by A. N. Wilson
Handbooks and periodicals of those first decades meditate upon what were the Zoo’s primary fascinations. On the one hand they provide a glimpse of the exotic. ‘In his mind’s eye, [the visitor] may track the pathless desert and sandy waste; he may climb amid the romantic solitudes, the towering peaks, and wilder crags of the Himalayan heights, and wander through the green vales of that lofty range whose lowest depths are higher than the summits of the European mountains.’4
Undoubtedly thrill was part of the appeal – ‘we are in the presence of hundreds of ferocious and wily animals; of slimy and creeping things; these restlessly parading their cages, and savagely growling their desire to escape and dart upon their mocking visitors. Those writhing upon the earth, or toad-like, crouching within some leafy hiding-hole; we dread the bare possibility of encountering the crushing coils of the upbreathing python; we think with horror upon being given over to the mercies of a tribe of chattering and malicious apes …’5 Yet it was also recognized, as it is to this day, that the proximity of other species can bring consolation to the melancholy and solace to the depressed. It was more than the jolly atmosphere and the music playing from the bandstand that visitors found cheering. ‘If you visit the gardens on a Monday – a sixpenny day – you will find crowds of honest people realizing from living forms what they had hitherto known only from picture-books, and impressing on their minds facts which no engraving or verbal description, be it ever so accurate, could convey.’6
The Zoological Society remained in principle a scientific organization, and a part of the fun, for those savouring a day’s outing at the Zoo, was the notion that it was educative. ‘The establishment of the Zoological Society forms an era in the history of the science in England, as regards the higher departments of animated nature.’7 As the clothed victors gawped at their encaged fellow creatures, and as the band played, however, it is possible that disturbing thoughts were beginning to dawn in the public mind about the nature of humanity in the scheme of things. No doubt, if you were a certain type of young woman, it gave an horrific thrill to contemplate being ‘given over to the mercies of a tribe of chattering and malicious apes’. At a deeper level of metaphysical awareness, was it not even more disturbing, as one viewed the apes’ fingers and hands, their attentive expressions, so reminiscent of the more contemplative type of clergymen, their humourless but compulsive grins, their fussy attention to their young offspring, that they were not as alien as one could wish?
Progress was the watchword of the age: advance, improvement, struggle and climb. Thackeray in his Book of Snobs had chronicled with deadly accuracy how social climbers wish to kick away the ladder from beneath their feet – how those whom financial good fortune or professional skill have advanced could bitterly resent the reminder that only a generation or two ago, the forebears of the grandee were indulging in small trade, or ploughing fields. Consider the social journeys of – to take a random sample from differing rungs of the social ladder – the Reverend Patrick Brontë (born in the meanest hovel), Herbert Spencer, the Gladstone family … hundreds of examples could be adduced. Was the thought that Our Race could similarly be found to connect with ‘lower’ species on a comparable level of collective shame? If so, was that the reason that this was the decade, the first of Victoria’s reign, when the idea took wing and became popular?
The commercial success of Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published anonymously in 1844, was both a symptom of how fascinating these matters had become to the public at large, and a cause of the growing obsession. It was a book which ‘everybody’ read. Fanny Kemble told Erasmus Darwin, ‘its conclusions are utterly revolting to me – nevertheless they may be true’ – thoughts which were echoed, more or less, by the 24,000 who bought the book. (Presumably you could multiply by five the numbers who read it.)8 fn1
The author of Vestiges was not a scientist – a fact which was noted with scorn by the scientific establishment, though they did not know who he was. (Or she: Adam Sedgwick thought the book was so bad that it might be the work of a woman.) ‘If the book be true, the labours of sober induction are in vain; religion is a lie; human law a mass of folly and a base injustice; morality is moonshine; our labours for the black people of Africa were works of madmen; and men and women are only better beasts!’10
The author of the controversial book was Robert Chambers, who was born, the son of a Peebles cotton manufacturer, on 10 July 1802. The invention of the power-loom bankrupted his father James, compelling Chambers and his brother William to strike out on their own. Robert had set up in his own business as a bookseller by the age of sixteen; William, also a bookseller, founded Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, one of the innumerable new periodicals of the age catering for the ever-burgeoning inquiring classes. In the past, scholarship, book-learning and natural history had perhaps been the activities of the few. In the nineteenth century there was a tremendous growth of autodidacticism in all classes. In those days before science departments in universities, before films and ‘natural history programmes’ on television, men and women and children could still look at the natural world about them and see. It was the great age of amateur botany – not just in the leisurely