Researchers from all over the world come to the Library to work with our special collections and archives. Our series of guest blog posts by visitors to Gladstone’s Library highlight the fantastic resource our collections can be for researchers from a variety of disciplines, and we hope they inspire you to explore our collections in new ways. If you are considering a research project, please get in touch by emailing [email protected].
By Richard Fallon, Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow, University of Birmingham
My research project on 'borderline geoscience' in the late Victorian era led me to Gladstone’s Library. William Ewart Gladstone, not known for a conspicuous interest in geology, nonetheless starred in one of the period’s last prominent squabbles over the scientific accuracy of the Book of Genesis. What we now call Christian creationist beliefs were held by most British scientific researchers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By the time Gladstone set out to reconcile Genesis and geology in the 1880s, however, these beliefs survived mostly on the nebulous ‘borderlines’ of British science. I visited Gladstone’s Library at the end of October 2022 in search of new insights.
Gladstone’s main contribution to creationist thought appeared in a monthly periodical, the Nineteenth Century, which was known for high-level intellectual debates. Writing in late 1885, he argued that the Bible’s story of the six days of creation, when figuratively interpreted, displayed divine insight into life’s prehistory. His opponent, agnostic naturalist Thomas Henry Huxley, rejected the claim that the Bible revealed anything remotely scientific. Like most high-profile reconcilers of geology and Genesis at the time, Gladstone argued that the world had not been created in 24-hour days, but rather long geological ages. Nonetheless, he still believed there was no contradiction with the words of the Bible. His debate with Huxley is fairly well-known to scholars.[1] The Library’s rich archives, however, provide intimate detail into the sympathetic responses Gladstone’s beliefs received at a time when they were becoming deeply unfashionable.
Some Christians wrote to Gladstone to offer extra ammunition. Hardly had the ink dried on Gladstone’s first article before London schoolmaster Samuel Kinns sent the statesman a copy of his 1882 book Moses and Geology, presumably hoping to be cited in Gladstone’s next Nineteenth Century submission.[2] In the new year, Joseph W. Hayes, a psychic researcher from Enniscorthy in Ireland, praised the politician for ‘nobly maintaining the authenticity of the sacred writings’.[3] Hayes went on to cite a barrage of works by famous naturalists – from ageing creationists to Darwin himself – that backed up Genesis (intentionally or otherwise). He was especially concerned with explaining how light had illuminated the plants of the third ‘day’ of Genesis before the creation of the sun on the fourth.
Writing to Gladstone, Joseph W. Hayes appropriates statements made by leading savants like Darwin, using these as evidence against a Godless scientific naturalism
Both Hayes and Kinns tactfully alluded to the fact that Gladstone had not done his homework. In the Nineteenth Century, he had argued that the animals mentioned in the creation story in Genesis were all modern species. Sympathisers pointed out that this position ignored the most persuasive scholarship on Genesis’s divine inspiration. As clergyman-botanist George Henslow explained, the sea monsters created on the fifth day (sometimes translated as ‘great whales’) likely represented the ‘Reptilian life’ of the ‘Mesozoic age’.[4] Missing this point, Gladstone had underplayed evidence that the author of Genesis mentioned Jurassic reptiles like ichthyosaurs thousands of years before they had first been unearthed by Mary Anning, the fossil-hunter of Lyme Regis.
George Henslow explains to Gladstone that the fifth day of creation in Genesis may have been equivalent to the Mesozoic Era of geology
Other letters demonstrate the persistence of even more scientifically marginal interpretations. Alfred Heep of Devonport offered Gladstone ‘a view that has not hitherto been advanced in the present controversy’.[5] Heep quoted at length from Elpis Israel (1849), a work by John Thomas, founder of the millenarian Christadelphians (still going strong today). Thomas was a proponent of gap theory, which stated that everything in prehistory had happened between the first and second lines of Genesis. In other words, between when ‘God created the heaven and the earth’ and when the earth was ‘without form, and void’. An initial ‘pre-Adamite’ world, where unfallen angels had coexisted with mammoths, was subsequently mashed up and made ‘void’ by God, who recreated Earth into its more familiar form in six days. Heep confidently declared that gap theory could ‘refute Professor Huxley … and others who say that modern science contradicts the simple & majestic account given to us by God’.
Gladstone’s response to Heep’s colossal letter is unknown – and, while he likely attended conscientiously to most of these epistles, the independent-minded statesman did not adopt their arguments. Instead, he developed his own rather convoluted interpretation of the Genesis days as akin to thematic chapters in a textbook. While this may seem to water things down to near-pointlessness, for Gladstone it kept the Bible’s reputation as an inspired document intact. In the 1880s, liberal interpretations of the Bible were dominant in British intellectual culture, making Gladstone’s stance in the Nineteenth Century a rather beleaguered one. These letters and many others in the Library shed light on private support for the enduring idea that the Bible accurately describes the prehistory of the planet – albeit in a manner quite different from what a literalistic reading might imply.
[1] David Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 238–41; Adrian Desmond, Huxley: Evolution’s High Priest (London: Michael Joseph, 1997), 162–65.
[2] Samuel Kinns to W. E. Gladstone, 7 November 1885, GLA/GGA/2/7/2/49.
[3] Joseph W. Hayes to W. E. Gladstone, 16 January 1886, GLA/GGA/2/7/3/14/5.
[4] George Henslow to W. E. Gladstone, 16 January 1886, GLA/GGA/2/7/3/14/1/2.
[5] Alfred Heep to W. E. Gladstone, 26 January 1886, GLA/GGA/2/7/3/14/6.