monkeys into men and men into monkeys: chance and ... - monkeys...to understand the laws of natural...

Monkeys into Men and Men into Monkeys: Chance and

Contingency in the Evolution of Man, Mind and Morals

in Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies

PIERS J. HALEDepartment of the History of ScienceUniversity of Oklahoma601 Elm Ave, Rm. 610

Norman, OK 73019USAE-mail: [email protected]

Abstract. The nineteenth century theologian, author and poet Charles Kingsley was anotable populariser of Darwinian evolution. He championed Darwin’s cause and that of

honesty in science for more than a decade from 1859 to 1871. Kingsley’s interpretation ofevolution shaped his theology, his politics and his views on race. The relationship betweenmen and apes set the context forKingsley’s consideration of these issues.Having defended

Darwin for a decade in 1871 Kingsley was dismayed to read Darwin’s account of theevolution of morals inDescent ofMan. He subsequently distanced himself fromDarwin’sconclusions even though he remained an ardent evolutionist until his death in 1875.

Keywords: Charles Kingsley, Evolution, Hipocampus minor, Darwin, British Associa-tion, Water Babies, Nineteenth century, Race, Morant Bay, Eyre affair, Thomas

Huxley, Descent of Man, Origin of Species, Biology, England, Politics, Theology,Science and religion

Jack (who has been reading passages from the ‘‘Descent of Man’’ tothe wife whom he adores, but loves to tease).‘‘SO YOU SEE, MARY, BABY IS DESCENDED FROM AHAIRY QUADRUPED, WITH POINTED EARS AND A TAIL.WE ALL ARE!’’

Mary. ‘‘SPEAK FOR YOURSELF, JACK! I’M NOT DES-CENDED FROM ANYTHING OF THE KIND, I BEG TOSAY; AND BABY TAKES AFTER ME. SO THERE!’’

(image courtesy of Punch, Ltd., London)

Journal of the History of Biology � Springer 2012

DOI 10.1007/s10739-012-9345-5

For the Victorians evolution was a moral question as much as it was oneof biology. The suggestion that even the most respectable of Victorianladies might share common ancestry with apes was only a part of theconcern, although it was this that most engaged the public – and certainlyit was this that most engaged Victorian cartoonists and caricaturists(Browne, 2001; Figure 1). A greater moral challenge was posed byuncertainties about the evolutionary process itself, for although theVictorian era was nothing if not an age of progress, even the most pro-gressive of Victorians were aware that evolution had a darker side, andthreatened degeneration just as readily (Chamberlin and Gilman, 1985).Further, the contingent and often capricious nature of adaptation andselection that Darwin had described in Origin raised the question ofwhether a simple anthropocentric hierarchy of progress and regress waseven an appropriate way to think about the world (Muller-Wille, 2009).Even though Darwin had made little mention of the implications ofevolution for mankind in Origin of Species (1859), noting only that ‘‘lightwill be thrown on the origin of man and his history’’, the human-apeconnection dominated the evolution debates of the 1860s both in thepages of scientific and popular journals and at successive meetings of theBritish Association for the Advancement of Science (Darwin, 1859,p. 488; Hesketh, 2009; Browne, 2001). What made this particular

Figure 1. A logical refutation of Mr. Darwin’s theory

PIERS J. HALE

taxonomy so controversial was that it raised some of the most pressingquestions of the day, regarding religion, race and the nature of humanity.

The questions that evolution raised of traditional exegesis and theprevailing views of mankind were significant. Nevertheless, and despitesome initial outrage at the suggestion that man might be an evolvedanimal rather than one of God’s separate and special creations, therewere a few notable individuals who embraced a simian ancestry formankind, and even a capricious and contingent evolutionary process, asquite compatible with a Christian world view. In particular, theAnglican theologian, novelist, naturalist and science populariserCharles Kingsley led the way in theorising a Darwinian natural theol-ogy.

Historians have long noted Kingsley’s embrace of evolution. GillianBeer’s Darwin’s Plots will be the most familiar to historians of biology,but Colin Manlove, Amanda Hodgson and more recently JessicaStraley, John Beatty and Jonathan Conlin have also commented uponthis aspect ofWater Babies (Beer, 1983; Manlove, 1975; Hodgson, 1999;Straley, 2007; Beatty and Hale, 2008; Conlin, 2011).1 Kingsley wasdeeply interested in evolution and all it implied. More recently histori-ans have turned to consider Kingsley’s role as a populariser of science,Bernard Lightman has noted Kingsley’s significance in this regard inboth Victorian Popularizers of Science (2007) and in his 2010 article‘‘Darwin and the Popularization of Evolution’’, and I have recentlyargued elsewhere that Kingsley was one of Darwin’s most importantadvocates in the early years of the Darwinian revolution (Hale, 2012).

In this essay I comment not so much on Kingsley’s role as a popu-lariser, but upon the understanding of evolution that he sought topopularize. This is the result of an ongoing and larger research projecton Kingsley that I have been pursuing in collaboration with JohnBeatty. Here I make the case that Kingsley not only embraced evolu-tion, but appreciated the deeply contingent and capricious nature ofadaptation and selection that Darwin had described in Origin.Acknowledging the chanceful nature of evolution, Kingsley argued thatthe question of whether mankind would undergo an evolutionary pro-gress or degeneration was entirely contingent upon their actions. JohnC. Hawley has argued that progress and degeneration inWater Babies isthe result of the changing moral state of Tom, the main character in the

1 An near-exhaustive bibliography of twentieth-century Kingsley scholarship isavailable through Boston College’s website: Charles Kingsley: The 20th Century CriticalHeritage. Works currently listed include those published between 1900 and 2006.

https://www2.bc.edu/�rappleb/kingsley/kingsleyhome.html.

MONKEYS INTO MEN AND MEN INTO MONKEYS

https://www2.bc.edu/~rappleb/kingsley/kingsleyhome.html

https://www2.bc.edu/~rappleb/kingsley/kingsleyhome.html

story. However, the lesson that Kingsley hoped to teach through hisfairy tale is more sophisticated than this – he hoped to teach science andthe reasons why we should do science, as well as morality. Indeed, aknowledge of science was necessary if one was to understand how to actmorally. Kingsley believed that the reason why God had chosen togovern the world by such an apparently chanceful process as naturalselection was that He intended mankind to learn about the world Hehad created and the laws by which He governed. It was only by doing sothat mankind could discover God’s intentions for them and, leavingnothing to chance, ensure that their own development was a progressiveone – as God surely intended. Evolutionary degeneration was a con-sequence of man following his own will rather than the will of God. As aresult Kingsley saw science as the light to the path of human progress –in mind, in body and in spirit, and he championed scientific educationaccordingly. Importantly, though, he also engaged in arguments aboutthe importance of honesty and integrity in pursuit of the truths thatscience might reveal about man and his place in the world.

I wish to show that Kingsley considered the moral implications ofevolution much more deeply than historians have hitherto acknowl-edged. Although Kingsley initially thought the human-ape connectionof little moral import, in fact it brought him to reflect upon the sig-nificance of science, and the fundamental importance of scientificintegrity; upon the politics of race and empire; and finally upon theorigin and nature of morality itself. Kingsley commented upon many ofthese issues in his fairy tale Water Babies, others only became apparentafter the book had been published. In this essay I focus on six episodes.The first episode revolves around the moral significance of an evolu-tionary relationship between man and ape and the debate between thetwo great men of nineteenth-century English comparative anatomy,Thomas Huxley and Richard Owen. Moral concerns about the impliedlink between man and ape had a long history, and it was this that hadbeen the crux of the debate between the Bishop of Oxford, SamuelWilberforce and Thomas Huxley at the 1860 meeting of the BritishAssociation for the Advancement of Science. Owen had pressed theissue later in the week, insisting that there was a significant point ofmorphological difference between the brain of a man and the brain of anape, called the hippocampus minor. This point of human exceptionalismwas further debated at the 1862 meeting of the British Association.Kingsley witnessed the proceedings and lampooned them, and theprotagonists, beautifully inWater Babies. Kingsley thought such a smallpoint of morphology irrelevant to morality. As I have suggested above,

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and in the second episode I discuss here, what Kingsley did thinkmorally relevant, was that mankind should learn about the world andthe laws by which it was governed in order to know how to placethemselves in such a position as to benefit from them. To this endKingsley believed that it was important for people to study science andto understand the laws of natural and sexual selection. They would needto understand evolutionary science if they, their nation, and the racewere to continue in their progressive development; to fail would lead toan evolutionary degeneration. Kingsley taught this lesson in WaterBabies as well through the story he told of ‘the great and famous nationof the Doasyoulikes’. Kingsley’s belief that God meant for man to studynature so that he might discover the place in the world that God in-tended for him was what lay behind his harsh judgment that the manythousands of people killed in the earthquake that destroyed the Chileancity of Arica in 1868 were responsible for their own demise. By refusingto enquire into the geology of the region, and act on the informationthat they might find there, Kingsley thought them guilty of ‘‘temptingGod’’.2 The third episode covers two separate but related events; bothconcern scientific integrity. The first reflected the outcome of the Hux-ley-Owen debate over the hippocampus minor. Kingsley was not alone inperceiving that Owen had behaved dishonestly, and had ignored theevidence in favour of his preconceptions. In celebration of Huxley’svictory over Owen, between them Huxley and Kingsley formed the‘‘Thorough Club’’, a club intended to promote ‘‘a Thorough and ear-nest search after Scientific truth’’.3 The second occurred years later, atthe 1868 meeting of the British Association. This time the debate wasbetween two of Kingsley’s friends, each of whom were politicians whowrote on anthropology, the banker, John Lubbock and the Duke ofArgyll, George John Douglas Campbell. At stake was the legitimacyof assuming that present-day ‘savages’ were analogous to the ancestorsof civilised Englishmen. The same concern for honesty and integrity thathad led Kingsley to side with Huxley against Owen led him to side withthe Duke of Argyll against Lubbock. The fourth episode concernsKingsley’s views on race and empire. The evolution debates erupted in aperiod in which slavery was passionately debated in England, and wasdeemed a cause for civil war in the United States and as a result thepolitics of race and emancipation became inextricably linked to ideas ofcommon ancestry and evolved racial hierarchy (Desmond and Moore,2009; Stocking, 1987; Stocking, 1982). The story of the Doasyoulikes is

2 See below, p. 000.3 See below, p. 000.


again relevant here. In addition to teaching his readers about naturaland sexual selection, the story of the Doasyoulikes was also Kingsley’scomment upon the emancipation of slave labour in the Caribbean.Kingsley echoed the position that Thomas Carlyle has laid out in his1853 essay ‘‘Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question’’. Thepaternalism of forced labour was better for the emancipated slaves thanwas the idleness that he believed now characterized their lives. Kings-ley’s views on the relationship between evolution, race and empire alsoled him to take the position he did in support of the Governor ofJamaica, Edward John Eyre. Eyre had ordered the suppression of anarmed uprising in a manner that was judged by many of Kingsley’smore liberal contemporaries to be no better than brutal and bloodymurder. Kingsley, on the other hand, thought Eyre’s actions not onlyjustifiable, but laudable. The fifth episode I discuss concerns Darwinrather than Kingsley. In Descent of Man (1871) Darwin had given anaccount of human evolution that not only described his physiologicaldevelopment, but also the evolution of language, mind and morals. Inopposition to those who sought to establish a last bastion of humanexceptionalism in human morals and conscience Darwin argued that thecontingent and capricious forces of natural and sexual selection couldaccount for even these highest attributes of mankind. In the sixth andfinal episode I turn to Kingsley’s response to Descent and here touch onsomething that has not been commented upon by any Kingsley scholarbefore now. Kingsley, who had been among Darwin’s most dedicateddisciples for over a decade, was shocked and perturbed by what Darwinhad written. Having been elected President of the Devonshire Associationfor the Advancement of Science, Literature and the Arts, Kingsley used hispresidential address to distance himself from Darwin’s conclusions. Indeed,not only did he criticize Descent as misguided, he suggested that hisaudience accept the account of evolution that the Catholic anatomist St.George JacksonMivart had laid out in his deeply theistic book The Genesisof Species (1871) that was published that same year.

