by Janet Browne
As with all such turning points, a host of smaller conflicts and anticipatory differences lay behind it. One matter of significance was the nature of the British Association meeting itself. These annual, week-long events were highly organised, respectable affairs to which members of the interested public, amateur devotees, and scientists of all persuasions came with their families for edification and “rational entertainment.” Visitors would take rooms in an inn or stay with friends in nearby houses, and would participate in all the outings, exhibitions, and entertainments laid on by local committees. The programme of scientific talks tended to present little more than summaries of the course of recent research in various disciplines, spiced up with appearances by celebrated speakers and an occasional aristocratic guest such as the prince consort (who had opened the Aberdeen meeting the year before). Well attended, well financed, well settled in the academic and public circuit, these meetings represented a relatively new phenomenon in nineteenth-century Britain—the annual congress. The organisers’ object was to consolidate the public prestige of science.95 Intellectual novelty was neither required nor expected.
In this regard, the city of Oxford made the meeting grander and more important than usual. The British Association president that year was Lord Wrottesley, a good astronomer, former president of the Royal Society, and the recipient of an honorary degree from the university a few months in advance of the association’s visit. Other well-known Oxford men played an active part in the proceedings. Wilberforce joined the local organising committee chaired by the professor of botany, Charles Daubeny.96 Gladstone was due to attend. The new Natural History Museum in Park’s Road, designed by Benjamin Woodward, ornamented according to John Ruskin’s naturalistic principles, and brought into being at vast expense by the efforts of Henry Acland, the university professor of medicine, was completed just in time to be used as a prestigious venue for association talks and lectures. With its fern and fossil-decked Gothic architecture, this edifice amply conveyed the university’s desire to nurture the sciences much more positively than before. At a time when almost two-thirds of the graduates of Oxford took holy orders, the university’s science teaching then lagged far behind Cambridge, and the plan to establish a museum had been by far the most ambitious step taken thus far by scientific dons.97 To complete the effect, the oldest and grandest university buildings were opened for sightseeing, the college halls and libraries made themselves available, and a whirl of fêtes, dinners, teas, supper-clubs, marquees in college gardens, river walks, tours of the quadrangles, and excursions to local beauty spots were arranged. Because it was Oxford, a larger number of prominent people planned to attend. Because it was Oxford, the intellectual fare was sharper. The whole business promised an agreeable week of mingling with friends accompanied by interesting diversions.
Wilberforce already placed private emphasis on the forthcoming meeting. He hoped to dine with senior politicians and clergymen and display his diocese in a favourable light. It was an opportune moment for him to do so. Ever since his arrival in Oxford in 1845, he had failed to manage this doctrinal hotspot quite as effectively as he wished. John Henry Newman had converted to Roman Catholicism in a blaze of publicity, and the “Oxford movement” had proved tricky to contain. Even now, in 1860, Edward Pusey was still inclined to mutiny. Moreover, the trend had created a personal difficulty for Wilberforce when all three of his brothers converted to Rome, followed by their wives, and then his brother-in-law, the future Cardinal Manning.98 He was increasingly perceived as a peculiar kind of Anglican bishop who could surround himself with Catholic colleagues and relatives. With rationalism squeezing him on one side and Catholicism on the other, Wilberforce was dismayed to discover that Frederick Temple, one of the seven contributors to Essays and Reviews, was going to preach the British Association’s Sunday sermon to the assembled notables. What might Temple, an outspoken, muscular Christian, be audacious enough to say in Wilberforce’s own pulpit?
A final contributory factor was Darwin himself—or rather Darwin’s absence. Darwin did not attend the meeting. This made all the difference. Without him events could take their course much more effectively. If he had been there, he would have cramped everyone’s style—speakers would have politely deferred to him, he would have tried to soothe or to minimise inflammatory situations. In his absence, controversy could run wild, causes could be snatched out of thin air, scientific flags waved, tables thumped, exaggerations tossed around with abandon. His absence, in other words, was the most pertinent feature of all.
At first he thought he might attend. Despite lingering concern over Henrietta, who was not yet recovered from a fever earlier in 1860, and continuing stomach problems of his own, he inquired about a set of rooms in Magdalen College and discussed the possibility of sharing with Hooker. The last time Darwin had gone to a British Association meeting at Oxford had been in the 1840s, when he enjoyed a family picnic with Henslow, Hooker, and Emma and took sightseeing tours in the surrounding countryside, secretly pleased by Hooker’s engagement to Frances Henslow. It had been a happy time. If he did decide to attend, he told Hooker cautiously, Emma was willing to come with him.
Early in June, Henslow unwittingly gave Darwin a taste of what he could look forward to. In a long letter written from Cambridge, Henslow described a recent meeting of the Cambridge Philosophical Society at which the scientific professors debated Darwin’s views.99 Sedgwick was apparently “temperate enough” about Darwin. But Sedgwick was furious over Baden Powell’s lofty dismissal of miracles in Essays and Reviews and raged about Powell’s praise for the Origin of Species. He plainly considered Powell’s utterances a devious Oxford plot against Cambridge common sense. William Clark, the Cambridge anatomy professor, spoke severely against Darwin, and together they whipped up a noisy anti-rationalist storm.100 Most of these dons were ordained in the Church of England, as was customary at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and as conservative men of science they ultimately grounded their work in doctrines of divine order and the created plan. They deplored the way that Darwin’s book—and Essays and Reviews—pushed into territories that they considered inappropriate locations for rational inquiry.
