Inside the warm shop filled with customers, the bookseller nodded in the man’s direction, recognizing him as Robert Chambers, the journalist and wealthy proprietor of the publishing house he ran with his brother William, famous now for the bestselling and influential Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. Chambers did not want to be recognized; he wanted to observe. Inside the shop the tables were piled with new publications, books in calf leather or bound with cloth, books on physiognomy or anatomy, translations of Continental books on chemistry or comparative anatomy, books on diseases, as well as novels, travel books, and histories. The volumes of Lyell’s Principles of Geology were stacked here, too, he noted, still selling well alongside Barclay’s course of lectures on anatomy and George Combe’s books on phrenology. Then Chambers’s eye lit on the pile of red books on the central table, copies of a new work called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which had been anonymously published. The pile was diminishing rapidly. Only four people in the country know that he—Robert Chambers—was the book’s secret author. If he had his way, no one else would ever know.
Robert Chambers, aged around fifty.
Steel engraving by T. Brown from an oil portrait by Sir J. Wilson Gordon. Frontispiece to the twelfth edition of Vestiges.
Men and women from the upper and middle classes, medical students, liveried servants buying for wealthy men waiting in carriages outside, carried the red book to the sales desk. Chambers noticed that a few them were also carrying copies of the Examiner, a weekly reform newspaper, which had just published an enthusiastic and lengthy review of Vestiges. “In this small and unpretending volume,” the reviewer had written,
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 presupposed 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.
Vestiges was certainly “small and unpretending,” but in its arguments and propositions it was also deeply heretical. The author had kept his identity a secret for good reason.
Making every effort to look uninterested, to avoid drawing attention to himself, Chambers wondered what the men and women buying his book would make of it. He had written Vestiges for just these people. The reviewer had recognized that, noting that the anonymous author had written with style and color and passion; he was not writing for specialists—medical men or philosophers—but for the middle classes who took an interest in the world around them, in the great mysteries of nature, ordinary people who were curious enough to ask big questions. How and when did the earth begin? How has it changed? How did life start out? Now Chambers had given them answers, told them a story of the earth from its spectacular birth in a nebula fire-mist through the origins of life to the evolution and metamorphosis of new and ever more diverse species as aquatic creatures became reptiles as reptiles became birds and birds humans. To engage them, he had written it almost like a novel, almost like a tale by Walter Scott.
South Bridge, Edinburgh, ca. 1829.
W. H. Lizzars (ca. 1829)
Chambers had worked hard to keep his authorship secret; even the book’s publisher did not know who had written it. What Chambers did not yet know was the scale and range of the scandal his book would ignite: that in London the bishops and priests would soon be calling it heresy and its author an infidel, that some men of science would declare it nonsense, dismiss it as full of mistakes of fact and interpretation, that everywhere at the dinner tables of the aristocracy and the public houses of market towns people would be talking about it for years. They would talk about what man had been and what he would become, about the age of the earth and the origins of time. Chambers did not know that the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, soon to be the poet laureate, had already ordered his copy of Vestiges from his bookseller and that he would soon be publishing his complex and eclectic ideas about deep time and the origins of life and the future extinction of man, ideas gleaned from both Lyell’s Principles and Chambers’s Vestiges, in a long poem that Queen Victoria would keep by her bedside for a decade, the bestselling In Memoriam.
Chambers would have been delighted but surprised to hear that in the late months of winter, in Balmoral, Prince Albert would begin reading it aloud to the young Queen Victoria and that they would be discussing it with their royal guests among the glitter of chandeliers and silver. Nor did he know that in 1848, walking through the streets of Paris during another uprising in this most incendiary of cities, a second poet, Arthur Hugh Clough, would discuss the book and praise the revolution with the great American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, and that both would thread ideas about evolution derived from his book through their subsequent essays and poetry.
Though Vestiges was one of the greatest publishing sensations of the decade and outsold Darwin’s Origin, Chambers always publicly denied that he wrote it. It was just too dangerous to take responsibility for its authorship.
The hush and smell of bookshops had always excited Robert Chambers. In Peebles, the small Scottish market town in which he grew up, life was often brutal and aggressive; “violence held rule almost everywhere,” his brother remembered.
[Boys] were flogged and buffeted unmercifully, both at home and at school; and they in turn beat and domineered over each other according to their capacity, harried birds’ nests, pelted cats, and exercised every other species of cruelty within their power. A coarse bustling carter in Peebles, known by the facetious nickname of “Puddle Michty,” used to leave his old worn-out and much abused horses to die on the public green, and there, without incurring reprobation, the boys amused themselves by, day after day, battering the poor prostrate animals with showers of stones till life was extinct.
As a bookish child, Chambers had taken refuge in the local bookshop, where the bookseller Alexander Elder kept the family cow behind bookshelves stacked with expensively bound classics, school slates, notebooks, and reams of paper. Upstairs above the shop, Elder ran a circulating library where local residents could rent and return books. Here, books piled in front of him, the smell of warm manure and cowhide rising from below, Chambers found all the history, geography, and science that was so desperately missing from his school lessons. Sandy’s library looked out on the High Street, and Chambers later remembered seeing soldiers on the street outside, parading recruits raised for Wellington’s Peninsular Campaign. He gorged himself on words and ideas, happy to go for long hours without food rather than lose his place in his book.
