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Summary
Summary
A riveting history of the men and women whose discoveries and inventions at the end of the eighteenth century gave birth to the Romantic Age of Science.
When young Joseph Banks stepped onto a Tahitian beach in 1769, he hoped to discover Paradise. Inspired by the scientific ferment sweeping through Britain, the botanist had sailed with Captain Cook on his first Endeavour voyage in search of new worlds. Other voyages of discovery--astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical--swiftly follow in Richard Holmes's original evocation of what truly emerges as an Age of Wonder.
Brilliantly conceived as a relay of scientific stories, The Age of Wonder investigates the earliest ideas of deep time and space, and the explorers of "dynamic science," of an infinite, mysterious Nature waiting to be discovered. Three lives dominate the book: William Herschel and his sister Caroline, whose dedication to the study of the stars forever changed the public conception of the solar system, the Milky Way, and the meaning of the universe; and Humphry Davy, who, with only a grammar school education stunned the scientific community with his near-suicidal gas experiments that led to the invention of the miners' lamp and established British chemistry as the leading professional science in Europe. This age of exploration extended to great writers and poets as well as scientists, all creators relishing in moments of high exhilaration, boundary-pushing and discovery.
Holmes's extraordinary evocation of this age of wonder shows how great ideas and experiments--both successes and failures--were born of singular and often lonely dedication, and how religious faith and scientific truth collide. He has written a book breathtaking in its originality, its storytelling energy, and its intellectual significance.
Author Notes
Richard Holmes is the author of Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer; Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer; Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage; Shelley: The Pursuit (for which he received the Somerset Maugham Award); Coleridge: Early Visions; and Coleridge: Darker Reflections (a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist). He lives in England.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The Romantic imagination was inspired, not alienated, by scientific advances, argues this captivating history. Holmes, author of a much-admired biography of Coleridge, focuses on prominent British scientists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, including the astronomer William Herschel and his accomplished assistant and sister, Caroline; Humphrey Davy, a leading chemist and amateur poet; and Joseph Banks, whose journal of a youthful voyage to Tahiti was a study in sexual libertinism. Holmes's biographical approach makes his obsessive protagonists (Davy's self-experimenting with laughing gas is an epic in itself) the prototypes of the Romantic genius absorbed in a Promethean quest for knowledge. Their discoveries, he argues, helped establish a new paradigm of "Romantic science" that saw the universe as vast, dynamic and full of marvels and celebrated mankind's power to not just describe but transform Nature. Holmes's treatment is sketchy on the actual science and heavy on the cultural impact, with wide-ranging discussions of the 1780s ballooning craze, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and scientific metaphors in Romantic poetry. It's an engrossing portrait of scientists as passionate adventurers, boldly laying claim to the intellectual leadership of society. Illus. (July 14) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
As a researcher of British science during the Romantic period of English literature, Holmes suitably emphasizes the individual facing nature, so characteristic of the Romantic sensibility. Alighting on astronomer William Herschel (1738-1822) and chemist Humphrey Davy (1778-1829), both of whom were artistic (music and poetry, respectively), Holmes connects them via botanist Joseph Banks. In a precursor to a modern pattern, Banks moved from his youthful success as a naturalist on James Cook's voyages into administration president of the Royal Society and promoted both Herschel and Davy. They came to Banks' notice seemingly from nowhere, and their determination to discover is well told in Holmes' biographical narratives. Elevated to societal notice, Herschel and especially Davy excited popular interest in ultimate questions their scientific findings seemed to open up, questions whose ripples into the literature of Byron and Mary and Percy Shelley Holmes elaborates. Readers interested in any of these figures, or in the lives of astronomer Caroline Herschel and explorer Mungo Park, have in Holmes a fine guide to the arts and sciences, Romantic style.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
