The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science

By Ruth Barton

In 1864, amid headline-grabbing heresy trials, members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science were asked to sign a declaration affirming that science and scripture were in agreement. Many criticized the new test of orthodoxy; nine decided that collaborative action was required. The X Club tells their story.

These six ambitious professionals and three wealthy amateurs—J. D. Hooker, T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall, John Lubbock, William Spottiswoode, Edward Frankland, George Busk, T. A. Hirst, and Herbert Spencer—wanted to guide the development of science and public opinion on issues where science impinged on daily life, religious belief, and politics. They formed a private dining club, which they named the X Club, to discuss and further their plans. As Ruth Barton shows, they had a clear objective: they wanted to promote “scientific habits of mind,” which they sought to do through lectures, journalism, and science education. They devoted enormous effort to the expansion of science education, with real, but mixed, success. 

​For twenty years, the X Club was the most powerful network in Victorian science—the men succeeded each other in the presidency of the Royal Society for a dozen years. Barton’s group biography traces the roots of their success and the lasting effects of their championing of science against those who attempted to limit or control it, along the way shedding light on the social organization of science, the interactions of science and the state, and the places of science and scientific men in elite culture in the Victorian era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Nov 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9780226551753

Book preview

The X Club

Published with support of the Susan E. Abrams Fund

The X Club

Power and Authority in Victorian Science

Ruth Barton

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-55161-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-55175-3 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226551753.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Barton, Ruth, 1945– author.

Title: The X Club : power and authority in Victorian science / Ruth Barton.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017049912 | ISBN 9780226551616 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226551753 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: X Club (London, England) | Science clubs—England—London—History—19th century. | Science—England—History—19th century. | London (England)—Intellectual life—19th century.

Classification: LCC Q41 .B37 2018 | DDC 506/.0421—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017049912

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

In memory of

my father and my sister

Harold Douglas Barton, 1913–1981

and

Mary Stedman, 1947–2005

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: The X Club 1864–92

I.1  Nine Men Who Wanted to Change the World

I.2  Historians of the X Club

I.3  Introducing This Book

PART ONE  Origins and Ambitions

1  Cultures of Science in Early Victorian England

1.1  Gentlemanly London Science

1.2  Science for Self-Improvement: Frankland, Tyndall, and Hirst

1.3  Spencer and Huxley: The Science and Politics of Rational Dissent

1.4  Spottiswoode at Oxford: A Liberal Education for a Christian Gentleman

1.5  Scientific Aspirations, Social Status, and Religious Beliefs

2  Making Careers

2.1  Finding Employment: Patronage and Pluralism

2.2  Scientific Expertise and Gentlemanly Status

2.3  A Taste for Campaigning

2.4  Friends

3  Speaking for Nature

3.1  Defending Darwin and Expanding the Domain of Nature

3.2  Alliances: Naturalistic Science and Liberal Theology

3.3  The Science of Man: Ethnologists against Anthropologists

3.4  The Reader: A Liberal Alliance and Its Collapse

3.5  Friends and Conspirators

PART TWO  The X Club Established

4  Organizing Science

4.1  Specialist Societies

4.2  The British Association for the Advancement of Science: Representing Science to the Nation

4.3  The Royal Society: Power and Its Symbolic Uses

4.4  Men of Weight, of Craft, and of Party

5  Public Money and the Public Good

5.1  Science in the Curriculum I: Examination Successes

5.2  Science in the Curriculum II: Lobbying Failures

5.3  Money and Advice: The Reciprocal Relations of Science and Government

5.4  Hirst’s Career: Higher Education and London Life

5.5  Good and Influential Men

6  Claiming Cultural Authority

6.1  Self-Images

6.2  Science Militant

6.3  Insiders: Scientific Men at Home among the Social Elite

6.4  Pulpits for Science

6.5  The Rhetoric of Scientific Authority

6.6  Sunday Lecture Societies: The Politics of Lay Sermons

6.7  Cultural Leaders

Retrospective  The Life, Work, and Times of the X Club

R.1  Phases of Power and Friendship, 1860–1900

R.2  The X Club Program: The Authority and Independence of Science and Scientific Men

R.3  Victorian Science and Victorian Culture

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Figures

I.1  George Busk, a fit-looking forty-year-old

1.1  Edward Sabine, science reformer, lobbyist, and patron in the 1840s and 1850s

1.2  Railway map of the United Kingdom, 1844 and 1854

1.3  Defford Bridge, Worcestershire, which was rebuilt under Spencer’s supervision

2.1  Joseph Dalton Hooker as imperial botanist

2.2  John Tyndall, July 1850

2.3  William Thomson in 1854, Tyndall’s scientific antagonist at British Association meetings

2.4  A cartoon of a scientific soirée

2.5  Royal Institution lecture, 1855

2.6  The young John Lubbock, 1856

2.7  Hooker’s letter to Huxley about the British Museum’s trustees

3.1  The title page of the Natural History Review

3.2  William Carpenter, physiologist, Unitarian, and X Club ally

3.3  Punch cartoon of Disraeli as an angel

3.4  Ellen Nelly Lubbock

3.5  A cannibal butcher’s shop, the offensive engraving in Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature

4.1  Sir John Lubbock, banker, naturalist, ethnologist, and MP, in his early forties

4.2  The presidential address at the Bath British Association Meeting, 1864

4.3  Joseph Dalton Hooker, ca. 1865

4.4  William Spottiswoode, printer and mathematician, president of the British Association, 1878

4.5  Some of the most distinguished fellows of the Royal Society, a composite portrait from the late 1880s

5.1  The Brompton Boilers, the first museum building at South Kensington

5.2  Huxley, bearded, on his return from Egypt, 1872

5.3  The School of Science, South Kensington

5.4  Sir Lyon Playfair, scientific politician

5.5  Thomas Archer Hirst

6.1  Cartoon of John Tyndall, combative Irishman

6.2  The library of the Athenaeum Club

6.3  Distribution of food for the relief of Paris, 1871

6.4  Darwin as Socrates

6.5  Sunday Evenings for the People, the flyer for Huxley’s opening lecture, 1866

6.6  Edward Frankland in 1880

R.1  The subscription portrait of Herbert Spencer, 1897

Tables

1.1  London’s learned societies, 1847, ranked in order of membership fees

2.1  Stacking the council of the Linnean Society, 1851–70

5.1  The growth of science teaching under the Science and Art Department, 1860–82

INTRODUCTION

The X Club 1864–92

George Busk (1807–1886)

Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911)

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)

John Tyndall (ca. 1822–1893)

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)

William Spottiswoode (1825–1883)

Edward Frankland (1825–1899)

Thomas Archer Hirst (1830–1892)

John Lubbock (1834–1913)

I have lived with these nine men for decades.