atmosphere of parsonage houses, though obviously the gentle existence of a country parson was ideal as a background for the natural historian, but in all classes of society. There were many botanical societies founded for artisans. John Horsefield recalled fixing the names of twenty-four Latin plants to his loom-post so that he could memorize them at work. At the Prestwick Botanical Society to which he belonged, men would bring botanical specimens to the pub. The president would take a specimen ‘off the table, gave it to the man on his left hand, telling him at the same time its generic and specific name; he passed it on to another, and so on round the room; and all the other specimens followed in a similar manner …’ As can be imagined, the rowdiness and noisiness of the pub often overwhelmed the men’s voices as they struggled to remember Latin names, but there were many such groups.11
A work such as Vestiges could be expected to make its appeal to a far wider circle than the scientific coteries of an earlier era. Chambers was not a professional scientist. Charles Darwin’s view was that ‘his geology strikes me as bad and his zoology far worse’.12 One of the many blunders in the book is his belief that birds were the ancestors of the duck-billed platypus and the latter of mammals. He believed in botanical fables such as the possibility of converting oats into rye. But these were mere details. What Chambers did, as a fascinated layman, was to read as much as he could of evolutionary scientific literature. He read Buffon, Laplace, Monboddo, Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck. He provided the book-buying public with an image: that all life on this planet had a common origin,13 and that life as we now observe it, and geology, had come about as a result of discernible or deducible evolutionary laws. Vestiges, as the great geologist Charles Lyell acknowledged, ‘made the English public familiar with the leading views of Lamarck on transmutation and progression, but brought no new facts or original line of argument to support these views’.14
Chambers vehemently rejected atheism, though we must presume that the chief reason he chose to publish anonymously was fear of the religious backlash against his book. ‘We advance from law to the cause of law, and ask, What is that? Whence have come all these beautiful regulations? Here science leaves us, but only to conclude, from other grounds, that there is a First Cause to which all others are secondary and ministrative …’15 Vestiges takes a broadly deist view, thinking that the ‘Almighty Deviser’ has set in place those laws which it is the job of the scientist, not the theologian, to unearth. ‘Are we to suppose the Deity adopting plans which harmonize only with the modes of procedure of the less enlightened of our race?’16
Evolutionary theory had been aired in scientific circles for at least a hundred years before this. Benoît de Maillet published posthumously in 1748 the theory that animal species transmuted into one another – the fish into birds, and so forth. Not only was suc
h a notion condemned by theology (hence de Maillet waiting until dead before publishing, and then under the pseudonym of his name spelt backwards, Telliamed) – it was also ridiculed by philosophy. Voltaire wrote that if such an idea were true, one species changing into another, why, ‘The Metamorphoses of Ovid would be the best textbook of science that had ever been written.’17 Diderot, however, and Maupertuis both put forward the view that there had once been one primeval animal and ‘Nature lengthened, shortened, transformed multiplied or obliterated some of its organs’ – according to need. Buffon began work on the kinship of asses and horses and realized that if a common equine ancestor could be found for them there was no logical reason to discount a common ancestor for men and apes.
The grandfather of Charles Darwin, Erasmus, concluded in Zoönomia or the Laws of Organic Life (1794–6) that the species were mutable, but it was left to Lamarck to posit an actual genealogical tree, a theory of evolution, based on what is now universally seen as a fallacy, namely the notion that acquired characteristics can be passed on genetically. (Lyell was right to see Chambers as a popularizer of Lamarck in general, but Vestiges does in fact reject the possibility of inheriting acquired characteristics.)18
Vestiges did not merely popularize the developments in zoology. It recognized the pre-eminence of geologists, particularly the modern pioneers of the subject from Scotland – James Hutton, John Playfair and above all Charles Lyell, whose own Principles of Geology, published between 1830 and 1833 but constantly revised and updated, really laid the foundation for the destruction of ‘creationist’ thought in Britain, America and Northern Europe. The complexities of his arguments and the depth and range of his learning forbid any simplification or summary of its conclusions. Lyell was neither a religious unbeliever nor a controversialist, but the evidence of geology convinced him that the planet Earth, and the universe, were of infinitely greater antiquity than any simple-minded reading of the Book of Genesis might suggest.
Lyell, who was landed and affluent, also belonged very definitely to the inner circle of what passed for the early Victorian scientific establishment. They partly welcomed the success of Vestiges: it cleared the ground for their own work. Another part of them was wistful, frightened by the vehemence of religious prejudice and perhaps genuinely fearful that if unbelief became widespread, as in France, it would have revolutionary consequences.
