In June 1860 the standard bearers of Victorian science and religion met in Oxford to do battle over the heretical tome that Charles Darwin had published at the end of the previous year, On the Origin of Species. In the midst of this incendiary dispute, which would hereafter become known simply as the “Oxford debate,” the intransigent and scientifically ill-informed Bishop of Oxford, “Soapy” Samuel Wilberforce, superciliously asked the leading proponent of the Darwinian cause on which side of his family he traced his ancestry from apes. Thomas Huxley, Darwin's sharp-witted and meritocratic “Bulldog” responded that he would rather be descended from a primitive species than from a man who would use religious sophistry to mask the truth, thereby crushing the haughty bishop and delivering a mighty blow for secular evolutionism against fusty creationism. “Or so the story goes” (6), according to Ian Hesketh's pithy and effective Of Apes and Ancestors, which endeavors to get beyond the partisan (or sometimes simply indolent) mythologizing of the events at Oxford 150 years ago. Hesketh sets out to examine—as far as is actually possible—what really happened there, as well as how the events have been represented in a variety of nineteenth-century and contemporary sources. Many of those who attended the famous debate, as Hesketh reveals, felt that Wilberforce had, in fact, triumphed over Huxley, while others considered that the event showed the mutual tolerance and broad-mindedness with which evolution and Christianity could be discussed. The assiduous mythologization, or “historical spin doctoring,” as Hesketh puts it (7), of the Oxford debate as a melodramatic clash between heroic science and malevolent religion is, to be fair, hardly news to academic historians of science, with J. Vernon Jensen and Frank A. J. L. James, among others, having already considered the evidence in detail. But the myth persists in both more popular accounts of the so-called Darwinian Revolution (including television programs and high-tech museum displays) and, most notably, in the simplified and blatantly partial versions of history promulgated in the writings of New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins. Hesketh's short and readable book, which synthesizes recent historical scholarship rather than explicitly proffering new insights, therefore aims to present a more nuanced and balanced alternative to the kind of triumphalist, Whig history that often prevailed at the Darwin anniversary events of 2009.

Hesketh takes a twofold approach in Of Apes and Ancestors: to provide biographical sketches of all the Oxford debate's main dramatis personae, including Darwin, Huxley, Wilberforce, Joseph Dalton Hooker, and Richard Owen (chaps. 1–4), and then to reconstruct “what actually happened” at Oxford as well as to assess the “cultural memory of the debate” (chaps. 5–6, quote at 106). There are already several excellent recent biographies of each of the scientific figures involved in the debate that Hesketh draws on extensively, and the decidedly sympathetic treatment of “Soapy” Sam Wilberforce provides the most interesting and innovative element of this section of the book. The habitual casting of the bishop of Oxford as the ignorant and hidebound fall guy of Huxley's lacerating wit becomes more problematic when the context of Wilberforce's opposition to Darwinism is taken into account, with his steadfast affirmation of faith reflecting the same evangelical principles that had earlier guided his abolitionist father William, who is now viewed, of course, as being unequivocally on the right side of history. The younger Wilberforce's defense of Anglican orthodoxy was also informed by the solace that he found in religion following his wife's death in the 1840s (the opposite pole of Darwin's loss of faith after the death of his daughter Annie, according to Hesketh). In any case, Wilberforce's main target at Oxford was not so much evolution as the wider rational Broad Church Movement that had recently published the incendiary Essays and Reviews (1860), while many of his criticisms of Darwin's Origin actually focused on valid scientific problems. In the second section of the book, the careful delineation of precisely how the myth of the Oxford debate as an indubitable triumph for Huxley and the Darwinian cause was first generated, principally in the reverential Lives & Letters authored by loyal family members in the 1890s and 1900s that are still sometimes taken for objective historical sources, will be of most value and interest to more specialist readers.

Although there are, as I have suggested, some elements of Hesketh's account of the Oxford debate that will be useful even to scholars well versed on nineteenth-century science and religion, Of Apes and Ancestors also aims to provide a generally comprehendible introduction to the subject for beginners, and I am not sure that it is entirely successful in mediating between the requirements of both types of reader. Sometimes, and especially when Hesketh attempts to emulate the kind of vivid prose style mastered by Huxley's biographer Adrian Desmond, he cannot avoid jargonized expressions like the oft-repeated “narrative arc” (10). The book seems to fall between two stools by being neither popular nor scholarly enough to satisfy either reader.