The anonymously written Vestiges of the Natural…
October 1844 CE
The anonymously written Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation is published, and paves the way for the acceptance of Darwin's book On the Origin of Species.
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation is a work of speculative natural history and philosophy by Robert Chambers.
Published anonymously in England in October 1844, it brings together various ideas of stellar evolution with the progressive transmutation of species in an accessible narrative that ties together numerous scientific theories of the age.
Vestiges is initially well received by polite Victorian society and will become an international bestseller, but its unorthodox themes contradict the natural theology fashionable at this time and will be reviled by clergymen—and subsequently by scientists who will readily find fault with its amateurish deficiencies.
The ideas in the book are favored by Radicals, but its presentation will remain popular with a much wider public.
Prince Albert will read it aloud to Queen Victoria in 1845.
Vestiges causes a shift in popular opinion which—Charles Darwin believes—prepares the public mind for the scientific theories of evolution by natural selection that will followed from the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859.
For decades there will be speculation about its authorship.
The 12th edition, published in 1884, will reveal officially that the author is Robert Chambers, a Scottish journalist, who had written the book in St Andrews between 1841 and 1844 while recovering from a psychiatric illness.
Initially, Chambers had proposed the title The Natural History of Creation, but he was persuaded to revise the title in deference to the Scottish geologist James Hutton, who had remarked of the timeless aspect of geology: "no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end".
Some of the inspiration for the work derived from the Edinburgh Phrenological Society, whose materialist influence reached a climax between 1825 and 1840.
George Combe, the leading proponent of phrenological thinking, had published his influential The Constitution of Man in 1828.
Chambers is closely involved with Combe's associates William A.F. Browne and Hewett Cottrell Watson who did much to spell out the materialist theory of the mind.
Chambers will die in 1871 and be buried in the grounds of St Andrews Cathedral, within the ancient chapel of St Regulus.