March 2, 2001

'Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation"'

By NINA C. AYOUB

"Every act of reading is an act of forgetting," says James A. Secord, "a palimpsest, in which each text partially covers those that came before." One now-forgotten book flooded Britain with talk of evolution 15 years before Darwin's Origin of Species.

Recapturing that wave is Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" (University of Chicago Press).

Vestiges (1844) blended disciplines from