“This world was once a fluid haze of light,
Till towards the centre set the starry tides,
And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast
The planets: then the monster, then the man;
Tattooed or wooded, winter-clad in skins,
Raw from the prime, and crushing down his mate;
As yet we find in barbarous isles, and have
Among the lowest.”
–Tennyson, The Princess (1847)
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In the 1840s, British literature was on the cusp of a golden age. Tennyson had published “The Lady of Shalott,” “Ulysses,” and “Break, Break, Break” in the collection Poems, while Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” and “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” appeared in Dramatic Lyrics. The novel was emerging as the dominant literary form, and the British were its masters: the Brontë sisters were writing Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, and William Makepeace Thackeray—in whose work the prehistoric Megatherium would appear with frequency—told of The Luck of Barry Lyndon. Charles Dickens, who was taking “unspeakable interest and pleasure in natural history,” published The Old Curiosity Shop, A Christmas Carol, and Dombey and Son, where a “great earthquake” churned the earth and exposed the rocks and soils and “fragments” of ages past.
And in the weekly press, the Illustrated London News opened its doors, while Henry Mayhew founded the satirical magazine Punch. All were available to read at the new London Library, which Thomas Carlyle, whose lectures on the heroic were shaping the “great man” theory of history, had helped to found as a refuge from the cramped and damp conditions at the British Museum. There was also a thriving readership for popular science. Yet rather than geology, to which Charles Lyell and Gideon Mantell had now published popular and successful introductions, it was often the “science” of phrenology that commanded the greater share of public attention.
Put simply, phrenology was the means of inferring a person’s intelligence and character from the size and shape of the skull. It was the invention of Franz Joseph Gall, a German anatomist who believed that the brain was the aggregate of multiple organs, all of which had precise locations and specific functions; the size of those organs, which phrenologists could assess by applying calipers to the cranium, then determined the strength of that person’s mental faculties. Among the twenty-seven different functions that Gall identified were “the gift of music,” “comparative sagacity,” and “educability.” The last of these he defined as “the faculty of being instructed by means of external objects,” and he claimed it was strongest in people who had a “prominent and perpendicular” forehead.
Combe’s great advantage was in promoting a scientific discipline in which ordinary people could participate.
The leading phrenologist in Britain was George Combe, the son of an Edinburgh brewer and one of thirteen children who had grown up in an atmosphere of stultifying Calvinism. Bored witless by sermons on the Sabbath and quickly estranged from his devout family, Combe was a conscious rebel against the religious strictures that, in his view, inhibited creativity. From an early age, therefore, he had set himself “to write some useful book on human nature” and there was no doubt—at least in his own mind—that he would achieve greatness in doing so: “A desire of fame,” he noted in his diary, “may be one mark of a mind that deserves it.” Combe’s damascene moment occurred in 1816, when Gall’s former assistant, the physician Johann Spurzheim, came to Scotland to defend phrenology’s honor against attacks in the Edinburgh papers. On listening to Spurzheim and witnessing his demonstrations, Combe became convinced that this new science could unlock the secrets of the soul.
Combe decanted his views on phrenology into The Constitution of Man, which first appeared in print in 1828. Here, he promised to illuminate the relationship between the laws of nature and “a theory of [the human] Mind,” all with a view “to the improvement of education, and the regulation of individual conduct”; in doing so, he cast himself as the heir not of medical men, but of moral philosophers such as Francis Hutcheson and Dugald Stewart. Although the Constitution flopped at first, selling only a few hundred copies, it became the bible of the science when an expanded, subsidized edition came out in 1832.
By then, “craniological mania [had] spread like a plague… possess[ing] every gradation of society from the kitchen to the gavel.” Armies of phrenological lecturers, seeking quick money from the gullible, now set forth into the shires on errands of unashamed quackery. At the Mechanics’ Institute in Banbury the Reverend Dr. Eden, who had “given hundreds of Analyses and Sketches of the Inhabitants of the Principal Towns,” promised to demonstrate “the Physiology of the Brain and other leading principles of Phrenology [and] its harmony with Sacred Scriptures.” In Leicester a handbill promoted the services of Dr. Bushea, who between the hours of eleven and five o’clock and then again between seven and ten could provide answers to the all-important questions of the age: “Are we about to marry?” “Have we children?” “Do we desire to know the true Characters of Clerks, Shopmen, or Domestic Servants?”
