by Janet Browne
In truth no one could afterwards remember exactly what Wilberforce did say. One witness, possibly no more reliable than the rest, recorded that Wilberforce expressed the “disquietude” he should feel if a “veritable ape” were shown to him as his ancestress in the zoo.111 These words have the ring of a Victorian bishop about them. Still, the literal words were not important. Wilberforce used the age-old formula of delivering an insult disguised as a friendly jest. The gibe was understood by every member of the audience. They smelled blood. So did Huxley. “The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands,” he apparently whispered to Benjamin Brodie on the bench beside him. As the audience fell silent, Huxley stood up on the platform.
He kept them waiting until the end. First, he repudiated the arguments Wilberforce employed. It was clear to him that most of the biological points were derived from Owen. So he stated that brains do not differ very much across the animal-human divide. He commended the way Darwin’s theory organised the chaotic data of natural history. When the riposte came, it was so quick that only a few people towards the front can have possibly heard. Like Wilberforce’s sally, the form of words was almost immaterial.
If I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence, and yet who employs those faculties for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion—I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.112
With this, the accumulated force of the theological, scientific, and social upheavals of the previous twenty or thirty years came to a head. Ever afterwards, Huxley was credited with having said that he would rather be a monkey than a bishop.
One by one, Hooker, Henslow, and John Lubbock rose to speak over the clamour of the crowd. Their arguments in defence of Darwin were just as powerful as Huxley’s, perhaps more so; and each man felt afterwards that he had personally made the best points of the day. Undergraduates waved their programmes and cheered, people pushed in and out of the hall, the heat rose, bonnets bobbed and weaved, and one over-stretched scientist’s wife in the early months of pregnancy gave up completely and fainted. Many people felt that the bishop had been ill treated—that Huxley was much too vulgar in his reply. Somewhere in the audience, young Henry Tristram, who had already published one of the first articles to use natural selection as an explanation for biological problems, changed his mind about Darwin and declared to Alfred Newton, who was sitting next to him, that he was from now on an anti-Darwinian. He said he objected to seeing a guardian of the nation’s soul shouted down by a mob hailing “the God Darwin and his prophet Huxley.”113
Also in the audience, Robert FitzRoy tried to make himself heard. It must have seemed to him that he was personally responsible for this confrontation between faith and science, between God and his former shipmate. Hepworth Dixon, the editor of the Athenaeum, was one of the few who caught what he said. FitzRoy shouted that he “regretted the publication of Mr. Darwin’s book, and denied Professor Huxley’s statement that it was a logical arrangement of facts.”114 He waved a copy of the Bible aloft—a futile exercise noticed by the distinguished mathematical physicist George Johnstone Stoney, and recorded by him in an account written many years after the event. According to Stoney, FitzRoy declared he had “often expostulated with his old comrade of the Beagle for entertaining views which were contradictory to the first chapter of Genesis,” and implored the British Association audience to believe God’s holy word rather than that of a mere human on the question of creation. The scene was corroborated by Julius Carus, the biologist who afterwards translated many of Darwin’s books into German. “I shall never forget that meeting of the combined sections of the British Association when at Oxford 1860, where Admiral FitzRoy expressed his sorrows for having given you the opportunities of collecting facts for such a shocking theory as yours.”115 The room fell silent. The pathos of FitzRoy’s intervention cannot have escaped at least some members of the audience. Since disembarking from the Beagle, FitzRoy had become enmeshed in the financial and mental problems that would eventually drive him to suicide. Seared with emotion, he slumped back in his chair almost unheard.
Afterwards, young naturalists like George Rolleston, Philip Sclater, William Henry Flowers, Michael Foster, and Ray Lankester talked melodramatically of a great victory, enthusiastically hero-worshipping Huxley and embracing the principles he endorsed. Some of the less scientific members of the audience were also impressed. W. F. Fremantle, son of the politician, declared it was “one of the most memorable events of my life.” Lubbock said he was proud to have played a part, however small.116 Hooker glowed with triumph about smashing the “Amalekite Sam” with botanical facts—an exaggerated impression, no doubt, but Hooker’s blood was up. Henslow, too, made some spirited remarks before dismissing the assembly with “an impartial benediction.”