At that meeting of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, Henslow vigorously defended Darwin’s right to investigate the question of living origins, although he, like the others, balked at jettisoning divine creation. In this, Henslow showed the mettle that his friends still admired. Elderly he might be, but he retained his inner fire. Yet his affection for Darwin evidently pushed him further than his heart would otherwise have taken him. He explained to Darwin that old-fashioned doctrinal rivalry between Oxford and Cambridge was as much to blame for the hullabaloo as anything, and he went on to smooth Sedgwick’s ruffled feathers by marking up for him a copy of Owen’s Edinburgh Review malediction to show that Darwin had been unjustly treated. At the same time, Henslow was doing even more. In his botany classes at Cambridge he had introduced the students of 1860 (the last class he taught before his death) to Darwin’s principles.101 While telling them of his own unshakeable religious faith, he nevertheless encouraged them to respect intellectual endeavour wherever it might lead. Faced with a painful split of loyalties, both in class and in the meeting hall, Henslow bravely defended his protégé’s work.
Sedgwick grumbled and sent a terse statement of his criticisms of Baden Powell to the Cambridge Herald—a local newspaper eagerly read by college fellows when their own doings were reported.102 Feelings ran high. Then, when John Phillips, Oxford’s professor of geology, visited Cambridge shortly afterwards to deliver the annual Rede lecture, his audience of Cambridge dons was only too pleased to applaud Phillips’s attack on Darwin’s natural selection. Phillips was fortified with theological points on miracles derived from Wilberforce and opposed to Baden Powell.103 In that lecture Phillips moved well beyond the disapproval he adopted in February when first discussing the Origin of Species as president of the Geological Society. He was to become one of the most formidable opp
onents of evolution.
With Henslow’s letter in hand, Darwin quailed at the thought of dealing with these combative old boys in person. The prospect of greeting Sedgwick or Phillips at Oxford dismayed him. If he went, he could hardly avoid Owen. He would certainly be called upon to defend himself in public, to stand up and speak in front of a mixed, and generally uncomprehending, audience. He would be obliged to make inconsequential chit-chat about his book at soirées. As Hooker scornfully reminded him, British Association meetings were full of “toadying & tuft hunting & buttering.”104 Darwin did not seek that kind of celebrity.
His stomach saved him. Two days before the meeting his health broke down completely. Never had a bout of sickness been more welcome. He rushed to the safety of the water-cure, not risking the possibility of a sudden recovery. There, at Edward Lane’s new hydropathic establishment at Sudbrooke Park, he could hide away. Whatever might happen would happen without him.
IX
At Oxford evolution was an issue from the first evening. Darwin’s book and the stream of comments and reviews published over the previous six months ensured everyone had something to say. Lord Wrottesley’s opening address, as bland and all-encompassing as these functions require, was charged with emotion in his call not to forget the wonders of God’s creation.
The initial papers the next day did not disappoint. The usual crowd-pullers of geology and geography lost some of their customary attraction as attention lurched decisively towards the life sciences. All the rising young men of science, and those members of the public who hoped for controversy, followed Huxley, Hooker, and Owen into Section D, held in the new Natural History Museum, a relatively arcane division usually devoted to dull talks on botany, zoology, and physiology, over which the aged Henslow presided. Any fireworks would be here, the youngsters thought, with Huxley and Owen on the platform together.
Audiences were an essential part of British Association meetings, particularly at Oxford. Shared events like these thrived on spectacle, gossip, and controversy. In a very real sense, participants demanded something different every time, and local organisers would strive to produce for them increasingly striking occasions year by year, offering outings to technological marvels like Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, candlelit caves in Derbyshire, artillery displays at Portsmouth, or yachting excursions to the Isle of Wight. The press regularly attended and reported these events. In return, visitors required scientific celebrities to do what was expected of them—to declaim, smoulder, preach, or shock. As a result, British Association meetings were very much led by the audience, an unusual phenomenon that rarely occurred in the nation’s other scientific societies.
So the speakers in Section D were quick to establish where they stood on the Origin of Species. Charles Daubeny introduced the topic directly. Since Daubeny was principal local organiser of the meeting, a vice-president of the association, and Henslow’s respected counterpart as professor of botany at Oxford, his viewpoint was sure to be taken seriously. Cautiously, he came down on the side of the angels. Some light-hearted talk about monkeys ensued. Then Owen jumped to his feet to assert there was no anatomical evidence for evolution, and that the brain of a gorilla was very different from the brain of humankind, a point he had made constantly over the previous years. Human brains, he stated, possessed one small structure, the hippocampus minor (a fold in the layers at the base of the brain), that was never found in apes. For Owen, mankind’s moral and theological distinctiveness was embedded in this small feature of brain anatomy. He staked his entire classification scheme for mammals on this difference, and one or two others, in cerebral anatomy; and it was on these points that Huxley had attacked him in print several times before. Huxley replied sharply that morning, letting his tongue run away with him. The anatomical differences were not that large, he insisted. Facetiously, Huxley remarked that churchmen would have little to fear “even if it should be shown that apes were their ancestors.”105
The exchange set the tone for the rest of the meeting. As Hooker told Darwin, “You & your book forthwith became the topics of the day.”
