Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 1

by Thomas Henry Huxley

The result of his application, thus backed, was that he obtained his appointment on November 29. It was for six months, subject to extension if he were able to report satisfactory progress with his work.

A long letter to his sister, now settled in Tennessee, gives a good idea of his aims and hopes at this time.]

41 North Bank, Regent's Park.

November 21, 1850.

My dearest Lizzie,

We have been at home now nearly three weeks, and I have been a free man again twelve days. Her Majesty's ships have been paid off on the 9th of this month. Properly speaking, indeed, we have been at home longer, for we touched at Plymouth and trod English ground and saw English green fields on the 23rd of October, but we were allowed to remain only twenty-four hours, and to my great disgust were ordered round to Chatham to be paid off. The ill-luck which had made our voyage homeward so long (we sailed from Sydney on the 2nd of May) pursued us in the Channel, and we did not reach Chatham until the 2nd of November; and what do you think was one of the first things I did when we reached Plymouth? Wrote to Eliza K. asking news of a certain naughty sister of mine, from whom I had never heard a word since we had been away—and if perchance there should be any letter, begging her to forward it immediately to Chatham. And so, when at length we got there, I found your kind long letter had been in England some six or seven months; but hearing of the likelihood of our return, they had very judiciously not sent it to me.

Your letter, my poor Lizzie, justifies many a heartache I have had when thinking over your lot, knowing, as I well do, what emigrant life is in climates less trying than that in which you live. I have seen a good deal of bush life in Australia, and it enables me fully to sympathise with and enter into every particular you tell me—from the baking and boiling and pigs squealing, down to that ferocious landshark Mrs. Gunther, of whose class Australia will furnish fine specimens. Had I been at home, too, I could have enlightened the good folks as to the means of carriage in the colonies, and could have told them that the two or twenty thousand miles over sea is the smallest part of the difficulty and expense of getting anything to people living inland; as it is, I think I have done some good in the matter; their meaning was good but their discretion small. But the obtuseness of English in general about anything out of the immediate circle of their own experience is something wonderful.

I had heard here and there fractional accounts of your doings from Eliza K. and my mother—not of the most cheery description—and therefore I was right glad to get your letter, which, though it tells of sorrow and misfortune enough and to spare, yet shows me that the brave woman's heart you always had, my dearest Lizzie, is still yours, and that you have always had the warm love of those immediately around you, and now, as the doctor's letter tells us, you have one more source of joy and happiness, and this new joy must efface the bitterness—I do not say the memory, knowing how impossible that would be—of your great loss. [The death of her little daughter Jessie]. God knows, my dear sister, I could feel for you. It was as if I could see again a shadow of the great sorrow that fell upon us all years ago.

Nothing can bind me more closely to your children than I am already, but if the christening be not all over you must let me be godfather; and though I fear I am too much of a heretic to promise to bring him up a good son of the church—yet should ever the position which you prophesy, and of which I have an "Ahnung" (though I don't tell that to anybody but Nettie), be mine, he shall (if you will trust him to me) be cared for as few sons are. As things stand, I am talking half nonsense, but I mean it—and you know of old, for good and for evil, my tenacity of purpose.

Now, as to my own affairs—I am not married. Prudently, at any rate, but whether wisely or foolishly I am not quite sure yet, Nettie and I resolved to have nothing to do with matrimony for the present. In truth, though our marriage was my great wish on many accounts, yet I feared to bring upon her the consequences that might have occurred had anything happened to me within the next few years. We had a sad parting enough, and as is usually the case with me, time, instead of alleviating, renders more disagreeable our separation. I have a woman's element in me. I hate the incessant struggle and toil to cut one another's throat among us men, and I long to be able to meet with some one in whom I can place implicit confidence, whose judgment I can respect, and yet who will not laugh at my most foolish weaknesses, and in whose love I can forget all care. All these conditions I have fulfilled in Nettie. With a strong natural intelligence, and knowledge enough to understand and sympathise with my aims, with firmness of a man, when necessary, she combines the gentleness of a very woman and the honest simplicity of a child, and then she loves me well, as well as I love her, and you know I love but few—in the real meaning of the word, perhaps, but two—she and you. And now she is away, and you are away. The worst of it is I have no ambition, except as means to an end, and that end is the possession of a sufficient income to marry upon. I assure you I would not give two straws for all the honours and titles in the world. A worker I must always be—it is my nature—but if I had 400 pounds sterling a year I would never let my name appear to anything I did or shall ever do. It would be glorious to be a voice working in secret and free from all those personal motives that have actuated the best. But, unfortunately, one is not a "vox et praeterea nihil," but with a considerable corporality attached which requires feeding, and so while my inner man is continually indulging in these anchorite reflections, the outer is sedulously elbowing and pushing as if he dreamed of nothing but gold medals and professors' caps.