With the 1836 edition of the Constitution selling more than 80,000 copies, Combe was the great champion of popular science. One magazine described phrenology as a “species of intellectual mushroom,” while the Spectator wagered its readers that “if in a manufacturing district you meet with an artisan whose sagacious conversation and tidy appearance convince you that he is one of the more favorite specimens of his class, enter his house, and it is ten to one but you find COMBE’s Constitution of Man .”
Besides tapping into the prevailing Victorian spirit of “progress” and self-improvement, Combe’s great advantage was in promoting a scientific discipline in which ordinary people could participate. To engage properly in geology, for instance, a person required the time and money for fieldwork. Roderick Murchison had just announced the discovery of the Permian system of rocks that was formed before the Triassic period, but this work had obliged him “to invade Russia” and explore the Urals with the support of the tsarist regime; accordingly, he had named the new system after the Russian region of Perm.
In a similar vein, any aspiring zoologist might require access to the exotic specimens which Darwin procured in South America, or which Richard Owen received from the outposts of the British Empire. Conversely, anyone could be a phrenologist so long as they could afford a copy of the Constitution and a pair of calipers, and so it brought scientific inquiry into the home in a way that zoology never could. This did not sit well with the patrician guardians of science. Although some organizations, such as the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, had been promoting cheaper copies of “instructive” books for years, they thought there was real danger in allowing the wider population to consume such literature without appropriate guidance.
Indeed, with Robert Owen and George Holyoake preaching a secular gospel to Chartists and socialists, the advance of infidelity among the lower orders was a source of growing anxiety: “If he chances to have any religion,” observed Friedrich Engels of the British worker, “he has it only in name, not even in theory. Practically he lives for this world, and…among the masses there prevails almost universally a total indifference to religion.”
Combe’s critics had further problems with the religious implications of phrenology. This was because, by ascribing moral and emotional qualities to anatomical features of the human skull, the Constitution was flirting with materialism. This was the belief that physical matter, such as atoms within the human body, had an energy of its own and did not require activation or direction by the Lord.
But if removing the divine from the physical world was sacrilegious in itself, there was also a disturbing political analogy: if the lower orders of British society were like physical matter and possessed an inherent agency, this was an implicit threat to the station of the ruling classes and to a social order that many assumed to have been divinely organized. All this meant that many reactions to the Constitution were brimming with invective which mixed the religious with the political. One of Combe’s opponents sought to measure phrenology against “the word of God” and found it wanting.
His pamphlet, which concluded that phrenology was “antichrist and injurious to individuals and families,” featured on its frontispiece a burning skull and the warning from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians that “the fire shall try every man’s work.” On another occasion, the mere sight of the Constitution sent a lady into a fit: “She threw it down as if it had been a serpent, and exclaimed—’Oh,…how can you print that abominable book?’”
By creating this marketplace for controversial science, Combe and the phrenologists had ploughed a furrow for others, and especially for the author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a book which appeared in late 1844, shrouded in mystery. Published anonymously, and with a title harking back to James Hutton’s aphorism about the history of the Earth having “no beginning” and “no prospect of an end,” the Vestiges described a world which had coalesced from the gas and dust of stellar explosions, and where species of animal had emerged, died out, and changed in response to the demands of their environment.
Of course, neither idea was born new in the Vestiges: Cuvier had long since established the soundness of extinction, while theories of “transmutation” had circulated—albeit under contempt—for decades. The Vestiges, however, put them together in a coherent history of the world; moreover, its author rejected the book of Genesis entirely, condemning “ideas about the organic creation [that] appear only as a mistaken inference from the [scriptural] text.” In his view, any schemes which put faith in that book belonged to “a time when man’s ignorance prevented him from drawing…a just conclusion.”
