Índice general
Capítulo 1. Introducción Descripción de las características del particulado atmosférico respecto al tamaño de
1.3. Principales tipos de partículas atmosféricas
Contemporaneous debate over Vestiges was heated and extensive—an amount of attention entirely unprecedented for a science book—and reactions were quite mixed. Secord, who published the most recent and most extensive reception study of Vestiges, concludes that it not only made “evolutionary theories…a common currency of conversation” but also made images from the book “ubiquitous in contemporary table talk.”317
Its accessibility was the source of both praise and alarm as it brought a familiarity with the developmental hypothesis into polite and domestic settings. Its popularity was often used against it by the scientific and religious orthodoxy, as evidence of the public’s inability to evaluate the scientific merits of a book.318
Milton Millhauser, author of one of the two book-length historical studies devoted to Chambers’s Vestiges, has observed that those who praised the work found “something that the book offered and that the critics did not like”: this was especially true of those frustrated with class relations and dominant religious institutions in Victorian Britain.319 Vestiges’s legitimating of evolutionary theory—alternately known as the development hypothesis, progressive development, transmutationism, or transformism—failed to disassociate such ideas from French and working-class radicals and revolutionaries.320 Socialists, who wanted to draw on science to overturn current social structures in order to achieve “a secular,
317 Secord, Victorian Sensation, 37, 38. 318 Yeo, 14.
319 Millhauser, Just Before Darwin, 161. 320 Secord, “Introduction,” ix, xxiv, qtn. at xvi.
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scientifically constrained cooperative society,” found the idea of constant and inevitable progression compatible with their goals.321 Even those with less radical religious views welcomed Vestiges’s loosening of religious ties to science. Some liberal Whigs, Unitarians, and other Dissenting freethinkers, particularly among the London intelligentsia, felt that Vestiges’s vision of progressive development cohered with their faith in human-driven improvement of conditions in this world.322
Counter to these positive receptions of Vestiges were the overwhelming number of negative reviews. Its anonymous author was attacked on methodological grounds by the scientific orthodoxy, particularly the Cambridge scriptural geologists for “lack of practical research, second-hand knowledge, and disregard of proper scientific methods.”323 Few scientific thinkers felt that Chambers’s natural laws were sufficient to account for the progressive development of all lifeforms, “from monad to man.”324
Embarrassingly, it was revealed through the publication of private letters in the Liverpool Journal in 1846 that Charles Lyell “condemned the book on the basis of reports from other geologists without even reading the copy the author had sent him.”325
Particularly offensive to religious sensibilities was Chambers’s presentation of humankind as descended from animals rather than specially and directly created by God.326 But while Vestiges was taking what can only be described as “a merciless critical pounding,” most heatedly from October 1844 to June 1846,
321 Desmond, “Artisan Resistance and Evolution,” 93.
322 Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors, 30, 31; Secord, “Introduction,” xxviii. 323 Yeo, 5.
324 Corsi, 262.
325 Secord, Victorian Sensation, 212. Later, as Geological Society president, Lyell used his presidential
addresses in 1849 and 1850, “to renew his attack” on Vestiges, this time presumably better informed (Secord, Victorian Sensation, 418).
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the book “was dissected at public scientific meetings, condemned from pulpits and lecture platforms, borrowed from circulating libraries, and read.”327
Criticism of the work only publicized it and increased its popularity.328
The Literary Response
Literary authors were not behind in evaluating Vestiges and discussing its implications in serious, considered ways. In doing so, they used fiction as a forum for
expressing ideas like those of the reviewers, but in perhaps more popular and accessible—or, at times, more sophisticated and nuanced—ways.329 The leap from Chambers to literature was never a great one: he used narratives and images not unlike those that appeared in popular fiction of the time.330 Chambers’s major project before beginning research for Vestiges was the History of English Language and Literature (1836), in which he concluded that Sir Walter Scott’s work represented the pinnacle of British literary tradition; from Scott, Chambers learned how an author could construct a history that also looked to the future, a story of progress and development that incorporated instability with hopefulness.331
Benjamin Disraeli, no longer much studied as a fiction writer, but one whose novels were widely read in his time, responded strongly to the Vestiges controversy. Disraeli’s Tancred, or The New Crusade (1847) used a discussion of Vestiges—thinly veiled by the fictionalized title “The Revelations of Chaos”—to free the eponymous character from an
327 Millhauser, Just Before Darwin, 4; Secord, Victorian Sensation, 37. 328 Secord, “Introduction,” ix.
329 Millhauser notes that Vestiges “enters significantly into the background of Victorian literature, an irritant if
not a major influence. If it was rarely taken seriously, it could not be entirely ignored” (“Literary Impact,” 214).
