Books have biographies. Like people, books have lives that can be told and stories that can be recounted. James Secord’s Victorian Sensation is an extraordinary example of a new genre of scholarship that might appropriately be dubbed the biblio-biography. It is the story of the writing, publishing, circulating, and reading of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, first published anonymously in 1844 but later revealed as the child of the Edinburgh publisher Robert Chambers. An imposing cosmological epic conceived on a grand scale, the book created a sensation at the time.
Embraced by some, vilified by others, it at once bemused, infuriated, consoled, and revolted readers in its bold portrayal of the drama of evolution and its popular synthesis of everything from astronomy to zoology. One thought it a “priceless treasure,” another dismissed it as materialist “pigology.” Some found it manly; others were sure they could detect a womanly hand behind its anonymity. Some thought it daring; still others found it melancholic. And while the young Thomas Archer Hirst—who would later become a prominent mathematician—found it laid out in a “masterly” fashion, Thomas Henry Huxley abominated it and characteristically sniped that it was nothing but a “weed,” a “lumber-room of second-hand scientific furniture,” and “a broth of a book.” Indeed, writers outdid one another in the metaphors they exploited to stage-manage the text for readers. The book’s striking red binding prompted one to “attribute to it all the graces of an accomplished harlot.” Its continuing anonymity drew from another the exclamation: “Unhappy foundling! Tied to every man’s knocker, and taken in by nobody; thou shouldst go to Ireland!” To yet another the book was an illicit marriage between gross credulity and rank infidelity.
But all this is to anticipate. Before readers can react to a book, they have to get it into their hands. Writers, publishers, printers, binders, shippers, sellers, and readers are netted together in a complex web of interchange, a tangled nexus that lies hidden behind the book that every reviewer—including this one—sits down to read. As Secord observes, “the most abstract ideas about nature should be approached first and foremost as material objects of commerce and situated in specific settings for reading.” Accordingly, the story of Vestiges is placed firmly in the context of the history of the book as a commodity that is constructed, advertised, circulated, and paraded in a variety of ways. The “great sensation” that it caused was crucially dependent on developments in print technology, systems of mass distribution, and other innovations in a rapidly industrializing Victorian Britain.
Production then, is Secord’s point of departure. And here we are treated to an exquisite elucidation of the revolution in the publishing industry at a time when steam presses, railway bookstalls, and telegraph wires all burst on the scene. These, and a dozen other technological breakthroughs like them, created the very possibility of a book becoming a sensation precisely because they created the possibility of a reading public. Books, magazines, tracts, pamphlets, and papers of all shapes and sizes tumbled from the presses. New editions could quickly be printed. And the culture of reviewing was established. In these circumstances the market for knowledge rapidly expanded. Print and progress reinforced one another. And all the more so as ever cheaper editions were made available. With such a system in place, the conditions were right for the mushrooming of works surveying the state of natural knowledge, and for publishers like W. & R. Chambers in Edinburgh to meet the hunger by printing schoolbooks, encyclopedias, and other improving texts.
This was the environment into which the anonymous Vestiges was launched—a book about cosmic progress for a progressive age. The author in fact was the Robert Chambers of the publishing firm just mentioned, but he took strenuous steps to ensure his anonymity by always corresponding with his own publisher, Churchill, through a third party with whom he developed a scheme of code names lest correspondence should fall into the wrong hands. And so his book was sent out into the world nameless.
Why? Because it was a touchy subject. This circumstance affords Secord the opportunity to reflect on the connections between writers and readers. As he reminds us, the astonishingly different ways in which Mary Barton (1848) was read when the public realized that the author was Elizabeth Gaskell, the wife of a Unitarian minister, and not some handloom weaver, bears witness to the invisible cords netting writer and reader together in the making of meaning. As readers wrestled over how to identify an ethereal author, it mattered whether the writer was from the gentry or the working class, was a believer or an infidel, a gentleman or a cad: “What if the anonymous author was not to be found in London’s fashionable Pall Mall, but a few blocks away in the squalid dens of Holywell Street, notorious for atheism and pornography?” Because urban terrain and moral territory belonged together, speculation was rife. And Secord notes that there were distinct spaces of surmise: names that circulated in Edinburgh barely surfaced in Oxford, while “those that were common in London’s fashionable West End were barely known in the Saint Giles rookeries only a few blocks away.” Anonymous works were troublesome, then, for they dislodged comfortable assumptions about the connections between readers and authors. Not least, readers and reviewers found it difficult to warrant the expertise of an unknown penman; without an author, authority was hard to stabilize. Moreover, anonymity allowed a writer to reshape his or her own identity without the anchor of named identification. It enabled Chambers to shift his ground when he saw that scientific readers, such as those at the British Association, queried his technical competencies. The gentlemen of science too often pointed to errors, blunders, inaccuracies, and, in some cases, just plain rubbish. Chambers, irked, shifted strategy and aimed for a different audience. As succeeding editions of the book adapted themselves—Lamarckian-like—to the prevailing circumstances, the anonymous Chambers underwent an evolutionary transformation. As Secord engagingly expresses it, the secret author became, over succeeding printings, “a voice with a history.”
