Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
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Daniel Pick
Such recognition of the malleability of forms ran together with controver-
sial geological arguments about the extreme age of the planet. You could
propose the latter without the former, but only with great difficulty the
former without the latter. As the building blocks of geology were erected,
so the discomfort increased of those scientifically intrigued Christians who
nonetheless took the Bible seriously as a historical record. The Earth was
simply too old, Lyell realised, to enable a literal reading of the Holy Book.
His frequently revised Principles of Geology (1830–3) was widely read. It ran
to twelve editions and offered a glimpse into astoundingly gradual sedi-
mentary changes, a vision which replaced eighteenth-century accounts of
suddenly induced and relatively recent natural catastrophes to explain the
complex make-up of the ground underfoot. But that gradualist account did
not lead Lyell to renounce Christianity. For the Bible itself could be read
less literally than had those seventeenth-century divines who had given the
precise figure for the world’s beginning as 4004 bc (Oldroyd 1980,p.40).
Lyell recognised the tr uly ancient history of the Earth; he was talking hun-
dreds or thousands of millions of years. But the age of the Earth was one
thing; the process of human ‘descent’ quite another (Lyell came to accept
evolution, but balked at Darwin’s attempt to treat human beings as just
another animal within the natural world).
The Origin, when finally published, retained a great deal of developmental
vocabulary, but Darwin pictured evolution not as a ladder or a line, but rather
as a branching tree-like form, bereft of a central trunk (Bowler 1989,p.12).
However carefully Darwin formulated his ideas or sought to differentiate
them from earlier, wilder studies, he knew the public was ready-primed to
find books about evolution at best controversial, at worst utterly disgusting.
The stormy fate of a previous work, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
(1844), had not escaped Darwin’s notice. Ve st ig es, the brainchild of the
Edinburgh publisher Robert Chambers, had appeared anonymously. It was
widely and fiercely derided and denounced. If this caused Darwin himself
much anguish, many others surreptitiously enjoyed the frisson of reading
Chambers’ notorious book. Ves ti ges became a voguish topic of conversation,
whispered about at genteel dinners and argued over amongst working-class
radicals in the 1840s. Vestig es drew attention from all social ranks, with its
mix of progressionist evolutionism and such scandalous gems as the claim
that man had descended, via the apes, from the primeval slime. It was a kind
of frog-prince yarn for adventurous grown-ups, and some saw Darwin’s as
merely a more sober sequel. Indeed, the clamour surrounding Chambers’
text has perhaps been too little considered, and that around Darwin’s Origin
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The politics of nature
viewed too much in isolation. The Origin itself became a false origin – cast
by later admirers as the founding work of Victorian evolutionary debate,
when in fact, as the historian of science James Secord has shown (2000), it
was by no means always perceived this way.
Thus many of the elements of the Darwinian dramas of the 1860swere
already powerfully evident in the scandal surrounding Ve st ig es, fifteen years
earlier. Darwin’s claims were more formidably researched, the tone more
measured, than Chambers’; yet in both cases, so it was claimed by critics,
the role of the Creator had been disturbingly sidelined or even monstrously
negated. There was to be no consensus about the best response to evolution-
ary theory within the Church of England. In 1864, at the Anglican Convo-
cation, evangelicals reaffirmed their faith in the harmony of God’s words and
works. Some set their face resolutely against Darwin (let alone Chambers);
other, liberal theological voices continued to demand fresh thought about
the terms of faith and to seek a dialogue about the implications of science
and evolution. Contributions broadly favourable to evolution were included
in the much-thumbed collection, Essays and Reviews, published in England
in 1860, a text soon criticised as polemical, unwise and perplexing.
2
Ye t
strikingly Frederick Temple, one of the authors, would become Archbishop
of Canterbury.
