Thomas Henry Huxley on Culture: Science and Humanities in Victorian England

A significant contribution to the multiple voices that engaged, from a variety of perspectives, in the late nineteenth-century debate on culture is provided by Thomas Henry Huxley. If the long process of reforms that increasingly improved the level of education in Victorian England had far-reaching social and political implications, as testified by Arnold’s views in Anarchy and Culture, it also marked the background of one of the most passionate seasons of the nineteenth-century dispute between scientific and literary culture, that reenacted in new terms the old querelle on the supremacy of ancient or modern writers. The prominent position that science was acquiring in modern curricula both in grammar schools and in Universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge, was highly controversial and harshly contrasted by most humanists, firmly anchored to the defense of literary culture. Not only did biology and geology struggle to reach a place in education, but the ‘respectability’ of scientific disciplines and the idea, in a wider perspective, that they could actually embody a form of culture, were largely eroded by their assumed closeness to profit. It is against this background that essay traces Huxley’s position in Science and Culture (1880). Arguing that to ignore science is to ignore the foundation of progress, he basically reversed Arnold’s thesis that literature is the unique way to achieve culture. Tracing the further evolution of the lively debate between Arnold and Huxley on this topic, and the subsequent development of Huxley’s thought in On Science and Art in Relation to Education (1883), this paper sheds light on his progressively more conciliatory tone. The author’s proposal of a synthesis between scientific discip¬lines and humanities challenges the very notion of hierarchy in culture’s complementary constituents, in ‘the three branches of art and science and literature’ that are ‘essential to the making of a man’.