Victorian Sensation

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

James A. Secord

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780226744117, 9780226744100
• eBook ISBN: 9780226158259
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Evolution
• Index: Biological Sciences

Fiction or philosophy, profound knowledge or shocking heresy? When Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was published anonymously in 1844, it sparked one of the greatest sensations of the Victorian era. More than a hundred thousand readers were spellbound by its startling vision—an account of the world that extended from the formation of the solar system to the spiritual destiny of humanity. As gripping as a popular novel, Vestiges combined all the current scientific theories in fields ranging from astronomy and geology to psychology and economics. The book was banned, it was damned, it was hailed as the gospel for a new age. This is where our own public controversies about evolution began.

In a pioneering cultural history, James A. Secord uses the story of Vestiges to create a panoramic portrait of life in the early industrial era from the perspective of its readers. We join apprentices in a factory town as they debate the consequences of an evolutionary ancestry. We listen as Prince Albert reads aloud to Queen Victoria from a book that preachers denounced as blasphemy vomited from the mouth of Satan. And we watch as Charles Darwin turns its pages in the flea-ridden British Museum library, fearful for the fate of his own unpublished theory of evolution. Using secret letters, Secord reveals how Vestiges was written and how the anonymity of its author was maintained for forty years. He also takes us behind the scenes to a bustling world of publishers, printers, and booksellers to show how the furor over the book reflected the emerging industrial economy of print.

Beautifully written and based on painstaking research, Victorian Sensation offers a new approach to literary history, the history of reading, and the history of science. Profusely illustrated and full of fascinating stories, it is the most comprehensive account of the making and reception of a book (other than the Bible) ever attempted.

 

Winner of the 2002 Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society

PART ONE

Romances of Creation

CHAPTER ONE

A Great Sensation

And what a sensation some books created!

The Autobiography of Mary Smith, Schoolmistress and Nonconformist, a Fragment of a Life (1892)

IN MID-NOVEMBER 1844 Alfred Lord Tennyson opened the latest issue of the Examiner, a weekly reform newspaper, and turned to the notices of books. The lead review, devoted to a just-published work called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, immediately caught his eye:

In this small and unpretending volume we have found so many great results of knowledge and reflection, that we cannot too earnestly recommend it to the attention of thoughtful men. It is the first attempt that has been made to connect the natural sciences into a history of creation. An attempt which presupposes learning, extensive and various; but not the large and liberal wisdom, the profound philosophical suggestion, the lofty spirit of beneficence, and the exquisite grace of manner, which make up the charm of this extraordinary book.

Intrigued, Tennyson asked his bookseller to send him a copy, noting that the work “seems to contain many speculations with which I have been familiar for years, and on which I have written more than one poem.”¹ In return Tennyson received a small volume bound in bright red cloth. Advertising bound inside showed that the publisher dealt in medical textbooks and monographs on obscure diseases; otherwise the origins and authorship were a mystery.

Tennyson was enthralled, “quite excited.” As a contemporary remarked, “He reads all sorts of things, swallows and digests them like a great poetical boa-constrictor.”² The book ranged from astronomy and geology to moral philosophy and the prospect of a future life, all drawn together in a gripping cosmological narrative. The early pages described a nebular hypothesis of the universe, showing how stars, planets, and moons had evolved from a gaseous “Fire-mist.” Tennyson then followed the book’s story of geological progress from simple invertebrate animals up through fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and man. These were ideas he knew well. God worked through a law that brought forth new species just as it did new worlds. Man’s spiritual sense and reason were the products of development, part of what the unknown author called “the universal gestation of nature.” There was, Tennyson later concluded, “nothing degrading in the theory.”³