Some were easier to live with than others. Busk was calm and reliable. He was the man in the background who brought many of Huxley’s projects to completion.

I like and admire Huxley, the witty, brilliant, egg-dancing controversialist, but also effective committee man and administrator. He was thin-skinned in his early years and, throughout his life, overready to find enemies. According to Marian Evans (George Eliot), who knew him for thirty years, he needed an enemy to attack; in later life, he found that controversy helped him to overcome depression. Huxley initially learned political strategy from Hooker, who had the benefit of birth into a botanical dynasty.

Hooker, who had a strong sense of social and scientific hierarchy, set high standards for scientific achievement and gentlemanly deportment. Although he was usually discreet and gentlemanly in public, he could be a harsh critic behind a friend’s back. Compared to Huxley, Hooker was privileged, but social tensions within his family left something of a chip on his shoulder.

Tyndall, the brilliant experimentalist, flamboyant lecturer, and dinner party conversationalist, was often seen as Huxley’s alter ego. Although like Huxley in many ways, he was not an easy friend or colleague. He could be moody and self-righteous and was unable to laugh at himself. Even Hirst, his admiring protégé, found him trying at times. I admire the self-discipline that enabled him to rise from Irish village to London high society; I sympathize with the high psychological price he paid in decades of headaches, indigestion, and insomnia; but I find his argumentativeness tiring and am unconvinced by his self-righteous rationalizations for entering yet another controversy.

Hirst could be ponderous and preoccupied with his own small affairs. Sometimes, perhaps, this could be explained and excused by his bad health. He was a loyal and forgiving friend. He was retiring, dignified, and, mercifully, unlike his better-known X-brothers, not argumentative.

Frankland was more introverted than most of his fellows. (His biographer, Colin Russell, says there was a family scandal to hide.) His warm early friendships with Tyndall, Hirst, and Hooker cooled over time, for reasons over which I can only speculate.

Spottiswoode, a wealthy businessman, was generous and sociable. He was a willing and effective supporter of many projects initiated by his friends, and often calmed the waters that they stirred up. He had a reputation as a witty dinner companion, but I saw little of this. I suspect that, until his untimely death, he helped to calm frictions within the Club.

Lubbock was by far the youngest of the group, almost ten years younger than all but one of the others, but he was born to scientific and social leadership. Unlike many of his X Club fellows, who had struggled to find a place in science, Lubbock was blessed with wealth and self-confidence. His social position made him useful in many group campaigns. His wife, Nelly, enjoyed his scientific friends, hence their large (and well-staffed) country house became one of the social centers of the group.

Finally, there was Spencer, our dear Diogenes, whose many quirky principles made life difficult for both his friends and himself.¹ He became more self-important and opinionated over time, and even his greatest admirers in the Club criticized him bitterly. Much can be explained by his emotionally bleak childhood and idiosyncratic upbringing, but that does not make him more likeable.

These nine men formed a dining club at the end of 1864. They intended to meet monthly, from October to June. Their meetings in London’s fashionable west end continued for almost thirty years, until early 1892 when Hirst died. Spottiswoode and Busk had already died, most of the others were in decline, and those few who survived in good health had loose emotional ties to the group.

In 1864 they were energetic and ambitious and, with a few exceptions, already warm friends. The formal club developed from two earlier friendship trios. Hooker, Busk, and Huxley were naturalists, each with experience as navy surgeons. Busk, the oldest by ten years, was fifty-seven. A decade previously, he had retired from medical practice to devote himself (as the Victorians said) to science. In 1864 he was pursuing his anatomical research and working tirelessly in the administration of many scientific societies. His earlier research had focused on microscopic organisms, but in the early 1860s he sought out sites of human prehistory and became an expert on the newly significant topic of craniometry. Hooker, second in age and first in scientific eminence, was forty-seven. He was acknowledged as the leading botanist in Britain and held the position of assistant director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew under his father, Sir William Hooker. He was also first in political skill. Over the preceding decade, he had often stirred up his friends to collaborate in various reforming and lobbying schemes. The idea of starting a club was his. Huxley was younger again, thirty-nine, and after years of struggle had secure but modestly paid employment as professor of natural history in the Government School of Mines and naturalist to the Geological Survey. Huxley and Hooker felt that their being well-salted by long scientific voyages made them brothers.² Busk’s experience of the sea, as surgeon on the merchant navy’s hospital ship moored at Greenwich, was not in the same league, but he shared scientific interests and reforming ideals with Hooker and Huxley. These three had been friends for a decade.

A second trio, Tyndall, Frankland, and Hirst, had been friends for even longer. All three were of modest birth and had developed their scientific interests through mechanics’ institutes and mutual improvement societies. Tyndall and Hirst had met twenty years previously, when employed in the same surveying company during the railway boom of the mid-1840s. A few years later, when Tyndall took up schoolteaching during a decline in railway building, he met Frankland, another new teacher at the school. Tyndall absorbed scientific ambitions from Frankland, who had already been employed as a chemist for three years. In 1848 they went together to Germany to study for PhDs at the University of Marburg. Hirst absorbed these same scientific ambitions from Tyndall and followed him to Marburg in 1850. In 1864 Tyndall (in his early forties) was well known in London society for his brilliant lecture demonstrations at the Royal Institution where, as professor of natural philosophy, he was gradually taking over the roles of the greatly respected Michael Faraday. He was also professor of physics in the Government School of Mines. Frankland (thirty-nine) was lecturer in chemistry at Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital in London and Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution; he made a substantial additional income from consulting. Hirst (thirty-four) was barely established in a scientific career. After his wife of only a few years died in the mid-1850s, he had spent two years visiting mathematicians in France and Italy. On returning to England he found employment as mathematical master at University College School. Only in 1865 was he appointed to a position worthy of his attainments, professor of mathematical physics at University College.

I.1 George Busk, a fit-looking forty-year-old. Busk was still healthy and energetic in the early 1860s. He often took walking holidays with his younger friends, for example, with Huxley, Lubbock, and Tyndall to the Isle of Wight just before Christmas in 1862 (Hirst, Journals, 21 December 1862). Source: 1849 engraving by Thomas Maguire. © The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

These two groups of friends had met, in London or on holidays in Switzerland, in the mid-1850s. As will be elaborated (chapter 2), Huxley and Tyndall became close friends in the early 1850s, and their friends were subsequently drawn into mutual acquaintance and friendship.

