Science and Place 393Textual meaning is mobile and shifts from place to place at a range
of different scales. Distinctive cultures of reading can be detected within
regions and between them, within cities and between them, within neigh-
borhoods and between them. Something of the dynamic of these readerly
spaces can be appreciated by turning to James Secord’s remarkable ac-
count of how, in different venues, the controversial Vestiges of the Natural
History of Creation, which fi rst appeared in 1844, was read. An anonymous
text, later acknowledged to be the work of the Scottish publisher Robert
Chambers, it caused a sensation at the time. Embraced by some, vilifi ed by
others, it at once bemused, infuriated, consoled, and revolted readers in its
bold portrayal of the drama of evolution. One thought it a “priceless trea-
sure,” another dismissed it as materialist “pigology.” Some found it manly;
others were sure they could detect a womanly hand behind its anonymity.
Some thought it daring; still others found it melancholic. Moreover, writ-
ers outdid one another in the metaphors they devised to stage- manage
the text for readers. The book’s striking red binding prompted one to “at-
tribute to it all the graces of an accomplished harlot.” Its continuing ano-
nymity drew from another the exclamation: “Unhappy foundling! Tied
to every man’s knocker, and taken in by nobody; thou shouldst go to
Ireland!” Because its anonymity ruptured the long- established suture lines
between author, narrative, and reader, it stimulated a lengthy list of autho-
rial suspects. Signifi cantly, a differential geography of suspicion surfaced.
As Secord puts it, “Names that seemed likely in Liverpool or Edinburgh
were barely canvassed in Cambridge or Oxford; those that were common
in London’s fashionable West End were barely known in the Saint Giles
rookeries only a few blocks away in the squalid dens of Holywell Street,
notorious for atheism and pornography.”^54 Yet speculation was intense.
Why? Because aligning an author was required to fi x a reading.
In different London salons, the book entered fashionable conversation
in different ways and found itself very differently treated. Among aristo-
cratic readers, it was regarded as poisonous. In the homes of progressive
Whigs, it was boldly visionary. In Unitarian drawing rooms, its emphasis
on change from below was seen as a telling blow against a smug ecclesi-
astical establishment. Outside London, the book also fared differently. In
Liverpool, for example, the way it was read refl ected the social topography
of the city. Here it sold briskly among those pressing for urban reform be-
cause it could be taken as scientifi c justifi cation for social improvement. In
Europe too its fortunes differed from place to place in various translations,
as Nicolaas Rupke has shown.^55 The German version translated by Adolf
Friedrich Seubert, for instance, strangely incorporated material—from
William Whewell’s Indications of the Creator (1845)—originally intended to