In November 1864, a London dining group known as the X Club was created by nine men of science (the gendering of the phrase was important to them, while the word “scientist” they deemed vulgar). There was the surgeon George Busk, chemist Edward Frankland, mathematician Thomas Archer Hirst, botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, naturalist John Lubbock, philosopher Herbert Spencer, mathematician William Spottiswoode, and physicist John Tyndall. Until 1892, the X Club dined monthly between October and June and socialized with their families outside of these dinners, too. These interactions helped the men coordinate their actions on how science was run in Britain, especially in the metropolis. Such cooperation—in escalating scale—took the form of gossiping; nominating each other to membership in prestigious groups like the Royal Society; running lobbying campaigns; supporting each other in public disputes; plotting to run the aforementioned prestigious societies; or—in the X Club's highest ambitions—trying to change how ordinary people saw themselves in the universe. This last aim is called changing the public's “cosmic imaginary,” to use Ruth Barton's splendid phrase (31). It is this aspiration that moves Barton's The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science from being a “microhistory” (Barton's own word) to a full-scale study of science and its place in Victorian culture (7).

While many of the figures’ names, such as Huxley's, are credited nowadays with being on the side of science and intellectual progress in a battle against ignorance and superstition, Barton's framing of these nine men is “deliberately unheroic” (8). This is in part because of concerns about anachronism and in part because these nine men were not lone figures but assisted, particularly by women whose own important contributions were revealed only later. Another reason is that Barton objects to the notion that a few people are by themselves able to change the world without the ground being prepared beforehand by larger social and cultural changes (8). Finally, any claims to heroism are undermined by concerns, held even then, that the group verged on being a secret society. Barton is too careful a scholar to directly say this, though there are some hints as to her leanings: their public downplaying of any special influence they may have exerted “arose not from innocence but from guilt” (284), and by 1870, “their tentacles were everywhere” (447). Heroes rarely sport tentacles.

The X Club is Barton's long-awaited “big book”—a culmination of immense amounts of research and writing into the subject of these characters, of “living with these men for decades” (1). As always, her scholarship is superlatively precise, an example that always comes into my mind whenever I am tempted to backslide and cite a book without also giving the relevant page numbers. Yet at the same time Barton's research is also extraordinarily systematic and deep, showing the differences between each of the nine men. My favorite finding, for instance, is Barton's discovery that on becoming director of studies at the Royal Naval College at Greenwich in 1872, Hirst's salary was bumped from £1000 to £1200 by Robert Lowe—a move completely at odds with his reputation as a tight-fisted chancellor of the exchequer (352).

What about the big picture? We see Barton hitting the expected points—Darwinism and secularization; whether the greater organization of science constituted “professionalization”; the role of periodicals; the importance that some X Club members attached to being gentlemen. And, of course, she insists upon the highly social nature of science—then, as now, scientists and other people do not just work in groups, but also think in them. But Barton's book points us toward the most fertile scholarly territory of power and authority. While I expect we will define these terms more precisely in future scholarly conversations, power and authority matter for several reasons. First, analyzing power and authority can help us answer questions about historical causation. For while it is indeed necessary for social and cultural conditions to be ripe for a group to change the world, there still remains the question of why some groups of people managed to do this while other groups failed. Second, focusing on power and authority reframes our views about the relative importance of different X Club members. In this light, the most important member of the X Club was not the brilliant Huxley or the combative Tyndall, but rather (Sir) John Lubbock, who became a key political representative of science. Thus, it is hard not to wonder if Hirst's surprise raise in salary was related to Lubbock's position as a recently elected Liberal Member of Parliament (1870–1900). As an MP, Lubbock became a member of another important club —one with the capacity not to identify the laws of nature, but to change the laws made by people. Finally, focusing on power and authority can shift the focus of Victorian history of science toward larger societal questions. To illustrate, the most influential X Clubber, Huxley, championed Darwinism and changed how science was taught. By contrast—to take Lowe again—his creation of limited liability partnerships in 1856 helped make possible the modern corporation, an institution that shapes so many scientists’ lives today, often invisibly. I do not mean “larger societal questions” in a vulgar Marxist way, nor do I cynically claim that power simply dictates knowledge. Rather, a focus on power and authority will help scholars limn the possible forms that culture, and science, can take.