Monkeys Into Men

Darwin may have censored himself when he wrote Origin, commentingonly that ‘‘light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’’,but the implications of his theory for mankind were not lost on hisreaders (Darwin, 1859, p. 488). Evolutionary ideas already linked manand ape in the public mind, both the French naturalist Jean BaptisteLamarck and the anonymous author of the sensational evolutionary

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book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) had made sureof that (Elliott, 2009; Secord, 2000). Charles Lyell was thus sayingnothing new when he noted the genealogy that Lamarck drew betweenapes and man in the second volume of his Principles of Geology (1832).Lyell rejected Lamarck’s transmutationism, ‘‘whereby, the orang-ou-tang, having already evolved out of a monad, is made slowly to attainthe attributes and dignity of man’’, as preposterous (Lyell, 1832, p. 14).Ironically it was Lyell’s rejection of Lamarck that prompted Darwin totake the Frenchman seriously.4

It was the suggestion of this dreadful paternity that had provided theBishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, with the punch line in his as-sault on Darwin and Origin at the 1860 meeting of the British Associ-ation for the Advancement of Science. Reaching the climax of hisinvective against what he saw as the irreverence of the Darwinianhypothesis he had reportedly demanded of the young anatomist Tho-mas Huxley ‘‘Is it through his grandfather or his grandmother that heclaimed descent from a monkey?’’ (Huxley, 1913, vol. I, pp. 265–256;Hesketh, 2009, p. 81).5

The relationship between apes and men had also been at stake in thedebate that Huxley had been drawn into by Richard Owen, England’sforemost comparative anatomist, earlier in the week of meetings.Aiming to defend the dignity of man from such associations Owen hadlong insisted that there were significant morphological differencesbetween the brains of apes and men that denied the connection thatevolution implied. Only the human brain had ‘‘the ‘hippocampus minor’which characterized the hind lobe of each hemisphere’’, he argued(Owen, 1858).6 According to the anthropologist E.B. Tylor, who wit-nessed the proceedings, however, ‘‘This was met by professor Huxleywith a flat denial, he declaring that the brains of man and the highestmonkeys differ less than the brains of the highest and lowest monkeys’’(Rolleston, 1884, p. xxxiv). Huxley promised to demonstrate his point inprint, and did so in a number of publications shortly thereafter, in 1861(Ruse, 1999, p. 242; Huxley, 1861a, b).7 Despite Huxley’s publicationsOwen continued to press his case, even though he was seen to be doing

4 Lyell’s rejection of Lamarck also impressed the opposite conclusion upon theradical journalist Herbert Spencer, (Spencer, 1904, vol. I, p. 176).

5 Thomas Huxley to Frederick Dyster, September 9, 1860. Huxley Papers, [hereaftercited as HP] Imperial College, London: 15.117.

6 Rupke has demonstrated that Owen was no crass anti-evolutionist, entertaining

transmutationist views himself (Rupke, 1994).7 Huxley also wrote a number of letters, which were published in the press about the

unseemliness of Owen’s insistence despite the evidence.


so against the evidence. It was thus with the intention of re-engagingOwen on this point that Huxley attended the 1862 meeting of the BritishAssociation in Cambridge. The debate was quickly to become as much apoint of honour as of morphology.

Not everyone who had deep religious convictions found the impli-cations of evolution disturbing. Darwin had had his publisher, JohnMurray, send an advance copy of Origin to Kingsley who had at onceresponded favourably. Origin confirmed the evolutionary ideas thatKingsley had already been exposed to by the radical writers who pop-ulated the London literary scene he had frequented in the early 1850s –the philosopher and radical journalist Herbert Spencer, the critic andpopular writer G.H. Lewis and the physiologist William B. Carpenter inparticular (Hale, 2012). In addition, his familiarity and appreciation ofselection in animal breeding had opened the door to the analogy be-tween artificial selection and natural selection that Darwin had em-ployed in Origin. Kingsley had written to Darwin that:

I have gradually leant to see that it is just as noble a conception ofDeity to believe that he created primal forms capable of selfdevelopment into all forms needful, pro tempore & pro loco, as tobelieve that He required a fresh act of intervention to supply thelacunas wh. He himself had made, I question whether the former benot the loftier thought (Burkhardt et al., 1991, vol. 7,pp. 379–380).8

Although he was far from conventional, Kingsley was well connectedand became increasingly influential in the decade that followed. Darwinlater had cause to be thankful for all that Kingsley had done to advanceevolutionary ideas, but even in 1859 he could see the importance ofbeing able to point to a prominent Churchman who was not adverse tohis argument. As I have already pointed out, Darwin quoted fromKingsley’s letter in the second and subsequent editions of Origin, notingthat ‘‘a celebrated author and Divine’’ found an evolved world an evenmore remarkable creation than one requiring what Kingsley laterreferred to as ‘‘an interfering God – a master-magician, as I call it’’. Inlight of Darwin’s work, people now had ‘‘to choose between the abso-lute empire of accident, and a living, immanent, ever-working God’’(Darwin, 1860, p. 481).9 This had clearly been exactly how Darwin hadhoped people might read his book, having quoted the renowned his-torian and philosopher of science, the Revered William Whewell to this

8 Charles Kingsley to Charles Darwin, 18 November 1859.9 Charles Kingsley to Frederick Maurice, July 1863.

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effect as a preface (Origin 1859). Darwin wrote enthusiastically ofKingsley’s support to Huxley, Lyell and his friend the banker, politicianand anthropologist John Lubbock (Darwin, 1860, p. 481; Burkhardtet al., 1991, pp. 404–405, 409–410, 432–433, 449–450).

As the 1862 meeting of the British Association approached Kingsleywas well aware that many people had theological objections to Darwin’sviews. The fact that he had come to see Darwinian science as quitecompatible with faith, even to the point of embracing the most con-tingent and capricious aspects of evolution as being well within God’sProvidence, only increased his desire to defend Darwin’s views.Kingsley had discussed these issues in private correspondence withHuxley, who for a time became one of his closest friends, and the twoarranged to meet when the Association convened.10

Kingsley, who resided for a good part of the year in Cambridge as aresult of his appointment in 1860 as Regius Professor of Modern Historyat the University, was on home ground, and while Huxley had long sincepromised Darwin ‘‘I am sharpening up my beak and claws in readiness’’(Burkhardt et al., 1991, vol. 7, pp. 390–391), Kingsley, in turn, hadpromised Huxley that ‘‘if anybody tries to get up a ‘religious’ controversy(which I think no Cambridge man will) then will I shew you that I toohave teeth and claws and [take] especial pleasure in worrying a parson’’.In contrast to Huxley’s motivation, though, Kingsley added that he didso ‘‘just because I am a good churchman’’.11 Kingsley was confident thatscience and theology had the same author and thus that the two –properly understood – could never truly be in conflict. This being thecase, he was determined to defend Darwin from what he perceived to bethe misplaced attacks of Owen and Wilberforce. He wrote to his mentorin theology, the broad church Anglican Frederick Maurice on this point,reassuring him over both his outspoken venture into Darwinian scienceand his increasingly intimate confederacy with Huxley. ‘‘I am not goingastray into materialism as yet’’, he wrote, ‘‘but I must be utterly confi-dential and trustworthy with these men if I am to do any good, and undothe horrible mischief wh. Owen and Oxford have done’’.12

Kingsley, held open house throughout the 1862 meetings of theAssociation, and entertained many of the Darwinian circle, including

10 Charles Kingsley to Thomas Huxley, 18 July 1862, HP 19:206; 4 August 1862, HP19:207–208.11 Charles Kingsley to Thomas Huxley, 4 August 1862, HP 19:207–208. Emphasis in

the original.12 Charles Kingsley to Frederick Maurice 17 May 1863, British Library Additional

Manuscript [hereafter BL Add Ms.] 41297:147.


AlfredRusselWallace, who recalled ‘‘the pleasure of spending an eveningwith Charles Kingsley in his own house, and enjoying his stimulatingconversation’’ (Wallace, 1905, vol. II, p. 46). Itwas in the evenings too thatKingsley wrote installments of the evolutionary parableWater Babies forongoing serial publication inMacmillan’s Magazine, and caricatured thekey events of the meeting as they unfolded, reflecting upon the broadermoral significance of evolution as he did so (Kingsley, 1862; 1863).

And Men Into Monkeys

That Kingsley should choose a fairy tale as the appropriate venue todiscuss such matters is not as peculiar as it might seem to the modemreader. As both Eileen Fyfe (2003) and Bernard Lightman (2007) havepointed out, the literary devices of the genre lent themselves well to thedidactic intentions of the natural theologian, and there was an estab-lished tradition of nature writers who put them to use in this manner.

Thus, albeit a fairy story, inWater Babies Kingsley tackled the moralimport of evolution head on. He not only weighed in on the debatebetween Owen and Huxley, but also demonstrated his embrace of boththe capriciousness that Darwin had seen in nature and the deep contin-gency of natural selection.Kingsley was quite open to the fact that humanevolution could be a downward road just as easily as it could be in theascendant. He believed that there were moral lessons that God sought toteach man through this arrangement of things, and it was these morallessons that Kingsley sought to teach the readers of Water Babies –whatever their age.

It was in this light that Kingsley urged Maurice, his mentor in the-ology, to read the book.

When you read it, I hope you will see that I have not been idling mytime away. I have tried, in all sorts of queerways, tomake children andgrown folks understand that there is a quite miraculous & divineelement underlying all physical nature…And if I havewrapped upmyparable in seeming Tom-fooleries, it is because so only could I get thepill swallowed by a generation who are not believing, with anythinglike theirwhole heart, in the LivingGod…Meanwhile, remember thatthe physical science in the book is not nonsense, but accurate, earnest,as far as I dare speak yet. I am busy working out points of NaturalTheology, by the strange light of Huxley, Darwin & Lyell.13

13 Charles Kingsley to Frederick Maurice, May 17 1863, BL Add. Ms. 41297:147.

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Water Babies is the story of a young orphaned chimney sweep namedTom who is apprenticed to the master sweep, the beastly, filthy, andaptly named Mr. Grimes. At the start of the tale Tom knows nothing ofcleanliness or Godliness and is clearly well along the downward roadthat leads to no good. Tom is becoming ever more like Grimes, andKingsley describes him quite literally as a young ape (Figure 2). Thingsare thus not looking good for young Tom, but echoing what Kingsleyrecognised from his reading of Darwin to be the capriciousness ofnature, in the story, by a chance sequence of events Tom’s circum-stances change – and as a result so too do his prospects.

