Victorian Sensation by James A. Secord, University of Chicago Press,
拢22.50/$35, ISBN 0226744108
IN 1844 a bombshell hit Britain. It was Vestiges of the Natural History
of Creation, a book proclaiming that all of nature could be explained as
the product of 鈥渄evelopment鈥�. The Universe began, it said, as a gaseous mass,
and then, under regular, immutable and unbroken natural law, all
else鈥攈umanity included鈥攅merged. This is, of course, the theory of
evolution by another name, and not even the first at that. Notably Jean Lamarck
and Erasmus Darwin had been this way before, but had been seen off by champions
of Christian and moral orthodoxy.
Vestiges hit the headlines and caught the public fancy, rather
like A Brief History of Time. It was a rattling good read. It too,
confidently wove in the best science of the day鈥攊ncluding palaeontology,
which seemed to reveal an orderly progression of more advanced fossils in more
recent strata. Above all, its author was anonymous.
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Was this one of science鈥檚 grandees spilling the beans under a cloak of
secrecy? Or, as its detractors claimed, was this 鈥渂eastly book鈥� the
work鈥攄readful thought 鈥攐f some woman, perhaps Ada Lovelace, who was
an accomplished mathematician鈥攁nd daughter of the scandalous Byron?
Whoever the writer, the impact of Vestiges was tremendous, and it鈥檚
this phenomenon that James Secord explores in Victorian Sensation, a
superbly researched, fluently composed and not at all sensationalist study.
Secord is chiefly interested in what Vestiges meant to the national
reading public, energised by such new technologies as the steam press, cheap
newspapers and periodicals, and charged with Victorian earnestness.
鈥淕entlemen of science鈥� and budding professionals such as Thomas Huxley tended
to be sniffy and dismissive of the bumptious outsider who wrote the thing.
Churchmen were incensed at what they saw as a sneaky apology for atheism. High
society was titillated by the 鈥渟cientific romance鈥� of it all, partly because of
the secrecy: Benjamin Disraeli, for example, sent up Vestiges gossip in
his novel Tancred.
But those who most took Vestiges to heart were, as Secord shows, the
petty bourgeois and the self-educated of the working class, who thronged the
mechanics鈥� institutes, debating societies and reading rooms of Victorian London,
Leeds and Liverpool. Vestiges鈥� doctrine of 鈥渄evelopment鈥� spoke to
them.
If nature could evolve without the need for endless divine miracles, then
they too could pull themselves up by their own bootstraps without patrons,
priests or Parliament, for that matter. To them, Vestiges was peddling
a kind of cosmic self-help. Most readers were probably not converted to
evolutionism, but Vestiges helped to create and sustain the growing
belief that the grand truth that explained all was the law of inevitable
progress.
And that is hardly surprising. Because when the author was finally outed, it
was none other than that hero of the autodidacts Robert Chambers, the highly
successful Edinburgh author-publisher of improving books and educational
manuals. 鈥淢r Vestiges鈥� had his finger on the pulse of the coming age.