we were beset with requests to give it the character of a “religious publication.” It was in vain for us to state that that was not our role; that our work was addressed to persons of all shades of thinking, religious and secular, and that we could not, without violation of our original profession, take a side with any one in particular. We only got abused, and were called names. The era of this species of persecution, for such it was, grotesque and ridiculous, extended for nearly twenty years after the commencement of the work.
The evangelicals were enormously powerful in Scotland during the reform crisis, and the pulpit denunciations worked. Robert was enraged by the campaign being waged against the Journal, but it made him more defiant. When his own vicar, the Reverend Dickson, denounced Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal from his pulpit, waving it in the air, declaiming that knowledge without God was useless, even dangerous, Robert and his wife, Anne, walked out of the church with their infant children. They never returned.
The more that evangelicals criticized the godlessness of the Journal, the more successful it became. In 1833 the brothers began to print and distribute the Journal in Ireland. The poet Allan Cunningham described the shepherds of Galloway passing copies of the magazine between them: “The shepherds, who are scattered there at the rate of one to every four miles square, read it constantly, and they circulate it this way: the first shepherd who gets it reads it, and at an understood hour places it under a stone on a certain hill-top; then shepherd the second in his own time finds it, reads it, and carries it to another hill, where it is found like Ossian’s chief under its own gray stone by shepherd the third, and so it passes on its way, scattering information over the land.”
In January 1835, Robert told his readers proudly that the weekly magazine “still penetrates into every remote nook of the country; still travels from hand to hand over pastoral wastes—the fiery cross of knowledge—conveying pictures of life, and snatches of science, and lessons of morality, where scarcely any such things were ever received before.” They reported that in one Glasgow mill, no fewer than eighty-four copies were regularly purchased by workers, that it “reaches the drawing-rooms of the most exalted persons in the country, and the libraries of the most learned; that, in the large towns, a vast proportion of the mercantile and professional persons of every rank and order are its regular purchasers … it pervades the whole of society.”
In using the phrase “the fiery cross of knowledge,” Robert Chambers was being deliberately provocative. The fiery cross, or Crann Tara, had been used by the Highland clans for centuries as a declaration of war. A small wooden cross was first dipped in the blood of a goat, then set on fire and carried from town to town. At sight of the Fiery Cross, every man capable of bearing arms, from sixteen years old to sixty, had to arm himself immediately and travel to the gathering place. Anyone who failed to appear would suffer death by sword or fire. It had been used during the Jacobite uprising in 1745; Walter Scott described its effects and importance many times in his poetry and novels. Its meaning would have been perfectly understood by all of Chambers’s Scottish readers: Robert Chambers was announcing a secular crusade and gathering the men and women of the Scottish working and middle classes to resist the persecution of the Church, to take a stand against ignorance, prejudice, and privilege. The Journal became more outspoken by the year. Robert wrote to his friend Alexander Ireland around this time: “I believe this liberal view is advancing, but we are still far from being able to fight those dogs of clergy.”
Since he had walked out of the church, Robert Chambers had made new friends among the phrenologists of Edinburgh, a fiery, articulate, reformist group of men and women who promoted and practiced this new science. Phrenologists believed that certain areas of the brain governed particular kinds of behavior; thus, by analyzing the precise shape of the head, it was possible to determine particular personality types.* The group gathered around George Combe, fourteen years older than Robert, whose book The Constitution of Man, published in 1828, had been denounced as materialist and atheist for arguing that mental qualities were determined by the size and shape of the brain and not by the soul.
George Combe and the members of the Phrenological Society of Edinburgh, which contained almost as many clever and educated women as it did men—women such as the novelist Catherine Crowe and Combe’s wife, Cecilia, daughter of the celebrated actress Sarah Siddons—met to discuss ideas. They lent Chambers recommended books, explained new ideas and theories to him, and shared his conviction that progress and reform would begin only when the people were given new knowledge. Phrenology would liberate people, Combe argued; it was a way of life. If you could persuade people to understand and live by natural physiological laws, to understand that mental functions and characteristics were controlled by different parts of the brain, the world would be a fairer, more just place; self-help could proceed on a rational basis.
