When I first saw the title of this book, Impossible Monsters, I thought it was about members of a certain state legislature whose prime purpose for existence appears to be gerrymandering. But no, it’s about another (mindless) animal who became extinct: the dinosaurs.
Author Michael Taylor applies his historical skills here to elucidating how adherents to the Christian religion fought tooth and nail (much like the dinosaurs actually fought) for much of the 19th century against the very existence of dinosaurs. And once there was too much physical evidence to deny, the preposterous belief that the Earth was born in 4004 BC was used to refute the multi-million-year-old antiquity of dinosaurs.
Of course, the book features the ‘big names’ in the evolution debate, such as Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, but many lesser-known figures were crucial in the battle. And a battle it was. George Holyoake (1817-1906; see lead photo) was “a radical thinker who struck a blow for intellectual independence.” In 1842, at a meeting of freethinkers in Cheltenham, Holyoake proclaimed that “religion has ever poisoned the fountain-springs of morality.” He compared the history of religion to “mental degradation and oppression.” For speaking the truth, he was arrested and charged because he said things “to the high displeasure of almighty god.” He was put in a filthy jail cell, with only rats for company. By the time he was released 6 months later, his daughter had died of malnutrition.
“Fears of prosecution for blasphemy and of persecution for infidelity,” writes Taylor, “were real and pervasive, and they were chief among the reasons why Charles Darwin had not yet committed to paper the ideas,” that would eventually overturn religious dogma.
I especially admire Holyoake because he never gave up. He returned to the lecture circuit in 1843, and became leader of the Anti-Persecution Union. In its circular, the Movement, he declared that all religion was “a broad, blazing, meridian fraud.” In 1852, Holyoake published a letter in the magazine (which had a circulation of up to 5,000) from the Chartist journalist Charles Nicholls. “If Rationalists have any mission,” Nicholls wrote, “it is to secularise the world, that they may moralise it. A strong moral impulse must be given to the secular army.”
That, Taylor writes in this book, started a fire that scorched its way through the century. “The secularists might yet have been few,” Taylor states, “but this was their call to arms. Where atheism once ran the risk of prosecution for blasphemy, secularism began to flourish.” Just that tweak from renaming atheism as secularism was the key. “For Britons who wished to conduct their lives without the suffocating supervision of religion, Holyoake and the secularists had given them a home and, perhaps more importantly, a vocabulary.” This is one of Taylor’s most important insights, in a book filled with insightful analysis. It paved the way for Darwin to feel confident enough to finally publish On the Origin of Species in 1859. By the 1860s, writes Taylor, “The book of Genesis lay in ruins, the dinosaurs had triumphed.”
However, the “greatest religious crisis of the age” was not specifically about Darwin. Indeed, Charles Longley (who later became the Archbishop of Canterbury, the top post in the Anglican Church), declared in 1862 that “no graver matter since the Reformation or in the next 200 or 300 years could be imagined.” What was he referring to?
Two priests were the cause of it. In 1860, the publisher John William Parker invited seven Anglican writers, six of them ministers, to “reconcile intellectual persons to Christianity” by showing how new modes of thinking were compatible with sincere Christian belief. What he got from Rowland Williams, Professor of Hebrew, and Henry Wilson, an Oxford theologian, did much more than rock the boat: they sank it.
The book the essays were published in, Essays and Reviews, quickly sold 22,000 copies, more than Darwin’s Origin would sell in 20 years!! Most who read the book regarded Williams and Wilson as heretics, but Darwin himself welcomed the contents of the Essays. The two Anglicans were formally charged with heresy by a Church court for denying inspiration of the scriptures; they were quickly found guilty. It was only after an appeal to the Privy Council that they were acquitted. But that did not end matters: the bishop Samuel Wilberforce got 11,000 signatures of churchmen on a petition, and in 1864 the Anglican synod condemned the Essays.
But it would be only another 6 years for a seismic shift to take place. By then Thomas Huxley had become “the mouthpiece of English science.” He was widely known as “Darwin’s bulldog.” Since Darwin himself was not very vocal in promoting his work, Huxley took up the cudgels and fought off every opponent. In 1870 he became president of the British Association, which Taylor calls “the parliament of science.” Huxley laid out a teaching laboratory, and in June 1871 the first students arrived. “It was the first significant movement in the creation of a biological profession.” Huxley’s new school is now Imperial College London, one of the world’s greatest universities. Taylor concludes that “If dinosaurs had once been regarded as impossible monsters, they were now – at least in Huxley’s considered opinion – the means of understanding life itself.”
The Victorian crisis of faith reached its peak in the 1860s. By 1868 even the government of the day saw the writing on the wall: it abolished the taxes that funded Anglican ministries.
There is much in this book of great importance, but I do want to draw attention to one issue: Taylor gets the details of the 1851 census forms wrong on page 142. He states “They asked the clergymen of Established churches to record on a black form the number of worshippers at morning, afternoon, and evening services,” and other details. “Nonconformist ministers, Catholic priests, and Quakers received a distinct red form which asked the same questions.”
In reality there were three forms. “The clergy of the Church of England received blue forms requesting a description of the church,” etc. Nonconformists received a “blue and red form,” while a third form “in plain black and white was intended for the Quakers.” It was similar to one sent to the other Nonconformists, “but had an additional question on floor area.” Taylor got the colours wrong, and he conflated the Quaker form with the one sent to other Nonconformists. My quotes come from Legg (1991). While these differences are not hugely relevant to the matter at hand, it does show a lack of attention to rigorous detail, which is important in such a book that has a 39-page bibliography and another 59 pages of notes. The book is strategically illustrated throughout, with an additional 8 pages of plates.
As a chronicle of a lost cause, this book is a salutary reminder to anyone in authority that the truth will win, no matter what. The flipside of the coin is that understanding nature, through science, can be held back for decades or centuries by the blind forces of ignorance, superstition, and self-righteousness. This is not just history. On Aug 6, 2025, the 2023 Nobel laureate in Medicine, Katalin Kariko, said that “science is no longer respected” in the United States. To escape the blind forces – to enable her to make further discoveries that will advance knowledge and civilization – she can no longer work here. She now does her research in Europe.
Reference
Legg, E. (1991). Buckinghamshire Returns of the Census of Religious Worship 1851. Buckinghamshire Record Society no. 27.
Impossible Monsters: Dinosaurs, Darwin, and the Battle between Science and Religion lists for $32.99. It is by Liveright Publishing (W. W. Norton).
Taylor was formerly a lecturer in Modern British History at Balliol College, Oxford.