James A. Secord

This monograph is an exhaustively thorough example of "book history": as its subtitle indicates, it charts not just the content, but the circumstances of publication and especially the reading of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), arguably the most significant pre-Darwin evolutionary publication. Secord adeptly uses the Vestiges as a way of looking at the state of science in Victorian Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century. Much of the Vestiges is-- and arguably was even at the time-- bad science, a muddle of popular ideas. I enjoyed the contemporary comment that the book was "peeping at nature through a skewer-hole that fills your honest heads with such monstrous one-sided ideas, and leads to speculations without end" (qtd. on 215). Partially the book was picked up and used because of its implications for political ideas, as it had a lot to say about "progress". Its (anonymous) author, Robert Chambers, had hoped that men of science would embrace it, but when it became clear that they would not, he argued that they were too into dull particulars to embrace a grand sweeping vision such as his-- though the public wanted such sweeping visions (384). With 532 pages of content, including illustrations (and another 92 of backmatter), there's a lot more to dig into here, more than I'll ever be able to I'm sure, but these were some of the particulars that stuck out at me.… (más)

One usually looks at history either as a chronological account of a particular place or discipline, or as broad account of a specific time period. This is the sort of slightly eccentric look at a time period that does so much to make connections between what one learns in more customary histories.

Secord is not so much looking at what Vestiges proposed, nor critiquing it by current scientific information, nor creating a biography of the author. He does a little of all these, but his main purpose is look intensively at the work as a social phenomenon. He considers it as a book, published in different versions for different segments of society, he reports on the reactions of various social classes in various geographic areas, the reaction of scientists, clergy and laymen to its "atheistic" or "deist" point of view, gender perspectives, etc. For the most part, for all its detail, it is extremely readable.

In order to do this, he has done an incredible amount of research. Knowing that the social elites talked, rather than wrote about it, he has combed diaries for records of conversation. He has researched technical details and statistics of the book trade. Truly a daunting project.

Serious students of the time period, scientific and philosophical history should find it very worthy of their attention. It should also appeal to the general reader (like me) who has at least a moderate knowledge of the era and of scientific history. I certainly wouldn't recommend this as a beginning text in either field.

The book is filled with a variety of black-and-white illustrations: ledgers, title pages, portraits, caricatures and cartoons, probably at least one on every fourth page. There is an extensive bibliography and a detailed index.… (más)