Sci & Educ
DOI 10.1007/s11191-011-9414-8
Darwin’s Other Bulldog: Charles Kingsley
and the Popularisation of Evolution in Victorian England
Piers J. Hale
Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
Abstract The nineteenth-century Anglican Priest Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) was a
significant populariser of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Kingsley was
successful in this regard because he developed such diverse connections throughout his
career. In the 1840s he associated with Chartists and radical journalists; in the 1850s and
1860s he moved freely in scientific circles and was elected Fellow of the Linnean Society
of London in 1856 and Fellow of the Geological Society of London in 1863. In 1859 he
was appointed Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen. In 1860 the Prince Consort was willing
and able to secure Kingsley appointment as the Regius Professor of Modern History at
Cambridge University and he subsequently became tutor to the Prince of Wales. Thereafter
he was frequently invited into high Victorian Society. A friend of ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’
Thomas Huxley, of the eminent geologist Charles Lyell and a correspondent of Darwin, at
every turn he sought to promote Darwin’s ideas as theologically orthodox, a life-long
campaign in which he was eminently successful.
On November 24th 1859 the London publishing house of John Murray published Charles
Darwin’s Origin of Species and, although Darwin had been careful to keep his speculations
on the origins of man to a minimum, suggesting only that ‘‘Light will be thrown on the
origin of man and his history’’, the implications were clear to all (Darwin 1859: 488).
The young and ambitious comparative anatomist Thomas Huxley was one of ninety
men to whom Darwin had asked Murray to send an advance copy of his work, and Huxley
had responded enthusiastically on the eve of publication. Huxley not only thought the
Origin significant for natural history, but also recognised that it would be read as having
profound and controversial implications for the orthodoxy of High Church Tory Anglicanism. ‘‘I am prepared to go to the Stake if requisite’’, he told Darwin, ‘‘I am sharpening
up my claws and beak in readiness’’ (Burkhardt et al. 1991: 390–391).
P. J. Hale (&)
Department of the History of Science, University of Oklahoma, PHSC,
601 Elm Avenue, Rm. 610, Norman, OK 73019, USA
e-mail: phale@ou.edu
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P. J. Hale
The Anglican theologian, naturalist and author, Charles Kingsley, also received an
advance copy of Origin, and he too was quick to respond.1 Kingsley told Darwin that from his
long familiarity with the breeding of domestic animals he was quite prepared to embrace the
transmutationist thesis at the heart of the book. Further, he added, he found it ‘‘just as noble a
conception of Deity, to believe that He created primal forms capable of self development… as
to believe that He required a fresh act of intervention’’. Indeed, he added, ‘‘I question whether
the former be not the loftier thought’’ (Burkhardt et al. 1991: 379–380).
If Huxley wanted a fight, the 1860 meeting of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science, which met in Oxford that year, gave him ample opportunity. As
he had foreseen, the controversy aroused by the implied link between humans and apes was
brought to a head at the meeting—it has subsequently become one of the most notorious
events in the history of science, and certainly in the history of the relationship between
science and religion (Hesketh 2009). The occasion was much anticipated for it had been
well-circulated that the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, a man renowned for
compelling oratory, and whom Darwin rated ‘‘one of the most eloquent men in England,’’
was set to ‘‘smash Darwin’’ and his theory (Burkhardt et al. 1993: 274; Huxley, L. 1913: I,
260). Huxley had already clashed with England’s most renowned comparative anatomist,
Richard Owen, on the Thursday of the week long meetings; the two had disagreed
vehemently over the points of similarity and difference between the brains of humans and
the higher primates. Both men had deemed the debate to be of great moral as well as
morphological significance and the exchange caused a ripple of excitement among those in
attendance.
As Huxley’s son Leonard later reported in The Life and Letters of Thomas Huxley
(1913):
On the Friday there was peace; but on the Saturday came a fiercer battle over the ‘‘Origin,’’ which
loomed all the larger in the public eye, because it was not merely the contradiction of one anatomist
by another, but the open clash between Science and the Church… it was not to hear him [Dr. Draper,
who opened with a discourse on the Origin], but the eloquence of the Bishop, that the members of the
Association crowded in such numbers into the Lecture Room of the Museum, that this, the appointed
meeting-place of the section, had to be abandoned for the long west room… the room was crowded to
suffocation long before the protagonists appeared on the scene, 700 persons or more managing to find
places. The very windows by which the room was lighted down the length of the west side were
packed with ladies, whose white handkerchiefs, waving and fluttering in the air at the end of the
Bishop’s speech, were an unforgettable factor in the acclamation of the crowd… (Huxley, L. 1913: I,
262–263).
Of course, and famously, toward the end of the Bishop’s oration, referring to Huxley,
and with full knowledge that he was in the crowd, Wilberforce demanded: ‘‘Is it through
his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey?’’ Huxley, as he
arose, apparently breathed to the physiologist and surgeon Sir Benjamin Brodie, who was
seated alongside him, ‘‘The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands,’’ and raising the
tenor of his voice, replied for all to hear, ‘‘If… the question is put to me would I rather have
a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of
great means and influence and yet who employs these faculties and that influence for the
mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion—I unhesitatingly
affirm my preference for the ape.’’2 ‘‘Whereupon,’’ Huxley later related to his friend,
1
For the full list of recipients with brief biographical sketch of each see (Burkhardt et al. 1993: Appendix
III:554–570).
2
Thomas Huxley to Frederick Dyster, September 9, 1860, Huxley Papers, Imperial College, London,
[hereafter ‘‘HP’’] 15.117.
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Darwin’s Other Bulldog
Frederick Dyster, ‘‘there was unextinguishable laughter among the people, and they listened to the rest of my argument with the greatest attention. Lubbock and Hooker spoke
after me with great force and among us we shut up the bishop and his laity.’’3
Thus, according to the various accumulated accounts brought together by Huxley’s son,
at least, with this damning repost Huxley won not only the day, but also a major victory in
defense of rational thought from the incursions of blinkered superstition. Hearing of the
events at Oxford, Darwin, who had retreated to Edward Lane’s water cure at Sudbrook
Park, Richmond, immediately wrote a letter congratulating Huxley on his successful and
spirited defense of his theory (Burkhardt et al. 1993: 277 & 280; Browne 2002: 114–125).
In light of this and his further efforts to advance the cause of Darwinism and a secular
mode of investigation in questions of science, Huxley’s self–appointment as ‘‘Darwin’s
Bulldog’’ was certainly appropriate.
In the early and anxious days in which he awaited the response to his book Darwin
appreciated Kingsley’s support too, and wrote as much to his friends, including Huxley, the
geologist Charles Lyell, and the politician, naturalist and anthropologist John Lubbock.
Each had been privy to Darwin’s developing ideas and had been among his principal
supporters from the first. He also mentioned Kingsley’s letter to his second cousin William
Darwin Fox—Kingsley had written a ‘‘capital paragraph’’, a ‘‘grand letter’’ (Burkhardt
et al. 1991: 404–405, 409–410, 432–433, 449–450).4 Darwin was sure to include Kingsley’s opinion in the second edition of Origin, which rolled off the press but a few short
weeks after the first, on 7th January 1860 (Burkhardt et al. 1991: 410–411).5 Given such
firm endorsement by ‘‘a celebrated author and divine’’, Darwin wrote, ‘‘I see no good
reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of anyone’’
(Darwin 1860: 481).
Huxley is well known as Darwin’s main promoter and publicist, Kingsley—although his
letter of endorsement is often quoted—is much less so. My title, ‘‘Darwin’s Other Bulldog’’, invites comparison between these two men and their efforts to promote Darwin’s
ideas, and for good reason. Although the two had very different reactions to Origin, I want
to make the case that Kingsley was just as significant as was Huxley in marshalling the
reception of Darwin’s work. Despite their differences, each recognised the other as
working to advance a common cause—even if there was some disagreement on occasion
over exactly what that common cause was. Kingsley, an ardent theist, saw himself as
promoting Darwin’s revelation of the divine laws by which God governed the world,
whereas Huxley would later coin the word ‘‘agnostic’’ to describe his own commitment to
scientific naturalism. Nevertheless, both men worked tirelessly—and often in collaboration—to promote modern science as a way of understanding the world that would benefit
the working man and advance the national interest.
Significantly, they also saw science as a fundamental tool for the reform of the Anglican
Church, Huxley sought to undermine its monopoly on political power so that merit might
rise where privilege held sway, Kingsley sought to save the church from the error and
3
Thomas Huxley to Frederick Dyster, September 9, 1860, HP 15.117.
4
Darwin later also wrote to John Stevens Henslow confirming that Kingsley was the author (Burkhardt
et al. 1993: 444–445).
5
In a letter to Murray Darwin had clearly indicated his intention to add an insertion to the second addition
that would read ‘‘The only passages of the least importance added, are (p. ) on fossil birds,—on (p. ) nascent
organs in contradistinction with rudimentary organs, - and lastly (p. ) an extract on the theological bearing of
the views advocated in this work.’’ This last, a reference to Kingsley’s views (Burkhardt et al. 1991:
410–411).
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ridicule that he foresaw would follow from refusing the truth of the discoveries that science
was making on all sides.
In re-evaluating Kingsley, especially in the shadow of Darwin’s bulldog, it is significant
that historians have long questioned Leonard Huxley’s account of the Oxford meeting.
Written so long after the event, Ian Hesketh is by no means alone in suggesting that it
served later rhetorical interests more than it was an accurate record of events.6 Certainly, it
seems that it was by no means apparent to all who attended the meeting that the victory had
been Huxley’s quite as unambiguously as his son Leonard’s account would have us
believe, but up for question too is the nature of the ground that was being fought upon, and
the extent to which the description of this being ‘‘a clash between science and the Church’’
needs clarification.
Indeed, as Adrian Desmond, one of Huxley’s biographers, has pointed out, Huxley’s
motivations are better understood in terms of class and power—his intention to attack the
politics of privilege of the established Church, rather than to marshal science against
religion per se (Desmond 1997: 618). Indeed, in correspondence Huxley told Kingsley he
was quite amenable to a reformed church, and later went on to argue the importance of
religious instruction (L. Huxley 1913: II:26).
Some good work has already been done on Kingsley as a populariser, and historians
have noted that the support he gave Darwin was both outspoken and enduring.7 James
Moore has given Kingsley some attention as one among a number of theists who lent
Darwin their support, noting that Darwin was no doubt ‘‘pleased to have Kingsley’s
support against the attacks of Jenkin and the Duke of Argyll’’ (Moore 1981: 306). Kingsley
had written to Darwin regarding a critical article in the North British Review, which
although published anonymously, had been written by Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin,
Professor of Engineering at Edinburgh University. Fleeming Jenkin had challenged Darwin’s theory of speciation on several fronts, but primarily on the ground that useful and
novel variations must be swamped as a result of interbreeding among the general population, causing a return to the mean rather than the divergence of character that was central
to Darwin’s theory (Fleeming Jenkin 1867; Darwin 1859: 111–126). Kingsley considered,
but dismissed Fleeming Jenkin’s objections, noting of the article that ‘‘it is a pity the man
who wrote it had not studied a little zoology & botany, before writing about them’’
(Burkhardt et al. 2005: 295).8
In the same letter Kingsley had also taken Darwin’s side against the criticisms raised by
George Douglas Campbell, the Duke of Argyll in his book The Reign of Law (1867).
Argyll had argued that ‘‘Mr. Darwin’s theory offers no explanation’’ of the beauty and
variety of colour in the plumage and tail-feathers of the hummingbird; ‘‘Mere beauty and
6
Subsequent to this account of the 1860 debate not only have the details of the British Association meeting
been called into question, but so too have the results. There also remains debate as to Huxley’s role, and
some question as to whether the Bishop was quite as convincingly routed as Leonard Huxley’s account
suggests (Lucas 1979; Gilley and Loades 1981; Morrell and Thackray 1981; Burkhardt et al. 1993: 270;
Hesketh 2009).
Also, the ‘‘warfare hypothesis’’ between science and religion, to which the above account has been pivotal
has now long been out of favour with historians (J.H. Brooke 1991; Moore 1981; Livingstone 1987; Bowler
2007). Correspondingly, Huxley’s battles have been re-cast as strategic efforts to carve out a professional
identity and a political niche for the ‘‘man of science’’ in mid-Victorian Britain (White 2003; Desmond
1997; Lynch 2002; Browne 2002).
7
For an extensive bibliography of works on and by Kingsley see the Boston College Libraries’ website:
Charles Kingsley: The Twentieth Century Critical Heritage, available at https://www2.bc.edu/
*rappleb/kingsley/kingsleyhome.html.
8
For Darwin’s detailed reply to Kingsley see Burkhardt et al. (2005: 297–301).
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Darwin’s Other Bulldog
mere variety, for their own sake’’, he contended, were sure evidence of God’s creative hand
(Burkhardt et al. 2005: 295; Argyll, (no date, [1867]: 142, 140)). While, Kingsley confessed that in his ‘‘old fashioned way’’, he was sympathetic to the idea that God created
things that humans might find beautiful, he told Darwin bluntly that he thought that
although the Duke’s book was ‘‘very fair and manly’’, ‘‘what he says about the hummingbirds is his weakest part. He utterly overlooks sexual selection by the females, as one
great branch of natural selection’’ and thus the fact that beauty existed ‘‘for the amusement
of the females first’’ (Burkhardt et al. 2005: 295).9
More recently, and in more depth, Bernard Lightman has drawn attention to the fact that
although Kingsley first published his own natural history writing in the North British
Review in the 1850s, he took quite a different position from Fleeming Jenkin and other
members of the ‘‘North British group’’, who ‘‘bearing the impress of Scottish Presbyterianism… were prepared to enter into alliance with Cambridge Anglicans to undermine the
authority of Huxley and his allies’’ (Lightman 2007: 7–8). Where John Beatty and Piers
Hale have focused on Kingsley’s evolutionary fairy tale Water Babies (1862), in which
Kingsley portrayed natural selection as quite in line with belief in a stern but caring God,
Lightman has highlighted the ways in which Kingsley’s post-Origin popular science
writings reflected the development of his maturing thoughts on how natural theology might
find accommodation with natural selection (Beatty and Hale 2008; Lightman 2007;
Lightman 2010).
