Product Description

Selected as one of the eleven Best Books of 1997 by the Editors of The New York Times Book Review.

Champion of modern education, creator of an intellectually dominated profession, T.H. Huxley epitomized the rise of the middle classes as they clawed power from the Anglican elite. Written with enormous zest and passion, Huxley is about the making of our modern Darwinian world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1567252 in Books
• Published on: 1999-03-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 848 pages

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviewed by Susumu Ohno, Ph.D.
Copyright © 1998 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.

From Kirkus Reviews
A whopping life of Thomas Huxley (182595), who did much to bring Victorian-era science to a lay audience. History has tended to remember Huxley as a stalking horse for Charles Darwin, a man who popularized evolutionary theory but did not himself contribute much to it. Desmond (Darwin, 1992), a biologist and historian of science, does much to correct this view- -albeit somewhat breathlessly. It is true, he writes, that Huxley, a physician born into a family of decidedly modest means, spent much of his time speaking to workingmen's associations and other working-class groups about ape ancestors and cave men; it is also true that he popularized the word ``scientist'' and coined the term ``agnostic,'' and that he wrote the first article on evolution for the Encyclopedia Britannica. Yet Huxley made several important advances in the study of the polyp- and medusa-bearing animals, the Coelenterata. Like Darwin, he saw the wonders of the natural world at first hand, having sailed as ship's doctor and scientist on a Beagle-like voyage that introduced him to odd creatures and ecological mysteries; he was thus equipped to appreciate evolutionary arguments concerning the great variability of species over time and space. Huxley was in many ways Darwin's equal, Desmond suggests, but was marshaled as a lieutenant into the cause of natural selection after abandoning his anti-utilitarian view of nature, an abandonment that made him a follower, not a leader. Desmond is too fond of overwrought prose (he describes a dissecting-room cadaver as ``a cold body and a dead brain that had once glowed with hopes and desires''), but he makes a compelling case for our viewing Huxley as a crucial figure in the 19th-century social transformation toward the modern world. This is an unfailingly interesting contribution to the history of science. (b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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