Spencer (age forty-four), Lubbock (thirty), and Spottiswoode (thirty-nine) were more recent members of the social circle. Huxley and Spencer, who shared philosophical interests and cultural backgrounds in radical provincial Dissent, had been good friends since the early 1850s. Spencer, who was on the fringes of scientific society—never a member of a scientific society and seldom a contributor to scientific journals—had links to the worlds of journalism and radical literature. Huxley had introduced Spencer to Tyndall but chose not to introduce him to Hooker and Busk. Spencer had become acquainted with the other friends only in the 1860s. He was working on his grand Synthetic Philosophy, a developmental interpretation of the entire universe. He had published the First Principles in 1862 and was busy, with advice from Huxley and Hooker, on Principles of Biology, which appeared in parts through 1864 and 1865. He was living on the remains of an inheritance, the proceeds of his writing, and contributions from friends and admirers.

Lubbock and Spottiswoode were drawn into the social network in the early 1860s when they found themselves on the same side as Hooker, Huxley, and friends in a series of theological and scientific controversies. John Lubbock was the son of John William Lubbock, wealthy banker, Cambridge-trained mathematician and astronomer, and, from 1840, Sir John, third baronet. Moreover, the Darwins were neighbors of the Lubbocks; Charles Darwin encouraged young John’s boyhood interest in natural history and mentored him as he began independent work in the 1850s. By 1864 the younger Lubbock’s reputation as a naturalist was well established. Like Busk, Lubbock was shifting his research interests from microscopic creatures, in his case to prehistoric archaeology. Because he had both social and scientific standing he was widely regarded—in spite of his comparative youth—as a suitable leader, even president, for scientific institutions. In 1863, when controversies over race split the Ethnological Society, twenty-nine-year-old Lubbock had been asked to take the presidency.

William Spottiswoode, an Oxford-trained mathematician, was principal of Eyre and Spottiswoode, Queen’s Printers. He was a member of many scientific and learned societies and a well-regarded administrator—in 1864 he was active on the councils of the Royal Geographical Society, the Ethnological Society, and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a friend of some of the contributors to the controversial theological volume, Essays and Reviews, and with Lubbock’s help had tried to raise scientific support for the essayists. Spottiswoode was the last of the nine to enter the friendship circle and was known to only some of the others in 1864.

The formal Club met for dinner from 1864 to 1892 but, informally, the X Club had a life of almost forty years. For at least five years before 1864 subgroups of the friends had engaged in coordinated action, and after 1892 there were rare revivals. The remaining members thought fondly of the few who were left, and forgot or forgave their failings.

I.1 Nine Men Who Wanted to Change the World

Group biographies of scientists tend to the heroic mode. They have subtitles like the friends who made the future, five friends whose curiosity changed the world, and four remarkable friends who transformed science and changed the world. Some make nationalistic claims, for example in Darwin studies: how four voyagers to Australia won the battle for evolution and changed the world.³ Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators is more realistic in its claims: how a group of hackers, geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution. Group biographies of women and extended family groups are usually more interested in the ways in which their subjects are representative rather than world-changing; the experience of the subjects is used to understand the culture and conventions of their times.⁴ This book rejects the heroic mode and shares features with such family histories as Barbara Caine’s Destined to Be Wives: The Sisters of Beatrice Webb. Between these extremes of fame and power there are many options. For example, group biographies of literary figures often seek to understand the nature of their creativity. Isaacson, similarly, analyzes what made his hackers and geeks so creative. He argues it was their ability to work together, and therefore his study bears on the larger question of how to be innovative. The power, representativeness, and close networking of the X Club members, combined with the density of their archives, similarly, enables this study of the X Club to move from microhistory to macrohistory and to become, also, a study of Victorian science and the place of science in Victorian culture. It is, I hope, a microhistory that generalists will find interesting.⁵

The X Club was, as James Moore claims, the most powerful coterie in late-Victorian science—although I would date that power earlier, from the late 1860s to the early 1880s.⁶ Members held institutional power within science and were given philosophical and scientific authority by a wide public. Organizationally, the most remarkable example of mutual power is the five years in the mid-1870s when Hooker was president, Spottiswoode treasurer, and Huxley the biological secretary of the Royal Society, and the subsequent succession of Spottiswoode and Huxley to the presidency, making a continuous twelve-year reign by the X Club. Equally important, they held positions of power in many other scientific and educational arenas at the same time. They were active in many educational institutions and in government inquiries into education. Four—Huxley, Lubbock, Spencer, and Tyndall—were nationally famous for presenting science and its implications (as they saw them) to general audiences. For many admirers and critics, they came to represent the tendencies of modern thought.

No contemporary scientific group even tried to compete, although there are hints that small groups sometimes wanted to counter the power of the X. The Philosophical Breakfast Club of the preceding generation was in decline by the time the X Club formed. Although it was similar in having a philosophical or ideological program, it never sought networks of power in scientific institutions, and would not have been in direct competition.⁷ The gentlemen who had controlled the British Association in its early decades, however, had sought institutional power, and some were still active across a wide range of scientific societies. No scholar has presented evidence of their being formally networked, but Lieutenant Colonel Sabine certainly had power in the British Association, the Royal Society, and government circles for decades, and supportive friends can be identified. The informal group of northern physicists, mathematicians, and engineers around Sir William Thomson are the only contemporary group proposed as an opposition. Like the X Club, Thomson’s friends had many values and attitudes in common. Occasionally they publicly criticized what they saw as the excesses of second-rate Cockney philosophers (as P. G. Tait called Huxley, Spencer, and Tyndall), but their institutional bases were in Scotland and they intervened in London institutions only occasionally.⁸

Equally important for this history, the members of the X Club represent a variety of social backgrounds, career pathways, and scientific specialties. Together they illustrate the variety of career making in mid-Victorian science, the ways in which entrance to science and roles within scientific institutions varied with social status, and the workings of power in scientific societies. While they represent a variety of regional and cultural origins, their mature careers were in London, hence, this book is about London science rather than British science; other places are viewed largely through the prejudiced eyes of the X-members. For London, they provide a rich picture of gentlemanly scientific life. Religiously too, they are unrepresentative. Some are renowned as leaders of Victorian scientific naturalism; those who remained within the Church of England were unorthodox in their beliefs. This raises questions about the coherence of the X Club that are hard to answer unless something of the religious beliefs and the positions with regard to scientific naturalism of the quieter members can be determined. The first chapter seeks to identify the religious beliefs of our men in early adulthood in order to consider how close the liberal Anglicans were to those who were renowned for their naturalism.