One day Tom and Mr. Grimes are contracted to clean the chimneysof the local squire’s mansion and as a result of getting lost in thebranching network of chimneys that spanned the various wings of thehouse – each generation of occupants had added rooms, wings, andchimneys to the house as they deemed necessary, (even this echoing theadaptive character of selection at work) – Tom comes down, quite bychance, into a different room from that in which he had started. Findinghimself in the bedroom of the squire’s beautiful and clean and very, verywhite daughter Ellie, Tom becomes aware of his own beastliness and,from the soot, his blackness, and seeks to make good his mistake byclimbing back up the chimney. However, in the process he upsets the fireirons waking Ellie. Upon seeing such ‘‘a little black ape’’ as Tom in herroom Ellie screams and brings on a hue and cry after Tom, the wholehousehold now taking him for a thief (Kingsley, 1863, pp. 28–29).Making good his escape, Tom scaled down a drainpipe and ran awayacross the hills and fields until he grew quite hot and tired. Seeing astream, and now fully aware of his dirtiness, he climbed in, but being sotired he instantly fell asleep. Upon awakening – for this is a fairy story,and children do not drown in fairy stories – Tom finds that he has beenreborn into a most fantastic underwater world – reborn not as a landbaby, of course – but as a water baby, complete with external gills, justlike an eft, or salamander.

Tom has many adventures in his new environment, and meets manydifferent creatures, and in the process he learns a great deal about theirnatural histories of development and transformation. This being a fairystory, Tom also meets two fairy sisters: Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedonebyand Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid. Each represents one of the two sides ofGod’s will – and of Kingsley’s Darwinian natural theology. Mrs.Doasyouwouldbedoneby represents the bountiful side of nature and ofGod, Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, the stern immutability of God’s laws –the laws that He had placed in nature. Tom does not simply learn by


being told how things work, though. Rather, and in good Baconianfashion – for like many of his contemporaries in science, Kingsley wasan ardent Baconian – Tom has to learn by doing, by experimenting, byexperience, and by trial and error.

The fairies watch over Tom as he learns his lessons and as he does so,just like the creatures he has encountered in the stream, he too passesthrough stages of development. Leaving his eft-like stage behind him hefollows the path of embryological recapitulation, recently made popularin the anonymous and sensational work Vestiges of the Natural Historyof Creation (1844), onwards and upwards. Needless to say, perhaps, inthis second chance at life in this most evolutionary of underwater worlds– in this ‘‘replaying of life’s tape’’, as Stephen Gould would have calledit – Tom’s evolution takes a very different path to that along which hehad been proceeding under the rough tutelage of Mr. Grimes. Indeed,

Figure 2. ‘‘What was such a black ape doing in her room?’’ (image: Kingsley, WaterBabies, London, MacMillan, 1863, p. 3)

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this time around he is well on his way to attaining to what, at least inKingsley’s mind, was the very top of the evolutionary tree: to becominga young Christian English gentleman. However, and this is Kingsley’spoint, Tom’s development along this path is by no means inevitable,and yet – and in this respect unlike the chanceful turn that saw Tomenter Ellie’s room – neither is it the result of mere caprice. Rather, it isthe result of a number of contingencies. Tom’s development is contin-gent upon his having learnt the lessons that the fairies have set him tolearn, upon his finding out for himself how nature works, and crucially,upon his acting upon this knowledge appropriately.

As long as Tom abided by the rules that he had learnt all was welland he continued in his progressive development. However, much toTom’s detriment, he strayed from the path and stole sweets from thefairies cupboard, and then, to make matters worse, he lied about it. Indoing so he at once found himself transformed into one of the verylowest forms of life – a spiny echinoderm (in Kingsley’s book, lying wasone of the very worst, and the most unmanly things a young man coulddo).

Unsurprisingly, Tom is quite dismayed at this turn of events – for heis too spiky to even be cuddled – and he begs Mrs. Doasyouwouldbe-doneby to help him. However, and as she informs him, he alone canremedy his condition, by learning his lessons over again, by learningabout the world he lives in and the laws by which it operates, and bylearning to place himself in just the right position so as to do well bythem. Tom also has to learn the importance of doing the things that hesometimes might rather not do; it was following his own will, indifferentto the will of God that had caused Tom’s degeneration, after all.

In order for Tom to relearn his lessons the fairies send him back toschool to be tutored by young Miss Ellie, who through her own chanceturn of events has now joined Tom in the underwater world. Of course,Tom does learn his lessons: how to be a good Christian, a good scientist,and the necessity of sometimes having to do the things he might rathernot do, and he successfully moves on in his development as a result(Beatty and Hale, 2008, p. 143).

But this is to race ahead, and to miss the importance of Kingsley’sdidactic message. Tom’s own degeneration taught him a hard lesson:that he needed to learn the rules that effected his own development.These were moral rules certainly, but they were also laws that were verymuch grounded in nature, the laws of natural and sexual selection thatDarwin had explained in Origin were among the most important. The


fairies taught this to Tom by means of a fairy story within the fairystory, which Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid read to both Tom and Ellie from acolour waterproof picture-book, called ‘‘The Story of the Great andFamous Nation of the Doasyoulikes.’’

The Doayoulikes were a race of people who had left the land ofHardwork and moved to the land of Readymade, making their home atthe foot of the happy-go-lucky mountains. In their new environmentthey did not have to labour because everything they might want – just asyou might expect – was readymade.

They sat under the flapdoodle trees, and let flapdoodle drop intotheir mouths; and under the vines, and squeezed the grape-juicedown their throats; and if any little pigs ran about ready roasted,crying ‘‘come and eat me’’, as was their fashion in that country,they waited till the pigs ran against their mouths and then took abite, and were content, just as so many oysters would have been.They needed no weapons, for no enemies ever came near their land;and no tools, for everything was readymade to their hand; and thestern old fairy Necessity never came near them to hunt them up,and make them use their wits or die (Kingsley, 1863, p. 241).

Tom thought that this sounded like an excellent way to live, and he saidas much to the fairies. ‘‘Do you really think so?’’ Mrs. Bedonebyas-youdid asked, and urged Tom to tum the pages of the book to see whathad become of the Doasyoulikes 500 years later.

Again, by the caprice of nature, circumstances had changed – andwith significant results. The happy-go-lucky mountains had turned outto be a smoking volcano, which erupted suddenly one day, killing one-third of the Doasyoulikes as well as the last of the ready-roasted littlepigs. Their numbers had been in sharp decline anyway, as pigs tend notto reproduce themselves once cooked and eaten. Because the Doas-youlikes had become so well adapted to their world of plenty they hadnot troubled themselves to find out about the world they lived in andthus were quite unprepared to deal with such altered circumstances.Indeed, they had been so inactive and unthinking for so long that theyhad actually lost the faculties through which they might have coped withsuch a change. The development or atrophy of faculties through use ordisuse in such a manner was quite in line with Darwin’s views onheredity (Darwin, 1859, pp. 134–135).

The climate changed too, becoming wet and cold. Those Doasyou-likes who were not particularly hairy caught consumption and died, anda further selection occurred when lions moved into the area. Only the

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strongest Doasyoulikes could climb into the trees for safety – and,notably showing his comprehension of sexual selection – Kingsleyadded that the lady Doasyoulikes would only marry those who werestrong enough to lift them into the trees (Kingsley, 1863, p. 246).

Turning the pages of time even further into the future, Tom is aghastto find that the Doasyoulikes, ever more hairy and ever more adapted totheir environment, have evolved through circumstance and selection inretrograde direction, just as he had done. Tom looked askance at Mrs.Bedonebyasyoudid, but as she solemnly points out to him, it was not herduty to force the Doasyoulikes to do things that they might rather not do– like work hard to discover things about their environment, and howtheir actions or inactions might benefit or harm them. She had providedthem with the where withal to explore their circumstances and discoversuch things through good inductive science, the rest, however, had beenup to them (Kingsley, 1863, p. 247; Beatty and Hale, 2008, p. 145).

Of course, the Doasyoulikes did not learn from the errors of theirways – indeed, by this point they had degenerated so far that they nolonger had the wits to do so. ‘‘‘Why,’ cried Tom, ‘I declare they are allapes.’’’ And indeed they were ‘‘something fearfully like it… they aregrown so stupid now, that they can hardly think’’ the fairy told Tom,‘‘They have almost forgotten, too, how to talk’’ (Kingsley, 1863, p. 247).They became fewer and fewer in number, ‘‘all dead and gone, by badfood and wild beasts and hunters.’’ The last of the Doasyoulikes, cameface to face with a hunter, he had ‘‘remembered that his ancestors hadonce been men, and tried to say, ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ buthad forgotten how to use his tongue; and then he had tried to call for adoctor, but he had forgotten the word for one. So all he said was,‘Ubboboo!’ and died’’ (Kingsley, 1863, p. 248) (Figure 3)

Turning to Tom the fairy tells him the moral of this tale:

‘‘Folks say now that I can make beasts into men, by circumstance,and selection, and competition, and so forth. Perhaps they are right;and perhaps, again, they are wrong… [At any rate] whatever theirancestors were, men they are [now]; and I advise them to behave assuch, and act accordingly. But let them recollect this, that there aretwo sides to every question, and a downhill as well as an uphill road;and, if I can turn beasts into men, I can, by the same laws of cir-cumstance, and selection, and competition, turn men into beasts.

You were very near being turned into a beast once or twice, littleTom. Indeed, if you had not made up your mind to go on this


journey, and see the world, like an Englishman, I am not sure butthat you would have ended as an eft in a pond’’ (Kingsley, 1863,pp. 249–250).

And this is the crux – For Kingsley it was clear, as it was for Darwin,that the nature revealed through the Malthusian mechanism of naturalselection was not all progress and improvement – at least in the way thatVictorians conventionally understood the words. However, whereDarwin came to believe, as he told his good friend the Harvard botanistAsa Gray, that there was simply ‘‘too much suffering in the world’’ tobelieve that such a blind and wasteful process as natural selection couldpossibly be God’s designed method of creation, Kingsley could readilyreconcile even this most Darwinian view of nature with his belief in astern but ultimately benevolent creator (Burkhardt et al., 1993, vol. 8,p. 223–226).14

Figure 3. The last of the Doasyoulikes (image: Kingsley, Water Babies, London:Macmillan, 1885, p. 266)

14 Charles Darwin to Asa Gray, 22 May [1860].

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Although Malthus, the author of the political economy that had ledDarwin to see fecundity amidst scarcity as the key to natural selection, isoften thought of as the profit of gloom, for Kingsley this was all a partof a much grander economy of nature (Beer, 1983). The incommensu-rable ratio that Malthus had pointed out between population andresources was but one of the stern rules that God had set out in natureto prompt mankind to rouse himself from idleness and indolence. AsMalthus had put it,

The first great awakeners of the mind seem to be the wants of thebody. They are the first stimulants that rouse the brain of infantman into sentient activity…The savage would slumber for everunder his tree, unless he were roused from his torpor by the crav-ings of hunger, or the pinchings of cold, and the exertions that hemakes to avoid these evils, by procuring food, and building himselfa covering, are the exercises which form and keep in motion hisfaculties, which otherwise would sink into listless inactivity (Mal-thus, 1798).

