Huxley: From Devil's Disciple To Evolution's High Priest (Helix Books) [Paperback]

Adrian Desmond (Author)

Book Description

Series: Helix Books | Publication Date: March 31, 1999

T. H. Huxley (1825–1895) was Darwin’s bloody-fanged bulldog. His giant scything intellect shook a prim Victorian society; his “Devil’s gospel” of evolution outraged. He put “agnostic” into the vocabulary and cave men into the public consciousness. Adrian Desmond’s fiery biography with its panoramic view of Dickensian life explains how this agent provocateur rose to become the century’s greatest prophet.Synoptic in its sweep and evocative in its details, Desmond’s biography reveals the poverty and opium-hazed tragedies of young Tom Huxley’s life as well as the accolades and triumphs of his later years. The drug-grinder’s apprentice knew sots and scandals and breakdowns that signaled a genius close to madness. As surgeon’s mate on the cockroach-infested frigate Rattlesnake, he descended into hell on the Barrier Reef, but was saved by a golden-haired girl in the penal colony.Huxley pulled himself up to fight Darwin’s battles in the 1860s, but left Darwin behind on the most inflammatory issues. He devasted angst-ridden Victorian society with his talk of ape ancestors, and tantalized and tormented thousands-from laborers to ladies of society, cardinals to Karl Marx—with his scintillating lectures. Out of his provocations came our image of science warring with theology. And out of them, too, came the West’s new faith-agnosticism (he coined the new word).Champion of modern education, creator of an intellectually dominant profession, and president of the Royal Society, in Desmond’s hands Huxley epitomizes the rise of the middle classes as the clawed power from the Anglican elite. His modern godless universe, intriguing and terrifying, millions of years in the making, was explored in his laboratory at South Kensington; his last pupil, H. G. Wells, made it the foundation of twentieth-century science fiction.Touching the crowning achievements and the crushing depths of both the man and his times, this is the epic story of a courageous genius whose life summed up the social changes from the Victorian to the modern age. Written with enormous zest and passion, Huxley is about the making of our modern Darwinian world.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

In Victorian England, T.H. Huxley was more notorious than Darwin. He was a self-educated, pugnacious defender of the doctrine of evolution, preaching Darwin's findings to bishops and cloth-capped manual workers while winning converts of every class?loved and loathed by people he'd never met. He studied jellyfish, marine worms, primates, dinosaurs, and humans; coined the word "agnostic"; and was the first to be designated a "scientist." Desmond (Darwin, LJ 5/15/92), himself a scientist and writer on evolution, has produced an exhaustive biography, dense and detailed, with touches that bring Huxley alive. There are extensive quotes from Huxley's writings incorporated so seamlessly that it seems you are hearing Huxley speak. A definitive biography of an important figure, this book is highly recommended for academic libraries and any collection on the history of science, evolution, or the Victorian era.?Jean E.S. Storrs, Enoch Pratt Free Lib., Baltimore
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The New England Journal of Medicine

All of us know Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) as the earliest and most ardent advocate of the then heretical view Charles Darwin expounded in The Origin of Species. "My good & kind agent for the propagation of the Gospel," Darwin called him. In fact, it was Huxley, not Darwin, who enraptured and outraged audiences in the 1860s with talk of our ape ancestors and cavemen. But we know little else of this raven-haired figure with sunken, flashing black eyes and a lashing tongue, as handsome as an Apollo. Hence, my strong recommendation of this book by Adrian Desmond, who is a renowned historian not only of 19th-century British science but also of 19th-century Britain altogether. We learn about the social structure of England after the Napoleonic wars in vivid detail, and within this context we learn why T.H. Huxley came to endorse the Darwinian gospel with almost messianic zeal.

Because of his illustrious grandsons, Julian S. and Aldous L. Huxley, I was under the impression that the Huxleys must have been one of those long-established English upper-class families with an intellectual tradition. The original Huxley was certainly not one of them. Thomas Henry Huxley had no fortune to inherit, no family tradition to uphold. He was born above a butcher's shop in Ealing, a small village 12 miles west of London, and spent his early youth in the depressed silk-weaving city of Coventry. In London, he attended a cut-rate anatomy school, Sydenham College, which was behind University College Hospital, and then studied at Charing Cross Hospital, this time tuition-free. At the age of 21, he enlisted in the Royal Navy as an assistant surgeon and was assigned to H.M.S. Rattlesnake, an old "jackass" frigate of 28 guns nominally converted to a surveying ship that was presumably capable of accommodating a number of geologists, hydrographers, and naturalists. Under Captain Owen Stanley, she was to sail to the northern coast of Australia to survey northern Australia and New Guinea and many islands in between.

T.H. Huxley hoped that the biologic discoveries he made during this voyage would earn him a place among the naturalists. After four years of elation, hardship, and sorrow in strange seas, the Rattlesnake returned. Huxley immediately applied to the admiralty for a year's shore leave with half pay. The request was denied, although Sir Francis Beaufort hoped that Huxley would write a book "`creditable to himself, to his late captain... and to Her Majesty's service."' Earlier, Darwin, "the privately-financed companion to Captain FitzRoy, received (pound sterling) 1,000 after a nod to the Chancellor from his Cambridge tutor John Stevens Henslow," but Huxley was denied (pound sterling) 300.

Post-Napoleonic England was a nation of empire builders, and the Royal Navy ruled the waves. But side by side with the affluent beneficiaries of the victory over France and the subsequent Industrial Revolution (Darwin lived off his railway shares), many people worked long hours for wages that were barely enough to sustain them. It is no wonder that T.H. Huxley distrusted the Anglican teaching that espoused the status quo in the social order and sought an antidote to religion in science. This book shows that through their crusade to spread the gospel of Darwinism, Huxley and his cohorts initiated sweeping educational reforms, and these reforms modernized English social structure.

