Edward Aveling
Edward Bibbins Aveling was an English comparative anatomist and popular spokesman for Darwinian evolution, atheism, and socialism. He was also a journalist and editor, playwright and actor, short story writer and poet. Aveling was the author of scientific works and numerous literary and political pamphlets that were published by The Freethought Publishing Company; he is perhaps best known for his popular work The Student's Darwin ; he also translated the first volume of Karl Marx's Das Kapital and Friedrich Engels' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.
Aveling was elected vice-president of the National Secular Society in 1880–84, and was a member of the Democratic Federation and then a member of the executive council of the Social Democratic Federation, and was also a founding member of the Socialist League and the Independent Labour Party. During the imprisonment of George William Foote for blasphemy, he was interim editor for The Freethinker and Progress. A Monthly Magazine of Advanced Thought. With William Morris, he was the sub-editor of Commonweal. He was an organizer of the mass movement of the unskilled workers and the unemployed in the late 1880s unto the early 1890s, and a delegate to the International Socialist Workers' Congress of 1889. For fifteen years, he was the partner of Eleanor Marx, the youngest daughter of Karl Marx, and co-authored many works with her.
Biography
Early years and education
Aveling was born on 29 November 1849 in Stoke Newington, in north-east London, England. The fifth of eight children of Reverend Thomas William Baxter Aveling, a Congregationalist minister, and his wife, Mary Ann, daughter of Thomas Goodall, farmer and innkeeper, of Wisbech.In 1863, Aveling attended the West of England Dissenters' Proprietary School in Taunton. He was sent there together with his brother Frederick W. Aveling, who later became headmaster of the same school. There is a record of prizes awarded to him in an old school register from 1863 to 1866. In 1863, he won prizes for Greek, German, Arithmetic, and Grammar, and was also awarded a certificate in French; he is noted as being in Class 11. The following year, always in Class 1, the prizes were for Arithmetic and Algebra, together with certificates for French, Greek, Euclid, and German. In 1865, he won prizes for Mathematics, Latin, and Greek, and in 1866 for writing and mapping. In each of those years, he was one of the Golden Optimi. Of particular importance is Aveling's early study of German. The English dissenting colleges laid great emphasis on the study of German higher criticism, as it was seen to challenge and undermine Anglican orthodoxy.
University College London
As a medical student at University College London, he was a successful and diligent student, receiving a gold medal in chemistry, a first in practical physiology and histology, and a silver medal in botany. In 1867, he won a medical entrance exhibition of £25. He studied surgery under John Marshall and the English anatomist Christopher Heath, who was assistant surgeon and teacher of operative surgery at University College Hospital. Aveling trained in minor surgery and the use of medical instruments with Matthew Berkeley Hill, professor of clinical surgery and teacher of practical surgery; and with William Morse Graily Hewit, professor of midwifery at University College and obstetric physician to University College Hospital, he took midwifery and gynecology.Aveling studied medicine with John Russell Reynolds, who in 1867 had just succeeded Sir William Jenner in the chair of medicine; and clinical medicine under Sydney Ringer. In 1869, he transferred from the medical to the science faculty, winning a £40 exhibition to study botany and zoology in the subject of zoology. It has recently been claimed that it was under the direct influence of Ray Lankester, who also lectured at the associated teaching hospital across Gower Street, University College Hospital, that Aveling made this switch from the medical school to study zoology.
Aveling graduated with a Bachelor of Science Honours degree in Zoology in 1870. Thomas Henry Huxley was his examiner; Aveling gave the following account in his obituary of Huxley from 1896: "As I remember well, he came himself to collect the papers that we had written in the afternoon of one of the three examination days. Of the six or seven students who were in the exam, I happened to be the only one who had written for the full three hours that had been set for the exam. When Huxley took my work from me, he said to me very kindly: "I am pleased to see that three hours did not seem too long for you to answer only three questions. I wouldn't be surprised if you are the first on the list." At an early age, his secularist period, Aveling's respect for Huxley's literary style remained key: "The scientific precision, the power of generalization, met with in Professor Huxley's works, have not their value lessened by the exquisite style of that distinguished writer." It is not difficult to see the profound influence of Huxley's early conception of Science and Religion on the young Aveling, with Huxley proclaiming science and religion as "mortal enemies", as well as his passionate project for a "New Reformation", wanting to see "the foot of science on the necks of her enemies."