By learning about the fixed laws of nature, such as the laws of naturaland sexual selection, humans were in a unique position in the animalkingdom to use their free will to place themselves in just the rightcircumstances so as to ensure the best possible outcome. Unlike therest of brute Creation that encountered the ever changing and capri-cious circumstances of nature in blind ignorance, for humanity – aspecies with the faculties of reason, of foresight, and enquiry thatmight facilitate their conscious adaptation to circumstance – suchchanges might be anticipated and avoided. A thorough training ingood inductive science would fit mankind to recognise how to bestplace themselves in relation to the working out of God’s immutablelaws. Only through an appreciation of natural science – and of naturalselection in particular – might individuals, nations, and the species as awhole, hope to continue their onward and upward evolution, frommonkeys into men and beyond.

‘‘A Thorough and Earnest Search After Scientific Truth’’

Act One: monkeys Into Men Again

Because Kingsley believed that scientific enquiry was the means bywhich man might recognise God’s intentions for humanity, in good


Baconian fashion, he thought it imperative that science should beunfettered by preconceptions, whether they were religious or secular innature. To this end Kingsley was outspoken on the importance ofhonesty and integrity in scientific investigation. When the BritishAssociation met in Cambridge in 1862 he had indeed met up withHuxley, as he had promised to do, and had witnessed his clash withOwen in section D over the hippocampus minor.

Kingsley clearly sided with Huxley over the truth of the matter, andin doing so stood alongside some of the most eminent men in the field.George Rolleston, Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Oxford hadbeen motivated by the personal attacks that Owen and Wilberforce hadmade upon Huxley at the 1860 meeting to make the study of the subjecthis own personal area of expertise; and William Flower, who hadrecently been appointed conservator at the Hunterian Museum of theRoyal College of Surgeons was also among those who backed Huxley’sconclusions. According to the Times, it was Flower who decided thequestion with the somewhat improbable announcement: ‘‘I happen tohave in my pocket a monkey’s brain’’. The production of the said organallowed Huxley to demonstrate that it did indeed exhibit the debatedcharacter (Fletcher, 2004). With such a weight of evidence in favour ofHuxley’s position, added to the fact that Owen had quite blatantlychosen to ignore the well-known published works of both Rolleston andHuxley on the subject, Owen was soundly defeated, not only on thescientific point, but on a point of honour. Owen had been seen to put hisown petty concerns above the standards of good science, he had beentempted to lie rather than admit the truth of his opponent. As A.F.R.Wollaston later wrote about the proceedings, ‘‘about the Gorilla, Owen,I do not think, gained any glory; he asserted the old story, about theHippocampus minor, etc., as if it had never been questioned’’ (Woll-aston, 1921, p. 123). This was not the behavior of a scientist, or agentleman.15

In celebration of Huxley’s victory, and the victory for free investi-gation over prejudice, Huxley and Kingsley founded the ‘‘ThoroughClub’’, a drinking and dining club that adopted as its aim ‘‘the pro-motion of a Thorough and earnest search after scientific truth partic-ularly in matters relating to Biology’’.16 The club was short lived, butboth Kingsley and Huxley remained true to its founding principle.(Figures 4, 5)

15 Gentlemanly behavior became fundamental to defining the scientific community inthe nineteenth century (White, 2003; Hale, 2012).16 HP 3:120.

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Despite his support for Huxley on the matter, when it came to themoral consequence, not of Huxley’s victory over Owen, but of the factthat both ape’s brains and men’s brains exhibited the hippocampusminor, Kingsley failed to see the significance that either Owen or Huxleyhad accorded it. Owen had sought to defend the dignity of mankind bydenying their morphological similarity to apes, and had ultimately beenwilling to ignore the truth for his cause; Huxley sought to substantiatehis belief that man could be thoroughly accounted for in material termsalone.17 InWater BabiesKingsley ridiculed both men for trying to makeso much of such a small point of comparative anatomy. CaricaturingHuxley as Professor Pttmllnsprts (Put them all in spirits), chief pro-fessor of Necrobioneopalreonthydrochthonanthropithekology, Kings-ley reported of the professor that

He had even got up once at the British Association, and declaredthat apes had hippopotamus majors in their brains just as menhave. Which was a shocking thing to say; for if it were so, whatwould become of the faith, hope, and charity of immortal millions?You may think that there are more important differences betweenyou and an ape, such as being able to speak, and make machines,and know right from wrong, and say your prayers, and other littlematters of that kind; but that is a child’s fancy, my dear. Nothing is

Figure 4. Professors Huxley and Owen dispute the anatomy of a water baby at theBritish Association (image: Kingsley, Water Babies, London: Macmillan, 1885, p. 80.)

17 Notably Owen had compared a Negro’s brain to that of a gorilla, arguing that thegap between the two indicated that even the most apelike of humans were far removed

from apes in the morphology of the brain.


to be depended on but the great hippopotamus test. If you have ahippopotamus major in your brain, you are no ape, though youhad four hands, no feet, and were more apish than the apes of allaperies. But if a hippopotamus major is ever discovered in onesingle ape’s brain, nothing will save your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-greater-greatest-grand-mother from having been an ape too (Kingsley, 1863, p. 156).

In his letter to Maurice, Kingsley made it clear that although he andHuxley were ‘‘most intimate and confidential’’ on this point they were‘‘utterly opposed in thought’’.18 There were indeed other more importantdifferences betweenamanandanape –most notably the fact thatmenhadthe souls of men, where apes had the souls of apes. To Kingsley’s mindapes were not rational, and thus, like theDoasyoulikes, would not use thephysiological characteristics they had – which were so similar to those ofmen – to raise themselves. Instead they merely adapted to their localconditions. Men, on the other hand, with a very similar physiology to theape, had the souls ofmen andwere capable of rational thought, and thus –if they so chose – of achieving the most wonderful things.

Reading Malthus had suggested to Kingsley that both mind andbody developed in response to physical stimuli (Malthus, 1798). How-ever, in light of his reading of George Combe’s popular phrenologicalwork The Constitution of Man (1828) Kingsley came to the conclusionthat an organism’s moral character might also influence its physiology,‘‘Souls secrete their bodies, as snails do shells’’, he wrote.19 Such ideas

Figure 5. The primary object of this club is the promotion of a Thorough and ear-

nest search after Scientific truth particularly in matters relating to Biology… [imagereproduced with permission: Huxley Papers 31.120, Imperial College Archives]

18 Charles Kingsley to Frederick Maurice, [1863?] BL Add. Ms. 41299:142.19 Such ideas were cannot be written of as mere pseudo-science even by the 1860s.

Rolleston clearly allowed for similar views on the relationship between morphology andmorals in his own work on the brains of apes and men, ‘‘In what other way… can we

read the physical results of education’’, he wrote (Rolleston, 1884).

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were popular at the time because they gave so much importance topersonal moral responsibility, as well as to agency and education.Kingsley’s conception of the soul was clearly connected to the moraland rational state of the person, or animal, in question, and thus one ofthe key distinctions he drew between man and ape in his discussion withHuxley, was the fact that the one had the capacity for informed delib-eration whereas the other did not. Man might recognise the truth of hiscircumstances and act accordingly, an ape could only blindly adapt towhatever circumstances it encountered, or, like the Doasyoulikes, sufferthe consequences of failing to do so – ultimately, the difference wasbetween contingency and caprice.

Kingsley was given cause to think about the Doasyoulikes onceagain, in 1868, when an earthquake devastated the Chilean city ofArica. Those who ignored God’s laws could expect little in the way ofsympathy from Kingsley. Again he appealed to stern discipline, but thistime to that of God’s immutable laws, and he metered out character-istically harsh judgment in his popular geology primer Madam How andLady Why (1869) accordingly:

I do not wish to be hard upon poor people in great affliction:but I cannot help thinking that they have been doing for hun-dreds of years past something very like what the Bible calls‘tempting God’ – staking their property and their lives upon thechances of no earthquakes coming, while they ought to haveknown an earthquake might come any day. They have ful-filled…the parable that I told you once, of the nation of theDoasyoulikes, who lived careless and happy at the foot of aburning mountain, and would not be warned by the smoke thatcame out of the tip, or by the slag and cinders which lay allabout them; til the mountain blew up, and destroyed themmiserably (Kingsley, 1869, p. 29).

Just like Tom, the people of Arica who had survived the tragedy wouldhave to go back to school and learn their lessons over – wiser, if sadder,for the experience.

The prospect of degeneration as a consequence of refusing to inves-tigate and take note of the laws of nature remained central to Kingsley’sargument for science education. Indeed, it was clear to him that thepursuit of natural science through inductive reasoning was God’s inten-tion for mankind. In 1871 Kingsley was elected President of the Dev-onshire Association and in his Presidential Address he once again urgedupon his audience ‘‘obedience to those laws of Nature which are non


other than the laws of God; the word of God (as Bacon says) revealed infacts’’. One must say to oneself ‘‘For only by obeying the laws of theuniverse can I live and thrive therein, and not be ground to powder bythose ‘mills of God’ which will not stop their grinding because I amignorant enough to entangle myself in their machinery’’, he said(Kingsley, 1871). The parable of the Doasyoulikes remained central tothe moral message that Kingsley took from evolution to the end.

Act Two: Men Into Monkeys Revisited

What was sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander, and Kingsleydemanded honesty in science from his secular friends just as ardently ashe did from his theological enemies. When Darwin had first set eyesupon the native Fuegians in December 1832 he had believed that he waswitnessing a people who were very much akin to his own distantancestors – a view that was subsequently adopted quite literally byevolutionary anthropologists like E.B. Tyler and John Lubbock. In hisJournal of ResearchesDarwin had also suggested that the Fuegians werea degenerate race that had adapted to the sparse conditions of theirenvironment. While these two statements were by no means incom-patible, in a branching theory of evolution it did raise the question ofwhether existing native peoples could unproblematically be taken as‘living fossil’ evidence of a missing link between civilized men and apesin lieu of real fossil finds. Just as the Estonian embryologist Karl Ernstvon Baer had criticised linear theories of embryological recapitulationon the basis that embryos did not pass through the adult stages of fish,reptile, bird or mammal in the course of their own development, soArgyll argued that present-day degraded races could not simply besubstituted for missing fossil evidence in civilized man’s own develop-mental history. Argyll thus sought to undermine a central presumptionof Lubbock’s 1865 evolutionary anthropological work PrehistoricTimes, As illustrated by Ancient Remains and the Manners and Customsof Modern Savage (1865).

As Neal Gillespie long ago pointed out, to Argyll’s mind, Lubbock –who was a longtime friend and colleague of Darwin’s – had committedexactly this error in reasoning, and had indeed, in the last chapters of hisbook, invoked existing primitive tribes as a stand-in for missing fossilevidence in order to bridge the gap between apes and modern man(Gillespie, 1977; Lubbock 1865). Debate between the two men came to ahead at the 1868 meeting of the British Association for the Advance-ment of Science, which met in Dundee that year. The Duke later wrote

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up his side of the argument in his own book on the subject, PrimevalMan (1869).