During the early nineteenth century, there had been intermittent
accounts of human remains found in geological deposits so ancient that they
contained evidence of now-extinct animals. Superficial deposits of gravel or
boulder-clay, known as ‘diluvium’, could be seen as the residue of Noah’s
flood, the last great geological catastrophe. Many preferred to go on insisting
that there could be no link between the geological and human time-scales;
that people must have appeared on the scene only beyond the last catas-
trophe. Claims for the very existence of ancient human traces were thus
countered by arguments that deliberate burial and the natural mixing-up of
deposits were equally likely to be responsible for any such surprises (Bowler
1989,p.78). Yet disturbing material that appeared to contradict the biblical
time-scale continued to be unearthed. The geologist William Buckland, for
instance, visited a cave near Swansea and found a human skeleton in deposits
containing bones of what appeared to be died-out forms of mammals. In
2 The book appeared shortly after The Origin and included a respectful discussion of Darwin (Temple
et al., 1861,p.139). Penned by Oxford professors, clergymen and the head of Rugby school, it sold
more than 20,000 copies in two years and remained controversial, a famous example of a much wider
tide of books that described the struggle to reconcile religious belief and practice with the findings
of science.
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Daniel Pick
1858, two reputable geologists, William Pengelly and Hugh Falconer, began
to excavate at Brixham cave near Torquay. They located stone tools and the
bones of extinct animals in close proximity and convinced themselves that
human toolmakers must have lived in the very remote past. More geologists
came to the cave, including Lyell, and were persuaded by the evidence. A
number of papers were published in 1859 and 1860 supporting the view
that the human race was of a much greater antiquity than had previously
been supposed. Parallel developments were occurring in France, with dis-
coveries by Jacques Boucher des Per thes in the gravel beds of the Somme
valley. Much of the new evidence was summed up in Lyell’s widely read
Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man of 1863.
3
Yet when it came to
The Origin, Lyell had profound misgivings. Nor was he encouraged when,
in voicing his doubts and warning that ‘the dignity of man is at stake’,
Darwin replied that he was sorry to say he had no ‘consolatory view’ to
offer.
4
Indeed, if anything, Darwin expressed to his friends his regret at
having hitherto offered too much by way of theological reassurance, having
excessively ‘truckled’ to public opinion (F. Darwin 1887, iii,p.18).
The problem for Darwin, however, was not simply vicissitudes of public
opinion; his often contradictory declarations about the compatibility of
evolution and belief in God’s design appeared to reflect a heartfelt personal
conflict. He had once been greatly drawn towards the notion of divine
organisation of the world and thus the language of natural theology. Later,
however, he confessed that he had come, increasingly, to doubt this view.
He declared that ‘I had no intention to write atheistically’, but owned up
that ‘I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence
of design and beneficence on all sides of us.’ Or again: ‘There seems to me
too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent
and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae
[parasitic wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living
bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.’ Not believing in
3 Lyell 1863,pp.98ff. Lyell’s parting remark was as follows: ‘I may conclude this chapter by quoting
a saying of Professor Agassiz, “that whenever a new and startling fact is brought to light in science,
people first say, ‘it is not true,’ then that ‘it is contrary to religion,’ and lastly, ‘that everybody knew
it before”’ (Lyell 1863,p.105).
4 Desmond and Moore 1991,p.475. Cf. Darwin’s remark to Hooker (15 May 1860): ‘As for the old
fogies in Cambridge, it really signifies nothing. I look at their attacks as a proof that our work is
worth the doing. It makes me resolve to buckle on my armour’ (F. Darwin 1887, ii,pp.307–8). For
Lyell’s admiration of Darwin’s ‘close reasoning’ as well as his objections and Darwin’s response to the
criticism, see F. Darwin 1887, ii,pp.205–15. Darwin insisted that the theory of natural selection
‘implies no necessary tendency to progression’ (p. 210).
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The politics of nature
this, he added that he could also ‘see no necessity in the belief that the eye
was expressly designed’. On the other hand, he immediately went on to say
that he could not be contented with the view that ‘this wonderful universe’
and ‘especially the nature of man’ are ‘the result of brute force’. At which
point he reached once again for a compromise: ‘I am inclined to look at
everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good
or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.’
5
Perhaps Darwin sought to resolve this conflict in his final autobiographical
statements, where he went the whole hog and declared his total loss of f aith.
