7
In the same way that everyone knows how the church punished that innocent “martyr of science” Galileo, so few people have never encountered the story of the world-changing clash that took place in Oxford’s newly opened University Museum, on the momentous summer’s afternoon of 30 June 1860. Almost as a vindication of poor Galileo, whom 227 years before (so the myth goes) the church had driven into submission, so the Oxford evolution debate dramatically turned the tables. In Oxford, a reactionary, anti-scientific, Bible-thumping old bishop had been argued down and publicly humiliated by a vigorous young freethinking “man of science”. Mankind had finally been liberated from its ancient bondage to spiritual superstition, and was now free to proclaim its cousinship with noble apes! And the newly liberated Prometheus of science was all set to change the world and bring in “The Truth”.
What happened at that momentous encounter, as the myth has it, is that the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, delivered an uninformed tirade against Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published just over seven months previously, and defended the strict literal truth of Genesis. He then made insinuating remarks against the evolutionist Thomas Henry Huxley, by asking from which of his grandparents he was descended from the apes. To which young “Darwin’s Bulldog” Huxley retorted, quick as a flash, that he would rather be descended from an innocent ape than from an ignorant bishop. At this irreverence ladies fainted, evolutionists proclaimed victory, and Wilberforce and all his clerical cronies were crushed. The meeting came to a dramatic end. And the world changed!
As the twentieth century progressed, and especially after c. 1950, this heroic scenario progressively ensconced itself in the Western psyche, through books, magazine articles, and bad TV docu-dramas which acted the whole thing out in graphic detail. And as a schoolboy and a student I swallowed it hook, line, and sinker, just like most other people; and only when I began on my history of science research career did I become gradually aware of serious problems in the “orthodox” telling of the confrontation.
One such problem was in the curiously unbalanced nature of the evidence. A research historian naturally expects the most detailed authentic accounts about an event to be found in the records of the time in which it took place, with shades of interpretation, rather than fundamental factual reportage, coming from 100 or so years later. But with the “Oxford Debate” it was the other way round: lots of modern-day references and amplifications yet, when you try to find an authentic source in the publications of around July 1860, you search largely in vain. For the “Debate” was scarcely noticed in the newspapers, magazines, and book literature of 1860, and what little there was failed to square with the “canonical” narratives of a century later, such as that presented in William Irvine’s Apes, Angels, and Victorians (1956). Yet in 1860, just like today, a world-changing event hit the then mass media of the printed word. But more about the authentic sources of the “Debate” anon: let us first look at the dramatis personae.
Central was the Rt Revd Samuel Wilberforce, Lord Bishop of Oxford. Yet far from being an out-of-touch geriatric, Samuel in 1860 was a vigorous 54-year-old, and bang up to date. And far from being a scientific ignoramus, he had a first-class honours degree in mathematics from Oxford, where he had been both an undergraduate and a member of Oriel College before ascending the ecclesiastical ladder. He also had a range of scientific friends, such as the astronomer Sir John Herschel and the physiologist Sir Richard Owen. And if anyone bothers to check the Royal Society registers, as I have done, they will find that by 1860 Samuel had been a full fellow of that society for fifteen years (longer than Huxley, in fact). I can, of course, already hear defenders of the “Debate” myth exclaiming “Aha! But in 1845 you did not need to be a full-time working scientist to be elected FRS, as you do now”, and I wholeheartedly agree. On the other hand, the Society would never vote you into the Fellowship if you were a scientific ignoramus, or an enemy of modern science. In fact, Sam of Oxford belonged to a long and noble breed of clerical scientists and friends of science that went back to the very founding of the Royal Society in 1660 – highly educated gentlemen, often in public life, with an informed knowledge of science! Indeed, a very useful thing for any civilized society to possess. Men with a breadth of vision, who could relate their science to their religion and social and political lives!
Bishop Samuel was also a brilliant orator, a wit, and a seasoned debater who clearly relished a merry old scrap in the House of Lords, in the universities, or at scientific or religious meetings. Nor is there evidence that he bore long-term grudges – unlike the much stiffer, earnest, and, one suspects, humourless Huxley. He even played along with his nickname “Soapy Sam”, saying that while he was often in hot water, he always emerged with clean hands; although we should remember that in Victorian usage “soapy” also meant smooth and polished. Or in today’s fashionable lingo, cool.