The bishop’s friends were equally convinced that Wilberforce had the best of it. His supporters “cheered lustily” and appeared bullishly satisfied afterwards. This well-distributed sense of success was important. Every speaker believed that he had won—that he had conquered. As the day wore on into evening, and various members of the audience elaborated on the scene, the conversations probably became more sensationalised, more easily turned to enhance particular points of view, more polarised and emphatic: Wilberforce versus Huxley, the church versus science, old versus new, rationality against obscurantism, “the triumph of reason over rhetoric,” said Robinson Ellis, future professor of Latin at Oxford, the burnished sword of faith confronting a hotbed of disbelief. The clash was understood as a struggle between titans.
The significant thing was that a contest had taken place. This occasion presented a clearly demarcated display of the respective powers of conflicting authorities as represented in two opposing figures. Wilberforce and Huxley were perceived as fighting over the right to explain origins—a dispute over the proper boundary between science and the church that seemed as physically real to the participants and to the audience as any territorial or geographical warfare. Each side was convinced that its claims about the natural world were credible and trustworthy, that its procedures were the only valid account of reality. As it happened, these opposing forces were unequally balanced in Victorian England. Science at that time held little innate authority in itself, and its status was sustained mainly through the rhetorical exertions of its practitioners, among whom Huxley would come to shine, whereas the church was the strongest body in the nation, attracting and retaining the very best intellects of the age. Afterwards, it was rumoured that Huxley’s victory for science was falsely embellished by science’s supporters.117 In this dispute, the challenge was clear. Any success for the Darwinian scheme would require renegotiating—often with bitter controversy—the lines to be drawn between cultural domains. Science was not yet vested with the authority that would come with the modern era. Its practitioners were exerting themselves to create professional communities, struggling to receive due acknowledgement of their expertise and the right to choose and investigate issues in their own manner.118 As Wilberforce demonstrated, that authority currently lay for the most part with theology. The gossip running through the crowd afterwards quickly crafted an epic narrative, a collective fiction with an inbuilt meaning much more tangible and important than reality. All felt they were witnessing history in the making.
A public polarisation of opinion had emerged. The issue became excitingly simple. Were humans descended from monkeys or made by God?
The point was not lost on the absent author. “Was Owen very blackguard?” he asked Huxley.
How durst you attack a live Bishop in that fashion? I am quite ashamed of you! Have you no reverence for fine lawn sleeves? By Jove you seem to have done it well.… I would as soon have died as tried to answer the Bishop in such an assembly.119
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4
FOUR MUSKETEERS
HE BISHOP STORY ran and ran. When Darwin’s son William went back to Cambridge i
n the holidays for some extra mathematics coaching, his tutor told him an anecdote going the rounds. Two Cambridge dons had happened to be standing near Wilberforce just after the exchange with Huxley. One of them was the blind economist Henry Fawcett. Fawcett was asked whether he thought the bishop had actually read the Origin of Species and said in a loud voice, “Oh no, I would swear he has never read a word of it.” Wilberforce bounced round with an awful scowl ready to lash into him, but noticed at the last moment that Fawcett was blind. For the sake of politeness, the bishop had to bite his tongue. Darwin enjoyed the story, repeating it to Huxley and Hooker vebatim.1
Another story came direct from Huxley, who said he felt no personal animosity towards Wilberforce at all. A guest at the Oxford house where Huxley had been staying thought he must be the bishop’s son—with their strong, square, belligerent faces there was a striking physical similarity later brought out by matching Vanity Fair cartoons.2 “Was the argument a family spat?” innocently inquired the guest.