Fanciful claims that he had a death-bed conversion to the church sought to
push the image the other way (Desmond and Moore 1991). In any event,
his status as national treasure was confirmed (after various machinations and
negotiations) by his burial in Westminster Abbey. Darwin’s statements often
brimmed with ambiguities. Thus a multitude of commentators (atheist,
agnostic or religiously devout, and ranging from the radical left to the right
of politics) seized upon them and claimed some allegiance, or rather sought
Darwin’s allegiance to their own pet schemes. Arguments for atheism,
laissez-faire economics and socially minded co-operation, for brute struggle
and egotism, natural altruism or a mix of the two, all found some support in
his remarks. Darwin’s conclusions were often fluid, and his attitude vexed, as
we can see, regarding the role of chance in the process of evolution.
6
Reeling
from his own challenge to guaranteed and continuing improvement, to say
nothing of the bleak prospect of the eventual heat death of the sun (cour tesy
of the second law of thermodynamics), Darwin confessed his perplexity and
distress:
Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than
he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed
to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress. To those who fully
admit the immortality of the human soul, the destruction of our world will not appear
so dreadful. (F. Darwin 1958,p.65)
7
Many of Darwin’s interpreters left nothing to chance, restoring the idea
that evolution did mean – indeed must mean – continuing progress and
improvement (Bowler 1989,pp.151–2). The specific theory of natural
5 Letter to Asa Gray (22 May 1860), in F. Darwin 1887, ii,pp.311–12. Darwin gloomily concluded
‘Let each man hope and believe what he can’, (p. 312).
6 Darwin and Seward 1903, i,p.321. cf. Ospovat 1980,p.194n. For a study of the variety of ideas of
chance in the evolutionary tradition, see Shanahan 1991.
7 Spencer reacted with similar personal disquiet when told of the thermodynamic theory by the
physicist Tyndall (Spencer 1908,p.104).
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Daniel Pick
selection was frequently ignored by his readers, at least until much later;
perhaps the theory was not fully given its due until the 1920sand1930s,
when population biologists and laboratory geneticists ‘rediscovered’ the
book’s most crucial argument (Secord 2000,p.516). By extension from
the notion of the natural improvement of nature, through evolution, it
was argued that social and political progress were inevitable. Spencer, for
one, had already vigorously insisted that this might be a ‘natural law’.
8
There were always those, including at points Darwin himself, who could
translate the story of our chancy existence into an assured moral as well
as technological advance, as was proposed, for instance, in John Lubbock’s
study, Prehistoric Times (1865). This was a paean to our development from
rude beginnings, our ascent from apes and savages. At the 1867 meeting of
the British Association, Lubbock confronted Archbishop Richard Whately
of Dublin on the subject of evolution and progress, using archaeological
evidence to dispose of any belief that the earliest human beings were directly
given civilisation by God.
Such views were countered by Whately and his supporters such as the
Duke of Argyll, Secretary of State for India. An amateur naturalist and author
of Primeval Man (1869), the duke argued that the archaeological record
could only prove technological not moral progress. He could not accept
the proposition that man had risen unaided from a ‘low condition’ of ‘utter
barbarism’. Instead he contended that mankind had sunk from some higher
state. Man’s place in nature, he declared, was the great ‘battle-ground’,
for ‘No man can run up the natural lines of Evolution without coming
to Christianity at the top’ (Argyll 1869,p.439). Others were insistent that
history witnessed both moral and physical advance. But here again evolution
was finessed into the more palatable terms of a tough but rewarding struggle
to the top, be it for individuals alone, or groups working together, images
that were congruent with Victorian homilies about our just rewards, the
moral virtues of physical exertion and personal sacrifice, for instance in
team sports or Alpine conquests. In Henry Drummond’s uplifting tome,
The Ascent of Man (1894), faith and science once again shared the summit,
and the darker clouds of Darwinism were spirited away.
The good news that the religiously faithful and the socially concerned
might legitimately become Darwinians had been spread by ‘muscular Chris-
tians’ such as the novelist and social commentator Charles Kingsley since
8 Spencer’s evolutionary arguments, even after the publication of The Origin, cannot be simply run
together with Darwin’s; see Crook 1994,pp.41–7; Peel 1971.
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The politics of nature
the 1860s. He had welcomed evolution precisely because he felt it enabled
us to abandon the idea of an excessively meddling God. But this was clearly
not, for him, in order to choose atheism. As he wrote to the Reverend F.
