Thomas Henry Huxley: A Character Sketch

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LONDON: WATTS & CO., 17 JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.4 1920
PORTRAIT FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY ELLIOTT AND FRY Frontispiece
FROM A DAGUERROTYPE MADE IN 1846 _To face p._20
PORTRAIT FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY MAULL AND POLYBLANK, 1857 _To face p._44
PORTRAIT FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY DOWNEY, 1890 _To face p._102
The object of a full-dress biography is to present as complete a picture as may be of a man and his work, the influence of his character upon his achievement, the struggle with opposing influences to carry out some guiding purpose or great idea. With abundant documents at hand the individual development, the action of events upon character, and of character upon events, can be shown in the spontaneous freedom of letters, as well as in considered publications. But this little book is not a full-dress biography, although it may induce readers to turn to the larger Life and Letters , in which (or in the Aphorisms and Reflections of T.H. Huxley ) facts and quotations can be turned up by means of the index; it is designed rather as a character sketch, to show not so much the work done as what manner of man Huxley was, and the spirit in which he undertook that work. It will not be a history of his scientific investigations or his philosophical researches; it will be personal, while from the personal side illustrating his attitude towards his scientific and philosophical thought.
Thomas Henry Huxley was born ten years after Waterloo, while the country was still in the backwash of the long-drawn Napoleonic wars. It was a time of material reconstruction and expansion, while social reconstruction lagged sadly and angrily behind. The year of his birth saw the first railway opened in England; it was seven years before electoral reform began, with its well-meant but dispiriting sequel in the new Poor Law. The defeat of the political and aggressive cause which had imposed itself upon the revolutionary inspiration of freedom strengthened the old orthodoxies here. Questioning voices were raised at their proper peril.