The Examiner had been one of the first to publish a review. Over five columns, Tennyson read of “the simplicity of the writer’s manner, and the beauty of his style”; this was one of the great works of the age. The unknown author, someone who had “earnestly investigated Nature,” had conducted his inquiry with “so much modesty and so much knowledge.” There were no criticisms of mistakes or the wider philosophy. The evolution of new species, and even of human beings, although “a remarkable hypothesis,” was described as worthy of consideration. In time, the author might even be able to throw off the mask of anonymity, for “there is now abroad in the world a certain rare disposition” to hear the truths of nature in “a beneficent spirit.” The Examiner regretted only the author’s failure to recognize Greek foreshadowings of its doctrines. “What are these,” the reviewer asked, “but, in another and simpler shape, the noblest thoughts and the loftiest aspirations that have consoled and elevated the hopes of humanity in this world?”⁴ Other works need only be borrowed; Vestiges was a book Tennyson wanted to buy.

Tennyson was fortunate to have ordered his copy. As his friend and fellow author Edward Fitzgerald reported, the Examiner’s eulogy sold out the first edition in a few days.⁵ Extraordinary rumors began to circulate. A huge number of copies—perhaps most of the impression—appeared to have been given away.⁶ The book seemed to emanate from the very center of English life: leading aristocrats, members of Parliament, and famous men of science were suggested as the author. As the novelist and politician Benjamin Disraeli wrote to his sister Sarah, Vestiges “is convulsing the world, anonymous” and from a publisher he had never heard of. As his wife Mary had told her: “Dizzy says it does & will cause the greatest sensation & confusion.”⁷

Mechanisms of Sensation

What did readers mean when they called Vestiges a “sensation”? “Sensation” needs to be our starting point because that is how readers first experienced the book. We might, from some perspectives, expect to begin with an author’s life or a summary of the text. But neither of these strategies will do. Gossip, rumor, advertising, street hoardings, newspaper notices: these were the ways that word spread. The book was an event and needs to be seen as part of the changing history of how such events were constituted. So we will explore the meanings of Vestiges as “sensation.” We begin with individuals—to see how reading engaged the passions and the senses—and then examine how these responses spread through society.

In the eighteenth century “sensation” had been part of the culture of sensibility; philosophical writings, most famously those of John Locke, stressed that mental states originated in the senses. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, for example, defined “sensation” as “perception by means of the senses.”⁸ In the most extreme versions of sensationalist psychology, all mental states were produced by the impact of corpuscles upon the brain. Reading involved nothing more than a series of physical shocks received from letters on a page and communicated from the eye to the brain, where they combined mechanically with other impulses to form ideas. This view of sensation gained notoriety as part of the philosophical underpinning for the French Revolution. Evolutionary narratives from an older classical tradition had been reshaped in the salons of enlightened Paris into materialist philosophical works such as those of Baron d’Holbach’s System of Nature. In Britain, these books were blamed for the bloody horrors of the French Revolution, and any account that could be read as linking matter with mind through material causes became suspect. For fifty years after the Terror, such books were associated with revolutionary atheists, pornographers, radical medical men, and dissolute foreigners.

In reaction, “sensation” took on new meanings during the early nineteenth century. Everyday usage increasingly limited the term to the realm of immediate nervous stimuli, and defined the mind’s consciousness of these stimuli as “perception.” This distinction had been most explicitly developed in the eighteenth-century Scottish philosophy of common sense, which argued that sensations are the occasions rather than the materials of perception. Acceptance of the existence of an external world was part of “common sense,” defined as the shared belief of rational men. The exact relation between the senses and the mind continued to be much debated. Manytheories maintained a mediating role for an immaterial soul, with mental activities such as reading carried out under the guiding influence of a spiritual governor.

In cases of heightened feeling, however, the senses could overwhelm reason, contemplation, and the other faculties. Raw, unconsidered, animal passions could engulf not just individuals, but much larger groups. A “sensation” came to mean an excited or violent emotion felt by an entire community and produced by a common experience: the death of a monarch, a terrible accident, a shocking discovery, a public hanging, a remarkable book. The use of the word had changed.