D. Maurice in 1863:
I am very busy working out points of Natural Theology, by the strange light of Huxley,
Darwin and Lyell. I think I shall come to something worth having before I have
done...Darwin is conquering everywhere, and rushing in like a flood, by the mere
fact of truth and fact. The one or two who hold out are forced to try all sorts of
subterfuges as to fact, or else by evoking the odium theologicum . . . But they find that
now they have got rid of an interfering God – a master magician, as I call it – they have to
choose between the absolute empire of accident, and a living, immanent, ever-working
God. (Kingsley 1877, ii,p.171).
9
While the Genesis story was increasingly understood to be (at best) a
metaphorical rendition of events, evolutionary theory provided a new lan-
guage of history in which the problem of final origins could be suspended.
All individuals and civilisations were subject to evolution and lay at dif-
ferent points on its trajectory, but science could not be sure how it all
began – maybe a divine designer set it in motion, maybe not. But other
high-minded, scientifically literate Christians expressed far more personal
dismay than did Kingsley at the direction in which Darwin was taking them.
The Catholic scientific writer and admirer of Darwin, St George Jackson
Mivart (1827–1900), for instance, found himself on the horns of a terrible
dilemma. Although Darwin did not openly denounce Christian faith in
his magnum opus, Mivart did not know how to save him from the charge
of materialist subversion. The author’s insistence that there was ‘grandeur’
to the view of life he presented would not do, at least not for this par-
ticularly excruciated onlooker. Mivart found too little glory and nobility
in his account of nature, concluding that Darwinian evolutionary theory
reflected (or perhaps even added to) the moral perniciousness of the times.
Darwin apparently lent himself easily to prevailing beliefs in the collective
advantages of self-interest, even to the endorsement of capitalism, utilitari-
anism and laissez-faire. Karl Marx, also an admirer of Darwin, made similarly
caustic interpretations about the ideological dimension of this evolutionism,
although he reached very different conclusions to Mivart’s.
10
9 There are various admiring letters from Kingsley to Darwin in the same volume.
10 Soon after the publication of The Origin, Marx commented on its importance even as he wryly drew
attention to its questionable ideological assumptions. He considered it remarkable how the naturalist
recognised among beasts and plants an English society marked by division of labour, competition,
the aggressive opening-up of new markets and the Malthusian ‘struggle for existence’. Marx and
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Daniel Pick
In the Munich Brief of 1863, the Pope had declared that while Catholics
might cultivate sciences, explain them, and render them useful and certain,
on the other hand they could not do so if this conflicted in any way with ‘the
infallible intellect of God as revealed in Christianity’ (Gruber 1960,p.46).
Mivart did his best to find a middle way, but his difficulties continued. Pope
Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors soon appeared, a warning shot across the bows
of those who might attribute more weight to new scientific ideas than to
the secure teachings of the church. By the late 1860s, Mivart was in the
midst of a major crisis, not keen to break with members of the Darwinian
circle (whose society he valued), but very unwilling to make the kind of
Faustian pact that Darwin seemed to invite, indeed privately to have been
rather excited about, when he had daringly allowed himself to muse: ‘What
a book a Devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering
low and horridly cruel works of nature!’
11
If Mivart was nonplussed by the atheistical flirtation of the old master, he
was positively horrified by the positions of some of his supporter s. He could
not shake off the idea that there was something horribly sordid here, a kind
of pornography of nature. Wandering about Italy, he had been ‘amazed and
saddened’ to see a work by Darwin’s vociferous lieutenant, T. H. Huxley, on
sale at ‘most of the railway stations amongst a crowd of obscenities’ (quoted in
Desmond and Moore 1991,p.569). Huxley’s explicit attacks on the Roman
Church as ‘our great antagonist’ made him shudder; but even this was mild
stuff when placed alongside the blistering anti-religious writings of some of
Darwin’s continental admirers, like the German Carl Vogt, exiled after 1848
to Geneva, whose provocative Lectures on Man (1863) were unmistakably
contemptuous of Christian sentiments.
12
Truth and reason belonged to
science, Vogt taunted. Religious cowardice made clerics obfuscate. They
were unwilling to stare our simian history boldly in the face, he contended,
much as Huxley had witheringly dealt with Wilberforce’s enquiry about
whether the monkey pedigree was to be found on the paternal or maternal
side of the family.
