealthy individuals who donated for the benefit of the poor or the Kirk as exemplars; for science, also, he wished to see the community “helping the action of the State.” Derby cautiously supported the many reformers who wanted the “ancient endowments” of Oxford and Cambridge colleges redirected to more modern purposes: the state, he believed, had the right to redirect endowments but, for pragmatic reasons, should respect the founders’ objectives.128 The Devonshire Commission’s Third Report (1873) had recommended that some of the fellowships be “remodelled” to support scholarships in science, science teaching in colleges, and more university professorships in science.129 The “proper destination” of college endowments, whether regarded as private bequests subject to the will of the founders or as having become public funds, asserted Nature in 1873, “is the support of learning and Science.”130 Huxley’s fear of “decorated

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Sir Lyon Playfair, scientific politician. Government chemist in the 1840s, unsuccessful promoter of science education in the 1850s, lobbyist for technical education in the 1860s, elected MP for Edinburgh and Saint Andrews universities in late 1868, Sir Lyon from 1883, and Baron Playfair from 1892. Source: Photograph, ca. 1891, by Herbert Rose Barraud. Wellcome Library, London.

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and endowed idleness” was an allusion to Cambridge and Oxford fellowships, which kept wealthy young men in leisure or enabled young lawyers to live in comfort while they built up a practice more often than they supported poor fellows beginning a life of scholarship. Huxley observed that wealthy public schools and wealthy university colleges did little for science education. The problem was not lack of money but lack of will. Although many reformers within the ancient universities agreed, others let it be known that they were not the only institutions with large endowments. It was “wild talk” to “represent the Colleges and universities as gorged with misapplied wealth,” wrote the Athenaeum reviewer of the report of the commission into “the property and wealth of Oxford and Cambridge,” and pointed to the even greater wealth of the London’s city guilds.131 Criticisms of government were less often at failure to “endow” science than at failure to respect the skills of scientific men. Nature was outraged when Treasury turned down a request to increase the salaries of British Museum staff. British Museum keepers began on a salary of £90, which rose so slowly to £600 that many of “the best men” left (so Nature claimed). Yet Treasury had recently justified paying their own junior clerks £250, as against the usual £100 starting salary in other departments, because “what was principally wanted at the Treasury, over and above the ordinary qualities of a clerk, was a certain ‘freemasonry’ which was best got at the public schools.” As Nature summed this up, the value of “Public School Freemasonry” to “Scientific Attainments” was in the ratio of £250 to £90.132 This illustrated how little understanding the classically educated men who dominated government had of scientific education and achievements. “We trust,” Nature caustically remarked, that a “determined stand” will be made by the trustees of the British Museum against this “monstrous” decision. One of the trustees was Robert Lowe who, as chancellor of the exchequer, was ultimately responsible for the salary differentials. One of Strange’s strongest supporters in the “endowment” lobby was Lockyer, editor of Nature, and an astronomer who wanted access to expensive equipment to study solar chemistry. Bitter conflict was aroused in the Royal Astronomical Society, where some astronomers accused Lockyer and Strange of self-­interested “jobbery.”133 Private correspondence of X Club members shows that they did not align themselves with Lockyer and Strange’s calls for increased state support for scientific research. Tyndall and Hooker, in particular, were doubtful as to what it would achieve. To some extent their doubts can be explained by the

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numerous untried proposals being promoted: there should be a minister for science, a council of scientific men to advise him, state-­funded laboratories for workers in experimental science, and a museum of experimental instruments (which could be examined by instrument makers and borrowed by researchers). All these options were canvassed with witnesses before the Devonshire Commission. We should not expect uncritical acceptance of every proposal that required more state money. The remainder of this section illustrates the quiet doubts and differences among the X-­men. Early in 1869, while Strange’s representations were going through the BA committee process, the X Club discussed how state support for “experimental” research should be increased. It favored only modest change: “an extension of the Govt Grant through the Royal Society was thought by the majority to be the best means.” Both Tyndall and Hooker later expressed doubt about even this means. In its Eighth Report (1875) the commission concluded that the annual grant of £1,000, administered by the Royal Society, “has contributed greatly to the Progress of Research, and the amount of this Grant may with advantage be considerably increased.”134 This was one of the few Devonshire recommendations that was followed up. Government offered an additional annual grant of £4,000 to be administered by the DSA on the advice of the Royal Society. Hooker announced the details that the Society had negotiated with government in his presidential address in November 1876.135 Tyndall, in an argument based on his organic and historicist view of the world, told Hirst that it would be difficult for the Society and researchers to adjust to the scheme because we have not “fairly and naturally grown” into it, therefore it will have to be “managed” rather than “healthily assimilated.” After one year of the scheme’s operation Hooker confided his dissatisfaction to Darwin: “Between ourselves, I think there will be a wretched outcome of the Govt. Fund.” Hooker’s authoritarian instincts surfaced: “[If] I had the uncontrolled selection of persons to grant it to, and was free to use my authority over them, I could have got ten times more done with the money.”136 When it came to the grand scheme for establishing public laboratories for chemistry, physics, and biology, where individual researchers who did not have resources of their own could work, only Frankland among the X-­clubbers was a supporter. Frankland argued that although local enthusiasm would usually be sufficient to build a laboratory, it was hard to sustain the enthusiasm for ongoing support. He recommended that state support be sought for the maintenance costs.137 Public

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laboratories were high on the agenda of the leading lobbyists. Nature editorialized on the topic in 1874. Such eminent men as “Sir Wm. Thom­ son, Dr. Frankland, General Strachey, Prof. Owen, . . . and others, express a most decided conviction that one of the most efficient methods by which Government could aid further research in this country is by the establishment of public laboratories” for the pursuit of areas of research “beyond the means of private individuals.” Men who give up their time “to the service of Science and the State . . . should be adequately remunerated.”138 Hooker and Spottiswoode were not named among the supportive witnesses, for both had recommended the development of existing institutions as sufficient for current needs and opposed expenditure on building new public laboratories.139 In its Eighth Report the Devonshire Commission held back from full support of public laboratories. It recommended that, just as naturalists had access to museums, private persons “engaged in important Chemical and Physical Investigations” should be allowed access in the future to laboratories “such as may be established or aided by the State” but that the admission of private investigators to university or state laboratories should first be tried.140 It is noteworthy that Sir William Thomson appeared regularly in lists of eminent advocates of state support. Throughout the lobbying he appears as a more consistent and thorough supporter of state endowment than even Frankland, the most enthusiastic among the X Club men. State funding implied state control, as Hooker well knew. Hooker wanted more scientific oversight (for example, over Owen at the Natural History Department of the British Museum) and less political oversight (for example, by the commissioner of works over the Royal Botanic Gardens). In Hooker’s dispute with Acton Ayrton, commissioner of works (1869–­73), and the long-­running territorial and personal disputes between Huxley, Hooker, and Owen, issues of principle and personality were joined. Tyndall led a campaign to defend Hooker (cast as the underdog) against the incursions of Ayrton. Interpretations need to allow for the entanglement of principles and policies about government funding and control, with Ayrton’s abrasiveness, and Tyndall’s enthusiasm for defending underdogs.141 Moreover, Ayrton’s attack on Hooker and Kew was not unique, and comparison with Cole’s responses to Ayrton’s efforts to rein in South Kensington imperialism would be illuminating. Even Lord Granville, the chancellor of the University of London, and fellow member of Gladstone’s government, was moved to protest publicly at the “very economical ideas as to the furniture of the University” held by the commissioner of works.142 The cautious and critical attitudes of Hooker and Tyndall to grand 338

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projects and government funding were also expressed in discussions over the “Loan Collection of Scientific Instruments” proposed in 1875. Loan collections were popular for art exhibitions in the mid-­Victorian period. In this case, the lobbyists hoped that the instruments would become the nucleus of a “museum illustrating the sciences of experiment and observation,” including modern instruments (which might be borrowed by researchers) and actual historic instruments from important experiments. Such a museum had been recommended by the Devonshire Commission and was perceived as a museum for the physical sciences that would attain the standing of the Natural History Department of the British Museum or the Paris Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers.143 Tyndall expressed his doubts to Spottiswoode and Hooker: “if the spirit of investigation be not there, such a collection cannot create it.” Hooker responded with the explanation that as president of the Royal Society his duty was to “echo” majority scientific opinion; he listed the well-­ known men who had “pressed [the scheme] on me.” He agreed, he assured Tyndall, as to “the inexpediency of jumping at the enterprises of scientific enthusiasts in the matter of museums and Exhibitions and, I may add of Government aids to original research too.”144 Hooker’s letter to Tyndall identifies significant divisions over state support. He differentiated “Donnelly, Lockyer, and all such men” from the majority and allowed that the majority were more optimistic and enthusiastic than he was himself. The significant differences of opinion among the X Club members demonstrate that Hooker and Tyndall, at least, were not enthusiasts for all the endowment of research schemes that were popular at the time. Nor is there any evidence that the X Club allies thought the issues of sufficient importance to attempt to find consensus or agree on a party line.145 Bernard Lightman’s recent study of Huxley’s role on the Devonshire Commission does not counter these conclusions. Huxley effectively promoted his educational interests concerning the DSA and the School of Mines, but with regard to research funding he had only two concerns, the research grant to the Royal Society, and defending Hooker from Owen. He did not push the schemes for public laboratories, new observatories and museums, or a council of scientific advisers.146 Between science and government, advice moved in the opposite direction to money. Hooker, who did not see the need for a scientific consultative committee, consulted behind the scenes. In 1872, well before he became president of the Royal Society, he told Huxley, “I believe that you and I have more influence than any other active scientific men now on stage.”147 There is some basis for such self-­important claims. 339

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In late 1873, as the Devonshire Commission came to the end of hearing evidence, Kay-­ Shuttleworth approached Hooker as confidential go-­between. Would Huxley be interested in becoming “director for science” under the Committee of Council—­a potential position that was discussed with many witnesses by the Devonshire Commission—­and Hooker passed on the message to Huxley, “if you would like such a post this is the time to press for it.” Kay-­Shuttleworth, who had held the comparable position for elementary education when the first Education Department was set up in 1839, would not press for the establishment of such a position unless Huxley would take it; Huxley did not want it, and the proposal lapsed.148 Huxley and Spottiswoode were similarly used by government as advisers and intermediaries, as will be illustrated in the next section. Hooker, Huxley, and Spottiswoode were well placed in the informal and confidential networks of advice and inquiry that informed government decisions. To conclude, while witnesses before the Devonshire Commission, in­ cluding even Hooker, agreed that there should be more state support for science and more appreciation by government of the benefits scien­ tific research could bring, whether in saving government money (the example of more economical ship design was often used) or increasing commercial competitiveness, this agreement hid large divergences of opinion over what should be done and by whom. Moreover, claims for public support were often directed at the wealthy Oxford and Cambridge colleges and the London livery companies rather than at the state. Even within the X Club there was little agreement. In the light of past scholarly emphasis on Huxley and the X Club as standard bearers for state funding, it is important to emphasize that although the members wanted more support and more respect for science they were uncertain as to how this could best be achieved, they did not work as a lobby on these issues, and they disagreed with one another. On my reading of the commissioners’ questions, Huxley collaborated more closely with Sharpey than with fellow X-­clubber, Lubbock. Further research is needed, identifying the alliances among the commissioners; comparing Huxley, Hooker, Frankland, and Spottiswoode, whose opinions can be identified from their evidence before the Devonshire Commission (and in Huxley’s case from his questions), with other groups, with Donnelly and Lockyer, with Playfair who had been a one-­man lobby, and with William Thomson and his Edinburgh and Glasgow associates.149 All these groups and individuals were more enthusiastic campaigners for state support of scientific research than were the members of the X Club.

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5.4 Hirst’s Career: Higher Education and London Life Hirst and Spottiswoode have emerged from the shadows in this chapter to stand only slightly behind Huxley and Lubbock as lobbyists for and activists in science education. This section examines Hirst’s career more closely. Through Hirst’s life we gain cameo insights into the University of London, the lobby for higher education for women, and the social and political life of the X Club. Members of the X Club could be expected to have found a congenial home in the secular University of London. It is, therefore, initially surprising that only Hirst was employed at University College, the pioneering secular university in England, and for only five years. On closer inquiry, their absence is easily explained—­there were few established positions and they did not become vacant at opportune moments in the careers of our men. Hirst’s opportunity came in 1865 when the professor of natural philosophy retired and the chair was split into mathematical physics and experimental physics. Alexander Williamson, the incumbent chemist, hoped that both Hirst and Tyndall would be attracted to apply,150 but Tyndall was committed to Faraday, whose health was fragile, and the Royal Institution. Hirst was appointed to the chair of mathematical physics but remained barely five years before moving to the lowlier university position of assistant registrar in 1870.151 Three years later he moved again, but upward, to become director of studies at the new naval college at Greenwich, an institution that was connected with the maneuverings over science teaching at South Kensington. His X-­brothers played a role in these appointments. Hirst’s career demonstrates upward social mobility through education and science. The Yorkshireman who was embarrassed by his regional accent rose to socialize with admirals. At University College School and then at University College itself, the awkward, shy young man, who had moved in Tyndall’s shadow, gained an independent circle of acquaintances and friends. He met the cultured Unitarians and Jews who supported the secular education offered by University College and its school. His circles expanded to include the reforming medical men and lawyers, and the old utilitarians who promoted secular education and opposed traditional privilege. Sharpey, a radical from the previous generation, and fellow professor at University College, became a good friend. They often dined informally together; when Sharpey was ill Hirst visited him regularly. Through Sharpey, he developed friendly relations

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with other reformers, for example, John Storrar, medical graduate of University College, a leading activist on the University of London Convocation, and a member of the University Senate.152 Although having little involvement in teaching at University College, many of the X Club men were involved in the administration and policy making bodies of the umbrella examining body, the University of London.153 Lubbock and Spottiswoode were appointed to the university’s senate at much the same time that Hirst took up the chair. They were joined over the following twenty years by Hooker, Busk, Hirst, and Huxley. In contrast to their activism as examiners for the DSA and as members of British Association committees, the friends seldom collaborated on the senate. Their chief achievement was the appointment of Hirst as assistant registrar. This conspicuous act of mutual support is just one of the ways in which a history of University College and the University of London senate provides interestingly different perspectives on the X Club. The election provides an example of mutual support among the X-­brothers taking place without the leadership of Hooker or Huxley. We also see them in interaction with secular and medical reformers who promoted higher education in London and with high government officials. The University of London was a bizarre, compromise institution, a mere “post office” for sending and receiving examination papers, according to one critic.154 By long tradition, universities were teaching institutions, but the University of London only examined. It had been created in the 1830s to overcome the stalemate that resulted when conservative forces refused to give the secular “London University” power to award degrees. University College (as London University was renamed in 1836) and King’s College taught classes; the University of London determined examination curricula, examined, and awarded degrees. By the time Hirst was involved, any (male) individual, resident anywhere in the world, who paid the set fee could sit an examination and, after passing an appropriate accumulation of subjects, obtain a University of London degree.155 The university was funded by government. The senate, whose members were appointed by the queen, conducted the business of the university through a bricolage of government departments, the Privy Council on major policy matters, Treasury for all expenditure, Works Department on accommodation and furnishings, and so on.156 All this made for cumbersome administrative processes that were managed by the registrar under the authority of senate. Their social and intellectual standing made the X Club men suitable members of the senate. In November 1865 Sir John Lubbock was ap-

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pointed in succession to his recently deceased father. Almost seven years on, aged only thirty-­seven, he was elected vice-­chancellor, an appointment of symbolic significance for both the university and himself, for his father had been the first vice-­chancellor of the university in 1836. When Spottiswoode was appointed to the senate in June 1866—­in spite of his Oxford connection—­he was a successful businessman with a reputation for scholarship and efficient administration of learned societies. Hooker was appointed in 1875, at which time he was president of the Royal Society; and Busk, a recent president of the Royal College of Surgeons, in 1876. Hirst was appointed in June 1881 (while director of studies at the Royal Naval College); and in October 1883 Huxley replaced Spottiswoode—­as he was replacing him in the presidency of the Royal Society.157 Few issues, however, stirred them to collaborative action, and their attendance was irregular. In the 1890s both Huxley, until his death in 1895, and Lubbock were active in debates over restructuring the University of London as a teaching university, but on opposite sides. This section focuses on the early period, before Lubbock’s vice-­chancellorship. The senate had nearly forty members but the typical attendance was about twelve, sometimes less, for many meetings were pro forma and the members of senate, who were appointed for life, often lingered on into ill health rather than retiring.158 As the University of London was an examining body, the chief activity of the senate was dealing with examinations: regulations, curricula, pass lists, prizes. Meetings were often dull. Attendance at senate jumped if there was a controversial item for discussion or an event of symbolic significance. Debates over the curriculum, whether attempts from the classics side to remove compulsory chemistry or, from the modern side, to substitute modern languages for compulsory Greek, and proposals to admit women to the examinations or degrees of the university brought out supporters and opponents. Elections were also well attended. Spottiswoode’s first meeting in mid-­1866 was a controversial one. Eighteen members were present, drawn by the motion from Convocation, the body representing the graduates of the university, presented by the chair of Convocation and senate member, Dr. John Storrar, “That it is desirable to establish in the University an Examination for Women, special in its nature.” The vice-­chancellor (George Grote) moved that “special in its nature” be omitted. Grote was a renowned radical and his wife, Harriet, a remarkable literary woman, was equally radical. He lost the motion in a close vote of 8 to 10 and the original motion was then easily passed (14 to 3). Spottiswoode voted with Grote on the side of full gender

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equality.159 The question of the admission of women to the examinations of the university had first surfaced in 1856 and continued until women received equal access in 1878. Some senate members completely opposed higher education for women; others, like Grote, sought full equality of access. In between there were those who thought one should wait for public opinion to change, or should make different conditions for women. Medical degrees were especially controversial. Many medical graduates, who had disproportionate power in university politics, opposed women in medicine; the women particularly wanted access to medical degrees, and kept up coordinated lobbying.160 Spottiswoode’s 1866 vote for equal access for women was consistent with his Christian socialist allegiance. As discussed in chapter 3, the Spottiswoode brothers were well known in the Macmillan circle. Moreover, William Spottiswoode’s wife, Eliza (Lise), was an active supporter of higher education for women. Reformers were frustrated by the intransigence of the medical men and the time required for legal changes to charters. The national Union for Improving the Education of Women tried to force the issue in 1874 by offering a £25 scholarship on the basis of the General Examination for Women. Although women were already being taught in University College, the University of London senate replied that the scholarship could not be awarded “without a departure from the existing Regulations.”161 Protesting memorials poured in, many with similar wording. They pointed out that the University of London had been founded to encourage the education of “all classes and denominations of Her Majesty’s subjects”—­including women, and argued that admitting women to the matriculation examination on an equal standing with men would have a beneficial influence on girls’ education throughout the country.162 “L. Spottiswoode” was among those who signed the petition from the Ladies’ Educational Association of London.163 The Spottiswoodes’ support for women’s higher education was not typical of the X Club. Huxley’s fancy footwork on women’s rights has been discussed by Evelleen Richards: his efforts to keep women outside scientific societies, his arguments about biological differences. Hooker was on the senate in 1877 when the final votes passed, admitting women to all the degrees of the university, including the medical degrees. He did not feel strongly enough to attend. Ironically, years later, Hooker belittled women’s attempts to get degrees from Cambridge—­surely the women could be satisfied with the more demanding London degrees?164 Hirst was involved in the earliest participation of women in university education in Britain. Before examinations and before degrees, University 344

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College pioneered the admission of women to lectures. In 1869 staff at University College began giving lectures to women for the Ladies’ Educational Association, the group to which Eliza Spottiswoode belonged. University College had to obtain a modified charter in order to teach women in college rooms. Hirst, for example, started his twenty-­four-­lecture course on the Elements of Geometry off-­site in January 1870. By the 1871/ 72 year, all classes met in the college, although the council kept men and women separate by timing the women’s classes on the half hour. J. E. Cairnes, professor of political economy, subverted this separation by refusing to repeat his lectures. He gained permission to combine men and women in one class and to open the prizes to all class members. By 1877 most classes at University College combined men and women.165 Hirst’s lecture course for women was one of the last courses he taught in his University College position. A socially diverse audience was expected, as indicated by the advertised fee differential—­ten and a half guineas, standard rate, one guinea for governesses.166 Hirst’s private notes cast a revealing light on the attendees. He was pleased with the diligence and interest of the sixty ladies who began his course, although many pursued mathematics as a cultural accomplishment rather than a useful skill. Many of his pupils were related to his scientific friends. “Mrs. Spottiswoode” was a major supporter; she enrolled, along with her daughter, sister-­in-­law, and five friends. Ellen Busk and one of her daughters enrolled. Some pupils were not serious students. Lady Lubbock, for example, wrote two valentines to Hirst, but did not do the exercises. Perhaps fewer than half did the exercises, for although almost sixty students had signed up Hirst recorded receiving only “25 very fairly (some beautifully) solved exercises.”167 For many it was an entirely new experience. His sister-­in-­law wrote that his was “the first lecture I have ever heard.” She felt that she had mastered the idea of the plane.168 Nelly Lubbock was similarly ill-­prepared to do the exercises. Her early education had been so deficient that, when the couple were courting, Lubbock’s sisters had laughed at her ignorance.169 Although mathematics was beyond her, she grasped biological topics and contributed a note to Nature on termites in 1875, possibly the first woman to publish in Nature.170 In spite of his interest in his ladies’ class, Hirst was not sympathetic with women’s aspirations for equality. Cultured conversation he could enjoy; competitive, campaigning women were another matter. He regarded men and women as having different characters and roles. “Manly force of character” made men leaders; women needed guidance.171 When courting Anna Martin, Hirst developed an elaborate father-­daughter role 345

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play that placed Anna in an obedient, deferential role.172 Although he greatly admired Lady Lubbock, Hirst had to admit that she did not entirely fit his feminine ideal. Her letters were so outspoken that, on her death, he burned them; they also had qualities he admired unreservedly: “full of spirit and fun,” “deep earnestness,” and “great insight.” In his sorrow at Lady Lubbock’s death, Hirst practically blamed Sir John for his wife’s failings: She was indeed highly gifted, though untrained; full of noble purpose though often wayward and capricious. In strength of will and determination she had few equals—­ none whatever at home. There was no one there strong enough even to temper or rather check her caprice.173

Ellen Lubbock was ill throughout the 1870s. The nature of her illness was never directly specified, but “caprice” is an allusion to her condition. Letters between Darwin and Tyndall in 1874 are more revealing. One relative, who feared that she was dying, reported to Darwin that “she eats nothing.” Darwin, who felt the only solution would be “diet” and “restriction of stimulants,” appealed to Tyndall to speak to her: “Sir John is . . . thoroughly alarmed, but has no influence over her”; Tyndall, he felt, might have some influence. Tyndall replied that he would “arrange to have an hour’s earnest conversation with her. I do not know that she will pay attention to me; but I think if she listens to anybody she will be inclined to listen to me.”174 Whether the primary problem was addiction to stimulants (a coca wine was available) or whether the fundamental problem was addiction to opium, which was widely used in Victorian England, is unclear. Nelly Lubbock could have been prescribed opiates as far back as the mid-­1860s, as she was injured in a train accident in 1865 (while pregnant).175 The details are speculation, but drug usage among the members of the X Club is consistent with the widespread drug dependence among the Victorians. Busk, who suffered severe pain in late life, injected morphine. Hirst, who suffered many illnesses, was tempted in the 1880s “to try the remedy that poor Busk knew so well.” Hirst resisted. Tyndall took opiates for sleeplessness for decades, which developed into “excessive use of narcotics and alcoholic stimulants.”176 The letters of their old age discuss health and remedies at length, but here we return to the problems of middle age. In the late 1860s, Hirst was worried about the progress of his research. He felt that his teaching absorbed all his energies. Lubbock suggested that the University of London’s new assistant registrar position, estab-

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lished to assist with the large increase in the number of examinees, might suit him. It would be “less arduous and more remunerative” than his teaching position, and hence allow him more time and energy for research. Lubbock also advised Hirst, with a revealing assessment of his senate colleagues and of the significance of the university, that he would meet “good and influential men” and “perhaps be able to influence to some extent the character of education in England.”177 In February 1870, while teaching his ladies’ class, Hirst applied for the position of deputy registrar in the university. The appointment process took strange turns, but first I investigate Hirst’s overwork. Hirst enjoyed a full social life and took on many responsibilities in the scientific community. In the late 1860s his journal shows that he was constantly at dinners, soirées, the theater, lectures, and meetings of scientific societies. He was a reliable member of many committees. In these years, his most regular social engagements were with Tyndall, the Lubbocks, the Spottiswoodes, the Busks, Debus (a friend since Marburg days), Sharpey, and the wealthy Huth family.178 Among the X Club, those whom he saw most often, usually at least once a week, were the Lubbocks, the Spottiswoodes, Tyndall, and the Busks. Hirst regularly took long walks with Tyndall on the weekends, and often ate dinner with him. With Tyndall, or alone, he often walked to High Elms on a Sunday to call on the Lubbocks. It was a standing invitation. Usually he took the train back to town for dinner but sometimes he stayed over until Monday. If he did not walk to High Elms he called on the Spottiswoodes. Hirst was musical. He joined a choir—­a rather “aristocratic assemblage of singers”—­ which Mrs Spottiswoode organized in the winter of 1867–­68; it met weekly over four months and was conducted by the twenty-­four-­year-­old Arthur Sullivan.179 There were also formal invitations—­dinners at the Busks, dinner parties before RI lectures at the Spottiswoodes, and numerous other forms of sociability. Often, other X’s and their Y’vs were among the guests at the formal dinners. Hirst saw the Hookers, Franklands, Huxleys, and Spencer much less often than those wealthier families with spacious houses and teams of household staff, but this is not to suggest any lack of warmth. In Feb­ ruary 1869, Hirst, Tyndall, and a Miss Symonds dined at the Hookers. The Hookers, Hirst observed, would be “glad if Miss [S.] could become Mrs Tyn­dall.” At the X Club dinner a few days later, Tyndall was “ ‘chaffed’ immensely about Miss S.”180 Many social events were linked to Hirst’s University College position. There were soirées, regular professors’ dinners, and a Literary and

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Philosophical Society.181 He was constantly at Sharpey’s house—­break­ fasts, dinners, calling by, celebrating Halloween; he attended dinners and musical events at the houses of other University College professors; he was invited to dinner by George Grote, chair of the University College senate.182 There were also evening lectures given by college professors and visitors. The most onerous of Hirst’s honorary positions was the position of general secretary for the British Association, discussed above. In 1867, he accepted nomination to the Athenaeum Club’s committee, which met weekly, and agreed to act as mathematical examiner for the Middle Class Schools. He was elected to the council of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1869 and was a long-­term member of the council of the London Mathematical Society.183 Worries about the slow progress of his research did not lead Hirst to give up these positions. Moreover, he had a supplementary position as examiner for the Department of Science and Art (which, at least, was well paying) and he tutored the sons, and an occasional daughter, of friends.184 In addition to committee meetings there were, of course, meetings for the presentation of scientific memoirs. Hirst regularly attended Royal Society and Mathematical Society meetings. Then there was the social and cultural life of London and its learned societies. Hirst frequently attended the theater, the opera, or a concert, sometimes even twice a week. There were the soirées and dining clubs of scientific societies. He was a regular attendee at Royal Institution lectures, and not only when Tyndall was lecturing. Sometimes the scientific and social were mixed. Hirst was at the Geological Society annual dinner to support Huxley, who, in his presidential address, was intending to attack William Thomson’s argument limiting the age of the earth.185 Thus it was not only the heavy lecturing load that left Hirst insufficient time for his research; committee meetings and his extensive social life eroded his research time. Unlike Faraday, who explained to Tyndall that he neither gave nor attended dinner parties in order to leave time for his investigations, and unlike Lyell, who advised Hooker to serve on only one scientific committee at any one time, there is no hint in Hirst’s journals that he ever considered a policy of restricting committee activities and dinners.186 He sometimes recorded being too ill or, unsurprisingly, too tired to go out, but the only work that prevented sociability was DSA examining, which, we have seen, had strict schedules.187 Usually, Hirst accepted each and every invitation. Perhaps he was flattered and honored to be asked, but the sense given in his journal is that dinners,

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soirées, committees, lectures, and the theater were taken-­for-­granted aspects of gentlemanly scientific life. There is no typical week, but early December 1869 well illustrates Hirst’s varied social activities. His niece Lilly, who was a student at Bedford College, usually visited on the weekends. Hirst took Lilly, plus two Simpson nieces who had recently arrived to live in London, to the theater, and two days later (Sunday) took Lilly to High Elms for lunch. On the three following days he had meetings, the Mathematical Society, the council of the Astronomical Society, and the council of the British Association. On the following Sunday, he had lunch with Tyndall; took a walk with Tyndall and Lilly; and then took Lilly to call on the Spottiswoodes, where he had some mathematics to discuss. Three days later he dined formally with the Spottiswoodes; most of the X Club men were present, also Mrs. Busk, Mrs. Hooker, and Lady Lubbock. (Hirst always used formal address—­ thus Lubbock was always “Sir John”—­in his journal.) The following day the Busks and Hirst went together to dine with Sharpey, and just two days later Hirst took Lilly “to dine with Mrs Busk and play billiards. . . . Mrs Busk was beautifully motherly and pleasant.”188 Hirst was fond of his friends’ wives. He often sat with “my two best lady-­friends Lady Lubbock and Mrs Busk” at Royal Institution lectures.189 For Hirst, and the other men without their own family circles, the families of their friends were important for providing warm companionship, varied activities, and relaxing entertainment. Hirst admired the social daring of Lady Lubbock, even when it shocked him. Usually restrained and dignified, he “laughed immoderately” at the amateur theatricals at Lady Lubbock’s birthday party in 1868; he was both surprised and reluctantly admiring when the ladies replied on their own behalf to the toasts.190 Hirst regularly recorded the names of women he sat beside at various events, but seldom the topics of conversation. Among the few noted were conversations about Italy, Governor Eyre, and music with women outside the X Club circle, but he was almost silent about his closer friends. Although Huxley had serious conversations with a freethinking Ellen Busk, Hirst emphasized, on more than one occasion, that Mrs. Busk was “motherly.” In a rare reference to conversation topics, Hirst recorded that Lady Lubbock “as is her wont drew us into interesting philosophic conversation on matters metaphysical and transcendental.”191 Thus it appears that Nelly Lubbock was interested in the more controversial theories and beliefs of her husband’s friends. Sometimes lady friends helped with Hirst’s research. When he was researching a controversy over Newton’s theory

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of gravitation, which involved the question of the authenticity of letters purportedly by Pascal and Newton, Ellen Lubbock copied out letters at the British Museum and Mary Colvill, who kept house for Sharpey, her uncle, prepared the index to Hirst’s collection of papers on the controversy.192 All this counters the conventional view that women were usually too ill-­ educated to provide friendship for educated men. When Hirst applied for the assistant registrar position he offered to give up some of his honorary positions. The appointment process is a noteworthy example of mutual promotion among the X-­brothers. Hirst was a loyal supporter of Lubbock. In 1867, when the University of London was given its own parliamentary seat, he had raised support among the University College professors and science graduates for the nomination of Lubbock as Liberal candidate.193 At the British Association meeting later in the year Hirst, Busk, and Tyndall held a carefully planned meeting to promote scientific support for Lubbock’s nomination—­against reforming medical men, who argued that a distinguished graduate of the university was required, preferably a medical graduate. This discussion became irrelevant when Robert Lowe agreed to stand for the university seat. Lowe, a brilliant debater, who had held government office in the areas of both education and public health, had broad appeal to London graduates; the other candidates wisely withdrew.194 In 1870 the roles reversed; Lubbock supported Hirst. There were 112 applicants for the assistant registrar position. A subcommittee made a short list of six, whom they interviewed. Sharpey, who was on the subcommittee, reported back to Hirst that the committee decided it did not need to interview him because “they all knew [you] perfectly well.” The subcommittee members were Grote (vice-­ chancellor), R. H. Hutton, Sir Edward Ryan, Sharpey, and Storrar, most of whom Hirst had met through his position at University College.195 His insider position, Hirst recognized, made his application unusual. Moreover, Grote thought the position unsuitable for Hirst because the duties were too routine. Sharpey, nevertheless, persuaded the committee that Hirst should have an opportunity to speak. Hirst prepared to counter the doubts about his being overqualified and not a graduate of the University of London. At the interview, he emphasized that he would be happy to work under the direction of Carpenter, the registrar, but that, in the light of the £500 salary, he did not regard the position as so subordinate as to be beneath him. He declared his respect for the “enlightened liberality” of the university.196 After interviewing the six, plus Hirst, the committee recommended to the senate that Frederick George Finch, a graduate of King’s College, 350

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University College, and the Royal School of Mines, and a geologist with experience in a Welsh iron company, be appointed. Hirst was informed that the committee had recommended Finch. He was astonished, a week later, when he arrived at the Athenaeum for dinner to find Spottiswoode waiting with the news that the senate had elected him as assistant registrar, “without opposition.”197 There is no official record of the senate discussion and no voting record; only the names of the twenty-­one members present were recorded.198 Lubbock, Spottiswoode, and Sharpey were among the twenty-­one. The reports of the senate meeting that filtered out to Hirst demonstrate that his many friends on the senate were looking after his interests. Lubbock had spoken first: when the committee reported its recommendation to the senate, he had asked if the decision was unanimous. When the committee admitted it was divided 3 to 2, discussion ensued over whether Hirst was overqualified. Spottiswoode praised Hirst’s “administrative powers”; Sir Robert Lowe asserted the principle that the best man should be appointed; Sharpey, and Hooker’s surgeon friend Paget, supported Hirst more indirectly. Hirst was relieved, he confided to his journal, that his “personal friends” did not take a leading part—­or so he persuaded himself.199 Nevertheless, Hirst was very uncomfortable. He suspected that Carpenter did not want to work with him and feared that the vice-­chancellor might not have confidence in him. Indeed, Hirst’s stress, in his interview, on being willing to take instructions from Carpenter, and later exchanges in the early months of the position, suggest that Carpenter would have preferred someone who was more clearly lower in status.200 All in all, this is an astonishing episode. In appointing Hirst, the senate not only went against the recommendation of its committee but also chose an applicant who was not a graduate of the University of London. When appointing the first registrar fifteen years previously there had been strong feeling that only graduates of the University of London would be sufficiently sensitive to defend their university and its graduates from slights and oversights. Graduates of the university had appealed to the senate that the appointee “should be habitually under the influence of a sensitive regard to the maintenance and extension of [the] privileges” and standing of the institution.201 The appointment was beset by misfortune. In May 1870, a debilitating attack of scabies delayed Hirst’s beginning work. The skin of his feet, legs, and hands blistered and peeled; he was unable to walk. Sharpey, who visited daily, warned him that Carpenter had given an overgloomy picture of his state of health to senate and advised him to call on Grote—­who 351

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would thereby see that he was already recovering. Some “expressions of dissatisfaction” had been uttered at senate, Sharpey told him. In order to persuade everyone, especially Carpenter, that he was nearly well, Hirst began appearing in his office while still on official leave.202 The second storm in a teacup arose after Hirst took up residence, as requested by the senate, in the university buildings. The striking of the university clock hindered his sleep. The Office of Works, when requested to stop the clock’s striking, replied this could not be done, besides, they noticed, there was no official approval for Hirst to reside.203 Only three years later he resigned to take the position of director of a new naval college. In 1872 when the navy decided to establish a reformed Royal Naval College with a modern scientific curriculum, the First Lord of the Admiralty, George Goschen, consulted independently with Huxley and Spottiswoode over a suitable head of studies and was “considerably surprised,” as Huxley described it, that they “coincided in recommending Hirst.”204 Goschen then met for “several hours” with Spottiswoode, Huxley, Admiral Key (the naval head of the new institution), and the Reverend Joseph Woolley (director of studies at the about-­to-­be-­merged School of Naval Architecture). No position was advertised; no written testimonials received; but Huxley was deputed to approach Hirst.205 Although Hirst was reluctant—­ he feared that the responsibilities “would be ruinous to my Geometry which is dearer to me than all,” he entered into discussions with Goschen and Key over the proposed curriculum. He approved their ambitions for a modern curriculum; moreover, the offer was financially attractive, a salary of £1,000, a house, and a retiring pension.206 To his surprise, the final written agreement gave the salary as £1,200. A few weeks later, over dinner at Spottiswoode’s house, he had a “chaffing” exchange with Lowe over his new position that concluded with Lowe telling him, “I have had a great deal more to do with your position at Greenwich that you can be aware of.” Hirst concluded that he owed the extra £200 to Lowe.207 Personal relationships were crucial. Although scrimping on the salaries of the lowly curators at the British Museum and cramping the expenditure of the DSA, Lowe must have found in Hirst the kind of “freemasonry” that he ascribed to public-­school-­educated Treasury clerks. The University of London senate appointed another committee to consider a new round of applications.208 Five years later, when Carpenter was considering retirement from the registrar’s position, Sharpey sounded out Hirst, suggesting that Lubbock, Spottiswoode, and Sharpey had not been embarrassed by what seems, to twenty-­first-­century eyes, to have been a fiasco.209 352

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Thomas Archer Hirst, probably during his employment at University College, 1865–­70. Source: University College London Archives (DH 70), by permission of UCL Records Office.

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Once he became assistant registrar, Hirst (figure 5.5) moved in even higher circles. Prince Arthur and the Duke of Devonshire (chancellor of Cambridge and chair of the sitting Royal Commission) were fellow guests at an official dinner in 1871 given by the Chancellor, Lord Granville: “It was a very elegant and distinguished party.” Almost two years later, on the last day of his assistant registrarship, Hirst recorded another dinner at Granville’s. This party was “a very distinguished one indeed”—­including the Prince of Wales, the Marquess of Ripon, the Bishop of Winchester, and Chief Justice Cockburn. The awkward friend whom Tyndall had often left behind at home ten years earlier, was astonished to find that Granville’s dinner was for himself.210 Although still socially retiring, Hirst was now widely known and respected. As director of studies at the Royal Naval Academy, Hirst (in his early forties on appointment) had a position of prestige and authority. He socialized with admirals, dispensed patronage, and entertained foreign dignitaries. Huxley considered him the “very best man for the post” because “he gets on with all manner of men, & singularly attracts young fellows.” Huxley may have been biased; some of Hirst’s students remembered him as formal and aloof.211 Huxley took for granted Hirst’s commitment to a modern scientific education and his foreign language competences. The curriculum developed under Hirst was more modern than that in any British university at the time. The sciences (physics, chemistry, mathematics, natural philosophy), geography, and modern languages (French and German) were required. Heinrich Debus, friend of Hirst and Tyndall from Marburg days, was appointed professor of chemistry. The curriculum changes were controversial. Hirst fully supported the plans of the Admiralty to provide naval officers with “the very best Scientific and Technical Training now attainable,” but in his public pronouncements was careful to affirm the importance of traditional naval values: plucky, courageous, and “dashing” officers were still needed.212 The mutual promotion of Lubbock and Hirst—­Liberal candidate for the University of London parliamentary seat, assistant registrar of the Uni­ ver­sity of London and, additionally, the drawing of various X-­brothers into these campaigns—­pointedly raise the question of whether the X Club was as much about mutual self-­interest as about the reform of scientific institutions or the promotion of a naturalistic philosophy. In general, I consider that their mutual promotion can be seen as principled. For example, in the campaigns for electing Spottiswoode as treasurer (1870) and president (1878) of the Royal Society, they were putting an ideological ally in place. A clear modern analogy is the femi-

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nist movement’s nominating and voting women into positions of power over the last forty years. This is not merely the election of friends, but putting a woman—­of suitable principles—­in place because she will see some crucial issues differently to an equally competent man. Huxley and Spottiswoode’s recommendation of Hirst to Goschen was different in that it had no identifiable ideological component. The navy had determined to modernize the training of officers, a physical scientist was needed, preferably with language skills as modern languages were to be taught, and officers from foreign navies would also be trained. Hirst spoke German, French, and Italian, and had excellent networks among foreign mathematicians. Moreover, he was retiring and politic; he would not provoke conflict. He was an excellent choice for the position, but this is not to say that there was no other suitable candidate. The University of London examples of mutual promotion in which Hirst and Lubbock were involved had much more to do with personal loyalty and in-­group bias than reform concerns. Hirst, and Huxley and Tyndall, who joined him in raising scientific support for Lubbock’s nomination as Liberal candidate, knew that Lubbock wanted a parliamentary seat. They gained wide support among scientific men at the British Association in what seems to have been an expression of scientific against medical interests. Given the importance of medicine to the high reputation of University College and the University of London, medical reformers understandably wanted a medical candidate and insisted on a London graduate. According to the Lancet, the British Association had no standing on the matter.213 Getting Hirst appointed as assistant registrar was even more narrowly about the personal interests of a friend and less about the interests of the institution. Similarly, when Hirst nominated Lubbock, against H. J. S. Smith of Oxford, for the presidency of the symbolically important 1881 anniversary British Association meeting (chapter 4.3), there was no apparent motive on Hirst’s part other than personal loyalty. Smith was a liberal reformer, even if from Oxford. Hirst’s career thus shows much about the more personal aspects of the X Club: the significance of the wives, especially for those members without close families, the tensions between gender in practice and in principle, the intensity of the social networks among the Club members, and the operation of mutual promotion. Hirst’s career has also illustrated the process of high-­level appointments in Victorian England. Examination had been introduced for entry to the civil service, but at higher levels of government confidential inquiries and personal interventions, with the Chancellor of the Exchequer even adjusting a salary,

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were unremarkable. As Adrian Desmond demonstrated for Huxley, Hirst moved in elite cultured and political circles; the hints above are that William and Eliza Spottiswoode were also at home among these elites.

5.5 Good and Influential Men Members of the X Club were deeply committed to expanding the reach of science education. This chapter has shown them taking positions of power and influence—­leading new initiatives in science education, debating and shaping policy regarding science education and research in many forums, and acting as confidential advisers to government. They were becoming, like the members of the University of London senate, “good and influential men.” The chapter has focused on projects and lobbies in which they collaborated. Individually they served the public good in many ways not covered here, Hooker as imperial botanist, Tyndall and Frankland as advisers to government on technical matters, Busk as the first Home Office inspector under the Cruelty to Animals (Vivisection) Act of 1876, and Huxley and Lubbock in hosts of other positions.214 Huxley and Lubbock were exceptional in their energy and commitment to educational causes, and both were sought out for many public positions. When Huxley turned down the invitation to join the University of London senate in 1883 on the grounds that he was unwell and could not perform the duties adequately, Lord Granville ignored his reservations, assuring him that even in decline he would be an outstanding member. Lubbock’s title, liberal reputation, and moderate style made him a valuable figurehead. When the London Society for the Extension of University Teaching asked Lubbock to succeed Goschen as president in 1894, the council promised that an acting chairman would relieve him “of the burden of all the details of work” for ordinary council meetings, “leaving only the important public meetings and the decision of important questions of policy to make any demands upon the time and energies of the President.”215 Lubbock frequently acceded to such requests to give status and credibility to worthy social and educational causes. Here, as in other chapters, birth was an important element in social authority. Within a few months of succeeding to the baronetcy, Sir John Lubbock was appointed to the senate of the University of London, in succession to his father. Although proud of his achievements, Lubbock did not always seek out high position. When asked to take the vice-­

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chancellorship of the University of London he replied that he had no university degree and neither the classical nor mathematical competences expected of a vice-­chancellor. He recommended Storrar and Spottiswoode as more suitable, but the Lords Granville and Derby disagreed.216 The symbolism of his relationship to the first vice-­chancellor was undoubtedly important for the University of London, but it is unclear what personal qualities made him such an attractive president and chairman for so many organizations. Certainly his title brought standing to any organization, and his reputation for moderation often made him acceptable to conflicting sides. Huxley is the outstanding example of achievement through personal qualities, without any benefits of birth, but in this chapter, we also have the noteworthy example of Hirst. The Department of Science and Art was the institutional vehicle for the most wide-­reaching achievements of the X Club in science education. The efforts of Huxley, Tyndall, Frankland, and Hirst contributed to expanding science teaching in night schools, at the upper levels of elementary schools, and in schools for the middling sorts of people. Their innovations in higher education were built on this foundation. Following from the machinations of Cole, Huxley, and others, and the success of the earliest teacher training courses, the first report of the Devonshire Commission recommended the establishment of a general science school to include teacher training. Texts were written to support both the teacher training and the courses at lower levels. These were publishing and financial successes, benefiting their authors and the Macmillan publishing house. Authoritative authors and cheap texts attracted further teachers and pupils, as did scholarships and exhibitions. X Club members were equally committed to, but less successful in establishing, science teaching at socially higher levels of the education system. Through committees, commissions, lobbies, and the House of Commons, they endeavored to persuade the public schools and government legislators that science should be part of a modern education. They attended committee meetings, turned dinner parties into working parties, drafted reports, and wrote letters. Lubbock spent years collecting and collating information in order to present the Parliament with information on the inadequate teaching of science in public schools. They represented science on boards of governors. All this effort achieved little, for the high-­status traditional institutions had tremendous inertia. Utilitarian programs of social manipulation through the Department of Science and Art were far more effective than good arguments presented to the public-­ school masters and members of parliament who were

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products of the system. It was undoubtedly true that the nation was being given its science “from below.” When the British universities were still providing a liberal education for gentlemen, the South Kensington science schools provided a professional, specialized education for science teachers. No one giving evidence before the Devonshire Commission, observes Cardwell, advocated a specialized education in science, rather “witness after witness specifically repudiated such a thing.” X Club members and other scientific witnesses alike, insisted that universities must give a liberal education, including both science and literature. The reformers accepted the traditional values associated with a liberal education but insisted that science be part of such an education. Adrian Desmond, reinterpreting thirty years of research in which “professionalization” was a dominant narrative in history of science, identified the South Kensington science schools as the first professional training in biology in Britain, but the profession in view was teaching. Cardwell had previously made the same point: “although science was slowly becoming professional this was almost entirely due to the demand for teachers.”217 This chapter challenges the widely held view that the X Club led the endowment of science lobby. Hooker and Tyndall were distinctly skeptical, Frankland the most enthusiastic; most were moderate and tactical in their representations. On women’s education, the Club members were divided; only Spottiswoode and Busk were supporters of women’s aspirations. On both these issues their Scottish colleagues were stronger reformers. As in other areas of activity, the achievements of the X Club members were the results of individual hard work, mutual support, and astute politics. In contrast to their work in scientific societies, on educational issues they seldom needed to make efforts to stack committees. When they were present in large numbers it was because their reputations and organizational positions made them appropriate members. Hirst and Spottiswoode were ex-­officio members of BA committees; Huxley and Tyndall were elected to BA committees on education because they had teaching experience and high reputations as lecturers. Their effectiveness resulted as much from ascribed authority as from the manipulation of power, but effectiveness also required regular, sustained effort: turning up to the endless meetings of the Devonshire Commission; persisting at the intense process of marking DSA examination papers; running teacher training courses in the summers. Their perseverance required strong beliefs in the transforming capacity of science education.

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Expanding the place of science in the curriculum was important to the X-­men for many reasons. Science was useful, the X Club members agreed. British industry would suffer if managers remained ignorant of the principles of science and, at the very least, workers needed an elementary education. But maintaining the preeminence of British industry was not their major motivation, although it was a useful argument that brought them allies among manufacturers and industrialists. Rather, science had cultural and intellectual value. They emphasized that science was a method of reasoning. Hence they argued that science must not be taught solely from books but that pupils should learn to observe or even experiment for themselves and to base their conclusions on observation. This emphasis on science as method rather than science as useful knowledge had two important implications. Constructing science as a method of inquiry implied science was essentially anti-­authoritarian, an implication that Huxley developed at length when he set up skepticism as the essence of science. Education in science was therefore the opposite of the rote learning and dogmatic style that critics claimed to be widespread in elementary education. Constructing science as a method of inquiry also enabled advocates of science to claim that science “trained the mind.” This argument enabled advocates to claim a position for science, alongside the classics, in a liberal education. The patient observation and cautious reasoning from facts to general ideas, which science inculcated, would be just as effective as the classics in “training the mind,” but science had the supplementary advantage of being useful to industry. With the exception of Hooker, they were also driven by (relatively) democratic ideals. To boys and young men in “humble” circumstances, education offered a means of rising in the world, and science (rather than classics) was an especially suitable education for ambitious young men who wanted to get beyond the three Rs. In addition to emphasizing hard work and collaboration, this chapter has drawn attention to collaborators outside the Club, to viewpoints that were widely shared, to issues on which the X Club were not in the vanguard, and to failed campaigns. The history of the DSA outlined early in this chapter shows how much the establishment of the School of Science owed to Playfair, Cole, and Donnelly. Macmillan was an ally in the textbook writing, as in so many other publishing projects. Roscoe, Frankland’s successor as professor of chemistry at Owens College, was an associate of Huxley in the textbook series. Leading industrialists supported science education, although for more utilitarian reasons than Huxley and Frankland. Sharpey was a friend and ally in many lobbies.

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There was very wide agreement among scientific men on some issues, such as the importance of universities giving a liberal education; similarly, most “failed” (as interpreted by many historians of technical education) to see how technical education was possible except in “the workshop.” School of Mines opponents of the proposed School of Science were among the few witnesses who advocated technical education. Huxley was, undoubtedly, brilliant but, in summarizing the achievements of the X-­men, it is all too easy to give the impression that, against reactionary forces in Church and state, Huxley’s brilliance and cunning, with a little assistance from his friends, pushed through many reforms in education. I therefore emphasize not only that they sometimes failed and that they had many allies but, following Sophie Forgan and Graeme Gooday, that “the accomplishments of the ‘great individual’ . . . merge inextricably with the vagaries of local politics and fluid socio-­cultural alliances.”218 Some of the debates over science education were as much about institutional politics as about ideology. Alexander Williamson of University College, so often an opponent of DSA schemes, was an ideological ally of the X Club and had supported Tyndall’s campaign to put “new blood” into the Royal Society. Williamson opposed the South Kensington scheme because he believed that government-­supported institutions were competing unfairly with private institutions such as University College. Perhaps if Huxley and Frankland had obtained positions at University College early in their careers, rather than at the School of Mines and the Royal College of Chemistry, they would have propounded different institutional schemes for science education. Tyndall’s rejection of government funding for research matched his position at a well-­supported, privately funded institution. Moreover, large changes quite outside X Club control permitted the DSA system to flourish. It was supported by industrialists who wanted educated workers, and by science teachers who turned to the DSA system when the narrowness of the new code for elementary education cut their incomes. This chapter has focused on the 1860s and early 1870s when the X-­ men were still working together. By the 1880s there was much less collaboration, for, when they had institutional authority and other allies, they needed one another less. Lubbock, MP for the University of London; Huxley, dean of the School of Science at South Kensington; Hirst, director of studies at the Royal Naval College at Greenwich; Hooker, ex-­ president of the Royal Society and director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew; and Spottiswoode, president of the Royal Society, were five good and influential men who owed their positions, in considerable part, to the earlier support of their loyal X Club friends. 360

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Not only did they need each other less in the 1880s, but also they were moving apart. On educational issues, for example, Huxley and Lubbock were going independent ways. Donnelly complained to Huxley that Lubbock ignored the DSA’s contributions to popular education. When the campaign to reconstitute the University of London as a teaching university rather than an examining body was under way, Huxley and Lubbock were on opposite sides. Lubbock was committed to the institution that he had served so long, on the senate, as vice-­chancellor, and as Member of Parliament. Huxley supported reorganizing the University of London as a teaching university and in 1892 accepted the presidency of the Association for Promoting a Professorial University of London.219 This is just one of the signs of weakening links within the X Club, to which I return in the conclusion.

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Claiming Cultural Authority When Tyndall retired in 1887, Nature praised him as a leader of a “great scientific movement”: “Others will rank beside or above him as investigators, but in the promotion of the great scientific movement of the last fifty years he has played a part second to none.” The movement was characterized, said Nature, by “a new habit of thought in the light of which the foundations of our educational, industrial, and political systems are being reconsidered.” Tyndall and his X Club friends would have added theological or religious systems to the list, but in the interest of uniting the scientific community to honor Tyndall, Nature overlooked his more controversial claims. Beatrice Webb, a sympathetic but critical observer of the scientific movement, described it in more far-­reaching terms as a “religion of science.” Its advocates had “an implicit faith that by the methods of physical science, and by these methods alone, could be solved all the problems arising out of the relations of man to man and of man towards the universe.” According to Nature, “all classes and opinions” were swept along in the scientific movement. Webb herself had been only a brief adherent. She had followed this faith for only six years (1876 to 1882, she said) before she “found it wanting.” Looking back, she thought the faith in science “almost fanatical” and speculated that it might have been due to hero worship: For who will deny that the men of science were the leading British intellectuals of that period; that it was they who stood out as men of genius 362

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with international reputations; that it was they who were the self-­confident militants of the period; that it was they who were routing the theologians, confounding the mystics, imposing their theories on the philosophers, their inventions on the capitalists, and their discoveries on the medical men; whilst they were at the same time snubbing the artists, ignoring the poets and even casting doubts on the capacity of the politicians.1

Webb exaggerated. Probably she was describing the perceptions of her younger self, for, through Herbert Spencer, who was a family friend, she had known all the members of the X Club during their years of greatest power. The claims made by Nature and by Beatrice Webb point toward the activities and reputations that will be explored in this chapter. Their ambitions went far beyond the science-­focused institutions and policies of the previous two chapters. X Club members were among those scientific men who proclaimed most loudly and publicly that science was a new way of thinking, and that old ways of thinking and acting must be reconsidered in the light of this new “habit of thought.” The chapter examines the kinds of claims that the X Club men made for the new ways of thinking and the modes of communication that they used to reach various audiences. Not all members of the X Club had the literary and rhetorical skills required to engage in these public activities. The extent to which the quieter of the X-­brothers shared the attitudes of Tyndall, Huxley, Lubbock, and Spencer is a matter for inquiry here. The chapter investigates how the X-­men saw their role in relation to the larger society and how others saw them. Also, it takes note of social and ideological divisions and alliances both within science and in relation to other social elites. As Webb remembered them, the men of science were “the leading British intellectuals” of the period. Modern scholarship on Victorian intellectuals has not come to such a clear conclusion. As discussed in the introduction, Turner put men of science at the center of his analysis and, indeed, quoted Beatrice Webb. But other scholars of Victorian intellectuals have focused on other occupational groups and intellectual interests, T. W. Heyck (1982) on men of letters, Stefan Collini (1991) on political thinkers, and William Lubenow (2010) on Oxford-­and Cambridge-­ educated professional men.2 By paying attention to these accounts of other elites, I elaborate Turner’s account of cultural authority and broaden his discussion of cultural leadership. I follow Paul White’s call to investigate friendship and cooperation between scientific and other elites. Examples of cooperation have been recounted in previous chapters—­ liberal theology and liberal science in alliance defending the essayists and Bishop Colenso (chapter 3.2); ordained public-­school masters 363

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and scientific men allied in seeking curriculum reform (chapter 5.3). Such cooperation was not merely pragmatic or strategic, White insists, but indicates deeper levels of agreement and common social goals.3 Interpreting the X Club with the arguments of Heyck, Collini, White, and other historians of Victorian intellectuals in mind enables a richer ac­ count of the intellectual, cultural, and social world that the X Club inhabited and a less polarized account than Turner’s of cultural authority. Scientific men were not the only group that challenged the cultural position of clergy. A long tradition in literary scholarship identifies men of letters as secular “sages” and “prophets.” Heyck’s study of the changing position of “men of letters” in Victorian society is an attempt from within this tradition to identify the changes in intellectual life brought by scientific preoccupations. Collini emphasizes political thinkers and the towering presence of John Stuart Mill. From this broadened perspective, the Reader (chapter 3.4) takes on a new significance. The X-­men joined Mill, men of letters, and Christian socialists in promoting liberal thought through the Reader. Questions about their social and cultural position, oppositional stance, and interpretations of religion are all aspects of the central question of this chapter: how did they see their cultural role? or, what did the X-­men think they were doing, and what were their aims and ambitions? I begin with their self-­descriptions. There are no serious or extended self-­analyses, rather, I interpret the frequent jokes and occasional justifications of particular activities that indicate something of how they conceived their roles and responsibilities. In later sections of the chapter, which focus more directly on action, I return to the question of what can be inferred about motives and identity from patterns of action. Under the heading of “Science Militant,” the second section identifies the confrontational styles and polarizing content in the lectures and essays of Huxley and Tyndall and discusses the extent to which Spencer and Lubbock were also militant in the claims they made for science. Later sections will qualify this militant narrative by drawing attention to friendships and alliances, intellectual agreements, and shared values, which make polarizing interpretations inadequate for understanding the X Club. But, I submit, the militancy is so central that it requires explanation. Following “Science Militant,” I take up Paul White’s emphasis on friendship and examine the ways in which the X-­men were cultural insiders, sharing the values and ambitions of the cultured elite. The fourth section examines the broad range of their activities in promoting science to general audiences. It identifies the diverse subject matters, audiences, and modes of communication that are usually grouped under the pro364

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tean category of popularization. The fifth section focuses narrowly on X Club involvement in the relatively unknown and unsuccessful Sunday lecture societies. The alliances uncovered in the Sunday lecture societies are an example of confrontational politics rather than confrontational ideas and identify specific groups among the cultural elite with whom the X Club made common cause. Finally, I turn to the question of the viewpoint represented by the X Club. I examine their naturalistic arguments, their efforts to find a place for religion and morality in a naturalistic universe, while promoting the authority of science and scientific men in political life. As indicated in the introduction, my interpretation remains within the historiographical tradition initiated by Frank Turner. I emphasize the naturalistic program that Frank Turner, Bernard Lightman, and many others identify as the heart of scientific naturalism but defer in some matters to Robert Young and propose a less systematic definition. Scientific naturalism, I suggest, was a movement and an ambition rather than a doctrine.4

6.1 Self-­Images Modern historians identify them as intellectuals, but this term does not indicate the crusading zeal or the sense of public responsibility with which the X Club men engaged in public life. “Public moralists” better conveys their Victorian sense of responsibility, but “moralist” is too narrow a description of their interests. Turner’s summing up of their ambitions as the seeking of “cultural authority” best captures the range of their actions. Through close examination of their self-­ descriptions and the descriptions of their admirers, I elaborate here on what cultural authority meant to them. Public Responsibilities In many ways, we can interpret Huxley and Tyndall as claiming, by virtue of their scientific standing, the role to which Lubbock was born. They were becoming public persons with public responsibilities. In an often-­ told story, Huxley defended his acceptance of an invitation to unveil a statue of the Unitarian and chemist, Joseph Priestley, and make a speech at the opening of Mason’s College in Birmingham. Tyndall told him he needed to protect his health. Overwork was justified, Huxley replied, because the Birmingham people “deserved to be encouraged for asking a man of science to do the job instead of some noble swell.” Besides, it 365

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could be “a good opportunity for a little ventilation of wickedness.”5 I begin with his understanding of himself as an alternative to a “noble swell.” As we have seen, within scientific societies the X-­men wanted social authority to be measured by scientific standing rather than birth. Here, Huxley claimed social authority for science in the world at large. Hooker’s campaigns to get scientific men elected to the Athenaeum were similar in motivation, but Hooker’s projects required only modest time commitments. Huxley could not resist the opportunity to assert the social authority of science and to elaborate the multisided implications of scientific thought—­with the provocative exemplar of the Unitarian Joseph Priestley. He later admitted that the lecture had been a large time commitment. Huxley had alluded to the social responsibilities of scientific men in 1860 when he reflected on his career in a letter to Hooker. “You and I, if we last ten years longer, . . . will be the representatives of our respective lines in the country. In that capacity we shall have certain duties to perform to ourselves, to the outside world, and to science.”6 Francis Galton, friend of the X Club and a potential additional member in the 1870s, represented scientific men as having “high duties” to “the health and well-­being of the nation in its broadest sense.”7 Previous chapters have shown Huxley performing many duties to science and science education. “Duties to the outer world” perhaps included the sort of lectures that related the findings of science to political issues. Notable Huxley examples are the balancing act of “Emancipation—­Black and White,” in which he managed to combine racist and sexist science with humanitarian politics, and “Some Fixed Points in British Ethnology,” in which he concluded that there were no ethnological grounds for any political separation of Irish and English peoples.8 Huxley and Tyndall both considered it important to counter the sci­ entific ignorance of the political classes. The root of the problem was the narrow education offered in the old universities, whose members, Tyndall implied, failed in their “noble vocation . . . to systematize the culture of England.” According to Tyndall, he collected his Royal Institution lectures on heat into a book only because a political friend had persuaded him that most cultivated people and political decision makers had so little understanding of science that they could not sympathize with its needs.9 Similarly, Huxley explained that it was worth his while to attack Gladstone’s claim that man was essentially religious because “the ignorance of the so-­called educated classes in this country is stupendous, and in the hands of people like Gladstone it is a political force.”10

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Scientific Missionaries and Spiritual Guides Religious metaphors and analogies pervade the self-­descriptions of the X-­ men and the commendations and criticisms of their friends and enemies. Some of these evocative phrases have been quoted in previous chapters. Huxley described his South Kensington–­trained schoolteachers as “missionaries” to a benighted English people. In an ironic reversal of orthodox language, the English became the “Christian Heathen of these islands” whom his “scientific missionaries” would convert to “the true faith”—­ namely, the scientific faith. Hugh Falconer, an ally of Hooker and Busk in gaining the Copley Medal for Darwin, described his own position as a “scientific faith” in contrast to a religious faith. Historians, also, have freely used religious metaphors to describe the ambitions of X Club members. Leslie Howsam describes Spencer, Tyndall, Huxley, Lubbock, and other contributors to the International Scientific Series as “evangelists” for science, that is, they were seeking to convert readers from one faith or creed to another. Mark Patton compares Lubbock with John Ruskin, both were “competing for the soul of the nation.”11 My discussion focuses on the religious metaphors they used for themselves. The reversal of language illustrated in Huxley’s description of Christians as “Heathen,” is widespread in the private letters of the X-­men and their friends. Sir James Coxe, phrenologist, commissioner in lunacy in Scotland, and a longtime friend of Tyndall, identified Christian belief with superstition when he praised Tyndall’s Belfast address: “I hope you will long labour in the vocation that has earned you so much notice; that is in bringing down the strong-­holds of ignorance and superstition.”12 In these metaphorical reversals of meaning, Huxley, Hooker, and their friends took the position of God’s chosen people for themselves and often identified the enemies of science as “Philistines” and “Amalekites,” that is, the enemies of God’s people. At various times Huxley labeled Ayrton (the commissioner of works with whom Hooker was in dispute) and St. George Mivart (a disciple turned critic of Darwin) as “Amalekites.”13 When Spencer and Huxley were engaging in bitter pub­ lic controversy, Hooker advised Huxley not to argue publicly with Spencer, not out of any consideration for Spencer (whom he described as “a man morbid in mind and body—­eaten up with self-­sufficiency”) but “because it makes the enemy to blaspheme.”14 Blasphemy is a crime against God; Hooker was implying that he and Huxley were on the side of truth and righteousness.

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Before Spencer’s self-­importance had become so irritating to his friends, Tyndall and Huxley both praised his synthetic philosophy, in revealing words. You “get into some tortuous verbal mazes,” Tyndall told Spencer, but (using both physical and religious metaphors), “my centre of gravity is at its lowest point as I read these pages—­on them I take my stand and defy the world, the flesh and the devil!” When the center of gravity is lowest a body is at its most stable, thus Tyndall felt that Spencer gave him a firm philosophical place to stand. Tyndall constructed himself, and Spencer, as on the side of truth and good, standing against the temptations of “the world, the flesh and the devil.” These were the temptations from which Anglicans regularly prayed to be delivered.15 The religious metaphors were usually, but not always, militant. When attacking Mivart, Huxley admitted that “smiting the Amalekites” was one of his favorite occupations, but he used a gentler metaphor when, after moving to Eastbourne, he invited Hirst to visit: “There is a chamber in the wall here for stray prophets—­and you must think of occupying it sometimes when the fine weather comes.”16 As many scholars have emphasized, scriptural metaphors were endemic in Victorian Britain. The allusions were part of the lingua franca, they were used for jokes, and to assure an audience that one’s background was respectable.17 Hooker raised a laugh during one of his very few public lectures when he compared the English to an ignorant tribe and scientific men to missionaries. Uncivilized tribes believe the moon is created anew each month, Hooker told the British Association audience at Nottingham in 1866. Some tribes believe that all species of animals and plants are created “in as many spots as we meet them.” His audience was puzzled until his explanation, that “the missionaries of the most enlightened nations” who teach otherwise are the scientific men, produced applause and laughter.18 The publicists among the X-­men saw themselves and were seen by their admirers as spiritual teachers or guides. The language they used for themselves and, significantly, the language of their admirers, resonates with scriptural and religious allusions. “Dear Uncle John,” wrote a nephew in thanks for a gift of the second part of Lubbock’s Pleasures of Life, “You will become a sort of secular Thomas à Kempis.”19 A member of a debating society in Bangor, in far northwestern Wales, felt that he spoke “for thousands of other young men” when he thanked Lubbock for his books: “Because . . . you have shown us the better way & bid us climb the altar-­stairs of the beautiful, the noble and true, up to God. ‘Forward, till you see the highest Human Nature is divine.’ ”20

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Mme Olga de Novikoff, who conducted an admiring and flirtatious correspondence with Tyndall in the mid-­1870s, complimented him in powerful biblical language after the Belfast address. She urged him not to allow fear of wounding his friends to inhibit his speaking out: “I sympathise now more than ever with the great number of people, unknown to you but living upon the bread you give them. Let the faith of those unknown but united be complete in you.”21 Comparing Tyndall’s ideas to life-­giving bread was to claim the Christian eucharistic symbol; suggesting that Tyndall could “unite” many in faith was an equally Christ-­like allusion. Huxley’s friends and disciples used a wealth of witty labels. Spottiswoode, when president of the Royal Society, wrote to Huxley as “Dear Mentor & Father Confessor.”22 Huxley’s disciple, Michael Foster, delighted in witty forms of address and reference. “Noble Sir,” “My dear General,” “Honored Episcopus,” and, most frequently, “Reverend Sir” were just a few of his leadership metaphors. Lubbock used biblical allusions and pro­ phetic declamations infrequently. On one noteworthy occasion Darwin praised the opening to his essay on “The Evidence of the Antiquity of Man.” With multiple allusions Lubbock began: “While we have been straining our eyes to the East” for light on our origins, “suddenly a new light has arisen in the midst of us . . . in the pleasant valleys of England and France.” The Magi of Christian tradition saw the star in the East; En­ glish Christians looked East to the lands of biblical history for discoveries about human origins, but Lubbock emphasized that new light and truth were to be found here, at home.23 Although there was deliberate humor in identifying themselves with the chosen people and English Christians with historic enemies of God’s people or ignorant heathen, as George Levine emphasizes, these “rhetorical inversions” were not merely satirical.24 The repetition built up an alternative vision of their world. They were not dangerous preachers of atheism or materialism; rather, they were preaching a message that their superstitious and ignorant countrymen needed to hear. The repeated metaphor of themselves as God’s chosen people was weighty in its implications: God was on their side, the side of truth and right, and they would win. On the Side of History Not only did the X Club men have confidence in their own cause being the side of right and truth, they also understood themselves to be on the side of history. At the end of a particularly provocative lecture, Huxley concluded, these ideas are “destined . . . to be more and more firmly

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established as the world grows older.”25 Tyndall used this strategy to introduce and excuse his most controversial interpretations. At the end of the Belfast address he explained: “I thought you ought to know the environment which, with or without your consent, is rapidly surrounding you, and in relation to which some adjustment on your part may be necessary.” Change was “inevitable.”26 A few years later he introduced the bogey of revolution to justify controversial aspects of his Royal Institution lectures: his aim was to gradually prepare “the public mind for inevitable changes which without this preparation might take a revolutionary form.”27 Huxley sometimes interpreted these intellectual changes as the working out of the principles of the Protestant Reformation. The “act which commenced with the Reformation is nearly played out” he told the students at Aberdeen in 1874, a “wider and deeper change, . . . a revolution in thought” is coming.28 Reformation metaphors were popular in radical literary circles. New understandings of religion were presented as continuous with the principles of the Reformation. Lewes had described a “new Reformation” as a shift from freedom of conscience to freedom of opinion.29 In a letter to his wife Huxley revealingly described the centuries-­long struggle as between “free thought and traditional authority.”30 Free thought was a radical label that Huxley avoided in public pronouncements. In these accumulated metaphors, he thought of himself as the heir of the Reformation and of God’s chosen people. From the explicit and implicit claims discussed here, the X Club images of their own authority can be distilled. The X Club men claimed for themselves the same social position as the aristocracy of birth. They had duties to the larger society (their conception of these duties will be elucidated further through analysis of their actions). Much stronger and more conspicuous than the social claims were the spiritual claims made for their science and themselves. Scientific men were missionaries, spiritual guides, and modern prophets offering new understandings of the world and new visions of the good and true for human aspiration. These self-­ understandings were overtly oppositional. Contemporary Christian beliefs were summed up as heathen ignorance and superstition, and the X-­men and their allies were the forces of truth and righteousness. Moreover, they would win, they were on the side of history and, metaphorically, of God.

6.2 Science Militant They were the “self-­confident militants” of the period, said Beatrice Webb. They used many polarizing metaphors as illustrated in the preceding sec370

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tion. Some of the X-­men enjoyed provoking those whom they regarded as opposition, for example, an opportunity for “wickedness” appealed to Huxley. This militancy has been pushed into the background by the accumulated qualifications of revisionist histories, especially on the issue of “Science and Religion.” There was no unified Science fighting a unified Religion (Moore, Lightman, Crosbie Smith). Science was not against “religion,” but against “theology” (Barton, Lightman). Or the issues at stake were social rather than intellectual: the scientific men were against clerical amateurs as part of their professionalizing campaign (Turner, Lightman), or against the established Church and its power (Desmond). Scientific men were not locked in combat with, but were friends of university humanists and leading clergy (White). While I accept most of these reinterpretations, I emphasize that the X Club members were distinctly militant. Some were aggressive, others were moderate in their style but uncompromising in their content; some were the best-­known spokespersons for the provocative view that all claims to knowledge had to conform to scientific canons of empirical truth, while others gave background support to the publicists; some made their personal opinions public, others have left little trace of their beliefs. In arguing that the X-­publicists were militant, I emphasize that the X Club did not represent all scientific men. As examples of conflict within the British Association and between the Ethnological and Anthropological Societies of London have demonstrated, there were deep interconnected scientific, religious, and political differences among scientific men. Nevertheless, although the X-­members were only a small group, some were such effective and popular communicators that they had an audience out of all proportion to their numbers. Huxley, who could be guaranteed to entertain and confront, filled halls; Tyndall’s brilliantly conceived and executed experiments drew crowds to his scientific lectures, and audiences flocked to his more philosophical lectures expecting something controversial; Lubbock’s lectures were mobbed. Spencer was too nervous in society for public speaking, but his writing brought him worldwide fame. All four collected their lectures and articles into books that were widely popular. Huxley and Tyndall, especially, were often aggressive in attack. This was partly a matter of personality and partly of their rhetorical skills. The others were less confrontational in personal style and less skilled at using words as weapons, thus the best quotes come from Huxley and Tyndall, but Lubbock, Spencer, and, sometimes, even Hooker made clear their departure from comfortable orthodoxy. As already seen, Hooker, 371

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like Huxley, used polarizing language in the context of Darwinian debates, firing “shots” and “smashing” Wilberforce. When Essays and Re­ views was published, Lubbock wanted to join the “battle for freedom” in theology. Lubbock and Busk, like Huxley, took up research in the early 1860s on controversial topics around human origins. Moreover, they chose to go beyond the bounds of their scientific specialisms. Under cover of anonymity, Tyndall tried out controversial views on the dependence of mind on body in the Saturday Review. Examples here are taken from the early years of the X Club and those members who were most engaged in public debate and expounding science to broad audiences.31 It starts with the overtly confrontational, Tyndall’s provocative public interventions in debates about national prayer in the mid-­1860s and Huxley’s masterful lay sermon, “On the Desirableness of Improving Natural Knowledge” (1866). The section examines Spencer’s growing reputation in the early 1860s and the challenges to Christian orthodoxy identified by the early reviewers of First Principles (1862). Lubbock’s Prehistoric Man, which is reputed to have contributed to his losing his first election campaign in mid-­1865, is then examined through the responses of its early reviewers. Finally, the various justifications of militancy and contradictory claims to be peace loving that the X-­men offered are considered. Later sections of the chapter will indicate something of how other members of the X Club shared the attitudes and supported the activities of their more outspoken friends. Tyndall’s skepticism about prayer came to widespread public attention in the mid-­1860s when he entered national debate over the effectiveness of prayer. The debate began as criticism of a specific prayer written by the Archbishop of Canterbury for relief from cattle plague, published early in October 1865. The government had called no national day of prayer, but had asked the archbishop to write a prayer for congregational use. The prayer, expressed in the conventional phrases of the Prayer Book and the King James version of the Bible, drew immediate criticism. Surely it was not reverent to suggest that God could “forget” to show mercy, declaimed the Examiner. A disingenuous schoolmaster wrote to the paper requesting the Bishop of Oxford’s advice on how he could explain to his pupils the assertion that God had smitten the animals in “anger at our manifold transgressions.” Would a perfectly good and wise God be angry with his creatures, and, “if so, would He show His anger by smiting the unoffending herds in the field”?32 The Pall Mall Gazette took the argument beyond theology to causation in nature. Many educated people were unsupportive of the proposals for national prayer against cholera (threatening from the east) and 372

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the cattle plague, not because irreligion was rife, pronounced the Pall Mall Gazette, quite the opposite. Educated people understood “the uniformity of the operations of physical law” to be “a result of the fiat of the Eternal Mind.” It would be “presumptuous imbecility” to ask God to change the order of nature. But there was a space for prayer. Humans, through their individual wills, intervene constantly in the natural order; also through prayer rational beings communicate with “the Author of physical laws” and surely he could act in the same ways as we ourselves intervene.33 Tyndall entered the public debate with a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette. Previously, in “Reflections on Prayer and Natural Law,” he had focused his criticism on a Catholic priest who had believed his blessing of the mountains could change the order of nature and had praised those En­ glish clergymen who understood “the real causes of disease and scarcity.” That article had been inconspicuously placed at the end of Mountaineering in 1861.34 In 1865 his language was more provocative and his site more public. “Granting the entire freedom of the human will,” but only for the initial purpose of argument, Tyndall accepted that the Pall Mall Gazette had shown it was not absurd to petition the Almighty to act against cholera or cattle plague. But the argument from free will, Tyndall continued, justified both mild and extravagant beliefs and supported the (obviously erroneous) “beliefs of ancient heathens and modern savages” as fully as the beliefs of modern Christendom. Knowledge has changed behavior. We once prayed against smallpox, but now when smallpox threatens we turn to vaccination, which has been found to be more effective. “The great majority of sane persons of the present day believe in the necessary character of natural laws, and it is only where the antecedents of a calamity are vague or disguised that they think of resorting to prayer to avert it.” Provocatively, Tyndall continued the pagan analogy. We “resort to pagan methods” because “we are in a state of darkness similar to that of the ancient pagan world” regarding many natural phenomena.35 Correspondence poured in. Some advocated both prayer and sanitary action. The Pall Mall Gazette again argued that, by analogy with human free will, divine intervention was possible. Tyndall wrote at greater length, arguing that people prayed only when ignorant of causes. Then, in a move that defended himself from any charge of irreligion, he argued that the difference between those who prayed and those who did not pray was “one of knowledge, not of religious feeling.” One group understood more about the antecedent causes than the other group.36 For himself, and others, he claimed that the essence of religion could 373

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John Tyndall, combative Irishman. “He is an Irishman and has the combativeness of his race; but he has its persuasiveness in still larger measure,” according to the text accompanying this Vanity Fair cartoon. Titled “The Scientific Use of the Imagination,” Tyndall is portrayed gazing beyond the seen to the imagined. Source: Cartoon by Andriano Cecioni, Vanity Fair, 6 April 1872 (Men of the Day, No. 43), 111.

