Francis Galton FRS
Photograph
1899 (photographed)
1899 (photographed)
| Artist/Maker | |
| Place of origin |
Portrait of Francis Galton, F.R.S., from Portraits of many persons of note photographed by Frederick Hollyer, Vol. 1, platinum print.
Object details
| Categories | |
| Object type | |
| Titles |
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| Materials and techniques | Platinum print |
| Brief description | Portrait of Francis Galton, F.R.S., Portraits of many persons of note photographed by Frederick Hollyer, Vol. 1, platinum print, late 19th century |
| Physical description | Portrait of Francis Galton, F.R.S., from Portraits of many persons of note photographed by Frederick Hollyer, Vol. 1, platinum print. |
| Credit line | Given by Eleanor M. Hollyer |
| Subject depicted | |
| Bibliographic reference | Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) was a British polymath involved in diverse subjects including meteorology, psychometrics, criminology (inventing advancements in fingerprint technology) and statistics. He instigated an Anthropometric Laboratory at the London International Health Exhibition of 1885, which was considered so successful, a permanent laboratory was established at the South Kensington Museum (now split into the V&A & Science Museum). Around 9,000 visitors paid to participate in machine tests largely invented by Galton to measure and test the human body in a variety of ways. Inspired by the natural selection theories of his distant cousin, Charles Darwin, he began to focus his study on genetics and is now chiefly known as the founder of the eugenics movement. Coining the term in 1883, his racist and dominant class ideology was envisaged to give 'more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing' (Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development).
Government policies were inspired across the continents by his many papers on the subject, leading to forced sterilisation programmes of indigenous people and those with various disabilities, illnesses, LGBTIQ+ identities, and criminal histories. A white supremacist ideology hiding in plain sight behind notions of Malthusianism (population control) and Meliorism (that humans are able to produce better outcomes for society by interfering in natural processes), it played a central role in the barbaric imperialist thinking underpinning the European colonisation of Africa between the 1880s and the First World War. Galton died in 1911 when eugenics was at peak popularity, especially in the USA where it was underpinning many new immigration, sterilisation, and segregation laws. Hitler had been watching these developments closely as trials for the concentration camps of the Second World War and the Lebensborn clinics designed to produce more Aryan children. As the world slid further towards the horrors of Nazism in the 1930s, many scientists who had been enthusiastically promoting eugenics for decades now scrambled to distance themselves from it. Even so, sterilisation programmes and atrocities inspired by eugenics such as the Stolen Generations of indigenous peoples in Australia continued well into the late 20th century.
Galton left an endowment and his archives to University College London where there was also a lecture theatre named after him. On the 19 June 2020, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter (Black Liberation Movement) demonstrations, the university publicly announced it would 'dename' rooms named after Galton and his colleague and fellow eugenicist, Karl Pearson. |
| Collection | |
| Accession number | 7687-1938 |
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| Record created | February 25, 2003 |
| Record URL |
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