Alfred Hitchcock


Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock KBE (August 13, 1899 – April 29, 1980) was an iconic and highly influential British-born film director and producer who pioneered many techniques in the suspense and thriller genres. He directed more than fifty feature films in a career spanning six decades, from the silent film era, through the invention of talkies, to the colour era. Hitchcock was among the most consistently successful and publicly recognizable world directors during his lifetime, and remains one of the best known and most popular of all time.

Famous for his expert and largely unrivalled control of pace and suspense, Hitchcock's films draw heavily on both fear and fantasy, and are known for their droll humour and witticisms. They often portray innocent people caught up in circumstances beyond their control or understanding.

Hitchcock was born and raised in Leytonstone, London, England. He began his directing career in the United Kingdom in 1922, but from 1939 he worked primarily in the United States and applied for U.S. citizenship in 1956. Hitchcock and his family owned a mountaintop estate known as Cornwall Ranch or "Heart o' the Mountain" at the end of Canham Road, high above Scotts Valley, California, from 1940 to 1972. They bought a second home in late 1942 at 10957 Bellagio Road in Los Angeles, just across from the Bel Air Country Club. Hitchcock died of renal failure in 1980.[1]

Rebecca was the only one of his films to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, although four others were nominated. However, Hitchcock never won an Academy Award for Best Director. He was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for lifetime achievement in 1967, but never personally received an Academy Award of Merit.

Life

[edit] Childhood and youth
Alfred Hitchcock was born on August 13, 1899, in Leytonstone, Essex (now London), the second son and youngest of three children of William Hitchcock (1862-1914), a greengrocer and poulterer, and his wife, Emma Jane Hitchcock (née Whelan; 1863-1942). His family was mostly Roman Catholic, being of Irish extraction.[2] Hitchcock was sent to the Jesuit Classic school St. Ignatius College in Enfield, London. He often described his childhood as being very lonely and sheltered, which was undoubtedly compounded by his weight issues.[3]

It is widely known that as a child, Hitchcock's father once sent him to their local police station with a note asking the officer to lock him away for ten minutes as punishment for behaving badly. This idea of being harshly treated or wrongfully accused is more than commonly reflected in Hitchcock's films.[4]

His mother would often make him address her while standing at the foot of her bed, especially if he behaved badly, forcing him to stand there for hours. This would be recalled by the character Norman Bates in Psycho.[5]

When Hitchcock was 14, his father died; the same year, he left the Jesuit-run St Ignatius' College in Stamford Hill, his school at the time, to study at the School for Engineering and Navigation. After graduating, he became a draftsman and advertising designer with a cable company.[6]

About that time, Hitchcock became intrigued by photography and started working in film in London. In 1920, he got a full-time job at Islington Studios with its American owner, Famous Players-Lasky and their British successor, Gainsborough Pictures, designing the titles for silent movies.[7]


[edit] Pre-War British career
In 1925, Michael Balcon of Gainsborough Pictures gave him a chance to direct his first film, The Pleasure Garden made at Ufa studios in Germany. The commercial failure of this film threatened to derail his promising career.[8] In 1926, however, Hitchcock made his debut in the thriller genre. The resulting film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog was a major commercial and critical success when it was released throughout the U.K. in January 1927. Like many of his earlier works, it was influenced by Expressionist techniques he had witnessed firsthand in Germany. This is the first truly "Hitchcockian" film, incorporating such themes as the "wrong man".[9]

Following the success of The Lodger, Hitchcock began his first efforts to promote himself in the media, and hired a publicist to cement his growing reputation as one of the British film industry's rising stars. On December 2, 1926, he married his assistant director Alma Reville at Brompton Oratory. Their daughter Patricia was born in 1928. Alma was Hitchcock's closest collaborator. She wrote some of his screenplays and (though often uncredited) worked with him on every one of his films.

In 1929, he began work on his tenth film Blackmail. While the film was in production, the studio decided to make it one of Britain's first sound pictures. With the climax of the film taking place on the dome of the British Museum, Blackmail began the Hitchcock tradition of using famous landmarks as a backdrop for suspense sequences. In the PBS series The Men Who Made The Movies, Hitchcock explained how he used early sound recording as a special element of the film, emphasizing the word "knife" in a conversation with the woman suspected of murder.[10]

In 1933, Hitchcock was once again working for Michael Balcon at Gaumont-British Picture Corporation. His first film for the company, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), was a success and his second, The 39 Steps (1935), is often considered one of the best films from his early period. It was also one of the first to introduce the concept of the "Macguffin", a plot device around which a whole story seems to revolve, but ultimately has nothing to do with the true meaning or ending of the story. In The 39 Steps, the Macguffin is a stolen set of blueprints. (Hitchcock told French director François Truffaut: "There are two men sitting in a train going to Scotland and one man says to the other, 'Excuse me, sir, but what is that strange parcel you have on the luggage rack above you?' 'Oh,' says the other, 'that's a Macguffin.' 'Well,' says the first man, 'what's a Macguffin?' The other answers, 'It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.' 'But,' says the first man, 'there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands.' 'Well,' says the other, 'then that's no Macguffin.'")[11]

His next major success was in 1938, The Lady Vanishes, a clever and fast-paced film about the search for a kindly old Englishwoman (Dame May Whitty), who disappears while on board a train in the fictional country of Vandrika (a thinly-veiled version of Nazi Germany).

By 1938 Hitchcock had become known for his famous observation, "Actors are cattle." He once said that he first said this as early as the late 1920s, when he thought of stage actors who were snobbish about motion pictures. However, Michael Redgrave said Hitchcock made the statement during the filming of The Lady Vanishes. The phrase would haunt Hitchcock for years to come and would result in a funny incident during the filming of his 1941 production of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, when Carole Lombard brought some heifers onto the set to surprise the director.[12]

By the end of the 1930s, Hitchcock was at the top of his game artistically, and in a position to name his own terms when David O. Selznick managed to entice him to Hollywood.


[edit] Hollywood
Hitchcock's gallows humour and the suspense that became his trademark continued in his American work. However, working arrangements with his new producer were less than optimal. Selznick suffered from perennial money problems and Hitchcock was often unhappy with the amount of creative control demanded by Selznick over his films. Consequently, Selznick ended up "loaning" Hitchcock to the larger studios more often than producing Hitchcock's films himself. In addition, Selznick, as well as fellow independent producer Samuel Goldwyn, made only a few films each year, so Selznick did not always have projects for Hitchcock to direct. Remarkably, Goldwyn had also negotiated with Hitchcock on a possible contract, only to be outbid by Selznick. Hitchcock was quickly impressed with the superior resources of the American studios compared to the financial restrictions he had frequently encountered in England. Nevertheless, Hitchcock's fondness for his homeland resulted in numerous American films set in, or filmed in, the United Kingdom, right up to his next-to-last film, Frenzy.

With the prestigious Selznick picture Rebecca in 1940, Hitchcock made his first American movie, although it was set in England and based on a novel by English author Daphne du Maurier and starred Sir Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. This Gothic melodrama explores the fears of a naïve young bride who enters a great English country home and must grapple with the problems of a distant husband, a predatory housekeeper, and the legacy of her husband's late wife, the beautiful, mysterious Rebecca. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1940. However, the statuette went to Selznick as the film's producer, and the film did not win the Best Director award. There were additional problems between Selznick and Hitchcock; Selznick, as he usually did, imposed very restrictive rules upon Hitchcock, hindering his creative control. Hitchcock was forced to shoot the film as Selznick wanted, immediately creating friction within their relationship. At the same time, Selznick complained about Hitchcock's "goddam jigsaw cutting," which meant that the producer did not have nearly the leeway to create his own film as he liked, but had to follow Hitchcock's vision of the finished product.[13] The film was the third longest of Hitchcock's films at 130 minutes, exceeded only by The Paradine Case at 132 minutes and North by Northwest at 136 minutes.[14]

Hitchcock's second American film, the European-set thriller Foreign Correspondent (originally titled Personal History), was also nominated for Best Picture that year. It was filmed in the first year of World War II and inspired by the rapidly-changing events in Europe, as covered by an American newspaper reporter portrayed by a wise-cracking Joel McCrea. The film cleverly used actual footage of European scenes and scenes filmed on a Hollywood backlot. Curiously, because of Hollywood's Production Code censorship, the film avoided direct references to Germany and Germans.[15]

Hitchcock's work during the 1940s was diverse, ranging from the romantic comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941) and the courtroom drama The Paradine Case (1947) to the dark and disturbing Shadow of a Doubt (1943).

Suspicion (1941) marked Hitchcock's first film as a producer as well as director. This was Cary Grant's first film with Hitchcock. Joan Fontaine won Best Actress Oscar and New York Film Critics Circle Award for her outstanding performance in Suspicion.

Saboteur (1942) was the first of two films that Hitchcock made for Universal, a studio where he would work in his later years. Hitchcock was forced to utilize Universal contract players Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane, both known for their work in comedies and light dramas; Hitchcock made the most of the situation and got remarkably good performances from the two lead actors. Breaking with Hollywood conventions of the time, Hitchcock did extensive location filming, especially in New York City, and memorably depicted a confrontation between a suspected saboteur (Cummings) and a real saboteur (Norman Lloyd) atop the Statue of Liberty.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943), his personal favourite of all his films and the second of the early Universal films, was about young Charlotte "Charlie" Newton (Teresa Wright), who suspects her beloved uncle Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten) of being a serial murderer. In its use of overlapping characters, dialogue, and closeups it has provided a generation of film theorists with psychoanalytic potential, including Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek. The film also harkens back to one of Cotten's best known films, Citizen Kane. Hitchcock again filmed extensively on location, this time in the Northern California city of Santa Rosa, during the summer of 1942. The director showcased his own personal fascination with crime and criminals when he had two of his characters discuss various ways of killing people, to the obvious annoyance of Charlotte.

Working at 20th Century Fox, Hitchcock adapted a script by John Steinbeck that dealt with the survivors of a German U-boat attack, Lifeboat (1944). Since the action was confined to the small boat, the film was clearly the most confined of Hitchcock's films. While at Fox, Hitchcock seriously considered directing the film version of A.J. Cronin's novel about a Catholic priest in China, The Keys of the Kingdom, but the plans for this fell through. John M. Stahl ended up directing the 1944 film, which was produced by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and starred Gregory Peck, among other luminaries.[16]

Returning to England for an extended visit in late 1943 and early 1944, Hitchcock filmed two short films for the Ministry of Information, Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache. The films were made for France's free territories and were the only ones Hitchcock made in French; they feature typical Hitchcockian touches.[17] In the 1990s, the two films were shown by Turner Classic Movies and released on home video.

In 1945, Hitchcock served as "treatment advisor" (in effect, editor) for a Holocaust documentary produced by the British Army. The film, which recorded the liberation of Concentration Camps, remained unreleased until 1985, when it was completed by PBS Frontline and distributed under the title Memory of the Camps.[18]

Hitchcock worked again for Selznick when he directed Spellbound, which explored the then-fashionable subject of psychoanalysis and featured a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí. The dream sequence as it actually appears in the film is considerably shorter than was originally envisioned, which was to be several minutes long, because it proved to be too disturbing for the audience. Some of the memorable and original musical score by Miklos Rozsa was later adapted by the composer into a concert piano concerto.

Notorious (1946) followed Spellbound. As Selznick failed to see its potential, he allowed Hitchcock to make the film for RKO. From this point onwards, Hitchcock would produce his own films, giving him a far greater degree of freedom to pursue the projects that interested him. Notorious starred Hitchcock regulars Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant and features a plot about Nazis, uranium, and South America. It was a huge box office success and has remained one of Hitchcock's most acclaimed films. His use of uranium as a plot device briefly led to Hitchcock's being under surveillance by the FBI. McGilligan wrote that Hitchcock consulted scientists about the development of an atomic bomb; Selznick complained that the notion was "science fiction," only to be confronted by the detonation of two atomic bombs in 1945 that led to the end of World War II.[19]

After completing his final film for Selznick, The Paradine Case (a promising courtroom drama that critics found lost momentum because it apparently ran too long and exhausted its resource of ideas), Hitchcock filmed his first colour film, Rope, which appeared in 1948. Here Hitchcock experimented with marshalling suspense in a confined environment, as he had done earlier with Lifeboat (1943). He also experimented with exceptionally long takes — up to ten minutes long (see Themes and devices). Featuring James Stewart in the leading role, Rope was the first of four films Stewart would make for Hitchcock. It was based on the Leopold and Loeb case of the 1920s. Somehow Hitchcock's cameraman managed to move the bulky, heavy Technicolor camera quickly around the set as it followed the continuous action of the long takes.

Under Capricorn (1949), set in nineteenth-century Australia, also used the short-lived technique of long takes, but to a more limited extent. He again used Technicolor in this production, then returned to black and white films for several years. For Rope and Under Capricorn Hitchcock formed a production company with Sidney Bernstein, called Transatlantic Pictures, which became inactive after these two unsuccessful pictures. Hitchcock continued to produce his films for the rest of his life.


[edit] Peak years and Knighthood
In 1950, Hitchcock filmed Stage Fright on location in the U.K. For the first time, Hitchcock matched one of Warner Brothers' biggest stars, Jane Wyman, with the sultry German actress Marlene Dietrich, whose daughter later wrote that Dietrich detested Wyman, although Wyman had just won the Best Actress Oscar for Johnny Belinda. Hitchcock may have exploited the offscreen animosity between Wyman and Dietrich in this offbeat, behind-the-scenes glimpse of London theatrical personalities, one of whom commits a murder. Hitchcock utilized a number of prominent British actors, including Michael Wilding, Richard Todd, and Alastair Sim. This was Hitchcock's first production for Warner Brothers, which had distributed Rope and Under Capricorn, because Transatlantic Pictures was experiencing financial difficulties.[20]

With Strangers on a Train (1951), based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith, Hitchcock combined many of the best elements from his preceding British and American films. Two men casually meet and speculate on removing people who are causing them difficulty. One of the men, though, takes this banter entirely seriously. With Farley Granger reprising some elements of his role from Rope, Strangers continued the director's interest in the narrative possibilities of blackmail and murder.

MCA head Lew Wasserman, whose client list included James Stewart, Janet Leigh, and other actors who would appear in Hitchcock's films, had a significant impact in packaging and marketing Hitchcock's films beginning in the 1950s. With Wasserman's help, Hitchcock received tremendous creative freedom from the studios, as well as substantive financial rewards as a result of Paramount's profit-sharing contract.

