Of Apes and Ancestors: Evolution, Christianity, and the Oxford Debate (review)

At least since its fifth edition in 1986, The Norton Anthology of English Literature has included a section on “Victorian Issues,” and the first of these is always “Evolution.” While the excerpts for this section, drawn from Charles Darwin’s work, have been expanded over subsequent editions, Leonard Huxley’s account of “The Huxley-Wilberforce Debate” between his father, T. H. Huxley, and the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, has remained a constant presence. According to the table of contents for the forthcoming ninth edition, that will not change. It is a singular scholarly embarrassment for that venerable anthology, and Ian Hesketh’s recent book on the Oxford debate shows why.

The Oxford debate has become iconic, not just in the history of evolution but in the history of science and even in the cultural history of the relationship between science and religion. It lives alongside Galileo’s troubles with the Vatican and John Scopes’s with the State of Tennessee as a moment when science clashed in open combat with the superstitious bigotry of Christianity. The outline of the debate is well known. At the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1860, the first since the publication of On the Origin of Species (1859), Wilberforce used the occasion of an American scientist’s paper on Darwinism to deliver a lengthy attack on Darwin’s book. Wilberforce ended his critique by sneeringly asking Huxley if he claimed descent from apes through his grandmother or grandfather. Huxley’s ensuing defense of Darwinism ended with the rejoinder that he would rather be the descendant of a monkey than of a man who used his gifts to obscure the truth. This retort shifted the crowd in his favor and marked a turning point in the scientific and public reception of Darwin’s theory.

The problem is that this account derives heavily from Leonard Huxley (whose Life and Letters of his father was published in 1900) and other supporters of Darwinism, many of whom recalled the event several years after the fact. For almost forty years, historians and other scholars who have examined the historical record, particularly contemporary accounts of the “Huxley-Wilberforce debate” in newspapers and in the correspondence of participants and observers, have concluded that the standard account is problematic or erroneous. Not surprisingly, considerable disagreement exists about the precise wording of Wilberforce’s question and Huxley’s retort. More fundamentally, though, it is not clear that Huxley’s retort was heard by the majority of the audience. Even more fundamentally, the evidence suggests that the speech of the botanist Joseph Hooker, Darwin’s close friend and scientific confidant, had the greatest effect on those present. Indeed, to call the event a “debate” between Wilberforce and Huxley is misleading, as many in attendance offered comments and made speeches. Similarly, opinion varied among both participants and audience members about who—if anyone—had won the debate.

Hesketh’s book offers little that is new from a historical perspective, but he has read the relevant primary and secondary material, and he synthesizes it into a concise and readable package. The first four chapters examine the major figures in the debate: the absent Darwin, Wilberforce, Huxley, Richard Owen, and Hooker. The account of Darwin needlessly treats his physical ills as exaggerated; Darwin clearly wished to avoid the inevitable conflicts at Oxford, but his symptoms were real, not merely a “well-worn excuse” or something from which he “claimed” to suffer (12, 28). That of Wilberforce intriguingly suggests as sources of the Bishop’s eagerness to attack Darwinism the reinvigoration of his faith occasioned by the 1841 death of his wife and his growing sense of Christianity under assault on a variety of liberal intellectual fronts. Finally, Hesketh emphasizes the way in which Huxley, bitter at being denied access to the patronage and privilege enjoyed by Owen, came to use Darwinism as a...