155. Salisbury and Science: a time of breakthroughs

Salisbury was back for his third term in office, but for now without a majority in the House of Commons. He had to form a government, and for the first time it would include Liberal Unionists as ministers. One of them, Joseph Chamberlain, surprised Salisbury by choosing to be named Secretary of State for the Colonies in preference to either of the great posts he’d been offered. It seemed that imperialism mattered more to him.

With a government in place, Salisbury took the country to a general election. He won with a landslide.

In this episode, however, we take a break from all that to look at some of the great breakthroughs, other than his electoral triumph, taking place at that time, specifically in the sciences. Physics was surging. So were the life sciences. So indeed was medicine, but we’ll come back to that next week, when we look at women in that male-dominated field.

In particular, one man proposed a disturbingly new scientific viewpoint. That was Charles Darwin, with his highly contentious theory of evolution. One of his admirers, it turned out, was none other than the Prime Minister himself. And, even more surprisingly, when Salisbury did differ from Darwin, his argument was well-founded in science. Not something one would expect from most British Prime Ministers.

Illustration: Charles Darwin, pen and ink portrait by Harry Furniis, National Portrait Gallery 6251(16)

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.