High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  However, Smiles also insisted that making money was not enough. A man, as he improved financially, had to improve culturally and in terms of his character too. ‘Men of business’, he writes, ‘are accustomed to quote the maxim that Time is money; but it is more; the proper improvement of it is self-culture, self-improvement, and growth of character. An hour wasted daily on trifles or in indolence, would, if devoted to self-improvement, make an ignorant man wise in a few years, and employed in good works, would make his life fruitful, and death a harvest of worthy deeds. Fifteen minutes a day devoted to self-improvement, will be felt at the end of the year.’38 For the socially ambitious – and the period of prosperity that followed the hungry forties and lasted until the downturn of 1873 was one of conspicuous social ambition – Smiles had this warning: ‘The making of a fortune may no doubt enable some people to “enter society”, as it is called; but to be esteemed there, they must possess qualities of mind, manners, or heart, else they are merely rich people, nothing more. There are men “in society” now, as rich as Croesus, who have no consideration extended towards them, and elicit no respect. For why? They are but as money-bags; their only power is in their till.’39

  The Victorians were practised at various hypocrisies – the related issues of sex and religious observance chief among them – and money was one of the other chief difficulties. Smiles is right to emphasise the number of peerages that emanated from trade, not least when one recalls the abundance of snobbish and condescending references in Victorian literature by those who have not had to make their own money to those who have. Perhaps only two or three generations earlier, the grandfather or great-grandfather of the snob himself was on the receiving end of such patronage. Smiles articulates the middle classes’ attitude to wealth in his chapter ‘Money – Its Use and Abuse’. He begins by saying that the way a man uses money is ‘one of the best tests of practical wisdom’, and therefore the measure of a man.40 He continues: ‘Although money ought by no means to be regarded as a chief end of man’s life, neither is it a trifling matter, to be held in philosophic contempt, representing as it does to large an extent, the means of physical comfort and social well-being.’ He attacks the ‘selfishness’ displayed by ‘inordinate lovers of gain’; and contrasts the ‘generosity, honesty, justice and self-sacrifice’ exhibited by the best of those who have money with the ‘thriftlessness, extravagance and improvidence’ of the worst.

  Above all – and this would have been considered a quite vulgar admission by some snobs – ‘comfort in worldly circumstances is a condition which every man is justified in striving to attain by all worthy means.’ Yet in what he has already said, Smiles has given the lie to those who accuse him of exhorting selfishness and materialism. He exhorts, rather, self-denial. ‘Every man ought so to contrive to live within his means,’ he writes. ‘The practice is the very essence of honesty. For if a man do not manage honestly to live within his own means, he must necessarily be living dishonestly upon the means of somebody else.’41

  There was a consciousness among the ruling class that more had to be done for adults who sought learning. Kingsley wrote: ‘I cannot forget, any more than the working man, that the Universities were not founded exclusively, or even primarily, for our own class; that the great mass of students in the middle ages were drawn from the lower classes, and that sizarships, scholarships, exhibitions and so forth, were founded for the sake of those classes, rather than of our own.’42 He also points out that after the Wars of the Roses the younger sons of gentlemen, no longer allowed to fight and not easily set up with their own land and estates, chose to try to become learned instead: and ‘by virtue of their superior advantages’ beat the poor boys to university places. Therefore he asked: ‘Does not the increased civilisation and education of the working classes call on the Universities to consider they may not now try to become, what certainly they were meant to be, places of teaching and training for genius of every rank, and not merely for that of young gentlemen?’ Gladstone, when he read Alton Locke, noted the importance of ‘university foundations for the poor’.43 Other politicians were keen to enable the provision of cultural institutions to allow those who had left, or had never had, full-time education to continue to enrich their minds. The Museums Act 1845 and the Public Libraries Acts 1850, 1855 and 1866 all contributed to this cause but, as with much other reforming legislation of the era, were only pushed through parliament in the face of opposition. As with the education of children, the education of adults would happen in spite of government action rather than because of it.

