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John Lubbock

London, 1834 - 1913, Broadstairs, England

Biographyhttp://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n50038652
found: Darwin's apprentice : an archaeological biography of John Lubbock, 2013 : jacket (an important yet often forgotten Darwinist, Sir John Lubbock)
Lubbock, John, first Baron Avebury (1834–1913), banker, politician, and scientific writer, was born on 30 April 1834 at 29 Eaton Place, London, the eldest of eleven children of Sir John William Lubbock, third baronet (1803–1865), and his wife, Harriet Hotham (d. 1873). His father and grandfather were both partners in the London banking firm of Lubbock, Foster & Co. (called Robarts, Lubbock & Co. between 1860 and its merger with Coutts & Co. in 1914). Lubbock moved to High Elms, near Downe, in Kent, in 1840, when his father succeeded to the baronetcy. Sir John William Lubbock was a successful amateur mathematician and astronomer and a good friend of Charles Darwin, who moved to Downe in 1842 and acted as the younger Lubbock's informal tutor in natural history. Between 1845 and 1849 Lubbock attended Eton College, the last formal education he would receive. In 1849 his father assumed active duty at the family bank following the death of both his partners, and called on the younger Lubbock to assist as a clerk.

In 1856 John Lubbock married Ellen Frances (Nelly) Hordern, the daughter of a Lancashire Anglican minister, and they had three sons and three daughters. Until her death in 1879, the Lubbocks split their residence between London and High Elms, with the exception of 1861–5 when Chislehurst was their country home. In 1884 Lubbock married Alice A. L. L. Fox Pitt, daughter of the archaeologist, Augustus Pitt-Rivers, and with her he had three more sons and two more daughters. After he was named to the peerage in 1900, Lubbock and his family increasingly spent their time refurbishing Kingsgate Castle on the Kent coast.

Upon his father's death in 1865, Lubbock took over as head of the family bank, a position he continued to fill until his death. From the 1850s onwards he divided his time evenly between banking, politics, and scientific and popular writing. As a banker, Lubbock was instrumental in the formation in 1860 of a separate clearing facility for provincial banks, which prevented the need to post cheques to London. In 1863 he took over his father's long-held job as secretary of the London Bankers' Clearing House, breaking with tradition in 1867 by commencing annual publication of the average volume of business transacted by the clearing banks. Lubbock also served as the first president of the London Institute of Bankers upon its establishment in 1879, and was an important representative of the banking interest in the House of Commons, where he defended the gold standard and helped to revise various niceties in commercial law.

Lubbock's lifelong interest in natural history started with his early introduction into Darwin's ‘inner circle’ and membership of such groups as the Royal Institution, the Geological Society, the Royal Society (FRS 1858), and the X Club, and persisted through his enduring idea that natural selection provided a ‘true cause’ that could be applied to such disparate fields as archaeology and entomology. His first major scientific contribution was Pre-Historic Times as Illustrated by Ancient Remains (1865), in which he coined the distinction between palaeolithic and neolithic man, summed up existing evidence in favour of human antiquity, and made much of the similarity between prehistoric tools and those in use by ‘modern savages’. In The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man (1870), Lubbock provided a more explicitly evolutionary account connecting ‘savage’ with ‘civilised’ societies. All his anthropological work exuded a relentless optimism, emphasizing the potential for all cultures to progress through stages. His work on insects, which he pursued most actively in the 1870s, carried this evolutionary model back from the human to the animal world. He professed to observe hunting, pastoral, and agricultural societies in different species of ants, and was intrigued by the possibility that they exhibited rational behaviour. Most of his published research concerned the social behaviour of insects, based in part on an ants' nest he and his daughters kept under constant observation in his room between 1874 and 1882; but he also published an account of a three-month experiment in teaching his pet poodle how to read.