Three very popular films starring Grace Kelly followed. Dial M for Murder (1954) was adapted from the popular stage play by Frederick Knott. This was originally another experimental film, with Hitchcock using the technique of 3D cinematography, although the film was not released in this format at first; it did receive screenings in the early 1980s in 3D form. The film also marked a return to Technicolor productions for Hitchcock. Hitchcock moved to Paramount Pictures and filmed Rear Window, starring James Stewart and Kelly again, as well as Thelma Ritter and Raymond Burr. Here, the wheelchair-bound Stewart observes the movements of his neighbours across the courtyard and becomes convinced one of them has murdered his wife. Like Lifeboat and Rope, the movie was photographed almost entirely within the confines of a small space: Stewart's tiny studio apartment overlooking the massive courtyard set. To Catch a Thief, set in the French Riviera, starred Kelly and Cary Grant.

A remake of his own 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much followed, this time with James Stewart and Doris Day, who sang the theme song, "Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)" (which became a big hit for Day and won an Oscar).

The Wrong Man (1957), Hitchcock's final film for Warner Brothers, was a low-key black and white production based on a real-life case of mistaken identity. This was the only film of Hitchcock's to star Henry Fonda.

Vertigo (1958) again starred Stewart, this time with Kim Novak and Barbara Bel Geddes. The film was a commercial failure, but has come to be viewed by many as one of Hitchcock's masterpieces; it is now placed highly in the Sight & Sound decade polls. It was premiered in the San Sebastian International Film Festival, where Hitchcock won a Silver Seashell.

Hitchcock followed Vertigo with three more successful pictures. All are also recognized as among his very best films: North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963). The latter two were particularly notable for their unconventional soundtracks, both by Bernard Herrmann: the screeching strings in the murder scene in Psycho pushed the limits of the time, and The Birds dispensed completely with conventional instruments, using an electronically produced soundtrack and an unaccompanied song by school children (just prior the infamous attack at the historic Bodega Bay School). These are widely considered his last great films, after which his career slowly wound down (although some critics such as Robin Wood and Donald Spoto contend that Marnie, from 1964, is first-class Hitchcock, and some have argued that Frenzy is unfairly overlooked).


[edit] Later Work
Failing health also reduced his output over the last two decades of his life. He filmed two spy thrillers, Torn Curtain with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews and Topaz (based on a Leon Uris novel), which both received mixed reviews. In 1972, Hitchcock returned to London to film Frenzy, his last major success. For the first time, Hitchcock allowed nudity and profane language, which had before been taboo, in one of his films. Biographers have noted that Hitchcock had always pushed the limits of film censorship, often managing to fool Joseph Breen, the longtime head of Hollywood's Production Code. Many times Hitchcock slipped in subtle hints of improprieties forbidden by censorship until the mid-1960s. Yet Patrick McGilligan wrote that Breen and others often realized that Hitchcock was inserting such things and were actually amused as well as alarmed by Hitchcock's "inescapable inferences."[21] Beginning with Torn Curtain, Hitchcock was finally able to blatantly include plot elements previously forbidden in American films and this continued for the rest of his life.

Family Plot (1976) was his last film. It related the escapades of "Madam" Blanche Tyler played by Barbara Harris, a fraudulent spiritualist, and her taxi driver lover Bruce Dern making a living from her phony powers. William Devane, Karen Black and Cathleen Nesbitt co-starred. It was the only Hitchcock film scored by John Williams.

Near the end of his life, Hitchcock worked on the script for a projected spy thriller, The Short Night, with screenwriters James Costigan and Ernest Lehman. Despite some preliminary work, the story was never filmed, primarily due to Hitchcock's failing health and his concerns over his wife Alma's health, after she suffered a stroke. The script was eventually published posthumously, in a book on Hitchcock's last years.[22] [23]

Hitchcock was made an Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in the 1980 New Year's Honours. He died just four months later, on April 29, before he had the opportunity to be formally invested by the Queen. Despite the brief period between his knighthood and death, he was nevertheless entitled to be known as Sir Alfred Hitchcock and to use the postnominal letters "KBE", because he remained a British subject when he adopted American citizenship in 1956.


[edit] Death
Alfred Hitchcock died from renal failure in his Bel-Air, Los Angeles home, aged 80. His wife Alma Reville, and their daughter, Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell, both survived him. A funeral service was held at Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Beverly Hills. His body was cremated and the ashes scattered over the Pacific. [24]


[edit] Themes and devices

[edit] Suspense
Hitchcock preferred the use of suspense over surprise in his films. In surprise, the director assaults the viewer with frightening things. In suspense, the director tells or shows things to the audience which the characters in the film do not know, and then artfully builds tension around what will happen when the characters finally learn the truth.


[edit] Audience as voyeur
Further blurring the moral distinction between the innocent and the guilty, occasionally making this indictment inescapably clear to viewers one and all, Hitchcock also makes voyeurs of his "respectable" audience. In Rear Window (1954), after L. B. Jeffries (played by James Stewart) has been staring across the courtyard at him for most of the film, Lars Thorwald (played by Raymond Burr) confronts Jeffries by saying, "What do you want of me?" Burr might as well have been addressing the audience. In fact, shortly before asking this, Thorwald turns to face the camera directly for the first time — at this point, audiences often gasp.

Similarly, Psycho begins with the camera moving toward a hotel-room window, through which the audience is introduced to Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) and her divorced boyfriend Sam Loomis (John Gavin). They are partially undressed, having apparently had sex though they are not married and Marion is on her lunch "hour." Later, along with Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), we watch Marion undress through a peephole.


[edit] MacGuffin
One of Hitchcock's favourite devices for driving the plots of his stories and creating suspense was what he called the "MacGuffin." The Oxford English Dictionary, however, credits Hitchcock's friend, the Scottish screenwriter Angus MacPhail, as being the true inventor of the term. Hitchcock defined this term in a 1964 interview conducted by François Truffaut, published as Hitchcock/Truffaut (Simon and Schuster, 1967). Hitchcock would use this plot device extensively. Many of his suspense films revolve around this device: a detail which, by inciting curiosity and desire, drives the plot and motivates the actions of characters within the story, but whose specific identity and nature is unimportant to the spectator of the film. In Vertigo, for instance, "Carlotta Valdes" is a MacGuffin; she never appears and the details of her death are unimportant to the viewer, but the story about her ghost's haunting of Madeleine Elster is the spur for Scottie's investigation of her, and hence the film's entire plot. In Notorious, the uranium that the main characters must recover before it reaches Nazi hands serves as a similarly arbitrary motivation: any dangerous object would suffice. And state secrets of various kinds serve as MacGuffins in several of the spy films, especially his earlier British films The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, and The Lady Vanishes. In Psycho, what might be mistaken for a red herring at the beginning of the film (a package containing $40,000 in stolen money) is actually a MacGuffin.


[edit] Signature appearances in his films
Main article: list of Hitchcock cameo appearances
Many of Hitchcock's films contain cameo appearances by Hitchcock himself: the director would be seen for a brief moment boarding a bus, crossing in front of a building, standing in an apartment across the courtyard, or appearing in a photograph. This playful gesture became one of Hitchcock's signatures. As a recurring theme he would carry a musical instrument — especially memorable was the large double bass case that he wrestles onto the train at the beginning of Strangers on a Train.

In his earliest appearances he would fill in as an obscure extra, standing in a crowd or walking through a scene in a long camera shot (e.g. in his 1927 film The Lodger). But he became more prominent in his later appearances, as when he turns to see Jane Wyman's disguise when she passes him on the street in Stage Fright, and in stark silhouette in his final film Family Plot (1976).


[edit] Motifs
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Numerous motifs (recurring objects or stylistic choices) can be found throughout Hitchcock's work.

Ordinary Person - Placing an ordinary person into extraordinary circumstances is a common element of Hitchcock's films. In The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), James Stewart plays an ordinary man from Indianapolis vacationing in Morocco when his son is kidnapped. In The Wrong Man, Henry Fonda is arrested for a crime he didn't commit. In Psycho, Janet Leigh is an unremarkable secretary whose personal story is violently interrupted by a furious schizophrenic. Other clear examples are Strangers on a Train, I Confess, Vertigo, and North By Northwest.
Wrong Man - Mistaken identity is a common plot device in his films. In North By Northwest, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is mistaken for George Kaplan, a non-existent CIA agent. In The Wrong Man, Henry Fonda is mistaken for a criminal. The plot of Vertigo revolves around James Stewart's investigation of Kim Novak's actual identity. In both versions of Man Who Knew Too Much the lead character is mistaken for a spy.
Likeable Criminal - The "villain" in many of Hitchcock's films is charming and refined rather than grotesque and vulgar. Especially clear examples of this tendency are Claude Rains in Notorious, Joseph Cotten in Shadow of a Doubt, and James Mason in North by Northwest. In Psycho, Marian Crane (Janet Leigh) steals from her employer and runs away to be with her boyfriend, thus making her a criminal as a thief and immoral for having pre-marital sex. However we are sympathetic for her as she has just decided to return the money when she is brutally murdered. In Marnie, the title character ('Tippi' Hedren) is a serial thief of significant cunning and planning. We identify with her anxiety when her disposing of an incriminating locker key gets stuck in a drain.
Stairways - Images of stairs often play a central role in Hitchcock's films. The Lodger tracks a suspected serial killer's movement on a staircase. Years later, a similar shot appears in the final sequence of Notorious. In Vertigo the staircase in the church bell tower plays a crucial role in the plot. In Psycho, several staircases are featured prominently: as part of the path up to the Bates mansion, as the entrance to the fruit cellar, and as the site of Martin Balsam's murder. In Rear Window, an entirely nonfunctional staircase adorns James Stewart's apartment, in addition to the numerous fire escape staircases seen each time we follow Stewart's gaze out of his window. In Shadow of a Doubt, Joseph Cotten attempts to murder his niece by rigging a staircase to collapse. This is attributed to the influence of German Expressionism, which often featured heavily stylized and menacing staircases (cf. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari). In Dial M for Murder , a key kept under the stair carpet plays a pivotal role in booking the murderer. Frenzy features an unusual shot which tracks the killer and his victim first up the stairs, then retreats backwards down the stairs alone while the audience is left to imagine the killing which is taking place.
Mothers - Mothers are frequently depicted as intrusive and domineering, as seen in Rope, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds.
Brandy - Hitchcock includes the consumption of brandy in at least five films. "I'll get you some brandy. Drink this down. Just like medicine ..." says James Stewart to Kim Novak in Vertigo. In a real-life incident, Hitchcock dared Montgomery Clift at a dinner party around the filming of I Confess (1953) to swallow a carafe of brandy, which caused the actor to pass out almost immediately. In Torn Curtain and Topaz, brandy is defined more closely as cognac. This element is also present in Dial M for Murder where the main characters of the film consume brandy throughout the entire film. Tippi Hedren (Melanie Daniels) is offered a brandy by Suzanne Pleshette, and after being attacked by the birds, drinks the brandy offered by Mitch (Rod Taylor). In Rear Window, Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) is "just warming some brandy."
Sexuality - For their time, Hitchcock's films were regarded as rather sexualized, often dealing with perverse and taboo behaviors. Sometimes, the prudish conventions of his era caused him to convey sexuality in an emblematic fashion, such as in North by Northwest, when the film cuts abruptly from two aroused but visually chaste lovers to a train entering a tunnel. Hitchcock found a number of ways to convey sexuality without depicting graphic behaviors, such as the substitution of explicit sexual passion with the passionate consumption of food. In a particularly amusing scene in Psycho, Anthony Perkins is carrying on a conversation with Janet Leigh while one of his hands strokes a dead animal and the other hand lingers in his crotch. Sexual feelings are often strongly associated with violent behavior. In The Lodger and Psycho, this association is the whole basis of the film. Biographers have noted how Hitchcock continued to challenge film censorship throughout his career, until he was allowed to show nudity in Frenzy. His last film, Family Plot, was curiously more subdued than many of his earlier films.
Voyeurism - Another aspect of Hitchcock's enthusiasm for perversion is the prominence of voyeurism in many films, including Vertigo, Rear Window, and Psycho. Many critics have suggested that voyeurism may be a useful metaphor with which to explain Hitchcock's approach to film narrative. (see above section)
Crime - Crime is the foundation for all Hitchcock stories, with some exceptions, such as The Birds.
Blonde Women - Hitchcock had a dramatic preference for blonde women, stating that the audience would be more suspicious of a brunette. Many of these blondes were of the Kim Novak/Grace Kelly variety: perfect and aloof. In Vertigo James Stewart forces a woman to dye her hair blonde. The Lodger, one of Hitchcock's earliest films, features a serial killer who stalks blonde women. Hitchcock said he used blonde actresses in his films, not because of an attraction to them, but because of a tradition that began with Mary Pickford. The director said that blondes were "a symbol of the heroine." He also thought they photographed better in black and white, which was the predominant film for most dramas for many years.[25]
Silent Scenes - As a former silent film director, Hitchcock strongly preferred to convey narrative with images rather than dialogue. Hitchcock viewed film as a primarily visual medium in which the director's assemblage of images must convey the narrative. Examples of imagery over dialogue are in the lengthy sequence in Vertigo in which Jimmy Stewart is silently following Kim Novak, or the Albert Hall sequence in the 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much.

[edit] Cinematic experimentation
Hitchcock seemed to delight in the technical challenges of filmmaking. In Lifeboat, Hitchcock sets the entire action of the movie in a small boat, yet manages to keep the cinematography from monotonous repetition. His trademark cameo appearance was a dilemma, given the limitations of the setting; so Hitchcock appeared on camera in a fictitious newspaper ad for a weight loss product. In Spellbound two unprecedented point-of-view shots were achieved by constructing a large wooden hand (which would appear to belong to the character whose point of view the camera took) and outsized props for it to hold: a bucket-sized glass of milk and a large wooden gun. For added novelty and impact, the climactic gunshot was hand-coloured red on some copies of the black-and-white print of the film. Rope (1948) was another technical challenge: a film that appears to have been shot entirely in a single take. The film was actually shot in 10 takes of ranging from four and half to 10 minutes each, 10 minutes being the maximum amount of film that would fit in a single camera reel; some transitions between reels were hidden by having a dark object fill the entire screen for a moment. Hitchcock used those points to hide the cut, and began the next take with the camera in the same place.

