In a famous essay first published in 1955, the historian Noel Annan attempted to describe the complex set of kinship relationships that bound together the great thinkers and scientists of late Victorian England. These great families formed what Annan called an "intellectual aristocracy", who bequeathed to their descendants not money or titles, but rather "some trait of personality, some tradition of behaviour, which did not perish with the passing of the years". Pre-eminent among these high-minded, inter-marrying, multi-generational magnificos were the Macaulays, the Trevelyans, the Arnolds and perhaps most extraordinary of all, the Huxleys.
The founder of the Huxley dynasty was Thomas Henry Huxley, born in Ealing in 1825 to a middle-class family fallen on hard times. He benefited from only two years of formal education and later claimed to have been "kicked into the world a boy without guide or training". Huxley is indeed the very image of the autodidact – adventurous, bold, prone to bouts of depression, an omnivorous reader who taught himself Greek and Latin. He eventually became a professor and president of the Royal Society. Broad of nose, mutton-chop whiskered and a famous defender of Darwin's theory of evolution, he was known as "Darwin's Bulldog".
Huxley and his wife "Nettie" (Henrietta Anne Heathorn) had eight children and the shadow of the great man fell heavily upon them and their descendants. Juliette Huxley, wife of one of Huxley's grandchildren, said in an interview in 1985: "There is something really devastating about having a grandfather … who was a god in the family. These children grew up with that atmosphere ... 'You must be worthy of grand-pater'." It seems possible that Annan's grand theory of the intellectual aristocracy is not based on the transmission of traits or behaviours, but on simple human fear. We must be worthy of grand-pater.
The worthiest among Huxley's many children was undoubtedly Leonard, an editor and literary journalist, who married Julia Arnold, scion of that other family of Victorian intellectual aristocrats, the Arnolds. She was one of the first women to attend Somerville College, Oxford, and later set up her own school, Prior's Field. Leonard and Julia had four children, among whom was Aldous Huxley, who recalled being taken as a six-year-old to the grand ceremonial unveiling of a statue of his grandfather, Thomas. Overcome with awe and emotion, young Aldous threw up in his brother's top hat.
Aldous was perhaps closest among all the many Huxleys to his grandfather's pioneering intellectual spirit. Tall, half-blind, terrifyingly intelligent, and the author of dozens of works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and plays, his subject, according to Isaiah Berlin, was nothing less than "the condition of men in the 20th century". According to his biographer, Nicholas Murray, in Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual (2002), Aldous was a "like an 18th-century philosophe, a modern Voltaire", a "prophet".
Born in Surrey in 1894, Aldous later moved to California with his wife Maria and their son Matthew, where he dabbled in writing screenplays and wrote a bestseller, The Art of Seeing (1943), about his attempts to improve his eyesight. But he achieved perhaps his greatest notoriety with his experiments with mescaline and LSD, about which he wrote The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956). The rock band the Doors apparently took their name from his title.
In an interview late in life, Aldous Huxley remarked: "We are multiple amphibians living in many different – even in some senses incommensurable – universes at the same time, and ... our business in life is somehow to make the best of all the worlds we live in." It might have been the Huxley family motto.