Keith A. Francis’s scientific contributions

Soapy Sam and the Devil’s Chaplain: even for an age in which public figures were regularly lampooned, the epithets are evocative. To call the recipients of the epithets, Samuel Wilberforce and Charles Darwin respectively, controversial figures of the nineteenth century is the intellectual equivalent of noting that the sky is blue. Without seemingly trying, both men were involved in controversy. Whether it was the Church of England’s response to Essays and Reviews or the creation of a government policy with regard to vivisection, for various reasons both men were regularly in the national spotlight in the mid-Victorian period.