As Lightman points out, while in the immediate aftermath of the publication of Origin
in 1859, like the American botanist Asa Gray, Kingsley believed that Divine Providence
was evident throughout even a Darwinian natural world, upon reflection, and as is evident
across Madam How and Lady Why (1869), Town Geology (1872) and Natural Theology of
the Future (1871),—the last of which was reprinted as a preface to his Westminster
Sermons and published in 1874, the year before his death,—Kingsley eventually concluded
that natural science and natural theology were two separate, although complementary,
enterprises. The task of the former was ‘‘to find out the How of things’’, that of the latter,
‘‘to find out the Why’’ (Kingsley 1874, quoted in Lightman 2007).10
Thus historians of science have significantly extended our understanding of Kingsley’s
embrace of Darwinian evolution and of the development of his thoughts on the relationship
between natural science and natural theology as they matured, and of how he presented
these ideas to the public. I have two reservations about this scholarship, however. First, as
scholars have broadened their focus to look at the wide range of Darwinian popularisers
who were influential in the last half of the nineteenth century, it has become the tendency
to look at Huxley, and at Kingsley in particular, as each being just one among many
engaged in the promotion of their own particular view of what Darwinism meant in moral,
political and theological terms. Lightman in particular has done sterling work in recovering
the publication history of the works of many of these popularisers, but, there is further
work that needs to be done on many of these figures in order to establish the real significance of this kind of evidence. As Jim Secord has demonstrated in Victorian Sensation
9
In fact Argyll had not overlooked sexual selection, as Kingsley suggests, he had rejected it as ‘‘beside the
question’’. Argyll thought sexual selection inadequate to explain the extent of the difference between the
comparatively dull female and the wide variety among the ‘‘fantastically decorated’’ males. See Argyll
([1867]: 137).
10
There were significant differences between Gray and Kingsley. Most notably in that Kingsley clearly
embraced the contingency at the heart of Darwinian selection, where Gray, a Calvinist, believed that
evolutionary outcomes were preordained. This is the subject of ongoing research that I am engaged in with
John Beatty. On Gray see the essay by T. Russell Hunter in this volume.
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P. J. Hale
(2000)—his study of the readership and reception of that other great Victorian evolutionary
work Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844)—we need to take account of a
whole social history of reading, of the reputation—in the broadest sense—that an author
held among his or her various readerships. This brings me to my second critique of the
ways in which historians of science have treated Kingsley thus far. We have yet to adequately situate Kingsley in the contemporary networks of class and power in the way that
Desmond has done for Huxley. By looking at Kingsley in this way we can expose the
social networks that were at work that enabled him to become such an effective populariser
across so many different audiences—working men, men of science, broad church and high
church Anglicans, and even among the men and women who frequented the highest
reaches of Victorian society. The various reputations that Kingsley had in these quite
different circles reflected not only the complexities of his own class identity in the context
of a period of rapid social, cultural and economic transformation, but the work he did and
had done at various points in his career.
The period from 1832 through to Kingsley’s death in 1875 was a tumult of social and
political unrest,—of the rise and fall of Chartism, of the formation of a new liberal intelligentsia, and the assault upon and eventual collapse of Anglican monopoly.11 Class identity,
social status and cultural authority were all in flux in the wake of the 1832 Reform Act as
men and women formed new class allegiances and identities and contested the boundaries of
the social-networks and hierarchies of an earlier age (Thompson 1963). Industrialists—self
made men—rose on the back of finance capital, but unlike their French bourgeois counterparts, aspired to the lifestyle of the landed gentry. They bought country houses, and
purchased or married title—no guillotine was raised in this revolution (Thompson 1965).
Moore, and more recently M.J.S. Hodge, have noted the significance of the fact that Darwin
aspired to the lifestyle of the landed squirearchy, as had his father (Moore 1985; Hodge
2009). As industry became king, the engineer and the man of science, as well as the man of
letters,—the author, the journalist, the publisher, the editor—also became familiar and
influential figures in Victorian society. As Noel Annan has shown, men—and a few
women—who made their living by the pen forged a new intelligentsia (Annan 1955).12
In the process of this re-forging of the nation, natural science became a coveted and
contested resource—those who spoke for nature had the power to describe the natural
order. To some of the old guard it was the natural theology of social stasis, to others it
naturalized social change—Paul Elliott has shown that the ideas of the French transmutationist Jean Baptiste Lamarck were not only appropriated to this end by London and
Edinburgh radicals, but that this was the case among radicals throughout the provinces as
well (Elliott 2009; Desmond 1992). To Huxley, of course, the order of nature vindicated
the politics of the emerging middle class—Darwin had written ‘‘a veritable Whitworth gun
in the armoury of liberalism’’ (Huxley 1894: 23). The best suited organism ruled the day
for there were no special privileges in nature.
As science and industry changed the face of the nation Huxley used Origin to assail the
ramparts of Anglican privilege; it was unclear whether this would also be the undoing of
natural theology, or of the Established Church,—certainly Darwin had put the doctrine of
special creation under withering fire.
It was here that Kingsley was so important. Where Huxley uttered a call to arms,
Kingsley offered a calmer reassurance—not only to the working men who had appreciated
11
Desmond and Moore (1994), Annan (1955), Collini (2006) and Desmond (1992).
12
Notable women include Marian Evans (George Eliot); Mrs. Gaskill; and Harriet Martineau, amongst
others.
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Darwin’s Other Bulldog
his labours on their behalf in the 1840s and 1850s, but those liberal theologians who feared
where science might lead them. A competent naturalist and skilled geologist Kingsley
came to mix freely in gentlemanly scientific circles years before Origin was published. As
a result he was ideally positioned to reassure those who were less than eager to embrace the
agnosticism that Huxley offered as the logical consequence of the scientific world-view.
By the 1860s Kingsley also moved in the highest echelons of Victorian society. Well
connected by birth and marriage, by this time he was also a social lion—a famous author,
Regius Professor at Cambridge, tutor to the Prince of Wales and Chaplain to the Queen.
Even here he was often called upon for his opinion on the orthodoxy of Darwin’s views.
Further, as Canon of Chester, he organized a local natural history society, as he had at
Eversley, and led hundreds on excursions into the countryside. Finally, as Canon of
Westminster, in the year before he died, Kingsley republished ‘‘The Natural Theology of
the Future’’, an essay in which he reaffirmed his belief that true religion need fear nothing
from science, as the preface of his Westminster Sermons (1874).
As the 1862 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science had
approached, at which Huxley would once more engage the enemy, Kingsley had written
promising to show that ‘‘I [too] have teeth and claws, and [take] especial pleasure in
worrying a parson’’, but did so, he said, ‘‘just because I am a good churchman.’’13
Throughout his own campaign to popularize Darwin’s work Kingsley’s battle was to see
the established Church reconciled with science, and he was quite as prepared as was
Huxley to employ whatever means might prove necessary.
1 The People’s Priest
Kingsley’s biographers are agreed that Kingsley was not the radical that many of his
contemporaries perceived him to be; that he was a paternalist Tory rather than a social
revolutionary. This is unsurprising given his class and family connections, but he was
perceived to be radical, nonetheless, and he was both genuine and adamant in his conviction that the plight of the poor was intolerable and needed redress.
Kingsley’s early biography mirrored that of many a son of privilege. His father was
descended from an old Hampshire family, his mother from a slave-worked sugar plantation
owner in Barbados. Although his father had spent his inheritance and the end of slavery in
1833 stemmed the flow of income from his mother’s side, Kingsley’s father secured a
reputable career in the Church (Vance 2009). Thus, growing up, the natural theology of
beneficent design that had been the presumption of generations of English gentleman
naturalists was Kingsley’s intellectual framework.
As a youth Kingsley was fascinated with the natural world, and like many a boy of his
age and interests, he was proud of his beetle collection. He was also a keen fisherman, a
crack shot, and a skilled huntsman, having ridden with his father from an early age.
Kingsley’s father was otherwise much aloof from his children, but the two had a love of
nature in common; the Reverend Kingsley was keenly interested in the habits and habitats
of the animals he hunted, and he passed this on to his son. They also shared a fascination
with the earth’s history, the young Kingsley breaking all decorum one evening with an
outburst at the fireside when he was supposed to be reciting Latin grammar, ‘‘I do declare,
papa, there is pyrites in the coal’’ (Chitty 1975: 32).
13
Charles Kingsley to Thomas Huxley, 4th August (1862, HP, 19, 207, 19).
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P. J. Hale
This proved no temporary childish fascination and when Kingsley went up to Cambridge in 1838, while he continued to ride, hunt and fish, his one passion was the course in
geology taught by the Reverend Adam Sedgwick. It was Sedgwick who had some years
before taken Darwin on a fortnight’s geologizing expedition to North Wales as hasty
apprenticeship for the Beagle voyage, and Kingsley later vividly recalled his own love of
Sedgwick’s geology classes, and his appreciation of ‘‘Old Sedge’’, his tutor. Sedgwick had
led students on geologizing excursions (– or ‘‘jolly-gizzing’’ as the stable-keepers referred
to it,) on horseback across the Cambridgeshire countryside (Chitty 1975: 56)—Where
Darwin was the ‘‘man who walks with Henslow’’ during his own time at Cambridge,
Kingsley earned a reputation as a ‘‘hard and fearless rider’’ (Ludlow 1893: 497), and thus it
might not be inappropriate to think of Kingsley as ‘‘the man who rode with Sedgwick’’,—
even though Sedgwick would never bring himself to entertain the idea of evolution.
Kingsley graduated in 1842 with a first class in classics and mathematics.
A graduate of Cambridge and recently married, Kingsley had witnessed the dreadful
plight of agricultural labourers at the outset of his career while staying with his brother in
law, Lord Sydney Godolphin Osborne, who held the parish living at Durweston in Dorset
(Chitty 1975; Seccombe and Clement 2004). Osborne had been deeply engaged in trying to
improve the lot of his parishioners in the face of the landholder’s wanton indifference to
their desperate poverty and the experience fired Kingsley with a combined sense of moral
outrage and obligation that was to become the hallmark of his life. ‘‘I will never believe
that a man has a real love for the good and the beautiful except he attacks the evil and the
disgusting the moment he sees it’’, he wrote (quoted in Chitty 1975: 91). That the plight of
Osborne’s parishioners was not exceptional was brought home to him when he took up his
own living at Eversley, in Hampshire in 1844.
Characteristic of the qualities that would later be dubbed ‘muscular Chrisitianity’,
where Osborne documented the conditions of the poor and wrote sermonizing letters to the
Times, Kingsley was moved to action. He set about providing basic education for his
parishioners, established several savings clubs, and provided what relief he could to the
poorest who flocked to his door (Chitty 1975: 96–97)—‘‘Do the work that’s nearest’’, he
later wrote in one of his poems (Kingsley 1856).
Kingsley’s concern for the working poor brought him notoriety in 1848, when, as
revolutions swept Europe, he involved himself in the Chartist movement. Kingsley had
been writing for John Parker’s Fraser’s Magazine to supplement what was left of his
meagre income once he had tended to the most needy of his flock. Parker, who was a friend
and fellow student of Kingsley’s from his Cambridge days, had published Kingsley’s first
book, The Saint’s Tragedy, earlier in 1848, and was visiting the Kingsleys at Eversley as
the Chartists gathered in London. They discussed the growing sense of unrest in the capital
and Kingsley took the opportunity to return with Parker to see what could be done.
Throwing in his lot with the liberal theologian Frederick Maurice, who was then
chaplain at Lincoln’s Inn, Thomas Hughes, who was studying for the bar, and John
Ludlow, a young barrister, the four founded the Christian Socialist movement. Kingsley’s
outspoken and enthusiastic response to the plight of the demonstrators where others
remained silent quickly saw him dubbed ‘‘the Chartist Parson’’.14 Proving his mettle, he
adopted the pseudonym ‘‘Parson Lot’’, and boldly stated in an open letter to the demonstrators that ‘‘My only quarrel with the Charter is, it does not go far enough in reform.’’ It is
unsurprising that he was quickly branded a radical (Huxley E. 1973: 26).
14
British Library Add. 28510 f.315.
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Kingsley was willing to put his money where his mouth was. When his appeals to
address the insanitary living conditions of the East End of London fell on deaf ears, for
instance, he went into the cholera-ridden districts with horse and cart placing casks of fresh
water on street-corners. On another occasion, outraged at the injustice of the piece-work
system in clothing manufacture he established a tailor’s cooperative in the West End,
persuading Samuel Wilberforce, who was his diocesan, to buy his servants’ liveries there.15
Kingsley elaborated upon his views in the journal that he, Maurice, Hughes and Ludlow
established called Politics for the People,—Parker willingly took on the publication—the
title alone was enough for many to conclude that Kingsley was indeed a man of
immoderate opinion (Chitty 1975: 111; Morton 1966: 137–143). Kingsley went on to write
a series of articles, pamphlets and several novels on the plight of urban as well as agricultural workers. The Macmillan brothers’s publishing house joined Parker in seeing them
into print, gaining Kingsley a national reputation in the process.
Kingsley was to put Macmillans on the map as a successful publisher. His Westward
Ho! (1855), which eventually sold over 100,000 copies, made him, for a time, their most
valuable author (Morgan 1944; Chitty 1975).16 Like Parker, however, the Macmillan
brothers, Daniel and Alexander, were not initially concerned with Kingsley’s work for its
commercial potential. They too revered the liberal theologian Frederick Maurice, and saw
their publishing house as a vehicle to advance the ideals of Christian Socialism rather than
a business venture alone (Morgan 1944: 35). Rising standards of education drove up the
literacy rate exponentially throughout the nineteenth century, while new publishing
practices and falling book prices in the second half of the century also encouraged more
people to read. As Secord attests, the emergence of a new reading public, with its fads and
enthusiasms, its literary lions and society favourites became a significant phenomenon in
Victorian society and politics—one that was to propel Kingsley into the limelight among
the reading classes.17
15
Chitty (1975: 130–133), Maurice F. (1884: II, 78–80) and Pope-Hennessey (1949: 118).
16
Macmillan’s publishing company was founded in 1843 by the two brothers Daniel and Alexander
Macmillan. Devout Christians, they published the theological work of Frederick Maurice, even though they
did so at a financial loss. Through Maurice they met Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, publishing Westward
Ho! And Glaucus in 1855 and Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days in 1857 (Morgan 1944: 35; Anderson
and Rose 1991: 178–195). Westward Ho! was Kingsley’s first novel for Macmillans and Macmillans first
novel. It appeared as a ‘three-decker’, that is, in three separately bound volumes, as was the standard format
of the day, made popular by the success of Scott’s Waverley novels. The standard price for a three-decker
was a guinea and a half, or, 31 shillings and sixpence, a price for this format that persisted even into the late
1880s, when the ‘three decker’ fell to the single volume novel (Griest 1970; Feather 2006: 123–124). This
was the price at which Westward Ho! first appeared in March of 1855. The edition ran to 1,250 copies, for
which Kingsley was paid £300.00 followed quickly in May by £250 for a second edition of 750 copies.