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not be captured in formal affirmations, these were the mere garments that clothed the “religious feeling.” As man of science Tyndall claimed, in this incident, to speak authoritatively about the natural causes of human and animal disease as he had previously, in the Mountaineering essay, asserted the natural causes of good and bad weather. Tyndall used Catholic priests and ancient heathen as bogeys of superstition from whom civilized English Protestants would want to distance themselves. The second letter was his strongest argument against any intervention being possible. He asserted that prayer had no consequences in the natural world. When the Pall Mall Gazette closed down correspondence (because it was becoming repetitious), debate over prayer continued in other forums. In December Tyndall provoked further debate with an article in the Westmin­ ster Review on “The Constitution of the Universe.” At this point, Tyndall undoubtedly knew of Sir John Herschel’s earlier, anonymous contribution to the Fortnightly Review, which argued that human actions were interventions in the course of nature and that human volition could add to the sum of energy in the universe.37 Tyndall attacked such thinking. His article gave an account of the universe in terms of vibrating atoms, a luminiferous ether, and the conservation of energy. In the final paragraph, Tyndall offered further observations on prayer. This time his argument against miracles was buttressed around by the most comprehensive law of modern physics, the conservation of energy. Those who pray for fair weather or for rain do not realize, wrote Tyndall, that what they request would be as much a violation of the law of conservation of energy as that water would flow uphill. Prayer is “impotent” in external nature, he declared, but can have an effect “on him who prays.” On this view even praying that scien­ tific men might find cures for plagues and epidemic diseases was “impotent.” In high-­sounding language, he pleaded: And if our spiritual authorities could only devise a form in which the heart might express itself without putting the intellect to shame, they might utilise a power which they now waste, and make prayer, instead of a butt to the scorner, the potent inner supplement of noble outward life.38

The controversies over prayer were continuing when Huxley made a vigorous and brilliant assault on Christian belief early in 1866. “On the Desirableness of Improving Natural Knowledge” was a masterpiece of rhetorical cunning in which Huxley set up the method of improving natural knowledge as the diametric opposite of the views on truth, faith, and doubt held by many of his devout countrymen. It was immediately 375

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published by Lewes in the Fortnightly Review. Huxley considered it important, for he placed it first in his 1870 collection of essays, and immediately after his autobiography in volume 1 of his Collected Essays.39 Huxley scholars identify the lecture as important in Huxley’s oeuvre—­ James Paradis aptly sums it up as “the most succinctly representative of his vision” and emphasizes its rhetorical power.40 Moreover, the occasion of its presentation was symbolically important, the opening lecture in a series of “Sunday Evenings for the People,” designed to offer improving alternatives to sermons (and discussed further below). Here I analyze the polarizing strategies by which Huxley created opponents and enemies of science. Huxley had begun his lecture mildly by portraying the Londoners of two hundred years earlier and the disasters of plague and fire that they faced. They submitted to the plague “for they believed it to be the judgment of God” and were “furiously indignant” at the fire, which they believed to be the work of either Republicans or Papists. But, said Huxley, they were “themselves authors of both plague and fire,” although it would have fared ill with anyone who had told them so (21–­22). This exaggeration was typical of Huxley’s rhetoric. Portraying people of the past as obviously naive allowed his auditors to feel wise. He then introduced the founders of the Royal Society (to which his title alluded), as a group of “students” who had come together for the purpose of “improving natural knowledge” (21). Huxley imagined the founding president of the society returning to earth. He would be astounded at the ships, printing presses, and other machinery of the present and would quickly realize, claimed Huxley, that all these wonders were a result of the project to improve natural knowledge. He would be delighted to know that improvements to drainage and ventilation and engines for throwing water had reduced pestilences and destructive fires. These improvements have not been due to more fervent religious faith, said Huxley, but to “the improvement of natural knowledge” (27). That was but the first step of the argument: science has improved material life and provided ships, railways, telegraphs, and printing presses for human welfare. But these material goods are only toys. “I would not care,” Huxley went on, “to toil in the service of natural knowledge” if the ultimate achievement were merely improved material welfare (31). Much more important, natural knowledge has given us new, grander views of the universe, brought us to “the ideas which alone can satisfy spiritual cravings,” and laid “the foundations of a new morality” (31–­ 32). This second stage of the argument thus claimed all of contemporary

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industry for science, while claiming that the greatest benefits of natural knowledge were in the spiritual and moral realm. The lecture culminated in a provocative and polarizing conclusion: “The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.” Thereby Huxley mirrored and attacked the defining anti-­Catholic slogan of the Reformation, “justification by faith,” not works. Natural knowledge, asserted Huxley, had altered intellectual ethics. He satirized devout literal-­minded Christians. What he asked, are the “intellectual ethics” most fondly held “by barbarous and semi-­barbarous people”? They are the convictions that authority is the soundest basis of belief; that merit attaches to a readiness to believe; that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and scepticism a sin; that when good authority has pronounced what is to be believed, and faith has accepted it, reason has no further duty. There are many excellent persons who yet hold by these principles.

The method of science was, he emphasized, the “exact reverse” of these convictions: The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin. And it cannot be otherwise, for every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority, the cherishing of the keenest scepticism, the annihilation of the spirit of blind faith. (40)

The repetition emphasized Huxley’s value judgments: any faith was “blind faith”; deference to authority was subservience. Science was defined in polarizing opposition: “scepticism is the highest of duties.” The scientific man believes only what he has proven. In this address, Huxley was not content with defending the theory of evolution, or persuading men that they were descended from monkeys, he took the debate onto the opposition’s territory and claimed a higher morality and spirituality for himself. At numerous points his formulations were offensive to the devout. For example, in the name of science he associated those who believed, both ancient Jews and contemporary Christians, with “barbarous and semi-­barbarous” peoples (40), described “books and traditions” as “idols” that must be broken in pieces (38), and satirized a central dogma of Protestant identity. Such outspoken attacks led to Huxley and Tyndall being joined in the public mind as irreligious thinkers. The North Staffordshire Church

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Protestant Association discussed the cattle plague at a meeting in March. Its members believed the plague was a consequence of national indifference to the Maynooth grant—­given for a Catholic college in Ireland. In their opinion the government had not appointed a day for fasting and humiliation, “being much more afraid of the sarcasms of Professors Huxley and Tyndall and the Pall Mall Gazette than of the warnings of the Word of God.”41 Spencer was less confrontational in style but his content was militant. He was known as “an advanced thinker,” which clearly indicated that his work was unlikely to find agreement among orthodox thinkers. Although extremely defensive when criticized, he seldom directly attacked the theories of others. His ponderous style did not attract readers looking for sparks; rather, his militancy lay in the content of his theories, theories about man, society, and the physical world that were completely naturalistic. Studies of responses to Spencer’s philosophy have focused on disciples rather than critics, hence the account here is limited to First Principles (1862). First Principles was important as the foundation of his philosophical system and the title that treated the controversial question of religion. Principles of Biology (1864 and 1867), which followed, was less widely read.42 Religious questions were of central concern to respectable Victorians. Reviewers often accused Spencer of atheism and materialism; for example, “Modern Atheism” was the title of R. H. Hutton’s review of Spencer’s earlier Psychology.43 As is well known, First Principles directly questioned the validity and nature of religion. Originally published in six installments for Spencer’s subscribers, the completed volume was divided into two parts, “The Unknowable” (five chapters) and “The Knowable” (seventeen chapters).44 In the first part Spencer argued that the ultimate conceptions of both science and religion were beyond comprehension. Thus although the antagonism of belief between Religion and Science was “the oldest, the widest, the most profound, and the most important” (3) of all such antagonisms, reconciliation could be based on this common “Unknowable” foundation. The second part provided a philosophical account of what could be known. For Spencer, philosophy was “completely-­unified knowledge,” that is, philosophy sought the generalizations that could be made on the basis of the lower-­level generalizations reached by science (37). He presented his grand generalizations on fundamental laws of the universe, such as evolution (the development of heterogeneity from homogeneity found in all phenomena from geological to social), the conservation of matter and the persistence of force (conservation of energy 378

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was a new theory with concepts and terminology still in flux) but had problems with the predicted heat death of the universe because the future equilibrium state of the universe, in his earlier theories, was a “vision of harmony.”45 Although First Principles (1862) was not reviewed widely when it appeared, its author was treated seriously. Many points were common across the majority of reviews. His “lofty aim,” “profound earnestness,” and “scholarly and scientific manner” were praised. The book deserved attention, they agreed. Most reviewers then added that they disagreed with the author, and criticized his mode of reasoning: “Abstract principles are sometimes pushed to paradoxical extremities, and logical deduction is made to land the author in conclusions which seem rather verbal than real.”46 The religious question was addressed by all the reviewers. The Corn­ hill Magazine was brief and direct: we “may as well warn our readers” that the reconciliation proposed between religion and science “will be found satisfactory by very few orthodox thinkers.”47 By contrast, according to the Westminster Review, Spencer showed “that a reconciliation of science and religion is herein possible, that they both of them in their most advanced forms recognise the inscrutableness of the Power which underlies the universe.” As the Westminster’s readers were likely to be “advanced” themselves, they were thus given the hint that they might accept Spencer’s reconciliation. But many were likely to misunderstand the argument, said the Westminster, because, “the terms Matter and Force” are so central in his analysis that some readers will regard his solution as “essentially materialistic.”48 Of the four major reviews of First Principles, the Westminster’s was the least critical. It was hardly complimentary though—­“tepid” in tone, said Spencer—­and, at three pages, relatively short.49 The more substantial reviews were all critical. The Athenaeum compared Spencer to the Divines who affirm the Articles in a “spirit of reserve.” Anyone could agree with Spencer’s formulations about the Unknowable, said the Athenaeum, but only because his meaning was ambiguous. It asked that Spencer make his meaning clear: was he a believer in revelation or was he not?50 The British Quarterly Review began with praise for Spencer’s “broad and profound” generalizations and expressed agreement with Spencer’s emphasis on the prevalence of law throughout the universe. Strong criticisms followed. Such religion as Spencer left to believers was “practical Atheism,” for it would not raise men above “the relative and immediate,” which he had claimed was the purpose of religion. The “radical vice” in all Spencer’s reasoning was that 379

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he ignored man’s “moral reason,” his arguments were based on intellect alone.51 The National Review did not even begin with compliments. (The author, Spencer rightly suspected, was the Unitarian theologian and philosopher, the Reverend Dr. James Martineau.52) The book was “speculative”; such bold enterprises as Spencer proposed “recommend themselves only to minds that have unbounded confidence in logical architecture” (394). Martineau pulled apart the arguments of Spencer, and of Mansel on whom he relied. He identified inconsistencies, accused Spencer of “a refined form of atheism” (401), and summed up his method as “a flourish of double edged abstractions” (403).53 In sum, then, even liberal thinkers and journals criticized the assumptions, arguments, and conclusions of First Principles. Questions of religious belief and morality were examined with close concern by all the reviewers. They wanted clarification of the religious ambiguities. In spite of this almost-­ uniform criticism, Spencer was widely accepted as an important philosopher by the late 1860s. In the mid-­1860s he had sufficient standing that friends tried to persuade him to apply for university positions—­the chair of mental and moral philosophy at University College and the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh.54 Had he been willing to apply he might have lost to more orthodox philosophers, but the suggestions show that admirers gave him high standing. Most surprising, when visiting Oxford Spencer found that his First Principles and Principles of Biology had been set for student reading by George Rolleston, Linacre Professor of Anatomy and Physiology.55 Rolleston was a friend but ambivalent supporter of Huxley. He criticized Huxley’s combativeness in the Reader while supporting him on more specifically scientific issues. Putting the published criticisms alongside the social and institutional recognition, we see that the wide criticism of Spencer’s theories of morality and religion did not preclude him and his books being considered important. Lubbock was seldom confrontational in style, but his content was challenging to orthodox believers. At the beginning of the 1860s, Lubbock changed research direction, from the examination of small Crus­ tacea to more controversial topics of broad interest in archaeology and ethnology. Lubbock’s loss of the Maidstone election in 1865 has usually been attributed to clerical reaction to his just-­published book, Pre-­historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages.56 The book put together Lubbock’s articles about the archaeological remains of prehistoric man and went on to suggest that modern savages were the equivalent in mental and moral condition to 380

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these prehistoric peoples. Lubbock argued that humans had progressed from a savage and bleak past, rather than fallen from the innocence and delights of the Garden of Eden or, as less literal-­minded Christians thought, degenerated in some parts of the world from an original moral and intelligent condition. The early notices and reviews of Pre-­historic Times, however, were remarkably mild and give no support to the claim that the book lost him the election. The Westminster Review praised it as “a faithful account of the present state of knowledge.” Most reviewers, including journals as varied as the Popular Science Review and the Anthropological Review, agreed.57 Longer reviews recounted the evidence in detail and generally accepted the antiquity of man as argued by Lubbock. J. F. McLennan, writing in the North British Review, bluntly described “the popular chronology,” that is, the literal interpretation of Genesis, as “entirely wrong.”58 Both the London Review and Archaeologia Cambrensis cited approvingly Lubbock’s quotation of the Bishop of London: The man of science ought to go on “honestly, patiently, diffidently, observing and storing up his observations, and carrying his reasonings unflinchingly to their legitimate conclusions, convinced that it would be treason to the majesty at once of science and religion if he sought to help either by swerving ever so little from the straight rule of truth.”

Archaeologia Cambrensis neither criticized nor supported Lubbock’s long chronology but announced that, as members of the society took very different views, it would merely state Lubbock’s position on the long timescale and against degradation from an original state of civilization. It concluded mildly: “We foresee that a good deal of controversy will arise from the present work.”59 In general the reviewers took the same calm, plain tone as Lubbock. All this is entirely unexpected. Lubbock had been warned that the book would undermine his chances of election, and some supporters even advised him to delay publication.60 But the Spectator’s review, published just after the election, observed that no one had publicly raised Pre-­historic Times as an objection to Lubbock’s election.61 Perhaps journal editors were deferring to his social standing. Some seem to have delayed reviewing the book and chose reviewers known to be on his side—­McLennan for the North British Review in 1868; Tylor for the Quar­ terly, and not until the second edition in 1869. The first serious criticism was from the Duke of Argyll, whose defenses of design in nature often stirred Huxley and Hooker to indignation. The duke’s tendentiously 381

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titled “Recent Speculations on Primeval Man,” which appeared in Good Words in 1868, took issue with Lubbock’s argument for progress from savage beginnings. Rather, the duke repeated his well-­known argument that savage man had high mental powers and that the most degraded races have become so through migration to inhospitable environments. However, even the duke accepted the geological evidence that the rough chipped tools of the river gravels “are of very ancient date.”62 Perhaps the liberal press avoided criticisms that would have turned voters against Lubbock. His electoral agent was sure that “the Clergy and the Clergy alone have beaten us” by voting against us “almost to a man,” but there is another issue that might have mobilized the clergy. Patton shows that the voting numbers do not support the interpretation that the clergy were voting against Lubbock personally, rather than against the Liberals.63 The clergy would have been against both Lubbock and his fellow Liberal candidate because they had announced their support for the abolition of the church rates. Although our expectations and preconceptions about the Victorians are that Pre-­historic Man would have been controversial, it seems that the political problem was the church rate. These examples illustrate the militancy of the leading publicists among the X Club. Huxley and Tyndall went out of their way to confront the creedal culture and the supernaturalist beliefs that shaped public life and guided large sectors of middle-­class society. Huxley was not merely defending his right to free inquiry in biology, but deliberately constructing science in opposition to the orthodoxies of evangelicals and high churchmen. In 1865 Tyndall chose conspicuous journalistic locations in which to argue against the physical effectiveness of prayer. Spencer was less aggressive in his style but not in his substance, as the reviews of First Principles make clear. Lubbock did not arouse the same automatic inquiries into his religious position. His citation of the Bishop of London was quoted approvingly. In the 1870s Lubbock again chose a controversial research area when he began observing and experimenting on insect behavior; he was especially interested in signs of what could be called morality and intelligence among insects. Like his more controversial friends, Lubbock placed man firmly within nature, but Lubbock did not go out of his way to challenge orthodox creeds. He was as mild as his material could permit. In addition to the confrontational discussions of principle identified here, the X-­men often found themselves in more personal controversies. Spencer always leaped to defend himself from criticism. Tyndall was exceedingly thin-­skinned and engaged in controversy whenever someone 382

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cast aspersions on his character or capacities. The personal and the principled often became mixed, especially in Tyndall’s controversies with P. G. Tait of Edinburgh. Given their confrontational styles, it is surprising to find Huxley and Tyndall claiming not to engage in unnecessary controversy. Huxley represented himself as a man of peace whose life was spent in turbulent times. He had taken up a role of “gladiator general” for science, he told the Bishop of Ripon, because the circumstances of the time required it.64 His friends, though, knew that he enjoyed controversy. Marian Evans described Huxley’s personality as combative, he “needed an enemy to attack,” and in time he admitted, if only to his friends, that a controversy in the journals with a theologian roused him from lethargy and depression.65 To find Tyndall accusing Huxley of unnecessary and unseemly controversy would seem to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black. More than twenty years after his own very public attacks on miracles, Tyndall criticized Huxley for similar arguments. It was hacking a dead horse. In these matters I am in favour of the decency of slow decay. Besides there is one thing that I feel probably more than either you or Huxley, and that is the goodness, tenderness and even loftiness of heart, that have got mixed up in these beggarly elements of Christian doctrine.

And Hirst agreed: “Huxley’s articles . . . display wide reading and considerable skill; but little depth and earnestness. . . . I share your abhorrence of ‘ribaldry,’ and in spite of their strict orthodoxy I have still relatives and acquaintances for whose convictions I entertain respect.”66 Although they all agreed that attacks on dogmatic theology and supernaturalist thinking were sometimes needed, these exchanges exhibit disagreements over when and how the circumstances made attack necessary. This readiness to engage in open criticism distinguished them from older allies, liberal and skeptical scientific men of the preceding generation, like Lyell and Sharpey.

6.3 Insiders: Scientific Men at Home among the Social Elite By mid-­career the X Club men moved in elite social and cultural circles. New associates, familiar with their public reputations, were sometimes surprised by their congeniality in private, for example, Frederic Harrison on Huxley: “Famous as he was for pugnacity in public controversies, I think none who knew him at home and in friendly society would deny 383

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that he was thoroughly clubbable and genial.”67 Lubenow and White emphasize the friendships and club memberships that linked members of cultural elites; Collini and Clark emphasize the sense of superior intellect and moral responsibility that marked them. Here I consider the forms of sociability that brought men of different viewpoints together and illustrate the collaboration of X Club men with other elites in humanitarian causes and campaigns for the public good. Paying attention to other cultural elites adds an important qualification to modern scholarship on science and religion. Orthodox Christian belief and practice were attacked by non-­scientific elites, thus the questioning of traditional worldviews cannot be ascribed purely to the advance of science. Moreover, the issue of religion in Victorian England was a political as well as an intellectual question. Here and in later sections of this chapter I draw attention to other individuals and groups who challenged clerical leadership and dogmatic theology as strongly as did Huxley, Spencer, and Tyndall. Friendships, memberships of formal and informal clubs, and participation in lobby groups show how well and widely networked were the members of the X Club. Tyndall dined and house-­partied with the wealthy and titled members of the Royal Institution to such an extent that his research was hindered. Reforming and radical intellectuals were more conspicuous in Huxley’s networks than in Tyndall’s, and the titled and wealthy less conspicuous. Huxley attended the late evening tobacco parliaments of Alexander Macmillan, Christian socialist and publisher. Robert Browning the poet, Leslie Stephen, and Matthew Arnold were among the regular guests to dinners and Sunday teas at the Huxley house.68 Hirst had a wide range of reforming and elite associates through his positions at University College School, University College, the University of London, and the Royal Naval College. Hooker, Lubbock, and Spottiswoode moved easily in such circles by birth. Hooker, who so often claimed to avoid society, had cultured relatives through whom he met leading men in church and literature. One of his mother’s sisters had married William Jacobson, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford and, later, Bishop of Chester; another married Francis Palgrave, who was knighted for his work in collecting and editing public records; and one of his sons, Hooker’s cousin, was the well-­known poetry anthologist, Francis Turner Palgrave. At a Palgrave dinner party in 1865 Hooker met Benjamin Jowett of Balliol College; F. D. Maurice, the controversial theologian of the Christian socialist movement; the poet Robert Browning; and A. P. Stanley, recently appointed dean of Westminster Abbey.69 Lubbock’s guest lists were immensely varied, for example, Hooker, Robert Lowe and his wife, and the editors John Morley and Walter Bage384

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hot, one Sunday evening in 1876.70 Spottiswoode entertained on a grand scale. He gave dinners before Royal Institution lectures and large receptions. Hirst attended “a large party” at Spottiswoode’s on a Wednesday evening in 1868, to take just one example from Hirst’s journal. Among the guests were Dean Stanley and his wife, Lady Augusta; Lubbock’s good friend, Mountstuart Grant Duff, a clubbable and widely read politician; and various scientific men—­from the aged Sir Roderick Murchison to the brilliant young Cambridge mathematician, W. K. Clifford: “Clifford is the Lion of this season. Everybody is anxious to entertain him,” Hirst noted.71 The obvious is sometimes overlooked. The higher clergy, the archetypal cultural leaders, were also integrated into elite cultural networks. In studies of cultural elites, the clergy usually appear in the background, as wallpaper against which the political thinkers, men of letters, members of new professions, and liberal intellectuals played their important parts. Nevertheless, educated and wellborn clergymen were active in elite cultural networks, and broad churchmen were sometimes found in more radical networks. Clergymen such as Kingsley, who believed it was necessary to adapt theology to modern thought, saw scientific men as allies. Moreover, these broad-­church clergy, who wanted the church to be as inclusive as possible, saw themselves as chaplains to the thinking men on the fringes of the church. Thus, Benjamin Jowett, Balliol tutor, maintained a wide circle of acquaintances among anti-­theological thinkers, including not only Huxley but also the scandalous Algernon Swinburne. Tyndall was married in a chapel of Westminster Abbey by Dean Stanley, whose dying wife urged him “not to lose sight of the men of science.”72 Stanley was especially close to the scientific men. Mutual respect possibly began when Stanley’s moderately supportive review of Essays and Reviews was published in 1861; Stanley made formal contact with Tyndall during the days of prayer debate. As the cattle plague continued, the Archbishop of Canterbury had requested the Privy Council to call a day of national humiliation. When Cabinet refused, some bishops, including the Bishop of London, proclaimed local days of humiliation. Stanley, who had to obey his bishop, was ill at ease over prayers to change the course of nature; also, as a broad churchman he wanted to attract rather than alienate skeptical intellectuals. He wrote formally to Tyndall (“Dear Sir,” which shows that they were not yet friends) asking what would be an appropriate kind of prayer. Tyndall, drawing back from the extremes of his Pall Mall letters, advised him to pray for “strength of heart and clearness of mind to meet it [cattle plague] manfully and fight against it intelligently.” His resolve strengthened, Stanley’s sermon included the men of science in God’s plan: the plague should be understood as “God’s 385

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6.2 The library of the Athenaeum Club. Social and intellectual elites mingled at the Athe­

naeum Club. While director of studies at the Royal Naval College, Hirst often worked at mathematics in the impressive library before dinner. Source: Engraving by Thomas Walter, Illustrated London News, 11 March 1893. Reproduced with the Permission of Special Collections, Leeds University Library (Newspapers ILL).

own stimulus to the activity of those scientific researchers by which His supreme will in the works and laws of nature was made known to us.”73 The X-­men met other elites at the meetings and dinners of learned societies, for example, at the Royal Institution (RI). In January 1870, Prime Minister Gladstone, Lord Granville (colonial secretary and chancellor of the University of London), Dean Stanley, and the animal painter, Sir Edwin Landseer, were all present, as were Huxley and many scientific men, at an RI lecture by Tyndall on the decomposition of various gases by light; they would have mingled during the post-­lecture reception.74 The annual dinners of specialist societies provided opportunities for sociability across the boundaries of expertise. A suitable respondent to each of the many customary toasts was required. When, as president of the Geological Society, Huxley invited friends to its annual dinner in 1869, he asked Dean Stanley to reply on behalf of the church, John Bright to reply for the Commons, and Tyndall for the physical sciences. Huxley 386

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was regularly called upon, and Tyndall occasionally, to reply on behalf of “Science” at Royal Academy banquets.75 Historians of Victorian intellectuals have emphasized club life, most notably the Athenaeum (founded in 1824), but also, “The Club” (founded by Dr. Johnson in 1764), the Century Club (1865–­81), and the Metaphysical Society (1869–­80). “Ballot Day at the Athenaeum” is the cover illustration for both Collini’s Public Moralists and Lubenow’s Liberal Intellectuals.76 For Collini the Athenaeum was “a symbol of the relative homogeneity of the intellectual elite,” but, as discussed in chapter 2, it also represented the integration of intellectual and social elites.77 Landed and titled men with cultural interests, wealthy patrons of the arts, bishops, editors of the leading reviews, members of parliament, men “of distinguished eminence in science, literature or the arts, or . . . public service” mingled in its dining room, reading room, and library (figure 6.2). As was demonstrated in chapter 2, Hooker wanted the social recognition for science that membership of the Athenaeum represented. The Athenaeum was comfortable and convenient, and also a location for the exercise of influence. Spencer visited almost daily to scan the newspapers and magazines and relax over a game of billiards.78 When Spottiswoode wanted to report the favorable decision of the University of London senate to Hirst, he went to the Athenaeum. To an even greater extent than the Athenaeum, The Club represented the alliance of learning and power. It was more selective than the Athenaeum, being limited to thirty-­five members. Members expected brilliant and wide-­ranging conversation over dinner. Tyndall was invited to join in 1871, well before any other member of the X Club, a priority that indicates his eminent connections, reputation as a conversationalist, and willingness to spend his time dining out with the great. He joined learned and devout members of the upper house, such as the Duke of Argyll, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Bishop of Oxford (Wilberforce); powerful politicians of divergent opinions—­from Lord Salisbury to Gladstone and Robert Lowe; and such eminent representatives of literature and science as Tennyson and Richard Owen. Owen had been elected a quarter of a century earlier at the unusually young age of forty-­ one.79 Tyndall made use of The Club connection to lobby Gladstone on behalf of Hooker in the latter’s dispute with the Commissioner of Works in 1871 and to attempt a reconciliation between Owen and Huxley.80 Hooker accepted an invitation to join in 1879, shortly after leaving the presidency of the Royal Society, and from that time sought to ensure that The Club acknowledged the standing of science by electing each new president of the Royal Society.81 387

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In the Century Club, Huxley, Spencer, and Tyndall joined the most brilliant and most liberal of Oxford and Cambridge graduates who were committed to reform in many arenas. Some of the members are familiar from chapter 3 as defenders of the essayists and Bishop Colenso, or as supporters of the Reader as a voice of liberal opinion. Those already familiar or who appear later in this chapter include reforming lawyers, for example, Frederic Harrison, Thomas Hughes, Godfrey and Vernon Lushington, James Fitzjames Stephen, and John Westlake; liberals in government, for example, Lord Houghton and Lubbock’s friend, Mountstuart Grant Duff; and H. J. S. Smith, the Oxford mathematician who was an ally of Huxley on the Devonshire Commission. The broad-­based Metaphysical Society, to which Huxley, Lubbock, and Tyndall belonged, was a cross between club and learned society. Some members met over dinner before the meeting proper, when the paper for discussion, which had been circulated in advance, was presented. It was initially planned as a theological society. Tennyson, the Reverend Charles Pritchard (who had established a modern grammar school in Clapham and who later became Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford), and the well-­to-­do and clubbable architect James Knowles, wanted to discuss metaphysical and theological problems in order to counter “the materialism of the age.” They initially invited churchmen, devout MPs, theistic philosophers, and even Unitarians and Roman Catholics to join, but “no distinct and avowed opponents of Christianity.”82 Thus, although the scientific men believed that Tennyson understood the direction of modern science and Tyndall regarded himself as Tennyson’s friend, Tennyson himself saw the scientific men as a problem. However, Stanley, Lubbock, and Martineau, who were included in the first round of invitations, all advised against defining some forms of unorthodoxy as outside the pale. Stanley and Lady Augusta argued that this would “widen the breach between religious and scientific points of view.” Hence Huxley, Tyndall, and Spencer were invited to join, although Spencer declined because the “nervous expenditure” required would lead to a sleepless night and, unsurprisingly, declined a specific invitation to hear his theory of morality critically discussed.83 The X Club associate, Carpenter, was one of the founding members, the mathematicians Sylvester and Clifford and the Roman Catholic biologist (and Huxley’s bête noire) St. George Mivart were invited later.84 That bishops of the established church sat down with Roman Catholics and Unitarians to discuss theological issues was surprising; that “professional atheists” were included was astounding. Cardinal Newman was appalled that Cardinal Manning joined.85 Such diversity indicates that 388

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liberal values were infiltrating even orthodox and dogmatic circles.86 As discussed in chapter 1, in midcentury London heretics and freethinkers were expected to accommodate their conversation to the sensibilities of the orthodox. Freedom in conversation was possible, but only in private among trusted friends. Hirst emphasized the “perfect freedom” of conversation in their new dinner club because it could not be taken for granted, even in London in 1864. Only such radical intellectuals as Marian Evans and John Chapman advocated such codes for public discussion. Their prospectus for the Westminster Review in 1852 declared that its coverage of religious questions would “unite a spirit of reverential sympathy for the cherished associations of pure and elevated minds with an uncompromising pursuit of truth.”87 This was to avoid the satire, insults, and deliberately offensive blasphemy that had characterized working-­ class atheist attacks on Christian belief in the tradition of Thomas Paine, while insisting that no compromises would be made over truth. Freedom in expressing opinion was necessary if the members of the Metaphysical Society were to engage with one another’s arguments. Expressing values reminiscent of the Westminster Review, Lubbock assured his more orthodox colleagues that even though the views of Huxley and Tyndall “might be objectionable to others of our members,” he could guarantee that “there could be nothing in the form of expression of which any just complaint could be made.”88 It was agreed at the first meeting that “the members crediting each other with a pure quest of truth[,] would confer together on terms of respectful fellowship, and never visit with reproach the most unreserved statement of measured belief and unbelief.”89 Free expression of opinion within the society required confidentiality as well as politeness. All, said Knowles, were “sworn to an honorable secrecy.” Given that, until 1871, most college fellowships at Oxford and Cambridge required conformity to the Thirty-­Nine Articles, there was still reason for confidentiality in theological matters,90 but, in the opinion of W. G. Ward, the brilliant editor of the Catholic Dublin Review, the greatest public criticism was likely to come from the Exeter Hall variety of evangelicals. This draws attention to the variety of theological opinion in Victorian England. I have been using such phrases as “orthodox belief” to include both the high and low varieties of Anglican tradition, Roman Catholics and evangelical varieties of Dissent. Exeter Hall, the meeting place for many evangelical organizations, represented the more enthusiastic sorts of evangelicals from both Anglican and Dissenting traditions. The discussion over the necessity for mutual respect led to a much-­ cited exchange between Ward and Huxley that is often interpreted as a 389

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serious exchange exemplifying Ward’s dogmatism and Huxley’s wit, an interpretation that overlooks Ward’s reputation for brilliance and good humor in debate (chapter 1.5). When it was proposed that speakers avoid any moral judgments against opponents, “there was a pause” before Ward spoke: “While acquiescing in this condition as a general rule, I think it cannot be expected that Christian thinkers shall give no sign of the horror with which they would view the spread of such extreme opinions as those advocated by Mr. Huxley.” After another pregnant pause, Huxley responded, “As Dr. Ward has spoken I must in fairness say that it will be very difficult for me to conceal my feeling as to the intellectual degradation which would come of the general acceptance of such views as Dr. Ward holds.”91 Given Ward’s reputation, I suggest that he was consciously challenging Huxley to a battle of wits. As the witticisms indicate, the Metaphysical Society started with general good will. The original utopian hopes, expressed by some, that agreement could be reached or the opposition converted were never realized, but members felt that they came to understand one another better, and “mutual personal respect” increased.92 The original plan for the society indicates a perceived divide between “opponents of Christianity” and all varieties of theistic thinkers from Roman Catholic to Unitarian. In Manning’s view the divide within the society was not over the existence of God but was epistemological, the choice between “the intuitions of Reason” and “the reports of Sense” as starting points, that is, between an empirical and an intuitionist epistemology.93 Given the emphasis on scientific men in this book, it is important to note that the most prolific presenter of papers on the empirical side was James Fitzjames Stephen, barrister and civil servant, and on the theist and intuitionist side, R. H. Hutton, ex-­Unitarian Anglican, editor of the Spectator, and University of London activist. Fitzjames Stephen and Hutton each gave seven presentations, Carpenter four, Huxley three, Lubbock one, and Tyndall none. Fitzjames Stephen was one of the most regular attendees; Carpenter, Huxley, and Lubbock attended regularly, although not Tyndall. Some turned out to support their allies, as when Huxley, Lubbock, and Tyndall all attended the meeting at which Leslie Stephen spoke on “The Uniformity of Nature.” They also turned out to listen to the best of the opposition, as when Huxley heard Henry Sidgwick on “The Incoherence of Empirical Philosophy.” On the Christian side the most active and reliable were the Catholics, Manning, Ward, and Father Dalgairns; Bishop Magee (Cathedral preacher during the 1868 BA meeting); and Hutton.94

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Some contributions severely tried the original principle of mutual respect. Discussion over vivisection was extremely heated. Richard Hutton, a leading antivivisectionist, was driven into “a white rage” by a letter contributed by the absent Huxley.95 Discussion over miracles also caused deep offense, with Huxley again the chief culprit. The possibility of miracles was a preoccupation of the society. Huxley and Tyndall were present in December 1872 to discuss Ward’s “Can Experience Prove the Uniformity of Nature?” but did not attend two months later when Ruskin spoke about miracles. Three years later the skeptics took their turn. In 1875–­76, Fitzjames Stephen, Carpenter, Huxley, and Shadworth Hodgson, a philosopher, all spoke against miracles, and, between the third and fourth meetings, one evening was devoted entirely to discussion of the topic. During an earlier discussion, Ward had protested that those “who fail to perceive the cogency of the evidence” for miracles should not discuss miracles in general but a particular case. Huxley’s response, “The Evidence of the Miracle of the Resurrection,” sorely tried the principles of open debate. His paper was so controversial that Morley deemed it unsuitable for the Fortnightly Review.96 Although no protest from within the society is recorded, Desmond finds evidence in Huxley sources that Manning was shocked. On Brown’s reading, politeness became more formal and argument more combative and less good-­natured after these bitter meetings in 1875 and 1876.97 Friendships and common memberships did not prevent vigorous disagreement. When the aging Huxley attacked Gladstone’s views on miracles in the 1880s, they were both members of The Club; Gladstone had been present at, even chaired, some of the meetings on miracles at the Metaphysical Society.98 Tyndall later went far beyond the norms of acceptable public debate. When denouncing Gladstone’s proposals for Irish home rule, Tyndall accused him of surrendering to “the mob” and distanced himself from those sociable dinners. In “former days it was my privilege to enjoy the acquaintance . . . of Mr. Gladstone,” he said. Now, “C’est une guerre eternelle” with Gladstone, he told Huxley, citing Voltaire’s Candide.99 Hirst was disturbed by the “animosity” that Tyndall displayed, and even Huxley thought that Tyndall’s attack was too personal in character.100 Other members of the cultural elite interpreted themselves as engaged in a similar fundamental conflict. The positivist, John Morley, editor of the radical Fortnightly Review, who later became a home-­rule MP, believed that he, Matthew Arnold, Huxley, and many others had “common enemies to encounter” (117). In terms that echo Huxley and

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Tyndall, he used battle language in referring to the 1860s and 1870s: “it was the day of battle and the hour for plain speaking.” Huxley was a “hard fighting leader in this battle” (95).101 Morley and other positivists shared the opposition of Huxley and Tyndall to religious orthodoxy, but ascribed more importance to social change. Morley associated the opposition with “thick sighted prejudice and moveless convention” (117–­18), and extolled independent thought and “the gospel of free intellectual and social expansion” (78). The Fortnightly Review, founded in 1865 and edited by Morley from 1867 to 1882, represented for him the “fresh flowing currents of thought” of the mid-­Victorian period, currents that were continuous with the progress of Europe since 1830. The claims of external authorities were subjected to individual human judgment, in religion and in social affairs. Dissent from religious orthodoxy and schemes of “social and political renovation” were found together in the Fortnightly. According to Morley, Huxley’s “On the Physical Basis of Life” and the defense of trade unions by Frederic Harrison, positivist and wealthy lawyer, contributed to its reputation as a dangerous publication (82–­83).102 While they debated with one another face to face, and attacked one another in the periodical press, these leaders of opinion also acted together in ways that show shared ambitions to provide moral guidance and practical leadership on social and humanitarian issues as shown in the project to send food to the starving Parisians when the siege of Paris was lifted at the end of the Franco-­Prussian War. Late in 1869 an ideologically diverse group from the Metaphysical Society joined forces: Knowles set up a mechanism to collect £100,000; Archbishop Manning and Professor Huxley were appointed as trustees and Robarts and Lubbock as bankers. A few months later, when the Daily Telegraph proposed a similar scheme, Knowles suggested combining his organization with the power of the newspaper to publicize the need. Ruskin, Tennyson and, to balance the Roman Catholic presence, the Bishop of London and a Baptist minister were added and the Lord Mayor of London made president. They raised enough money to ship 10,000 tons of food to Paris (figure 6.3).103 Such leadership might be expected from Lubbock and from the lord mayor, but Manning, Huxley, and Ruskin were, alike, outsiders to traditional leadership. They were presenting themselves as national leaders: Manning was not merely a leader for the Roman Catholics; Huxley not only a leader in educational matters. Clearly, the scientific men of the X Club were at home among cultured elites. We have previously seen that they interacted on friendly terms with reformers in church and education. This section shows the extent of their 392

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6.3

Distribution of food for the relief of Paris, 1871. The gift of British food to the French was of sufficient public interest that the Illustrated London News devoted an illustrated supplement, with many full-­page engravings, to the topic. By their involvement, Huxley, Ruskin, and Cardinal Manning were presenting themselves as moral leaders alongside members of traditional elites. Source: Illustrated London News, 11 March 1871. Reproduced with the Permission of Special Collections, Leeds University Library (Newspapers ILL).

informal social interactions and the breadth of their networks beyond those with whom they had common reforming interests. Although their professional lives did not give them the same direct experience of moral and humanitarian issues as the lives of landowners, clergy, MPs, and lawyers, the scientific men presented themselves as sharing the concerns and responsibilities of these social elites. Nevertheless, science at home among the cultured elite still had claws. Friendship did not prevent vigorous controversy. Huxley and Tyndall could be bitter assailants. In mixing with the great and the cultured, the X-­men used their own status to promote the status of science. For example, by their presence in the Century Club, Huxley and Tyndall ensured that university elites did not overlook science. As he had done in the Athenaeum Club in the 1850s, Hooker sought to ensure that leading scientific men were elected to The Club in the 1880s. 393

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6.4 Pulpits for Science New modes of public communication, most conspicuously journalism, struck Victorians as remarkable. For a society in which the spoken word, especially sermons, had been the chief mode of shaping public opinion, the mass of newspapers, magazines, weighty journals, books, pam­phlets, and tracts opened innumerable possibilities for mass communication. On his retirement in 1882 from the editorship of the radical Fortnightly Review, John Morley emphasized the importance of the higher journalism for preachers of alternative beliefs: “The clergy no longer have the pulpit to themselves, for the new Reviews became more powerful pulpits, in which heretics were at least as welcome as the orthodox.”104 Nevertheless, the spoken word remained important. Joseph Meisel argues that “public speech” was even more important in the age of Gladstone than previously. Certainly, speeches and lectures were fundamental modes of communication used by scientific men. Thousands flocked to lectures by Huxley, Lubbock, Tyndall, and their competitors. Audiences accepted long lectures. At Belfast three thousand people listened to Tyndall for an hour and a half. The following year a Glasgow audience of over two thousand listened “with rapt attention” to their local hero, Professor Sir William Thomson, talk for two hours on “The Theory of Tides.”105 For Huxley, Lubbock, and Tyndall, most of their books and articles began life as lectures and speeches. They were submitted to friendly editors for publication, although they had often been fully reported in the press when given; often also they were reprinted with and without permission. Finally, the articles were collected together into books. Spencer avoided public speaking but, like the others, he collected articles into books. Therefore, this section begins with lectures and moves on to the articles and books through which the X-­men addressed general audiences. In a society accustomed to oratory, the X-­men were compared favorably with parliamentary performers. After Tyndall’s first Royal Institution lecture, Samuel Whitbread assured him that he had not heard a better speaker, even in Parliament. Journalist and fellow member of the Metaphysical Society, Richard Holt Hutton, who was no supporter of Huxley’s conclusions, told Lubbock that “an abler and more accomplished debater” than Huxley was not to be found in the House of Commons.106 Lubbock did not match Huxley in rhetorical style or Tyndall in flamboyance, but he was equally popular. At the York BA in 1881 he was followed by “about 50 females hurrying everywhere after you” (his daughter remembered). 394

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She was amused by the Times report of the Aberdeen meeting “that ‘of course’ your section was ‘mobbed.’ ”107 Lubbock often evoked wonder in his audiences. Knowles thanked him for a lecture on the behavior of ants, which “seemed to me like a dip into Fairy-­land.”108 Lectures in a variety of social and institutional environments are analyzed here. Huxley, Lubbock, and Tyndall received many invitations to lecture or to preside over some body that expected an annual presidential address. In London, they lectured to social elites at the Royal Institution and to workingmen through programs at the School of Mines and the Working Men’s College. Frankland gave scientific lectures at the Royal Institution but recognized that the publicist mode was “not much in my line.” Moreover, lecture preparation encroached on his research time and competed with his remunerative consultative work.109 Hooker hated public speaking. It was a “wise good & conservative” decision to have held out against lecturing, he told Darwin, but he occasionally took public positions that required a lecture or speech.110 Spottiswoode took up lecturing in middle age. He had always given educational lectures to his employees, but he gained a wider audience in the 1870s when, at the urging of “his nearest friends,” he shifted his research topics “in order that the general public might have better opportunities of appreciating his abilities.”111 This reveals a high valuation of public lecturing by Spottiswoode and his closest friends—­who certainly included Huxley and Tyndall. Lectures: The Royal Institution The men of the X Club were closely associated with the Royal Institution (RI). Tyndall, professor of natural philosophy for over thirty years, succeeded Faraday as the public face of the institution. Most of his X Club friends were active and contributed to the fame and success of the RI in the mid-­Victorian period. Most important, for the themes of this chapter, at the RI they gained a platform among the social and cultured elite for their vision of science. Observers were impressed by the social standing of RI audiences, but many middle-­class-­professional sorts were also present. Audiences included the titled and landed elite, wealthy men of commerce and industry, cultured professional men, leading and aspiring scientific men, and wives and daughters from all these groups. In previous chapters we have noticed Whitbread, the wealthy brewer; Lord Ashburton; the Duke of Argyll; Frederick and Juliet Pollock; the wealthy physician, Henry Bence Jones; Richard Owen; and Lord Claud Hamilton and his family. As the Friday evening lectures were open only to members and their guests, 395

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the chief qualification was being able to afford the five-­guinea annual fee.112 For the audience members, RI lectures provided introductions to recent scientific developments in elegant surroundings and among congenial company. Just how serious the audiences were, is open to question. The lecture courses, such as young John Lubbock attended in the early 1850s, were systematic and educational, but the Friday evening lectures were often compared with other fashionable entertainments.113 The focus here is on the Friday evening lectures for cultured people who wished to be well informed. The reputations of the X-­men, especially of Tyndall, maintained the popularity and financial viability of the RI in its post-­Faraday years. During Tyndall’s tenure, the number of members increased from about 800 to just over 1,000, and attendance at his Friday discourses increased: an average of about 400 in the 1850s, 600 in the 1860s, and over 800 in the early 1870s. Thus Tyndall was a worthy successor to Faraday. He gave over fifty Friday evening lectures from the 1850s to the 1880s. Other X-­ men contributed regularly to the Friday evening program: Huxley gave about twenty lectures, Frankland fourteen, Lubbock and Spottiswoode about ten each. Hooker gave just one lecture, in 1878.114 Diagrams, models, and experiments helped to make their lectures accessible and entertaining, even if not fully understood. Tyndall’s brilliantly conceived and thoroughly rehearsed experiments added to the theatricality of the occasion and succeeded in attracting large audiences to esoteric topics, but sometimes, as Hirst critically noted after Tyndall’s lecture on “Sounds and Sensitive Flames” in 1867, “everyone was entertained if not instructed.”115 Some contemporaries found his showmanship egotistical. Once, when an instrument dropped while Tyndall was practicing his demonstration experiments, he vaulted the table to catch it, and then decided to feature the accident and his acrobatics in the lecture.116 The topics of Lubbock and Huxley were of more obvious general interest, and their success as lecturers was less dependent on showmanship. Lubbock’s first lecture in 1863 was an account of the remains of prehistoric man in the kitchen middens of Denmark, the lake dwellings of Switzerland, and the river gravels of France, topics on which he had already published in the Natural History Review. Huxley’s lectures were often syntheses of research, collected in the service of Darwin, that is, Darwin as interpreted by Huxley. From his “On Species and Races and Their Origins” (1860) and “The Pedigree of the Horse” (1870), to “The Coming of Age of the Origin of Species” (the twenty-­first birthday in 1880), Huxley avoided discussion of natural selection.117 Everyone 396

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wanted to hear Huxley, even Wiseman, Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, attended his lecture “On the Fossil Remains of Man” in 1862.118 Wiseman was not the only auditor who went away unconvinced. Hirst thought that the evidence was not strong enough to justify Huxley’s “startling and heterodox assertions.”119 Royal Institution lectures were not always reports of new scientific findings by brilliant professor-­researchers. Some scientific topics were not research based, and many topics were not scientific. Tyndall lectured on topics of economic and practical significance beyond his own research expertise: a lecture on electric lighting given in 1879, when electric lighting was being introduced to London’s major thoroughfares and important buildings, was so popular was that it was repeated a few days later, making a total audience of 1,762. Seldom before had audiences exceeded 1,000: only Faraday (three times), Cardinal Wiseman (on science and art), and Dean Stanley (on Westminster Abbey) in the 1860s, and Tyndall and Huxley in the 1870s.120 Sometimes Frankland, also, could grip an audience. No one in the packed theater complained when his lecture on “Climate in Town and Country,” a plea to abandon air-­polluting coal as a fuel, went ten minutes over time.121 These statistics of success take us beyond the image of the Royal Institution as a scientific institution. It is clear that the RI was not a purely scientific institution but, as Sophie Forgan has shown, it was a scientific and literary institution that, initially, added consultancy and, from the 1840s, research to the traditional role of informing, instructing, and entertaining.122 Literary and philosophical topics continued in the programs of the 1870s. Huxley gave a lecture course on Bishop Berkeley’s idealism, and Matthew Arnold gave a Friday evening lecture on “Equality.”123 Thus, it was not only the brilliance of John Tyndall’s experiments and the excitement of Huxley and Lubbock’s provocative theories that attracted new members during the 1860s and 1870s but also the breadth and accessibility of lecture topics. Forgan emphasizes the importance of the officers to the RI programs. Bence Jones, secretary from 1860 to 1873, had supported Faraday in developing the RI as a research institution and had brought more scientific men onto the board of managers. Spottiswoode, who was treasurer from 1865, followed Bence Jones as secretary from 1873 to 1879 (when he resigned on election as president of the Royal Society), and continued to serve as a manager until his death in 1883, that, is a total of eighteen years. Busk spent more than twenty years in management positions at the Royal Institution. He became a manager early in the 1860s, replaced Spottiswoode as treasurer in 1873, and remained in the position until the mid-­1880s. Lubbock was frequently a 397

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manager from the early 1860s until the late 1880s. Frankland and Hooker served as managers in the late 1870s, after they had achieved scientific eminence.124 As secretary, Spottiswoode guided the choice of lecture topics in both scientific and more general areas in the 1870s. It was Spottiswoode who suggested to Tyndall that a lecture on electric lighting would be popular and who persuaded Matthew Arnold to lecture on “Equality.” His success as secretary was based on informal networking and thorough committee work. Spottiswoode entertained on the scale of previous wealthy managers and secretaries, and it was during a party at his country house in Kent that Spottiswoode proposed the lecture on equality to Arnold.125 To some members of the RI the combination of topics and lecturers was controversial. Lecturers were supposed to avoid religion and politics. When Spottiswoode heard that the RI president was planning to criticize recent lecture programs, he made sure the managers were prepared. He asked Hooker to attend the next manager’s meeting: I have reason to think that our President the Duke of Northumberland is coming to give us all a great scolding for allowing such men as Matthew Arnold, Goldwyn Smith, Romanes, and Tyndall to pervert the Institution etc. etc. It is very desirable, if he does this, that the managers should be fully and well represented, and that they should be prepared.126

Spottiswoode could rely on Hooker to turn up in an emergency, even though he was probably as irregular at RI managers’ meetings as at the University of London senate. Thus Spottiswoode, Hooker and, I assume, Busk and Frankland, in their roles as officers and managers of the RI, were not merely social place-­men, but were pursuing a liberal agenda to broaden debate on both scientific and social issues. Tyndall considered that he had been careful to avoid controversial topics in his RI lectures. Just a few months before Spottiswoode prepared to meet Northumberland’s criticisms, Tyndall assured him that he avoided the forbidden topics of politics and religion in his lectures, and that when he published controversial articles and letters he avoided claiming any association with the Royal Institution or any other institution. The duke, he said was quoting not from his lectures but from a publication based on the lectures: “within these walls I am as obedient to the laws of the Institution as any man of the Church is to the Vatican, outside of them I claim intellectual freedom.”127 Such scrupulous distinctions were not reassuring to Tyndall’s critics. Those who heard 398

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Tyndall’s Belfast address or read his newspaper pieces on prayer would have known that he was associated with the Royal Institution, without his signing, “Professor of Natural Philosophy, Royal Institution.” Even Bence Jones had advised Tyndall against publishing his essay on “Miracles and Special Providences” in 1866 and was angry when it appeared in the Fortnightly Review.128 Reluctantly, Tyndall sometimes took advice. He feared a forthcoming lecture would be dull, he told one lady friend, because “Spottiswoode has forbidden all heresy which might have added spice to the occasion.”129 Frank James, both historian and RI insider, notes that the royal family had little contact with the RI during Tyndall’s preeminence and suggests that they were avoiding his controversial associations.130 Cultural elites, though, were attracted to the RI in the era of Tyndall, Huxley, Spottiswoode, and Busk.131 Of the X-­members, only Hirst and Spencer did not have official connections with the Royal Institution. Hirst was, of course, a regular attendee at lectures, especially those of his friends, and Spencer’s presence is occasionally recorded. Spencer was invited to lecture in the mid-­1870s but declined on the official grounds that “life is short and philosophy long.” Clearly, however, Spencer’s personality made him entirely unsuited to lecturing.132 Alone of the X Club publicists for science, Spencer’s reputation rested solely on his published work. Lectures to Workingmen Huxley, Lubbock, Spottiswoode, and Tyndall were as ready to give lectures to workingmen as to the wealthy and cultured. Huxley and Tyndall were enthusiastic participants in the School of Mines’ winter lectures to workingmen. As we have seen (chapter 4.2), Tyndall, Huxley, Lubbock, and Spottiswoode were chosen as the first, second, fourth, and fifth presenters of the British Association lectures to workingmen. W. A. Miller of King’s College, the devout critic of Huxley and Tyndall, was the third lecturer.133 Huxley and Tyndall exchanged many letters on how intelligent and interested were working-­class audiences. Workingmen, they felt, were more responsive than fashionable audiences to the serious message. When Spottiswoode was about to lecture at South Kensington, Tyndall assured him that the effort would be worthwhile: “never have I given lectures which have better repaid me than those given in Jermyn St. to working men.”134 Huxley, Lubbock, and Tyndall were associated with the Christian socialists in the workingmen’s college movement. When the South London Working Men’s College was established in 1868, Lubbock and Tyndall 399

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were on the council and Huxley the principal. The believers in the transforming power of education who collaborated in these projects were sometimes competitors for the allegiance of working people. John Ruskin, a bitter ideological opponent of naturalistic science, contributed to the foundation of the library at the South London college in 1868. Tensions could be expected between the Christian socialists, scientific secularizers, and Ruskin, but Lubbock, at least, continued to work harmoniously with the college movement. For fifteen years, from 1883 to 1898, Lubbock was principal of the London Working Men’s College, his chief duty being to give the address and distribute certificates at the annual graduation.135 Tyndall’s lectures to workingmen were on similar themes to his other lectures. He gave lectures on electricity at the School of Mines (six lectures) and at the Royal Institution (twelve) in the early 1860s.136 In his 1867 lecture in Dundee, which inaugurated the BA lectures “to the operative classes,” he introduced many of the themes later developed in his major 1868 and 1870 addresses, but first he flattered his audience and, en passant, established his own credentials. In London, he explained, he gave lectures to the aristocracy of labor (at which the lecture theater overflowed) and to the aristocracy of rank; these audiences were equally courteous—­showing that “the essential qualities of what we in England understand by a gentleman is confined to no class.”137 He told the workingmen that to reach satisfying causal explanations of phenomena we have to go beyond the senses, by imagination, to the realm of the unseen. He introduced molecular forces, describing heat, magnetism, crystallization, and the vegetable world as the product of molecular forces and finished with his usual qualification: such inquiry does not solve the “real mystery” of the universe (73). All this was elaborated in his more famous addresses of 1868, 1870, and 1874. The dominant theme in Huxley’s extant popular lectures was the “evolutionary epic,” a narrative of the slow formation of the earth and all the forms of life upon it through the operation of natural causes, identified by Bernard Lightman as a common form in other contemporary popularizing narratives: the evolutionary epic moved across “vast expanses of time” and synthesized many topics in an evolutionary story of “gradual, lawful, progressive development.”138 In keeping with his skeptical principles, though, Huxley tried to distinguish what was proven and what was extrapolation. His lecture for workingmen at the 1868 BA meeting is an exemplar. He began, as so many popularizers did, with a common object, a piece of chalk. About two-­thirds of the lecture was devoted to the development of the chalk formations.139 Then asides began. He mentioned the discovery of flint implements as proof of a 400

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long human history in Europe. In case anyone had missed the implications, he added, “the chalk is vastly older than Adam himself” (169). He continued to emphasize the slowness of geological change until, very near the end, he shifted his emphasis: “Up to this moment I have stated . . . nothing but well-­authenticated facts, and the immediate conclusions which they force upon the mind.” In Tyndallian style he then justified discussion of remoter links in the chain of causation, because “the mind is so constituted that it does not willingly rest in facts and immediate causes” (172). Changes in remote times, such as the sinking and rising of ocean beds, had also been “effected by none other than natural causes.” Either each species of crocodile, across eons, has “been specially created, or it has arisen out of some pre-­existing form by the operation of natural causes.” Then, in allusion to Joshua’s call to the ancient Israelites to “choose this day whom you will serve,” Huxley proclaimed: “Choose your hypothesis; I have chosen mine” (174). While their examples were quite different, Tyndall and Huxley used a similar mode of argument in these two lectures. Both extrapolated from particular examples to all of science or all of nature. For both there was no break in continuity, whether over time or from one kind of phenomenon to another. Elaborating on the general conclusions to which their case studies pointed was an important aspect of their popular lectures. Huxley’s lectures were not particularly Darwinian—­ they followed Huxley’s interest in structural analogies rather than Darwin’s population reasoning—­but Huxley left no doubt that his conclusions were directly antagonistic to conventional theology. Frederic Harrison attended a School of Mines lecture in the 1862 series on “the relation of man to the quadrumana.” Harrison was impressed with the intent interest of the workingmen who “crammed” the theater. He summarized the central proposition of the lectures: “Biology shows less structural difference between man and the higher apes than between the higher and the lower apes; and far less than between the higher [sic] apes and inferior animals,” and wrote approvingly to a positivist friend: “It will want many sermons to undo last night’s work.”140 A second important theme in Huxley’s popular lecturing, especially to working-­class audiences, was the moral import of the laws of nature. As discussed previously (chapter 5.3), throughout his career Huxley argued that laws of nature showed the reason for moral law. The argument that “physical virtue is the basis of all other” was a subsidiary theme in his public lectures; the Darwinian narrative of gradual development and the concluding emphasis that all variety has been produced through the operation of natural causes is the chief theme of his extant lectures.141 401

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“A Liberal Education: And Where to Find It,” an address at the opening of the South London Working Men’s College early in 1868, is a clear example of Huxley’s moral theme. He began by presenting himself as on the side of workingmen. Others might seek education for workingmen to keep them from infidelity, make them into safe and responsible voters, or prepare them for industrial labor, but Huxley claimed a higher moral ground: “because they are men and women with unlimited capacities of being, doing, and suffering.”142 In support Huxley quoted Scripture: “the people perish for lack of knowledge” (25). This allowed him to elaborate on the dangers of not understanding the laws of nature, and knowing those laws became, by skillful redefinition, an important part of a liberal education. Huxley created a compelling metaphor, a rhetorical ploy characteristic of his lectures to popular audiences, of life as a game of chess in which each individual played against a “fair, just, and patient” Nature. “The rules of the game are . . . the laws of Nature.” Nature “never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance” (28). Huxley repeated in South London what he had emphasized to his friend, Frederic Dyster a decade earlier: “there lies in the nature of things a reason for every moral law . . . stealing and lying are just as certain to be followed by evil consequences, as putting your hand in a fire, or jumping out of a garret window” (32). He drew on selection metaphors that were unavailable to him in 1855: those who lose the game will be “exterminated” (30). Lubbock’s commitment to working people was not as focused on science as the activities and pronouncements of Huxley and Tyndall. As Mark Patton emphasizes, his parliamentary position gave him a wide sphere of action. In addition to his advocacy of science, he was renowned for promoting legislation that gave more leisure time to working people, most notably the Bank Holidays Act of 1871, and was the chief proponent of the Public Libraries Act of 1892, which gave local government the power to charge a rate for the support of a local library. Lubbock’s famous speech on “The Hundred Best Books” at the Working Men’s College in 1885 reveals his high aspirations for working people. In a previous address at the Working Men’s College, Lubbock had described a library as a “true fairyland, . . . a haven of repose from the storms and troubles of the world.” But not all books would produce ennobling results, and aspiring workingmen hardly knew where to start. Lubbock therefore produced a list of one hundred “good books” to guide readers.143 It was not a list of his personal favorites, he emphasized, but books that were recommended by authorities on reading. It included books widely admired and others widely liked. He included ancient classics, Aristotle, Plato, and Marcus Aurelius; Christian classics such as Keble’s Christian Year and Thomas 402

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à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ; classics from other cultures such as Confucius’s Analects, and modern authors as diverse as Samuel Smiles and George Eliot. No living authors were included. Some contemporaries ridiculed the list, but it struck a chord with self-­ improvers, and publishers saw commercial opportunities. While Matthew Arnold sneered, the Contemporary Review published the list for its well-­ educated readers. The Pall Mall Gazette published the list, then circularized one hundred of the “best literary judges of the day” and published the composite list in a pamphlet, together with “an article on the choice of Books by Mr. John Ruskin,” all for threepence.144 Lubbock reprinted the lecture in his best-­selling collection of speeches, The Pleasures of Life. This title sold over 200,000 copies in English and was translated into numerous European and Asian languages. In his brilliantly evocative account of The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Jonathan Rose assesses Lubbock’s “Hundred Best” as “enormously popular” among readers who regretted their cultural deficits. Future Marxists were inspired by the intellectual demands and the literary qualities of the works on Lubbock’s list. Macmillan published the recommended works as a series.145 Lubbock, Huxley, and Tyndall were enormously popular. Huxley remained popular among later generations of artisan readers.146 Lubbock received fan mail from ambitious young men around the world. However, while I stress their popularity, it would be misleading to single them out as unique. Henry Roscoe and John Ruskin, ally and competitor respectively, were equally energetic and popular. Roscoe, who followed Frankland as professor of chemistry at Owens College, instituted “Penny Science Lectures” in Manchester for unemployed workingmen during the cotton famine caused by the American Civil War. The lectures contin­ ued at a penny each, threepence for a series of four, into the 1870s. Roscoe, who also collaborated with Huxley on Macmillan’s Science Primer series, must be compared with Huxley in his commitment to making science available to working people. Lectures—­Scotland and the Provinces As they became more famous Huxley, Lubbock, and Tyndall received numerous invitations—­to open an institution, unveil a statue, accept a presidency (and therefore give an annual address), or become lord rector of a Scottish university. Their individual biographies list many, the addresses given can be followed in their collected essays. Huxley, Lubbock, Spottiswoode, and Tyndall were among the few southerners invited north by the Glasgow Science Lectures Association (founded in 403

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1875), an organization that emphasized that its lectures would be “solid and substantial,” given “by accomplished masters in each department of science.”147 Here I focus on the Birmingham and Midland Institute founded in the late 1860s. These different organizational locations illustrate the variety of elites whom they appeared alongside. The Birmingham and Midland Institute (B&MI) was an educational and cultural institution that functioned as both a mechanics’ institute and a literary and philosophical institute. The classes, lectures, and clubs sponsored by the institute covered everything from Latin, Spanish, and music to the “laws of health,” geology, and inorganic chemistry; some were specifically for artisans, others specifically for ladies; an archaeological section ran regular excursions in the summer. Prizes endowed by local patrons were awarded, and successes by its pupils in the DSA and Society of Arts examinations were announced with pride at the annual prize-­giving assemblies. Its presidents represented this range of interests. Huxley (1871), Lubbock (1874), and Tyndall (1877) were all presidents of the B&MI during its first decade. The invitation made clear that the appointment was an honor by listing previous presidents: Charles Dickens, Lyon Playfair, the Reverend Charles Kingsley, Professor Henry Fawcett (political economist), Lieutenant Colonel Sir Henry Rawlinson (an archaeologist), Dean Stanley, Professor Max Müller (Oxford liberal and Sanskrit scholar), and John Morley all before 1880. Thus, the X-­men joined other members of the cultural elite—­literary men, liberal clergy, cultured members of Parliament, and practitioners of various historical sciences—­as supporters of education and culture for the people. The only other scientific man in the first decade was the MP, Lyon Playfair. In the aftermath of the 1870 Education Act, which made the state responsible for the elementary education of the poor, education was a popular topic. In his 1871 address, Huxley justified state intervention and openly disagreed with Spencer’s extreme laissez-­faire view of the state. He was not as entertaining as audiences had come to expect. The lecture on “the functions of the State in matters appertaining to the instruction and well-­being of the people” was too long and philosophical, according to one newspaper, and too detailed, according to another.148 Huxley presented his position as a middle ground between state and individual responsibility. The state should be concerned with the “good of mankind” said Huxley, and pushed the case for the state “forming and fostering” science schools, but leaving “local energy . . . to develop the work.” He published it under the witty title “Administrative Nihilism,” a critical allusion to the kind of laissez-­faire advocated by Spencer.

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Three years later it was Lubbock’s turn. He drew on information gained from his roles in educational inquiries, to discuss “the present state of education . . . from a scientific point of view.” The speech is interesting because it shows Lubbock following Spencer and Huxley in advocating a morality of natural consequences. He used Huxley’s parable of man playing the game of life on the chess board of the world, where the rules are “the laws of nature.” He plays for “the highest stakes”—­ namely, life and health. It is also a revealing example of Lubbock criticizing and praising at the same time. The “great fault of the present system of education” is its neglect of science. He presented statistics on the failures of elementary schools and of Oxford and Cambridge, quoted lengthy recommendations from reports, but then made excuses for the failures of parents, schools, and universities, and reassured everyone with the conclusion that “other nations are, on the whole, not much in advance of us.” Anyone who had felt criticized could later feel excused or complimented. The local newspaper reported that “the hall was filled in every part” and the address “frequently applauded.”149 Education was a major theme in the 1870s. Rawlinson, a diplomat and Assyriologist, praised history and geography as interesting areas of study and gave some attention to biblical history. It was a mistake, he argued, to rest ancient history on the numbers found in “the Hebrew version of the book of Genesis,” but he also argued that study of other ancient cultures verified the biblical record at many points.150 Fawcett, who followed Lubbock, also spoke on educational issues. He praised the expansion of education, emphasized the importance of his own subject, political economy, but also advocated breadth in higher education, including Latin, Greek, and mathematics.151 Both these examples counter easy polarizations, whether of science/religion or science/classics. Tyndall, who was not closely involved with educational policy in the 1870s, gave a provocative philosophical address to the B&MI. Starting from the premise of the continuity of deterministic laws in the physical world, Tyndall discussed free will and moral responsibility. He rehearsed his regular themes—­the beginnings of human thought and history in a prehistoric, “abysmal” past, the superiority of the living tree to the lifeless machine as an image for the universe—­and praised his usual heroes before introducing new emphases based on the theory of conservation of energy. His account of the circulation of energy included eating, digestion, nervous and muscular action, thought, and emotion in one continuous system. Shifting from his usual emphases on the incompleteness of materialism as a philosophy of life, he emphasized the completeness

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of scientific explanation: “We can present to our minds a coherent picture of the physical processes” (that is, in terms of atoms and molecules), whereas attempts to explain the subjective by, for example, a concept of “self,” only “explain the unknown in terms of the more unknown” and therefore explain nothing according to scientific criteria. He made his point more directly: “Physical science offers no justification for the notion that molecules can be moved by states of consciousness; and it furnishes just as little countenance to the conclusion that states of consciousness can be generated by molecular motion.” Given the completeness of explanation at the physical-­molecular level, he went on to assert the “iron necessity everywhere reigning in physical nature.” The question of moral responsibility and punishment he then solved relatively easily. Punishment was justified by the right of society to protect itself “against aggressive and injurious forces, whether they be bond or free,” that is, regardless of moral responsibility. This was provocative. The social and geographical range of institutions at which Huxley, Tyndall, Lubbock, and Spottiswoode were invited to lecture indicates the breadth of their reputations. They were invited to Glasgow because they were “accomplished masters” in their departments of science and accomplished lecturers and in spite of the bitter disputes between Tyndall and the north British. Their reputations were sufficient to overcome any local opposition. At Birmingham, they were the representatives of science chosen to join other cultural leaders from literature, history, Church, and politics. Having emphasized that lectures were the basis of most of the essays and books published by X Club members, I now consider more briefly these other forms of popular presentation.152 Journalism The X Club men engaged in various ventures to establish a voice for science in the periodical press in the late 1850s and early 1860s. They flip-­flopped between publications specifically for science (the aborted “Scientific Review” and the Natural History Review) and titles covering “literature, art and science” (the Saturday Review and the Reader), which would have the advantages of bringing science before a wider audience and benefiting financially from a larger audience base. We have ob­ served the collapse or fading away of these projects, for they took too much work and they required cooperation across groups whose values and priorities differed. By the later 1860s the X-­men no longer initiated journalistic ventures. Perhaps even Huxley had at last learned that their work would end in failure but, also, they now had opportunities for pub406

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lishing through journals founded by others. As the reputations of the individual X-­men grew, they were increasingly sought out by editors. Journalism burgeoned in the 1860s.153 In 1859 Alexander Macmillan founded Macmillan’s Magazine, the first major monthly to be sold at only one shilling. Macmillan asked Huxley for contributions, but only in 1868, after he had divested himself of his Saturday Review, Natural His­ tory Review, and Reader projects did Huxley become a regular contributor. Tyndall and Lubbock also contributed to Macmillan’s in the late 1860s. The X-­men were also welcome in the more radical Fortnightly Review, founded in 1865. Its editor, G. H. Lewes, announced in the opening number that the “restrictions of party and of editorial ‘consistency,’ ” customary in Victorian journalism, would not be followed in the Fortnightly. There would be no party view that contributors and editor had to maintain, rather, each author would sign his articles and be responsible for his own views. Both Huxley and Tyndall were regular contributors to the Fortnightly under Lewes and his successor, John Morley; Spencer and Lubbock joined them in the 1870s. There was also a new weekly scientific journal, Nature, to which they contributed from 1869. Nature was similar to the NHR in that, at its origins, it aimed to attract both a specialist and a generalist audience, but across a broader spectrum of sciences. Although sometimes assumed to be an X Club project, following on from the NHR and the Reader, Nature was essentially a Lockyer and Macmillan project. They wanted support from all leading scientific men, rather than restricting themselves to any particular party. Both Huxley and Lubbock had articles in the first issue but, as the controversies that flourished in the pages of Nature in the early 1870s illustrate, Lockyer was not representing X Club interests. He was independent and encouraged controversy because it increased sales. Hooker and Tyndall both withdrew in outrage when Lockyer gave space to their critics, but Huxley and Lubbock continued to make use of Na­ ture, especially on issues of public policy concerning science education and scientific research.154 Other journals favored by the X-­men were the Contemporary Review and the Nineteenth Century. When James Knowles took over the Contem­ porary in 1870, he planned to make it, like the Metaphysical Society, “an entirely free and open field, where all forms of honest opinion and belief (represented by men of sufficient weight) should not only be tolerated but equally welcomed.” X Club members were certainly men of weight in the 1870s. Knowles reprinted papers read at the Metaphysical Society’s meetings and solicited papers from its luminaries, including Manning, Hutton, Gladstone, Huxley, Lubbock, and Tyndall. When Knowles 407

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left the Contemporary Review in 1877 and founded the Nineteenth Cen­ tury, Huxley, Lubbock, and Tyndall moved with him. The close relationships between the X-­men and their regular editors were useful when they were engaged in disputes. Friendly editors would publish them quickly. Knowles, to an even greater extent than Lockyer, tried to stir up controversy, which was always good for sales.155 Tyndall, Spencer, and Huxley were easily stirred up. They submitted different sorts of articles to different journals: education and reform to Macmillan’s Magazine, specifically scientific matters to Nature, and controversial interventions on theological or metaphysical topics to the Fortnightly Review and Knowles’s journals. As already emphasized, Huxley, Lubbock, and Tyndall seldom wrote specifically for these journals, rather, they contributed copies of speeches and lectures they had already given. Editors were grateful because their names helped sales. Most remarkably, “On the Physical Basis of Life,” a Sunday lecture given in Sabbatarian Scotland, in which Huxley argued that there was a substance, “protoplasm,” common to all forms of animal and plant life, took the February 1869 issue of the Fortnightly into seven editions.156 On a more modest cultural plane, many popular science journals publishing in the 1860s and 1870s reprinted speeches and lectures from leading lecturers. In 1870, Scientific Opinion, a weekly that was in direct competition with Nature, reprinted Huxley’s lecture “On a Lump of Coal,” and the Student and Intellectual Observer reprinted Tyndall’s British Association lecture “On the Scientific Use of the Imagination.”157 Local newspapers often published extensive accounts of speeches. All this made the speeches and lectures of Huxley, Lubbock, and Tyndall widely accessible. There was no need to attempt further journalistic ventures themselves. Spencer’s use of journals was different because he reached his audiences only through publishing. Like the others, he collected articles into books, but books were more central to him, for his grand philosophical project was planned to appear in book rather than article format. Whether books or articles, Spencer was interested in payment, as the following example of the International Scientific Series illustrates, for he was entirely dependent on publishing for his income.158 Books: The International Scientific Series For the X-­men the publishing of books was usually an individual rather than a group matter. Only two collaborative publishing projects have been identified. Led by Huxley and Henry Roscoe of Manchester, they joined Macmillan in the production of Macmillan’s Science Primers for 408

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the DSA system (as discussed in chapter 5.2). The books that have been most closely associated with the X Club are the hundred plus volumes of the International Scientific Series (ISS). Here I will argue that, like Nature, this was a project initiated by publishers who wanted X Club help, and that their input was limited by overcommitment to many other projects. The ISS has been characterized as an innovation in publishing, and as a series that promoted the naturalistic and evolutionary worldview associated with the X Club.159 Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall, and Lubbock were active in the project. As a publishing venture, it was unusual in bringing publishers from six countries into cooperation. As an X Club–­related project, it was unusual in that Spencer took a major organizational role, for the first time since the Reader. The project was initiated by the American, Edward Youmans, an evolutionist since the 1840s and an admirer and friend of Spencer. Youmans persuaded the New York publisher Appleton that a series of scientific books, written by expert authors from various countries and published, in translation where necessary, by each of the cooperating publishers offered a new model for successful publishing. British and European authors would have the benefit of access to the large American market, and the agreements between publishers would give each publisher access to excellent books from other countries, prevent piracy, and ensure that authors received royalties from sales in all countries; that would be as good as international copyright argued Youmans.160 Spencer was so enthusiastic about the project that he took the lead in seeking British contributors.161 When Youmans arrived in Britain in mid-­ 1871 to pursue the plan, Spencer took him to an X Club meeting and accompanied him to the British Association meeting in Edinburgh to meet potential authors. At a fringe meeting held during the BA meeting, Spencer, Huxley, and Tyndall were elected as a committee to advise on authors. But in 1871 Huxley was overextended and Tyndall unwilling to undertake new projects; both agreed to serve only if no correspondence or business was required of them.162 This left the business side of liaising with authors and publishers to Spencer. The committee limited its activities to preparing lists of provisional titles and authors. Howsam’s interpretation is that the financial advantages of the project were major motivations for committee members and authors, coming ahead of their secularizing political ambitions for the series.163 The aim was to cover the full range of the sciences for “the non-­ scientific public.” The series would acknowledge growing specialization, but not be for specialists. As Henry King, principal of H. S. King, British publisher for the enterprise, described it, the books would embody the 409

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“latest investigations” in the sciences of greatest contemporary interest.164 The series got off to a rapid start with Tyndall’s Forms of Water in Rain and Rivers, Ice and Glaciers (1872), which did not match the vision of embodying the “latest investigations.” It was a collection of Tyndall’s Christmas lectures that he had intended to publish as the “Boys’ Book of Glaciers.” King insisted on a title change, but the content remained the same, hence the Nature reviewer, who noticed the mismatch, complained that the title was misleading—­the book was mostly about ice! But it sold well and had thirteen printings.165 The publishers of the series often had to compromise to get the authors they wanted. Huxley’s contribution, The Crayfish: An Introduction to Zoology (1880) was not the promised book for a general audience—­“The Races of Mankind” and “Bodily Motion and Consciousness” had both been proposed—­ but a text, based on his South Kensington laboratory teaching.166 Surprisingly, given the committee, Youmans was advised that E. B. Tylor was “great on primitive man—­greater than Lubbock.”167 Tylor agreed to contribute but never delivered, and the series did not have a title on primitive man until 1889. Lubbock, meanwhile, became the most prolific contributor to the ISS with two titles on insect behavior and two on plants.168 Spencer, who had never intended to contribute and who complained that the administrative work that fell to him was burdensome, nevertheless gave in to persistent pressure from Youmans and wrote his Study of Sociology (1873) for the ISS. It became the most popular book in the English series, and the most popular of Spencer’s books, with twenty-­two printings. It is noteworthy that although the titles in the series were intended to gain authority from their connection with the series, and although good royalties could be expected through the international publishing arrangements, the X Club authors followed their usual publishing practices and produced their books by collating lectures and articles. The chapters of Lubbock’s books had been previously published as articles; the crayfish was a topic in Huxley’s South Kensington laboratory course. When Spencer agreed to write for the series, he and Youmans planned that his chapters would be first published in the Contemporary Review and in an American periodical of similar standing.169 This was to maximize the income from their efforts, income being especially important for Spencer whose livelihood depended on his pen. The publishers were not always happy with this process. Charles Kegan Paul, who took over the British series when he bought King’s company in 1877, noticed that “some of the most distinguished contributors gave merely old magazine articles.”170 The ideological objectives for the series were intimated in Appleton’s advertisement: “The general aim of the series will be to give authentic, 410

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[yet] popular expression to the latest advances in thought on the leading subjects of progressive inquiry. . . . Those branches of biological, psychological, and social science which help to a better understanding of human nature and the economy of human life” would be given special prominence.171 Allusions to “advances” in thought and “progressive” inquiry indicated that science was seen to fit a liberal agenda. Roy Mac­ Leod and Leslie Howsam both emphasize the ISS promoted a secular, evolutionary, and naturalistic view of the world. The social and moral subject matters emphasized by Appleton—­human nature and the economy of human life—­were, as emphasized in chapter 5, crucial to the naturalistic, secularizing agenda of the X Club members. From the beginning, social science was conspicuous in the list. William Bagehot’s Physics and Politics (1872) was the second title; its subtitle, “thoughts on the application of the principles of natural selection and inheritance to political society,” typifies the orientation of the series. Biological, evolutionary, and human topics and themes were conspicuous. Mind and brain dominated the social and human sciences, with sociology and political economy adequately represented but, owing to Tylor’s failure to deliver, little on anthropology or ethnology. In the first ten years of the series almost one-­third of the forty-­three titles published in London represented the social and human sciences.172 It was difficult to maintain the strong ideological line. Balfour Stewart’s Conservation of Energy, Being an Elementary Treatise on Energy and Its Laws (1873) was not as systematically naturalistic as Youmans and Appleton wished. When it appeared in the United States, appendixes were added, one extending conservation of energy to “questions of life and mind.”173 Personnel changes made it hard to maintain the intended directions. Spencer gave up his correspondence role in 1876. Due to declining health, King passed on his business to Charles Kegan Paul in 1877 and, for similar reasons, Youmans withdrew from active involvement in the 1880s. Huxley departed in 1883 because Paul did not consult as much as Huxley expected.174 By the late 1880s the series had lost its coherence of viewpoint, and by the 1890s reviewers often criticized the standard of individual titles.175 Although they did not initiate the ISS project, the leading publicists of the X Club gave it enthusiastic support. However, they had far too many irons in the fire in the 1870s to carry the project when others fell ill. The illness of Youmans and the death of King broke the informal networks of trust and communication. Moreover, without the involvement of the more persistent and reliable members (such as Busk and Spottiswoode) or the long-­term support of energetic allies and disciples (such as Macmillan and Roscoe), X Club projects had short lives. 411

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As I have emphasized, with the exception of Spencer, lecturing was the foundational activity of the X Club publicists for science. The commitment of time and energy by Huxley, Lubbock, and Tyndall in lectur­ ing to general audiences shown here is remarkable. They found lecturing easier to maintain than long-­term publishing projects. Lectures were easier to fit among the competing responsibilities of committee member­ ships, examinerships, original investigations, and, for Huxley and Tyndall, fluctuating health. Huxley gave many public lectures while failing to finish the books he had committed himself to write.176 These three were extremely popular lecturers, although there are other notable examples, such as Roscoe, of popularity and commitment to public enlightenment. Later in their careers, as they aged and gave fewer lectures, an increasing proportion of articles appeared first in written form, often as part of some controversy or in response to some criticism. The publicists of the X Club used a great variety of platforms and addressed highly varied congregations. They shared platforms with literary men and archaeologists, historians and political economists, Charles Dickens, A. P. Stanley, and Matthew Arnold being among the noteworthy. Through lectures, periodicals, letters to newspaper editors (mentioned previously), and books they reached audiences from cultural elites to workingmen, and from London to Glasgow. The content was often similar across diverse audiences. Huxley, Lubbock, Spencer, and Tyndall had immense public reputations; Lubbock and Spencer were famous worldwide, beyond English-­speaking and European contexts; Huxley and Spencer remained popular long after their deaths. Through their committee work the quieter members often supported the publicists, Spottiswoode, Busk, Hooker, and Frankland at the Royal Institution and, as illustrated in chapter 4, Spottiswoode and Hirst at the British Association. Spottiswoode and Frankland were also active lecturers, although less widely popular. The concentration of such famous publicists in one small group is remarkable, but should not blind us to the achievements and reputations of others, such as William Thomson, Henry Roscoe (both emphasized above), Richard Proctor, and the numerous other popularizers that Bernard Lightman has resurrected for scholarly attention.177

6.5 The Rhetoric of Scientific Authority If they were preachers of a new gospel, missionaries to the Christians of darkest England, and spiritual guides to the young, what was their 412

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message? What was the creed of the scientific faith? Huxley, of course, claimed that he had no creed. A creed implied dogma fixed in time, and he demanded that all conclusions be open to question. This indicates a methodological problem with this topic. Although, in general, the use of actors’ categories gives insight into the self-­images, motivations, and worldviews of historical actors (as in the first section of this chapter), the method is fraught with difficulties when applied to X Club “beliefs.”178 Largely this is due to the rhetorical centrality and dexterity of Huxley, as discussed in the introduction. The polemical context and rhetorical form of the X-­members’ claims is taken seriously here. While offering a philosophical-­style analysis of their naturalistic arguments and assumptions, I also identify the values and principles that they promoted in more allusive and rhetorically indirect ways. Nor do I start with scientific naturalism. As already argued (I.2), the identification of three theories of scientific naturalism by Turner-­Huxley has reified scientific naturalism into a doctrine. Moreover, as shown in the introduction and in chapter 1, their scientific naturalism cannot be separated from metaphysical positions. While emphasizing the naturalism of the X Club program, I pay attention to difference, not in order to fragment scientific naturalism but to identify the assumptions and goals that the X-­men held in common. The result is a looser definition of what I call a naturalistic movement or a naturalistic project. The analysis begins with rhetoric, examining the assertions made about the high value of science and the high motives and morals of scientific men. Next, I examine the varying ways in which agnostic ar­ guments were formulated and applied by the chief publicists of the X Club. I then develop an account of scientific naturalism that includes all or most of the X Club members and argue that they shared an intellectual commitment to the development of completely naturalistic accounts of all the phenomena of the physical and human worlds. In their view there were no discontinuities, in particular, human mind, morality, and religious beliefs were continuous with nature. Finally, I examine the assertions about science, theology, and religion that enabled them to condemn dogmatic theology while claiming to represent true religion. Pure Motives and Calm Minds Many of the claims made for science by the X-­men were heavily rhetorical. Rather than elaborating arguments, they affirmed beliefs in metaphorical and allusive terms. They built up an image of science as powerful and scientific men as reliable. Huxley claimed the wonders of contemporary 413

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industry as the fruits of science but then, in an egg dance, affirmed that the spiritual values of science were higher than the material values. Tyndall glossed scientific men as “calm” reasoners and presented his controversial conclusions as the beliefs of disembodied “scientific minds” or “profound scientific thinkers.” Another widely used trope was to represent scientific men as “fearless” inquirers. Extreme examples can be found in Huxley’s “Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge” discussed earlier (“On the Desirableness of Improving Natural Knowledge” in 6.2). There have been relatively few studies of the place of utilitarian values in Victorian science, but it is clear that they were not consistently denigrated. Crosbie Smith and Norton Wise have shown that the engineers and physicists of North Britain highly valued efficiency in science and engineering. Huxley and the X Club may represent an extreme position. Many popular science journals in the mid-­Victorian period claimed the practical achievements of industry as achievements of science (failing, like Huxley, to acknowledge the many technical advances made by artisans or trial and error methods) but these journals often praised inventions and practical men.179 Similarly, in evidence before the Devonshire Commission, leading scientific men insisted on the cultural value of science as part of their argument for the place of science in the traditional university curriculum, but this did not entail devaluing practical results and motives. The extent to which the X-­men differed from the eminent physicists and engineers associated with William Thomson is illustrated by one of the many confrontations between Tyndall and Tait. During his American tour, Tyndall emphasized to the reputedly pragmatic Americans that science “must be cultivated for its own sake, for pure love of truth, rather than for the applause or profit that it brings.” Inventions were dependent on earlier science, for example (and it was a particularly unfortunate example), developments in practical telegraphy were “the mere outcome of antecedent forces which acted without reference to practical ends.”180 His examples were from the 1830s and 1840s, but Tait was outraged at the implied criticism of his hero, Thomson, who made money from his important contributions to telegraph cable design. According to Tait, Tyndall “inculcated the monstrous doctrine that men who devote themselves to practical applications are men incapable of original research.” Moreover, an error in his recent account of the rainbow undermined Tyndall’s scientific credibility. According to Tait, his achievements in the popular realm had been won at the cost of his scientific authority.181 Praising science for its truth rather than its utility and denigrating the money-­making aspects of science were characteristic of the X-­men. 414

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For one of Tyndall’s admiring auditors, the Royal Institution became “a sort of sacred place, where pure science was enthroned to be worshipped for its own sake.”182 Frankland’s attraction to money-­making activities sometimes stretched friendships with his fellows in later years. Spencer expressed anti-­utilitarian values in characteristically abstract terms in his 1857 essay on “Progress,” where he argued that the essence of progress was not the popular view associated with the proliferation of “articles for satisfying men’s wants” but, considered from a philosophical general point of view, “the law of all progress” is “change from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous.”183 Another favored rhetorical construction was reference to the supposed qualities of scientific men and disembodied “scientific minds.” Tyndall, especially, often alluded to the conclusions reached by scientific minds or “thoughtful men,” the implication being that any who differed were unscientific or unthoughtful. In an early lecture, he elaborated the process by which high moral and intellectual qualities are developed. The study of physics enforces “precision of thought,” and demands “prudence, foresight, and sagacity.”184 He often presented controversial statements with claims that he was only “avowing what many scientific thinkers more or less distinctly believe.”185 Such assertions elided the processes of argument by which the claimed thoughtful minds and scientific thinkers reached their conclusions. Particularly controversial affirmations were associated with especially powerful minds as, for example, the conclusion of “On the Scientific Use of the Imagination,” which prefigured the Belfast address. The “core and essence” of the hypothesis of natural evolution, is that not only animal life and “the exquisite and wonderful mechanisms of the human body but that human mind itself—­emotion, intellect, will, and all their phenomena—­were once latent in a fiery cloud.” To accept this requires a revolution in our notions of matter and spirit, but “in many profoundly thoughtful minds such a revolution has already taken place.”186 Huxley’s 1866 Sunday lecture contains a fine exemplar of this trope. On his account, the Royal Society of London was founded by “a few calm and thoughtful students [who] banded themselves together for the purpose . . . of improving natural knowledge.” (Perhaps he intended to imply that contemporary fellows of the Royal Society were similar in temperament.) This calm and thoughtful spirit was implicitly contrasted with the religious and political passions and prejudices of contemporaries. Spottiswoode used the same trope, but in ponderous form, in his presidential address at the 1878 BA meeting. The earliest BA president still living was a resident of Dublin, “whether it be due to the salubrity 415

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of the climate or to the calm and dispassionate spirit in which Science is pursued by its votaries here, I do not pretend to say.”187 Thus, he implied that the scientific men of Dublin were even more uniformly calm and dispassionate than other scientific men. All this was a philosophical fairy tale. Eminent representatives of science, most notably Darwin, were picked out as embodying these high qualities of mind and character. As James Moore has shown, obituaries constructed Darwin as a scientific saint. As president of the Royal Society when Darwin died, it fell to Spottiswoode to read an obituary. It was my fortune, he told the Anniversary Meeting, “to have been able by a short pilgrimage to enjoy his bright welcome, and his genial conversation, and to revive from time to time a mental picture of that ideal of the philosophic life.” Huxley’s more fulsome obituary in Nature represented Darwin as “wonderfully genial, simple, and generous.” The better one knew him the greater he seemed: “the incorporated ideal of a man of science”; his actions “irradiated” by an “intense and almost passionate honesty”; one could not converse with [him] without being reminded of Socrates.”188 Tyndall hero-­worshipped Michael Faraday, who was universally admired for his gracious character. Tyndall acknowledged Faraday’s dependence on his Christian belief and practice for spiritual peace, but then, by appeal to Darwin, he argued that Christian belief was not essential for moral greatness: We may compare with Faraday a philosopher of equal magnitude, whose character, including gentleness and strength, candour and simplicity, intellectual power and moral elevation, singularly resembles that of the great Sandemanian, but who has neither shared the theological views nor the religious emotions which formed so dominant a factor in Faraday’s life. I allude to Mr. Charles Darwin, the Abraham of scientific men—­a searcher as obedient to the command of truth as was the patriarch to the command of God.189

Thus Darwin was symbolized by Abraham, the great man of faith common to Jewish and Christian tradition, and by Socrates, the great philosopher of pagan tradition, who valued truth over life. Here, Tyndall and Spottiswoode joined Huxley and Hooker, the better-­known admirers of Darwin, in creating the heroic image of Darwin as courageous truth seeker190 (figure 6.4). Such arguments had multiple uses. As Thomas Gieryn has argued, using Tyndall as a major example, the hierarchy of motives created a boundary between scientific men and practical men.191 Huxley, for example, was keen to keep “Engineers, Chemical Traders and ‘Experts’ ” 416

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Darwin as Socrates. Julia Margaret Cameron’s iconic 1868 photograph “created the visual image of Darwin as the great abstract mind” (Browne). Darwin’s beard, distant gaze, and domed head provided an image of a timeless sage and courageous seer. Source: Wellcome Library, London. Note: See discussions of Darwin iconography by Browne, “Retched,” and Gapps, “Darwin as an Icon.”

