Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Historian James Secord has brilliantly documented the impact of the 1844 bestseller "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation," published anonymously by Scottish journalist Robert Chambers on how the universe had evolved. Chambers was a golfer who played the Old Course at St. Andrews frequently and got to wondering how that remarkable landscape had developed, both geologically and socially. Chambers didn't manage to come up with Darwin's mechanism of Natural Selection, but his emphasis on developmentalism in astronomy, geology, and biology won over sophisticated society (e.g., Abraham Lincoln read his book in remote Illinois) 15 years before Darwin. Hence, as Secord notes, Darwin triumphed rather easily in 1859 because the basic facts of evolution had been accepted in the 1840s by readers of Chambers.Secord's book confirmed my long-held intuition that the evolution of the golf links at St. Andrews over the centuries played a role in introducing the idea of unplanned development to the British mind: Chambers, it turns out, played the Old Course at St. Andrews several times a week while writing "Vestiges" and he later used the Old Course to illustrate how landscapes evolve. Chambers played some sort of role in the origin of the famous links at Carnoustie.Chambers' son co-designed the first 9 holes at Royal Hoylake, still a British Open course, and Chambers' great grandson Sir Guy Campbell became a leading golf sportswriter who cowrote a history of golf with the other premier golf sportswriter of the time, Bernard Darwin, the grandson of Charles Darwin. They emphasized the evolutionary nature of linksland golf courses.

Book arrived in great condition. Otherwise, needed a good editor.

The author does an outstanding job painting a full picture of the cultural situation and scientific issues surrounding the impact of this unexpectedly important book. Far more influential than Origin of the Species in the 19th century (it outsold it at least 10 to 1), the author explains how it's influence has been eclipsed and forgotten by Darwin's work. A must-read for those wanting to understand this history of evolutionary thought.

For a thorough study of a single work, Victorian sensation is surprisingly light reading. Despite being in a a field only tangentially related to the sunject matter (I work in a natural history museum), I found myself reading it on the subway and at lunch breaks. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in early Victorian science and political life, and to anyone interested in in how the idea of evolution eventually arose in the mid 19th century.

This is an absolutely amazing book. It takes you step-by-step into the depths of the early Victorian Mind as well as into the backrooms of scientific work at the very moment the sciences were working out their social identities.It is beautifully, even dramatically written and marvelously researched and illustrated. There are few books as good and surprising and satisfying and informative as this one.

Book exceeded expectations of condition.

This book is an exceptional, wide-ranging view not only of evolutionary thought in the nineteenth century, but of the emergence of mechanized printing.

Secord says he has "attempted to provide" "a full-length picture of how a substantial range of contemporary readers made meaning from a single work." The work is Robert Chambers' 1844 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. It is usually thought of today, if it is thought of at all, as an amateurish "forerunner of Darwin"; the Origin of Species was 15 years later. But Secord tells us that it was "a sensation" upon publication and was still selling years after the Origin. Today we might call it an interdisciplinary "big history", sweeping from the beginning of the solar system to present day humanity.Alas, Secord never tells us exactly what the book says. We learn that there is something about a "Fire Mist" at the beginning, that the truth of the "the nebular hypothesis" is relevant, that there are disagreements about fossil and rock dating, and that it asserts "transmutation of species". But exactly what it says and how Chambers fits everything together? Pfft.I suspect this was deliberate. One of Secord's themes is that a book has no intrinsic meaning. It speaks to different people in different ways, depending on what they bring to it. That's what Secord is interested in.He is very much trying NOT to write "Whig history", where the past is of importance mostly as a step along the way to a better future. Thus, there is almost no consideration of the truth or falsity of the work.Alas, since I didn't know quite what the book said, I had a hard time following the reactions. Some times I had the feeling I had gone to a sporting event where I didn't know the rules.And we get lots of different reactions from different people. Along the way, he talks about different cities and social classes, how certain concerns and sentiments and preconceptions were different in 1844 and 1859, the changing economics and technology of publishing, anonymity in the writing of the time, the creation of middle class reading culture, and a whole lot more. "Full-length" here means 532 pages, mostly interesting but some times a little ... academic.P.S. The book got me interested enough, and frustrated enough, to get Secord's 1994 edition of Vestiges. The first nine pages of the Introduction went a long way toward giving me what this book lacked in the way of describing Vestiges. Somewhat similarly: the word phrenology, or some variation, occurs hundreds of times in Sensation and I often read right past it, like it was one of those sports rules I didn't quite grasp. Today, people think of phrenology as the silly idea that personality can be read from the bumps on a person's head. But in Chambers' time it was much more. By locating "the mind" in "the brain", and specific aspects of the mind in specific parts of the brain, it had the smell of materialism, a very big deal in that time and place. It potentially raised deep philosophical and religious issues. This only hit me reading further in the Introduction. The more I think about it, the more I think Victorian Sensation suffers from a lack of sufficient context.P.P.S. And it was only after reading Chapter IX, "The Temporalizing of the Chain of Being" in Arthur O. Lovejoy's classic The Great Chain of Being, that I discovered Chambers was working within a philosophical tradition almost a century old. I realize that Secord is writing reader response and not intellectual history, but that seemed relevant to why so many readers found it plausible and worth thinking about.