Somewhat against the grain of the publishing trade, which, largely capitulated to the preference of Edward
Mudie’s circulating library for the three volume work, in 1857 Macmillan produced a single volume third
edition with a print run of 6000 copies, for which Kingsley received a further £300. After 1873, author and
publisher came to a new arrangement of a 10 percent royalty fee on further sales. Such was Macmillans’
confidence in Kingsley’s ability to sell, that they assured Mrs. Kingsley that they would publish Two Years
Ago in sufficient numbers to guarantee him £1000 on publication (Morgan 1944: 47). Such was the success
of Westward Ho! that a substantial hotel was built on the North Devon coast of the same name, hoping to
cater to increasingly popular seaside tourism, which Kingsley had also had a role in promoting. The town
which grew up around the hotel took the same name.
17
Between 1814 and 1850 literacy rates expanded across the middle and upper classes. Upper class
readership increased among the upper class from 75 to 90% during this time and from 25 to 75% among the
middle class. The middle class grew rapidly as well throughout the century, which makes the figures for
middle class literacy even more significant. What figures there are for working class literacy suggest a
literacy rate of approximately 20%, although figures are difficult to evaluate, since there was no assessment
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P. J. Hale
This raises interesting questions not only about the cross-class nature of Kingsley’s appeal,
but about social status and issues of class and power in general in the middle third of the
nineteenth century. This period witnessed the birth of what Annan has called an ‘‘intellectual
aristocracy’’, and Stephan Collin, more recently, a ‘‘liberal intelligentsia’’ (Annan 1955:
247–248; Collini 2006). The expansion of industry and commerce required new skills and a
new class of workers, clerks, accountants, and journalists, as well as teachers and professors,
those who earned their bread ‘‘by the dirty pen’’, to use Kingsley’s words (Kingsley 1856).
Drawn primarily, but not exclusively, from across the lower middle class, often from families
with precarious finances, it included radicals, dissenters, and liberal Anglicans as well as
ardent Comteans like G.H. Lewes, Marian Evans and Harriet Martineau. Annan has illustrated the extent of this phenomena and the networks of intermarriage that cemented family,
finance and new class allegiances across the country; earnest and aspiring intellectuals, they
‘‘set the moral and educational and professional standards of what it meant to be a gentleman’’
(Annan 1955).18 Despite their diverse intellectual or religious starting points, they were
united in their critique of aristocratic privilege and corruption. Kingsley’s mish-mash of
aristocratic Tory paternalism, Christian socialism and bourgeois work ethic fit in well
enough—so too did his passion for natural history as a didactic enterprise.
2 In the Company of Radicals and Socialists
Theologically speaking, prior to 1859 Kingsley was a conventional enough natural theologian of the school of Joseph Butler and William Paley. Like many of his cut and cloth he
had had youthful doubts, but reaffirmed his faith through reading Maurice before he was
ordained. When it came to the natural world, like the Cambridge theologian-naturalists
who taught him, Kingsley saw evidence of God’s beneficence all around him.
As I have suggested, though, by the 1840s natural science could mean much more than
this. To Kingsley natural history was the perfect field in which the aspiring Christian might
confirm and develop his faith. The study of God’s creation called for a man of action and
adventure who had an enquiring mind and was prepared to endure discomfort, strenuous
exercise and inclement weather—all in the quest to uncover the laws by which God had
ordered the universe. In true Baconian fashion, Kingsley thought that the naturalist would
then be in a position to apply what he had learned in order to improve the lot of mankind
(Kingsley 1860). Kingsley’s construction of the man of science as the ‘muscular Christian’
was not incompatible with the hunting and riding set, of course, but by the 1850s it
arguably described the likes of Hughes, Maurice, and even Huxley—who had made his
Footnote 17 continued
of working class education until the last decades of the nineteenth century. After 1850 the expansion of
lending libraries, the railway network, and later in the century, of cheaper production methods, combined
with a conscious attempt on the part of publishers to cater to new reading markets drove the cost of books
down (Altick 1957: 294–317).
18
What it meant to be a gentleman was contested throughout this period. Originally indicative of landownership, title and inherited wealth, the new class of successful industrialists, of whom the Wedgwoods
were a classic example, were new money. As E.P. Thompson has long since pointed out, in many ways they
sought to mimic the lifestyle of the aristocracy, buying extensive estates, and buying or marrying into title.
As Annan suggests, this novel lower middle class of intellectuals and pen-pushers asserted a new definition
of what it meant to be a gentleman based on education, honesty and personal integrity—the latter two
criteria, of course, were common to all (Thompson 1965). In light of Thompson’s work it is relevant that
Kingsley’s wife’s father, Pascoe Grenfell who was an industrialist and MP, married the daughter of the first
Viscount Doneraile as his second wife (Vance 2009).
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Darwin’s Other Bulldog
first forays into natural history while enduring the hardships of service in Her Majesty’s
Navy—as well, if not better, than it did the likes of Sedgwick, William Whewell, or
Samuel Wilberforce.19
Quite different interpretations of the lessons that might be learned from the study of
natural history and natural science were evident in the heart of the capital, in the discussions and debates that fired the hopes and aspirations of the journalists, radicals, and
reformers with whom Kingsley now mixed on a regular basis.
Historians have noted the importance of the salon that grew up around John Chapman’s
Westminster Review, located on the Strand, for discussion and development of radical ideas
in biology as well as politics (Desmond 1997: 196–197; Collini 2006: 18).20 Chapman had
taken on the paper from John Stuart Mill and, with the aid of Harriet Martineau, revitalized
its fortunes with a fiery group of young contributing writers (Martineau 2007). Chapman
held evening soirees where G.H. Lewes, Marian Evans, and the young Thomas Huxley
mixed with other young and talented intellects—the physiologist William Benjamin
Carpenter and the atheist cooperator George Holyoake among them (Baker 2004). Further
down the Strand were the offices of the free trade paper the Economist where the young
radical journalist Herbert Spencer was writing his Social Statics (1851) around his light
duties as sub-editor (Spencer 1904a: Vol. I: 347).
On the same street John Parker hosted four o’clock afternoon teas. His father had built
the publishing house as a bastion of liberal Christianity, but, enamoured by Maurice, after
1848 Parker steered it towards Christian socialism (Dean 2004). Many of the same people
who frequented Chapman’s offices also appear on Parker’s publishing list, and presumably
partook of his afternoon teas as well. The network of writers and publishers was a tight
one, and John Murray’s house—at 50 Albermarle Street where he hosted social gatherings
of all comers—was also within easy walking distance.21 Such was the importance of this
close-knit community that John Churchill’s medical publishing house also relocated to the
area in 1854, at 11 New Burlington Street, again only a short walk away (Bartrip 2004).
Thus Kingsley might well have been prepared to appreciate the evolutionary significance of the artificial selection of animal breeders through his long familiarity with the
important variations among dogs and horses, as he had written to Darwin in 1859, but as a
frequent visitor to the capital to see Parker, Maurice and Hughes, and to promote Christian
Socialism, he was certainly not ignorant of the debates about science, politics and transmutation that were going on all around him. Origin was certainly far from Kingsley’s first
exposure to these ideas. Spencer’s ‘‘Developmental Hypothesis’’ appeared in the radical
Leader and his ‘‘Theory of Population deduced from the general law of animal fertility’’ in
19
Sedgwick, Wilberforce and Whewell all rode. Wilberforce was a particularly keen huntsman, and
Whewell an accomplished athlete. On Huxley as naval surgeon see (Desmond 1997); Huxley and Kingsley
did not meet in person until 1855 (L. Huxley 1913: I:177; Klaver 2006: 477–478). In the wake of Kingsley’s
tenure as Regius Professor of History at Cambridge it is evident that ‘muscular Christianity’ had a strong
hold over many of the Colleges at the University, even as religious tests were dropped after 1871. According
to C.N.L. Brooke (1993: 30–39) this was especially evident in the rowing colleges, not only Magdalene
College, but Jesus College. See also C.N.L. Brooke (1988).
20
Herbert Spencer gives an account of Chapman’s soirées and several of the attendees he met there
(Spencer 1904a: I:347–348).
21
John Murray was a traditionally conservative publishing house, and he was responsible too for the
Quarterly Review which retained its conservative politics even as Murray published Samuel Smiles’s Self
Help (1859), incidentally, on the same day as Darwin’s Origin. Murray was a staunch defender of religious
morals, and refused Kingsley’s Saint’s Tragedy as well as Martineau’s Eastern Life on this score. However,
like the other publishers considered here, he hosted large social gatherings, both at his offices on Albermarle
Street and at his home in Wimbledon (Zachs et al. 2004).
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P. J. Hale
the Westminster in 1852 (Spencer 1852). In this essay and in Social Statics, which had
appeared the year before, Spencer outlined his vision of the evolution of humanity towards
a brighter more socialist future on the back of self-reliance, hard work and the development
of moral character—no wonder that Kingsley later acknowledged Spencer as his favourite
author. Like Huxley, though, he remained unmoved—in public at least—by the transmutationism of the anonymously authored Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation,
which, published by Churchill, went through its tenth edition in 1853 (Spencer 1851, 1852;
Secord 2000).22
The company that Kingsley kept in London reinforced the perception that he was a
political radical, an association that was only strengthened in 1851 when he delivered a
sermon on ‘‘The Message of the Church to the Labouring Man’’ to cater to the crowds of
working men who flocked to the capital to see the Great Exhibition. Not only had Kingsley
unequivocally embraced socialism, but his advocacy of ‘‘freedom, equality and brotherhood’’ as the basis of modern Christianity was understandably taken by many as having
revolutionary overtones,—fearing repercussions the Bishop of London banned him from
the City’s pulpits.23 The London Daily News judged Kingsley a tainted man, and he was
branded ‘‘a reckless and dangerous writer’’ by the then Principal of King’s College Oxford,
Richard William Jelf (Hughes 1898: 31–33; Colloms 1975: 136–139). Kingsley’s wife,
Fanny thus had good reason to fear that her husband was doing irreparable damage to his
chances of preferment, and later recalled, ‘‘at this time and for some years to come, the
clergy of all parties in the Church stood aloof from him as a suspected person’’ (Chitty
1975: 111; Kingsley F. 1901: II, 150).
The reactions of Jelf and the Daily News speak volumes about the state of anxiety that
prevailed in London. Given the rapidity with which revolution had spread across Europe,
as the Chartists had marched on London the Duke of Wellington had drawn troops from
across the country to set up barricades across the Thames bridges, and nearly a quarter of a
million special constables had been enlisted and the Queen had left the capital. ‘‘France is
ablaze in every quarter’’, Prince Albert wrote in the February of 1848, ‘‘European war is at
our doors’’ (Weintraub 1997: 192).
In fact though, Kingsley’s message to the working man was one of appeasement and far
from revolutionary. Kingsley, like Maurice, Hughes and Ludlow, certainly recognized the
need for reform, but it was also clear in his mind that the average working man was in need
of moral reform and an education in the values of liberal self-help before political reform
could end in anything but disaster.24 Kingsley’s emphasis upon industry, honesty, cleanliness and Godliness reflected his embrace of Thomas Carlyle’s noble ‘‘Gospel of Work’’
and Maurice’s broad church theology which together quickly became synonymous with
22
Lewes also discussed evolution explicitly in the pages of the Westminster drawing analogies between the
breeding of dogs, poultry, and horses (Lewes 1856a, b, c, d). As Secord points out, the tenth edition of
Vestiges was ghost edited by Carpenter, who also became one of Kingsley’s close friends. Harris (2010)
notes that Kingsley and Spencer met in this period. It is notable that Kingsley included an explicitly
evolutionary dream sequence in Alton Locke which owes a lot to the contemporary evolutionary take on
embryological recapitulation which had been popularized by Vestiges, it was not until after the publication
of Origin that Kingsley was prepared to publically declare himself for evolution.
23
Given the wording of Kingsley’s sermon, and the prevailing political climate, it is easy to see why this
was the common interpretation of his words. Notably, ‘‘Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood’’ is the title of the
last chapter of Alton Locke.
24
Smiles’s Self Help was essentially a liberal rather than a radical tract, Smiles urging his readers that
‘‘character is the anti-septic of society’’ (Matthew 2009).
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Darwin’s Other Bulldog
Kingsley’s ‘muscular’ Christian socialism.25 The pursuit of natural history was one avenue
through which Kingsley urged his readers to develop independence and moral character,
and he championed sanitary science as the means to an environment in which they might
flourish. Kingsley saw the Crystal Palace as a beacon of hope for what might be, and spoke
of a brighter day to come through ‘‘freedom, science, industry’’ (Chitty 1975: 109). As
Geoffrey Cantor has recently pointed out, Kingsley saw in the Great Exhibition the
promise that science and industry might realise a true spirit of international brotherhood,
and was moved to tears upon first entering the building (Cantor 2011: 7 & 102).
3 Taking a Stand on Science
Despite the fact that Kingsley self-deprecatingly described himself as a mere ‘sciolist’ in
his letter of thanks to Darwin, his knowledge of natural history was far from superficial.26
He had been elected Fellow of the Linnean Society on the strength of his work in 1856 and
would be elected Fellow of the Geological Society in 1863.27 Kingsley was committed to
the methods of Baconian inductive science not only for the material improvements science
might bring the English people, but as a means of discovering truth about the world in
service to his natural theology. As a result, Kingsley consciously aligned himself with men
of science in defense of the church against what he saw as the ‘‘Odium Theologicum’’ of
denying the revelations of science—even if these truths were evolutionary,—but he was
also keen to remind men of science that they need not throw out the baby with the
bathwater. ‘‘I am not going astray into materialism as yet’’ he reassured Maurice, his
mentor in theology, ‘‘but I must be utterly confidential and trustworthy with these men if I
am to do any good, and undo the horrible mischief wh. Owen and [Samuel Wilberforce the
Bishop of] Oxford have done’’.28 Indeed, Kingsley not only made a success as a science
populariser with his written work, but in doing so became deeply integrated into the social
networks of natural science. He developed a close friendship with Huxley, Lubbock, Lyell
and others, and despite his social ostracism as a theologian, he found himself welcomed
into the geological community.