Robert’s father shared his love of books, though the hours he spent in the local public house meant he did not always remember things as clearly as he once had. The Chambers family enthusiastically borrowed Gulliver’s Travels, Don Quixote, Peregrine Pickle, and Pope’s translation of the Iliad and read them aloud in the evenings after Robert’s father had played his flute. Robert Chambers could never read fast enough. He and his brother would borrow a book and read it simultaneously, lying stretched out on the floor and alternating the page turning. Robert’s father had a telescope, and he and his father read books on astronomy, trying to make out what they saw in the skies.
Chambers was an intellectual roamer, a dilettante, a natural polymath. The bookshop was a place where he wandered freely, memorized, reflected, made connections, and framed new questions. Years later, when he wrote his memoirs and reflected on who he was, he could not write enough about books. He wanted to remind his children that he had always had to struggle to get them, and that reading meant sacrifice. He wanted them to know that books gave him more pleasure than anything else, that he lived inside their covers, that they sustained him through all his frustrations and deprivations and disappointments.
He remembered with a thrill of pleasure coming across a chest of books among stacks of cot
ton wefts and meal arks (chests for storing dried food for the winter) in his attic as a young boy and finding inside a full set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His father had bought it from Alexander Elder on a whim when it had first arrived, realized that the volumes were too big for the shelves, stored them in the attic chest, and then forgotten about them. “From that time for weeks,” Chambers wrote,
all my spare time was spent beside the chest. It was a new world to me. I felt a religious thankfulness that such a convenient collection of human knowledge existed, and that here it was spread out like a well-plenished table before me. What the gift of a whole toy-shop would have been to most children, this book was to me. I plunged into it. I roamed through it like a bee. I hardly could be patient enough to read any one article, while so many others remained to be looked into. In the one on Astronomy, the constitution of the material universe was all at once revealed to me. Henceforth, I knew—what no other boy in the town dreamed of—that there were infinite numbers of worlds besides our own, which was by comparison a very insignificant one.… I pitied my companions who remained ignorant of what became to me familiar knowledge.
Familiar knowledge became secret knowledge: Chambers’s developing ideas about the birth of planets, nurtured in the dark attic by lamplight, would have been scandalous in conservative, superstitious, God-fearing Peebles.
But Robert’s secret attic treasure was suddenly gone a year later, the contents of the chest sold to pay off his father’s debts. When James Chambers’s weaving business failed as new machinery replaced the old hand looms, he was forced to sell the old house and its belongings in order to set himself up in a drapery business that would itself soon fail. Robert, his head full of wild geological and astronomical ideas, was glad to be distracted by the arrival of a troop of French prisoners of war, captured in Spain, who had been sent to the town on parole. The soldiers spent their days in a derelict once-grand house playing billiards and performing plays in a makeshift theater they built in an old ballroom. The brothers began to breed rabbits, selling them for eightpence a pair to the French prisoner-chef who cooked for the soldiers; they used the money to buy books. The soldiers taught the boys French and cookery; they performed Molière with them; back in the village on their way to church on Sundays, the boys listened to the scandal the soldiers raised in the village when they continued to perform their plays and music on the Sabbath. For the two boys and their intellectual and feckless father, the French prisoners of war were exotic and colorful. Both Robert and William Chambers, listening to the droning of the preacher in the pulpit, knew where they would rather be.
When the entire community of prisoners was suddenly moved out to Dumfriesshire, leaving an empty house full of discarded tins, books, and a broken stage set, the boys were devastated. But the soldiers that Robert’s father had befriended and lent money to had also failed to pay their substantial debts, forcing the family to move to Edinburgh, where Robert attended school and persuaded the local booksellers to allow him to sit quietly reading in back rooms in return for an errand or two. He read voraciously in the Agency Office book auction room opposite the university, talking to the booksellers about books, authors, and the book trade. It was warm and well lit and smelled of new furniture; it was as good as a reading room. His father was now running a saltwork yard in Joppa Pans, a salt panning village adjoining Portobello, and the rest of the family moved out to live there, leaving William and Robert in lodgings in Edinburgh. William was learning the book trade, living, like thousands of others around them, in genteel poverty while scratching out an existence.
The Peebles bookseller, the Encyclopaedia in the dark attic chest, the Sabbath-breaking French prisoners of war—they were all powerful influences on Robert, but there were others. An aged porter named James Alexander lived in an obscure corner of Carlton Street in Edinburgh, making a small living from mending china. “He was great in electricity,” Robert remembered excitedly, “and had once fabricated a machine for producing that fluid. His house, which resembled the den of an alchemist or magician—so full was it of all kinds of odd and unaccountable implements—was also resorted to by two young men of the name of King, one of whom was shopkeeper to a seedsman, while the other was a draper, and who were really most ingenious young men.” Here, among the machinery, electrical and chemical experiments, and engineering schemes, Robert developed his questions about astronomy, the movement of the planets, and the origins of life.