Even more controversially, the author of the Vestiges suggested that “the Divine Author,” whom he conceded was present at the original creation, had not intervened subsequently to bring about changes in the world. “How can we suppose that the august Being who brought all these countless worlds into form,” he asked, “was to interfere personally and specially on every occasion when a new shell-fish or reptile was to be ushered into existence…?”
As we have seen, this thought had occurred to Charles Darwin, but he was keeping it to himself, safe in his notebooks. The author of the Vestiges, however, would state it plainly: the notion of divine intervention recurring throughout history was “too ridiculous to be for a moment entertained,” mostly because it undermined any deity’s pretense to omniscience. After all, if the Divine Author had made mistakes which demanded correction, would this not “greatly detract from his foresight” and “lower him towards the level of our own humble intellects”? It would be “the narrowest of all views of the Deity,” the author considered, to expect the Lord to act “constantly in particular ways for particular occasions”; the truly sacred had no business with the minutiae of the profane.
There was no question that dinosaurs and other fossil reptiles had informed the author’s views of the world and its history. In discussing the “era of the oolite”—that is, the limestone of southern England—the author referred to the “huge saurian carnivora…[who] plied…their destructive vocation” in the seas of past ages; on land there were megalosaurs and the Iguanodon, “a creature of the character of the iguana of the Ganges, but reaching a hundred feet in length”; and in the ancient air flew “at least six species of the flying saurian, the pterodactyle.”
Beyond recounting the discoveries of British palaeontologists, the author also evoked Lamarck and Grant in suggesting that the dinosaurs were well suited to their time and place: “The huge saurians,” he wrote, “appear to have been precisely adapted to the low muddy coasts and sea margins of the time when they flourished.” But what time was that? The author does not mention dinosaurs until almost one hundred pages into the Vestiges and, before that, the book teems with astronomical speculations, accounts of the “commencement of organic life” from which all other life had flourished, and descriptions of prehistoric corals, sandstones, and carboniferous formations. So how old was the Earth? And how wrong was biblical history?
In one of the great studies of any single book, the historian James Secord has dissected the “Victorian sensation” that the Vestiges became. First there was a clever marketing campaign. On a scale unusual for the time, and in addition to taking out dozens of advertisements, the publisher John Churchill distributed 150 free copies—fully one-fifth of the initial print run—to newspapers of all political persuasions, intellectual journals, libraries, and leading naturalists, thereby guaranteeing the attention of the men who shaped public opinion. This did not always procure the desired reviews, and many prestigious journals did not notice the Vestiges, but commercial success followed all the same.
October 1844’s first edition of 750 copies sold out almost immediately, as did December’s second edition of 1,000; by January 1846, three more editions and a supplementary “sequel” had appeared, with readers snapping up all 6,500 copies at the retail price of 7s 6d. Besides the simple volume of business, it was the quality of its readership which set apart the Vestiges, which was “being extensively read in the highest circles.” The poet Tennyson professed himself “quite excited” by the book, while Benjamin Disraeli thought it was “convulsing the world” and causing “the greatest sensation & confusion.” And as she sat on a sofa, a table and lamp beside her, Queen Victoria listened as Prince Albert read the Vestiges aloud.
For Chambers…anonymity remained a sanctuary, a defense against the worst of the allegations that attended the profession of heresy.
Not everyone liked what they read. The Bridgewater Treatise author William Whewell thought the Vestiges was “unscrupulous and false” and that it appealed only to ignorant readers who had “no power or habit of judging scientific truth”; the geologist George Featherstonehaugh, who had once bought fossils from Mary Anning, regarded the book as “the signal of the Revolt against the Church.” Another critic damned the Vestiges as the despicable consequence of “unwashed Radicals” having intruded upon national life since the passage of the Great Reform Act.
And in a furious essay for the Edinburgh Review, one of the longest ever published in the journal, Adam Sedgwick ranted against an author who told readers that “their Bible is a fable when it teaches them that they were made in the image of God [and] that they are the children of apes and the breeders of monsters.” The Vestiges, he concluded, represented “the progression and development of a rank, unbending, and degrading materialism.” For all the freethinking radicals who welcomed its daring vision, the men whom Secord calls the “clerical magistrates of Nature” attacked the impiety that the author had embedded within the Vestiges. But the author did not mind. In fact, he relished the controversy: in a later edition he noted that even if “obloquy has been poured upon the nameless author from a score of sources,” the Vestiges had provoked “professing adversaries [to] write books in imitation of his.” It was flattery of sorts.