Significantly, and as Gillespie makes clear, despite the fact thatArgyll very clearly laid out his objections, rather than refuting Argyll’scriticism with a substantive argument to the contrary, Lubbockresponded by attempting to link Argyll’s concerns about degenerationto the very different degeneration theory that had only recently beenarticulated by the Bishop of Dublin, Richard Whately (Gillespie, 1977,p. 49). Whately had suggested that rather than evolution being a storyof a progressive development from monad to man, at least as far ashumans were concerned, it was rather a case of the degenerational fall ofman from the perfection of God’s creation of Adam and Eve in theGarden of Eden. By Whately’s reckoning other races were thus thedegraded forms of the most noble form of mankind (Bowler, 1989,pp. 236–237). Not only could this account be made to fit well enoughwith traditional exegesis regarding the Fall in Genesis, but it also con-veniently avoided the necessity of any theologically problematic linkbetween man and animals. Lubbock was well aware that Argyll’sargument was of a different stripe, and his own attempt to link the twowas clearly disingenuous. However, such had been the sea-change inBritish science that by 1868 methodological naturalism was not onlyaccepted, but expected, and Argyll’s only too evident religious moti-vations allowed Lubbock to win the day with rhetoric rather thansubstance (Gillespie, 1977, p. 40).

Kingsley was a close friend of both Argyll and Lubbock, and Lub-bock had had Macmillan, his publisher, send a copy of Primitive Timesto Kingsley. Macmillan had misplaced the book, however, and so it was1867 before Kingsley actually received it; but once he had read it, hewrote to say he thought it ‘‘excellent’’ (Hutchinson, 1914, vol. I, p. 92).Kingsley did disagree with Lubbock on one point, however, ‘‘thequestion whether certain races of man are degraded. You think not – (asit seems to me) – I am as certain of it as we both are that whales aredegraded quadrupeds’’, he wrote (Hutchinson, 1914, vol. I, p. 92).Kingsley, who had read the reviews, and spent considerable time dis-cussing evolution with Argyll, was doubtless aware of the Duke’sthoughts on degeneration, as well as of the coming meeting in Dundee(Hale, 2012, p. 1006). Playing both peacemaker and truth-seeker,Kingsley pressed Lubbock to see that degeneration was just as muchorthodox Darwinism as was progress, and that if this raised problemsfor the kind of inference that Lubbock wanted to make between savageand civilized man, then so be it.


Degeneration was certainly a likely outcome for any race that simplyadapted to its environment and the members of which did not applywhatever reason they had to understand and take advantage of theircircumstances. ‘‘The nearer man is to the animals, and the less civilised,[he is] therefore the more the puppet of circumstances’’, he wrote, just asthe closer he was to civilisation the more he was in control of hisenvironment, the more he would progress.20 Here again Kingsleypressed the need for honesty and following the evidence rather thanone’s preconceptions or presumptions. Baconian inductive reasoninghad warned against just such idols. ‘‘I am sure that, side by side withDarwin’s true theory of development by natural causes, lies a theory ofdegradation by the same natural causes; which I sketched once inserious jest in theWater Babies; and it will be part of our future work toinvestigate the methods of Natural Degradation’’, he wrote to Lub-bock.21 Indeed, Kingsley was so enamoured by the possibility ofdegeneration that he also urged Rolleston to entertain the possibilitythat the ape’s skulls he was working upon might actually be degenerateforms of human skulls–one could not simply presume progressivedevelopment, after all.22

Kingsley’s point was clearly not to use degeneration to score pointsagainst Lubbock on behalf of Argyll, but rather appears to have been anattempt to draw his friend away from the sort of argumentation that hehad witnessed Owen make in Cambridge, (and which Lubbock didindeed employ against Argyll in Dundee). Where many of his contem-poraries were hung up on the fact that there seemed an impassible gapbetween even the highest ape and the lowest man, Kingsley made it clearthat he did not feel the need of any fossil missing link–‘living’ orotherwise–to convince him of the truth of the evolutionary link betweenman and apes.

As early as 1862, at the height of the debate between Huxley andOwen, Kingsley had suggested to Darwin that the existence of semi-human mythical creatures in all cultures was surely testament to the factthat some kind of intermediate creature had existed between ape andman in the long distant past. ‘‘I want now to bore you on anothermatter. This great gulf between the quadrumana & man; & the absence

20 Charles Kingsley to John Lubbock, 27 May 1867, Life of Sir John Lubbock,pp. 91–92.21 Charles Kingsley to John Lubbock, 27 May 1867, Life of Sir John Lubbock,

pp. 91–92.22 Charles Kingsley to George Rolleston, 12 October 1862, Welcome Library for the

History and Understanding of Medicine, Western Ms. 6119:8.

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of any record of species intermediate between man & the ape’’, he wrote.

It has come home to me with much force, that while we deny theexistence of any such, the legends of most nations are full of them.Fauns, Satyrs, Inui, Elves, Dwarfs – we call them one minutemythological personages, the next conquered inferior races… Themythology of every white race, as far as I know, contains thesecreatures, & I (who believe that every myth has an original nucleusof truth) think the fact very important… That they should havedied out, by simple natural selection, before the superior white race,you & I can easily understand.

That no sculls, &c. of them have been found, is a question wh. maybother us when the recent deposits of Italy & Greece have been aswell searched as those of England. Till then, it concerns no man. Asfor having no historic evidence of them – How can you have his-toric evidence in pre-historic times? (Burkhardt et al., 1997, vol. 10,pp. 62–64).23

Darwin was quick to reply, ‘‘That is a grand and awful question on thegenealogy of man to which you allude’’, he wrote. He appreciatedKingsley’s thoughts on the evidence that might be derived from myth. Itwas, he wrote, ‘‘a very curious subject’’. Kingsley was surely right tosuggest that the large gap between savage and civilised man was theresult of the systematic extermination of the former by the latter –Darwin had witnessed as much in his travels in South America. There hehad seen Spanish Christians systematically exterminating the nativetribes of Buenos Aires, although he was led to wonder whether suchbarbarism could really be the mark of civilised men (Darwin, 2004,p. 90).

Darwin told Kingsley that the idea that man had such savageancestry was perhaps not as troubling to him as it was to the majority oftheir contemporaries, ‘‘partly from familiarity & partly, I think, fromhaving seen a good many Barbarians’’, but he confessed that this hadnot always been the case. ‘‘I declare the thought, when I first saw in T.del Fuego a naked painted, shivering hideous savage, that my ancestorsmust have been somewhat similar beings, was at that time as revoltingto me, nay more revolting than my present belief that an incomparablymore remote ancestor was a hairy beast’’ (Burkhardt et al., 1997, vol.10,pp. 71–72).24 Where, in Water Babies, Kingsley had portrayed both

23 Charles Kingsley to Charles Darwin 31 January 1862.24 Charles Darwin to Charles Kingsley, 6 February 1862.


savages and apes as too degraded to realize the significance of theirsituation and thus secure their own progressive development, Darwinwas more sanguine. In his Journal of Researches he had contrasted thestoic loyalty of the natives with the barbarism of the ostensibly morecivilized and Christian Spaniards, and he wrote to Kingsley too that‘‘Monkeys have downright good hearts, at least sometimes, as I couldshow if I had space’’. But added, ‘‘How I shd. be abused if I were topublish such an essay!’’ (Darwin, 2004, p. 90; Burkhardt et al., 1997, vol.10, pp. 71–72).

Kingsley’s Politics of Science, Race and Empire

‘‘Am I a man and a Brother?’’

The human-ape connection quickly became the defining trope of evo-lutionary ideas in the context of mid-nineteenth century politics andpolicy, and although Adrian Desmond and James Moore may not haveconvinced many people of their claim that Darwin’s primary motivationin pursuing transmutation was a hatred of slavery, they have at leastdemonstrated that the questions that evolution raised of the relationshipbetween human races were part and parcel of the debate about therelationship between man and the rest of the animal kingdom (Des-mond and Moore, 2009). Indeed, the brotherhood of all men, which wasat least implicit in an evolutionary worldview, pressed many who weresympathetic towards slavery either to oppose Darwin outright, or toargue that the different races had issued from different ‘centres of cre-ation’ – arguing, in effect, that the white man and the negro were dif-ferent species (Rolleston, 1884, pp. xxxii–xxxiii; Desmond and Moore,2009, pp. 111, 242). This was a view held by many in the Anthropo-logical Society of London. In 1864 Alfred Russel Wallace proposed acompromise that he thought might chart a middle ground and thusbring the reluctant members of the Anthropological Society into theevolutionary fold. He presented a paper at a meeting of the society inwhich he suggested that although all men ‘‘must have been, once ahomogeneous race’’, they had diverged a very long time ago, prior to thefull development of language, intellect and morality, ‘‘at a period whenhe had the form but hardly the nature of man’’ (Wallace, 1864, p. clxvi).Wallace’s attempt at a compromise satisfied no one, however. Even thisdistant connection was too close for comfort for the Anthropologicals,the record of the meeting show that Wallace’s paper was badly received,

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and while Darwin thought the paper excellent in many respects, he toowas discomfited by what Wallace was prepared to give up (Wallace,1864, pp. clxx–clxxxvii). Clearly disturbed by the fact that Wallace’sstance allowed those who wished to continue to deny the humanity ofthe Negro, he confessed to Hooker ‘‘I am not sure that I fully agree withhis views about man’’ (Burkhardt et al., 2001, vol. 12, pp. 203–204).(Figure 6)25

Kingsley certainly acknowledged that all men of all races were of thesame species, even if he did believe that they could be categorized in ahierarchy in which the Englishman occupied the highest rank while theaborigine held the lowest station, in many ways indistinguishable froman ape.26 In light of this Kingsley found Darwin’s suggestion ‘‘that thewhole human race sprang from one pair’’ was ‘‘strangely orthodox’’.27

This was no fixed hierarchy, however. It was quite possible even forwhite men to degenerate into the most ape-like of states. Kingsley hadbeen horrified upon a visit to Ireland in 1860 to see the degradation ofthe people even fifteen years after the onset of the potato famine. Hewrote to his wife, ‘‘to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they wereblack, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except wheretanned by exposure, are as white as ours’’ (F. Kingsley, 1901, vol. III,p. 111). For Kingsley racial hierarchy was an inevitable conclusion to bedrawn from evolution, even as he was aware that the Englishman’s riseto the top was the result of a number of contingencies.

The last words of the last of the Doasyoulikes are indicative of theties that bound nineteenth-century conceptions of racial hierarchies toevolution. ‘‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’’, he had tried to ask. Thiswas the demand and motto of the anti-slavery campaign that had longbeen championed by the Wedgwoods, Darwin’s in-laws. (Desmond andMoore, 2009). The story of the Doasyoulikes was thus not just a moralmessage about the importance of doing science, about natural andsexual selection, and of the need to do the things you might not want todo; it was also Kingsley’s comment on the anti-slavery campaign andwhat he perceived to have been the negative effects of the abolition ofslavery in the Jamaican colonies.

