ABSTRACT
Darwins, the Trevelyans, the Stephens. Aldous Huxley was the product of two
particularly brilliant families, the Huxleys and the Arnolds. His paternal grandfather was Thomas Huxley, the great zoologist and populariser of
Darwin. Aldous's elder brother Julian followed in Thomas Huxley's path, and
became an eminent zoologist himself, a man of letters, and the first Director-General of UNESCO. Their mother Julia was an Arnold: a granddaughter of the illustrious Dr Arnold of Rugby, and a niece of Matthew Arnold. Her father, Thomas Arnold junior, was an engaging figure, a gifted
scholar in classical and English literature, though always overshadowed by his
more celebrated and stylish elder brother Matthew. Thomas junior followed a
complex religious path, moving back and forth between Anglicanism and
Catholicism; he was a friend of Newman and ended his life, back in the Catholic Church, as Professor of English at University College, Dublin, where
he was a friend and colleague of the Professor of Greek, Fr Gerard Hopkins,
SJ. The most distinguished of Thomas junior's several children was certainly the
eldest, Mary Augusta, who was born in 1851. She was an intellectually
emancipated woman, who early in her life became an authority on Spanish literature, and was acquainted with many thinkers and writers of the later
Victorian period. In 1888 she achieved fame with her novel Robert Elsmere, which deals with the characteristically Victorian dilemma of a serious-minded
clergyman who loses his faith in Christianity whilst retaining a strongly
religious temperament. She wrote under her husband's name, as Mrs Humphry
Ward, and it is as such that she is known to posterity, though it is only as an
appendage to his wife's reputation that the dim, amiable figure of Humphry Ward, originally an Oxford don and later art critic for The Times, is remembered today. That mode of description now seems both clumsy and
ideologically suspect, and I shall refer to her henceforth as Mary Ward. A few
years ago John Sutherland published an excellent biography, Mrs. Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian, and I am much indebted to it in this paper.
