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29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A review from the Sunday Times, London, February 17, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: Victorian Sensation : The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Hardcover)
From the Sunday Times, 18 February 2001 Bigger than Darwin VICTORIAN SENSATION: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation by James A Secord Chicago U P pp624 MIRANDA SEYMOUR Tennyson, with whom this accomplished work begins and ends, was an avid reader. In 1844, he spotted a review of an anonymously authored book which, according to the critic, convincingly linked the natural sciences to the history of creation. The poet, like many other readers of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, had already formed what we might consider advanced views on this subject. Man had resulted from a slow gestation beginning with simple invertebrates; man's ability to reason and distinguish between good and bad was part of his development. Tennyson had already completed much of In Memoriam, arguably the most powerful of Victorian poems. After reading Vestiges, he used its notion of an ever-ascending condition to celebrate the idea of a link "Betwixt us and the crowning race". Tennyson's readers knew exactly what that reference meant. It is we who have lost it. Hailing Darwin as the great originator, we have forgotten that Vestiges, in the mid-19th century, had a greater impact, reaching far more readers and being discussed at all levels. This is the central point of James A Secord's book. The idea he illustrates in a hundred entertaining ways is that we, as readers, like making narratives. We want things tidy, with beginnings and ends. It's reassuring to suppose that the concept of evolutionary culture began with Darwin's Origin of the Species in 1859. Reassuring, and wrong, not just because Darwin's grandfather had been writing about evolutionary matters in the previous century, but because geologists had reached Darwin's conclusions on evolution - not natural selection, which blew up a storm rather later - years before he published his turgid and, in many respects, quite cautious book. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, first published (anonymously) in 1818, was not directly responsible for the upward surge of new ideas about creation and spontaneous generation. Shelley's extraordinary book did, however, provide the creationists and their opponents with a potent image. Discussions of man's origins were regular among the circles in which she herself moved; her own interest in fossil history led her to consider writing a book on the subject. The suggestions made by Vestiges were, then, original only in the elegance of their formulation. (Even its opponents conceded that the prose was superb.) Revealingly, the gossips and critics were able to produce at least 10 authors who might have produced such an argument. Two of them, intriguingly, were women. "Sensational" was the description always given to Vestiges. In Britain alone, it went through 14 editions and sold 40,000 copies: why? It helped, of course, that Vestiges looked small and user-friendly, its scarlet cover causing one irate reviewer to compare it to "the accomplished harlot". It was, unlike Darwin's later work, easy to follow and illustrated with homely analogies. Above all, it was a curiosity. The anonymity by which the Scottish publisher, Robert Chambers, screened himself for 40 years became one of the book's hottest selling points. Not even Secord, whose knowledge is impressively omnivorous, is certain why Chambers continued to hide his identity for so long. The decision was first taken, it seems, from a combination of prudence and shrewdness. He wanted to sell copies; he knew that his unscientific status would be held against him. Anonymity, while frequent in fiction, was unusual in the fields of biography and history. To be anonymous in this area was to attract attention and speculation. Guessing the author became part of the enterprise in a period that extended into decades during which Vestiges and its authorship were passionately discussed. An anonymous sequel, published in 1845, may have sold only 3,000 copies, but it achieved the more important goal for Chambers of keeping up interest. Transmutation was the brand-new theory of creation that Chambers put on offer in his book, prefacing it with the bold, Frankenstein-led query: "In what way was the creation of animated beings effected?" The notion of endless ascent was not received with unanimous respect. Florence Nightingale joked that she found it impossible to climb down again, "and was obliged to go off as an angel". Darwin, scratching for fleas while he furtively studied the British Museum's copy, thought the geology and zoology were hopelessly amateur, although he agreed with the general conclusions. Philip Gosse, rejecting the idea that fossils indicated a pre-biblical history, wrote a response, Omphalos; 75% of the published copies were pulped through lack of demand. Vestiges continued to sell. Punch joked about a lonely book that is spurned at the door of every famous author who might have claimed it. Chambers, confronted with an inquiry about "that horrible book" and whether he had read it, kept his counsel. It is hard to overpraise this book. Magnificently illustrated, erudite, thoughtful and stimulating, it has the added bonus of a wickedly subversive style. I liked, to single out a small example, Secord's throwaway description of a Punch journalist: "Douglas Jerrold was a known infidel (and ate his peas with a knife)." One of the illustrations shows a group of "advanced thinkers" chatting by the fire. The light catches their faces; they look intensely alive, and enthralled. Reading Victorian Sensation gives you the illusion, at least, of joining them.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Evolution of Evolution, January 12, 2002
This review is from: Victorian Sensation : The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Hardcover)
As Henry Drummond noted in 1883, "This is the age of the evolution of Evolution. All thoughts that the Evolutionist works with, all theories and generalizations, have themselves evolved and are now being evolved." This remarkable work on the Vestiges of Robert Chambers is itself a history of the evolution of evolution, describing in wonderful detail the context of a book that perfectly fits Drummond's description. Springing from eighteenth century intimations, first theorized by Lamarck, the idea of evolution finally bursts into public consciousness with Chambers' Vestiges, whose sudden popularity, if not notoriety, made it one of the first modern bestsellers in an age of technological breakthroughs in communications, transport, and printing. Laying the groundwork for laters theories, it nonetheless is too often dismissed as pseudo-scientific when, in fact, the author was aware of certain aspects of the pre-Darwinian ideas of evolution that only now are resurfacing, after being shunted aside by the Darwin tide to come. The account in this work is an engaging hybrid of cultural history mixed into the biography of Chambers' book, and is useful for the student of evolution in its account of the social relations of science, from the gentleman scientist to the grub street popularizers, and indirectly brings to life the later relationship of Huxley to Darwin. The age of Darwin in which we live has made him the sole authority and source of a science of evolution and this distorts the facts, and has obscured the reputation of this and other books. Indeed part of the confusion over selectionist theories sprang from the need for Darwin to artificially separate himself from previous ideas of evolution, by a novelty of claims, since the idea of evolution had seen its foundations laid. It is good to remember the full tale. The reality is that Vestiges was the first thunderclap of the evolutionary idea, whose correct intimations mixed with much speculative confusion were filtered out of the positivist account of Darwin, that provoked its own firestorm of reactions, for not the least reason that it was as evolutionary as the work of Chambers, and did not truly foot the bill for a theory of descent.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Fascinating look at Victorian and scientific history, July 1, 2006
One usually looks at history either as a chronological account of a particular place or discipline, or as broad account of a specific time period. This is the sort of slightly eccentric look at a time period that does so much to make connections between what one learns in more customary histories.
Secord is not so much looking at what Vestiges proposed, nor critiquing it by current scientific information, nor creating a biography of the author. He does a little of all these, but his main purpose is look intensively at the work as a social phenomenon. He considers it as a book, published in different versions for different segments of society, he reports on the reactions of various social classes in various geographic areas, the reaction of scientists, clergy and laymen to its "atheistic" or "deist" point of view, gender perspectives, etc. For the most part, for all its detail, it is extremely readable.
In order to do this, he has done an incredible amount of research. Knowing that the social elites talked, rather than wrote about it, he has combed diaries for records of conversation. He has researched technical details and statistics of the book trade. Truly a daunting project.
Serious students of the time period, scientific and philosophical history should find it very worthy of their attention. It should also appeal to the general reader (like me) who has at least a moderate knowledge of the era and of scientific history. I certainly wouldn't recommend this as a beginning text in either field.
The book is filled with a variety of black-and-white illustrations: ledgers, title pages, portraits, caricatures and cartoons, probably at least one on every fourth page. There is an extensive bibiography and a detailed index.
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