In detailing the circumstances of Chambers’s life, his authorial strategy and narrative voice, his religious and political outlook, his family affairs and social networks, Secord treats us to thick description of the highest order. The inhabitants of 1 Douane Terrace, Edinburgh, are brought to life in the most vivid detail. The tactics adopted in Vestiges to secure the confidence of readers, to mobilize authority, and to manage the most tricky subjects, like sex and transmutation, are reviewed with penetrating insight.
Secord’s treatment, then, opens up the production side of the publishing industry to telling scrutiny. The consequences are far-reaching. No longer can intellectual history be conducted in isolation from the materiality of the books and bodies in which ideas are incarnated. All of this is an impressive achievement. And yet, if anything, Secord’s revelations on the consumption side of the scientific circuit are yet more remarkable. For books are read differently in different places, in different ways, by different people. As Secord charts in filigree detail the way Vestiges was received in a multitude of social and physical spaces, the very idea of “the reader” is profoundly disrupted and exposed for what it is—an imagined singularity.
Here again, the delight is in the detail. On ways of reading, we learn much. Take Charles Darwin. A book-abuser. A page-ripper. A marginal graffiti artist. Darwin’s library was not a space of ostentatious display; it was a workshop in which books were the tools of the trade. Or take the anxiety that evangelicals had that books should be read the right way. “How shall you begin to read a book?” asked the Religious Tract Society. “Always look into your dish and taste it, before you begin to eat. As you sit down, examine the title-page; see who wrote the book; where he lives; do you know anything of the author?” Readers read in different ways. And they read differently depending on what they have already read. No books are encountered “cold.” Rather, they mingle and intertwine in the minds of readers to produce new and unexpected alliances. As Gillian Beer once put it, there is a remarkable miscegenation among texts.
For all that, distinct groups of people tend to read books in similar ways. The emergence of periodicals serving niche markets helped create literary tribes who reacted in distinct ways to new offerings. Here Secord treats his readers to an extraordinary survey of how Chambers’s volume was received in a range of weekly and monthly magazines. In different social and physical spaces, to put it another way, Vestiges was treated differently. We discern here, as Secord puts it, distinctive “geographies of reading.” In circulating libraries, gentlemen’s clubs, drawing rooms, social circles, and public houses Vestiges was read and talked about in different ways. Evangelical reviewers read it one way; progressive gentlewomen another; radical reformers yet another. In every case, meaning was manufactured in the spaces of textual encounter.
In different London salons the book entered fashionable conversation in different ways and found itself very differently treated. Among aristocratic readers, such as in the home of Lord Francis Egerton—a leading Tory—it was regarded as poisonous, and the refutations streaming from the pens of scientific critics were warmly embraced. To the progressive Whigs who gathered in the drawing room of Sir John Hobhouse, it was boldly visionary and gloriously free of bigotry or prejudice. In Unitarian conversation, like that in the townhouse of Lord and Lady Lovelace on Saint James’ Square, the book’s emphasis on change from below was seen as a telling blow against a smug ecclesiastical establishment.
In different British cities, too, the book fared differently. Elucidating the fine-grained geography of London’s, Liverpool’s, and Edinburgh’s moral topographies, Secord again and again uncovers how differently situated readers read Vestiges in different ways. In Cambridge it was vilified by writers like the clergyman-geologist Adam Sedgwick, who thought it an example of the most degrading species of materialism. (Sedgwick’s views, incidentally, did not go down anything like as well in Edinburgh.) By contrast, in Oxford, where science was less important in the culture of the university, the prevalence of liberal theology and tendencies toward unbelief meant that Vestiges received a warmer welcome there. Here, the naturalistic cosmology that the book promulgated deeply affected readers like the poet Arthur Clough and J. A. Froude, British historian and man of letters.
