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

The appearance in 1844 of the anonymous and controversial, yet highly readable, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation caused, as the title of James Secord's recent book suggests, nothing short of a sensation. Literary sensations were not unknown, of course, and indeed fashionable society demanded them. Vestiges was not, however, an ephemeral, trashy scandal but a substantial work of great intellectual ambition which marshalled a considerable breadth of scientific fact and theory into an essentially progressivist evolutionary discourse. Many in the scientific and clerical establishments were quick to condemn it for its factual inaccuracies and religious heresies. Historians of science have been no less keen to see the book's frailties and thus to underplay its role in the emergence of evolutionary theory and debate.

Secord takes a rather different approach, concentrating not on the author's arguments but rather on what his public made of them. Key to this understanding is the cleverness of Vestiges's manufacture: its carefully chosen publisher, the intricate processes of concealed authorship (Robert Chambers's identity was only revealed forty years after publication, though by then many had guessed), the use of the narrative structures of science, Chambers's own publishing experiments, and the debt owed to the Scottish literary tradition centred on Walter Scott. These factors, however, are merely a prelude to what Secord tells us is the "most comprehensive analysis of the readership of any book other than the Bible" (2). Vestiges thus becomes not just ideas on the page but interpretable material culture, which made evolutionary thought a middle-class concern some fifteen years before Charles Darwin's great work was published.

What Secord refers to as his "experiment" (518) was undoubtedly risky: few historians would be willing to expend so much effort on Vestiges, a work widely considered to be a second- or third-tier intellectual contribution. Fewer still could have carried it off so successfully. That Secord has managed to do so results in large part from his sheer mastery of the period and of historiographic method. While many historians of science remain wedded to notions of knowledge creation, Secord recognises that actions arise from readings, from a sense of knowing and believing, from an act of making, which responds to, rather than simply absorbs, the black and white of the printed page. The fallacy of judging the reception of a scientific work simply from the reviews it receives becomes all too apparent as a result, particularly given the social politics bound up in the author-reviewer relationship. Interestingly, the fledgling scientific author becomes more powerful in this relationship when anonymous, as Richard Owen, who believed Vestiges to have been written by a member of the elite, reveals with his two-faced (or "diplomatic") comments. While Secord makes much of the role of the book in private efforts to establish self-identity, it is clear that Vestiges was used by all who had cause to comment upon it, including its reviewers and those debating in public arenas, for proclaiming identity. Contemporary postmodernist discourses centred on gender and authority are prominent in Secord's analysis and intertwine well with historical arguments. Secord demonstrates that the power of Sensation, too, is capable of deconstruction!

The difficulty of achieving this kind of insight from scattered sources cannot be underestimated. The advantage for the historian is that a literary sensation is rather short lived and has a high probability of entering the lives of anyone who might be represented in modern archives. Nonetheless, as if to compound the difficulties, Secord does not simply go in search of mainstream figures. The Halifax apprentice, Thomas Archer Hirst, in later life known as a mathematician and member of the X-Club, is given as much consideration as members of...