But who was the author? Publishing anonymously or under a pseudonym was, of course, quite common for the time, even for successful authors. But unlike Charlotte Brontë, who had quickly revealed herself as “the unknown power whose books ha[d] set all London talking,” the author of the Vestiges was truly a secret. Thomas Choate Savill, who operated one of London’s largest printing shops near Charing Cross, had no idea whose words were going through his press. Nor did the publisher John Churchill, for the Vestiges had gone from the author’s mind to the bookshelf in a manner worthy of the most intricate espionage.
First, the author wrote each section of the Vestiges by hand; then, lest anybody down the line recognize his writing, his wife copied each word of the manuscript onto fresh pages. Now, an envoy intervened: the Manchester-based journalist Alexander Ireland took each section of the book from the author’s wife to the publisher, Churchill; thereafter, when each page went through the press, Savill delivered the proofs not to the author but to Ireland, who conveyed them to the author. Beyond the author’s wife, brother, lawyer, and envoy, nobody knew the truth about his identity.
Trying to divine the authorship of the Vestiges became one of the great parlor games of the 1840s and, for Gideon Mantell, it was because of its anonymity that the book became so controversial: “A little volume of 390 pages,” he wrote to a friend, “has made a great sensation, chiefly I believe because the author cannot be detected.” But who was it? There were rumors at Cambridge parties that it was, in fact, Mantell; in London, there were whispers about Richard Vyvyan, an MP whose writings on natural history had earned him fellowship of the Royal Society.
Others thought that it might have been George Combe’s second great work, while another theory held that all the book’s moral failings were explicable by female authorship: Harriet Martineau and the mathematician Ada Lovelace were among the suspects. Others still were moved to deny that the book was theirs. Writing to his cousin, Charles Darwin described the Vestiges as “that strange unphilosophical, but capitally-written book…[that] has made more talk than any other of late.” As for rumors that he was the author, Darwin was “much flattered & unflattered,” and he read Sedgwick’s review of the Vestiges—where his old Cambridge mentor had argued fiercely against “the mutability of species”—with “fear & trembling.”
As the guessing continued, the suspicions of Britain’s more perceptive commentators fell upon the Edinburgh-based publisher Robert Chambers. The author of dozens of books on Scottish history and the editor of the Edinburgh Journal, Chambers had also dabbled in phrenology and geology, and by the spring of 1845 sharper eyes had noticed too many similarities between the Vestiges and his other works for coincidence alone to explain. With his authorship becoming an open secret among the cognoscenti, the conservative critics of the Vestiges at last found an object for their fury.
At the 1847 meeting of the British Association, where Chambers presented a paper on “raised beaches” and “ancient sea-margins,” the old guard of Buckland, Murchison, and Lyell made sure that he was “roughly handled”; it seems that Lyell did so “purposely that C[hambers] might see that reasonings in the style of the author of the Vestiges would not be tolerated among scientific men.” The next year, even the rumor of association with the Vestiges was enough to scupper Chambers’s nomination for lord provost of Edinburgh. It was on account of such reactions—of the enduring hostility to works which denied the role of God in the natural world—that Chambers never once confessed publicly to writing the Vestiges, not even in his posthumous memoir.
It was a book which had embraced and promoted ideas that remained heretical and, as a man with responsibilities, he could not risk the ruin that would follow acknowledgement. Later asked by his son-in-law why he continued to deny title to his great work, he pointed to his house and eleven children and said simply, “I have eleven reasons.” For Chambers as for other radical authors of the day, anonymity remained a sanctuary, a defense against the worst of the allegations that attended the profession of heresy. The case of one young academic at Oxford, who in 1849 dared put his name to a work of similar profanity, was proof of that.
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From Impossible Monsters: Dinosaurs, Darwin, and the Battle Between Science and Religion by Michael Taylor. Copyright © 2024. Available from Liveright Publishing Corporation, an imprint of W.W. Norton & Company.