  IV

  The pursuit of knowledge in mid-Victorian Britain, notably in science, laid the foundations of the modern, secular, world. A climate of discovery, inquiry and curiosity fed on itself, and the appetite grew with eating. Rational answers were sought for phenomena that had hitherto been given spiritual or theological explanations. The sensation caused by Darwin’s researches accelerated this process, as did the work of T. H. Huxley, who coined the term ‘agnostic’. Scientific progress forced thinking people to reconcile what was now understood about the natural sciences with religious teachings. Novelists such as George Eliot and Samuel Butler undermined religion; and the most popular novelist of the era, Charles Dickens, had little to say in any of his works about its benefits. In Butler’s case The Way of All Flesh aggressively portrayed it as sustaining and validating Victorian hypocrisy, though his work was considered so scandalous it was published posthumously, in 1903, by which point the world had moved on. Doctrinal disputes such as highlighted by the Oxford Movement caused the Church to appear divided and inward looking, helping reduce its relevance to the masses and making it appear the private property of prelates, dons and theologians.

  Those who might have brought religion before a new generation chose instead to voice their doubts. By the 1870s, and despite the adherence to the Church of such prominent politicians as Gladstone, Britain had become an increasingly secularised and rationalist state. Scientists such as Huxley and John Tyndall displayed their agnosticism or atheism, their minds altered by scientific fact. What remained was one of the foremost Victorian hypocrisies – or accommodations – that paid public tribute to the place of religion in society, even while that society made rapid intellectual advances without it – often with the explicit approval of Christian intellectuals.

  Describing in his masterpiece The Way of All Flesh the mood of the 1830s, when his own hated father (pilloried in the novel as Theobald Pontifex) had been ordained, Butler wrote that ‘in those days people believed with a simple downrightness which I do not observe among educated men and women now. It had never so much as crossed Theobald’s mind to doubt the literal accuracy of any syllable in the Bible. He had never seen any book in which this was disputed, nor met with anyone who doubted it. True, there was just a little scare about geology, but there was nothing in it. If it was said that God made the world in six days, why He did make it in six days, neither in more nor less; if it was said that He put Adam to sleep, took out one of his ribs and made a woman of it, it was so as a matter of course.’44

  One of the first significant scientific advances in Britain had been in geology. It had startled the largely irrational world of late Georgian science by observing that evidence suggested that the story of the Creation set out in the Scriptures was unlikely to be accurate. The man responsible, Charles Lyell, had acquired an interest in geology as an undergraduate at Oxford. A massive influence upon him in the early 1820s was the work of Karl von Hoff, which he learned German specifically to read, and which inspired him to begin work on his own Principles of Geology, the first volume of which was published by John Murray in 1830. In it, Lyell rounded on geologists who believed that the period of the earth’s development was within that specified in the Bible. He realised, as a result of his studies, the impossibility of the earth’s having reached its present state in a few thousand years. Like Charles Darwin, who was greatly influenced by him, Lyell had published a ground-breaking work of scientific rese
arch that most of his fellow scientists attacked as wrong.

  Darwin picked up this baton. He was born in 1809, the son of a doctor in Shrewsbury. He was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin, the physician, botanist, natural historian and poet, on his father’s side, and Josiah Wedgwood, one of the giants of the Industrial Revolution, on his mother’s. Darwin was a clever student, but the curriculum at Shrewsbury, where he was a pupil, bored him. He was taken out of the school at sixteen. When he spent his spare time conducting experiments in his dormitory the headmaster, Samuel Butler – grandfather of the novelist who would become one of Darwin’s admirers and, then, one of his critics – rebuked him for wasting his time.

  He went to Edinburgh University to train as a doctor, but found surgery revolted him (this was before the invention of anaesthetics). However, he acquired interests in natural history, particularly of bird life and invertebrates from long walks along the coast of the Firth of Forth, and in geology. He was introduced to the work of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the French zoologist who believed the origin and primal function of human organs could be explained through studying certain invertebrates. This began a thirty-year odyssey for Darwin towards his most celebrated and important work, On the Origin of Species.

