THOMAS HUXLEY was a kind of impresario of science, whose chief claim to fame was that he established biology and physics in a central position in the late Victorian English educational curriculum, in an era when the study of Classics was still thought to be the be all and end all of knowledge. Best known to a wider public as the man who coined the word "agnostic", Huxley has been much misunderstood. He lacked the originality of Darwin or the intellectual brilliance of Alfred Wallace and was most of all a superb committee man.
It is therefore incorrect to claim him either as St Paul to Darwin's Jesus or as "Darwin's bulldog". One of the many virtues of Adrian Desmond's life of Huxley is that he appreciates this and presents him in a clear light, free of cliched accretions.
The second volume of Desmond's biography, far superior, in my view, to his wildly over praised Darwin, shows how the one time gadfly of the Establishment was co opted to become a pillar of the elite. In this book we see him sitting on royal commissions, influencing school boards, acting as Britain's fishing supremo, presiding over the construction of Imperial College in South Kensington. From 1870 until his death in 1895 he was so much a creature of places, pensions, perquisites and sinecures that Punch dubbed him "Professor Huxley, LL.D, FRS, LSD".
As a self made man with a disastrous family of hangers on to support, he needed every penny he could get. His sister Ellen Cooke was a drunkard who lived a vile, gin soaked existence and died in the gutter. Huxley had to support her, as also his ungrateful widowed sister in law. He got little sustenance of any kind from his family and was the victim of cruel usage and ill luck; his beloved daughter Marian ("Mady") bizarrely lived up to her nickname and went mad in her 20s.
Desmond very ably describes the process whereby Huxley in middle and old age became Victorian England's token radical. He was allowed to express agnostic, free thinking views and to enjoy the comforts, benefices and privileges of upper middle class society. His opposition to socialism, to Booth's Salvation Army, to Bradlaugh and Annie Besant seems merely cowardly and selfserving, and his visceral dislike of Gladstone simply a rationalisation of the hatred felt by a fanatical unionist for anyone whose mission was to pacify Ireland. Like his star pupil H.G. Wells, he believed in rule by a scientific elite and to this end pamphleteered vehemently against the egalitarianism of Alfred Wallace and Prince Kropotkin. He was one of those "radical" bienpensants who are "agin" things but take fright whenever the possibility of revolution appears. He was at one time a working class hero, to the point where London cabbies would refuse his fare, but they misperceived their man.
Desmond tries to defend Huxley by saying that the working class swung left in the 1880s, but the truth is that Huxley swung right. Desmond claims that his hero had been "pushed" into a defence of property by socialism and into unionism by Home Rule. But socialism was the only thing that meaningfully threatened property and Home Rule the only thing that challenged Orange hegemony. Huxley, in a word, wash one of those "liberals" who are in favour of social change, provided it never happens.
Desmond's explanation is that science was perceived to be on the side of the "have nots" in the early Victorian epoch but was later co opted by the Establishment as a sort of back up system for religion, with the result that Huxley became a social darling. But I suspect the real reason - science increasingly displaced Classics in the curriculum was cynically straightforward: Huxley frightened the ruling elite in Britain by claiming that Germany and the USA, dedicated to science, would thereby soon overtake the UK as economic and military powers.
Huxley's later career was hedged about by cynicism. Darwin's great work was The Descent Of Man, but Desmond's book charts the moral descent of one particular man.