In fact, by 1860 Samuel was one of the most high-profile of all English churchmen, and was further revered because his father, William Wilberforce, was the “national saint” who had spearheaded the parliamentary campaign to abolish the slave trade in 1807. Samuel was also a very popular diocesan bishop, the driving force behind many charities, and a social lion. When the popular magazine Vanity Fair did a profile and a cartoon of Wilberforce in July 1869, in its “Men of the Day” series, it said that should the Church of England be suddenly disestablished and lose its investment revenues, Samuel “assuredly would be provided for by a grateful country as the most amusing diner out of his time”, and would never lack for Society dinner tables at which to eat! So one might be rightly forgiven for asking the question “How does this Bishop Wilberforce of historical record square with the fundamentalist buffoon of myth?”
Thomas Henry Huxley was a profoundly different sort of man. He was born in 1825, the son of a far from wealthy schoolmaster, but his brilliance had secured him a scholarship to medical school. After an unhappy Pacific voyage as assistant surgeon aboard HMS Rattlesnake, which nonetheless taught him a lot of zoology and natural history, Huxley came to occupy a Chair at the School of Mines in London, and also ran evening classes for working men. A friend of Charles Darwin – himself a wealthy gentleman naturalist – the hard-up Huxley identified himself with that small minority of professional, paid-position-holding academic scientists, rather than with clerical “Grand Amateurs” like Wilberforce, whom he seems to have actively disliked. And while the early widowed Wilberforce was a deeply religious High Church evangelical who could be at ease among scientists, peers of the realm, dons, and the frequenters of Pall Mall clubs and Society dinner parties, the happily married, agnostic Huxley preferred to move among his fellow-scientists and his family.
So who said what to whom on that fateful 30 June 1860? The plain fact is, we don’t really know, for there is no official record of a wholly spontaneous, very brief exchange of words, and the best that we have are very partisan private remarks. But we do know this for certain. (1) The “Debate” was part of that annual week-long jamboree of British science, the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which in 1860 just happened to take place in Oxford. It was not a “special event”. (2) The meeting phased in with the end of the Oxford academic year, when, in addition to the scientists (clerical, lay, and amateur), journalists, and pundits up for the jamboree, there would have been numerous mamas and papas, with marriageable daughters in attendance, up to meet their undergraduate sons’ friends, attend balls and dinners, go for jaunts on the river, and enjoy all the other delights of the Victorian upper middle classes at play. In short, Oxford was in high holiday. (It is important to note, however, that the fun, games, and courtship are never mentioned in the twentieth-century “canonical” accounts of the “Debate”, charged as they invariably are with fanatical anti-religious fervour.) (3) A discussion of Darwin’s novel ideas had been tabled for the day in the newly opened University Museum, under the “Section D, Zoology and Botany” part of the Association meeting. (4) The discussion began with Dr John William Draper of New York (whom we met at the beginning of Chapter 6) delivering a paper on his own version of Darwinized positivism as an explanation of modern society. We can infer that it was a tedious beginning to that hot afternoon from the references to cat-calls and animal noises contributed by mischievous undergraduates who were among the 700 people packed into the Museum Lecture Room. (5) Then the audience got what most of them had probably come for, when Bishop Samuel took the floor. Though delivered spontaneously, or at least with no surviving record, Wilberforce’s lecture said a lot about Darwinism as a scientific theory, but nothing, as far as we can gather, about religion. And then, by way of a throw-away remark, he seems to have asked Huxley the fateful question about his monkey ancestry. (6) And, as we saw above, Huxley replied something about preferring a primate to a Primate ancestor!
The “Great Debate” as a world-changing encounter, however, did not hit the public consciousness until after 1887, when Francis Darwin, Charles’s son, published his father’s Life and Letters. Here we find letters from Huxley, Joseph Dalton Hooker, and other friends who wrote to the indisposed Darwin (who was then taking a water-cure at Richmond) reporting what happened. Primary sources, it is true, but replete with their own contradictions. Huxley tells Darwin how he stood up to the bishop, yet Hooker claims that he, Hooker, was the one who had personally “smashed” Soapy Sam, and that Bulldog Huxley did not speak loudly enough to be heard among the bedlam of laughter that had, no doubt, erupted after Sam’s quip.
Yet other manuscript reminiscences only add confusion to the clean-kill scenario of the “canonical” account. The Revd Adam Storey Farrar believed the bishop had been improper to ask whether another gentleman’s grandmother had been a monkey, while William Tuckwell recorded in his Reminiscences of Oxford (1900, 1907) that the bishop seems to have pulled himself up sharp and apologized to Huxley, not meaning “to hurt the Professor’s feelings”, although this was probably lost in the noise and laughter. Furthermore, both the Scottish physicist Balfour Stuart, FRS, and Mr Henry Baker Tristram recorded that as they saw it the bishop came off best; while Wilberforce himself wrote to a friend a few days later: “I think, I thoroughly beat him [Huxley or Hooker?].”
