Science at Home: The Space between Henrietta Heathorn and Thomas Huxley

Jacques-Henri Bernardin de St. Pierre, Paul and Virginia (London, 1828), 288; Carlyle Thomas , “Characteristics”, Edinburgh review , 1827, in Critical and miscellaneous essays, iii (London, 1899), 10.

The important collection by Abir-Am Pnina Outram Dorinda (eds), Uneasy careers and intimate lives: Women in science 1789–1978 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1987) emphasizes the juxtaposition of science (objective, public) to domestic life (subjective, private) as the former became professionalized. See also Evelleen Richards, “Darwin and the descent of woman”, in Oldroyd D. E. Langham Ian (eds), The wider domain of evolutionary thought (Dordrecht, 1983), 57–112, Cynthia Russett, Sexual science: The Victorian construction of womanhood (Cambridge, 1989), and the eighteenth-century studies of Londa Schiebinger, The mind has no sex? Women in the origins of modern science (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).

For an early version of the separate spheres thesis, see Houghton Walter , The Victorian frame of mind (New Haven, 1957), 341–53. Among recent examples of the argument, the most influential and subtle is that of Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family fortunes: Men and women of the English middle-class, 1780–1850 (Chicago, 1987). Subsequent works based on the conclusions of Davidoff and Hall include, Jane Rendall, Women in an industrializing society, 1750–1880 (London, 1990), Perkin Joan , Victorian women (London, 1993), Loeb Lori Anne , Consuming angels: Advertising and Victorian women (New York, 1994), and Clark Anna , The struggle for the breeches: Gender and the making of the British working class (London, 1995).

The works of Jean Peterson, Family, love, and work in the lives of Victorian gentlewomen (Bloomington, 1989), and Mary Poovey, Uneven developments: The ideological work of gender in mid-Victorian England (Chicago, 1988) have rendered the ‘separate spheres’ thesis highly problematic. For more recent critiques, explicitly directed against the canonical status of Family fortunes, see Vickery Amanda , “Golden age to separate spheres? A review of the categories and chronology of English women's history”, The historical journal, xxxvi (1993), 383–414, and Wahrman Dror , “‘Middle-class’ domesticity goes public: Gender, class, and politics from Queen Caroline to Queen Victoria”, Journal of British studies, xxxii (1993), 396–432.

On the particular topic of gender and the sciences, I have found the work of Jan Goldstein, “The uses of male hysteria: Medical and literary discourse in nineteenth-century France”, in La Berge Ann Feingold Mordechai (eds), French medical culture in the nineteenth century (Amsterdam, 1994), 210–47, Jordanova Ludmilla , “Gender and the historiography of science”, The British journal for the history of science, xxvi (1993), 469–83, and Sexual visions: Images of gender in science and medicine between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries (London, 1989), Outram Dorinda , “Before objectivity: Wives, patronage, and cultural reproduction in early nineteenth century French science”, in Uneasy careers and intimate lives (ref. 2), 19–30, and Daston Lorraine , “The naturalized female intellect”, Science in context, v (1992), 209–35, most helpful.

Much of the literature on English masculinity takes the divisions of public and private, etc., for granted and fails to discuss femininity or the power relations that operate in conjunction with these gender identities at all. An exception is John Tosh, “Domesticity and manliness in the Victorian middle-class”, in Roper Michael Tosh John (eds), Manful assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London, 1991), 44–73, although this study, like the collection as a whole, largely subscribes to the ‘separate spheres’ thesis and fails to show the processes of negotiation through which gender roles were settled.

The standard hagiographic account is Bibby Cyril , T. H. Huxley: Scientist, humanist, educator (London, 1959). The initial assessments of Heathorn's role in Huxley Leonard , Life and letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (2 vols, New York, 1900, cited hereafter as LL), i, 38–39, and Huxley Julian (ed.), T. H. Huxley's diary of the voyage of H.M.S. Rattlesnake (Garden City, N.Y., 1936, cited hereafter as Diary), 268–9, have been largely reproduced in J. Vernon Jensen, Thomas Henry Huxley: Communicating for science (Newark, 1991) and Desmond Adrian , Thomas Huxley: The devil's disciple (London, 1994). For a feminist critique of Huxley's career with an emphasis on women's exclusion from the professions, see Richards Evelleen , “Huxley and women's place in science: The ‘woman question’ and the control of Victorian anthropology”, in Moore James R. (ed.), History, humanity and evolution: Essays for John C. Greene (Cambridge, 1989), 253–84. For accounts of Huxley as a ‘rising professional’, see Desmond Adrian , Archetypes and ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London, 1850–1875 (Chicago, 1982), and Rupke Nicolaas , Richard Owen: Victorian naturalist (New Haven, 1994).