Other entertaining reports trickled in. Darwin’s friend John Brodie Innes, the vicar of Downe, met Wilberforce at an ecclesiastical house party. Innes showed the bishop a letter from Darwin about the clash. “I am very glad he takes it in that way, he is such a capital fellow,” Wilberforce said.3 In London Erasmus snickered that Wilberforce probably “had no idea he would catch such a tartar.”4 And a little later on, Prince Albert amused himself by appointing Huxley and Wilberforce as joint vice-presidents of the Zoological Society for a concurrent period of office. Altogether, something of an air of boyish contest prevailed among these respectable men of parts, almost as if they were standing on the perimeter of a schoolboy scrap, cheering on rival sides before they all went off to lunch. Given the small social circle in which they operated and the pervasive cultural norms derived from common educational and political institutional structures, the singularity is not perhaps unexpected. The two main protagonists were never estranged—though never intimate friends either—and both came to treat their Oxford collision with nonchalant satisfaction.
So when the bishop’s review in the Quarterly reached Down House, Darwin was prepared to be amused. As he read, he scribbled casually in the margin, “What a quibble,” “Rubbish,” “All a blunder.” Only the last part gave him pause for serious thought, and that not for his own sake but for Lyell’s. Darwin was well aware how hard it was for Lyell to go even as far as he was going, and he handled Lyell’s religious hesitations about evolution sympathetically. Wilberforce’s closing words deliberately confronted Lyell with the full enormity of what he was doing. “No man has been more distinct and more logical in the denial of the transmutation of species than Sir C. Lyell,” Wilberforce thundered. “We trust that he still abides by these truly philosophical principles; and that with his help and with that of his brethren this flimsy speculation may be as completely put down as was what we may venture to call its twin though less instructed brother, the Vestiges of Creation.”5 The bishop knew exactly what he was doing. Lyell’s public support gave Darwin’s theory a great deal of credibility. Darwin told Hooker, “The concluding pages will make Lyell shake in his shoes.… By Jove if he sticks to us he will be a real Hero.”6
Generally speaking, the whole affair continued to entertain. Richard Owen was inevitably drawn in, not only because of the anatomical information he fed Wilberforce for his review and the speech at Oxford, but also because Darwin and Huxley now considered him a villain of the highest order. Hugh Falconer sent Darwin a lively description of Huxley snarling around Owen’s heels and basting the “Saponaceous Bishop.” Darwin rubbed his hands. “I must say I do heartily enjoy Owen having had a good setting down—his arrogance and malignity are too bad,” he responded.7
Shortly afterwards, Lyell made a humorous slip, misreading a word in one of Darwin’s letters. Where Darwin wrote “natural preservation,” Lyell thought it read “natural persecution.”8 Persecution caught the current mood to a hair, said Darwin jovially. Yet Owen’s review still throbbed painfully in his mind, associated with what he now considered all the black arts of religious prejudice as represented by the Athenaeum and Bishop Wilberforce. “Owen will not prove right when he said that the whole subject would be forgotten in ten years,” he remarked defiantly to Asa Gray.
My book has stirred up the mud with a vengeance; & it will be a blessing to me if all my friends do not get to hate me. But I look at it as certain, if I had not stirred up the mud some one else would very soon; so that the sooner the battle is fought the sooner it will be settled,—not that the subject will be settled in our lives’ times. It will be an immense gain, if the question becomes a fairly open one; so that each man may try his new facts on it pro & contra.9
He was grateful for everything his friends were doing. “From all that I hear from several quarters, it seems that Oxford did the subject great good.—It is of enormous importance, the showing the world that a few first-rate men are not afraid of expressing their opinion. I see daily more & more plainly that my unaided book would have done absolutely nothing,” he told Huxley.10 “I shd have been utterly smashed had it not been for you & three others.”11
II
Going public in this fashion helped Darwin and his book immeasurably. John Murray was right to believe that controversy was good for business. The general attention ensured that Darwin’s views—as well as those of his supporters and critics—were far more widely broadcast than many other scientific concepts of the era, circulating first among members of the literate reading public and then progressively reaching most sections of society before the end of the 1870s. “Darwin’s book is in everybody’s hands,” said George Henry Lewes in the Cornhill in 1860.