The following day’s big draw was John William Draper, the chemist and historian, head of the medical school of the City University of New York although originally from Liverpool. Draper held interesting views about natural changes, sometimes applying these to chemistry, sometimes to the progress of nations, sometimes to human physiology and growth and development. The title of his paper, “On the Intellectual Development of Europe, Considered with Reference to the Views of Mr. Darwin,” suggested he would favour progress and transmutation in human beings, and it did eventually supply much of the groundwork for his big book on the advancement of human societies published in New York in 1863. Since he was also well known for his denunciation of organised religion, making a particular target of Roman Catholicism, Draper looked ripe for a rousing presentation.106 A murmur ran through the crowd that Wilberforce or Owen would use Draper’s talk as an excuse to criticise the Origin of Species. It seemed as if a clash might be coming.
Huxley nearly did not attend. He suddenly wearied of the extended goings-on, and he may well have been irritated by the assumption he would necessarily be involved if there was a fight to be had. Long afterwards he confessed to Sir James Crichton-Browne that he suffered a great deal from stage-fright during those early years.107 If he went to Draper’s talk, he would have to participate. Far better to get out of the city for a day in the country with his wife.
By chance he met Robert Chambers in the street, who “broke out into vehement remonstrances, and talked about my deserting them.” Chambers was in buoyant mood, fresh from secretly revising the eleventh edition of Vestiges for publication later in the year and keen to see the idea of transmutation defended. Any ground captured by Darwin’s clique would be ground for his book too, and he had already added several, mostly appreciative, comments about the Origin of Species to the new edition.108 He thought Owen’s Edinburgh article showed that Vestiges’ “law of development” was worth renewed attention; and at the very least, republishing Vestiges in 1860 would capitalise on renewed evolutionary excitement. Most of all, Chambers longed for someone to denounce Wilberforce and all his theological kind. Sedgwick’s attack on Vestiges more than fifteen years before still grated. He turned the force of his persuasive ardour on Huxley, and on the spur of the moment Huxley changed his mind. So on Saturday, 30 June 1860, Huxley took his place on the platform with the speakers and other organisers of Section D, in front of a large audience in the lecture hall of the University Museum of Natural History. He was glad to see that Owen was not there.
Irresistibly drawn by the prospect of heated exchanges about monkeys and the heavenly host, an unusual number of people arrived at the museum along with Huxley, including a noisy posse of undergraduates staying on through the holidays, so many that the organisers felt obliged to move the session to a much larger room on the west side of the building (which later became the library). The Athenaeum said the audience was immense, and other reports put the figure somewhere between four hundred and seven hundred. Hooker thought there were nearly a thousand people present.
Draper was on first. He revealed himself a keen cultural evolutionist, describing the advance of human society as it was released from what he called a thoroughly benighted Catholic past, an embryology of nations, so to speak. Draper said that human progress depended on science vanquishing theology. If anyone was likely to push a bishop into a rash response it was he.
But after an hour and a half on the intellectual march of the ancient Greeks, the audience squirmed with relief as Draper returned to his seat. “For of all the flatulent stuff and all the self sufficient studies—these were the greatest. It was all a pie of Herbert Spencer & Buckle without the seasoning of either,” objected Hooker.
Henslow, as chairman, let one or two members of the public ask questions before raising an inquiring eyebrow at Huxley. Would he like to comment? A few unruly spirits at the back were already chantin
g “Mawnkey, mawnkey!”109 Huxley shook his head. The eyebrow moved to Wilberforce.
This was the moment Wilberforce was waiting for. Theatrically rising to his feet, he took control of the meeting. He discoursed eloquently for thirty minutes or more, powerful, argumentative, amusing, his voice filling the hall with confident assertions and making good use of the witticisms he felt constrained to omit when in the pulpit. Draper was forgotten as Wilberforce transformed his still-unpublished review of the Origin of Species into his text for the day. It was one of his best secular sermons, carried along by peals of laughter from the students and punctuated by attentive silences. Darwin’s facts, Wilberforce proclaimed, did not warrant his theory. Evolution by natural selection was unphilosophical. The line between humanity and animals was obvious and distinct. There was no tendency on the part of lower organisms to become self-conscious intelligent beings. “Is it credible that a turnip strives to become a man?”110
Perhaps it was the laughter that loosened Wilberforce’s grip. At some point he turned with a flourish to Huxley and alluded to the remarks made the day before. Was Huxley related on his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side to an ape?