The interpretations of the X Club in this book are deliberately unheroic. Intellectually, some of these men are modern culture heroes who can be interpreted as brave and far-sighted heroes who charged on, battling the forces of prejudice and ignorance, regardless of insults and personal disadvantage.⁹ One objection, but not my chief objection to the heroic mode, is that they are not entirely admirable by twenty-first-century standards; they were men of their time. As Evelleen Richards demonstrates, they often used their science in the cause of racial, gender, and social inequality.¹⁰ My chief objection to the heroic mode is the conception of historical causation implied by claims that a few men changed the world. This is to ignore the conditions and movements that allowed, even enabled, particular actions or events to have large consequences. As Baron de Montesquieu, the great eighteenth-century social theorist, put it, if the loss of one battle brings down an empire, then some general cause made it necessary for that state to perish from a single battle.¹¹ Much the same point—about successful individuals rather than collapsed empires—is made by Janet Browne in summing up her approach to Darwin biography: figures like him were the product of a complex interweaving of personality and opportunity with the movements of the times.¹² Most powerful coterie does not imply all powerful. The cultural weight of long-established traditions and institutions, financial constraints, and opposition from occasional groups and assorted individuals meant that the X Club members often failed to achieve their ambitions.

The X Club offers a window onto Victorian science and culture. By analyzing the ways in which the members were representative as well as famous and powerful, and placing the X-men in their larger scientific and cultural context, the X Club and its members reveal much about the social structure of Victorian science and the place of science in Victorian culture. The depth of the archival sources is crucial. There are thousands of letters between the members and over a century in total of journal keeping. The power of the group and, sometimes, their frustrated desire for power mean that they were well placed to provide accounts of the internal operations of scientific institutions; because they represent diverse social backgrounds and scientific specialties they cover many aspects of Victorian science. These personal sources are sometimes elucidated by the minutes and attendance records of the committee meetings of scientific societies.¹³ The diverse sources enable the production of a deeply personal account of scientific politics. Letters also comment on personal quirks or one another’s scientific and philosophical theories. Some, for example, indicate differences in their understandings of agnosticism, which are relevant to scholarly interpretation.

The cast of characters is large. The quieter members, the wives and families, and friends and allies are essential to this unheroic interpretation of the X Club. Too often Huxley, especially, is turned into a hero whose brilliance and energy made him successful in many forums.¹⁴ I have worked to include the lesser known members, to show the importance of Busk, Hirst, and Spottiswoode in supporting the activities that are often seen as achievements of Hooker, Huxley, or Tyndall. The work of the obscure members appears only when we dive deep into detail. The dynamics of personal relationships—affection, respect, impatience, hurt feelings, and mutual support in hard times—are also part of the group story.

The families were important. In the background were six wives and, in 1864, about twenty-five children. The wives gave emotional support, scientific assistance, and the dinner parties that strengthened friendships and facilitated networking. They translated letters and books and provided illustrations for their husbands’ lectures and publications; sometimes they gave similar support to the bachelors in the Club. The families were a haven in the heartless world for both their husbands and the bachelors. Tyndall, Spencer, and the widowed Hirst found sympathetic ears and relaxing recreation in conversation with their friends’ wives and in play with their children. The social life of the X-members provides examples of friendships between men and women that enrich the limited literature on Victorian friendship. The importance of the wives to the social cohesion of the group is illustrated by the disintegrating consequences of the deaths of Sophie Frankland, Frances Hooker, and Nelly Lubbock in the 1870s and the subsequent entry of new wives, following the remarriages of Frankland, Hooker, and Lubbock.

To a much greater extent than any previous work on the X Club, I examine the roles of collaborators, most notably, botanists and naturalists who joined X-clubbers in reforming institutions of natural history; administrators and educators who joined in campaigns for science education; and liberal Anglicans, Unitarians, and other aspirants to cultural leadership whom X-men joined in campaigns for Church reform and cultural change. Including allies, both within and outside science, shows something about how the X Club succeeded, the extent to which their various goals were shared with other groups up and down the social order and, at times, why projects failed. Assessing the importance and significance of the X-men also requires knowing how they related to their predecessors and contemporaries. Here the goals and ambitions of Huxley and other X-men are compared with those of their contemporaries. Many characters appear in multiple contexts and in this way, the rich interconnections among Victorian elites become apparent, and the personalities and priorities of the actors emerge.

Considered only as biography, the rich account that emerges from collective biography vastly enhances what is known even about the well-known members of the Club. Huxley’s successes are shown to depend on the work of his quieter X Club colleagues. Hooker’s concerns are shown to extend very widely into scientific politics and religious politics. New, insider perspectives on Spencer’s idiosyncratic personality emerge. Busk and Spottiswoode, who were previously almost unknown, are here shown to be significant actors in scientific and educational institutions. Others, such as Lubbock and Hirst, who have been known to specialists, are here embedded in larger developments in Victorian science and culture.

The details of the X Club story throw a revealing light on many contested issues in the historiography of Victorian science. Some, but only some, aspects of the issues historians have identified as professionalization are shown to be important to the X Club members. Alternatives to the professional-amateur dichotomy are discussed; in particular, comparison of the entrance of the different members to scientific societies suggests that birth had continuing importance in achieving scientific status. Close attention to the naturalistic orientations of all the members, particularly, greater attention to Lubbock and Tyndall, suggests that the defining features of Victorian scientific naturalism, as characterized by Frank Turner, should be formulated less rigidly than is customary. Examination of their shifting skeptical and agnostic arguments over time, and of their private and public statements, suggests a more complex origins story for agnosticism than Bernard Lightman’s emphasis on Mansel’s 1858 lecture, or Mark Francis’s 1850s new Reformation context. Their participation in elite culture, dining, and debating with poets and journalists, lawyers, Unitarians, and liberal elites in the Church of England, makes science less important in familiar secularization stories and places failed science-and-religion narratives in a broader context. These major reinterpretations are introduced in the remainder of the introduction.

I.2 Historians of the X Club

Widely regarded by scholars as powerful, and sometimes alluded to as the famous X Club, the X Club has indeed become famous to scholars of Victorian England, but in 1864 it was just another dining club, a common mode of sociability among middle- and upper-class London men.

