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

de James A. Secord (Author) "IN MID-NOVEMBER 1844 Alfred Lord Tennyson opened the latest issue of the Examiner, a weekly reform newspaper, and turned to the notices of the books..." En savoir plus
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  • Cet article : Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation de James A. Secord

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"What a thing a book is!": Elizabeth Barrett's celebrated exclamation sets the tone of Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation", James A Secord's spectacular contribution to the cultural history of reading. On the one hand, this is the story of a book. Published anonymously in 1844, Vestiges, was a "sensation": a book about evolution as "readable as a romance, based on the latest findings of science". On the other hand, Secord is uncovering what he describes as "the role of reading in creating the first mass industrial society": the thousands of encounters with Vestiges that he traces through letters, diaries, newspapers, reviews, journals. Vestiges was the subject of conversation: an apparently mundane observation that Secord turns into an opportunity to consider the place of "conversation about books" in civic life, the shift in ideas about what it means to read, and talk about, books in a society coming to terms with the "outpouring of print". The topic of evolution is crucial to this discussion; in part, Victorian Sensation is an exploration of how evolution becomes and remains so pivotal in public debate as a means of addressing the forms of social and cultural conflict that characterised the Victorian era (class and gender, religion and science are the common themes). It's an era of transformation conjured through Secord's impeccable scholarship and compelling prose: Victorian Sensation is a fascinating, and remarkably readable book. --Vicky Lebeau --Ce texte provient de la Hardcover édition.


From Publishers Weekly

Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was one of the Victorian era's bestsellers. In England in the 1840s, everyone was reading it: aristocrats, students, barmaids, farmers. Those who couldn't read were having it read to them, and everyone was discussing it over tea or ale. Pre-Darwinian, the book shocked and titillated readers by suggesting that the planets and stars had their origin in a blazing fire-mist and that life on earth had evolved. University of Cambridge's Secord traces the history of science in Victorian times and translates the wacky theories in Vestiges into modern, accessible language; he also outlines a history of reading and publishing in 19th-century England. We learn, for example, that in the two decades before the publication of Vestiges, English bookmakers began experimenting with more identifiable bindings. Publishers were wary of new, untested novelists but churned out cheap volumes of nonfiction, many of them on scientific themes. Early in the century, working-class people read primarily religious works, radical political pamphlets and astrology guides, but in the 1830s they began devouring scientific treatises, boning up on phrenology and physiology. Secord also shows how a small army of writers and editors managed to profit from Vestiges--writers were paid top rates to review the book; scientific periodicals began flying off the stands after the book appeared. In addition, a plethora of outraged responses to the perceived sacrilege provide a printed microcosm of the West's longstanding battle between science and religion. Secord's book is an exemplar of nuanced, scholarly curiosity--i.e., he delivers a brief study of the phenomenon of sensation in the 19th century--and clear, understated prose. Anyone interested in English history or the histories of science or literature shouldn't miss it. Illus. throughout.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--Ce texte provient de la Hardcover édition.
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IN MID-NOVEMBER 1844 Alfred Lord Tennyson opened the latest issue of the Examiner, a weekly reform newspaper, and turned to the notices of the books. Lire la première page
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2.0étoiles sur 5 Interesting history, poor epistemology, Mars 15 2004
Par Un client
This review is from: Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Hardcover)
Unlike many of the horrible, theory-driven products of American graduate schools, Victorian Sensation is well written (despite occasional lapses into jargon) and readers can learn a lot about Victorian culture in the first half of the 19th century. Mr. Secord reads carefully and is sensitive to the nuances and social context of what he is reading. This makes for good history. He provides a finely detailed account of how Vestiges was received within different social groups and how the definition of science itself was developing during the period. I'm not sure why he is so surprised that people interpret the same information in different ways. All communication falls into an existing state of affairs. As for the concept of genius, anyone who studies any subject in depth will find that all works are built upon a foundation provided by others. There is no other way. This understanding does not diminish Darwin's achievements; it merely puts journalistic excesses into perspective. Further, hero worship encourages as many people as it discourages.

