Book review: The Beginning and the End of the World by Robert Crawford

Take an imaginary pair of compasses. Stick the pin in a map of St Andrews at Robert Crawford's office in the School of English on The Scores, with its sweeping view over the ruined castle. And draw a circle. This handful of streets, in the 1840s, contained a hotbed of dramas. A brilliant but contentious scientist was picking fights with the university hierarchy. Several of Scotland's first photographers were taking their first pictures. And a man was writing a book which would scoop Darwin and scandalise the Victorian world.

More than that, the protagonists were all members of the same club, the St Andrews Literary and Philosophical Society, where, a stone's throw away in what is now the King James Library, academics rubbed shoulders with local farmers to discuss topics as diverse as geology, poetry and the functioning of a camera lens.

"Sometimes people have tended to write off St Andrews in the 19th century, as if nothing really happened here," says Robert Crawford, a smile playing on his lips. "I like that." He has disproved it once and for all by lifting the lid on this microcosm of Victorian society in his new book, The Beginning and the End of the World: St Andrews, Scandal and the Birth of Photography.

"What clinched it for me was realising that Robert Chambers was writing Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation at the same time as the early photographs were being taken," says Crawford. "It was a really good constellation of interesting materials. It's not that any of it was unknown, but the challenge, the excitement was that there were pieces of knowledge which had not been constellated in this way before.

"St Andrews was actually the first town in the world to be so thoroughly documented in photography. It intrigued me that there should be all these photographs that are prized on the other side of the Atlantic in places like the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, of this little place, of scenes I could immediately recognise because I see them through my window every day."

The centre of St Andrews has changed very little since those early calotypes. Crawford shows me the way to Robert Chambers' house, Abbey Park, on an 1838 map, and it makes perfect sense. Much of his inspiration for the book came from exploring the town on foot, reading the ubiquitous blue plaques which commemorate eminent residents. Amid today's bustle of shoppers and students, and the coffee shop with its banner claiming to be "Where Wills met Kate (for coffee)", the past is just beneath the surface.

"St Andrews today is a place that once you've lived here for a while, you can't walk from one end of the town to the other without meeting people you know," says Crawford. "Clearly it was like that then too. I think that closeness promotes interdisciplinarity. To some extent it's still true of the university, you have to make your own entertainment and for that reason people come together, form societies."

The book is steeped in a knowledge of, and affection for, St Andrews. Crawford has worked here since 1989, where he is now Professor of Modern Scottish Literature. His family has grown up here, much of his poetry has been written here. A man who once gave his recreational interests to Who's Who in Scotland as "being private", he hasn't written a personal book, but he is there between the lines, walking, looking, making connections.

While cheerfully admitting he gave up science at the earliest opportunity and knows nothing of the technicalities of photography, he brings to his subject a critic's careful eye and a poet's sensitivity. He also loves the visual, describing himself as "a frustrated painter". His latest project is a poetry/photography collaboration, Body Bags/Simonedes, with photographer Norman McBeath, an exhibition to be shown at Edinburgh Art Festival in August.

The Beginning and the End of the World is a series of sketches, snapshots, if you will, of the characters in the drama which was St Andrews in the 1840s. First there is Sir David Brewster, knighted for his contribution to optical science, a brilliant, belligerent man who became University principal. "Very eminent, very brilliant, and very difficult, which is not an unknown combination," Crawford laughs. "I think that appealed to me."

Casting his critic's eye over a selection of Brewster's voluminous prose, he realised that he was looking at the work of photography's first theorist. In a way that writers such as Susan Sontag would do more than 100 years later, Brewster was making the connection between photography and mortality, the photograph as a moment frozen in time, a memento mori.

Meanwhile, Brewster's next-door neighbour, the flamboyant Hugh Lyon Playfair, a passionate golfer who became Provost of St Andrews, was cultivating a cosmological garden, with artefacts and automata, a 90ft-high rustic pagoda and a private theatre. "It was an age of grand exhibitions and spectaculars, and as far as I can see he just wanted one of these on a small scale in St Andrews. It's not quite Charles Jencks, but it's a garden that wanted to explore history and the universe."

