Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  The full story came out in letters afterwards. The only one who did not comprehend the high drama was Emma. “I suppose you have heard of Ch getting the Copley Medal from the Royal Society,” she wrote to an aunt. “He has been much pleased but I think the pleasantest part was the cordial feeling of his friends on the occasion.”41

  Cordial they certainly were, but also ruthless.

  V

  Thoroughly vexed over the Copley Medal affair, Huxley decided to start a private dining club of his own that would bring together a significant bunch of like-minded activists. Over dinner they would catch up on gossip and scheme about science. These men soon became an important informal pressure group, focussing their attentions on the reform of scientific administration and promoting the liberal naturalism associated with Darwin’s theory. Huxley’s first dinner party included friends like Hooker, Spencer, Tyndall, Lubbock, and Busk, and two new acquaintances, Thomas Archer Hirst, a mathematician, and Edward Frankland, a clever chemist at the Royal Institution. For the next party, he added William Spottiswoode, another mathematician, making with himself nine in all. “I think originally there was some vague notion of associating representatives of each branch of science,” he recalled. “At any rate the nine who eventually came together … could have managed among us to contribute most of the articles to a scientific encyclopaedia.”42

  They never could agree on a tenth member, nor could they for a while think of a suitable title. Mrs. Busk suggested the X Club, which gave the advantage of committing them to nothing, as Spencer said approvingly. The only rule was that there were to be no rules. Her suggestion also supplied amusing nicknames, such as the Xquisite Lubbock, the Xemplary Busk, the Xalted Huxley, and so on, and allowed invitations for mixed social outings to include Xs and Yvs (Wives). Underneath the humour, the serious aims were obvious. “Beside personal friendship, the bond that united us was devotion to science,” recorded Hirst after the first meeting, “pure and free, untrammeled by religious dogmas. Amongst ourselves there is perfect outspokenness, and no doubt opportunities will arise when concerted action on our part may be of service.”43

  Some of the Xs’ early discussions would have been absurdly self-important if the members had not so obviously been destined for success. In 1864, for example, when Huxley’s Natural History Review collapsed in financial disarray the Xs discussed the need for another journal that would adequately represent their views. They toyed with the Reader for a little while, each sinking £100 into a fund for establishing this as a broad-minded magazine-style review, staffed by more than thirty leading intellectuals including Ruskin, Maurice, and Kingsley, all under the general editorship of Francis Galton. The scheme worked well enough until Huxley destroyed its credibility with a slashing attack on the Catholic Church that made even the atheists among the Xs shudder.

  The Reader was to expire in 1867. Not long afterwards, Norman Lockyer, one of its editors, put up the idea of founding a periodical which they would call Nature, to be owned and published by Alexander Macmillan, a journal that would provide cultivated readers with an accessible forum for reading about advances in scientific knowledge. Lockyer brought Nature into existence in November 1869, fronted by an introduction by Huxley (“as if written by the maddest English scholar,” said Darwin indulgently). To command the periodical market was a shrewd tactic in any contested cultural arena but one as yet little exploited in science, and while Lockyer was never a member of the X Club he displayed similarly strong, progressive liberal opinions. Far more than any other science journal of the period, Nature was conceived, born, and raised to serve polemic purpose.44 In the first year of its existence, there were six or seven articles urging Darwin’s scheme, two of which were written by Darwin himself. Darwin became a lifelong subscriber, claiming he got a kind of “satisfaction” in reading articles he could not understand.

  The Xs also advanced favoured candidates for Royal Society council elections and medals. In 1865 they seriously discussed whether Tyndall should accept the chair of natural philosophy at Oxford. One by one, the members infiltrated every government panel and committee that dealt with scientific affairs. Later, they cultivated the American publisher E. L. Youmans, expecting to win his help in arranging American editions of significant English scientific works. Occasionally they dispensed patronage to young men or visiting naturalists by inviting them to dine. Nonchalantly, they developed an impregnable aura of exclusivity.

