Bloomsbury £16.99 pp298
It must have been magic to be a moneyed Victorian polymath. The unexplored horizons were so extensive that even if, like Francis Galton, you were plagued by the kind of unspecified “weak constitution” that needed extensive rest cures in nice European resorts, you could still embark on a medical career, try mathematics, become a celebrated African explorer, one of the first eminent scientific geographers and a Fellow of the Royal Society before moving into meteorology, identifying the anticyclone, helping create what became the Met Office and devising many of the symbols still used on weather maps. At this point, your cousin Charles (Darwin) could write about evolution and your career could really get going as you became the founding father of eugenics and helped create two of the fundamental tools of the new discipline of statistics. Along the way, you could distract yourself with experiments in brewing the perfect cup of tea, advise the army on survival techniques and play a significant role in the adoption of forensic fingerprinting.
On one level, therefore, Galton’s life makes a rattling yarn, and Martin Brookes tells it well. The story benefits hugely from its subject’s lively autobiography and correspondence. In middle age, Galton looked back at his precocious, poetry-spouting childhood and feared he had been an “intolerable prig”. As a medical student, he wrote home: “Cut a brace of fingers off yesterday and one the day before. Happy to operate on any one at home — I am flourishing — wish I could say the same of my Patients.”
While this material is a gift, Brookes, who provides no footnotes or sources, sometimes seems to take Galton’s colourful accounts of his adventures too literally. A series of escapades in a rickety boat on the Danube feels hyberbolised for the entertainment of family and posterity, but Brookes relays it as gospel, and the same goes for some of Galton’s African exploits.
But Galton’s life was not just a Boy’s Own story. His enduring fame, or infamy, rests on eugenics, which means, crudely, the selective breeding of humans. For Galton, as for so many others, the idea of natural selection was an epiphany. He decided man had moved beyond mere nature: civilisation was complex and difficult, and a superior type of man was needed to cope with it, which meant that man must take control over his own evolution.
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Galton’s initial conviction, that almost everything was hereditary, mellowed over years of surveys, during which he pioneered various important psychological and statistical techniques, into an older and wiser willingness to accept that nurture had a place as well. He did not relinquish eugenics, far from it given that the Boer war gave him such dramatic evidence of “degeneration” (more than 70% of Manchester volunteers were deemed physically unfit to fight, for instance), but he could back down when the evidence was against him.
Many of Galton’s ideas were, of course, based on prejudices he brought to his science. Brookes makes a decent fist of saying this, but he never gets to grips with the relationship between Galton and his intellectual milieu. He grudgingly admits that Galton’s belief in a racial, sexual and class hierarchy was commonplace, but says that the frequency of Galton’s racist pronouncements displayed a hint of mania. He does not wonder if, since his subject was writing about Africa at the time, he naturally wrote more about race. He also does not explore the possibility that Galton became the poster boy for Victorian ideas of human difference simply because he was the most prominent person trying to square those ideas with the new, exciting but little-understood science of evolution.
Some of Galton’s contemporaries thought eugenics was impractical or distasteful, but Brookes concentrates on prescient-seeming criticisms in such a way that it feels peculiar that Galton was knighted and awarded every medal the Royal Society could offer. A century of hindsight makes almost any science look simplistic. It is ingenuous, up to a point, to ask why we laugh at the theories expounded by early physicists, while we are horrified by those of early biologists — after all, men such as Galton advocated that the poor should not be allowed to breed. On the other hand, few people stand outside the orthodox beliefs of their times. Brookes ducks the obvious question: was Galton, whose ideas we find abhorrent, a bad scientist? By giving no clear sense of how conventional Galton was, in his fears of degeneration for instance, Brookes misses half the story.
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