His 1958 film Vertigo contains a camera trick that has been imitated and re-used so many times by filmmakers, it has become known as the Hitchcock zoom.


[edit] Character and its effects on his films
Hitchcock's films sometimes feature characters struggling in their relationships with their mothers. In North by Northwest (1959), Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant's character) is an innocent man ridiculed by his mother for insisting that shadowy, murderous men are after him (in this case, they are). In The Birds (1963), the Rod Taylor character, an innocent man, finds his world under attack by vicious birds, and struggles to free himself of a clinging mother (Jessica Tandy). The killer in Frenzy (1972) has a loathing of women but idolizes his mother. The villain Bruno in Strangers on a Train hates his father, but has an incredibly close relationship with his mother (played by Marion Lorne). Sebastian (Claude Rains) in Notorious has a clearly conflictual relationship with his mother, who is (correctly) suspicious of his new bride Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman). And, of course, Norman Bates' troubles with his mother in Psycho are infamous.

Hitchcock heroines tend to be lovely, cool blondes who seem proper at first but, when aroused by passion or danger, respond in a more sensual, animal, or even criminal way. As noted, the famous victims in The Lodger are all blondes. In The 39 Steps, Hitchcock's glamorous blonde star, Madeleine Carroll, is put in handcuffs. In Marnie (1964), the title character (played by Tippi Hedren) is a kleptomaniac. In To Catch a Thief (1955), Francie (Grace Kelly) offers to help a man she believes is a cat burglar. In Rear Window, Lisa (Grace Kelly again) risks her life by breaking into Lars Thorwald's apartment. And, most notoriously, in Psycho, Janet Leigh's unfortunate character steals $40,000 and is murdered by a reclusive lunatic. Hitchcock's last blonde heroine was - years after Dany Robin and her "daughter" Claude Jade in Topaz - Barbara Harris as a phony psychic turned amateur sleuth in his final film, 1976's Family Plot. In the same film, the diamond smuggler played by Karen Black could also fit that role, as she wears a long blonde wig in various scenes and becomes increasingly uncomfortable about her line of work.

Hitchcock saw that reliance on actors and actresses was a holdover from the theater tradition. He was a pioneer in using camera movement, camera set ups and montage to explore the outer reaches of cinematic art.

Most critics and Hitchcock scholars, including Donald Spoto and Roger Ebert, agree that Vertigo represents the director's most personal and revealing film, dealing with the obsessions of a man who crafts a woman into the woman he desires. Vertigo explores more frankly and at greater length his interest in the relation between sex and death than any other film in his filmography.

Hitchcock often said that his personal favourite was Shadow of a Doubt.


[edit] Style of working
Hitchcock once commented, "The writer and I plan out the entire script down to the smallest detail, and when we're finished all that's left to do is to shoot the film. Actually, it's only when one enters the studio that one enters the area of compromise. Really, the novelist has the best casting since he doesn't have to cope with the actors and all the rest."

Hitchcock would storyboard each movie down to the finest detail. He was reported to have never even bothered looking through the viewfinder, since he didn't need to do so, though in publicity photos he was shown doing so. He also used this as an excuse to never have to change his films from his initial vision. If a studio asked him to change a film, he would claim that it was already shot in a single way, and that there were no alternate takes to consider.

However this view of Hitchcock as a director who relied more on pre-production than on the actual production itself has been challenged by the book Hitchcock At Work written by Bill Krohn, the American correspondent of Cahiers du Cinema. Krohn after investigating several script revisions, notes to other production personnel written by or to Hitchcock alongside inspection of storyboards and other production material has observed that Hitchcock's work often deviated from how the screenplay was written or how the film was originally envisioned. He noted that the myth of storyboards in relation to Hitchcock, often regurgitated by generations of commentators on Hitchcock's movies was to a great degree perpetuated by Hitchcock himself or the publicity arm of the studios. A great example would be the famous cropduster sequence of North by Northwest which wasn't storyboarded at all. After the scene was filmed, the publicity arm asked Hitchcock to make storyboards to promote the film and Hitchcock in turn hired an artist to match the scenes in detail. While Hitchcock did do a great deal of preparation for all his movies, he was fully cognizant that the actual film-making process often deviated from the best laid plans and was flexible to adapt to the changes and needs of production. Even on the occasions when storyboards were made, the scene which was shot did differ from it significantly.

Similarly much of Hitchcock's hatred of actors has been exaggerated. Hitchcock simply did not tolerate the method approach as he believed that actors should only concentrate on their performances and leave work on script and character to the directors and screenwriters. In a Sight and Sound interview, he stated that, ' the method actor is OK in the theatre because he has a free space to move about. But when it comes to cutting the face and what he sees and so forth, there must be some discipline' (see [3]). During the making of Lifeboat, Walter Slezak, who played the German character, stated that Hitchcock knew the mechanics of acting better than anyone he knew. Several critics have observed that despite his reputation as a man who disliked actors, several actors who worked with him gave fine, often brilliant performances and these performances contribute to the film's success.

Regarding Hitchcock's sometimes less than pleasant relationship with actors, there was a persistent rumor that he had said that actors were cattle. Hitchcock later denied this, typically tongue-in-cheek, clarifying that he had only said that actors should be treated like cattle. Carole Lombard, tweaking Hitchcock and drumming up a little publicity, brought some cows along with her when she reported to the set of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. For Hitchcock, the actors, like the props, were part of the film's setting.

The first book devoted to the director is simply named Hitchcock. It is a document of a one-week interview by François Truffaut in 1967. (ISBN 0-671-60429-5)

In the late 1950s the French New Wave critics, especially Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and François Truffaut, were among the first to see and promote his films as artistic works. Hitchcock was one of the first directors to whom they applied their auteur theory, which stresses the artistic authority of the director in the film-making process.


[edit] Influence
Hitchcock's innovations and vision have influenced a great number of filmmakers, producers, and actors. His influence helped start a trend for film directors to control artistic aspects of their movies without answering to the movie's producer.


[edit] Awards
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Hitchcock the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, in 1967. However, despite six earlier nominations, he never won an Oscar in a contested category. His Oscar nominations were:

for Best Director: Rebecca (1940), Lifeboat (1944), Spellbound (1945), Rear Window (1954), and Psycho (1960);
as producer, for Best Picture: Suspicion (1941).
Rebecca, which Hitchcock directed, won the 1940 Best Picture Oscar for its producer David O. Selznick. In addition to Rebecca and Suspicion, two other films Hitchcock directed, Foreign Correspondent and Spellbound, were nominated for Best Picture.

Hitchcock is considered the Best Film Director of all time by The Screen Directory.[26] Hitchcock was knighted in 1980.

Sixteen films directed by Hitchcock earned Oscar nominations, though only six of those films earned Hitchcock himself a nomination. The total number of Oscar nominations (including winners) earned by films he directed is fifty. Four of those films earned Best Picture nominations.


[edit] Television and books

Alfred Hitchcock introduces the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode "The Sorcerer's Apprentice"
This image is a candidate for speedy deletion. It will be deleted after seven days from the date of nomination.Along with Walt Disney, Hitchcock was one of the first prominent motion picture producers to fully envision just how popular the medium of television would become. From 1955 to 1965, Hitchcock was the host and producer of a long-running television series entitled Alfred Hitchcock Presents. While his films had made Hitchcock's name strongly associated with suspense, the TV series made Hitchcock a celebrity himself. His irony-tinged voice, image, and mannerisms became instantly recognizable and were often the subject of parody. The title theme of the show pictured a minimalist caricature of his profile (he drew it himself; it is composed of only around seven lines) which his real silhouette then filled. His introductions before the stories in his program always included some sort of wry humor, such as the description of a recent multi-person execution hampered by having only one electric chair, while two are now shown with a sign "Two chairs--no waiting!" He directed a few episodes of the TV series himself, and he upset a number of movie production companies when he insisted on using his TV production crew to produce his motion picture Psycho. In the late 1980s, a new version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents was produced for television, making use of Hitchcock's original introductions in a colorised form.

"Hitch" used a curious little tune by the French composer Charles Gounod (1818-1893), the composer of the 1859 opera Faust, as the theme "song" for his television programs, after it was suggested to him by composer Bernard Herrmann. Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra included the piece, Funeral March of a Marionette, in one of their extended play 45-rpm discs for RCA Victor during the 1950s.

Alfred Hitchcock appears as a character in the popular juvenile detective series, Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators. The long-running detective series was created by Robert Arthur, who wrote the first several books, although other authors took over after he left the series. The Three Investigators -- Jupiter Jones, Bob Andrews and Peter Crenshaw -- were amateur detectives, slightly younger than the Hardy Boys. In the introduction to each book, "Alfred Hitchcock" introduces the mystery, and he sometimes refers a case to the boys to solve. At the end of each book, the boys report to Hitchcock, and sometimes give him a memento of their case.

When the real Alfred Hitchcock died, the fictional Hitchcock in the Three Investigators books was replaced by a retired detective named Hector Sebastian. At this time, the series title was changed from Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators to The Three Investigators.

At the height of Hitchcock's success, he was also asked to introduce a set of books with his name attached. The series was a collection of short stories by popular short-story writers, primarily focused on suspense and thrillers. These titles included Alfred Hitchcock's Monster Museum, Alfred Hitchcock's Supernatural Tales of Terror and Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbinders in Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock's Witch's Brew, Alfred Hitchcock's Ghostly Gallery, Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories to be Read with the Door Locked, Alfred Hitchcock's A Hangman's Dozen and Alfred Hitchcock's Haunted Houseful. Hitchcock himself was not actually involved in the reading, reviewing, editing or selection of the short stories; in fact, even his introductions were ghost-written. The entire extent of his involvement with the project was to lend his name and collect a check.

Some notable writers whose works were used in the collection include Shirley Jackson (Strangers in Town, The Lottery), T.H. White (The Once and Future King), Robert Bloch, H. G. Wells (The War of the Worlds), Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain and the creator of The Three Investigators, Robert Arthur.

Hitchcock also wrote a mystery story for Look magazine in 1943, "The Murder of Monty Woolley." This was a sequence of captioned photographs inviting the reader to inspect the pictures for clues to the murderer's identity; Hitchcock cast the performers as themselves: Woolley, Doris Merrick, and make-up man Guy Pearce, whom Hitchcock identified, in the last photo, as the murderer. The article was reprinted in Games Magazine in November/December 1980.


[edit] Filmography
For a complete list of all his films go to:

Main article: Alfred Hitchcock filmography

[edit] Phobias
Alfred Hitchcock had a dislike of egg yolk. He once said:

"I’m frightened of eggs, worse than frightened, they revolt me. That white round thing without any holes … have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid? Blood is jolly, red. But egg yolk is yellow, revolting. I’ve never tasted it."[27]
Biographer Patrick McGilligan confirmed Hitchcock's avoidance of eggs[28], while noting that the director had actually tried them as a young man, then discovered he didn't like them. He was especially annoyed by poached eggs. His daughter Patricia, however, stated that "He loved souffles."[29]

Hitchcock also had a serious fear of the police, which was the reason he said he never learned to drive. His reasoning was that if one never drove, then one would never have an opportunity to be pulled over by the police and issued a ticket. However, Patrick McGilligan wrote that "though Hitchcock pooh-poohed driving, insisting to interviewers that he didn't even know how, he often chauffeured his daughter to school at Marymount [a private academy for girls], and for a long time drove her to Sunday Mass."[30] His fear of the police can be attributed to a circumstance encountered by Hitchcock in his youth, which he told a number of interviewers and mentioned in the PBS documentary The Men Who Made the Movies. In an attempt to punish Hitchcock for an instance of misbehavior, Alfred's father detailed in writing that the young Hitchcock had engaged in some form of childish mischief. Hitchcock's father then handed the description to Alfred, sending him to the local police station to demonstrate his wrongdoing. In response to the written notice, the on-duty police officer immediately brought Hitchcock to an empty cell and locked him there for a full 5 minutes, citing the justification for this action as a means to reprimand the young boy. Undoubtedly, history has recorded this incident as scarring. This perhaps influenced his signature theme in his movies where an innocent person would become entangled in the web of another guilty person's behaviour. This can be noted in many of his films, and a possible reason would be due to his hatred for authority, and his siding with the innocent. He also manages to convey this message to his audience in order to allow them to take his (the innocent) side. [31]


[edit] Frequent collaborators
Actors:

Sara Allgood
Murray Alper
Ingrid Bergman
Paul Bryar
Donald Calthrop
Leonard Carey
Leo G. Carroll
Edward Chapman
Hume Cronyn (also as Writer)
Violet Farebrother
Bess Flowers
Cary Grant
Clare Greet
Edmund Gwenn
Gordon Harker
Tom Helmore
Patricia Hitchcock
Ian Hunter
Isabel Jeans
Hannah Jones
Malcolm Keen
Phyllis Konstam
Grace Kelly
John Longden
Percy Marmont
Basil Radford
Jeffrey Sayre
James Stewart
John Williams
Film Crew:

Fred Ahern - Production Manager
Michael Balcon - Producer
Jack Barron - Makeup
Saul Bass - Main titles design
Robert F. Boyle - Art Director/Production Designer
Henry Bumstead - Art Director
Robert Burks - Cinematographer
Herbert Coleman - Assistant Director/Producer
Jack E. Cox - Cinematographer
Lowell J. Farrell - Assistant Director
Charles Frend - Film Editor
Hilton A. Green - Assistant Director
Bobby Greene - First Assistant Camera
Edith Head - Costume Designer
Bernard Herrmann - Music Composer
J. McMillan Johnson - Art Director/Production Designer
Barbara Keon - Production Assistant
Emile Kuri - Set Decoration
Bryan Langley - Cinematographer/Assistant Camera
Louis Levy - Musical Director/Music Composer
Norman Lloyd - Producer/Director
John Maxwell - Producer
Daniel McCauley - Assistant Director
Frank Mills - Assistant Director
George Milo - Set Decoration
Ivor Montagu - Editor/Producer
Hal Pereira - Art Director
Michael Powell - Still Photographer/Assistant Camera
Alma Reville - Assistant Director/Writer
Rita Riggs - Costume Designer
Peggy Robertson - Assistant
Emile de Ruelle - Film Editor
William Russell - Sound Recordist
David O. Selznick - Producer
Harry Stradling - Cinematographer/Director of Photography
Lois Thurman - Script Supervisor
Dimitri Tiomkin - Music Composer
George Tomasini - Film Editor
Joseph A. Valentine - Cinematographer
Gaetano di Ventimiglia - Cinematographer
Waldon O. Watson - Sound Recordist
Franz Waxman - Music Composer
Albert Whitlock - Matte Painter
William H. Ziegler - Film Editor
Screenwriters:

Charles Bennett
James Bridie
Joan Harrison
John Michael Hayes
Ben Hecht
Angus MacPhail
Eliot Stannard



[edit] See also
List of unproduced Hitchcock projects
List of film collaborations
Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine
High Anxiety – a comedy spoof that parodies many Hitchcock devices
Hitchcock & Herrmann – a stage play about the relationship between Hitchcock and composer Bernard Herrmann
Hitchcockian
Why – Milton Bradley Company board game presented by Alfred Hitchcock.