  His father settled that Charles should take holy orders, blissfully unaware of how he had come under the influence at Edinburgh of men and ideas that challenged the ideas of Creation. Darwin went up to Christ’s College, Cambridge in 1828, and managed to maintain his Christian faith. He had a cousin at Cambridge, William Fox, who interested him in beetle-collecting. He soon made a name for himself as an entomologist; and began to confess to doubts that would make a career in the Church impossible. He refined and deepened his knowledge of geology and its crucial role in providing evidence for what came to be called evolution. He was offered a place as resident scientist on the voyage of HMS Beagle to Tierra del Fuego and the East Indies, departing in late 1831 not long after his graduation. As Darwin admits in his Autobiography, his life was changed by the five-year voyage. He explored inland during the ship’s many stops. He read Principles of Geology. Everything he saw validated Lyell, and provided evidence of a time frame of the development of the earth that would accommodate a theory of natural selection. He would later describe Lyell’s work as one ‘which the future historian will recognise as having produced a revolution in natural science’.45 He also wrote that ‘geology plainly proclaims that each land has undergone great physical changes’, and thus ‘organic beings’ must have ‘varied under nature’.46

  Within a month of his return to England in October 1836 he met Lyell. The two became close friends and, in a sense, collaborators. ‘Amongst the great scientific men, no one has been nearly so friendly and kind,’ he wrote.47 Darwin spent several years writing up his account of the voyage of the Beagle, and found homes for the collections made on the journey. He became prominent in both the scientific and Whig intellectual life of London, but as his thoughts on evolution developed he kept them, for the moment, to himself. He first set eyes on an ape at London Zoo in March 1838, and noted certain common characteristics. He started to believe that what man was had been determined by his ancestors, not by God. The contemporary notion that science should be used to explain the creations of God was turned on its head: science would now be used to prove the Bible could not be taken literally.

  By the mid-1840s he had developed his theory of evolution, but felt unequal to promulgating it – such would have been the climate of hostility. He had determined that natural selection took place, and that overpopulation in all species meant that the fittest adapted and survived while the weaklings died. This had taken place, he knew, over hundreds of millions of years, not in the few thousand specified by the Scriptures. He studied barnacles during the 1840s, and determined how they had descended from crab-like forebears. This confirmed his view that all species, over time, were variable. Then he worked on plants, determining that seeds could be dispersed by ocean currents (he proved that salt water did not kill the seeds) or by birds. Seeds could germinate after being in the bellies of rotting dead birds, or in their droppings. It was then that his study of pigeons, highly influential in his work on evolution, became significant. Darwin had long been influenced by the population theory of Thomas Malthus, and saw it being worked out in animal life – not just pigeons, but in other species too.

  At the urging of Lyell (‘I wish you would publish some small fragment of your data on pigeons if you please and so out with the theory and let it take date – and be cited – and understood’), and after much discourse with T. H. Huxley, Darwin in 1856 began formulating the work that became On the Origin of Species.48 In his researches he compared artificial selection – the deliberate breeding of new species of domesticated animals – with those developed without human intervention, by natural selection. The man who had found dissection and anatomy repellent now dissected pigeons, ducks and even dogs. The bones in the wing of a domesticated duck, he found, weighed less than those of a wild duck; while the leg bones weighed more in the former than in the latter: because the wild duck did more flying and the domesticated one more waddling.49

  One reason Lyell had urged him to publish was an article by Alfred Russel Wallace in 1855 that seemed close to Darwin’s theories. Wallace indeed wrote to Darwin in June 1858 outlining his own theory, which was identical: and enclosing an essay he had written on the subject. Darwin professed himself ‘quite upset’ that Wallace appeared to have jumped ahead of him, though he did tell Lyell that ‘there is nothing in Wallace’s sketch which is not written out much fuller in my sketch copied in 1844’.50 Darwin was anxious to avoid a charge of plagiarism, and told Lyell of two other scientists with whom he had shared his theories. He wondered whether he could now publish ‘honourably’, having been sent Wallace’s findings. He told Lyell: ‘I would far rather burn my whole book than that he or any man should think that I had behaved in a paltry spirit.’ To avoid difficulties, Darwin and Wallace agreed to present papers outlining their views to the Linnean Society in London on 1 July 1858. This, and not On the Origin of Species, was the first pronouncement of the theory of natural selection. Later that summer Darwin started to write a book unlike the intensely detailed academic treatises he had written before, but designed to secure the widest possible audience for his revolutionary views. Lyell persuaded John Murray, his publisher, to issue it, on 24 November 1859. He arranged to print 1,250 copies, which Darwin considered ‘rather too large an edition’: it sold out almost at once.51