Playfair's garden seems to encapsulate the Victorian attitude to learning, unbridled in the way it mixed disciplines, vigorous in promoting them as widely as possible. Such was the spirit of the St Andrews Lit & Phil, which brought together academics, businessmen and farmers. "People can make rather ready assumptions, even today, about the social backgrounds of everyone in St Andrews," says Crawford.

"In the same society was the man who coined the word 'epistemology', an optical scientist, and several people who wrote and published poetry – I loved that. It's what we now call interdisciplinarity, and people would say you have to spend millions of pounds trying to achieve it."

However, unknown to the other members of the Lit & Phil, one of their number was engaged in an extraordinary and secret work of writing. Robert Chambers, living a stone's throw from the Major's garden, was writing Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, an ambitious work of popular science which prefigured many of the ideas of Darwin about the origins of the world. Its publication (anonymously) in 1844 sent ripples through Victorian society.

"It caused a scandal on more than one continent. Everybody from Queen Victoria and the young George Eliot to Abraham Lincoln read it, and a lot of people were outraged."

Vestiges was pilloried both for its mistakes (Chambers lacked Darwin's scientific training) and because it was seen as challenging the ideas of the church, but it became the great popular science bestseller of the Victorian age. Darwin himself – a corresponding member of the St Andrews Lit & Phil – was one of its most important readers. "Cambridge scholar James Secord argues that to some extent he took Chambers' book as a dummy run. He observed carefully the impact, the horror and scandal it generated, and then did things a little differently himself."

Crawford's sketch includes not only Chambers but his wife, Anne, whom he describes as the unsung heroine of the story. As well as raising their 14 children, she looked after her husband's sometimes fragile mental health and copied out the entire manuscript of Vestiges in longhand so it could be sent anonymously to publishers. "If that's not a labour of love, I don't know what is. You could say it's a labour of servitude, but that's not at all my impression of their marriage."

While Chambers was walking on The Scores, thinking about the origins of the world, John and Robert Adamson were studying the same rock formations through the lens of a camera. John was a doctor, concerned with public health in the town. Robert went on to become half of the famous Edinburgh-based photography partnership Hill & Adamson. Crawford was concerned that Adamson, the "chemical manipulator", always played second fiddle to David Octavius Hill, the "artist".

"Adamson was a farmer's son and he's always tended to be overshadowed by this – as I can see him – rather more swanky Edinburgh artist and arts administrator. I wanted to write Adamson back into the script as much as I could. When I looked up the books he had borrowed from St Andrews University library, you can tell that he wasn't just a chemical manipulator. He was that to a degree of genius, but he was also somebody who had artistic and aesthetic taste."

The book is also a polite challenge to the town of St Andrews to recognise and celebrate its part in the history of photography, perhaps by considering a new home for the University's important photography collection, or putting to a more appropriate use the building (now the University Careers Service), designed in the 1860s for Thomas Rodger and believed to be the earliest surviving purpose-built photography studio in Scotland.

"I suppose I'm trying to give people a nudge and say, we've got this very special heritage here. I know that for decades people have been arguing for a gallery of photography in Edinburgh and it hasn't happened. It wouldn't be absurd to have such a gallery in St Andrews."

It is still possible to wander down The Scores and see exactly what Adamson, Chambers and Brewster saw. "There are not all that many places where the town centre has changed so little that you can get a sense of what it was like to walk up and down. I think it would make a good television programme," Crawford grins. "If there is somebody out there who would like to make a television programme about the book, I'd be up for that."

• The Beginning and the End of the World by Robert Crawford, is published by Birlinn, priced 16.99. Body Bags/ Simonides is at Edinburgh College of Art, 4 August – 9 September