"The Age of Wonder"...new book

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

by

Richard Holmes

ISBN-10: 0007149522
ISBN-13: 978-0007149520

"When Poets Were Scientists and Nature Their Mysterious Muse"

by

Janet Maslin

July 9th, 2009

The New York Times

William Herschel, the German-born, star-gazing musician who effectively doubled the size of the solar system with a single discovery in 1781, was not regarded as a scientist. That word had not been coined during most of the era that will now be known, thanks to Richard Holmes's amazingly ambitious, buoyant new fusion of history, art, science, philosophy and biography, as "The Age of Wonder." And Mr. Holmes's excitement at fusing long-familiar events and personages into something startlingly new is not unlike the exuberance of the age that animates his groundbreaking book.

In Herschel's day (and that of his sister, Caroline, who functioned as his doting assistant to the point of feeding him like a baby bird), science was deductively methodical. And astronomy was no amateur's game. But Herschel charted the skies as if making musical notations. And when he lacked instruments with enough precision, he painstakingly invented a telescope with startling new powers of magnification.

Looking through it, he noted a starlike object, twice as far from the Sun as Saturn, that appeared to be moving yet did not have a comet's tail. He identified this as the planet Georgium Sidus, first named for George III of Britain but later known as Uranus. (Mr. Holmes is much too spirited a writer to resist making a bon mot about the English pronunciation of that name.)

Beyond enlivening the story of Herschel's discovery into a gripping narrative, this book speculates fascinatingly about the ramifications of such a breakthrough. Thanks to Herschel the idea of a fixed universe was challenged, replaced by a cosmos in flux. Was that cause for wonder or terror? What were its theological implications? How would it influence a future generation of poets? (The thrill of this breakthrough would later figure in one of Keats's most famous sonnets, "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer.") Where would it figure in the relay race of scientific discoveries?

In order to structure his big, sweeping book about such issues, Mr. Holmes uses two exploratory voyages as bookends. The first, a trip to Tahiti in 1769 led by Capt. James Cook, brought the eager young botanist Joseph Banks to a place he would regard as a paradise, botanical and otherwise. (Mr. Holmes quotes deftly from Banks's delightfully candid journals, noting that Banks wrote with "gentlemanly jeu d’esprit.") The book then follows Banks back to England, where, at the age of 35, he became president of the Royal Society in 1778. He would hold that post for 41 years and encourage the other young pioneers whose stories Mr. Holmes has told.

"The Age of Wonder," a book with a distinct taste for high times, next moves to the golden age of ballooning, which began as an offshoot of paper-bag manufacturing. Gorgeously illustrated, "The Age of Wonder" captures the full gaudiness of early French ballooning experiments in Easter-egg-colored airborne specimens. And it finds an element of bawdy comedy in the era's gossipy whisperings about what might happen up in the air. ("So the first Mile High Club was also formed," Mr. Holmes writes of one such story.)

A wild anecdote about one American-British collaborative effort says of the two balloonists that "quite early on, each accidentally managed to drop the other’s national flag over the side of the basket and then profusely apologized." As to the rest of what was spilled overboard, Mr. Holmes's attention to detail raises the question of how exactingly such scientific endeavours really need to be documented.

But this book also understands the seriousness of these early experiments and the confusion they engendered: Was the eagerness to make a first crossing of the English Channel a sporting, scientific or diplomatic matter? What could balloon flight be used to measure? What would be its legacy? (The first test pilot with "the right stuff" can be found here.) And why should this kind of story not be told as enthusiastically as stories about artists and historical figures are? Over all "The Age of Wonder" makes a splendid case for treating the history of science in a bright new way.

Much of the book is also devoted to Humphry Davy, whose reputation is multifaceted. He wrote poetry; he had lively friendships with some of the best-known writers of his day; he invented a lamp that would prevent methane gas from exploding and save the lives of countless miners. Best immortalized here, though, are Davy's experiments with nitrous oxide, tests in which he eagerly served as guinea pig. Inhaling that substance gave him "a thrilling all over me most exquisitely pleasurable," he recorded. "I said to myself I was born to benefit the world by my great talents."

That Davy did not benefit the world by realizing surgical patients could be anesthetized is symptomatic, Mr. Holmes writes, of the strange, uncharted world that this book explores. Davy knew he was discovering something; what he did not know was what its practical applications might be. And with the kind of throwaway brilliance that makes this book so enthralling, Mr. Holmes uses only a footnote to conjure one of science’s least documented realms: that of failure. The cliché of the "Eureka!" moment easily obscures the doubt and uncertainty that are also part of the discovery process.

A particularly inspired section of the book relates Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" to dissection, to the debate about the existence of a life force, and to the way fiction writers and poets could invoke spiritual power while avoiding making reference to God. But by the time the book reaches the Age of Wonder's concluding event, Charles Darwin's five-year voyage on the Beagle beginning in 1831, it has raised both the antecedents and ramifications of today's most enduring scientific debates, on subjects from global warming to extraterrestrial life to intelligent design. It is impossible to understand where these arguments are headed, "The Age of Wonder" maintains, without knowing where they began.

Book review--"The Age of Wonder"

Ranked with the romance of the "Golden Age of Physics".

"My chemical romance"

by

Kevin Jackson

October 9th, 2008

New Statesman

The Romantic generation of poets and thinkers, schoolchildren are often told, took a dim view of science. Like a lot of blunt instruments, this received wisdom is not without its uses. Wordsworth's witty and much-cited line, "We murder to dissect", pretty much sums up the bias: try too hard to understand, say, how a frog works, and all you'll end up with is a nasty, smelly mess of slop, bones and juices. (Wordsworth's line is also haunted by fears about the increasingly common practice of dissecting human remains, and by sinister rumours about how unscrupulous doctors might source their corpses. The wit is a hair away from shuddering horror.)