  Darwin was not a member—he was insufficiently engaged with the cut and thrust of scientific politics—yet the Xs pushed his perspective as an integral part of their own. Without the Xs, Darwin’s ideas would never have percolated British culture quite as far as they did. And Darwin did everything he could to help them, even writing a number of articles for the Natural History Review. He willingly lent the Xs his name.

  In return, the Xs counted on being able to use his influence—and were tireless in asking for it. “Have you any objection to putting your name to Flower’s certificate for the Royal Society herewith enclosed,” Huxley inquired late in 1864. “Mrs. Darwin perhaps will do me the kindness to send the thing on to Lyell as per enclosed envelope.”45 In similar terms, Hooker casually mentioned, “I have been thinking of Wallace for Gold Medal R.S. but it seems to be half engaged to Dr Lockhardt Clark this year. How would you word Wallace’s claims? Will it not be difficult to cite sufficient paper work?”46 Wallace had to wait his turn for a medal until 1868, when Huxley proposed him for the essay on species in the Linnean Society Journal. He waited even longer (until 1893) for fellowship.47 Curiously, the Xs never invited Wallace to join their company, perhaps believing that he was not in quite the same position to make things happen as each of them was individually. Possibly the Xs decided that getting him a medal—a public sign of approval—was the most effective way to utilise him.

  Huxley overheard two scientists in the Athenaeum Club chatting later in the year. “I say, do you know anything about the X Club?” one asked the other. “What do they do?” The reply amused Huxley no end. “Well they govern scientific affairs, and really, on the whole, they don’t do it badly.”48

  VI

  Hidden away in Downe, Darwin missed much during these years of illness. “I suppose your destiny is to let your Brain destroy your Body,” his cousin Fox put it alarmingly.

  As it happened, Darwin’s theory was only one of many profound challenges to conventional opinion. His book was necessarily caught up in the transformations of thought and ways of life taking place all over the developed world in the nineteenth century, so much so that he and his Origin of Species became part of the transformation itself.

  Chief among these was theology. Continued dissent and fragmentation in the established Anglican Church in Britain was reaching a peak even without the push that biological sceptics provided. The comfortable liberal Anglican tradition—the Broad Church—was already in difficulties, with high church, low church, Evangelical, Tractarian, Episcopalian, Arminian, and Calvinist factions arguing over points of doctrine, as sharp a debate in real life as in Trollope’s Barchester. Missionary societies, publishing companies, theological colleges, universities, and even individual parishes tended to adhere to a particular party. These internal difficulties reflected wider discontents with the Church of England. The 1851 population census had revealed that only about one-third of the seventeen million people counted in the poll actually attended Anglican parish churches. Despite the difficulties experienced by the census recorders and the fact that religious avocation was not a compulsory question, the statistics still made surprising reading.49 Of the remainder, some four million people declared themselves nonconformist Protestant dissenters of one kind or another: Methodist, Congregationalist, Unitarian, Quaker, or similar. These dissident non-Anglicans not only objected to traditional theological liturgy but also strongly disapproved of the church’s civil power. Broadly speaking, they found a natural home in the Liberal party, the party of moderate reform under the successive leadership of Palmerst
on, Russell, and Gladstone, each of whom every now and then took a shot at curtailing the church’s institutional might. To some, Catholicism appeared increasingly attractive. To others, doubt or scepticism beckoned. In one and the same ten-year period, Francis Galton could declare that science was a valid alternative to all forms of religion and pious John Henry Newman could convert to Rome. At the personal level, men and women queried the evidence for Christianity, the nub of the Victorian crisis of faith. On a larger scale, the Anglican Church, so much a part of the state with its vast wealth, its lands and property, its right to draw income from parish tithes, its parliamentary presence, and its stranglehold over education, looked around and found itself beset by repeated calls for change. While it would be too much to claim that Darwin’s work triggered these movements, his Origin sowed doubt and intensified doubt where doubt already existed. His book was generally regarded as dangerous. Yet the fluidity and adaptability of religious doctrine during this period made it possible for his theories sometimes to harmonise with contemporary cultural convictions.