In this big two-hearted river of a book, the twin energies of scientific curiosity and poetic invention pulsate on every page. Richard Holmes, the pre-eminent biographer of the Romantic generation and the author of intensely intimate lives of Shelley and Coleridge, now turns his attention to what Coleridge called the "second scientific revolution," when British scientists circa 1800 made electrifying discoveries to rival those of Newton and Galileo. In Holmes's view, "wonder"-driven figures like the astronomer William Herschel, the chemist Humphry Davy and the explorer Joseph Banks brought "a new imaginative intensity and excitement to scientific work" and "produced a new vision which has rightly been called Romantic science." A major theme of Holmes's intricately plotted "relay race of scientific stories" is the double-edged promise of science, the sublime "beauty and terror" of his subtitle. Both played a role in the great balloon craze that swept across Europe after 1783, when the Montgolfier brothers sent a sheep, a duck and a rooster over the rooftops of Versailles, held aloft by nothing more substantial than "a cloud in a paper bag." "What's the use of a balloon?" someone asked Benjamin Franklin, who witnessed the launching from the window of his carriage. "What's the use of a newborn baby?" he replied. The Gothic novelist Horace Walpole was less enthusiastic, fearing that balloons would be "converted into new engines of destruction to the human race - as is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in Science." The British, more advanced in astronomy, could afford to scoff at lowly French ballooning. William Herschel, a self-taught German immigrant with "the courage, the wonder and the imagination of a refugee," supported himself and his hard-working assistant, his sister Caroline, by teaching music in Bath. The two spent endless hours at the enormous telescopes that Herschel constructed, rubbing raw onions to warm their hands and scanning the night sky for unfamiliar stars as musicians might "sight-read" a score. The reward for such perseverance was spectacular: Herschel discovered the first new planet to be identified in more than a thousand years. Holmes describes how the myth of this "Eureka moment," so central to the Romantic notion of scientific discovery, doesn't quite match the prolonged discussion concerning the precise nature of the tail-less "comet" that Herschel had discerned. It was Keats, in a famous sonnet, who compared the sudden sense of expanded horizons he felt in reading Chapman's Elizabethan translation of Homer to Herschel's presumed elation at the sight of Uranus: "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken." Holmes notes the "brilliantly evocative" choice of the verb "swims," as though the planet is "some unknown, luminous creature being born out of a mysterious ocean of stars." As a medical student conversant with scientific discourse, Keats may also have known that telescopes can give the impression of objects viewed "through a rippling water surface." Though Romanticism, as Holmes says, is often presumed to be "hostile to science," the Romantic poets seem to have been positively giddy - sometimes literally so - with scientific enthusiasm. Coleridge claimed he wasn't much affected by Herschel's discoveries, since as a child he had been "habituated to the Vast" by fairy tales. It was the second great Romantic field of science that lighted a fire in Coleridge's mind. "I shall attack Chemistry, like a Shark," Coleridge announced, and invited the celebrated scientist Humphry Davy, who also wrote poetry, to set up a laboratory in the Lake District. Coleridge wrote that he attended Davy's famous lectures on the mysteries of electricity and other chemical processes "to enlarge my stock of metaphors." But he was also, predictably, drawn to Davy's notorious experiments with nitrous oxide, or laughing gas. "The objects around me," Davy reported after inhaling deeply, "became dazzling, and my hearing more acute." Coleridge, an opium addict who coined the word "psychosomatic," compared the pleasurable effects of inhalation to the sensation of "returning from a walk in the snow into a warm room." Davy passed out frequently while under the influence, but strangely, as Holmes notes, failed to pursue possible applications in anesthesia. In assessing the quality of mind that poets and scientists of the Romantic generation had in common, Holmes stresses moral hope for human betterment. Coleridge was convinced that science was imbued with "the passion of Hope," and was thus "poetical." Holmes finds in Davy's rapid and systematic invention of a safety lamp for English miners, one that would not ignite methane, a perfect example of such Romantic hope enacted. Byron celebrated "Davy's lantern, by which coals/Are safely mined for," but his Venetian mistress wondered whether Davy, who was visiting, might "give me something to dye my eyebrows black." Yet it is in his vivid and visceral accounts of the Romantic explorers Joseph Banks and Mungo Park, whose voyages were both exterior and interior, that Holmes is best able to unite scientific and poetic "wonder." Wordsworth had imagined Newton "voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone." When Banks accompanied Captain Cook to Tahiti and