Excited by the power of such “a new gospel,” Chambers became for a while a proselytizer. He published Introduction to the Sciences in 1832, a book that promoted core phrenological principles, although he was careful to avoid using the word “phrenology” itself because of its heretical associations. The way to overturn long-entrenched beliefs, he told Combe, was not to preach but to persuade. It would take time. “When we reflect,” he wrote to Combe, “that some of the forms of heathenism survived in Scotland till the close of the last century, perhaps eight hundred years after Christianity had been acknowledged to all intents and purposes, we must not fret at the slow progress that phrenology makes.”
Chambers was at first alarmed to discover that transmutation, which he had seen so powerfully rebutted by Charles Lyell in Principles of Geology, was discussed widely and enthusiastically in this new circle. Transmutation took many forms by the 1830s—Lamarckian, Geoffroyian, and hybrids of the two. Ideas circulated among medical men in London and Edinburgh, some of whom had sat in on Lamarck’s lectures in Paris. George Combe was, however, set against all such ideas. He was more uncompromisingly materialist than Chambers, but he was afraid of transmutation. It was too French, and the French were too violent. He did not want to be tarred with that particular materialist brush. He denounced the “revolutionary ruffians” in his Constitution of Man and their program of “fraud, robbery, blasphemy, and murder.”
Until the late 1830s, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal had consistently denounced transmutation as fantastic and absurd. Ignorance of the facts, Chambers wrote in an article published in the Journal in 1832, had “tempted philosophers to hazard the absurd opinion that man had his beginning as a minute animalcule, and has attained his present perfect condition from progressive improvement by reproduction.” He lamented the fact that “even so late as the year 1803, one of the greatest scholars, and ablest medical men of his day, Dr Darwin, espoused these false doctrines.” But though Chambers believed the doctrines false and absurd, they were interesting enough for him to quote from Erasmus Darwin’s poem The Temple of Nature at length. He was clearly struggling to resist Erasmus’s arguments: “The acute and anatomical knowledge of the Doctor, and his deeply sophisticated arguments, have a strong tendency to seduce the less philosophical reader into his baseless doctrines.… But views like these can never be entertained by healthy minds and it requires but little reflection to dispel such absurd theories.”
As late as 1835, when Robert was discussing transmutation in the drawing rooms of the phrenologists, he was still confident enough to declare in the Journal that Charles Lyell’s rebuttal of Lamarck in Principles of Geology was “so satisfactory as to require us to say nothing in addition” and to express renewed amazement that “some very eminent philosophers” had claimed that “man himself, Socrates, Shakespeare and Newton, were merely zoophytes in a state of high improvement and cultivation!”
By the mid-1830s, Robert Chambers had begun to change his mind about transmutation. In 1835 he started writing a treatise on phrenology, and this shaped new questions and sets of connections in his mind. He became mo
re reclusive, ordering book after book from MacLachlan, Stewart and Co., or rummaging through their shelves, newly impressed by the kind of books that he had previously been suspicious of, large-scale theories of the earth written for sizable, nonspecialist audiences, books like John Pringle Nichol’s Views of the Architecture of the Heavens, published in 1837. Chambers knew Nichol well. The two of them toured poverty-stricken Ireland together that summer, talking about the forces of conservatism, the enforced ignorance of the poor, science, progress and reform, and undertaking geological experiments. Nichol’s book, which described in vivid and colorful detail the evolution of the universe from the formation of galaxies and stars and was intended to be the first of six volumes in which Nichol would demystify “the mechanism of Nature,” had been an instant bestseller.