In every city there were spaces of appreciation and spaces of aggression, spaces of suspicion and spaces of bewilderment. Social class, local politics, religious creed, and professional interests all had a bearing on patterns of reception. While Edinburgh evangelicals like Hugh Miller regarded Vestiges as “one of the most insidious pieces of practical atheism,” phrenologists like George Combe enthused about “the great scientific learning” it displayed. Differences such as these were not simply the expression of radically different religious sentiments; they were as much to do with local urban politics and the control of municipal Edinburgh’s administrative structures as dogma and doctrine. The act of reading, it is clear, is a cultural performance. But it is also an individual practice. And Secord devotes the last third of his book to the place of reading in the making and remaking of personal identity. His strategy here is to fasten on a sequence of single readers—some better known than others—in order to unpack something of the existential experience of reading. As for Vestiges itself, Secord’s stories of individual responses display readers engaged in struggles of epic proportions, perhaps even “a choice between salvation and damnation.” In an era of working-class defection from institutional religion, a series of blasphemy trials, and the spawning of a spate of city missions, Vestiges was nothing less than a sign of the last days. Pursuing stories like these in painstaking detail, and focusing most especially on the case of Thomas Archer Hirst, Secord uncovers the ways in which that Victorian sensation shaped self-understanding and personal identity through new ways of understanding nature.
Finally, Secord calls our attention to how Vestiges was read by the new generation of evolutionists such as Huxley and Darwin. Huxley, as we have seen, lambasted it. To him it was a work in which a “spurious, glib eloquence” had entirely triumphed over real science. It confused wishful thinking with hard evidence. It mistook opinion for fact. It was, he bitingly quipped, a form “of fetish worship, where reverence is proportionate to the bigness of the idol.” All in all, Huxley thought Vestiges did nothing but stand in the way of the march of science toward professionalism. If science were to progress, such amateurism had to be left behind.
Seen in this light, the feuds that the book fired were part of a wider struggle about the kind of activity that “real science” was supposed to be. Darwin, by contrast, read the book differently. To him it was not so much a cosmological romance conducting readers from one end of time to the other; instead he saw in it a screwed-up version of his own theory. Here was an author who had recklessly paraded before the public a naturalistic theory of evolutionary change and—even worse—had not hesitated to spell out its moral ramifications. Perhaps it was because he was anxious about how the public would react to his own theory that Darwin was inclined to think that Huxley had been “rather hard on the poor author.” But he certainly had to distance himself from Vestiges, if only to make it clear that his own project was a different species of thing altogether.
Such, in all too brief compass, is the story that Secord sets before us. On page after page we find illuminating detail, telling observation, penetrating analysis, and quotable quote upon quotable quote. Secord himself considers his work “an experiment in a different kind of history.” That is too modest. It is a powerful accomplishment that will set new and exacting standards on how histories of scientific culture will be written in the future. No student of science, religion, and society can afford to pursue her inquiries without taking with the greatest seriousness Victorian Sensation. In compiling this review, I have forgotten more than I have remembered from this remarkable volume; but that only goes to confirm Secord’s own observation that those “books that allow us to forget the most are accorded the authority of the classic.”
Finishing Victorian Sensation, however, is not the end of the story. It is only the beginning. Reviewing a book which is itself about the reception of a book is an odd experience. At every point the reviewer finds himself implicated in the very plots that Secord spins. Every reader of Victorian Sensation will find herself, if Secord’s insights are assimilated, embroiled in the drama at every twist and turn. Readers of Vestiges were situated—socially, politically, religiously; so are we. As readers made and remade the meaning of Vestiges, so too do we make and remake the meaning of every text we read.
Indeed the entire enterprise of Books & Culture is open to the very analyses which Secord spells out in such rich detail. Books & Culture has its own format, typeface, and advertising strategies; its own social circuitry and readerly spaces; its own theological geography and cultural ecology; its own means of authorizing its authors. And the same is true of other books too—not least printings of the Bible. As Paul C. Gutjahr has recently put it,
Even if not constrained by doctrine and clergy, Scripture is constrained by its own materiality: how it is set in type, formatted, commented upon in marginalia, illustrated, bound, and distributed. If the story of nineteenth-century publishing teaches us anything, it is that bible packaging, content, and distribution all inseparably work together to give the Book meaning. A book is judged by its cover, as well as by all aspects of its contents and method of conveyance—a precious lesson worth remembering in any attempt to interpret the meaning and influence of the Word once it becomes words.1
All of which is just a way of saying that the implications of Secord’s marvelous achievement spiral way beyond the subtitle of this book—”the Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.” It is nothing less than a reworking of our understanding of the culture of the book—and for that very reason, of Books & Culture itself.
David N. Livingstone is Professor of Geography and Intellectual History at the Queen’s University of Belfast. He is the author of several books, including Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and the Culture of American Science, Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders, The Geographical Tradition, and (with R.A. Wells) Ulster-American Religion. With Mark Noll he edited Evolution, Science, and Scripture: Selected Writings, by B.B. Warfield.
1. Paul C. Gutjahr, An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777-1880 (Stanford Univ. Press, 1990) p.178.
Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