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out of the Royal Society.192 But the X-­men also used spiritual rhetoric. Spottiswoode went on “pilgrimage” to see Darwin, science met “spiritual” needs, the call of truth was as high as the call of God. This was to separate science from the vulgar materialism that cultural critics such as Carlyle associated with industrial progress—­while also claiming industrial and material progress as the result of science. The Limits of Agnosticism Skeptical and agnostic arguments, about any possible supernatural realm and about materialism/idealism, were used by many of the X-­men well before Huxley proposed calling himself an agnostic in 1869. Guided by Carlyle, Tyndall and Hirst had come to the conclusion that God’s existence could never be known or proved, only “felt.” Well before 1850, Huxley had been persuaded by reading both Carlyle and William Hamilton’s Philosophy of the Unconditioned that the ultimate nature of reality could not be known by limited human faculties. Huxley, Spencer, and Tyndall discussed these topics with one another and others, most notably G. H. Lewes, through the 1850s. Henry Mansel’s Christian skepticism about the knowability of God, in his Bampton lectures of 1858, reinforced Huxley’s anti-­Christian skepticism and invigorated Spencer’s interest in such questions.193 By the 1860s, Hamilton-­style arguments appeared in their publications, most conspicuously in Spencer’s First Principles (1862), where he argued that the ultimate principles, in religion and in science, were unknowable. He also advanced the argument, which Tyndall frequently took up, that the matter of which he wrote was not the “brute” matter of popular conception but was itself ultimately incomprehensible. One could not say whether this matter was ultimately material or spiritual (556–­57). Even Hooker picked up Hamiltonian language. Natural theology was presumptuous, he told his BA audience in 1868, because “it seeks to weigh the infinite in the balance of the finite.”194 In “Scientific Materialism,” at the same BA meeting, Tyndall asserted there were dual truths, the continuity of purely mechanical processes extending from the formation of crystals to the operation of the brain, to consciousness. Like Spencer, Tyndall had much more to say about the brain or material aspect than the consciousness or spiritual aspect of the dualism. At many points, though, the arguments of Tyndall and Huxley were skeptical rather than agnostic. In 1868 Tyndall had not grasped the weight of the agnostic arguments concerning the incapacity of the human mind. Although he then asserted that the ultimate nature of mat418

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ter was unknown to science, he allowed that “the mystery may resolve itself into knowledge at some future day.”195 Moreover, Huxley’s 1866 argument for “justification by verification” was less an agnostic argument—­it made no appeal to the innate limits of the human mind—­than a skeptical argument. The agnostic arguments were strategically useful. They allowed Huxley to force others to justify their positions while keeping clear of that obligation for himself. Huxley initially conceived of the agnostic label as a “weapon,” says Lightman, probably to counter accusations of materialism.196 While Huxley, Spencer, and Tyndall were clearly unorthodox thinkers, agnostic arguments allowed them to defend themselves from charges of atheism and materialism and spend their time and energies on the deterministic, material aspect of the unknown. As Turner suggests, agnosticism was a useful cultural stance; it rejected the culture and “the cultural values that depended on answers to such questions.”197 Nevertheless, the arguments were not merely polemical. Personal journals and letters from nonpolemical contexts demonstrate that their assertions of ultimate unknowability and mystery were seriously held arguments or, for Tyndall, deeply felt affirmations. As Bernard Lightman has shown, neither Huxley nor his friends took up the “agnostic” designation.198 Decades later, when his critics drew up a “creed” of agnosticism, Huxley attacked. Agnosticism is not a creed but a method, he declared. It is the principle common to Socrates, the Reformation, and modern science: “Try all things, hold fast by that which is good” (his readers would have recognized Saint Paul).199 This argument also rests on a general skeptical or inquiring attitude, rather than any agnostic appeal to the limits of human faculties. It alluded back to Huxley’s definition, in the “Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge,” of scientific method as the “rejection of authority” and “the cherishing of scepticism.” Neither Spencer nor Tyndall came close to identifying scientific method with a skeptical attitude. Spencer did not discuss scientific method directly, but his style of argument was to accumulate dozens of examples in support of his generalizations. Marian Evans, who accompanied Spencer on a trip to Kew Gardens in the early 1850s, described it as “a proof-­ hunting expedition” because Spencer had “all sorts of theories about plants.” If the flowers didn’t fit the theories, she reported unkindly to her friends, we said “tant pis pour les fleurs.”200 There was nothing skeptical or self-­critical about Spencer’s reasoning. Tyndall offered more reflective accounts of the scientific method. At the heart of his theory was what he called scientific imagination. In a 419

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physical analogy for thinking, he pictured the mind as looking from the bright light of knowledge into dark regions of the unknown: “knowledge once gained casts a faint light beyond its own penumbral boundaries. . . . The force of intellectual penetration into this penumbral region which surrounds actual knowledge is not, as some seem to think, dependent upon method, but upon the genius of the investigator.”201 In formulating hypotheses to explain the sensible phenomena, the investigator will “habitually form mental images of the ultra-­sensible.”202 In a later appeal to another physical analogy, Tyndall claimed that a mind strengthened by exercise, examining phenomena illumined by knowledge, was “enabled to enter and explore the subsensible world . . . to place before the mind’s eye atoms and atomic motions which lie far beyond the range of the senses.”203 As philosophical reasoning this is weak and it ignored contemporary debates on whether atoms were real entities. Huxley, for example, thought that atoms might be “pure myths.”204 In his address at the 1870 BA, Tyndall “defied” such skepticism: the “sceptical ‘as if ” is one of the parasites of science. . . . But a strong constitution defies the parasite . . . until in the end the malady of doubt is completely extirpated.”205 (This would seem to be an allusion to Huxley, the incumbent BA president.) Similarly, Lubbock, who was seldom critical, dissented from Huxley’s skepticism: “Many of us may think that Huxley took his scepticism too far—­that some conclusions which he doubted, seem, if not indeed proved, yet to stand on a securer base than he supposed.”206 As the term “agnosticism” came to be used in the 1880s, it was a stance toward the divine rather than toward materialism and idealism. Hirst and Tyndall considered that agnosticism was what they had learned from Carlyle in the 1840s; Huxley was saying nothing new. Hirst wrote impatiently to Tyndall, “You and I were agnostics long before our friend Huxley invented the word.”207 As Lightman argues, the agnosticism of the 1880s owed more to Spencer than to Huxley: those secularists who defined themselves as agnostic “were inspired by Spencer’s vision of an Unknowable deity.” Critics contrasted Huxley’s “I do not know” with Spencer’s dogmatism about “the Unknowable.” W. G. Ward’s son, with some of his father’s wit, claimed that “Spencer’s knowledge of the Unknowable seems to grow steadily.”208 By 1889, Huxley publicly emphasized his distance from Spencer: he did “not care to speak of anything as ‘unknowable.’” In private Huxley was scathing: Spencer’s “Unknowable” was “the name of a negation hocus-­pocussed into a sham thing.”209 Thus Hirst and Tyndall rejected the leadership of Huxley, Huxley distanced himself from Spencer, and contemporaries recognized that divergence. 420

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Agnosticism became a recognizable movement, but most self-­identified agnostics gave Spencer’s Unknowable a Christian rather than a metaphysical gloss. Hence, I conclude that agnosticism provides no consistent characterization of even the leading publicists of the X Club. While they genuinely rather than merely strategically held some agnostic arguments, they did not develop them consistently and did not agree with one another on their implications. A Naturalistic Movement The men of the X Club extended naturalistic explanation in many directions. At the core of their common project was the belief or assumption that the laws of nature were true for all time, and that these laws were deterministic. There were no outside interventions in the natural order of cause and effect. Tyndall’s campaign against prayer was essentially an argument against there being any possible intervention, human or divine, in the natural order determined by the laws of nature. Huxley, playing his agnostic game, merely said we had no good evidence of interventions in the natural order. But he also emphasized (in 1892) that in practice his countrymen were “Naturalists”: when an epidemic breaks out they examine the drains.210 Only Spencer explicitly expressed a totalizing ambition. At the end of First Principles he summarized the program of his synthetic philosophy as “to interpret the detailed phenomena of Life, and Mind, and Society, in terms of Matter, Motion, and Force.” This ambition exhibits Spencer’s conception of philosophy as the highest level of generalization, bringing together in one explanatory system the general laws already reached by the particular sciences. These three concepts were his foundation because, he explained, we conceptualize “the widest uniformities in our experience” in terms of “the relations of Matter, Motion and Force.” Con­ sistently with his philosophy of the Unknowable, he added that these concepts were but symbols of “the Unknown Reality.”211 In many ways Spencer’s naturalistic project was also the project of his X Club brothers. None of the others were as wide ranging as Spencer, but Huxley, Tyndall, and Lubbock, taken together, were interpreting the phenomena of life, mind, and human society in scientific terms. Life, mind, and society—­ the crucial difference between the X-­members and many of their contemporaries was that the human world was included in the deterministic order of natural law.212 The theories they emphasized in this project varied with their areas of personal expertise and interest. Lubbock used evolutionary theory—­in 421

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its developmental form—­to tell the story of human evolution from sav­ agery to civilization, from hunters and gatherers up to the present. Tyndall used the nebular hypothesis to speculate about the origins of mind, life, and emotion. He used atomic theory to make claims about the nature of the brain; the more skeptical Huxley referred to molecules not atoms. All assumed deep time. Huxley’s evolutionary epics followed some detailed trajectory before sweeping over eons. Lubbock, Huxley, and Tyndall all referred back to what distant savages would have feared, wanted, or thought, creating conjectural histories to explain the developments of religion, language, and other social phenomena. There is a remarkable emphasis in their arguments on unity and continuity, which has not previously been noticed.213 They developed a unified account of nature that left no gaps between culture and nature, humans and animals, life and non-­life. Tyndall, for example, insisted on the continuity of molecular organization and human brains; Huxley argued the essential sameness of animal and plant matter; Lubbock assumed that the same questions could be asked of insect behavior as of human behavior. Spencer wanted to link all phenomena, including physical, biological, social, and psychological, into a single explanatory schema. Both Spencer and Tyndall found the origins of everything in the nebular theory. Evolution was a crucial theory for all of them, for it tied humans into nature. Spencer used Lamarckian evolutionary theory to explain the moral sense as the inheritance of the race; Tyndall constantly described the origins of human thought in a pre-­historic past; Busk compared the skulls of prehistoric “savage” peoples with those of “civilised” peoples; Lubbock showed the slow development of human society from stone age savage to civilization; Huxley was identified with the claim, popularly expressed, that men came from monkeys, but he also wrote an anthropological and comparative-­religion-­style study on the evolution of theology. The view that there were no discontinuities, that human mind, morality, and religious beliefs were continuous with nature, set them apart from many of their contemporaries. Thus Balfour of Edinburgh had criticized Huxley’s discussion of the “zoological relations of men to monkeys,” because he had ignored man’s “intellectual and moral” functions (chap­ ter 3.1). Stokes had claimed in the conclusion to his BA presidential address in 1869 that not all phenomena came under the domain of science. Although he expected the same laws to apply to living beings as to dead matter, he claimed that life was also “a something sui generis” and a “profound mystery.” The phenomena of mind were even “more profoundly mysterious. Science can be expected to do little to aid us here.”214 Similarly, the X-­men did not accept A. R. Wallace’s proposal that mind intro422

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duced something radically new into the evolutionary process. Although only some members of the X Club were involved in giving lectures and writing articles for popular audiences, there is no evidence of the quieter X-­men dissenting from the naturalistic program of the leading publicists. This naturalism, at least for Huxley and Spencer, was held as a philosophical or metaphysical position. Spencer’s father taught him to explain phenomena in terms of natural causes. He first became interested in the laws of mind through phrenology and published developmental accounts of the universe in the 1850s.215 Huxley was committed to a naturalistic account of species before Darwin, but no available theory was adequate so he espoused a Lyellian constant state—­until Darwin began to lobby him in the mid-­1850s. Darwin offered a powerful new argument (a “Whitworth gun”) to proponents of naturalism, but the naturalistic goal predated Darwin.216 Admitting that physics and metaphysics were conjoined in the program of “scientific naturalism” and broadening the list of important theories and concepts links my interpretation of scientific naturalism to Robert Young’s account of the naturalistic side in the pre-­ Darwinian debate over “man’s place in nature” (introduction I.2). Tyndall’s philosophical directions were also set pre-­1859. He had given up Christian supernaturalism for Carlylean “natural supernaturalism.” His early confident metaphysical idealism shifted by the late 1850s to a semimaterialist monism.217 Scientific, religious, and philosophical arguments interacted as they developed their personal visions of the universe. They believed that scientific reasoning implicitly assumed naturalism. Thus, unpolemical lectures and elementary education in science would spread naturalistic reasoning. Any science, as they argued in committees and before royal commissions on educational topics, promoted clear thinking about causes and effects, or a habit of reasoning from observed facts rather than authority. Minds would become “very considerably opened.” The heart of Victorian “scientific naturalism,” I propose, was its commitment to including life, mind, and society within naturalistic and deterministic explanation. “Scientific naturalism” was not focused on a particular set of theories but it was a movement to expand naturalistic explanation. False Theology and True Religion Respectable Victorians agreed that true science and true religion were in agreement but, in Bernard Lightman’s apt metaphor, this was a “discordant harmony,” for true science and true religion were conceived in widely divergent ways by different Victorian groups.218 For Huxley, Lubbock, 423

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and Tyndall, science and dogmatic theology were in conflict, but religion was different from theology. Tyndall and Hirst, like Huxley, learned from Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus that “a deep sense of religion was compatible with the entire absence of Theology.”219 The basis for this claim was the widely made distinction between intellect and feeling or, more metaphorically, head and heart. True religion was a deeply felt response to the universe, but made no dogmatic claims. Thus Lubbock, in a 1903 address, affirmed, theology “is an exercise of the mind—­religion of the heart.”220 Although the romantic redefinition of religion as founded on feeling resonated with many Victorians, the implications of dividing feeling from intellect and then claiming all theology as the province of the intellect were controversial, especially when presented aggressively by Tyndall and Huxley. In their view, theology was an intellectual activity, a human effort to explain religious experience, therefore theological assertions were subject to the same logical and evidential assessments as any knowledge claims. Thus, Tyndall affirmed the authority of science as he moved toward the apogee of his Belfast address: “The impregnable position of science may be described in a few words. We claim we shall wrest from theology, the entire domain of cosmological theory.” Even in private, Huxley was outspoken: My screed was meant as a protest against Theology & Parsonism in general—­both of which are in my mind the natural & irreconcilable enemies of Science—­Few see it but I believe we are on the Eve of a new Reformation and if I have a wish to live thirty years, it is that I may see the foot of Science on the necks of [her] Enemies—­But the new reli­ gion will not be a worship of the intellect alone.221

These are angry words. But, we should also note the subtleties of language. Both Tyndall and Huxley identified “theology” as the opposition, and Huxley expected a “new religion” to emerge. Huxley’s anger broke out on many occasions. He regarded theology and “parsonism,” the culture of clerical authority and lay deference to that authority, as “natural & irreconcilable enemies” to scientific inquiry. This parallels the opposition between authority and free inquiry that he elaborated in his “Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge.” Behind parsonism was a political system in which economic privileges were associated with membership of the established Church and, as Adrian Desmond has argued, this system of authority and privilege was the object of Huxley’s passionate indignation. It led him into extreme attacks on such opponents as Gladstone.

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Huxley and Tyndall were especially vigorous in prosecuting arguments against the supernaturalism of popular Christianity, whether belief in miracles in the past (as in Huxley’s paper on the resurrection at the Metaphysical Society, or his arguments with Gladstone over the Gadarene swine story) or expectations that God would intervene in the natural order in their present (as in Tyndall’s arguments about prayer). They not only attacked the factual accuracy of Genesis but the whole authority structure based on claims to privileged sources of knowledge. Claims about origins and about the natural order were to be assessed at the bar of science. Although, in their view, conventional religion had outlived its usefulness, an essential pure truth remained for human aspiration. When religion was stripped of its false garments, an Unknowable Mystery remained. The dichotomy between intellect and feeling was crucial for Tyndall and was the ground of his effusive claims about Mystery being at the heart of the universe. The conclusion of the Belfast address was his fullest public elaboration of the importance of man’s emotional nature. Hav­ ing claimed all cosmological theory and all discussion of origins for science, he asserted that the “unquenchable claims of his [man’s] moral and emotional nature” must also be given expression. Feelings of “Awe, Reverence, Wonder,” which are “mischievous” intrusions if given any weight in the “region of objective knowledge,” have their appropriate expression in the realms of poetry and music and in seeking to grasp “the Mystery” from which the human mind has emerged. Such feelings or sentiments add, “in the region of poetry and emotion, inward completeness and dignity to man.”222 Such religious and moral allusions characterized the perorations of Tyndall’s more philosophical lectures. Tyndall was entirely sincere. Although his many affirmations cannot be turned into a conceptually clear and consistent philosophy, he was not evasive in order to escape criticism. Huxley was planning to “dance between the eggs” in his lecture at Belfast; Tyndall aimed to “be true to myself.”223 In frustration at the misunderstandings of his critics, he protested to one disciple that, although he rejected the common anthropomorphic conceptions of God, he was not an atheist: “I said as plainly as words could make it, that inscrutable Power lay behind it all.”224 Like Tyndall, Huxley separated feeling from intellect: All the subjects of our thoughts . . . may be classified under one of two heads—­as ei­ ther within the province of the intellect . . . or as within the province of feeling . . . and which can neither be proved nor disproved, but only felt and known . . . poetry, art, re­ ligion belong to the province of feeling.

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He mentioned feelings of awe and “consciousness of the limitation of man,” but over time the allusions to mystery diminished and his references to religious feeling began to focus on the moral significance of religious feeling.225 Although reason, through awareness of the laws of nature, defined moral action, only religious feeling will direct us to choose the moral option, he claimed (implying that the pleasures and pains of natural consequences were not strong enough motivation). Thus, to the surprise of many, when on the London School Board, he supported reading of the bible, because its advocacy of justice, righteousness, and care for one’s neighbor (but “no trash about the rights of man”) would strengthen the ethical sense.226 Occasional comments from Lubbock indicate that he also associated religious feeling with moral ideals. In his widely read essay, “On Religion,” Lubbock identified religion with right conduct: We commonly . . . bring together under this term [religion] two things which are yet very different: the religion of the heart, and that of the head. The first deals with conduct, and the duties of Man; the second with the nature of the supernatural and the future of the soul, being in fact a branch of knowledge.227

The essay was essentially a collection of quotations. In his characteristic mediating style, Lubbock drew quotations from diverse sources, thereby showing that all traditions—­from classical to Christian and Persian to Confucian—­agreed on the essential nature of religion. This insubstantial essay was published in Lubbock’s immensely popular Pleasures of Life, which went through dozens of editions. In their presidential addresses to the British Association (chapter 4.2) both Hooker and Spottiswoode made vague allusions to “inscrutable powers” and “regions beyond,” which suggest that they shared something of Tyndall’s inexpressible responses to Nature. Spencer differed from his friends in his conception of religion. Carlyle’s re-­creation of religion as a personal response to the Immensities and Mysteries of the universe had no appeal to him, for he did not share the emotional experiences that Carlyle’s vision presumed. Hence, the romantic definition of religion as feeling did not resonate with him.228 As Tyndall once told him, he was “too much occupied with the pure intellect to feel to its full extent the lifting of the soul in the presence of natural grandeur.”229 Spencer sought to find the essence of religion in what was common to all religions. He found almost nothing in common, no common doctrines or observances, merely that every religion sets out “with the tacit assertion of a mystery.” Analysis shows that ev426

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ery proposed solution is invalid, that “no hypothesis is even thinkable,” and therefore the mystery is transcendent.230 Thus, Spencer reached the same conclusion as Tyndall, but by logical analysis rather than emotional experience. Some contemporaries thought Tyndall’s affirmations about mystery were pathetic, but they were genuine expressions of emotional experience; Spencer, who did not feel the mystery, did not capitalize the word. Through all the rhetoric and argument, naturalism was their central commitment. Agnosticism was a useful weapon but the agnostic arguments were not used consistently and sometimes slipped into skeptical arguments. At the heart of their understanding of the world were the beliefs that science deals in natural causes and that there were no supernatural interventions in the natural order. Uniform natural laws describe not only the physical world but also the human mind and human society. Their public teaching and evangelizing emphasized continuity in the natural world: where barriers had been set up between matter and life, plants and animals, other animals and humans, they talked about continuity and unity. Their research work often promoted these unifying ambitions. Their representation of science included affirmations of ethical values. They presented scientific men as high-­minded, pure in motive, seeking truth rather than fame or money, and working for the public good.

6.6 Sunday Lecture Societies: The Politics of Lay Sermons The Sunday lecture societies in which the friends were active introduce a different kind of project, directed to political change. Sunday lectures were a deliberate challenge to the Sabbatarians and to the alliance of Church and state, which sustained Sabbatarian legislation. Not that the proponents of Sunday lectures admitted this; rather, Sunday lectures were represented as improving opportunities for those who did not attend places of worship. In addition, proponents claimed that by providing an alternative to the public house, the lectures would diminish drunkenness and depravity among the working classes. In the Sunday lecture movement, members of the X Club collaborated with Unitarians, secularists, positivists, Christian socialists, leading liberal and radical politicians, and reforming lawyers. Their participation in the Sunday lecture movement and in the larger anti-­Sabbatarian movement offers more complete evidence than previously available of a shared political agenda. Equally interesting, the honorific roles that they attained 427

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in these obscure organizations suggest that by the 1880s science had gained a measure of cultural authority.231 The first Sunday lecture, to be given on January 7, 1866, was advertised by flyers and by large notices in London newspapers.232 Half the Times’s advertisement was taken up with a long list of worthy men who gave their approval to “Sunday Evenings for the People.” Such patronage was important for a project that many would see as Sabbath-­breaking. The respectability and good judgment of the men involved were indicated by their titles and honors. The first lecturer was “Professor Huxley, F.R.S.,” “On the Desirableness of Improving Natural Knowledge,” future lecturers and topics were listed. The flyer for the lecture elaborated the social and religious benefits of the lecture program (figure 6.5). The promoters expressed enormous optimism about the unfulfilled desires of nonattendees at church and chapel and the transforming potential of the proposed lectures. On Sundays (glossed as a time for “rest and leisure,” which was not how Sabbatarians would have put it), when “the thoughts of men are released from the engrossing labour of mere existence,” many men will be drawn to “the exercise of the reflective faculties” and, “if opportunities were afforded . . . large numbers . . . would listen to discourses on science and the wonders of nature.” Such topics would stimulate “a reverence and love of the Deity” and raise up “an opposing principle to intemperance and immorality” (figure 6.5). As was apparent in the efforts of Hooker and others to produce signed memorials in support of the essayists and of Colenso (chapter 3), lists of supporters would be assessed critically. Although respectable, the supporters of Sunday Evenings for the People were not from the social elite. The fifty-­four names include a sprinkling of baronets, knights, and MPs, eighteen FRS’s, and a few clergymen (figure 6.5). To some extent the presence of a few eminent, widely respected individuals with intellectual and cultural standing compensated for the modest social standing of the listed supporters. The names, titles, and honors of Charles Dickens; Sir Charles Lyell, FRS; John Stuart Mill, MP; Professor Richard Owen, FRS; and Sir James Clark (physician to the queen) endowed the projected Sunday lectures with credibility and respectability. One-­third of the supporters represented science. Eighteen were iden­ tified as FRS, one as FGS, and two were medical men. It is apparent that the FRS was being used as a mark of respectability and intellectual achieve­ ment. Five of the X-­men appear: Frankland, Huxley, Sir John Lubbock, Spencer, and Tyndall. The names of Lyell, Owen, Thomas Graham (master of the mint, previously professor of chemistry at University College), and August Hofmann (of the Royal College of Chemistry) gave 428

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6.5

Sunday Evenings for the People, the flyer for Huxley’s opening lecture in 1866. Source: College Archives, Imperial College London.

breadth to the scientific part of the list; the lectures were not open to the charge that supporters were only “the younger progressionists.”233 One notable name, Sir John Herschel’s, is missing, and this is probably significant. The ever-­cautious Herschel may well have judged the project too provocative. 429

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As one early critic noted, there were many Unitarians on the list, and one of the Anglican clergyman had been accused of heresy.234 Thus although the list represented social respectability, it failed to represent theological respectability. It was still the case, as Carpenter had warned Lubbock five years previously, that the names of Unitarians carried no authority on a religious issue. Smaller numbers of Christian socialists and positivists can be identified on the list of supporters.235 Belief in the intellectual capacities of the people and the reforming power of education was common to these three groups and matches the confidence expressed in the flyer that the unchurched would want to attend “discourses on science and the wonders of nature.” In general, these groups were more egalitarian and democratic than the X-­men. The three lecturers scheduled to follow Huxley were all Unitarians: Sir John Bowring on “Religious Progress outside the Christian Pale,” W. B. Carpenter, on “The Antiquity of Man,” and W. B. Hodgson, LLD, on “Many Members, but One Body.” Bowring appeared above (chapter 3.2), praised by Hooker for his outspoken criticism of the “Declaration of the Students of the Natural Sciences.” He was a devout Unitarian, who had been a close associate of Jeremy Bentham in the 1820s and first editor of the Westminster Review. As an MP in the 1840s he stood for many national and global reforming and humanitarian causes.236 Unitarian religion and reforming politics characterized many of the following lecturers. Carpenter was well known as a Unitarian. Hodgson was a Unitarian, phrenologist, political economist, and a supporter of such radical causes as Church dis­establishment and higher education for women. Lectures could be expected in the future from James Heywood, FRS, Unitarian, and promoter of many reforming causes. As a radical MP of the 1850s, he had been a leading advocate of parliamentary intervention to reform Oxford and Cambridge. Other announced lecturers were James Martineau (Unitarian theologian), Professor Richard Owen (the eminent naturalist was highly regarded as a lecturer), and Charles Dickens. Thus, of the eight advertised lecturers, five were Unitarians and, of these, three were politically active in liberal or radical causes. The dominance of Unitarians on the list of lecturers suggests that they were influential among the organizers of the lecture series. The dominance of representatives of science on the list of supporters and their showing alongside the Unitarians on the lecture plan suggest that that “FRS” was a valued label and that the organizers considered that science (rather than literature or art or political economy) would be particularly appropriate in raising auditors’ thoughts to the Creator.

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The organization behind the Sunday Evenings for the People, with which the Unitarians were collaborating, was the National Sunday League (NSL), which was closely connected with the Owenite socialist and secularist movements.237 The names of leading secularists, though, would not confer respectability on any cause and did not appear on the list of supporters.238 The NSL had been established in 1855 to campaign for the opening of museums, art galleries, libraries, and botanic gardens on Sunday afternoons. It also promoted Sunday excursions, band performances in parks, and, beginning in the mid-­1860s, lectures. Of the names on the advertisement, R. M. Morrell (d. 1893) was a founding member and honorary secretary of the NSL; Sir Joshua Walmsley (1794–­ 1871), radical Liverpool politician and proprietor of the Daily News was president, and Henry J. Slack (1818–­1896), a Unitarian, microscopist, editor of and writer for popular science magazines, was vice president. Like most of the activists involved in Sunday lectures, these men were extreme liberals. Walmsley campaigned, for example, for the ballot. Slack’s causes included higher education for women and the condemnation of Governor Eyre. Much less is known of Morrell who, like most of the working committee members of the NSL, was a skilled craftsman. The X Club discussed “Huxley’s forthcoming lecture at St Martin’s Hall and the Sunday League generally” at its meeting in early January 1866. The brief minutes give no hint as to the opinions expressed but at least seven members were supporters, the five who had publicly affirmed their support, plus Hirst, Busk, and, probably, Spottiswoode. On the following Sunday Tyndall and Hirst dined with the Huxleys before setting off to Saint Martin’s Hall for the lecture. It was a great success. The hall, which held two thousand, was crammed (the free seats at the back filled first), and another two thousand were turned away—­Busk and Huxley told the Royal Society’s assistant secretary.239 Huxley entered to the music of Haydn’s Creation, and further excerpts became a concert at the end. The crowd, the stirring music, and the “noble utterances” delivered (according to Hirst) “in an earnest and impressive tone” made the lecture an awesome occasion. It would probably make “a new epoch” for both science and Sabbatarianism—­or so Hirst hoped.240 A more critical auditor wrote a witty report for the conservative Stan­ dard newspaper, emphasizing the anti-­theological aspects and satirizing the scientific authority of Huxley’s lecture: The object of it seems to be to tell us that if there is a God, which is at least doubtful, nature is the entity in question, and physical science is its prophet; that the world has

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been groping about in darkness through philosophies, theologies and what not for centuries, and is only at last discovering that “scepticism is the highest of duties, blind faith the one unpardonable sin”; . . . and that when he [the man of science] has once fairly learnt to “break in pieces the idols built up of books (Bibles, for instance) and traditions and fine-­spun ecclesiastical cobwebs,” he will be able to “cherish the noblest and most human of man’s emotions by worship, for the most part of the silent sort, at the altar of the Unknown and Unknowable”—­a very scientific prospect.

The ultimate irony was the music: “What on earth were they thinking of to select their music from the Creation? The thing is a myth, as the orators have been proving until everybody is tired of hearing their clatter.”241 Nothing in Huxley’s lecture corresponded to the announced aim of discussing the wonders of nature in ways that would produce reverence for a deity. Following lectures were also highly controversial. Lyell, although a sympathetic observer, described Carpenter as “very aggressive.” He “attacked some Psalms as immoral and claimed that 9/10 of clergy teach what they don’t believe.” These were accusations that freethinkers had long made against official representatives of orthodoxy, but, although judged heretical by the orthodox, Unitarians considered themselves to be Christian. Carpenter went on to defend Christian belief and assured his audience that the “revelations of science were not in opposition to Christianity.”242 Hirst’s epochal hopes were dashed, for the Sabbatarians fought back effectively. The Lord’s Day Observance Society (LDOS) threatened legal proceedings against the directors of Saint Martin’s Hall. In April 1867, the NSL called a public meeting to discuss the suppression of the lectures. Hirst, Huxley, and Tyndall attended; donations to a defense fund were announced from Lubbock (£5) and other wealthy supporters. Eminent people who sent letters of support included Earl Granville, chancellor of the University of London, one-­time lord president of council and supporter of the Science and Art Department, and Goschen, the later lord of the Admiralty who appointed Hirst to the Royal Naval Academy.243 Such multiple links between political leaders and the X Club men suggest that recognition of shared values and ideologies helped to sustain mutual respect. The Sunday lecture movement split over how to respond to the legal challenges. Various strategies were tried: defining the paid seats as “sittings” (like church pews); abandoning the musical performances that were the grounds of the accusation of “entertainment”; defining themselves as a religious body, the “Recreative Religionists.” This last was an “unworthy evasion,” declared Carpenter and Huxley, and departed the 432

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NSL alliance. Carpenter and Huxley then became leaders in a group that sought to establish Sunday evening lectures independently of the secularists. In November 1869, after almost a year of planning, a meeting of sympathizers resolved that a “Sunday Lecture Society” be formed, its chief objective being “to provide for the delivery on Sundays in the Metropolis, and to encourage the delivery elsewhere, of Lectures on Science—­ physical, intellectual, and moral,—­History, Literature and Art; especially in their bearing upon the improvement and social well-­being of man.”244 The geographical ambitions were grand; the subject matter encompassed all science and added history, literature, and art; the social goals—­“the improvement and social well-­being of man”—­sound unchallengeable to modern ears, but Victorians would have noticed the omission of any spiritual aims. The words were carefully chosen. The lectures would not be entertainment, not even rational entertainment. Rather, they claimed to be directed to moral and social improvement. The Sunday Lecture Society was close to claiming for itself the concern for “the health and well-­being of the nation in its broadest sense” that Galton suggested would mark a new “scientific priesthood.”245 Demonstrating more mundane concerns, it was resolved that “no musical performances shall be introduced at any Lecture without the sanction of a General Meeting of the Society.”246 The committee elected to manage the affairs of the Sunday Lecture Society was dominated by lawyers. This was appropriate given the legal problems likely to arise from giving lectures on Sundays but also indicates a depth of concern for social and religious reform among lawyers. As in the earlier Sunday lecture organization, Unitarians were prominent. Of the eight committee members whose occupations I have been able to identify, six were lawyers, one a political economist, and one a “retired merchant.” Of the five for whom I have been able to find religious affiliation, three were Unitarians, one Church of England (a Christian socialist of the 1850s), and one described himself as “Agnostic.”247 Some have appeared in previous chapters. John Westlake, one of the founders of the London Working Men’s College in 1854, was the lawyer who had advised Colenso, Lyell, and Lubbock on the planned memorial in support of Colenso. William Shaen, a Unitarian, was a leading promoter of the full admission of women to the University of London. He too was a lawyer. He had acted for Colenso, for the Jamaica Committee, and for the NSL in 1866 and 1867.248 Although there were no scientific men on the committee that managed the society’s affairs, scientific men and scientific topics were conspicuous in the program, especially in the early years. The majority of the early lecturers were associated with either medicine or science. 433

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W. B. Carpenter was prominent. He opened the first series of lectures in 1870 with two lectures on the deep sea and, similarly, opened the second, 1870–­71, season with two lectures on the microscope. He was the most regular contributor to the society’s lecture program in the 1870s. Huxley, who was prominent as chairman of the founding meeting, gave only one lecture thereafter. (Admittedly, he was busy on many other committees and projects.) None of the other X Club members gave lectures. The most prolific and eminent of Carpenter’s early supporters in the lecturing schedule was Thomas Spencer Cobbold, Britain’s leading parasitologist. The majority of lecturers on scientific topics were either less eminent in science, dependent on popular writing for an income (for example, Richard Proctor), or younger (the brilliant young mathematician, W. K. Clifford, lectured regularly in the 1870s). To encourage further members, the Sunday Lecture Society printed lists of supporters to publicize both the number of its supporters and their respectability. One hundred and thirty people had promised their support before the November meeting; a list of 250 members and donors was published just after the meeting, 350 names were published in late 1871, with the report of the second annual meeting. The subscribers, donors, and supporters were a broad group: scientific men, medical men, lawyers, clergymen, a few musicians, writers and publishers, and a few military men. Eminent scientific men were on the list, including Charles Darwin and Sir Charles Lyell. One of the clergy was Rev. J. D. la Touche, whose reforming inclinations are clear in his long correspondence with his friend, J. D. Hooker;249 John Stuart Mill and J. E. Cairnes, of the Reader project, were supporters. The aging radical Robert Grant, professor of comparative anatomy at University College, was a member and regular attendee. Another listed supporter on the edge of respectability was William Pare, one of the Owenite landlords of Queenwood College.250 More surprising, John Ruskin was on the list, suggesting that the SLS was seen as a forum for those who wanted to address “the people.” Some supporters preferred not to fully identify themselves: for example, an “FRS” who donated £5 and a “Lord H.” (probably Lord Houghton) were on the first 1869 subscriber list. Women were involved as members and subscribers and from the second season women appeared regularly on the lecture program; this is consistent with both the Unitarian and Christian socialist interest in Sunday lectures. Six of the X-­men signed up: Frankland, Hirst, Tyndall, and Spottiswoode were members who paid their annual subscription of £1, Huxley was elected to honorary membership “in recognition of his gratis lecture,” and Spencer was on a supplementary list of those agreeing with the ob434

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jects of the society but not contributing financially.251 Busk, Hooker, and Lubbock were missing but Lubbock, I suggest, may have been the anonymous “FRS.” Busk had been a supporter in 1866. He could well afford £5 but had no reason to hide his personal views. Hooker could have been a secret supporter, out of deference to his relatives’ sensibilities252 (his mother lived until 1872), however, £5 would have been a large donation from someone dependent on a salary. Lubbock is a more likely source. Lubbock had reason to remain anonymous and could afford £5. He may have been protecting his political career. In 1866 and 1867 he had been an open supporter of Sunday lectures. But at the general election of 1868 the Working Men’s Lords Day Rest Association had campaigned against Lubbock and five other candidates who supported the Sunday opening of museums. Eleven thousand “large bills” had been posted in these selected electorates. The 1869 annual meeting of the Lord’s Day Rest Association reported with satisfaction: “Not one of the candidates thus opposed obtained a seat.”253 Lubbock had backpedaled on Sunday opening during his election campaign when, in response to a question, he and his fellow Liberal candidate had said that they “would vote against opening the Crystal Palace, &c., on the Lord’s Day.”254 It would not be surprising if he chose to support the Sunday Lecture Society anonymously; moreover, £5 was the amount that he had given to the NSL’s defense fund in 1867. In spite of its caution the Sunday Lecture Society faced many diffi­ culties. Many shopkeepers declined to display the society’s advertising, fearing loss of customers. Potential lecturers made excuses for being unable to lecture on Sundays, and, in spite of the lengthy list of supporters, gentlemen of social and intellectual eminence were unwilling to take prominent patron roles. The committee was unable to find “four or five eminent men” willing to confer respectability on the society by filling the positions of president and vice presidents. It abandoned the attempt.255 When, at last, nine years after its founding, the London Sunday Lecture Society found a president and vice presidents the range of representation was narrow and the list was short on traditional titles and honors. Naturalistic science dominated. W. B. Carpenter, just retired from the University of London, took the presidency.256 Of the ten vice presidents, five were members of the X Club: Frankland, Huxley, Spencer, Spottis­ woode (identified as “P.R.S.”), and Tyndall. Another was Alexander Bain, professor of logic and English at the University of Aberdeen and a founder of the journal Mind; he was like Carpenter, interested in the re­lations of mind and body and, like Spencer, a representative of the moral and social sci­ences. Most astonishing, Charles Darwin was on the list of vice 435

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presidents. Someone, there is no record of whom, persuaded the reclusive and single-­minded Darwin to lend his name to the cause.257 In addition, there were three lawyers and men of affairs among the vice presidents: James Heywood (Unitarian and radical MP), who had been listed as a potential lecturer in 1866; James Booth, a Liverpool Unitarian and high civil servant; Sir Arthur Hobhouse, knighted two years previously when he retired as law member of the Council of the Viceroy of India, the only vice president outside both science and Unitarianism.258 When Carpenter died suddenly at the end of 1885, Huxley replaced him. Huxley had declined to take the SLS presidency in 1884 because he was president of the Royal Society, and he felt that as president he should not take controversial positions on which the society was divided.259 However, neither Huxley nor Spottiswoode showed any such caution about appearing on the list of SLS vice presidents as “P.R.S.” This is a remarkable lineup of X Club members. Frankland, who so seldom took a public position and who was drifting away from his friends in the 1880s, joined Huxley, Spencer, and Tyndall in this public and con­ troversial stand. Moreover, Spottiswoode, who appears so often in this book as an efficient administrator and reliable supporter, here took a public position on an issue of religious politics. Although the bonds of friendship were wearing thin and the shared goals often stretched in the 1880s, the X-­brothers were still able to mobilize in a controversial cause. The roles of the president and vice presidents were largely honorific. There is no evidence that the X Club vice presidents had continuing input to the affairs of the society, for example, there is no extant correspondence in the Huxley or Tyndall papers. Nor did the X-­men lecture. John Morley, who was a promoter of the Tyneside SLS in the late 1870s, wanted Huxley and Tyndall to aid the London SLS by giving lectures, but they ignored his urging.260 They were not regular attendees. Nor do the vice presidents seem to have exercised control over the program. Lectures on socialism were becoming regular features by the late 1880s. Sidney Webb’s 1892 lecture on “The Progress of Socialism” would surely have presented a viewpoint unacceptable to Huxley, the president, and highly unacceptable to Spencer, a vice president. The X Club men continued in their figurehead roles while others made use of the opportunities provided by Sunday lectures. Clifford attacked the arguments of Maxwell and Thomson for the universe having a beginning. Literary, artistic, and classical topics appeared; physical science topics occupied a lesser proportion of the program and comparative religion became more common. Mind and brain were recurrent topics.

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In the 1870s various other groups promoted Sunday lectures, the move­ ment spread to provincial towns, and the Recreative Religionists, who had retaken the original name of National Sunday League, ran popular summer railway excursions. Frankland sometimes took his son to Sunday lectures at a “Church of Progress.” His willingness to attend suggests he was more pragmatic than Carpenter and Huxley, however, he accepted his son’s criticisms that it should not be called a church.261 The NSL’s “Sunday Evenings for the People” were considerably more successful than the SLS’s lectures: the former reported an average of almost a thousand people a lecture in 1872, which contrasted with the average of about four hundred that was typical of the Sunday Lecture Society. Certainly, the music contributed to their greater popularity; they also ran more recreational activities in the summer and were more responsive to the interests of working people in timing their lectures for 7:00 p.m., rather than the 4:30 p.m., which was adapted to the schedules of the middle-­class organizers of the SLS. Thus the SLS is another example of the X-­men being principled rather than pragmatic, and elitist rather than populist. Public opinion was changing, as the establishment of a new anti-­ Sabbatarian organization in 1875 illustrates. The London Sunday Society, which took up the aims of the National Sunday League and campaigned for the opening of museums, art galleries, libraries, and gardens on Sundays, was supported by many more respectable representatives of church and elite society than either the NSL or the SLS. Aristocratic supporters conferred unquestionable respectability on the society. “The Right Hon. the Earl of Dunraven, K.P.” was president. Among the twelve vice presidents were a duke, two earls, and a viscount. The SLS had not raised a single supporter of such standing. Among the vice president, leading representatives of art and science, including Huxley and Spencer, joined the aristocracy of birth and leading clergy from a range of denominations.262 The anti-­Sabbatarian movement spread widely. In 1880 Tyndall, as president, gave the address at the inaugural meeting of the Glasgow Sunday Society. The extent of respectable support was emphasized by reading apologies from supporters who could not be present: “Professor Huxley,” “Mr. Wm. Spottiswoode, President of the Royal Society,” the Earl of Roseberry and the Duke of Westminster, K.G. (both vice president of the London Sunday Society), Canon Shuttleworth of Saint Paul’s, and many others.263 A particularly remarkable example of rising social authority is that, in the mid-­1880s, Herbert Spencer was invited to follow the extremely wealthy and well-­connected Hugh Lupus Grosvenor, first Duke of Westminster, as president of the Sunday Society.264

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Such lists served crucial symbolic functions. Comparison of the patron lists of the Sunday Society and the SLS suggests that the latter was making the best of difficult circumstances. Theirs was a narrow and modest list, even allowing for the official standing of the president of the Royal Society and the personal eminence of Charles Darwin. “P.R.S.” did not compensate for the absence of a bishop or a duke. The difficulty the Sunday Lecture Society had in finding even this unrepresentative list shows how controversial Sunday lectures were. The extent of the X-­men’s involvement in the Sunday Lecture Society and the Sunday movement more generally leads to important conclusions. First, their objectives and ambitions in the Sunday movements were about the politics of religion and were not directly related to science. The Sunday societies were not about science claiming authority over religion, nor about making science naturalistic, and had nothing to do with the issues discussed in chapter 5 about gaining support for scientific research and education. In the Sunday societies, the X Club men and their allies were attacking the Victorian alliance of Church and state. Strictly, Sabbatarian legislation was not Church-­privileging legislation, but it was a conspicuous example of legislation that used state power to enforce a particular theological vision, shared by many Anglicans, Scottish Presbyterians, and Nonconformists in the evangelical tradition, on the entire society. The Sunday societies were advocating a more secular state, a state that treated all varieties of religion and irreligion equally. The campaign for the removal of Sabbatarian legislation was continuous with previous campaigns for the removal of civil disabilities for Dissenters. Its achievement in the 1890s was one of the later steps in the slow secularization of the state. The extent to which the members of the X Club, with the apparent exception of Hooker, were prepared to give their reputations, money, and energy to the controversial campaign for Sunday lectures shows the depth of their commitment to a secular state. In the broader campaign, the X-­men were allied with Dissenters, but also with liberal churchmen. Adrian Desmond, J. D. Y. Peel, and Frank Turner have all emphasized the alliances between secular, naturalistic science and Dissent, and I have taken up their arguments in earlier chapters. Desmond interprets Huxley’s bitterness as driven by resentment at the Anglican privileges from which he was excluded. Peel emphasizes that Spencer’s thinking and politics were shaped by his background in provincial Dissent. Both Desmond and Turner emphasize that the advocates of naturalistic science shared opposition to the privileges of Establishment with many Dissenters. Many of the activists of the Sunday lecture societies had been active in anti-establishment politics—­against the church 438

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6.6 Edward Frankland in 1880. Frankland, who was seldom involved with the campaigns of

his friends, took a public role on the controversial issue of Sunday lectures.Source: Well­ come Library, London.

rate and the exclusion of Dissenters from Oxford and Cambridge for example. As the defense of Essays and Reviews and Colenso (chapter 3.2) made clear, liberal Anglicans were committed to Church reform and the equality of Dissenters. The Sunday lecture program, however, was so radical that only the Unitarians were open supporters. Few liberal Anglicans (Spottiswoode is one exception) or devout Dissenters were to be found in the Sunday Lecture Society. 439

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Finally, the dominance of scientific men among the vice presidents of the Sunday Lecture Society and Tyndall’s position as president of the Glasgow Sunday Society suggests that scientific men had achieved cultural leadership by the 1880s. They were presenting themselves, and were accepted by some others at least, as conferring intellectual credibility and social respectability on these organizations.

6.7 Cultural Leaders Clearly, the X-­men had achieved social standing and cultural authority by the 1870s. With Playfair, they were leading representatives of science in the public arena. As presidents of the Birmingham and Midland Institute, they stood alongside leading literary men, university reformers, progressive lawyers, and reforming churchmen. By the 1880s Huxley, Tyndall, and Spencer stood beside high-­placed churchmen and dukes as advocates of Sunday reform. Scientific and philosophical achievement, lecturing brilliance, reforming reputations, and commitment to the public good, in varying mixes, brought them to these positions. They used some of the social capital they had earned to promote controversial and unpopular causes—­although they declined to support many other unpopular causes, such as socialism or birth control. In the 1860s, Huxley, Hooker, Lubbock, and Spottiswoode had been willing to support free thinking in theology. In the 1880s, Frankland, Huxley, Spencer, Spottiswoode, and Tyndall used their reputations to support the Sunday Lecture Society. In such locations as the Metaphysical Society, they ate dinner and engaged in (mostly) gentlemanly debate with philosophical opponents, exchanged witticisms with Ward, and acted jointly with Ruskin and Cardinal Manning for the public good, but without becoming one whit less critical of the positions their allies represented. This chapter has shown that replacing science-­ against-­ religion by naturalistic-­science-­against-­dogmatic-­theology is still an inadequate interpretation of the Victorian culture wars. Scientific men were not the vanguard of critics of the established church: literary men had long seen themselves as cultural critics; positivists were radical critics of both dogmatic and liberal theology; and, in a tradition going back to the late eighteenth century, Unitarians openly criticized the church and its theology. All these, plus liberals from within the church, can be found in alliance with the men of the X Club in promoting a more scientific understanding of the universe and a more secular society.

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Those who saw themselves as united on the side of free thought and social progress differed over how best to reconstruct religion and social organization. Even among leading contributors to the provocative Fortnightly Review there was considerable disagreement. Matthew Arnold believed that literary criticism was more effective “than either natural science or philosophic history” in reconstructing the foundations of theology (119).265 Positivists emphasized the interpretation of history; Frederic Harrison, for example, taught history at the Working Men’s College.266 The X-­men accepted only scientific authority. Thus, while sharing the view that the old religion had lost all power and meaning, and now hindered intellectual and social progress, they differed fundamentally over how to build what Morley described as “a new spiritual foundation” (120) for a new social order. Among these diverse programs Morley discerned a unity that he described as “the spirit of Liberalism in its many sided sense” (79). They shared a vision of religious and social progress that they interpreted as building on the protestant Reformation. The Reformation had appealed to the “supreme authority” of the individual conscience in religion. These modern reformers extended the principle of the freedom and value of the individual to the right to individual judgment in all matters of opinion and respect for the dignity and worth of the individual as the basis for social policy. This was liberalism in its mid-­Victorian form, as Lubbock, Hooker, Mill, and Spencer used the label in the 1860s. The scientific men had much broader appeal than either Arnold or the positivists. Arnold was too “refined” (according to Harrison) and too elitist to appeal to working people. Historian Donald Read observes that Arnold “made little impression upon the masses” and not much on the middle classes.267 The positivists were much more democratic and egalitarian than the X-­men and more focused on social and political questions; Harrison, for example, was an expert on employment legislation and a defender of trades unions. Nevertheless, Huxley, Lubbock, and Tyndall presented themselves as allies of and sympathizers with workingmen and, although modern scholars have questioned their credentials, and contemporary socialists found them frustratingly evasive, they won reputations among contemporary working people. Ruskin and Cardinal Manning can be compared with Huxley, Lubbock, and Tyndall as respectable claimants to cultural authority who achieved wide acknowledgment among working people. Like Collini’s public moralists, the publicists among the X-­men proffered moral guidance, Lubbock most conspicuously but with no particular reference to science in such lectures and essays as “The Duty of

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Pleasure” and “The Pleasure of Duty.” However, we have seen that Spencer, Huxley, and, occasionally, Lubbock, argued that the laws of morality were based not on social authority but on natural law, that the evil consequences of wrongdoing were based in the nature of things rather than social convention or divine authority.268 The issue of morality is complex because the individuals differed, in addition to natural consequences they (with the exception of Spencer) appealed to the need for moral feeling, and late in his life, after his daughter Mady’s tragic decline into insanity, Huxley questioned the morality of the laws of nature. There is not space in this discussion to tease out the strands. I limit myself here to asserting that they too were public moralists, while concluding that this phrase captures only an aspect of their ambitions. This chapter, like the previous chapter on education, conveys an impression of incessant activity. Huxley, Lubbock, and Tyndall lectured to and (these three plus Spencer) were read by self-­improving workingmen, social elites, and most social groups in between. There is evidence that women sought out lectures by Huxley, Lubbock, and Tyndall. The extent of their commitment to scientific missionary work is astonishing. When describing themselves and their role in society, the X-­men constantly used religious metaphors. They saw themselves as missionaries and preachers guiding thinking, providing ways of understanding the physical universe, political relations, moral action, and human responsibilities. They also preached a way of feeling that would sustain that new morality and a new spirituality. “Spirituality” is our modern term, “religion” was theirs. They claimed, with varying meanings and degrees of intensity, that they were truly religious. For Tyndall, this was a feeling of Mystery and Awe before the universe; for Spencer, it was the conclusion of a philosophical argument; for Huxley, it was the conscience that sustained moral action. Naturalistic science was for them a vision of the universe, a calling and a commitment. This was most fully true of Huxley, Spencer, Tyndall, and Hirst. For Frankland, Hooker, Lubbock, and Spottiswoode their visions of science were subservient to a broader commitment to liberalism. (Of Busk we know too little.) This included defending freedom of thought in public life, liberalizing the church, and secularizing the state. Their social origins explain much of this variety. Lubbock, born to social responsibilities, was much more of a moralist than the others. Spencer and Huxley, whose understandings of science developed in the provincial culture of radical Dissent, elaborated naturalistic worldviews most fully; Tyndall to a lesser extent. Personality and birth interweave. Hooker was brought up to be an expert and he also hated lecturing. 442

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They preached a vision of science as worthy of the best of human efforts and able to satisfy the highest of human aspirations. (Their many critics disagreed.) Science is the pursuit of truth. It shows us our true position in the world, removes delusions, and challenges false authorities. Science also provides for our welfare, resulting in greater health, comfort, and wealth. Less convincing in our century, Huxley also claimed military power as one of the benefits of science. They emphasized, with varying degrees of aggressiveness, that science displays the universe to be a self-­ contained order of cause and effect in which everything can be explained as the outcome of previous conditions. Human consciousness, thought, choice, emotion, and action all have their parallels in molecular processes in the brain, which are subject to the iron necessity of natural law. There is no spontaneity in nature. There are no interventions from beyond for there is no supernatural realm outside nature. In addition, I have emphasized, that they presented a unified vision of nature. By emphasizing the continuities of matter and life, plants and animals, mind and brain, and animals and humans they left no gaps where others could insert supernature. Scholars, since Turner, and a few contemporary critics labeled this view of the world as “scientific naturalism,” but the X-­men felt no need for a name. The label “agnostic” found no enthusiasts inside the Club. Retrospectively, in 1892, Huxley accepted both “naturalism” and “scientific naturalism” as names for a movement of the second half of the nineteenth century. It was too late to become a term of self-­description, although it is a useful term for scholars. However, long usage has tended to reify “scientific naturalism.” In my analysis its borders were vague, its associated epistemologies varied, and it was expressed as much rhetorically as philosophically. Rather than a set of theories, it was a goal they shared. They were important, at the cultural level, in contributing to a secular cosmic imaginary. Life on earth, human, animal, and plant, is to be understood in terms of deep time and slow change. Explanations of human behavior and social institutions can be sought by understanding the experiences of primitive and savage peoples. The entire universe is, ultimately, an interconnected system of particles described by natural laws. This uni­ verse is immensely mysterious, but about that we can say nothing. They also, in Charles Taylor’s terms, contributed to a secular social imaginary. Scientific men are especially reliable in their reasoning, virtuous in their concern with public good, and high-­minded in their concern for truth rather than money. The application of science expands the material wealth and health of all. Science will help us to understand our selves and our societies; it contributes to progress. All these were contested claims. 443

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Returning to Beatrice Webb’s description, cited at the beginning of this chapter, the public campaigns and private self-­images of the X-­ members fitted well with her description: “self-­confident militants, . . .  routing the theologians, . . . imposing their theories on the philosophers, . . . and even casting doubts on the capacity of politicians.” Not all contemporaries agreed that they succeeded, nevertheless, as individuals the publicists among the X-­men achieved cultural authority and in doing so they claimed cultural authority for Science.

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The Life, Work, and Times of the X Club William Spottiswoode (1825–­1883) George Busk (1807–­1886) Thomas Archer Hirst (1830–­1892) John Tyndall (ca. 1822–­1893) Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–­1895), the Rt. Hon. Sir Edward Frankland (1825–­1899), KCB (1897) Herbert Spencer (1820–­1903) Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–­1911), KCSI (1878), KGCSI (1897) Sir John Lubbock (1834–­1913), Bart., the Rt. Hon., Lord Avebury

Detail is crucial to the argument of this book. Close reading of a wide array of contemporary sources produces a more integrated view of the X Club than previously available and embeds it more fully in Victorian science and culture. The centrality of Hooker in many early projects, the importance of the lesser known figures to the success of Hooker and Huxley campaigns, and the extent to which visions of science were shared justifies treating the X Club as a relatively coherent group. Accounts of how it operated and identification of those with whom members collaborated opens a window onto Victorian scientific and cultural life. This retrospective on the Club’s life moves, as have the preceding chapters, between the micro and the macro, between personal idiosyncrasies and the social and cultural shifts of the Victorian era. The first section integrates the thematic accounts of the preceding three chapters into a chronological narrative and identifies major phases in the 445

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life of the Club. In the second section, I turn to my aim, signaled in the introduction, of identifying the objectives underlying the formation and activities of the Club. Finally, I discuss what close-­grained study of this small group has shown about Victorian science more generally, and about the place of science in Victorian culture and society.

R.1 Phases of Power and Friendship, 1860–­1900 The X Club began and ended in friendship, as many of its historians have emphasized, but it was much more than a group of friends. Shared priorities, principles, and enemies were the basis for many lobbying activities and reforming schemes. The formal first dinner in November 1864 marked no sudden change in relationships among the members, but provided a regular forum for the sort of collaboration the friends had undertaken over the previous five years. Similarly, the last meeting in 1892 was not a definite end, but a step in a slow decline that had begun a decade previously and continued on for another five years. Three phases in the life of the Club are usefully distinguished: close networking and intense campaigning from about 1860 to the mid-­1870s, individual authority and mutual collaboration from the mid-­1870s to about 1883, reminiscence and decline from 1884.1 The friendships, which went back to the early 1850s, even to the 1840s for some, first extended into campaigning in the later 1850s, when Hooker began to draw reform-­minded naturalists into his projects. Hooker’s ambitions and networks broadened in the late 1850s. As his ambitions grew beyond the natural history sciences, his schemes drew in representatives of the physical sciences and were occasionally directed toward general audiences. Leadership also broadened. In the early 1860s Huxley and Lubbock joined Hooker in initiating reform and lobbying projects; in 1864 with the promotion of the Reader, Spencer became more than a hanger-­on. Close collaboration and close friendship marked the period from 1860 to the mid-­1870s. Overlapping networks of X Club members were allied in many causes. They promoted the expansion of science teaching, successfully (Huxley, Frankland, Tyndall, and Hirst, joined on one occasion by Hooker), for the middling orders through the Department of Science and Art and, largely unsuccessfully (the above, plus Spottiswoode, Lubbock, and even Spencer), in elite institutions. They tried to raise the scientific understanding of the general educated public through journalism, briefly through the Reader in the mid-­1860s and through the leading organs of liberal opinion in the following decades. The Anglicans joined together to 446

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promote freedom of thought (even for bishops) within the Church; they were all outraged by the attempt of the “Students of the Natural Sciences” to push scientific men into affirming the authority of Scripture. When the Club formed, Huxley, Lubbock, and Tyndall were already well known as lecturers to general audiences. Within the British Association they found many opportunities to promote their naturalistic interpretation of science in addresses to the public. In 1868, 1870, and 1874 they worked es­ pecially closely together—­the public front men, Hooker, Huxley, Lubbock, and Tyndall, were supported by the administrative work of Spottiswoode and Hirst. Useful allies, such as Francis Galton, were drawn in. By 1870 their tentacles were everywhere. Starting in the summer of 1869, Frankland and Huxley, with the physicist, Guthrie, developed laboratory classes to train teachers for the DSA system. All (except Spencer) gave official support to Lockyer and Macmillan’s new journal, Nature, and Huxley and Lubbock had contributions in the opening issue. In 1869 to 1870 most were supporters of a new Sunday Lecture Society, in which Huxley (with Carpenter) took a leading role. Early in 1870, Lubbock and Spottiswoode (with Sharpey), gained the position of assistant registrar of the University of London for Hirst. In May 1870 Huxley and Lubbock (and Sharpey again) were appointed to the Royal Commission on the Advancement of Science. Later that year Huxley at last succeeded in negotiating a merger between the quarreling Anthropological and Ethnological Societies and Lubbock became the first president of the Anthropological Institute. This is to mention only their major joint commitments. The intensely networked activity continued. In 1871, Spencer, Huxley, and Tyndall became the British committee for the International Scientific Series. The extent to which success depended on close collaboration is shown most clearly in the Royal Society. Change in the Royal Society—­sym­ bolized by the leadership trio of Hooker, Spottiswoode, and Huxley in the mid-­1870s—­was achieved after the failed efforts of Frankland, Hirst, and Spottiswoode in the mid-­1860s and depended on the effective collaboration of Huxley, Tyndall, and Busk in 1870. Strachey was an ally in electing Hooker as president in 1873. There is also evidence of close collaboration in the Royal Institution. Behind the successful public careers of Tyndall and Huxley were Spottiswoode and Busk, who pushed new directions in knowledge and advised the hot-­headed Tyndall, and Hooker, who turned up to the managers’ meetings when liberal tendencies required defense. Nevertheless, we have seen that “the most powerful coterie” was not always successful. Even in their years of greatest power they had conspicuous failures, for example, Hooker and friends lost control of the Linnean Society in 1874. 447

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The X Club was unified through these years, extending even to Hooker and Spencer, both of whom, to use a statistical term, were outliers. Hooker and Spencer stand at the extreme opposite ends of X Club concerns. Although previously active in defending the heterodox and proposing journalistic projects, by the mid-­1860s Hooker’s priorities had narrowed; he focused his energies on the organization of scientific institutions in the interests of research workers, the public reputation of science, and the social status of scientific men. Spencer was not interested in the organization of science—­he protested when “too much business” was transacted at Club meetings—­but with philosophical discussion and following the scientific advances that he needed to integrate into his synthetic system. In spite of his earlier and later criticism of Spencer, during these years Hooker acted to promote Spencer’s reputation, praising him in his BA address of 1868 and offering to nominate him for FRS in 1874. In the 1860s they were sometimes described as a clique, indicating that their power was not regarded as legitimate. Individually, though, they were gaining authority. Some started with the authority of wealth and birth. All were gaining authority through scientific achievement, institutional position, and the recognition by others of their personal capacities. When they acted together, they were regarded as appropriate persons to take leadership. Increasingly they were consulted behind the scenes and listened to respectfully when they made private representations. Furthermore, by 1870, the publicists among the X-­men were recognized as belonging to an intellectual and cultural elite. Sometimes this took institutional form, as when Lubbock, Huxley, Tyndall, and Spencer were invited to join the new Metaphysical Society (1870). Lubbock was elected the first president, an acknowledgment of his mediating position, as both devout churchman and man of science, and his intellectual standing. Possibly it was also an acknowledgment of social standing: as in science so in intellectual life more generally, recognition probably came more readily to the wellborn than to those of lesser birth. The fol­ lowing year Tyndall was invited to join The Club and Huxley invited to follow Dickens in the presidency of the Birmingham and Midland Institute. Lubbock and Tyndall later joined the list of liberal thinkers, promoters of popular education, and cultural leaders who were early presidents of the institute. Huxley’s growing recognition was remarkable. Without Lubbock’s benefits of birth and eight years younger than Hooker, he was widely respected by the late 1860s. Hooker criticized him for being unnecessarily offensive to the clergy, but others recognized mediating and statesmanlike capacities. Scientific achievement,

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hard work, debating power, personal brilliance that went far beyond science, and witty good humor brought Huxley enormous respect. Through the 1870s the X-­men continued to be appointed to high and influential positions. But, unlike the 1860s, positions were often attained without lobbying campaigns by the group. In 1873 Lubbock was elected vice-­chancellor of the University of London; Hirst appointed director of studies of the new Royal Naval College (with support from Huxley and Spottiswoode, but the initiative was not theirs); and Spottiswoode appointed secretary and Busk (in his place) treasurer of the Royal Institution. Lubbock became a trustee of the British Association in 1872 (in succession to Murchison), but was relatively powerless because Hirst and Spottiswoode resigned their administrative positions in 1873 and his fellow trustees were the old guard, Grey Egerton and Sabine, until the 1880s. In 1874 Huxley was offered, but turned down, a proposed new civil service position of director for education. Only a few appointments of the 1870s required concerted action by the X-­men and their allies. From the mid-­1870s to the mid-­1880s the importance of the Club as a lobbying network declined. As individuals, the members were widely respected, but as their individual authority increased, they needed one another less. Lobbying and scheming continued, but usually among a subgroup only. Although the friendships remained strong, there are indications of diverging interests and diminishing mutual respect. With the benefit of hindsight, it is significant that the members’ activities in science education diverged. Frankland and Huxley promoted science at lower levels of the education system through the DSA. They worked closely with Cole and Donnelly at South Kensington. Lubbock, meanwhile, supported by Lords Granville and Derby, was engaged in promoting the status of the University of London. Thus, although both Huxley and Lubbock were renowned for their commitment to education, they were moving in different directions and among different circles. Small cracks in the 1870s developed into serious problems in the 1880s. The friends became more critical of one another’s quirks and limitations: Tyndall’s injudiciousness, Spencer’s self-­absorption and dogmatism, Lubbock’s superficiality. The Belfast address was not Tyndall’s only indiscretion. Both Hooker and Hirst intervened to diminish the damage caused by his ill-­judged words in disputes with Tait and other Scots in 1873–­74. Hooker criticized Lubbock’s research, which seemed to him ill focused: “he is dabbling in Bees, but apparently with no direct object—­ waiting I suppose for something to turn up.” (Hooker, though, could be hypercritical of colleagues; against Hooker, the historian of entomology,

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John Clark, considers Lubbock’s research on insect behavior significant for the naturalistic program.)2 Hooker and Huxley were frustrated at Spencer’s turning down their invitation to be elected FRS in 1874. Tyndall and Hirst often noted Spencer’s intellectual stubbornness. At one X Club meeting, “Spencer, as usual, was laying down the law with a priori definiteness, but was by no means left at peace with his conclusions by Huxley.”3 Critics took advantage of the weaknesses and failings noted by their friends. Tait used Nature to publicize scientific errors by Spencer and Tyndall and challenge their scientific authority.4 Among the nine there were many health problems by the 1870s. Hirst, although only in his forties, was often seriously ill. Huxley broke down from overwork. Tyndall suffered severely from sleeplessness and from the changing mixtures of opiates and stimulants with which he treated himself. Moreover, Busk, tactful, reliable, never taking offense, was aging. He was already sixty-­four when he accepted the presidency of the Anthropological Institute in 1872. The projects of Hooker, Huxley, and Lubbock owed much to him. But in 1874 he declined to take the presidency of the Linnean Society, even under pressure from Hooker. All this contributed to very different X Club roles when Spottiswoode and Huxley were elected to the Royal Society presidency than in Hooker’s election. There was no open discussion in the X Club in 1878 or 1883. Hooker, Spottiswoode, and Huxley had the traditional authority of the officers and had other allies on the council, so they did not need X Club action. Moreover, their opinions of their friends—­Frankland, Lubbock, Tyndall “won’t do”—­could not be expressed openly at a Club meeting. By the mid-­1870s they relied more on individual authority and less on numbers. As in the Royal Society, so in scientific and cultural life more generally, the X-­friends had individual authority; they continued to collaborate, but other allies were often as important as their X-­brothers. In this same period, some of the friendship links were weakening. The importance of the wives in the life of the X Club is demonstrated by the impact of their deaths and their husbands’ remarriages on the friendships. The social ties were loosened by the deaths of Sophie Frankland and Frances Hooker in 1874. Both Frankland (1875) and Hooker (1876) remarried, and in 1876 Tyndall married for the first time. All three wives were much younger, about twenty-­five years, than their husbands. The summer excursion, canceled in 1874, was never revived. Undoubtedly, the group dynamics were changed; some new wives did not fit in easily. Huxley, for example, was critical of Frankland’s recent importation.5 Frankland is mentioned less and less often by his X-­brothers in

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the 1870s. This could be related to his growing participation in money-­ making consultancy or to Frankland’s own social unease, as shown by the tensions within his family exacerbated by his remarriage. Nevertheless, informal sociability continued as an important part of the Club life. They supported one another in times of sorrow and need. Hooker invited his prickly friends to visit, and Tyndall tried to keep Hooker cheerful at Christmas 1874, shortly after the death of Frances Hooker. Hooker referred fondly to “dear old J. T.” who had stayed for three days, and to Spencer who came for Christmas dinner.6 Tyndall accompanied Frankland’s daughters on the journey back to England after Frankland’s remarriage, which had taken place in Norway. Weekends at the Lubbock estate at High Elms and parties at the Spottiswoodes still provided informal social occasions for Club life and opportunities to mingle with other elites. Ellen Lubbock’s death at the end of 1879 was an enormous loss to the social cohesion of the X Club. The friends initially rallied around Lubbock and, until he remarried in 1884, continued to visit High Elms on weekends. Alice, the second Lady Lubbock, was, like the other second wives, about twenty-­five years younger than her husband, but also she lacked social skills and appeared unfriendly and snobbish. Lubbock’s X-­ brothers began to decline invitations, which left him on the social edge of the group. The remaining social centers of X Club life were lost when Spottiswoode died unexpectedly in 1883, aged only fifty-­eight, and, after a long illness, Busk died in 1886. From Spottiswoode’s death in 1883 and Lubbock’s remarriage in 1884 the X Club declined rapidly. Individual members had personal authority but most were in failing health and they seldom collaborated. Huxley resigned the presidency of the Royal Society after only two years and also retired from official life. Spottiswoode was a great loss because he died while still active in many institutions. The campaigning days of the Club were practically over. Individuals followed their own, very different priorities: consultancy (Frankland), botany (Hooker), theological controversy (Huxley), combating socialism (Spencer), and opposing Irish home rule (Tyndall). Hooker and Lubbock were active in the Linnean Society, but this was rarely cooperation, rather, Hooker tried unsuccessfully to direct Lubbock’s priorities. Hirst, Huxley, and Lubbock were active on the University of London senate, but Lubbock and Huxley were on opposite sides in the debate over the future structure of the university. Even in decline, however, old concerns occasionally drew them together, most surprisingly when five gave their names to affirm the respectability of the Sunday Lecture Society in the 1880s. In general,

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though, the friends responded in different ways to changing circumstances and discussed issues less with one another and more with other allies. Club dinners became meetings of old friends. In the mid-­1880s attendance at meetings declined. It was “doleful” when only two or three members were present.7 Some of the remaining members retired out of London, many were in poor health, and those who remained healthy had relatively weak emotional ties to the others. Lubbock and Frankland enjoyed “perennial youth” (said Huxley) but they lacked loyalty. Hooker, who kept the minutes from 1888, often noted that Lubbock was absent “without leave” and commented critically to Tyndall that Frankland had gone to Monte Carlo instead of attending a dinner.8 Inconsistently, Hooker predicted that if only Frankland and Lubbock attended “it would be a cold dinner.” He wanted to see Hirst or Tyndall or Huxley.9 The wives thought they should close the Club: “That X meeting gets very melancholy and should be . . . given up.”10 But Hooker, especially, wanted it to continue and hoped to revive the warmth of the past. Frankland and Hooker even discussed electing new members in 1888.11 The X-­men not only lost their campaigning zeal in the 1880s, they also lost the moderating influences among themselves. Spottiswoode and Busk, who died first, were among the more equable of the members. The friends who remained were becoming more dogmatic and more intolerant of one another’s dogmatisms. When members disagreed over the proposal that Spottiswoode be buried in Westminster Abbey, Huxley appealed to Hooker not to disagree publicly: “It has long been too obvious to me that the relations of some of us at the X are getting very strained. Strong men as they get old seem to me to acquire very much the nature of rogue elephants . . . and run amuck at everything that does not quite meet their fancy. I am conscious at the tendency in myself.”12 The greatest crisis in the Club’s life came when Huxley turned his crit­ ical wit upon Spencer’s theories in the late 1880s, but this was the tip of an iceberg of diminishing tolerance and respect for one another. Hirst was critical of Lubbock’s parliamentary speeches (“small, but useful”) and scientific lectures (feeble).13 Huxley and Hooker thought that Tyndall’s draft manifesto against home rule, which he wanted scientific men to sign, read like a personal attack on Gladstone. It would alienate younger men of science, who would therefore be likely to get up an opposing manifesto.14 Tyndall and Hirst thought that Huxley was overaggressive in his attacks on miracles and were impatient with Frankland’s habit of name dropping.15 The X Club was cracking apart. Huxley and Spencer clearly disagreed about scientific method, the role of the state, and, from the late 1880s, naturalistic ethics. In 1888 Hux­ley 452

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publicly argued, against Spencer and his earlier self, that Nature was not just and ethics not deducible from natural consequences. In order to give less offense, he did not identify Spencer by name, although he cheerily told friends that Spencer would be angry with his argument.16 The following year, when Huxley joined a debate over land nationalization in the columns of the Times, he turned his satirical skills against his old friend. Some Newcastle workingmen had quoted Spencer as a supporter of land nationalization, and Spencer had countered in his typical self-­ defensive and turgid manner.17 Huxley ostensibly entered the debate in order to provide a stronger critique of socialism, but this rapidly turned into criticism of Spencer. His a priori method was equivalent to treating cholera “by deduction from physiological principles.” Because he had no “practical experience in either medicine or in affairs” he lacked the “caution and discretion” to apply principles in practice.18 Spencer, in a state of outraged dignity and nervous collapse, resigned from the X Club. Apologies, reconciliations, and renewed grievances continued for years and resulted in many letters reflecting critically on Spencer’s intellect and character. His “crushing” egoism made conversation impossible. “I never esteemed him,” said Hooker.19 Hirst and Tyndall thought that Huxley should have been more careful, in consideration of Spencer’s delicate state of health.20 Tyndall, who was also prone to take offense easily, felt more sympathy for Spencer than did his X-­brothers. Even Hirst recognized Spencer’s scientific limitations: “What a pity Spencer’s ingenuity was not based on sounder elementary instruction.”21 For Huxley the final straw came a few years later when Spencer published an accusation of plagiarism against him. He has “sucked my brains for thirty years,” Huxley burst out, he is “not a gentleman.”22 All this reveals deep reservoirs of frustration and shows how much had been forgiven in the years of shared campaigns and warm friendship. The old ties, although stretched very thin, did not break. In the 1890s their bitter judgments and personal resentments faded and they fondly remembered the past. After Hirst’s death, Tyndall remembered (inaccurately) that “no single ruffle” had ever disturbed their affection.23 When Tyndall died, Hooker overlooked his rashness and remembered his pure motives: “the purest, brightest creature I ever knew to be a philosopher.”24 In one last and surprising act by the remnants of the X Club, Hooker was drawn into a project to commission a portrait of Spencer for presentation to the National Gallery (figure R.1). Hooker, who chaired the committee for raising subscriptions, consulted closely with Frankland. They worried that the project might collapse: “Even if we raise the whole sum I feel that some whim of Spencer’s may, at the last moment, quash 453

R.1 The subscription portrait of Herbert Spencer, 1897, by Hubert von Herkomer. Spencer

liked the facial expression, “a far-­off gaze appropriate to a thinker.” The body was cropped out of this version, published by Spencer’s official biographer, because Spencer thought the bodily proportions wrong. He was unwilling that the portrait hang, as the subscribers had intended, in the National Gallery, thereby confirming the forebodings of Frankland and Hooker about the project. Source: Duncan, Life of Herbert Spencer, opp. p. 392.