Kingsley’s fascination with natural history and geology had been life long, but his interest
took on new significance in the summer of 1854. It was then that Kingsley relocated his
family to the Devonshire coast in the hope that the sea air would alleviate the health problems
that his wife suffered as a result of the damp conditions in the rectory at Eversley. Still
shunned as a radical by the local clergy he was not invited to preach in the vicinity and so
turned to natural history. It was here that he began his researches into the natural history of
the seashore, and befriended Phillip Henry Gosse, author of Naturalist’s Rambles on the
Devonshire Coast (1853) and staunch member of the puritanical Plymouth Brethren.
Historians have usually highlighted the significance of Kingsley’s friendship with Gosse
in order to expose Gosse’s somewhat embarrassing work Omphalos, which he wrote some
years later in 1857, and it is worth returning to this episode here as it demonstrates
Kingsley’s insistence upon the truth to be found through scientific inquiry (Gould 1985:
25
Carlyle (1843), Baldwin (1934), Haley (1978) and Rosen (1994).
26
In Kingsley’s Letters and Memories, edited by his wife, this is mis-transcribed ‘‘scientist’’.
27
Several dates have been suggested by Kingsley’s biographers for his election to the Linnean Society of
London; however, Society records indicate that he was elected 6 December 1856. I am grateful to Claire
Inman, Communications Manager for the Linnean Society of London for ascertaining this point.
28
Charles Kingsley to Frederick Maurice 1863, BL Add Ms. 41297.
123
P. J. Hale
99–113). In Omphalos, Gosse sought to reconcile the apparent incommensurability of
Genesis and geologic time by proposing that God had placed fossils in the rocks to give
only the appearance of pre-existence, just as Adam would have been born with a similarly
‘‘fabricated’’ navel (‘‘Omphalos’’ is Greek for navel). Bereft of favourable responses from
other quarters Gosse had turned to Kingsley to review his book, but Kingsley was more
than candid in his refusal—he could not, he said, ‘‘give up the painful and slow conclusion
of five and 20 years’ study of geology, and believe that God has written on the rocks one
enormous and superfluous lie’’ (Gosse 1986: 105). ‘‘Shall I tell you the truth?’’, he asked,
‘‘It is best. Your book is the first that ever made me doubt, and I fear it will make hundreds
do so. Your book tends to prove this—that if we accept the fact of absolute creation, God
becomes a Deus quidam deceptor [a ‘‘God who is sometimes a deceiver’’]…I would not for
a thousand pounds put your book into my children’s hands’’ (Krause 1980).
This is certainly significant, but Kingsley’s acquaintance with Gosse in 1854 was
important for other reasons too. Their friendship developed over the rest of the year and
Kingsley continued to send Gosse specimens and descriptions of his own dissections after
the latter returned to London. What had begun as an occupation to pass the time and
entertain his children took on new meaning as Kingsley persisted with his own microscopy,
writing a short article on his observations for the North British Review which appeared in
November 1854 (Klaver 2006: 352–356). It was well received and confirmed Kingsley’s
reputation as a competent naturalist. The Macmillan brothers were suitably impressed with
the article and asked him to expand it into the book that became Glaucus in 1855. It was a
skillful descriptive work that reflected both his orthodox natural theology and muscular
Christianity as he encouraged young people to take up the inductive study of natural
history as a means to immerse themselves in the wonders of God’s creation (Klaver 2006:
352–353; Elder 1996: 127–128).
The book had a mixed reception. It was slammed in both the conservative Blackwood’s
Edinburgh Magazine and Athenaeum, but received abundant praise in the pages of the
Westminster. Blackwood’s, like the Daily News, had no love of Kingsley in any case, and was
evidently happy to print a negative review regardless of the actual merits of the book. In the
June of 1855 the same paper had berated what it saw as the deeply questionable sexual politics
of Kingsley’s novels. ‘‘Mr. Kingsley is, we know, a gentleman, but he is also a man of extreme
and unsafe opinions’’, the anonymous author had stated—a comment on the insinuation of
cross-class infatuation evident in several of Kingsley’s novels. Indeed, the reviewer concluded that ‘‘The socialist sympathies of Mr. Kingsley have carried him so far that he has lost
sight of all considerations of rank, breeding, and education’’.29
The review of Glaucus although also negative, was so for different reasons. It was
written by the young radical George Henry Lewes who took issue with Kingsley’s muscular Christianity, his natural theology, and questioned his competence as a naturalist in the
process (Klaver 2006: 356 & 369). Lewes’s over-riding motive, however, was evidently
the competition that Kingsley mounted to his own work in the field. Lewes wrote a series
of three essays on ‘‘Seaside Studies’’ for Blackwood’s that appeared in 1856 with a further
essay and a new series of a further five essays in 1857. He also published a book of the
same name in 1858 which, as Klaver points out, included none-too-thinly veiled attacks on
Kingsley as well (Klaver 2006: 369).30
29
Blackwoods Magazine, 77, 476 (June 1855), pp. 625–643, on 628.
30
(Lewes 1856b, c, d; 1857a, b, c, d, e, f; 1858). Klaver notes that this was in part because he felt there was
nothing original in Kingsley’s work, but primarily because he was envious of the sales of Glaucus, writing to
his publisher to this effect (Klaver 2006: 369).
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Darwin’s Other Bulldog
The favourable review that appeared in the Westminster was Huxley’s. In 1855 Huxley
had only recently returned from his voyage aboard HMS Rattlesnake and was struggling to
make ends meet reviewing scientific literature for Chapman at pennies a line (Desmond
1997: 185). Huxley’s own specialty was marine organisms and, unlike Lewes, he appreciated the clarity and accuracy of Kingsley’s work (Huxley 1855).
Their common interest was to lead to a mutual respect that later blossomed into
friendship following the death of Huxley’s son, Noel, in 1860, and laid the groundwork for
an ongoing intellectual exchange about the relationship between science and religious
belief, about the nitty-gritty detail of doing science, and—on a deeper level—about the
philosophy of science as well (Beatty and Hale 2008). Kingsley had not only appreciated
Huxley’s review of his own work, but later applauded the review of Origin that Huxley
wrote for Macmillan’s Magazine in 1860.31 Kingsley took the implications of Origin for
his natural theology seriously, and appealed to Huxley’s superior scientific knowledge to
help him through, writing to ask if Huxley would kindly send his own papers on the
Coelenterata—the order that then included sea anemones and jellyfish.32 Huxley did so,
and in consequence Kingsley started to rethink the science behind the anti-evolutionary
stance he had taken in the early editions of Glaucus. As their friendship deepened Kingsley
tested his revised and now evolutionary natural-theology on his friend in return (Huxley L.
1913: I: 345–348).
The summer of 1854 was thus crucial for Kingsley’s later career as a science populariser, but there is more. One aspect of that summer that historians have hitherto overlooked is the friendship that he made with the Devonshire geologist William Pengelly.
William Pengelly was well-regarded in the geological community. He had founded the
Torquay Natural History Society in 1844 and went on to found the Devonshire Association
for the Advancement of Science, Art, and Literature in 1861. His life’s work on Kent’s
Cavern did a lot to substantiate not only the vast age of the earth, but also the antiquity of
man, it was Pengelly too, who introduced Kingsley into the geological community—both
familial and literary connections played their part.
As Pengelly’s daughter and biographer, Hester Julian, recalled, ‘‘The friendship
between Charles Kingsley and William Pengelly commenced through the latter’s
acquaintance with the members of the Bird family, who frequently visited Torquay’’ near
to where Pengelly had a house (Julian 1923: 1–13). Torquay was a popular coastal resort
during the mid-nineteenth century and like the Kingsleys, the Birds had also relocated to
Torquay for the summer of 1854. Mrs. Bird (nee Grenfell) was Fanny Kingsley’s sister,
and thus Pengelly was subsequently introduced to Kingsley whom he knew as the author of
Hypatia (1853). Pengelly had reckoned the book ‘‘first rate,’’ and soon came to hold its
author in similarly high esteem (Julian 1923: 1). The two clearly enjoyed each other’s
company in explorations not only of local Devonshire seashore, but also of the local
geology (Julian 1923: 4). Julian recorded that her father ‘‘thenceforward enjoyed the
friendship of the novelist, having the gratification of taking him to see many geological
points of interest at Torquay, and entertaining him at his residence ‘Lamorna’’’ (Julian
1923: 1).
According to Annan ‘‘Family connexions are part of the poetry of history’’, and it is
certainly the case that family, business, and social connections were important both for
securing science an influence in Victorian society and for gaining admission and influence
within the various scientific circles (Annan 1955: 243). Here Kingsley’s connections
31
Charles Kingsley to Thomas Henry Huxley, 7 December 1859, HP, 19. 160.
32
Charles Kingsley to Thomas Henry Huxley, 18 July 1862, HP, 19, 205.
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P. J. Hale
through marriage again placed him in fortuitous company. Not only was Pengelly’s good
friend Mrs. Bird, Kingsley’s sister in law, but the historian J.A. Froude, another of
Pengelly’s friends, was married to Charlotte Grenfell, Fanny Kingsley’s other sister.
Pengelly was also intimate with the geologists Lyell and Bunbury, of course, both of whom
were also frequent visitors to the Grenfell household, at Royal Lodge, Maidenhead, as was
John Lubbock.
Kingsley first met Lubbock in 1855, and it was while both were visiting Pascoe
Grenfell’s estate that Kingsley had taken Lubbock on a trek to the gravel pit near Taplow
Station (Hutchinson 1914: I:23 & 37). It was here in Kingsley’s company that Lubbock
unearthed the first fossil musk-ox to be found in Britain—evidence of a glacial age, it
secured Lubbock’s election as Fellow of the Geological Society in 1855 (Hutchinson 1914:
I: 38). It was through Bunbury too that Kingsley met Joseph Dalton Hooker. As Kingsley
wrote to Gosse in May 1856, the publication of Glaucus saw him receive many ‘‘pleasant
letters, & self-introductions, from scientific men’’—Kingsley was obviously now included
in their ranks (Klaver 2006: 475). Hooker was among those who nominated Kingsley for
election as Fellow of the Linnean Society of London in 1856, as was Thomas Bell, the
Society’s president, who had worked on marine organisms himself.33
It was through these connections and following his appointment as Regius Professor in
History at Cambridge in 1860 that Kingsley and his wife became frequent visitors at
Barton Hall, the Bunbury’s country residence in Suffolk,—another country house that
became a familiar meeting point for men of science of the day. Not only did Kingsley
cement friendships with the Lyell’s here, but it was also at Barton Hall that Kingsley met
with Hooker, Huxley and other members of the geological and scientific community on a
regular basis. It was here too that Kingsley had his first nervous meeting with Darwin, at
which, he later confessed to Lubbock, ‘‘I trembled like a boy’’ even as Darwin encouraged
him to write about the evolutionary natural history they discussed.34
Kingsley took the opportunity of having these and other eminent scientists in his social
circle to continue his campaign to weed out the ill-seeds that had been sown by Wilberforce and Owen, but also, however doubtful of his own ability to do so, he also clearly took
Darwin’s encouragement about making his own contribution to evolutionary natural history seriously. On both of these accounts, Kingsley wrote to Maurice that he believed
himself to be making some progress:
I am very busy working out points of Natural Theology, by the strange light of Huxley, Darwin, and
Lyell. I think I shall come to something worth having before I have done… The state of the scientific
mind is most curious; Darwin is conquering everywhere, and rushing in like a flood, by mere force of
truth and fact… They find that now they have got rid of an interfering God—a master-magician, as I
call it—they have to choose between the absolute empire of accident, and a living, immanent everworking God. Grove’s truly great mind has seized the latter alternative already, on the side of
chemistry. Anstead, in his Rede Lecture is feeling for it in geology; and so is Lyell; and I, in my small
way in zoology, am urging it on Huxley, Rolleston and Bates, who has just discovered facts about
certain butterflies in the valley of the Amazon, which have filled me, and, I trust, others, with utter
astonishment and awe. Verily, God is great, or there is no God at all (Kingsley F. 1901: III: 175).
33
Again I am grateful to Clare Inman for this information. Kingsley was elected to the Society on 6th
December 1856 and his nomination bears the signatures of William Yarrell, Thomas Bell (President), Joseph
D. Hooker, Lovel Reeve, and Edward Rigby. See Linnean (2005), 21, No. 2.
34
Richard D. Beards, ‘‘Introduction’’, Water Babies, London, Penguin (2008), p. xii. Horace G. Hutchinson, Life of Sir John Lubbock, Lord Avebury, London: MacMillan & Co. 1914, pp. 90–98 For an account
of Kingsley’s first meeting with Darwin see Charles Kingsley to John Lubbock, May 27 1867 (Hutchinson
1914: 91–92; Clark 1984: 137).
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Darwin’s Other Bulldog
This list, added to those whom Kingsley met with at Barton Hall, includes some of the
truly eminent men of nineteenth-century science, and yet Kingsley was clearly not in the
minority when he asserted the former conclusion, and urged the same upon his scientific
colleagues—few of whom were comfortable with Huxley’s agnostic conclusions.
Further underlining Kingsley’s intimacy with the scientific community, Pengelly also
introduced Kingsley to his fellow geologists in the London Clubs, and at the Geological
Society of London in particular. Julian tells us that after becoming acquainted at Torquay
in 1854, Pengelly and Kingsley ‘‘were afterwards accustomed to meet in London at the
Geological Society of London [at Somerset House, on the Thames] and the Royal Institution, [where Kingsley was later to deliver and subsequently publish his first overtly stated
support of evolution by natural selection] as well as in the ordinary circles of social life’’
(Julian 1923: 1).
Scientific Societies, London clubs and scientific institutions became an increasingly
important part of the nineteenth-century scientific network in the second half of the
nineteenth century. Membership was often exclusive and usually accessed only through
nomination by existing members and it was a commonplace that social deportment and
gentlemanly status were as important for membership as one’s scientific credentials. Given
Kingsley’s public reputation for impropriety the vouchsafe of a man like Pengelly was
valuable indeed.
Kingsley, for all his bad press, was still recognised as a gentleman—even by the author
of the critical article in Blackwood’s magazine—and the introduction by an existing
member proved sufficient. It says a lot about the changing complexion of mid-century
science that both Darwin and Hooker held back from nominating Huxley for membership
of the Athenæum Club for fear of how he might behave and whom he might offend
(Birkhardt et al. 1990: 106; White 2003: 48). As Paul White has made clear in his study of
Huxley,—and echoing the point made by Annan about the emergence of new social classes
and novel understandings of what it meant to be a gentleman,—with no inherited social
status to his name Huxley had to work hard to present himself as a gentleman of science
(White 2003; Annan 1955). Darwin and Hooker need not have feared, Huxley was later
admitted in 1858 having been nominated by Sir Roderick Murchison, and proved himself
quite able to conduct himself appropriately—the historian and civil servant Sir Spencer
Walpole later recalled ‘‘the singular charm of his conversation, which was founded on
knowledge, enlarged by memory, and brightened by humour’’ (L. Huxley 1913: II: 296).
