Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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matical Triposes, he had been advised to focus more heavily on his classics,
which he did. He took a First Class in both and was First Chancellor’s
Medallist, but he was Thirty-third Wrangler in mathematics and Senior
Classic in his chosen study – the very top classical scholar. With surprise
to none, he was elected a Fellow of Trinity College in October of .
His first lectureship was in classics, and it was in that area that his teach-
ing had its beginning, with the normal mix of formal duties and private
tutoring.
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But the most important development in Sidgwick’s life was not quite
so visible to the public eye: it had come in the shape of the Cambridge
Conversazione Society, better known as the Cambridge Apostles. Founded
in by a number of St. John’s undergraduates – including George
Tomlinson, later bishop of Gibralter – the Society quickly evolved into a
secret, select discussion group for Cambridge’s best and brightest, drawn
primarily from Trinity and King’s. Before Sidgwick’s time, it had had such
notable and influential members as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Arthur Hallam,
Erasmus Darwin, John Frederick Denison Maurice, John Sterling, James
Fitzjames Stephen, Henry Sumner Maine, William George Harcourt,
Richard Monckton Milnes, and Edward Henry Stanley. After Sidgwick’s
active membership, it became perhaps the best-known secret society in
England, celebrated for honing the philosophical abilities of Russell and
Moore and for fortifying the gay propensities of the Bloomsbury set,
especially Keynes and Strachey.
Sidgwick found the Society irresistible:
I have noted the great change that took place about the middle of my undergraduate
time. Up to that point I cannot remember that I had formed any ambition beyond
success in my examinations and the attainment of a Trinity Fellowship; but in the
Michaelmas term of my second year an event occurred which had more effect on
my intellectual life than any one thing that happened to me afterwards: I became a
member of a discussion society – old and possessing historical traditions – which
went by the name of “The Apostles.” A good description of it as it existed in
his time is to be found in the late Dean Merivale’s autobiography. When I joined
it the number of members was not large, and there is an exuberant vitality in
Merivale’s description to which I recall nothing corresponding. But the spirit, I
think, remained the same, and gradually this spirit – at least as I apprehended it –
absorbed and dominated me. I can only describe it as the spirit of the pursuit of
truth with absolute devotion and unreserve by a group of intimate friends who
were perfectly frank with each other, and indulged in any amount of humorous
sarcasm and playful banter, and yet each respects the other, and when he discourses
tries to learn from him and see what he sees. Absolute candour was the only duty
that the tradition of the society enforced. No consistency was demanded with
opinions previously held – truth as we saw it then and there was what we had
to embrace and maintain, and there were no propositions so well established that
an Apostle had not the right to deny or question, if he did so sincerely and not from mere love of paradox. The gravest subjects were continually debated, but gravity
of treatment, as I have said, was not imposed, though sincerity was. In fact it
was rather a point of the apostolic mind to understand how much suggestion and
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instruction may be derived from what is in form a jest – even in dealing with the
gravest matters.
I had at first been reluctant to enter this society when I was asked to join it. I thought that a standing weekly engagement for a whole evening would interfere with my
work for my two Triposes. But after I had gradually apprehended the spirit as I
have described it, it came to seem to me that no part of my life at Cambridge was so
real to me as the Saturday evening on which the apostolic debates were held; and
the tie of attachment to the society is much the strongest corporate bond which
I have known in life. I think, then, that my admission into this society and the
enthusiastic way in which I came to idealise it really determined or revealed that
the deepest bent of my nature was towards the life of thought – thought exercised
on the central problems of human life. (M –)
Here, then, against all the forces of Sidgwick’s youth, was a powerful
counterforce: the Saturday evening Apostolic meetings over “whales” (an-
chovy toast), with papers given and discussed by luminaries and friends,
faculty and students, sharing the Apostolic spirit. In this “school of mind
and heart,” as a later Apostle would explain, one “mastered the art of
reconciling by a phrase the most divergent of hypotheses, the most funda-
mentally antagonistic of antinomies” and grew accustomed to differ from
one’s comrades in “nothing but opinion.” Like so many others, Sidgwick,
“upbourne by the ethereal atmosphere of free and audacious enquiry,”
could discover “to his delight that, towards midnight on a Saturday, he
too could soar.”