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the whole thing.”25 Hooker valiantly carried through the process, placating Spencer each time that he found a reason to withdraw. It was out of “duty” to posterity that the project was initiated, Hooker claimed, “the want of a likeness of you would be a great loss to those who will come after us.”26 Spencer could easily turn down an honor but, as an ultrascrupulous Victorian, could not hinder others from doing their duty. The Club engendered a loyalty among its members, even among those who had been most distant from one another. Spencer was the most ill fitting of the members. Although Hooker did not join in many of the enthusiasms of the others, he was at the heart of many of their organizational initiatives. Spencer was in the Club, I have argued, because he and Huxley shared a common background in radical Dissent; and also, he was at the center of the Reader initiative that coincided with the Club’s founding. Accidents of friendship, illness, and the coincidences in contemporary events explain exactly who was in or not in the X Club. The period of X Club power was about fifteen years, from the mid-­ 1860s to the early 1880s. From 1860 they sought to exert influence, and by the mid-­1860s they had a few successes. By 1884 the period of X Club power was over. Although some of the individuals remained eminent and active, their closest allies were outside the X Club. Ill health and early deaths diminished their power, and the members grew apart. They thought fondly of past friendships but their preoccupations had diverged. The next section examines the shared assumptions and goals that brought and, for twenty years, held them together. While emphasizing the power of the Club, it may be advisable to be explicit about what I have not claimed. I do not claim that what I have identified as successes of the X-­network would not have happened if there had been no X Club. The naturalists would have networked together in the Linnean Society and in the Ethnological Society; the DSA exam system would have burgeoned; Huxley, Tyndall, and Spencer would have been close allies. The Club intensified these networks that were already in existence and created new alliances. Without the Club, the mathematicians, Hirst and Spottiswoode, might never have been drawn into close collaboration with Busk, Hooker, and Huxley. The many allies identified, who were part of the Club’s networks, show that the X Club did not represent a uniquely radical position. From this group biography, individual biographies emerge. Through close-­grained study of institutional activities, Busk, Hirst, and Spottiswoode appear in historiographical daylight. Most unexpectedly, Busk’s personal qualities become apparent. In identifying the many allies of 455

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the X Club itself—­Strachey, Galton, Rolleston, Roscoe, for example—­the Club looks much less like a small embattled minority. Its formal existence provides a focus for historical study, but it should not be seen as unrepresentative. It identified enemies, and they were real, but polarizations do not help historical analysis.

R.2 The X Club Program: The Authority and Independence of Science and Scientific Men As the preceding chapters have shown, the activities of the X-­network ranged broadly and are not easily summed up by any single label or slogan. Here, their ambitions and objectives are identified by joining the occasional allusions and explicit formulations with what can be inferred from their actions. Hirst identified the threats that they felt in 1864. Science needed defense, they believed, from those who valued it for its commercial and practical utility, and from those who would assess its conclusions against theological dogma. In their vision of the world, science was valuable because it sought truth, and other claims to truth should be subject to assessment by scientific criteria, rather than vice versa. Over the decades the concerns and objectives of 1864 were worked out and expanded in response to new opportunities and problems. When the X Club formed there were clear and immediate threats to the freedom of science from dogmatic theology, illustrated, for example, by the resistance to awarding the Copley Medal to Darwin. Attempts to have scientific men affirm the authority of Scripture, even without assent to specific doctrines, as in the “Declaration,” were equally suspect to many scientific men. The X-­members’ devotion to freedom meant following inquiry without regard to dogma or revelation. The domain of freedom extended to all knowledge claims, including theological and historical claims. With some slight hesitations (illustrated by Carpenter’s disagreement) they defended freedom of thought, even within the Church. Science meant naturalistic science, without reference to creation, any supernatural realm, souls, or even independent minds. Placing man firmly in Nature was at the center of the research programs of Busk, Huxley, and Lubbock who, in the 1860s, sought to fill the gap, anatomical and social, left by Darwin between apes and man. The naturalism of the X Club left no gaps where others might insert the supernatural. Life and emotion came from non-­life, although at some very distant time in the past. Animals and vegetables were essentially the same substance. There was no gap between animals and humans; no gap between brain and 456

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mind. Morality was grounded in the laws of nature. Mind was subject to the determinism of the molecular order. Religion was a social and histo­ rical development, originating not in revelation but in human attempts to explain natural phenomena. “Their” commitment, that is, the commitment of Huxley, Spencer, and Tyndall, to psycho-­physical parallelism is curious. It is not clear that mind is a theological concept. Rather, I suggest their arguments for the dependence of mind on brain link them back to pre-­Darwinian naturalism and its associated materialism; after all, Huxley and Spencer were acquainted with these traditions in early life. Tyndall was an idealist when he first met Huxley and Spencer; in the early 1850s he asserted the power of mind over body. By the early 1860s, after almost a decade of friendship, he was trying out materialist explanations. In the 1860s, especially, their language conveyed a sense of battle against those who would impose dogmatic orthodoxy. Parsonism, bibli­ cal literalism, dogmatism, and the established Church were variously seen as enemies. These antagonisms were shaped by youthful experience. The established Church was regarded as politically oppressive in the circles among which Spencer and Huxley moved. Biblical literalism was experienced as intellectually constraining and socially repressive by Tyndall, Hirst, Frankland, and, it would seem, Hooker. The naturalism of Huxley and Tyndall extended to vigorous attack on the credibility of contemporary orthodox theology, for example, in its practice of prayer and acceptance of past miracles. Spencer’s mode of argument was the development of a systematic naturalistic alternative to the dominant Christian supernaturalism of Victorian public culture. In the liberal Anglican contexts of Lubbock and Spottiswoode, belief was much more open to discussion and modification; perhaps it was partly for this reason that their style was never confrontational.27 In later years, the friends disagreed as to how far attacks on orthodoxy were advisable. Huxley was at one extreme but, in their own way, Hooker and Lubbock went far beyond defending science from theological attack when they defended theology from dogmatic criticism. Recognition of shared enemies united them in the 1860s, but when that danger was over priorities diverged, at least in part. Hooker turned to his botanical and administrative work at Kew, but the others were persuaded, as Hooker was not, of the importance of popular education and public enlightenment. Lectures and the consequent articles and books would promote scientific ways of understanding the world among the general public. Naturalistic continuity, from the original fiery nebula through deep time to the present and into the future, was the message 457

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they preached to the wider public through lectures and formal education. Scientific understanding would predispose people to ask for evidence and teach them to look for natural causes where previously they might have seen or hoped for miracles, and would make the public at large skeptical of mere authority (whether orthodox clergy or unorthodox spiritualists). In addition, science education for the poor offered a route to social improvement. On the basis of the account offered of the naturalism and agnosticism of the X Club, the naturalistic commitments were more important than the agnostic arguments. Agnosticism fragments under close analysis; the naturalistic program was broad enough to include many emphases and areas of research; its advocates drew on various scientific theories. It was naturalistic understanding that the X Club members promoted, applied to man as much as to nature, for man was part of nature. The second commitment identified by Hirst was “pure” science. To assert the value of pure science was to separate science from mundane concerns and “impure” motives, such as money making. No particular threats to science from commercial values in the years preceding the formation of the Club have been identified, but Christine MacLeod shows that public fascination with technological achievement was at a peak in the 1860s. Huxley, Spencer, and Tyndall often felt the necessity to assert the superiority of Truth and Knowledge over profit and machinery and reacted, overreacted it sometimes seems, against the mundane utilities of science. Huxley and Hooker occasionally fulminated against engineers and inventors: the election of Frederick Bramwell to the Philosophical Club “polluted that once fair stream.”28 But although Bramwell was enjoying a high profile, and had recently been appointed secretary of the Royal Institution, there was no tendency for engineers to dominate scientific institutions. More research is needed on popular attitudes and on conceptions of science and technology among Victorian politicians in order to understand the risks the X-­men perceived.29 Certainly, science needed protection from cultural critics, such as Carlyle, who associated science with factories, machinery, base motives, dehumanizing activity, and spiritual poverty. Identifying science as the search for Truth, a goal shared with truly religious persons, was to associate the pursuit of science with moral and spiritual qualities, and hence to claim a place for science and scientific men in high culture. Thus, leading scientific men should be elected to the Athenaeum and The Club. Science gave meaning to their lives. “Devotion” the word used by Hirst to describe their commitment had, at root, a religious connotation of being dedicated or consecrated. Science was their fundamental commit458

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ment. Those who chose science as a career rather than as an avocation were particularly conscious that they were making a commitment to seek knowledge rather than money. Hooker’s self-­description as a “professed botanist” used the language of Christian vocation to describe his career choice, as Endersby has shown. For Hirst and Tyndall, science was the “work” to which they were called, in the Carlylean, secularized version of a Christian calling. Huxley claimed (with exaggeration) that he would not care to toil in the service of “natural knowledge” if it was merely to earn a living; he represented the benefits of science as spiritual and moral. Even Frankland, who became wealthy from consulting, placed research above commerce in principle, although not in practice. Their frequent self-­description as “liberals”, their identification with a “great liberal party”, and Spottiswoode’s allusion to an opposing “theological party” at Oxford, indicates the importance they gave to opposing dogmatic criteria, whether for truth or respectability, in the 1860s. Even Lubbock felt himself to be fighting a battle for freedom. They campaigned for the intellectual liberalism identified by Lubenow, freedom of discussion in gentlemanly exchange. They were Victorian liberals, not modern liberals; in particular, they were deeply respectable. In defending their right to freedom of thought, they were determined not to risk Science being associated with dangerous political or moral tendencies, such as satirical attacks on Christian belief or the representation of socialism as the outcome of evolutionary progress. Nor should scientific men argue among themselves, as did branches of Christianity, because this would suggest that Science provided no firmer an authority than Scripture and Christian tradition. Unorthodox scientific men must themselves be models of virtue; they must counter the common accusation that religious belief was the only basis for morality. Their social respectability was genuine, not a mere political strategy, but it was politically important not to bring disrepute upon science by immoral associations or ungentlemanly behavior. Keeping clear of the unseemly Anthropological Society was important to Hooker, and reuniting the Ethnological and Anthropological Societies was high on Huxley’s priorities. Behind all these projects was a shared determination to promote the dignity and independence of science and of scientific men. Science was not to be subject to the approval of any other social or intellectual authority; rather, science itself gave authority. Thus, they expanded the domain of science and attacked what they believed to be competing authorities. There were ideological and organizational sides to their ambitions. They developed philosophical accounts of science which denied authority to orthodox theology and claimed all knowledge for science, and they 459

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promoted the respectability and authority of scientific men. Science did not need the patronage of wealth and rank, commerce, or Church. Hence, the president of the Royal Society must represent sci­entific achievement. In mirror image, Hooker affirmed the social standing of scientific men, most notably, by election to the Athenaeum Club or The Club. Just two of their preoccupations are not well encompassed by the above summary, specialist publishing and the Sunday Lecture Society. Enabling the more effective pursuit of science was important, although here their priorities counter decades of historiography. In particular, their demands for general government funding of science were modest. Other than their personal research, their most significant contribution to the advance of knowledge was through the development of specialist publishing. To this extent they were concerned with one of the major aspects of professionalization to which I return in the final section below. Also, outside Hirst’s or my summing up of their objectives, the Sunday Lecture Society was a remarkable late demonstration of a common cause. They were committed to the breaking down of Sabbatarian constraints. As vice presidents of the controversial Sunday Lecture Society they stood together for a secular social order. What is more, because they now had scientific and social status, their names carried authority and brought respectability to their controversial cause. Hooker did not openly join the cause, but he had worked hard to give men of science the social authority that his friends brought to the anti-­Sabbatarian campaign. Differences among the members on many issues have been identified but no fault lines, for example, members who remained practicing Anglicans (Hooker, Lubbock, and probably Spottiswoode) are not found to be less naturalistic than the Carlyleans (Hirst and Tyndall) and the agnostics (Huxley and Spencer). Rather, all rejected dogmatic orthodoxy and felt free to follow where evidence and reasoned inquiry led. Although we remain ignorant about many interesting issues, for example, physical parallelism so whether the other members held the psycho-­ central to the arguments of the chief publicists, large areas of agreement have been identified. Naturalistic explanations, although not agnosticism, remain at the center of the science, the educational projects and the public controversies of the X-­members.

R.3 Victorian Science and Victorian Culture The X Club opens windows onto Victorian science and the place of science in Victorian culture. At the mundane level, from the wide variety of 460

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scientific societies covered, some over a fifty-­year period, structural similarities in the operation of scientific societies are suggested and changes over time identified. The preoccupations of the X-­members, demonstrated in a variety of contexts and institutions, and the indications of the extent to which their concerns were shared by other scientific men are valuable in suggesting a partial chronology for the changes conflated as the “professionalization of science.” Examination of the activities of scientific men in elite culture leads to a reinterpretation of the conflict-­ of-­science-­and-­religion, which agrees with the anti-­polarization arguments while demonstrating a more multidimensional conflict. Although the great and lowly mixed in many scientific institutions, social status made a difference to scientific status. In the long term, high scientific achievement brought increased social status, but recognition of scientific achievement and entry to scientific societies came more easily to the wellborn than the lowly. The wellborn could expect to be elected FRS a little earlier and were more likely to be elected to the presidencies of scientific societies. For these reasons, Lubbock and Spottiswoode were useful in X Club campaigns. Subtle distinctions were made within scientific societies. The highest-­born were not expected to serve in onerous secretarial positions. Lubbock was president of dozens of societies but never, a far as I can see, a secretary. High fees kept some scientific societies more socially select than others; low fees were a sign that middling sorts were welcome. Over time, gradually and unevenly, increasing weight was given to scientific achievement and decreasing weight to rank and wealth in ascribing position in the scientific community. These issues are particularly clear in the Royal Society where entrance was limited to fifteen new fellows per year. The limitation on numbers, achieved in the reforms of 1847, ensured that election as FRS represented scientific achievement rather than social status. Attitude change in the 1840s ensured that an unscientific man of high status was no longer acceptable as president; presidents were expected to have social and scientific standing—­to represent science in the House of Lords and to lead science with competence and appropriate dignity. Scientifically, though, the Royal Society became increasingly elitist. As the number of scientific men increased, the limit of fifteen new fellows per year ensured that a smaller proportion of aspirants were elected. Those who were already elected showed little inclination to make the Society open to all scientific men. The reforms under Hooker in the 1870s were continuous with the earlier reforms. Hooker’s election as president asserted the priority of scientific achievement over rank and money. Hooker’s election changed assumptions; ten years later a title was no longer seen 461

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as desirable for the presidency. Under Hooker’s presidency the abolition of entrance fees and reduction of annual fees removed the financial barriers that prevented poor men from seeking election.30 Spottiswoode’s election as Royal Society treasurer, which began the period of X Club power, signifies the extent of continuity. Spottiswoode, Queen’s Printer and mathematician, won the election over Gassiot, wine merchant and electrician; one businessman replaced another. And Spottiswoode was replaced by another businessman, John Evans, paper manufacturer, archaeologist, and numismatist, who served from 1878 to 1898. Such continuities counter interpretations of Victorian science that emphasize generational change from the “gentlemen of science” of the early Victorian period to the “men of science” of the X Club era. The social structure and the social ideals of science changed slowly and unevenly. The gentlemen called themselves “men” of science or cultivators of science; many of the men of science of the following generation were gentlemen by birth, as the examples of Spottiswoode and Lubbock demonstrate.31 Moreover, there was significant opposition to Hooker’s election to the presidency of the Royal Society in 1873; some fellows wanted a duke, albeit a scientific one. Understanding scientific standing as an interaction between social status and scientific achievement, with a gradual shift in the balance between the two, is proposed here as an alternative to both the old amateur/professional dichotomy and the gentlemen of science/men of science dichotomy that has been tried in replacement. Under Hooker the Royal Society remained gentlemanly in style, while allowing for those with ungentlemanly incomes. Hooker wanted the conversaziones of the Society to be very select. Over time, undoubtedly, there were more salary-­dependent fellows of the Royal Society, but even at the end of the century, gentlemanly independence was valued over the best position that an old university could provide: in 1884 Lord Rayleigh resigned from the Cavendish Chair at Cambridge to pursue his research in his home laboratory. He was elected president of the Royal Society in 1895. Specialist publishing is the only area of X Club concern that matches those shifts identified as professionalization. They were not concerned with specialist education and formal qualifications. Their publicist activities were directed more to changing beliefs and ideas rather than to promoting the financial needs of science. The X Club men showed a persistent interest in publishing standards and the needs of specialist audiences. In the Linnean Society journals, the Natural History Review, and the publications of the Ethnological Society and the Anthropological 462

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Institute they wanted to divide mixed journals into specialist parts, publish more frequently, include book reviews, improve illustrations, and, most demanding, provide bibliographies. All this was for the benefit of the active research worker who wanted to keep up to date with the work of others, get his own work published quickly in order to establish priority, and find the illustrations accompanying articles sufficiently detailed for expert interests. Subdividing publications into specialities was beneficial to researchers who were not independently wealthy, for they could save money by limiting their subscriptions to what was most useful. The Royal Society’s giant bibliographical project, the Catalogue of Scientific Papers, which aimed to list all scientific articles published since 1800, indicates that the X Club concerns were not unique. Their interest in translating or summarizing foreign articles to make them more widely accessible also aligned them with others in William Francis’s Scientific Memoirs and in Nature. The X-­men showed no such interest in the changes in education that sociologists associate with professionalization. They were little concerned with developing formal training procedures or establishing specialist qualifications. Most did not have formal training themselves, which is unsurprising, for there has to be a first generation. Frankland, Tyndall, and Hirst had specialist training at the end of their education, but this was the result of accidents of friendship rather than the end of a formal path. Their lack of interest in establishing formal specialist training in their particular sciences is noteworthy. Rather, their major successes in science education were at the school level. The South Kensington educational machine, as Desmond emphasizes, developed to examine pupils and train their teachers. In evidence before the Devonshire Commission, Huxley and Frankland had claimed that teacher training was more important to the country than producing technical experts for industry or the technical professions. Nor did they advocate for specialist education in the universities. Along with almost every other witness before the Devonshire Commission, they recommended that university education be “liberal,” training the mind rather than producing experts. Their argument was that science was as important to a liberal education as the classics; their frustrations were over the sciences being regarded as secondary. Even the representatives of Scottish universities, when asked by the commissioners, did not want to establish a science degree. In supporting the proposal to include research as an option within the University of London’s doctoral degree, the X-­men on the senate took a modest line. They did not follow the German model and require independent research; they argued only that 463

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research be an option alongside the written examination, which had previously been the route to a University of London doctorate. The origins of specialist education in science must be sought in a later period. To some extent, the preoccupations of the X-­men were a matter of their employment locations. But although they had little choice in their initial appointments, they chose not to leave when other opportunities opened. Tyndall and Huxley turned down invitations to apply for positions in Oxford and Edinburgh.32 Although some teachers at University College had developed research schools, it was Oxford and Cambridge that could afford to establish the laboratories and museums at which large and continuing research schools could be built. Hirst always hoped that Tyndall would be able to set up a research school, but Tyndall stayed at the Royal Institution, as Huxley stayed at South Kensington. Both were more committed to public enlightenment and general education than to specialist education. Controversy over religious belief, in its immense Victorian variety, has been another recurrent theme. Victorians, especially middle-­class Victorians, were preoccupied with religion. The devout took their beliefs seriously, and those who opposed orthodoxy were shaped by the power and pervasiveness of what they opposed. Subtle distinctions are essential to make sense of issues of science and religion as they appeared to the Victorians. Few respectable sorts were willing to identify themselves as irreligious or against religion, moreover, many wanted to hold on to some vaguely formulated beliefs; hence the popularity of Spencer’s agnosticism. Acknowledging an “Unknowable,” which could be thought of in a vaguely spiritual way, allowed Spencerians to keep aspects of traditional belief while rejecting specific doctrinal and historical assertions. Tyndall’s insistence that he was religious because he felt some power greater than himself was a common position within the romantic understanding of religion. The X-­men opposed dogmatic theology, that is, any theology based on the authority of revelation or tradition and not open to revision in the light of modern knowledge, but they insisted that they were truly religious. The political power and privilege of the established Church, which brought bitterness to controversies over orthodoxy, also brought many diverse groups together as political allies. Devout Dissenters of relatively orthodox theology, Unitarians, socialists, positivists, lower class and less respectable secularists, and reforming churchmen shared with the X-­ network the desire to reduce the political power and privilege of the church. Many of these groups, plus literary men, were committed to the reconstruction of belief. Groups and individuals differed over the 464

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degree of change required and the methods judged appropriate. Some attacked with ribaldry and satire; others thought that scientific knowledge would gradually change attitudes and beliefs. Some (for example, positivists and socialists) were much more interested in social reform than the X-­men. Within the Church, there were reformers who agreed that discriminatory practices against Dissenters should be abolished and who modified their theological beliefs, for example, about eternal punishment, miracles, the interpretation of the six “days” of Creation, and human unity. Only some of the shifts in theology were responses to scientific discoveries and theories, others were based on moral questions about divine justice or arose from developments in German theology that sought to interpret the Bible like any other ancient text. All this is well known to historians of Victorian religion, but the implications for history of science are not sufficiently recognized. Science had no unique position in debates over theology, and scientific opponents of dogmatic theology had an array of potential allies. We have seen that the X-­men found much in common with Unitarians and with leading liberals in the Church. The contestation of cultural authority in Victorian England was much more multidimensional than science-­ versus-­ religion stories or, even, science-­and-­religion-­stories allow. John Ruskin, Cardinal Manning, Matthew Arnold, and John Morley were as conspicuous in cultural debate as Huxley, Lubbock, Spencer, Tyndall, and Dean Stanley. Among leading lawyers there were as many reformers as among scientific men, and they sometimes acted on the same issues. Elite scientific men belonged to this cultural elite. At dinners, receptions, and clubs in London and over house weekends they socialized with the great and learned, country-­ with leading artists, influential editors, and powerful politicians. This did not hold back the polemicists among the X-­men from bitter public attacks on those they regarded as dangerously misleading intellectual guides. They challenged not only the authority of clergy but also the capacity of literary elites, who did not understand scientific culture, to act as guides in the modern world. Sometimes they attacked the systems preached by Unitarians and positivists, groups who accepted the authority of contemporary science. They also, variously, attacked or tried to distance themselves from socialists and secularists who, from a less elevated social position, preached their visions of a new social and intellectual order. The X Club had many powerful and useful allies in politics, in publishing, in the church, in education, and in science: Lord Granville, Alexander Macmillan, Charles Lyell, Henry Roscoe, and John Stuart Mill 465

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are just a few of those that have been identified. Their power, which was far from all-­embracing, was grounded on close collaboration, individual brilliance, and the extent to which they could build allegiances with other reformers. Different issues, from the importance of education in science to the need to oppose churchly culture, required different alliances. Their naturalism, which included human mind and human society in the deterministic order of natural law, took them further than even their Unitarian allies were willing to go, but all such reforming groups were willing to enter into coalitions. The world changed, but the X Club did not change the world. In the reinterpretations offered here, Huxley is as brilliant as ever, but both Huxley and the X Club are less powerful. His and their successes and failures must be understood in a larger context. As Huxley himself put it: Missionaries, whether of philosophy or of religion, rarely make rapid way, unless their preachings fall in with the prepossessions of the multitude of shallow thinkers, or can be made to serve as a stalking-­horse for the promotion of the practical aims of the still larger multitude, who do not profess to think much, but are quite certain they want a great deal.33

In old age Huxley and Hooker were surprised to find how much that they had once fought for was taken for granted; they observed other changes with concern. The world changed for many reasons, of which I mention only a few. Industrialists from above and aspiring workingmen from below sought science education. Bicycling diminished both church attendance and Sunday lecture attendance. Women and workingmen demanded political and economic rights. The railway, the telegraph, and many other technologies transformed daily life to such an extent that Huxley’s unthinking multitude came to expect naturalistic explanations for and technical solutions to many human problems.

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Acknowledgments Over the many years in which this book has been researched and written, I have accumulated debts to many people. First of all, I want to thank Sophie Forgan, Bernie Lightman, and Chicago’s two readers for the care with which they read the manuscript. Their advice and encouragement have greatly improved the argument and its organization and have saved me from factual errors. I admit that I did not take all the ad­ vice proffered, and I am certainly responsible for any remain­ ing errors or confusions. Other colleagues read portions of the manuscript. I thank John Jones of Balliol College, Ox­ ford; Jamie Elwick of York University, Toronto; Frank James and Roland Jackson of the Royal Institution, London; and closer to home, Allan Davidson, Sarah Grimes, Peter Line­ ham, Margaret McClure, and Prue Purser. In bringing the manuscript to book form, Karen Merikangas Darling, Evan White, Dawn Hall, Renaldo Migaldi, and others at the Uni­ versity of Chicago Press have been a pleasure to work with. I am grateful to those institutions that have been cru­ cial to my research. Many archivists and librarians have en­ abled me to access their collections. I remember congenial and productive visits to the libraries and manuscript col­ lections of the Royal Society of London; the British Library; the Linnean Society; the Royal Anthropological Institute; the Open University; the Natural History Museum, Lon­ don; the Geological Society of London; the Senate House of the University of London; the Royal College of Surgeons, London; Balliol College, Oxford; the National Library of Scotland; and Te Papa Tongarewa / Museum of New Zea­ land. I did not visit, but Sarah Dodgson of the Athenaeum 467

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Club library and Chris Wisdom of the Royal Horticultural Society were most helpful in answering my questions about membership of their institutions. I especially thank the generations of archivists and librar­ ians at the Royal Institution, London; Imperial College London; and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, who have welcomed me on many oc­ casions. I remember gratefully James Friday, who introduced me to the Royal Institution archives, and the late Jeanne Pingree, who served sherry in the late afternoons to researchers at the Imperial College archives. More recently, Anne Barrett of Imperial College archives and Frank James and Jane Harrison of the Royal Institution have prepared papers for my arrival, and given advice on difficult-­to-­read manuscripts and per­ mission for long quotations from manuscripts in their care. Quotations from the Joseph Dalton Hooker Correspondence are made by kind per­ mission of the Trustees of the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew. In the last few years I have benefited from access to the extensive databases (managed by Jamie Elwick) of the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, on which I have been a coeditor. Lyulph Lubbock, now Lord Avebury, generously welcomed me to the family archives, gave me copies of portraits of Nelly and John Lubbock, and has given permission for their publication here. Carolyn Hyde gave me the Huxley carte de visite. I also thank the University of Leeds Special Collections; Imperial Col­ lege, London; the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; the Royal College of Sur­ geons, London; University College, London; Ross Galbreath of Onewhero; and the Royal Society of London for permission to reproduce items held in their collections. (Copyright for specific images is acknowledged in the text above.) Many of these institutions waived reproduction fees. I particularly acknowledge the Wellcome Library, London, which makes images freely available under a Creative Commons license, and Crestina Forcina, who has answered my questions on this process. Some parts of this manuscript draw on previously published mate­ rial. Chapter 3 and much of chapter 2 are an expansion of “‘Huxley, Lubbock, and Half a Dozen Others’: Professionals and Gentlemen in the Formation of the X Club, 1851–­1864” (published in Isis 1998, 89: 410–­ 44). Chapter 4.3 draws material from “‘An Influential Set of Chaps’: The X Club and Royal Society Politics, 1864–­85” (published in the British Journal for the History of Science 1990, 23: 53–­81). Chapter 6.6 is based on “Sunday Lecture Societies: Naturalistic Scientists, Unitarians, and Secularists Unite against Sabbatarian Legislation” (which appeared in Victorian Scientific Naturalism: Community, Identity, Continuity, edited by Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman, and published by the University of Chicago Press in 2014). 468

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After the 1998 Isis article I intended to stop writing about the X Club. Jim Moore and David Knight helped me to change my mind. Jim gave the doubtful advice that it would take only two years to write a book, as I already knew so much. But I had further questions and, for many rea­ sons, it has taken many more than two years. In the intervening period, my writing has been assisted by two periods of study leave from the Uni­ versity of Auckland. The Division of History and Philosophy of Science in the School of Philosophy at the University of Leeds was a most conge­ nial place to visit, and the seminar audiences there particularly generous with their time and thoughtful questions. I thank Jon Topham, Greg Radick, Geoffrey Cantor, Graeme Gooday, Jack Morrell, and Jon Hodge for stimulating conversations and warm hospitality. Bernie Lightman at York University, Toronto, gave generously of his time. I thank him and his colleagues for their welcome. At the University of Wisconsin, I also found congenial colleagues and a good library. On shorter visits, I have given seminars to the Cabinet of Natural History in the School of His­ tory and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Over the years many colleagues have generously written letters, an­ swered questions, given books, and offered information. Adrian Desmond and John Clark have been especially generous in sharing their specialist knowledge. Adrian, Jim Moore, Sophie Forgan, Bill Brock, Victor Hilts, Bernie Lightman, Jamie Elwick, Jim Endersby, Miguel de Arce, Hannah Gay, Ariane Tschumi, and Leonard Wilson have written letters and given books, offprints, or unpublished papers. Bernie wrote many letters, even in the days of snail mail. In addition to those already mentioned, I have learned from conversations with Gowan Dawson, David Knight, Mark Patton, Anne Secord, Jim Secord, Jim Strick, and Paul White. And there have been many other generous colleagues and stimulating seminar audiences. All these have helped to reduce the intellectual isolation of living in this distant but pleasant part of the world. In Auckland, Jeremiah Ran­kin and Simon Thode, ex-­students, have been congenial conversation part­ ners on Victorian England and history of science. My scholarly friend Nicola Hoggard Creegan has been a constant encouragement and has carried me off to seaside places on writing retreats. It is an irony—­and, like Huxley, I am fond of irony—­that I, a woman, living in a city located at the distant reaches of a once-­powerful empire, write about famous white men who lived at the nineteenth-­century cen­ ter of that empire. My city, Auckland, was named after the Earl of Auck­ land, Viceroy of India in 1840 when this city was established and, a few years later, First Lord of the Admiralty when Joseph Hooker was given 469

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free passage to India for his collecting expedition. I am both like and un­ like my subjects. Certainly, I am not at any center of world power, but like them, I am white and a beneficiary, if a somewhat distant one, of British imperial power. There are other ironies. I, who grew up in a fun­ damentalist family, am writing about some of the most famous critics of orthodox religion of their age. This means I have some understanding of a society in which religion mattered. I notice their biblical quotes, and the clever moves by which they quoted scripture in their own cause. I, who was taught that all people are equal (although some, the men, were more equal than others) am writing about class. We New Zealanders be­ lieved that we lived in a classless society. I gradually came to see through this myth and to locate my origins as lower-middle-class. This gives me some feeling for the struggles and anxieties of Tyndall, Hirst, and their friends. As I have recently come to realize, my personal history has shaped my modes of argument in other ways. I started my academic career as a mathematician. When two friends were recently arguing, mathemati­ cian Y said to the rest of us, “Don’t listen to him, he’s a mathematician, he always looks for a counterexample.” At that moment I realized that when presented with an interesting new theory or argument I habitually start looking for counterexamples. As I reread what I have written here, it seems to me that I disagree with many colleagues with whom I would like to agree; but I am too good at finding counterexamples and too fond of clarity. This means that I may sound rather blunt at times. To go back to the origins of this book, I thank Arnold Thackray and Roy MacLeod, whose perceptions shaped its beginnings. Arnold was an encouraging supervisor when I was learning how to become a historian; I realized just how encouraging only after I had my own experience of writing comments on research students’ work. The book is dedicated to my father and my sister, both of whom provided financial support in the very early stages of this research.

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Notes Abbreviations Used in Notes a r c h i va l s o u r c e s

Avebury The correspondence and diaries of John Lubbock, Lord Avebury, British Library, Add. MS series HP Huxley Papers, Imperial College of Science, Technology, and Medicine HS Herschel Letters, Royal Society of London JDH Correspondence of J. D. Hooker, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew JT John Tyndall Papers: Tyndall correspondence and notebooks, the journals of Tyndall and Frankland, and the X Club Notebooks, Royal Institution, London LT Papers of Louisa Tyndall, Royal Institution, London LUA Papers of Sir John Lubbock, Lord Avebury, Royal Society of London LUB Papers of Sir John William Lubbock, Royal Society of London MC Miscellaneous Correspondence of the Royal Society of London OC Owen Correspondence, Natural History Museum, London Royal Anthropological Institute RAI RFA Raven Frankland Archives, the Open University (microfilm) RS Royal Society of London Minutes of Council and other administrative papers RR Referees Reports, Royal Society of London Te Papa Te Papa Tongarewa / Museum of New Zealand The University of London, Senate papers ST 471

Notes to the introduction Printed Sources

AHS Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography BPP ES&T  Irish University Press series of British Parliamentary Papers, Education: Scientific and Technical CCD Correspondence of Charles Darwin CE T. H. Huxley, Collected Essays CJT Correspondence of John Tyndall DNBS Dictionary of Nineteenth-­Century British Scientists DSB Dictionary of Scientific Biography Huxley DD Huxley: The Devil’s Disciple Huxley EHP Huxley: Evolution’s High Priest JASL Journal of the Anthropological Society of London JESL Journal of the Ethnological Society of London JWW The Journals of Walter White LLBJ Abbott and Campbell, Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett LLCL Life and Letters of Sir Charles Lyell LLHS Duncan, Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer Eve and Creasey, Life and Work of John Tyndall LJT LLJDH Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Joseph Dalton Hooker LLJL Hutchinson, Life and Letters of Sir John Lubbock LLTHH Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley NHR Natural History Review ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography OED Oxford English Dictionary PMG Pall Mall Gazette Proc. LSL Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London Proc. RGS Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society Proc. RS Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Q JGS Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society QR Quarterly Review SM T. H. Huxley, Scientific Memoirs BA Report Report of the . . . meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science Trans. ASL Transactions of the Anthropological Society of London Trans. ESL Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London WR Westminster Review In t r o d u c t i o n

1.

2.

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Huxley to Hooker, 31 March 1874 (HP 2.210), discussed in chap. 4.3. All these interpretations of the protagonists will be developed in later chapters, especially in chap. 1. References are given here only for quotations. Huxley to Hooker, 15 November 1888 (LLTHH 2:211).

Notes to the introduction

3.

The subtitles are from the British and American editions, respectively, of Uglow, Lunar Men; Snyder, Philosophical Breakfast Club (American); and the Australian edition of McCalman, Darwin’s Armada. 4. On group biography, see Caine, Biography and History, esp. chap. 3. 5. See Kohler, “A Generalist’s Vision.” 6. Moore, “Theodicy and Society,” 172. 7. Philosophical Breakfast Club: Snyder, Philosophical Breakfast Club. British Association and Sabine: Morrell and Thackray, Gentlemen of Science, 23n63 and chap. 1.1, 2.1, and 4.3 below. Thomson and the North British network: Crosbie Smith, Science of Energy, chap. 9; Barton, “Scientific Authority” and chap. 4.2 below. 8. Tait to Blackwood, 17 April 1873 (Blackwoods 4312). 9. “Modern,” of course, has many meanings. They are heroes to those who identify modernity with science, secularity, and progress, not to “postmod­ ern” people, who value multiple perspectives. 10. Richards, “Huxley and Woman’s Place” and “Moral Anatomy.” 11. Montesquieu, Considerations, chap. 18. 12. Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging, xi. For a more general discussion, Caine, Biography and History, chap. 5. 13. The minutes of X Club meetings, recorded in two notebooks held in the John Tyndall papers, are disappointingly brief and, after the first eight years, largely uninformative about their conversations. 14. On Huxley mythology, see Forgan and Gooday, “Constructing South Ken­sing­ ton,” 435–­38. 15. Hall, All Scientists Now, 82. 16. Keith, “Presidential Address,” 20. 17. Moore, “Deconstructing Darwinism,” 370; Barton, “Professionals and Gentlemen,” 443; Jonathan Smith, “Alfred Newton” 144–­45. 18. For these and other clubs see Finch, History, 1; Gay and Gay, “Brothers in Science”; MacLeod, “X-­Club,” 306; Barton, “Professionals and Gentlemen,” 412; Harvie, Lights of Liberalism, 128, 187–­89. The Red Lion Club was revived by Lubbock in 1864, see Lyell to Hooker, 4 June 1865 ( JDH/2/1/14.325). 19. Worth, Macmillan’s Magazine, 7–­9. 20. Christopher Kent, Brains and Numbers, 32–­33, and “Century Club,” ODNB. These clubs were quite different from the gentleman’s clubs with permanent buildings, which provided libraries, reading rooms, and dining facilities for their members and which therefore required large numbers of fee-­paying members to cover the costs of their facilities. 21. Huxley to Frankland, 3 February 1888 (cited in Russell, Edward Frankland, 322). 22. Hirst, Journals, 6 November 1864. 23. AHS 2:115. 24. AHS 2:115. 25. AHS 2:115–­16; LLTHH 1:256 (from 1894 recollections). Hirst recorded the new name in February ( Journals, 5 February 1865).

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Notes to the introduction

26. This is to elaborate on “the Huxley problem,” which I first identified in “Men of Science,” 75. 27. See Barton, “Professionals and Gentlemen, ” 425–­40 on their pre-­1864 schemes. 28. Spencer: “it was, we heard, spoken of with bated breath” (AHS 2:116). For further accounts by Huxley see chap. 4. 29. MacLeod, “X-­Club,” 310; the quotation is from the title of Jensen’s article on Ellen Busk. 30. Turner, Between Science and Religion; Lightman, for example, many of the articles collected in Evolutionary Naturalism. 31. Turner, “Rainfall”; Barton, “Professionals and Gentlemen.” 32. Turner, “Victorian Conflict.” There are many other articles by Turner; those identified were the most important in shaping X Club interpretations. 33. Moore, “Deconstructing Darwinism,” 375–­76, 374. 34. MacLeod, Creed of Science, xvii. 35. Recent examples are Michael Taylor: the X Club was “intended as an agency of the struggle of scientists against theologians” (Philosophy of Spen­ cer, 22); Matthew Stanley: “one of the X-­Club’s major goals was to wrest con­trol of the universities from the clerics” (Huxley’s Church, 243). 36. As discussed briefly in Barton, “Professionals and Gentlemen,” 425–­32. 37. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 69–­73; Trautmann, “Revolution”; Van Riper, Men among the Mammoths, chaps. 4–­5. Gruber, “Brixham Cave” (1965), first emphasized that the evidence of human antiquity was inde­ pendent of Darwin’s theory of transmutation. 38. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, chap. 5 (esp. 146–­50, 162, 172). Interest in savage development is attributed to “ethnologists,” because “anthropolo­ gists” in the 1860s were interested in anatomy rather than customs (chap. 3.3 below). 39. Turner, Between Science and Religion (in-­text page references are to the book). The recent extremes are represented by Dawson and Lightman’s “In­ troduction” to Victorian Scientific Naturalism, and the articles in the same volume by Endersby (“Odd Man Out”) and Paul White (“The Conduct of Belief”). 40. Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, cited in Turner, Between Science and Religion, 15. 41. Turner, Between Science and Religion, 24. The Spencer quote is the first sen­ tence from the concluding section of Spencer’s First Principles, sec­tion 194. 42. Spencer, First Principles, chap. XV.127. 43. Michael Taylor, “Herbert Spencer,” and Robert Smith, “Great Plan.” Turner allowed that the nebular hypothesis was important to Tyndall and made the important qualification that the movement was not monolithic (Between Science and Religion, 10). 44. Desmond, “Redefining the X Axis,” 37. 45. Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism.

474

Notes to the introduction

46. From Between Science and Religion (10 for the quote) to “Victorian Conflict.” 47. Lightman, “Huxley and the Devonshire Commission,” 103. It is unclear which institutions Lightman intended, but he begins by listing those in which the X Club members were employed. 48. Herbert Butterfield explains Whig interpretations of history as a product of both historians’ assumptions about progress and their need to summarize (Whig Interpretation of History, chap. 2). 49. Young, “Impact of Darwin,” 1. Van Wyhe makes a similar argument in Phrenology. 50. Young, “Impact of Darwin,” 21. 51. Dawson and Lightman, “Introduction,” 4–­7. 52. “Prologue” (1892), CE V:1–­58 (quotations on 14, 32, 39). He used the phrase “scientific Naturalism” only once more in the essay (41). 53. White, “Conduct of Belief,” 220. 54. Dawson and Lightman, “Introduction,” 10. 55. “Dr. J. E. Gray,” Athenaeum, 13 March 1875, 363. 56. Berman, “Hegemony.” 57. Porter, “Gentlemen and Geology”, 809. 58. Desmond, “Redefining the X Axis” (“localized,” 5). 59. Bellon, “Hooker’s Ideals”; Endersby’s work culminated in Imperial Nature, but I acknowledge here the conversations, conference papers, and PhD thesis from which I profited. Paul White offers another alternative to the professional­ ization narrative. He argues that, having given up the assumption that the professional “scientist” was arriving in the mid-­Victorian world, we need to examine the process of identity formation (Thomas Huxley, esp. 4–­5). This ap­ proach can be fruitfully applied to some aspects of X Club activity (see chap. 6) but I have not found it able to encompass the full range of its concerns. 60. See Morrell and Thackray, Gentlemen of Science, 533–­39, for outline biog­ raphies; standard biographical sources provide additional detail. On my count, 40 percent of the “gentlemen of science” who led the early BA were born in modest or poor circumstances. James Secord makes a similar point about many scientific gentlemen not being genteel by birth (Victorian Sensation, 404). 61. “Gentlemen of science” was not an early nineteenth-­century self-­description. Comparing “men of science” and “gentlemen of science” (at https://books .google.com/ngrams) shows that use of the latter phrase was negligible throughout the nineteenth century in Britain. I thank James Secord for this website reference. 62. MacLeod, “Whigs and Savants”; Miller, “Revival of the Physical Sciences” and “Between Hostile Camps”; Hall, All Scientists Now. 63. Barton, “Men of Science” on how the words amateur and professional were used by scientific men in the Victorian period. Against professionalization narratives, see also Desmond, “Redefining the X Axis.”

475

Notes to the introduction

64. There are borderline groups, such as chemical consultants (who received fees rather than salaries) and science teachers in schools. Within the con­ text of this book there is no need to define their position. 65. Lightman, Victorian Popularizers, 13. James Secord uses the term “practi­ tioner of knowledge” (Victorian Sensation, 405). 66. Baldwin shows that this phrase was still preferred usage in the early twenti­ eth century (Making Nature, chap. 3). 67. Lightman, Victorian Popularizers, 12. 68. Morrell, “Professionalisation,” 982–­84. 69. I do not engage directly with Turner’s “Public Science” article (1980), because it is shaped strongly by his professionalizing interpretation. The X Club publicists’ concern for shaping public attitudes was only partially concerned with support for science; it was more about shaping beliefs and attitudes. 70. Miller, “Revival of Physical Sciences”; Endersby, Imperial Nature, 36–­38; Morrell and Thackray, Gentlemen of Science, 259–­60, 265, 317. 71. Turner, “Rainfall,” 65. I omit Turner’s reference to industrialising society as not essential to his interpretation. 72. Moore’s phrase, in “Deconstructing Darwinism,” 376. 73. Smith, Science of Energy, esp. chap. 9. 74. Richards, “Moral Anatomy,” 406–­36 (Richards’s work, it should be recog­ nized, is grounded in Robert Young rather than Frank Turner). See also Barton, “Professionals and Gentlemen,” 437–­44. 75. Clark, “The Ants”; Perkin, Rise of Professional Society, 363. 76. White, “Ministers of Culture,” 12–­13, 2. 77. Intellectuals was not a Victorian term (although Heyck, Transformation of Intellectual Life, 235–­36, shows it was occasionally used late in the century). Coleridge’s proposed term, “clerisy,” might be an option, but it did not catch on. Just as “man of science” was preferred to Whewell’s “scientist,” the Victorians were satisfied with “man of letters.” 78. Heyck, Transformation of Intellectual Life, cites Turner’s account of scientific naturalism once (117n59); Collini, Public Moralists, cites only Turner’s work on classics (934n38). 79. Although Heyck’s title implies he is writing about “intellectual life” in gen­ eral, his specific argument is about the changing position of men of letters. Men of science appear only as part of the explanation. 80. Clark, “The Ants.” 81. Turner, Between Science and Religion (1974), “Rainfall” (1974; rpt. 1993), “The Religious and the Secular” (1993). 82. Moore, Post-­Darwinian Controversies, chap. 3; Smith, Science of Energy. 83. The bitterness of the politicized Dissenters is demonstrated by Machin’s references to church-­rate controversies in Politics and the Churches. 84. A theme throughout Desmond, Huxley DD.

476

Notes to chapter one

85. Their Carlylean interests and their distinction between religion and theol­ ogy were first discussed by Turner, “Thomas Carlyle,” and Barton, “Whit­ worth Gun.” Lightman’s “Discordant Harmonies” is an excellent account of how the same words could mean different things when Victorians spoke about religion. 86. Cox, “Provincializing Christendom,” and, for example, Morris, “Strange Death.” 87. Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, chap. 8. 88. Taylor, Secular Age, 171–­73 and 346–­47. 89. Houghton, “Rhetoric.” 90. “Controverted Questions” (1892), CE 5:9. 91. Huxley, “Agnosticism” (1889), CE 5:239; Lightman, “Huxley and Scientific Agnosticism.” 92. Huxley, “Evidence of the Miracle of the Resurrection” (1876), 366–­67. chapter one

1.

See Morus, Schaffer, and Secord, “Scientific London,” for a brief introduc­ tion to the diversity of London’s scientific cultures. 2. Evans, Forging, table E.iii for population; Hoppen, Mid-­Victorian Generation, chap. 2, on the professional middle class (esp. 33–­36). In a host of ways, for example, the skilled workers in luxury trades who could also make sci­ entific instruments, London provided enormous resources for scientific life (Morus, Schaffer, and Secord, “Scientific London,” 139–­40). 3. On William Hooker’s early career, see Allan, Hookers of Kew. The most in­ sightful work on William Hooker is Richard Drayton’s study of Kew Gardens, Nature’s Government. Also useful are J. D. Hooker’s Sketch, and two long obitu­ aries: “Sir W. Jackson Hooker,” Proc. LSL (May 1866): lxvi–­lxxiii (the Linnean obituary); “Sir William Jackson Hooker,” Proceedings of the Royal Society, xxv–­ xxx (the Royal Society obituary). On the cultural life of Norwich see Brock and Meadows, Lamp of Learning, 6–­20. 4. Biographical sources do not mention the Horticultural Society of London, but according to the society’s records he joined sometime between 1810 and 1822 (personal communication, 5 May 2004). 5. On the Banksian era see Gascoigne’s companion volumes, Joseph Banks and Enlightenment and Science in the Service of Empire. 6. Financial circumstances: see esp. Hooker, Sketch, xxv–­xliv. Endersby (Imperial Nature, 10) emphasizes the loss of status. Ray Desmond, Hooker, Allan, Hookers of Kew, and LLJDH 2:380–­81 emphasize Hooker’s desire to return south and identify many positions that he sought. 7. The Linnean and Royal Society obituaries give similar accounts. 8. Drayton, Nature’s Government, 147; Linnean obituary, lxviii. 9. Bellon, “Hooker’s Ideals,” 76; LLJDH 1:155 and 2:445.

477

Notes to chapter one

10. Allan (Hookers of Kew, 93–­94) suggests family tensions on which Leonard Huxley (LLJDH 1:30–­31) is silent. 11. Endersby emphasizes the contrast between Hooker’s need for employment and his gentlemanly ideals (Imperial Nature, 20). 12. Richard Bellon emphasizes Hooker’s pursuit of public funding in “Joseph Hooker’s Ideals.” 13. When his brother died suddenly in the West Indies, Hooker was able to send back £250 to support his brother’s widow and child. On money, see LLJDH 1:46–­47, 155, 160, 170. 14. Criticisms and compliments: LLJDH 1:61–­72, 112–­13. 15. At Glasgow and Kew, William Hooker was only partly dependent on his offi­ cial salary. His income had reached £800 per year when he left Glasgow and included £250 per year from his Botanical Magazine (Linnean obituary, lxviii). 16. On the intellectual and social aspects of the challenge to the “Banksian learned empire,” see Miller, “Hostile Camps” and “Physical Sciences.” 17. Timothy Alborn, “Lubbock, Sir John William,” ODNB is an excellent introduction. 18. Miller, “Hostile Camps” and “Physical Sciences” (the Astronomical So­ ciety). Becher, “Whewell’s Odyssey” criticizes Lubbock’s mathematics as insufficiently informed by Laplace (13–­14). 19. MacLeod (“Whigs and Savants”) first identified parallels between political reform and Royal Society reform; Desmond (Politics of Evolution) argues that reform in science, medicine, church, and local government were part of the reforming attack on “old corruption.” 20. Patterson, Mary Somerville, 58–­65; 207n52; Hall, All Scientists Now, 58–­61, 64–­65; LLJL, 1:3. 21. Brewster to W. V. Harcourt, 4 March 1832 (Morrell and Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Correspondence, 133). Resignation: Lubbock to P. M. Roget, 12 November 1835 (RS MC.2.189). 22. Alborn, “Lubbock, Sir John William,” ODNB. 23. Allen, “Biological Societies,” 24–­25. 24. The secretary read Darwin’s papers, both before and after his admission to the Royal Society (Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging, 407). 25. On the Geological Society, see Rudwick, “A Year in the Life”; Morrell, “Lon­ don Institutions and Lyell’s Career,” 139. Thackray reports on the practices of a few other societies (To See the Fellows Fight, vi–­vii). 26. Hume, Learned Societies, 115. 27. On the importance of conversation in London science, see James Secord, “Scientific Conversation.” Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging, 354, 366, 379 (on clubs); 354, 404, 428 (Babbage); Morrell, “London Institutions,” 137 (Athenaeum). Secord reproduces an 1839 schedule of scientific meetings (29). 28. Patterson pays attention to informal meetings in Somerville. In “Year in the Life,” Rudwick describes the same sorts of informal activities among geolo­ gists in 1835.

478

Notes to chapter one

29. Opitz, “This House.” 30. This is to depart from Cannon’s emphasis on the importance of the Cam­ bridge network in science, but is supported by Morus on Grove (“Correla­ tion and Control”). 31. Secord, “Scientific Conversation,” 35 (Sharpey). 32. LLJDH 1:162. 33. See chap. 3.2 for Herschel. 34. Bellon (“Hooker’s Ideals,” 77) and Endersby (Imperial Nature, 267) have sought clues as to Hooker’s later religious beliefs. Hope for afterlife: Hooker to Maria Hooker [1840], LLJDH 1:156, and Hooker to Darwin, 3 February 1865 (CCD 13:48). Keeping silent: see Hooker’s defence of theological liberalism in chap. 3.2 below. Comparative religion: see discussion in chap. 4.2. 35. Brock’s “Spectrum of Scientific Patronage” is a useful source, but covers the entire century and country; discussion is limited here to London before 1850. 36. Hooker and De la Beche were alike, Endersby points out, in being gentle­ men who needed employment when their investments failed (Imperial Nature, 329n20). 37. This overview draws on Porter, “Gentlemen and Geology”; Secord, “Geo­ logical Survey” (numbers, 236); Bentley, “Chemical Department”; Sharpe, “De la Beche, Henry Thomas,” DNBS; and Morrell, John Phillips, chaps. 6 and 7. 38. Although the English Victorians used “English” and “British” inter­ changeably, I use “English” here in the restricted sense because, as will be discussed in chap. 5, the Scots were more open to state funding than the English. 39. Hall, All Scientists Now; Miller, “Physical Sciences,” 117–­21 (on Sabine); Nathan Reingold, “Sabine, Edward,” DSB; Iwan Morus, “Grove, William,” ODNB. 40. K. Bryn Thomas, “Busk, George,” DSB, and Plarr, Lives, “Busk.” Biographi­ cal sources are brief and sometimes contradictory. The DNB mistakenly describes him as a navy surgeon, and this error is often repeated, even in the ODNB; similarly, it is erroneously claimed that he had two daughters. The Busks had four daughters (AHS 2:71 and the 1881 Census). According to census records, Ellen Busk was ten years younger her husband. 41. Royal Society election certificates can be viewed through a search (by name of candidate) from the Royal Society Archives web page: https://royalsoci ety.org/collections/#archive. 42. With the reservation that the Linnean Society was scientifically moribund in the 1840s (see chap. 2.3). 43. Dull: Thomas, “Busk,” DSB; self-­confidence: Huxley cited in Barton, “Profes­ sionals and Gentlemen,” 420n26. The Busks were not invited to the Lyells’ parties, from which Desmond concludes that Ellen Busk was regarded as

479

Notes to chapter one

socially inferior (Huxley DD, 160, 341–­42). Leonard Wilson’s alternative interpretation is that Mary Lyell had learned of Nettie Huxley’s unease over her husband’s friendship with Ellen Busk (personal communication, and “Scientific Libel,” 78–­80). 44. From a photograph at http://mapio.net/o/1059893/ (accessed 28 April 2016). 45. Helmstadter, “W. R. Greg,” 188–­90, 204–­5. 46. LLJDH 1:170. 47. Drayton, Nature’s Government, 180 (public interest), 193–­98 (the museum). Endersby explains Sir William’s interest in economic botany by the Glasgow context (Imperial Nature, 11), but it can equally be explained by the Banksian tradition and (Drayton) self-­interest. 48. Edinburgh: Bellon, “Hooker’s Ideals,” 55; Geological Survey position: LLJDH, 1:207. 49. Sir William’s reports: Drayton, Nature’s Government, 186–­87; Hooker Jr.’s indignation: Bellon, “Hooker’s Ideals,” 60. 50. Royal Society Archives online, https://royalsociety.org/collections/#archive. 51. LLJDH 1:208, 216–­17. 52. LLJDH 1:232–­34. 53. LLJL 1:23–­25; Lubbock to Herschel, 31 December 1844 (HS.11.372). 54. Eton: Patton, Science, Politics, and Business, 18, and LLJL 1:15–­17 (micro­ scope, 22). See also Lubbock’s Commonplace Book (LUA.24), 30 April 1844. 55. Lecture notebook (LUA.7). These recreational activities are based on Lub­ bock’s diary records for 1853–­55 (“Diary, 1853–­63”). 56. Schedule: LLJL 1:30–­31; for actual practice see Lubbock’s “Diary” (Busk, 3 January 1853). 57. “Diary” references to crustacea: 27 January; 6, 23, and 25 February 1853; 9 September 1854. 58. Darwin meetings: 15 January and 22 February 1853. 59. “Diary, 1853–­63,” 26 January 1853 (the school); 22 February, 11 March, 15 May 1853; 9 March and 27 July 1854 (religious practice); 25 September 1853 (drunkenness). 60. Lubbock listed the books he had read and made extracts from them in a notebook titled “On Philosophy.” These are from a list begun in 1855 (LUA.19.46 and 53). He often recorded topics of conversation in his diary, which is particularly detailed for the years 1853–­55, before he attended the bank regularly. For these topics see “Diary, 1853–­63,” 6, 11, 28 May and 4 July 1853; species change: 22 September 1853. 61. Darwin to Dana, cited in Patton, Science, Politics and Business, 24. 62. Research from the John Tyndall Correspondence Project suggests that the previously accepted date of 1820 is too early. See Elwick, Lightman, and Reidy, “General Introduction,” CJT 1:xvii. 63. Inkster, Steam Intellect Societies: “Liverpool,” 55–­56, lists almost forty “steam intellect” societies in Liverpool before 1850; Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, 128.

480

Notes to chapter one

64. The classic account is Tylecote’s Mechanics’ Institutes of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Both Inskter and Vincent complicate the standard account, for example Vincent (Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom, 142) identifies a London Mechanics’ Institute that was active 1817–­20. 65. The quoted aim is that of the Manchester Mechanics’ Institute, founded in 1824 (Tylecote, Mechanics’ Institutes, 131). 66. Historians have often criticized mechanics’ institutes for providing culture for the lower middle classes rather than useful knowledge for the workers, and accuse the patrons of using education as a means of social control. Against the many critical and dismal assessments, I follow the interpreta­ tions of Royle, “Mechanics’ Institutes” (esp. 311–­14); Inkster, Steam Intellect Societies; Laurent, “Science, Society and Politics”; and Vincent, Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom. 67. Colin Russell, Lancastrian Chemist, the authoritative work on Frankland’s early life is the source for the following paragraphs. References are given only for quotations and numerical facts (money: 98, 171). Lancastrian Chemist is summarized in Russell’s full biography, Edward Frankland, chap. 1. 68. The Johnsons: Russell, Lancastrian Chemist, esp. 123–­26; Morrell, John Phillips, 91, 116–­17. Costs: Russell, Lancastrian Chemist, 143; Reid, Memoirs of Playfair, 84; Lord Lincoln to Thomas Greene, 2 October 1845 (RFA 01.01.1382). 69. Playfair’s early years in London: Reid, Memoirs of Playfair, chaps. 4–­5. Frank­ land’s association with Playfair: Russell, Lancastrian Chemist, chap. 9 and Edward Frankland, chap. 2. 70. Russell, Lancastrian Chemist, 152–­56. Lancaster and Preston had been linked by railway since 1842. 71. With the exception, perhaps, of McMillan and Nevin, “Tyndall of Leigh­ lin,” previous accounts of Tyndall’s early life have been superseded by the editorial introductions to the early volumes of the Correspondence of John Tyndall. On the survey see Baldwin and Browne, Correspondence, “Introduc­ tion,” xv–­xvii. 72. Cantor, “John Tyndall’s Religion,” identifies an earlier politically radicaliz­ ing experience. Leighlinbridge is the modern spelling of Tyndall’s birthplace. 73. Tyndall, “Journal,” 7 November 1843 (conscience). Tyndall’s self-­education had begun earlier in Ireland ca. 1840, when he began private study of French, drawing, and rhetoric on the advice of a survey superior (Mc­ Millan and Nevin, “Tyndall of Leighlin,” 26). For Tyndall, French was a useful accomplishment as well as a sign of cultural aspiration. 74. Mussell, “This Is Ours”; Tyndall, “Journal,” 25 and 28 February 1844. 75. French: Tyndall, “Journal,” 1 January 1844, and many later entries; and Tyndall to his father, [October] 1842 (CJT 1:0171). Craik: “Journal,” 15 and 20 April 1844. George Craik’s Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties was the most successful title in the Library of Entertaining Knowledge series,

481

Notes to chapter one

76. 77.

78. 79.

80. 81. 82.

83.

84.

85. 86.

87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

96.

482

published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and was frequently reprinted (Vincent, Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom, 144). Tyndall, “Journal,” 23 April 1844, 26–­28 May 1844. There are many entries in Tyndall’s journal, for example 3, 11, and 19 April 1844. See also, Baldwin and Browne, Correspondence, xix, and McMillan and Nevin, “Tyndall of Leighlin,” 28 (for Boyle). Tyndall, “Journal,” 30 March; 24 and 31 May 1844; 6 July 1852 (cultured men), 27 May 1844. Poetry: Tyndall, “Journal,” 13 January 1844 (by “a distant one”); 3 and 4 August 1844; 19 August 1844 (I. L. Leighlin rejected). Public health: “Jour­ nal,” 23–­24 April 1844; 26 May 1844. The survey: “Journal,” 27 December 1843; 18 and 26 February 1844; 8 March 1844. Ireland: “Journal,” 14 and 28 December 1846; 11 March 1847. Tyndall’s “Journal” records long hours of work in October 1845. Tyndall to his father, [14] February 1843 (CJT 1:0187); Tyndall, “Journal,” 2 July 1845 and 12 May 1847; Tylecote, Mechanics’ Institutes, 144–­45. Tyndall, “Journal,” 22 May 1844; 8 April 1846. Inkster, “Science and the Mechanics’ Institutes: Sheffield,” 456, and Royle, “Mechanics’ Institutes,” 308, discuss lecture programs. Conversations recorded: Tyndall, “Journal,” 30 June 1843; 29 June 1846; 5 April 1846; 22 March 1846 (Owen). Lectures: “Journal,” 29 and 30 Octo­ ber 1846; 13 April 1847; 3 November 1846. Tyndall, “Journal,” 6 June 1847. The Primitive Methodists were called Ranters. In Ireland Tyndall had once attended a Roman Catholic mass (“Journal,” 7 April 1844). Tyndall’s religious views: Barton, “John Tyndall, Pantheist,” 124–­30, and Kim, Tyndall’s Transcendental Materialism, 50–­59. Tyndall, “Journal,” 1 and 3 September 1844. Tyndall, “Journal,” 1 June 1845 (Methodists); 9 May 1847 (shadowy); 2 April 1847 (moral guide). See Cantor, “John Tyndall’s Religion,” for fuller discussion of early changes in Tyndall’s religious beliefs. Tyndall, “Journal,” 16 May 1847. Tyndall, “Journal,” 5 July 1847. Tyndall, “Journal,” 17 June 1847. Tyndall, “Journal,” 8 July 1847. Kent, “Whittington Club,” is the only substantial discussion of the club. “The Whittington Club,” Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 18 July 1846, no. 1, 14–­15. Tyndall’s response: Tyndall, “Journal,” 1 August 1846. Tyndall, “Journal,” 20 and 30 August, 6 September, 4 October 1846; 21 Feb­ ruary, 31 March, 3 and 6 April 1847. Tyndall, “Journal,” 23 June 1844; 15 May 1847. Tyndall, “Journal,” 29 July 1844. Tyndall felt himself to have a poetic nature (“Journal,” 22 March 1846). Joyce, Democratic Subjects, discusses the popular expression of the romantic cult of the heart (59–­63). Tyndall, “Journal,” 28 February 1847.

Notes to chapter one

97. Hirst, Journals, 18–­19 May 1847; 12 June 1847. “Useful” for Hirst did not mean utilitarian (see Vincent, Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom, 134–­35, 156, who discusses the meaning of “useful”). 98. Hirst, Journals, 3, 5, 13 June 1847. He studied French through July 1847. 99. Hirst, Journals, 1, 3 and 10 September 1847 (Improvement Society); 26 Feb­ ruary 1848 (Mechanics’ Institute); 4 March and 13 April 1848 (discussion topics); 16 November 1848 (Hirst presented a very long essay for discus­ sion). The Halifax Mechanics’ Institute Library had 2,700 books (Secord, Victorian Sensation, 347). 100. Hirst, Journals, 31 December 1848; 3 and 4 January, 29 March 1849; 1 April 1849 (insipid). Hirst wrote to Tyndall about the laboratory arrangements and the amalgamation: 20[–­28] January and 16[–­18] April 1850 (CJT 3:0393 and 0398). See also Tylecote, Mechanics’ Institutes, 229–­40, on the Halifax amalgamation. 101. Hirst, Journals, 15 March and 9 November 1849; Hirst to Tyndall, 9 July 1850 (CJT 3:0412); Hirst, Journals, 12 August 1850. Hirst discussed the pur­ poses and achievements of the institutions in his Journals (1 April 1849) and in a paper read to the Franklin Society in July 1850, published as “Ed­ ucational Societies Considered in Their relation to Individual Culture,” Monthly Literary and Scientific Lecturer, 1 October 1850, 298–­306, and copied into his journal (fols. 690–­97). 102. Tyndall had survived layoffs in 1846 when Carter lost a big contract (Tyn­ dall, “Journal,” 14, 16, and 26 September). In 1846, experienced surveyors were earning £200–­£300 (“Journal,” 22 and 24 October, 22 December 1846), but salary payments were irregular, for example, Tyndall was fully paid only twelve months after leaving Carter’s employment (“Journal,” 12 March and 20 September 1848). At Queenwood, Tyndall’s salary rose to £200 in the second year (“Journal,” 4 August 1847 and 29 August 1848). Engineer­ ing ambitions: “Journal,” 19 February 1848. 103. On Queenwood see Brock, “Queenwood College Revisited”; Russell, Ed­ ward Frankland, chap. 3, and Thompson, “Queenwood College.” So-­called middle-­class schools, like Queenwood, were as varied as their proprietors and are seldom mentioned in general histories of education. 104. Frankland’s arrival: Tyndall, “Journal,” 4 September 1847; eventful year: Frank­ land, “Journal,” 2 October 1848; Tyndall, “Journal,” 25 September 1848. 105. Russell, Edward Frankland, 49–­50; Thompson, “Queenwood College,” 249–­51. 106. Russell, Lancastrian Chemist, 151; Frankland, Sketches, 47 and 50. 107. Frankland, “Journal,” 18 January 1848. 108. Frankland, “Journal,” 23 January 1848. My interpretation has Frankland moving further from his Congregationalist attachments by the end of 1848 than does Russell’s account. 109. Tyndall, “Journal,” 7 January 1848 (gift); Frankland, “Journal,” 7 April 1848 (lucubrations).

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110. A people’s edition of five thousand copies, price 2s 6d, was published in May 1847, in contrast to the previous smaller editions at three times the price (Secord, Victorian Sensation, 131, 306). Tyndall bought his copy of Ves­ tiges on 2 July 1847, and first made reading notes on 21 July. Secord (chap. 10) analyzes Hirst’s reading of Vestiges. 111. Frankland, “Journal,” 25 March and 8 September 1848. 112. The Owenite visitors were William Pare and John Finch who, with Robert Owen, had been governors of Harmony Hall (Brock, “Queenwood College Revisited,” 3, 16). Frankland, “Journal,” 16 January 1848 (Edmondson). 113. Tyndall, “Journal,” December 1847. 114. Tyndall, “Journal,” 14 October 1848; Frankland, “Journal,” 6 October 1848. Tyndall kept his engineering options open, for example, a connection of Carter’s promised to recommend him to the great railway engineer, George Stephenson (“Journal,” 13 June 1848). 115. Frankland quoted approvingly Tyndall’s attribution of a reforming “high mission” to German thought (Frankland, “Journal,” 21 February 1848; Rus­ sell, Edward Frankland, 72). On Tyndall’s enthusiasm for German philoso­ phy: Barton, “John Tyndall, Pantheist.” 116. Russell, Edward Frankland, 73. Franz Theodor Waitz (1821–­1864) was Profes­ sor of Philosophy at Marburg from 1848 (92n43). 117. Tyndall, “Journal,” 26 November 1848 (Frankland); 6 October 1848 (Schlegel). 118. For example, a letter of 11 November 1848 to Hirst and Craven used both forms of address (CJT 2:0365). Advice: Tyndall to Hirst, 28 November 1847 (CJT 2:0339). 119. Hirst, Journals, 27 October 1849. Tyndall contrasted Hirst and Frankland to the latter’s disadvantage (Tyndall, “Journal,” 4 March 1850). 120. Tyndall recorded Hirst’s letter and his own response: “Being without a dialect of my own to express my feelings . . . [I] muttered God be praised!” (“Journal,” 5 February 1849). 121. Pantheists: Tyndall to Hirst, [10–­12 July 1850] ( JT/1/T/529); unity of universe: Tyndall to Hirst, [19 August 1850] ( JT/1/T/532); transcendental­ ist: “Journal,” 9 April 1851. For a fuller discussion of Tyndall’s developing philosophy see Barton, “John Tyndall, Pantheist,” esp. 124–­28. In Tyndall’s Transcendental Materialism, Kim argues that “transcendentalist” is a more appropriate label than “pantheist.” See also, Cantor, “John Tyndall’s Reli­ gion.” As illustrated here, Tyndall used both “pantheist” and “transcenden­ talist” approvingly; at this stage of his life he was not a materialist. 122. Hirst, Journals, 24 December 1849 (friends); 31 August 1850 (surveying); 15 November 1850 (work). For a particularly strong statement of the religious value of work see Hirst, Journals, 2 November 1851. On Carlyle’s concept of work see Clarke, “Strenuous Idleness.” 123. Copied by Hirst, Journals, 9 January 1849.

484

Notes to chapter one

124. Tyndall, “Journal,” 25 September 1848. For later, similar opinions see Tyn­ dall’s identification of science as a “secondary domain” and Hirst’s enthusi­ asm for a Schiller poem on the limits of scientific knowledge (Tyndall to Hirst, [May 1850], JT/1/T/527, and Hirst to Tyndall, 3 August 1851, JT/1/H/160). 125. Lectures recorded: Tyndall, “Journal,” 17 April 1848 (esp. fol. 313) and 14 March 1848 (esp. fol. 304). In an article sent to the Leader, Tyndall later dis­ cussed to what extent the “propensities” (or instincts) could be overcome by the will (“Journal,” 28 April 1850). 126. Tyndall, “Journal,” 19 January 1849 (Whittington Club); 11 December 1848; 9 January and 25 February 1849 (Ireland). At Christmas, he sent money to provide food for the hungry. 127. Hirst, Journals, 11 April 1850 (Lewes); Hirst to Tyndall, 16 April 1850, JT/1­/ H/144 (Leader). Hirst had previously read a series of unsigned articles by Lewes, “The Coming Reformation,” in Douglas Jerrold’s Magazine (Hirst, Journals, from 13 June 1847). The journals and magazines read by Tyndall and Hirst reveal common cause and common sympathies between self-­ improving mechanics and radical middle-­class opinion makers. 128. This is to add the encouragement of patrons to the “strength of character and favourable domestic and occupational circumstances” emphasized by Vincent (Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, 133). 129. Tyndall, “Journal,” 13 May 1847. 130. Tyndall, “Journal,” 6 October 1849. 131. Hirst, Journals, 7 October 1850. On Tyndall: Frankland, “Journal,” 8 August 1848, and Tyndall, “Journal,” 4 August 1847; 28 April 1850; and 3 May 1849. 132. Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, and Joyce, Democratic Subjects, identify various pathways to modest success (teaching: Vincent, 150–­51), although both emphasize the difficulties faced by self-­improvers. 133. It is often stated that Frankland replaced Playfair, but Russell emphasizes that the transition was gradual and describes Frankland as a “lecturer” (Edward Frankland, 97–­98). 134. Pilgrimage: Tyndall, “Journal,” 11 June 1850. Tyndall and Hirst discussed employment options and loans in many letters from late 1849 to mid-­1850. 135. Tyndall to Hirst, 29 April and 29 July 1851 ( JT/1/HTYP/128 and 152). 136. Alan Gilbert, Religion and Society, distinguishes Old and New Dissent. “New Dissent” includes the Methodists and the older dissenting groups that were transformed by the Methodist revival; “Old Dissent” stands for those groups closer to Presbyterians and Unitarians, who were shaped by eighteenth-­century rationalism. 137. On Erasmus Darwin’s continuing significance to the Derby Philosophical Society see Elliott, “Erasmus Darwin,” and further discussion below. 138. Peel, Herbert Spencer, 8, 24. On Spencer’s religious context my reading of the biographical material supports Peel and Michael Taylor (Philosophy of Spencer, 8) rather than Francis’s interpretation that Spencer’s immediate

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Notes to chapter one

religious context was evangelical (Herbert Spencer, 22). Francis’s examples of the evangelical children’s literature, from which Spencer learned to read, are all moralistic rather than theological (23–­24). 139. For Spencer’s emphasis on his inheritance of personality traits see his Auto­ biography (AHS 1:12–­13 and 2:430–­40). LLHS is more reliable on factual details than AHS, and its chronology is clearer. 140. Francis attributes more self-­awareness to Spencer that other modern interpreters. He argues that Spencer was aware that his life was blighted by emotional incapacity, and reads AHS as irony and self-­deprecation (Herbert Spencer, 12) and, indirectly, a theory of the importance of passion in hu­ man life (chap. 2). The emotional incapacity is, I agree, crucial for under­ standing Spencer, but (based on both my reading of AHS and my aware­ ness of his X-­brothers’ assessments of his personality) I cannot agree that Spencer showed self-­deprecating humor. 141. Kargon, Science in Victorian Manchester, chap. 2. 142. AHS 1:72–­3, 224. 143. Elliot, Derby Philosophers, 201. 144. Elliott’s interpretation of the significance of Erasmus Darwin in the Derby philosophical community builds on the analysis of Peel. On the Strutts, their Unitarianism, and politics, see Peel, Herbert Spencer, 35, and, for fur­ ther detail on the society’s membership and the Strutts, Elliott, “Erasmus Darwin,” 16. Mozley’s Reminiscences of Towns is a crucial source for both Peel and Elliott (“enduring,” Darwinian, 2:172–­73). As Mozley was care­ less and prone to exaggeration (see O’Connell’s references to Mozley in Oxford Conspirators), confirming evidence should be sought for his accusations. 145. Mozley, Reminiscences of Towns 2:145. 146. The infant deaths were all after Herbert’s birth (LLHS, 7–­9). See Uncle Thomas’s reference to Harriet Spencer’s discipline (LLHS, 16). 147. AHS 1:88–­90. 148. Mozley, Reminiscences of Oriel 1:146; Spencer’s indignant response, AHS 1:46–­47. 149. AHS 1:83–­84; LLHS, 11. 150. This interpretation is based on many hints (for example, LLHS, 12, 16–­17; AHS 1:79, 82, 84, 94, 115–­17, 345–­46). 151. LLHS, 12, 16–­17; AHS 1:27 and 102. 152. AHS 1:25–­30. 153. AHS 1:102–­11 (grammar, 108). 154. AHS 1:112 (early inventions and publications); 1:122–­24 (school mastering). 155. Spencer’s presentation to the club: LLHS, 27, and AHS 1:153. His argu­ mentativeness: AHS 1:133, 202; design fault: AHS 1:143–­45. According to Simmons, Victorian Railway, both Moorsom and Fox had poor reputations (109–­10, 117).