Other English Romantics appeared to share the sentiment: "Do not all charms fly/At the mere touch of cold philosophy?" (Keats's "Lamia"). And the most enduringly popular prose work of the Romantic movement, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - another creepy vision of human dissection - may be read as a fable about the hubris of natural philosophy.

That is one side of the story; Richard Holmes briskly concedes its measure of justice at the very outset and then goes on to cast light (sometimes bright and bracing, sometimes guttering and spooky) on its many other sides. His subject is what academics have lately been calling Romantic Science - a turbulent passage of the later Enlightenment, which Coleridge in 1819 identified as "the second scientific revolution", a successor to the 17th-century revolution of Newton, Locke, Hooke, Descartes and company.

Holmes's narrative is roughly bounded by two maritime expeditions: the botanist Joseph Banks's voyage with Captain Cook on the Endeavour in 1768 and the young Charles Darwin's departure on the Beagle in 1831. His leading characters are two major scientists, the astronomer William Herschel (plus his long-suffering, long-neglected sister Caroline, an invaluable assistant) and the chemist Humphry Davy. A hefty and colourful supporting cast includes balloonists, libertines and nitrous oxide sniffers, a doomed African explorer (Mungo Park), lots of searchers after extraterrestrial life . . . and the usual Romantic suspects: Keats, Percy and Mary Shelley, Byron and Coleridge.

As one would expect from Holmes, our leading biographer of figures from those momentous generations, it makes for an abundance of yarns, metaphors and insights, above all on the occasions when the author picks up some familiar or over familiar detail from a poem and makes it come alive in a new way.

Take Keats's sonnet of October 1816 "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer": "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken . . ." Most cultural historians would have been more than content with simply pointing out that Keats must have been thinking of Herschel's discovery of the planet Uranus in 1781 - a discovery that doubled the size of the known solar system at a stroke, and then led Herschel and others on to the part-terrifying, part-exhilarating idea of Deep Space (a sibling for the equally vertiginous prospect of Deep Time, which was being introduced by geologists).

But the assiduous Holmes goes on to unearth all manner of charming additional evidence for this "scientific" reading: for instance, that Keats was given Bonnycastle's Introduction to Astronomy as a senior prize in 1811; that, at his school in Enfield, children had once been organised into dancing round the playground as planets and satellites, like a kind of juvenile human orrery; that Keats may well have attended, and certainly knew about, Charles Babbage's "Lectures on Astronomy" in 1815.

Even had he not been so alert to the new astronomy, Holmes suggests, Keats's scientific training at Guy's Hospital told more deeply in his verses than has usually been noticed. (Although I did once teach a student who thought that the phrase "or emptied some dull opiate to the drains" in "Ode to a Nightingale" was a description of putting down rat poison. He concluded that the poem was about Florence Nightingale.)

This is delicious literary detective work in its own right, but it serves a much larger end. Holmes proves beyond reasonable dissent that, far from being consistently horrified by the recent developments in science, the Romantics were also thrilled, amazed and inspired by them. Shelley, who was taught by Joseph Banks's colleague Dr James Lind (Percy doted on his exciting, radical talk of Lavoisier, Herschel, Franklin and others), read widely in the fields of geology, cosmology, electricity and meteorology. When, in "Ode to the West Wind", he mentions the "locks of the approaching storm", he is tacitly alluding to the recent classification of cirrus clouds by the meteorologist Luke Howard.

Nor were the links between the boffins and the aesthetes merely those of reading and writing. As at an ideal High Table, the various faculties could talk freely together, to mutual benefit. Coleridge and Humphry Davy delighted in each other's company, and their mutual admiration coloured both a later preface to the Lyrical Ballads and many of Davy's subsequent scientific writings. (Holmes proposes that Davy's 1818 essay "On the Safety Lamp for Coal Miners" should be seen as one of the prose masterpieces of English Romanticism; and he knows what he's talking about.) Byron liked Davy, too, and in Italy said that the chemist was one of the few Englishmen he could stand to meet.

Holmes's account draws to a close with the widespread misgiving, in the 1830s, that the great names had all gone and British science was about to suffer a terrible decline: Banks died in 1820, Herschel in 1822, Davy in 1829. This was, to put it mildly, unduly pessimistic, given that the stars of Victorian science, notably Babbage, Faraday, Darwin and Herschel's son John, were already launched on their careers. Oddly enough, it was at this very moment of lost momentum that the word "scientist" was finally coined (by William Whewell, in 1833).

Still, the doomsters were right in thinking that some kind of change had taken place, and that science would come to occupy a different place in the national imagination. The outlook of scientists changed, too; they became, so to say, less poetic. (By all means wonder at the Universe, but do not be so naive as to mistake it for a Creation.) Thanks to the two Charleses, Lyell and Darwin, the next major corpse to be dissected was that of God. Yet, for all this hardening of attitude, most of the Victorian scientists kept faith with at least one major inheritance from the Romantic period: the belief that science should be conducted in a language available to all intelligent citizens, and that the public should always be educated both in its deepest fundamentals and in its most topical developments. Holmes's exuberant and thought-provoking book breath es that same noble, democratic spirit.

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

by

Richard Holmes

ISBN-10: 0007149522
ISBN-13: 978-0007149520