The X Club

Power and Authority in Victorian Science

Ruth Barton

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226551753
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

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.

PART ONE

Origins and Ambitions

ONE

Cultures of Science in Early Victorian England

Although the X Club members established their careers and reputations amid the institutions of gentlemanly London science, they came from widely varying backgrounds. Here, the future members of the Club are located in the “scientific culture” in which their scientific interests developed. The chapter includes gentlemanly London, where science was a complex balance of polite culture, sociability, useful knowledge, and expertise; mechanics’ institutes and the culture of self-improvement; science as worldview among rational Dissenters; science at Oxford and Cambridge as part of the education of a Christian gentleman. By “culture of science” I mean the practices, beliefs, and assumptions that characterized a scientific community. These include the social organization (societies, clubs, dinner parties, for example); forms of communication (journals, lectures); and shared goals and purposes (whether improving agriculture, spreading rationality, bringing glory to the Creator, or enjoying polite recreation) that characterized a group.

The chapter pays particular attention to the shaping of values and aspirations in different sociocultural contexts. Other major themes in the chapter are family context and the shaping of personality and temperament, and the development in early adulthood of the religious beliefs of the nine men.

The chapter starts with gentlemanly London science, the context that shaped the early ambitions and careers of Busk, Hooker, and Lubbock. In the clubs, specialist societies, and lecturing institutions of gentlemanly London science, employed experts mixed with the well-born, cultured, and wealthy. As the center of English public life, commercial activity, and publishing, London drew in many middle-class professionals. The growing number of national scientific institutions in London ensured that men of science were part of this London-ward movement. Secular London offered more varied routes to scientific success than were available elsewhere in Britain and (with the exception of Spencer) no matter from where they started the X-men aspired to establish themselves in elite scientific and social London circles. Gentlemanly London science is therefore central to this book. Identifying the nature of gentlemanly London science and the changes already underway before 1850 is important as a background against which to understand the efforts of the ambitious young outsiders to enter London science in the 1850s and also to identify any differences brought about by the following decades of near-tireless activity by the X-network.

The following three sections follow the X-members whose scientific interests were established in very different contexts. The sections move from lower to higher in the social order and from the provinces toward the metropolis in the spatial order, thereby mirroring the movement of the X Club members and symbolizing the significance of London in British life. First, I follow the education and aspirations of Edward Frankland, John Tyndall, and T. A. Hirst, artisans in northern industrial towns, who found in science a means to improve their position in the world. The world of mechanics’ institutes and mutual improvement societies allowed them to move beyond that world. Next, moving up the social order, I group Herbert Spencer and T. H. Huxley together as representatives of a radical provincial dissenting science. Although their career paths diverged, there are interesting early and later parallels that throw a revealing light on the nature of their different visions of scientific knowledge and scientific authority. Then I discuss science at Oxford (with brief allusions to Cambridge) as represented by William Spottiswoode, the only member of the X Club to have an Oxbridge education.

These four cultures of science are by no means an exhaustive account of British science. For example, to take London alone, there were also radical medical reformers, scientific showmen, and bohemian literary advocates of new worldviews and lifestyles who advocated different political programs and occupied different social spaces from gentlemanly members of elite scientific societies.1

I choose “cultures” rather than “spaces” to interpret my material. The close attention to specific locations required by an emphasis on spaces does not work well for a group of nine people operating in lecture theaters, committee rooms, laboratories, dining rooms, and the difficult-to-locate spaces of editorial and publishing activity.

1.1 Gentlemanly London Science

Gentlemanly London science was in conflict and transition in the early Victorian period, and for at least a decade previously. When Sir Joseph Banks, long-term president of the Royal Society, friend of the king, and unofficial government minister of science, died in 1820, many groups who had long been discontented renewed their reforming efforts. Coincidentally, but conveniently for my narrative, the Hooker and Lubbock families represent different phases of reform. J. D. Hooker’s father, Sir William (from 1836), whose career had been promoted by the patronage of Banks, represents pre-reform values, but Hooker junior entered science in the reform era, and his conflicted ambitions suggest tensions within gentlemanly science. Lubbock’s father was one of the reformers of the 1830s who wanted expertise to count for more and rank for less in scientific institutions. Lubbock junior entered the reformed Royal Society in the 1850s but, as we shall see in chapter 2, rank smoothed his entry to scientific society. Busk spent his scientific energies in more obscure locations; his very obscurity can be taken as representative of hundreds of medical men, businessmen, and others who pursued scientific inquiries and supported the burgeoning specialist scientific societies of the metropolis. This section aims to evoke the world of gentlemanly London science, a world of clubs and societies in which few leading scientific men had paid employment in science, and landed gentlemen, lawyers and medical men, and businessmen devoted their considerable spare time to science. It tracks the changes and the continuities in London scientific life over half a century, from the height of Sir Joseph Banks’s fame and power to the reforms of 1847.