[edit] References
^ Patrick McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light (New York: HarperCollins, 2003)
^ Patrick McGilligan, pg. 7
^ Patrick McGilligan, pgs. 18-19
^ Patrick McGilligan, pgs. 7-8
^ Patrick McGilligan, pg. 9
^ Patrick McGilligan, pgs. 24-25
^ Patrick McGilligan, pgs. 46-51
^ Patrick McGilligan, pgs. 68-71
^ Patrick McGilligan, pg. 85
^ Patrick McGilligan, pgs. 120-123
^ Patrick McGilligan, pg. 158
^ Patrick McGilligan, pgs. 210-211, 277; American Movie Classics
^ Patrick McGilligan, pgs. 251-252
^ Patrick McGilligan, pg. 253
^ Patrick McGilligan, pg. 244
^ Patrick McGilligan, pg. 343
^ Patrick McGilligan, pgs. 346-348
^ Patrick McGilligan, pgs. 372-374
^ Patrick McGilligan, pgs. 366-381
^ Patrick McGilligan, pgs. 429, 774-775
^ Patrick McGilligan, pg. 249
^ Patrick McGilligan, pgs. 731-734
^ Freeman, David (1999). The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock. Overlook. ISBN 087951728X.
^ "Alfred Hitchcock Dies; A Master of Suspense; Alfred Hitchcock, Master of Suspense and Celebrated Film Director, Dies at 80 Increasingly Pessimistic Sought Exotic Settings Technical Challenges Became a Draftsman Lured to Hollywood", New York Times, April 30, 1980, Wednesday. Retrieved on 2007-08-21. "Alfred Hitchcock, whose mastery of suspense and of directing technique made him one of the most popular and celebrated of film makers; died yesterday at the age of 80 at his home in Los Angeles. Mr. Hitchcock, ailing with arthritis and kidney failures, had been in declining health for a year."
^ Patrick McGilligan, pg. 82
^ [1]
^ [2]
^ Patrick McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), page 18
^ "Alfred Hitchcock and To Catch a Thief - An Appreciation" (DVD)
^ Patrick McGilligan, pg. 243
^ http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000033/bio

Thomas Henry Huxley


Thomas Henry Huxley PC, FRS (4 May 1825 Ealing – 29 June 1895 Eastbourne, Sussex) was an English biologist, known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.[1]

Huxley's famous 1860 debate with the Lord Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, was a key moment in the wider acceptance of evolution, and in his own career. Wilberforce was coached by Richard Owen, against whom Huxley also debated on whether man was closely related to apes. Huxley was slow to accept some of Darwin's ideas, such as gradualism, and was undecided about natural selection, but despite this he was wholehearted in his public support of Darwin. He was instrumental in developing scientific education in Britain, and fought against the more extreme versions of religious tradition.

Huxley used the term 'agnostic' to describe his own views on religion, a term whose use has continued to the present day, and which throws light on his demanding criteria for proof in science (see Thomas Henry Huxley and agnosticism).

Huxley had little schooling, and taught himself almost everything he knew. Remarkably, he became perhaps the finest comparative anatomist of the second half of the nineteenth century. He worked first on invertebrates, clarifying the relationships between groups that were previously little understood. Later, he worked more on vertebrates, especially on the relationship between man and the apes. Another of his important conclusions was that birds evolved from dinosaurs, namely, small carnivorous theropods. This view is widely held today.

The tendency has been for this fine anatomical work to be overshadowed by his energetic controversial activity in favour of evolution, and by his extensive public work on scientific education, both of which had significant effect on society in Britain and elsewhere.

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life

Young Huxley RN age 21Huxley, born in Ealing, a small village in Middlesex, was the second youngest of eight children of George Huxley and Rachel Withers. Like some other British scientists of the nineteenth century such as Alfred Russel Wallace, Huxley was brought up in a literate middle-class family. The elder Huxley was a mathematics teacher at Ealing School until it closed, putting the family into financial difficulties. As a result, Thomas left school at 10, after only two years of formal schooling.

Despite this unenviable start, Huxley possessed a strong determination to become an educated individual. He became one of the great autodidacts of the nineteenth century. He made himself an expert first on invertebrates, and later on vertebrates, all self-taught. He was skilled in drawing, and did many of the illustrations for his publications on marine invertebrates. In his teens he taught himself German, eventually becoming fluent and used by Charles Darwin as a translator of scientific material in German. Later he learnt Latin and enough Greek to read Aristotle in the original. In his debates and writing on science and religion his grasp of theology was better than most of his clerical opponents. So, a boy who left school at ten became one of the most knowledgeable men in Britain.[2][3]

He was apprenticed for short periods to several medical practitioners: at 13 to his brother-in-law John Cooke in Coventry, who passed him on to Thomas Chandler, notable for his experiments using mesmerism for medical purposes. Chandler's practice was in London's Rotherhithe amidst the squalor endured by the Dickensian poor. Here Thomas would have seen poverty, crime and rampant disease at its worst.[4] Next, another brother-in-law took him on: John Salt, his eldest sister's husband. Now 16, Huxley entered Sydenham College (behind University College Hospital), a cut-price anatomy school whose founder Marshall Hall discovered the reflex arc. All this time Huxley continued his program of reading, which more than made up for his lack of formal schooling.

A year later, buoyed by excellent results and a silver medal prize in the Apothecaries' yearly competition, Huxley was admitted to study at Charing Cross Hospital, where he obtained a small scholarship. At Charing Cross, he was taught by the remarkable Scot, Thomas Wharton Jones, who had been Robert Knox's assistant when Knox bought cadavers from Burke and Hare:

Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief,
Knox, the boy who buys the beef!

The young Wharton Jones, who acted as go-between, was exonerated of crime, but thought it best to leave Scotland. He was a fine teacher, up-to-date in physiology and also an ophthalmic surgeon. In 1845, under Wharton Jones' guidance, Huxley published his first scientific paper demonstrating the existence of a hitherto unrecognized layer in the inner sheath of hairs, a layer that has been known since as Huxley's layer. No doubt remembering this, and of course knowing his merit, later in life Huxley organised a pension for his old tutor.

At twenty he passed his First M.B. examination at the University of London, winning the gold medal for anatomy and physiology. However, he did not present himself for the final (2nd M.B.) exams and consequently did not qualify with a university degree. His apprenticeships and exam results formed a sufficient basis for his application to the Royal Navy.[5][6]


[edit] Voyage of the Rattlesnake
Aged 20, Huxley was too young to apply to the Royal College of Surgeons for a licence to practice, yet he was 'deep in debt'.[7] So, at a friend's suggestion, he applied for an appointment in the Royal Navy. He had references on character and certificates showing the time spent on his apprenticeship and on requirements such as dissection and pharmacy. Sir William Burnett, the Physician General of the Navy, interviewed him and arranged for the College of Surgeons to test his competence (by means of a viva voce).


HMS Rattlesnake
by the ship's artist Oswald Brierly
Finally Huxley was made Assistant Surgeon ('surgeon's mate') to HMS Rattlesnake, about to start for a voyage of discovery and surveying to New Guinea and Australia. Rattlesnake left England on December 3, 1846 and, once they had arrived in the southern hemisphere, Huxley devoted his time to the study of marine invertebrates.[8] He began to send details of his discoveries back to England, where publication was arranged by Edward Forbes FRS (who had also been a pupil of Knox).

Huxley's paper On the anatomy and the affinities of the family of Medusae was published in 1849 by the Royal Society in its Philosophical Transactions. Huxley united the Hydroid and Sertularian polyps with the Medusae to form a class to which he subsequently gave the name of Hydrozoa. The connection he made was that all the members of the class consisted of two cell layers, enclosing a central cavity or stomach. This is characteristic of the phylum now called the Cnidaria. He compared this feature to the serous and mucous structures of embryos of higher animals. When at last he got a grant from the Royal Society for the printing of plates, Huxley was able to summarise this work in The Oceanic Hydrozoa, published by the Ray Society in 1859.[9][10]


Australian woman, prob. from the Cape York peninsula (N. Queensland). Pencil drawing by Huxley (Diary of HMS Rattlesnake)The value of Huxley's work was recognized and, on returning to England in 1850, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In the following year, at the age of twenty-six, he not only received the Royal Society Medal but was also elected to the Council. He met Joseph Dalton Hooker and John Tyndall, who remained his lifelong friends. The Admiralty retained him as a nominal assistant-surgeon, so he might work on the specimens he collected and the observations he made during the voyage of Rattlesnake. He produced a number of important papers on such groups as the Ascidians, in which he solved the related problem of Appendicularia, whose place in the animal kingdom Johannes Peter Müller had found himself wholly unable to assign. They are both, as Huxley showed, tunicates, today regarded as a sister group to the vertebrates in the phylum Chordata.[11] Other papers on the morphology of the Cephalous Mollusca and on brachiopods and rotifers are also noteworthy.[12][13][14] The Rattlesnake's official naturalist, John MacGillivray, did some work on botany, and proved surprisingly good at notating Australian aboriginal languages. He wrote up the voyage in the standard Victorian two volume format.[15]


[edit] Later life
Huxley effectively resigned from the navy (by refusing to return to active service) and, in July 1854, he became Professor of Natural History at the Royal School of Mines and naturalist to the Geological Survey in the following year. In addition, he was Fullerian Professor at the Royal Institution 1855–58 and 1865–67; Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons 1863–69; President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science 1869–1870; and, later, President of the Royal Society 1883–85; and Inspector of Fisheries 1881–85.[16]


Huxley at 32
by Maull & PolyblancThe thirty-one years during which Huxley occupied the chair of natural history at the Royal School of Mines included work on vertebrate palaeontology and on many projects to advance the place of science in British life.


[edit] Man's position in nature
Among Huxley's most important work in this period was his continuing investigation of the relationship of man to other animals. For nearly a decade his research and lecturing was directed mainly to this topic, which led him directly into a clash with Richard Owen, a man widely disliked for his behaviour whilst also being admired for his capability. This struggle was to culminate in some severe defeats for the older man. Huxley's Croonian Lecture, delivered before the Royal Society in 1858 on The Theory of the Vertebrate Skull was the start. In this, he rejected Owen's view that the bones of the skull and the spine were homologous, an opinion previously held by Goethe and Lorenz Oken.[17]

From 1860 to 1863 Huxley developed his ideas, presenting them in lectures to working men, students and the general public, followed by publication. In 1862 he examined the Neanderthal skull-cap, which had been discovered in 1857. It was the first pre-sapiens discovery of a fossil man, and it was immediately clear to him that the brain case was surprisingly large.[18] Also in 1862 a series of talks to working men was printed lecture by lecture as pamphlets, later bound up as a little green book; the first copies went on sale in December.[19] Other lectures grew into Huxley's most famous work Evidence as to Man's place in Nature (1863) where he addressed the key issues long before Charles Darwin published his Descent of Man in 1871.

Rather less productive was his work on physical anthropology, a topic which fascinated the Victorians. In his Hunterian lectures for 1864 he addressed two key questions: 1. Are the differences [between races] sufficient to justify us in [considering] them as distinct species of men? 2. Can any of the differences [between races] be considered as transitional towards the lower forms of animals? Since Huxley answered no to both questions (as would all biologists today) his views are uncontroversial. In general, his attitudes were liberal though he did not entirely escape the prejudices of his day towards non-Europeans and towards women.[20]

Huxley classified the human races as: Europeans, Mongolian, Negro (or Ethiopian) and Australian; each of these categories being broken down further into sub-sets. In fact all such anthropological classifications are put in the shade by our modern discovery that the genetic diversity of man in Africa is greater than exists in the rest of mankind put together.


[edit] Vertebrate palaeontology
The first half of Huxley's career as a palaeontologist is marked by a rather strange predilection for 'persistent types', in which he seemed to argue that evolutionary advancement (in the sense of major new groups of animals and plants) was rare or absent in the Phanerozoic:
"Without at all denying the considerable positive differences which exist between the ancient and the modern forms of life... these differences and contrasts have been greatly exaggerated... of the orders... not more than seven per cent are unrepresented [at the present day]." [21] In the same vein he tended to push the origin of major groups such as birds and mammals back into the Palaeozoic era, and to claim that no order of plants has ever gone extinct.
Much paper has been consumed by historians of science ruminating on this strange and somewhat unclear idea.[22] He is wrong to pitch the loss of orders in the Phanerozoic as low as 7%, and he avoids estimating the number of new orders which evolved. Persistent types sat rather uncomfortably next to Darwin's more fluid ideas. However, gradually Huxley moved away from this style of thinking as his understanding of palaeontology, and the discipline itself, developed.

Huxley's detailed anatomical work was, as always, first-rate and productive. His work on fossil fish shows his distinctive approach: whereas pre-Darwinian naturalists collected, identified and classified, Huxley worked mainly to reveal the relationships between groups.