330 Secord, Victorian Sensation, 1. 331 Stierstorfer, 28, 32-33.
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intellectually limited love interest. In Chapter 9, appropriately entitled “Disenchantment,” Disraeli skewers Vestiges and its readership:
'To judge from the title, the subject is rather obscure,' said Tancred.
'No longer so,' said Lady Constance. 'It is treated scientifically; everything is explained by geology and astronomy, and in that way. It shows you exactly how a star is formed; nothing can be so pretty! A cluster of vapour, the cream of the Milky Way, a sort of celestial cheese, churned into light, you must read it, 'tis charming.'
'Nobody ever saw a star formed,' said Tancred.
'Perhaps not. You must read the "Revelations;" it is all explained. But what is most interesting, is the way in which man has been developed. 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. And the next change there will be something very superior to us, something with wings. Ah! that's it: we were fishes, and I believe we shall be crows. But you must read it.'
'I do not believe I ever was a fish,' said Tancred.
'Oh! but it is all proved; you must not argue on my rapid sketch; read the book. It is impossible to contradict anything in it. You understand, it is all science; it is not like those books in which one says one thing and another the contrary, and both may be wrong. Everything is proved: by geology, you know. You see exactly how everything is made; how many worlds there have been; how long they lasted; what went before, what comes next. We are a link in the chain, as inferior animals were that preceded us: we in turn shall be inferior; all that will remain of us will be some relics in a new red sandstone. This is development. We had fins; we may have wings.'332
A particularly telling line in this satirical passage is Lady Constance’s claim that “It is impossible to contradict anything in [Vestiges]. You understand, it is all science.” Of course, Vestiges was roundly critiqued and contradicted, but the notion that science could propose poetic and fanciful theories lacking empirical evidence (such as how nebular clusters are “churned into light”) and then use the mantle of science to claim inarguability is ludicrous to Tancred, and presumably to Disraeli as well. Lady Constance appears to be an unusual devotee of Vestiges, claiming for the work a specificity that it does not contain, such as the exact number of other worlds, but as the only such character in Tancred, she is to be taken as
332 Disraeli, 109-10. For critical discussion of this scene, see Millhauser, Just Before Darwin, 33, 153; and
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representative of all that Disraeli finds wrong with Chambers’s book: a lack of realism, rigor, and focus. Tancred goes on to explore issues of progressive social and species development; a philosophical conversation on civilization in Chapter 14, argues that “the progressive development of the faculties of man” is an illusion: it is not progressive development that is the most prominent natural law, but rather decay which “is an inevitable necessity.”333
The evidence for progress is lacking, when one looks out of the geological record, which is presented as a questionable source upon which to base grand conclusions, to socio-political history. Vestiges does not explain everything, contra Lady Constance, and those phenomena it fails to explain are perhaps most important for humans to understand, such as the narrative arc and causes of changes in human social history.
A number of other prominent writers were less critical of Vestiges. Leigh Hunt apparently spoke very positively of the work to Chambers in confidence, although he moderated his praise in public, and so we have no firsthand account of his evaluation of the work.334 Charles Kingsley references it occasionally—though not always positively—in Water Babies (1863).335 George Henry Lewes, an intellectual both in the literary and natural history arenas, wrote of Vestiges in 1851, “There are faults in that delightful work, errors both in fact and philosophy, but compared with the answers it provoked, we cannot help regarding it as a masterpiece.”336 George Eliot “continued to speak favorably about Vestiges and its pioneering role in spurring debate, well after the appearance of the Origin of
333 Disraeli, 148, 150.
334 Secord, Victorian Sensation, 490. 335 Millhauser, “Literary Impact,” 218. 336 Qtd. in Secord, Victorian Sensation, 488.