486

Notes to chapter one

156. Mechanics’ Magazine: LLHS, 26; the skew arch and velocimeter designs are reprinted in AHS, 1, App. A and C; experience in bridge design: LLHS, 24–­ 25; AHS 1:178. 157. AHS 1:142. 158. LLHS, 35. 159. Hints of Spencer senior’s beliefs: LLHS, 18 and 491. Mozley wrote that George Spencer “had no religion in the sense I then attached to the word” (Reminiscences of Towns, 2:146). Although careless in his judgments (as noted above), Mozley’s account rules out the evangelical beliefs that Taylor and Francis ascribe to Spencer’s family. There is no direct evidence that George Spencer held the evangelical beliefs widely characteristic of Meth­ odists. Spencer believed that, in later life, his father came to share his own formulations (LLHS, 5–­6). 160. AHS 1:151. 161. Spencer dated his interest in theories of progressive development to his reading of Charles Lyell’s critique of Lamarck in Principles of Geology in 1840 (AHS 1:176–­77), but Elliott argues persuasively that Spencer was already acquainted with Erasmus Darwin’s theories. 162. AHS 1:242–­43. 163. AHS 1:166. 164. AHS 1:170 and 190 (electro-­magnetic engine). Cardwell, “Work of Joule,” esp. 678. 165. Freedom: AHS 1:336–­38. Binding pin: AHS 1:306–­8 and App. I in Vol. 2; LLHS, 52. Elliott lists Spencer’s inventions, “Erasmus Darwin,” 15. 166. AHS 1:221–­22. 167. Money and work hours: LLHS, 51; study schedule: LLHS, 33–­34; music: AHS 1:196–­97. 168. Miall: LLHS, 35–­6; laws of society: AHS 1:209. Spencer’s argument is doubt­ ful. He assumed that states were outside but that persons were within the system of laws of nature. Thus individual persons could act to protect them­ selves but individual states could not act to protect themselves or their mem­ bers. See Elwick, “Herbert Spencer” and Styles of Reasoning, on Spencer’s concept of the individual. 169. On Miall and these associated political movements see Machin, Politics and the Churches. 170. AHS 1:218–­20; LLHS, 36–­37. 171. LLHS, 38–­45; AHS 1:225–­38. 172. LLHS, 46. 173. AHS 1:195–­96, 226, 240–­47. Spencer published some of these unappreci­ ated articles and unrealized inventions as appendices in AHS, vol. 1. The Phil. Mag. article (App. F) was published in February 1844, that is, before Vestiges. 174. LLHS, chaps. V–­VI; AHS, vol. 1, chaps. XVIII–­XXIII (Pilot, 259). On the political context see Peel, Herbert Spencer, chap. 3.

487

Notes to chapter one

175. AHS 1:322 and 370. 176. AHS, vol. 1, chap. XXIII (esp. 333–­34 and 341–­42). On Spencer’s relation­ ships at the Economist see also Ruth Dudley Edwards, “Wilson, James,” ODNB, and Michael Taylor, Philosophy of Spencer, 13–­14. 177. AHS 1:344 and 346 (aunt and uncle); 342 (Whittington Club). 178. The Chapman circle: Ashton, Eliot, chap. 4; Dodd, George Eliot, 158–­69; Spen­ cer, AHS 1:347–­72, passim. Spencer on Evans: AHS 1:394–­98 and 2:445; Hughes, George Eliot, 166; Eliot’s response to Spencer: Ashton, George Eliot, 97. 179. Financial arrangements: AHS 1:357; Wellesley Index 3:548n91. Chapman’s invitation: AHS 1:372; Francis, Herbert Spencer, 136. 180. Ashton, G. H. Lewes, chap. 6 (masthead: 88). 181. Haythorne Papers: AHS 1:385–­86. The Leader reviewed Social Statics over three issues (LLHS, 58n2). 182. Evans’s importance at the Westminster: Ashton, George Eliot, 92–­93; Dodd, George Eliot, 197–­8; Hughes, George Eliot, 156, 150 (uncredited). Spencer’s contributions to both the Westminster and the Leader are identified in Dun­ can’s bibliography, LLHS, 579–­80. 183. Larken: Ashton, G. H. Lewes, 88–­89, and Lewes, Letters 1:180–­81. Pattison: Wellesley Index, vol. 3, Westminster Review entries for 1855 and 1857. 184. AHS 1:372 (Manchester industrialist) and 1:408 (Kingsley). 185. Ashton, G. H. Lewes, 90–­91; Lewes, Letters 1:193–­5. 186. Spencer to his father, AHS 1:346 (Spencer’s italics). Spencer assigns the conversation at issue to early 1849. 187. Lewes, Letters 1:154. Lewes discussed his philosophical and religious opin­ ions in letters to the Reverend George Crabbe in 1847–­48. 188. Taylor, Philosophy of Spencer, 14, emphasizes Thomas Hodgskin rather than the Chapman circle. 189. AHS 1:242, 312, 379–­82. 190. Spencer, who usually emphasized his independence from others, admitted that he learned from Lewes (AHS 1:391–­92). Lewes’s Biographical History (1846) sold 40,000 copies within twelve years from publication. It was reported to be read at Oxford and Cambridge and by artisans and women (Lewes, Letters 1:261, 231; Ashton, Lewes, 49). Vestiges (1844) sold at most 21,000 copies in twelve years (Secord, Victorian Sensation, 131). 191. AHS 1:384. 192. Haythorne Papers: LLHS, 66, 579. Use of von Baer: AHS 2:9. 193. [G. H. Lewes—­my attribution] “Lyell and Owen on Development,” Leader, 18 October 1851, 996–­97. Lewes often wrote to Owen in the 1850s. 194. Spencer and Owen: AHS 1:368 and 2:24. Copies distributed: LLHS, 66 and 70. 195. LLHS, 64–­66. 196. AHS 1:402.

488

Notes to chapter one

197. Adrian Desmond’s Huxley: The Devil’s Disciple is the authoritative source on Huxley’s early life. This account depends heavily on Desmond’s chaps. 1–­9. Except for quotations, references are given only for material that supple­ ments Desmond. On the Ealing school see Mozley, Reminiscences of Oriel, 1:13. Paul White’s biography, Thomas Huxley, takes issue with Desmond’s emphasis on conflict. I share Desmond’s view that Huxley’s personality was combative, and his emphasis on dissenting antagonism to the established Church. 198. The church rate: Machin, Politics and the Churches, and Desmond, Huxley DD, 10. 199. Thomas Southwood Smith, Divine Government, 1, 9 (creation), 24–­25 (in­ variable laws, intervention), 104–­5 (greater good). 200. “Sayings and doings,” cited in Desmond, Huxley DD, 8. 201. Desmond, Huxley DD, 13. 202. Desmond’s Politics of Evolution is the authoritative work on the science and politics of the reforming medical practitioners (RCS rule changes, 157–­61; radical democratic demands, 102–­5). 203. Desmond, Huxley DD, 28. 204. Desmond, Huxley DD, 42 (introductions), 36, 38, 43 (money). 205. Di Gregorio, T. H. Huxley’s Place, 5. 206. Winsor, Starfish (on the biology of these small creatures); Elwick, Styles of Reasoning, chap. 4, and “Herbert Spencer,” 50–­55 (on animal individuality). 207. Desmond, Huxley DD, 116 (hotch potch), 84 (stimulus), 83 (the old man). 208. White, Thomas Huxley, 19–­20. White’s is a less political interpretation of Huxley’s struggles than Desmond’s Huxley DD. My interpretations are closer to Desmond’s. 209. Desmond, Huxley DD, 86 (mother’s hopes), 63 (morals and religion), 394–­ 95 (judging hearts, truthfulness). Possible biblical sources include 1 Sam. 16:17 and Luke 16:15. 210. Desmond, Huxley DD, 79 and 135. 211. Desmond, Huxley DD, 131–­32 (parents), chap. 9 (money). Compare Tyn­ dall, whose scientific star had not risen so quickly but whose Queenwood salary of £150 was higher, his debts and obligations less. 212. Secord, Victorian Sensation, chaps. 13–­14. 213. Curthoys, “Careers,” esp. 503–­5; Stone, “Size,” 9 (private career). The es­ says in Oxford in the Nineteenth Century, Part I, ed. Brock and Curthoys, are thorough and subtle accounts of nineteenth-­century Oxford. Some older histories and the lives and letters of contemporaries are useful for their colorful examples. 214. From a parliamentary report, cited in LLBJ, 1:186. 215. Frederick Temple, Spottiswoode’s tutor, attended twice daily (Sandford, Memoirs of Archbishop Temple 2:436–­37). 216. Rupke, “Oxford’s Scientific Awakening,” 544–­46, 560–­61.

489

Notes to chapter one

217. In general, see Meisel, Public Speech; for specific examples, Mallet, Modern Oxford, 233–­35. 218. On undergraduate life, including its entertainments and excesses, see Curthoys and Day, “Oxford of Mr. Verdant Green.” Nockles argues that reputation was worse than reality (“Lost Causes,” 199). 219. Cited in Sanderson, Universities, 96; for examples see Mallet, Modern Oxford, 225–­26. 220. Wesleyans and members of the Church of Scotland were permitted to subscribe, but only if they had no contact “with a congregation of persons dissenting from the doctrine or discipline of the Church of England” while at Oxford (M. G. Brock, “Oxford, 1800–­1833,” 11). 221. Incomes varied enormously, the most successful lawyers and medical men, for example, earned multiple thousands. Scholarships: Faber, Jowett, 77; LLBJ, 1:103. Costs varied between colleges: see Mallet, Modern Oxford, 305–­6 and Stone, “Size,” 62–­63. Cambridge costs were similar (Rothblatt, Revolution, chap. 2). 222. Austen-­Leigh, Story of a Printing House, provides details of the Strahan and Spottiswoode companies over the generations (respectable, 15). The Crown leased rights to print certain bibles, prayer books, school texts, and almanacs to selected printers. Centuries of this practice are described in the histories of both Cambridge and Oxford University Presses. For Eyre’s lease see Carter, History of the Oxford University Press, 352–­55. 223. Austen-­Leigh, Story of a Printing House, 37. 224. Jones, “Balliol,” 176–­78. 225. Curthoys, “Unreformed,” 159 (ten scholars and sixty-­three commoners); Stone, “Size,” 6 and 60, for trends in admission numbers. 226. Balliol: LLBJ, 1:102–­3 (proportion, 102); Faber, Jowett, 112–­13. Rugby: Roth­ blatt, Revolution, 193. 227. See Curthoys and Day, “Oxford of Mr. Verdant Green,” 270–­71, on social divi­ sions among students. Recollections differ on the degree of social mixing: com­ pare J. C. Shairp (cited in Curthoys and Day, “Oxford of Mr. Verdant Green,” 270), Edwin Palmer (LLBJ, 1:102–­4), and H. S. Escott (Faber, Jowett, 113). 228. “Scientific Worthies: XXI—­Spottiswoode,” Nature 26 (April 1883): 597–­601 (on 597n3). 229. See the notes on students made each term by Richard Jenkyns, Master of Balliol, “Examinations III 1841–­46” (Balliol College Archives). 230. Jones, Balliol College, 180–­87, 190–­91; Curthoys “Unreformed,” 168–­69, 177. LLBJ, 1:87–­88. 231. Wilson, “Earlier Years,” 44; LLBJ, 2:239. 232. Galton, “Spottiswoode,” 491. Although Temple was appointed lecturer in logic and mathematics, he also lectured in classics (Wilson, “Earlier Years,” 63–­65). He is often described as a tutor. 233. Sources vary on dates (honors 1845–­46; prizes 1846–­47). Compare Boase, “Spottiswoode, William” and the Royal Society’s obituary ([Kempe], “Spot­ tiswoode”). Some (e.g., “Scientific Worthies,” Nature 27 (26 April 1883): 597–­

490

Notes to chapter one

601) omit the Johnstone but include a Junior University Scholarship. Other obituaries and lives derive from these three. 234. LLBJ, 1:104; Hinchliff, Benjamin Jowett, 4–­5. 235. Temple’s lectures: Wilson, “Earlier Years,” 87–­88. Jowett’s lectures: LLBJ, 1:117–­18; Faber, Jowett, 160. Temple’s reading: Wilson, “Earlier Years,” 53–­ 54; Hinchliff, Frederick Temple, 281. 236. Faber, Jowett, 140. 237. In addition to the histories of Oxford and biographies of participants (al­ ready referenced), the following summary draws on accounts of the Oxford movement that focus on the Oxford context: esp. Nockles, “Lost Causes”; Green, Religion at Oxford, chap. 11; O’Connell, Oxford Conspirators; W. R. Ward, Victorian Oxford, chap. 6; and on the biography of Ward by his son, Wilfrid Ward. References are given only for quotations and lesser-­known details. 238. Chadwick, Victorian Church, 1:42–­46; Jones, Balliol College, 191–­92. 239. Marvin O’Connell’s phrase (Oxford Conspirators, 324). 240. For Ward’s arguments see Wilfrid Ward, Ward, 158–­75 (darkness, 174). 241. Faber, Jowett, 151; Wilson, “Earlier Years,” 44 and 89. 242. Faber, Oxford Apostles, 403 (dinner hour). 243. Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, 51 (truth). 244. According to Faber ( Jowett, 177) and Turner ( John Henry Newman, 515), the books were published on 31 May and in early June respectively. 245. Wilfrid Ward, Ward, 343; W. R. Ward, Victorian Oxford, 120; Turner, John Henry Newman, 521. 246. Green, Religion at Oxford, 277 (weather); LLBJ, 1:95 (execution); Wilfrid Ward, Ward, 342 (hisses). 247. LLBJ, 1:111–­15 248. Cited in Nockles, “Lost Causes,” 262. 249. G[laisher], “Spottiswoode” 150 (lectures); Francis Galton, Memories, 184 (lost fortune). For hints of the problems in the business see Austen-­Leigh, Story of a Printing House, 39–­41; Boase, “Spottiswoode, Andrew”; “Scientific Worthies,” 597. Spottiswoode left Oxford in 1846 according to the Royal Society’s obituary (K[empe], “Spottiswoode,” xxxv). 250. The other Spottiswoode printing company was restructured in 1848, when Spottiswoode senior, took his younger son, George, into the business. Spottiswoode senior retired completely in 1855 (Austen-­Leigh, Story of a Printing House, 53–­54). 251. K[empe], “Spottiswoode,” xxxv. 252. Meditationes analyticae, iii. The quote alluded to Newton (see Schaffer, “Newton on the Beach”). 253. Meditationes analyticae, v. For some criticisms see the 1855 referees’ reports in RR2.226–­228. 254. RSCSP lists all nineteenth-­century scientific articles, but does not include medicine.

491

Notes to chapter two

255. Bellon, “Hooker’s Ideals,” 76, makes a similar argument. 256. Age at marriage for the other men: Lubbock, twenty-­two; Hirst, twenty-­ four; Frankland, twenty-­six; Huxley, thirty; Hooker, thirty-­four; Tyndall, ca. fifty-­five. Common reasons for late marriage were financial expecta­ tions (which were class dependent) and lack of choice in constrained social circles. Chapter two

1.

Patrons were conventionally described as “friends.” Here I use patron-­ friend or “friend” to avoid ambiguity. On the language and practice of patronage see Perkin, Origins, 44–­52. 2. Bellon, “Hooker’s Ideals,” 66–­67 (Antarctic reputation), 56 (extracts from letters). Drayton brilliantly evokes Sir William’s mastery of clientage (these examples, Nature’s Government, 190–­91). Rhododendrons advertisement: Times, 12 March 1851. Capture: “India and China,” Times, 21 January 1850. 3. Bellon, “Hooker’s Ideals,” 56, 70. 4. Bellon (“Hooker’s Ideals”) and Endersby (Imperial Nature) make clear the insecurity of Hooker’s position before 1855, in spite of the advantages that accrued to Hooker through his father’s patronage. Henslow and Hitcham: Allan, Hookers of Kew, 181; S. Max Walters, “Henslow, John Stevens,” DNBS. 5. Hoppen, Mid-­Victorian Generation (chap. 2). Only 1.2 percent of income re­ cipients in England and Wales earned over £300 per year (table 2.2) in 1867. 6. Allan, Hookers of Kew, 180–­81. 7. British Association: BA Report 1851, xxx. Presidents’ appeal: Allen, Hookers of Kew; Bellon, “Hooker’s Ideals,” 56. Sir William’s appeal: Drayton, Nature’s Government, 191n108, 204, and Bellon, “Hooker’s Ideals,” 57n24. Available accounts differ in fact and emphasis. Older accounts, which emphasize the public virtue of the Hookers, should be treated cautiously (see Bellon, “Hooker’s Ideals,” 55n12). 8. Hooker’s employment: LLJDH 1:351 and 365. 9. For Sir William’s schemes and the political context see Drayton, Nature’s Government, 187–­89, 198–­99. 10. Bellon, “Hooker’s Ideals,” 68–­69; see also, Endersby, Imperial Nature, 300. 11. Ramsay, Diary; Endersby, Imperial Nature, 28. 12. Russell, Edward Frankland, 96. 13. For details Russell, Edward Frankland, 96–­101. The title of professor was loosely used, and Russell describes Frankland as lecturer in chemistry or assistant to Playfair (Edward Frankland, 97). 14. Kargon, Science in Victorian Manchester, 156. 15. On Frankland’s Manchester years, Kargon’s chap. 5 usefully supplements Russell’s Edward Frankland (chap. 7). Kargon identifies the appointment as half-­time (156) but Russell implies that a larger commitment was expected (160).

492

Notes to chapter two

16. Kargon, Science in Victorian Manchester, 158–­59, and Russell, Edward Frankland, 184. 17. Russell, Edward Frankland, 164–­65; Frankland to Argyll, 30 December 1851 (cited in Russell, Edward Frankland, 176). The duke was the 8th Duke of Ar­ gyll (acceded 1847) who was later a friend of Tyndall and often in dispute with Hooker, Huxley, and Lubbock. 18. Kargon, Science in Victorian Manchester, 160; Russell, Edward Frankland, 149–­50. 19. Russell, Edward Frankland, 167–­69. 20. Russell, Edward Frankland, 187. 21. Kargon, Science in Victorian Manchester, 156–­57; Russell, Edward Frankland, 191. 22. Russell, Edward Frankland, 176, 180–­82; Frankland to Tyndall, 13 November 1855 (cited in Russell, Edward Frankland, 176). 23. Tyndall, “Journal,” 20–­21 June 1850 (Faraday); 3 October 1850 (Phil. Mag.). 24. Tyndall, “Journal,” 7 August 1850 and 15 September 1855. 25. Tyndall’s letter to Hirst, 4 August 1850 ( JT/1/T/530; ordeal, points of im­ portance) is similar to his “Journal” entry, 7 August 1850 (terror). Member­ ship rules: BA Report 1852, xix. 26. “On Diamagnetism and Magnecrystallic Action,” BA Report 1851, 15–­ 18. Magnetism, the strong attraction of iron to magnets, had long been known. Over the preceding half century, it had been discovered that many substances—­called “diamagnetic”—­were weakly repelled by magnets. Plücker and Faraday had found that these weak forces varied with the orientation of the crystal between the magnet’s poles. See George Chrystal, “Magnetism,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed., 15:264–­65 and Jackson, “Tyndall and Diamagnetism.” 27. Loans: Tyndall, “Journal,” 11 June 1850; Tyndall to Hirst, 21 August 1850. Translations: “Journal,” 3 October and 2–­6 December 1850; Hirst, Journals, 3 October 1850. Tyndall was writing for the Leader and the Literary Gazette (“Journal,” 18 November and 8 December 1850; 17 May 1851); Hirst, Journals, 28 September and 18 November 1850; Hirst to Tyndall, 11 May 1851 ( JT/1/HTYP/131–­33); Tyndall to Hirst, 17 May and 15 July 1851 ( JT/1/ HTYP/131–­35, 147–­48). 28. Tyndall, “Journal,” 6 December 1850. The People’s College was a project of Phillips to provide “first rate instruction to classes who could not afford to go to Cambridge etc.”: Hirst to Tyndall, 16 April 1850 ( JT/1/HTYP/70). 29. “Journal,” 28 April 1851. 30. Tyndall, “Journal,” 30 April 1851 (class); 11 May 1851 (Physical Society). 31. Tyndall, “Journal,” 31 May 1851; Francis to Tyndall, 5 March 1851 ( JT/1/ TYP/11/3573); Tyndall to Hirst, 29 April and 29 July 1851 ( JT/1/HTYP/128 and 152); “Journal,” 2 April 1851 (salary). 32. “Naval Intelligence,” Times, 9 December 1850. 33. Desmond, Huxley DD, 152–­56, 162.

493

Notes to chapter two

34. Desmond, Huxley DD, 151 and 161. 35. T. H. Huxley, Rattlesnake, 358. 36. Prince’s visit: Tyndall to Hirst, 15 July 1851 ( JT/1/T/543) and LLTHH, 1:89; committee process: LLTHH, 1:89–­90; recommendation: BA Report 1851, xxx. 37. LLTHH, 1:89. 38. Tyndall to Hirst, 15 July 1851 ( JT/1/T/543), and Tyndall, “Journal,” 9 Sep­ tember 1851. 39. Tyndall, “Journal,” 9 November 1851 (FRS); 9 May 1852 (support for ex­ periments); 26 August 1852 (section secretary). 40. Tyndall, “Journal,” 9 November 1851. 41. Desmond pays close attention to Huxley’s financial circumstances: see Huxley DD, 162–­78. The Royal Institution lecture: Desmond, Huxley DD, 175–­76, 179–­80 and LLTHH 1:98–­99. The translation, of Albert von Kölliker’s Manual of Human Histology, was published in two volumes in 1853 and 1854. 42. Busk, “Observations on Certain Points in the Anatomy of a Species of Thaumantias,” Transactions of the Microscopical Society of London 3 (1848–­ 49): 23–­30 (30 on Huxley). 43. Ellen Busk: Jensen, “Intimate and Trusted Friend,” and Desmond, Huxley DD, chap. 9. On the Busks see also chap. 1.1 above and 3.5 below. 44. Brock and Meadows, Lamp of Learning, chaps. 4–­5 (Francis told Tyndall of his parentage, 115). 45. Tyndall, “Journal,” 9 May 1852 (draft letter to Huxley); 17 June 1851 (in­ troduced by Huxley). 46. Desmond, Huxley DD, 181. 47. Tyndall to Hirst, 17 October 1852 ( JT/1/T/554); Tyndall, “Journal,” 16 Oc­ tober 1852 and 3–­8 January 1853. Tyndall used his close relationship with Francis through the Phil. Mag. to advance his own career. “Introduction,” CIT, Barton, Rankin, and Reidy, 3: xxiii–xxiv. 48. See LLTHH 1:307; Desmond, Huxley DD, 181–­82; Barton, “Professionals and Gentlemen,” 421; LJT, 35–­36. 49. Huxley to sister: LLTHH 1:96. 50. Huxley to MacLeay, LLTHH 1:93–­94. 51. White cites and discusses this Forbes-­Huxley exchange (Thomas Huxley, 43). As he emphasizes, deference and condescension were appropriate attitudes in a patronage system (45). See also Desmond, Huxley DD, 183; Rupke, Richard Owen, 8–­10. 52. Antagonist: Tyndall to Hirst, 19 September 1852 ( JT/1/T/553); Thomson and Stokes: Tyndall, “Journal,” 3 and 4 September 1852; friends: “Journal,” 3 and 6 September 1852. 53. Tyndall, “Journal,” 17 and 24 October 1852 (invitation); Forgan, “Tyndall,” 49–­52 (RI context). 54. Tyndall, “Journal,” 20 February 1852 (Hampshire); 21 January 1853 (RI visit). 55. Tyndall, “Journal,” 9 February 1853.

494

Notes to chapter two

56. Tyndall, “Journal,” 11 February 1853. 57. Tyndall, “Journal,” 22 February 1853; Huxley to Tyndall, 25 February 1853 (  JT/1YP/9/2859–­61). 58. Forgan, “Tyndall,” 49–­52. For the offers and negotiations see esp. Tyn­ dall, “Journal,” 18 and 24 March; 26 April; 15 and 26 May; 6 July; and 12 August 1853; Hirst: Journals, 26 April and 6 July 1853. Gassiot had been a Royal Society reformer, see chap. 1.1. 59. Tyndall, “Journal,” 17 October 1853; 10 June, 23 September, and 27 No­ vember 1854; LJT, 60, 62, and 81. 60. Tyndall, “Journal,” 7 May (Faraday), 1 May (Whewell), 31 March 1854 (headache; the lecturer was J. H. Gladstone). On the work Tyndall put into lecturing, see Howard “Physics and Fashion.” 61. Frankland to Tyndall, 21 April 1855 ( JT/1/F/43) and Desmond, Huxley: DD, 217. 62. Speculirt: Desmond, Huxley DD, 184. I thank Simon Thode for this transla­ tion. Spencer and Tyndall shared common backgrounds in railway engineer­ ing but the extant evidence on their early friendship suggests it was based on shared philosophical interests rather than common employment experiences. 63. Huxley, “Contemporary Literature—­Science,” WR, n.s., 5 ( January 1854): 254–­70. See Desmond, Huxley DD, 184–­94, and Ashton, George Eliot, 77–­ 109. Desmond explains Huxley’s venom as the unemployed expert’s envy of those who made money from less-­expert science. 64. Tyndall, “Journal,” 14 May 1854; Desmond, Huxley DD, 190–­97 (Westminster), 195–­207 (positions and money). 65. Tyndall, “Journal,” 9 August 1853 (womanhood); 7 November 1855 (bank deposit); 25 March 1856 (Hooker). 66. The circle can be identified through the dinner parties recorded in Tyndall’s journal. 67. Russell, Edward Frankland, 188–­89; Kargon, Science in Victorian Manchester, 165–­66, 169. 68. Russell, Edward Frankland, 202–­12, covers this part of Frankland’s career (Bence Jones, cited 203). 69. Nasmyth to Frankland, 24 November 1857 (cited in Russell, Edward Frankland, 204). 70. Among many comments on the Pollocks see Tyndall, “Journal,” 14 May 1854; 2 and 21 May 1857. 71. Huxley: LLTHH 1:122–­23. Owen: Gruber and Thackray, Richard Owen, 62–­ 65. Tyndall to Playfair, 21 November 1859 (copy in “Journal,” 19 Novem­ ber 1859; JT/1/T/1126). 72. Hirst to Tyndall, 28 November 1854 ( JT/1/H/208); Tyndall, “Journal,” late November 1854; Hirst, Journals, 13 November 1859; Tyndall to Playfair, [mid-­November] 1859 ( JT/1/P/1163). 73. Tyndall to Playfair, [mid-­November] 1859 ( JT/1/P/1163); Hirst, Journals, 6 October 1859.

495

Notes to chapter two

74. Hirst, Journals, 8 November 1865. 75. Hirst, Journals, 11 July 1865; 15 July 1867 (pay); 28 August 1865 (sacrificed). 76. To Leonard Huxley, 4 November 1881 (cited in LLTHH 2:32); Desmond, Huxley EHP, 134–­35. 77. Bellon, “Hooker’s Ideals,” 67. 78. Richards, “Huxley and Woman’s Place,” 258, and Desmond, Huxley DD, 228. 79. Tyndall, “Journal,” 7 and 14 March 1858; 16 December 1860. 80. Hirst, Journals, 21 October 1860; Brock and MacLeod, Natural Knowledge, “Introduction,” 14 and 19. 81. Brock and MacLeod, Natural Knowledge, “Introduction,” 12–­13, on Hirst’s ideals of womanhood. 82. Hirst, Journals, 4 December 1859. 83. Hirst, Journals, 20 November 1859 and 24 March 1861. 84. Desmond, Huxley DD, 298; Hirst, Journals, 1 September and 17 Novem­ ber 1861. 85. “The Earl of Rosse’s Soirée,” Times, 24 May 1852. 86. Huxley, June 1851 (cited in Desmond, Huxley DD, 165). 87. Scientific, cultural, and social elites also mixed in the Athenaeum Club, which is discussed in the following section. 88. Tyndall, “Journal,” 3 and 7 September 1852. 89. Tyndall, “Journal,” 9 May 1852 (height); 2 July 1852 (Sabine surprised); 6 and 7 July (draft of Tyndall’s letter and copy of Sabine’s reply). Tyndall later regretted his openness with Sabine (e.g., “Journal,” 12 December 1852 and 12 May 1855). 90. Allan Chapman, “Herschel, Frederick William,” DNBS; Endersby, Imperial Nature, esp. 262–­67; Secord, “Scientific Conversation”; and chap. 1.1. In “Gentlemanly Politeness,” John Tosh argues that these gentlemanly codes were less important in the mid-­nineteenth century, but see counterexam­ ples from Hooker in chaps. 2.3 and 3.1, and chap. 4.3 for the importance of manners in the Royal Society’s president. 91. Debus: Tyndall to Hirst, 7 December 1853 ( JT/1/HTYP/296). On Tyndall’s reading see chap. 1.2 above. Opera: Tyndall, “Journal,” 26 December 1851. 92. From an early letter of Tyndall to Faraday, 28 November 1851 ( James, Correspondence, 4:2476). Burchfield first noted Tyndall’s admiration for Faraday (“Tyndall at the R.I.,” 150). 93. Tyndall, “Journal,” 7 December 1854. On the significance of Faraday’s San­ demanianism see Cantor, Michael Faraday. See also, Gay and Gay, “Brothers in Science,” 438–­40 and, for a rare criticism, JWW, 21 September 1872. 94. Tyndall, “Journal,” 3 February 1854 (RI lecture); 20 September 1854 (rail­ way coach); 5 October and 5 November 1853 (warmth). 95. Tyndall, “Journal,” 10 February 1854 (Argyll); 21 July 1856 (weekly income); 14 May 1854 (Pollocks); 11–­13 January 1856 (Carlyle); LJT, 75 (Tennyson).

496

Notes to chapter two

96. Hirst to Tyndall, 15 March 1853 ( JT/1/HTYP/241). 97. Tyndall, “Journal,” 31 May 1851 (nutriment); 9 February 1853 (struggle); Hirst to Tyndall, 7 October 1852, JT/1/HTYP/210 (pure manliness). 98. Hirst to Tyndall, 7 October 1852 (as copied by Tyndall, “Journal,” 16 Octo­ ber 1852). 99. Tyndall, “Journal,” 24 October 1852; 16 January 1853; 12 October 1853; 13 June 1857. 100. Tyndall, “Journal,” 15 September 1855; Tyndall to Faraday, 25 Septem­ ber 1855, and Faraday to Tyndall, 6 October 1855 ( James, Correspondence 4:3026 and 3027). 101. Tyndall to Hirst, 17 September 1855 ( JT/1/T/HTYP/414). 102. Tyndall, “Journal,” 5 November 1853. 103. Hirst, Journals, 6 November 1859 (on Tyndall). Tyndall hinted to Hirst of his desire for marriage, 9 August 1853 ( JT/1/HTYP/254). Bence Jones’s fam­ ily: Tyndall, “Journal,” February to April 1856. On Tyndall’s friendships with women, the manuscript version of his journal is more complete than the typescript (for example, February–­March and May–­June 1857). 104. Tyndall, “Journal,” 26 June 1853. 105. Tosh, “Gentlemanly Politeness.” 106. Tyndall, “Journal,” 5 October and 22 November 1853. The award was dis­ puted and Tyndall turned it down with excessive high-­mindedness (see Jack­son, “Tyndall and the Royal Medal,” for details). 107. Tyndall to Hirst, 6 December 1853 ( JT/1/T/583). Discussions with De la Beche: Tyndall, “Journal,” 8–­10 November and 1 December 1853. 108. Tosh, “Gentlemanly Politeness,” 458, 460. 109. White, Thomas Huxley (Forbes, 24). 110. Airy to Forbes, 3 March 1859 (cited in Hevly, “Heroic Science,” 81). 111. Hirst to Tyndall, 10 April 1855 (cited in LJT, 71) and 24 December 1855 ( JT/1/H/221). 112. On the Lubbock family and John Lubbock’s early life, both the Victorian Life and Letters (LLJL) by Hutchinson and the recent biography, Science, Pol­ itics and Business, by Mark Patton are useful. This section also draws inten­ sively on Lubbock’s “Diary 1853–­63.” 113. Lubbock, “Diary, 1853–­63,” 15 and 27 October 1854. 114. Patton, Science, Politics and Business, 28; Lubbock, “Diary, 1853–­63,” 27 and 30 June 1855; Owen to Lubbock, 15 August 1855 (Avebury 49638.22). 115. Huxley to Lubbock, 30 January 1858; Busk to Lubbock, 6 October 1858; Huxley to Lubbock, 5 December 1856; Busk to Lubbock 8 May 1857 (Avebury 49638.100, 125, 45, 60). 116. Lubbock, “Diary, 1853–­63,” 8 August 1853. 117. LLJL 1:22. 118. Lubbock, “Diary, 1853–­63,” 18 March 1854 (first pay); 18 September and 30 December 1854 (partnership). For partial financial records see “Accounts” (LUA.12).

497

Notes to chapter two

119. Lubbock, “Diary, 1853–­63,” 18 September 1854; 5 February and 9 March 1855 (societies); 3 and 9 January 1855 (lectures); Patton, Science, Politics, and Business, 24–­25. 120. Entomological nomination: LLJL, 2:269–­70. Geological nomination: Lyell to Lubbock, 16 June and 6 December 1855 (Avebury 49638.16–­17 and 25). 121. Hume, Learned Societies, 29; “Accounts,” (LUA.12); and table 1.1 above. Lubbock’s financial circumstances changed on his marriage in 1856 (Pat­ ton, Science, Politics and Business, 29). 122. Huxley to Lubbock, [May 1858] and Owen to Lubbock, 27 January 1858 (Avebury 49638.114 and 98–­99). 123. I draw on Bellon, “Hooker’s Ideals,” for this account of Hooker’s vision for science; see also chaps. 1.1 and 2.1. Advice: Lyell to Hooker, 7 May 1854 ( JDH/2/1/14.252–­3). The best general account of Bentham’s life is Stevens, “George Bentham.” 124. Hooker to Huxley, [1861] (HP 3.97). 125. Tyndall to Hirst, [20–­28] November 1857] ( JT/1/T/936). 126. Rowlinson, “Tyndall’s Glaciology”; Russell, Edward Frankland, 427–­28; Hevly, “Heroic Science”; Barton, “Scientific Authority,” 229–­30. 127. Endersby, Imperial Nature, esp. 13–­14, and Rehbock, Philosophical Naturalists. 128. James Moore, “Green Gold,” and Endersby, Imperial Nature. 129. Hooker and Henslow on teaching: LLJDH, 1:388–­98. On examinations in general: Roach, Public Examinations. 130. Hooker on examinations: LLJDH 1:385–­401 (“important reforms,” 387). Busk’s positions: “Busk” in Plarr, Lives. Indian and British examinations: Roach, Public Examinations, 4. 131. Hooker to Huxley, [April 1856], (HP 3.23, printed in LLJDH 1:368–­69). 132. Hooker on scientific societies: to Huxley, [April 1856] (HP 3.23); to Darwin, [8–­18 January 1863] (CCD 13:19). On the Linnean Society: Gage and Stearn, Bicentenary History, 156–­57; LLJDH 1:407–­8. 133. On Francis Hamilton’s “Commentary on the Hortus Malabaricus” see Gage, History (pabulum, 76) and David Mabberley, “Francis Hamilton (née Bu­ chanan),” DNBS. 134. Relationship of other natural history societies to the Linnean Society: Gage and Stearn, Bicentenary History, 30–­33 and 39–­41; Stevens, “George Ben­ tham,” 198–­99. Fragmentation: Hooker to Huxley, [April 1856], HP3.23. 135. Linnean Society changes: Gage and Stearn, Bicentenary History, 45, 49–­54, 162. Hooker’s opinions: Bellon, “Hooker’s Ideals” (on Brown, 63); Drayton, Nature’s Government, 200. 136. Obstructiveness: Gage, History, 49; funks: Hooker to Huxley, [1853–­54] (HP 3.5–­7). On the people, see David Mabberley, “Bennett, John Joseph,” DNBS, and David Knight, “Bell, Thomas,” DNBS. 137. Stevens, “Hooker, Bentham, Gray and Mueller on Species Limits,” 354. 138. Hooker to Huxley, [1853–­54] (HP 3.5–­7), and [April 1856] (HP 3.23) for the publication schemes and the desired colleagues.

498

Notes to chapter two

139. Hooker to Asa Gray, 17 March 1855 (cited in Bellon, “Hooker’s Ideals,” 72–­73); Huxley to Hooker, 19 December 1860 (LLTHH 1:222). 140. Hooker to Huxley, two undated letters of March–­April 1856 (HP 3.23–­27); see also, Barton, “Professionals and Gentlemen,” 427–­28, and chap. 4.1. 141. Council Minute Books (Linnean Society Archives), No. 3, 1 May 1855 (election); 23 July 1858 (undersecretary). History of the Linnean Society’s publications: Gage and Stearn, Bicentenary History, 157–­63 and appendix 2. Bentham’s publications: RSCSP:1. 142. Bellon, “Hooker’s Ideals,” 62–­63, discusses these issues. Hooker to Asa Gray, 26 July 1858 (cited in Stevens, “George Bentham,” 197). 143. Bell’s Anniversary Addresses were printed in the Proc. LSL: 24 May 1861, x–­xx (Mr. Busk, xviii; conversations, xii); 24 May 1856 (new members, xx), 24 May 1860 (new members and debt, xii; zoological papers, xiii). 144. Dates in the text refer to the Council Minute Books (No. 3, and, from April 1859, No. 4). 145. Cited in Stevens, “Hooker, Bentham, Gray, and Mueller on Species Limits,” 355. 146. Gage and Stearn, Bicentenary History, 50–­53. 147. Although Hooker wanted supportive allies on the council, his friends attended infrequently. Carpenter in his second term was the only one who approached 50 percent attendance (recorded in the Council Minute Books). 148. Desmond, Huxley DD, 236; Henfrey to Huxley, 13 March 1857 (HP 18.109). 149. Huxley present (“General Minute Book, No. 7,” 18 December 1855; 20 January and 5 November 1857; 3 June 1858); elected (Proc. LSL, 16 Decem­ ber 1858); without fees (“Council Minute Book No. 3,” 20 January 1859). 150. Bennett, “Anniversary Meeting,” Proc. LSL, 24 May 1861, xii. 151. New president: Hooker to Huxley, [17 April 1861] (HP 3:88). I have found no account of the discussion over the principle of alternating the presi­ dency between botany and zoology. 152. Gage and Stearn, Bicentenary History, 67–­73; Stevens, “George Bentham,” 199. 153. The disputes over the natural history collections were complex and in­ volved many viewpoints and actors. My interpretation begins from Rupke’s accounts (in “Albertopolis” and Richard Owen); draws on Drayton’s brief discussion (Nature’s Government, 200–­201); and adds new material from letters in the Huxley, Hooker, and Darwin correspondence. Undated letters between Hooker and Huxley in the Huxley Papers add to the difficulties of sorting out changes of opinion and strategy over time. Undoubtedly further letters remain to be found in the archives of Hooker’s less studied allies. Panizzi’s plan was reported in “Report from the Select Committee on the British Museum,” QR 104 ( July 1858), 201–­24 (grand masses, 201; pagan art, 216). 154. Drayton, Nature’s Government, 200.

499

Notes to chapter two

155. Hooker to Huxley, 18 June 1858 (HP 3.36–­38). In classifying Wrottesley, an astronomer, as a physicist, Hooker showed as little discrimination as those who considered that a geologist could represent natural history. 156. The Literary Gazette published the Memorial, as it began circulating, on 19 June 1858 (“The British Museum,” 589–­90). The reference to the botanical collections was removed before submission (the final version is reprinted in CCD 7:523–­25. The Daily News report appeared under “Court News,” 5 July 1858. Darwin to Murchison, 19 June [1858] (CCD 7:112). 157. South Kensington: Forgan and Gooday, “Fungoid Assemblage,” 157 and 164; Rupke, Richard Owen, 42–­43; Barton, “Professionals and Gentle­ men,” 431–­32; Forgan and Gooday, “Constructing South Kensington,” 5. Secret anxiety: Hooker to Huxley, 18 June 1858 (HP 3.36–­38); also Huxley to Hooker, 5 September 1858 (LLTHH 1:160) on South Kensington, and Darwin to Huxley, 23 October 1858 (CCD 7:175–­76), quoted below, on the higher status of art. 158. “Report from the Select Committee on the British Museum,” QR 104 ( July 1858), 201–­24 (warehouse, 201; Newgate, 213; Owen, 223). 159. Hooker to Huxley, [September 1858] (HP 3.49–­51) and Hooker’s later let­ ter to Murchison, 27 November 1858 (cataloged as Hooker to Huxley, HP 30.52–­53). 160. Shoulders together: Huxley to Hooker, [19 September 1858] (HP 2.61–­62). Decorum and “plant life”: Hooker to Huxley, [September 1858] (HP 3. 49–­ 51). Light: Huxley to Hooker, 5 September 1858 (HP 2.35; printed LLTHH 1:160). 161. Owen, “Address,” BA Report 1858, xcv–­xcvii. Rupke, “Albertopolis,” 82 and 85. Against South Kensington: Hooker to Huxley, 18 June 1858 (HP 3.36–­38); Huxley to Hooker, 5 September 1858 (HP 2.35). Against Owen: Carpenter to Huxley, 22 October 1858 (HP 12.94). 162. Conciliate: Carpenter to Huxley, 22 October 1858 (HP 12.94); mummies, governing classes, expense: Darwin to Huxley, 23 October [1858] (CCD 7:175–­76); alarm, revised draft: Bentham to Huxley, 25 October 1858 (HP 10.302); Bentham’s care with words: Stevens, “George Bentham,” 196. Paul White’s interpretation that Huxley “spearheaded” the campaign (Thomas Huxley, 55) underestimates the importance of these others. 163. Evil: Darwin to Hooker, 29 [October 1858] (CCD 7:177); Lyell’s name: Dar­ win to Huxley, 3 November [1858] (CCD 7:183). 164. The memorial is reprinted in CCD 7:525–­29. Hooker intended to dine with Lyell (Hooker to Huxley, [1858], HP 3.43–­44), although whether this was before or after Darwin’s advice is unclear. 165. Darwin to Hooker, 24–­25 and 27 [November 1858] (CCD 7:208, 211–­12); Hooker to Murchison, 27 November 1858 (under Hooker to Huxley, HP 30.52); Darwin to Huxley, 1 December [1858] (CCD 7:213–­14). 166. Huxley to Hooker, 2 December 1858 (HP 2.39–­42).

500

Notes to chapter three

167. The letter from Wallace that prompted Darwin to write a short account of his theory was discussed in some of the same letters as the first memorial over the British Museum’s natural history collections. 168. [Cowell], The Athenaeum, 11, and Collini, Public Moralists, 16. Darwin was impressed by the Athenaeum, as Desmond and Moore show (Darwin, 253). 169. Collini (Public Moralists, chap. 1) uses membership of the Athenaeum to identify a cultural elite. 170. Hooker’s election: Desmond and Moore, Darwin, 318. Hooker and Darwin’s discussion of Huxley: Barton, “Professionals and Gentlemen,” 429. 171. Hooker to Huxley, [26 January 1858] (HP 3.28–­29, in LLTHH 1:150). 172. Athenaeum, Rules and List of Members, 1891, with further dates supplied by the Athenaeum librarian. 173. Desmond, Huxley DD, 242; Hooker to Huxley, 26 January 1858 (HP 3.28–­ 29). Huxley, who could not afford to join the Linnean Society, paid 25 guineas for admission to the Athenaeum plus the 6 guineas annual fee ([Cowell], The Athenaeum, 127). On fees compare table 1.1. 174. Tyndall’s description in a letter to Hirst, 8 February 1858 ( JT/1/HTYP/508–­9). 175. Lyell to Ticknor, 23 January 1858 (LLCL 2:279–­80); Hooker to Darwin, [25] Feb­ ruary 1858 (CCD 7:34); Lyell to Hooker, 6 February 1858 ( JDH/2/1/14.273). 176. “Valedictory,” Fortnightly Review 38 (1882): 518. Shattock, “Parentage,” 145–­46, on the range of religious periodicals; Barton, “Just before Nature,” on scientific “organs” promoted in the 1860s. 177. Tyndall, “Journal,” 17 and 24 January 1858. 178. Hooker to Frankland, [ January–­February 1858] (HP 9.220–­23). 179. The plan: Huxley to Tyndall and Hooker, 20 April 1858 (in LLTHH 1:139; and HP 2.33–­34). Hooker’s response: [21 April 1858] (LLJDH 1:412). Tyn­ dall’s response: [April 1858] (HP 8.35). Maskelyne was a Christian socialist (Meadows, Science and Controversy, 18), and Christian socialists supported the spread of scientific knowledge (chap. 3.4 below). 180. Hooker to Huxley, 12 December 1860 ( JDH/2/13/213); and Huxley to Hooker, 19 December 1860 (LLTHH 1:222). Chapter three

1. 2. 3.

A question answered inadequately in Barton, “Professionals and Gentle­ men,” 442n82. Huxley to Darwin, 23 November 1859 (CCD 7:241). On Huxley at this time see Desmond, Huxley DD, chaps. 14–­15 (reviews, 259–­65). Darwin to Hooker and Darwin to Huxley, 28 and 29 December 1859 (CCD 7:457–­58); Huxley to Hooker, 31 December 1859 (cited in Desmond, Huxley DD, 264). The Times was the highest circulation daily at this time (50,000–­ 60,000: Altick, English Common Reader, appendix C), but other newspapers overtook it when the economics of publishing changed in the mid-­1860s.

501

Notes to chapter three

4.

No just idea: Darwin to Hooker, 14 February 1860 (CCD 8:84). Huxley’s general position on natural selection: Bartholomew, “Huxley’s Defence”; Desmond, Huxley DD, 271; Bowler, Non-­Darwinian Revolution, 72–­82. Domi­ nation: Huxley, Westminster review of the Origin (cited in Barton, “Evolu­ tion: The Whitworth Gun,” 279). 5. The opening quote (Gilmour, Victorian Period, 130) is typical of more general literature. Reinterpretations: Browne, Charles Darwin: Place, 124; Desmond and Moore, Darwin, 492–­98; Desmond, Huxley DD, 278–­80; James, “Open Clash.” Shindy: Lyell to Sir Charles Bunbury, 4 July 1860 (LLCL 2:355). I draw here only on near-­contemporaneous accounts, not on distant memories, of participants, and therefore do not use secondary sources that neglect dates of their sources. 6. Eloquent: Darwin to Asa Gray, 3 July 1860 (CCD 8:274); Tory: Desmond and Moore, Darwin, 493. 7. The humorous tone of proceedings in Section D is conveyed by the report, “Meeting of the British Association,” Oxford Chronicle and Berkshire and Buckinghamshire Gazette, 21 July 1869. The Athenaeum, 7 July 1860, summarized humorous and serious exchanges (see extracts in CCD 8:591–­93). 8. Draper’s paper: Athenaeum, 14 July 1860 (rpt. CCD 8:593–­94), and Browne, Charles Darwin: Place, 120; smash: James, “Open Clash,” 175; Huxley’s par­ ticipation: Desmond, Huxley DD, 276–­78; Hooker’s participation: Hooker to Darwin, 2 July 1860 (CCD 8:270). 9. In “Open Clash” James collates various contemporary reports, see 177 (numbers present; length of Draper’s paper), 179 (Wilberforce’s ques­ tion). The Athenaeum of 14 July 1860 reported the lecture and the debate (CCD 8:593–­97) but not the unseemly exchange about personal ancestry, nor the contributors who were silenced by the chair. Huxley’s response: a short version was reported in Wilberforce’s biography (cited in James, “Open Clash,” 183); Huxley’s account, written two months later to Dyster, 9 September 1860 (cited in James, “Open Clash,” 179) is similar to Lyell’s synthesis of the versions he had heard (Lyell to Bunbury, 4 July 1860, LLCL 2:335) but Huxley’s earlier letter to Darwin is lost. Hooker’s letter to Darwin, 2 July 1860 (CCD 8:270) is one of the earliest extant accounts of the affair. Hooker’s allusion to “Sam Oxon” referenced Wilberforce’s official signature, “Samuel Oxon.” or “S. Oxon.,” where Oxon. stands for “Oxoni­ ensis” (translated, “of Oxford”). 10. Hooker’s role: Huxley to Dyster, 9 September 1860 (cited in James, “Open Clash,” 179); Hooker to Darwin, 2 July 1860 (CCD 8:271); Lyell to Bunbury, 4 July 1860, LLCL 2:335. Wilberforce victorious: James, “Open Clash,” 181, and Browne, Charles Darwin: Place, 124. 11. Hooker to Francis Darwin, 30 October 1886 ( JDH/2/3/3/150). 12. Leonard Huxley’s reconstruction: James, “Open Clash,” 186–­87; LLTHH 1:179 and 181.

502

Notes to chapter three

13. Vice-­chancellor: Lyell to Bunbury, 4 July 1860, LLCL 2:335, and Desmond, Huxley DD, 280. Arthur Munby criticized the sermon (Diaries, 1 July 1860). On the assumptions embedded in polarized accounts of “war” between “science” and “religion” see Moore’s critique (Post-­Darwinian Controversies, 80–­85), and the introduction (I.3) above. 14. Desmond and Moore discuss Darwin’s polarized view of events in Dar­win, 489. 15. Hit: Hooker to Darwin, 2 July 1860 (CCD 8:271); smashed, our side, fight­ ing nobly: Darwin to Lyell, 30 July 1860 (CCD 8:306); Amalekites: Huxley to Hooker, 6 August 1860 (HP 2.72–­73). 16. Both Bellon, “Hooker Takes a ‘Fixed Post,’” and Endersby, Imperial Nature, discuss the relationship of natural selection to the principles of botanical classification. 17. Huxley’s Westminster review is reprinted in CE 2:22–­79 (Whitworth gun, 23). Huxley’s rhetoric: Barton, “Whitworth Gun.” My gloss is based on Bar­ ton, “Whitworth Gun,” 278–­78, Desmond, Huxley DD, 268, and Browne, Charles Darwin: Place, 106. 18. See the introduction (I.1), above. 19. Lubbock’s travels can be followed most easily in Patton, Science, Politics and Business, chaps. 4–­5. 20. Busk’s changing research interests can be followed through his publica­ tions, see RSCSP, vol. 1. 21. On Dublin context and the early years of the NHR see DeArce “The Natu­ ral History Review.” X Club sources provide additional material on the London series. Reports on circulation differ: compare CCD 8:295n4 and DeArce, 254. 22. The times, episcopophagous, adversaries: Huxley to Hooker, 17 July 1860 (HP 2.67–­68); plastic minds: Huxley to Lubbock, 17 July 1860 (Avebury 49639.14–­15). 23. Hooker’s warnings: Hooker to Huxley, 18 July 1860 (HP 3.119–­20); Dar­ win’s advice: Darwin to Huxley and Darwin to Lubbock, 20 July 1860 (CCD 8:294–­97); Darwin to Lyell, 30 July 1860 (CCD, 8:306). 24. Darwin received his copy in November 1860 (CCD 8:471). Huxley got his first issue out on time in January 1861, in spite of the sudden death of his eldest son, Noel, in September. 25. My identification here of a dual audience disagrees with Desmond’s inter­ pretation (Huxley DD, 284 and 342) that the NHR was aiming at a specialist audience. “Working” and “professed” naturalists were terms used by Hux­ ley and Hooker respectively when they wanted to identify active researchers (Barton, “Men of Science”; Endersby, Imperial Nature, 20–­25). I have found three different forms of the “Prospectus,” bound in various volumes of the NHR. The first, 1860 version (quoted here), was written in the future tense, listed all editors with their specialties, and promised three sections; the second had a few minor wording changes, including a shift

503

Notes to chapter three

26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

504

from future to present tense; the third, which dates from Huxley giving up the chief editorship in late 1863, had further word­ing changes, omit­ ted the list of editors, and announced the division of the contents into four sections. Indispensable: Huxley to Wright, 30 November 1860 (HP 29.106); Darwin’s approval: Darwin to Huxley, 10 November 1860 (CCD 8:471); Athenaeum: Desmond, Huxley DD, 290. CCD 11:10n5. NHR, 1 (April 1860): 155–­76 (fact, 172) and Desmond, Huxley DD, 299. Bibliographies: Huxley to E. P. Wright, 2, 10, 20, 30 November 1860, 6 De­ cember [1863] (HP 29.102–­6, 120–­21). Busk undoubtedly also wrote re­ views, for example, a review of eight works in four languages on craniom­ etry, NHR 2 (October 1862): 349–­60, was probably his. Huxley, “On the Zoological Relations of Man with the Lower Animals,” NHR 1 ( January 1861): 67–­84; Rolleston, “On the Affinities of the Brain of the Orang Utang,” NHR 1 (March 1861): 201–­17. Hooker, “On the Cedars of Lebanon, Taurus, Algeria, and India,” NHR 2 ( January 1862): 11–­18; Darwin, “Contributions to an Insect Flora of the Amazon Basin. By H. W. Bates, Esq.,” NHR 3 (April 1863): 219–­34 (Darwin’s authorship, CCD 11:75n30). Darwin to Huxley, 3 January [1861], 14 [ January 1862], and 10 [ January 1863] (CCD 9:1; 10:19; 11:29). Party organ: Alfred Newton, cited in Barton, “Professionals and Gentle­ men,” 434. Correspondence over Wright’s article includes: Huxley to Darwin, 26 No­ vember 1860; Darwin to Gray, 26 November 1860, 12 March and 11 April 1861 (CCD 8:523 and 528; 9:51 and 88). Balfour to Darwin, 14 January 1862, and Darwin to Hooker, 25 January 1862 (CCD 10:17–­18 and 48). Rolleston to Lubbock, 2 December [1861] (Avebury 49639.71–­73). Huxley to Wright, 11 May 1861 (HP 29.107–­8). Hooker to Darwin, [24 July 1862] and 6 January 1863 (CCD 10:335 and 11:14–­15). Hooker to Huxley, [4 January 1861] (HP 3.83). Darwin to Hooker, 15 January [1861] and 4 February 1861 (CCD 9:8 and 20); to Oliver, 20 January [1863] (CCD 11:62); and to Lubbock, 4 January [1863] (CCD 11:10). Huxley to Hooker, 21 July 1863 (HP 2.120–­22); Hooker to Darwin, 15 Sep­ tember 1863 (CCD 11:630). Volume 1: reviews 28 percent; original articles 44 percent of the whole; vol­ ume 2: 13 percent, 60 percent; volume 3: 31 percent, 38 percent. In vol­ume 4 the reviews rose to 58 percent and original articles fell to 26 per­ cent; volume 5: 58 percent, 21 percent. The bibliographies, which had

Notes to chapter three

previously occupied 28 percent, 25 percent, and 24 percent, respectively, disappeared. 43. Oliver to Darwin, 20 July 1863 (CCD 11:545). 44. Darwin to Sclater, 12 [March 1861] (CCD IX, 53). 45. Darwin’s praise: 27 January 1864 and 10 July 1865 (CCD 12:31 and 13:194). Impending failure: Hooker to Darwin, 13 July 1865 (CCD 13:200); circulation: Meadows, Science and Controversy, 25. 46. The scholarship of the Darwin Correspondence project enables this story to be told more fully than previously: see “Darwin and the Copley Medal” (CCD 12:509–­27, 514 for Sabine quote). 47. On Falconer: “Darwin and the Copley Medal,” (CCD 12:516), and A. Bow­ doin Van Riper, “Falconer, Hugh,” DNBS. It must have been a deliberate strategy that Hooker, who was on the council in both 1863 and 1864, was neither nominator nor seconder. 48. Darwin-­Falconer letters: 4, 7, and 8 November 1864 (CCD 12:395–­96, 401–­2). 49. Stokes was reading for Sabine, who was ill although present, hence Huxley corresponded with Stokes over the exact words spoken: see letters of 6, 7, 8, 9 December 1864 (CCD 12:450–­59). Tyndall and Hirst were sufficiently interested to report the incident in their journals (Tyndall, “Journal,” 30 No­ vember 1864; Hirst, Journals, 4 December 1864). 50. Hirst, Journals, 4 December 1859; Huxley, “On Species and Races, and Their Origin” (1860), rpt., SM 2:393. 51. Ruse, “Huxley and the Status of Evolution,” 149–­51. 52. Huxley to Spencer, 3 September 1860 (LLTHH 1:212–­13). 53. On the Essays and ensuing controversy see Altholz, Anatomy (sales, 100), and Ieuan Ellis, Seven against Christ. Altholz is useful for his clear chronol­ ogy and attention to legal detail. 54. The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua critically examined was completed in 1879 with its seventh volume. For a brief introduction to Colenso and his Pentateuch see Peter Hinchliff, “Colenso, William,” ODNB. Colenso’s place in theological development is debated in Draper, Eye of the Storm. 55. Sales figures: Lyell to Ticknor, 19 December 1862 (LLCL 2:360). 56. [Frederick Harrison], “Neo-­Christianity,” WR, n.s., 18 (October 1860): 293–­ 332; [Samuel Wilberforce], “Essays and Reviews,” QR 109 ( January 1861): 248–­305; editions: Altholz, Anatomy, 45. 57. Altholz, Anatomy, chap. 7. The letter was submitted by W. R. Fremantle: “Oxford Essays and Reviews,” Times, 16 February 1861. 58. [A. P. Stanley], “Essays and Reviews,” Edinburgh Review 113 (April 1861): 461–­500; Altholz, Anatomy, chap. 6. 59. The memorial and its development: Spottiswoode to Lubbock, 25 Febru­ ary 1861 (Avebury 49639.28–­29); Lubbock to Hooker, 27 February 1861 ( JDH/2/1/14.173).

505

Notes to chapter three

60. Lubbock to Hooker, 27 February 1861 ( JDH/2/1/14.173); Carpenter to Lubbock, 27 February 1861 (Avebury 49639.32–­33). The list in LLJL (1:58) differs from Lubbock’s list to Hooker. Desmond (Huxley DD, 298) suggests that Huxley did not sign. 61. Hooker to Lubbock, 29 February and 4 March 1861 ( JDH/2/3/10.240–­41, 242–­44); Lubbock to Hooker, 2 March 1861 ( JDH/2/1/14.174). 62. Herschel to Lubbock, 2 March 1861 (Avebury 49639.37–­38). Desmond, Huxley DD, 298, and Barton, “Professionals and Gentlemen,” 436, wrongly claim (through misreading another name as “Stanley” in a manuscript) that, in recognition of Stanley’s scientific theology, Hooker, Huxley, and Carpenter tried to get him elected to the Philosophical Club of the Royal Society. 63. Withdrawn: Thomas Wollaston to Lubbock, 7 April [1861] (Ave­ bury 49639.53); critical position: Hooker to Lubbock, 4 March 1861 ( JDH/2/3/10.243). 64. Improvement: Lubbock to Hooker, 5 March 1861 ( JDH/2/1/14.175); Essay Fund: Darwin to Lubbock, 1 August [1861] (CCD 9:228). 65. The Address: “The Bishops and Dr. Colenso,” The Times, 2 March 1863. Thirlwall: Altholz, Anatomy, 105–­7. Examples of clergy and bishop letters: The Times, 9, 19, and 30 March 1863. 66. Terror: John Westlake, reporting an MP’s comment to Lubbock, 1 April 1863 (Avebury 49640.49). The strong feelings at Oxford on Jowett’s case are clear in LLBJ, vol. 1, chap. X. 67. “Royal Geographical Society” and “Royal College of Surgeons,” The Times, 7 and 11 February 1863. Spottiswoode, a secretary of the RGS, was present at the former occasion. 68. Huxley Diary, 15 February 1861 (HP 70.(4)); Hooker to Lubbock, [late February 1863] (Avebury 49640.27); Lubbock to Hooker, 3 March 1863 ( JDH/2/1/14.179); Hooker to Darwin, 20 April 1863 (CCD 11:516); Hirst, Journals, 5 July 1863. 69. Powell to Darwin, 11 February 1863 (CCD 11:125). 70. This wording (from Westlake to Lubbock, 16 March 1863, Avebury 49640.40–­43) was a revised form of an earlier memorial. 71. The signatures, reported by Westlake to Lubbock, 20 February 1863 (Ave­ bury 49640.24), were those of the earlier memorial. A much wider search of archives (for example, for Colenso, Jowett, Lyell, and Westlake material) is required to clearly distinguish all the memorials and petitions that were undertaken in these months. In Barton, “Professionals and Gentlemen,” I misinterpreted this memorial as in support of Colenso, rather than initi­ ated by Colenso. Lyell and Westlake each said that the other was a chief promoter: Lyell to Lubbock, 14 February 1863; Westlake to Lubbock, 15 Feb­ ruary 1863; Hooker to Lubbock, 17 February and [late February] 1863 (Avebury 49640.11–­12, 13–­14, 20, 27). 72. Parliamentary support: Lyell to Lubbock, 14 February 1863; Westlake to Lubbock, 5 and 16 March, 1 April 1863 (Avebury 49640.11, 35–­37, 40–­43,

506

Notes to chapter three

73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81.

82.

83.

84.

85. 86. 87. 88.

89.

49); Lubbock to Hooker, 16 February and 3 March 1863 ( JDH/2/1/14.178 and 179). On the fate of Ebury’s bill see The Times reports on the House of Lords: 28 May 1862; 20 May 1863; 21 May 1863. Westlake to Lubbock, 19 and 20 February, 5 and 19 March 1863 (Avebury 49640.22, 23–­24, 35–­37, 45). Lubbock to Hooker, 16 February and 3 March 1863 ( JDH/2/1/14.178 and 179); Hooker to Lubbock, [late February] 1863 (Avebury 49640.27). Nomination: Lyell to Lubbock, 14 February 1863; Huxley to Lubbock, 16 February 1863 (Avebury 49640.11–­12, 15–­18). Failure: Carpenter to Lubbock, 11 March 1863, and Colenso to Lubbock 30 November 1863 (Avebury 49640.38–­9, 101). Busk to Lubbock, [before 27 February 1861] (Avebury 49639.74); Lyell to Lubbock, 14 February 1863 (Avebury 49640.12). Hooker to Darwin, 5 February 1864 (CCD 12:38). Tyndall, “Journal,” 13 November 1862. Legal proceedings: Chadwick, Victorian Church, 2:78–­83. Large declarations: Altholz, Anatomy, 117–­19. Erasmus Darwin wrote to Charles about various proposals, 1 February [1864] (CCD 12:35). Some confusion was created because there were both pro-­and anti-­Colenso funds: “The Colenso Fund,” Times, 2 April 1864, and Henry Douglas, Letter to the Editor, Times, 13 April 1864. Contributors: Hooker to Darwin, 16 February 1864 (CCD, 12:49); Lub­ bock to Hooker, [1864] ( JDH/2/1/14.182); Erasmus Darwin to C. Darwin, 1 February [1864], (CCD 12:35). Hooker’s criticisms: Hooker to Darwin, 16 February 1864, (CCD, 12:49). Late in life Hooker remembered Colenso more favorably. Gay, “Declaration”; Brock, “Fortieth Article”; Brock and MacLeod, “Declara­ tion,” 40–­42. The Lower House of Convocation was a formal representative body of the Canterbury See of the Church of England. Gay’s account is more sympathetic to the goals of the young Declaration­ ists than previous accounts. Huxley and Alexander Herschel: Gay, “Declara­ tion,” 25–­26 and 34n33. Herschel and Bowring’s letters as copied out by Hirst, Journals, 25 Septem­ ber 1864; Hooker to Darwin, 19 September 1864 (CCD 12:331); Hirst’s response: Journals, 11 September 1864. Hooker to Darwin, 19 September 1864 (CCD 12:331); Hirst, Journals, 16 and 25 September 1864; Hirst to Tyndall, 16 September 1864 ( JT/1/H/250). Bath Chronicle: cited in Brock and MacLeod, “Declaration,” 48. For Hooker’s religious beliefs see chap. 1.1. Huxley to Darwin, 2 July 1863 (CCD 11:516). Frankland’s daughter Sophie married Colenso’s son Frank in 1880 but Frankland’s biographer does not identify any family contact before 1876 (Russell, Edward Frankland, 354–­56). Hooker to Lubbock [late February] 1863 (Avebury 49640.27–­28).

507

Notes to chapter three

90. Lubenow, Liberal Intellectuals, allows that “confessional tests did not dis­ appear immediately” (15), but he places so much weight on the political changes of 1828–­29 that he constantly implies a rapid shift in intellectual life. 91. This redefinition of blasphemy was made by a judge at two trials in 1842 (Chadwick, Victorian Church 1:487–­89). Tennyson, In Memoriam, 1850 (cited in Willey, More Nineteenth-­Century Studies, 98). 92. Parry, Democracy and Religion, 80–­102, on the Church policy of the whig-­ liberals (summarized at 78). Although on many issues Hooker was a con­ servative, his stance on Church reform made him, on Parry’s definition, a whig-­liberal. 93. On the nature of ethnology see Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, chap. 2, and “What’s in a Name?” 376–­79. On the differences between the two societies: Stocking, “What’s in a Name,” 376–­79, and Victorian Anthropology, 247–­54; Richards, “Moral Anatomy,” 410–­14, and “Huxley and Woman’s Place,” 255–­70. Sera-­Shriar (Making British Anthropology, chap. 4) empha­ sizes scientific similarities between the Darwinians and the Anthropologi­ cals (as does Richards) but neglects the political differences emphasized by Richards and by Desmond and Moore (Darwin’s Sacred Cause). My focus is on the short-­term political differences that so disturbed Lubbock and Huxley. 94. “Observations on a Systematic Mode of Craniometry,” Trans. ESL 1 (1861): 341–­48. 95. Spottiswoode was elected in June 1861, and appointed secretary of the ESL to replace Hunt when Hunt was made foreign secretary (ESL, “Council Minute Book, 1861–­69,” 4 June 1861 and 6 May 1862, RAI, A:1). Lubbock was elected to the society in January 1863, and the nominations for the new council were made in May (“Council Minute Book, 1861–­69, 13 Janu­ ary and 5 May 1863). That Spottiswoode, rather than some other member of the ESL council, talked to Lubbock is my inference. 96. Huxley to Lubbock, 2 May [1863] (Avebury 49640.53–­54). Flower did not become a member until 1868. 97. ESL, “Minute Book, 1861–­69,” 5 May 1863. Francis Galton had joined the ESL in 1862. 98. On the ASL: Stocking, “Name,” and Victorian Anthropology, 240–­46. Mania: Robert Hunt in his 1867 presidential address to the ASL (cited in Stocking, “Name,” 379). 99. In-­text references are to James Hunt’s address of 24 February 1863, pub­ lished in the Anthropological Review 1 (May 1863): 1–­20. This argument for common rhetoric parallels Sera-­Shriar’s argument, based on the same article, that Huxley and Hunt had many scientific principles in common. 100. The illustrations: Stocking, “Name,” 376; Sera-­Shriar, Making of British Anthropology, 120–­26. Women’s admission: Richards, “Huxley and Woman’s Place,” 254–­66.

508

Notes to chapter three

101. Reviews: “On the Relations of Man to the Inferior Animals” and “Man and Beast,” Anthropological Review 1 (May 1863): 107–­17 (three essays: 107), and 153–­62. 102. I have been unable to find the attack on Rolleston. Diploma: Huxley to C. Carter Blake, 2 May 1863 (HP 11.17–­18); Richards, “Moral Anatomy,” 421; impertinent: Huxley to Darwin 2 July 1863 (CCD 11:517). 103. Cannibals and skeletons: Keith, “Presidential Address,” 20; Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 252–­53; Desmond, Huxley DD, 343–­44. Colenso spoke to the society on 14 May 1865, “On the Efforts of Missionaries among Sav­ ages,” JASL 3 (1865): ccxlvii–­cclxxxix. Sera-­Shriar (Making British Anthropology, 113) suggests that the X Club and Cannibal Club were “counterparts.” As discussed above, clubs were so common that there need be no particular relationship between the two clubs. 104. Charlatan: Rolleston to Huxley, 1 January 1865 (HP 25.166); jackal: Huxley to Darwin, 2 July 1863 (CCD 11:517); Huxley attacks: Hooker to Darwin, 9 and 29 March 1864 (CCD 12:65 and 98). 105. Comparing the societies: Huxley to Lubbock, [18] October 1867 (Avebury 49642.63–­64), and John Beddoe to Huxley, 4 June 1869 (HP 10.268). ASL numbers: Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 248; approximately two hun­ dred members are listed in the back of vol. 2 (1863) of the Trans. ESL. 106. Burton, “A Day among the Fans” and “The Present State of Dahome,” Trans. ESL, 3, 1865, 34–­47 and 400–­408; Busk: “Notes on some Human Remains,” Trans. ASL, 1, 1863, xi–­xiv. 107. Hunt, cited in Richards, “Moral Anatomy,” 414–­15, 426–­27; Stocking, “Name,” 379; Semmel, Jamaican Blood, esp. 64–­65, 117–­19. Hunt often sep­ arated himself from his racist colleagues (e.g., “Anniversary Address,” 19 Jan­ uary 1869, 6–­8) but Richards gives examples of the extent of his race-­based policies. See also chap. 4.1 below. 108. Scandal: Huxley to Lubbock, 1 August 1866 (Avebury 49641.144); dam­ age: Robert Hunt, “Report of the Council ( January 1865),” Anthropological Review 3 (1865): lxxxv–­cxii (cvii). 109. Richards, “Moral Anatomy,” 428–­35. Sera-­Shriar’s interpretation is more purely personal, he sees Hunt and Huxley as vying for control (Making of British Anthropology, 114 and 144). This neglects the other concerned actors (see chap. 4.1). 110. The chief work on the Reader is John Byrne’s 1964 thesis, “The Reader: A Re­ view of Literature, Science and the Arts, 1863–­1867.” See also Barton, “Pro­ fessionals and Gentlemen,” 439–­40, and Desmond, Huxley DD, 331–­34 and 343. 111. Altick, Common Reader, 379–­80; Brock, “Commercial Science Journals,” 105. 112. For surveys of the Christian socialism of the mid-­nineteenth century see Chadwick, Victorian Church, 1:346–­63, and Reardon, Religious Thought, chap. 6. The movement is variously interpreted as dangerous or as conser­ vative (see Chadwick; Reardon; and Byrne, “The Reader”).

509

Notes to chapter three

113. See the entries for John Llewellyn Davies, Edward Dicey, F. J. Furnivall, Thomas Hughes, J. Norman Lockyer, and E. Vansittart Neale (a philanthro­ pist who funded many Christian socialist projects) in Byrne, “The Reader,” appendix C. 114. Chadwick, Victorian Church, 1:545–­50, 361; Reardon, Religious Thought, 136–­41, 153. 115. Munby recorded the Spottiswoodes’ presence: Diary, 27 June 1860 and 3 January 1861. George Spottiswoode: Austen-­Leigh, Printing House, 45; “London Diocesan Penitentiary,” Times, 14 December 1861; and entries for George Andrew Spottiswoode in the British Library catalog. 116. Desmond, Huxley DD, 208–­9, 285, 361–­63. 117. Byrne (“The Reader,” 46–­55) discusses the principles of Macmillan and the practice of the Reader. See Worth, Macmillan’s Magazine, chap. 1, on Mac­ millan’s Christian socialism. 118. Meadows, Science and Controversy, 3–­9, 20 (taking advice). 119. From the front, advertisement page of the issue for 16 January 1864. Previ­ ously, I followed Byrne (“The Reader,” 100) and dated this advertisement to the new scientific ownership of late 1864 (“Professionals and Gentlemen,” 439 and 444). It is sometimes claimed (Byrne, “The Reader,” 80; Meadows, Science and Controversy, 18–­20) that Huxley was active in the first phase of the Reader but the only evidence of involvement I have found, a letter asking his advice, dates after this advertisement change (David Masson to Huxley, 23 February 1864 [HP 22.194]). 120. For example, Darwin to Roland Trimen, 13 May 1864, and Hooker to Dar­ win, 29 May 1864 (CCD 12:170 and 100). 121. Byrne, “The Reader,” appendix C for contributors. On Charles Carter Blake see his letters to Owen (OC 62, vol. IV) and Sera-­Shriar, Making British Anthropology, 82. Lubbock’s name was listed by 4 April 1863 (front cover). 122. The collection of contemporary documents, reminiscences, and secondary accounts on the restructuring of the Reader are not consistent. It is not possible to disentangle the plans of the various actors from the outcomes. This account draws on AHS 2:118–­19; Spencer to Lubbock, 12 Novem­ ber 1864 (Avebury 49640.174–­76); Tyndall to Spencer, Wed. [1864] ( JT/1/ TYP/3/1029); Hirst, Journals, 9 October 1864; Lubbock, “Diary 1864–­1882”; Galton, Memories, 167–­68; and Pollock, Personal Remembrances, 2:128. 123. Galton, Memories, 168; Spencer to Lubbock, 12 November 1864 (Avebury 49640.174–­76); Tyndall, “Journal,” 15, 17, 18 November 1864; Tyndall to Bence Jones, 18 November 1864 ( JT/TYP/3/793); Tyndall to Herschel, 18 November 1864 (HS 17.398); Darwin to Lubbock, 19 November 1864 (CCD 12:410 and n4). 124. Hughes to Huxley, 22 November 1864 (HP 18.326–­27). 125. Tom Hughes to Huxley, 2, 22 November 1864 (HP 18.326); Tyndall, “Jour­ nal,” 21 November 1864.