Desmond's book mentions a number of important discoveries made in 19th-century Europe before The Origin of Species that pointed to the notion of evolution. In his student days at Sydenham College, T.H. Huxley became aware of the cell theory of life that was maturing in Germany and that culminated in Rudolf Virchow's dictum: Omnis cellula a cellula. He was also aware that urea, present in the urine of all mammals, was synthesized by Friedrich Woehler in Germany in 1829. This achievement made a mockery of the long-held belief that only living creatures can synthesize organic chemicals.

At the jamboree of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Southampton in 1846, Richard Owen spoke of the vertebrate ground plan or "archetype," while Huxley spoke on homologies among the heads of crustaceans, insects, spiders, and millipedes. Clearly, the notion of a common ancestor of each group of animals was developing throughout Europe. From that idea to the theory of evolution was but one step. Indeed, Jean-Baptist Lamarck, professor of insects and worms at the Paris Museum of Natural History, had already ventured to propose the likelihood of a species in the past being transformed into another species today. One therefore wonders whether the Darwinian gospel would have found ready acceptance, at least by the scientific community, as a natural culmination of recently developed thoughts, had it not been for the militant endorsements of T.H. Huxley. In the history of ideas, however, ready acceptance is equated with rapid obscurity. By deliberately confronting the Anglican English public with the Devil's gospel, it was Thomas Henry Huxley of the lashing tongue who gave Charles Darwin immortality.

Reviewed by Susumu Ohno, Ph.D.
Copyright © 1998 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 848 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (March 31, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0738201405
• ISBN-13: 978-0738201405
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,073,713 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Exhaustive and exhausting, September 23, 2003

By 

Luke D Jasenosky - See all my reviews

This review is from: Huxley: From Devil's Disciple To Evolution's High Priest (Helix Books) (Hardcover)

I've never read a book quite like Desmond's. He is an extremely talented writer and is obviously enthusiastic about Huxley, his "X club" cohorts, and Victorian England in general. Some of his prose is worth savoring, in fact. However, as other reviewers have mentioned, his talent and enthusiasm primarily result in a 650 page-long monograph of purple prose. It is difficult to find a single sentence on some pages that doesn't contain a simile (usually of an overwrought nature) or highly charged authorial proclamation. Although this practice certainly makes the writing lively, it also makes it extremely heavy-going and, at times, quite confusing. It is difficult to read more than a few pages at a time.

As for the book's material, it is never less than fascinating. Desmond is a thorough researcher, and he never fails to explore the major events in Huxley's life in proper detail. He is also enormously well-schooled in the world of Victorian science, university politics, and culture. Although he makes even the slightest struggle in Huxley's life seem like a battle for all time, he also succeeds in making "Hal" a truly sympathetic and utterly unparalleled individual. I had no problem with the straight narrative structure as other reviewers seem to have had, but many, many names popped in and out of the story with little information to refresh my memory and this grew tiresome.

In short, I recommend giving this book a shot. You may tolerate or even enjoy Desmond's prose. There is a lot of wonderful information about a wonderful and remarkable man to be imbibed. However, be warned that it will most likely be a murky, if hot and spicy, pool to wade through.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best science biographies ever, June 16, 2005

By 

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang "historian and futurist" (Menlo Park, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Huxley: From Devil's Disciple To Evolution's High Priest (Helix Books) (Paperback)

I've read Adrian Desmond's Huxley biography several times since its initial publication a decade ago. When I first read it, I thought it was a tour de force; ten years later, it still holds up.

Desmond is a brilliant biographer: his "Darwin" (co-authored with James Moore) and his studies of Robert Owen have been deeply influential among historians of science. The difference between those books and this one, though, is that Desmond obviously likes Huxley: he admires the young Huxley's drive and ambition; his willingness to take risks; his ferocious, furious determination to succeed in despite lack of connections or inheritance (Victorian Britain wasn't so far from Jane Austen when Huxley was striking out on his own); and his incredible success. As much as any single individual, Huxley deserves credit for creating our modern notion of what science can do, and how scientists should be treated-- by the state, by the general public, by universities. It's the bulldog's world; we just live in it.

The hip-hop criticism is astute. The book is actually filled with references to earlier histories of science: nearly every page has a play on the title of some book or article. Insiders will get them; apparently they're noticeable, but distracting, to others.

Still, the book is a model for how to write biography, and probably the best introduction to Victorian science and culture around today.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Bio! We Could Sure Use a Huxley Today in USA!, September 7, 2005

By 

S. Henkels (Devon, Pa United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Huxley: From Devil's Disciple To Evolution's High Priest (Helix Books) (Paperback)

What a fine book and bio! The author stated that he is most interested in placing TH Huxley into the context of his times, late 19th Century England, and the world, and he succeeds completely! From THH's humble origins with descriptions of the slums of 1840's London, through the amazing Rattlesnake voyage to Australia and New Guinea, and onward to the world's #1 Iconoclast (Nietzsche came a little later), this book reads like the best novel, with tons of biology, paleontology,history of science, theological debunking, and English history all included. Not to mention the sometimes difficult financial and family life of the founder of the famous 20th century Huxleys. THH was obvious as close to a universal scientific genius and spokeman as we'll ever have! Very strange how his many claims for science in school were accepted in Britain by the 1890's, but are still controversial in 2000's USA!