And small wonder, given the intellectual ferment of that time and place.
Sheldon Rothblatt has noted how Sidgwick’s first decade at Cambridge
“coincided with one of the most exciting intellectual periods of the nine-
teenth century, and he was soon completely absorbed in the writings of
Mill, Comte, Spencer, Strauss, Renan, Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, George
Eliot and Darwin, wandering freely from biological science to biblical
scholarship, ethics and problems of proof.” Of course, the ferment was
sometimes quite foul-smelling, especially in the aftermath of the Indian
Mutiny of , when racist pseudoscience increasingly entered the de-
bates. And the overly orthodox young Sidgwick was not always as receptive
as he should have been to such things as, say, Mill’s case against the sub-
jection of women.
By Sidgwick’s day, the Apostles were not just a model for the life of
the mind. Members were elected for life, and even after they became
“Angels,” ceasing to participate on a regular weekly basis, they often
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maintained strong ties to the Society and its past and present members –
a habit encouraged by the Society’s annual dinner, at which old and new
“Brethren” ha
d a chance to meet and mingle. Indeed, the Society was
caught up in the London literary scene, via such means as the brief interest
of Sterling and Maurice in the literary paper the Athenaeum, and it would
be increasingly active, behind the scenes, in various reform movements,
particularly in education. Thus, it provided a powerful support group
for its members, support that would be of special value to those seeking
academic careers. As later chapters will show, the Society was, in effect,
a powerful tool for challenging the Church of England’s domination of
education.
Election to the Apostles was no little accomplishment, even for someone
like Sidgwick, who seemed the virtual embodiment of the virtues of the
rising middle and professional class. But surpassing expectations was a
habit of his. The son of an Anglican clergyman of modest means, Henry’s
entire life fell within the reign of Queen Victoria, but by the end of it
he was about as well connected as any nonaristocrat could be. His two
brothers, William and Arthur, would both become Oxford classicists, and
his sister Mary would wind up marrying Benson and living in Lambeth
Palace. The upward trajectory of the family, courtesy of Rugby, Oxbridge,
and the church, was spectacular. And this is not to mention his future
brothers-in-law Arthur Balfour and Lord Rayleigh, the latter of whom
would win the Nobel Prize for discovering argon. Thus, Sidgwick found
himself belonging to some of the most influential cultural and political
circles in England, at a time when England was the greatest imperial
power on earth.
Yet if the Sidgwicks ended up on a lofty plateau of cultural accomplish-
ment, their path was not untypical, inauspicious as the beginnings may
seem. Henry set out like many a middle-class clergyman’s son; he simply
went further.
What little is known of Sidgwick’s early life has mostly been reported
in the Memoir. He was the son of Mary Crofts and the Rev. William
Sidgwick, who at the time of Henry’s birth, on May , , was head-
master of the grammar school at Skipton, near Leeds in Yorkshire. William
Sidgwick’s father was another William; he had arrived in Skipton from
Leeds in and owned a water-powered cotton-spinning mill, a busi-
ness most of his sons followed him in. But it is hard to go much fur-
ther back. In the Memoir, Sidgwick records a visit to the “Raikes,” his
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uncle Robert’s house in Skipton, and the light this shed on the Sidgwick
genealogy:
My uncle is still meditating the problem of our genealogy; he gave me a copy of
the stamp which the tobacconist at Leeds – believed to be ‘Honest James’ and my
great-great-grandfather – used for his packets of Virginia. But we do not seem
able to trace back the tobacconist to our ancestral hill-valley on the Cumbrian
border. So we must be content to begin with Tobacco. One might start from a
worse thing. (M )
The allusion here is to “a persistent tradition in the family that they had
originally migrated from Dent, a picturesque dale in the far north-west
of the county. . . . At Dent there have been for the last four centuries at
least, as the parish registers show, ‘sidesmen’ (or small farmers owning
their own land) of the name of Sidgwick or Sidgswick. The only one of
the clan who was at all widely known was Adam Sedgwick of Cambridge.”
(M ) The altered spelling of the name of the famous geologist and
philosopher was apparently an error from the mid eighteenth century. At
any rate, as one of Henry’s American obituaries would note, the “district
will best be recognized by Americans as the Brontë country, and Sidgwick’s
family were ‘dalesmen,’ – an acute, hard-headed, and never-tiring race.”