In telling the story of the Doasyoulikes Kingsley quite consciouslyechoed the concerns that Thomas Carlyle had raised in his 1849

25 Charles Darwin to Joseph Dalton Hooker, 22 May 1864.26 Michael Banton (1975) discusses Kingsley’s views on race and notes that we should

be wary of evaluating Kingsley’s views on race by our present day standards, but rathershould view them in the context of the times.27 Charles Kingsley to Frederick Maurice, 20 May 1863, BL Add. Ms. 41297.


‘‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’’, which appeared inFraser’s Magazine. Carlyle had republished the essay in 1853 as apamphlet with the more offensive title The Occasional Discourse on theNigger Question, the change in title underlining his argument that theformer slaves were lazy, ignorant and in need of the paternal oversightof white planters. Carlyle had been horrified at the consequences for theplantation owners of the ending of slavery throughout the Empire,believing the compensation paid to these former slave owners was bothinadequate and wasteful. Further, it was a recipe that seemed designedto give the economic advantage to the Americans, who still employedslave-labour. He was much more offended, though, by the fact that oncefreed, the former slaves were apparently happy to let sugar cane rot inthe fields ‘‘with their beautiful muzzles up to the ears in pumpkins’’

Figure 6. Monkeyana: am I a man and a brother? (image: Punch, Ltd., London)

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rather than work for a living (Carlyle, 1849, p. 671). The racial slur inwhich Carlyle describes the former slaves in animalistic terms is obviousenough, the reference to pumpkins a catch-all for watermelon and otherstaple crops. Carlyle, who saw the British Empire as a benign andpaternal force for good in the world and who had long preached the‘gospel of work’, could only wonder at the degeneration of the eman-cipated slaves once the reforming effect of hard work was removed.Kingsley, whose mother’s family descended from formerly slave-workedplantation owners, shared Carlyle’s opinion. He too had long advocatedfor the dignity of labour and the moral improvement to be gained fromit (Carlyle 1853; Vance, 2009).

To Kingsley’s mind, God’s intention for man was clear, he shouldseek to understand the world around him in order to raise himself bydoing so – science, work and civilisation were God’s aim for man.Kingsley had already said to Lubbock that the further from civilisationman was the closer he was to the animals, and thus the further fromGod, and, as ended up being the case for the Doasyoulikes, closer to thepoint of being too far gone to remedy the situation. Echoing Carlyle,Kingsley believed that this was clearly the point that the Caribbeanslaves had reached. Without the paternal hand of the plantation ownersto force them to do things they would rather not do, they would sinkinto slothful degeneracy and live off flapdoodle and pumpkins. AsConlin has recently argued, Kingsley sought to assimilate natural his-tory with national history in a narrative that endorsed the evolutionaryrise of the white Teutonic race at the expense of other lesser races whosefate was either to be assimilated or eradicated (Conlin, 2011, p. 170).

It was this firm belief in the need for a stern hand and discipline thatalso dictated Kingsley’s stance on the ‘Eyre Affair’, which becamenational news in 1865. The Governor of Jamaica, Edward John Eyre,had put down a political rebellion using what some judged to beexcessive force. Fearing an Island-wide revolt he had overseen thehanging of hundreds of black peasants, the flogging of hundreds ofothers and, by at least one account, troops under his command burnedhouses and killed men women and children indiscriminately. In EnglandJohn Stuart Mill led a campaign to prosecute Eyre for murder, whileCarlyle established a committee for Eyre’s defense. Huxley and Darwinlined up behind Mill, Kingsley, and, amongst others, the author,Charles Dickens, behind Carlyle. Eyre’s defenders claimed he had acteddecisively to restore discipline and order with a firm hand (Semmel,1962; Heuman, 1994, p. 172; Hall, 2002). The satirical magazine Punchcaricatured the argument of Eyre’s defenders in a cartoon depicting a


white planter, now bereft of his workforce appealing to the EvangelicalMr. Stiggins, a character from Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, asking ‘‘Amnot I a man and a brother, too, Mr. Stiggins?’’ (Figure 7).28 It wasKingsley’s stance on the Eyre affair that led to a cooling of thefriendship he had with Huxley.

‘‘Nothing for Any Purpose’’: The Evolution of an Agnostic

Darwin had written ‘‘Nothing for any purpose’’ on the cover of his Rednotebook in 1838. It is not clear that this was a reference to his new

Figure 7. The Jamiaca question white planter: am not I a man and a brother, too,Mr. Stiggins? (image: Punch, Ltd., London)

28 As Ford (1948) points out, Kingsley later wavered in his support of Eyre as a result

of the negative response he received.

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understanding of a world of chance and contingency, but as SandraHerbert notes, it is an ‘‘ominous epigram’’ (Herbert, 1980, p. 5).Although Darwin stated that he began the Beagle voyage with con-ventional religious beliefs, what he saw on the voyage ultimately drovehim to very different conclusions.

Despite the fact that he could not help but conceive of the differencesbetween the Fuegian savage and the average English gentleman in termsof progress and hierarchy, it was not long before he was remindinghimself that the anthropocentric concepts of higher and lower weresimply inappropriate. He addressed the issue directly – although atsome remove from the debate about the implications of his theory formankind – in his work on barnacles. These organisms exhibited suchcomplex adaptations and yet were so humble that they confoundedtraditional hierarchies. ‘‘Barnacles in some sense, eyes and locomotion,are lower, but then so much more complicated, that they may be con-sidered higher… leave out the term higher & lower’’, he counseledhimself (Stott, 2003, p. 108).

Despite his initial impressions to the contrary, Darwin also quicklyrecognized that even the Fuegians – the very lowest of men – were of thesame species as himself. ‘‘Viewing such men, one can hardly make one’sself believe that they are fellow creatures’’, he wrote (Darwin, 2004,p. 188). And yet he did.

On Beagle’s previous voyage Captain FitzRoy had captured severalFuegians, and had taken them back to England to be educated andcivilised. Now he intended their return in the company of a missionary,Mr. Matthews, in order to bring the light of Christianity to theirGodless homeland. Darwin had befriended one of the Fuegians duringthe voyage, a young man whom FitzRoy had christened Jemmy Button.With Jemmy as evidence, it was clear that the savages who gesticulatedso wildly from the shore were far from being a separate species, eventhough he at first declared the difference ‘‘greater than between a wildand domesticated animal’’, and as Jemmy’s own experience showed, itwas clear that the transformation from one to the other was by nomeans impossible (Darwin, 2004, p. 181).

From the first Darwin believed that the differences between savageand civilized man were largely the result of adaptation to circumstance.Given the harshness of the Fuegian’s environment it was hardly sur-prising that they had adapted in such a manner that Darwin thoughtdegenerate. ‘‘How little is there for imagination to picture, for reason tocompare, for judgment to decide upon? to knock a limpet from a rockdoes not even require cunning, that lowest power of the mind’’, he wrote


(Darwin, Voyage p. 236). Branching out, he followed his observations totheir logical conclusions: ‘‘Nature by making habit omnipotent, and itseffects hereditary, has fitted the Fuegian to the climate and the pro-ductions of his country’’ (Darwin, 2004, p. 191).

But what had brought these men and women to live in such aninhospitable place? Darwin was aware that a consequence of the scarcityof even the most basic resources among the Fuegian’s led to almostconstant conflict between the various tribes, and even before he wasthinking in terms of natural selection he conjectured that the ancestorsof the Fuegians must have been driven to their present location from themore amenable and abundant habitation to the north by the forebearsof the tribes who currently occupied those regions. These northernnatives were superior to the Fuegians in every way, Darwin thought,and so too must their ancestors have been. Once the Fuegians had beenforced to this most wretched outpost they had adapted only too well totheir surroundings.

Clearly though, it required much longer than the three years thatJemmy had spent in England for the civilized characteristics he hadacquired there to become fixed. This was brought home to Darwin bythe speed with which Jemmy regressed once left to his own devices.Seeing this, Darwin despaired of the Fuegians ever raising themselves –their habits and social conventions not only reflected, but exacerbatedthe effects of their environment. Expressing sentiments that Kingsleywould later echo in his story of the Doasyoulikes, Darwin noted thatthey appeared to have neither the wit nor the will to recognize that therewere useful plants flourishing all around them (Darwin, 2004). Hecontrasted the strange conventions of Fuegian society to those withwhich he was familiar. It would clearly take more than Mr. Matthewsand the Gospel to raise these men from their depravity. Rather, Darwinthought that only a change in their economic and social structure couldeffect such a transformation. The Fuegian’s seeming ignorance of pri-vate property as an incentive to labour was anathema to him comparedto the vigour and industry that had made England the workshop of theworld.

The perfect equality among the individuals composing the Fuegiantribes must for a long time retard their civilisation… until somechief shall arise with power sufficient to secure any acquiredadvantage, such as the domesticated animals, it seems scarcelypossible that the political state of the country can be improved. Atpresent even a piece of cloth given to one is torn into shreds anddistributed; and no one individual becomes richer than another. On

PIERS J. HALE

the other hand, it is difficult to understand how a chief can ariseuntil there is property of some sort by which he might manifest hissuperiority and increase his power (Darwin, 2004, pp. 202–203).

His reading of Malthus in the September of 1838 would only strengthenthe political and economic assumptions that informed his conception ofnature (Young, 1969; Desmond and Moore 1994; Radick, 2003).

Darwin kept his own council as he worked through the full impli-cations of his theory for his understanding of human evolution. It wasnot until 1868 that he was prepared to put pen to paper, the argumentbetween Lubbock and Argyll was in full swing, and even though Des-cent of Man (1871) was written in his familiar considered and reasonabletone, he held nothing back.

Mere morphology was no longer the issue, Huxley had won thatbattle. Rather, debate had moved on to the more sensitive groundconcerning the origin of language, mind, and morals, the characters thatseemed most definitive of mankind’s humanity. Darwin found this issueparticularly pressing, for there appeared to be a growing consensus –even among his scientific colleagues – that these qualities were beyondnaturalistic explanation, and thus were being set up as the last bastionof human exceptionalism and a point of entry for the divine. Whatdistressed Darwin the most was that in 1869 even Wallace had declaredfor this kind of unscientific nonsense. Wallace had raised these issues ina review article in 1869, which he fleshed out the following year in anarticle entitled ‘‘The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man’’(Wallace, 1869, 1870). How could a mere struggle for survival haveresulted in the far superior intellect of mankind over and above that ofany other species, when natural selection would have been content withonly a slightly more intelligent ape? Wallace asked. What of the facilityand complexity of human language? Again, natural selection couldhardly be invoked to explain the abyss this opened between man andanimal. And what of our sense of aesthetics, our ability to appreciatebeauty, to enjoy the harmonies of song? How did these serve in a merestruggle for existence? (Wallace, 1869, 1870). ‘‘The moral and higherintellectual nature of man,’’ Wallace now maintained, was ‘‘utterlyinconceivable as having been produced through the action of a lawwhich looks only, and can look only, to the immediate material welfareof the individual or the race’’ (Wallace, 1870, p. 359). Where Wallacefound natural selection wanting, like the American theist and botanistAsa Gray (1861) and Charles Lyell (1863), he invoked supernaturalintervention in its stead. Like them he hoped that recognition of this factmight prepare the ground for a reconciliation of science and religion.