510

Notes to chapter three

126. Editors, proprietors, and financial arrangements are culled from many sources: Spencer to Lubbock, 12 November 1864 (Avebury 49640.174–­76); Tyndall, “Journal,” 15–­16 December 1864; AHS 2:118–­19; Galton, Memories, 68–­69; Pollock, Personal Remembrances, 2:129–­30; Lewes to George Smith, [24 December 1864], (Lewes, Letters 2:294); Lubbock, “Christmas” entry, “Diary 1864–­1882”; CCD 12:411n4. 127. Hirst contributions: Journals, 19 December 1864; 19 and 27 March and 29 Oc­ tober 1865. Frankland contributed under the first proprietors but there is no record of further involvement. 128. Hooker to Darwin [Hooker’s punctuation], 1 January 1865 (CCD 12:1). 129. Spencer to Sir John Herschel, 10 April 1865 (HS 16.495). 130. AHS 2:119 (to Mill); Spencer to Lubbock, 12 November 1864 (Avebury 49640.174–­6). Meeting described by Hirst, Journals, 6 November 1864. 131. Parry, Democracy and Religion. 132. [Huxley], “Scientific Notes,” Reader 4, 3 December 1864, 710. 133. Hirst, Journals, 31 October 1859; Hooker to Darwin [6 December 1864] (CCD, 12:449). 134. Copy of letter to Pollock, Tyndall, “Journal,” 24 December 1864. 135. [Huxley], “Science and ‘Church Policy,’” Reader 4, 31 December 1864, 821; Desmond, Huxley DD, 331–­32. 136. Rolleston to Huxley, 4 January 1865 (HP 25.171–­74); Hooker to Darwin [Hooker’s punctuation], 1 January 1865; Darwin to Hooker, 7 January [1865]; Huxley to Darwin, 15 January 1865 (CCD 13:1, 17, 21). 137. Tyndall recorded the meeting, “Journal,” 21 March 1865; Byrne, “The Reader,” 22 (printing arrangements), 108–­9 (Spencer’s criticisms). 138. Spencer’s letters describe the new plans: to Herschel, 10 and 18 April 1865 (HS 16.495–­6); to Darwin (fit to quote), 22 April 1865 (CCD 13:129–­30). Theological editor: Colenso to Huxley, 28 March 1865 (HP 12.274) 139. Spencer to Mill and Mill to Spencer, 26 and 29 May 1865 (LLHS, 117–­18). 140. Hooker to Huxley, 11 July (HP 3.111–­12) and Huxley to Lockyer, 22 August 1865 (HP 21.242); J. T., “Death by Lightning,” Reader 6, 8 July 1865, 27; Hirst ( Journals, 29 October 1865) identified “Probability,” published in Sep­ tember 1865, as his. 141. Frances Hooker to Darwin, 6 September 1865; Darwin to Wallace, 22 Sep­ tember 1865; Wallace to Darwin, 2 October 1865; Hooker to Darwin, 6 October 1865 (CCD 13:228, 238, 256, 262–­63). 142. Michael Foster to Huxley, 23 October 1865 (HP 4.153–­54). 143. Hirst, Journals, 8 January 1876, and Barton, “Professionals and Gentlemen,” 416. 144. In 1859 Frankland and Huxley colluded to oppose the award of a Cop­ ley Medal to J. D. Forbes of Edinburgh, a scientific opponent of Tyndall. Although the dispute added to the tensions between Tyndall and the North British, in 1859 it was so narrowly personal that I omit it from discussion of the X Club’s development. See Rowlinson, “Tyndall’s Work on Glaciology

511

Notes to chapter three

and Geology,” and, for further references, Barton, “Professionals and Gentlemen,” 425n38. 145. Huxley to Hooker, 31 December 1859 (LLTHH 1:178). 146. Advice: LJT, 83. Tyndall began writing the book about September 1858 (LJT, 79) so Huxley could have seen the text by the end of 1859. “Phys­ ics and Metaphysics,” Saturday Review, 10, 4 August 1860, 140–­41 (141). Hirst ( Journals, 6 August 1860) identified Tyndall as author and praised the article as “the boldest of well-­founded speculations.” 147. Tyndall, “Reflections,” Mountaineering, 33–­40, reprinted as “Reflections on Prayer and Natural Law,” Fragments, 2:1–­7 (on 6). See also Turner, “Rain­ fall,” 50–­52 and Ellis, Seven against Christ. 148. For example, Hooker to Darwin, 2 November 1862, and 26 October 1864 (CCD 10:497 and 12:384). 149. In mid-­1860, the Hookers had five children and the Huxleys three. In late 1860, the Huxleys’ eldest son Noel died shortly before the birth of another son. Nettie Huxley was distraught (Desmond, Huxley DD, 287–­91). In 1861 Frances Hooker was ill after the death of her father; in 1863, the Hookers’ six-­year-­old daughter died; and in 1864 Frances Hooker seemed to be suf­ fering heart trouble (CCD 11:657n4 and 12:39). 150. Brother/sister: Tyndall, “Journal,” 22 January 1865; subjective: Tyndall to Ellen Lubbock, 4 March 1863 (Avebury 49640.31); portrait: Hirst Journals, 22 January 1865. 151. Reader, 11 February 1865, 148, but the poem was dated for Saint Valentine’s Day, 14 February 1865. The ascription to Ellen Lubbock is my inference: Pollock told Tyndall that he had a submission from a female friend of Tyn­ dall (“Journal,” 26 February 1865); moreover, Ellen Lubbock later wrote val­ entines for Hirst (see chap. 5.4). 152. Initial subscription list in AHS 2:484. 153. Flora: Spencer to “Dear Dr. Hooker,” 7 July 1860; Hooker criticisms: to Darwin, 27/28 December 1862, 24 January and 26[–­28] October 1864 (CCD 10:629–­30; 12:28 and 382–­83); vacuity: Desmond and Moore, Darwin, 535. 154. Lubbock to Spencer, 17 March 1862 (Spencer Papers 1.64) and Spencer to his father, April [ca. 1862] (AHS 2:71–­72). 155. Spencer to his father, 9 June 1863, LLHS, 109. 156. Hirst, Journals, 21 and 29 June 1863; 22 November 1863 (rare soul). 157. Hooker to Darwin, [10 March 1862] (CCD 10:100). 158. Hooker to Darwin: Frankland: 16 February 1864 (CCD 12:49); Tyndall: [15 and 20] November 1862 and 26[–­28] October 1864 (CCD 10:527 and 12:383); Huxley: [26 February 1863] (CCD 11:179) inadequate reading [19 April 1865] (CCD 13:128); Busk: 26 October 1864 (CCD 12:384). 159. Spottiswoode’s mathematics: Hirst, Journals, 23 February 1862; Spottis­ woode’s house: Hirst, Journals, 29 November 1863.

512

N o t e s t o pa r t t w o

160. Hirst, Journals, 11 May 1862 (Frankland at the Busks); October 1862, 8 Feb­ ruary 1863, 1 March 1863 (Williamson and Ramsay). 161. John Stenhouse and David Brewster were the best known of the supporters of the declaration. 162. Darwin paid £80 in November 1864 (CCD 12:411n4), and £3 to the Co­ lenso fund. part two

1. 2.

Barton, “Influential Chaps,” 56. X Club Notebooks, 5 January and 2 March 1865. The Senate meeting of 9 November 1874 approved Carpenter’s leave (ST/2/2/6:80–­81). 3. Identification is based on Hirst’s journal entry: “Dined at Busks with Lubbocks and Spencer and then all to Fergusson’s Royal Institution lecture” (5 March 1865). Fergusson (1808–­1886) had made a fortune in business in India (David Boyd Haycock, “Fergusson, James,” ODNB). His role at the 1868 British Asso­ ciation meeting (chap. 4.2) shows that he was a friend of Hooker, one of many examples of the strong sense of community between Hooker and other India scholars and colonists. He would have been known to Spottiswoode, as both were on the Council of the Royal Geographical Society, and he must have been known to Busk, for he called on him. He contributed one article, “Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem,” to the Reader (vol. 5, 17 September 1864, p. 371). 4. The choice of name is discussed above in the introduction (I.2). 5. AHS 1:115–­16. Such joking habits might suggest that the members were young men, but their average age in 1864 was over forty, and most mem­ bers had growing families, therefore they were not the youthful kind of club that Gay and Gay discuss (in “Brothers in Science”). 6. “X Club Notebooks,” 5 January 1865. A concession was made to declining health in 1887, when it was decided that only those attending would pay (“X Club Notebooks,” 5 May 1887). 7. Treasurers, with dates of election, were: Hirst (November 1864); Spottis­ woode (October 1867); Spencer (October 1872); Frankland (October 1876); Busk (October 1880); Huxley ( June 1885); Hooker (October 1888). 8. Hirst, Journals, 6 November 1864. See I.2 above, for discussion of the first meeting. 9. LLHS, 502. 10. Ritchie, Famous City Men, 249, citing The World. 11. In May 1885 a proposal that the treasurer be required to keep a record of discussion was voted down. Huxley chose to keep detailed notes but they are often illegible. 12. LLJDH 1:589. 13. Summer excursions: “X Club Notebooks,” 10 June 1865; Hirst, Journals, 10 May 1866; 20–­21 June 1868; 23 June 1872; Russell, Edward Frankland, 327.

513

Notes to chapter four chapter four

1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

514

Fiske, 5 December 1873 (cited in Barton, “Influential Chaps,” 58). The changing divisions of Section D can be followed in the lists of the fiftieth anniversary report (BA Report 1881, xlv–­xlvi). Huxley to Foster, 17 September 1885 (LLTHH 2:112). Bath Chronicle, 1864 (cited in Brock and MacLeod, “Declaration,” 48; meet­ ing discussed in chap. 3.2 above); Sabine’s complaint as recorded by Walter White, JWW, 31 October 1868. Sylvester in February 1873 (cited in Brock and MacLeod, Natural Knowledge, 10 October 1872, n390). Huxley (1894), cited in LLTHH 1:259. Huxley was a secretary for four years, 1859–­62, president in 1868 and 1869, and on the council in many of the other years (the electoral year, February to January, almost coincided with the calendar year). Tyndall’s participation was sometimes criticized as ill-­informed by the fel­ lows (see Thackray, The Fellows Fight, 224a and 236a). Huxley, “Geological Reform,” Q JGS 25 (1869): 28–­53; rpt., CE 8:305–­39. Hirst, Journals, 19–­20 February 1869 (the anniversary meeting); 7 March 1869 (proofs). For further discussion see Crosbie Smith, Science of Energy, chaps. 6 and 9. Desmond and Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, 332. “Emancipation—­Black and White,” Reader 5 (20 May 1865), 561–­62; rpt., CE 3:66–­75. “On the Methods and Results of Ethnology,” Fortnightly Review 1 (15 June 1865): 257–­77; rpt., CE 7:209–­52 (248, 209). See also Richards’s discussion, “Moral Anatomy,” 418–­24. The Fortnightly was liberal in its politics and radical in its journalistic policy: it advocated “full and free expression of opinion” and signature (Wellesley Index 2:173–­83). Laudable: “Eyre, Edward John,” Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th ed.), 10:101; Eyre defense and attack: Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 251; Richards, “Moral Anatomy,” 426; Semmel, Jamaican Blood, 117–­19; Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians, chap. 9; Lubbock: Patton, Science, Politics and Business, 80–­81; Desmond and Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, 349–­51. Tyndall (with private support from Hooker, Ellen Busk, and Ellen Lubbock), Carlyle, Ruskin, Kings­ ley, and Sir Roderick Murchison joined the ASL on the other side (Desmond, Huxley DD, 352, and Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians, 193–­94). Huxley to Hooker, 24 [June] 1868 (HP 2.140). Hunt, “Address . . . at the third anniversary,” JASL 4 (1866): lix–­lxxxi (on lxix–­lxx). More research is needed on anthropology at the BA. Huxley to Lubbock, 1 August 1866 (Avebury 49641.144). Lubbock was gen­ erally treated respectfully in discussions at the ASL, but see the discussion in chap. 6.2 of the 1865 review of his Pre-­historic Times. ASL Council, Minutes, 5 September 1866 (RAI, A:3:1, fols. 217–­18); Des­ mond and Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, 352–­53.

Notes to chapter four

18. Huxley to Lubbock, 19 September 1866 (Avebury 49641.154); Huxley to Hunt 4, 16 October 1866 (HP 18.343–­44). 19. Hunt to Huxley, 18 October 1866 (HP 18.345); “Manchester Anthropologi­ cal Society,” Manchester Times, 3 November 1866. 20. Fools: Huxley to Tyndall, 18 September 1867 (HP 9.32); alive: Huxley to Lubbock, 18 October 1867 (Avebury 49642.63–­64). 21. “X Club Notebooks,” 5 June 1868. 22. Desmond, Huxley DD, 351. 23. Murchison to Huxley, 2 October 1866 (HP 23.168). There are numerous letters in the Huxley Papers discussing possible names. Stocking gives an excellent brief summary of these negotiations (“Name,” esp. 382–­83), and Huxley prepared tortuous notes for his 1870 presidential address (HP 33.10–­16). Financial questions: Huxley to Hunt, 10 June 1868 (HP 33.17). 24. Letters under the title “Anthropological Society of London” appeared in The Athenaeum every week from 15 August to 3 October with later contributions on 21 November and 19 December 1868. There were also reports of two con­ troversial ASL meetings, “Societies,” Athenaeum, 12 September and 7 Novem­ ber 1868, 344 and 609. See also Keith’s 1917 “Presidential Address,” 19–­26. 25. P. M. Duncan to Huxley, 8 September 1868 (HP 15.26). 26. ESL, Minutes of Council, 21 November 1865, 23 June 1868 (RAI, A:1); Huxley to Hooker 126, 24 [   June] 1868 (HP 2.140). More rapid publication was the chief policy issue over which Spottiswoode joined Francis Galton’s lobbying efforts on the RGS Council in the early 1860s (Forrest, Francis Galton, 69–­71). 27. Hooker to Huxley, [after 24 June 1868] (HP 3.85); Hooker communicated papers for the meetings of 23 February and 23 March 1869. 28. “Report of the Council of the Ethological Society of London,” JESL 1 (1869–­70): vii–­xvii. 29. Richards, “Huxley and Woman’s Place,” 261, 270–­76. 30. William Brock, “Hunt, James,” ODNB. 31. Müller to Huxley, 8 January [1869] (HP 23.112). 32. Beddoe to Huxley, 29 May and 4 June 1869 (HP 10.267–­8); letters between P. M. Duncan (well known to Huxley through the Geological Society) and Huxley show a similar level of trust (HP 15.26–­34). Stocking, “Name,” dem­ onstrates the extent of Lubbock’s opposition to “anthropological.” 33. Huxley to Lubbock, [22] January 1871 (Avebury 49643.142); Beddoe, Mem­ ories, 216. 34. Anthropological Institute, Minutes of Council, 29 May 1871, and 6 May 1872 (RAI, A:10:1, fols. 32, 86–­87). Not until 1900 could the Anthropological Institute afford to revive the publishing ambitions of the ESL under Busk and Huxley (Keith, “Presidential Address,” 25). 35. Anthropological Institute, Minutes of Council, 9 and 12 January 1872 (fols. 62–­65).

515

Notes to chapter four

36. Wright to Lubbock, Sat. [May 1868] (Avebury 49642.187); Lubbock to Hux­ ley, 2 August 1866 (HP 22.65). 37. The extent of mutual action among the X-­men and the appeals from outsiders to Huxley counter Sera-­Shriar’s interpretation (Making British Anthropology, chap. 4) that the conflicts between the ESL and ASL were largely due to Huxley and Hunt vying for leadership of the discipline. 38. Foster to Huxley, 31 [May 1870] (HP 4.175). 39. The official history of the Linnean Society gives an excellent account of the issues debated: Gage and Stearn, Bicentenary History, 67–­73 (disagreeable talk: 69). 40. Busk to Hooker, 7 February 1874, and Trimen to Hooker, 12 February 1874 ( JDH/2/17.71 and 74). 41. Hooker’s drafts: JDH/2/1/14.58–­64. British Museum: Gage and Stearn, Bicentenary History, 68 (imperialist designs). The Nature editorials: Barton, “Scientific Authority,” 228–­29, esp. n31. 42. The protestors’ affiliations are inserted in Hooker’s hand ( JDH/2/1/14.91–­92). 43. Trimen sent his proposals, dated 11 February 1874, to Hooker ( JDH/2/ 17.72–­73); see also, Gage and Stearn, Bicentenary History, 71–­73. 44. Hooker to Busk, 4 March 1874 ( JDH/2/3/3.89). 45. Lindley to Hooker, 14 February 1874 ( JDH/2/1/14.76). 46. Hooker to Busk, 14 and 20 February 1874, and Busk to Hooker, 20 February 1874 ( JDH/2/3/3.87–­88; JDH/2/1/14.85). 47. On Mivart: Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging, 329–­31, 353–­56; Dawson, Victorian Respectability, chap. 2. 48. Busk to Hooker (proposing officers), 12 and 13 March 1880 ( JDH/2/17/39–­40). 49. Hooker to Lubbock, 3 August 1881 ( JDH/2/3/10.246–­47). 50. Hooker to Lubbock, 25 and 27 March 1884 (Avebury, 49647.19 and JDH/2/ 17.251–­52). On Jackson: Gage and Stearn, Bicentenary History, 75–­77. 51. Hooker to Lubbock, 25 March 1884 and 7 March 1886 (Avebury, 49647.19 and LLJDH 2:273–­74). 52. Hooker to Lubbock, 20 [February] and 26 February 1885 ( JDH/2/3/10.255–­57); Lubbock to Hooker, 2 March 1885 ( JDH/2/1/14.203). 53. Hooker to Lubbock, 7 March (two letters) and 27 March 1886 ( JDH/2/3/ 10.260, 262–­63, 266–­68); Gage and Stearn, Bicentenary History, 75–­79, 219–­21. 54. MacLeod, “Introduction,” 27 (he does not identify the other epicenters). 55. Tyndall to Spottiswoode, 25 September 1879 ( JT/1/TYP/3/1281), emphasis added. Allman, “President’s Address,” BA Report 1879, 1–­30 (evolutionary vision: 29–­30; bathybius: 4); JWW, October [1879]; Gordon Herries Davis, “Haughton, Samuel,” DNBS. 56. Morrell and Thackray’s Gentlemen of Science is the authoritative account of the early decades. The articles collected in Parliament of Science (MacLeod and Collins), are useful for the following period, see especially: the “In­ troduction”; Brock, “Advancing Science”; and Lowe, “Provincial Public.”

516

Notes to chapter four

Withers, Higgitt, and Finnegan address the provincial context in “Histori­ cal Geographies of Provincial Science.” On women’s involvement in the BA see Higgitt and Withers, “Science and Sociability.” 57. Galton, Memories, 313 (Galton was a general secretary of the BA from 1863 to 1868); Brock, “Advancing Science” 99–­100. 58. Tyndall: Huxley to Tyndall, 14 March 1873 ( JT/1/TYP/9/2977). Declining the BA presidency, Hirst to Tyndall, 7–­8 April 1889 ( JT/1/H/402). Russell, Edward Frankland, 496. 59. Spottiswoode to Hooker, 7 September 1867 (cited in Barton, “John Tyndall, Pantheist,” 114). The duke was the Duke of Buccleuch; his address was so weak that it was not printed. 60. Tyndall to Huxley, 2 September 1873 (HP 1.112). 61. On BA customs see Lodge, Advancing Science, 134 and 149, and Howarth, British Association, 136, in addition to the general sources already listed (n56). 62. The committee had no constitution, membership lists were not published (unpublished records show Londoners dominated), and only “sparse” min­ utes kept (Morrell and Thackray, Gentlemen of Science, 313–­16). Hirst’s journal is near-­silent on its proceedings. 63. This account of the to-­and-­fro process between council and General Com­ mittee is based on my reading of the annual Reports. 64. Egerton was an expert on fossil fish, a hardworking MP, and a trustee of the British Museum (see chap. 2.3 above). Sabine was lieutenant general from 1865. In 1883 Lyon Playfair, chemist and scientific statesman, and Lord Rayleigh, the Cambridge physicist, replaced Sabine and Spottiswoode. 65. Hirst, Journals, 12 April 1866 (invitation); 9, 20–­23 March 1867 (hard work). Busk was an auditor from 1869 to 1872, Spottiswoode from 1875 to 1878. 66. Nomination practices: Hirst, Journals, 27 February 1869; Galton, Memories, 216; “X Club Notebooks,” 6 February 1868, and 2 March 1871. Hirst nominated Lubbock at a committee meeting of the BA Council ( Journals, 14 January 1880, but entered in August 1880). 67. Hirst, Journals, 3 February 1867 (to Kew); “X Club Notebooks,” 7 February 1867. Hooker recorded his responses in letters to Darwin, 4 and 12 Febru­ ary, 14 March 1867 (CCD 15:65–­66, 80, 142). 68. Berkeley, a poor clergyman, had worked closely with the Hookers (Barton, “Men of Science,” 89). 69. “X Club Notebooks,” 7 November 1867; 9 January and 6 February 1868; Hirst, Journals, 6 February 1868. 70. Hirst, Journals, 19 and 23 August 1868 (Spencer was not present; the Hook­ ers were officially entertained). Whether these Hamiltons were the aris­ tocratic supporters of the Royal Institution whose daughter Tyndall later married, I do not know. 71. “British Association,” Athenaeum, 22 August 1868, 242; Hooker to Darwin, 30 August 1868 (LLJDH 2:119).

517

Notes to chapter four

72. LLJDH 2:114–­16; LLTHH 1:297. In-­text references are to Hooker, “Address,” BA Report 1868, lviii–­lxxv. 73. Hirst, Journals, 18, 21, 23 August 1869. 74. Hooker’s lecture finished with three stanzas from “The Reign of Law” by his cousin, F. T. Palgrave (Macmillan’s Magazine 15, January 1867, 34–­37). 75. Hirst, Journals, 12 March 1868, for the BA committee discussion; chap. 2.3 above for Hooker’s earlier campaigning. 76. The compromise between Ethnologicals and Anthropologicals brokered by Huxley for the 1866 BA meeting had collapsed. 77. Lubbock: LJL 1:25; criticism: Hooker to Darwin, 18 January 1869 (CCD, 17:26). 78. Addresses by section presidents were customary by 1866 (see Andrew Ram­ say, “Address,” BA Report 1866, Geology: 46). 79. Hooker to Tyndall, 4 September 1868 ( JT/1/TYP/8/2597). 80. Tyndall, “Scientific Materialism,” Fragments, 2:75–­89 (89). By dualism here, I mean not ontological or metaphysical dualism but Tyndall’s “dual truth,” that is, an epistemological dualism. 81. Hooker to Darwin, 30 August 1868 (CCD 16:701–­3); love of flowers: LLJDH 2:62. 82. Hooker to James Hector, 31 May 1868 (Te Papa, MU000147/002/0039). Hooker’s persistent interest in comparative religion (shown for example in his correspondence with La Touche), leads me to assess his beliefs as less or­ thodox than does Jim Endersby in his discussion of this same event (“Odd Man Out,” 169–­77). 83. Russell, Edward Frankland, 235; Hirst, Journals, 14–­17 September 1870 (on Tyndall). On Spencer compare: AHS 2:219–­20, 230–­31, 371–­72 and LLHS 172, 217. 84. Hirst, Journals, 27 February and 23 August 1869. Hooker to Huxley 133, [September 1869] (HP 3.126). 85. Hirst, Journals, 13–­17 September 1870. Hirst did not mention Spencer din­ ing with them although Spencer was present for the first half of the meet­ ing. No X Club members were section presidents. 86. Tyndall, “Scientific Materialism,” Fragments, 2:77. In-­text references are to “Scientific Use of the Imagination,” Fragments, 2:101–­34. 87. See Huxley, “On the Physical Basis of Life,” discussed by Strick, Sparks, 68–­ 69; compare Paul White, Thomas Huxley, 111. 88. Strick, Sparks, 78–­81 (tightrope), 89–­91, 170. In-­text references are to Hux­ ley, “Address,” BA Report 1870, lxxiii–­lxxxix. 89. Hirst, Journals, 14 September 1870. Miller died two weeks later. 90. Beddoe, Memories, 212–­13. 91. “Synopsis of Grants,” BA Report 1871, lxxiv; “Recommendations Adopted by the General Committee,” “Report of the Council,” and “General State­ ment of Sums Paid,” BA Report 1872, liii, lxix–­lxx, lxvi–­lxvii.

518

Notes to chapter four

92. Hooker to Huxley, 11 August 1871 (on Tait) ( JDH/2/13.110). In-­text page numbers refer to Thomson, “Address,” BA Report 1871, lxxiv–­cv. 93. Crosbie Smith, Science of Energy, esp. chap. 9. 94. Huxley to Hooker, 11 August (cockshy), and 23 August (nebulosity) 1871 and Hooker to Huxley, 19 August 1871 (HP 2.178, 3.144, 2.180); Lodge, Advancing Science, 23 (newspapers). 95. Hooker to La Touche, 1 June 1896 (LLJDH 2:364); Hirst, Journals, 22 Febru­ ary 1870. 96. On these bitter controversies see Barton, “Scientific Authority,” 229–­32. 97. Hooker to Huxley, 14 October 1873 (HP 3.212). His brothers’ worries about Tyndall counter Stanley’s suggestion that Belfast was part of an X Club strategy to become more aggressive (Huxley’s Church, 189). 98. Tyndall to Huxley, 24 September 1873 (HP 1.114). It is sometimes claimed that in the Belfast Address Tyndall was reacting to the failure of the Catho­ lic University of Ireland to adequately teach science, but Tyndall does not seem to have known of the issue until he wrote his “Apology for the Belfast Address” (see Tyndall, Fragments, 2:211). 99. Huxley to Tyndall, 24 June 1874 and Tyndall to Huxley, 1 July 1874 (HP 8.163 and 1.128). 100. Lodge, Advancing Science, 35. 101. Tyndall, “Apology for the Belfast Address,” Fragments, 2:202–­23 (207–­8). 102. Tyndall to Hirst, 26 August 1874 ( JT/1/T/715). The pamphlet responses are described briefly in Barton, “John Tyndall, Pantheist,” 116, and the responses in the periodical press analyzed by Lightman, “Scientists as Materialists.” 103. Barton, “John Tyndall, Pantheist,” 113; see also Lightman, “Scientists as Materialists,” 216–­17. 104. Desmond, Huxley EHP, 62–­63; Patton, Science, Politics and Business, 121. 105. Argyll to Tyndall, 23 April 1875 ( JT/1/A/101). Argyll had been elected FRS for contributions to geology and was a member of the RI. He was well known for his advocating a non-­naturalistic evolutionary theory that al­ lowed for “contrivance.” 106. Barton, “John Tyndall, Pantheist”; Kim, John Tyndall’s Transcendental Materialism; William Brock, “Tyndall, John,” ODNB. 107. Dawson, Victorian Respectability, esp. 15–­17, 97–­101. But see John Morley’s contemporary identification of the most controversial articles (chapter 6.3 below). 108. Tyndall, “Belfast Address,” 192 (materialism), 194 (cosmical), 201 (Mys­ tery), 199 (the Heart), 190 (Lucretius), 176 (Darwin). 109. Lyell to Darwin, 1 September 1874 (LLCL 2:435); Lubbock attended lectures by Tyndall, Hooker, and Huxley, but only for Tyndall did he make no com­ ment (“Diary, 1872–­79 (locked),” 19, 21, 24 August 1874); Hooker to Dar­ win, 29 August 1874. I thank Paul White for copies of the Lyell and Hooker letters from the Darwin Correspondence Project.

519

Notes to chapter four

110. Brock, “Advancing Science,” 98–­99, 110 (citing The Times). 111. Hirst, Journals, August 1878. In-­text references are to Spottiswoode, “Ad­ dress,” BA Report 1878, 1–­34. 112. Hooker to Darwin, 12 June 1881 (LLJDH 2:245). 113. Lubbock, “Address,” BA Report 1881, 1–51 (51). 114. Burkhardt, “England and Scotland”; Howarth, British Association, 93. 115. Lubbock, “On the Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man, Part II,” BA Report 1869, Biology, 137–­51. Only the titles of the papers by the Reverend J. M’Cann and the Reverend F. O. Morris were printed: “Philosophical Objections to Darwinism or Evolution” and “The Difficulties of Darwinism” (151). 116. “X Club Notebooks,” November 1867. Some of the incidents here are dis­ cussed more fully in Barton, “Influential Chaps.” 117. See the chapter introduction, above, for previous expressions of dissatisfaction. 118. RS, “Minutes,” 3:391, 19 December 1867. Huxley was in the middle of a two-­year period on the council, from December 1866 to November 1868. Elections were traditionally held on Saint Andrews Day, 30 November. From 1871 to about 1883 there were often four or five X members on the council, and usually at least one close associate. See Barton, “Influential Chaps,” 59–­60, for a chart of X Club membership of council and further statistics on membership. 119. Gassiot’s lists of council members (Remarks, 9–­11) vindicate the critics. 120. Hooker to Darwin, [8–­18 January 1865] (CCD 13:19–­20). 121. Letters by Huxley, Tyndall, and Huxley, respectively, 2, 3 and 4 October 1870 (HP 8.83–­85). 122. Gassiot to Busk, 19 October 1870 (cited in Gassiot, Remarks, 15). 123. Galton, “William Spottiswoode,” Proc. RGS, 5 August 1883, 489–­91 (491). 124. Tyndall to Gassiot and Gassiot to Tyndall, 22 and 24 October 1870 (cited in Gassiot, Remarks, 15–­18). 125. As reported to White, JWW, 22 November 1870. 126. Hooker to Darwin, 5 August 1871 (cited in LLJDH 2:127). 127. Cawood, “Magnetic Crusade.” 128. Gregory A. Good, “Sabine, Sir Edward,” ODNB (opponent of Sabine). In 1872, Airy accepted a knighthood (both knighthoods and baronetcies rank below the aristocracy). His lowly origins are mentioned in the introduc­ tion above. 129. JWW, 25 and 20 April 1871. 130. JWW, 1 November 1870. 131. Hirst, Journals, 7 December 1871. 132. JWW, 29 June and 1 July 1871. 133. Hirst to Tyndall, 1 December 1872 ( JT/1/H/253); Hirst, Journals, 2 January 1873. 134. Hooker to Tyndall, 27 February 1873 ( JT/1/TYP/8/2717).

520

Notes to chapter four

135. Barton, “Influential Chaps,” 68; Strachey to Hooker, [February 1873] ( JDH/2/18.198); Spottiswoode to Hooker, 20 February 1873 ( JDH/2/18/179). R. H. Vetch, rev. Elizabeth Baigent, “Strachey, Sir Richard,” ODNB. 136. JWW, 23 January 1874. 137. JWW, 8 November 1864. 138. Stokes to his father-­in-­law, T. R. Robinson, 1 December 1877 (Larmor, Memoir, 1:40). 139. Stokes to Robinson, 1 December 1877 ( Larmor, Memoir, 1:40). 140. Smith to Huxley, 7 May 1878 (HP 26.114). 141. Alexander Williamson, the foreign secretary, warned Hooker that there was strong support on council for nominating Warren De la Rue as treasurer (3 [   June] 1878, JDH/2/18/271). 142. Huxley to Hooker, 30 June 1883 (HP 2:250–­53); Hooker to Huxley, 1 and 4 July 1883 (HP 3.270–­73). 143. For the details see Barton, “Influential Chaps,” 70–­71. 144. There is no record of discussion in the minutes of X Club meetings, but in these years the treasurer kept minimal notes. 145. RS, “Minutes,” 6:1, 30 October 1884. 146. RS, “Minutes” 6:55, 29 October 1885; Bartholomew Price to Stokes, 17 November 1885 (cited in Barton, “Influential Chaps,” 72). 147. Smith to Huxley, 5 May 1878 (HP 26.112). 148. Chap. 2.3 above on Murchison; Endersby, Imperial Nature, 36–­38, on the hierarchy of the sciences. 149. Carpenter and Wyville Thomson were the chief lobbyists for the Chal­ lenger expedition, and it was planned well before Hooker’s presidency, thus the X Club had little to do with the initiative although their support may have contributed to its success (Hall, All Scientists Now, 211). 150. The rhetoric of “Truth” in opposition to utility is discussed below in chap. 6. Clark (“The Ants,” 164–­65) and Gay and Gay (“Brothers in Science,” 428–­30) make similar points. 151. Hall, All Scientists Now, 94–­95. 152. Huxley to Hooker, 26 March 1889, Hooker to Huxley, 18 September 1886 (HP 3.340 and 3.291). Huxley went on to characterize those engineers and traders who would use the Royal Society for commercial advantage as “seven devils worse than the first.” Given that engineers had little power in the Royal Society, this antagonism may illustrate Huxley’s delight in finding enemies to fight rather than any actual risk. Alternatively, it may have been focused on Bramwell, elected to the Philosophical Club in 1883 (Allibone, Royal Society, 243) and secretary of the RI since 1885. Further investigation is desirable, for example, see Andrew Harrison, “Scientific Naturalists,” chap. 2, and Hall, All Scientists Now, 144–­45. 153. Strachey at the X Club (“Notebooks,” 5 March 1874) and Philosophical Club (Bonney, Annals, 65); Hall, All Scientists Now, 142; Barton, “Influential Chaps,” 73.

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Notes to chapter four

154. Hooker to Huxley and Huxley to Hooker, 29 and 31 March 1874 (HP 3.218 and 2.210). 155. The minutes of the Finance Committee are included in “Miscellaneous Committees, 1869–­1884” (RS MSS 429.CMB.2). On fees see table 1.1 above. 156. Hooker, “Anniversary Address of the President,” Proc. RS 28 (1878–­79): 146. 157. Barton, “Men of Science,” 89. 158. Hall, All Scientists Now, 116. 159. Miller’s summing up, in Discovering Water, 137. 160. For the first time: RS, “Minutes,” 5 November 1874; Hall, All Scientists Now, 219. 161. RS, “Minutes,” 21 March 1867. 162. JWW, 8 November 1864, 194. The Soirée Committee allowed £50 for a sin­ gle soirée in 1871, a large amount for a mere professor (Barton, “Influential Chaps ,” 75). 163. Hooker to Lubbock, 25 March 1884 (Avebury 49647.19); Huxley to Hooker, 6 July 1883 (HP 2.256–­57). 164. The minutes of the Soirée Committee: in “House Committee and Soirée Committee” (RS MSS CMB.84a). 165. Hooker to Walter White, 12 February 1876 (RS MSS MC.10.351). 166. Bellon, “Joseph Hooker’s Ideals,” 74. 167. Allibone, Royal Society, gives two examples: Huxley in 1861 (223–­24) and Lubbock in 1864 (229). 168. According to Michael Foster, Stokes undertook the internal and Huxley the external secretarial work (Larmor, Memoir, 1:98). On the refereeing of Bastian’s papers see Strick, Sparks, 96–­100, 170–­73. 169. Barton, “Influential Chaps,” 77. 170. Contributors: JDH/2/18/274–­47; lighting: Hall, All Scientists Now, 118. 171. RS, “Minutes,” 5:394, 5 July 1883. 172. Larmor, Memoir, 1:101. For Foster’s private opinions on Stokes see Barton, “Influential Chaps,” 71 and 80. 173. The ASL was notably different, with a paid “Director,” a position of author­ ity. Paid positions were, more typically, “assistant secretaries,” who worked under the instruction of the officers of a society. 174. JWW, 2 May 1872. 175. Hooker to Darwin, 30 August 1868 (CCD 16:703). 176. Hirst may have been less effective than Busk, as exemplified by the weak­ nesses that William Brock identifies in Hirst’s leadership of the Associa­ tion for the Improvement of Geometrical Teaching (“Geometry and the Universities”). 177. Oxford English Dictionary, party (II.6.a). 178. “X Club Notebooks,” 5 November and 3 December 1874. When new mem­ bers were next proposed in 1888, Strachey and Galton were again sug­ gested, plus Michael Foster and John Evans (“X Club Notebooks,” 1 March 1888). Foster and Evans were Royal Society allies.

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179. Cited in Hall, All Scientists Now, 116. 180. In addition to examples discussed above, Hooker lambasted Lockyer for the poor editing of botanical articles in Nature (Meadows, Science and Controversy, 31). 181. Lyell to Hooker, 2 March 1863 (LLCL 2:361–­62). C h a p t e r FI v e

1. Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848), Book V, chap. XI.7. 2. For example, Roy MacLeod, who produced founding studies on the X Club and on the support of Victorian science, asserts that the “informal influence” of “the London Circle” (the X Club plus a few others) “was deci­ sive” in the success of the lobbies over state aid (“Support,” 201–­3). 3. [News items], Morning Post, 5 February 1870. 4. MacLeod, “Science and the Treasury” (159 for quote); Brock “Spectrum of Science Patronage”; Cardwell, “Patronage of Science in Manchester”; and Morrell, “Patronage of Science in Edinburgh” (esp. 55–­60), all in G. L’E. Turner, ed., The Patronage of Science in the Nineteenth Century. MacLeod has published many case studies showing the extent of government use of and support for science (for example, articles collected in Public Science). 5. Alter, Reluctant Patron (quotes from p. 9 and title of chap. 2). 6. Bishop, Rise of a Central Authority. 7. Bonython and Burton, Great Exhibitor. 8. Cardwell, Organisation of Science; Meadows, Science and Controversy; Light­ man, “Huxley and the Devonshire Commission.” 9. In Imperial Nature, Jim Endersby shows the frustration faced by J. D. Hooker, who accepted this ideal of independence but lacked the matching indepen­ dent income. 10. Crosland, “Pensions.” The British state treated other parts of the kingdom differently, for example, large grants were made to Scottish universities early in the century (Gillian Sutherland, “Education,” 137). 11. Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848), Book V, chaps. I and XI (quota­ tions I.2 and XI.15). 12. The first school was established in London in 1837. See Bishop, Central Authority, 151–­55; Burton, Vision and Accident, chap. 1. 13. See chap. 1.1. 14. The unsystematic and ad hoc nature of government intervention is emphasized by many historians, for example, Morrell, “Patronage,” 59–­60, and Mac­ Leod, “Science and the Treasury,” 130. 15. Many members taught and lectured at educational institutions, but the em­ phasis in this chapter is on the ways in which they worked to expand and direct science teaching in the wider educational context. 16. Forgan and Gooday, “Constructing South Kensington,” 435, 437, and 464. 17. Desmond, Huxley EHP, 20, and Hirst, Journals, 1 December 1870.

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18. Most of these schemes are discussed further below, but see LLTHH 2:269, 308, and Bibby, Huxley, 168–­70, for the International College; and Brock, “Geometry and the Universities” for geometry teaching. 19. Bud and Roberts, Science versus Practice, 88–­89. 20. For Cole’s life see, Bonython and Burton, Great Exhibitor. 21. Bonython and Burton, Great Exhibitor, chap. 9; Bishop, Central Authority, chap. 7; Layton, Science for the People; Bud and Roberts, Science versus Practice, 88 (consultant chemist); ,Bentley, “Chemical Department,” 172. I limit discussion here to London and the institutions in which X Club members were heavily involved. I retain DSA for the Science and Art Department as SAD is an unfortunate acronym. 22. For the complex of administrative changes, see Bishop, Central Authority, 40–­49. 23. Bud and Roberts, Science versus Practice, 88–­90; Jarrell, “Department of Science and Art,” 332; Cole, Fifty Years 1:295–­97 and 307; Bishop, Central Authority, 98–­99, 164–­65, 178–­82; Layton, Science for the People, 132–­33 (former subordinate), 155–­59; Bonython and Burton, Great Exhibitor, 158 (revolution). 24. Bishop, Central Authority, 164–­68; Butterworth, “Science and Art Examina­ tions,” 30. 25. For ease of comparison the text gives rounded numbers; precise numbers are given in table 5.1. 26. On the DSA and its examinations see especially Bishop, Central Authority, chaps. 7–­9 (168); Butterworth, “Science and Art Examinations”; Sylvester, Robert Lowe, chap. 10. 27. On Donnelly’s importance see Bonython and Burton, Great Exhibitor, 233; Armytage, “Donnelly”; and R. H. Vetch, rev. James Falkner, “Donnelly, John,” ODNB. (Where these sources disagree I follow Vetch and Falkner.) Donnelly moved gradually from site duties to departmental duties. 28. Bishop, Central Authority, 168–­69, and Butterworth, “Science and Art Ex­ aminations,” on changes in the system. 29. “Science from Below,” Nature 12 (15 July 1875): 203–­6. Given that Huxley had used the phrase “from below” in a letter to Hooker, he is probably the author. 30. Tenth Report of the Science and Art Department (1863), vi–­vii. 31. On the Revised Code: Devonshire Commission, Second Report, xii–­xiv. 32. Butterworth, “Science and Art Examinations,” and Sylvester, Robert Lowe, chap. 10, identify numerous changes in the system. 33. Examination subjects and examiners: Butterworth, “Science and Art Exami­ nations,” 31–­33, 36; “Eighth Report of the Science and Art Department (1861). Tyndall was followed by Frederick Guthrie. 34. Hirst, Journals, 13 March 1870, 26 February and 4 June 1871, 11 March and 16–­28 May 1872.

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35. Cole, Fifty Years, 2: 324–­27; Bishop, Central Authority, 171–­74. Elwick (“Economies of Scales”) describes the organization of the process and ar­ gues that it was modeled on the Oxford Locals (established 1857), but this overlooks the preexisting arts examinations of the DSA. 36. Frankland: Russell, Edward Frankland, 293–­94. Tyndall’s assistants: Hirst, Journals, 15–­29 July 1860, 24 May and 18 November 1865; Tyndall, Samu­ elson Committee, qq. 2238–­39. Huxley: Desmond, Huxley EHP, 35; LLTHH, 2:141, 156–­57, 235; Elwick, “Economies of Scales,” 142–­45. According to Elwick, Huxley became disillusioned with examination systems in the mid-­ 1870s (145–­46) but his long commitment counters this interpretation. 37. Donnelly, cited in Butterworth, “Science and Art Examinations,” 36. 38. Cole to Hooker, 24 September 1864 ( JDH/1/18/111). 39. The DSA’s definition of the “industrial classes” (until 1873), cited by the Devonshire Commission (Second Report, 1872, BPP ES&T, 2, xv). Neale’s “middling” class conjoins those usually identified as skilled working class and lower middle class (“Class and Class Consciousness”). Payments were also made for passes by teachers (Butterworth, “Science and Art Examina­ tions,” 32). 40. Table 5.1 lists all students examined, including these middle-­class students. 41. Middle-­class proportion: “‘Draft of Seventeenth Report’ of D.S.A.,” Item II.II, printed in Devonshire Commission, appendix I:2 (BPP ES&T, 2); Butterworth, “Science and Art Examinations,” 38. Pass rates by age for 1870: Devonshire Commission, Second Report, (1872, BPP ES&T, 2), xxiv–­xxv. 42. These numbers counter the claim, sometimes made, that the DSA system supported secondary education. More than half the passing students were well beyond the age of secondary education. 43. Devonshire Commission, Minutes of Evidence (BPP ES&T, 2), q. 199. 44. The system was described in the Fifteenth Report of the Science and Art Department (1868), viii, and subsequent annual reports of the DSA. The total number of scholarship holders in any one year was thirty. 45. Devonshire Commission, Minutes of Evidence (BPP ES&T, 2), qq. 343 (Huxley), 569 (Ramsay), 776 (Frankland), 2112 and 2246 (questions from Huxley) and (ES&T, 3) q. 9887 (question from Lubbock). 46. The Second Report of the Devonshire Commission (1872, BPP ES&T, 2) described and praised the early courses (xxi). Payments: Huxley to Foster, 5 January 1871 (HP 4.29–­30); Desmond, Huxley EHP, 13–­14. 47. [Huxley], “Science Education from Below,” Nature 12 (15 July 1875): 203–­6 (205). 48. Teacher numbers are taken from the annual reports of the DSA: Eighteenth Report (1871), viii; Twenty-­second Report (1875), ix. 49. In general, see COPAC, which allows the publishing histories of popular works to be traced. Also, Frankland: Russell, Edward Frankland, 299–­300; Guthrie: Graeme Gooday, “Guthrie, Frederick,” DNBS; Huxley’s laboratory manual: LLTHH 1:380.

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50. Lightman, Victorian Popularizers, 390. Huxley received £250 for the manu­ script and first ten thousand copies; two pence per copy or about £83 for each further print run of ten thousand (395). Lightman does not mention the terms for other authors. 51. LLJDH 2:275, 501. 52. LLTHH 1:360, 476; Desmond, Huxley EHP, 23–­24, 73–­74, 121, 124; Bibby, T. H. Huxley, 11–­12. Physiography entered the DSA examination system in 1877 (Twenty-­fifth Report of the Science and Art Department [1878], viii). 53. Spencer, Huxley, and Tyndall were editors for the International Science Se­ ries, but although these books were intended to be introductory they were not texts for a specific curriculum (see chap. 6.4 below). 54. Lightman summarizes the volume in Victorian Popularizers, 393–­95. 55. Desmond, Huxley EHP, chap. 1 (Huxley in 1871), chap. 2 (Egypt). Tyndall to Huxley and Huxley to Tyndall, 3 and 4 June 1872 (HP 8.120–­21). 56. Bonython and Burton, Great Exhibitor, 276. 57. Mark 4:3–­20. 58. Huxley to Dohrn, 7 July 1871 (LLTHH 1:362). Hooker used similar rhetoric in his 1866 BA lecture (see chap. 4.2). 59. Roscoe (1875), cited in Lightman, Victorian Popularizers, 392. 60. Paradis argues that the conception of natural order was central to Huxley’s systematic thought (T. H. Huxley, 112–­13). 61. Lodge, Past Years, 66–­92. 62. Huxley’s curriculum: Desmond, Huxley EHP, 38–­39, 70–­71. 63. Elwick, “Economies of Scales,” 147; compare Desmond, “Redefining the X Axis,” 37. 64. Hooker, Botany, 110. 65. Gooday, “‘Nature’ in the Laboratory,” 335. 66. Donnelly to Huxley, 13 October 1886 (HP 14.66–­67). 67. “Report of the Council . . . 1871–­72,” BA Report 1872, li. 68. “Report of the Parliamentary Committee . . . 1865,” BA Report 1865, xxxix; “Report of the Parliamentary Committee . . . 1866,” BA Report 1866, xl. 69. Farrar, “On the Teaching of Science at the Public Schools,” BA Report 1866, Reports of Sections, 72–­73. 70. X Club sources add significant material to the previous discussions of this committee by David Layton, “Schooling of Science,” 193–­95, and Paul White, “Ministers of Culture,” 7–­9. 71. Farrar to Huxley, 1 October [1866] (HP 16.21–­22) and Desmond, Huxley DD, 350. The council report listed the committee members: “Report of the Coun­ cil . . . 1867,” BA Report 1867, xxxix. Griffith had lectured at Oxford, before being appointed first science master at Harrow in 1865 (Morrell, John Phillips, 319 and 324). Wilson belonged to the Macmillan circle (Meadows, Science and Controversy, 89) and was working with Frederick Temple to expand sci­ ence teaching at Rugby (Layton, Science for the People, 73).

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72. Hirst, Journals, 4 and 15 December 1866, 20 December 1866 (Farrar), 15 January 1867 (Wilson), 20 January 1867 (subcommittee). R. A. Farrar, Life of Farrar, 106 (Spencer; draft report). According to Farrar, Grove (presum­ ably William Grove, BA president for 1866–­67) was also on the committee and present at the meeting at Huxley’s house (106). Farrar’s recollections are not entirely reliable, for example, he dates his BA presentation as 1867 rather than 1866. Hirst, who recorded events weekly or monthly in his journal, is the more reliable source, hence my interpretation differs from Paul White’s, which is more reliant on Farrar. 73. Hirst, Journals, 2 and 20–­22 March 1867. 74. “Report of the Parliamentary Committee . . . 1867,” “Report of the Com­ mittee . . . for Promoting Scientific Education in Schools,” and “Recom­ mendations Adopted by the General Committee . . . 1867,” BA Report 1867, lx–­lxi, xxxix–­liv, lxv. On the duke’s scientific weakness see the above account of the 1867 BA meeting (chap 4.2). 75. “Report of the Council . . . 1868–­69,” BA Report 1869, xlii–­xliii. 76. Hirst, Journals, 8 February 1867 and 31 January 1868; Frederick Farrar, On Some Defects, 24, 29. 77. Lawson and Silver, Social History of Education, 304. 78. Lubbock and the Public Schools Commission: LLJL 1:97–­98. X Club and High Elms meetings: X Club, “Minutes,” 7 January 1869, item 1; Hirst, Journals, 17 and 30 January 1869. 79. Spencer’s Education (1861) began with the assertion that the value placed on Latin and Greek in education exemplified the general law that the orna­ mental precedes the useful. 80. Patton, Science, Politics, and Business, 119–­121, and numerous letters in Ave­ bury 49644 and 62685. 81. Times, 21 December 1869 (Spottiswoode); Hirst, Journals, 25 September 1871 (Busk). 82. “Diary (locked),” 18 September 1874. 83. Cardwell, Organisation of Science, 112–­14; “Conference on Technical Educa­ tion” and reports of the subcommittee, Journal of the Society of Arts, 16, 183–­209 (31 January 1868), 275–­76 (28 February 1868), 627–­28 (24 July 1868); Hirst, Journals, 21 March 1868. 84. Tyndall: “On the Study of Physics” (1854), Fragments, 1:287; see also “An Address to Students” (1868–­69), Fragments, 2:91–­100. Lubbock: “On Educa­ tion” (1903), Essays and Addresses, 262; see also “Elementary Education” (1877), Addresses, Political and Educational, 99–­101. 85. Hooker to La Touche, 22 April 1898 (LLJDH 2:330). 86. Devonshire Commission, Minutes of Evidence (BPP ES&T, 2): qq. 795, 812–­13 (Frankland); and (BPP ES&T, 3): qq. 9516, 9519–­20, 9608–­9 (Lubbock). 87. La Touche had been tutor to Hooker’s sons: 24 May 1893 (  JDH/2/3/10.38–­39).

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N o t e s t o c h a p t e r FI v e

88. Hooker to Darwin and Darwin to Hooker, [19 January 1862] and 25 Janu­ ary [1862] (CCD 10:29–­30, 48). 89. “Report . . . Promoting Scientific Education in Schools,” BA Report 1867, xl. 90. Devonshire Commission, Seventh Report (1875; BPP E&ST, 4), 87. 91. For example, “Report . . . Promoting Scientific Education in Schools,” BA Report 1867, xl. 92. Tyndall, “On the Study of Physics” (1854), Fragments, 1:282–­83, 291–­93, and, similarly, “Address to Students” (1868–­69), Fragments, 2:95, 98. Hux­ ley, “On Natural History as Knowledge, Discipline, and Power” (1856), SM 1:312–­13. 93. Minutes of Evidence (BPP ES&T, 2), qq. 265, 614, 747. 94. “Report . . . Promoting Scientific Education in Schools,” BA Report 1867, xl–­xliii. 95. Contrast this objective rhetorical ideal with the metaphysical commit­ ments that Huxley embedded in his syllabus (Elwick, “Economies of Scales,” 147). 96. Hirst, Journals, 4–­9 July 1867; “Middle-­Class Schools Corporation,” Times, 27 July 1867; “The Middle-­Class Schools,” Times, 31 March 1870; “Middle Class Schools Corporation,” Times, 25 March 1871. 97. Playfair: Samuelson Committee (BPP ES&T, 1), qq. 1104 and 1097. 98. Spencer first advocated the discipline of “natural consequences” in Social Statics (1850). It became more widely known through “Education a State Duty, What Knowledge Is of Most Worth?” WR, 72, July 1859, 1–­40, re­ printed as chap. 1 of Education, which had numerous editions. Laws of na­ ture: Huxley (quoting Carlyle) to Dyster, 27 February 1855 (HP 15.54–­55). 99. Huxley’s starving-­v-­stealing argument: “A Liberal Education and Where to Find It” was presented in a lecture to the South London Working Men’s Col­ lege in 1868, and first published in Macmillan’s Magazine (rpt., CE, 3:88–­89). 100. Huxley: Samuelson Committee, qq. 8000 and 8018. 101. Devonshire Commission, Second Report (1872; BPP ES&T, 2), xvii. Object lessons had been associated in the 1850s with “the science of common things,” which Layton contrasts with the liberal ideal of training the mind (Science for the People), but the British Association committee did not set the useful and the liberal in opposition. 102. Devonshire Commission, Second Report, (1872; BPP ES&T, 2), xvii. See Pat­ ton, Science, Politics and Business, 100–­101, on Lubbock. 103. Samuelson Committee, Report, vii. 104. Huxley had argued before the Samuelson Committee that a science school should precede special applications (BPP ES&T, 1), 99. 7987–­91). 105. Sharpey’s and Huxley’s questions to Reeks and Ramsay (of the School of Mines) and Woolley and Merrifield (of Naval Architecture) made their agenda clear (Devonshire Commission, Minutes of Evidence, BPP ES&T, 2, from qq. 359–­1168). According to Bud and Roberts, Samuelson already shared this ambition (Science versus Practice, 137). According to Forgan and

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Gooday, South Kensington became the preferred site only in the late 1860s (“Constructing South Kensington,” 442–­49). Stanley (Huxley’s Church, 244), attributes much greater foresight to Huxley. 106. Devonshire Commission, Minutes of Evidence (BPP ES&T, 2), Cole, qq. 42ff.; Huxley, q. 295; Woolley, qq. 935–­39, 1010. 107. Devonshire Commission, Minutes of Evidence (BPP ES&T, 2), Williamson, qq. 1211–­13; Murchison, q. 2469. 108. Devonshire Commission, Minutes of Evidence (BPP ES&T, 3), qq. 9598–­99, 9823–­30. 109. Times, 6 April 1871 (cited in Bibby, Huxley, 116). 110. Devonshire Commission, First Report (1871; BPP ES&T, 2), vii–­viii. 111. First Report (1871; BPP ES&T, 2), appendix V.14 (emphasis added). 112. See Bud and Roberts, Science versus Practice, 124–­25, 137–­38, 143, and the correspondence between the Treasury and the DSA that was collected in a parliamentary report, “South Kensington Museum,” 28 April 1870. On Cole see Bonython and Burton, Great Exhibitor, 211–­17 (budgets), 224 (size of building), 245–­46. 113. On the buildings and institutional organization: Forgan and Gooday, “Fun­ goid Assemblage,” 160–­64, and “Constructing South Kensington,” 444–­49; Bonython and Burton, Great Exhibitor, 244–­46; Bud and Roberts, Science versus Practice, 149–­54. Driving force: Desmond, Huxley EHP, 36. 114. MacLeod and Moseley, “Breaking the Circle,” 193. 115. Huxley to Hooker, 6 October 1864 (HP 2.127). 116. My impression is that Lubbock did not attend sittings of the Devonshire Commission as regularly as did some other commissioners. Attendance statistics are not included in the overviews of either MacLeod (“Support,” 205) or Lightman (“Huxley and the Devonshire Commission,” 101, 125). 117. Ireland: Devonshire Commission, Seventh Report (1875; BPP ES&T, 4), item 219 (39), and Alter, Reluctant Patron, 33. 118. Meadows, Science and Controversy, 80; Cardwell, Organisation of Science, 112–­13, 121; Charles Trotter, rev. Elizabeth Baigent, “Strange, Alexander,” ODNB. 119. Strange, “On the Necessity for State Intervention to Secure the Progress of Physical Science,” Brit. Ass. Report 1868, 6–­7; “Recommendations of the General Committee . . . 1868,” BA Report 1868, xlvii; “Report of the Coun­ cil . . . 1869–­70,” BA Report 1870, xliii–­xliv. 120. “Report of the Council . . . 1869–­70,” BA Report 1879, xliii–­xliv. Cardwell identifies the interconnections between these lobbies (Organisation of Science, esp. chap. 5). Williamson appeared above as a critic of the laboratory developments at South Kensington. 121. For example, see Hooker and Huxley’s discussions over the British Museum (chap. 2.3 above). 122. Hirst, Journals, 4 February 1870. On Stokes’s persona see the joke that Hirst reported ( Journals, 7 December 1871), cited in chap. 4.3 above.

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N o t e s t o c h a p t e r FI v e

123. “Scientific Instruction,” Times, 5 February 1870. Many similar reports ap­ peared: “Scientific Instruction Deputation,” Leeds Mercury, 5 February 1879; “Scientific Instruction,” Standard, 5 February 1870; “State Aid to Science,” Liverpool Mercury, 7 February 1870. 124. The Society of Arts passed a resolution supporting the BA call for a royal commission at a meeting in April 1870 when Strange presented a paper on the “Relation of the State to Science” (Cardwell, Organisation of Science, 121). 125. The appointments are discussed by Meadows (Science and Controversy, 82–­83). On Kay-­Shuttleworth see R. J. W. Selleck, “Shuttleworth, Sir James Phillips Kay-­,” ODNB. 126. Graeme Gooday, “Playfair, Lyon,” ODNB, and Reid, Memoirs of Playfair, are silent about Playfair in relation to the Devonshire Commission. 127. Devonshire Commission, Eighth Report (1875; BPP ES&T, 4), 8, citing q. 13,513. 128. “Lord Derby on the Endowment of Scientific Research,” Nature 13 (23 De­ cember 1875): 141–­42. 129. The Third Report of the Devonshire Commission (1873; BPP ES&T, 3) discussed the remodeling of the university fellowships at length (esp. in “IV.—­The Colleges,” xliii–­liii). 130. [Lockyer], “The Endowment of Research,” Nature 8 (26 June 1873): 157–­58. 131. “The Universities Commission,” Athenaeum 24 October 1874, 541–­43. Hux­ ley later argued, similarly, that the wealth of the City Guilds was properly used for technical education (Forgan and Gooday, “Constructing South Kensington,” 455–­60). 132. “The Pay of Scientific Men,” Nature 8 (17 July 1873): 217. 133. On divisions among astronomers see Meadows, Science and Controversy, 92–­106. 134. X Club Notebooks, 7 January 1869; Devonshire Commission, Eighth Report (BPP ES&T, 4), Recommendation VI, 47. 135. Hooker, “President’s Address,” 30 November 1876, Proc. RS, 25:339–­56 (342–­43). 136. Tyndall to Hirst, 17 December 1876 ( JT/1/HTYP/644–­45); Hooker to Dar­ win, 13 December 1878 (LLJDH 2:235). 137. Devonshire Commission, Minutes of Evidence (BPP ES&T, 2), Frankland, q. 5875. 138. J. S. K. [   J. S. Keltie, subeditor of Nature from 1873], “The Science Commis­ sion,” Nature 8 (14 May 1873): 21–­23. 139. Devonshire Commission, Minutes of Evidence (BPP ES&T, 4), Hooker, qq. 12, 187; Spottiswoode, qq. 11,989–­94. 140. Devonshire Commission, Eighth Report (1875; BPP ES&T, 4), 47 (IV) and 25. 141. There are numerous letters in Hooker, Tyndall, and Avebury papers. For interpretations of the Ayrton-­Hooker affair see Endersby, Imperial Nature, chap. 10; Drayton, Nature’s Government, 211–­20; and MacLeod, “Ayrton.”

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142. Granville’s graduation address (cited in Hirst, Journals, 10 May 1871). 143. Devonshire Commission, Fourth Report (1874; BPP ES&T, 3), 13–­14. 144. Hooker described the proposal, “President’s Address,” 30 November 1875, Proc. RS 24:72–­88 (88); Tyndall to Spottiswoode, 30 June [1875] ( JT/1/T/ 1363); Hooker to Tyndall, 20 January 1877 ( JT/1/TYP/8/2738–­9). 145. The X Club minutes record only one discussion of state support (7 Jan­ uary 1869). 146. Lightman, “Huxley and the Devonshire Commission.” 147. Hooker to Huxley, [   July 1872] (HP 3.158). “Active” scientific men excluded Playfair who had entered parliament in 1868. 148. Hooker to Huxley, [5 October 1873] (HP 3.216). On the potential adminis­ trative restructuring see Bishop, Central Authority, 179–­81. 149. Given the support of both Playfair and Thomson for state funding, and building on the arguments of Crosland (in “Pensions”), differences be­ tween Scottish and English traditions should be investigated. 150. Brock and MacLeod, Natural Knowledge, “Introduction,” 35n64. 151. Hirst held three chairs in succession, as the institutional organization of mathematics and physics changed: mathematical physics, pure and applied mathematics, and then, his preferred position, pure mathematics (Bellot, University College, chart 4). 152. Hirst, Journals, 26 June, 4 July, 8, 9, and 14 December 1867; 31 May and 27 August 1868. 153. Undoubtedly, X Club members were also active in the administration of University College, but research on University College is hindered by the loss of many records through bombing. 154. The account is based on my reading of the Senate minutes; David Masson’s contemporary criticism, “London University,” Macmillan’s Magazine 16 (Oc­ tober 1867): 417–­31; and the following general histories: Ker, Materials for a History of University College; Bellot, University College London; Harte, University of London; and Willson’s aptly subtitled, University of London, 1858–­1900: The Politics of Senate and Convocation, which is invaluable for political details. 155. F, “Admission of Women to the University of London,” Times, 15 January 1878; Masson, “London University,” 427–­29. 156. The Education Department, established to support elementary education for the poor, was an inappropriate location for university governance. Vari­ ous government departments are identified by Harte, University of London, 120–­24, and in the minutes of Senate, ST/2/2/8:21, 18 March 1874 and ST/2/ 2/10:2–­3, 5 February 1879. (The minutes are printed and bound in twelve volumes, four years to a volume, University of London Archives, ST 2/2/1 to ST 2/2/12. Pagination is continuous per calendar year, so starts again four times in each volume). 157. Lubbock and Spottiswoode appointments: ST2/2/6:83, 22 November 1865; ST2/2/6:43, 20 June 1866; ST/2/2/8:55, 19 June 1872. J. W. Lubbock’s ap­ pointment: “An University of London” [sic], Times, 13 December 1836.

531

N o t e s t o c h a p t e r FI v e

158. Senate membership was thirty-­six, plus chancellor and vice-­chancellor (Will­ son, University of London, 13) with a quorum of six (ST/2/2/10:84, 23 July 1879). Attendance improved over time (Willson, University of London, 44–­45). 159. ST2/2/6:43–­4, 20 June 1866. 160. On the women’s campaigns see Raftery, Women and Learning, chap. 5; Bry­ ant, Unexpected Revolution, chap. 3, esp. 83–­91; Willson, University of London, chaps. 8–­11, esp. 96–­97 (public opinion), 130–­33 (medical graduates). 161. ST2/2/8:20 and 40, 8 February and 22 April 1874. 162. For example, the petition from the Rugby Council for Promoting the Edu­ cation of Women, ST2/2/8:49–­50, 13 May 1874. 163. ST2/2/8:60, 17 June 1874. Eliza Spottiswoode habitually signed herself L. Spottiswoode. Juliet Pollock referred to her as [Lise] in a letter to Tyndall ( JT/1/P/190, 2 July [1887 or later]). 164. ST2/2/9:61 and 63, 20 June and 4 July 1877; Hooker to La Touche, 5 June 1897 (LLJDH 2:331–­32). Lubbock followed the lead of the chancellor, who in 1877 decided it was time that he and Lubbock descend “into the arena” to counter medical intransigence (Granville to Lubbock, 30 December 1877, Avebury 49644.186–­89). Although a recent appointee to Senate, when the final votes on the admission of women were taken in 1877, Busk attended the crucial 20 June meeting and voted against the medical pro­ crastinators (ST2/2/9:61). 165. University College and Cairnes: Bellot, University College, 370; Ker, Materials, 15; “Higher Education of Women,” Times, 15 October 1873. Cairnes was editor for political economy in the Reader project (chap. 3.4). 166. Advertisement, transcribed by Hirst, Journals, 4 December 1869. 167. Hirst, Journals, 17 January to 8 April 1870 (exercises, 24 January; list of class members, April 1870). 168. Letter from Mary Simpson after Hirst’s second lecture (Hirst, Journals, 21 Jan­ uary 1870). The Simpsons had only recently come from Dublin to live in London. 169. Lubbock, Diary, 20 August 1854. 170. Ellen Lubbock, “A Note on Termites,” Nature 12 (15 July 1875): 218. 171. See his critical comments on Dean Stanley ( Journals, 23 June 1866). 172. Hirst, Journals, 4 July and 11 September 1852 (and many other entries in 1852–­53). 173. Hirst, Journals, long entry covering October 1869 (fol. 2091). 174. Darwin to Tyndall and Tyndall to Darwin, 27 and 28 December 1874 ( JT/1/ TYP/9/2835–­36). 175. Lubbock to his mother, 10 July 1865 (Avebury 49641.71–­74). On Victorian drug use see Parssinen, Secret Passions (coca wine, 34). 176. Busk: Hirst to Tyndall, December 1887 ( JT/1/H/331); Tyndall: Hirst to Tyn­ dall, 10 July and 27 September 1886, Tyndall to Hirst, 19 July 1889 ( JT/1/ H/317 and 435; JT/1/HTYP/745).

532

N o t e s t o c h a p t e r FI v e

177. Lubbock, as paraphrased by Hirst, Journals, 28 February 1870. 178. The Huths were probably the family of Henry Huth (a notable book col­ lector), who had been shareholder in the Reader (chap. 3.4). Hirst usually mentioned Mrs. Huth, Miss Huth, and the Huth sons. 179. Hirst, Journals, 29 November 1866–­5 April 1867. Sullivan was already fa­ mous for composition but had not yet begun his collaboration with W. S. Gilbert. 180. Hirst, Journals, 28 January and 4 February 1869. Miss Symonds was prob­ ably Hyacinth Symonds, the daughter of the well-­born clerical geologist, the Reverend William Symonds. She married Sir William Jardine in 1871 and, after he died, the widowed Joseph Hooker in 1876. 181. Hirst, Journals, 13 February 1868; 19 June 1867; 17 May 1866. 182. Hirst, Journals, 11 November 1867 (Halloween); 18 June 1868 and 3 June 1869 (Grote). 183. Hirst, Journals, 13 April 1867 (Athenaeum); 4 July 1867 (Middle Class Schools); 12 March 1869 (Astronomical Society). 184. Hirst, Journals, 6 November 1866. Sometimes he was paid for the tutoring. 185. Hirst, Journals, 19 February and 7 March 1869. 186. See above chap. 2 (2.2 for Faraday and 2.3 for Lyell). 187. Hirst, Journals, 25 November 1866. 188. Hirst, Journals, 18 December 1869. At this period Hirst filled in his journal only every week, so it is not a complete record. 189. Hirst, Journals, 18 January 1867. 190. Hirst, Journals, 15 February 1868. 191. Hirst, Journals, 22 December 1866 (Lady Belcher); 2 June 1869 (Harriet Grote); 3 November 1866 (Lady Lubbock). 192. Hirst, Journals, 26 October 1867 and 3 March 1868. Hirst spelled Mary Colvill’s name as Colville. 193. Hirst, Journals, 4 June 1867. 194. Willson (University of London, chap. 14) gives a full account of the elec­ tioneering. Numerous letters about the campaign are in Avebury 49642. The Lancet reported critically on the BA meeting (“Representation of the University of London,” 21 September 1867, 381). 195. Hirst, Journals, 15 March 1870. Subcommittee: ST2/2/7:82 and 112, 27 October and 15 December 1869. 196. Hirst, Journals, 13 and 16 March 1870. 197. Hirst, Journals, 22 and 30 March 1870. 198. ST2/2/7:29, 30 March 1870. 199. Hirst, Journals, 30 March 1870. 200. Hirst, Journals, the entries for 8–­13 May 1870 express the tensions. 201. ST2/2/6:26, 30 March 1856. In 1867, it had been formally agreed that the registrar must be a graduate of the University of London (ST2/2/7:29, 27 March 1867).

533

Notes to chapter six

202. Hirst, Journals, 28 April, 8 and 13 May 1870; ST2/2/7:64, 11 May 1870. 203. Hirst, Journals, 15 June and 23 September 1870; ST2/2/8:44, 14 June 1871. 204. Huxley to Tyndall, 1 January [1873], HP 8.131. Brock and MacLeod (Natural Knowledge, “Introduction,” 24) say that Huxley and Spottiswoode ap­ proached Goschen, but Huxley’s letter implies that the initiative was from Goschen. 205. Huxley to Tyndall, 1 January [1873], HP 8.131; Desmond, Huxley EHP, 275n35. 206. Hirst, Journals, 29 November 1872–­12 January 1873, for his consideration of the appointment (quote, 29 November). 207. Hirst, Journals, 4 February 1873, for the dinner. Roy MacLeod suggests Lowe was responding to Devonshire Commission lobbies (“Science and the Trea­ sury,” 138), but the exchanges Hirst recorded indicate more personal reasons. 208. ST2/2/8:118, 19 December 1872. 209. Hirst, Journals, 12 July 1877. 210. Hirst, Journals, 10 May 1871 and 28 February 1873. 211. Huxley to Tyndall, 1 January [1873] (HP 8.131); Rice, “Mathematics in the Metropolis,” 385. 212. The appointments and the social life can be followed through Hirst’s Jour­ nals and the valuable biographical chapters of Brock and MacLeod’s Natural Knowledge. Scientific training: copy of Hirst’s acceptance letter, Journals, 12 January 1873; officer style: [Hirst], “Report of Admiralty Committee,” QR 145 (April 1878): 394–­417 (394–­96). 213. “Representation of the University of London,” Lancet, 21 September 1867, 381. 214. What exactly was the public good was contested, most notably among these examples, the antivivisectionists were not happy with Busk’s appoint­ ment (French, Antivivisection, 170). 215. Bibby, Huxley, 221; Lord Milner to Lubbock, 29 November 1894 (cited in LLJL 2:37). Lubbock accepted the position and remained until 1902. 216. LLJL 1:36–­37. 217. Cardwell, Organisation of Science, 123 (for both quotes); Desmond, “Rede­ fining the X Axis.” 218. Forgan and Gooday, “Constructing South Kensington,” 435. Matthew Stanley takes an opposing view, and attributes the success of the School of Science to Huxley’s strategic insight (Huxley’s Church, 243–­45). 219. Patton, Science, Politics, and Business, 209, 223–­24; Bibby, Huxley, 222–­230. Patton suggests this disagreement contributed to a growing rift between Huxley and Lubbock. I argue below that a social rift, following Nelly Lub­ bock’s death and Lubbock’s remarriage, preceded the policy rift. Chapter six

1.

534

“Professor Tyndall and the Scientific Movement,” Nature 36 (7 July 1887): 217–­18 (217); Webb, My Apprenticeship, 83, 92, 134.

Notes to chapter six

2. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England; Collini, Public Moralists: Political Authority and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–­1930; Lubenow, Liberal Intellectuals and Public Culture in Modern Britain, 1815–­ 1914. Turner cites Webb in Between Science and Religion, 13–­14. 3. White, “Ministers of Culture,” 12–­13. White criticizes Adrian Desmond for making too much of controversy and me for presenting the alliances as merely strategic. 4. On a much smaller canvas, this parallels Peter Burke’s 1987 interpretation of the Renaissance as a movement rather than an era (The Renaissance). 5. Huxley to Tyndall, 22 July 1874 (HP 8.165). 6. LLTHH 1:222 (19 December 1860). 7. Galton, English Men of Science, 193–­94. 8. On “Emancipation” see chap. 4.1 above. “Ethnology” (1871) was first pub­ lished in the Contemporary Review (rpt., CE, 7: 253–­70). 9. Tyndall, Heat, vi; Tyndall to H. Helmholtz, 13 April 1872 ( JT/1/T/489). 10. Huxley to Lord Farrer, December 1885 (cited in Metcalf, James Knowles, 309). 11. Howsam, “Experiment,” 190; Patton, Science, Politics, and Business, 10. 12. Coxe to Tyndall, 6 November 1874 ( JT/1/TYP/1/1/305). 13. Mivart: Huxley to Hooker, 27 December 1874 (HP 2.220). 14. Hooker to Huxley, 25 October 1893 (HP 3.410). The disputes and resent­ ments that divided the Club in later years are discussed in “Retrospective.” 15. Tyndall to Spencer, 7 April n.y. ( JT/1/TYP/3/1028); Book of Common Prayer, Litany of 1662. 16. Huxley to Hirst, 21 January 1891 ( JT/1/H/544). 17. Landow, Elegant Jeremiahs, 34, 163. 18. Hooker to Darwin and Darwin to Hooker, 28 and 30 August 1866 (cited in LLJDH 2:102–­4). 19. Harley Rodney to Lubbock, 24 April 1889 (Avebury 49652.85). 20. To Lubbock, 1 February 1909 (Avebury 49676.60). 21. Novikoff to Tyndall, 30 October [1874] ( JT/1/N/41). 22. Spottiswoode to Huxley, 1881 (HP 7.201). “Lay Sermons” was a compara­ tively modest metaphor, first used by S. T. Coleridge. It represents the speaker as a teacher of a congregation rather than founder of a faith. 23. Darwin: 10 March 1862 (CCD 10:197); Lubbock: “On the Evidence of the Antiquity of Man, Afforded by the Physical Structure of the Somme Valley,” NHR, 2 (1862), 244; repeated in Pre-­Historic Times, chap. 8 (1865). 24. Levine, “Scientific Discourse,” 112. 25. “Advisableness,” CE 1: 18–­41 (41). 26. “Belfast Address,” Fragments, 2:200. 27. Tyndall to Spottiswoode, in his role of Royal Institution secretary, 11 No­ vember 1877 ( JT/1/T/1313). 28. “Universities: Actual and Ideal,” CE, 3:191. 29. Letters of Vivian [Lewes] to Percy, “The Coming Reformation,” part 3, Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine 5 ( July 1847): 35–­45. A “second reformation”

535

Notes to chapter six

metaphor had also been used by George Combe in 1847 (see Barton, “Whit­ worth Gun,” 286n122). Mark Francis applies the “new Reformation” meta­ phor to a movement of the early 1850s (chap. 1.3 above). 30. Huxley to Nettie Huxley, 8 August 1873 (LLTHH 1:397). 31. Examples could equally well be taken from the 1880s when, for example, Tyndall and Huxley engaged in arguments with Gladstone, over home rule for Ireland and miracles, respectively. 32. “Is It Reverent?” [Leader], Examiner, 4 October 1865; “One who would learn as well as teach,” “The Bishop of Oxford’s New Form of Prayer” [Cor­ respondence], Examiner, 7 October 1865. 33. “Prayers against Cholera,” PMG, 9 October 1865. 34. See chap. 3.5 above. Scholarly discussions of Tyndall’s intervention in de­ bates over prayer have usually followed Turner and emphasized the prayer gauge debate of the early 1870s (see Turner, “Rainfall”). Kim is one of the few scholars ( John Tyndall’s Transcendental Materialism, 98–­100) who notices the 1865 debate. 35. “Prayer and the Cholera,” PMG, 12 October 1865. 36. “Prayer and the Cholera,” PMG, 19 October 1865. 37. “On the Origin of Force,” Fortnightly Review 1 ( July 1865): 435–­42. 38. “The Constitution of the Universe,” Fortnightly Review 14 (1 December 1865): 129–­44 (on 144). The debate continued for years. 39. The title was modified to “On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge”: Fortnightly Review 3 (15 January 1866): 626–­37; Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews, 1–­19; Method and Results, CE, 1:18–­41 (1893). In-­text references are to the 1893 volume. 40. Paradis, T. H. Huxley, 76–­81. 41. “Occasional Notes,” PMG, 9 March 1866. Cragoe, who identifies popular explanations for the plague (“The Hand of the Lord,” 200), supplements Turner, “Rainfall.” 42. Wiltshire, Social and Political Thought, 75. 43. Wiltshire, Social and Political Thought, 57. 44. By the second edition, part 2 was reordered, some chapters were deleted and others added, to make a total of twenty-­four chapters. Because there are so many differently paginated editions, in-­text references here are by section number, which remained constant from the second edition. 45. Neswald, “Saving the World,” 20. 46. For example, “Our Survey of Literature, Science, and Art,” Cornhill Magazine 6 (August 1862): 273. See also the preliminary notice in “Science,” British Quarterly Review 72 (October 1862): 486. 47. “Our Survey of Literature, Science, and Art.” 48. [Henry Wilson], “Theology and Philosophy,” WR, 22 (October 1862), 520 (reconciliation), 522 (materialistic). 49. Spencer to his father, 3 October 1862 (LLHS, 105).

536

Notes to chapter six

50. “Science,” Athenaeum, 4 October 1862. 51. “Mr. Herbert Spencer’s First Principles,” British Quarterly Review 37 ( January 1863): 84–­121; 110–­11 (practical atheism), 112–­16 (Spencer’s moral reasoning). 52. Spencer to his father, 3 October 1862 (LLHS, 105). The Wellesley Index iden­ tifies Martineau. 53. [Martineau], “Science, Nescience, and Faith,” National Review 15 (October 1862): 394–­403. 54. AHS 2:146–­47. 55. AHS 1:456. 56. Only Mark Patton shows caution over this conclusion (Science, Politics, and Business, 76). 57. [W. S. Dallas], “Science,” WR ( July 1865), esp. 258–­59; compare “Pre-­ Historic Times,” Anthropological Review 3 (October 1865): 338–­46. 58. [   J. F. McLennan], “The Early History of Man,” North British Review 50 ( July 1869): 516–­49 (popular, 516). 59. “Prehistoric Times,” London Review 11 (23 December 1865): 671–­72; “Lub­ bock’s Pre-­historic Times,” Archaeologia Cambrensis 12 ( July 1866), 379–­82 (Bishop, 380; foresee controversy, 382). 60. Darwin to Hooker, 17 April [1865] (CCD 13:122 and 123n4). 61. “Prehistoric Man,” Spectator, 5 August 1865, 866–­67. 62. Good Words, 1 June 1868, 385–­92 (390). 63. Charles Norman to Lubbock, 20 July 1865 (Avebury 49640.87). At a later election Sabbatarians opposed Lubbock’s election (see chap. 6.6). 64. Huxley, 16 June 1887 (LLTHH 2:162). 65. Desmond, Huxley DD, 186; Barton, “Whitworth Gun,” 274; LLTHH 2:144–­45. 66. Tyndall to Hirst, 15 April 1889 ( JT/1/HTYP/742) and Hirst to Tyndall, 22 April 1889 ( JT/1/H/403) were commenting on Huxley’s “The Value of Witness to the Miraculous” (1889; rpt., CE 5:160–­91). 67. Harrison, Autobiographic Memoirs 2:111. 68. Desmond, Huxley EHP, 44, 110, 296n57. 69. See Hooker’s family tree, LLJDH 1:18–­19. Hooker described the dinner to Darwin, 13 July 1865 (CCD 13:199). 70. Lubbock, “Diary 1864–­1882,” 27 November 1876. 71. Hirst, Journals, 1 and 2 April 1868. 72. Cited in Desmond, Huxley EHP, 86. 73. Stanley to Tyndall, 10 March 1866 (LJT, 125); Tyndall to Stanley, 13 March 1866, and Stanley’s sermon, cited in Turner, “Rainfall,” 58. 74. LJT, 144–­45 (or possibly his brother, Charles Landseer, keeper of the Royal Academy). 75. Geological Society: Desmond, Huxley DD, 370; Royal Academy: Desmond, Huxley EHP, 22 and 141, and Tyndall to Hirst, 22 April 1888 ( JT/1/T/776). Similarly, White, “Ministers of Culture,” 13.

