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Adrian Desmond has written a biography in two volumes of Thomas Henry Huxley. The first (ISBN 0 7181 3641 1), was published in 1994 and the second, (ISBN 0 7181 38821), in 1997.
Published by Michael Joseph Ltd.
Vol. 1 £20 CAN. $35.00.
Vol. 2 £20 CAN. $37.50
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T.H. Huxley was Darwin’s bloody-fanged bulldog. His giant scything intellect shook a prim Victorian society; his ‘Devil’s gospel’ or 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 great prophet.
Desmond reveals the poverty and opium-hazed tragedies of young Tom Huxley’s life. The drug-grinder’s apprentice knew sots and scandals (one sent his sister fleeing to Tennessee). Then came breakdowns signalling 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 he left Darwin behind on the most inflammatory issues. He devastated angst-ridden Victorian society with his talk of ape ancestors. London turned out - from cardinals to Karl Marx - to be tantalised and tormented by his scintillating lectures. He conjured up magical pasts: Neanderthal men in Ice Age caves and dinosaurs evolving into today’s birds. He caused clerical wrath with his resurrected fossil humans and took the Dissenters’ attacks on the privileged Church to an extreme. Out of his provocations came our image of science warring with theology. But out of them too came the West’s new faith - agnosticism (he coined the word).
In the process Huxley created a new, scientific, culture. Championing a modern education, creating an intellectually dominant profession, he epitomised the rise of the middle classes as they clawed power from the Anglican elite. This man from nowhere was making the modern world.
With its rich evocation of Victorian times, Huxley does full justice to this enfant terrible, ending with his presidency of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1870. It is based on extensive archival research and contains many previously unpublished photographs and Huxley’s pen-and-ink sketches.
By 1870 T.H. Huxley - Darwin’s Bulldog - had become the prophet of the new world of science. But how did ‘Pope Huxley’, as the Spectator dubbed him, sell Evolution? And did his satires on Anglican supernaturalism break the stranglehold of the old Universities?
Adrian Desmond continues his acclaimed study of the rise of the professional and the changes in industrial society and shows how our evolutionary understanding was forged by this seminal figure.
Huxley was the young hot-head in the first volume, The Devil’s Disciple, clawing his way from the East End slums to the presidency of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Evolution’s High Priest takes the story through Huxley’s social triumph to his death in 1895.
The enfant terrible has become a symbol of the middle-class ascent, penetrating the Establishment as a Privy Councillor to the Queen. But grass-roots society was moving even faster. Adrian Desmond offers surprising evidence of Huxley’s brushes with a growing socialism to explain why he forged today’s major arguing point, ‘Social Darwinism’.
Synoptic in its sweep, Huxley shows how a happy designed Nature gave way to our passionless cosmos. Family tragedy forced Huxley to peer deep into the ‘abyss of the Eternal’. That modem 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 heights and crushing depths, this is the epic story of the first ‘agnostic’ whose life summed up the social changes from the early Victorian to the modem age. Written with enormous zest and passion, vast in its conception, and based on a reading of 5.000 letters, Huxley: Evolution’s High Priest is about the making of our modern Darwinian world.
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