T.H.H. Dean, Normal School of Science
Drawing by T. B. Wirgnam (1882)The lobed-finned fish (such as coelacanths and lung fish) have paired appendages whose internal skeleton is attached to the shoulder or pelvis by a single bone, the humerus or femur. His interest in these fish brought him close to the origin of tetrapods, one of the most important areas of vertebrate palaeontology.[23][24][25]

The study of fossil reptiles led to his demonstrating, in the course of lectures on birds (delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons in 1867) the fundamental affinity of the two groups which he united under the title of Sauropsida. His papers on Archaeopteryx and the origin of birds such as Further evidence of the affinity between the dinosaurian reptiles and birds (1870) were of great interest then and still are.[26][27][28]

Apart from his great interest in persuading the world that man was a primate, and had descended from the same stock as the apes, Huxley did little work on mammals, with one exception. On his tour of America Huxley was shown the remarkable series of fossil horses, discoverd by O.C. Marsh, in Yale's Peabody Museum.[29][30] Marsh was part palaeontologist, part robber baron, a man who had hunted buffalo and met Red Cloud (in 1874). Funded by his uncle George Peabody, Marsh had made some remarkable discoveries: the huge Cretaceous aquatic bird Hesperornis, and the dinosaur footprints along the Connecticut River were worth the trip by themselves, but the horse fossils were really special.

The collection at that time went from the small four-toed forest-dwelling Orohippus from the Eocene through three-toed species such as Miohippus to species more like the modern horse. By looking at their teeth he could see that, as the size grew larger and the toes reduced, the teeth changed from those of a browser to those of a grazer. All such changes could be explained by a general alteration in habitat from forest to grassland. And that, we now know, is what did happen over large areas of North America from the Eocene to the Pleistocene: the ultimate causative agent was global temperature reduction (see Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum). The modern account of the evolution of the horse has many other members, and the overall appearance of the tree of descent is more like a bush than a straight line.

The horse series also strongly suggested that the process was gradual, and that the origin of the modern horse lay in North America, not in Eurasia. And if so, then something must have happened to horses in North America, since none were there when the Spanish arrived... That, however, is another story. The experience was enough for Huxley to give credence to Darwin's gradualism, and to introduce the story of the horse into his lecture series.


[edit] Public duties and awards
From 1870 onwards, Huxley was to some extent drawn away from scientific research by the claims of public duty. From 1862 to 1884 he served on eight Royal Commissions. From 1871 to 1880 he was a Secretary of the Royal Society and from 1883 to 1885 he was President. He was President of the Geological Society from 1868-1870. In 1870, he was President of the British Association at Liverpool and, in the same year was elected a member of the newly-constituted London School Board. He was made a Privy Councillor in 1892.

He was awarded the highest honours then open to British men of science. The Royal Society, who had elected him as Fellow when he was 25 (1851), awarded him the Royal Medal the next year (1852), a year before Charles Darwin got the same award! He was the youngest biologist to receive such recognition. Then later in life came the Copley Medal in 1888 and the Darwin Medal in 1894; the Geological Society awarded him the Wollaston Medal in 1876; the Linnean Society awarded him the Linnean Medal in 1890. There were many other elections and appointments to eminent scientific bodies; these and his many academic awards are listed in the Life and Letters. He turned down many other appointments, notably the Linacre chair in zoology at Oxford and the Mastership of University College, Oxford.[31]

Huxley also found time to write a treatise on physiography (1878)—a detailed physical geography of the Thames River Basin—as a primer in science, and an excellent textbook on the crayfish. Still of considerable interest is his biography of David Hume, the 18th century Scottish empirical philosopher. This shows that his choice of agnosticism was accompanied by a lengthy period of thought on the foundations of knowledge.


Huxley in power, circa 1885
by Alexander BassanoHis health broke down in 1885. In 1890, he moved from London to Eastbourne where he had the satisfaction of seeing the nine volumes of his Collected Essays published by Macmillan. In 1884 he heard of the Eugene Dubois' discovery in Java of the remains of Pithecanthropus erectus (now known as Homo erectus). Finally, in 1895 he died of a heart attack (after contracting influenza and pneumonia), and was buried in North London at St. Marylebone (now East Finchley) Cemetery. This small family plot had been purchased upon the death of his beloved little son Noel, who died of scarlet fever in 1860; Huxley's wife is also buried there. No invitations were sent out, but two hundred people turned up for the ceremony; they included Hooker, Flower, Foster, Lankester, Joseph Lister and, apparently, Henry James.[32]

There is so much in his life of scientific and social interest that it seems extraordinary that he was given no award by the British state until he was made Privy Counsellor late in life. In this he did better than Darwin, who got no award of any kind from the state. (See Desmond and Moore for the story of how an honour for Darwin was vetoed by ecclesiastical advisors, including Wilberforce.[33]) Perhaps Huxley had commented too often on his dislike of honours, or perhaps his many assaults on the traditional beliefs of organised religion made enemies in the establishment—he had vigorous debates in print with Prime Ministers Disraeli, Gladstone and Arthur Balfour, and his relationship with Lord Salisbury was less than tranquil.[34][35]

As recognition of his many public services (he served on eight Royal Commissions—see below, became Inspector of Fisheries for a period, and more or less established scientific education in Britain) he was given a pension by the state. When one compares this with, say, Charles Lyell (who was awarded first a knighthood, then a baronetcy) or William Thomson (who was made a knight, a baron and awarded the Order of Merit) one is forced to conclude that the British establishment treated Huxley in a shabby manner.

However, in 1873 the King of Sweden made Huxley, Hooker and Tyndall Knights of the Order of the North Star, a remarkable event (they could wear the insignia but not use the title in Britain).[36] Huxley did collect honorary memberships of foreign societies, academic awards and honorary doctorates from Britain and Germany, and his writings are still widely read today, which can be said of few nineteenth century scientists.

Huxley was the founder of a very distinguished family of British academics, including his grandsons Aldous Huxley the novelist, Sir Julian Huxley the first Director General of UNESCO and a founder of the World Wide Fund for Nature, and Sir Andrew Huxley the physiologist and Nobel laureate.

After Darwin and Wallace, Huxley was for about thirty years evolution's most effective advocate, and for some Huxley was "the premier advocate of science in the nineteenth century [for] the whole English-speaking world".[37]

Though he had many admirers and disciples, the loss of Francis Balfour in 1882 deprived British zoology of the person whom many regarded as the best of his generation. Balfour, the younger brother of A.J. Balfour, was an embryologist and morphologist; his Comparative Embryology (2 vols, 1880-81) was a landmark. Huxley had thought he was "the only man who can carry out my work": and the deaths of Balfour and W.K. Clifford were "the greatest loss to science in our time".[38] Balfour died whilst climbing in the Alps; he had just been appointed to a chair at Cambridge.


[edit] Darwin's bulldog

In the frontispiece to his Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Huxley first published his famous image comparing the skeletons of apes to humans.Huxley was originally not persuaded of 'development theory' as evolution was once called. We can see that in his savage review[39] of Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a book which contained some quite pertinent arguments in favour of evolution. Huxley had also rejected Lamarck's theory of transmutation, on the basis that there was insufficient evidence to support it. All this scepticism was brought together in a lecture to the Royal Institution[40], which made Darwin anxious enough to set about an effort to change young Huxley's mind. It was the kind of thing Darwin did with his closest scientific friends, but he must have had some particular intuition about Huxley, who was from all accounts a most impressive person even as a young man.[41][42]

Huxley was therefore one of the small group who knew about Darwin's views before they were published (that group included Joseph Dalton Hooker and Charles Lyell). The first publication by Darwin of his ideas came when Wallace sent Darwin his famous paper on natural selection, which was presented by Lyell and Hooker to the Linnean Society in 1858 alongside excerpts from Darwin's notebook and a Darwin letter to Asa Gray.[43][44] Huxley's famous response to the idea of natural selection was "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!". However, the correctness of natural selection as the main mechanism for evolution was to lie permanently in Huxley's mental pending tray. He never conclusively made up his mind about it, though he did admit it was an hypothesis which was a good working basis.

Logically speaking, the prior question was whether evolution had taken place at all. It is to this question that much of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was devoted. Its publication in 1859 completely convinced Huxley of evolution and it was this and no doubt his admiration of Darwin's way of amassing and using evidence that formed the basis of his support for Darwin in the debates that followed the book's publication. (see also Reaction to Darwin's theory)

Huxley's support started with his anonymous favourable review of the Origin in the Times for 26th December 1859,[45] and continued with articles in several periodicals, and in a lecture at the Royal Institution in February 1860.[46] At the same time, Richard Owen, whilst writing an extremely hostile anonymous review of the Origin in the Edinburgh Review,[47] also primed Samuel Wilberforce who wrote one in the Quarterly Review, running to 17,000 words.[48] The authorship of this latter review was not known for sure until Wilberforce's son wrote his biography. So it can be said that, just as Darwin groomed Huxley, so Owen groomed Wilberforce; and both the proxies fought public battles on behalf of their principals as much as themselves.


Huxley in Vanity Fair January 28, 1871.
chromolithograph by 'Ape' (Pellegrini)

[edit] Debate with Wilberforce
Famously, Huxley responded to Wilberforce in the debate at the British Association meeting, on Saturday 30th June 1860 at the Oxford University Museum. He was joined at the debate by his and Darwin's friends Hooker and Lubbock, and they were opposed by the Lord Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, and Robert FitzRoy, the captain of HMS Beagle. The chair for this debate was Darwins's former botany tutor John Stevens Henslow.

Wilberforce had a track record against evolution as far back as the previous Oxford B.A. meeting in 1847 when he attacked Chambers' Vestiges. For the more challenging task of opposing the Origin, and the implication that man descended from apes (theme continued from the previous day) he had been assiduously coached by Richard Owen—Owen stayed with him the night before the debate (Desmond & Moore p493). On the day Wilberforce repeated some of the arguments from his Quarterly Review article (written but not yet published), then ventured onto slippery ground. His famous jibe at Huxley (as to whether H. was descended from an ape on his mother's side or his father's side) was probably unplanned, and certainly unwise. Huxley's reply to the effect that he would rather be descended from an ape than a man who misused his great talents—the exact wording is not certain—was widely recounted in pamphlets and a spoof play.

Other friends of Darwin spoke also; Hooker especially thought he had made the best points. The general view was and still is that Huxley got the better of the exchange but there are dissenting voices, and Wilberforce himself thought he had done quite well. In the absence of a verbatim report these differing perceptions cannot be judged fairly; Huxley wrote a detailed account for Darwin, a letter which does not survive.[49][50][51][52][53]


[edit] Man and ape
Although Darwin did not publish his Descent of Man until 1871, the general debate on this topic had started years before (there was even a precursor debate in the 18th century between Monboddo and Buffon). Darwin himself had dropped a hint when, in the conclusion to the Origin, he wrote: "In the distant future... light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history."[54] Not so distant, as it turned out. A key event had already occurred in 1857 when Richard Owen presented (to the Linnean Society) his view that man was marked off from all other mammals by possessing features of the brain peculiar to the genus Homo. Having reached this (erroneous) opinion, Owen separated man from all other mammals in a subclass of its own.[55] No other biologist held such an extreme view. Darwin reacted "Man...as distinct from a chimpanzee [as] an ape from a platypus... I cannot swallow that!"[56] Neither could Huxley, who was able to demonstrate that Owen's idea was completely wrong.


Huxley with sketch of gorilla skull, c.1870The subject was discussed before a jury of experts at the same 1860 Oxford meeting, then in 1862 at the Cambridge meeting of the B.A. Huxley's friend William Flower gave a public demonstration that the same structures were indeed present in apes. Thus was exposed one of Owen's greatest blunders, revealing Huxley as not only dangerous in debate, but also a better anatomist. Huxley's ideas on this topic were summed up in January 1861 in the first issue (new series) of his own journal, the Natural History Review: "the most violent scientific paper he had ever composed".[57] This paper was reprinted in 1863 as chapter 2 of Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (his most influential book), but in the 1894 volume 7 in his Collected Essays the history of the Owen/Huxley debate was edited out. This extended debate, partly oral and partly in print, was a landmark in Huxley's career. It was highly important in asserting his dominance of comparative anatomy, and in the long run more influential in establishing evolution amongst biologists than was the debate with Wilberforce.

'I am Darwin's bulldog' said Huxley, and it is apt; the second half of Darwin's life was lived mainly within his family, and the younger, combative Huxley operated mainly out in the world at large. A letter from THH to Ernst Haekel (Nov 2 1871) goes "The dogs have been snapping at [Darwin's] heels too much of late."


[edit] Natural selection
Huxley was certainly not slavish in his dealings with Darwin. As shown in every biography, they had quite different and rather complementary characters. Important also, Darwin was a field naturalist, but Huxley was an anatomist, so there was a difference in their experience of nature. Lastly, Darwin's views on science were different from Huxley's views. For Darwin, natural selection was the best way to explain evolution because it explained a huge range of natural history facts and observations: it solved problems. Huxley, on the other hand, was an empiricist who trusted what he could see, and some things are not easily seen. With this in mind, one can appreciate the debate between them, Darwin writing his letters, Huxley never going quite so far as to say he thought Darwin was right.

Huxley's reservations on natural selection were of the type "until selection and breeding can be seen to give rise to varieties which are infertile with each other, natural selection cannot be proved."[58][59] Huxley's position on selection was agnostic; yet he gave no credence to any other theory.

Darwin's part in the discussion came mostly in letters, as was his wont, along the lines: "The empirical evidence you call for is both impossible in practical terms, and in any event unnecessary. It's the same as asking to see every step in the transformation (or the splitting) of one species into another. My way so many issues are clarified and problems solved; no other theory does nearly so well."[60]

Huxley's reservation, as Helena Cronin has so aptly remarked, was contagious: "it spread itself for years among all kinds of doubters of Darwinism."[61] One reason for this doubt was that comparative anatomy could address the question of descent, but not the question of mechanism.[62] Huxley's resistance to Darwin's massaging and suasion is evidence of mental firmness; he may be Darwin's bulldog, but not his poodle! At least he went so far as to say that he knew of no better hypothesis.


[edit] The X Club
In November 1864 Huxley succeeded in launching a dining club, the X Club, like-minded people working to advance the cause of science; not surprisingly, the club consisted of most of his closest friends. There were nine members, who decided at their first meeting that there should be no more. The members were: Huxley, John Tyndall, J. D. Hooker, John Lubbock (banker, biologist and cousin of Darwin), Herbert Spencer (social philosopher and sub-editor of the Economist), William Spottiswoode (mathematician and the Queen's Printer), Thomas Hirst (Professor of Physics at University College London), Edward Frankland (the new Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution) and George Busk, zoologist and palaeontologist (formerly surgeon for HMS Dreadnought). All except Spencer were Fellows of the Royal Society. There were also some quite significant satellites such as William Flower and George Rolleston, (Huxley protegées), and liberal clergyman Arthur Stanley, the Dean of Westminster. Guests such as Charles Darwin and Hermann von Helmholtz were entertained from time to time.[63]

They would dine early on first Thursdays at a hotel, planning what to do; high on the agenda was to change the way the Royal Society Council did business. It was no coincidence that the Council met later that same evening. First item for the Xs was to get the Copley Medal for Darwin, which they managed after quite a struggle.