The scientific society, perhaps more so than the gentleman’s club, provided a space where
conventional social barriers might be held in abeyance. This was especially the case at the
‘conversaziones’ that were occasionally organized by these societies. Such often open-door
events provided further (and overlapping) venues at which men with an interest in science—
from all social ranks—might meet on an equal footing as ‘‘learned gentlemen’’ (Collini 1991:
35). As Sam Alberti has shown, the ‘‘conversazione’’ was much more clearly under middleclass control than the high Victorian Society soirée, of which I shall have more to say
shortly.35 Conversaziones often took place in the gentlemen’s clubs and scientific societies of
35
Although Alberti has suggested that the terms ‘soirée’ and ‘conversazione’ might be used interchangeably, it is useful to draw a distinction between these different, although related phenomena. I reserve
soirée to refer to the Society gatherings at the country estates, such as those that frequently took place at The
Grange. The term ‘conversazione’ I shall reserve for this much more urban and bourgeois cultural phenomenon hosted by scientific societies, scientific or civic institutions, gentlemen’s clubs, either on their own
premises, in town halls or other civic buildings, or, on occasion, at Universities. It is of note that the majority
of local societies, as well as the subtitle of Huxley’s Reader stressed art and literature along with science,
each as complementary aspects of bourgeois cultural capital. With this in mind too Kingsley’s place among
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P. J. Hale
Mayfair, Pall Mall, and Belgravia, but also in provincial urban centres. In this latter case they
served the social function of conspicuously both defining and celebrating science as a part of
national and civic pride that sought to identify science with industry. The celebration of
natural science took its legitimate place alongside the exhibition of other aspects of bourgeois
culture such as the arts and literature (Alberti 2003: 216).
Pengelly’s introductions served Kingsley well at the 1862 meeting too. While Kingsley
caroused with Huxley and other Thorough Club attendees in the evenings (see below),
Pengelly ‘‘had the pleasure of introducing him to many eminent geologists’’ at the meeting
as well. Julian notes that Kingsley was ‘‘warmly welcomed into their ranks’’ and that ‘‘in
the following year he was elected to the Geological Society of London’’ (Julian 1923: 4).36
Nominated by Bunbury and seconded by Lyell, Pengelly’s introductions had clearly served
Kingsley well.37
4 Royal Patronage and the Reguis Professorship
J.M.I. Klaver, Kingsley’s most recent biographer, has made the case that Glaucus earned
Kingsley the attention of the Prince Consort (Klaver 2006: 356). It certainly did, but in fact
both Prince Albert and the Queen had admired Kingsley’s work long before he wrote
Glaucus. Both Victoria and Prince Albert (who became the Prince Consort only in 1857),
had admired Kingsley’s poetry and The Saint’s Tragedy (1848) in particular from its first
publication and from 1859 royal patronage played a significant part in Kingsley’s career.
Kingsley’s views on sex were as controversial as his views on social reform. The Saint’s
Tragedy, his first book-length work, was interpreted by many reviewers as one of questionable propriety, to say the least, and—as we have seen—this judgment held for his
novels too. Indeed Saint’s Tragedy was refused by a number of publishers on account of
this, including Murray, and was only reluctantly taken on by Parker with the insertion of a
suitably pious explanatory preface by Maurice (Klaver 2006: 113).
Kingsley was fast developing a reputation for radicalism and questionable morality,
however, exactly the things that might have ruined the career of another man, and which
had clearly caused Kingsley problems, ultimately proved to be the very things that facilitated his career. Queen Victoria, who had ascended the throne in 1837 was well known for
her concern for the social condition of the English people, and she and her husband
admired Kingsley’s social concern as well as his written work. In 1848, the same year that
Kingsley established a tailor’s cooperative and was urging Wilberforce to have his servant’s liveries made there, the Queen let it be known that those in attendance in her
drawing rooms would be expected to wear British-made clothes, much to the annoyance of
the government (Hobhouse 1983: 31–32).
Thus despite the criticism that Saint’s Tragedy received from some quarters, it became a
Royal favourite—Albert apparently read it to Victoria in installments each evening, as he
Footnote 35 continued
those that we historians have, by reason of our own specialization, tended to emphasize as ‘men of science’
might raise fewer eye-brows.
36
Kingsley was formally elected Fellow of the Geological Society of London, having been nominated by
Bunbury and seconded by Lyell at the May 20th meeting of the Society in 1863. ‘‘Annual General Meeting,
Feb 19, 1864, Report of the Council’’, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, XXV, I, London:
Longmans Green (1864, pp. i–xxix, on p. xi).
37
Bunbury was a baronet, a Whig and a staunch Anglican. He married the geologist Leonard Horner’s
second daughter, Frances, in 1844. Lyell had married Horner’s eldest daughter, Mary, in 1832.
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did later with Yeast, Hypatia and Two Years Ago. Albert had been keenly interested in
natural history since his youth, an interest he had pursued through his education at the
Gymnasium Casimirianum academy in Coburg (Weintraub 1997: 39), and thus when
Kingsley wrote Glaucus Albert read that too, but he was also moved by the plight of the
poor. A driving force behind the Crystal Palace, Albert pressed for the exhibition of model
cottages alongside the demonstrations of the industries and agriculture of the empire, and
he was active in promoting the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring
Classes, having become its president in 1844 (Hobhouse 1983: 57–58).
Kingsley was subsequently invited to deliver a Palm Sunday service at Buckingham
Palace and shortly thereafter was appointed first, in 1859, Chaplain in Ordinary to the
Queen, followed in 1860—at the suggestion of the Prince Albert and the invitation of Lord
Palmerston—to the position of Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University.38 A year later he was engaged as tutor to Edward the Prince of Wales, the future
Edward VII (Klaver 2006: 483–484; Weintraub 1997: 367). By all accounts Kingsley and
the young prince got on famously, the prince dining with Kingsley once a week during the
term time and taking classes with other carefully selected students twice each week.39
From Kingsley’s letters it is clear that the two discussed much more than the history of
England in their long walks together. Thus, in the very years that Kingsley was embracing
one of the most controversial ideas of the century—Darwin’s theory of speciation by
means of natural selection,—he was also becoming one of the most socially connected
characters of his day; one of the country’s most popular authors, he was also increasingly
sought-after as a guest at society events.40 Darwin thus had good reason to be enthusiastic
about Kingsley’s continued support, and indeed, Kingsley only went on to become an even
more influential spokesman for his ideas as the years passed, not only in high society, but at
Cambridge too.
The position as Regius Professor of History at Cambridge that the Prince had managed
to secure for Kingsley was to prove important not only for his own advancement, but, and
as a result, for his promotion of Darwin’s views. ‘‘Consider the noble honour of the thing &
the status w. it gives me & you & the children henceforth’’, he wrote to his wife (F.
Kingsley 1901; Klaver 2006: 484). The appointment was not without controversy however,
for although Albert had served as Chancellor of the university from 1847 and did so until
1861, the university was a house of many mansions (C.N.L. Brooke 1993: 181–182).
Although invited to stand for election as Chancellor by the Vice-Chancellor and supported
by Whewell, Master of Trinity, he did not do so unopposed. Edward Herbert, second Earl
of Powis contested the election, and those electors who feared the Prince would usher in
reform stood firm behind the traditional mission of the University to train gentlemen in
classics and churn out clergymen. The Prince won by only the narrowest of margins, and
did indeed usher in reform, with the support of the Lord Russell and Peel, and at the urging
of Lyell and with the aid of Sedgwick the Prince oversaw the introduction of courses in
modern science and languages, law, philosophy and modern history (Hobhouse 1983:
65–66; Weintraub 1997: 182–187).
38
Klaver notes that in fact Kingsley asked the Prince to secure the appointment for him, citing Kingsley’s
letter to his wife in evidence: ‘‘To decline a thing after having asked for it would offend the Prince deeply’’
(Klaver 2006: 484). This is indicative of the level of intimacy that Kingsley enjoyed in his contact with the
Prince Consort.
39
Kingsley was aided in the selection of these students by William Whewell, Master of Trinity College.
40
Klaver notes that Kingsley’s offer to write a preface for Charles Henry Bennett’s illustrated edition of
Pilgrim’s Progress was sufficient for Longmans publishing house to reconsider their initial refusal to take
the work (Klaver 2006: 483).
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P. J. Hale
In 1848 Kingsley had taken a deeply partisan stance in favour of university reform in Alton
Locke. ‘‘To monopolize those institutions for the rich, as is done now is to violate the spirit and
the letter of the foundations’’ as was ‘‘to restrict their studies to the limits of middle-aged
Romanism’’, he had boldly stated. The required subscription to the 39 Articles of the
established church, he added, only served to admit ‘‘the reckless, the profligate, the ignorant,
the hypocritical, and only excludes the honest and the conscientious, and the mass of the
intellectual working men’’ (Kingsley 1881: I: 351). These words had not been forgotten by
1860, even if the Prince was ultimately successful in securing Kingsley the post.
Despite the questions raised regarding his appointment as Professor of Modern History,
and the mixed reception that his inaugural lecture ‘‘The Limits of Exact Science as Applied to
History’’ received, Kingsley proved immensely popular with the undergraduates (Hesketh
2011; Chadwick 1975: 311).41 His lectures drew a large and enthusiastic attendance;
Kingsley could clearly captivate an audience, and his students would cheer as he reached the
culminating points of his lectures; it is clear that they enjoyed his interest in their sporting
activities as well as his performance in the lecture hall—especially in the rowing.
Kingsley’s efforts to promote Darwin at Cambridge were not confined to rabble-rousing
among the undergraduates, however, and he also took pains to foster an environment of
intellectual inquiry regarding both the scientific evidence for and the theological implications of evolution. He debated with those he found incredulous of Darwin’s theory,
finding, as he later wrote to Darwin, that those who opposed Darwinism most vocally were
those who knew the least, including his friends at College, the Lowndean Chair of
Astronomy and Geometry, John Couch Adams and Arthur Cayley, who would, from 1863,
become the first Sadleirian Professor—both were eminent mathematician-astronomers.42
Kingsley’s knowledge of natural history and familiarity with the Origin also set him in
good stead to expose the arguments of at least one anti-evolutionary pamphlet that was
doing the rounds among the underclassmen, but he also on another occasion approached
Darwin to ask whether he had a copy of Frederick Hutton’s paper that had been published
in the Geologist, which he ‘‘very specially want[ed] in your defense’’ (Burkhardt et al.
2005: 296).43 Hutton’s paper provided a concise set of responses to the frequently asked
questions of doubters, a work that Kingsley had previously owned, but misplaced.
5 Kingsley’s Acceptance into Victorian High Society
Kingsley’s Royal patronage and position at Cambridge evidently trumped what were
quickly written off as his youthful indiscretions. Fanny Kingsley recollected that one
consequence of his appointment as Chaplin in Ordinary was that ‘‘From this time there was
a marked difference in the tone of the public press, religious and otherwise, towards him’’
(F. Kingsley 1901; Klaver 2006: 467). Historian Owen Chadwick has summed up the
41
Chadwick has made clear that contrary to the opinion of some of Kingsley’s biographers, the original
objections to Kingsley’s appointment had nothing to do with his qualification (or lack of it) for the post as an
historian, rather, he argues that Kingsley was in fact eminently qualified. Opposition was entirely to do with his
radical political associations and his slandering of the university in Alton Locke (Chadwick 1975: 311); Vance
(2009) suggests that his inaugural lecture was a success, this in contrast to C.N.L. Brooke (1993), who argues
that Kingsley’s lecture exposed his weakness as an historian. Herbert Spencer recalled that it was ‘‘severely
criticised, if I remember rightly, when the address was originally published’’ (Spencer 1904b: 37).
42
Burkhardt et al. (2005: 477–479), Crilly (2009) and Hutchins (2009).
43
Also see Darwin’s reply (Burkhardt et al. 2005: 297–301). Kingsley had forgotten the author and title,
Darwin suggested it must have been Hutton’s paper.
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Darwin’s Other Bulldog
situation, noting that Kingsley now ‘‘had reputation where formerly he had notoriety’’
(Chadwick 1975: 311).
As Fanny Kingsley further testified in the Letters and Memories she prepared after her
husband’s death, ‘‘His yearly residences at Cambridge gave him not only the advantage of
associating with scholars and men of mark in the University, but of paying visits in the
neighbourhood to houses where good pictures and charming society refreshed and helped
him through the toil of his professional work—to Wimpole, to Ampthill Park, and other
country houses, where he and his were always made welcome’’ (Kingsley F. 1901: III:237).
And this is significant. The Kingsley’s were welcome at Bunbury’s estate at Barton Hall,
but these were invitations of a different order. Ampthill Park was the home of Francis
Russell, a liberal MP who in 1872 would become the 9th Duke of Bedford. Russell’s wife
had been Queen Victoria’s bride’s maid and later served as mistress of the robes. Russell,
like Prince Albert was a keen experimental agriculturalist (Lloyd et al. 2004). Wimpole
House, still the largest estate in the environs of Cambridge, was the residence of ViceAdmiral Charles Philip Yorke, 4th Earl of Hardwicke and Lord Privy Seal (1858–1859),
Postmaster General and Lord Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire.44 Kingsley’s growing reputation and royal connections had clearly gained him entry to the highest echelons of
Victorian Society, and he and his were subsequently invited to attend the soirées and
parties at these and other residences that characterized the Season (Davidoff 1973).
In the context of reconstructing the relationship between science and Society in this
period, James Secord has drawn attention to the importance of conversation as an area of
investigation hitherto given scant consideration by historians of science (Secord 2007).
Conversation served a number of purposes at Society gatherings, both cementing, as well
as policing the boundaries of those that made up the social elite (Alberti 2003: 216). One
important marker of this was knowing the rules of the game, so-to-speak, as well of course,
as having the ability to play—of knowing what one might talk about and to whom—
exactly the reservations that Darwin and Hooker had initially held about the young Huxley
(Secord 2007).45 While those who were secure in their inheritance might be concerned to
appear the lion of the party rather than a social bore in order to satisfy their own vanity,—
or to impress eligible young ladies—for those who had a more tenuous entry to Society,
such as the self-made men of science and letters who might be graced with an invitation,
either a faux pas or the appearance of pedantry might result in being cut from future guest
lists all together (Secord 2000: 164).46 Despite his lifelong stammer and controversial
personal history Kingsley evidently proved as great a success with his Society hosts as he
had with his students. Bunbury was certainly sincere in his recollection following
Kingsley’s death, that ‘‘I hardly think I have ever known a man whose conversation was so
charming,—so rich in matter, so various, so easy and unassuming, so instructive, yet so
44
Yorke attained the rank of Admiral in 1863.