There were many clubs, more and less innocent, in the mid-Victorian scientific world. The Philosophical Club of the Royal Society was well known as a club with an agenda. Founded in 1847 and limited to forty-seven members, its explicit purpose was to maintain the scientific emphases of the 1847 reforms. Its dinner meetings, held monthly before the regular meetings of the Royal Society, were both a locale for conversation on scientific matters (thereby modeling serious scientific conversation) and an informal scientific caucus.¹⁵ It was a society of equals in which the secretaryship circulated among all members. Little is known of some clubs, for example, the provocatively named Cannibal Club, founded by members of the Anthropological Society of London in the mid-1860s.¹⁶ Some clubs were transient, existing as little more than hope and intention. The Thorough Club, founded at the 1862 British Association meeting, lasted only a few months. Its purpose was to promote a thorough and earnest search after scientific truth particularly in matters relating to biology, where thorough meant free from the suspicion of temporizing and professing opinions on official grounds.¹⁷ (This was to imply that many clergymen affirmed the Thirty-Nine Articles dishonestly, or with silent qualifications, in order to keep their positons and incomes.) At the apolitical extreme was the College Council Club of the Royal College of Surgeons (founded in 1869), which was only for social purposes such as dining together and in no sense for political or medico-political purposes. This explicit rejection of political purpose implies that such purposes were common. Even the convivial Red Lion Club (founded in 1839), whose members roared approval and wagged dinner-suit tails at their annual dinner (held during British Association meetings), had the original purpose of protesting the cost and pomposity of the formal British Association dinners.¹⁸ It established a London tribe for regular dinners during the year.

Many clubs in the wider intellectual world combined sociability and serious purpose. Alexander Macmillan, of the Macmillan publishing house, held informal tobacco parliaments at his London office on Thursday afternoons, from the late 1850s. Christian socialist friends and allies stopped by for conversation, tea and stronger beverages, and smoking. Huxley, Spencer, and Spottiswoode were among those who discussed the publishing world, social issues, and potential new titles with Macmillan.¹⁹ The Century Club (founded in 1865) was initiated by men who had excelled at Oxford and Cambridge and who were committed to university reform. Outside the university, they sought political, social, and ecclesiastical reform. Some were leader writers and journalists and some stood as parliamentary candidates. (Huxley, Spencer, and Tyndall were later members.) It met on two evenings a week for conversation and refreshments.²⁰ Although operating on a much larger stage than the X Club, it was similar in having a programmatic commitment to reform. Thus there was nothing remarkable in establishing a private club with political purposes, and the X Club did not need to be secretive about its existence.

Just what the purposes of the X Club members were is one of the central questions of this study: what did they want to achieve, what were their ambitions, and why were they so energetic? Scholarly interpretation of the intentions and objectives of the members has been complicated, and even mis-directed, by the vague and contradictory accounts that they passed down to posterity. We never had any purpose, Huxley claimed in old age, when the friends discussed adding new members:

The club has never had any purpose except the purely personal object of bringing together a few friends who did not want to drift apart. It has happened that these cronies had developed into big-wigs of various kinds—& therefore . . . had a good deal of influence in the scientific world. But if I had to propose to a man to join, and he were to say Well, what is your object? I should have to reply like the needy knife-grinder—Object, God bless you, sir, we’ve none to show.²¹

Huxley’s summing up is characteristically witty and memorable, but misleading.

Against Huxley’s claim of original innocence, Hirst’s report on the first meeting must be put in the balance:

Besides personal friendship, the bond that united us was devotion to science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas. Amongst ourselves there is perfect outspokenness, and no doubt opportunities will arise where concerted action on our part may be of service. The first meeting was very pleasant and jolly. . . . There is no knowing into what this club, which counts amongst its members some of the best workers of the day, may grow, and therefore I record its foundation.

Friendship and jollity, yes, but also shared principles, and an expectation of concerted action. Hirst added, Huxley in his fun christened it the ‘Blastodermic Club’ and it may possibly retain the name.²² Against his later protestation of innocence, Huxley’s witticism hints at large purposes. The blastoderm, Spencer explained, when he told his father about his new club, is that part of an ovum in which the rudiments of future organization first appear.²³ The implication is that, in 1864, Huxley expected the Club to lead the development of the body scientific. This name was ponderous and, probably, rather too revealing of their intentions. Someone suggested Thorough Club, but this was rejected, for its association with the failed 1862 club.²⁴ The name, though, alludes to the concern that thought and conversation be free, not inhibited whether internally or externally by dogmatic orthodoxy. After a few months of anonymity, they chose the safer name of X Club, for the unknown quantity, suggested I believe by the wife of one of the members, Mrs. Busk, said Spencer; by our mathematicians, said Huxley.²⁵

Already, we have two problems with Huxley’s memory. On the origins of the Club, there is no reason to doubt the contemporary records of Hirst and Spencer, both of which imply intentions beyond friendship, therefore Huxley’s later reconstruction can be disregarded. Regarding the name chosen, although Spencer’s I believe qualifies his certainty, Mrs. Busk is a specific memory. Against this, our mathematicians seems only a plausible reconstruction. The issues raised by these conflicting accounts recur in writing X Club history. Huxley creates problems for historians of Victorian science in general, and for historians of the X Club in particular, because he has received more than his fair share of attention. He was so witty and quotable that his views are often selected to represent Victorian scientific men (or some lobbying subgroup among them) without inquiring into possible alternatives. Moreover, generations of scholars have more accessible information about Huxley than about almost any other Victorian scientific hero—with the conspicuous exception of Darwin. His articles were collected and republished, a loyal son wrote a readable Life and Letters that contains numerous extracts from letters, and all these volumes are widely available. The combination of Huxley’s attractive humor, his association with Darwinian controversy, an accessible biography, and scholarly reliance on predecessors has resulted in generations of historians investigating his achievements and neglecting many contemporaries.²⁶ In the following chapters the importance of associates, within and outside the X Club, to Huxley campaigns will be emphasized.

To return to the questions of the founding of the X Club and the choice of name: it would seem that Mrs. Busk suggested the name and that the members wanted to organize science, in some unspecified sense. The directions they sought are hinted at by Hirst’s description of their common bond as devotion to science pure and free. Free science, he elaborated, was untrammelled by religious dogmas. Pure science was not constrained by the demands of utility and money making.

Later allusions by X Club members to their Club are no more helpful in determining its objectives. Much about their hopes and intentions can, however, be inferred from their previous collaborative actions. My previous analysis of their pre-1864 service to science, which is extended in chapter 3 herein, demonstrates that Huxley’s just-friends claim is misleading.²⁷ They had already been engaged in promoting the reputation of Darwin, extending evolutionary theory to man, defending clergy suspected of heresy, attempting (unsuccessfully) to sideline the anthropologists who, in their eyes, brought disrepute on science, and as they met for dinner were taking over a weekly paper in order to spread scientific knowledge and attitudes. Some of these projects, we can assume, were in the back of Hirst’s mind when he mentioned concerted action in the future. Huxley habitually underplayed the intentions and power of the X Club; even at the end of his life it was better not to admit what they had planned or done. By contrast, comments scattered through Spencer’s Autobiography exaggerate their influence.²⁸

