The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
by Richard Holmes
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Book Summary Information
Author: Richard HolmesEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-07-14
ISBN: 0375422226
Number of pages: 576
Publisher: Pantheon
Book Reviews of The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
Book Review: No "Two Cultures" during that generation
Summary: 5 Stars
This book consists of a number of brilliantly written and fully rounded biographies of scientists and discoverers - extensively covering their private as well as their public lives - and the reception of their work during the Romantic Period.
The first chapter, called `Joseph Banks in Paradise', is about Banks' activities and their descriptions when he visited Tahiti in 1768 as a botanist on Captain Cook's voyage of that year. One `paradisal' feature of which Banks took full advantage was the free sexual behaviour of the Tahitians. The chapter also tells the story of Omai, the Tahitian whom Banks introduced into English society. Later, as member and eventually President of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks became involved with encouraging many of the scientists dealt with in later chapters, and he is a presence throughout the book.
For instance, when he was no longer able to travel himself, he got the Africa Association to sponsor the explorations in West Africa of Mungo Park, to whose two expeditions in 1794 and 1805 - the second ending with his death - another rivetting chapter is dedicated. These journeys would inspire poems by Wordsworth, Southey, Keats, and Shelley.
Two chapters are devoted to the astronomer William Herschel who, with his remarkable and initially home-made telescopes, probed deep into the heavens and discovered a planet (Uranus) and nebulae which had never been seen before. Later he came to develop the idea that the universe had not been a static creation but had ever been evolving - a notion that deeply affected Romantic poets like Keats. There is a touching portrayal of William's devoted sister Caroline who for eighteen years (until his marriage) acted not only as his housekeeper but, in the middle of the night, as note-taker of his observations of the sky. Once, while William was away in Germany in 1786, she herself discovered a comet that had not been found before, and by 1797 she had found six more and had been recognized by the Royal Society as an astronomer in her own right. She lived to the age of 98 and would follow with knowledgeable interest the astronomical discoveries in the Southern hemisphere made by her nephew, Sir John Herschel, in the 1830s.
Then there is a chapter about the `ballomania' which followed the first flight of Montgolfier's balloon. The English scientific establishment was inclined to put French enthusiasm down to French flightiness, but eventually the interest and ballooning experiments spread to England also, of which there are some entertaining accounts.
There are two fascinating chapters about Humphrey Davy, who was thrilled with the new science of chemistry and who experimented, dangerously on himself to start with, with a variety of inhalants, especially nitrous oxide, which would, two generations later, be used as an anaesthetic, as Davy himself thought it might be. In low doses it transforms the nature of perceptions, often in a pleasurable way and opened new dimensions to the romantic experience, as with Davy's friends, the poets Southey and Coleridge. Davy was a poet, too, and moved in literary circles as easily as he did in scientific ones. In their turn, the romantic poets frequently incorporated in their works reflections on the scientific discoveries of their day: no notion of Two Cultures during that period!
The second chapter about Davy tells us, step by step, how he invented the safety lamp which could be taken down the mines without the danger of its flames setting off explosions of firedamp (methane) that had been costing the lives of hundreds of miners. Already knighted for his earlier work, this invention led to more honours being heaped upon him, culminating in his election as President of the Royal Society after the death of Sir Joseph Banks in 1820. In that position he was nothing like as genial or, above all, as generous to younger scientists - his former assistant Michael Faraday and William Herschel's son John among others - as his predecessor had been, and in his vain old age he was nothing like as appealing as the other characters in the book. But his last work, `Consolations in Travel, or the Last Days of a Philosopher', an imaginative work with many autobiographical elements, is `one of the most extraordinary prose books of the late Romantic period' in which he marries his conceptions of science with Romantic visions of Nature.
Later Romanticism, as Holmes points out, was to see Science and the sense of Wonder not as allies but as antagonists, with such as Carlyle in 1833 accusing scientists of destroying the sense of wonder with their `Mensuration and Numeration'. (But Wordsworth had surely made the point as early as 1798, with famous his lines:
"Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:
We murder to dissect.")
Having devoted most of the book to the three giants - Sir John Banks, Sir William Herschel and Sir Humphry Davy, Holmes devotes his last chapter to next generation of scientists: Michael Faraday, Charles Babbage, John Herschel, William Whewell who coined the word `scientist' in 1834, Mary Somerville after whom the Oxford College is named; and the book more or less ends with Charles Darwin's departure on HMS Beagle, when it had started with Banks' departure on HMS Endeavour 62 years earlier. Perhaps Holmes will one day devote a whole book describing the work of that generation in as full and fascinating detail as he has to their predecessors.
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Summary of The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
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.
Amazon Exclusive: Oliver Sacks on The Age of Wonder
Oliver Sacks is the author of Musicophilia, Awakenings,The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and many other books, for which he has received numerous awards, including the Hawthornden Prize, a Polk Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and lives in New York City, where he is a practicing neurologist. Read his exclusive guest review of The Age of Wonder:
I am a Richard Holmes addict. He is an incomparable biographer, but in The Age of Wonder, he rises to new heights and becomes the biographer not of a single figure, but of an entire unique period, when artist and scientist could share common aims and ambitions and a common language--and together create a "romantic," humanist science. We are once again on the brink of such an age, when science and art will come together in new and powerful ways. For this we could have no better model than the lives of William and Caroline Herschel and Humphry Davy, whose dedication and scientific inventiveness were combined with a deep sense of wonder and poetry in the universe. Only Holmes, who is so deeply versed in the people and culture of eighteenth-century science, could tell their story with such verve and resonance for our own time.
(Photo © Elena Seibert)
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