Having risked so much and worked so hard to get this far Darwinwould make no such compromise. If there was evidence of humandegeneration anywhere, he thought, it was in Wallace’s thinking! ‘‘Youwrite like a metamorphosed (in retrograde direction) naturalist’’, Wal-lace’s defection pained him deeply; he signed off, ‘‘Your miserablefriend’’ (Burkhardt et al., 2010, vol. 18, p. 17).29 Thus, having set out hisstall on the relatively uncontroversial ground of the animal origin ofman’s morphology in the early chapters of Descent, in what followedDarwin quickly set about documenting incidence upon incidence ofincipient moral qualities across the animal kingdom. Far from beingdetrimental in the process of natural selection, he argued that in a socialspecies such as man, intelligence and language could easily have evolvedin tandem, each serving to increase the social coherence of the groupand increasing the likelihood of it defeating its competitors. Man’sappreciation of beauty and his sense of aesthetics were no divine giftthat man might enjoy God’s Creation, but rather were the contingentand fully material results of eons of sexual selection. Likewise morality,loyalty, courage and a willingness to help others, even at some cost tooneself, would also clearly be characters that would be favoured bynatural selection.

A tribe including many members who, from possessing in highdegree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage andsympathy, were always ready to aid one another and to sacrificethemselves for the common good, would be victorious over mostother tribes; and this would be natural selection (Darwin, 1871, vol.1, p. 166).

Indeed, Darwin suggested that even that most ancient of ethics, theGolden Rule, which had subsequently been embraced by Christianity,was but a natural outcome of circumstance and selection (Darwin, 1871,vol. 1, p. 106).

In fact, and ironically, Wallace had laid the groundwork for much ofthis work himself in his 1864 paper to the Anthropological Society.There he had first suggested that – as a contingency of human history –once man had become a social animal, it was his mental and moralfaculties that had been naturally selected more than his morphology(Wallace, 1864, p. clxiv). Given the growing evidence of man’s vastantiquity a large moral and mental gap between apes and humans wasto be expected.

29 Charles Darwin to Alfred Russel Wallace, January 26th 1870.

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Stepping Back from the Brink

Kingsley clearly had no problem with the notion of man’s physicalevolution, or that mental and moral qualities could be enhanced or lostthrough natural selection. He was also one of only a handful of Dar-win’s contemporaries to fully appreciate the importance of sexualselection. Thus, when Darwin wrote to Kingsley that he imagined hewould be roundly abused were he to write an essay on the evolution ofman from apes, he could hardly have imagined that Kingsley would beamong those that did so.

In Descent Darwin had not only offered an explanation of the evo-lution of mind and morals as the result of no more than the contingenthistory of circumstance and selection, but had also suggested that thevarious religious beliefs and superstitions that were in evidence amongthe many races and nations of the world also had an evolutionaryorigin. Indeed it was this realization that forced Darwin to recognizethat his own religious beliefs and those of his countrymen deserved nospecial privilege regarding their claim to be the word of the one trueGod (van Wyhe and Pallen, 2012, pp. 110–111). This much was toomuch for Kingsley.

While Kingsley was quite happy to see that much of the world, andeven much of our own history, had been the result of mere circumstanceand selection, the materialist conclusions that Darwin had drawn fromsuch a fact were beyond the pale. Kingsley could not accept a schemethat denied a grander purpose to the inexorable operation of nature’slaws than that of mere chance and contingency. After all, the outcomesof natural selection, however chanceful, were well within God’sboundless ken, he reasoned. Shortly after finishing Water BabiesKingsley had written to the naturalist Henry Walter Bates that helooked at the whole of nature as tending ‘‘not towards the omnipotenceof Matter’’ as materialists might conclude, ‘‘but towards the omnipo-tence of spirit’’. On the whole, men did learn their lessons, study natureand profit from doing so, becoming ever more rational and manly as aresult – developing the man’s soul that they had awakened in the pro-cess. This was far from nature having no purpose. Chance might rule thelives of the animal kingdom, but as he told Bates, while natural historythus ‘‘looks like a chapter of accidents [it] is really… a chapter of specialProvidences of Him without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground,and whose greatness, wisdom, and perpetual care I never understood asI have since I became a convert to Darwin’s views’’ (F. Kingsley, 1901,


vol. III, pp. 179–180).30 It was by just such an arrangement that Godhad provided the means whereby man might raise himself – as God hadsurely planned, but as He had also left man to choose.

Kingsley was clearly blind-sided by Darwin’s apparent embrace ofmaterialism. This was a far cry indeed from the man who had formerlyquoted Kingsley’s own words in defense of a theistic reading of evolu-tion. In 1871 Kingsley had been elected President of the DevonshireAssociation for the Advancement of Science, Literature and Art, and hemade this most serious turn of events the subject of his presidentialaddress, delivered in the town of Bideford.

What upset Kingsley most was not so much Darwin’s evolutionaryaccount of language, aesthetics and morality, per se, but that he had tiedit to the notion that religious beliefs were similarly evolved by the samecontingent processes of natural selection, and were, at least by impli-cation, adaptations of earlier ignorance and superstition. Such meta-physical speculation was both unwarranted and unfounded, Kingsleyargued – and this from the man whom he had come to call ‘‘master’’.

I deeply regret that a most illustrious man of science, whom I cannever mention without reverence and gratitude, and who is himselfneither materialist nor atheist, should have entangled (quite need-lessly, as it seems to me) his recent speculations on The Descent ofMan – especially where he treats of Language, of the sense of Beauty,and of the origin of Morality – with a metaphysic which only crampsthe free play of his noble intellect, he said (Kingsley, 1871, p. 383).

Clearly reeling, Kingsley was even willing to recommended The Genesisof Species (1871), which had just been published by the talented Cath-olic anatomist St. George Jackson Mivart, ‘‘as a specimen of what canbe said on the other side by a sound man of science, who is also a soundmetaphysician’’ (Kingsley, 1871, p. 383). Kingsley had never beenbackwards in coming forwards with his negative opinion of Catholics,but for once he looked beyond his immediate prejudices in defense of atheistic reading of evolution.

In fact Kingsley’s views were quite different from Mivart’s. In Genesisof Species, Mivart argued that evolution was, to all intents and purposes,a foreordained unfolding of God’s intentions (Mivart, 1871). However, asis clear from the tale of the Doasyoulikes and the frequency with which hereturned to this tale, Kingsley believed that while God’s laws wereimmutable, the progress or degeneration of an organism – animal orhuman – was entirely contingent in how they placed themselves vis a vis

30 Charles Kingsley to Henry Walter Bates, April 13 1863. See also Matthew ch. 10.

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these laws (Kingsley, 1863, pp. 248–249). Despite their differences on theprocess of evolution, though, Kingsley could not deny that Mivart wasindeed a talented anatomist, and one who saw God at work in evolution.Kingsley was thus concerned that Darwin and Huxley were attempting tomarginalize Mivart’s views for reasons that appeared to be less thanscientific. Mivart had already stated much of his case in a series of articlespublished in the Catholic journal The Month, (Mivart, 1869), and hadwritten a stinging review of Descent in the Quarterly Review ([Mivart]1871). Huxley had taken up the cudgels in reply, writing the essay ‘‘Mr.Darwin’s Critics’’ (1871) in which he criticized both Wallace and Mivart.Huxley had written it for the Contemporary Review ensuring a wide cir-culation, and took pains to expose the differences between Mivart andWallace’s views – this was no united front. He reserved particularly harshwords for Mivart, however, whose treatment of Darwin had been ‘‘unjustand unbecoming’’ (Huxley, 1871, p. 475). He had also made it clear thatMivart was influenced in his thinking by his Catholic faith, implying thatthis was reason enough to discount his opinions.

In a way it was, and it is ironic that Kingsley had been complicit inensuring that this was the case, for no one had done more than Kingsley todemonize and defame Catholics. His most popular novelWestward Ho!wasa celebration of the superiority of Protestantism over Catholicism from startto finish (Schiefelbein, 1998); and in his infamous attack on John HenryNewman – that most famous of all defectors to the Roman Church –Kingsley had insinuated that Catholics had a tendency to put blindadherence to papal authority before the truth (Kingsley, 1864).31 Nowthough, and referring to Mivart’s work, Kingsley appealed to his audienceto join with him in rising above such prejudicial and unscientific grounds fordiscounting a theistic account of evolution. Clearly referring to the treat-ment that Darwin and Huxley between them had metered out to Mivart,Kingsley said, ‘‘You will believe, I am sure, that I deprecate the attempt tosilence this or any other form of philosophic thought; and, most of all, byappeals to popular prejudice or superstition, on the grounds of its supposedtendencies’’ (Kingsley, 1871, p. 383). At the same time, Kingsley was equallyat pains to make clear that he did not object to Darwin’s conclusions simplybecause they were offensive to his religious sensibilities. Rather, he believedthat Darwin’s argument was based on presumptions that had yet to be

31 This charge was coupled with the suggestion that there was something inherentlyeffeminate in Catholicism, and thus in stark contrast to the muscular, manly and

Protestant science that Kingsley promoted (Buckton, 1992). FitzPatrick (1983, 1991)has argued that even though Kingsley might have been punching above his weight intaking on such a skilled orator, in fact, and in contrast to the usual reading of this clash,

Kingsley’s attack struck a nerve and that Newman struggled to deflect the allegation.


proven – namely, that savage races, their customs, superstitions, and idol-atrous religions, could be taken as representative of an earlier stage in theevolution of the civilised and Christian peoples of the world. In DescentDarwin had sided with Lubbock against Argyll on this point, glossing overthe substance of Argyll’s argument, just as Lubbock had done in Dundee.Indeed, Darwin had virtually quoted from Lubbock’s Primitive Times,thereby allowing the association that Lubbock had drawn in Dundeebetween the theories of Argyll and Whately to go unchallenged:

The arguments recently advanced by the Duke of Argyll [in PrimevalMan] and formerly by Archbishop Whately, in favour of the beliefthat man came into the world as a civilised being and that all savageshave since undergone degradation, seem to me weak in comparisonto those advanced on the other side (Darwin, 1871, vol. I, p. 181)

‘‘To believe that man was aboriginally civilised and then suffered utterdegeneration in so many regions, is to take a pitiably low view of humannature’’, he added (Darwin, 1871, vol. I, pp. 183–184).32 Even thoughDarwin was willing to admit that ‘‘Many nations, no doubt, have fallenaway in civilization’’, again echoing Lubbock, this was something forwhich, he wrote, ‘‘I have not met with any evidence’’, and was certainlyby no means a generalizable phenomenon (Darwin, 1871, vol. I,p. 181).33 Nineteenth-century science, of course, was only really con-cerned with establishing the general and the lawful, rather than whatmight be locally interesting exceptions.