On the gentlemenly ethos and broad civic concerns of scientific practitioners in the first half-century, see Inkster I. Morrell J. (eds), Metropolis and province: Science in British culture, 1780–1850 (London, 1983), Thackray A. Morrell J. , Gentlemen of science: Early years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford, 1981), Cannon Susan , Science in culture: The early Victorian period (New York, 1978), Kargon Robert , Science in Victorian Manchester: Enterprise and expertise (Baltimore, 1977), and Berman Morris , Social change and scientific organization: The Royal Institution, 1799–1844 (Ithaca, 1978). Much less attention has been paid to the cultural history of the middle and late Victorian ‘man of science’. See however Secord James A. , “John W. Salter: The rise and fall of a Victorian palaeontological career”, in Wheeler A. Price James (eds), From Linnaeus to Darwin: Commentaries on the history of biology and geology (London, 1985), 61–76, and “The Geological Survey of Great Britain as a research school 1839–1855”, History of science, xxiv (1986), 223–75, and Schaffer Simon , “Astronomers mark time: Discipline and the personal equation”, Science in context, ii (1988), 115–45.

Carlyle , “Characteristics”, Edinburgh review (1827), quoted in Huxley Papers, Imperial College Archives (cited hereafter as HP), 31.169, ‘Thoughts and Doings’ journal, entry for April 1842. For accounts of ‘genius’, see Abrams M. H. , The mirror and the lamp (New York, 1953), R. Currie, Genius, an ideology in literature (London, 1974), Shapin Steven , “‘The mind is its own place’: Science and solitude in seventeenth-century England”, Isis , Ixxix (1988), 372–404, Christopher Norris, “Deconstructing genius: Paul de Man and the critique of Romantic ideology”, in Murray Penelope (ed.), Genius: The history of an idea (Oxford, 1989), 141–65, Battersby Christine , Gender and genius: Towards a feminist aesthetics (London, 1989), and Schaffer Simon , “Genius in romantic natural philosophy”, in Cunningham Andrew Jardine Nicholas (eds), Romanticism and the sciences (Cambridge, 1990), 82–98.

On the extensive utilization of imperial motifs by British naturalists during the period, see Browne Janet , “A science of empire: British biogeography before Darwin”, Revue de l'histoire des sciences modernes et contemporaines, xlv (1992), 453–75, and Secord James A. , “King of Siluria: Roderick Murchison and the British imperial theme in nineteenth-century British geology”, Victorian studies, xxv (1982), 413–42. Huxley's early research program, which was guided by a classification scheme known in contemporary zoological circles as Quinarianism, and his relationship with the chief author of that scheme, William MacLeay, are carefully examined in Mary P. Winsor, Starfish, jellyfish, and the order of life (New Haven, 1976), 81–97.

See especially his letter to his sister, 28 Oct. 1846, LL, i, 29.

Diary, entries for 10 Jan. 1847, 15; and 25 Dec. 1847, 71.

For an argument on patronage relations as forms of domesticity, see especially Outram , op. cit. (ref. 4).

Diary, entry for 24 Dec. 1847, 70.

LL , i, 37–38, 15 May 1847; for another account, see Diary, entry for 7 May 1847, 28–30.