45
Darwin and Hooker need not have been concerned, as Huxley later proved himself to be the most amiable
company in conversation. Spencer Walpole was only one who recalled ‘the singular charm of his conversation, which was founded on knowledge, enlarged by memory, and brightened by humour’ (Huxley L.
1913: II:296).
46
Also see George Cruikshank’s cartoons from 1845 (Secord 2000: 179). On being cut, Alfred Russel
Wallace, for example, recounts his own experience of offending his hostess at Stratton Street, Lady BurdettCoutts, by stating his opinion too freely, and as a result ‘‘was never invited again’’ (Wallace 1905: II:51–52).
Barabara and Hensleigh Wedgwood note that such a standard was also defining of the middle class dinnerparty set, where ‘‘Throughout dinner, the well-dressed guests, both men and women, were expected to be
clever, agreeable, and au courant with art, literature, politics, science and theology… those who did not
measure up conversationally failed to survive socially’’ (Wedgwood & Wedgwood 1980: 275).
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P. J. Hale
free from dogmatism and from any preaching or lecturing tone, [he was] sensibility,
humour, wisdom, so happily blended’’ (Bunbury 1894: III: 59).
Of course, it is also quite possible that rather than a detriment to his new-found popularity, now that Chartism was a dead movement, Kingsley’s past notoriety might have
added to his attractiveness as a valued Society guest, especially in light of his broad
knowledge and outspokenness on the most pressing issues of the day.47 Kingsley was
certainly a success in this regard, however much he might complain to his wife (although
with what is surely a measure of false modesty) ‘‘I hate being made a lion of’’ (Kingsley F.
1901: III:258).
Science was one topic that was deemed a suitable subject for conversation at Society
events, and natural history in particular. Secord tells us in Victorian Sensation (2000) that
works like the anonymous Vestiges were frequently set up as talking points at fashionable
soirées during the season of their publication and it is clear from Kingsley’s accounts that
Darwin and his work were the hot topic of discussion at such gatherings throughout the
1860s. This was only more so after the adventurer and discoverer Paul du Chaillu brought
the first gorilla specimens to England from Africa—in the process making the somewhat
esoteric morphological points of contention between Huxley and Owen at the British
Association suddenly seem very much closer to home.48
Who better to have as a weekend guest to keep conversation interesting than Kingsley,
not only a popular author, but also a man who was well-credentialed to speak to both the
scientific and the theological implications at stake in the evolution debates? For although,
as Secord and Sam Alberti have noted, the open expression of heterodox ideas might be
seen as bad manners in polite society, Kingsley’s virtue in this regard was his ability to
speak both sensitively as well as knowledgably to the concerns of all comers (Secord 2007:
141; Alberti 2003: 216).
Kingsley’s charm could be incisive, but subtle enough not to cause offense. Huxley
clearly took great pleasure in recounting to his colleague, Frederick Dyster, the story of
Kingsley’s response to being admonished for associating himself with such unorthodox
views as those expressed in Origin by the renowned hostess, the ‘‘Evergreen Marchioness,’’ Lady Maria Elizabeth Ailsbury. Also of the Royal household, and a long-established
and popular, if matronly, figure at Society parties, Ailsbury’s opinion was one that mattered. On this occasion, in 1860, Kingsley had certainly been disarming. As Huxley related
the occasion:
He is an excellent Darwinian to begin with, and told me a capital story of his reply to Lady Aylesbury
[sic] who expressed her astonishment at his favouring such a heresy—‘What can be more delightful
to me Lady Aylesbury, than to know that your Ladyship & myself sprang from the same toad stool.’
Whereby the frivolous old woman shut up, in doubt whether she was being chaffed or adored for her
remark.49
However the Marchioness took Kingsley’s comment, this last sentence is telling testimony of the acceptance of Kingsley’s opinion as that of an expert, as much as of someone
47
Secord (2007) notes the increasing importance of celebrity as well as accomplishment at the soirée.
48
Secord (2000: 155–190) especially 187, Secord (2007: 147) and Rushing (1990).
49
Thomas Huxley to Frederick Dyster, 29 February 1860, HP, 15. 110. On Maria Elizabeth Tollemache,
Lady Ailsbury, see Gibbs (1910: I:64), especially note (e): ‘‘For nearly 60 years the ‘evergreen Maria
Marchioness’, sprightly, gay and universally popular, was a constant frequenter of London parties and
country race courses, and was to be seen in Hyde Park with flaxen hair (or wig), driving two ponies,
generally preceded by two outriders.’’ The family seat was Tottenham House in Savernake Forest, near.
Marlborough, but following her husband’s death in 1856 it seems she spent more time in rooms reserved for
her in Windsor Castle.
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Darwin’s Other Bulldog
whose opinion was shielded by Royal patronage. Indeed, despite the potential for Darwinism to be controversial, the fact that Kingsley proposed a reconciliation of scientific
naturalism and Anglican faith in his own particular reconception of a post-Darwinian
natural theology would also have prevented discussion of the topic appearing improper, as
Secord again points out, ‘‘Talk about God’s providential laws could smooth over these
kinds of potentially awkward social situations’’ (Secord 2000: 162).50 In any case, as
Klaver has pointed out, it was clear to all—with few exceptions—that the Kingsley of
1860, the Cambridge don, member of the Royal Household and literary lion, was a far cry
from the Kingsley of 1848, from Chartism, and the Christian Socialist movement (Klaver
2006: 472).51
It was in the course of this new flurry of society invitations that Kingsley and his wife
also found themselves frequently invited to ‘‘The Grange,’’ the extensive country estate of
Lord and Lady Ashburton in Alresford, Hampshire.52 The Grange, more so perhaps than
the other country seats mentioned above, was a well known society venue. The second
Lady Ashburton, Louisa Caroline Stewart-Mackenzie kept up the tradition established by
her husband’s first wife, Lady Harriet Baring, who had been one of the better-known and
more respected of Victorian Society hostesses, her weekend and sometimes month-andmore soirées echoing the salons of an earlier age.53 Louisa Caroline frequently brought
prominent men of arts and letters together to discuss the latest matters of interest and
controversy, and, as Kingsley subsequently wrote to Darwin, in 1862 he had had occasion
to defend both Darwin and his writings in these conversations.54 As Kingsley reported, in
one instance, the bringing down of a brace of ‘‘Blue Rock’’ pigeons by a shooting-party
naturally turned conversation to the Origin. Pigeons, of course, being the subject of much
of the opening chapter:
I have just returned from Lord Ashburton’s where the Duke of Argyll, the Bp. of Oxford, & I, have
naturally talked much about you and your book. As for the Bp. you know what he thinks - & more
important, you know what he knows.
The Duke is in vy different mood; calm, liberal, ready to hear all reason, though puzzled as every one
must be, by a hundred questions wh. You have opened (Burkhardt et al. 1997: 62–64).55
50
Kingsley had been inspired by Maurice’s Kingdom of Christ [1842], which appealed for a broad church
unity, see Maurice (1958).
51
As Klaver points out the views of the author of the accompanying text to the 1872 Vanity Fair caricature
of Kingsley could equally have been written of Kingsley in 1859: ‘‘Time and opinions move so fast that it is
difficult to recall the period, though it is really so recent, when the Rev. Charles Kingsley, sometime author
of ‘‘Alton Locke’’ and now Chaplain to the Queen… was one of the most daring and advanced revolutionists
of his cloth.’’
52
William Bingham Baring, and the second Lady Asburton, Louisa Caroline Stuart Mackenzie. Lady
Harriet, the first Lady Ashburton, died in 1857, Baring married Louisa Caroline in 1858.
53
For instance, of the Grange under the first Lady Ashburton see: Jane Carlyle to Mrs. Russell, 29
December 1848, ‘‘we staid 6 weeks at a fine place called The Grange, belonging to Lord Ashburton. The
visit was anything but a retirement; for in London we should not have seen half so many people, - the house
being filled with company the whole time’’ (Carlyle 1893: 250). For Louisa Caroline’s role as a patron of the
arts and a socialite see the Asburton Papers which are in the process of being made available online at:
http://www.nls.uk/catalogues/online/cnmi/inventories/acc11388.pdf.
54
At the Ashburton’s it seems likely that Kingsley was one of the more scientifically informed men present.
Specific study of the particular venues, hosts and guests at the various Society gatherings, however, would
be revealing.
55
Argyll had hitherto confessed himself unconvinced by Darwin’s use of pigeon breeding as a satisfactory
metaphor for selection in nature, both in his 1860 Presidential Address to the Royal Society of Edinburgh
and in private conversation with Charles Lyell (Burkhardt et al. 1997: 64 n. 4).
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P. J. Hale
These gatherings were thus clearly not all shooting and fishing, but also frequently
included discussion of science—perhaps somewhat unsurprising given the make-up of this
particular shooting party.56 Importantly though, the Society setting allowed Kingsley to
engage his companions in frank and open discussion of the implications of Darwin’s work
in a way that might not have been possible in less-select company. In addition, Kingsley’s
familiarity with Wilberforce, his diocesan at Eversley (Kingsley F. 1901: III:103) and later
with George Douglas Campbell, the Eighth Duke of Argyll, provided the opportunity for
him to make the case that Darwin’s theories of selection and speciation were quite compatible with Anglican orthodoxy. As Kingsley related to Darwin, he ‘‘was called on to
decide [the matter].’’ (Burkhardt et al. 1997: 63). Argyll had previously expressed his
belief that the analogy of pigeon breeding ‘‘fails fundamentally’’ to substantiate speciation
in nature, having confided to Lyell in February 1860 that ‘‘As regards the effects of
breeding, I think the facts he gives in respect to pigeons tell more against than for his
theory’’ (Campbell 1906: II: 482.)57 However, as Kingsley continued: ‘‘My own view is—
& I coolly stated it, fearless of consequences—that the specimen before me was only to be
explained on your theory… to shew how your views are steadily spreading— …of 5 or 6
men, only one [, presumably the Bishop,] regarded such a notion as absurd’’ (Burkhardt
et al. 1997: 63).
Despite Kingsley’s deference to the Bishop in matters of Church orthodoxy, his lack of
regard for Wilberforce’s opinion in scientific matters is clear from this letter, as is
Kingsley’s confidence—at least in such a setting—that the expression of unorthodox ideas
would not harm his career. However, he was clearly impressed by the Duke.58 Kingsley
wrote to Huxley of the occasion of his success; and of the jokes they had clearly made at
Huxley’s expense: ‘‘We had great fun about you with the Bishop of Oxford, Monkton
Milnes and the good little Duke, at Lord Ashburton’s. You cannot conceive how Darwin’s
views are spreading.’’59
In the August following the 1862 Season, and less than 6 months after this meeting at
The Grange, Kingsley, his wife and young son Maurice spent a month vacationing in
Scotland, a trip which included a week at Murthly Castle in the company of Lord John
Manners and Sir Hugh Cairns, followed by a stay with Argyll at his Scottish country home,
Inverary Castle.60 As Don Opitz has indicated in his study of science in the Victorian
country house, ‘‘Thriving among the aristocracy was a wide network indeed of country
houses infused in scientific thought and practice, intimately linked across broad distances
56
Richard Monkton Milnes was one of the unnamed guests present, Charles Kingsley to Thomas Henry
Huxley, 20 February (1862, Imperial College, 19, 203–204). The following year Milnes was made 1st Baron
Houghton, and became a very influential figure among the literary set. Like Kingsley, he too was interested
in theology and education.
57
Argyll had also expressed scepticism on this point both in his 1860 Presidential Address to the Royal
Society of Edinburgh and in private conversation with Charles Lyell (Burkhardt et al. 1997: 64, n. 4).
58
Kingsley had once deferred to his Bishop on the order of service, abandoning his long established habit of
prayer prior to his sermon (Kingsley F. 1901: II:103). Kingsley admired much of the Duke’s argument, but
with reservations. See Kingsley’s correspondence with Darwin on the matter below.
59
Charles Kingsley to Thomas Henry Huxley, 20 February (1862, HP, 19, 203–204).
60
The height of the Season dated from May to July (Davidoff 1973). Manners was a graduate of Trinity
College, Cambridge and prominent statesman. In the 1840s he had also been a prominent voice in the Young
England movement. Cairns, appointed Solicitor General and Knighted in 1858 was, like Kingsley concerned
with child welfare, being a keen supporter of Barnardo, as well as a keen sportsman, once claiming that he
only practiced law so as to afford to keep Hunters.
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Darwin’s Other Bulldog
through tightly knit social relations’’ (Opitz 2005: 145). Inverary was one such household.
As Mrs. Kingsley recounted,
The visit to Inveraray was one of the bright memories and green spots of his [Kingsley’s] life, and
always looked back upon by himself and those who were with him with gratitude, combining as it did
not only beautiful scenery [and the successful fishing!], but intellectual, scientific, and spiritual
communings on the highest, holiest themes (Kingsley F. 1901: III:144).
It is evident from these last comments that this more intimate visit allowed Kingsley and
Argyll to return to the subject of God’s place in a Darwinian world, and the sufficiency, or
not, of selection to explain and account for the many beautiful as well as the useful
contrivances exhibited in nature. Following these discussions, Argyll went on to engage
Darwin deeply and thoughtfully over the apparent design in nature—and upon the existence of natural beauty as evidence of this in particular. He wrote extensively critiquing the
sufficiency of natural selection to explain every aspect of nature in the Edinburgh Review,
and Good Words, expanding upon doubts he had first expressed in his 1860 Presidential
Address to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. These enquiries eventually formed the basis of
The Reign of Law (1867), a work in which he attempted to reconcile the Anglican faith
with a God that worked exclusively through law (Campbell [1867]). It was this work that
Kingsley had in mind when he had commented to Darwin that the Duke had entirely
overlooked the significance of sexual selection.
As well as being an important advocate for natural selection, Kingsley was thus one of
the very first to also recognise the role of sexual selection.61 In light of their correspondence on the Duke’s position, and encouraged by Kingsley’s favourable reception of
sexual as well as natural selection Darwin wrote ‘‘I had hoped to see a review by you on the
Reign of Law,’’ but he was to remain disappointed—at least no review by Kingsley has
been found (Burkhardt et al. 2005: 421).