108 Species”;337
Vestiges influenced her thinking on evolution so much that she first read Origin, she wrote in her diary that when she viewed it as derivative, a rephrasing of Chambers’s ideas.338
Tennyson’s In Memoriam, A. H. H. and The Princess
In November of 1844, Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote to Edward Moxon, his publisher, requesting that he acquire a copy of a book he saw enthusiastically reviewed in the
Examiner—Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.339
Explaining his interest, Tennyson said, “it seems to contain many speculations with which I have been familiar for years, and on which I have written more than one poem.”340 He had a longstanding interest in science341 (especially the evolutionary implications of geology) and was drawn to Vestiges for “its graphic style [and] its vivid picturesqueness”342
; the elements of the book that so distressed other readers were largely familiar to him already through his reading of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830) in 1837. Lyell had read and incorporated the ideas of Lamarck and Cuvier into his geological tome, specifically their notions that humanity is a biological species subject to extinction like any other.343 In fact, Tennyson might have been comforted
337 Secord, Victorian Sensation, 505.
338 In her journal entry of 5 December 1859, Eliot wrote of Darwin’s Origin “it marks an epoch, as the
expression of his thorough adhesion, after long years of study, to the Doctrine of Development” (Eliot, III, 227).
339 Secord, “Introduction,” xxviii; Victorian Sensation, 9.
340 Tennyson, 186. Literary critics have discussed Tennyson as working through the ideas of evolutionary
science in The Palace of Art (1833), “Locksley Hall”(1837-38), Morte d’Arthur (1842), Maud (1855), De Profundis (1880), and “By an Evolutionist” (1889) (Dean, 5; Killham, 259; Millhauser, Fire and Ice, 25, 27; Stevenson, 67, 69; Zimmerman, 66).
341 For a discussion of Tennyson’s scientific references as both stylistic and thematic throughout his canon, see
Taylor, “Science in Tennyson’s Poetry.”
342 Chatterjee, 14. 343 Mattes, 79.
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by Vestiges’s confirmation of how up-to-date with scientific debates his own reading was, not to mention by Vestiges’s suggestion that there is a plan and purpose behind the seemingly ruthless processes of nature that Lyell presented.344 Although many contemporaneous readers were troubled by the religious system of Vestiges, Tennyson found in the work a means to reconcile a nonorthodox but still sincere Christian faith with modern scientific discoveries.345
Tennyson’s The Princess (1847) was his first major poem composed and published after his reading of Vestiges, and references to its version of evolutionary theory abound—in the prologue alone, we can identify the setting on Sir Walter Vivian’s lawn (EBB, among others, thought that Sir Richard Vyvyan, MP and FRS, was the author of Vestiges for a number of years) and the ammonites and other fossils lying about.346 The eponymous
princess in this work has rejected her betrothal to a prince and founded a university solely for women; the lessons taught in this institution express and apply many of the central tenets of Vestiges. The princess speaks of creation as a single, nebular event, “All creation is one act at once, / The birth of light” (III.308-9); Lady Psyche, one of the instructors at the university, also endorses the nebular hypothesis made culturally prominent by Vestiges:
This world was once a fluid haze of light, Till toward the center set the starry tides, And eddied into suns, that whirling cast
The planets; then the monster; then the man. (II.101-4)347
344 Chatterjee, 15; Mattes, 80.
345 Chatterjee, 16; Mattes, 77; Millhauser, Just Before Darwin, 161, 163.
346 Ammonites, like trilobites, were well-known fossils taken as representative of some of the extinct earliest
marine animals. On The Princess’s ammonite, see Zimmerman, 76. Dean has also identified two mammoth
fossils in The Princess: V.142 and III.276-277 (17).
347 This passage has been discussed in terms of the nebular hypothesis by a number of critics, including
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Tennyson’s “fluid haze of light” closely resembles Chambers’s description of the primal nebulae as a “universal Fire-Mist.”348
Interestingly, this passage obscures any role of God in creation with the movement of “starry tides,” tides of course being associated with lunar cycles and hence with women’s menstrual cycles. An androcentric vision of history is thus replaced with a gynocentric one, in keeping with the university’s strict gendering, and with Chambers’s vision of female reproduction as central to evolution, a theme that I will discuss more extensively in relation to Aurora Leigh.349 The vision of the Academy—and of Princess Ida—is consistently developmental: life in the universe and in human societies has
progressed to the point that women are becoming the dominant species, the evolutionary type of the future; the work concludes, however, that it is not women who epitomize evolutionary development, but rather domesticity, as it is the site that brings men and women together and helps them to progress toward a better society.350 Women’s education has led to this state, as “Princess Ida recognizes her own sexual attraction to the Prince through a literary experience assisted by images of flowers, insects, birds, and stars,” subjects long associated with the natural sciences.351 And yet, the Princess’s persona is a means for Tennyson to distance himself from the Vestiges’s arguments and implications, “holding [each evolutionary] idea at arm’s length, displaying commitment but not quite confessing it.”352
348 Millhauser, Just Before Darwin, 156.
349 Zimmerman, 79. For comparisons of Tennyson’s treatment of the Woman Question in The Princess with
EBB’s in Aurora Leigh, see Kaplan; Taylor, “‘School-Miss Alfred’,” 5-7; Stone, “Genre Subversion,” 106,
116.
