344 Lightman
to England while on the Rattlesnake brought him to the attention of some
of the gentlemen of science. When he returned, his scientifi c credentials
now established, he endured fi ve years of frustration searching for a suit-
able position. There were few paid posts in science, and when one of the
few became open, he was passed over for lesser- qualifi ed individuals with
more respectable social and religious backgrounds. Cultivating powerful
patrons among the gentlemen of science fi nally paid off in 1855 when he
obtained a position at the Royal School of Mines, but in the meantime
he had built up a nasty grudge against the Anglican establishment that
had delayed the start of his scientifi c career. Huxley never forgot his early
struggles to establish a scientifi c career for himself, and throughout his life
he set as one of his main goals the redefi nition of both the meaning and
institutional infrastructure of British science, which had in the past been
dominated by the Anglican- aristocratic establishment.
Huxley found like- minded friends, some with similar backgrounds
and experiences. The German- trained physicist John Tyndall (1820–
1893), professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution, and the
philosopher of evolution Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), both from Non-
conformist backgrounds, shared Huxley’s lower- middle- class roots. Like
Huxley, they had been educated outside the privileged Anglican institu-
tions of Oxford and Cambridge. Some allies were men whose Anglican-
ism had been demolished by a tumultuous crisis of faith, such as William
Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879), professor of applied mathematics at Uni-
versity College, who rebelled against his High Church upbringing while
at Cambridge in the late sixties, and literary critic and editor of the Dic-
tionary of National Biography Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), whose agony
at Cambridge in the early sixties was so intense that he considered sui-
cide. Other members of the group, who scholars refer to as the “scientifi c
naturalists,” included the anthropologist Edward Tylor (1832–1917), the
biologist E. Ray Lankester (1847–1929), and the medical doctor Henry
Maudsley (1835–1918).
During the latter half of the nineteenth century, intellectuals believed
that science provided the most legitimate path to certain truth. Fact, ob-
jectivity, and practicality were catchwords of the day. In her autobiogra-
phy, Beatrice Webb, a Fabian socialist, recalled the “cult of science” that
pervaded the mid- Victorian world when she was a young disciple of Her-
bert Spencer. “Two outstanding tenets, some would say, two idols of the
mind, were united in this mid- Victorian trend of thought and feeling,”
she remembered. “There was the current belief in the scientifi c method...
by means of which alone all mundane problems were to be solved” and
“the transference of the emotion of self- sacrifi cing service from God to