Of course, Lewes did not literally mean everybody. He meant the educated reading classes.12 The first visible responses to Darwin, for the most part, were emerging from the upper reaches of British society, the community to which Darwin belonged and to whose members he implicitly addressed his words.13 Lewes understood perfectly the manner in which a handful of leading figures shaped cultural points of view. He, like others, assumed that the majority of important new ideas would originate in the university-educated sections of society and diffuse outwards and downwards along the social, geographic, and economic scale. And Darwin’s effect can indeed be tracked through Victorian audiences in such a fashion, making waves like a pebble thrown into a pool. On the other hand, Lewes merely reiterated the views of his time and place. There was no single British culture. To see the nineteenth century in terms of high learning alone was to give priority to a set of values that obscured other moral codes, other political commitments, as well as disguising the backbreaking labour of the masses. People from all walks of life were reading and thinking seriously about Darwin. Moreover, Darwin’s work did not generally lose its theoretical content as it percolated through the nation’s consciousness.14 Quite the reverse. Readers outside the elite community confronted many of the issues ignored by its author and integrated them into systems of thought that, on occasion, included resistance to dominant authority. An anonymous writer in the Saturday Review put his finger on the people’s pulse more accurately than Lewes when he remarked that the controversy “passed beyond the bounds of the study and lecture room into the drawing-room and the public street.”15
Nevertheless, it was to Darwin’s friends that the first wave of positive responses must be attributed. For it was obvious that Darwin’s theories were as useful to them as they were to his theories. Over the following decades, Darwin’s defenders came to occupy influential niches in British and American intellectual life. Together, these men would also control the scientific media of the day, especially the important journals, and channel their other writings through a series of carefully chosen publishers—Murray, Macmillan, Youmans, and Appleton. Towards the end they were everywhere, in the Houses of Parliament, the Anglican Church, the universities, government offices, colonial service, the aristocracy, the navy, the law, and medical practice; in Britain and overseas. A
s a group that worked as a group, they were impressive. Their ascendancy proved decisive, both for themselves and for Darwin.
Darwin’s opponents failed to achieve anything like the same command of the media or penetration of significant institutions. Opponents did not unite with the same esprit de corps. In fact the community that grew up around Darwin in the wake of the Origin of Species was a notable feature of the period. Within a year after publication, it was nearly impossible to break into Darwin’s tightly integrated group without some expressed homage to evolution.
This circle turned the sociable aspects of nineteenth-century life to good use. They became intimate. Huxley, Hooker, Busk, Tyndall, Lubbock, and the rest, even including Falconer, despite his never taking to evolutionary theory, were warm-hearted, garrulous beings who talked and dined together, exchanged letters, swopped natural history specimens, asked for photographs to display on each other’s walls, stood godfather to rounds of children, established supper clubs so that they could keep in touch, exerted patronage, read proofs, discussed each other’s work, and commiserated, supported, and congratulated one another in turn. Their wives paid each other morning calls; the men toured the Alps or rented summer houses in the Lake District near enough to walk over for a late breakfast. As the years went by, deaths or an occasional marriage knitted them more closely. Not quite an intellectual aristocracy as seen in other kinship networks of the United Kingdom, these intimacies bound a very small group of scientific Victorians as securely as any tribe in the rain forest—a tribe that constantly adjusted its complex web of relationships both inside and outside, and with adjacent and overlapping groups.16
Likewise, the maturing personal relationships between four figures in particular were crucial to the dissemination and acceptance of natural selection. Lyell, Hooker, Huxley, and Gray instinctively moved together. Their combined effect was formidable. To be sure, the adrenaline of pursuing a mutual goal and attacking a common enemy occasionally masked their differences. Despite their shared commitment to Darwin, they were sometimes poles apart in their individual points of view. Where Lyell allowed himself to be flattered by the attention of society, Hooker preferred to exert influence behind the scenes. Asa Gray believed in God, America, and design, while Huxley was alternately witty and bullying.