Adrian Desmond, Reign of the Beast: The Atheist World of W. D. Saull and his Museum of Evolution (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2024) xii+664 Free e-book. £25.46 Pb. £37.36 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-80511-240-2
In 1851, Admiral Sir John Ross returned to London from the Arctic expedition that had discovered the sad fate of Franklin’s lost expedition. Ross and his fellow officers had also taken every opportunity to collect scientific data and at least two collections of fossil corals from the expedition went not to the prestigious British Museum, but to W.D. Saull’s private museum, in the city of London. Such was its scientific reputation that nobody seems to have been surprised by their decision, but Ross might have made a different choice had he known that Saull was a notorious atheist and socialist, a public defender of radicals and a private financier of atheist chapels, who regularly paid the costs of convicted blasphemers and unlicenced, anti-clerical publishers. More than a decade before the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation appeared (and long before Darwin had even started speculating privately about evolution), Saull had even been using his museum to argue that humans had evolved from monkeys.
Among the hundreds of good causes to which Saull devoted his time and money was the successful campaign to pardon the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Dorsetshire Labourers who were transported to Australia for forming a trade union in 1833. Such activities made him sufficiently well-known that he became the butt of published satires. However, his limited fame was fading twenty years later and by the time when he died in 1855, few remembered the man or his tireless commitment to radical politics. The eclipse of his reputation was accelerated by the disintegration of his world-famous museum, which had been regularly mentioned in travel guides as one of London’s important attractions. Saull had wanted to leave it to the working people for whom it had been created, but a combination of accidents (including ambiguities in his will) consigned it to years in crated-up limbo before it was dispersed by unscrupulous fossil dealers. A few of its outstanding treasures were immortalised by Richard Owen in his History of British Fossil Reptiles, but for most of the museum’s contents, we no longer have even a catalogue.
Adrian Desmond has been gathering material on Saull for decades, ranging from newspaper clippings to the reports of police spies. These fragments have been skilfully combined into a rich picture of the world that sat alongside (and occasionally overlapped with) that of the radical medical communities he revealed in his classic The Politics of Evolution (1989). However, as Desmond himself acknowledges, Saull remains curiously elusive; we learn a lot more about the world he lived in than we do about the man himself. The result, at times, feels like Hamlet without the prince. I was reminded of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966), which plays with the idea of taking events that Shakespeare places off-stage and putting them at the heart of the play. Desmond does something similar, pushing well-known figures in Victorian geology (including Owen, Charles Lyell, Gideon Mantell and Edward Forbes) to the periphery, with the previously all-but unknown Saull being given the lead. Just as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are regularly confused with one another (even forgetting their own names at one point), Saull suffered from being mis-named by his contemporaries (Owen got his first initial wrong and people regularly omitted the second ‘l’ from his surname) and he was mistakenly identified as member of the English aristocracy (he was in fact a self-made merchant who made his money importing French brandy, leading to satirical remarks about this atheist’s more ‘spiritual’ interests). Despite Desmond’s years of effort, the sources remain scanty. Although Saull gave endless public lectures, only one survives, thanks to a couple of detailed newspaper accounts. And Desmond has devoted a whole appendix to proving that an anonymous letter to a radical paper was by Saull, partly because he has uncovered almost nothing else that Saull wrote. Putting such a minor character at the heart of the story is so challenging that at times it feels almost perverse, but it provides a novel perspective.
The book’s great strength is the impressive mass of evidence that allows Desmond to give a full account of the cultures of the anti-establishment radicalism – and its working-class audience – that shaped an evolutionary infidel science. However, that strength sometimes feels as if it could be a weakness when the sheer weight of facts threatens to bury the analysis. For example, Saull’s museum was free when almost no others were; he welcomed everyone, especially working men and women, and was usually on hand to show them round and deliver impromptu lectures. As Desmond notes (more than once) this contrast with better-known institutions exemplifies Saull’s political motivations and he reinforces the point with an exhaustive list of museums, giving details of the ways they kept working people out, from admission charges to the need for a letter of introduction or appropriate, ‘respectable’ clothing. This claim is scarcely controversial, so perhaps one well-chosen example would have sufficed to establish the contrast with Saull’s open-door policy. This is one of several times when the abundant detail (which has created a book over 650 pages long) threatens to overwhelm the main claims.
Later controversies over Genesis and geology are well-known, but Desmond argues persuasively that we cannot fully understand these debates without understanding the earlier world of outsider science created by working class radicals and socialists. Thanks to his decision to work with Open Book Publishers, this book will be readily accessible to researchers, who will find the free download particularly useful for such tasks as tracking down details of obscure radicals, their publications and the venues where they spoke. By providing a much fuller understanding of geology’s dangerous associations, Desmond enriches our understanding of later responses, such as John Ruskin’s well-known complaint about the sound of the geologists’ ‘dreadful hammers’, chipping away at the foundations of faith. For men like Saull, geology not only demonstrated the falsity of the Biblical chronology, but offered tangible evidence of continual progress, driven entirely by natural, material forces with no hint of divine intervention. Desmond has proved a vivid and probably definitive account of the challenge early nineteenth-century radical science presented to its establishment counterpart, one that will help scholars to more fully understand the varieties of faith and doubt in Victorian Britain.
Jim Endersby, University of Sussex
