Notes: Chapter 2: Victorian Biology and Victorian Letters

1 Alex Comfort, Darwin and the Naked Lady: Discursive Essays on Biology and Art, p. 3.

2 The Life and Works of Lord Macaulay, vol. V, pp. 5,6. 'Milton' was first published in 1825.

3 John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, Defined and Illustrated in Nine Discourses . .., ed. Martin J. Svaglic, p. 206.

4 Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, new ed revised by Ernest de Selincourt, p. 738.

5 Herbert Spencer, Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical [1861] (London, 1893), pp. 40-1.

6 Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship, p. 113. A subjective view, of course, but there is hard evidence in that the number of people attending the annual meetings of the British Association remained constant at about 1,200 for the three decades before 1860. But by the year to which Webb is referring (1872) that number had more than doubled to 2,500. Much time was spent at these meetings on the moral responsibilities of science.

7 Thomas Henry Huxley, 'Science and culture', in his Collected Essays, Vol. 3, p. 142.

8 By Michael S. Helland, 'T. H. Huxley's "Evolution and Ethics": the politics of evolution and the evolution of politics', Victorian Studies, vol. 20 (Winter 1977), p. 160. Helland strongly attacks Gertrude Himmelfarb's contention in 'Varieties of social Darwinism' (in her Victorian Minds) that Huxley kept Darwinism depoliticised; ie that he succeeds in his expressed wish never to give his sanction to the application of Darwinism to any social theory or practice.

9 Walter F. Cannon, 'Darwin's vision in On the Origin of Species', in George Lewis Levine and William Anthony Madden (eds), The Art of Victorian Prose, pp. 154-5.

10 Richard Stanley Grove, 'A re-examination of Darwin's argument in On the Origin of Species', unpublished PhD thesis, University of Missouri, 1969, fo. 3.

11 Letter to W.B. Carpenter of 6 April: Francis Darwin (ed.), The Life and Letters of Charles Danain, Vol. 2, p. 299. Dated by the editor 1860.

12 Charles Darwin, Autobiography of Charles Danain, 1809-1882, ed. Nora Barlow, pp. 44, 115.

13 Donald Fleming, 'Charles Darwin, the anaesthetic man', Victorian Studies, vol. 4 (March 1961), pp. 219-36.

14 'Geoffrey West' [Geoffrey Harry Wells ], Charles Darwin: The Fragmentary Man, pp. 328-9.

15 Considering the influence he wielded over scientific and educational policy, Huxley's prose has, surprisingly, been subjected to little penetrating stylistic analysis. Apart from Helland above, D.J. Foskett has looked at the technical prose in 'T. H. Huxley and his presentation of scientific material', unpublished MA thesis, University of London, 1955, and Charles Blinderman at the language of the essays in 'Semantic aspects of T.H. Huxley's literary style', Journal of Communication, vol. 12 (1962), pp. 171-8.Walter Houghton has exposed Huxley's frequent rhetorical flourishes in his 'The rhetoric of T.H. Huxley', University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 18 (1948-9), pp. 159-75. The substance of Houghton's important attack is taken up by Foskett, fos 91 ff., in more moderate vein.

16 'Westminster Abbey' was printed in Nineteenth Century, vol. 32 (November 1892), p. 831. There are some minor differences in the version published together with 'From Shanklin' and 'Altr'Arno, Florence' in Poems of Henrietta A. Huxley with Three of Thomas Henry Huxley. Entirely incorrect is William Irvine's statement in Apes, Angels and Victorians: A Joint Biography of Darwin and Huxley that this first poem was the only one 'of his discreeter years' (p. 266). The other two poems are dated only five and seven years earlier, when Huxley was in his early sixties.

17 Ethel Romanes, The Life and Letters of George John Romanes, new edn, p. 155.

18 Walter Bagehot's Physics and Politics (1872) first appeared as a series of essays in the Fortnightly Review from 1867, where Darwin presumably read them. The citation from Charles Kingsley in The Descent of Man is to 'Strange noises heard at sea off Grey Town', Nature, vol. 2 (19 May 1870), p. 46. This latter title accurately captures the flavour of Nature at this point in its history.

19 There is no adequate bibliographical-critical guide to the scientific press in this period. The estimate above is taken from Alvar Ellegard, The Readership of the Periodical Press in Mid-Victorian Britain, p. 24. This invaluable study, being a predecessor of his Darwin and the General Reader, unfortunately covers only the same dates as the latter (1859--72). There was a very great expansion of the periodical press in these decades: between 1860 and 1870 a new periodical began publication once every three weeks, on average. Though the percentage of these covering scientific topics must have been small, doubtless there is a good deal of writing by well-known scientists stored in the files of such transient productions.

20 It is worthwhile summarising the progress of this protracted debate, because it demonstrates as nothing else can the almost undlimited appetite of Victorian lay readers for the most intricate analysis of issues in biological theory. Herbert Spencer started the ball rolling with his 'The inadequacy of "natural selection"', vol. 63 (February-March 1893), pp. 153-66 and 439-56. This is a typical piece of anti-Darwinism of the time, rehearsing all the usual objections. In the same volume (April 1893, pp. 499-517), George John Romanes reacted to 'Mr Herbert Spencer on "natural selection"' with a long-drawn-out demonstration 'that the whole of this line of evidence is practically worthless' (p. 499). Spencer answered Romanes in May (1893, pp. 743-60); and, as if that wasn't enough, the whole debate was reviewed in detail as 'The Spencer-Weismann controversy' (vol. 64, July 1893, pp. 50-9) by Romanes and Marcus Hartog in tandem. Later on in the same year August Weismann himself entered the fray with a two-part article insisting on 'The all-sufficiency of natural selection' (vol. 64, September-October 1893, pp. 309-38 and 596-610). This did not silence the indefatigable Spencer, who offered 'A rejoinder to Professor Weismann' (vol. 64 December 1893, pp. 893-913) and finally, not having been able to draw Weismann again, concluded almost a year later with 'Weismannism once more' (vol. 66, October 1894, pp. 592-608). And this sequence is not atypical.

21 'Notes on development (no. 1)', Punch, vol. 44, 21 March 1863, p. 122.