Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Then, in 1844, Robert Chambers, an Edinburgh publisher and polymath, released (anonymously) his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. As James Secord has recently shown, this book produced a sensation in Victorian Britain because it was Chambers (and not Darwin) who introduced the general idea of evolution to the wider public. Chambers had no idea how evolution worked, how natural selection caused new species to arise, but his book argued in great and convincing detail for an ancient solar system which had begun in a ‘fire-mist’, coalesced under gravity and cooled, with geological processes, tremendous and violent to begin with, gradually getting smaller but still taking aeons to produce their effects. Chambers envisaged an entirely natural and material origin of life and argued openly that human nature ‘did not stem from a spiritual quality marking him off from the animals but was a direct extension of faculties that had been developing throughout the evolutionary process’.¹³ And this was the single most important sentence in the book: ‘The idea, then, which I form of the progress of organic life upon the globe – and the hypothesis is applicable to all similar theatres of vital being – is, that the simplest and most primitive type, under a law to which that of like production is subordinate, gave birth to the type next above it, that this again produced the next higher, and so on to the very highest, the stages of advance being in all cases very small – namely, from one species to another; so that the phenomenon has always been of a simple and modest character.’¹⁴

By this time too there had been parallel developments in another new discipline, archaeology. Although the early nineteenth century saw some spectacular excavations, mainly in the Middle East, antiquarianism, an interest in the past, had remained strong since the Renaissance, especially in the seventeenth century.¹⁵ In particular there had been the introduction of the tripartite classification scheme – Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age – that we now take so much for granted. It occurred first in Scandinavia, owing to an unusual set of historical factors.

In 1622, Christian IV of Denmark issued an edict protecting antiquities, while in Sweden a ‘State Office of Antiquities’ was founded in 1630. Sweden established a College of Antiquities in that year and Ole Worm, in Denmark, founded the Museum Wormianum in Copenhagen.¹⁶ At the very beginning of the nineteenth century, there was a period of growing nationalism in Denmark. This owed a lot to its battles with Germany over Schleswig-Holstein, and to the fact that the British – fighting Napoleon and his reluctant continental allies – annihilated most of the Danish navy in Copenhagen harbour in 1801, and attacked the Danish capital again in 1807. One effect of these confrontations, and the surge in nationalism which followed, was to encourage the study of the kingdom’s own past ‘as a source of consolation and encouragement to face the future’.¹⁷ It so happens that Denmark is rich in prehistoric sites, in particular megalithic monuments, so the country was particularly well suited to the exploration of its more remote national past.