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The “Retrospective” provides an overview of the rise and decline of the X Club. Interacting theological, political, and scientific controversies in the early 1860s gave naturalists, physical scientists, and the philosophical Spencer a shared sense of beleaguerment against common enemies. As the Club formed in late 1864 their concerns culminated in an alliance with political and theological liberals to expand the science columns in the weekly Reader. By 1870 their tentacles were everywhere – in scientific societies and education lobbies, and as recognized spokespersons for science. However, as they gained more individual authority the Club became less important as a lobby group. By the late 1870s they often had different priorities and were sometimes critical of one another. In the early 1880s, with the death of Nelly Lubbock, Lubbock’s remarriage, and the deaths of Spottiswoode and Busk, the social centers of the group and the moderating influences among the friends were lost. Club meetings were poorly attended. Nevertheless, in the 1880s they had cultural authority and occasionally united in controversial causes. The chapter sums up their objectives, emphasizes the many allies who were crucial to their successes, acknowledges their failures, and discusses the larger context of their successes.

The chapter examines changing modes of support for scientific research and science education. The X-men were deeply committed to the expansion of science education but, contrary to historiographical opinion, were not leading lobbyists for state aid to science. Their activism in education was sustained by the belief that science would change “ways of thinking.” They lobbied, sat on committees, examined, and wrote textbooks. Most notably, Huxley and Lubbock were members of the Devonshire Royal Commission on the advancement of science. They failed to persuade elite public schools and the well-endowed ancient universities that science was essential to a liberal education, but were successful at lower levels, through the burgeoning examination system of the Science and Art Department, which met the aspirations of middling sorts of people. Thus, the School of Science at South Kensington, a school for training teachers, became the chief institution of science education in England and the School of Mines, from which it was carved, diminished in status. Finally, the chapter focuses on Hirst, whose career in science education provides vignettes of the social life of the X Club and of gender issues– including the roles of the Club wives and contemporary controversies on education for women.

This chapter tells the story of Nature’s foundation and its first few years of publication. Norman Lockyer, the astronomer who founded the journal with the financial backing of the publishing house Macmillan & Co., originally intended to produce a popular science magazine that would be read by both laymen and scientific researchers. However, the respected men of science whom Lockyer wanted as his contributors preferred to write for an audience of their scientific peers. Lockyer encountered further difficulties with his plan to direct the journal at laymen when his editorial policies clashed with the wishes of the X Club, a group of influential men of science who were also prominent science popularizers. As a result, Lockyer lost the support and the pens of the very group of people who would have been most likely to write the kinds of pieces he wanted. By the mid-1870s, even scientifically sophisticated laymen found it difficult to understand much of Nature’s content.

This chapter explores how and why a younger generation of British scientists adopted Nature as a forum of scientific communication in the 1870s and 1880s. Although men of science Norman Lockyer’s age and older, including the prominent X Club, certainly contributed to the journal, they did not see Nature as a particularly desirable place to conduct scientific debates—with the notable exception of Charles Darwin. The older generation preferred more established venues such as literary periodicals or the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In contrast, younger men of science—those born in the 1840s and later, such as E. Ray Lankester and George J. Romanes—adopted Nature as the primary forum where they could debate the most important scientific questions of the day before a knowledgeable readership. The contributions of this younger generation established Nature as essential reading for British men of science in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

A disproportionately large percentage of the most prominent evolutionary naturalists, and almost every member of the X-Club, traveled and climbed in the Swiss Alps. John Tyndall and Leslie Stephen, in particular, were simultaneously the most vocal of the evolutionary naturalists and the two most accomplished alpinists of their age. The height of their climbing came in the early 1860s, the same years in which they formulated their agnosticism. This paper will examine their journals and letters to uncover the role that mountaineering played as they formulated and defended a naturalistic framework. The questions the mountains forced them to ask, whether through beauty or desolation, order or chaos (what William Clifford termed “cosmic emotion”) helped influence their common project of formulating an ethic based on nature rather than God.

This introductory chapter describes Maxwell’s and Huxley’s backgrounds, particularly the formation of their views on and experience with religion. It shows the variety of “religion” present in the Victorian period: it is necessary to distinguish personal religiosity, institutional religion, and Anglican theology. Huxley argued strongly for a distinction between religion and theology, and aimed his rhetorical weapons against the latter with great precision (though this was not always appreciated by his readers). Maxwell’s religious background blended Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and evangelical thought, which shows the spectrum of belief and practice in Victorian Britain. His training and career, heavily influenced by the natural theology tradition, demonstrates how theistic science functioned in a deeply religiously environment while still promoting science. Further, the established Church of England played a powerful role in education and employment in the sciences, and Maxwell and Huxley show how careers in science were significantly shaped by an individual’s relationship to the many forms of Christianity in play.

This chapter explores the emergence of Britain's first Neurological Society by setting it in sharp contrast to its important specialist counterpart, the Ophthalmological Society of the United Kingdom. While the members of the Ophthalmological Society advocated for a wholly specialist profile, the members of the Neurological Society never aligned themselves with a specialist identity and instead embraced an inclusive attitude and scrupulously cultivated a generalist appearance in order to mitigate any pejorative charge that neurology was a narrow field of enquiry.

This chapter asks if Draper and White were indeed the sole originators of the conflict thesis, or whether there were others before and/or alongside them. Journeying from the French Revolution through to late Victorian England, key players are identified and discussed. These include Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, John Tyndall, Thomas Huxley, the X Club, and many more influential characters who spoke on or wrote about the relationship between science and religion. The conclusion is that Draper and White were far from alone: many other highly significant public figures had argued that there was an inherent conflict between theology and the scientific method in one way or another. The chapter then teases why it might be that Draper and White are so forcefully put forward in the literature as being the lone progenitors of the idea.