For Kingsley, the highlight of this trip, however, was that the two men did more than
just talk about science, and he wrote to his mother, clearly ecstatic: ‘‘We are going out to
dredge sea-beasts, live Terebratulas!!!! and I will bring you some’’ (Kingsley F. 1901: III:
144).62 Kingsley’s excitement was understandable. It was dredging that had been his
initiation into the scientific community with Gosse and Pengelly on the Devonshire coast.
Further, Kingsley was familiar with Terebratulas, a genus of brachiopod that includes
many living as well as some now extinct fossil species. From his own studies, however,
Kingsley knew only the fossilized forms as described by John Phillips in his Palæozoic
Fossils of Cornwall, Devon and West Somerset (1841), and had clearly never encountered a
living specimen.—One can only surmise the conversation that must have ensued between
Kingsley and Argyll as to exactly what light the Origin might have thrown upon this
particular phenomenon. By Kingsley’s account, at least, Argyll was ‘‘ready to hear all
reason’’, and despite his reservations, his thoughtful consideration of the issues led to his
becoming known as ‘‘the Darwinian Duke’’ (Browne 2002: 307).
Fired with enthusiasm for Darwin’s ideas, and even before his trip to Scotland, Kingsley
had written to Huxley of his intention to attend the 1862 British Association meeting that
was to convene in the city, declaring that he would be keeping an ‘‘open house,’’ he
expressed the hope that the two might find the time to meet.63—Alfred Russel Wallace,
who was also in attendance at the meetings for the first time, was among those who ‘‘had
61
For more on Kingsley’s unorthodox and passionate views on sex see Chitty (1975).
62
A genus of brachiopods which includes many living and some fossil species.
63
Charles Kingsley to Thomas Huxley, 18th July (1862, HP, 19, 205. 19).
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P. J. Hale
the pleasure of spending an evening with Charles Kingsley in his own house, and enjoying
his stimulating conversation’’ (Wallace 1905: II:45). Kingsley’s stated intention in
attending, he told Huxley, was to ensure ‘‘fair play,’’ promising that ‘‘if anybody tries to get
up a ‘religious’ controversy… then will I shew you that I [too] have teeth and claws, and
[take] especial pleasure in worrying a parson, just because I am a good churchman.’’64
In saying as much, Kingsley was only re-emphasizing a position he had staked out some
two years earlier. In the flurry of deeply earnest letters that the two men had exchanged in
the wake of the death of Huxley’s young son Noel, Kingsley, like Huxley, had bared his
soul:
What you say about scientific men and the Church of England I am well aware of. All I can answer is
that standing, as I do (rightly or wrongly) on both grounds, I will do my little best to see fair play for
the men of science. Them I love, them I trust, with them I should like, had I my wish, to live and
die.65
It was at this meeting that Huxley was to renew his attack on Richard Owen over the
morphological similarities or differences between man and ape. This was a debate that had
its origins in the Oxford meeting, but this time around saw not only Huxley, but a wide
array of authorities on the matter reject Owen’s conclusions outright.66
Owen had refuted the existence of the small structure known as the hippocampus minor
in the brains of apes, upon which, according to the account in the Times, Mr. William
Flower, an ardent Darwinian, friend of Huxley and recently appointed conservator at the
Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, decided the question with the
improbable announcement: ‘‘I happen to have in my pocket a monkey’s brain.’’ The
production of the said organ allowed Huxley to demonstrate that it did indeed exhibit the
debated character (Fletcher 2004).
Annual meetings—then, as now,—served the vital discipline-building functions of the
exchange of ideas, forging and cementing alliances, and of networking. Kingsley had
evidently witnessed Huxley’s victory and the two, who were by now fast friends, took their
celebrations of this victory over Owen into the last evening of the conference, at what
became the inaugural meeting of the Thorough Club, on the 7th October.67 The dinner that
became the Thorough Club had originally been intended to be a serious ‘‘Ibis’’ dinner for
the ornithologists, hosted by Alfred Newton, the Drury Traveling Fellow at Magdalene
College and editor of the ornithological journal Ibis. The Thorough appropriated the tradition of the long established ‘‘Red Lion Club’’, an informal dining, joking, drinking, and
speechifying club, which quickly became an alternative to the official meeting banquet
whose members ‘‘fed together during each meeting of the association and expressed
applause by gentle roars and wagging of (coat) tails’’ (Wallace 1905: II:47–48). Appropriately set to meet at the Lion Hotel in Cambridge, Huxley and Kingsley, appear to have
hijacked the occasion, declaring it a meeting of a ‘‘club for the promotion of common
honesty,’’ Huxley taking Chair, with Kingsley as Vice (Raby 2001: 170; Barton 1998:
64
Charles Kingsley to Thomas Huxley, 4th August (1862, HP, 19, 207, 19).
65
Charles Kingsley to Thomas Huxley, 26 September (1860, HP, 19, 186–187).
66
See Burkhardt et al. (1997: 449–451) for Huxley’s account, plus notes. Also Browne (2002: 156–160).
Owen’s papers, both delivered on October 3rd to Section D, were, ‘‘On the zoological significance of the
cerebral and pedial characters of man,’’ and ‘‘On the characters of the Aye–Aye, as a test of the Lamarckian
and Darwinian hypotheses of the transmutation and origin of species.’’
67
See Huxley’s dinner invitation, Huxley Papers, 31: 121, and the draft constitution, Huxley Papers, 31:
120.
123
Darwin’s Other Bulldog
442–443, especially n.3).68—The concern with ‘‘common honesty’’ was clear comment on
the apparent lack of this quality displayed by Owen in his own presentation to section D
earlier in the week. The founding statement, although jotted on a napkin among the
frivolities, is serious comment on the bond that cemented Kingsley and Huxley’s friendship and their common purpose—‘‘The primary object of this club is the promotion of a
thorough and earnest search after scientific truth particularly in matters relating to
biology.’’69
Although the Red Lions continued to meet and dine annually at each subsequent
Association meeting the ‘‘Thorough Club’’ appears not to have been so long-lived,—Ruth
Barton cites Marian Evans as dating its demise to the March of 1863 (Barton 1998: 443,
n.83).70 Huxley clearly had high hopes for the club, and wrote to Darwin shortly after the
inaugural meeting encouraging his membership, however, the serious concerns that Huxley
wanted to address only later found their expression in the much more exclusive X-Club
(Burkhardt et al. 1997: 449–451).71 Nevertheless, it is significant that Kingsley clearly
fitted well and easily into such company and spoke of an invitation to dine with the ‘‘Red
Lions’’ again at the 1867 meetings—the membership of the ‘‘Thorough’ and the ‘‘Red
Lions’’ clearly overlapping.
During the evenings of the meeting Kingsley, who had given the human relationship
with apes a significant amount of thought, and discussed the matter with both Huxley and
Darwin, not only wrote a comic skit on the debate between Owen and Huxley for private
circulation, but also sketched out a parody of the encounter between the two eminent
anatomists which later appeared in his evolutionary fairytale Water Babies, which had been
appearing serially in Macmillan’s Magazine from that August.72
In Water Babies the debate over the hippocampus minor became the great debate about
the ‘‘Hippopotamus Major’’ and Kingsley, of course, whilst he clearly sided with Huxley
over the issue, could not help but ridicule the whole episode and the importance which both
men attached to its outcome. On the one hand, it seemed that Owen was prepared to deny
the evidence of his own eyes—evidence well established by a number of authorities even
before Flower had so dramatically facilitated its empirical demonstration—and simply
refused to admit this point of morphological similarity, let alone the theory of common
ancestry of man and ape which Huxley hung upon it.73 Huxley, on the other hand, tried to
make the case not only for common ancestry, but that man could be fully accounted for in
terms of material nature alone. To Kingsley, both men were misguided, but Owen the more
so. To deny the evidence before one’s eyes was clearly against the grain, both in science
and in natural theology. Huxley, on the other hand, was certainly sincere, but to Kingsley’s
68
Newton had witnessed Huxley’s demonstration of the hippocampus minor, and while clearly convinced
he thought that Huxley and Flower had been savage to Owen (Wollaston 1921). Invitations to dine with the
‘‘thorough’’ were quickly printed; the cost of the dinner was 12 s. 6d. See HP 31.121.
69
HP 31:120.
70
See also George Eliot’s letters to Sara Sophia Hennell, 26 November 1862 and 9 March 1863, in Haight
(1955: IV:66 & 78).
71
It is notable that the ‘‘Thorough’’ was mooted as name for what became the ‘‘X’’, however, as Herbert
Spencer recalled, ‘‘the historical associations negatived it’’ (Spencer 1904a, b: II:134).
72
Kingsley wrote a short skit in the style of Lord Dundreary which is reproduced in Kingsley F. (1901:
III:145–148).
73
Which is quite bizarre, of course, given that Owen seriously hinted at common ancestry in his famous
essay ‘‘On the Nature of Limbs’’ in which, as Ron Amundson notes, Owen forged a middle ground in the
ongoing debate over the relative merits of form and function in comparative anatomy (Amundson 2007:
xxxi); see also Rupke (2009) who refutes the caricature of Owen as merely a dogmatic anti-evolutionist.
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P. J. Hale
mind, had erroneously taken no account of the human soul—a point on which he subsequently took Huxley to task:
I know an ape’s brain and throat are almost exactly like a man’s—and what does that prove?… If
men had had apes bodies they would have got on very tolerably with them, because they had men’s
souls to work the bodies with. While an ape’s soul in a man’s body would be only a rather more filthy
nuisance than he is now (Kingsley F. 1901: III:176).
Kingsley not only urged reconciliation upon men of science, but also upon his fellow
Churchmen, his position as a ‘‘good churchman’’ also gave him leave to discuss the
theological implications of Darwinism behind-closed doors, a campaign that Kingsley
carried on throughout the rest of his career, even following his appointment as Canon of
Chester in 1870.
Despite the initial reservations of John Saul Howson, the Dean of Chester, about
whether such a controversial figure as Kingsley was fitted for Cathedral life, the two
quickly discovered shared scientific as well as spiritual interests and became fast friends.
Howson was chair of the Chester Archeological Society, and Kingsley quickly established
a popular (and still extant) Chester Society for Natural History, Science and Art shortly
after his arrival in the city, enrolling Lyell, Phillip Egerton, Hooker, Huxley, and John
Tyndall, as well as other notables as honorary members (Kingsley F. 1901: IV: 91).
Recalling the Canon’s service to the city of Chester, Howson wrote to Fanny Kingsley
recalling her late husband’s compelling and articulate conversation on matters of science
and theology.
I must refer to the good done here by Canon Kingsley in the course of casual conversations. Great
effects are produced in this way by certain men; and he produced them without being aware of it…
On being asked how he reconciled Science and Christianity, he said, ‘By believing that God is love.’
On another occasion, when the slow and steady variation of Mollusca, traced from stratum to stratum,
was pointed out by a friend, with the remark that Darwin’s explanation would hardly be considered
orthodox, he observed, ‘‘My friend, God’s orthodoxy is truth; if Darwin speaks the truth, he is
orthodox (Kingsley F. 1901: IV:154).74
In the January following his arrival in Chester, Kingsley was invited to give a lecture at
Sion College, the London Anglican theological college, and chose for his subject ‘‘The
Natural Theology of the Future,’’ a lecture in which he urged upon his audience the
necessity for theologians to seek reconciliation with the revealed facts of natural science,
Darwin’s work included. Echoing the sentiments of the reassurances he offered to Howson,
he declared:
I sometimes dream of a day when it will be considered necessary that every candidate for ordination
should be required to have passed creditably in at least one branch of physical science, if it be only to
teach him the method of sound scientific thought. And if it be said that the doctrine of evolution, by
doing away with the theory of creation, does away with that of final causes—let us answer boldly,
Not in the least. We might accept what Mr. Darwin and Professor Huxley have written on physical
science, and yet preserve our natural theology on exactly the same basis as that on which Butler and
Paley left it. That we should have to develop it, I do not deny. That we should have to relinquish it, I
do (Kingsley F. 1901: IV:87).
Kingsley’s efforts in defense of Darwin both at Cambridge and further-a-field were not
without effect, and he later wrote to Darwin to inform him of the sea-change that had
occurred at the university between the early post-Origin days and his return to the city in
the winter of 1867:
74
For Kingsley’s friendship with Howson see Martin (1958: 19, n. 3).
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Darwin’s Other Bulldog
My Dear Mr. Darwin, I have been here 3 or 4 days; & have been accidentally drawn, again & again,
into what the world calls Darwinism, & you & I & some others [call] fact & science—I have been
drawn thereinto, simply because I find everyone talking about it: all shewing how men’s minds are
stirred.
I find the best and strongest men coming over…& I find in Cambridge, that the younger M.A.’s are
not only willing, but greedy, to hear what you have to say; and that the elder (who have of course
more old notions to overcome) are facing the whole question in a quite different tone from what they
did 3 years ago… I trust you will find the good old university… to be your finest standing ground in
these isles (Burkhardt et al. 2005: 477–479).
Darwin was again thankful for Kingsley’s confidence, and made it clear in his response that
he believed Kingsley to be the primary reason for such a welcome turn-around. ‘‘Although
you are so kind as to tell me not to write,’’ he responded, ‘‘I must send a few lines to thank
you for your letter. It is very interesting and surprising to me that you find at Cambridge
after so short an interval a greater willingness to accept the views which we both admit. I
do not doubt that this is largely owing to a man so eminent as yourself venturing to speak
out. The mass of educated men will always sooner or later follow those, whose knowledge
they recognise on any special study…’’ (Burkhardt et al. 2005: 480).
Kingsley’s social mobility did not divert him from continuing to exercise an influence in
the world of publishing,—not only as an author, but as an editor as well. In addition to his
efforts at Cambridge and in Society, Kingsley advanced Darwinian science through his
contributions to the popular periodicals of the day. Kingsley was well known as a reviewer
for both Macmillan’s Magazine and the North British Review and had also had a hand in
The Reader: A Review of Literature, Science, and Art (Byrne 1964).75 Although under the
proprietorship and editorship of John Ludlow—the paper was originally dominated by
Christian Socialist authors—it increasingly took on a more scientific bent as, from 1864,
Huxley joined with Norman Lockyer, Hooker, Tyndall, Herbert Spencer, and Darwin,
amongst others, to support and staff the paper (Byrne 1964; Roos 1985).