So whose account can be believed? Let us now refer to the nearest thing we have in the contemporary media to a report on what was said, in the local paper, Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 7 July 1860, which devotes twenty lines to the “Section D” session among several full broadsheet pages covering the rest of the British Association meeting. The anonymous reporter tells his readers that the bishop “condemned the Darwinian theory as unphilosophical [i.e. unscientific]; as founded not upon philosophical principles [i.e. scientific or experimental induction], but upon fancy, and he denied that one instance had been produced by Mr Darwin of the alleged change from one species to another had ever taken place [sic]”. Hardly a fundamentalist rant, indeed! The reporter names four other respondents in addition to Huxley, including Hooker, but does not record what they said. But no reference to religion at all. Only what Wilberforce identified as Darwin’s scientific evidential shortcomings: shortcomings which the honest Darwin fully admitted. So no clean Huxley–Wilberforce kill and no Bible-thumping!
What we see here is not the ignorant episcopal buffoon of legend, but Wilberforce the sharp-eyed FRS, dissecting the scientific work of another FRS – Darwin – and being challenged by yet other FRSs – Huxley, Hooker, et al. For we must never forget that Victorian science was deeply inductive and experimental in its basis, and in that respect, as things stood regarding biological knowledge in 1860, Darwin was on very shaky “philosophical” ground – and he knew it, for neither he nor any other scientist could demonstrate evolution experimentally.
One or two papers covered other aspects of the week-long British Association meeting: The Athenaeum, 7 July 1860, for instance, mentioning the “play” and exchanges that took place in the various section meetings. Yet one searches in vain for the “Great Debate” of 30 June. Even the leading satirical paper of the day, Punch, which was not averse to publishing cartoons and poems about “Soapy Sam” as a High Tory bishop, is silent about the “Debate”. I wonder why? Could it have anything to do with a fleeting humorous exchange being in reality no more than that, yet blown up out of all proportion in the decades after 1887? Wilberforce was killed in a riding accident in 1873, and could do nothing to challenge the tale thereafter, while the “canonical” view is repeated in Huxley’s Life and Letters (1900) and those of Hooker (1918).
One finds a fascinating perspective on the “Debate”, however, in our two “American atheists” mentioned above. While John William Draper had spoken on Darwinized positivism in “Section D” immediately before Wilberforce, and was clearly a witness to whatever else followed, he quite forgot to mention the world-changing “Debate” in his anti-Christian A History of the Conflict between Science and Religion (1874). I wonder why? Because the momentous exchange was in reality nothing more than a quip, which he had long forgotten by 1874? On the other hand, when Andrew D. White published his magisterial Warfare volumes in 1896, he made what is probably the first independent mention of the “Debate”. White, however, had not been in England in June 1860, and had the advantage of access to the Huxley, Hooker, and other letters, plus Francis Darwin’s interpretation of the “Debate” in his edition of his father’s Life and Letters (though in 1860 Francis had been a twelve-year-old schoolboy and had not been present at the event).
I have read, and been told, many reasons why the Oxford “debacle” never hit the national headlines in July 1860, usually based upon a “press cover-up” theory. For would not the public humiliation of a bishop make ladies faint and the establishment crumble? Yet such an explanation can only be sustained in blissful ignorance of the workings of the Victorian “mass media”. In 1860, England had scores of daily and weekly newspapers, magazines, and “scandal rags”. There is probably no underhand trick used by modern-day reporters that their Victorian forebears did not use 150 years before – mobile phones notwithstanding – for the Victorian press was big, noisy, and free. A thing of national pride, in fact, for it proclaimed to the world that John Bull could speak his mind, unlike the more government-controlled news agencies of Continental Europe.
Reforming papers like The Times and The Examiner regularly exposed ecclesiastical abuses of various kinds, while Dissenting Christian, freethinking, and radical political periodicals would have had a field day with a bishop who had been made a monkey of in Oxford. Just think of the stick Anthony Trollope gives the self-satisfied Chapter of the fictitious Barchester Cathedral in The Warden (1855), and the assault on it by his fictional character Tom Towers, the radical editor of The Jupiter newspaper! A veil of polite reverence, indeed!
I have devoted so much space to the Oxford “Debate” myth because it has become so pervasive, and so universally accepted, while in 2010 Richard Dawkins was instrumental in having a memorial stone to the “event” set up outside the Oxford University Museum. Yet, as I hope to have shown from what we know of the historical record, as opposed to the cosy fairyland of atheist fantasy, what the stone actually commemorates is a prime example of ideologically motivated “monkeying around with history”. What, I have suggested, is really the “Great Delusion”!