“The proprieties of the Association have been outraged.” So wrote civil servant Arthur Munby in his diary on 1 July1860. And no wonder: the previous day, at the annual meetingof the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Oxford, there had been a most ungentlemanly discussion. The topic was Charles Darwin’s new – and dangerous – idea. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce stood ready to defend the works of God in creation. The zoologist Thomas Huxley attended as evolution’s champion. The battle lines were clearly drawn. Much of what is widely believed about this legendary debate isfarfrom reliable, written 20 years after the event by people with an axe to grind. And the official record doesn’t help: it sanitised the proceedings forthe sake of the association’s propriety. Historian Frank James has spentIO years examining diaries, letters and other eyewitness accounts written within days or weeks of the event. These records, he says, lead us to a rather different conclusion aboutthe outcome of that day.
IT CAME as a last-minute call: the room was far too small and time was short. Only the library in the university’s new museum could hold the anticipated crowd, and even this grand hall needed extra seating to accommodate the throng. A troupe of carpenters set to work, and the air filled with sawdust and the sound of frenetic hammering.
Why the rush? A dull American called John Draper had suddenly become the meeting’s hot ticket. His subject, Darwin’s evolutionary theory, was of wide and topical interest. On the Origin of Species had been published only seven months earlier, and emotions were running high. But Draper wasn’t the attraction: word was that evolution’s fiercest opponents were planning to make a stand. Draper’s talk, originally scheduled for Monday, was given top billing, brought forward to Saturday and moved to the largest space available.
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The clergyman and historian John Green was certainly looking forward to the event. “On Saturday morning I met Jenkins going to the Museum,” he wrote in a letter a couple of days afterwards. “We joined company, and he proposed going…’to hear the Bishop of Oxford smash Darwin’.”
It could have been a one-sided debate: Darwin was not there – he was unwell – and the prime defender of evolution, Thomas Huxley, was not planning to attend. On Friday, he had met the evolutionist Robert Chambers in the street, and the two men started talking about the meeting. Huxley was aware that the bishop was planning to exploit the event to score points against Darwin but said he was tired and, as he later wrote, he did not see the good of “giving up peace and quiet to be episcopally pounded”. Chambers accused him of deserting the cause. Huxley relented.
The hall was packed. There were “not less than 400 or 500” in the audience, according to the following day’s report in The Evening Star. Others reckoned on twice that many. Draper was flattered. He wrote to his family that “there was a very great audience, the room being filled perfectly full”. That, he wrote, was partly because the association’s physiological section had adjourned to hear his paper “as a mark of the greatest respect in their power to offer to me”.
He would have been disappointed to learn that not everyone was so respectful by the end of his talk. Joseph Hooker, assistant director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, thought Draper’s paper full of “flatulent stuff” – or that’s what he wrote in a letter to Darwin a few days later. Draper was no draw, Hooker said: the room was full because everyone had heard that “Soapy Sam was to answer”.
“The popular view of Huxley’s victory may have arisen only because Bishop Wilberforce was not wellliked, a fact missing from most accounts”
But Bishop Samuel Wilberforce didn’t answer straight away. A few sceptics spoke first, including the president of the Royal Society. Then a young clergyman said something so ridiculous that the Reverend John Henslow, the chairman and a professor of botany, shut him up. Henslow then asked Huxley if he was ready to speak.
No, Huxley said, there were as yet no arguments to meet. Wilberforce took his cue. He rose to great applause and proceeded to argue that humans must have been specially created, rather than evolving from non-human animals, because the idea was a central pillar of Christianity. At the end of his argument, according to the following week’s edition of The Press, he asked the famous question: would Huxley prefer a monkey for his grandfather or grandmother?
Huxley’s response was double-edged. Respectful, but not giving any ground, he referred to Wilberforce as an “unscientific authority” but paid homage to the bishop’s intellect. “If I had to choose between being descended from an ape or from a man who would use his great powers of rhetoric to crush an argument, I should prefer the former,” he declared. According to The Evening Star of 2 July, Huxley then went on to defend Darwin’s ideas “in an argumentative speech which was loudly applauded”.
In his own version of events, written in a letter to the marine zoologist Frederick Dyster in September, Huxley paints himself in an even better light. There was, he wrote, “inextinguishable laughter among the people” at his witty reply. “I believe I was the most popular man in Oxford for full four-and-twenty hours afterwards.”
Others were not quite so impressed by Huxley’s performance. Robert FitzRoy, captain of HMS Beagle during Darwin’s all important voyage, remained unconvinced by Huxley’s arguments, and the archaeologist and biologist John Lubbock was left thinking Darwin’s hypothesis was nothing more than the best on offer.
Indeed, when Hooker related the day’s events to Darwin, he grumbled that Huxley didn’t “put the matter in a form or way that carried the audience” so he’d had to do it himself. “I smashed [Wilberforce] amid rounds of applause …Sam was shut up – had not one word to say in reply and the meeting was dissolved forthwith.”
Wilberforce didn’t remember it that way. “I think I thoroughly beat him,” he wrote to archaeologist Charles Anderson three days later. The physicist Balfour Stewart agreed. “I think the Bishop had the best of it.”
Victory, it seems, lay in the eye of the beholder. After a decade delving through the documents, Frank James, historian at London’s Royal Institution, suggests that the popular view of Huxley’s victory may have arisen only because Wilberforce was not well-liked, a fact missing from most accounts. “Had Wilberforce not been so unpopular in Oxford he would have carried the day and not Huxley.”
But what does the official record say? Very little. The Athenaeum published a long, bureaucratic report of the meeting two weeks later. It was probably written by the secretary of the association’s biological section, Edwin Lankester, but it makes no mention of Wilberforce’s jibe and Huxley’s response. It might have been the talk of Oxford, but the writer preferred not to draw attention to the fracas in so public a record. And the association’s report for 1860 makes no reference to the discussion at all. “The British Association had a gentlemanly ethos. And these were most ungentlemanly goings-on,” says James. The discussion was officially adjourned until Monday, but then quietly dropped.
In the end, the gentlemen of the British Association suppressed as much information about the debate as possible, never realising the significance of their decision. The story of Huxley’s victory only really took hold 20 years later – when it suited the cultural climate. “In the 1880s there was a split developing between religion and science,” James says. “In the 1860s there really wasn’t one.” But, without any official record of the meeting to counter their claims, scientists looking to establish their authority were able to refer back to the debate as the moment when science defeated religion: the battle, they declared, was already won. “You see it referred to as an enormously important event when, at the time, it quite clearly wasn’t,” James says.
By turning this local discussion into a universal myth, men and women in the late 19th century contributed to the process of separating science from Christian belief, says James. How ironic then, that the meeting was the inaugural event of Oxford’s Museum of Natural History. It had been built with the surplus funds of the University Press’s Bible account, and the architect John Ruskin declared the edifice founded “to bring the light and beauty and life of the works of God to their eyes”. It almost worked – but not quite. The works of God were appreciated in Oxford; unfortunately, the bishop of Oxford was not. To Ruskin’s disgust, evolutionary theory went from strength to strength, provoking him to a different declaration over his glorious building. The museum, he said years later, was a display of “the devil’s working”.