Although by the following year Huxley’s interest had turned largely from the Reader to
the Fortnightly Review, Kingsley had seen enough of Huxley’s energy and ability for
engaging the public in serious discussion of science that when he later found himself in the
position of temporary editor of Fraser’s in the April of 1867, he immediately appealed to
Huxley, as well as a number of his other scientific friends and acquaintances for copy, with
the expressed intention of keeping the scientific arguments in favour of Darwin in the
public mind.76 As he put it to Alfred Newton, who was by this time the first professor of
zoology and comparative anatomy at Cambridge,
I want to make it gradually a vehicle for advanced natural science, and have written to several leading
men in that sense… Do pray help me, and, if you are good enough, make John Clark, or any of your
friends, help me also, and we will try and get a little real natural history into folks heads (Kingsley F.
1901: III: 252).77
Kingsley had indeed written to a number of ‘‘leading men,’’ including Lyell, Bunbury,
Huxley and Darwin. Darwin again wrote in appreciation of Kingsley’s efforts, but
demurred; busy with the proofs of Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication he
75
On the history of the Reader, see John Francis Byrne. ‘‘The Reader: A Review of Literature, Science, and
the Arts, 1863–1867’’, Ph.D. Thesis, Northwestern University, 1964.
76
J. A. Froude, Kingsley’s brother in law was the editor, and was travelling in Spain researching his multivolume History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada.
77
John Willis Clark (1833–1910) was a Fellow of Trinity College and in 1866 had been appointed
superintendant of the museum of zoology and secretary to the museum and lecture rooms syndicate. He was
a talented systematist (James and Pickles 2004).
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P. J. Hale
declined taking on more work (Burkhardt et al. 2005: 242–243). Kingsley’s attempts to
pack Fraser’s with a little ‘‘advanced natural science’’ were not entirely unfruitful,
however, Newton wrote on the ‘‘Birds of Norfolk’’, Bunbury on the ‘‘Flora of South
America’’ and Kingsley himself wrote the prose idyll ‘‘A Charm of Birds,’’ having first
pumped Newton for ‘‘any Darwinite lore about the development of birds’’ (Kingsley F.
1901: III:252 & 253).78 It was in Fraser’s too that Kingsley also published the two lectures
he gave to the Royal Institution on ‘‘Science’’ and ‘‘Superstition’’ in June and July of 1867
respectively—as mentioned above, aside from Water Babies, the two were his first
confession of faith as a Darwinian in print and he humbly sent them along to Darwin,
suggesting: ‘‘I think you will find that I am not unmindful of your teaching’’ (Kingsley F.
1901: III:255–256).
Kingsley was thus unceasing in his efforts to promote Darwin. It was later that year,
1867, and following hard on the heels of his visit to Murthly and Inverary, that Kingsley
attended the British Association meeting in Dundee, and again he was welcomed among
the most eminent men of science as one of their own. He dined with the ‘‘Red Lions,’’
before finding himself sat at dinner later in the week in the more formal setting of the
Association banquet among some of the most eminent geologists in the British Isles
(Kingsley F. 1901: III: 258). Kingsley had been present in Dundee to hear Archibald
Geikie, then newly elected Director General of the Geological Survey of Scotland, and
President of the Geological Section, deliver his Presidential Address, but also to deliver an
evening lecture on ‘‘the origin of the present scenery of Scotland’’ based on the geological
theories of James Hutton and John Playfair (Geikie 1924: 118).
The following day the University of St. Andrews hosted a banquet in honour of the
Association, and, as Kingsley reported to his wife: ‘‘I sat at dinner between dear old
Phillips [Professor John Phillips, Assistant General to the British Association] and Geikie,
with Grant-Duff next, who has asked me to come on and visit him if I have time, and kill
his Salmon. Hurrah!’’ (Kingsley F. 1901: III:258) Geikie recalled Kingsley’s presence at
the dinner in his autobiography, noting that Kingsley had praised his lecture as ‘‘a kind of
revelation to him of what he had for years been groping and grubbing for’’ (Geikie 1924:
118). Also at the dinner was Professor J. Campbell, a geologist at St. Andrews. Kingsley
had been impressed by his book Frost and Fire (1865) and had written in advance of the
meeting to ask his opinion on a number of issues (J. Campbell 1865; Kingsley F. 1901: III:
257). According to a local paper and in evidence of the level of appreciation that
Kingsley’s work as a popularizer was held among practicing geologists, ‘‘Professor
Campbell, St. Andrews, then proposed [a toast to] ‘The Literature of Science’, coupling it
with the name of Prof. Kingsley…’’ Kingsley, in return, then stood ‘‘to return thanks for
the unexpected honour of coupling his name with any toast within these learned walls, and
especially in connection with the meeting of such a body as the British Association’’
(Kingsley F. 1901: III:259, n.1.) The assembled party was clearly aware of the importance
of men like Kingsley to advancing the cause of science.—After all, as Paul White has
noted, ‘‘Though [he was] clearly operating within the newly designated genre of popular
science… Charles Kingsley produced volumes that rivaled or exceeded in influence those
of Huxley, Tyndall, and other elites’’ (White 2003: 75).
In addition to writing popular science, Kingsley was also clearly thinking seriously
about writing his own contribution to post-Darwinian science, as Darwin had urged him to
do at their first meeting, and in which he was encouraged by his other scientific friends,
Lyell and Bunbury in particular. As is evident from Kingsley’s correspondence, he had
78
This essay has recently been reprinted in Hale and Smith (2011)
123
Darwin’s Other Bulldog
been slowly amassing facts in support of a comprehensive account of the geology and
natural history of the Bagshot Sands, a subject that brought him to consider biogeography
as it related to geology, and took him as far afield as Dundee in search of answers. This was
a subject that he had introduced in both his lectures to working men, and in his popular
works, Madam How and Lady Why (1869) in particular (Kingsley 1920: 93–97). As he had
written to his mentor Frederick Maurice, the science in these works, even—and especially—in Water Babies, was ‘‘not nonsense, but accurate earnest, as far as I dare speak
yet,’’ and at the same time he confided his intentions to write something of a more serious
bent ‘‘in some 7 years hence,’’ not wishing to rush in with half-baked ill-considered ideas
(Kingsley F. 1901: III:142).
This was a project that Kingsley had been working on, albeit intermittently, for much
longer than 7 years at the time of his untimely death in 1875, sending and receiving
correspondence from amateurs and recognised experts alike. By mid 1863 he was writing
to Bunbury that he believed Lyell had overlooked the geology of the Bagshot Sands region
when making the overarching claim in Antiquity of Man (1869) that the whole of England
south of the Thames had been laid during the glacial period. In a detailed letter to the
contrary Kingsley explained his reasons for believing that ‘‘the whole [from south of the
Thames] to the Bagshot sand district was ice-traveled sea at that period, and during that
period rose slowly out of the sea,’’ describing at length both his own observations and those
of his correspondents in support of his conclusions (Kingsley F. 1901: III:174–175). As
Kingsley later confessed to Bunbury, it was his hope, upon accepting his appointment to
the Canonry of Westminster in 1873, that he would finally be freed to write ‘‘deliberately,
but not for daily bread,’’ and thus find the time to really get into this project. He also
confirmed Bunbury’s view of his preferment that it would bring him into closer proximity
to ‘‘scientific society, libraries etc.’’ (Kingsley F. 1901: IV:155). It was not to be, however.
Finding other projects, Kingsley never quite found the time to write his own big book, a
fact that both Bunbury and Lyell sorely lamented upon his premature death.
Following the resignation of his Cambridge Professorship in 1869, Kingsley had written
to his friend William Carpenter, Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution,
that with his new-found freedom from lecturing he was ‘‘intending henceforth to devote
myself to my first love, physical science, as far as is compatible with my parish duties.’’
(Kingsley F. 1901: IV:32). His celebrity, his ability, and his knowledge led his scientific
friends to make sure that he made good on this intention, and he found himself invited to
speak as an authority at conversaziones. Indeed, it was not long before he was writing
good-natured complaints to Pengelly about his increasingly hectic scientific schedule.
Doubtless at Pengelly’s suggestion, the Devonshire Association had asked Kingsley to take
on their Presidency for 1871 an honour that required that he address their meeting in
Bideford that year. The secretary of the Association, acting on behalf of the publisher of
their annual Report and Transactions, had pressed Kingsley for the text of his Presidential
Address some weeks in advance. Clearly feeling the pressure, Kingsley had written to
Pengelly, half in complaint, and half, it seems, to excuse his delay: ‘‘I have had a preposterous request through ___ [Rev. W. Harpley] the Secretary, that I should send them the
MS. of my address by the 4th. Do they think a man has nothing to do but to serve them? I
want a whole fortnight after the 1st to write my address, and have two lectures [at the
Royal Institution] and a scientific conversazione to get done between now and then’’
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P. J. Hale
(Julian 1923: 11).79 Kingsley’s life as a populariser was clearly much more involved than
we have hitherto recognised.
As Canon of Westminster, the year before his death, Kingsley published his Westminster Sermons (1874) prefacing them with his 1871 ‘‘Natural Theology of the Future.’’
He urged his readers, just as he had urged the clergymen to whom he had originally
addressed the work at Sion College, to acknowledge that it was not only possible, but
necessary that theologians accommodate the latest findings of natural science with scripture even if this ultimately meant revising traditional exegesis. The harsh view of nature as
red in tooth and claw, a world of premature death, of struggle, and competition was, he
argued, quite compatible with ‘‘a God not merely of love, but of sternness’’ (Kingsley
1874: xv).
With more than a nod towards the doubts expressed by his good friend Huxley—the
outcome of over a decade of discussion between the two men on this point—Kingsley
concluded that it was ultimately not important whether all men of science saw testimony to
God’s existence and benevolence in the natural world, those who would not see it, he
suggested, simply had not the eyes to see such things. Rather, those, like Huxley, who
approached nature as physical students only, concerned only with the ‘‘How’’ of things,
had no business with final causes: the moral explanation of the ‘‘Why’’ of things. This was
the job of the Natural Theologian. Thus, to reach a full account of the world, Science and
Religion were necessary compliments, each fulfilling its own part of a division of labour in
reaching truth about the world, and although Huxley found such a conclusion somewhat
perplexing, it is clear that Kingsley promoted just the sort of middle ground that many of
his contemporaries in both science and theology found comfortable. Theologians might go
about their business without any fear of science, but regard it instead as further testimony
to God’s lawful character,—while scientists could hold back from embroiling their own
profession in the dubious moral quagmire of implied atheism, remaining free to legitimately seek their own answers without the necessity of referring back to the intervention of
supernatural or divine fiat.80 As Kingsley had wrote to Darwin, ‘‘It is better that the
division of labour should be complete, and that each man should do only one thing, while
he looks on, as he finds time, at what others are doing, and so get laws from other sciences
which he can apply, as I do, to my own’’ (F. Kingsley 1901: III, p.177).
6 Conclusion
In most accounts of the Darwinian Revolution Charles Kingsley is passed over as a
marginal character. In recent years, however, his popular works, especially Water Babies,
Madam How and Lady Why, and Glaucus have begun to receive serious scholarly
79
I have been unable to discover which conversazione Kingsley was referring too, or the subject on which
he spoke. However, the text of Kingsley’s Presidential Address to the Devonshire Association was indeed
completed in time to appear in their Transactions: (Kingsley 1871). The Hon. General Secretary for 1871
was Reverend W. Harpley, MA, FCPS, of Clayhanger, near Tiverton. I am grateful to Geoff Bulley, registrar
of the Devonshire Association for this information.
80
Strick (2000: 112–114) briefly discusses this solution to the problems presented by the harsh realities of
Darwinian nature. He notes that Frederick Barnard, President of Columbia College in New York, was also
troubled by the amount of death in nature and the problems it caused for natural theology, and ultimately
found the sort of consilience offered by Kingsley wanting. Kingsley was untroubled by death in the natural
world, convinced that it was everlasting life in the supernatural world that mattered.
123
Darwin’s Other Bulldog
attention. The recent publication of unabridged and annotated editions of Water Babies is
further testament to a resurgence of interest in Kingsley and his place in the history of
science. However, the depth to which Kingsley was embedded in the social networks of an
emerging scientific community that sought to establish its own authority in a period
wracked with dynamic class and cultural politics has not previously been appreciated; nor
has the extent of the audiences to which he successfully appealed. Kingsley clearly fit well
with the rising middle class men of science, but letters from working men testify to his
continued popularity among them throughout his long career as well. Further, in light of his
society success he was able to write to Darwin in 1867 that ‘‘even the Swells of the World
are beginning to believe in you’’, noting too that ‘‘I have found actually a Darwinian
Marchioness!!!!!’’ (Burkhardt et al. 2005: 423).
This account of Kingsley reminds us too of the hazy nature of the distinction historians
have drawn between men of science and popularisers of science in the early years of this
period, and of its gradual hardening by the end of Kingsley’s life (Morus 2007). In the
1860s it was clearly as non-controversial for Kingsley to be instrumental in the foundation
of the ‘Thorough Club’ as it was for Sam Wilberforce to be an active participant in the
British Association meetings, or indeed, for Darwin to urge Kingsley on to write up his
own big book. In 1868, though, the same year in which Kingsley had recognized his
inability to review the more specialised scientific literature for Macmillans, Kingsley had
happily received Campbell’s toast to ‘‘The Literature of Science’’—clearly important for
keeping science in the public eye, but here recognised as something short of actual science.
Illustrative of this point, in 1876, the year following Kingsley’s death, the President of the
Geological Society, John Evans, clearly wrestled with how to classify Kingsley’s contribution to a field. Reflecting upon Kingsley’s passing in his anniversary address, he noted
that ‘‘[a]lthough, owing to the many-sided and diffusive nature of his genius, he may not
have carried his studies as far as to entitle him to take any foremost place in the ranks of
science, there are few modern writers who have done more to promote intelligent inquiry
and a taste for scientific knowledge among all classes’’ (Evans 1876: pplii).
Acknowledgments I would like to thank John Beatty with whom I continue to have fruitful discussions
about Kingsley’s theology, his science, and Water Babies, I am grateful too to the archivists at Imperial
College London for their prompt and enthusiastic help in my research. Note: for the readers convenience
when quoting or citing Kingsley’s correspondence I give the references to the Letters and Memories
published by Kingsley’s wife. In instances where her text differs from the manuscript letter, or is only
partially reproduced, I have given the reference to the British Library mss collection; the Darwin Correspondence; or the Huxley Papers.
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