13
Engels 1936,pp.125, 198, 201, 237. For Engels’ musings on evolution, adaptation, regression and
so forth, see Engels 1940a, for instance at p. 236 and Salvadori 1979,atp.24.
11 Letter to J. D. Hooker (13 July 1856), Darwin 1990, vi,p.178.
12 The English edition of Vogt’s work, the full title of which was Lectures on Man: His Place in Creation,
and in the History of the Earth, was edited by James Hunt. Vogt’s text was printed for Hunt’s recently
established Anthropological Society.
13 This occurred during Huxley’s set-piece debate with Bishop Wilberforce at the British Association
in Oxford in 1860, an event often caricatured at the time as a straightforward choice between the
voice of reason and dogma (Di Gregorio 1984;Lucas1979; Richards 1989). In fact Wilberforce
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The politics of nature
When Mivart’s book, The Genesis of Species appeared in 1871,abreach
with Darwin became unavoidable. The latter told his erstwhile admirer
that The Genesis was a travesty. Further discussion between them was to
be abruptly curtailed.
14
But the urgency of the task of critique, as Mivart
understood it, could not be doubted any more than could Matthew Arnold’s
horror shortly before, in contemplating political agitation in the 1860sand
the wider moral vacuum of the age. Arnold railed against the barrenness
of laissez-faire, the thin gruel of utilitarian philosophy, the urgent need for
the sweetness of light and culture to bind and heal, to create moral uplift
in an age where orthodox religion was not to be relied upon. Mivart also
dreaded that England might be approaching a religious decay similar to that
of the middle of the eighteenth century in France for which Frenchmen
were paying in ‘blood and tears’.
A number of Darwin’s critics would seize on similar points. They wanted
to understand the history of the world as an unfolding design (a concept
Darwin himself had, as we have seen, reluctantly, and perhaps never quite
wholeheartedly, given up). They spoke up for the intended beauty and
spiritual significance of plumage and nature’s rich colours – all these bril-
liant God-given patterns. Beauty could not be explained away through
the merely useful or the random. Why one tint for the feather rather than
another? Was there always merely some ‘use’ at stake – camouflage or sexual
signpost? Darwin replied that while the initial variations had arisen by the
way, selection always followed. But surely there was some ir reducible realm
of loveliness, caused and designed by our maker, argued critics such as the
Duke of Argyll or Mivart, that was not simply to be understood in the lan-
guage of evolutionary advantage. Arguments about art and aesthetics were
distinct, but in this respect strikingly similar to such critiques of Darwinism.
Beauty, anti-Darwinian naturalists as well as aesthetes in the circle of Pater
and Wilde would have agreed, was never simply to be understood in terms
of social utility or some other pay-off.
15
had been carefully primed for the debate by scientific opponents of Darwin, including Richard
Owen. Other examples of militant evolutionists thumbing their nose at the church include the
aforementioned anti-clerical Haeckel. His ridicule of the Christian God as a ‘gaseous vertebrate’
was just the kind of thing to rile the faithful. Haeckel denounced the pernicious effects of religion
and supported Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church. The papacy was dismissed as a
swindle, its despotism founded on an unscrupulous and labyrinthine system of lying and deceit.
14 In a letter to Hooker, Darwin complained that Mivart had cut him ‘into mincemeat’. Mivart
continued to express regret that their ‘philosophical’ quarrel had become so wide; see Darwin 1985,
p. 332,item7710 and p. 354,item8145.
15 On Darwin’s version of utilitarianism, see Richards 1982,p.57.
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Daniel Pick
The representation of the nineteenth century as an epoch dominated by
narrow-minded utilitarian beliefs was culturally powerful; it can be traced
through the work of Carlyle, Dickens, Ruskin and many others. There
are famous, much-quoted passages from such writers, in which the beauty
of a flower or the value of a person is seen to be brutally denied by a
cold, utilitarian analyst. The value of nature, art or humanity could not
simply be explained through decomposing the whole into its constituent
parts and processes, they complained. The sense of spiritual inadequacy
and psychological impoverishment, even of personal crisis, this philoso-
phy might lead to was, of course, eloquently and movingly set out by
John Stuart Mill in his Autobiography. Whether anyone actually went so
far as to claim that a flower had no meaning beyond the strict analy-
sis of its properties (as Ruskin implied that his contemporaries did) mat-
ters less than the fact that in their scathing accounts, such critics seemed
to have identified a kind of bankruptcy in the prevailing views of the
age.
