The mad, bad and dangerous theories of Thomas Henry Huxley

Racism lies at the heart of the Victorian rewrite of the creation myth. What happened in prehistory, according to Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s representative on Earth, was that while Homo sapiens emerged from its primitive state among the other apes and lemurs, some – Europeans – developed at a faster rate. Humankind had evolved from a ‘hairy, tailed quadruped’, which was itself ‘probably derived from an ancient marsupial animal’ (Darwin). But once the human species emerged, ‘men differ more widely from one another than they do from the apes’.

This ineluctably leads to the conclusion that there is as much difference, perhaps more, between the higher type of human being (such as members of the Darwin and Huxley families) and the ‘savages’ as there is between, say, Queen Victoria and an orangutan. Writing to Charles Kingsley, having sent him a copy of Man’s Place in Nature (1863), Huxley opined: ‘I suspect that the modern Patagonian is as nearly as possible the unimproved representative of the makers of flint implements of Abbeyville.’

It is no accident that while Huxley was penning Man’s Place in Nature (or Darwin his Descent of Man, 1871) the British Empire was changing gear, moving from a commercial and missionary endeavour in Asia and Africa to a theory of racial superiority which justified not merely the abusive trading relationship between the East India Company and the indigenous civilisation but all-out colonisation. ‘All the Polynesian, Australian and central Asiatic peoples,’ Huxley wrote in Man’s Place in Nature, ‘were at the dawn of history substantially what they are now.’

That European humanity – with the British at its apex, naturally – out-classed Asian and African humanity went without question. Possessing steam trains, winged collars, top hats and newspapers made Europeans obviously superior to people who dressed and behaved differently.