Cambridge
From 1870 to 1872, he worked as an assistant or demonstrator to the physiologist Michael Foster in Cambridge. Foster, one of his former teachers at UCL, was then an associate professor at Trinity College, Cambridge. At the same time, Foster was a professor of physiology at the Royal Institute. On the days that Foster held lectures in London, Aveling accompanied him and prepared at the laboratory all his apparatus and experiments. He wrote that on many days he was in contact with Huxley and the professor of physics John Tyndall:"Quite often I had to borrow apparatuses or reagents from both of them. Tyndall... was always more or less unfriendly and either patronizingly condescending, and sometimes downright crude. Huxley, on the other hand, showed himself always as the embodiment of kindness, courtesy and willingness."
College of Preceptors
Aveling was elected as a member of the College of Preceptors on 25 November 1871. It was one of the first professional organizations for teachers and it pioneered formal training by examination for teachers. Aveling read a paper "On the Teaching of Botany in Schools" at the monthly evening meeting of the College of Preceptors on 12 March 1879. George Henslow was in the chair. His lecture began with the images of working-class children escaping the pollution of the town situated amidst flowers, citing lines from Shelley's "To a Skylark": "faint with too much sweet". His peroration at the end was Darwinian, addressing the apparent perfection of Nature. With the acclaimed Christian Darwinist beside him in the chair, he does, however, refer to "gigantic blunders in the universe". Aveling had not yet publicly emerged as an atheist; that would be four months later. What is remarkable here is his emphasis upon the importance of teaching Charles Darwin in schools in 1879.First marriage
On 30 July 1872, Aveling married Isabel "Bell" Campbell Frank, the daughter of a Leadenhall poulterer. The marriage service was conducted by Edward's father at the Union Chapel, Islington. They separated after two years but did not divorce. According to Aveling, the cause of the split was her turning into a 'High Church woman' and their house increasingly crowded with "High Church proclivities and many clergymen" one, a reverend from St. Paul's in Walworth, a Latinist and a member of the Society of the Holy Cross, Isabel had a passionate affair with. Aveling told Charles Bradlaugh that she had admitted this to him and he had previously had the letters to prove this, although much later there were the typical spiteful rumours, spread by his brother Frederick, that he had only married her for her money.Lecturer on Comparative Anatomy at London Hospital
Aveling took out four separate column advertisements in Nature all grouped together. At this time he had four teaching positions, a Lecturer on Comparative Anatomy at London Hospital, a lecturer on Natural History at New College, London, and lecturer on Animal Physiology and Botany at Birkbeck Institute, also he taught Natural Science at the North London Collegiate School for Girls. Aveling obtained a London D.Sc. in 1876 and he was a lecturer on Comparative Anatomy at the London Hospital from 1875 to 1881. In 1876 he was made a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London. He had been recommended as a Fellow by the botanists George Henslow and Maxwell Tylden Masters, the zoologist James Murie, as well as the biologist St. George Jackson Mivart, who had written On the Genesis of Species. In 1878 Aveling was also made a Fellow of University College.Aveling's dismissal from his post was officially announced in the British Medical Journal on 26 November 1881: "The Board of the London Hospital have dismissed Dr. E. B. Aveling from the post of lecturer on comparative anatomy at the medical school of the hospital. Dr. Aveling made a statement of the progress the class had made during his conduct of it, concluding with the assertion that the real reason for his dismissal was his avowal of certain religious and political views of an unpopular nature." It was looked upon as a crass example of the political persecution of secularists, the National Secular Society and their journal The National Reformer that was being extended to their teaching of science at the Hall of Science as well. Charles Bradlaugh, the President of the National Secular Society stated clearly: "Dr. E. B. Aveling has been deprived of his lectureship on Comparative Anatomy at London Hospital because he has publicly identified himself with us." Aveling's election in 1880 to Vice-President of the NSS, points towards the most probable grounds for his dismissal, especially with such close proximity to Bradlaugh who was still endeavouring to take up his seat in Parliament as an elected Northampton MP since 1880.
In 1877, Aveling published his "Physiological Tables, for the use of students". The work consisted of detailed structured tables on food, digestion, absorption, circulation, respiration, secretion, nutrition, the nervous system, sense organs, motor organs, voice and skeleton, amongst others. The introduction was dated September at the London Hospital. Aveling suggested to teachers of Physiology that each of these tables "may serve as the foundation of one or more lectures", and that they provided "all the physiological facts, required by the Science and Art Department, South Kensington, and by the ordinary medical examining bodies".