Given the vague, open-ended sources and the wide range of projects in which the friends collaborated, it is not surprising that historians have offered diverse and conflicting interpretations of the Club’s goals and achievements. Modern studies of the X Club began with two, near-simultaneous articles by Vernon Jensen and Roy MacLeod in 1970. The fragmentary records of Club discussions and the networks of high positions held by the X-brothers convinced both that the group had been powerful. MacLeod believed Huxley—that the Club began with no formal purpose—but, implying that it became a conspiracy, he called it the Albemarle Street conspiracy after the street on which it met for dinner. At this stage of research though, proof was missing, although there were smoking guns. Jensen emphasized the strong friendships—of the men with one another and, within Victorian mores, with the wives of one another. Ellen Busk was the most intimate and trusted friend that Huxley had in the early 1850s; he told her about his fiancée in distant Sydney.²⁹ In spite of his emphasis on friendship, Jensen suggested that the Club had some more significant purpose than preventing old friends from drifting apart; they wanted, he wrote, to further the cause of science. Unpacking this evocative but unspecific phrase is a major task. A wide range of objectives fall under this slogan, objectives regarding scientific and educational institutions, the attitudes and beliefs of the public at large, and the social and intellectual position of science (in general) and of individual scientific men.

Almost all subsequent interpretations of the X Club have been shaped by Frank Turner’s interpretations of Victorian science in a series of publications of the mid-1970s. In accounts going back to his first elaboration of scientific naturalism, the X Club has been identified with the promotion of naturalistic interpretations of the universe. Many scholars have built on Turner’s work, most notably Bernard Lightman, in wide-ranging research on advocates and opponents of scientific naturalism.³⁰ Turner, again, argued that scientists sought cultural leadership, and used X Club members as leading exemplars of scientific dissatisfaction with the lack of social recognition for the achievements and utility of science and medicine. My analysis of the prehistory of the Club interpreted their ambitions regarding their larger society in terms of cultural leadership.³¹ Turner, yet again, but building on much previous work by Roy MacLeod, identified the X Club as the vanguard of a professionalizing and anti-amateur movement in mid-Victorian science, and this interpretation too was widely taken up, by Lightman, by Adrian Desmond in his biography of Huxley, and many others.³² My account of the X Club’s power in the Royal Society, in paying more attention to scientific institutions than to science in general culture, owed more to MacLeod than to Turner. It demonstrated the close networking and political cunning that justified MacLeod’s ascription of conspiracy and argued, against Turner, that they were not anti-amateur, for they installed the amateur printer-mathematician, William Spottiswoode, in the chair of the Royal Society.

Although Turner includes evolutionary theory as one of the theories characteristic of scientific naturalism, James Moore gives it much greater emphasis. His larger interpretation parallels Turner’s cultural authority thesis. The X-brothers plotted an aggressive campaign to reclaim nature from theology and to place scientists at the head of English culture. And behind them . . . stood the inspiring genius of Darwin. He describes the X Club as a Darwinian clique.³³ Building on Moore, but holding back from his grander claims about cultural ambitions, MacLeod’s 1999 reflections on X Club research propose an evolutionary understanding of ‘Man’s Place in Nature’ as the common commitment of the Club members.³⁴

All these interpretations have, to speak somewhat loosely for the moment, anti-church or anti-religion connotations, which some scholars emphasize as central to X Club objectives. Naturalism was against supernaturalism. When scientific men sought cultural authority, it was against the authority that clergy then held. Professionalization, as interpreted by Turner, was partly a strategy for edging out clerical amateurs—although because they were amateurs rather than because they were clerical. Although Moore himself has written persuasively against hypostasized Science and Religion being at war, his language here puts X Club and clergy in confrontation. The X Club is usually identified as being, if not at war, at least in conflict with clerical authority.³⁵

Quite apart from their relevance to the X Club, all these interpretations have been questioned and nuanced. The following discussion outlines the issues as raised by research on X Club members and introduces the interpretations that are developed in subsequent chapters.

The Darwinism of the Darwinian Clique

Promoting Darwin’s reputation and developing his theory in new directions was one of the issues that drew the X Club together (as will be shown in chapter 3). Nevertheless, the X Club was much more than a Darwinian clique. Its roots can be traced to pre-Origin campaigns in the 1850s.³⁶ Rather than Hooker campaigning for Darwin, before the Origin Hooker persuaded Darwin to join his lobbying networks for the reform of natural history organizations (see chapter 2.3). Darwin, I argue, was not the raison d’être of the Club, but one among many causes. Moreover, Darwin as defended by the X Club stands for the entire Darwinian complex, including the developmental style of reasoning that preceded the Origin.

The existence and importance of non-Darwinian forms of evolutionary theory have been frequently argued. James Secord’s Victorian Sensation treats Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation as an important work in its own right, rather than an inadequate predecessor to Darwin. In Victorian Popularizers, Bernard Lightman shows that such grand developmental schema remained popular throughout the century. Peter Bowler’s often-elaborated argument is summed up by one title, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Darwin converted the Victorian world to evolution, but not to a Darwinian evolution. Even Huxley was not converted to natural selection. Many educated people accepted that the variety of forms of life had slowly developed but, rather than explaining this by the mechanism of natural selection, the majority appealed to some progressive tendency or directed process.

Because Busk, Lubbock, and Huxley were active in the development of anthropological theories and institutions, the relationship of Darwin to evolutionary anthropology is particularly important in this book. The evolutionary anthropology and the new prehistoric archaeology to which Busk and Lubbock contributed in the 1860s were neither Darwinian in style of argument nor derived theoretically from Darwin, although, because they developed in the late 1850s and early 1860s, they have often been presumed to follow in some way from the Origin. Subtle and indirect relationships between these developments and the Origin have been identified by George Stocking in his authoritative Victorian Anthropology. Discoveries in prehistoric archaeology in 1858–60 coincided with the Origin but were relatively independent, neither caused the other. (Rather, both were made possible by the mining, quarrying, and railway building that uncovered animal fossils and ancient human tools.) Geologists and antiquarians found evidence of a vastly longer human history than had previously been imagined. Most startling of the British finds was the mixture of chipped stone tools and fossilized bones of long-extinct animals found in 1858 in the undisturbed floor of Brixham Cave in Cornwall. Although Brixham Cave offered no evidence of human transmutation, it created a revolution in human time.³⁷ It pushed human history back toward the deep time of geology. When the Origin and Brixham Cave were considered together, supporters of transmutation could hope that evidence of even greater human antiquity might be found. Busk and Lubbock were involved in analyzing further prehistoric finds.