But in some of his correspondence, Sidgwick would remark on how his
own family afforded many excellent examples of the problem of finding
appropriate employment for solid but not terribly ambitious middle-class
types.
Henry’s father did not go into the cotton-spinning business, but was
sent to Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating in . The Memoir re-
ports that after his graduation, he apparently made a grand tour of the
Continent, and that he counted among his friends W. M. Thackeray and
Perronet Thompson, the second of whom would figure in the develop-
ment of utilitarianism. Sidgwick’s mother, Mary Crofts, had come from
East Riding, Yorkshire. She had been orphaned at an early age and had
been raised, along with three brothers and two sisters, by her bachelor
uncle, the Rev. William Carr, whose family had for generations held the
living at Bolton Abbey. She married William Sidgwick in .
Henry’s older brother, William Carr Sidgwick, had been born in ,
but the next two siblings, Henrietta Rose and Edward Plunket, both died in
childhood, despite efforts to relocate to healthier environs. The boy died
in , and the girl in , not long after the death of the father, when
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Henry was only three. This was an alarming and quick succession of losses,
and it must have left a painful mark on the family. Perhaps Henry was seeing
ghosts from a very early age. At any rate, even his earliest correspondence
would refer to his “ghost-seeing” tendencies, and he would always have
members of his family collect ghost stories for him.
He was not of particularly robust health himself. Though not exactly
unhealthy, he was never positively athletic or vigorous, and was vari-
ously plagued over the course of his life by hay fever, stuttering, insom-
nia, depression, impotence, and dyspepsia, with one very serious bout
of this last as a Cambridge undergraduate, when he seemed near death.
As a five-year-old he was forced on doctor’s orders to give up chess be-
cause the game was said to “overexcite” him, possibly contributing to
his later stammer (though as an adult he continued to enjoy playing).
In all, though Sidgwick’s body would be a source of physical and meta-
physical consternation to him for his entire life, he managed to com-
pensate for many of his infirmities, and as an adult pursued serious
walking, jogging (fully clothed, and through the middle of Cambridge),
lawn tennis, and garden golf. These concessions to health were some-
what compromised by a sedentary, academic lifestyle and an addiction to
cigarettes.
With William, Henry, and the two younger siblings, Arthur and Mary,
it was a fairly full Sidgwick household that in settled in Redland,
; on the outskirts of Bristol. Mary Sidgwick built a happy and comfortable
life for them, though no doubt their impressive upward trajectory was
smoothed by the prosperity and proximity of the larger family. In ,
upon hearing of the death of his uncle, J. B. Sidgwick, Henry wrote to
his mother: “I was much startled and grieved, having no idea that he was
in any danger. I remember well the last time that I saw him at the mill,
little thinking that it was the last time. I seem to remember all my childish
feelings about him as the Head of the family, and it makes me sad to think
that I shall never see his fine impressive old face again.” (M )
Once the family was settled, Henry proved to be a rather precocious
child, with marked Apostolic tendencies:
After the move to Redland the boy lived at home for four years under a gov-
erness (Miss Green), with Latin lessons from his mother, and then for two
years more he went to a day school in Bristol known as the Bishop’s College. . . .
The younger brother and sister remember chiefly the earlier years, when Henry
was the inventive genius of the nursery. Nearly all the games which the three
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children most relished were either devised by him, or greatly improved by his
additions, and amongst them was a special language whereby the children be-
lieved they might safely discuss their secrets in the presence of the cold world
of elders. The tedium of Sunday, when games (unless constructively religious)
were forbidden, was beguiled, under his direction, not only by an extended sec-
ular use of the animals of Noah’s ark, but for a while by the preaching of actual
sermons written with all seriousness, on which the children bestowed remarkable
pains. (M )
This inventiveness was in fact kept up in later life. A mysterious
piece entitled “The Ural Mountains: A New Parlour Game” appeared
in Macmillan’s Magazine in early , signed with the initials E.E.B. and
H.S. It described a game in which one person would be elected judge and
the rest of the company would be divided into two sides, each side electing
a captain. “The game is begun by the captains, one of whom accuses the