The number of science articles in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal increased dramatically that summer as Robert read voraciously and turned in one article after another on zoology, botany, spontaneous generation, origins of races, nations, languages, and civilizations, always searching for the laws that held all these different sciences together. Inspired by Nichol’s Architecture of the Heavens, Chambers now expanded his book on phrenology to take in the origins of time, the earth, and species, and he even attempted to predict the future progress and mutation of the human race. Now “preoccupied with speculative theories” and with the search for new explanations for the history of the earth and of species, Chambers had himself elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, which considerably expanded the circle of scientists around him.
By the late 1830s, Chambers was buying or borrowing books on earth history, zoology, botany, and geology at an extraordinary pace, reading them in his office among the thundering sounds of the printing presses in the publishing house. Then, sometime in 1842, the Chambers family suddenly moved from Edinburgh to a house in Abbey Park, on the outskirts of the coastal university town of St. Andrews. Robert seems to have suffered a kind of breakdown, brought on by overwork and the noise of printing presses. Convalescing, he returned to his manuscript with a new sense of clarity as he gathered his books around him in a study looking out to open space and sky. The move also protected him from prying eyes. At Abbey Park, his daughter recalled, he could “work at his secret with all the security of a criminal unrecognized in the midst of the police.”
Chambers destroyed all the papers and notes and letters he wrote during these years in St. Andrews, so the only evidence of what he read as he assembled Vestiges is in the book itself. He quoted more than eighty authorities to support the different parts of his case. He was certainly rereading Lyell’s Principles of Geology as he expanded his geological knowledge, which took him back to Lyell’s detailed rebuttal of Lamarck. The more medical and physiological books Chambers read for his phrenological project, the more he encountered transmutationist ideas at every turn, transmutationism either roundly rebutted as it had been by Lyell or modified to accommodate religious explanations of creation. Now he was ready to take Nichol’s brilliant first volume of Architecture of the Heavens forward in time, to tell a story that stretched from the birth of the planets to the birth and metamorphosis of species.
In 1844, his manuscript complete, Chambers and his family moved back to Edinburgh. He summoned his friend the journalist Alexander Ireland and told him he was about to publish a dangerous book and needed his help in approaching the London publisher he had chosen: John Churchill, publisher of The Lancet. “I do not think Churchill is likely to boggle,” he wrote in explaining his choice, “for publishers of that class are a little used to such things.” Ireland subsequently wrote to Churchill on June 27, 1844, offering a book on behalf of an anonymous friend. Robert’s wife, Anne, began the laborious task of copying out the manuscript so as not to give away Robert’s identity, sending the pages to Churchill in batches through July and August 1844. Churchill told Ireland he proposed publishing a thousand copies; later, fearing financial risk, they renegotiated a print run of 750 copies. The book was originally to be called The Natural History of Creation, but Chambers insisted on softening the title to Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation to protect himself from charges of blasphemy. By adding the word “vestiges,” meaning fragments or traces, the book might begin, he reasoned, to look a little like an antiquarian work and the author like an archaeologist or a classicist solving a puzzle.
By the time Vestiges reached bookshops in October 1844, a total of 150 advance copies had already been delivered to leading men of science in London, Oxford, and Cambridge, to major libraries of universities, to mechanics’ institutes, to literary and philosophical institutions, and to writers and politicians. Churchill placed advertisements for the book in newspapers and weeklies and periodicals across the religious spectrum. Only four people knew the name of the book’s author: the author’s wife, Chambers’s brother William, Alexander Ireland, and his closest friend, Robert Cox, Combe’s nephew and the editor of the Phrenological Journal. Three others were allowed into the secret later so that they could help with specific questions about science after the book was attacked: David Page, editorial assistant on Chambers’s Journal, who knew a good deal about geology; Neil Arnott, a member of the Royal Society and physician extraordinary to the queen, who could advise on general scientific issues; and the Glasgow professor of astronomy John Pringle Nichol, who would help on matters of astronomy. None of the Chambers children was told, and Robert kept all matters relating to the book in a locked drawer in his study. Years later, when his son-in-law asked him why the secret had had to be maintained for so long, Chambers “pointed to his house in which he had eleven children and then slowly added, ‘I have eleven reasons.’ ”
Chambers enjoyed the excitement and frisson of anonymity; he took pleasure in sitting at dinner tables joining in with speculation about the identity of the author. It was only two months before his name became linked to the book, but in February 1845 he was still only one of several proposed authors, the list including Richard Vyvyan, Ada Lovelace, and even the scientifically minded Prince Albert. What Robert had not anticipated was that his friends might be implicated. George Combe, Catherine Crowe, and Neil Arnott were all at one time or another in the firing line for authorship. By April 1845, Chambers was alarmed at the small but growing number of letters he received from readers who addressed him directly as the author; but, he wrote to Ireland, “they can but suspect and surmise.”
