Secord 2000

Secord, James A. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Overview

• thesis:
• methodology:
  • archive:
  • specific period covered:
• evidence/argument:
• relevance/stakes:

Notes

Prologue

• [Epigraph] "What a thing a book is! what power it has! It is a devil or an angel for power,- if a real, living book." - Elizabeth Barrett to Mary Russell Mitford, 1844
• 1: Vestiges, published in 1844, was more controversial than any other philosophical or scientific work of its time. In a hugely ambitious synthesis, it combined astronomy, geology, physiology, psychology, anthropology, and theology in a general theory of creation. It suggested that the planets had originated in a blazing Fire-mist, that life could be created in the laboratory, that humans had evolved from apes. Most intriguing of all, Vestiges was anonymous [written by Robert Chambers, brother of William Chambers, covered in Fyfe 2012]
• 2: To my knowledge, it offers the most comprehensive analysis of the reading of any book other than the Bible ever undertaken.
• How did evolution gain this pivotal role in the public arena? The answer turns out to have little to do with Darwinian biology or Big Bang astronomy. Instead, the critical period is the first half of the nineteenth century, and the turning point is the response of readers to Vestiges. The decades before its publication in the mid-1840s had witnessed the greatest transformation in human communication since the Renaissance. Mechanized presses, machine-made paper, railway distribution, improved education, and the penny post played a major part in opening the floodgates to a vastly increased reading public. Only now, with the advent of electronic communication, are we undergoing a period of equal change.
• 3: The remarkable story of Vestiges can be recovered through new approaches to reading and communication that are revolutionizing our interpretation of many aspects of the past. Reading has often been seen as a profoundly private experience, but it is better understood as comprehending all the diverse ways that books and other forms of printed works are appropriated and used. Taken in this sense, a history of reading becomes a study of cultural formation in action.
  • Cross ref with Sherman "book use"
• My strategy will be to follow a single work in all its uses and manifestations - in conversation, solitude, authorship, learned debate, religious controversy, civic politics, and the making of knowledge. We can then begin to understand the role of the printed word in forging new senses of identity in the industrial age. Rather unexpectedly, tracking a work like Vestiges proves to be especially revealing, for the handful of scientific books that became sensations have left more identifiable traces than comparable works of fiction, history, and poetry.... Because of this, a widely read scientific work is a good "cultural tracer"
  • compare with Hofmeyr & Burton 2014 - book as contrast agent
• 4: In recent years historical and literary studies have turned from the analysis of disembodied ideas toward an understanding of practices.
• 5: Paradoxically, though, the study of reading is fragmented into a dozen different academic specialities, from economic analyses of the publishing industry to critical theories of reception and reader response. The controversy over Vestiges offers an opportunity to bring these approaches together, not least because the author - the dominant figure in almost all literary and intellectual history - was hidden for nearly forty years.
  • look up: Jonathan Rose, "Rereading the English Common reader," (1992) "How Historians Study Reader response: Or, what did Jo think of Bleak House?" (1995)

Ch 1

• 11 books as events that are constituted in gossip, rumor, reviews, etc
• 15 l/u Mary Smith’s autobiography
• 23 how the text’s anonymity makes it an interesting study in the reception of a work without being able to collapse it into the easy formulation of "the anonymous work of RW Chambers," the conceptual underpinnings of that formation
• 33 good little potted history of technological and policy developments in early c19 showing the increase in cheap printing

Ch 2

• 43 impact of solitary scientists, "sons of genius" in Davy’s phrase, on ideas of individual romantic authorship in 2nd quarter C19
• 46 trend for cheap editions of history, biography and science being pub from 1825 led by Constable in Edinburgh— again establishing precedent for collected novels?