  In this unsettled atmosphere some Anglican clergymen began to think that liberal theology was going too far. They wondered where the church’s stability and authority would lie if scholars kept on pointing out errors in the familiar Bible stories. The simmering crisis over Essays and Reviews climaxed in 1864 at the same time as Huxley’s and Lyell’s books exposed the ancient, animal lineage of humanity. To many it looked as if the desire to explore naturalistic explanations, especially in science and religion, might be undermining the primary basis of spirituality.

  Bishop Wilberforce got his ecclesiastical court case against Essays and Reviews early that year and the seven authors were formally condemned for their heterodoxy by the church’s Convocation. However, the government promptly overruled the church’s verdict. Nearly eleven thousand clergymen (almost half the Anglican clergy in the country) then signed a declaration protesting to the Archbishop of Canterbury about this interference in their affairs and asserting that despite the doubts broadcast by Essays and Reviews, they at least fully believed in the divine inspiration of the scriptures. A number of devout scientists associated with the Royal Institution prepared a similar petition. Lubbock briefly tried to raise a sceptics’ counter-proclamation.50

  Similarly, John William Colenso’s liberal reevaluation of the first five books of the Old Testament was more than most parsons could take. Colenso, an energetic missionary bishop in Natal, regarded the earliest sections of the Bible as little more than a collection of ancient historical documents that had accumulated errors and misreadings over the centuries. Like other biblical commentators such as Renan, Strauss, and Eliot, Colenso took an advanced interpretative line in higher criticism, much of it naturalistic in tone. He was accused of heresy and fled to England to argue his case with the church authorities. Huxley’s band of X Clubbers revelled in the ensuing confrontation, invited Colenso to dine, and in 1864 set up a subscription fund to provide a sum of money should he be unceremoniously defrocked—which some of them half hoped might happen. Very soon a petition was circulating in progressive philosophical circles, “a declaration in favour of freedom of opinion & defending the rights of Bp. Colenso,” as Erasmus called it. Erasmus and Darwin both signed.51 Again, Colenso’s comparative historical approach must have seemed to conventionally religious readers as if it were based on the same bold disregard for the divine as Darwin’s theory of living origins.

  And at the Oxford Diocesan Conference in November 1864, Benjamin Disraeli had little trouble identifying the question of the day. Disraeli—then leader of the Conservative party in opposition to the Liberal government—was the guest speaker at the clerics’ conference, invited to attend by Wilberforce. He had accepted the invitation with alacrity as part of a campaign to woo Anglican clergymen, every one a potential Tory voter and many of them looking to Disraeli to preserve the system of tithes (the annual sum of money due to clergymen from their parishioners), then under threat from the Liberals. Exotic, ex-radical, and consummate politician, Disraeli was prepared to promise whatever was needed, be it tithes or biblical orthodoxy. The irony of Wilberforce’s last public appearance at Oxford did not escape him. “Is man an ape or an angel?” Disraeli asked his clerical audience at the height of his address. “I am on the side of the angels.”52 Within the month, he was in the pages of Punch caricatured as a simpering angel, adorned with false wings, political opportunism oozing from every pore. His phrase carried the day. Although this diocesan conference hardly turned the tables on Palmerston, who went on to win the general election of 1865, Disraeli scented Tory victory not too far ahead.

  In other areas, too, Darwin let most of the shifts in opinion temporarily pass him by. An Anthropological Society had been founded in 1863 in London, dedicated to the “science of man.” This new society was set up by James Hunt in direct opposition to the philanthropic, missionary connections of the older Ethnological Society, a bias that was in part stimulated by the Ethnological’s intention to admit women to their meetings, and its abolitionist stance both before and during the American Civil War. By and large, the members of the Ethnological Society believed in monogenism—that all human beings belonged to the same species.

