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Books have biographies. Like people, books have lives that can be told and stories that can be recounted. James Secord's Victorian Sensation is an extraordinary example of a new genre of scholarship that might appropriately be dubbed the biblio-biography. It is the story of the writing, publishing, circulating, and reading of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, first published anonymously in 1844 but later revealed as the child of the Edinburgh publisher Robert Chambers. An imposing cosmological epic conceived on a grand scale, the book created a sensation at the time.
Embraced by some, vilified by others, it at once bemused, infuriated, consoled, and revolted readers in its bold portrayal of the drama of evolution and its popular synthesis of everything from astronomy to zoology. One thought it a "priceless treasure," another dismissed it as materialist "pigology." Some found it manly; others were sure they could detect a womanly hand behind its anonymity. Some thought it daring; still others found it melancholic. And while the young Thomas Archer Hirst—who would later become a prominent mathematician—found it laid out in a "masterly" fashion, Thomas Henry Huxley abominated it and characteristically sniped that it was nothing but a "weed," a "lumber-room of second-hand scientific furniture," and "a broth of a book." Indeed, writers outdid one another in the metaphors they exploited to stage-manage the text for readers. The book's striking red binding prompted one to "attribute to it all the graces of an accomplished harlot." Its continuing anonymity drew from another the exclamation: "Unhappy foundling! Tied to every man's knocker, and taken in by nobody; thou shouldst go to Ireland!" To yet another the book was an illicit marriage between gross credulity and rank infidelity.
But all this is to anticipate. Before readers can react to a book, they have to get it into their hands. Writers, publishers, printers, binders, shippers, sellers, and readers are netted together in a complex web of interchange, a tangled nexus that lies hidden behind the book that every reviewer—including this one—sits down to read. As Secord observes, "the most abstract ideas about nature should be approached first and foremost as material objects of commerce and situated in specific settings for reading." Accordingly, the story of Vestiges is placed firmly in the context of the history of the book as a commodity that is constructed, advertised, circulated, and paraded in a variety of ways. The "great sensation" that it caused was crucially dependent on developments in print technology, systems of mass distribution, and other innovations in a rapidly industrializing Victorian Britain.
Production then, is Secord's point of departure. And here we are treated to an exquisite elucidation of the revolution in the publishing industry at a time when steam presses, railway bookstalls, and telegraph wires all burst on the scene. These, and a dozen other technological breakthroughs like them, created the very possibility of a book becoming a sensation precisely because they created the possibility of a reading public. Books, magazines, tracts, pamphlets, and papers of all shapes and sizes tumbled from the presses. New editions could quickly be printed. And the culture of reviewing was established. In these circumstances the market for knowledge rapidly expanded. Print and progress reinforced one another. And all the more so as ever cheaper editions were made available. With such a system in place, the conditions were right for the mushrooming of works surveying the state of natural knowledge, and for publishers like W. & R. Chambers in Edinburgh to meet the hunger by printing schoolbooks, encyclopedias, and other improving texts.
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