As literacy increased and civil society seemed threatened, problems of social cohesion were portrayed in physiological terms, as disturbances in what the literary historian Mary Poovey has termed the “social body.”⁹ Matters of state were united with management of individual sensibility and public opinion. Society became a “mass”—undifferentiated and operating according to animal instinct rather than reason. “Sensation” became part of a language developed to diagnose this new social malaise; as the conservative Quarterly Review noted disapprovingly in 1817, it was “the phraseology of the present day.”¹⁰ “Sensation” did not always carry pejorative implications—a letter from a distant loved one could cause a “sensation” in a household—although in some circumstances ambivalence remained. “Sensation” could easily be linked with words such as “vulgar,” “noisy,” and “popular.”

The language of sensation became ubiquitous. In his classic Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), the Scottish newspaperman Charles Mackay rewrote history as a series of delusional sensations:

In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.¹¹

Mackay’s book was almost entirely about the period before 1800, but its analysis in terms of “madness,” “excitement,” and “millions of people” is entirely characteristic of the 1840s. Vestiges, he later remembered, “excited a great sensation at the time. . . . highly praised by some, violently abused by others . . . before it finally ‘blew over’ and disappeared alike from public favour and animadversion.”¹²

People varied in their susceptibility to sensation. Working-class readers were thought to be easily affected by sensual imagery, as their brains were assumed to associate words on the page with concrete, external objects. Cheap newspapers were dangerous because they brought the overt excitement of politics, murder, and other current events into ordinary cottages and working-class homes. Genteel readers, on the other hand, could remain aloof by rising to logical abstraction. Standard medical works explained that women could be subject to intense and rapidly changing sensations, which made them incapable of connected trains of reasoning. Sensation could be a disease of civilization, more easily affecting the refined nerves of upper-class women. As one Scottish weekly said in combating Vestiges, “It would almost appear . . . that the more civilized a society becomes, the more apt are visionary notions to spring up and flourish, just as we find hysterics and nervous vapours to prevail among fine ladies, while their robust maids are exempt from any thing of the kind.”¹³ Books suited to one kind of readers might be totally inappropriate for others. Who read what, and under what circumstances, mattered intensely.

Take the experience of Samuel Richard Bosanquet, a wealthy lawyer who read Vestiges at his Welsh country estate at Dingestow Court, Monmouthshire. A cultivated man of learning who had written several books, Bosanquet read Vestiges as a sign that the world was coming to an end. His “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation:” Its Argument Examined and Exposed, a pamphlet published in two editions during 1845, railed against the “rapid circulation” and “very general approval” that the work had obtained. Bosanquet was a fervent evangelical in the Church of England, who identified the 1840s as the “last times” of apostasy that would precede Christ’s second coming. As a premillennialist, he believed that God worked through “special” or “particular” acts involving the suspension of the laws of nature.¹⁴ Vestiges was anathema because it denied special providence.

Bosanquet never doubted his ability to avoid temptation, but the serpent was poisoning the spiritual mind of the nation. Many readers, “especially the increasing class of female philosophers,” were dangerously susceptible to the promise of a book of knowledge. Like Eve, they were led by “its most honied sweetness, to the most tasteful, and to the bitterest fruit.” In Vestiges, the serpent (as in medieval images of the Edenic snake) “rears its head with human front and voice, and syren sweetness of address and invitation; while other idols exhibit their bestial foulness to only ordinary discernment.”¹⁵ The feminine was demonized by association with images of luxury, oriental corruption, and unthinking consumption.

In Bosanquet’s reading, Vestiges was a temptress whose declarations of religious orthodoxy were carefully calculated lies. The bright red binding cloth of the book in his hands was the cloak of the whore of Babylon:

We readily attribute to it all the graces of the accomplished harlot. Her song is like the syren for its melody and attractive sweetness; she is clothed in scarlet, and every kind of fancy work of dress and ornament; her step is grace, and lightness and life; h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Prologue: Devils or Angels
• Part One. Romances of Creation
• Part Two. Geographies of Reading
• Part Three. Spiritual Journeys
• Part Four. Futures of Science
• Epilogue: Lifting the Veil
• References
• Notes
• Credits
• Index