  By contrast, Hunt was convinced that the geographical diversity of human beings was a consequence of having emerged from several species—the doctrine of polygenism. Brash, noisy, and masculine, the members of the new society pursued the biology of human difference. They talked of skulls and brain size, buttocks, and primitive civilisations.53 Huxley, Wallace, and several others interested in human origins joined this extrovert band, at least for a while. They turned up in force to see Colenso come onto the podium in 1865 flatly to contradict the story of Creation and the Deluge on scientific grounds. These “Anthropologicals” acquired an eccentric reputation, helped along by the president’s posturing with a gavel topped by a carved human skull to call members to order during lively meetings.

  With its emphasis on human anatomy and the origin of mankind, Hunt’s society brought the question of human diversity back into focus. Like Louis Agassiz, and Nott and Gliddon before him, Hunt stoked contemporary prejudices with his assertions that four or five modern human types had existed since the earliest times. What was new was that Hunt placed these views in evolutionary context. He demarcated humans into biologically distinct races, in the terminology of the day, and said that these should be regarded as self-contained taxonomic entities, separating black from white. Reproduction between blacks and whites, he claimed, was biologically unnatural—the offspring were said to be sterile or reduced in fertility—and “the analogies are more numerous between the negro and the ape, than between the the European and the ape.”54 Under Hunt’s direction, some members of the Anthropological Society not only espoused racist categories of thought but also mostly sided with the South’s cause in the war.

  These opinions did not go unchallenged. Huxley and Busk took a dim view of Hunt’s anatomical assertions in his paper on the Negro, and others reminded Hunt that reproduction took place across all supposed human frontiers. James Horton, an African doctor educated and living in England, icily inquired if fellows of the Anthropological Society had ever seen a black man, for he could not recognise any of his countrymen from Hunt’s “prejudiced” and “absurd” descriptions.55 Even so, there were numerous elements in these programmatic statements that touched a chord. For all his criticism of Hunt’s blunders, Huxley also believed in a racial hierarchy and the inferiority of Negroes. Moderate men like Lubbock and Darwin relegated primitives to a stage early in social organisation.56

  The Anthropological Society also began a programme of translations of foreign texts to promote the polygenist view, including important works by Paul Broca and Carl Vogt. Vogt had proposed separate ape origins for each race of human being (followed by interbreeding and blending) in his Vorlesungen über den Menschen, translated by the Anthropologicals as Lectures on Man in 1864. Such views were regarded with suspicio
n by those who believed in a single common ancestor, although Vogt espoused evolution and usually praised Darwin. As Wallace complained to Darwin, “the Anthropologists … make the red man descend from the Orang, the black man from the Chimpanzee, or rather the Malay & Orang one ancestor, the Negro & Chimpanzee another.”

  Darwin was pleased when Wallace made his own standpoint known. He was the first of the Darwinians deliberately to apply natural selection to the emergence of human difference. Everyone else had published his views on various aspects of the evolutionary scheme. Wallace felt he was ready to speak out too. He did so in an article in the Journal of the Anthropological Society, in 1864. In this, Wallace proposed that human beings emerged in a single group from apelike ancestors and then rapidly diverged under the impetus of natural selection. In effect, he gave a chronological, developmental account of human origins that united conflicting theories of single or multiple beginnings. First, they were one. Then they were many. “Most striking and original and forcible,” remarked Darwin. “I wish he had written Lyell’s chapters on Man.… there is no doubt, in my opinion, on the remarkable genius shown by the paper.”57

  Wallace included a second theme that was unlike anything yet said about human descent. He proposed that at an early point in human evolutionary history, selective pressure must have shifted away from the physical body onto mental processes. Natural selection would then act mainly on the human mind and behaviour, producing the faculty of speech, the art of making weapons, and the division of labour. In this way, human beings would adjust to their local environment and free themselves from the operation of the laws of natural selection. Thoroughly interested, Darwin agreed with much of what Wallace had to say. He too thought human beings had been gradually unshackled from purely biological necessity, although he differed from Wallace in the manner this might have come about.