witnessed exotic practices like surfing and tattooing and various erotic rites, he returned to England a changed man; as president of the Royal Society, he steadily encouraged others, like Park, to venture into the unknown. "His heart," Holmes writes of Park, "was a terra incognita quite as mysterious as the interior of Africa." At one low point in his African travels in search of Timbuktu, alone and naked and 500 miles from the nearest European settlement, Park noticed a piece of moss "not larger than the top of one of my fingers" pushing up through the hard dirt. "At this moment, painful as my reflections were, the extraordinary beauty of a small moss in fructification irresistibly caught my eye," he wrote, sounding a great deal like the Ancient Mariner. "I could not contemplate the delicate conformation of its roots, leaves and capsula, without admiration." For Holmes, the "age of wonder" draws to a close with Darwin's voyage aboard the Beagle in 1831, partly inspired by those earlier Romantic voyages. "With any luck," Holmes writes wistfully, "we have not yet quite outgrown it." Still, it's hard to read his luminous and horizon-expanding "Age of Wonder" without feeling some sense of diminution in our own imaginatively circumscribed times. "To us, their less tried successors, they appear magnified," as Joseph Conrad, one of Park's admirers, wrote in "Lord Jim," "pushing out into the unknown in obethence to an inward voice, to an impulse beating in the blood, to a dream of the future. They were wonderful; and it must be owned they were ready for the wonderful." Christopher Benfey is the Mellon professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. His books include "A Summer of Hummingbirds" and an edition of Lafcadio Hearn's "American Writings" for the Library of America.
Choice Review
Authored by well-known writer/biographer Holmes, this interesting description of the "second scientific revolution" or "Romantic science" is an excellent history of both the onset of the Romantic period and the account of scientific discoveries. The first scientific revolution, late in the 17th century, can be considered to have been "private," practiced and known primarily by insiders. As the era's writers and artists (Romantics) became aware of these scientific discoveries, this second revolution became public, with writings often authored by women and shared with children. The primary actors in this scientific drama are astronomers/siblings William and Caroline Herschel and polymath Humphrey Davy. The period described is delineated by the voyages of Joseph Banks, who sailed around the world with Captain Cook in the 1760s, and of Charles Darwin on the Beagle in the 1830s. In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley sowed the seeds of future unrest between science and literature, the arts, and religion, relationships that were initially quite favorable to all. A "Cast List" at the end of the book briefly describes additional influential individuals during this period. Of interest to readers in a number of disciplines as well as general readers for pleasure. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All libraries. R. E. Buntrock formerly, University of Maine
Library Journal Review
While Romanticism in Great Britain is known mostly as an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement, rapid and revolutionary scientific discoveries were an underlying catalyst to the era's vaunted sense of "wonder." It was also a period when remarkable individuals working alone could make major contributions to knowledge. Historian and biographer Holmes (Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage) conveys the history of Romantic-era science through vivid biographies of a few such individuals. Notable among them are Joseph Banks, a botanist whose experiences in Tahiti were life-changing; William Herschel, the eccentric astronomer who (aided invaluably by his devoted sister, Caroline) discovered the planet Uranus; and Humphrey Davy, an intrepid chemist who conducted gas inhalation experiments on himself. These and others are depicted against the cultural tapestry of an age of idealism, which was both fueled and threatened by the advances of science. The subject makes this book most relevant for readers of general science and history of science, but its engaging narratives of the period could appeal to a broader readership. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 3/1/09.]-Gregg Sapp, Evergreen State Coll. Lib., Olympia, WA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| List of illustrations | p. ix |
| Prologue | p. xv |
| 1 Joseph Banks in Paradise | p. 1 |
| 2 Herschel on the Moon | p. 60 |
| 3 Balloonists in Heaven | p. 125 |
| 4 Herschel Among the Stars | p. 163 |
| 5 Mungo Park in Africa | p. 211 |
| 6 Davy on the Gas | p. 235 |
| 7 Dr Frankenstein and the Soul | p. 305 |
| 8 Davy and the Lamp | p. 337 |
| 9 Sorcerer and Apprentice | p. 381 |
| 10 Young Scientists | p. 435 |
| Epilogue | p. 467 |
| Cast List | p. 471 |
| Bibliography | p. 485 |
| References | p. 497 |
| Acknowledgements | p. 526 |
| Index | p. 529 |