As is well known, Darwin did not address the relationship of man to animals in the Origin. The obvious question for every reader was how to fill the fossil gap between ape and man. Stocking emphasizes that this was a new question, to which ethnologists replied with an old answer. They already had theories expounding a hierarchy of human races, and they threw living savages into the fossil gap. By assuming that the most savage groups represented the most primitive and ancient peoples, ethnologists created a developmental schema for man. This was not a Darwinian branching-tree model in which human groups diverged and became more varied; rather, it was a typological schema in which all human groups went through similar stages of development, from savagery toward civilization (although some groups moved extremely slowly). Prehistoric archaeology added details to the story of development, but it was still essentially a theory of developmental stages. Stocking concludes that by the late 1860s there was a group of theorists following similar arguments: accepting the great antiquity of man and the link between man and some primate form, ranking savages in a hierarchy of development, and committed to a naturalistic uniformitarian explanation.³⁸

Scientific Naturalism and Agnosticism

Although the X Club has been identified with the philosophical position of scientific naturalism, the relevant research has focused on a small subgroup within the X Club, usually Huxley, Spencer, and Tyndall. (Lubbock, who could readily be included, is usually omitted.) This leaves open the question as to how well the relatively silent majority fit within the naturalistic movement. Recent research has been challenging in two ways, scientific naturalism has been problematized and, with specific reference to the X Club, Hooker has been interpreted as the odd man out. The view developed in this book is that the X Club as a whole can be identified with scientific naturalism, but that scientific naturalism first needs a looser definition. After close investigation of the quieter members, many of whom had unorthodox or tenuous Christian beliefs, I argue (in chapter 6) that all were committed to the project of expanding naturalistic explanation, which is the focus of my redefinition of scientific naturalism.

Recent reinterpretations have produced polarizing oppositions. Scholars who follow closely in Frank Turner’s steps use the label scientific naturalists for the promoters of scientific naturalism and argue this was an actors’ category. Others go so far as to argue that the term, scientific naturalism, has become empty, that scientific naturalism was merely a polite strategy for avoiding conflict over religion.³⁹ Here I situate my interpretation, which will be developed in chapter 6, between these two extremes. Over decades of summary, I submit, scientific naturalism has become oversimplified and overscientific. It has been reified into an explicit doctrine. Here, I illustrate the process of simplification in order to provide a basis for a looser definition.

In justifying his proposed name, Victorian scientific naturalism, Turner wrote, The movement was scientifically naturalistic in that it derived its repudiation of supernaturalism and its new interpretations of man, nature, and society from the theories, methods, and categories of empirical science rather than from rational analysis (12). He associated this kind of naturalism with the science of the second half of the nineteenth century and distinguished it from the naturalistic rationalism of the preceding century.

As evidence for the existence of a scientifically naturalistic movement, Turner offered three contemporary characterizations of modern (Victorian) scientific thinking, by James Ward, Herbert Spencer, and T. H. Huxley, that is, one critic and two advocates. Turner emphasized the Huxley version, and scholars have generally taken Turner-Huxley as their starting point and overlooked the significant differences between the three. According to Ward,

This naturalistic philosophy consists in the union of three fundamental theories: (1) the theory that nature is ultimately resolvable into a single vast mechanism; (2) the theory of evolution as the working of this mechanism; and (3) the theory of psychophysical parallelism or conscious automatism, according to which theory mental phenomena occasionally accompany but never determine the movements and interactions of the material world.⁴⁰

Ward did not dignify naturalism with the adjective scientific; rather, naturalism was a philosophy. Moreover, only his second theory is at least as much scientific as metaphysical.

The advocates summed up their philosophy in more scientific terminology. Turner paraphrased Huxley, the "three seminal theories of nineteenth-century science . . . were Dalton’s atomic theory, the law of conservation of energy, and evolution. He went on to quote directly:

The peculiar merit of our epoch is that it has shown how these hypotheses connect a vast number of seemingly independent partial generalisations; [and] that it has given them that precision of expression which is necessary for their exact verification. . . . All three doctrines are intimately connected, and each is applicable to the entire physical cosmos.

Then he conflated the Huxley statement with Spencer’s summary of the program of his synthetic philosophy. Huxley and his fellow naturalistic writers, such as Spencer, employed these three theories ‘to interpret the detailed phenomena of Life, and Mind, and Society, in terms of Matter, Motion, and Force.’⁴¹

Read closely, the Spencer and Huxley statements are not so obviously scientific as to justify unexamined ascription of scientific to their synthesizing project. Spencer’s list does not include the theory of evolution; rather, it would seem that he intended to explain evolution in terms of matter, force, and motion, as in his famous, tortuous formulation, Evolution is definable as a change from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and the integration of matter,⁴² a statement of doubtful scientific status. There are hidden ambiguities in Huxley’s prose, whether they are intended double meanings is uncertain. Huxley did not write Dalton’s atomic theory, but that doctrine concerning the constitution of matter which, for want of a better name, I will call ‘molecular.’ Huxley used the circumlocution, primarily, to avoid commitment to atomism, but his statement could be read as an allusion to theories broader than chemical atomic theory, for example, claims about brain function and mind. Moreover, his concluding assertion that the doctrines are intimately connected sounds rather Spencerian and difficult to tie down to theories that have been exactly verified.

Therefore, I suggest that the scientific nature ascribed to so-called Victorian scientific naturalism should be bracketed as a claim for investigation, and that the specific scientific theories at the heart of naturalistic interpretations of the cosmos should not be defined by any one list. Recent attempts to fit particular individuals to the Turner-Huxley definitions support these proposals. Michael Taylor’s argument that Spencer’s evolutionary naturalism had metaphysical roots supports my proposed bracketing of the scientific ascription. With specific reference to William Huggins, Robert Smith argues that the nebular hypothesis was a crucial theory for astronomers who argued naturalistically; moreover, the nebular hypothesis was important to Spencer, Huxley, and Tyndall.⁴³ Desmond, it should be noted, has long recognized the importance of physiological psychology to the naturalistic program.⁴⁴ The discussion of scientific naturalism in chapter 6 herein argues that the X Club protagonists sought naturalistic explanations, it interprets scientific naturalism as a project rather than a doctrine, and analyzes the varied ways in which the X Club men extended naturalistic explanation.