537

Notes to chapter six

76. On clubs associated with reforming intellectuals see Kent, Brains and Numbers, and Harvie, Lights of Liberalism. 77. Collini, Public Moralists, 18–­19. 78. LLHS, 495. 79. LJT, 159; Desmond, Huxley EHP, 123; Lubenow, Liberal Intellectuals, 110–­11. On the importance of club life for Owen and the history of “The Club” see Rupke, Victorian Naturalist, 55–­59. 80. LJT, 164–­65, and numerous letters in the Tyndall and Hooker archives; LJT, 157–­59. 81. Hooker to Huxley, 31 March 1892 (HP 3.387–­88); Hooker to Lubbock, 17 February 1892 (Avebury 49652.39). 82. The classic sources on the Metaphysical Society are A. W. Brown, Meta­ physical Society, and Priscilla Metcalf’s biography, James Knowles, esp. chap. 6 (212 and 214 for these quotations). Recent additions to the litera­ ture are Lightman, “Science at the Metaphysical Society”; Paul White, “The Conduct of Belief”; and the collected Papers of the Metaphysical Society (ed. Marshall et al.). 83. Brown, Metaphysical Society, 21 and 24. 84. Members: Metcalf, James Knowles, 216–­17; Brown, Metaphysical Society, 27, 318–­37. J. S. Mill, Matthew Arnold, G. H. Lewes, and Cardinal Newman declined (Metcalf, James Knowles, 215). 85. “Professional atheists” was Lord Arthur Russell’s term (cited in Lubenow, Liberal Values, 21). On Newman see Brown, Metaphysical Society, 31 and 67n44. 86. The example of the Metaphysical Society shows that this shift was slower that Lubenow implies. It was a slow and uneven cultural change, an indi­ rect rather than a direct political consequence of the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts and Catholic Emancipation (Liberal Intellectuals, esp. chap. 1). 87. Reprinted as “G. Eliot on the Westminster Review, 1852,” in Moore, ed., Reli­ gion in Victorian Britain, 3:434. 88. Lubbock, “Huxley’s Life and Work” (1900), in Essays and Addresses, 27. 89. Metcalf, James Knowles, 224. 90. Knowles: cited in Metcalf, James Knowles, 223–­24. On fellows giving up fellowships: Lubenow, Liberal Intellectuals, 14–­25. 91. Ward stories: Brown, Metaphysical Society, 29. 92. Metcalf, James Knowles, 223; Brown, Metaphysical Society, 318 (on Richard Hutton’s hopes). The bitterness of the controversy over miracles (see below) suggests that Metcalf and Brown had a rosy vision. 93. Brown, Metaphysical Society, 72. According to Lightman the members saw themselves as divided by two different conceptions of knowledge or “sci­ ence,” with the empiricist side emphasizing the uniformity of nature. 94. Attendance records and a summary of numbers of papers are accessible in Brown (Metaphysical Society, 318–­39).

538

Notes to chapter six

95. Reported by Knowles to Huxley, 9 June 1875 (cited in Metcalf, James Knowles, 223). 96. On this series of five meetings see Barton, “Miracles.” 97. Desmond, Huxley EHP, 84; Brown, Metaphysical Society, 89. 98. Brown, Metaphysical Society, 329, and Marshall, Papers, 2:325 and 345. 99. Political speech, 28 May 1890 (cited in LJT, 266–­67); to Huxley, 16 May 1887 ( JT/1/TYP/9/3129). 100. Hirst (1885), LJT, 242; Huxley to Hooker, 29 December 1887 (HP 2.307–­8). 101. Morley, Recollections, all in-­text page references are to volume 1. On plain speaking compare Tyndall discussing the Reader (chap. 3.4). 102. Morley picked these as more provocative than aestheticism (which Gowan Dawson emphasized in explaining controversy over the Belfast Address, see chap. 4.2 above). 103. Metcalf, James Knowles, 240–­44; Desmond, Huxley EHP, 18. The two ac­ counts differ, partly because it is difficult to distinguish the proposals from the outcomes. 104. “Valedictory,” Fortnightly Review 38 (1882): 518. 105. Glasgow: “Thursday Morning February 4,” Glasgow Herald, 4 February 1875. 106. Reported by Lubbock in “Huxley’s Life and Work,” Essays and Addresses, 1–­43 (6). 107. Constance Buxton to Lubbock, 19 September 1885 (Notes of Life, LUA.L4 and Avebury 49645.8). 108. Knowles to Lubbock, 29 January 1877 (Avebury 49644.172). 109. Russell, Edward Frankland, 307, 225. 110. Hooker to Darwin, 26 November 1862 (CCD 10:571); for Hooker lectures see chap. 4.2. 111. “William Spottiswoode,” Scientific Worthies XXI, Nature 27 (26 April 1883): 597–­601 (598). 112. On audiences see Sophie Forgan, “National Treasure House” (membership fee, 31), and Jill Howard, “Physics and Fashion,” 737–­41. 113. Frank James, “Running the RI,” 140 (citing Marian Evans); Howard, “Phys­ ics and Fashion,” 730, 752–­53. 114. Audiences: Forgan, “National Treasure House”, 31; James, “Running the RI,” 139–­40; lectures by X-­members: drawn from the Proceedings of the institution and the annual Report of the Visitors. Given that the population of London was growing, Tyndall cannot be considered more popular than Faraday. 115. Cited in LJT, 123. 116. Howard, “Physics and Fashion,” 739, and, for the egotistical extremes, Thompson, “John Tyndall,” 15. 117. Patton, Science, Politics and Business, 57. Huxley’s lectures: LLTHH, 2:453–­ 58; Desmond, Huxley EHP, 15 and 125–­26; chap. 3.1 above. 118. Desmond, Huxley DD, 301. 119. Hirst, Journals, 9 February 1862.

539

Notes to chapter six

120. Lecture attendances: James, “Running the RI,” 137–­40; Howard, “Physics and Fashion,” 744; DeYoung, Vision of Modern Science, 39. Non-­scientific topics: “Royal Institution,” Morning Post, 31 January 1863 (Wiseman) and 30 April 1866 (Stanley). 121. Russell, Edward Frankland, 432. 122. Forgan, “Royal Institution,” chap. 5. 123. Desmond, Huxley EHP, 125. 124. Forgan “National Treasure House,” 25. Administrative positions: culled from the Proceedings of the institution and the annual Report of the Visitors, and Burchfield, “Tyndall at the RI,” 166. 125. LJT, 218; Forgan, “Royal Institution,” 28–­29. 126. Spottiswoode to Hooker, 1 March [1878] ( JDH/2/1/19.181). 127. Tyndall to Spottiswoode, 11 November 1877 ( JT/1/T/1313). 128. Tyndall, “Journal,” 17 April 1866. 129. Tyndall to Lady Colvile, 2 December 1867 (Strachey Papers 60634.121). 130. James, Common Purposes, “Introduction,” 12. 131. Becker, Scientific London, 50; Forgan, “Tyndall,” 53; Burchfield, “John Tyn­ dall at the RI,” 166. 132. LLHS, 184–­85, for invitations declined. 133. See chap. 4.2 above and, for a list of lecturers, BA Report 1881, liv. 134. Tyndall to Spottiswoode, 30 August 1876 ( JT/1/TYP/3/1257–­58). 135. Davies, Working Men’s College. 136. LJT, 88. 137. “Matter and Force,” Fragments, 2:53–­74 (54). 138. Lightman, Victorian Popularizers, 220. 139. “On a Piece of Chalk,” Lay Sermons, 151–­75 (page references in text), rpt., CE 8:1–­36, was originally published in the BA Report 1868. 140. Harrison, Autobiographic Memoirs, 1:283–­84. 141. For some titles see Desmond, Huxley EHP, 179, 206, 249. 142. The speech was published in Macmillan’s Magazine, reprinted in Huxley’s first, 1870, collection of essays, Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews, 24–­46 (24–­25), and in CE, vol. 8. Page references in the text are to the Lay Sermons version. 143. The speeches were published as “A Song of Books” and “The Choice of Books” in Pleasures of Life, 1:53–­69 (fairyland, 69) and 70–­93 (good books, 75). 144. Advertisement, PMG, 4th ed., 11 March 1886. 145. Rose, Intellectual Life, 128–­30; Patton, Science, Politics and Business, 175–­76. 146. Rose, Intellectual Life, 121, 194, 407, 409. 147. Professor Allen Thomson, president, introducing the first lecture, “Glasgow Science Lectures Association,” Glasgow Herald, 9 January 1875. 148. “Professor Huxley on State-­Aided Education,” Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 10 October 1871; “Professor Huxley at Birmingham,” Daily News, 10 October 1871.

540

Notes to chapter six

149. “Birmingham and Midland Institute: Inaugural Address by Sir J. Lubbock, Bart., M.P., F.R.S.,” Birmingham Daily Post, 6 November 1874. 150. “The Address,” Morning Post, 8 October 1873. 151. “Birmingham and Midland Institute,” Birmingham Daily Post, 19 October 1875. 152. This emphasis on lectures differs from Lightman’s study of Victorian Popularizers, which emphasizes books. Because books were the major platform for many of his subjects (and his women had no opportunities for lecturing), books enable comparison but give an incomplete impression of popularizing activities. 153. See the discussion of technical and taxation changes in chap. 3.4. 154. Barton, “Scientific Authority,” and Baldwin, Making Nature, chap. 1. 155. On Knowles’s skill in soliciting papers see Metcalf, James Knowles (308–­34 for controversies). 156. Desmond, Huxley DD, 367. 157. Barton, “Scientific Authority,” 226. 158. I have found no analyses of Spencer’s income from journalism and book writing. 159. Roy MacLeod, “Evolutionism, Internationalism and Commercial Enter­ prise,” emphasizes the X Club and evolutionism; Leslie Howsam, “An Ex­ periment with Science for the Nineteenth-­Century Book Trade,” empha­ sizes the publishing innovations. Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers, 378–­88, examines Huxley’s involvement. 160. MacLeod, “Evolutionism,” 66–­67. 161. LLHS, 158–­59. 162. MacLeod, “Evolutionism,” 70. 163. Howsam, “An Experiment,” 197. 164. In addition to Appleton, there were collaborating publishers in Paris, Leipzig, Milan, and Saint Petersburg. King: MacLeod, “Evolutionism,” 71. Youmans had discussed a similar project, for textbooks, with the X Club and Macmillan in 1868 (Hirst, Journals, 3 and 4 December 1868). As dis­ cussed in chap. 5.1 the ISS books were not textbooks. 165. Howsam, “An Experiment,” 203; LJT, 154; Barton, “Scientific Authority,” 229. MacLeod lists the number of editions, or printings, claimed for each title. 166. Lightman, Victorian Popularizers, 384–­85. 167. MacLeod, “Evolutionism,” 68. 168. Lubbock’s titles (as listed in MacLeod’s appendix): Ants, Bees and Wasps (1882); On the Senses, Instincts, and Intelligence of Animals with Special Reference to Insects (1888); A Contribution to Our Knowledge of Seedlings (1896); Buds and Stipules (1899). 169. Patton (Science, Politics and Business, 189) emphasizes that The Senses of Animals was “largely a compilation” of previously published articles; MacLeod, “Evolutionism,” 72–­73; LLHS, 159.

541

Notes to chapter six

170. MacLeod, “Evolutionism,” 78. 171. Howsam, “An Experiment,” 195. 172. MacLeod lists the titles in “Evolutionism,” appendix 1. The physical sci­ ences were neglected (“Evolutionism,” 79). The social and human science proportion declined over time. 173. Howsam, “An Experiment,” 299. 174. MacLeod, “Evolutionism,” 73 and 79; Howsam, “An Experiment,” 198–­99. Lightman, Victorian Popularizers, gives more weight to religious differences in explaining the disagreements between Huxley and Paul (93–­94, 383–­84). 175. Howsam, “An Experiment,” 206; MacLeod, “Evolutionism,” 78–­79. 176. See chap. 5.1 on Huxley’s failures to produce texts for Macmillan. 177. I have not conducted this analysis in terms of “popularization,” which, as Ralph O’Connor, “Reflections,” emphasizes, lacks analytic power. There is not space here to discuss the variety of modes of popularization covered by the above examples. 178. Actors’ categories may also be insufficient to interpret the full dimensions of self-­understanding, as Nick Jardine argues in “Etics and Emics.” 179. Barton, “Just before Nature,” on utility in science journalism. Peter Mathias, Transformation of England, analyzes the sources of technological progress. 180. Tyndall, Six Lectures on Light (1873), 211 and 214. 181. “Tyndall and Forbes,” Nature 8 (11 September 1873): 381–­82 (382). In his 1879 lecture, “The Electric Light,” Tyndall was less derogatory about use­ ful inventions but still expressed a clear hierarchy of motives (Fragments, 2:450–­51). John Clark makes a similar argument (“The Ants,” 164–­65). 182. Oliver Lodge, Past Years, 75. 183. “Progress: Its Law and Cause” (1857), Essays, 1:7–­8. 184. “On the Study of Physics,” Fragments, 1:293. 185. “On Scientific Materialism,” Fragments, 2:85. 186. Fragments, 2:131–­32. 187. “Address,” BA Report 1878, 2. 188. “Charles Darwin,” Nature 25 (27 April 1882): 597. 189. “Science and Man,” Fragments, 2:368. 190. Browne, “Retched,” and Gapps, “Darwin as an Icon.” 191. Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science, chap. 1. 192. Huxley, cited in Barton, “Influential Chaps,” 73. 193. On Tyndall and Hirst see chap. 1.2 above and Barton, “John Tyndall, Pan­ theist”; for Huxley, Spencer, and Mansel see Lightman, Origins of Victorian Agnosticism; for Spencer see also Francis, Herbert Spencer. 194. “Address,” BA Report 1868, lxxiv. 195. “Scientific Materialism,” Fragments, 2:88. 196. Lightman, Origins of Victorian Agnosticism, 146, 274. 197. Turner, Between Science and Religion, 28. 198. Lightman, “Huxley and Scientific Agnosticism.” 199. “Agnosticism” (1889), CE 5:209–­62 (245–­46); quoting 1 Thess. 5:21.

542

Notes to chapter six

200. “So much the worse for the flowers” (my translation), Eliot to Sara Hennell, 29 June 1854 (cited in Paxton, Eliot and Spencer, 17). 201. “Scientific Materialism” (1868), Fragments, 2:77. 202. “Scientific Use of the Imagination” (1870), Fragments, 2:103. 203. “Professor Virchow” (1878), Fragments, 2:385. 204. Huxley to Kingsley, 22 May 1863 (LLTHH 1:242). 205. “Scientific Use of the Imagination,” Fragments, 2:103, 116. 206. “Huxley’s Life and Work,” the Huxley Memorial Lecture to the Anthropo­ logical Institute (1900), in Essays and Addresses, 1–­43 (39). 207. Hirst to Tyndall, 22 April 1889 ( JT/1/H/403). 208. Here I follow Lightman, “Huxley and Scientific Agnosticism,” 285 (Spen­ cer), 283 (Ward). 209. Huxley, “Agnosticism and Christianity,” CE 5:311; Huxley to Gould (cited in Lightman, “Huxley and Scientific Agnosticism,” 287). Huxley had been privately critical of Spencer in a letter to Kingsley as early as 1863 (LLTHH 1:242). 210. “Prologue to Controverted Questions,” CE 5:38. 211. Spencer, First Principles, 194 (the concluding section). References are to sec­ tion numbers. 212. See Barton, “Sunday Lecture Societies,” 205, 212–­14, and Stanley, Huxley’s Church, chap. 6. 213. Kim develops a similar argument with specific reference to Tyndall. The unity of nature was foundational for Tyndall’s philosophy of nature ( John Tyndall’s Transcendental Materialism, chap. 3). 214. BA Report 1869, civ and cv. 215. Taylor, “Herbert Spencer,” 74, and chap. 1.3 above. 216. Desmond, Huxley DD, 219–­23; Barton, “Whitworth Gun.” 217. Tyndall, Fragments, 2:199; Huxley’s early commitments: Barton, “Whit­ worth Gun,” 265–­66; changes in Tyndall’s philosophy: Barton, “John Tyndall, Pantheist,” 129–­32, and “John Tyndall (1820–­1893).” 218. Lightman, “Victorian Sciences and Religions: Discordant Harmonies.” 219. Huxley to Charles Kingsley, 23 September 1860 (HP 19.176–­77). 220. Lubbock, “Address to the Churchmen’s Union”, Essays and Addresses, 293. 221. Huxley to Dyster, 30 January 1859 (HP15.107). 222. Tyndall, Fragments, 2:196–­201 (emphasis original). 223. Huxley to Foster, 12 August 1874, and Tyndall to Huxley, 1 July 1874 (cited in Barton, “John Tyndall, Pantheist,” 115–­16). 224. Tyndall to Novikoff, 29 September [1874], JT/1/T/391. 225. The change is discussed in Barton, “Whitworth Gun,” 265–­66. 226. “Prologue” (1889) rpt. CE, 5:55–­58. 227. “Religion”, in The Pleasures of Life, part 2 (first ed. 1889; 200,000 printed by 1910), 209. 228. See chap. 1.3 above. 229. Tyndall to Spencer, 21 October 1890 ( JT/1/TYP/3/1078–­79).

543

Notes to chapter six

230. Spencer, First Principles, section 14. 231. This section depends heavily on Barton, “Sunday Lecture Societies,” which contains an extended discussion of the X Club allies. Previous accounts of Sunday lecture societies (for example, Desmond, Huxley DD, 344–­46; Moore, Religion in Victorian Britain, 456–­60; Knight, Science and Spirituality, 119) have identified only the tip of an iceberg. 232. “Sunday Evenings for the People,” Times, 30 December 1865. 233. Unrepresentative lists looked weak, as Hooker warned Lubbock, 29 Febru­ ary 1861 (chap. 3.2 above). The flyer was incorrect in giving Darwin’s wealthy, freethinking elder brother Erasmus an FRS. 234. “London Correspondence,” Bury and Norwich Post and Suffolk Herald, 2 January 1866. 235. See Barton, “Sunday Lecture Societies,” 193, for individual identifications. 236. Gerald Stone, “Bowring, Sir John,” ODNB. 237. See Barton, “Sunday Lecture Societies,” 193–94, 215nn16   –17, for further detail. 238. Royle, Radicals, Secularists, and Republicans, 297. 239. Hirst, Journals, 7 January 1866; JWW, 7 January 1866. 240. Hirst, Journals, 7 January 1866, and Desmond, Huxley DD, 344–­45 for Hux­ ley’s lecture. 241. “The ‘Standard’ on the Suppressed Lectures,” English Leader, 31 March 1866, 155–­56. “Bibles for instance,” was the satirist’s explication of Huxley’s meaning. The lecture was published almost immediately in the Fortnightly Review 3 (15 January 1866), under the revised title, “On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge.” 242. On Carpenter’s lecture: JWW, 26 January 1866; “The Sunday Movement,” Caledonian Mercury, 24 January 1866. Bowring’s lecture was also confronta­ tional and controversial; only Hodgson expressed “reverence” for the Deity. 243. Hirst, Journals, 3 April 1867; “The ‘Sunday Evenings for the People’ Ques­ tion,” Daily News, 4 April 1867. The issue was of national interest, being reported even in Scotland. 244. See the pamphlets in Miscellaneous Proceedings of the Sunday Lecture Society [hereafter Proceedings SLS] (held in the British Library at 4355.df.17), #1a and b, for the invitation to the preliminary meeting and the report of the meet­ ing. See Barton, “Sunday Lecture Societies,” 198–200, for a fuller discussion. 245. Galton, English Men of Science (1874), 260. 246. Report of the Preliminary Meeting, Proceedings SLS, #1b. 247. Barton, “Sunday Lecture Societies,” table 1. There were eleven committee members over the first fifteen years, most served for the entire period. 248. Solicitor to the NSL: Daily News, 4 April 1867. 249. See Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, JDH/2/1/12 and JDH/2/12. 250. Grant (1793–­1874) had been a Lamarckian and a medical reformer in the 1830s and 1840s. 251. Sunday Lecture Society, Report [of the Second Annual Meeting], 12–­23 (Proceedings SLS, #24).

544

Notes to retrospective

252. See Hooker’s discussion with Busk over signing public memorials (chap. 3.2 above). 253. “The Lord’s Day Rest Association,” Times, 29 June 1869. 254. “Election Intelligence—­Kent (West),” Times, 30 September 1868. 255. Problems were mentioned discreetly at the First General Meeting (Proceedings SLS, #16, 6–­7) and by Domville in his 1888 address (Proceedings SLS, #353). 256. The list was announced in 1881 at the Tenth AGM (Proceedings SLS, #186, 8). 257. I thank Paul White, who searched the Darwin Correspondence for any reference. 258. M. C. Curthoys, “Booth, James,” ODNB. 259. Carpenter: Margaret Deacon, “Carpenter, William Benjamin,” DNBS. 260. Morley to Huxley, 26 January 1879 (HP 23.55–­56). 261. Russell, Edward Frankland, 335. 262. The advertisement for “Professor Tyndall’s Inaugural Address” to the Glasgow Sunday Society lists the vice presidents of the London Society: Glasgow Herald, 25 October 1880. For other supporters see Wigley, Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday, 126–­27; “The Sunday Society,” Times, 14 May 1877; Barton, “Sunday Lecture Societies,” 208. 263. “Glasgow Sunday Society: Inaugural Meeting,” Glasgow Herald, 26 Octo­ ber 1880. 264. LLHS, 247. 265. Morley, Recollections, in-­text page references are to volume 1. 266. Harrison, Autobiographic Memoirs, 1:265–­69. 267. Harrison, Autobiographic Memoirs, 1:256; Read, England, 1868–­1914, 84. 268. Robert Young and James Moore have used similar material to argue that the advocates of naturalism were developing a secular theodicy. I do not follow this argument because it seems to me that the emphasis of the Huxley-­ Spencer arguments is on social control of the poor rather than justification of the ways of Nature. retrospective

1.

The phases of power and decline identified here are dated about five years earlier than the phases suggested by MacLeod (“X-­Club,” 318). 2. Hooker to Huxley, 29 August 1873 (HP 3.206); Clark, “The Ants.” 3. Tyndall to Hirst, 17 December 1876 ( JT/1/HTYP/645). 4. Barton, “Scientific Authority,” 230–­32. 5. Jensen, Thomas Henry Huxley, 148. 6. Hooker to Huxley, 28 December 1874 (HP 3.229). 7. Huxley to Hooker, 3 May 1886 (HP 2.278–­9). 8. Huxley to Hooker, 24 October 1885 (HP 2.176–­7); X Club Notebooks, 3 October 1889 and 4 June 1891; Hooker to Tyndall, [March 1891], ( JT/1/ TYP/8/2779).

545

Notes to the retrospective

9. Hooker to Huxley [April 1888], (HP 3.325). 10. Nettie Huxley to Louisa Tyndall, 4 March [1886] (TP/1/TYP/9/3112). 11. Hooker to Huxley, 24 April 1892 (HP 3.89–­90) and Huxley to Hooker, 13 March 1888 (HP 2.311). 12. Huxley to Hooker, 30 June 1883 (HP 2.250). 13. Hirst to Tyndall, 25 August 1887 and 16 September 1889 ( JT/1/H/329 and 408). 14. Huxley to Hooker, 29 December 1887 (HP 2.307–­8). 15. Hirst to Tyndall and Tyndall to Hirst, 7–­8 and 15 April 1889 ( JT/1/H/402, JT/1/T/810). 16. Huxley to Hooker, 9 March 1888 (HP2.311–­15); Huxley to Donnelly, 9 Jan­ uary and 9 February 1888 (LLTHH, 2:187–­88). 17. Spencer’s first letter: “Mr. Herbert Spencer and the Land Question,” Times, 7 November 1889. For a longer account of this dispute see Desmond, Huxley EHP, 191–­94. 18. Huxley, “Political Ethics” and “The Ownership of Land,” Times, 18 Novem­ ber 1889 and 21 November 1889. 19. Hooker to Huxley, 2 June 1890 ( JDH/2/13.183); compare Huxley to Hooker, 1 June and 26 September 1890 (HP 2.361–­62, 365–­66). 20. Hirst to Tyndall, 10 December 1889 ( JT/1/H/415). 21. Hirst to Tyndall, 9 April 1890 ( JT/1/H/421). 22. Huxley to Hooker, 20 October 1893 (HP 2.433–­34). 23. Tyndall to Spencer, 17 February 1892 ( JT/1/TYP/3/1098). MacLeod also notes their inaccurate memories (“X-­Club,” 318). 24. Hooker to La Touche, 1 January 1894 ( JDH/2/3/10.47). 25. Frankland to Hooker, 25 February 1897 ( JDH/4/9/3.306). 26. Hooker to Spencer, 28 December 1897 ( JDH/4/9/3.158). For Spencer’s sen­ sitivities over portraits see LHS, 373–­74, 382–­94. 27. Busk is omitted for lack of information. 28. Hooker to Tyndall, 3 May 1889 ( JT/1/TYP/8/2767). As secretary of the Royal Institution from 1885, Bramwell was associated with the changes that contributed to Tyndall’s retirement. 29. MacLeod’s analysis (in Heroes of Invention) is based on contemporary nov­ els. Popular journalism offers another site for historical investigation. 30. The poor curate, Rev. Miles Berkeley, is an example (chap. 4.2). 31. “Gentlemen of science,” Morrell and Thackray’s label for the early leaders of the British Association, is an apt description but, unlike “men of sci­ ence,” was not a term of self-­description. 32. Sometimes it is claimed that the X-­members wanted to take over the old universities. There are counterexamples in chap. 2.1. 33. “On the Natural Inequality of Man” (1890), rpt., CE 1:291.

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569

Index Note: The letter f following a page number denotes a figure and its associa­ted caption. The letter t following a page number denotes a table. Aborigines Protection Society, 199 agnosticism, 11, 54, 87, 90–­91, 216, 418–­21, 427, 433, 443, 458; historiographical discus­ sion, 11, 87, 418, 420–­21, 488n188; Spencerian form popular, 420–­21, 464; as useful strategy, 34, 259, 419, 421, 427; X Club members’ differing interpretations of, 419–­20, 543n209 Airy, George Biddell, 24, 121, 127, 143, 146, 272, 287, 520n128; and the Royal Society pres­ idency, 230, 269, 272, 280, 287, 381 Albert, Prince, 46, 106, 121, 135, 139f, 162, 296, 300 Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, 354; recovery from typhoid, 27 Allen, David, 47 Allman, George, 243–­44, 247; “President’s Address,” 247 Alter, Peter, 293–­94 “amateurs.” See professionalization: historiographical discussion; social structure of Victorian science American Civil War, 170, 202, 233, 234, 403 Anglican. See Church of England Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 238–­40.

See also Ethnological and Anthropological Societies of London, and Anthropologi­ cal Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Anthropological Review, 200, 236, 381 Anthropological Society of London (ASL), 198, 199, 200–­202, 213, 232–­40; Cannibal Club, 11, 200–201, 509n103. See also Ethnological and Anthro­pological Societies of Lon­don, and Anthropologi­ cal Institute of Great Britain and Ireland anti-­Sabbatarianism. See Sunday lectures antivivisection. See vivisection apothecaries, 91, 92, 106, 149 archaeological sites, 17, 176–­77, 180, 220, 396 Argyll, 8th Duke of (Thomas Camp­ bell), 116, 139, 263, 267, 269, 381–­82, 387, 493n17, 519n105 Arnold, Matthew (son of Thomas), 384, 391, 397–­98, 403, 441, 538n84 Arnold, Thomas, 100–­102, 204; Prin­ ciples of Church Reform, 100 Association for the Improvement of Geometrical Teaching, 300, 522n176

571

index

Athenaeum, 184, 194, 236, 255, 336, 379; journalistic position and reputation, 194, 205 Athenaeum Club, 43, 50, 157, 163–­65, 180, 231, 261–­62, 386f, 387; and theo­ logical respectability, 164–­65, 169, 192, 196, 226; X Club involvement in, 163–­65, 168, 169, 192, 226, 230, 261–­62, 348, 351, 387, 458, 460, 501n173 Avebury, Lord. See Lubbock, John, Lord Avebury Ayrton, Acton Smee, 327, 338, 367, 530n141 BA. See British Association for the Advance­ ment of Science Babbage, Charles, 50, 292, 294–­95 Bagehot, Walter, 384–­85; Physics and Pol­ itics, 411 Bain, Alexander, 435 Balfour, John, 181 Banks, Joseph, 41, 42, 43, 44, 156, 160, 269; Banksian traditions, and challenges thereto, 26, 42, 44, 46, 47–­48, 104, 150, 280, 480n47 Bastian, Charles, 282 Beddoe, John, 238 Bedford, 6th Duke of (Francis Russell), 43 Bell, Thomas, 150–­55, 155t Bellon, Richard, 24, 114, 147, 281 Bendyshe, Thomas, 213 Bennett, John Joseph, 151–­52 Bentham, George, 114, 148, 161–­62, 241–­ 43; ally of Hooker, 150–­54, 155t, 159, 162, 168, 241–­42 Bentham, Jeremy, and Benthamites, 101, 194, 302, 430. See also utilitarianism Berkeley, Miles, 253, 256, 280 Berman, Morris, 23 biography. See group biography Birmingham and Midland Institute, 404–­6 Bishop, Anthony Savell, 294 Blake, Charles Carter, 201, 206 Bonython, Elizabeth, and Anthony Burton, 294 Booth, James, 436 Bowler, Peter, The Non-­Darwinian Revolution, 17 Bowring, John, 194, 430; “Religious Prog­ ress outside the Christian Pale,” 430, 544n242

572

Boyle, Bernard, 63, 73 Bramwell, Frederick, 458, 521n152, 546n28 Bray, Cara and Charles, 86 Brewster, David, 47, 117, 119, 137, 223, 294–­95 British Association for the Advancement of Science, 7, 12, 230, 246–­67, 286, 313–­16 British Association for the Advancement of Science, administrative and commit­ tee structures, 247–­48, 249–­52, 286, 314–­15, 331; Committee on Science Education in Schools, 314–­17, 319, 320–­21, 323, 328, 526–­27n72; com­ mittees of inquiry into education, 313–­16, 328; finances, income and its distribution as research grants, 247, 249, 251, 260, 295; general officers, 198, 246, 251–­52, 314–­16, 348; lobbying activities, 247, 264, 297, 315, 330–­32; Parliamentary Committee, 278, 313, 314; trustees, 247, 251, 286, 315, 449, 517n64 British Association for the Advancement of Science, annual meetings of, 109, 111, 248–­50, 253–­67, 286; 1838 Newcastle, 43; 1839 Birmingham, 12; 1847 Oxford, 502n7, 502n9; 1850 Edinburgh, 117–­19; 1851 Ipswich, 121–­22; 1852 Belfast, 122, 124, 136–­ 37; 1853 Hull, 144; 1855 Glasgow, 117, 141; 1858 Leeds, 160; 1860 Ox­ ford, 173–­76, 177; 1862 Cambridge, 11; 1864 Bath, 194–­95, 231, 250f; 1866 Nottingham, 234–­35, 314, 368; 1867 Dundee, 230, 235, 249, 252, 315, 350, 355, 400, 517n59; 1868 Norwich, 230, 250f, 252–­57, 262–­63, 288, 315, 330–­31, 400–­401, 418; 1869 Exeter, 255, 257, 331–­32, 422; 1870 Liverpool, 257–­59, 262, 269, 420; 1871 Edinburgh, 230, 260–­62, 313, 409; 1872 Brighton, 230; 1873 Bradford, 249; 1874 Bel­ fast, 248, 257, 262–­64, 265, 394, 519n97; 1878 Dublin, 257, 264–­65, 415–­16; 1879 Sheffield, 247; 1881 York, 252, 257, 265–­66, 355, 394; 1885 Aberdeen, 395; anthropology and ethnology at, 202, 230, 234–­35, 248, 253, 259, 518n76; conventions

index

of the presidential addresses at, 247, 248, 255, 263, 266–­67, 286; Darwin­ ian controversy at, 173–­75, 248, 260–­61, 266–­67, 286; public lectures at, 248–­49, 253, 256–­58, 266, 368, 399–­401; purposes of, 247–­48, 264, 295; roles of president and section presidents, 247, 248, 249, 251, 259, 518n78; section meetings, 230, 249, 256 British Association for the Advancement of Science, X Club objectives and activities in: addressing the nation through the lectures and presiden­ tial addresses, 246–­47, 248, 256, 257, 258–­59, 264–­65, 266, 400–­401, 447; electing one another, 230, 252–­ 53, 257, 265–­66, 316, 355; lobbying, through the committee structures, 313–­16, 321, 329, 331–­32; public service and institutional power as officers, 251–­52, 314–­16, 331; self-­ promotion in early career, 111, 112, 117, 119, 121–­22, 124 British Museum, 57–­58, 114, 122, 255, 286, 332, 333, 336, 338, 339; reorganiza­ tion of the natural history collec­ tions, 155–­63, 168, 255, 499n153, 500n162; tensions with Kew over herbaria, 235, 241–­42, 245 Brock, William H., 237, 248, 251, 264, 293 Brodie, Benjamin Collins (father), 174 Brodie, Benjamin Collins (son), 100 Brown, Robert, 51, 150–­51, 156 Browne, Janet, 8–­9 Browning, Robert, 384 Buccleuch, 5th Duke of (Walter Francis Montagu-­Douglas-­Scott), 252, 315, 517n89 Buckle, Henry, 164, 196; History of Civiliza­ tion in England, 164 Bunsen, Robert, 62, 71, 120 Burkhardt, Frederick, 266–­67 Burnett, William, 93, 95 Burton, Anthony, and Elizabeth Bonython, 294 Burton, Richard, 200, 201 Busk, Ellen (wife of George), 13, 14, 15, 54, 345, 347, 349, 479n40, 479–­80n43, 514n13; friendship with Hirst, 133, 220, 347, 349; friendship with

Huxley, 15, 122, 133–­34, 220, 349; re­ ligious beliefs of, 54–­55, 122, 133–­34 Busk, George, 1, 3, 4f, 10, 33, 34, 54, 167, 168, 215 career, 3, 41; election to scientific socie­ ties, 53–54, 356; financial circum­ stances, 54, 106, 122; Royal College of Sur­geons, Hunterian professor, 329; Seamen’s Hospital Society, sur­ geon, 53–­54, 479n40; social recogni­ tion through science, 164, 356 early life and education, 53 historiographical discussion, 54–­55, 479n40, 479–­80n43 lectures and publications for general audiences, 206; “Remarks, and Orig­ inal Figures, Taken from a Cast of the Neanderthal Cranium,” 180 personal, 34, 106, 122, 227, 450, 451; family, 53, 54, 106, 219, 345, 479n40; friendship with Huxley, 122, 132, 300; friendship with Lubbock, 144, 190, 219–­20, 350; health, 4f, 346, 450, 451; social position, 164, 479–­ 80n43; temperament, 1, 54, 107, 122, 152, 238, 240, 242–­43, 246, 289, 450 religious, philosophical, and political views, 54–­55, 219, 431, 456; gender, 358, 532n164; religion, 54–­55, 122, 188, 190, 192 reputation, 54, 151, 220, 227 science education, promoter of, 313–­14, 317, 329, 342; examiner, 149; Lon­ don School Board, Huxley election committee, 300, 313 scientific ideals and scientific research, 3, 34, 122, 215, 223, 456; change in research interest, 17, 173, 176–­77; craniometry, 177, 180, 198, 422, 504n29; filling the gap between apes and man, 180, 223, 422, 456; microscopy, 54, 122; publications, 54, 57, 105, 122, 504n29, 509n106; “Remarks, and Original Figures, Taken from a Cast of the Neander­ thal Cranium,” 180 societies and committees, administra­ tive positions and roles, 54, 152–­55, 232–­46, 289, 356, 534n214; in An­ thropological Institute, 238, 240; 573

index

societies and committees (cont.) in British Association, 202, 313–­14, 517n65; in Ethnological Society, 198–­99, 201, 236–­38; journal editor, 54, 152, 153–­54, 178–­80, 182; in Linnean Society, 152–­55, 242–­44, 246; in Microscopical Society, 54; obliging, reliable, and peace-­making committee person, 180, 182, 240, 243, 246, 289; president and chair­ man, 54, 240, 243, 343; referee, 281; in Royal College of Surgeons, 243, 329, 343; in Royal Institution, 397–­98; in Royal Society, 183–­84, 269–­71, 272–­73, 281, 284; secretary, 152–­55; treasurer and auditor, 397, 517n65; on University of London Senate, 223, 342–­43, 350, 530n164 X Club, position in X-­networks and projects, 147, 168, 215, 222, 246, 350, 411, 412, 447; British Museum natural history collections, 159, 161–­62; friendship networks, 4f, 129, 132, 134, 167, 185, 215, 217, 222, 253; Linnean Society, 152–­55, 242–­44, 246; Lubbock for University of London MP, 350; the Natural His­ tory Review, 178–­82, 504n29; pro­ moter of Darwin’s reputation, 183–­ 84; the Reader, 206, 208; redirection of anthropological science, 198–­202, 238, 240; Royal Society elections, 269–­71, 272–­73; social center, 216– ­20, 222, 347, 349, 451, 452; special­ ist journals, 152–­54, 236–­37, 238, 240; Sunday lecture supporter, 431; supporter of free inquiry in theol­ ogy, 185, 188, 190, 192 Busk, Jane (née Westly, mother of George), 53 Busk, Robert (father of George), 53 Butterfield, Herbert, 21 Caine, Barbara, Destined to Be Wives, 6 Cairnes, John Elliot, 207, 345, 434 Cardwell, Donald, 293, 294 career-­making in science, 110–­34, 144; pluralism, 110, 120, 122, 129, 132–­ 33, 149–­50, 167; the use of British Association meetings, 111, 112, 117, 119, 121–­22, 124; the uses of pa­

574

trons, 42, 43, 44, 55–­56, 59, 60–­61, 73–­75, 93, 95–­96, 111–­16, 120–­22, 123–­24, 130, 134, 144, 146, 167, 494n51 Carlyle, Thomas, 73, 418, 426, 458; en­ thusiasm of Hirst, Huxley, and Tyn­ dall for, 30, 67, 71–­72, 96, 107, 132, 138, 140–­41, 418, 420, 424, 528n98; Frankland and Spencer not interested in, 70, 82, 88, 426; Heroes and Hero-­ Worship, 70, 71–­72; Past and Present, 67; religion of natural supernatural­ ism, 30, 67, 71–­72, 107; Sartor Resar­ tus, 424; social and political theories, 67, 72, 458, 514n13, 528n98 Carpenter, William Benjamin, 160, 166, 174, 189f, 219, 225, 350–­52, 430, 436, 521n149; in British Museum lobby, 159–­62; friend and ally of the X-­men, 110, 132, 134, 168, 215, 220, 222, 225; in the Linnean Soci­ ety, 153, 155t, 499n147; and Meta­ physical Society, 388, 390, 391; and Natural History Review, 178; Principles of Physiology, 88; promoter of Dar­ win, 172, 183; in the Sunday lecture movement, 430, 432–­33, 434, 435, 437; in theological controversies, 188, 191, 192, 195, 196, 456 Carruthers, William, 241–­42, 245 Carter, Richard, 63, 68, 69, 73, 484n114 Century Club, 12, 387, 388 Chambers, Robert, 86, 162, 174, 176. See also Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation Chandler, Thomas, 91 Chapman, John, 85–­86, 87, 128, 389; and the Westminster Review, 85, 86, 128, 389 Charing Cross Hospital, 91, 92–­93 Chartism, 65–­66, 77, 83, 203 Christian socialism, 112, 203–­5, 208, 501n179, 509n112; associated individuals, 12, 165–­66, 204–­5, 215, 227, 344, 433, 501n179, 510n113, 526n71; working­ men’s college movement, 203, 299–­ 300, 399–­400, 402, 433, 441. See also Macmillan, Alexander Church of England, 50–­51, 196–­97; clergy suspected of intellectual dishonesty, 11–­12, 95–­96, 170, 186–­87, 190–­91,

index

196–­97, 379, 432; moves to broaden the Church’s doctrinal formularies, 188, 190–­91, 196–­97; Oxford and Cambridge as Anglican institutions, 30, 97–­98, 389; the privileges of Es­ tablishment and the disabilities of Dissent, 30, 90, 196, 382, 424, 438–­ 39, 538n86; the Thirty-­Nine Articles, 12, 97–­98, 101, 102, 191, 192, 389. See also Dissent; religion, the politics of City and Guilds of London Institute, 312 Clark, James, 162, 191, 428 Clark, John F. C., 28–­29, 384, 449–­50 Clarke, Hyde, 236, 238 Clifford, William Kingdon, 21, 385, 388, 434, 436 Club, The, 387, 391, 393, 458, 460 clubs, 11–­12, 50, 226, 227, 230, 383–­84, 387, 473n20, 513n5; Cannibal Club, 11, 201, 509n103; Century Club, 12, 387, 388; The Club, 387, 391, 393, 458, 460; College Council Club of the Royal College of Surgeons, 12; confidential discussion in, 87, 389; Philosophical Breakfast Club, 7; Red Lion Club, 12, 50, 288, 473n18; Thor­ ough Club, 11–­12, 13. See also Athe­ naeum Club; Macmillan, Alexander: his tobacco parliaments; Royal So­ ciety of London, organization and procedures: Philosophical Club of; Whittington Club Cobbold, Thomas Spencer, 434 Cole, Henry, 294, 298f, 309, 327f; and de­ velopment of South Kensington in­ stitutions, 158, 296, 298f, 300, 301–­ 2, 324, 326, 327f, 338; promoter of school of science against School of Mines, 301–­2, 324, 326, 357, 359; and Science and Art Department examinations, 304, 306, 309 Colenso, John William (bishop of Natal), 185–­86, 189–­96, 197, 201, 212, 223, 231, 433, 506n71, 507n80, 507n88, 513n162; the Pentateuch, 186, 190, 505n54; X Club involvement with, 190–­96, 226, 507n81, 507n88. See also theological controversy: Bishop Colenso’s Pentateuch Collini, Stefan, 363–­64, 384, 387, 441; Public Moralists, 28–­29, 387

Colvile, William James and Elinor, 253 Colvill, Mary, 350 combative style and confrontational content of the X-­publicists, 214, 290, 370–­83, 391–­93, 408, 415, 457; allies who agreed it was the time for battle, 391–­92, 401; allies who criticized combative style, 210–­12, 399; criticisms of Huxley’s aggres­ siveness by his X-­brothers, 211, 288, 383, 452, 453; criticisms of Tyndall’s aggressiveness by his X-­brothers, 262, 264, 288–­89, 391, 398–­99, 449, 452; Herschel against confronta­ tional religious controversy, 51, 188, 194, 291, 429; Huxley in combative mode, 34, 209–­11, 220–­21, 288, 375–­77, 391, 401, 453; justifications of plain speaking by X-­men, 210, 211, 366, 383, 398, 424; Lubbock’s mild and mediating style, 380–­82, 405, 426; military metaphors, 174, 176, 184, 188, 210–­12, 215, 259, 309, 311, 367, 370, 391–­92, 424; principle that free inquiry should be reverential and not deliberately of­ fensive, 187, 196–­97, 209, 383, 389, 391; reputations of the combative X-­men, 362–­63, 377–­80, 383, 399; Spencer’s polarizing content, 378–­ 80; Tyndall in combative mode, 216, 262, 372–­75, 391, 398–­99, 424 Combe, George, 58, 66, 86, 535–­36n29 Committee of Council on Education (“Com­ mittee on Education”), 301, 333, 340 comparative religion, 51, 256–­57, 422, 436, 457 Complete Suffrage Union (CSU), 83–­84 Comte, Auguste, 88, 97, 100 Contemporary Review, 403, 407–­8, 410 Cooke, John, 91–­92 Copley Medal, awarded to Darwin, 183–­85 “country-­house science,” 50, 462 Coventry, 75–­76, 86, 89–­91 Cox, Jeffrey, 31 Coxe, James, 367 Craik, George, The Pursuit of Knowledge un­ der Difficulties, 62–­63, 481–­82n75 Craven, James ( Jemmy), 68 575

index

Crawfurd, John, 234, 235–­36, 240 Crosland, Maurice, 294–­95 cultural leadership, 27–­29, 366, 384–­85, 393f, 404, 406, 407, 440–­42, 444, 465; Archbishop Manning and, 392, 441; claims to cultural authority by scientific men, 163–­65, 168–­69, 387, 458; clubs and cultural authority, 163–­65, 384, 387–­88; higher clergy among the cultural elite, 385–­88 passim, 404; historiographical dis­ cussion, 28–­29, 363–­64, 365, 384, 442, 465; literary men and cultural leadership, 28, 197, 364, 404, 440–­ 41, 476n79; positivists among the cultural elite, 391–­92, 404, 441; public responsibilities of the cultu­ ral elite, 168, 365–­66, 384, 392–­93, 441–­42; recognition of X-­men as cultural leaders, 365, 368–­69, 385, 387–­88, 392–­93, 403, 404, 407, 428, 429f, 432–­37 passim, 440–­41, 444, 448; Ruskin and, 367, 392, 403, 434, 441; social integration of the cul­ tural elite, 383–­93. See also intellec­ tuals, historiographical discussion Currey, Frederick, 154, 155t, 178 Dalhousie, 10th Earl of ( James Andrew Brown Ramsay), and Susan Geor­ giana Ramsay, Lady Dalhousie, 56, 111 Darwin, Charles, 17, 21, 50, 170, 172–­76, 180–­81, 223, 226, 234, 346, 417f, 423; correspondent of Hooker, 164, 172, 175, 182, 183, 192, 195, 211, 213, 217, 219, 220, 256, 264, 288, 319, 337, 395; mentor of Lubbock, 5, 56, 57–­58, 143–­44, 146, 369; repu­ tation promoted by the X-­network, 170, 172–­73, 174–­76, 183–­84, 223, 253, 258, 264, 266, 277, 282–­83, 284, 396, 416, 418, 505n47, 505n49; significance of the Origin to the for­ mation of the X Club, 16, 32, 163, 172–­73, 180–­81, 215; supporter of Hooker campaigns, 16, 153, 155t, 158, 161, 162–­63; supporter of X-­network campaigns, 177–­78, 180, 181, 182, 183, 188, 193, 206, 207, 211, 212, 223, 434, 435–­36, 438

576

Darwin, Erasmus (brother of Charles), 191, 544n233 Darwin, Erasmus (grandfather of Charles), 21–­22, 76, 77, 78, 191, 486n144 Darwinian issues, 177, 180, 201, 215, 223, 311–­12; conventions of debate in scientific societies, 248, 266–­67, 281–­82, 286; evolutionary anthro­ pology, 17, 18, 21, 380–­82, 421–­22; geological time, 232, 255–­56, 261, 348; human antiquity and pre-­ history, 17–­18, 176–­77, 178, 180, 282, 421–­22, 474n37; human vari­ ety and human-­ape relationships, 174, 180–­81, 198, 200, 256, 401, 422; monogenesis vs. polygenesis, 11, 199, 201, 202, 233–­34, 235; nat­ ural selection, 17, 172–­73, 176, 263, 396, 401, 402; spontaneous gener­ ation, 258–­59, 282. See also evolu­ tionary theory Davies, J. Llewellyn, 204, 207 Dawson, Gowan, 263–­64, 282–­83; and Lightman, 22 Debus, Heinrich, 123, 138, 347, 354 “Declaration of the Students of the Natural Sciences,” 193–­94, 222–23, 507n83 de Grey, 3rd Earl (George Robinson), later 1st Marquess of Ripon, 331, 332, 354 De la Beche, Henry, 52, 55, 129, 142–­43, 296, 300, 301, 324, 479n36 De la Rue, Warren, 126, 127, 283, 521n141 Department of Education, 301, 340, 531n156 Department of Science and Art (DSA), 300–­ 301; name change, 301, 524n21. See also Science and Art Department/ Department of Science and Art de Perthes, Boucher, 176 Derby, 15th Earl of (Edward Henry Stanley), 334, 357, 449 Derby, intellectual life of, 75–­79, 83 Derby Philosophical Society, 75–­78, 82, 486n144 Desmond, Adrian, 20, 54, 91, 175, 328, 391, 478n19, 479–­80n43; on anti-­ Establishment politics, 30, 371, 424, 438, 489n197; on Huxley, 30, 90–­91, 95, 132, 311, 356, 391, 424, 438, 489n197, 489n208, 495n63;

index

in Journal of the History of Biology, 23–­24; on professionalization, 15, 23–­24, 358, 463; on the South Ken­ sington science schools, 24, 311, 328, 358, 463 Devonshire, 7th Duke of ( William Cavendish), 273, 274, 277, 278, 326, 333, 354 Devonshire Commission. See Royal Com­ mission on Scientific Instruction and the Advancement of Science (the Devonshire Commission) Dickens, Charles, 404, 428, 430 Disraeli, Benjamin, 161, 209–­11, 210f, 212, 255 Dissent, 75–­76, 464, 485n136; campaigns against and resentment at civil dis­ abilities, 31, 98, 424, 430, 438–­39, 476n83; civil disabilities of Dissent­ ers, 31, 90, 97–­98, 196, 209, 538n86; the politics of radical Dissent, 75–­ 76, 77, 83–­84, 90, 430; the rational­ ism of “old” Dissent, 75, 90–­99. See also religion, the politics of Dixon, Thomas, 31 Donkin, William Fishburn, 99 Donnelly, John Fretchville Dykes, 302, 304–­ 5, 339, 340, 524n27; alliance with Huxley, 312, 326, 328, 361 Douglas Jerrold’s Magazine and Douglas Jer­ rold’s Weekly Newspaper, 66–­67, 68 Draper, William Draper, “The Intellec­ tual Development of Europe,” 174–­75 Drayton, Richard, 55, 114, 148 drugs, 346, 450 DSA. See Department of Science and Art (DSA); Science and Art Department/ Department of Science and Art Du Chaillu, Paul Belloni, 190, 235 Duff, Mountstuart Grant, 385, 388 Ebury, 1st Baron (Robert Grosvenor), 191–­92 Economist, 84–­85 Edinburgh Review, 165, 172, 187, 212 Edmondson, George, 62, 69, 70, 120 education, liberal, 96–­97, 103, 108, 149, 313, 319–­20, 328–­29, 358–­59, 360, 463, 527n79; claims of modern lan­ guages, 297, 322; claims of science to be an essential part of, 149, 297, 313, 315, 319–­21, 359; dominance

of classical languages, 97, 99, 297, 315–­16, 322, 527n79; Huxley’s re­ working of the ideal, 402 education, science, 296–­97, 300–­309, 311–­ 30; a basis for morality by teaching the laws of nature, 322–­23, 376–­77, 401–­2, 405, 442; in public schools, 313–­17, 328, 357; trains the mind, 115, 315, 319–­21, 359, 415; utility of, 115, 315, 359, 528n101 (see also education, technical) education, technical, 317, 323–­28, 329, 330, 359–­60; support by London’s trade guilds and livery companies, 298, 312, 336, 340, 530n131 education lobbies, 297, 313, 314–­17, 323, 330–­31, 333 Egerton, Philip de Malpas Grey, 157, 251, 286, 315, 517n64 elementary education, 296, 301–­2, 304, 306, 309, 322–­23, 359, 360, 404, 426. See also London School Board Elliotson, John, 91–­92 Elliott, Paul, 76, 77–­78, 487n161 Elwick, James, 36, 311, 525nn35–­36 Elwin, Whitwell, 162 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 72, 82, 119, 132 Endersby, Jim: the gentlemanly ideal of in­ dependence, 23, 480n47; on Hooker, 252, 287, 459, 518n82; on Hooker’s ideal of gentlemanly manners, 24, 138, 243; on Hooker’s ideal of inde­ pendence and reality of employment, 25, 44, 106, 114, 478n11, 523n9; on William Hooker and Kew, 114, 480n47 Entomological Society of London, 48t, 145 Essays and Reviews, 170, 185; the contro­ versy over, 186–­90, 192–­93, 196; individual essayists, 186–­87, 190, 191, 226; the scientists’ memorial, 187–­88, 192, 195, 226, 506n60 Ethnological and Anthropological Societies of London, and Anthropological In­ stitute of Great Britain and Ireland, 197–­202, 231–­40 Ethnological and Anthropological Socie­ ties of London, and Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ire­land, conflicts of: attempts at amalgam­ ation, 234–­36, 237–­38, 240; financial 577

index

Ethnological and Anthropological Societies of London, conflicts of (cont.) irregularities, 236, 238; historiography of, 200, 202, 232, 508n99, 509n109, 516n37; political and scientific differences, 11, 198–­202, 232–­34, 508n93, 509n107; publications, 200, 236–­37, 238; women at meetings, 200, 237. See also Anthropological Review; Darwinian issues: monogen­ esis vs. polygenesis Ethnological and Anthropological Societies of London, and Anthropological In­ stitute of Great Britain and Ireland, individuals: Busk, 198–­99, 201–­2, 236–­37, 238–­40; Clarke (Hyde), 236, 238; Crawfurd, 234, 235–­36; Hooker, 237, 255; Hunt, 198–­202, 234–­37; Huxley, 197–­202, 233–­38, 240; Lub­ bock, 198, 200–­202, 234–­40; Spottis­ woode, 198, 200; X Club allies, 198, 200–­201, 238, 515n32 Ethnological and Anthropological Societies of London, and Anthropological In­ stitute of Great Britain and Ireland, X Club preoccupations: the dignity and respectability of science, 200–­ 202, 234–­35, 236, 237, 459; special­ ist publishing, 236–­37, 238, 515n34; the unity of science, 202, 459 Evans, John, 201, 274–­75; X Club ally, 274–­ 75, 522n178 Evans, Marian (George Eliot), 1, 85, 86, 87, 90, 128, 383, 389, 419 evolutionary theory: evolutionary anthro­ pology, 17–­18, 21, 380–­82, 421–­22; the evolutionary epic, 17, 400–­401, 422; non-­Darwinian evolutionary theory, 17–­18, 184; pre-­Darwinian evolutionary theory, 17, 21–­22, 70, 76, 77–­78, 84, 87–­88, 89, 128, 184, 423, 487n161; Spencer’s cosmic evo­ lution, 5, 87–­88, 378, 415, 421–­22, 423; and the X Club, 16–­18, 184–­85, 401, 422. See also Darwinian issues examinations, 299, 314, 335, 348, 355, 404, 525n35; curriculum control through, 147, 149–­50, 306, 311–­ 12; for medicine, 93, 149; for the military, 149; of the Science and Art Department, 301–­13, 525nn35–­36,

578

525n39 (see also Science and Art Department/Department of Science and Art, science examination system of ); of the University of London, 342, 343–­44, 346–­47, 361, 464 Eyre affair, 234, 235, 236, 349, 431, 433, 514n13 Eyre and Spottiswoode. See Spottiswoode printing companies Falconer, Hugh, 183–­84, 215, 222, 223, 367 Faraday, Michael, 117, 126, 135, 138–­39, 141–­42, 166, 194, 341, 348; at the Royal Institution, 4, 57, 125–­27, 138–­39, 139f, 395–­97; Tyndall’s role model, patron, and mentor, 117, 119–­20, 121, 126–­27, 135, 138–­39, 140–­42, 348, 416 Farrar, Frederic William, 191, 314, 315–­16, 317, 526n72 Fawcett, Henry, 404, 405 Fergusson, James, 225, 253, 256–­57, 513n3 Fick, Sophie. See Frankland, Sophie (née Fick, first wife of Edward) Finch, Frederick George, 350–­51 Fiske, John, 229 Fitzroy, Robert, 175 Flower, William Henry, 198, 253 Forbes, Edward, 89, 93, 124, 126, 127, 129, 143, 199; patron of Huxley, 120, 121, 123–­24 Forbes, James David, 119, 143, 148, 511n144 Forgan, Sophie, 397, 528n105, 534n218; and Gooday, 297, 360 Forster, William Edward, 331, 332 Fortnightly Review, 441; controversial arti­ cles, 233, 375–­76, 378, 391, 392, 399, 408; journalistic position and reputation, 213, 264, 391–­92, 407–­8, 514n12 Foster, Michael, 231, 240–­41, 277, 284, 305, 307, 369; X Club ally, 274, 275, 522n178 Fownes, George, 92–­93 Fox, Charles, 80, 486n155 Francis, Mark, 11, 76, 77, 87, 485–­86n138, 486n140, 487n159, 535–­36n29 Francis, William, 120, 122–­23, 463; friend and patron of Tyndall, 120, 121,

index

122, 123, 129, 133, 138, 494n47; patron of Huxley, 122, 123 Frankland, Edward, 58–­62, 69–­74, 105–­6, 129–­32 passim, 285f, 439f career, 5, 74, 114–­17, 129–­30, 134; con­ sulting work, 116, 117, 130, 132, 356, 451; election to and honors from scientific societies, 106, 116, 134, 148; financial circumstances, 115, 116, 117, 130, 167; Owens Col­ lege, 115–­17, 129–­30, 492n15; pa­ trons, 60–­61, 73–­74, 111, 130; plu­ ralism, 116, 130; Putney College, 61, 74, 115, 485n133, 492n13; Queen­ wood College, 62, 69; rare partici­ pant in cultural politics, 234, 433; Royal College of Chemistry, 304; Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, 130; School of Science, South Kensington, 329; social mobility through science, 105, 106, 116, 164 early life and education, 3, 60–­62, 69–­74; mechanics’ institute and self-­ improvement, 59–­60, 62, 75; pupil of Playfair, 61; University of Berlin, 114–­15; University of Marburg, 3–­4, 62, 69, 71 lectures and publications for general audiences, 206, 256, 395, 396–­97, 412, 511n127; “Climate in Town and Country,” 397; Lecture Notes, 307; “On the Educational and Commercial Utility of Chemistry,” 115–­16; Royal Institution lectures, 5, 116, 396, 397 personal: family, 60, 115, 117, 132, 227, 450–­51, 507n88; friendship with Tyn­ dall, 69–­71, 130–­32, 451; health, 452; temperament, 2, 60, 275, 289, 395 religious, philosophical, and political views, 69–­72, 184–­85, 195, 219, 484n115; politics, 234, 319, 438, 442; religion, 60–­61, 69–­70, 71, 107, 116, 437, 483n108 reputation: criticism by Hooker, 220; early reputation, 115, 116, 134, 227 science education, promoter of, 115, 307, 312, 317, 319, 329, 357; en­ ables social mobility, 319, 329; teaching must be based on observa­ tion and experiment (not books),

306–­7, 312; through School of Sci­ ence, 301; through Science and Art Department examinations, 304–­5, 312, 319; through teacher training, 307, 312, 325–­26 scientific ideals and scientific research, 72; early research and publications, 3, 61, 69–­70, 106, 115, 116, 117; the temptations of consultancy, 117, 132, 395, 415, 459 societies and committees, administra­ tive positions: British Association, 253, 256, 257, 266, 331; Royal Insti­ tution, 398; Royal Society, 134, 148, 229, 275, 277, 289, 511n144 X Club, position in X-­networks and projects: early X-­network, 132, 134, 167, 215, 222; loosening social ties, 347, 415, 451, 452; Saturday Review science columns, 165–­66; school of science promoter, 301, 325–­26, 328–­29; Science and Art Depart­ ment examination activist, 302–­7; “Scientific Review” project, 165; Spencer portrait promoter, 453–­54; state aid lobbyist, 326, 333, 337–­38; Sunday lecture supporter, 428, 434–­ 36, 437 Frankland, Ellen (née Grenfell, second wife of Edward), 450, 451 Frankland, Margaret, later Margaret Helm (mother of Edward), 60 Frankland, Sophie (née Fick, first wife of Edward), 10, 115, 132, 227, 450 freedom in conversation, 13, 50–­51, 87, 107, 122, 130–­32, 389, 407, 459 freedom of thought. See liberals, liberalism, and liberal thought “free” science, 11, 13, 14, 22, 67, 194–­95, 227, 278, 456. See also liberals, liber­ alism, and liberal thought Galton, Francis, 248, 251–­52, 270, 282, 315, 366, 433, 515n26, 517n57; X Club friend and ally, 198, 206, 253, 282, 289, 508n97, 522n178 Gassiot, John Peter, 53, 127, 142, 270–­71, 289, 290 Gay, Hannah, 193–­94, 507n83 gentlemanliness and manliness as ideals, 162, 164, 181, 184, 272, 496n90; 579

index

gentlemanliness and manliness as ideals (cont.) continuing concern for gentlemanli­ ness as birth and rank, 24–­25, 252, 269, 272, 273, 274, 277; gentlemanli­ ness as character and dignity, 24, 44, 137–­38, 287, 400, 453; historiograph­ ical discussion, 24–­25, 475nn60–­61; manly independence vs. gentlemanly independence, 23, 140, 142, 143, 295, 462; manly simplicity vs. gentle­ manly diplomacy, 139, 142–­43, 167; “weight,” 157, 161, 194, 269, 278, 287–­88 “gentlemen of science.” See professional­ ization: gentlemen/men of science rejected as alternative to amateur/ professional Geological Society of London, 47, 48t, 49, 113, 120, 200, 232; annual dinners, 348, 386; debate over William Thom­ son’s limitation of geological time, 232, 348 (see also geological time); X-­men involvement in, 146, 147, 232, 241, 267, 348, 386, 514nn7–­8 Geological Survey, 52, 55, 108, 129, 206, 294, 296, 300–­301, 324, 328; its chemical laboratories, 52, 296, 300, 301; its Museum of Economic Geol­ ogy, 52, 61, 126–­27, 160, 296; its Museum of Practical Geology, 160, 296, 301. See also School of Mines/ Government School of Mines geological time, 232, 255, 261, 348, 436 German language, 57, 70, 92, 94; transla­ tions from, 74, 104, 122, 123, 180, 494n41 German philosophy and theology, 30, 70, 71, 103, 465 German science and education, 28, 125, 323, 326; admirers of, 71, 115, 125–­ 26, 131–­32, 293 Gieryn, Thomas, 416 Gladstone, William Ewart, 338, 366, 386, 387, 391, 407, 424–­25, 452 Glasgow Science Lectures Association, 403–­4, 406 Glasgow Sunday Society. See Sunday lectures Gooday, Graeme, and Sophie Forgan, 297, 360

580

Goschen, George, 352, 355, 356, 432, 534n204 government committees and commissions of inquiry: Clarendon Commission (into public schools), 313, 314; Ox­ ford University Commission, 103; Public Schools Commission, 316–­17; Royal Commission to Inquire into the Property and Income Belonging to . . . the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, 336; Select Commit­ tee on Provision for Instruction in Theoretical and Applied Science to the Industrial Classes (Samuelson Committee), 317, 322–­23, 324, 325, 333; Taunton Commission (into en­ dowed schools), 313. See also Royal Commission on Scientific Instruc­ tion and the Advancement of Sci­ ence (the Devonshire Commission) Graham, Thomas, 428 Grant, Robert, 434 Granville, 2nd Earl (Granville George Leveson-­Gower), 317, 338, 354, 356, 357, 386, 432, 449 Gray, Asa, 153, 176, 181 Gray, James Edward, 22, 93 Great Exhibition, 114, 294, 296 Griffith, George, 315, 317, 526n71 Grote, George, 343–­44, 348, 350, 351–­52 Grote, Harriet (wife of George), 343 group biography, 6, 7, 8–­9, 10, 455–­56; the heroic mode of, 6, 8–­9 Grove, William, 53, 272, 526–­27n72 Guthrie, Frederick, 307, 312–­13; Magnetism and Electricity, 307 Halifax Mechanics’ Institute and Halifax Mutual Improvement Society, 63, 68–­69, 483n99 Hamilton, Lord Claud, and family, 253, 257, 395, 517n70 Hamilton, Louisa (daughter of Lord Claud). See Tyndall, Louisa Charlotte (née Hamilton, wife of John) Hamilton, William, The Philosophy of the Unconditioned, 418 Harrison, Frederic, 383, 388, 392, 401, 441 Haughton, Samuel, 247 Helmstadter, Richard, 54–­55

index

Henfrey, Arthur, ally of Hooker: and British Museum natural history collections, 159, 161, 162; in the Linnean Soci­ ety, 153, 155t, 162 Henslow, John, 112, 148, 149, 150, 162; ally of Hooker, 161 Herschel, Alexander (son of John), 194 Herschel, John Frederick William, 46–­47, 56, 127, 138, 144, 188, 194, 207, 212, 260–­61, 375; against confron­ tational religious controversy, 51, 188, 194, 291, 429 Herschel, Louisa (Loo, daughter of John), 143–­44, 146 Herschel, William (father of John), 137–­38 Heyck, Thomas William, 28, 363–­64, 476n79; Transformation of Victorian Intellectual Life, 28 Heywood, James, 430, 436 Hirst, Anna (née Martin, wife of T. A.), 133, 345–­46 Hirst, Lilly (niece of T. A.), 349 Hirst, Thomas Archer, 2, 3, 5, 71–­75, 341–­ 56, 353f career, 3, 5, 109, 131–­32, 355; election to scientific societies, 170; financial circumstances, 131, 133, 352, 534n207; patronage by X-­brothers, 127, 350–­ 52, 354–­55, 360; pluralism, 299, 305, 348; positions lost or rejected, 131–­32; Queenwood College, 75, 127, 133; Royal Naval College, 352, 354–­55, 534n204; social mobility through science, 105–­6, 164, 341, 348, 354, 384; University College, 5, 132, 341, 344–­45, 347–­48, 531n151; University College School, 5, 341; University of London, 342, 346–­47, 350–­54 early life and education, 3, 67–­69, 71–­75; mechanics’ institute culture, 59–­60, 68–­69, 73–­74; mentored by Carter and Tyndall, 68, 71–­72; social and financial position, 67, 74, 105, 120; surveying apprenticeship, 68; Uni­ versity of Marburg and other German universities, 75; visits to French and Italian mathematicians, 5, 133 lectures and publications for general audiences, 73, 74, 354, 483n99,

483n101; in the Reader, 207, 208, 213, 511n140 personal, 67, 143, 209–­10, 231, 345, 347, 354; family, 5, 133, 345–­46, 349; friendship with Ellen Busk, 130, 220, 345, 349–­50; friendship with Ellen Lubbock, 220, 345–­46, 349–­50; friendship with Sharpey, 341, 348–­49; friendship with Tyn­ dall, 67–­68, 71, 133–­34, 140, 143, 261, 391, 396, 449, 453; health, 346, 348, 351–­52, 450; London social life, 133–­34, 347–­50, 354, 386f, 387; temperament, 2, 227, 289, 354 religious, philosophical, and politi­ cal views, 256, 259, 383, 452, 457; Carlylean religion of feeling without dogma, 30, 71–­73, 420; gender, 133, 344–­46; liberal visions of progress, 73, 184, 196; outsider perspective on Darwin’s Origin and human evolution, 184, 397; science to be “free” (from constraints of religious dogma), 194–­95, 227 reputation, 354 science education, promoter of, 313–­ 16, 317, 347, 348; as examiner, 299, 305, 312, 348; geometry as an em­ pirical science, 300; for women, 344–­45 scientific ideals and scientific research: priority of research, 132, 346, 352; science as a religious calling, 72, 140, 442, 459 societies and committees, administra­ tive positions and roles, 289, 348, 522n176; Association for the Im­ provement of Geometrical Teaching (founder), 300, 522n176; Athenaeum Club, 261–­62, 348; British Associa­ tion, 246, 251–­52, 257, 286, 313–­16, 331, 355; diligent committee person, 252, 347, 348–­49; London Mathe­ matical Society, 348–­49; Royal Astro­ nomical Society, 348–­49; Royal So­ ciety, 230, 272–­73, 284; University of London Senate, 342–­43 X Club, position in X-­networks and projects: British Association Com­ mittee on Science Education in

581

index

X Club (cont.) Schools, 314–­16; friendship networks, from fringe to center, 133, 134, 167, 170, 190, 218–­20, 222–­23, 349, 355, 452, 513n7; mutual promotion of Lubbock and Hirst, 286, 350; the Reader, 207–­8, 213, 511n40; Royal Society elections, 273; Sunday lecture supporter, 431–­32, 434 Hobhouse, Arthur, 436 Hodgson, William Ballantyne, 430, 544n242 Hofmann, August, 126, 130, 304, 428 Holland, Henry, 207 Hooker, Frances (née Henslow, first wife of J. D.), 112, 132, 217, 227, 289, 349, 451, 512n149 Hooker, Hyacinth (née Symonds, sec­ ond wife of J. D.), 275, 347, 450, 533n180 Hooker, Joseph Dalton, 1–­2, 3, 7, 41–­44, 111–­14, 113f, 214, 254f, 285f, 305 career, 3, 55–­56, 111–­14; election to and honors from scientific societies, 44, 56, 114, 237; expeditions and writ­ ing up reports of expeditions, 44–­ 45, 55–­56, 111–­14, 113f, 121; finan­ cial circumstances, 44, 112, 478n13; Geo­logical Survey, 55; patronage of father and father’s “friends,” 44, 55, 111–­12, 114; pluralism, 114, 149; political skills learned from father and father’s networks, 56, 112, 147–­ 48, 162; positions lost or rejected, 55, 112, 113–­14; Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, assistant director and director, 3, 114, 244 early life and education, 42–­43, 58; botanical family and botanical edu­ cation, 42–­43, 58; family tensions and unhappy memories of youth, 2, 43; social position, 42–­43, 106, 384; travel ambitions, 43 historiographical discussion: Hooker, religion, and scientific naturalism, 18, 518n82; Hooker as typical/atypi­ cal of contemporaries, 24–­25, 106 lectures and publications for general audiences, 166, 253, 395; Botany, 308, 311–­12; British Association presidential address, 253–­55; jour­

582

nalism a low priority, 165–­66, 178, 181, 182, 213; occasional lectures, 249, 253–­55, 367, 396 personal, 1–­2; botany as a personal inheritance, 114, 252, 273; criticism of and praise for Huxley, 182, 201, 208, 210, 211, 220, 221f, 264, 288; criticism of and praise for Tyndall, 220, 256, 262, 264, 275, 449, 453; criticism of Frankland, 220, 275; criticism of Lubbock, 220, 253, 275, 288, 449–­50; deferential, elitist, and hierarchical, 56, 148, 242–­43, 246, 271, 280–­81, 290, 337; family, 42–­43, 112, 289, 384, 450, 478n10, 478n15, 512n149, 533n180; friendship with Darwin (see Darwin, Charles: cor­ respondent of Hooker); friendship with Huxley, 3; hyper-­critical, 1, 220, 291, 449–­50, 523n180; shift­ ing opinions of Spencer, 5, 168, 219, 253, 255, 279, 448, 449, 450, 453, 455; social position, 167, 384; temperament, 1–­2, 152, 156–­57, 158, 395 religious, philosophical, and political views, 51, 194, 255–­56, 266, 311, 418, 426, 442; Church reform sup­ porter, 188, 190–­93, 197, 508n92; on gender, 344; hierarchical view of science and society, 148, 242–­43, 246, 271, 280–­81, 290, 318–­19; nat­ uralism, 256–­57, 311, 368; polar­ izing and party language, 176, 196–­ 97, 367, 368, 371–­72; relativizing interest in comparative religion, 51, 256–­57; on “savages” and race, 164, 210, 514n13; supporter of free inquiry in theology, 188, 190–­93, 194, 195, 196, 507n81 reputation, 113f, 285f, 287; early repu­ tation, 56, 111–­13, 114, 134, 148 science education, 149–­50, 297, 305, 308, 318; Botany (text), 308, 311–­12; as examiner, 149–­50; for naturalists, 132; skeptical about educating “the people,” 318–­19; teaching must be from objects not books, 149–­50, 306 scientific ideals and scientific research, 147–­49; the Australian Flora, 219;

index

conflicting ideals, scientific exper­ tise, financial independence, gen­ tlemanly conduct, 23, 25, 41, 44, 106, 290; early publications, 56, 105, 111–­12; Flora Antarctica, 56; high sense of his own motives and value, 112, 148–­49, 244; high standards for publishing, 151–­54, 182, 244–­45, 523n180; occasional acceptance of broader cultural role, 197, 255, 368, 387, 418; priority of research, 166, 178, 216–­17, 244, 252, 305, 457; The Rhododendrons of Sikkim-­Himalaya, 111, 112–­13; science as vocation, 459; science must be gentlemanly, conducted in a dignified, courteous, and respectable manner, 24, 50, 142, 201, 237, 243, 246, 262, 288, 290; science should be supported by public funding, 112, 147, 148, 339; scientific achievement should bring cultural recognition, 163–­64, 201, 366, 387, 406 societies, committees, and lobbies, administrative positions and lobby­ ing networks, 147–­48, 167–­68, 244, 246, 448; action through proxies, 153, 159–­61, 178, 243–­45; British Association, 230, 246, 250f, 252–­ 53, 256, 266; Geological Society, 232; Linnean Society, 150–­55, 232, 241–­46; networker and strategist, 162–­64, 191, 242–­45, 246, 273, 289; presidential positions, 244, 252–­53, 256, 273, 309; Royal Geographi­ cal Society, 266; Royal Institution, 398; Royal Society, 147, 148, 269, 273, 278–­81, 284, 309, 339, 461–­62; University of London Senate, 342, 343, 344 X Club, position in X-­networks and projects, 32–­33, 215, 226, 446, 455; British Museum natural history collections, strategist, 155–­62, 158f, 255; center of network of lobbying naturalists, 16, 147–­48, 153–­54, 155t, 159–­63, 279; founder of Club, 214; friendship circles, 132, 134, 214–­15, 222, 347, 451; friendship with the Lubbocks important to the Club’s development, 220; initia­

tor of early projects, 32–­33, 147, 150–­51, 164, 167–­68, 227; Linnean Society, 150–­55, 241–­46; maintain­ ing the respectability of ethnological science, 201, 213, 237, 255; Natural History Review, critic and occasional participant, 177–­78, 181, 182–­83; promoter of Darwin’s reputation, 172, 174–­75, 255, 367, 505n47; the Reader, critic and occasional partici­ pant, 206, 208, 211, 213; “Scientific Review” project, 165; strategist over Athenaeum Club, 163–­64; supporter of free inquiry in theology, 188, 190–­93, 194–­95, 196 Hooker, Maria (née Turner, mother of J. D.), 42, 43, 51, 192, 384, 435 Hooker, William (brother of J. D.), 43, 51, 478n13 Hooker, William Jackson (father of J. D.), 41–­44, 46, 51, 105, 111, 147, 148, 296, 477n6, 478n15, 480n47; his herbarium, 42–­43, 44, 114, 147–­48, 156–­58, 160; at Kew Gardens, 44, 46, 55–­56, 114; patron and supporter of son’s career, 44, 55, 111–­14 Hoppen, Theodore, 112 Horner, Leonard, 53, 188 Houghton, 1st Lord (Richard Monckton Milnes), 388, 434 Houghton, Walter, 34 Howsam, Leslie, 367, 409, 411 Hughes, Thomas (Tom), 204, 205, 207–­8, 209, 234, 388; Tom Brown’s School­ days, 204 Humboldt, Alexander von, 43, 86 Hunt, James, 508n95; his politics, 199, 202, 235, 509n107; “Introductory Address on the Study of Anthropol­ ogy,” 199–­200; leader of the An­ thropological Society, 198, 199–­200, 201, 202, 234–­36, 237, 516n37 Hunt, Thornton, 73, 86 Huth, Henry, and the Huth family, 207, 209, 347, 533n178 Hutton, James, Theory of the Earth, 90 Hutton, Richard Holt, 350, 390–­91, 394, 407; review of Spencer’s Psychology, 378 Huxley, George (brother of T. H.), 89 Huxley, Henrietta (Nettie, née Heathorn, wife of T. H.), 94–­96, 121, 133, 204, 583

index

Huxley, Henrietta (cont.) 217, 310f, 479n43, 512n149; friend of Tyndall and Hirst, 129, 133, 220 Huxley, Noel (son of T. H.), 132, 134, 503n24, 512n149 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 1, 132, 221f, 285f, 288, 310f, 448–­49 career, 93–­96, 120–­22, 123–­24, 128–­ 29; election to and honors from scientific societies, 120, 123, 146, 153; financial circumstances, 93, 96, 122, 153, 208, 434, 501n173, 526n50; Geological Survey and School of Mines, 129; patrons, 93, 95, 111, 123–­24, 129, 494n51; pluralism, 122, 123, 128–­29, 149; positions lost or rejected, 122, 123, 129, 131–­32, 340, 464; Rattlesnake expedition and writing up reports, 93–­96, 120–­21, 122; Royal Navy, assistant surgeon, 93; upward social mobility and cultural leadership through science, 106, 135, 164, 207–­8, 234, 299–­300, 365–­66, 384, 425, 501n173 early life and education, 75–­76, 89–­93, 96; debts, 93; downward social mo­ bility, 89; early brilliance, 92, 93; introduced to materialism, 90, 91–­ 92; medical training, 76, 89–­93 historiographical discussion: combat­ iveness, 489n197, 489n208; exag­ geration of Huxley’s power, 9, 10, 14, 147, 297, 362, 500n162, 528–­ 29n105, 534n218; Huxley as prob­ lem, 12, 13–­14, 31, 34, 474n26 lectures and publications for general audiences, 122, 128, 129, 407–­8; Aberdeen, address to students, 370; ambitions for broad science com­ munication, 166; Bishop Berkeley’s idealism (RI), 397; British Associa­ tion lectures, 249, 253, 256, 258–­59, 263–­64, 266; “The Coming of Age of the Origin of Species” (RI), 396; commitment to popular journalism, 165–­66, 264; “Emancipation—­Black and White,” 233, 366; “The Evi­ dence of the Miracle of the Resurrec­ tion,” 34, 391; evolution as a theory in the public domain, 176, 185; “A