350 Chatterjee, 32; Killham, 261; Millhauser, “Tennyson’s Princess,” 339; Stevenson, 70; Zimmerman, 77. 351 Qtn. from Taylor, “‘School-Miss Alfred’,” 12. See also Chatterjee (28) on the central role of women’s
education.
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Tennyson wrote In Memoriam (1850) over the course of seventeen years (1833-49) as an act of grieving for his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. The poem works through personal and cultural anxieties caused by developments in science, especially evolutionary theory, eventually reconciling with faith the seemingly irreconcilable notion of the insignificance and impermanence of humankind.353 Welcomed by scientists and religious figures alike, In Memoriam impressed its age with its sincere and informed approach to timely scientific crises.354
Sections LIV-LVI of In Memoriam are typically referred to as the “evolutionary doubt” epicenter of the poem. These famous sections deal with Tennyson’s hopes “that somehow good / Will be the final goal of ill,” “That nothing walks with aimless feet,” “That not a worm is cloven in vain” (LIV.1-2, 5, 9) but fade into fears that “God and Nature [are] at strife,” causing nature to preserve neither the species nor the individual (LV.5), not even humans.355 This is where the famous line about “Nature, red in tooth and claw” (LVI.25)— probably a reference to Lyell’s Principles, not Chambers’s Vestiges—appears.356
These “evolutionary” sections, then, are really geological (or Lyellian) sections.357
Tennyson integrated Vestiges, instead, into his “evolutionary resolution” sections of CXVIII-CXXIII.358
In CXVIII, Tennyson draws on Chambers’s notion of humankind as “but the initial of the
353 Altholz, 67; Gliserman, “Part I,” 279, “Part II,” 442; Stevenson, 44-45, 83; Zimmerman, 67. Dean has listed
the sections influenced by geological thought as “its Prologue, poems XXIV, XXXV, XXXVI, XLIII, LIV, LV, LVI, LXIX, LXX, XCV, CXII, CXIII, CXX, CXXIII, CXXIV, CXXVII, CXXXI, and its Epilogue” (9).
354 Mattes, xi; Stevenson, 92.
355 See, for example, Gliserman, “Part II,” 451; Harrison; Leonard, 36; and Stevenson, 87.
356 As Millhauser comments, “‘Nature red in tooth and claw’ does not play a prominent part in Chambers’
scheme of things (or, rather, is rationalized away)” (“Literary Impact,” 220).
357 Armstrong, 102; Chatterjee, 37; Gliserman, “Part II,” 441-52; Killham, 254, 264; Mattes, 81; Millhauser,
“Tennyson, Vestiges,” 25.
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grand crowning type” to think of our species not as a future fossil as in LVI but as “The herald of a higher race” (CXVIII.14). Tennyson by CXXIII has reached a comfortable compromise, accepting geological visions of time and biological visions of animal descent without being dragged down by them, which is made possible through the mediation of Vestiges. Chambers, after all, had addressed Tennyson’s early fear that the stars “blindly run” (III.5) by showing that the stars, instead, demonstrate progress.
The Epilogue, most likely written in 1845, relies more than the other sections of the poem on Chambers’s Vestiges to synthesize the movement of In Memoriam.359
The Epilogue celebrates the marriage of Tennyson’s sister Cecilia and the future birth of a child, who shall recapitulate the previous evolutionary states to progress one step closer to “the crowning race” (line 128); Chambers’s theory of progressive development (Tennyson’s “one law” [142]) enables this optimistic vision of the future.360 Marriage, in this vision, becomes an evolutionary step because it is the socially and religiously legitimated means of reproduction, gestation of course being central to Chambers’s vision of progress.361
The final lines, referring to the “far-off divine event, / To which the whole creation moves” (143-44), “suggest both the biblical idea of the Kingdom of God and the nineteenth century’s dearly cherished belief that perfection lay ahead and the whole world was progressing toward it, a belief for which Chambers found scientific evidence in organic development.”362 The key step for Tennyson in moving from a state “half-akin to brute” to the transcendent type is