Charles Darwin had already completed in outline, by the time Vestiges was published, his own essay On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. He was, as a modern biographer writes, ‘forestalled by a book which would injure his own arguments unless he divorced himself completely from Vestiges’ style of popular progressive science’.19
Yet he wasn’t Josiah Wedgwood’s grandson for nothing, and he had noted the huge sales, both of Vestiges and of Lyell’s Geology. He judiciously asked his friend Lyell to approach his own publisher – John Murray, himself a keen amateur scientist – about the possibility of publishing a second edition of his Journal of Researches. ‘I should hope for a considerable sale,’ he added, thereby revealing that he was not completely above the notion of ‘popular science’.20
The question which the historian must answer is not so much whether any of these scientific notions were true, as why they excited so much popular interest in the middle of the 1840s. Voltaire’s joke about the Metamorphoses of Ovid being a scientific textbook if the Theory of Transmutation were true all but stopped the serious reception of ‘Telliamed’ in non-scientific reading circles in 1748. But the 1840s were different. Disraeli’s jokey references to evolution in his novels acknowledge that it was the theory by which that generation was defining itself – ‘You know, all is development. The principle is perpetually going on. First, there was nothing, then there was something; then, I forget the next. I think there were shells, then fishes; then we came, let me see, did we come next? Never mind that, we came at last.’21
The notion that this generation was different, that its achievements, its metaphysical self-understanding, marked it out from anything which had gone before, can be attributed to the change in economic circumstances brought about by the Industrial Revolution, to the sheer force of the market economy, driving men and women into cities, wrecking some lives and improving more; dazzling them with the range of its technological changes. Tennyson wrote his poem ‘Locksley Hall’ in the first year of Victoria’s reign,
When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed;
When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed …22
More than any poet before or since, Tennyson openly exposed himself to the mood of his age, mopping up its angsts and its excitements and triumphs, and transforming them into haunting lyric forms; caught up by the peculiar disturbances to be found
In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind23
In none of his poems is the identification of his own person with the preoccupations of an entire generation more marked than in In Memoriam. ‘It is rather the cry of the whole human race than mine.’24 The event which provoked the collection of lyrics was the death of his beloved friend Arthur Hallam, budding historian, friend of Gladstone, rising hope of his generation. The lyrics were written sporadically over seventeen years. When the poem was eventually published, anonymously, in 1850, lamenting
My Arthur, whom I shall not see
Till all my widowed race be run;25
it was understandable that there were those who supposed its author to be a woman. What makes the elegy so much a phenomenon of its time is the way that this one death provokes doubts about the after-life, fears that the universe itself might be a mindless machine. Tennyson has read Lyell and Vestiges and been as profoundly shaken by them as many another intelligent (though not scientifically educated) person. While he falls with his weight of cares
Upon the great world’s altar-stairs
That slope through darkness up to God,26
he is coldly aware that the Nature revealed by Chambers and Lyell is pitiless
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.’27
Men and women had watched their friends die, and their children die, for countless generations. They might not have known, in the pre-Lyell centuries, quite how many generations those were, but the apparent indifference of Nature to suffering seems to have prompted astoundingly few thinkers between, say, Lucretius and Tennyson to ask ‘Are God and Nature then at strife?’ This is really the core of nineteenth-century doubt about the Creator: that the God of Scripture and the God discernible from Nature violently diverge.28 Geology had only lately emerged as an independent discipline. It had to fight for its independence against those Biblical fundamentalists who, by counting back through the genealogies in the Old Testament to the point where ‘in the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth’, were able to date the momentous phenomenon at 4004 BC.29
All but crackpots now in the twenty-first century accept that these early to mid-nineteenth-century geologists were, if not precisely accurate in their conclusions, broadly speaking right. Independent scientific inquiry had taken the place of a blindly erroneous reading of Scripture, as the criterion for determining truth. If the jury is still out over the question of Darwin’s theory of evolution, not published until fifteen years after Vestiges, it is because we can see how quintessentially it is of its time, whereas the antiquity of the Earth, hence of human prehistory, can be debated and determined on the basis of observable, tangible phenomena – geological specimens, strata, fossils and so forth. The theory of transmutation of species would find no comparable verification test until the development of electron microscopes and the whole science of molecular biology more or less a century later.
For the historian, then, the first and immediate importance of Vestiges and the phenomenon it represented is not whether it is true, but whether it aptly reflected a generation to itself.
Robert Chambers read Lamarck, Buffon, Lyell and others to propound the notion that ‘the whole train of animated beings, from the simplest and oldest up to the highest and most recent are … to be regarded as a series of advances of the species of development’30 (his italics).
Many have noted that in the very months that Chambers was applying this notion to the phenomena of the visible world, John Henry Newman was completing An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. ‘Developments, reactions, reforms, revolutions, and changes of various kinds are mixed together in the actual history of states, as of philosophical sects, so as to make it very difficult to exhibit them in any scientific analysis.’31 Taken to its extreme, this could lead to the view that religion itself is best understood in its sociological perspective, as an expression of the aspirations of different generations. That is not, on the surface at least, the conclusion of Newman’s Essay on Development, though many would question, having accepted the premise, how any other conclusion was tenable.
Newman’s career up to 1844 had been largely absorbed with the sometimes esoteric ecclesiastical controversies buzzing in the heads of his fellow academics at Oxford. The rallying cry for the Oxford Movement, so called, had been a sermon on ‘National Apostasy’ by the saintly professor of poetry, John Keble, who, together with his conservative-minded followers, saw the policy of successive governments, Whig and Peelite, in Ireland as profoundly regrettable. The reduction of the number of Protestant bishoprics in that largely Catholic land struck the Tractarians (so called after the Tracts they wrote in defence of their High Church doctrines) as worse than heretical. A typical mouthpiece of their viewpoint was Gladstone, who in his book on Church and state argued that any true believer in Anglicanism must believe in its absolute truth. For a Parliament whose function was to defend the Church, to hand over a part of the kingdom to a schismatic erroneous sect such as the Roman Catholic Church was indeed an ‘apostasy’. Macaulay’s robust review of this book must have led Gladstone to think again on the Irish question – as we know he did, by the time of the Maynooth Grant. Gladstone, however, remained High Church, that is a believer in the view that the true Catholic Church in England was that by law established.