  The publication of On the Origin of Species is widely regarded as the key intellectual event of the era. It advanced rationalism, undermined religion, and radicalised the comprehension of existence. So thorough was Darwin’s research that his ideas could not intelligently be dismissed in the way that serious scientific opinion had attacked, fifteen years earlier, the anonymously written Vestiges of Creation, which had speculated on how different species had come about. Gertrude Himmelfarb has observed that ‘it was On the Origin of Species that precipitated the “war of science and religion”, a war that was as confused, complicated, and ambiguous – indeed, as unwarlike – as any that has ever been fought.’52

  There were many common denominators between Lyell and Darwin, but none so significant as this: if what they said was true, the Bible could not be interpreted literally. And, if the Bible could not be interpreted literally, this meant – in the eyes of some clergy – that the whole basis of Christianity and the Christian faith was open to question. Although Darwin had not put this question himself, there were others happy enough to do so: not to humiliate organised religion, but to defend Darwin’s work. And none was a more partisan supporter than the man who came to be known as his ‘bulldog’, Thomas Henry Huxley.

  Huxley had had an unconventional upbringing. Born in 1825, he had a brief formal schooling in Ealing, at a school run by his father that went bust. He was thereafter educated at home, where he read all he could find on science. He also read much Carlyle, which e
xacerbated his instinctive questioning of his parents’ evangelical Christianity. His two sisters married surgeons, and at fourteen he was apprenticed to one himself. He briefly attended an anatomy school in London, and in 1842 won a scholarship to the Charing Cross Hospital medical school, which had only recently opened. Lack of money prevented him from finishing his medical degree, so he joined the Navy and became an assistant ship’s surgeon specialising in scientific research.

  As his ship, HMS Rattlesnake, sailed around Africa to Australia, Huxley collected sea-creatures and dissected them, examining them under his microscope. He surveyed the inner passage of the Great Barrier Reef in 1847–8 and wrote learned articles about what he discovered in the sea-life there. When he returned to England late in 1850 he found himself acclaimed, and acquired supporters such as Lyell and Richard Owen, the celebrated anatomist. He also became more radical and dislocated from religion, despising the class system and the deference given to those at its zenith, and angry at the State’s inadequate support of scientific research. He finally left the Navy in 1854 and became a lecturer in natural history and palaeontology at the School of Mines. The following year he became Fullerian professor of physiology at the Royal Institution, and also began a series of regular lectures at working men’s colleges. Around 1853 he met Darwin and, although the two men did not agree on everything, a friendship was built upon the younger man’s respect for the older.

  Darwin’s thinking strongly influenced Huxley, giving him intellectual support to gainsay the idea of the Creation, which he had come to see as an obstacle to progress in scientific understanding. Huxley put the descent of man at the centre of his studies. His first target had been Richard Owen, who had defined a new subclass for Homo sapiens based on its having a lobe in the brain that Owen had called a hippocampus minor. Huxley dismissed this at the Royal Institution in 1858. His support was invaluable to Darwin, not least because of Huxley’s growing influence in the academic world, both as a teacher and an administrator. He had just successfully campaigned for London University to have a science faculty and to award the BSc degree; later he would campaign for the introduction of science into the school curriculum, and for women to be educated to take their place in intellectual society as men did. Also, Huxley and Darwin developed a circle of friends and fellow scientists who shared their broadly secularist, research-based view of science, and created an atmosphere in which Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection would not be dismissed out of hand.