Abstract

This is a steamer trunk of a book! Its chapters, like so many tightly stuffed drawers with their numerous partitions, are full of all the apparel needed for a five‐hundred‐plus‐page voyage across the thirty years of Victorian history that surround the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and its anonymous author, Robert Chambers. We find storage places for observations on the new steam presses, on the reading public—both high‐ and lowbrow—on phrenology, on Scottish science and the Free Church movement, on science in the great urban centers of England, on Von Baerian development, on a multitude of reviews, letters, personal journals, and salon gossip, on the contrasting styles of classical gentlemanly and the nouveau commercial science of industrial England, on the career of Chambers and many of his associates, and much more. A list of such static cubbyholes, however, fails to do justice to the unconventional and careful packing by the book's author, James Secord. More revealing is the hanging compartment of this steamer trunk, which meticulously folds the larger vestments against the pullout drawers. Here one finds the central themes that should concern all historians of science. These pertain to the varied recipients as well as the producers of science, publishers and illustrators as well as the technologies of elite and mass production, the nature of professional and amateur science at midcentury, and the clash between various ideologies, theologies, and politics as they bear on all of the above.With this extraordinary marshaling of historical material, backed by years of intensive sleuthing and broad reading, Secord dares to provide a near‐total history of and revision of a traditional minor affair in the history of science. He states one of his important goals at the outset in the form of a challenge: “What once made sense as the ‘Darwinian Revolution’ must be cast as an episode in the industrialization of communication and transformation of reading audiences” . Although the book is not focused on this challenge till the end of the last chapter and epilogue, Secord's endgame becomes clear when he revisits the question about the contrasting style, production, and reception of the Vestiges and the Origin of Species. He finishes with the provocative conclusion that “the Origin was important in resolving a crisis, not in creating one” . By this Secord means that the Origin forged a new alignment of professional and entrepreneurial biologists and the reading public around a new, often misunderstood developmental hypothesis; so “Darwinism” becomes “the science of the future” . It strikes me that the author's conclusions belie his initial claim. Without question Chambers and the Vestiges must now rank as major indicators and an episode of great importance in early Victorian culture. To me, however, Darwin and the Origin in its past, present, and future contexts—pace modern contextualists—still make sense as a broader, contentious episode known as “the Darwinian Revolution.”I profited particularly from Secord's discussions about the revisions and the target audiences of various editions of the Vestiges, his evidence that many professional scientists grew confident of Chambers's alleged authorship, and his demonstration that the evangelical Free Church in Scotland enabled a shift by the 1840s of the historical sciences from Edinburgh to the English urban centers. “From the Chamberses' perspective, the ‘Athens of the North’ had degenerated into a provincial backwater ruled by Calvinist fanatics” . My understanding of the history of science has been permanently altered by Secord's extended attention to communications and the reading public. I would have liked more reflection on the contemporaneous scientific and cultural scene in Germany and a deeper discussion of Herbert Spencer, but you cannot cram everything into a steamer trunk. This book is exhaustively illustrated, broadly researched, and well written. It contains a fine bibliography and index. I strongly recommend Victorian Sensation to anyone concerned about the twin processes of representation and communication in the history of science and for all interested in Victorian cultural history