Meanwhile, Vestiges was being read across the country and was making an impact. The first edition sold out in weeks. Another thousand copies were printed and sold out within a month. The third edition of fifteen hundred sold out on the day of publication in mid-February 1845. In April, Churchill printed a further two thousand copies. Few people would have read the book without a frisson of anticipation and a thrill of transgression, for it was denounced by reviewers everywhere. The anonymous author, speaking in a voice that was warm and respectful and never sermonizing, unfolded the story of the earth’s history, supporting his claims with facts garnered from scores of authorities, offering to tie together all the new discoveries in zoology, anatomy, and geology to explain the great mysteries of time and creation. The author and his readers were embarking on a voyage of discovery together, he promised. And he told his readers again and again that they had a right to be curious about creation. Uncovering the answers to a series of perfectly innocent qustions about how life had come to be was as natural as a child’s asking questions at his mother’s knee.
Chapter by chapter the reader’s eyes were opened to the “facts” of the birth of the earth in a great fire-mist, to the “facts” of the early spinning earth, gradually emerging, bubbling and molten from a primal ocean, right up to the controversial material on the emergence of species, a chapter humbly entitled “General considerations respecting the origin of the animated tribes.” Chambers wrote in the margins of the manuscript he sent to the publisher: “The great plot comes out here.” Everything had led to this great question. How did life come to be? “W
ould it be too bold to imagine?” Erasmus Darwin had asked, 450 pages into Zoonomia, as he began to broach the issue of the origin of species. Chambers tackled the question only 152 pages into Vestiges. There was, he reassured the reader, no danger in asking the question. It was entirely legitimate and there was no blasphemy in asking it:
A candid consideration of all these circumstances can scarcely fail to introduce into our minds a somewhat different idea of organic creation from what has hitherto been generally entertained. That God created animated beings, as well as the terraqueous theatre of their being, is a fact so powerfully evinced, and so universally received, that I at once take it for granted. But in the particularity of this so highly supported idea, we surely here see cause for some re-consideration. It may now be inquired—In what way was the creation of the animated beings effected?
Throughout Vestiges the author appealed repeatedly to the reader’s knowledge, to his or her common sense, tying new discoveries from many different sciences together to make a plausible, verifiable, chronological history of the earth and species. He made concessions everywhere to religious feeling, trying again and again in rereading the manuscript in its final stages to imagine how different people might balk at the ideas, trying to find ways to smooth potentially ruffled feathers, modifying the effect of speculative claims with familiar and everyday observations. He tried to disarm at every point. “I believe my doctrines to be in the main true,” he wrote; “I believe all truth to be valuable, and its dissemination a blessing.” He even added passages to reassure a religious reader. “Every effort is made that reason and common sense would at all admit of to keep smooth with the sticklers—though I daresay I shall not succeed with the extreme ones,” Chambers wrote to Ireland. “I am happy to say that I have been able at the end to introduce some views about religion which will help greatly, I think, to keep the book on tolerable terms with the public, without compromising any important doctrine.”
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