The next step was to acquire an organ for propaganda. This was the weekly Reader, which they bought, revamped and redirected. Huxley had already become part-owner of the Natural History Review[64] bolstered by the support of Lubbock, Rolleston, Busk and Carpenter (X-clubbers and satellites). The journal was switched to pro-Darwinian lines and relaunched in January 1861. After a stream of good articles the NHR failed after four years; but it had helped at a critical time for the establishment of evolution. The Reader also failed, despite its broader appeal which included art & literature as well as science. The periodical market was quite crowded at the time, but most probably the critical factor was Huxley's time; he was simply over-committed, and could not afford to hire full-time editors. This occurred often in his life: Huxley took on too many ventures, and was not so astute as Darwin at getting others to do work for him.

However, the experience gained with the Reader was put to good use when the X Club put their weight behind the founding of Nature in 1869. This time no mistakes were made: above all there was a permanent editor (though not full-time), Norman Lockyer, who served until 1919, a year before his death. Alan P Barr says "To celebrate his 100th birthday, Nature, a journal that Huxley had been instrumental in founding and nurturing, issued a supplement devoted to recollections of him".[65]

The peak of the X Club's influence was from 1873 to 1885 as Hooker, Spottiswoode and Huxley were Presidents of the Royal Society in succession. The Club continued to meet regularly until 1892, after which it was just an excuse for the surviving members to meet. Hooker died in 1911, and Lubbock (now Lord Avebury) was the last surviving member.

Huxley was also an active member of the Metaphysical Society, which ran from 1869 to 1880.[66] It was formed around a nucleus of clergy and expanded to include all kinds of opinions. Tyndall and Huxley later joined The Club (founded by Dr. Johnson) when they could be sure that Owen would not turn up.[67]


[edit] Educational influence
When Huxley himself was young there were virtually no degrees in British universities in the biological sciences and few courses. Most biologists of his day were either self-taught, or took medical degrees. When he retired there were established chairs in biological disciplines in most universities, and a broad consensus on the curricula to be followed. Huxley was the single most influential person in this transformation.


[edit] School of Mines and Zoology
In the early 1870s the Royal School of Mines moved to new quarters in South Kensington; ultimately it would become one of the constituent parts of Imperial College London. The move gave Huxley the chance to give more prominence to laboratory work in biology teaching, an idea suggested by practice in German universities.[68] In the main, the method was based on the use of carefully chosen types, and depended on the dissection of anatomy, supplemented by microscopy, museum specimens and some elementary physiology at the hands of Foster.

The typical day would start with Huxley lecturing at 9am, followed by a program of laboratory work supervised by his demonstrators.[69] Huxley's demonstrators were picked men—all became leaders of biology in Britain in later life, spreading Huxley's ideas as well as their own. Michael Foster became Professor of Physiology at Cambridge; E. Ray Lankester became Jodrell Professor of Zoology at University College London (1875–91), Professor of Comparative Anatomy at Oxford (1891–98) and Director of the Natural History Museum (1898–1907); S.H. Vines became Professor of Botany at Cambridge; W.T. Thiselton-Dyer became Hooker's successor at Kew (he was already Hooker's son-in-law!); W. K. Parker became Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons; and William Gunion Rutherford became the Professor of Physiology at Edinburgh. William Flower, Conservator to the Hunterian Museum, and THH's assistant in many dissections, became Sir William Flower, Hunterian Professor of Comparative Anatomy and, later, Director of the Natural History Museum.[70] It's a remarkable list of disciples, especially when contrasted with Owen who, in a longer professional life than Huxley, left no disciples at all. "No one fact tells so strongly against Owen... as that he has never reared one pupil or follower".[71]

Huxley's courses for students were so much narrower than the man himself that many were bewildered by the contrast: "The teaching of zoology by use of selected animal types has come in for much criticism";[72] Looking back in 1914 to his time as a student, Sir Arthur Shipley said "[Although] Darwin's later works all dealt with living organisms, yet our obsession was with the dead, with bodies preserved, and cut into the most refined slices".[73] E.W MacBride said "Huxley... would persist in looking at animals as material structures and not as living, active beings; in a word... he was a necrologist.[74] To put it simply, Huxley preferred to teach what he had actually seen with his own eyes.


portrait W&D Downey (photographer prob. John Edwards, 1888/1891). [75]This largely morphological program of comparative anatomy remained at the core of most biological education for a hundred years until the advent of cell and molecular biology and interest in evolutionary ecology forced a fundamental rethink. It is an interesting fact that the methods of the field naturalists who led the way in developing the theory of evolution (Darwin, Wallace, Fritz Müller, Henry Bates) were scarcely represented at all in Huxley's program. Ecological investigation of life in its environment was virtually non-existent, and theory, evolutionary or otherwise, was at a discount. Michael Ruse finds no mention of evolution or Darwinism in any of the exams set by Huxley, and confirms the lecture content based on two complete sets of lecture notes.[76]

Since Darwin, Wallace and Bates did not hold teaching posts at any stage of their adult careers (and Műller never returned from Brazil) the imbalance in Huxley's program went uncorrected. It is surely strange that Huxley's courses did not contain an account of the evidence collected by those naturalists of life in the tropics; evidence which they had found so convincing, and which caused their views on evolution by natural selection to be so similar. Desmond suggests that "[biology] had to be simple, synthetic and assimilable [because] it was to train teachers and had no other heuristic function".[77] That must be part of the reason; indeed it does help to explain the stultifying nature of much school biology. But zoology as taught at all levels became far too much the product of one man.

Huxley was comfortable with comparative anatomy, at which he was the greatest master of the day. He was not an all-round naturalist like Darwin, who had shown clearly enough how to weave together detailed factual information and subtle arguments across the vast web of life. Huxley chose, in his teaching (and to some extent in his research) to take a more straightforward course, concentrating on his personal strengths.


[edit] Schools and the Bible
Huxley was also a major influence in the direction taken by British schools: in November 1870 he was voted onto the London School Board.[78] In primary schooling, he advocated a wide range of disciplines, similar to what is taught today: reading, writing, arithmetic, art, science, music, etc. In higher education he also foresaw how schools should be run, with two years of basic liberal studies followed by two years of some upper-division work, focusing on a more specific area of study. This was a fresh approach to the general study of classics in contemporary English colleges. His educational approach is illustrated by his famous essay On a piece of chalk [1] first published in Macmillan's Magazine in London, 1868. The piece reconstructs the geological history of Britain, from a simple piece of chalk and demonstrates the methods of science as "organized common sense".

Huxley supported the reading of the Bible in schools. This may seem out of step with his evolutionary theories and personal agnostic convictions, but he believed that the Bible's significant moral teachings and superb use of language were quite relevant to English life. However, what Huxley proposed was to create an edited version of the Bible, shorn of "shortcomings and errors... statements to which men of science absolutely and entirely demur... these tender children [should] not be taught that which you do not yourselves believe."[79][80] The Board voted against his idea, but it also voted against the idea that public money should be used to support students attending church schools. Vigorous debate took place on such points, and the debates were minuted in detail. Huxley said "I will never be a party to enabling the State to sweep the children of this country into denominational schools".[81][82] The Act of Parliament which founded board schools permitted the reading of the Bible, but did not permit any denominational doctrine to be taught.

It may be right to see Huxley's life and work as contributing to the secularisation of British society which gradually occurred over the following century. Ernst Mayr said "It can hardly be doubted that [biology] has helped to undermine traditional beliefs and value systems"[83] — and Huxley more than anyone else was responsible for this trend in Britain. Some modern Christian apologists consider Huxley the father of atheistic evangelism, though he himself maintained that he was an agnostic, not an atheist. He was, however, a lifelong and determined opponent of almost all forms of organised religion, especially the "Roman Church... carefully calculated for the destruction of all that is highest in the moral nature, in the intellectual freedom, and in the political freedom of mankind".[84][85] Perhaps Lenin was right when he remarked (in Materialism and empirio-criticism) "In Huxley's case... agnosticism serves as a fig-leaf for materialism".


[edit] Adult education
Huxley's interest in education went still further than school and university classrooms; he made a great effort to reach interested adults of all kinds: after all, he himself was largely self-educated. There were his lecture courses for working men, many of which were published afterwards, and there was the use he made of journalism, partly to earn money but mostly to reach out to the literate public. For most of his adult life he wrote for periodicals—the Westminster Review, the Saturday Review, the Reader, the Pall Mall Gazette, Macmillan's Magazine, the Contemporary Review. Germany was still ahead in formal science education, but interested people in Victorian Britain could use their initiative and find out what was going on by reading periodicals and using the lending libraries.[86][87]

In 1868 Huxley became Principal of the South London Working Men's College in Blackfriars Road. The moving spirit was a portmanteau worker, Wm. Rossiter, who did most of the work; the funds were put up mainly by F.D. Maurice's Christian Socialists.[88][89] At sixpence for a course and a penny for a lecture by Huxley, this was some bargain; and so was the free library organised by the college, an idea which was widely copied. The time Huxley gave to his College showed his commitment to working class education. He thought, and said, that the men who attended were as good as any country squire. Huxley resigned as Principal in 1880.[90]


portrait W&D Downey (photographer prob. John Edwards, 1888/1891)The technique of printing his more popular lectures in periodicals which were sold to the general public was extremely effective. A good example was The physical basis of life, a lecture given in Edinburgh on November 8th, 1868. Its theme — that vital action is nothing more than "the result of the molecular forces of the protoplasm which displays it" — shocked the audience, though that was nothing compared to the uproar when it was published in the Fortnightly Review for February 1869. John Morley, the editor, said "No article that had appeared in any periodical for a generation had caused such a sensation". It was like "the stir that in a [former] epoch was made by Swift's Conduct of the Allies, or Burke's French Revolution" (Morley 1917 p90). The issue was reprinted seven times and protoplasm became a household word; Punch added 'Professor Protoplasm' to its other tags for him.

The topic had been stimulated by Huxley seeing the cytoplasmic streaming in plant cells, which is indeed a sensational sight. For these audiences Huxley's claim that this activity should not be explained by words such as vitality, but by the working of its constituent chemicals, was surprising and shocking. Today we would perhaps emphasise the extraordinary structural arrangement of those chemicals as the key to understanding what cells do, but little of that was known in the nineteenth century.

When the Archbishop of York thought this 'new philosophy' was based on August Comte's positivism, Huxley corrected him: "Comte's philosophy [is just] Catholicism minus Christianity" (Huxley 1893 vol 1 of Collected Essays Methods & Results 156). A later version was "[positivism is] sheer Popery with M. Comte in the chair of St Peter, and with the names of the saints changed." (lecture on The scientific aspects of positivism Huxley 1870 Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews p149). Huxley's dismissal of positivism damaged it so severely that Comte's ideas withered in Britain.


[edit] Royal and other Commissions
The following list is given by Leonard Huxley in his biography of his father (titles somewhat shortened here).[91] The Royal Commission is the senior investigative forum in the British constitution. A rough analysis shows that five commissions involved science and scientific education; three involved medicine and three involved fisheries. Two were directed solely to Scotland and two to Ireland. Several involve difficult ethical and legal issues. All are directed partly or wholly towards the examination of possible changes to law and/or administrative practice.

1862 Trawling for herrings on the coast of Scotland.
1865–65 Sea fisheries of the United Kingdom.
1870–71 The Contagious Diseases Acts.
1870–75 Scientific instruction and the advancement of science.
1876 The practice of subjugating live animals to scientific experiments (vivisection).
1876–78 The universities of Scotland.
1881–82 The Medical Acts. [i.e. the legal framework for medicine]
1884 Trawl, net and beam trawl fishing.
He was also elected to two general Commissions on Ireland (which at that time referred to the whole island).

1866 On the Royal College of Science for Ireland.
1868 On science and art instruction in Ireland.

[edit] Family
See also: Huxley family

THH by Marian Collier (née Huxley),
Pencil drawing from the National Portrait Gallery.
In 1855, he married Henrietta Anne Heathorn (1825–1915), an English emigrée whom he had met in Sydney. They kept correspondence until he was able to send for her. They had five daughters and three sons:

Noel Huxley (1856–1860) died aged 4.
Jessie Oriana Huxley (1856–1927), married architect Fred Waller in 1877.
Marian Huxley (1859–1887) married artist John Collier in 1879.
Leonard Huxley (1860–1933) author.
Rachel Huxley (1862–1934) married civil engineer Alfred Eckersley in 1884, he died 1895.
Henrietta (Nettie) Huxley (1863–1940), married Harold Roller, travelled Europe as a singer.
Henry Huxley (1865–1946), became a fashionable general practitioner in London.
Ethel Huxley (1866–1941) married artist John Collier (widower of sister) in 1889.
Huxley's relationship with his relatives and children were quite genial by the standards of the day—so long as they lived their lives in an honourable manner, which some did not. After his mother, his eldest sister Lizzie was the most important person in his life until his own marriage. He remained on good terms with his own children, which is more than can be said of many Victorian fathers. This excerpt from a letter to Jessie, his eldest daughter is full of affection:

"Dearest Jess, You are a badly used young person—you are; and nothing short of that conviction would get a letter out of your still worse used Pater, the bête noir of whose existence is letter-writing. Catch me discussing the Afghan question with you, you little pepper-pot! No, not if I know it..." [goes on nevertheless to give strong opinions of the Afghans, at that time causing plenty of trouble to the Indian Empire—see Second Anglo-Afghan War] "There, you plague—ever your affec. Daddy, THH." (letter Dec 7th 1878, Huxley L 1900)

Thomas and Julian HuxleyThe most famous descendents in the third generation are offspring of Leonard Huxley:

Sir Julian Huxley FRS, grandson (1887–1975, son of Leonard Huxley and Julia Arnold) was a notable evolutionary biologist, who promoted the idea of humanism and was the first Director of UNESCO. His work in zoology was broader even than his grandfather: it included ethology and wildlife conservation, genetics and development as well as evolution. His two sons were both scientists of note: Anthony Julian Huxley, a botanist, and Francis Huxley, an anthropologist.

