Their slate-roofed house was built by James Chambers' father as a wedding gift for his son, and the ground floor served as the family workshop.

[5] A small circulating library in the town, run by Alexander Elder, introduced Robert to books and developed his literary interests when he was young.

Occasionally his father would buy books for the family library, and one day Robert found a complete set of the fourth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica hidden away in a chest in the attic.

Near the end of his life, Chambers remembered feeling "a profound thankfulness that such a convenient collection of human knowledge existed, and that here it was spread out like a well-plenished table before me.

At first, his entire stock consisted of some old books belonging to his father, amounting to thirteen feet of shelf space and worth no more than a few pounds.

[10] While Robert built up a business, his brother William expanded his own by purchasing a home-made printing press and publishing pamphlets as well as creating his own type.

[11] It was followed by Illustrations of the Author of Waverley (1822), which offered sketches of individuals believed to have been the inspirations for some of the characters in Walter Scott's works of fiction.

[16] At the same time Robert ran a bookshop and circulating library from 48 Hanover Street with his younger brother, James Chambers.

Robert at this time was living close to the shop, at 27 Elder Street[17] (demolished in the 1960s to improve access to Edinburgh Bus Station).

For the Life of Burns he made diligent and laborious original investigations, gathering many hitherto unrecorded facts from the poet's sister, Mrs Begg, to whose benefit the whole profits of the work were generously devoted.

In 1844, Chambers completed the dictation of his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation to his wife, Anne Kirkwood, as he recuperated from depression at his holiday home in St Andrews.

The book was arguing for a developmental view of the cosmos combining stellar evolution with progressive transmutation of species in the same spirit as the late Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

"Now it is possible that wants and the exercise of faculties have entered in some manner into the production of the phenomena which we have been considering; but certainly not in the way suggested by Lamarck, whose whole notion is obviously so inadequate to account for the rise of the organic kingdoms, that we only can place it with pity among the follies of the wise.

"[24] Robert Chambers was aware of the storm that would probably be raised by his treatment of the subject, and he did not wish to get his and his brother's publishing firm involved in any kind of scandal.

[3] To further prevent the possibility of any unwanted revelations, Chambers only disclosed his authorship to four people: his wife, his brother William, Ireland, and George Combe's nephew, Robert Cox.

The geologist Adam Sedgwick predicted "ruin and confusion in such a creed" which, if taken up by the working classes, "will undermine the whole moral and social fabric" bringing "discord and deadly mischief in its train".

The Unitarian physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter called it "a very beautiful and a very interesting book", and helped Chambers to correct later editions.

Vestiges brought widespread discussion of evolution out of the streets and gutter presses and into the drawing rooms of respectable men and women.

An observer named Andrew Crombie Ramsay at the meeting reported that Chambers "pushed his conclusions to a most unwarrantable length and got roughly handled on account of it by Buckland, De la Beche, Sedgwick, Murchison, and Lyell.

On the Sunday Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, used his sermon at St. Mary's Church on "the wrong way of doing science" to deliver a stinging attack obviously aimed at Chambers.

The church, "crowded to suffocation" with geologists, astronomers and zoologists, heard jibes about the "half-learned" seduced by the "foul temptation" of speculation looking for a self-sustaining universe in a "mocking spirit of unbelief", showing a failure to understand the "modes of the Creator's acting" or to meet the responsibilities of a gentleman.

In 1851 Chambers was one of a group of writers who joined the publisher John Chapman in reinvigorating the Westminster Review as a flagship of free thought and reform, spreading the ideas of evolutionism.

Two years before, the University of St Andrews had conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Laws, and he was elected a member of the Athenaeum Club in London.

Alexander Ireland, in 1884, issued a 12th edition of Vestiges with Robert Chambers finally listed as the author and a preface giving an account of its authorship.