584

Liberal Education,” 322, 528n99; Man’s Place in Nature, 200, 220, 221f; the Natural History Review (chief ed­ itor), 177–­83, 503n24; “On a Piece of Chalk” (BA), 256, 400–­401; “On Species and Races, and their Origin” (RI), 172, 184, 396; “On the Desir­ ableness/Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge,” 375–­77, 419, 429f, 536n39, 544n241; “On the Fossil Remains of Man” (RI), 397; “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata and Its History” (BA), 263–­64; “On the Methods and Results of Ethnology,” 233–­34; “On the Physical Basis of Life,” 392; “On the Races of Mankind” (BA), 256; “The Pedigree of the Horse” (RI), 396; the Reader (editor and contribu­ tor), 206, 207–­12, 233; Royal Insti­ tution lectures, 122, 128–­29, 172, 184, 396–­97; “Some Fixed Points in British Ethnology,” 366; Sponta­ neous Generation (BA), 258–­59; Westminster Review, science reviews, 128; to working men, 322, 399–­402, 528n99; Zoological relations of Men to Monkeys, 181 personal, 1, 93–­96, 142–­43, 310f; family, 75, 89, 91, 94–­95, 129, 132, 134, 217, 503n24, 512n149; financial circumstances, 94, 153, 501n173; friendship with, and assessments of, Spencer, 5, 89, 96, 134, 219, 279, 452–­53; friendship with Hooker, 3; friendship with the Busks, 15, 122; friendship with Tyndall, 123, 124, 126–­27, 129, 132, 133, 134; health, 1, 95, 275, 277, 309, 310f, 383, 450; Hooker assessments of Huxley, 182, 201, 208, 210, 211, 220, 221f, 264, 288; ideal of manly independence, 24, 142, 143; temperament, 13, 92, 95, 123–­24, 142–­43, 209, 226, 240, 366, 368, 371, 383, 389–­90, 495n63 polemical style, 161, 164, 366, 382–­83, 424; claimed to avoid unnecessary controversy, 34, 383; in combative mode, 34, 209–­12, 220–­21, 375–­77, 391, 401, 453; constructing the op­ position, 370, 377, 424; justification

index

of confrontation, 366, 383; militant and polarizing metaphors, 176, 210–­11, 288, 367, 370, 377, 424; rhetorical dexterity, 34, 258–­59, 413–­14, 419, 421, 425. See also under combative style and confrontational content of the X-­publicists religious, philosophical, and political views, 95–­96; against the privileges of the established Church, 90, 438, 489n197; agnostic arguments and rhetorical strategies, 34, 90, 418–­ 21; on gender, 200, 237, 344; iden­ tification with liberals, 176, 208, 209, 211; the laws of nature reveal the reasons behind the moral laws, 322, 401, 402, 426, 545n268; mate­ rialism, 92, 126; metaphysical com­ mitment to naturalistic continuity from non-­life to life to mind, 105, 259, 311, 423; political, 92, 204, 234, 319, 426; religion as feeling, 96, 211, 425–­26; slavery, race, and anti-­Semitism, 94, 209–­10, 232–­34; supporter of free inquiry in theol­ ogy, 187–­88, 190–­92, 194, 506n60; the universe is governed by law, 76, 90, 92–­93 reputation, 7, 285f, 356–­57; as club­ bable, 12, 383–­84, 388; for contro­ versy, 221f, 288, 383; as cultural leader, 365, 388, 392, 393f, 403, 404, 428, 433, 435–­36, 437, 440; as debater and speechmaker, 318, 371, 394, 397; early scientific reputation, 93, 122; as irreligious, 132, 377–­78, 388–­89; as statesmanlike, 236, 237, 240, 288 science education, promoter of, 149, 297, 299–­300, 302–­30, 332, 340, 360–­61; allies, 308, 326, 359; as coeditor of Macmillan’s “Science Primer” series, 308; Lessons in Ele­ mentary Physiology (text), 308; as lob­ byist for the school of science, 301, 323–­26, 328; on London School Board, 300, 322–­23; Physiography (text), 302, 308; science education develops moral qualities, 320; “Sci­ ence from Below,” 524n29; Science Primers: Introductory (text), 308–­9,

526n50; teaching must be based on observation (not books), 306–­7, 321; through British Association educa­ tion committees, 313–­22; through Science and Art Department exami­ nations, 299, 302, 305, 309, 311, 525n36; through teacher training, 307–­8, 311–­12; through the Dev­ onshire Commission, 323–­26, 333, 339–­40; in working men’s college movement, 299–­300, 399–­400, 402 scientific ideals and scientific research: “the Ascidians,” 89; chose speciali­ zation as the route to scientific rep­ utation, 76, 94; diverted from re­ search by commitment to public enlightenment, 132, 241, 464; early reputation, 93, 122; early research on delicate sea creatures, 93, 95, 96, 106, 120, 122, 128–­29; evolutionary theory in Huxley’s research, 17, 128, 172–­73, 176, 185; science must pres­ ent a united front, 202, 232, 234, 235; scientific men have duties to the wider world, 168, 365–­66; shift in research to ape-­human compara­ tive anatomy, 174, 180–­81, 223 societies, committees, and lobbies, ad­ ministrative positions and lobbying networks, 213, 284, 288, 340; Ath­ enaeum Club, 192; British Associa­ tion, 249, 253, 256, 257–­59, 261–­63, 264, 331; British Museum natural history collections lobby, 156, 159–­ 62; Devonshire Commission, 323–­26, 333, 339–­40; effective administrator and committee man, 237, 324, 325, 356; Ethnological and Anthropologi­ cal Societies, 198–­99, 201–­2, 233–­40; Geological Society, 232, 241, 514n7; Linnean Society, 153, 154, 155f; ne­ gotiator and strategist, 1, 154, 234– ­40; president and chairman, 232, 236, 241, 245; Royal Society, 148, 184, 220, 231, 268, 269–­70, 272–­73, 274–­75, 277, 280, 282, 511n144, 520n118, 522n168; Sunday Lecture Society, promoter, 233; University of London Senate, 342–­43, 356 X Club, position in X-­network and proj­ ects: apprentice to Hooker in early 585

index

X Club (cont.) natural history projects, 147, 153, 154, 156–­62, 168; British Association Committee on Science Education in Schools, 314–­16; British Museum natural history collections lobby, 159–­62; doubts about state aid to science, 332, 335–­36; friendship net­ works, 109, 129, 132, 133, 134, 167, 220, 222; International Scientific Series, 409–­11; the Natural History Review, 177–­83; promoter of Darwin’s reputation, 172–­76, 184; the Reader, 206–­14; redirecting and unifying anthropological science, 198–­202, 232–­40; Saturday Review science columns, 165–­66; the “Scientific Re­ view” proposal, 165; Sunday lecture promoter, 408, 427–­28, 429f, 431–­37; supporter of free inquiry in theology, 187–­88, 190–­93, 194 Inkster, Ian, 59, 481n64, 481n66 intellectuals, historiographical discus­sion, 28–­29, 362–­64, 365, 384, 387, 442, 476n77. See also cultural leadership International Scientific Series, 367, 408–­11, 541n159, 542n164; and the social and human sciences, 411 Ireland and the Irish, 107, 131–­32, 209, 330, 378; home rule, 391, 451, 452, 536n31; Irish education, 330, 378; the potato famine, 61, 63, 73; race and racial stereotypes, 202, 366, 374f; Tyndall as Irishman, 107, 137, 142–­43, 374f Isaacson, Walter, The Innovators, 6–­7 Jackson, Daydon, 244–­45 Jamaica Committee. See Eyre affair James, Frank, 173, 175, 399 Jenkin, Fleeming, 261 Jensen, J. Vernon, 15 Jerrold, Douglas, 66–­67 Jews (and anti-­Semitism), 134, 209–­10, 231, 341, 377 Johnson, Christopher (father) and James (son), 60–­61, 74 Jones, Henry Bence, 124–­25, 126, 130, 139–­ 40, 142, 207, 319, 395, 397, 399;

586

patron of Tyndall and Frankland, 130, 134 Jones, Thomas Wharton, 92–­93 journalism. See periodical press journalism, as a source of income, 73–­74, 80–­81, 82–­86, 114, 120, 122, 123, 128–­29, 410 Jowett, Benjamin, 99–­100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 384, 385; and Essays and Re­ views, 186, 187, 190–­91, 192, 195 Jukes, J. Beetes, 206 Kargon, Robert, 130 Kay-­Shuttleworth, James Phillips, 333, 340 Kew Gardens. See Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Kim, Stephen, 484n121, 536n34, 543n213 King, Henry S., 409–­11 Kingsley, Charles, 87, 143, 144, 216, 385, 404, 514n13 King’s Printers. See Queen’s Printers Knoblauch, Hermann, 71 Knowles, James, 388, 395, 407; editor of the Contemporary Review and the Nineteenth Century, 407–­8; and the Metaphysical Society, 388–­91, 392, 407 Kolbe, Hermann, 61, 62, 106 laissez-­faire, 83, 292, 295–­96, 302–­3, 330, 332, 404 Lane-­Fox Pitt Rivers, Augustus, 238 Lansdowne, 5th Marquess of (Henry Petty-­ Fitzmaurice), 333 Larken, Edmund, 86 la Touche, John Digues, 319, 434, 527n87 lawyers: in defense of liberal theology, 190, 191, 193, 433; in elite circles, 140, 163, 234, 336, 341, 388; promoting the interests of working men, 204, 392; in scientific life, 53, 154, 178; in the Sunday Lecture Society, 433, 434, 436 Leader, 73, 86–­87, 89 lectures and addresses to general audiences, 399, 412 lectures and addresses to general audiences, by the X-­men, 115–­16, 126–­27, 129, 144, 365–­66, 370, 371, 375–­77, 395, 434; at the Birmingham and Mid­ land Institute, 404–­6; at the British

index

Association, 248–­49, 253–­59 passim, 262–­67, 304, 368, 399, 400–­401, 415–­16, 418; at the Glasgow Science Lecture Society, 403–­4, 406; at the Royal Institution, 116, 122, 124–­27, 128–­29, 131, 172, 184, 396–­99, 400, 410; the stresses of lecturing, 127–­ 28; to working men, 248–­49, 253, 256, 322, 399–­403, 528n99 lectures and addresses to general audiences, other popular lecturers, 127, 146, 255, 260–­61, 394, 403, 430, 433–­34; criticisms of others by the X-­men, 127–­28, 255, 261 Levine, George, 369 Lewes, George Henry, 87, 88–­89, 128, 208, 370, 418, 485n127, 538n84; Biographical History of Philosophy, 88, 488n190; coeditor of the Leader, 73, 86; editor of the Fortnightly Review, 376, 407; friend of Spencer and of Huxley, 85, 86, 87, 88 liberal education. See education, liberal liberals, liberalism, and liberal thought, 33, 185–­97 passim, 202, 441, 442, 459; liberalism identified with freedom of thought and inquiry, 188, 192–­93, 196, 207, 209, 370; liberal thought as open to change, unconstrained by dogmatic criteria, 30–­31, 102–­3, 105, 107, 188, 196, 370, 459; Luben­ ow’s argument, relating liberal shift in public life to political change of 1828 and 1829, 196–­97, 388–­89, 508n90, 538n86; and reform of Church and universities, 104, 195, 197, 388, 439; self-­identification by X-­men as liberals, 176, 188, 196, 208–­9, 211; X-­men claim freedom of inquiry, 22, 164, 370, 398, 460; X-­men in alliances with political liberals, 197, 199, 202, 209, 388, 430–­31, 441. See also “free” science; religion, varieties of belief and unbe­ lief: liberals in theology Liebig, Justus, 74, 115, 141; British students of, 61, 92, 100, 122–­23, 125 Lightman, Bernard, 17, 22, 26, 294, 338, 371, 400, 412, 538n93, 541n152; on agnosticism, 11, 34, 419, 420; and Dawson, 22; on professionalization,

15, 21, 26; on science and religion, 371, 423; on scientific naturalism, 15, 21, 22, 365; Victorian Popular­ izers, 17, 400, 412, 542n174 Lindley, John, 156, 162; ally of Hooker, 155t, 159, 161, 162, 243 Linnean Society of London, 42, 44, 47–­49, 54, 146, 147, 150–­55, 173, 239f, 241–­ 46, 269; 1854–­61, Hooker, Bentham, and Busk as reformers, 150–­55; 1873– ­74, Hooker and Bentham as oligar­ chy, 241–­44; 1874–­86, Hooker’s failed attempts at control by proxy, 243–­45; Busk as mediator, 242, 243, 246; development of the library, 151–­53; Hooker allies, 153–­55, 162, 243, 499n147; reform of meetings, 150–­52; reform of publications, 151–­54 literary men. See under cultural leadership Lockyer, Joseph Norman, 205–­6, 255, 333; editor of Nature, 407, 523n180; lob­ byist for state aid to science, 333, 336, 339, 340; and the Reader, 203, 205–­6, 207, 208, 213 Lodge, Oliver, 262, 263, 311 London, 8, 27, 39–­40, 41, 150, 477n2; alter­ native scientific cultures, 40, 76, 90–­ 91; conventions of polite conversa­ tion, 50–­51, 87, 389; elite social and cultural life, 50, 139–­40, 347–­49, 352, 354, 384–­85, 386–­87; gentle­ manly scientific culture, 39–­40, 41, 47, 48–­49t, 49–­50, 53–­54, 104, 105, 106, 135, 136f, 145–­46, 190, 280–­81, 347–­49, 395–­96; X-­men’s reasons for staying in, 109, 130–­32, 192 London Institution, 126–­27, 129, 142 London School Board, 300, 322–­23, 426 London Working Men’s College. See under Christian socialism Lord’s Day Observance Society. See under Sunday lectures Lowe, Robert, 304, 327, 336, 350, 351, 352, 384, 387, 534n207 Lubbock, Alice (née Lane Fox, second wife of John), 451 Lubbock, Ellen (Nelly, née Hordern, first wife of John), 2, 345, 346, 349, 514n13; friendship with Hirst, 220, 346, 349, 350; friendship with Tyndall, 587

index

Lubbock, Ellen (cont.) 217–­18, 346; “The Ice Flower,” 217, 512n151; ill health, 346; importance to the X Club, 10, 218f, 220, 451, 534n219 Lubbock, Harriet (mother of John), 56, 219 Lubbock, John, Lord Avebury, 2, 5–­6, 58, 135, 145f, 239f, 356–­57 career, 57–­58, 135, 144–­46, 274; elec­ tion to scientific societies, 145–­46, 198; electoral campaigns, 350, 355, 380–­82, 435, 537n56, 537n63; fam­ ily bank, 144–­45, 480n60; financial circumstances, 144–­45, 146, 498n121; member of parliament, 282, 318, 329, 333, 402; patrons, 56–­58, 143–­ 44, 146, 216, 532n164; willing ac­ ceptance of cultural leadership, 6, 28–­29, 107, 144–­46, 187–­88, 190–­ 93, 287–­88, 299–­300, 347, 356–­57, 392, 402, 404, 441–­42 early life and education, 56–­58, 143–­44, 255–­56, 396; Darwin as mentor, 56–­ 58; Royal Institution lectures, 56–­57 historiographical discussion, 28, 380–­ 82, 537n56 lectures and publications for general audiences, 7, 180, 206, 394–­95, 402, 403, 407–­8; Birmingham and Midland Institute, address, 404–­5; British Association lectures and ad­ dresses, 248–­49, 257–­58, 266, 267, 399; “Common Wild Flowers in Relation to Insects” (BA), 263; “The Duty of Pleasure” and “The Pleasure of Duty,” 441–­42; “The Evidence of the Antiquity of Man,” 369; high aspirations for working people, 319, 329, 402; “The Hundred Best Books,” 402–­3; the International Scientific Series, 410; mediating style, 318, 405, 426; Pleasures of Life, 368, 403, 426; praised as a secular religious leader by admirers, 368, 369; Pre-­ Historic Times (and reviews), 380–­82; Royal Institution lectures, 396; “Sav­ ages” (BA), 257; “The Wireworm,” 144; to working men, 248–­49, 257, 399–­400 personal, 2, 56, 143–­44, 146, 346, 452; born to social responsibility, 144,

588

442; family, 217, 244, 451, 492n256, 534n219; friendship with Busk, 4f, 144, 167, 177, 219–­20; friendship with Hooker, 220; health, 56, 452; social position, 135, 164, 384; tem­ perament, 234–­35, 237–­38, 240, 316–­17, 346 religious, philosophical, and political views, 58, 107, 381, 424; for Church reform, 191–­92, 195, 197; gender, 532n164; liberal values identified with free inquiry in theology, 188, 192, 195–­97, 209, 372; morality, 31, 405, 426, 441–­42; optimistic about progress, 266, 318–­19, 329; religion, 58, 188, 195, 208–­9, 388, 426, 457; religion distinct from theology, 426; social and political views, 58, 234, 319, 329, 382, 402, 435, 441 reputation, 178, 220, 287–­88, 368, 403, 410, 412; assessments by X Club friends, 146, 220, 269–­70, 274–­75, 288, 291, 410, 449–­50, 452; as cul­ tural leader, 368, 403, 404, 432, 448; as lecturer and speechmaker, 318, 371, 394–­95, 402–­3, 405, 452 science education and education in general, promoter of, 297, 299–­300, 316–­17, 318–­19, 323, 329, 356–­57; British Association committees, 313–­14, 316; children are excited by science, 318–­19; Devonshire Commission, 319, 329, 333, 340, 529n116; enables social mobility, 319, 329; working men’s colleges, 299–­300, 399–­400, 402 scientific ideals and scientific research, 58, 177, 263, 274, 456; change in re­ search interests, 5; early publications on microscopic organisms, 57–­58, 105; geology, 144; human prehistory, 176–­77, 180, 223; insect behavior and intelligence, 382, 422, 450; natu­ ralistic continuity from insects and apes to humans, 18, 215, 223, 382, 422, 450; pre-­Darwinian develop­ mental schema, 17–­18, 21, 422 societies and committees, institutional positions and roles, 5–­6, 144–­45, 239f, 287–­88, 356, 461; Anthropo­ logical Institute, 238–­40; Athe­

index

naeum Club, 192; British Associa­ tion, 175, 247, 251–­52, 253, 265–­66, 286, 313; Devonshire Commission, 329, 333, 340, 529n116; Entomo­ logical Society, 145; Ethnological Society, 6, 198, 201–­2; Geological Society, 232; International Congress of Prehistoric Archaeologists, 253; Linnean Society, 154–­55, 244–­45; Metaphysical Society, 388–­90, 448; presidencies (and other presiding roles), 198, 201, 238–­40, 247, 252, 253, 265, 356, 400, 448, 461; Public Schools Commission, 316–­17; Red Lion Club, 473n18; Royal Institu­ tion, 397–­98; Royal Society, 183, 220, 269, 274–­75; treasurer, 193; University of London Senate, 342–­ 43, 351, 356–­57, 449, 532n164 X Club, position in X-­networks and projects, 215, 220, 312, 361, 449; British Association Committee on Scientific Education, 316; defender of free inquiry in theology, 187–­88, 189, 190–­93; friendship circles, 167, 217, 220, 253; International Scientific Series, 410; Linnean Soci­ ety, 154–­55, 244–­45, 451; mutual promotion of Lubbock and Hirst, 286, 346–­47, 350–­51, 355; Natural History Review, 177–­81, 183; pro­ moter of Darwin’s reputation, 175, 183, 215, 282; the Reader, 207, 208; redirection of anthropological science, 201–­2, 232, 234–­40; social center, 216–­20, 253, 257, 347; social fringe, 312, 343, 361, 449, 451–­52, 534n219; Sunday lecture supporter, 428, 432, 435 Lubbock, John William (father of John), 5, 41, 46–­47, 56, 143–­45, 219, 343, 478n18 Lubenow, William, 196, 363, 384, 459, 508n90, 538n86; Liberal Intellectuals, 363, 387 Ludlow, John Malcolm, 203, 205–­6, 207, 209 Lyell, Charles, 50, 89, 120, 144, 146, 164, 168, 173, 175, 194–­95, 212–­13, 234, 250f, 264, 269, 291; Antiquity of Man (review of), 180; and British

Museum natural history collections, 161–­62; and the Linnean Society, 153, 155t, 499n147; and Natural His­ tory Review, 177–­78, 180; Principles of Geology, 68, 487n161; relationship to Hooker, 147–­48, 162, 168, 191, 195, 217, 246; supporter of Church reform and the liberalization of the­ ology, 164, 187–­88, 191–­93, 195, 222, 433, 506n71; supporter of Sun­ day lectures, 428, 432, 434 MacLeod, Christine, 458 MacLeod, Roy: on the International Scientific Series, 328, 411, 541n165; on state aid to science, 293, 523n2, 523n4, 534n207; on the X Club, 15, 16, 246, 328, 411, 523n2, 534n204, 545n1 Macmillan, Alexander, 204–­5, 213, 308, 359, 407; alliance with X-­men, 308, 359, 407, 408–­9, 411; his tobacco parliaments, 12, 384. See also Chris­ tian socialism; Macmillan publish­ ing house Macmillan publishing house, 403, 541n164; Macmillan Science Primers, 308, 311, 357, 408–­9; Nature, 213, 407, 408; School Class Books, 308 Macmillan’s Magazine, 134, 172, 184, 213, 227, 407, 408 Magee, William Connor (later bishop of Peterborough), 256, 390 manliness. See gentlemanliness and manli­ ness as ideals Manning, Henry Edward (archbishop of Westminster, later cardinal), 388, 390, 391, 392, 393f, 407, 440, 441 Mansel, Henry, 11, 380, 418 Mantell, Gideon, Wonders of Geology, 68 Martin, Anna. See Hirst, Anna (née Martin, wife of T. A.) Martin, Emma, 65; “Christianity detrimen­ tal to human happiness” and “The inutility of divine worship,” 65 Martineau, James, 388, 430; review of Spen­ cer’s First Principles, 380 Maskelyne, Nevil Story-­, 165–­66, 215, 501n179 Masson, David, 227; editor of Macmillan’s Magazine, 227 589

index

Maurice, Frederick Denison, 204, 384 May, George, 90–­91 Mayer, Julius Robert, 260 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 66 McLennan, John F., review of Lubbock’s Pre-­historic Times, 381 McLeod, Herbert, 193 Meadows, Jack, 294 mechanics institute culture, 58–­75; the cir­ cumstances conducive to success or failure, 59, 73–­74, 485n128; the culture of self-­improvement, 59–­60, 62–­69, 70, 73–­74, 78, 80, 485n127, 485n132; historiographical discus­ sion, 59, 481n64, 481n66; institu­ tions of self-­improvement, 59, 60, 62, 63–­64, 66–­67, 69, 73, 317, 480n63. See also Halifax Mechanics’ Institute and Halifax Mutual Improvement Society; Mechanics’ Magazine Mechanics’ Magazine, 59, 62, 80–­81 Meisel, Joseph, 394 memorials, supporter lists, and the inter­ pretation of signatures: the British Museum natural history collections, 157–­59, 161; Sunday societies, 428–­ 31, 429f, 434–­38; theological issues, 187–­88, 190–­94 Metaphysical Society, 388–­91, 440, 448, 538n84; ambitions, 388, 390; a hy­ brid institution, 388; papers and debates, 34, 390–­91, 538n92 Metropolitan Anti-­State Church Associa­ tion, 83 Miall, Edward, 83 Microscopical Society, 48t, 49, 51, 54, 107, 146, 150 Middle Class Schools Association, 299–­300, 321–­22, 348 Mill, John Stuart, 58, 97, 101, 209, 234, 292, 295–­96, 321, 364, 441, 538n84; and the Reader, 207, 208, 212, 364; supporter of Sunday lectures, 428, 434 Miller, William Allen, 255, 257, 259, 269, 271, 333, 399 Miller, William Hallowes, 273, 331 miracles. See theological controversy: miracles Mivart, St. George Jackson, 244, 247, 367, 368, 388

590

Montesquieu, Baron de, 8 Moore, James, 16, 173, 282, 416; against science-­and-­religion-­in-­conflict metaphors, 16, 29, 371; on the X Club, 7, 16, 27 Moorsom, William Scarth, 80, 486n155 Morley, John, 165, 391–­92, 394, 404, 436, 441; and the Fortnightly Review (edi­ tor), 384–­85, 391–­92, 407, 539n102; perceived alliance with Huxley and Tyndall, 391–­92, 436, 441 Morrell, Jack, 26, 293 Morrell, Robert Matthew, 431 Mozley, Thomas, 77–­78, 79, 486n144, 487n159 Müller, Friedrich Max, 237, 288, 404 Murchison, Roderick, 57, 135, 139, 143, 157, 164, 191, 234, 277–­78, 288, 290, 291, 315, 324, 385, 514n13; in the British Association, 234, 251–­52, 286, 315; and the British Museum natural history collections, 156–­59, 162, 286; and Huxley, 120, 135, 164, 236, 288 Murray, John, 165 Museum of Economic Geology. See Geologi­ cal Survey: its Museum of Economic Geology Nasmyth, James, 130 National Sunday League. See under Sunday lectures Natural History Review, 177–­83, 179f, 223; Busk’s crucial support, 180, 182; Hooker’s warnings and criticisms, 178, 182; Huxley’s allies, 178–­79, 181; Huxley’s editorship and its problems, 177–­82; journalistic posi­ tion and reputation, 177–­78, 180, 181, 503–­4n25 naturalism and naturalistic. See scientific naturalism “naturalist,” Victorian usage, 3, 22, 44, 93, 129, 148, 154, 157, 178, 210, 503n25 Nature, 213, 345, 346, 362, 416, 463, 523n180; controversy and lobbying, 242, 262, 336, 410, 450; journalistic policy and reputation, 213, 407 Newman, John Henry (later cardinal), 101–­ 2, 388, 538n84

index

Nonconformist, 83 North British network, 7–­8, 29, 148, 261–­ 62, 406, 414, 450, 511n144 Oliver, Daniel, 178, 182, 183 ordnance surveys, 62, 63 Owen, Richard, 51, 89, 93, 124, 131, 139, 144, 164, 176, 183, 188, 194, 266, 285f, 291, 338, 387, 428, 430; and the Anthropological Society of Lon­ don, 201, 206, 259; and the British Museum natural history collections, 156, 159–­60, 161, 255; early sup­ port for Huxley and for Lubbock, 93, 120, 124, 146, 173; tensions between X-­network and, 160, 172, 174, 175, 180–­81, 184, 215, 246, 255, 259, 338, 339, 387 Owen, Robert. See Owenite socialism Owenite socialism, 65, 69, 70, 107, 203–­4, 431, 434, 484n112 Paget, James, 130, 162, 351 Paine, Thomas, and his style, 69, 196, 389 Palgrave, Francis Turner, 255, 384, 518n74 Palgrave family, 384 Pall Mall Gazette, 378, 403; controversy over prayer, 372–­73, 375, 385 Panizzi, Anthony, 155–­56, 159 Paradis, James, 376 Pare, William, 434, 484n112 Paris, the relief of (1871), 383f, 392 Paris Exhibition, 317, 330 Parry, Jonathan P., 197 Pater, Walter, 264 patronage. See under career-­making in science Pattison, Mark, 86 Patton, Mark, 367, 382, 402, 534n219, 537n56 Paul, Charles Kegan, 410–­11 Peel, John D. Y., 76, 438, 485–­86n138, 486n144 Peel, Robert, 52, 296, 300 People’s College (Huddersfield), 120, 493n28 People’s Journal, 66, 68, 73 periodical press, 165, 203, 394, 406–­8; changing economic and legislative context, 165, 203, 501n3; practice of anonymity, 86, 186, 204–­5, 209,

211, 212, 215–­16, 233, 242, 372, 375, 407; viewpoints represented, 165, 176, 194, 256, 407, 431; X Club ambitions for journalism, 165–­66, 168, 215, 446, 457–­58; X Club use of titles established by others, 213, 406–­8; X-­network projects, 165–­66, 177–­82, 207–­13, 215, 406. See also journalism, as a source of income; specialist science publishing; and individual journal titles Perkin, Harold, 28 Phillips, George Searle ( January Searle), 73, 493n28 Philosophical Club of the Royal Society, 46–­47, 136, 150, 231, 267–­85 Philosophical Magazine, 74, 82, 84, 117, 120, 122 phrenology, 21, 58, 86, 90, 367, 430; its importance in the development of naturalism, 21–­22; Spencer’s inter­ est in, 78, 83–­84, 96, 423. See also Combe, George Pilot, 84 Pim, Bedford, 240 Playfair, Lyon, 61, 115, 126, 127, 294, 296, 301, 322, 333, 335f, 404, 440, 517n64, 531n147; government chemist, 61, 115, 300; lobbyist for state aid to science, 292; lobbyist for technical education, 306, 317, 322, 330, 333; patron of Frankland, 61, 71, 74, 111, 115; promoter of South Kensington developments, 296, 299–­301, 323–­24, 328, 359 Plücker, Julius, 119 pluralism. See under career-­making in science Pollock, Frederick, 130, 140, 210, 217; and the Reader, 207–­8, 210, 212 Pollock, Juliet (wife of Frederick), 130, 140 Poor Law, 79 Porter, Roy, 23 positivism, 21, 86; individual positivists, 100, 222, 391, 392; politics and theology of, 88, 391–­92, 430, 440–­ 41, 464–­65; shared interests with X-­men, 391–­92, 401, 441, 465 Powell, Baden, 190 Powell, Henrietta (wife of Baden), 190 prayer. See under theological controversy 591

index

Prestwich, Joseph, 144 Prince of Wales. See Albert Edward, Prince of Wales Pritchard, Charles, 127, 188 Proctor, Richard, 412, 434 professionalization: gentlemen/men of sci­ence rejected as alternative to amateur/professional, 24, 462, 475nn60–­61; historiographical dis­ cussion, 10–­11, 15–­16, 23–­26, 358, 461–­62, 463, 475nn59–­61; ideal of gentlemanly independence, 23, 106, 295, 462; and specialist journals, 26, 151–­54, 462–­63. See also social structure of Victorian science Prospective Review, 165 “pure” science, according to the X Club, 35, 227, 278, 414–­15, 427; chronology of development, scientific knowledge precedes technologies and practi­ cal applications, 376–­77, 414, 443; hierarchy of motives and value, truth and knowledge above profit and utility, 13, 14, 117, 211, 359, 376, 414–­15, 458, 459, 542n181; North British disagreements with X Club valuations, 261, 414; social hierarchy, scientific men above engineers, 416, 418, 458, 521n152; “truth” and knowledge given religious values, 122, 376–­77, 389, 415, 416, 458 Pusey, Edward Bouverie, 190 Putney College of Civil Engineering, 61, 74, 115, 116 Quarterly Review, 172, 186, 381; on British Museum natural history collections, 159, 162, 165; journalistic position and reputation, 89, 165 Queen’s College for Women, 203 Queen’s Printers, 6, 98, 103, 106, 490n222 Queenwood College, 62, 69, 70, 72, 73, 75, 107, 120, 123, 127, 133, 318, 434, 483n103; salaries, 120, 483n102, 489n211 railways, 3, 63, 64f, 69, 80–­82, 81f, 217, 376, 437, 466; railway employment, 3, 62, 63, 69, 76, 80–­82, 81f, 84, 495n62

592

Ramsay, Andrew, 51, 114, 132, 219, 220, 222; friend and ally of X-­network, 129, 132, 134, 165–­66, 168, 222; Sci­ ence and Art Department, examiner, 304–­5, 321 Ramsay, Louisa (wife of Andrew), 132 Rattlesnake, expedition of, 93–­95 Rawlinson, Henry, 404, 405 Rayleigh, 3rd Baron ( John William Strutt), 462, 517n64 Read, Donald, 441 Reader, 171, 202–­14, 217, 223, 233, 364, 406, 510n119; Christian socialist phase, 203–­6; editorial conflicts in X-­network phase, 208–­13; liberal and X-­network phase, 207–­13; Spen­ cer’s role in, 203, 207, 208, 214 Recreative Religionists. See under Sunday lectures religion, the politics of, 29–­30, 196, 427, 438, 459, 464–­65; anti-­Establishment politics, 83–­84, 90, 191, 430, 438–­ 39, 457; the control of elementary education, 116, 309; Dissenters’ re­ sentment at and campaigns against their civil disabilities, 31, 98, 424, 430, 438–­39, 476n83; the seculariza­ tion of the state, 31, 438, 440, 460; university reform, 101, 103, 334, 336, 430. See also Church of En­ gland; Dissent; Sunday lectures religion, varieties of belief and unbelief, 30–­31, 65, 69–­70, 86–­87, 100–­101, 175, 388–­89, 464–­65, 512; Carlylean reinterpretation, natural supernatu­ ralism, 30, 67, 71–­72, 82, 88, 96, 425, 426; Christian socialism, 203–­4, 205, 344, 430; evangelicals, 51, 60–­ 61, 389, 438; latitudinarians, 100, 102–­3; liberals in theology, 30–­31, 102–­3, 104, 185–­87, 195, 385–­86, 439 (see also liberals, liberalism, and liberal thought); Methodism, 30, 65, 75, 76, 78–­79, 82, 165, 485n136, 487n159; natural theology, 115–­16, 418; “orthodoxy,” 192–­93, 389, 457; Owenite socialism, 65, 69, 70, 107, 203–­4, 431, 465, 484n112; positivism, 88, 391–­92, 401, 430, 440–­41, 465; Quakers, 62, 69, 70,

index

79, 199; religion as feeling, 30, 71–­72, 373, 375, 424, 425–­26, 464, 477n85; Roman Catholics (and anti-­Catholicism), 86, 94, 101–­2, 196, 209, 216, 373, 375, 377, 378, 388, 392; Sandemanians, 138–­39, 416; secularists, 420, 431, 465; Spencerian agnostics, 380, 420–­21, 433, 464; Tractarians, 30, 100–­102, 190; Unitarianism, 76–­77, 86, 90, 165, 188, 194, 196, 341, 380, 430–­ 32, 433–­34, 436, 440, 465–­66. See also Christian socialism; Church of England; Dissent; positivism; Unitarianism religious metaphors, 184, 223, 362, 367–­69, 377, 418, 433; biblical metaphors, 176, 259, 282, 309, 367–­69, 401, 402, 419; ironical reversals of mean­ ing, 309–­11, 367–­69, 370, 373, 375, 377; Reformation metaphors, 184, 370, 377, 424, 441, 485n127, 535–­ 36n29; self-­image as missionaries and religious guides, 367–­70 Reynold’s Miscellany, 68 RI. See Royal Institution Richards, Evelleen, 8, 27–­28, 202, 232, 237, 344, 476n74, 508n93 Richardson, John, 93 Ripon, Marquess of. See de Grey, 3rd Earl (George Robinson), later 1st Mar­ quess of Ripon Rolleston, George, 215, 222, 380; friend, ally, and critic of Huxley, 177–­78, 181, 198, 200–­201, 211, 380 Roscoe, Henry, 403, 412; ally of Frankland and Huxley, 305, 308, 359, 411; use of religious metaphors, 309, 311 Rose, Jonathan, 403 Ross, James Clark, 43; patron of Hooker, 43, 55, 56, 111 Rosse, 3rd Earl of (William Parsons), 135, 272, 278 Royal Academy of Arts, 386–­87 Royal Astronomical Society, 46, 336 Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 44, 55, 244, 280, 318, 333, 338, 419; develop­ ment of the herbarium, 114, 147, 148, 156–­58; distrust between Kew and natural historians at the Brit­

ish Museum, 156–­61, 242, 245; its Museum of Economic Botany, 55, 296; under William Hooker, 44, 46, 55–­56, 114 Royal College of Chemistry, 193, 194, 301, 304, 307, 324–­26; changing admin­ istrative locations, 301, 324, 326 Royal College of Surgeons, 91, 93, 144, 190, 243, 255; Busk’s involvement in, 53, 54; College Council Club of, 12 Royal Commission on Scientific Instruction and the Advancement of Science (the Devonshire Commission), 292–­98, 323–­26, 330–­40, 529n116; appointment, 332–­33; focus on instruction rather than research, 330, 333; lobby for, 292–­93, 297, 337, 530n124; reports of, 319–­20, 323, 325, 326, 328, 330, 333–­34, 337, 338, 357 Royal Geographical Society, 48, 104, 190, 198, 200, 266, 270, 513n3, 515n26 Royal Horticultural Society, 42, 47, 48t Royal Institution, 4–­5, 56–­57, 124–­27, 128–­29, 131, 135–­36, 138–­40, 139f, 225, 311, 348–­49, 395–­99, 410, 411, 415, 447; both scientific and literary institution, 397; the control of controversy, 370, 398–­99; Friday evening lectures, 57, 122, 125–­26, 127, 128, 146, 172, 184, 217, 315–­ 16, 386, 396–­97, 513n3; lecture courses, 56–­57, 116, 127, 366, 396, 397, 400; managers and administra­ tors, 124–­25, 142, 288, 316, 397–­99, 458, 546n28; members and audi­ ences, 56, 131, 138–­40, 139f, 311, 386, 396–­97; social aspects of, 50, 126, 128, 135–­36, 139–­40, 349, 384, 385, 386, 395–­98 Royal Naval Academy, 352, 354 Royal Society of Arts, lobbying by, 317, 330, 333 Royal Society of London, 46–­47, 136, 150, 231, 267–­85 Royal Society of London, elections: chang­ ing criteria for FRS, 53, 163, 279–­ 80, 286, 461–­62; of Hooker as pres­ ident, 273; of Huxley as secretary

593

index

Royal Society of London, elections (cont.) and as president, 272–­73, 274–­75; of Spottiswoode as treasurer and as president, 269–­71, 274, 276f; of X-­men as FRS, 54, 56, 104, 116, 120, 121–­22, 123, 146, 170, 279. See also scientific and learned societies, their customs and conventions Royal Society of London, organization and procedures, 268; 1830s reforms, 46–­47, 478n19; 1847 reforms, 41, 52–­53, 104, 268, 273–­74, 461; ad­ vice to government, 275, 277–­78; assistant secretary role, 272–­73; award of medals, 114, 123, 142, 148, 183–­84, 267, 511n144; the council, 231, 267–­68, 520n118; fees, 47, 48t, 49, 279–­80; Government Grant Committee and research grants, 122, 281, 295, 337; Philosophical Club of, 11, 217, 220, 225, 226, 279, 282, 458; refereeing of papers, 281, 282; Scientific Relief Fund, 270; the soirées, 50, 135, 136f, 272, 277, 280–­81, 462 Royal Society of London, the officers, 231, 268, 276f; 1853–­72, Sharpey as secretary, 272; 1854–­85, Stokes as secretary, 273–­74; 1861–­71, Sabine as president, 231, 268, 269–­70, 287; 1870, Gassiot, losing candidate for treasurer, 270–­71; 1870–­78, Spottis­ woode as treasurer, 269–­72; 1871–­ 73, Airy as president, 269, 272; 1872–­81, Huxley as secretary, 274, 275, 282; 1873–­78, Hooker as president, 273, 278–­81, 339; 1878–­ 83, Spottiswoode as president, 274, 282–­83, 288; 1881–­1903, Foster as secretary, 274–­75, 277; 1883–­85, Huxley as president, 277, 284; 1885–­ 90, Stokes as president, 273–­74, 275, 277, 280, 284; financial circum­ stances of officers, 270, 272, 274, 280, 281, 283; qualities sought in a president, 269, 272, 273–­74, 277, 278, 280, 284, 286, 287, 461–­62; qualities sought in a treasurer, 47, 270, 274, 275, 286, 462, 521n141 Royal Society of London, X Club campaigns and concerns, 230; allies, 268, 271,

594

272, 273, 275, 279; the Copley medal for Darwin, 183–­85, 505n47, 505n49; council elections, 230, 267–­68, 520n118; Darwin’s burial in West­ minster Abbey, 282–­83; electing one another, 269–­75; infrastructure of scientific research, 277, 283–­84; oppo­ sition to Sabine and Stokes, 269, 271–­ 72, 273–­75, 284; raising the status and dignity of science, 277–­78, 280, 284, 461; their power and achievements, 231, 269–­75, 284, 450; their tactics, 267, 269–­70, 273, 282, 447 Rupke, Nicolaas, 124, 160 Ruse, Michael, 185 Ruskin, John, 367, 391, 392, 400, 403, 434, 441, 514n13 Russell, Colin, 2, 132, 483n108 Russell, Lord John, and Lady Russell, 113–­14 Ryan, Edward, 350 Sabbatarianism. See Sunday lectures Sabine, Edward, 7, 45f, 124, 139, 271, 517n64; and the British Association, 251, 286, 315; patron of Tyndall, 121–­22, 134, 137, 142, 270, 290; and the Royal Society, 53, 183–­84, 231, 268, 269, 270, 271, 274, 275, 280 Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, 5, 130 Salisbury, Lord, 3rd Marquess of (Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-­Cecil), 272 Samuelson, Bernhard, 317, 319, 323, 325, 326, 333 Saturday Review, 165, 406; science columns by X-­network, 165–­66, 215–­16, 372, 407, 512n146 Saunders, William Wilson, 154, 155t School of Mines/Government School of Mines, 52, 129, 131, 296, 299–­301; administrative structures, 300–­301, 323–­28; lectures to working men, 395, 399–­400, 401; and Science and Art Department’s examination sys­ tem, 304–­5, 312; status undermined by new School of Science, 301, 323–­ 25, 328, 329 School of Science. See under Science and Art Department/Department of Science and Art, administrative structure

index

schools, 367, 483n103; Clapham College School, 127, 388; elementary schools, 296, 301–­2, 304, 306, 309, 322–­23, 359; the International College, 300; the London School Board, 300, 322–­ 23; Middle Class Schools Association, 299–­300, 321–­22, 348; public schools, 56, 98, 313–­17, 336, 352, 357, 363, 526n71; secondary schools, 357, 388; University College School, 341, 384. See also Queenwood College Schools of Design, 300 science, rhetorical construction of, 427, 443; purity of motive in the pursuit of science nevertheless leads to util­ ity in outcomes, 259, 376, 413–­15, 418, 443, 458 (see also “pure” sci­ ence, according to the X Club); the pursuit of science is associated with moral and spiritual values, 376–­77, 389, 414, 415, 416, 417f, 418, 442, 458–­59; scientific men are especially reliable in their reasoning, 413–­14, 415–­16, 427, 443 Science and Art Department/Department of Science and Art, 296, 299–­313, 337, 357 Science and Art Department/Department of Science and Art, administrative structure, 300–­301, 309, 323–28 passim; name change, 300, 524n21; opposition between School of Mines and the proposed science school, 300–­301, 323–­28, 329, 463; Royal College of Chemistry, 301, 304, 307, 324–­26; the School of Naval Archi­ tecture, 294, 324–­25, 326–­28, 341, 352; the School of Science/Normal School of Science, 327f, 328, 357–­ 58, 359, 528n105. See also School of Mines/Government School of Mines Science and Art Department/Department of Science and Art, administrators and empire builders: Cole, 298, 300–­ 302, 304–­6, 309, 324–­27, 328; De la Beche, 296, 300–­301, 324; Donnelly, 302, 304–­5, 326, 328; Frankland, 301–­2, 304–­7, 312–­13, 325, 329; Huxley, 301–­12, 325, 326, 328, 339, 357; Murchison, 324; Playfair, 300–­ 301; Royal Engineers, 305

Science and Art Department/Department of Science and Art, science examination system of, 301–­13, 320–­21, 322, 357, 525n35; achievements, 306, 311–­13, 319, 328, 332; examiners and their assistants, 302, 304–­5, 307, 311–­12, 348; growth of, 301, 302, 303t, 304, 312; historiographical discussion, 525n35, 525n39, 525n42; payments, 302, 303t, 304–­5, 307, 313, 321; pu­ pils, 303t, 305–­6, 311, 404, 525n42; scholarships and prizes, 306; subjects, 302, 304–­5, 307–­8; teachers and teacher training, 304, 306–­7, 309, 311, 312–­13, 325–­26, 367; textbooks, 307–­9, 311–­12 science and religious belief, conflict inter­ pretations, 29, 371, 423–­26, 461; construction of conflict by Huxley, Spencer, and Tyndall, 22, 211, 375–­ 77, 378–­79, 423–­26, 457; multi-­ dimensional interpretation of polit­ ical and intellectual conflict proposed, 433, 440–­42, 461, 464–­65; perceived allies of the X-­men in opposing orthodox belief, 184, 223, 309, 311, 391–­92; Victorian counter-­claims to conflict, 29, 193–­94, 261, 423, 432; in X Club historiography, 16, 18, 23, 28, 474n35 scientific advice to government, 277–­78, 331, 337, 356; British Association procedures, 315, 331; Royal Society traditions, 273, 275, 278; by X-­men, 331, 339–­40, 352, 534n204 scientific and learned societies, their cus­ toms and conventions, 47–­49, 51, 146, 150, 153, 285, 461; fees and relative status, 26, 42, 47–­49, 51, 54, 104, 146, 153, 269, 461; journals, 150, 151, 182, 236–­37, 238, 269, 290, 462; libraries, 151–­52, 153, 283–­84, 290; organizational structures, 242, 285, 286, 522n173; presentation of papers, 49, 150; roles of officers, 47, 51, 151–­52, 244, 245, 285, 461. See also social structure of Victorian science Scientific Memoirs, 123, 463 scientific method, 227, 253, 321, 359, 362, 419; according to Huxley, 375, 377, 595

index

scientific method (cont.) 419–­20; according to Spencer, 419; according to Tyndall, 257–­58, 419–­ 20 scientific naturalism, historiographical dis­ cussion, 11, 15, 16, 18–­23, 27–­29, 365, 421–­22, 460, 474n39, 545n268; metaphysical and pre-­scientific aspects identified, 20, 76, 77–­79, 90–­92, 93, 105–­6, 215–­16, 311, 423; “scientific” status questioned, 19–­ 20, 21–­22; the Turner-­Huxley inter­ pretation, 19–­20, 21, 413, 474n43; and the X Club, 15, 16, 21, 22, 23; Young’s interpretation, 21–­22, 423, 545n268 scientific naturalism, reinterpretation, as a movement to expand the domain of naturalistic explanation, 18, 22– ­23, 227, 311, 365, 413, 423, 427, 443; associated scientific theories expanded, 16–­18, 20, 21–­22, 82, 91–­92, 180, 382, 401, 405, 421–­22, 474n43; continuity of naturalistic explanation from fiery nebulae to emotions, beliefs, and societies, 92–­ 93, 215–­16, 233, 258, 401, 405–­6, 408, 418, 422–­23, 424, 427, 443, 449–­50, 456–­57; filling Darwin’s gap between apes and modern humans, 17–­18, 177, 180–­81, 401, 421–­22, 456; Victorian critics of naturalism, 29, 181, 261, 375, 422–­23 “scientific naturalist” an ambiguous term, 18, 22–­23. See also “naturalist,” Victorian usage Sclater, Philip, 178, 182, 183, 188 Scotland, 131, 261, 333, 335; London per­ ceptions of Edinburgh, 131; Scottish-­ English differences on state aid to science, 294–­95, 338, 340. See also North British network Second Law of Thermodynamics, 261 Secord, James, 17, 96, 138 Sedgwick, Adam, 24, 89, 183 Sera-­Shriar, Efram, 232, 508n93, 508n99, 509n103, 509n109, 516n37 Shaen, William, 433 Sharpey, William, 50–­51, 272, 275, 333, 341, 347–­52, 359, 383; ally of Hux­

596

ley on Devonshire Commission, 324–­25, 328, 340, 528n105; friend and supporter of Hirst, 341, 347–­52; in the Royal Society, 272–­73, 275 Siemens, William (Wilhelm), 283 Simpson, Mary, 345, 532n168 Slack, Henry J., 431 Smith, Crosbie, 27, 29, 261, 371; and Wise, 414 Smith, Henry J. S., 252, 274, 277, 333, 355, 388 Smith, Robert, 20 Smith, Thomas Southwood, Divine Govern­ ment, 90 Smyth, Warrington, 166 socialism, 86, 436; X-­men opposition to so­ cialism, 86, 266, 436, 440, 451, 453, 459. See also Christian socialism; Owenite socialism social structure of Victorian science, 23–­ 27, 35, 51, 122–­23, 135–­46, 167, 287–­89, 461; “amateur” roles in scientific societies, 41, 53, 54, 104, 154, 265, 270, 274, 284, 286, 462; experts and generalists, relationships between, 88–­89, 96, 185; gentle­ manly (financial) independence the ideal, 23, 25, 106, 295, 462, 523n9; hierarchy of scientific and learned so­ cieties, 42, 47–­49, 54, 104, 146, 461; hierarchy of scientific disciplines, 26–­27, 46, 56; roles for titled gentle­ men, 35, 51, 238, 244, 252, 269, 273, 277–­78, 287–­88, 356–­57, 461–­62; scientific recognition dependent on both social status and scientific achievement, 11, 24–­25, 35, 145–­46, 167, 461–­62; social mixing and social mobility through science, 32, 106–­7, 117, 135–­37, 139–­40, 163–­64, 167–­ 68, 395–­96, 461. See also profession­ alization; “pure” science, according to the X Club Society of Antiquaries, 42, 47–­48 South Kensington site, 158, 160–­61, 162, 255, 281, 294, 296, 298f, 299, 301, 302; building for the School of Na­ val Architecture, 307, 324–­28, 327f, 528n105 South London Working Men’s College. See under Christian socialism

index

specialist science publishing, 151–­54, 169, 236–­37, 238, 277, 290–­91, 460, 462–­ 63, 515n26 Spencer, Harriet (mother of Herbert), 78, 79 Spencer, Herbert, 5, 75–­89, 378–­80, 452–­55, 454f career, 80–­81, 82–­86; authorship, 5, 84–­85, 408, 410; financial circum­ stances, 5, 80, 82, 83–­86, 219, 378, 408, 410; inventing, 80–­81, 82–­83, 84; journalism, 82–­88, 408, 410; po­ sitions lost or rejected, 380; railway engineering, 80–­82, 81f, 84; school teaching, 80; social mobility, social recognition, and cultural authority through intellectual achievement, 84–­85, 164, 168, 207–­9, 219, 234, 387, 426, 448 early life and education, 75–­81; reli­ gious and political context, 75, 76–­ 78, 79, 84–­85, 485–­86n138; self-­ improvement, 80–­81, 83 historiographical discussion: agnosti­ cism, 11, 87–­88; Derby Philosophi­cal Society, 77–­78; his place in sci­entific naturalism, 21; his religious context, 76–­77, 485–­86n138, 487n159; tem­ perament, 77, 486n140 lectures and publications for general audiences, 76, 83–­84, 86, 371, 388, 399; Autobiography, 14, 34–­35, 76–­ 77, 257; “Development Hypothesis,” 88, 89; Education, 527n769, 528n98; First Principles (including reviews), 5, 378–­80, 421; “Haythorne Papers,” 86; “On Progress,” 415; “The Phi­ losophy of Style,” 88; Principles of Biology, 5, 219, 378, 380; Social Stat­ ics, 85–­86, 528n98; The Study of So­ ciology, 410; Synthetic Philosophy, 5, 219; “A Theory of Population,” 88, 89 personal, 34, 75–­85 passim, 227; family, 3, 78–­79, 84, 85; friendship with Marian Evans, 85, 419; friendship with Huxley, 89, 128, 167, 452; friendship with Lewes, 85, 87–­88; friendship with Tyndall, 134, 167, 257, 453, 495n62; social position, 76, 81, 85, 105, 219; subscription

portrait, 452–­55; temperament, 14, 76, 79–­80, 86, 279, 368, 371, 382, 388, 399, 453–­55, 486n140 religious, philosophical, and politi­ cal views, 82–­89, 105–­6, 227, 234, 378; agnostic about ultimate principles, 87, 418, 420, 426–­27; anti-­Establishment politics, 83–­84; a priori mode of reasoning, 81, 168, 226, 380, 419, 450, 453; laissez-­faire politics and economics, 83, 404; the laws of nature reveal the reasons behind the moral laws, 528n98; “liberal,” 208, 209, 234; metaphysi­ cal and pre-­Darwinian naturalism, 77–­79, 87–­89, 105–­6; religion, 82, 84, 87–­88, 379, 426–­27; theories of progress and development, 20, 21, 77–­78, 84, 87–­88, 415, 422–­23, 486n144, 487n161, 487n173; the universe, including mind and society, is governed by law, 83, 87, 105–­6, 421–­23, 487n168 reputation, 86, 412, 420; “advanced” or irreligious thinker, 378–­80, 388; criticisms by friends, 219, 279, 367–­ 68, 420, 449–­50, 452–­53; as cultural leader, 388, 437, 453, 455; Hooker’s shifting opinions, 5, 168, 219, 253, 255, 279, 448, 449, 450, 453, 455; important philosopher, 379–­80, 388; praise by friends, 185, 253, 255, 368 science education, promoter of, 315–­16, 319, 527n79, 528n98; Education, 527n769, 528n98 scientific ideals and scientific research, 5, 88–­89, 96, 105–­6; few special­ ist publications, 80–­81, 84, 253; a generalist, 84, 96, 185; ideal of independent thought, 78–­79, 82, 453; science as explanation in terms of natural causes, 79, 421, 423 societies and committees, 5, 257, 279, 409–­10 X Club, position in X-­networks and campaigns, 13, 223, 226, 448, 455; friendship circles, 167, 203, 218–­ 20, 222–­23, 451; fringe position in, 96, 168, 185, 455; International Scientific Series, 409–­11; the Reader,

597

index

Spencer, Herbert (cont.) 206–­9, 212, 214, 223; Sunday lecture supporter, 428, 434–­36, 437 Spencer, Thomas (uncle of Herbert), 78–­80, 83, 84–­85, 87 Spencer, William (uncle of Herbert), 78, 80 Spencer, William George (father of Herbert), 75–­79, 82, 487n159; Inventional Geometry, 78 spiritualism and spiritualists, 22, 58, 126, 128, 166, 458 spontaneous generation, 258–­59, 282 Spottiswoode, Andrew (father of William), 98, 103, 491n250 Spottiswoode, Eliza (Lise, wife of William), 344–­45, 347, 532n163 Spottiswoode, George (brother of William), 98, 204, 212, 491n250 Spottiswoode, Robert (uncle of William), 98 Spottiswoode, William, 2, 6, 9, 10, 34, 98–­ 99, 101–­4, 276f, 412 career: election to scientific societies, 104, 198; financial circumstances, 103, 104, 106, 274, 283; mathemat­ ics, lecturing and examining, at Ox­ ford, 103; occasional participation in cultural politics, 187, 435–­36; principal of Eyre and Spottiswoode, Queen’s Printers, 103, 395 early life and education, 97, 98–­99; Bal­ liol College, Oxford, 98–­99, 101–­3; mathematical achievements and am­ bitions, 99, 101, 103, 490–­91n233; public schools, 98; social and finan­ cial circumstances, 97–­99, 103 lectures and publications for general au­ diences, 395, 396, 399, 403–­4, 406, 412; British Association, “Address,” 264–­65, 415–­16; British Association public lectures, 249, 263, 266; “On the Colours of Polarized Light,” 263; Royal institution lectures, 396 personal, 227; family, 344–­45, 347; so­ cial position, 164, 287–­88, 290, 356, 385, 398; temperament, 2, 222, 226, 270, 283, 287, 398–­99 religious, philosophical, and politi­ cal views, 104, 107, 200, 256, 398; associate of social reformers and theological liberalizers within the Church, 101–­2, 204; defender of free

598

inquiry in theology, 187, 195–­96; defender of Tyndall’s Belfast address, 265; on gender, 343–­44; a liberal, secular state, 434–­36; religion and philosophy, 265, 266 reputation, 352, 354, 356–­57; excellent committee person, 270, 283, 288; modest mathematical achievements, 104, 222 science education, promoter of, 103, 317; British Association education committees, 313–­16; geometry as an empirical science, 300; lobby on science teaching in public schools, 315–­16 scientific ideals and scientific research: diverse scholarly interests, travel, foreign literature, mathematics, 104, 198, 215; mathematical research not well-­focused, 103–­4, 105; Meditatio­ nes analyticae, 104; research shift to polarization of light, 395 societies and committees, administra­ tive positions and roles, 6, 270, 287–­ 88, 398, 412; Association for the Im­ provement of Geometrical Teaching (founder), 300; British Association, 198, 246–­47, 251, 313–­16, 517n65; Ethnological Society, 6, 198, 200, 215, 508n95; generous donor, 283; president and chairman, 247, 271–­ 72, 279, 397; Royal Geographical Society, 6, 198, 515n26; Royal Insti­ tution, 385, 397–­99; Royal Society, 230, 267, 271–­72, 273, 274, 279, 282–­83, 416; secretary, 198, 397; treasurer and auditor, 198, 246, 271, 397, 517n65; University of London Senate, 342–­44, 351 X Club, position in X-­networks and projects: British Association Com­ mittee on Science Education in Schools, 314–­16; Club weakened by his death, 286, 451–­52; defender of ethnology against anthropology, 198, 200; defender of free inquiry in theology, 187; friendship networks, latecomer to, 220, 222, 225; pro­ moter of Hirst’s interests, 351–­52, 355, 534n204; promoter of the reputation of Darwin, 282–­83, 416;

index

the Reader, 208; social center, 253, 257, 347, 349, 451; Sunday lecture supporter, 431, 434–­36, 437 Spottiswoode printing companies (includ­ ing Eyre and Spottiswoode, Queen’s Printers), 6, 98, 103, 104, 106, 204, 490n222, 491n250 Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, 29, 100–­101, 103, 384, 385–­86, 388, 397, 404, 506n62; defender of the essayists, 187, 188, 385; Life of Thomas Arnold, 102 Stanley, Edward (father of A. P., bishop of Norwich), 93, 95, 120 Stanley, Lady Augusta (wife of A. P.), 385, 388 Stanley, Matthew, 474n35, 519n97, 528–­ 29n105, 534n218 Stanley, Owen (brother of A. P.), 93, 95, 111 state aid to science, 292–­301, 330–­40, 358, 523n2; before 1850, 52, 292, 294, 295, 296, 330; the “endowment” lobby, 292, 297, 330–­31, 336–­39; English–­Scottish differences, 294–­ 95, 338, 340, 523n10; the “Govern­ ment Grant,” 261, 295, 332, 337, 339; historiographical discussion, 292–­94, 340, 358, 523n2; laissez-­ faire principles and practice, 292, 295–­96, 302, 324, 330, 332, 334; proposals before the Devonshire Commission, 295, 326, 332, 336–­40; scientific advice for government, 61, 71, 74, 115, 126, 127, 300, 337, 339–­40; scientific ignorance of the governing classes, 161, 336, 340; sources of aid between the indi­ vidual and the state, 295, 298, 312, 334–­36, 340, 530n131; South Ken­ sington developments, 292–­301; X Club hesitations over, 293, 298, 336, 337–­39 Stephen, James Fitzjames, 190, 192, 388, 390, 391 Stephen, Leslie (brother of James), 384, 390 Stewart, Balfour, 308; Conservation of Energy, 411 Stocking, George W., 17–­18, 177, 200; Victo­ rian Anthropology, 17 Stokes, George Gabriel, 124, 247, 255, 331–­ 32, 333, 334, 422; personal, 273–­74, 284; in the Royal Society, 184, 272,

273–­75, 277, 280, 282, 283, 284, 285f, 288, 505n49, 522n168 Storrar, John, 342, 343, 350, 357 Story-­Maskelyne, Nevil, 165–­66, 215, 501n179 Strachey, Richard, 338; X Club and Hooker ally, 243, 273, 279, 289, 522n178 Strahan, William, 98, 490n222 Strange, Alexander, 292, 330, 333, 336, 337, 530n124 Strauss, David Friedrich, Das Leben Jesu, 85 Strick, James, 258 Strutt, Edward (son) and William (father), 77 Sullivan, Arthur, 347, 533n179 Sunday lectures, 408, 432, 436, 437; the broader anti-­Sabbatarian move­ ment, 431, 435, 436, 437; Huxley’s 1866 Sunday lecture, 375–­77, 429f, 431–­32; lawyers and, 433, 434, 436; music at, 431–­32, 433; National Sunday League (NSL)/Recreative Religionists, 431, 432, 433, 437; the Sabbatarian opposition, 432, 435; and the secularization of the state, 438; Sunday Evenings for the People, 376, 428–­32, 429f; Sunday Lecture Society, 433–­36; and Unitar­ ians, 430–­31, 433, 439; and the X Club, 428–­29, 431–­40, 460 Sussex, Duke of (Prince Augustus Frederick), 46–­47 Swinburne, Algernon, 385 Sylvester, James Joseph, 134, 166, 231, 388 Symonds, Hyacinth, 347, 450, 533n180. See also Hooker, Hyacinth (née Sy­ monds, second wife of J. D.) Tait, Archibald Campbell (later Bishop of London and archbishop of Canter­ bury), 100–­101, 103, 381, 382, 385, 387 Tait, Peter Guthrie, 7–­8, 260, 261; conflicts with Tyndall, 262, 288, 383, 414, 449, 450. See also North British network Taylor, Charles, 31, 443 Taylor, Michael, 20, 87–­88, 474n35, 485n138, 487n159, 488n188 Taylor, Richard, 123 Taylor and Francis, and their journals, 74, 82, 84, 117, 120, 122, 123 599

index

technology. See under “pure” science, ac­ cording to the X Club Temple, Frederick, 99–­100, 101, 103, 104, 175, 490n232, 526n71; and Essays and Reviews, 186, 187 Tennyson, Emily (wife of Alfred), 140 Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 140, 196, 387, 388, 392 theological controversy: Bishop Colenso’s Pentateuch, 185–­86, 190–­93, 506n71, 507n80; “Declaration of the Stu­ dents of the Natural Sciences,” 193–­ 94, 223, 507n83; Essays and Reviews, 170, 185, 186–­88, 192; miracles, 34, 185, 391, 421, 425, 457–­58; prayer, 27, 29, 216, 372–­73, 375, 382, 383, 385–­86, 399, 421, 457, 536n34; Tractarianism, 100–­102 Thiselton-­Dyer, William Turner, 245 Thomson, C. Wyville, 178, 521n149 Thomson, Thomas, 112, 268 Thomson, William (later Lord Kelvin), 29, 119, 120, 124, 125f, 328–­29, 338, 340, 394, 412, 414; at British Associ­ ation meetings, 119, 124, 141, 247, 257, 260–­62; on geological time, 232, 261, 348, 436; Hirst, Hooker, and Huxley respect for, 261–­62; member of North British network, 7, 27, 29, 261–­62, 414; Tyndall’s rivalry with, 119, 124, 125f, 141, 260. See also North British network; “pure” science, according to the X Club: north British disagreements with X Club valuations; Scotland Thorough Club, 11–­12, 13 Times, 172, 501n3 Tosh, John, 142, 143, 496n90 Trimen, Henry, 241, 242 Truth Seeker, 73 Turner, Dawson, 42, 43 Turner, Frank, 363–­65, 438, 476n69, 476n71; agnosticism as a cultural stance, 419; cultural authority claimed by scientific men, 15, 27, 29, 363–­64, 365; on professionalization, 15, 16, 20–­21, 23, 371; on scientific natu­ ralism, 11, 19–­21, 365, 413, 443, 474n43; on the X Club, 15, 21, 23, 27, 419 Tylor, Edward B., 381, 410–­11

600

Tyndall, John, 2, 3–­5, 58–­75 passim, 118f, 135–­43, 167, 285f, 374f career, 117–­28 passim, 131; building a reputation through the British Association, 117–­19, 121, 122, 124, 136–­37; election to and honors from scientific societies, 121–­22, 123, 134, 142; financial circumstances, 117, 119, 120, 123, 129; patronage, 73, 74, 117, 120, 121–­22, 270, 290, 494n47; pluralism, 74, 120, 123, 127, 131, 142; positions lost or re­ jected, 120, 122, 123, 127, 131, 142; return to Queenwood, 120; at Royal Institution, 4, 124–­26, 127–­28, 129, 341, 362, 395–­99, 546n28; at School of Mines, 131, 142; social mobility and cultural leadership through science, 126, 129, 135–­37, 139–­40, 141–­42, 164, 207–­8, 216, 372–­73, 375, 384–­88 passim, 407, 429, 435, 514n13 early life and education, 2, 58–­60, 62–­67, 69–­73, 103; expanding horizons at Queenwood, 68, 69–­70, 75, 120; Irish origins, 3, 59, 62, 374f; mechanics’ institute culture, 59–­60, 62–­65, 67, 74, 138, 481n73; political activism, 62, 63, 65–­66, 73; surveying, 62, 63, 123, 483n102, 484n114; the Univer­ sity of Marburg, 71, 74–­75 historiographical discussion: the Belfast address, 263–­64, 392, 519nn97–­98, 519n107, 539n102; Tyndall’s “mate­ rialism,” 263–­64, 484n12 lectures and publications for general audiences, 206–­8, 212, 232, 395–­ 96, 399, 406, 437, 442; Belfast ad­ dress (BA) and responses, 262–­64, 265, 286, 367, 369, 370, 424, 425; Birmingham and Midland Institute, address, 405–­6; British Association lectures and their similarities, 248–­ 49, 256, 257–­58, 262–­63, 400, 415, 418; commitment to journalism, 166, 207, 213; “The Constitution of the Universe,” 375; “The Electric Light” (RI), 397–­98, 542n181; Forms of Water, 410; high standards for lec­ turing, 126, 127–­28, 129; “Miracles and Special Providences,” 399; “On

index

Scientific Materialism” (BA), 256, 418; “Physics and Metaphysics,” 216, 372, 512n146; on prayer in the Pall Mall Gazette, 373, 375; “Reflections on Prayer and Natural Law,” 373, 375; at the Royal Institu­ tion, 396–­97, 400, 410, 542n181; “Scientific Use of the Imagination” (BA), 257–­58, 262, 374f, 408, 415; to working men, 248–­49, 399–­400, 441 personal, 135–­43, 227; assessments by Hooker, 256, 262, 264, 275, 450, 451, 453; criticisms by friends, 140, 143, 262, 275, 391; family, 62, 74, 129, 137, 141–­43, 217, 266, 347, 450, 497n103; Faraday as role model, pa­ tron, and mentor, 117, 119–­20, 121, 126–­27, 135, 138–­39, 140–­42, 348, 416; friendship with Frankland, 3, 62, 69, 70–­72, 132, 451; friendship with Hirst, 3, 67, 71, 72, 134, 140, 143, 453; friendship with Huxley, 123, 124, 126–­27, 129, 132; friend­ ship with Ellen Lubbock, 217–­18, 346; friendship with Spencer, 128, 134, 257, 453, 495n62; health, 346, 450; personal insecurities, 107, 119, 120, 124, 137, 138–­39, 140, 141, 142–­43, 167; pride at achievements, 126, 136, 140; temperament, 72, 73–­ 74, 134, 137, 140–­43, 262, 288–­89, 382–­83, 391, 408 polemical style, 140–­41, 367, 374f, 382–­83, 457; the Belfast provoca­ tion, 262–­63, 265, 286; claims to avoid unnecessary controversy and offence, 383, 398–­99; in combative mode, 216, 372–­75, 391, 405–­ 6, 424; conflicts with Tait, 262, 288–­89, 414; efforts by friends to restrain, 262, 399, 449; justification of confrontation, 210; rhetorical devices, 258, 370, 415. See also under combative style and confrontational content of the X-­publicists; Tyndall, John: lectures and publications for general audiences religious, philosophical, and political views, 65, 69–­71, 216, 405, 423; against home rule, 452; continuity of natural causes in the universe,

405–­6, 415, 418, 422, 543n213; for freedom of opinion, 192, 398; a lim­ ited agnosticism, 216, 418–­19, 420; naturalistic vision, 216, 442; natural supernaturalism, 67, 71–­72, 140, 258, 423, 425, 442; nebular hypoth­ esis important to his naturalism, 20, 258, 415, 418, 422; pantheistic interpretation of matter, 72, 256, 258, 262–­63, 405, 457, 484n121; politics of human progress, 65–­67, 69; “religion” understood as a deep emotional response to the universe, 31, 67, 71, 373, 375, 383, 424, 442; scientific method, 257–­58, 419–­20; secular, Carlylean puritanism, 67, 138, 140; shift from idealism to de­ terministic naturalism, 72–­73, 126–­ 27, 216, 256, 372, 373, 375, 405–­6, 421, 423, 457, 485n125 reputation, 126, 262, 285f, 288, 291, 362, 427, 514n8; as cultural leader, 367, 369, 385, 386–­87, 388, 393, 404, 406, 437, 441, 448; as irreli­ gious, 377–­78, 388–­89, 397–­98, 399; as lecturer and speechmaker, 4, 143, 256, 257, 371, 394, 396 science education, promoter of, 300, 317, 318; in British Association edu­ cation committees, 313–­16; children are excited by science, 318–­19; as Department of Science and Art ex­ aminer, 302, 304, 305, 312; develops intellectual and moral qualities, 320; in working men’s college move­ ment, 399–­400 scientific ideals and scientific research: committed to public enlightenment than specialist teaching, 131–­32, 464; diverted from research by social life, 132, 384; early research on dia­ magnetism, 71, 75, 119, 121, 126, 493n26; science as a religious calling, 67, 72, 459; science as the “pure” pursuit of truth, 414–­15, 416, 458 (see also under “pure” science, accord­ ing to the X Club); scientific men have social responsibilities, 365–­66; spontaneous generation, 258, 282 societies and committees, administra­ tive positions and lobbies, 275, 601

index

societies and committees (cont.) 288–­89, 338, 387, 409, 450; British Association, 248, 252–­53, 262, 331; Royal Society, 134, 269–­71, 289 X Club, position in X-­networks and proj­ ects: British Association Committee on Science Education in Schools, 314–­16; doubts about state support for science, 337, 339; friendship network, 129, 132, 134, 167, 217; International Scientific Series, com­ mittee, 409–­10; promoter of Darwin’s reputation, 258, 264, 416; promoter of Lubbock’s electoral campaign, 350, 355; the Reader, 206–­8, 210, 212; Royal Society elections, 269–­71; Saturday Review science columns, 165–­66, 216, 512n146; “Scientific Re­ view,” 165; Sunday lecture supporter, 428, 431–­32, 434, 435–­36, 437, 440 Tyndall, Louisa Charlotte (née Hamilton, wife of John), 385, 450, 517n70 Unitarianism: individual Unitarians, 107, 123, 132, 172, 194, 365–­66, 380, 390; and the Metaphysical Society, 388, 390; politics and theology of, 76–­77, 86, 90, 165, 172, 188, 194, 196, 341, 380, 430–­32, 433–­34, 436, 440, 465–­66; Unitarians in the Sun­ day lecture movement, 430–­32, 433–­34, 436, 439 universities and university colleges, 75, 311, 326; Berlin, 75, 114, 120, 326; Edinburgh, 131; Giessen, 61, 74, 92, 100, 122–­23, 125; Kings College, London, 47, 311, 342; Marburg, 62, 70–­71, 75, 102; Owens College, Manchester, 115–­16, 130, 131, 308; parliamentary representatives for British universities, 47, 333, 335f, 350; Queen’s University, Ireland, and its colleges, 123, 330; research requirements for degrees in British universities, 326, 463–­64; Royal Col­ lege of Science for Ireland, 131; Uni­ versity College, London, 47, 92, 132, 222, 311, 341–­42, 344–­45, 347–­48, 464; women, admission to classes (at University College), 344–­45.

602

See also Universities of Oxford and Cambridge; University of London Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, 96–­97, 107, 108, 340, 464; as Angli­ can institutions, 96–­98, 389, 439, 490n220; Balliol College, Oxford, 98–­102, 227; college fellowships, 30, 103, 110, 332, 334, 336, 389; and Es­ says and Reviews, 185, 186–­87, 190, 192; reformers of, 12, 93, 101, 103, 334, 336, 388, 430, 438–­39; Tractar­ ian controversy at Oxford, 100–­103 University College School. See schools University of London, 47, 338, 341–­44, 346–­47, 350–­52, 357, 361; adminis­ trative structure, 342–­43; admission of women to examinations, 343–­44, 532n164; examinations, 93, 342–­43, 347; Lubbock as vice chancellor, 343, 356–­57, 532n164; medicine at, 344, 350, 355; the senate, 342–­44, 347, 350–­53, 354, 356; X-­men ap­ pointed to senate, 342–­43, 356 utilitarianism, 302, 304. See also Bentham, Jeremy, and Benthamites utility of science. See under education, sci­ ence; education, technical; “pure” science, according to the X Club Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 17, 21, 70, 88, 484n110, 487n173, 488n190. See also Chambers, Robert Victoria, Queen, 46, 55, 106, 342 Vincent, David, 59, 481n64, 481n66, 485n128, 485n132 vivisection, 356, 391, 534n214 Voltaire, and his style, 63, 196, 209, 391 Waitz, Theodor, 71 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 202, 213, 233, 422–­ 23, 501n167 Walmsley, Joshua, 431 Ward, James, on naturalism, 19, 20–­21 Ward, William George, 101, 102, 389–­90, 391; The Ideal of a Christian Church, 102 Ward, Wilfrid Phillip (son of W. G.), 420 Webb, Beatrice, 362–­63, 444 Webb, Sidney, 436 Wellington, 1st Duke of (Arthur Wellesley), 53

index

Westlake, John, 190, 191, 192, 197, 204, 433, 506n71 Westly, Jane. See Busk, Jane (née Westly, mother of George) Westminster, 1st Duke of (Hugh Lupus Grosvenor), 437 Westminster Review, 85, 186, 381, 430; con­ tributions by X-­network, 85–­86, 88, 128–­29, 172, 176, 375; journalistic position and reputation, 128, 165, 176, 379, 389 Whewell, William, 24, 127, 143, 255, 476n77 Whitbread, Samuel, 126, 394 White, Paul, 22, 28; on friendships and com­mon interests among cultural elites, 28, 363–­64, 371, 384, 535n3; on Huxley and his temperament, 95, 143, 475n59, 489n197, 489n208, 494n51 Whittington Club, 66–­67, 73, 85 Whitworth, Joseph, scholarships, 306 Wilberforce, Samuel (bishop of Oxford), 172, 186, 216, 372, 387; at 1860 Oxford British Association meeting, 173–­75, 502n9 Williamson, Alexander, 220, 249, 252; on science education, 324, 325, 326, 331, 360; X Club friend and ally, 222, 271, 275, 341, 360, 521n141 Wilson, Henry Bristow, 226 Wilson, James, 84–­85 Wilson, James Maurice, 315, 317, 526n71 Wise, Norton, and Crosbie Smith, 414 Wiseman, Nicholas Patrick Stephen (car­ dinal archbishop of Westminster), 396–­97 women, 343–­50, 488n190; admission to scientific meetings and lectures, 119, 126, 139f, 200, 237, 247, 249, 250f, 253, 256, 281, 395, 442; education, for women and girls, 78, 204, 343–­ 46, 348, 358, 532n164; friendships with men, 10, 15, 132, 133, 217, 220, 349–­50; gender stereotypes, 133, 209, 233, 275, 344, 345–­46, 349; scientific women, 43, 50; sup­ porters of women’s education, 227, 343–­45, 358, 430, 431, 433, 434, 532n164

Woolley, Joseph, 324, 327, 352 Wright, Chauncey, 181 Wright, E. Perceval, 177, 178 Wrottesley, 2nd Baron ( John Wrottesley), 156–­57, 500n155 X Club aims, ambitions, and assumptions, 169, 222–­23, 227–­28, 230, 291, 329–­ 30, 362, 442–­43, 456–­57, 460, 462 X Club aims, ambitions, and assumptions, a fully naturalistic science, 456; all knowledge, including theology, claimed for science, 181, 211, 227, 424–­25; naturalistic continuity from non-­life to life, from savagery to civ­ ilization, from fiery nebula to human emotions and thoughts, 176–­77, 380–­81, 382, 400–­401, 405–­6, 408, 413, 415, 421–­23, 427, 443, 456–­57; science identified as a naturalistic anti-­authoritarian way of thinking, 320–­21, 359, 362 X Club aims, ambitions, and assumptions, in scientific societies: to build the infra­ structure of scientific research, 153, 163, 178, 182–­83, 237, 277, 283–­84, 290, 463 (see also specialist science publishing); to claim independent authority for scientific knowledge and achievement, without need for aristocratic, religious, or commercial legitimation, 252, 278, 279–­80, 284, 286, 290, 291, 459, 461–­62, 521n152; mutual self-­interest, 148, 252, 282, 350, 351–­52, 354–­55, 511n144; to represent the dignity and unity of science, 188, 202, 232–­33, 234, 280–­ 81, 284, 459, 462 X Club aims, ambitions, and assumptions, in the wider world, 31; to change ways of thinking (through lectures, journalism, and science education), 166, 208–­9, 214, 215, 297, 309, 311, 318, 320–­21, 329–­30, 358–­59, 390, 462; to counter the constraints of religious orthodoxy in intellectual and public life, 164–­65, 192, 196–­97, 226, 367, 398–­99, 438, 457, 460 (see also liberals, liberalism, and liberal thought); to gain social and cultural

603

index

X Club aims (cont.) recognition for scientific merit, 163–­ 65, 365–­66, 387, 392, 458; self-­image as scientific missionaries, prophets, and religious guides, 309, 365–­70, 401, 442, 458–­59 X Club as a social and lobbying network, al­ lies, 162, 168, 178, 222–­23, 268, 289, 359, 449, 455–­56, 465–­66, 522n178. See also individual persons and projects X Club as a social and lobbying network, meetings, 225–­27, 337; choice of name, 13, 14, 225–­26; Club proce­ dures, 225–­26, 513nn6–­7, 513n11; first meeting, 225; guests, 226–­27, 229, 253, 279; members, 225, 289, 452, 455, 522n178 X Club as a social and lobbying network, social networks, 166–­68 passim, 214–­23 passim, 347, 349, 449–­53;

604

development of the X-­network in the 1850s, 3–­6, 110–­11, 122–­23, 129, 132–­34, 167–­68; development of the X-­network in the early 1860s, 214–­ 15, 216–­17, 218–­20, 222–­23; drifting apart from the mid-­1870s, 275–­76, 312, 360–­61, 449–­55; holidays and excursions, 4f, 5, 132, 134, 177, 217, 220, 227, 257, 450; importance of wives and families, 9–­10, 217, 227, 345–­47, 349–­50, 450–­51, 452; joint party at British Association meetings, 253, 257, 264, 265–­66 X Club campaigns and projects, power and its limits, 7–­9, 243–­44, 284, 357–­58, 360, 447, 455. See also individual campaigns Youmans, Edward F., 226, 409–­10, 411, 541n164 Young, Robert M., 21, 365, 423, 545n268