Epilogue

• 515: Every act of reading is an act of forgetting; the experience of reading is a palimpsest, in which each text partially covers those that came before.
• 516: The problem is not that we take meanings from the Origin than the Victorians could never have imagined. Like all readers, we are free to make what we can out of books in the context of our own interpretive communities.... [517] As I have come to realize, the problem is more fundamental, involving the way that relations between texts, books, authors, and readers are dealt with in historical narratives. Take a simple example: it should be obvious by now that [518] the statement "Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859" is false. Authors are not publishers, texts are not books, and books are not the interpretive property of authors. Yet it is hard to avoid speaking as if all these things were true. By default "Darwin" functions as the basis for determining the meaning of a work that remains resolutely "his." Such statements define the terms on which concepts such as "the Darwinian Revolution" are based. Like all forms of hero-worship, this celebration of the author undermines possibilities for individual action, for none of us can be Darwin, at least in the terms that the myth provides. It sets an unobtainable ideal - the genius revealing great discoveries - as the model of what a scientist should be. It obliterates decades of labor by teachers, theologians, technicians, printers, editors, and other researchers, whose work has made evolutionary debate so significant during the past two centuries.
• 518: This book has been an experiment in a different kind of history. It has explored the introduction of an evolutionary account of nature into public debate in order t see what happens when a major historical episode is approached from the perspective of reading.... The tools I have employed are ready to hand in the writings of literary critics, cultural historians, and historians of the book. They suggest that notions of a "text" should be expanded.... They stress that all texts are in the material form of a work, whether that be a published work, a periodical review, or an oil painting. Third, they show that material form is integral to the meaning of the work. Academics are so used to standard editions, microfilm, and on-line texts that they forget the central importance of format, price, paper, and typography in determining the audience for, and interpretation of, words and images. And finally, meaning is understood as the product of reading, undertaken in a context of struggles for authority over interpretation.
• 519: The sheer volume of sources for such a study is daunting, and anyone who has ventured beyond the familiar canon of Victorian authors has experienced the sense of being engulfed in a cacophony of conflicting voices. Attempts to bring order out of this seeming chaos goes back to the origins of Victorian studies. The early literature tended to look for unity in dominant worldviews and ideologies. In 1957 Walter Houghton's Victorian Frame of Mind identified a way of thinking, a unitary temper, as a way of understanding the period. In the following decades Robert Young and others argued that religious, social, and scientific ideas were brought together in an ideological "common context." This [520] analysis, which considered scientific ideas as forms of political and social representation, has as its centerpiece the demonstration that the discovery of natural selection had been informed by an ideology of Malthusian competitive capitalism. This was controversial at the time ,but in retrospect this agenda can be seen to have been working within parameters set by the history of ideas and postwar evolutionary theory. As one commentator has noted, "only after biologists legitimated Darwin did historians rush to study him."... Like notions of a "Victorian world picture," the "common context" turned out to be a nostalgic invocation of a predisciplinary past in which everyone spoke the same language. Instead, historians have revealed a society riven by controversy.
• 521: In the humanities more generally, a critical emphasis on fragmentation and interpretative freedom has sometimes slipped into a celebration of Victorian values of liberal pluralism.... No matter how strong their emphasis on "social explanation" or "context," biographies keep the individual at the center of readers' understanding.
• From very different perspectives, much of the cultural and media studies literature has produced a parallel result: accounts of audience response illustrate diversity, but little else. All readings of a work become equally plausible in all circumstances.
  • Critique of Poovey Making of a Social Body in Gagnier, "Methodology and the New Historicism," JVC 1999
• This book has sought to escape these constricting frameworks. There are signs that older forms of intellectual and literary history are being recast as aspects of the history of communication.... What we have not had for the modern period is a full-length picture of how a substantial range of contemporary readers made meaning from a single work. This is what I have attempted to provide.
• 522: It is precisely when readings do not reinforce existing attitudes that they can change questions, upset the boundaries of disciplines, and confuse the conventions of genre. It is then that they can transform the practices of everyday life in a society and enter into wider processes of historical change.
• 523: The industrialization of print culture has often been given a key role in these developments, for printing by machine is associated with the production of stable, permanent objects, which can serve as repositories of fixed meaning. The power of print lies in the assumption of its fixity. Although I have argued for the centrality of the early and mid-C19 within the history of print, the explanation cannot rely primarily on specific technical innovations. In fact, mechanization initially produced a crisis of stability, as reading, authorship, printing, and publishing all came under close public scrutiny as part of the debate about the machine. Groups like the SDUK found "diffusing" uniform knowledge in print proved almost impossible: no one could agree on who would ensure uniformity, what useful knowledge was, who should have access to it, or how reading should take place. attempts to create a "popular science" or "literature for the people" failed to achieve consensus. Books were less trusted to be what they claimed to be, and more open to alternative meanings, than at any time since the civil wars of the seventeenth century.... The industrial revolution in communication resulted as much from changes in the forms of public debate as it was the consequence of technological innovation.
  • against technological determinism as with Fyfe 2012
• 525: The dismissive use of the term "popular," as it stabilized in the late C19 and 20, was designed to render readers as invisible members of a mass audience. Just because books and other printed materials became factory produced commodities, however, does not mean that readers agreed with what they found in them. Such a claim is in any event meaningless, as books are not checklists of messages against which responses can be compared. The mass-communications industry never created a passive, homogeneous audience: it stereotyped books and newspapers, not readers. The power of scientists to dictate views on wider issues was (and remains) severely limited both by the institutions of the mass media and by the proliferation of alternative points of view. Even as the production of print became standardized, interpretation remained bound by local circumstance. Processes of national integration - like current trends toward globalization - enhanced awareness of difference.
• 529: Controversy about the origin of the universe had erupted through the work of creating a progressive past for an industrial, imperial society. The Victorians read science in general, and Vestiges in particular, as part of their search for narratives of origins - to make sense of individual and collective experience. they read to understand the seemingly infinite prospects for the future revealed by science - to wonder at new discoveries, new lands, new inventions, new forms of human relations. They erased new stories or remembered them in new ways.
• 531: In Memoriam's most significant incorporation of Vestiges is through the address to the reader in the final verses. It is the reader, addressed as the groom ,who is to be married, and the poet's sister is hte bride. During the ceremony the address shifts briefly to the second-person plural, as the vows "have made you one"; thereafter the couple are spoken of in the third person ("we wish them store of happy days"). The reader observes the consummation of this cosmic marriage from outside and remains, simultaneously, a partner within it. By participating in this "thy marriage day," the reader of In Memoriam is invited to join in the forward advance of evolution. As in Vestiges, the act of reading thus becomes part of the progress toward "the crowning race": "Of those that, eye to eye, shall look / On knowledge; under whose command / Is Earth and Earth's, and in their hand / Is Nature like an open book..." This is a biblical promise, recalling the potential for human perception in the garden of Eden. As Vestiges had said, the reader is to become that "nobler type of humanity, which shall...realize some of the dreams of the purest spirits of the present race." In the future, the poem predicts, reading will be the model [532] for pure understanding: mastery over creation will be transcendent literacy. When nature can be read like a book, it will need no interpretation. The final verse looks to the union of knowledge and spiritual fulfillment in the reader who sees direct and whole.