Darwin has been seen by various commentators as a kind of naturalist
utilitarian. Much earlier, the idea that nature could best be viewed as a cor-
nucopia of useful traits had been explored in the work of that highly influen-
tial natural theologian, the Reverend William Paley. His Natural Theology: or,
Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances
of Nature (1802) had been much appreciated by the young Darwin. Paley’s
account nicely restated a number of familiar eighteenth-century arguments:
crucially, he accepted that the day-to-day operation of nature was devoid of
magic. Life proceeded without any chronic divine meddling. But these laws
and processes were themselves intended, set in play by God. It was indeed a
miracle that so many useful natural materials should be provided, and that
the system should all work together like clockwork, but once it did, no more
help was required. Crucially, however long the chain of natural causes and
effects, behind it all was a designer who had the ultimate utility of the scheme
in mind, and had set the whole sequence in motion. To imagine no such
creator or ‘artificer’ was to enter into the ‘absurdity’ of atheism, the ‘irra-
tionality of irreligion’, in the historian John Hedley Brooke’s phrase (1991,
p. 151).
Some commentators see Darwin’s renunciation of natural theology
as a reflection of social conditions themselves: the brutal evidence of
industrial and urban change in England in the nineteenth century
placed Paley’s vision of ‘contented‘ nature and design under intolerable
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The politics of nature
strain.
16
There is something in this, but it would, nonetheless, be mislead-
ing to imagine that either Paley or Darwin simply encapsulated the cultural
‘mood’ of their time. Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus penned verses which
undid the ‘benign’ view of nature long before Charles joined the fray:
‘One great Slaughter-house the warring world!’ (E. Darwin 1804,p.107).
The vision of violent nature, its continuing ‘vegetable war’ (p. 106), was
not erased by Erasmus Darwin’s simultaneous admiration for the temple of
nature (p. 113). Conversely, Paley’s own rather reassuring story continued
to be influential (his work indeed reprinted and recycled) well after The
Origin of Species appeared.
Any broad-brush characterisation of shifting ‘moods’ on nature across
the century is likely to distort, erroneously unifying the beliefs of what
were ideologically and spiritually disparate times. The world may well have
been, in Desmond and Moore’s phrase, ‘turned upside down in fifty years’
(1991,pp.449–50), but there were numerous ways to construe such ma-
terial changes. Contemporaneous with Paley’s work, and perhaps even more
significant to Darwin, was Thomas Malthus’ EssayonthePrincipleofPopula-
tion (1798) which was often identified with political and moral pessimism, a
rebuttal of the upbeat words about ‘human nature’ and ‘progress’ which the
author had detected, inter alia, in the writings of Godwin. But in Malthus’
case, no less than in Darwin’s, there is a risk of producing mere caricature;
we are well advised to avoid instant descriptions of his law of population as
‘bleak’, ‘dark’ or ‘stern’ (Winch 1987;LaVergata1990).
Malthus’ work challenged the eighteenth-century commonplace that
population increase necessarily reflected and stimulated progress and pros-
perity. His work led to countless debates about the precise relationship
between the expansion of numbers and the future adequacy of resources.
Some later commentators continued to combine the population warnings
of Malthus with the benign constructions of Paley, thus to provide ‘natu-
ral theological’ rationales for the reproductive mayhem and indeed for the
burgeoning increase in population evident during the nineteenth century.
17
16 Desmond and Moore’s Darwin reads as follows: ‘The world had been turned upside down in fifty
years. Seen through Paley’s rose-tinted spectacles, it was a continual summer’s afternoon, with the
rectory garden buzzing with contented life. But no longer. An expanding industrial society meant
that more and more people were herded, hungry and angry, into factory towns. Those on the sharp
end began hammering away at Paley’s image for ages’ (1991,pp.449–50).
17 Extravagant exercises in providential ‘number-crunching’ claimed, for instance, that the system of
nature was divinely arranged to ensure that every woman could find a husband without recourse to
the ‘unnatural’ practice of polygamy. Mathematicians busied themselves in formulating the ideal
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