As part of a broad examination of enduring associations of women with nature and men with culture, Ludmilla Jordanova draws on Paul et Virginie to illustrate one version of this pairing that gave the moral advantage to women. Huxley's own reading of this tale supports her important claim that such conceptions could coexist and contend in the very same person with a discourse of masculine conquest. See Jordanova , op. cit. (ref. 5, 1989), 33–34, and my discussion below. In contrast, Desmond interprets Huxley's difficulties (when they are not caused by climate) as class difficulties, and his ship-board conflicts as class conflicts, op. cit. (ref. 7, 1994), 40–41, 54, 72, 85. For brief accounts of the manly expression of the emotions in the Victorian period, see Hilton Boyd , “Manliness, masculinity and the mid-Victorian temperament”, in Goldman Lawrence (ed.), The blind Victorian: Henry Fawcett and British liberalism (Cambridge, 1989), 60–70, Curtin Michael , Propriety and position: A study of Victorian manners (New York, 1987), and St. George E. A. W. , The descent of manners: Etiquette, rules and Victorians (London, 1993), chap. 6. For more extended arguments about shifts in manly comportment, see Barker-Benfield G. J. , The culture of sensibility: Sex and society in eighteenth-century Britain (Chicago, 1992), Outram Dorinda , The body and the French Revolution: Sex, class and political culture (New Haven, 1989), and Vincent-Buffault Anne , The history of tears: Sensibility and sentimentality in France (London, 1991).

Smiles Samuel , Character (London, 1871), 44–57. On the anguished sympathies of Whewell, Herschel, and Babbage for middle-class values of work and utility, see Alborn Timothy L. , “Idols of the factory: Genius and industry in the language of British scientific reform, 1820–1840”, History of science, xxxiv (1996), 91–121. On the masculine cult of industry more generally, see Collini Stefan , “Manly fellows: Fawcett, Stephen and the liberal temper”, in Goldman Lawrence (ed.), The blind Victorian: Henry Fawcett and British liberalism (Cambridge, 1989), 40–59. For a suggestive account of the gender troubles of Victorian men of letters, see Clarke Norma , “Strenuous idleness: Thomas Carlyle and the man of letters as hero”, in Roper Michael Tosh John (eds), Manful assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London, 1991), 25–43.

See the highly influential studies of Turner Frank , collected in Contesting cultural authority: Essays in Victorian intellectual life (Cambridge, 1993).

HP 62.37.

Huxley Henrietta A. , Poems of Henrietta A. Huxley with three of Thomas H. Huxley (London, 1913), 14.

Diary , entry for May 1849, 211. On the importance of private acts of writing for Victorian gentlewomen, see especially Peterson , op. cit. (ref. 4).

Establing the important role of women in the Victorian middle-class economy is one of the central aims of Davidoff Hall , op. cit. (ref. 4). For an account of the strenuous occupation of household management in Britain, see Branca Patricia , “Image and reality: The myth of the idle Victorian woman”, in Hartman Banner (eds), Clio's consciousness raised: New perspectives on the history of women (New York, 1974), 179–91.

Diary, entries for 28 June 1849, 218; and 26 May 1849, 214.

The religion-saturated home of the evangelical middle-class is a commonplace in British historiography; though most studies, when not focused on the confining effects of the angel-in-the-house ideology, have been concerned with how Christian piety gave women mobility and authority outside the home. See for example, Prochaska F. K. , Women and philanthropy in nineteenth-century England (Oxford, 1980), Owen Alex , “Women and nineteenth-century spiritualism: Strategies in the subversion of femininity”, in Obelkevich Jim Roper Lyndal Samuel Raphael (eds), Disciplines of faith: Studies in religion, politics and patriarchy (London, 1987), 130–53, and Thompson F. M. L. , The rise of respectable society (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 250–3.

See, for example, Shuttleworth Sally , “Female circulation: Medical discourse and popular advertising in the mid-Victorian era”, in Jacobus M. Keller E. F. Shuttleworth S. (eds), Body/Politics: Women and the discourses of science (London, 1990), 47–63.

Burkhardt Frederick Smith Sydney (eds), The correspondence of Charles Darwin, ii (Cambridge, 1985), 122–3, 126, 169.

Diary, entry for 23 Oct. 1849, 276–8.

Diary, 228–9.

Diary, 240–2.

Diary, entry for 18 Mar. 1850, 239.

Diary, entry for 26 Mar. 1850, 242.

Diary, entry for 27 Nov. 1849, 286.

HP, Henrietta Heathorn Correspondence (cited hereafter as HH), letters 7 and 8, 6 and 15 Feb. 1848.

Diary, entry for 25 Nov. 1847, 65–66.