Aldous Huxley, grandson, (1894–1963, son of Leonard Huxley and Julia Arnold) was a famous author (Chrome Yellow 1921, Brave New World 1932, Eyeless in Gaza 1936, Ape and Essence 1948, The Doors of Perception 1954).

Sir Andrew Huxley OM FRS, grandson (b 1917, son of Leonard Huxley and Roselind Bruce) won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1963 jointly for work on nerve impulses. Andrew is the second Huxley to become President of the Royal Society (1980–85).


[edit] Mental problems in the family
Biographers have sometimes noted the occurrence of mental illness in the Huxley family. His father became "sunk in worse than childish imbecility of mind" [92], and later died in Barming Asylum; brother George suffered from "extreme mental anxiety" [93] and died in 1863 leaving serious debts. Brother James was at 55 "as near mad as any sane man can be" [94]; and there is more.

His favourite daughter, the artistically talented Mady (Marion), who became the first wife of artist John Collier, was troubled by mental illness for years. By her mid-twenties it was becoming clear that she was not sane, and was getting steadily worse (the diagnosis is uncertain). Huxley persuaded Jean-Martin Charcot, one of Freud's teachers, to examine her with a view to treatment; but soon Mady died of pneumonia.[95][96] It was a terrible blow to her husband and parents.

About Huxley himself we have a more complete record. As a young apprentice to a medical practitioner, aged thirteen or fourteen, Huxley was taken to watch a post-mortem dissection. Afterwards he sank into a 'deep lethargy' and though Huxley ascribed this to dissection poisoning, Bibby[97] and others are surely right to suspect that emotional shock precipitated the depression. Huxley recuperated on a farm, looking thin and ill.

The next episode we know of in Huxley's life when he suffered a debilitating depression was on the third voyage of HMS Rattlesnake in 1848.[98] This voyage was mostly to New Guinea and the NE Australian coast, including the Great Barrier Reef, which is a kind of wonderland for any zoologist, especially a young man hoping to make his career. The story is clear from the diary Huxley kept: p112 'little interest in the Barrier Reef'; p116 'two entries in seven weeks'; p117 '3 months passed and no journal' p124 'the black months of struggle and depression'.[99] For Huxley to pass up such a golden opportunity speaks of his state of mind quite painfully.

Huxley had periods of depression at the end of 1871 ('overwork' the explanation, true, but when was he not overworked?): alleviated by a cruise to Egypt.[100] Again in 1873, this time coincident with expensive building work on his house. His friends were really alarmed, and his doctor ordered three months rest. The three wives of Lyell, Darwin and Tyndall decided something had to be done. Darwin picked up his pen, and with Tyndall's help raised £2,100 — an enormous sum! The money was partly to pay for his recuperation, and partly to pay his bills. Huxley set out in July with Hooker to the Auvergne, and his wife and son Leonard joined him in Cologne, while the younger children stayed at Down House in Emma Darwin's care.[101]


Thomas Henry HuxleyFinally, in 1884 he sank into another depression, and this time it precipitated his decision to retire in 1885, at the age of only 60.[102] He resigned the Presidency of the Royal Society in mid-term, the Inspectorship of Fisheries, and his chair (as soon as he decently could) and took six month's leave. His pension was a fairly handsome £1500 a year.

This is enough to indicate the way depression (or perhaps a moderate bi-polar disorder) interfered with his life, yet unlike some of the other family members, he was able to function extremely well at other times. Perhaps it is not too surprising to find that the perceptive Beatrice Webb had written in her diary, after a conversation with Huxley, "Huxley, when not working, dreams strange things; carries on conversations between unknown persons living within his brain. There is a strain of madness in him".[103][104] An overstatement, but probably not written for publication.

The problems continued sporadically into the third generation. Two of Leonard's sons suffered serious depression: Trevennen committed suicide in 1914 and Julian suffered a breakdown in 1913[105], and five more later in life. Of course, there are many family members for whom no biographical information is available, but both the talent and the mental problems would have interested Francis Galton. His Hereditary Genius[106] contained this comment: "The direct result of this enquiry is... to prove that the laws of heredity are as applicable to the mental faculties as to the bodily faculties".


[edit] Satires
Darwin's ideas and Huxley's controversies gave rise to many cartoons and satires. It was the debate about man's place in nature that roused such widespread comment: cartoons are so numerous as to be almost impossible to count; Darwin's head on a monkey's body is one of the visual clichés of the age. Three or four items of especial ripeness are:

Monkeyana (Punch vol 40 18th May 1861). Signed 'Gorilla', this turned out to be by Sir Philip Egerton MP, amateur naturalist, fossil fish collector and — Richard Owen's patron![107] Last two stanzas:
Next HUXLEY replies
That OWEN he lies
And garbles his Latin quotation;
That his facts are not new,
His mistakes not a few,
Detrimental to his reputation.

To twice slay the slain
By dint of the Brain
(Thus HUXLEY concludes his review)
Is but labour in vain,
unproductive of gain,
And so I shall bid you "Adieu"!

The Gorilla's Dilemma (Punch vol 43 p.164, 1862). First two lines:
Say am I a man or a brother,
Or only an anthropoid ape?

Report of a sad case recently tried before the Lord Mayor, Owen versus Huxley [108]. Lord Mayor asks whether either side is known to the police:
Policeman X — Huxley, your Worship, I take to be a young hand, but very vicious; but Owen I have seen before. He got into trouble with an old bone man, called Mantell, who never could be off complaining as Owen prigged his bones. People did say that the old man never got over it, and Owen worritted him to death; but I don't think it was so bad as that. Hears as Owen takes the chair at a crib in Bloomsbury. I don't think it will be a harmonic meeting altogether. And Huxley hangs out in Jermyn Street.

[Tom Huxley's 'low set' included Hooker 'in the green and vegetable line' and 'Charlie Darwin, the pigeon-fancier'; Owen's 'crib in Bloomsbury' was the British Museum, of which Natural History was but one department.]
The Water Babies, a fairy tale for a land baby by Charles Kingsley (serialised in Macmillan's Magazine 1862–3, published in book form, with additions, in 1863). Kingsley had been among first to give a favourable review to Darwin's On the Origin of Species, having "long since... learnt to disbelieve the dogma of the permanence of species",[109] and the story includes a satire on the reaction to Darwin's theory, with all the main scientific participants appearing, including Richard Owen and Huxley.

Richard Owen and Thomas Henry Huxley inspect a water baby in Linley Sambourne's 1881 illustrationAn illustration by Linley Sambourne showed Huxley and Owen studying a captured water baby. In 1892 Thomas Henry Huxley's five-year-old grandson Julian saw this engraving and wrote his grandfather a letter asking:

Dear Grandpater – Have you seen a Waterbaby? Did you put it in a bottle? Did it wonder if it could get out? Could I see it some day? – Your loving Julian.

Huxley wrote back:

My dear Julian – I could never make sure about that Water Baby.

I have seen Babies in water and Babies in bottles; the Baby in the water was not in a bottle and the Baby in the bottle was not in water. My friend who wrote the story of the Water Baby was a very kind man and very clever. Perhaps he thought I could see as much in the water as he did – There are some people who see a great deal and some who see very little in the same things.

When you grow up I dare say you will be one of the great-deal seers, and see things more wonderful than the Water Babies where other folks can see nothing.


[edit] Quotations

[edit] Huxley
"I am Darwin's bulldog" coined by THH himself and so self-evidently apt that it was almost universally copied.
"How extremely stupid [of me] not to have thought of that" said in particular of the idea of natural selection. [versions in Life & Letters of CD and L&L of THH differ slightly as indicated]
"After all, it is as respectable to be modified ape as to be modified dirt" written in a letter to Dr Frederick Dyster 30th Jan 1859, i.e. before the publication of the Origin. [Huxley papers at Imperial College: HP 15.106]
"The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands" said to Sir Benjamin Brodie after Wilberforce's jibe in the Oxford debate. [L&L of THH Chapter 14]
"Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once". Last of a series of exchanges when Owen repeated his claims about the Gorilla brain in a Royal Institution lecture. [Athenaeum 13 April 1861 p.498; Browne vol 2 p.159]
"The fact is that he (Richard Owen) made a prodigious blunder... and now his only chance is to be silent & let people forget the exposure!" THH to J.D. Hooker 27 April 1861 about Owen's view on human and ape brains; and of course Owen was not silent.[110]
"Science is organised common sense". Appears in his talks and essays at least half a dozen times; and seems of doubtful validity to many philosophers of science today.
"The great tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact". Occurs with variations several times.
Agnosticism: coined in 1869 to label his attitude to religion, it also throws light on his philosophy of science. Example: "I neither deny or affirm the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing it, but on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it." [letter to Charles Kingsley, Sept 23 1860, L&L of THH vol 1, p233-39]
"I do not advocate burning your ship to get rid of the cockroaches". Said of those who wished to abolish all religious teaching, when really all they wanted was to free education from the Church. [THH Critiques and Addresses 1873 p90]
"Controversy is as abhorrent to me as gin to a reclaimed drunkard". THH to John Morley 1878.
"Science is... the results of exact methods of thought whatever be the subject-matter". THH to Charles Kingsley.
"The doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction."
"Try to learn something about everything and everything about something."
"The mediaeval university looked backwards: it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge... The modern university looks forward: it is a factory of new knowledge" THH letter to E. Ray Lankester 11 April 1892.[111]
"Not far from the invention of fire... we must rank the invention of doubt." [Collected Essays vol 6, viii]
Abram, Abraham became
By will divine
Let pickled Brian's name
Be changed to Brine!
– THH Poem in letter to J.D. Hooker 4th Dec 1894, on hearing that JDH's son had fallen into a salt vat. [112]


[edit] About Huxley
"I think his tone is much too vehement" [Charles Darwin in letter to Hooker about THH's Royal Institution lecture in 1854]
"Huxley gave the death-blow not only to Owen's theory of the skull but also to Owen's hitherto unchallenged prestige"[113]
"Pope Huxley" title of an article by R.H. Hutton who complains that whilst THH advocates agnosticism for everyone else, he's apt to be a mite too certain himself! [The Spectator 29th Jan 1870]
"If he [THH] has a fault it is... that like Caesar, he is ambitious... [it might be said that] cutting up apes is his forté, cutting up men is his foible" ['A Devonshire Man' in the Pall Mall Gazette Jan 18th 1870]
"Darwin's bulldog was patently a man of almost puritanical uprightness"[114]
"Archbishop Huxley and Professor Manning" [Bishop Thirwell Letters to a friend 1887 p.317]
"A man who was always taking two irons out of the fire and putting three in" [Herbert Spencer]
"It was worth being born to have known Huxley" [Edward Clodd 1840–1930, biologist and biographer]
"The illustrious comparative anatomist, Huxley, Darwin's great general in the battles that had to be fought, but not a naturalist, far less a student of living nature." [Edward Bagnall Poulton Charles Darwin and the origin of species London 1909 p58]
"From [1854] until 1885 Huxley's labours extended over the widest field of biology and philosophy ever covered by any naturalist with the single exception of Aristotle"[115]
"Huxley, I believe, was the greatest Englishman of the nineteenth century." [H.L. Mencken 1925]
"Huxleyism: the theory of the anthropoid descent of man and its inevitable consequences." [Clarence Ayres, Huxley p242]
"Oh, there goes Professor Huxley; faded but still fascinating" Woman overheard at B.A. meeting of 1878.[116][117]
"I'm a good Christian woman—I'm not an infidel like you!" Huxley's cook on being scolded by THH for drunkenness.[118]

