Before Darwin, Vestiges

Historiography

Just Before Darwin

Milton Millhauser, 1959

Victorian Sensation

James A Secord, 2000

Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation appeared anonymously in 1844. The book’s author was Robert Chambers, a publisher and philanthropist of Edinburgh. Vestiges, “alarmingly popular despite a merciless critical pounding, was regarded by the orthodox as pernicious in the very highest degree.” This is how Milton Millhauser described the 1844 explication of evolutiuon in his 1959 book. The other book about Vestiges, which I found accidentally because it mentioned Charles Bradlaugh, is James A. Secord’s Victorian Sensation, published in 2000. I was excited to read these books because I was beginning to get the impression that ideas of biological evolution were popular among regular people for several decades before Charles Darwin’s 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species. It might almost be said that Charles Darwin was merely the figure who forced the scientific establishment (represented by the Royal Society) to consider a topic they had been studiously avoiding ever since Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus published his Zoonomia in 1796!

Millhauser said the problem with Vestiges was that it was in plain English and it was inexpensive. This made it available and affordable for the masses. “Once again,” Millhauser said (referring to Erasmus Darwin?), “the public was informed, by a glib pseudo scientist without even Lamarck’s pretensions to authority, that the true Adam of the human race was a baboon” This sums up the issue nicely: it has to do with public rather than scientific understanding of humanity’s origins. It has to do with the control of scientific information by an elite class of authorities naturally drawn from the upper classes and educated at the best “public” schools. And it has to do with the inevitable demise of a biblical creation story that no educated Englishman actually took seriously, but that nearly all believed should be upheld (as Plato’s Noble Lie) for the common people, especially in lieu of any plausible alternative story that could maintain the authority of the established church.

Millhauser actually dismissed both Erasmus Darwin and Charles Lyell in an endnote, saying “they each devote to evolution only a small portion of a work dealing with some other major theme.” This was true and Vestiges deserves recognition as the first complete book on the subject to achieve wide readership. But it ignored the relationships between the ideas of Darwin and Lyell and those of Chambers. Making his case for closer study of Chambers, Millhauser identified the issue of synthesis, and especially of synthesis by amateurs. He said “An early Victorian Era layman might still feel…that he had perceived a truth that the professionals had somehow managed to ignore or even to hush up, and that this might provide the principle of unification, the frank definition of the central tendency of science, for which the world was waiting” This is an idea that has particular resonance for me, not least in the political implications such a changed understanding of the world might have had on regular people in the early 19th century.

The idea that Evolution was “in the air” is well supported: “it had recently made a considerable stir in France, with that infidel Lamarck and his party, and all the authority of Cuvier had been needed to put it down. Lyell was obliged to devote a good many pages of his Principles of Geology to repudiating it…for geology, blink the fact or gloze over it as one would, contradicted Scripture.” But the reluctance of major scientific figures doesn’t necessarily represent the feeling of all scientists, unless you subscribe to the “great man” theory and think they were all the scientists. Lyell was a knight and baronet. Cuvier was a baron. Erasmus Darwin delayed publishing his theory of evolution from 1770 to 1796, and he didn’t have the personal attachment to religion that his grandson did. It’s interesting, though, that they were all willing to go only so far.

And the eighteenth-century mentions of early ideas of evolution were swept under the rug. “Since the turn of the [19th] century…the theory has had no outstanding, serious, and determined popular apologist or representative…Among the informed few the idea is detested: a disgusting and exploded folly, kept alive only in atheistic, revolutionary France; it may also be a little feared.” Millhauser’s impressionistic style seemed to capture some interesting clues, though. There’s a relationship between popular, out-loud debate and acceptance of new ideas, even among the elite. All kinds of things may be believed by “the informed few,” but they’re not dangerous unless spoken of. Reminds me a bit of John Stuart Mill and birth control (I’ll find that surce soon!).

Vestiges was reviewed in George Jacob Holyoake’s Movement and Anti-Persecution Gazette in January 1845 and in the Reasoner in 1846, where “The compositor and former bricklayer William Chilton recognized Vestiges as an attempt to remove the radical edge from the weapons of materialism; see his “ ‘Materialism’ and the Author of the ‘Vestiges’.” But the notices were not limited to the secular or working-class press. “Francis Bowen, a philosophical conservative at war with Kant, Mill, Comte, and much besides, devoted some fifty-odd pages of his North American Review to a technical refutation of Vestiges, fortified by an exposure of its atheistic tendencies”.

Even those you might expect to support Vestiges, didn’t. “Thomas Henry Huxley begins with a tart remark that Vestiges continues to appear although exploded, and continues enthusiastically in this key”. And as always, Huxley was ambivalent about the impact on the public’s understanding of the issues. For his part, Charles Darwin "feared ridicule; as early as 1844, in a letter that spoke a little superciliously of Lamarck’s ‘absurd though clever work,’ he anticipated comparison with this inept new version of it...When he published, then, he indicated his disapproval of Vestiges in terms that contrasted markedly with his courtesy toward such minor precursors as Matthews.” But then, by the same token, he had totally ignored his most significant precursor, his grandfather. So in a sense, bad treatment by Darwin was high praise. On the other hand, “Wallace (who had once found the book stimulating to his own mind,” and who apparently wasn’t afraid to admit it, “always spoke of it with the respect due a pioneer”