Kingsley, like Argyll, had long insisted upon the possibility of evo-lutionary degeneration, and he was well aware that Darwin had

32 As Neal Gillespie has pointed out though, the case for human degeneration asargued by the George Douglas Campbell, the Duke of Argyll, was more sophisticated

than this, Argyll argued that the possibility of degenerate adaptation to a relativelyunstimulating environment was quite plausible, and that if this was the case then itundermined the case, which had been made by Darwinian anthropologists like John

Lubbock, that primitive tribes could stand in as ’living fossils’; evidence of the kind oflife that ancestors of modem western man endured (Gillespie, 1977).33 Darwin’s adjudication of the matter, which was all the more decisive for its mea-

sured tone, deferred further consideration of the contingencies of degeneration until the1880s when it became a central concern of E. Ray Lankester and August Weismann.Thomas Huxley would also return to the subject in his famous Romanes Lecture,

Evolution and Ethics in 1893 inspiring his onetime student, H. G. Wells, to popularizethe ideas of each of these men in his science fiction story Time Machine (1895)–In eachof these cases, however, the theological implications had been expunged even as the

moral questions remained (Hale, 2010).

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acknowledged it too. Now, however, it appeared to Kingsley, at least,that like Lubbock, Darwin was also willing to dismiss possibilities thatdid not fit with his preconceptions. Thus, in addition to reading Mivart,Kingsley also recommended that his audience read Argyll’s PrimevalMan. Surely Darwin’s branching tree of selection and adaptationaccommodated the degeneration of organisms to fit their niche, just as itdid the progressive development of those that became more complex.Given this presumption, an awareness of the contingencies of time andplace meant that it was quite possible that present day savages had noplace in the genealogy of civilized Englishmen. He told his audience thatof the authors who held different opinions on the matter ‘‘more thanone of them are personal friends of mine’’ – here referring to Argyll andLubbock. He quoted Aristotle’s Nichomachaean Ethics to the effect that‘‘both are dear to us, but we must prefer the truth’’.34 Speaking of the‘‘Esquimaux-like savages, whose implements of flint or bone are foundin caves and river gravels’’ across Europe, Kingsley stated that beyondthe fact that it seemed that they were among the first men to haveappeared or reappeared in Europe, there were no grounds for furtherextrapolation. ‘‘As for their being the original type of man, as for ourbeing able to argue from their habits what were the habits of ourremotest ancestors’’ as Lubbock and now Darwin had done, ‘‘that Imust deny, as utterly as I deny it of any and every savage now existing’’,he wrote (Kingsley, 1871, p. 386).

Kingsley did not mean to deny that man had a simian ancestry,indeed, he acknowledged that the physical origin of man ‘‘seems,moreover, less important to me than it does to many persons on bothsides’’, he said (Kingsley, 1871, p. 394). However, the very history thatDarwin had given of the Fuegians being driven from the more abundantregions and degenerating as a result, which was echoed too by theGerman naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, who hadaccounted for the barbarism of the natives of American and NorthernAsia as ‘‘perhaps, less owing to a primitive absence of all kinds ofcivilisation, than to the effects of long degeneration’’ (Kingsley, 1871,p. 387). ‘‘Those who talk of a continual progress upward in man, forgethow many facts are against them’’, Kingsley added (Kingsley, 1871,pp. 386–387). Indeed, it seemed that degeneration was rather more oftenthe rule than the exception when it came to accounting for savage life.Almost by definition they were inferior peoples who had been drivenfrom the topical regions by better men, and, like the Doasyoulikes, had

34 The text in the original is in Greek script, I am grateful to Professor Kerill O’Neill

for identifying and translating this passage for me.


adapted to their meager surroundings. ‘‘Undeniably the facts show thatdegradation in mankind is as easy and as common as progress. Youhave only to leave civilized human beings to themselves for them tobecome savages’’ (Kingsley, 1871, p. 388). This much was just the storyhe had told of Tom, ‘‘Is not an average street-Arab as very a savage as aFuegian…? That is the natural tendency of man by the laws of hisnature.’’

Even though Kingsley had read and appreciated Darwin’s account ofthe education and civilisation of the Fuegians who had been broughtback to England, what Kingsley found impossible to entertain was thenotion that such savages would ever be able, or that their like had everbeen able, to raise themselves to the heights of English morals andcivilisation of their own accord. This had been Darwin’s opinion too, infact. Having witnessed Jemmy’s quick regression he had speculated thatthe only thing that might allow the Fuegians to rise was some event tochange their system of political economy – the imposition of some chief,perhaps. Kingsley, by contrast, could only think that if science did oneday actually prove that such had been our ancestors, then, siding withWallace, he could only suppose that such an improvement must havebeen the result of divine intervention. If it was ever proven that civilizedEnglishmen had arisen from such savages, he told his audience, ‘‘then Imust hold… that man never would have risen out of that state withoutsome special influence – supernatural, if you will – (I am not afraid ofthe word) – which has made him what he could never have made himself– a moral, and civilized, and even a decently decent being’’ (Kingsley,1871, p. 389). Such an unlikely and, to Kingsley, counter - intuitiveimprovement would certainly require a supernatural explanation,however much modern men of science might baulk at the notion.

Despite his rejection of the materialist conclusions that Darwin hadtaken from the contingency and chancefulness of the natural history ofmankind, Kingsley did not give up on his own commitment to the truthof evolution, or its compatibility with orthodoxy. He did, however,realize that science was increasingly only willing to speak to the physicaluniverse – and perhaps this was best – it was for the theologians tospeak for the spiritual evolution of mankind. Indeed Kingsley hadanticipated this position in a lecture he had delivered to Sion College onJanuary 1871 under the title ‘‘The Natural Theology of the Future’’.There he had told his assembled audience, that

‘‘If it be said that the doctrine of evolution, by doing away with thetheory of creation, does away with that of final causes – let usanswer boldly, Not in the least. We might accept what Mr. Darwin

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and Professor Huxley have written on physical science, and yetpreserve our natural theology on exactly the same basis as that onwhich Butler and Paley left it. That we should have to develop it, Ido not deny. That we should have to relinquish it I do’’ (Kingsley,1874, p. xviii).

This was still sufficiently Kingsley’s view some three years later when hechose to publish this essay as the preface to his Westminster Sermons,which appeared in 1874, the year before his untimely death.

In the letter that Darwin had written to Kingsley about the ‘‘dreadfulsubject’’ of the genealogy of man, Darwin had confessed that when hehad first set eyes upon the naked painted hideous [and] savage’’ Fue-gians, that he had found the notion that his ancestors must have been‘‘somewhat similar beings’’, ‘‘as revolting to me, nay more revoltingthan my present belief that an incomparably more remote ancestor wasa hairy beast,’’ and he recognized that many of his contemporarieswould doubtless feel the same. This was perhaps especially so in light ofthe prominence of the ongoing debate about slavery and the relation-ship between the races. Besides, Darwin had continued, the connectionwith apes was not as dreadful as it might at first appear. ‘‘Monkeys havedownright good hearts, at least sometimes, as I could show if I hadspace’’, he wrote (Burkhardt et al., 1997, vol. 10, pp. 71–72).

In Descent Darwin did indeed attempt to show that there was muchmerit in a monkey, regaling his readers with the story if one monkeywho rescued a youngster from a vicious pack of dogs, and another thathad risked its own life to save that of its keeper (Darwin, 1871, vol. I,p. 78). He used these anecdotes to repeat the sentiment he had expressedto Kingsley a decade earlier.

‘‘For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroiclittle monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the lifeof his keeper… as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies,offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse,treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by thegrossest superstitions’’ (Darwin, 1871, vol. II, p. 405).

So too, it seems, would Kingsley.

Conclusion

Charles Kingsley is both interesting and relevant for our understandingof nineteenth-century reactions to evolution. He was outspoken in his


views and highly influential (Hale, 2012). Unlike many High ChurchAnglicans, Kingsley was untroubled by the notion that God might havechosen to create humanity from apes. Indeed, as he had written toDarwin in 1859, he found that the idea that God created through law,rather than repeated acts of special creation gave him an even greaterconception of God. Kingsley’s embrace of evolution was a highly moralone nonetheless. God did nothing in vain and thus Kingsley believedthat his choosing to create through such an apparently chanceful andcontingent process as natural selection was indicative of his intentionthat we learn about the world he had created, the laws through which heordered the world, and thus how we might act so as to benefit fromthem. Evolution was thus no inevitable progressive development andevolutionary degeneration befell those who followed their own will ra-ther than the will of God. To Kingsley’s mind, therefore, the pursuit ofscience was imperative to uncovering God’s intentions for man and hethus became a staunch defender of honesty and integrity in the searchafter the truth. It was this that brought him so close to Huxley, whichled him to distain Owen, but that also led him to side with the Duke ofArgyll in his argument with John Lubbock. While Kingsley was nottroubled by apes in his ancestry he was quite horrified to think thatsavages similar to the Fuegians might also have been among the fore-bears of civilised Englishmen. Indeed, he pointed out that in light of thefact that evolution was a branching tree, in which degeneration was aslikely an outcome as progress, that there was no justification forassuming that the Fuegians, or any other such savages, had played apart in the evolutionary history of civilised men and women. Darwinhad pointed out degeneration in his work on barnacles and in hiscommentary on the Fuegians, just as Kingsley had made it central to histale of the Doasyoulikes. Kingsley was therefore dismayed when he readDescent of Man in 1871. Not only did Darwin now appear to reject thereal significance of evolutionary degeneration as it might be applied tomankind, but he did so in what Kingsley took to be the same dishonestway as Lubbock had done in 1868. Further, and far worse, Darwin nowoffered an account of the evolution of mankind’s highest attributes, oftheir language, mind and morals in which he suggested that they werenothing more than the outcome of contingent expediencies. Such a viewof morality, of what was right and what was wrong, was simply unac-ceptable. Having championed Darwin and Origin for a decade he nowstepped back from the brink to which Darwin had led him. Kingsleywas clearly blind-sided by what he read in Descent to the pointthat despite his own rabid anti-Catholicism he was willing to endorse

PIERS J. HALE

Mivart’s Genesis of Species as an alternative, despite the many differ-ences in their respective understandings of evolution. This is significant.Bernard Lightman has pointed out that the view of ‘Darwinism’ thatprevailed in England owed more to what popularisers like Kingsleymade of it than what Darwin himself had written (Lightman, 2010).Studies of men like Kingsley, Argyll and Mivart, will give us a valuableinsight into what the English made of evolution, despite what Darwin,Huxley and others whom we might more readily think of as Darwiniansintended. Kingsley’s story is especially interesting since it involves anotable change of heart about the moral implications of evolution.Kingsley quickly assimilated matters of morphology into a Darwiniannatural theology, but he could not give up his belief that moral truthswere absolute.

Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to John Beatty for years of discussion and col-laboration on Kingsley. His help in understanding Kingsley’s viewson the mechanism of biology, especially with regard to Kingsley’s taleof the Doasyoulikes, has been vital to my appreciation of Kingsleyand his evolutionary fairy tale Water Babies – Thanks John! Aspectsof this paper were first presented in a panel at the 2009 Brisbane con-ference of the International Society for the History, Philosophy andSocial Studies of Biology. The paper, ‘‘Monkeys into Men and Meninto Monkeys: Caprice and Contingency in Charles Kingsley’s WaterBabies’’ was a part of the panel: ‘‘Thus From the War of Nature:Caprice, ‘‘Contingency and the Dreadfulness of It All.’’ Other pre-senters were Staffan Muller-Willie (panel organizer) and John Beatty.

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