Some problems of interpretation arise when scholars extend the category of scientific naturalism beyond those to whom Ward and other sophisticated philosophical critics at the end of the nineteenth century applied it. Ward focused on Spencer, Huxley, and W. K. Clifford, all of whom had explicitly expounded their views in philosophical, although also polemical and rhetorical, terms.⁴⁵ Turner originally included these men plus Tyndall, leading positivists, anthropologists who extended the theories of science into the study of society, and literary men who advocated the cause of science as chief representatives of scientific naturalism. But when Turner developed his argument about naturalistic science as a tool of professionalizers, he moved the positivists and literary men to an outer circle and made more of the X Club members and their scientific allies, many of whom had not publicly and unambiguously expressed their philosophical and religious views.⁴⁶ The professionalization-equals-scientific-naturalism thesis assumes a unity to all the activities of Huxley, Spencer, and Tyndall (but most notably Huxley), and aligns all their associates under this same umbrella without specifying what that unity was. Thus, for example, Bernard Lightman uses the phrase the institutions of scientific naturalism.⁴⁷ To some extent, as with Butterfield’s account of the Whig interpretation of history, such oversimplifications are a consequence of the need to summarize;⁴⁸ even scholarly works must take some things as accepted. However, with the undermining of the professionalization thesis, the unity of scientific naturalism has become more problematic. It is time to return to the beginning.

Given all these questions, Robert Young’s arguments about the significance of pre-Darwinian sources for naturalistic understandings of the universe merit reconsideration. Writing at the same time as Turner, Young argued that Darwin and Darwinism have become clichés for a much wider movement.⁴⁹ Darwin was one among many Victorians who argued in scientific terms for a naturalistic understanding of the earth, life, man, his mind, and society. Young emphasizes that the movement began well before Darwin, going back at least to his grandfather in the 1790s and including the extremely popular, anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation of 1844. Young also argues that Darwin’s Origin was not the most important work in the naturalistic tradition. Phrenology, which extended the uniformity of nature to the link between mind and brain, had already challenged free will and, by implication, moral responsibility. Therefore, Young argues, the impact of Darwin is really the impact of a much wider naturalistic movement in psychology, social theory, and science and cannot be fruitfully studied in isolation.⁵⁰ Other arguments lead to the same conclusion: Spencer’s sources were pre-Darwinian; the Darwinism of the X Club included Lubbock’s developmental history of humankind from savagery to civilization. With specific reference to Spencer and Lubbock, and in the light of Young’s arguments, the pre-Darwinian sources of scientific naturalism should be acknowledged. Thus the scientific naturalism with which the X Club is associated cannot be isolated from Erasmus Darwin, phrenology, and Vestiges.

The naturalism of the X Club has been indirectly linked to the non-Darwinian naturalism of Vestiges in Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman’s recent analysis of pre–X Club uses of the label scientific naturalism.⁵¹ The term was first used by an American critic of Vestiges in midcentury, then used by British critics of Tyndall, Darwin, and allies in the 1860s, then in the 1870s spiritualists debated whether naturalism or scientific naturalism were apt self-descriptions. Huxley used the label only in 1892. If he was aware of these predecessors, as Dawson and Lightman suggest, he did not acknowledge them. Rather, he created a respectable genealogy for scientific naturalism, which he identified with modern science. Modern science, he declared, followed in the tradition of the Renaissance because it shared the goal of complete intellectual freedom. He used the adjective scientific to emphasize that the Naturalism of his era was an advance on the Naturalism of the Renaissance (I follow his capitalization of major concepts). He went on: Naturalism had always been opposed to Supernaturalism; in these latter days (he used the language of biblical prophecy), Naturalism takes the form of Science, which is the young strong enemy of Supernaturalism. Thus, the Naturalism of the Renaissance has culminated in the scientific Naturalism of the latter half of the nineteenth century.⁵² As Paul White points out, scientific naturalism had extremely limited currency" among its supposed exponents.⁵³ However, even if it is a long stretch to claim scientific naturalism as a term of self-description for the X Club, it is not a misleading term and can be justified on pragmatic grounds.⁵⁴

The name scientific naturalist, though, for advocates of what was later called scientific naturalism, introduces confusion. The term naturalist referred, until almost the end of the century, to someone who collected flora, fauna, or fossils and classified them into species and genera, and is used in this sense in the following chapters. Naturalists could be mere naturalists, scientific naturalists, or philosophical naturalists according to the quality and breadth of their work. I give only one typical example here from an 1875 obituary. When J. E. Gray, keeper of zoology at the British Museum, died, the Athenaeum obituary described him as pre-eminently a scientific naturalist rather than a popular writer.⁵⁵

Consequently, I avoid scientific naturalist as ambiguous. I prefer the adjective naturalistic over scientific naturalism in order to leave open the question of scientific status, and to de-familiarize the old phrase so that we are stimulated to think anew. My aim in the subsequent discussion is not to define scientific naturalism and certainly not to decide who is or is not a scientific naturalist in the way these terms have been widely used. Rather, I seek to find the unifying themes, assumptions, arguments, and objectives of the X Club members (see chapter 6). I propose that their theories and theoretical ambitions can be labeled naturalistic. However, because the leading X Club members have been so closely associated with scientific naturalism by scholars of the last forty years, my discussion has implications for definitions with broader aims.

The Social Structures of Victorian Science

Professionalization has been one of the master narratives shaping interpretations of Victorian science. In the enthusiasm for the perspectives opened up by the social turn in history of science, Frank Turner’s 1976 argument that the apparent conflict between science and religion was rooted in the antagonism of the new professionals to the old clerical amateurs was widely taken up. Thus, among historians of science, although not in more popular interpretations, the professionalization narrative subsumed the science-against-religion narrative. The X Club was considered to be at the heart of a professionalizing movement that sought higher salaries, more paid positions, and greater social recognition for scientific men.

There were early critics of professionalizing narratives. Morris Berman argued, as Jim Endersby has since elaborated, that gentlemanly independence, that is, an income that left one free to pursue scientific interests, was the ideal for most of the nineteenth century. Scientific employment was second best.⁵⁶ Critics acknowledged that the pursuit of science changed, from (predominantly) an avocation for gentlemen to (predominantly) full-time paid employment, but they warned that to label this as professionalization implies a teleological process. Professionalization is a pseudo-explanation, wrote Roy Porter.⁵⁷ Professionalization came about, but it was not something the X Club members, nor other scientific men, set out to achieve. I have long criticized the professionalizing interpretation of the X Club. Most obviously, the X Club included both gentlemanly amateurs and professionals paid to do scientific work; moreover, the amateurs were important to the success of many campaigns. The balance of interpretation shifted with the 2001 thematic issue of the Journal of the History of Biology, especially with the brilliant reversal of the X axis by Adrian Desmond, previously an exponent of the Turner interpretation. Desmond concluded that, rather than some overarching professionalizing goal, the changes that came to be called professionalization must be explained by contemporary goals [and] localized strategies. For example, the first important site of professional education in science was the South Kensington School of Science, which produced schoolteachers; the teachers were wanted by provincial industrialists and liberal politicians, who wanted British workers to be scientifically literate so that British industry was competitive with German industry.⁵⁸

In place of professionalization I pay attention to the intertwined themes of hierarchy, class, and social status and to the