The real problem with this work lies in his epistemology, which is shoddy beyond measure. To wit: "The texts of science have no meaning apart from what readers make out of them, yet -ironically - they aspire to be a transcript of the truth of nature, needing no interpretation." Historians and scientists alike may well be confused about many of the details of how science developed, but Secord is a reader who can make little sense of science. He seems to be at home in the emotional, blustering, and over-moralized world our ancestors lived in before they learned how to evaluate the world with some degree of objectivity (full objectivity is impossible, of course). This was the problem the 19th century set itself. The fact that this rationalism was carried too far does not mean it needs to be rejected in toto. I am old enough to remember the distortions of print culture and I find those fostered by electronic media and espoused by Mr. Secord to be no improvement. All symbolic systems distort. The current obsession with cultural relativism is no more than an unconscious mimicry of habits encouraged by television, which favors rhetoric (he said-she said) over objectivity. Mr. Secord and his ilk consider themselves to be on the cutting edge of historical criticism when they really represent a new orthodoxy fostered by television. Secord is hardly the chief offender here. He retains both a readable style and knowledge of how to gather and evaluate evidence. He would be a better historian if he would rid himself of his philosophical pretensions.

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4.0étoiles sur 5 Interesting, but a little tedious, Aoû 12 2003
Par Sergio A. Salazar Lozano (Tampico, Tamaulipas Mexico) - Voir tous mes commentaires
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Hardcover)
Don't get me wrong, I liked the book, the problem is it seems to me James Secord digress too much. It's a good thing to know the context at which the events took place, but too much detail sometimes makes reading hard. Secord definitively can't be accused of superfluos, he really did a profound investigation and a great effort, though a little hard sometimes, the book still is worth reading.
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5.0étoiles sur 5 The Evolution of Evolution, Janv. 12 2002
This review is from: Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Hardcover)
As Henry Drummond noted in 1883, "This is the age of the evolution of Evolution. All thoughts that the Evolutionist works with, all theories and generalizations, have themselves evolved and are now being evolved."
This remarkable work on the Vestiges of Robert Chambers is itself a history of the evolution of evolution, describing in wonderful detail the context of a book that perfectly fits Drummond's description. Springing from eighteenth century intimations, first theorized by Lamarck, the idea of evolution finally bursts into public consciousness with Chambers' Vestiges, whose sudden popularity, if not notoriety, made it one of the first modern bestsellers in an age of technological breakthroughs in communications, transport, and printing. Laying the groundwork for laters theories, it nonetheless is too often dismissed as pseudo-scientific when, in fact, the author was aware of certain aspects of the pre-Darwinian ideas of evolution that only now are resurfacing, after being shunted aside by the Darwin tide to come. The account in this work is an engaging hybrid of cultural history mixed into the biography of Chambers' book, and is useful for the student of evolution in its account of the social relations of science, from the gentleman scientist to the grub street popularizers, and indirectly brings to life the later relationship of Huxley to Darwin. The age of Darwin in which we live has made him the sole authority and source of a science of evolution and this distorts the facts, and has obscured the reputation of this and other books. Indeed part of the confusion over selectionist theories sprang from the need for Darwin to artificially separate himself from previous ideas of evolution, by a novelty of claims, since the idea of evolution had seen its foundations laid. It is good to remember the full tale. The reality is that Vestiges was the first thunderclap of the evolutionary idea, whose correct intimations mixed with much speculative confusion were filtered out of the positivist account of Darwin, that provoked its own firestorm of reactions, for not the least reason that it was as evolutionary as the work of Chambers, and did not truly foot the bill for a theory of descent.
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5.0étoiles sur 5 A review from the Sunday Times, London
From the Sunday Times, 18 February 2001

Bigger than Darwin

VICTORIAN SENSATION: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural... Read more

Publié le Fév 18 2001

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