| Author |
Holmes, Richard |
| Year |
2008 |
| Publisher |
London: HarperCollins |
| Number of pages |
576 |
| ISBN |
9781400031870 |
| Keywords |
|
- Tim Fulford on BSLS site (2012):
“The best feature of this fascinating survey
of Romantic science is Richard Holmes’s skill in bringing to utterly believable life
the domestic circumstances in which scientific discovery was made. A considerable
biographer with much-praised lives of Shelley and Coleridge to his name, Holmes has
a talent for illuminating, with a quiet, tolerant humour, the fears, foibles and quirks
of writers and experimentalists, showing how their work was made possible by stimulating
milieux in which the emotional support of sisters and wives and brother and father-figures
was quite as important as membership of institutions and formal training. The result
of this approach is his best book yet, a unique presentation of Romantic science for
a popular readership that takes the form of a series of interlinked biographies of
a cast of central characters including Joseph Banks the explorer—President of the
Royal Society and patron of others’ work; William Herschel and his sister Caroline—watchers
of the skies so obsessive that they made their own lenses to see them better; Humphry
Davy—the country lad from the Cornish coast who revolutionized chemistry; Mungo Park—the
Scottish gardener who walked deep into Africa; Faraday and Babbage—young intellectuals
whose careers were shaped by Banks and Davy. The supporting cast includes the balloonists
Montgolfier, Lunardi and Jeffries, the surgeons William Lawrence and John Abernethy,
the poet Coleridge, the novelist Mary Shelley and the ‘fat democrat’ chemist Thomas
Beddoes.
There are weaknesses as well as strengths: ‘wonder’ is a rather
general and vague concept with which to define an age; it is also scarcely cognate.
And although the book is comprehensive, it cannot cover all the discoveries of the
era: among those whose omission I regretted was geology. Mathematical science does
not appear and little is said about the astonishing developments in technology (wonder-inducing
if anything was). It is also apparent that Holmes’s forte is not the detailed explication
of intellectual influence or the philosophical theory that guided scientific experiment.
Nevertheless, the weaknesses are relatively unimportant, for the
book is unified by the multiple personal connections between its characters—all actual
or would-be protégés of Banks—and such is the verve with which the social and biographical
context of discovery is related that the reader is carried along fascinated. Holmes,
in short, has succeeded superbly in synthesising the specialist research of historians
of science, literature and culture to produce a work that, if not original, is unsurpassed
in its combination of general survey and biographical insight.
For this
reviewer the best chapters are those devoted to single figures. That on Banks recounts
with exhilarating vividness his voyage around the world with Captain Cook. Holmes
dwells on Banks’s readiness to enquire into indigenous cultures and gives graphic
accounts of his romantic encounters with Tahitian women. But he also emphasizes the
seriousness of Banks’s commitment to natural history and botany: his collections on
the voyage increased the number of plant species known to European science by 25%.
After his return he had the collections catalogued and displayed at his house, along
with an unsurpassed natural history library. Gradually, it became the centre to which
explorers, botanists and natural historians flocked from all over Europe and America,
before embarking on their own collecting expeditions. Banks, meanwhile, became a man
of influence with the admiralty, ministry and monarch—adviser on exploratory voyages,
instigator of the colonisation of Australia, de facto director of Kew Gardens. As
President of the Royal Society for forty years, he presided over an expansion of experimentation
and discovery that embraced Jenner, Davy, Volta, Cavendish and Blumenbach as well
as Herschel and Mungo Park. As such he is rightly the figure with whom Holmes opens
his story, for the other featured discoverers benefited from his work and under his
patronage.
From Banks, Holmes turns to balloons and details the era’s amazed
fascination with the first ascents. Both the French and English flights are
discussed, and Holmes enjoys recounting the pratfalls, as when Mrs Sage, England’s
‘first female aeronaut’ was seen ‘on all fours in the open entrance of the gondola.
The crowd assumed that she had fainted, and was perhaps receiving some kind of intimate
first-aid from Mr Biggin’ (p. 142). One Ralph Heron, by contrast, suffered a tragic
fall, dropping over 100 feet from a guy rope: ‘the impact drove his legs into a flower
bed as far as his knees, and ruptured his internal organs, which burst out onto the
ground’ (p. 143).
After the fleshy interlude of the ballooning chapter,
Holmes turns to the second of his heroes, the modest Hanoverian musician who, in conjunction
with his sister Caroline, constructed a telescope through which he discovered a new
planet. William Herschel’s career is presented in great detail: the originality of
his theories about nebulae and the staggering extent of his observations are memorably
revealed. Yet what makes the account so compelling is Holmes’s reconstruction of the
intense collaborative relationship between the siblings. Night after night for year
after year William observed and Caroline recorded, continuing even in freezing weather
and, on one occasion, when Caroline impaled herself on the telescope gantry and sustained
a serious leg wound. As productive as the relationship between William and Dorothy
Wordsworth, it was riven by William’s marriage. Holmes is especially engaging when
he teases out the signs of resentment hidden within Caroline’s dedication and he is
wise enough to see that the Herschels’ achievements, depending as they did on painstaking
long-term observation, could not have occurred without the spur of rivalry.
Holmes’s portrait of Davy also features collaboration. Here the story is more familiar:
other writers have explored the Pneumatic Institution run by Thomas Beddoes, where
Davy administered nitrous oxide to a brilliant circle of young intellectuals including
Coleridge, Southey and Roget. Nevertheless Holmes re-creates the excited sense of
possibility shared by this circle and shows how their identification of Davy as a
genius was adopted by him, directing his later self-disciplined and self-promoting
experimentation at the Royal Institution and carrying him all the way to the Presidency
of the Royal Society. By 1820 Davy was tired and disillusioned, the stimulating circle
of his Bristol days replaced by a tense and unhappy marriage from which he sought
escapes. Davy, Holmes implies, came to represent the burnt-out embers of the once-brilliant
fire of Romantic discovery. Incapable of generosity towards the brilliant young assistant
Faraday, he also seemed an obstruction to the younger Turks of the Royal Society,
men such as John Herschel and Charles Babbage who would take science in a more specialised
and mathematical direction in the Victorian era.
That it ends by registering
disillusion as well as wonder is a sign of the subtlety with which Holmes delineates
the age. This is a more complex book than its title suggests, but a book that makes
enjoyable and arresting sense out of complexity. Holmes’s canvas is vast, crowded
with people, ideas and facts, yet it is never blurred or dull. The Age of Wonder is
one of the best books ever written about Romantic-era science and an example to all
of us who study the connections between literature and science.”
Abstract
Amazon (2013):
The Age of Wonder is a colorful and utterly absorbing 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 in search of new worlds. Other voyages of discovery—astronomical,
chemical, poetical, philosophical—swiftly follow in Richard Holmes's thrilling evocation
of the second scientific revolution. Through the lives of William Herschel and his
sister Caroline, who forever changed the public conception of the solar system; of
Humphry Davy, whose near-suicidal gas experiments revolutionized chemistry; and of
the great Romantic writers, from Mary Shelley to Coleridge and Keats, who were inspired
by the scientific breakthroughs of their day, Holmes brings to life the era in which
we first realized both the awe-inspiring and the frightening possibilities of science—an
era whose consequences are with us still.
