Search citation statements
Paper Sections
Citation Types
Year Published
Publication Types
Relationship
Authors
Journals
In the 1830s, decades before Darwin published the Origin of Species, a museum of evolution flourished in London. Reign of the Beast pieces together the extraordinary story of this lost working-man's institution and its enigmatic owner, the wine merchant W. D. Saull. A financial backer of the anti-clerical Richard Carlile, the ‘Devil's Chaplain’ Robert Taylor, and socialist Robert Owen, Saull outraged polite society by putting humanity’s ape ancestry on display. He weaponized his museum fossils and empowered artisans with a knowledge of deep geological time that undermined the Creationist base of the Anglican state. His geology museum, called the biggest in Britain, housed over 20,000 fossils, including famous dinosaurs. Saull was indicted for blasphemy and reviled during his lifetime. After his death in 1855, his museum was demolished and he was expunged from the collective memory. Now multi-award-winning author Adrian Desmond undertakes a thorough reading of Home Office spy reports and subversive street prints to re-establish Saull's pivotal place at the intersection of the history of geology, atheism, socialism, and working-class radicalism.
In the 1830s, decades before Darwin published the Origin of Species, a museum of evolution flourished in London. Reign of the Beast pieces together the extraordinary story of this lost working-man's institution and its enigmatic owner, the wine merchant W. D. Saull. A financial backer of the anti-clerical Richard Carlile, the ‘Devil's Chaplain’ Robert Taylor, and socialist Robert Owen, Saull outraged polite society by putting humanity’s ape ancestry on display. He weaponized his museum fossils and empowered artisans with a knowledge of deep geological time that undermined the Creationist base of the Anglican state. His geology museum, called the biggest in Britain, housed over 20,000 fossils, including famous dinosaurs. Saull was indicted for blasphemy and reviled during his lifetime. After his death in 1855, his museum was demolished and he was expunged from the collective memory. Now multi-award-winning author Adrian Desmond undertakes a thorough reading of Home Office spy reports and subversive street prints to re-establish Saull's pivotal place at the intersection of the history of geology, atheism, socialism, and working-class radicalism.
A brief introduction to William Devonshire Saull and his legacy, comparing him with Darwin. Within this chapter, the concept and ideas behind the book are addressed and discussed.
William Devonshire Saull was a financial kingpin of the political underworld. His wine-trade profits were as essential to the deist-cum-atheist Richard Carlile’s anti-clerical movement in the 1820s as to Robert Owen’s socialism in the 1830s. And Saull’s museum of fossils—forgotten today—was designed to glorify an evolutionary world with its promise of earthly salvation for the downtrodden. This opening section explains why the new understandings of earth history were paramount in the blasphemy/socialist movements, as it sought to shrug off clerical and capitalist control. It details some of the new, untapped sources for dealing with the subject at street level: police spy reports, the newly-digitized London newspapers, and satirical magazines, which left a wide class of readers laughing at Saull’s belief in a monkey ancestry for mankind. The introduction also touches on Victorian sensitivities to explain why Saull, his bankrolling activities and criminal enormities (atheism, socialism, evolution), are so little known. It gives a preview of Saull’s political activities: in London’s first Labour Exchange, in rational schooling experiments, in his materialism as a seditious, anti-theological weapon, and in his help for the emerging working-class activists resisting tithes and clerical oppression. ‘Atheism’ was never a stationary concept, and we track its changes as activists developed new vectors of attack. Science’s multiplicity of meanings for the underclass is also explored. The theme of this section is Saull’s gigantic, free-to-all museum and why it has escaped attention, and how we have to refocus to see it in its true dissident context.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.