[edit] See also
Evolutionary ethics

[edit] Notes
^ Encyclopædia Britannica Online 2006
^ Desmond 1994
^ Huxley 1900
^ Chesney, Kellow 1970. The Victorian underworld. Temple Smith, London; Pelican 1972, p105 and p421.
^ Desmond 1994
^ Huxley 1900
^ Desmond 1994, p. 35
^ Huxley 1935
^ Di Gregorio 1984
^ Huxley 1859
^ Holland 2007, p. 153–5
^ Desmond 1994
^ Huxley 1900
^ Foster & Lankester 1898-1903
^ MacGillivray 1852
^ Huxley 1900
^ Foster & Lankester 1898-1903, p. 538–606
^ Huxley 1862a, p. 420–22
^ Huxley 1862b
^ Di Gregorio 1984
^ Huxley T.H. 1859. On the persistent types of animal life. Proceedings of the Royal Institution.
^ Desmond A. 1982. Archtypes and ancestors: palaeontology in Victorian London 1850-1875. Blond & Briggs, London.
^ Clack 2002
^ Huxley 1861, p. 67-84
^ Foster & Lankester 1898-1903, p. 163–87
^ Foster & Lankester 1898-1903
^ Paul 2002, p. 171-224
^ Prum 2003, p. 550-561
^ Desmond 1997, p. 88 et seq
^ Huxley 1877
^ Bibby 1972
^ Desmond 1997, p. 230
^ Desmond & Moore 1991
^ Desmond 1997
^ Huxley 1900
^ Desmond 1998, p. 431
^ Lyons 1999, p. 11
^ Huxley 1900
^ Huxley 1854, p. 425–39
^ Huxley 1855, p. 82–85
^ Browne 1995
^ Desmond 1994, p. 222 et seq
^ Browne 2002
^ Darwin & Wallace 1858, p. 45-62
^ Huxley 1893-94a, p. 1-20
^ Foster & Lankester 1898-1903, p. 400
^ Owen 1860
^ Wilberforce 1860
^ Browne 2002, p. 118 et seq.
^ Huxley 1900, p. chapter 14
^ Desmond 1994, p. 276–281
^ Lucas 1979, p. 313-330 A somewhat pro-Wilberforce account; lists many sources.
^ Gould 1991 Chapter 26 'Knight takes Bishop?' is Gould's take on the Huxley-Wilberforce debate.
^ Darwin 1859, p 490
^ Owen 1858, p. 1-37
^ Burkhardt 1984 onwards (continuing series)
^ Browne 2002
^ Variously worded in Huxley 1860a, Huxley 1860b, Huxley 1861, Huxley 1862b and Huxley1887
^ Poulton 1896 chapter 18 gives detailed quotations from Huxley and discussion—Darwin's letters to Huxley being not yet published
^ Letters CD to THH in Darwin & Seward 1903 vol 1 p137-8, 225-6, 230-2, 274, 277, 287
^ Cronin 1991, p. 397
^ Mayr 1982
^ Jensen 1970, p. 63-72
^ Desmond 1994, p. 284, 289–90
^ Barr 1997, p. 1
^ Irvine 1955 Chapter 15
^ Desmond 1997, p. 123
^ Bibby 1959
^ Osborn 1924
^ Desmond 1997
^ Charles Darwin to Asa Gray 1860 in Darwin & Seward 1903, p. 153
^ Lester 1995, p. 67
^ Wollaston 1921, p. 102
^ MacBride 1934, p. 65
^ Pritchard 1994 Date based on comparison with other portraits of known date. Photo is by the firm of William & Daniel Downey, active ca. 1872-1919; photographer probably John Edwards
^ Ruse 1997
^ Desmond 1997, p. 273 note 20
^ Desmond 1997
^ Huxley 1893-94b, p. 397
^ Bibby 1959, p. 153
^ School Board Chronicle vol 2, p.326
^ Bibby 1959, p. 155
^ Mayr 1982, p. 80
^ School Board Chronicle vol 2, p.360
^ Bibby 1959, p. 155
^ White 2003, p. 69 et seq
^ Note: articles are listed, and some are available, in The Huxley File at Clark University
^ Bibby 1959, p. 33
^ Desmond 1994, p. 361–2
^ Desmond 1994 Chapter 19
^ Huxley 1900
^ letter THH to eldest sister Lizzie 1853 HP 31.21
^ THH to Lizzie 1858 HP 31.24
^ THH to Lizzie HP 31.44
^ THH to JT 1887 HP 9.164
^ Desmond 1997
^ Bibby 1972, p. 7
^ Huxley 1935 Chapter 5 'Wanderings of a human soul'
^ Huxley 1935
^ Desmond 1997, p. 27
^ Desmond 1997, p. 49
^ Desmond 1997, p. 151 et seq
^ Mackenzie 1982, p. 202-3
^ Webb 1926
^ Clark 1968
^ Galton 1892, p. xix
^ Desmond 1994, p. 296
^ pamphlet, published by George Pycraft, London 1863; Huxley Papers 79.6
^ Darwin 1887, p. 287
^ Bibby 1958, p. 73 HP 2.98
^ Bibby 1958, p. 182 HP: 30.448
^ Huxley papers at Imperial College London HP 2.454
^ Osborn 1924, p. 113
^ Bibby 1958, p. 56
^ Osborn 1924, p. 107–8
^ Huxley 1900 vol 2, p.63
^ Bibby 1958, p. 80
^ Desmond 1997, p. 7

[edit] References
Encyclopædia Britannica Online (2006), Thomas Henry Huxley,
Barr, Alan P, ed. (1997), Thomas Henry Huxley's place in science and letters: centenary essays, Georgia: Athens
Bibby, Cyril (1959), T.H. Huxley: scientist, humanist and educator, London: Watts
Bibby, Cyril (1972), Scientist Extraordinary: the life and work of Thomas Henry Huxley 1825–1895, Oxford: Pergamon
Browne, Janet (1995), Charles Darwin. vol 1: Voyaging, Cambridge University Press
Browne, Janet (2002), Charles Darwin. vol 2: The Power of Place, Cambridge University Press
Burkhardt, F et al (eds) (1984 onwards: continuing series), The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Cambridge University Press
Clack, Jenny (2002), Gaining ground: the origin of tetrapods, Indiana
Clark, Ronald W. (1968), The Huxleys, London
Cronin, Helena (1991), The ant and the peacock: altruism and sexual selection from Darwin to today, Cambridge University Press
Darwin, Charles (1887), Darwin, Francis, ed., The life and letters of Charles Darwin, including an autobiographical chapter, vol. 2, London: John Murray, . (The Autobiography of Charles Darwin)
Darwin, Charles & Wallace, Alfred Russel, written at London, "On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection", Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London. Zoology 3 (9): (Read 1 July): 45–62, 1858.
Darwin, Francis & Seward, A.C. (1903), More Letters of Charles Darwin. 2 vols, London: John Murray
Desmond, Adrian (1994), Huxley: vol 1 The Devil's Disciple, London: Michael Joseph, ISBN 0-7181-3641-1
Desmond, Adrian (1997), Huxley: vol 2 Evolution's high priest, London: Michael Joseph
Desmond, Adrian (1998), Huxley: vol 1 and 2, London: Penguin
Desmond, Adrian & Moore, James (1991), Darwin, London: Joseph
Di Gregorio, Mario A (1984), T.H. Huxley's place in natural science, New Haven: Yale University Press, ISBN 0300030622
Duncan, David (1908), Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer. 2 vols, Michael Joseph
Eve, A.S. & Creasey, C.H. (1945), Life and work of John Tyndall, London: Macmillan
Foster, Michael & Lankester, E. Ray (1898-1903), The scientific memoirs of Thomas Henry Huxley. 4 vols and supplement, London: Macmillan, ISBN 1432640119
Galton, Francis (1892), Hereditary Genius 2nd ed, London, pp. xix
Gould, Stephen Jay (1991), Bully for Brontosaurus, Random House
Holland, Linda Z (2007), "A chordate with a difference", Nature (UK: Nature Publishing Group) (no. 447/7141, pp. 153-155), ISSN 0028-0836
Huxley, Julian (1935), T.H. Huxley's diary of the voyage of HMS Rattlesnake, London: Chatto & Windus
Huxley, Leonard (1900), The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley. 2 vols 8vo, London: Macmillan
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1854), "Review of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, tenth edition", British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review (no. 13)
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1855), "On certain zological arguments commonly adduced in favour of the hypothesis of the progressive development of animal life in time", Proceedings of the Royal Institution 2 (1854–58)
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1859), The Oceanic Hydrozoa, London: The Ray Society, ISBN 0300030622
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1860a), "On species, and races and their origin", Proc. Roy. Inst. 1858-62 (no. III): 195
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1860b), "The origin of species", Westminster Review (no. April)
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1861), "On the zoological relations of man with the lower animals", Natural History Review (new series) (no. 1)
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1862a), On the fossil remains of Man, vol. III, London: The Royal Institution.
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1862b), On our knowledge of the causes of the phenomena of organic nature, London
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1863), Evidence as to Man's place in nature, London: Williams & Norwood
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1864), "Further remarks on the human remains from the Neanderthal", Natural History Review (London) (no. 4): 429–46
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1870), Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews, London
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1877), American Addresses.
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1887), "On the reception of the 'Origin of Species'", in Darwin, Francis, Life & Letters of Charles Darwin, London: John Murray
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1893-94), Collected essays. 9 vols. Vol 1: Methods and results; vol 2: Darwiniana; vol 3: Science and education; vol 4: Science and Hebrew tradition; vol 5: Science and Christian tradition; vol 6 :Hume, with helps to the study of Berkeley; vol 7:Man's place in nature; vol 8: Discourses biological and geological; vol 9: Evolution and ethics, and other essays, London: Macmillan
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1893-94a), Collected essays: vol 2 Darwiniana, London: Macmillan
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1893-94b), Collected essays: vol 3 Science and education, London: Macmillan
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1898-1903), "Preliminary essay upon the systematic arrangement of the fishes of the Devonian epoch.", in Foster, Michael & Lankester, E. Ray, The scientific memoirs of Thomas Henry Huxley. vol 2, London: Macmillan, pp. 421–60, ISBN 1432640119
Jensen, J Vernon (1970), "The X Club: fraternity of Victorian scientists", British Journal of the History of Science (no. 5): 63-72
Lester, Joe (1995), E. Ray Lankester:the making of modern British biology (edited, with additions, by Peter J. Bowler), BSHS Monograph #9
Lucas, John R. (1979), "Wilberforce and Huxley: a legendary encounter", The Historical Journal (Cambridge University Press) 22 (2), . Retrieved on 2007-06-09
Lyons, Sherrie L (18999), Thomas Henry Huxley: the evolution of a scientist, New York
MacBride, E.W. (1934), Huxley, London: Duckworth
MacGillivray, John (1852), Narrative of the voyage of HMS Rattlesnake. 2 vols, London: Boone
Mackenzie, N & Mackenzie, J, eds. (1982), The diaries of Beatrice Webb vol 1 1873–1892, London: Virago
Mayr, Ernst (1982), The Growth of Biological Thought, Harvard University Press
McMillan, N.D. & Meehan, J (1980), John Tyndall: 'X'emplar of scientific & technological education, National Council for Educational Awards. (despite its chaotic organisation, this little book contains some nuggets that are well worth sifting)
Morley, John (1917), Recollections. 2 vols, Macmillan
Osborn, Henry Fairfield (1924), Impressions of great naturalists
Owen, Richard (1858), "On the characters, principles of division, and primary groups of the Class Mammalia", Proc Linnean Society: Zoology (no. 2): 1–37
Owen, Richard (1860), "Darwin on the Origin of Species", Edinburgh Review (no. 111): 487-532
Paradis, James & Williams, George C (1989), Evolution and Ethics: T. H. Huxley's 'Evolution and Ethics', with New Essays on Its Victorian and Sociobiological Context, Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press
Paul, G (2002), "Looking for the true bird ancestor", Dinosaurs of the Air, the evolution and loss of flight in dinosaurs and birds, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, pp. 171-224, ISBN 0-8018-6763-0
Poulton, Edward Bagnall (1896), Charles Darwin and the theory of natural selection, London: Cassell.(Chapter 18 deals with Huxley and natural selection)
Pritchard, M. (1994), A directory of London photographers 1891-1908
Prum, R (2003), "Are current critiques of the theropod origin of birds science? Rebuttal To Feduccia 2002", The Auk 2 (120): 550-561
Ruse, Michael (1997), "Thomas Henry Huxley and the status of evolution as science", in Barr, Alan P., Thomas Henry Huxley's place in science and letters: centenary essays, Georgia: Athens
Spencer, Herbert (1904), Autobiography. 2 vols, London: Williams & Norgate
Webb, Beatrice (1926), My apprenticeship, London: Longmans
Wilberforce, Samuel (1860), "Darwin's Origin of Species", Quarterly Review (no. 102): 225-64
Wollaston, A.F.R. (1921), Life of Alfred Newton 1829–1907
White, Paul (2003), Thomas Huxley: making the 'Man of Science', Cambridge University Press

[edit] Biographies of Huxley

Grave of Thomas Huxley at St. Marylebone (now East Finchley) CemeteryAshforth, Albert. Thomas Henry Huxley. Twayne, New York 1969.
Ayres, Clarence. Huxley. Norton, New York 1932.
Bibby, Cyril. T.H. Huxley: scientist, humanist and educator. Watts, London 1959, Horizon Press, N.Y. 1960. Forewords by Sir Julian Huxley and Aldous Huxley. [one of the best biographies, and especially good on his educational work; good plates]
Bibby, Cyril. Scientist extraordinary: the life and work of Thomas Henry Huxley 1825–1895. Pergamon, Oxford 1972. [not identical with the above, but contains the same plates; includes helpful one-para biogs of THH's circle]
Clark, Ronald W. The Huxleys. London 1968. [family biogs to the third generation]
Clodd, Edward. Thomas Henry Huxley. Blackwood, Edinburgh 1902. [apart from the L&L of THH, this is the best of the early biographies; it is organised into five themes: 1. the man 2. the discoverer 3. the interpreter 4. the controversialist 5. the constructor]
Desmond, Adrian. Huxley: vol 1 The Devil's disciple. London 1994, vol 2 Evolution's high priest. London 1997; paperback edition, 2 vols in one, Penguin 1998. [this is the most comprehensive modern biography; quite outstanding in placing Huxley in his societal context; perhaps not quite so impressive in dealing with his work as a scientist]
Di Gregorio, Mario A. T.H. Huxley's place in natural science. New Haven 1984. [much-needed; but emphasises THH's careerism too stongly]
Huxley, Leonard. The life and letters of Thomas Henry Huxley. 2 vols 8vo, Macmillan, London 1900; 2nd ed 3 vols cr8vo, Macmillan, London 1903. [this is a good source for facts pertaining to his life, and includes many letters]
Huxley, Leonard. Thomas Henry Huxley: a character sketch. Watts, London 1920.
Irvine, William. Apes, Angels and Victorians. New York 1955. [highly readable joint biography of Darwin and Huxley. It still makes a good intro despite one or two careless errors — it describes (p.81) the 1858 Darwin/Wallace papers as read before the Royal Society instead of the Linnean Society]
Irvine, William. Thomas Henry Huxley. Longmans, London 1960. [40-page pamphlet]
Jensen, J. Vernon. Thomas Henry Huxley: communicating for science. University of Delaware, Newark 1991. [centres on Huxley's oral rhetoric]
Lyons, Sherrie L. Thomas Henry Huxley: the evolution of a scientist. New York 1999. [recognises THH's love of truth as his main motive]
MacBride E.W. Huxley. Duckworth, London 1934. [author had the dubious distinction of being one of the last Lamarkists to hold a chair of zoology in Britain]
Mitchell, P. Chalmers. Thomas Henry Huxley: a sketch of his life and work London 1901. see Project Gutenberg. [chapters 3, 5 and 8 on THH's science recommended; contains strange error p29 'Huxley was the only surgeon aboard the Rattlesnake'. He most certainly was not! The surgeon (Huxley's superior officer) was 'Jonny' Thomson]
Osborn, Henry Fairfield. Impressions of great naturalists. 1924. [by one of THH's students; includes essays on Darwin, Wallace and Huxley]
Paradis, James G. T.H. Huxley: Man's place in nature. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln 1978. [on Huxley's Humanism]
Peterson, Houston. Huxley: prophet of science. Longmans Green, London 1932. [excellent & literate; includes reprint of Huxley's Mr Balfour's attack on agnosticism II not previously published]
White, Paul. Thomas Huxley: making the 'Man of Science'. Cambridge University Press 2003.
Voorhees, Irving Wilson. The teachings of Thomas Henry Huxley. Broadway, New York 1907.
The Huxley File. A website created by Charles Blinderman and David Joyce. [this is an indispensable source, though there are some errors, for example, Huxley did not graduate with a degree]
There are also many obituary notices in newspapers, periodicals and reference works.
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