A Book That Rocked the Victorian World

book reviews

A book that rocked The treasures beneath our feet the Victorian world Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation by James A. Secord University of Chicago Press: 2001. 581 pp. $35, £22.50 David Oldroyd Traditionally, historians of science have studied what scientists have thought and how they generated ideas, as well as the social, economic and political implications of science. Among geo-historians, contro- versies have attracted particular attention: Excellent pictures and straightforward, University Press, £18.95) almost a coffee-table in his Controversy in Victorian Geology informative text make Ron Vernon’s Beneath our book for the scientifically literate non-geologist (Princeton, 1986), James Secord wrote the Feet: The Rocks of Planet Earth (Cambridge — or anyone who’s always curious. definitive account of the contest between Adam Sedgwick and Roderick Murchison about the Cambrian–Silurian boundary. subversive of social order. Hence the Edin- But Secord pursues them further. He has Now Secord, American by birth but long burgh publisher and amateur scientist wore examined Sedgwick’s annotated copy of Ves- immersed in British culture — he is Reader the cloak of anonymity to protect his business tiges, showing how he scrawled all over it. He in History and Philosophy of Science at interests, using another firm to issue his book. ascertains which passages attracted Sedg- Cambridge — re-orients the task of science Some of Chambers’s ideas were implausi- wick’s attention, and how he responded historians in what will become another ble, but they included a disturbing actuality: to them. Similarly, Secord shows how the definitive book. He asks not so much how the ‘parallelism’ between embryonic develop- Halifax autodidact, Thomas Hirst, doggedly Robert Chambers’s Vestiges was produced as ment, the stratigraphic record, and the princi- wrote out extracts from Vestiges, assimilating how it was received, by whom and where. It pal features of animal classification. These them with, as Secord puts it, “extraordinary is a grand but daunting undertaking. analogies suggested causal connection. This intensity”. “Almost no one,” he continues, Secord makes the remarkable claim that hinted that revealed religion (as then con- “reads like this any more.” True. Books were his book is “the most comprehensive analysis ceived) was deficient — which implied that scarcer items then than now, and everything of the reading of any book other than the the social ‘cement’ might crack if something possible had to be wrung from them by the Bible ever undertaken”. I’m not qualified to was not done, and quickly. earnest self-improver. judge the truth of this assertion, but certainly The work’s anonymity unsettled its Of course, Darwin’s shadow falls over this. it is plausible. Immense pains have been reviewers. Were they writing about Charles But in his epilogue, Secord argues that it was taken to set the scene for the publication of Lyell, Ada Lovelace, the phrenologist George not just Darwin’s work that changed every- the book and to describe, through exhaustive Combe, the Prince Consort …? Caution was thing, creating a new world-view. For exam- historical research, how it was distributed needed. Adam Sedgwick, however, secure in ple, although The Origin of Speciesappeared in and sold, and most particularly how it was his Trinity sanctuary, was unrestrained. Writ- 1859, it was selling fewer copies than Vestiges read — by whom, why, and with what effects ing anonymously in the Edinburgh Review — until the 1880s. Focusing all attention on Dar- on different readers. Thereby the author but in his case making sure that his authorship win obscures rather than clarifies the past. So constructs a remarkably intricate picture of was known — he averred that Vestiges had by concentrating on the production, distribu- major features of nineteenth-century British “annulled all distinction between physical tion and reception of Chambers’s book and culture. All this is undertaken in a book and moral”. Pulling rank, he asserted that the “network of relations that make up the which, despite its long and complex narra- “[n]o man living, who has not partaken of this larger picture”, rather than the factors that led tive and argument, is both coherent and kind of [scientific] labour, or … has not thor- him to arrive at his ideas, Secord aims to offer agreeably written, besides being adorned oughly mastered the knowledge put before his “an experiment in a different kind of history”. with 155 illustrations, mostly unfamiliar. senses by the labours of other men, has any Secord’s method of enquiry shows that Vestiges (1844), of course, wasn’t just any right to toss out his fantastical crudities before there was not a homogeneity of Victorian old book. It was a sensation, and a significant the public, and give himself the airs of a legis- thought. People read and responded to Ves- piece of the darwinian jigsaw. The fact that it lator over the material world”. Sedgwick had tiges differently according to their geograph- was published anonymously made it special, some reason to complain. He had toiled over ical, political, economic or religious circum- although anonymity was commoner then many mountains, done much original stances. It wasn’t just “Darwin’s century”, to than now: reviews were often unsigned and research, mastered many books, fought bat- use the well-known phrase of Loren Eiseley. authors (women particularly) often sheltered tles at the Geological Society. His anonymous To show all this coherently and intelligibly, as behind pseudonyms. Chambers opted for opponent evidently had not. But Sedgwick Secord has done, is no small undertaking. anonymity because his cosmic evolutionism was also worried. If Vestiges were correct, his Take a lead from Secord’s book: read Victori- — with spontaneous generation and a gradual position might be questioned. The comforts an Sensation and see what you make of it. I ‘unfolding’ of ‘higher’ life forms in a ‘gestatory’ of (the) Trinity, or his clerical position at Nor- David Oldroyd is in the School of Science and process — was incompatible with the deemed wich, might have no moral warrant. Technology Studies, University of New South truths of revealed religion and potentially These matters are relatively well known. Wales, Sydney 2052, Australia.