James A Secord's "Victorian Sensation - The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" is a gem, combining an extensive lifetime's knowledge of Victorian society with the history of science.The Vestiges were published anonymously by Robert Chambers in 1844 to an audience receptive to explanations of creation not based on revealed religion. It was published too at a time when Victorian society considered itself as a leader of progressive thought and action, embraced such nonsense as phrenology (which continues in highbrow and lowbrow intellect) but which remained averse to the implications of non-religious opinion because of the secular and atheistic impact of the French Revolution on political radicalism and social stability.It is not often realised that the Vestiges outsold the Origins of Species by the thousands drawing as it did on the novel, the encyclopaedia, mass circulation journalism and combing readable narrative with scientific explanation. It came at a time when literacy and readership was spreading through cheap publications and formed a key ingredient in the philosophy of self improvement that was at the heart of the radical political movement.Secord expresses this succinctly, "A vengeful God who demanded retribution had less appeal for a cosmopolitan society with a rapidly advancing economy; speculation in science, as in the market, was no longer condemned as sinful." The railways brought Sunday work for the plebs while the middle class attended church to atone for the rest of the week spent in pursuit of gain and pleasure.Much of what Darwin expounded in the Origins of Species can be found in the Vestiges, natural selection being the missing link which Darwin proclaimed. Secord explores why it is that the Vestiges, which made such a sensational impact ( even the different meanings of "sensational" are discussed at length) on publication, is far less well known than Darwin's Origins of Species.Part of the answer lies in the development of expertise, the redrawing of the boundaries between aristocrats, gentlemen and churchmen pursuing natural theology and scientists pursuing the destruction of theology. In the environment of mid-Victorian splendour the Vestiges became the work of an amateur overtaken by the professionalism of the all conquering scientists offering inductive reasoning as fact. Darwinism provided the rationale for empire, racism and laissez faire, the Vestiges became an embarrassment.The beauty of this book lies in its understanding that reconstructing history should be done in terms faithful to the time. The famous Oxford debate in 1860 between Wilberforce and Huxley is correctly identified as a minor incident raised to mythical dimensions for political purposes. Darwinism itself was only revived in the 1930's and raised to its own mythical status in the latter part of the twentieth century.Secord observes that many Victorians, including Darwin, did not keep books on the shelf. The ripped them up and used them as work tools. Secord's book certainly does not deserve that fate, notwithstanding the frequent grammatical error of inserting commas before "and". It should rest on the shelf and referred to frequently as the superb reference work it will become for anyone interested in the real history of the origins of the present debate on evolution. Buy it.

This book deserves more attention. It is very well researched and written. I thoroughly enjoyed Secord's detailed contextual history of the times, particularly his attention to detail regarding Robert Chambers's need for anonymity due to the heresy of the concept of evolution by natural selection.Today, the facts beg Professor Secord to write a second edition in order to update his book to take account of the facts he never found. One particular newly discovered fact I refer to is that among those we newly know did read and cite Patrick Matthew's (1831),book 'Naval Timber and Arboriculture', which contains the entire orignal theory of evolution by natural selection is Robert Chambers himself. Chambers then went on to write his own detailed guide on arboriculture and to cite Matthew's second book 'Evolution Fields' before writing 'The Vestiges of Creation' - his own book on evolution. Those facts are to be found in 'Nullius in Verba: Darwin's greatest secret'.Dr Mike Sutton is author of Nullius in Verba: Darwin's greatest secretNullius in Verba: Darwin's greatest secret