LL, i, 103–4, 3 Mar. 1848; HH 2–3, 17 and 18 Jan. 1847; and HH 36, 23 and 27 July 1848.

LL, i, 65–69, 21 Nov. 1850.

LL, i, 67.

Diary, entries for 19, 20, and 26 Aug. 1849, 218–28.

While arguing for the triumph of science over ideology, Smith Bernard , European vision and the South Pacific (New Haven, 1985), contains a wealth of iconographic material. A more sophisticated reading of such conquest narratives is Pratt Mary Louise , Imperial eyes: Travel writing and transculturation (London, 1992), 142–55. For their imperial roles, English men (Huxley included) would also revive medieval models of the virtuous conqueror and rescuer of women. See Girouard Mark , The return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English gentleman (New Haven, 1981).

Diary, entry for 31 Aug. 1849, 166.

Diary, entries for 12 Aug. 1849, 212–13; 5 Sept. 1849, 234–45; and 12 Dec. 1849, 260.

The form of manliness Huxley entertained here was quite close to another being preached at the time by liberal Anglicans like Thomas Arnold, Frederick Maurice and Charles Kingsley. See especially Wee C. J. W-L. , “Christian manliness and national identity: The problematic construction of the racially ‘pure’ nation”, in Hall Donald E. (ed.), Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian age (Cambridge, 1994), 66–88, also Vance Norman , The sinews of the spirit: The ideal of Christian manliness in Victorian literature and religious thought (Cambridge, 1985). While recent work, for example, of Alison Blunt, Travel, gender, and imperialism: Mary Kinsley and West Africa (New York, 1994), and Mills Sara , “Knowledge, gender, and empire”, in Blunt Alison Rose Gillian (eds), Writing women and space: Colonial and postcolonial geographies (New York, 1994), 29–50, has focused on the role of gender, and women's writing in particular, in the construction of colonial discourses, more attention needs to be given to the ways in which domesticity was a resource for the women and men who furthered British imperialism. For hints in this regard, see Poovey , op. cit. (ref. 5), chap. 6, and Pratt , op. cit. (ref. 39), 155–71.

The crew's treachery was gently reprimanded in MacGillivray John , Narrative of the voyage of H.M.S. Rattlesnake (2 vols, London, 1852), i, 270–1. Thomas would obtain a public forum by reviewing MacGillivray's work in “Science at sea”, Westminster review, 1854, 98–119.

HH 135, 31 Jan. 1851; HH 140, 14 Mar. 1851.

HH 177, 31 Dec. 1851; LL, i, 65–69, 21 Nov. 1850.

All of these testimonials are collected in HP 31.68ff.

HP 31.139.

HH 172, 7 Nov. 1851.

Ibid.

HH 156, 7 Dec. 1850.

LL, i, 137, June 1855.

LL , i, 103–4, 30 Mar. 1851; LL, i, 102, 9 Nov. 1851.

While the argument for the Geological Survey as a domestic fraternity under De la Beche's patronage-cum-fatherhood is not developed, Secord , op. cit. (ref. 8), is very suggestive in this regard.

HH 172, 7 Nov. 1851.

HH 164, 9 July 1851.

HH 211,20 June 1852.

HH 183, 18, 20 and 25 Jan. 1852.

HH 211, 20 June 1852.

HH 186, 10 Feb. 1852.

HH 250, 10 Sept. 1853.

HP 62.2.

For example, her published Poems suggest quite strongly that through the end of her life she persistently placed herself and Thomas, not in the custody of his genius, but of her quite different God, see Heathorn , op. cit. (ref. 20), 11–12, 75–76, 99–101, 155–6.

On the mutual construction of the ‘popular’ or ‘amateur’ and the ‘professional’, see Cooter Roger Pumphrey Stephen , “Separate spheres and public places: Reflections on the history of science popularization and science in popular culture”, History of science, xxxii (1994), 237–67, and Secord Anne , “Science in the pub: Artisan botanists in early nineteenth-century Lancashire”, History of science, xxxii (1994), 269–315. Wide-ranging reflections on resistance in everyday practice may be found in de Certeau Michel , The practice of everday life, transl. by Rendell Steven (Berkeley, 1984).