London was an enormous, rapidly growing city, the largest city by far in Britain and the largest in Europe throughout the nineteenth century. Its population was almost one million in 1800, passed two million in the early 1840s, and three million in the mid-1860s. For comparison, Paris was half the size in the 1840s and, Liverpool and Glasgow, the next-largest British cities, about 300,000. As the center of English public life and the center of a commercial empire, London had a proportionately larger and more varied middle class than most other British towns and a correspondingly varied cultural life, in which science was one element.2

William Jackson Hooker (1785–1865) entered the patronage network of science when he discovered a new moss near his home town of Norwich in 1805.3 A local naturalist named the moss after him; Dawson Turner, a banker and naturalist in nearby Yarmouth introduced him to the Linnean Society; and there he met Joseph Banks. Hooker determined to devote himself to botany, which was possible because, although born in modest circumstances, in 1806 he inherited substantial property from his godfather. He made botanical tours to foreign parts, married Turner’s daughter, Maria, and was elected to other leading learned societies, the Royal Society, Society of Antiquaries, and Horticultural Society.4 These societies, with the Royal Society, represent the polite interest in antiquities, aesthetic and horticultural interests in landscaping and new plants, and economic interest in agricultural improvement at home and colonial development overseas that characterized elite science under the Banksian regime.5

Reversals of fortune made it impossible for William Hooker to continue as a gentleman botanist. Unfortunate investments and the expense of publishing illustrated botanical works diminished his income and, after 1815, his growing family increased his requirements. He needed employment. Through Banks’s patronage he was appointed in 1820 to the Regius Chair of Botany at Glasgow. The move to Glasgow meant both intellectual isolation and loss of status; the landowner of 1806 had become an employee. Hooker was a reluctant migrant, always hoping to return to the south.6

Although diminished in social status and financial resources, William Hooker continued to take a gentlemanly role in science. From Glasgow, he maintained an orientation to the outside worlds of government ministers, European botanists, gardeners, horticulturists, and land improvers. He supplemented his meager university income by boarding and tutoring students and writing books and editing magazines on gardening and horticulture. Student numbers and, hence, his income from student fees grew. In a dense network of patronage and obligation, Hooker’s credibility spiraled upward. He lobbied government to appoint botanists to voyages of scientific exploration and recommended his ex-students as appointees; other students emigrated and Hooker encouraged them by giving duplicates from his plant collections and good introductions; his grateful, well-placed students sent him exotic plants; his herbarium became ever-more impressive; and he appealed to the government for assistance in publishing descriptions of new species. His private herbarium attracted scientific visitors to Glasgow and diminished his isolation. Within botany Hooker attained a Banksian-type influence.7 Hooker had both paid and unpaid assistants in this ceaseless letter writing, plant sorting, and publication. Both his wife, Maria, and his second son, Joseph, worked in the herbarium and proofread the gardening and horticultural magazines. Thus Joseph, born just before his father moved to Glasgow, grew up in a household conscious of having lost status, and in which hard work was required to overcome financial constraints.

In spite of his physical distance from London, William Hooker was a founding member of the Athenaeum Club, established in London in 1824 to provide a forum where leaders in art, science, and literature could associate with gentlemen by birth. In 1836, he was knighted—with the support of the Duke of Bedford, an ardent horticulturist and improving landowner, who had (in the evocative words of the Linnean obituarist) “honoured” Hooker “with his friendship and correspondence.”8

Joseph’s parents hoped that he would follow in the footsteps of both his father and his maternal grandfather. At age seven he was taken to his father’s botany lectures. He was brought up to be hardworking, conscientious, orderly, devout—and ambitious. His mother in particular, hoped that he would follow in his grandfather’s footsteps. This could have been a heavy burden to bear but, although Joseph showed interest in other branches of natural history, he willingly followed botany. At the age of fifteen, in 1832, he entered Glasgow University, with his elder brother, William. Joseph remembered these years as unhappy. He spoke to friends of the lack of sympathy and encouragement he was given when a student in Glasgow.9 Nor did he have happy memories of Yarmouth and his maternal grandfather. Turner, apparently, was condescending toward his lower-status but more expert son-in-law; Joseph considered that his grandfather’s poor advice had contributed to his father’s financial woes. On one occasion, when in Yarmouth to assist his grandfather with herbarium work, Joseph pointed out that a supposedly rare moss was actually a common species. When his grandfather was publicly sarcastic, Joseph ran away to an aunt in London.10

As a boy, Hooker had read illustrated travel narratives and dreamed of undertaking such adventures himself—in the steps of Banks and Alexander von Humboldt. In 1838, when attending his first meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, he heard of an opportunity. Captain James Clark Ross, the eminent arctic explorer, was to lead a voyage to measure the earth’s magnetic field in the southern oceans. Voyages, which provided an opportunity to collect in exotic places, were the route to botanical fame. The enthusiastic young botanist was delighted when Ross told him he could have a surgeon’s position if he finished his medical training by the departure date.

Joseph knew that, like his father, he would have to make a living from botany and that he could not hope to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps as “a naturalist with a fortune.” He could not afford to be “proud.”11 Hooker’s attitudes were contradictory. As Endersby presents him, Hooker accepted that paid employment lowered the social status of a gentleman, that is, he accepted the value system of his grandfather; he also insisted that manners rather than birth made the gentleman. His insistence that courtesy should govern scientific interaction was one of the ways in which he carried the older values into the new world of salaried employment. At the same time, he respected his father’s science over his grandfather’s. Expertise counted for more than gentlemanly status of the conventional kind. The tensions between the gentlemanly and expert ideals will appear at various points below in Hooker’s relationships with his X Club friends and is revealed in differences between his and his father’s expectations.

William Hooker continued gentlemanly Banksian traditions. His person was handsome, his demeanor courtly. Although his expenses exceeded his official salary, he showed a gentlemanly generosity. He admitted any visiting botanist to the library and herbarium, which he kept up at his own expense. His son did not share this sense of the public responsibility of a gentleman but expected, instead, that public service should be adequately compensated by a publicly funded salary.12 In later life Joseph Hooker emphasized the generosity that his father took for granted.

Sir William (from 1836) was a supportive father and a skilled manipulator of patronage, in both his own and Joseph’s interests. He contributed £50 for books and microscopes needed for Joseph’s botanical work on the Antarctic voyage. The younger Hooker was inclined to exaggerate ...