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PAUL WHITE, Thomas Huxley: Making the 'Man of Science'. Cambridge Science Biographies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv + 205. ISBN 0-521-64967-6. £16.99, $22.00 (paperback).
doi:10.1017/S0007087406347899
Although this study is part of the Cambridge Science Biographies series, it is much more than a biography of Thomas Huxley. It is a finely crafted and cogently argued account of the way that a particular cultural identity-the Victorian 'man of science'-was constructed through processes of negotiation and collaboration between naturalists such as Huxley and their families, colleagues, friends and adversaries. Through close readings of private correspondence, juxtaposed with carefully revisionist analyses of public pronouncements, Paul White has created a sensitive and multifaceted portrait of Huxley as, variously, aspiring professional, moralizing educationalist, high-culture demagogue, religious reformer and, finally, out-of-touch reactionary.
White's book opens and closes with reflections on how the identity of the 'man of science' differed both from the 'natural philosopher' of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and from the 'scientist' of the twentieth century. The intervening chapters show how Huxley was involved in the production, from the 1840s to the 1890s, of this intermediate identity. The man of science, compared to the natural philosopher, was more concerned to establish specialist authority in a particular domain of natural knowledge, and to do so in a way that was dependent on neither wealth nor patronage. At the other end of the period, Huxley's rejection of the label ' scientist ' is particularly informative for those of us who thought that the term was introduced by William Whewell in the 1830s. Whewell did indeed coin the term then, but it had not been widely adopted in Britain even by the 1890s. When asked by a journalist in 1894 whether he...