In 1848 the American writer Edgar Allan Poe went into the publisher George P. Putnam’s office on Broadway and told him that as of that day he could abandon all of his other projects and dedicate his entire business to the production and distribution of Poe’s newest work: Eureka: A Prose Poem. The work was to be his magnum opus, beside which “Newton’s discovery of gravitation was a mere incident”. It would revolutionize the way that humanity understood its place in the world, and as such an initial print run of fifty thousand copies may have been sufficient.

There is no comparable story surrounding Robert Chambers' 1844 publication of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Yet James Secord has described it as the key work responsible for bringing an “evolutionary vision of the universe into the heart of everyday life” with its widespread popularity and influence. In its first print run Poe had difficulty selling five hundred copies of his masterpiece, and his publisher concluded that: “It has never, apparently, caused any profound interest either to popular or scientific readers”. Chambers’ work ran to twelve editions at around twenty nine thousand copies. Insofar as it laid the groundwork for the acceptance of the evolutionary theories of the latter half of the nineteenth century, it could be said that Vestiges, rather than Eureka accomplished what Poe had claimed for himself. Charles Darwin’s tombstone in Westminster Abbey, resting just a few meters away from the exalted monument to Isaac Newton, would seem to corroborate this account.

Yet however dissimilar, there was something in Poe’s Eureka that caused contemporary commentators to link the two works together in the popular press. Here, the social circumstances and posturing of the two authors helps us make sense of this puzzling relationship. While coming from remarkably similar professional backgrounds, Chambers’ anonymity and appeals to socially acceptable sources of authority allowed him to win the hearts of his bourgeoisie audience. Poe had no such support. Instead, he parodied and criticized the very foundations of scientific discourse, and opted for a pantheistic theological underpinning to his cosmology, which flew in the face of all but the most radical of artistic and moral sentiments.