By 1818 the Chambers brothers, now eighteen and seventeen, had established their own bookstalls and then bookshops with circulating libraries on the same street in Edinburgh, Leith Walk, where they passed the time with many disaffected radicalized young men angry about privilege and the power of church and king. The Peterloo Massacre of 1819 had further enraged an already aggressively alienated underclass. The possibility of a revolutionary uprising in the streets of Edinburgh or London alarmed Robert. He was passionate about reform, but he believed it had to come about without violence. It made him think again about the power of books, journals, and magazines to inform, argue, and persuade.
By 1821 the brothers had taken their first foray into the publishing business, producing a literary journal called Kaleidoscope, hand-printed by William on an old repaired printing press and almost entirely written by Robert. Later Robert told his readers that “it was my design from the first to be the essayist of the middle class—that in which I was born, and to which I continued to belong. I therefore do not treat their manners and habits as one looking de haut en bas, which is the usual style of essayists, but as one looking round among the firesides of my friends.… Everywhere I have sought less to attain elegance or observe refinement, than to avoid that last of literary sins—dullness.”
In 1830 the air was full of talk of reform and the political implications of the proposed extension of the franchise to the middle classes. Robert, remembering the radical young men on Leith Walk and the customers who bought the penny magazines in his bookshop, knew that those lower and middle classes wanted to be educated, and that they were seeking out the kind of easily digested knowledge that he had found so seductive in the attic and in the bookshop but that was, he knew, always a struggle to afford for someone living on a tradesman’s salary. There were a few cheaply priced magazines like the Kaleidoscope on sale in Edinburgh, but most were poorly written or inconsistent in quality. The libraries and the museums of Edinburgh University were closed to people like him and the clever, intellectually curious King brothers. Those well-heeled professors were suspicious, convinced that a working man in shabby clothes, however genteel, however seemingly well educated, would cause trouble, even steal or deface precious objects and books.
But for Robert Chambers, fiery radicalism was as dangerous and backward-looking as evangelicalism. The street demonstrations in Paris and other European cities and in London in the run-up to the Reform Bill that he read about in the papers terrified him. He had written to Walter Scott in 1830 about his fears and convictions. “This fervour is as fatal to literature as the irruption of the Goths,” he lamented. “Nor do I think it near an end: it is rather at a beginning. People formerly had a maxim, which history in all ages showed to be good, that the great object of informed and civilised society was to keep the mob in check; but now the maxim is, that the government must reside in the mob.… The fiend, say I, take all the fools who are now hurrying us on to revolution and vandalism. But this way madness lies; I must to business.” Chambers had begun to believe that it was time to leave antiquarianism and historical nostalgia behind and begin to respond instead to the present by finding new ways of bringing knowledge to the people.
Robert’s publishing ambitions had taken on an increasingly political edge. He had seen how, as his family fell further and further into poverty, doors had closed against them. It made him angry. While libraries and universities and museums refused entry to the workingman, he told his fiancée, Anne Kirkpatrick, while books were too expensive to buy, while ignorance prevailed, there
could be no social change or progress. The workingman would remain no more than an animal, a slave to the factory and the shop and a slave to the men who had the monopoly on knowledge, the men of the Church.
So when William suggested to his newly married brother that they produce a serial magazine affordable to shopkeepers, drapery assistants, and insurance clerks, Robert poured all of his educational zeal into the manifesto. The aim of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal was, he wrote, to “take advantage of the universal appetite for instruction which at present exists; to supply to that appetite food of the best kind.” It was one of several such ventures, such as the Penny Magazine published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, which had been founded in London in 1826 to supply clearly explained scientific ideas for the rapidly expanding reading public; but none was as successful or as long-lived as Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. The sixteen-page magazine was designed to be collected. It carried short, colorfully written articles, many by Robert Chambers, on a range of historical, philosophical, scientific, and literary subjects, and cost just a penny. The first number sold thirty thousand copies in Scotland; the third number sold eighty thousand in bookshops around the country. It brought the Chambers brothers wealth almost overnight. “All previous hardships and experiences,” William wrote, “seemed to be but a training in strict adaptation for the course of life opened up to us in 1832.” Within a decade the circulation of the Journal made W. & R. Chambers one of the biggest publishing houses in the world.
For the brothers, it was imperative that the knowledge they were disseminating to the lower and middle classes be secular and nonpartisan. It was a point of principle with them. “It has been a matter of congratulation,” William wrote later, “that Chambers’ Journal owed nothing, in its inception or at any part of its career, to the special patronage or approval of any sect, party or individual.” But it was not easy to maintain such neutrality. As soon as the journal had this kind of circulation, the evangelicals, deeply concerned about growing radicalism and growing secularism among the urban poor, began to take an interest in its contents. Soon the interest had turned into a kind of persecution. “On all hands,” William wrote,
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