The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science by Ruth Barton (review)

The Victorian scientist Thomas Henry Huxley liked to tell a funny story about the time that he overheard two gentlemen chatting in the Athenaeum Club in London. "I say … do you know anything about the X Club?" one asked the other. "What do they do?" The reply amused Huxley to no end. "Well they govern scientific affairs, and really, on the whole, they don't do it badly" (Huxley qtd. in Barton 231).

Ruth Barton's magnificent book The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science explores the reality behind that anecdote. She peels back many layers of historical mythologizing and debunks Huxley's exaggerated claim to show how a group of friends who were deeply interested in science came together on a regular basis to dine and ended up as some of the most powerful figures in late-Victorian culture. They called themselves the X Club: nine ambitious outsiders who became insiders. They never could find a tenth man they liked well enough to bring their collective name up to the Roman numeral ten. They met more or less monthly from 1864 until 1892. In person, they were in the main socially mobile, non-dogmatic in religious outlook, and adopters of liberal, reformist, and metropolitan values. Most were struggling to make a career in their chosen scientific vocation. A few held secure social positions and wealth, although two of them lost their fortunes and, like the rest, had to find a job. Barton is clear about the dangers of making easy judgments about the demographics, yet it is still accurate enough to say that these men were hugely influential in creating the modern profession of science. They were active in many educational institutions and government bodies in Britain, and for a number of years were dynamic and no doubt provocative, reforming presences in the prestigious Royal Society of London: the elite academy for high-achieving gentlemanly thinkers. Huxley, along with fellow X Clubbers John Tyndall and Herbert Spencer, became internationally famous for presenting science to general audiences. John Lubbock entered Parliament. They were all brilliant thinkers, either in mathematics, philosophy, natural history, chemistry, physiology, or physics. Collectively, via skirmishes against cultural traditions, mutual financial constraints, criticisms of education, theological fights, collaborations, failures and successes, warm friendships, holidays, and copious correspondence, they reveal the rich materiality of Victorian science.

Who were they? They joined the club at various times in the 1860s and were invariably introduced by mutual friends. Huxley is probably the best known to posterity. A little older than Huxley were George Busk (physiologist and archeologist), Joseph Dalton Hooker (botanist), Spencer (philosopher and sociologist), and Tyndall (physicist). Younger than Huxley were William Spottiswood (mathematician), Edward Frankland (chemist), Thomas Archer Hirst (mathematician), and Lubbock (archeologist and politician). Individually, they could be self-righteous, argumentative, dignified, loyal, generous, over-confident, opinionated, and difficult. Apart from Lubbock, they were mostly of modest origins. They were warm friends, eventually acquiring wives and families who also became close friends.

Barton's book about them is the product of years of labor in the archives and is destined to become the most authoritative source on the X Club and its meaning for science. It is written by an author at the top of her game. Much more than this, it deserves to be read by any Victorianist interested in how science as a profession emerged from more general natural philosophy in the middle years of the nineteenth century, and how scientists became significant members of the new intellectual and cultural communities emerging in Victorian London. It is a highly accessible account of genuinely momentous movements in Victorian culture that are often overlooked by scholars who may not be inclined to steep themselves in the scholarship of the history of science. Part of the value of Barton's analysis is to explain and explore Victorian science through the medium of a collective biography that features a...