After 1880 Lubbock's banking and political duties increasingly took time away from his original scientific work. After failing in his attempts to win a seat in the Commons in 1865 and 1868, Lubbock successfully stood for Maidstone in 1870; upon losing that seat in 1880, he stood for the safe borough of London University (which he had served as vice-chancellor since 1872), and represented it for the next twenty years. He was a Liberal until 1886, when he broke with Gladstone over home rule, and he continued to support the Unionist case on Ireland, at times marshalling ethnological evidence on his side of the debate. He was also outspoken on labour issues, championing early-closing bills in the 1870s (which he saw mainly as a question of occupational health among clerks); he also drafted the Bank Holiday Bill of 1871, which, when it was passed, created the first secular holiday in British history, popularly called ‘St Lubbock's day’ in his honour. A self-professed ‘scientific’ MP, Lubbock pushed through a bill to preserve ancient monuments in 1873, and upon being named to the peerage in 1900 chose the title Avebury after an ancient druidical site which he had long fought to save from being ‘destroyed for the profit of a few pounds’ (Scientific Lectures, 2nd edn, 1890, 170). He was also an advocate of voting reform, founding, with his brother Beaumont and with Leonard Courtney, the Proportional Representation Society in 1884. On economic issues he remained a strong advocate of free trade, despite his break with the Liberals. He was a member of the royal commission on trade depression of 1885. In 1905 he opposed both Joseph Chamberlain's imperial preference scheme and Arthur Balfour's compromise plan for retaliatory duties.

Like many economic liberals, Lubbock assumed Britain could maintain its economic position by improving its system of education, especially in the sciences and modern languages. To that end he published a number of extremely popular didactic books late in his life, including The Pleasures of Life (1887), The Use of Life (1894), and The Beauties of Nature (1896). Lubbock also pursued his economic and social interests through local London politics. As president of the London chamber of commerce between 1888 and 1893, and chairman of the London county council from 1890 to 1892, he took a strong line against municipal socialism and in favour of technical education. A few years after being created Baron Avebury he retired from public life. He died from anaemia on 28 May 1913, at Kingsgate Castle, and was buried three days later in Farnborough churchyard, High Elms. He was survived by his wife.

Timothy L. Alborn
Sources

H. G. Hutchinson, Life of Sir John Lubbock, Lord Avebury, 2 vols. (1914) · G. W. Stocking, Victorian anthropology [1987] · Y. Cassis, City bankers, 1890–1914, trans. M. Rocque (1994) [Fr. orig., Banquiers de la City à l’époque édouardienne, 1890–1914 (1984)] · DNB
Archives

BL, corresp., diaries, and papers, Add. MSS 49638–49681; Add. Ch 76145–76147 · CKS, corresp. and business papers · Committee of the London Clearing Bankers, minute books · Electoral Reform Society of Great Britain and Ireland, papers · LUL, corresp. and papers relating to elections · RS, notebooks · U. Warwick Mod. RC, papers relating to shop hours :: BL, letters to W. E. Gladstone, Add. MSS 44434–44789 · BL, corresp. with Macmillans, Add. MSS 55213–55214 · BL OIOC, letters to Grant Duff family, MS Eur. F 234 · CUL, letters to Sir George Stokes · Elgin Library, Moray, letters to George Gordon · ICL, letters to Thomas Huxley · Oxf. U. Mus. NH, letters to Robert McLachlan · Oxf. U. Mus. NH, corresp., mainly letters to E. B. Poulton · Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, letters to A. H. L. F. Pitt-Rivers · Surrey HC, letters to Lord Farmer · U. Edin. L., corresp. with Sir Charles Lyell · UCL, corresp. with Sir Edwin Chadwick

Likenesses

G. Richmond, drawing, 1867, repro. in Hutchinson, Life, vol. 1 [frontispiece] · G. Richmond, chalk drawing, 1869, NPG · G. B. Black, lithograph, 1871, NPG · lithograph, 1871 (after G. B. Black), NPG · H. von Herkomer, painting, 1911, repro. in Hutchinson, Life, vol. 2 [frontispiece] · Barraud, photograph, NPG; repro. in Men and Women of the Day, 2 (1889) [see illus.] · M. Klinkicht, wood-engraving (after photograph), BM; repro. in ILN (1890), supplement · Maclure & Macdonald, lithograph, NPG · Pet, chromolithograph caricature, NPG; repro. in Monetary Gazette (10 Jan 1877) · Spy [L. Ward], chromolithograph caricature, NPG; repro. in VF (23 Feb 1878) · lithograph (after photograph by London Stereoscopic Co.), NPG · print (after H. T. Wells), NPG
Wealth at death

£315137 9s. 11d.: resworn probate, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
© Oxford University Press 2004–16
All rights reserved: see legal notice Oxford University Press

Timothy L. Alborn, ‘Lubbock, John, first Baron Avebury (1834–1913)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2012 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/34618, accessed 20 Oct 2017]

John Lubbock (1834–1913): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/34618

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Last Updated8/7/24

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