X Club

X Club

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For the Marvel Comics team, see X-Club (comics).

Thomas Henry Huxley, the initiator of the X Club, c. 1880.

The X Club was a dining club of nine men who supported the theories of natural selection and academic liberalism in late 19th-century England. Thomas Henry Huxley was the initiator: he called the first meeting for 3 November 1864.[1] The club met in London once a month—except in July, August and September—from November 1864 until March 1893, and its members are believed to have wielded much influence over scientific thought. The members of the club were George Busk, Edward Frankland, Thomas Archer Hirst, Joseph Dalton Hooker, Thomas Henry Huxley, John Lubbock, Herbert Spencer, William Spottiswoode, and John Tyndall, united by a "devotion to science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas".[2]

The nine men who would compose the X Club already knew each other well. By the 1860s, friendships had turned the group into a social network, and the men often dined and went on holidays together. After Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, the men began working together to aid the cause for naturalism and natural history. They backed the liberal Anglican movement that emerged in the early 1860s, and both privately and publicly supported the leaders of the movement.

According to its members, the club was originally started to keep friends from drifting apart, and to partake in scientific discussion free from theological influence. A key aim was to reform the Royal Society, with a view to making the practice of science professional. In the 1870s and 1880s, the members of the group became prominent in the scientific community and some accused the club of having too much power in shaping the scientific landscape of London. The club was terminated in 1893, after depletion by death, and as old age made regular meetings of the surviving members impossible.

The X Club came together during a period of turbulent conflict in both science and religion in Victorian England. The publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species through Natural Selection brought a storm of argument, with the scientific establishment of wealthy amateurs and clerical naturalists as well as the Church of England attacking this new development. Since the start of the century they had seen evolutionism as an assault on the divinely ordained aristocratic social order. On the other side, Darwin's ideas on evolution were welcomed by liberal theologians and by a new generation of salaried professional scientists; the men who would later come to form the X Club supported Darwin, and saw his work as a great stride in the struggle for freedom from clerical interference in science. The members of the X social network played a significant part in nominating Darwin for the Copley Medal in 1864

There were also some quite significant X-Club satellites such as William Flower and George Rolleston, (Huxley protegés), and liberal clergyman Arthur Stanley, the Dean of Westminster. Guests such as Charles Darwin and Hermann von Helmholtz were entertained from time to time.[82]

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.

X Club

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