The Age of Wonder

The second of the New York Times Ten Best of 2009:

The Romantic period, which roughly consists of the last few decades of the eighteenth century and the first few of the nineteenth, is mostly thought of in terms of literature and music. But author Richard Holmes argues persuasively that there was Romantic science as well, in his richly entertaining book The Age of Wonder, subtitled How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.

The Romantic movement began as a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment with writers such as William Blake, but Holmes, who has written several books about the Romantic poets, argues that the scientific discoveries of the age inspired the poets, and that there was a give and take between them. He begins with a chapter on the botanist Joseph Banks, who accompanied Captain Cook on an expedition to Tahiti, where he collected several new plants and also lived a few months in paradise, taking a Tahitian girlfriend. Banks would come home to England a national hero, and then would be elected president to the Royal Society, a body of scientists who acted as an advisory body to the crown (and still exists today). He would be president for over forty years, and would shepherd British scientists for a generation.

Among them were William Herschel, the astronomer who discovered the existence of the planet Uranus (ably assisted by his sister Caroline, who discovered many comets), Mungo Park, who explored the Niger river in Africa in search of Timbuktu, and Humphry Davy, a chemist who, among other things, discovered chlorine, iodine, and invented the safety lamp for miner's which revolutionized the mining industry (the poor miners had had a tendency to be blown up when using exposed flame in methane-laced mines).

Herschel and Davy are the dominant characters in the book, and Holmes expertly gives them life as people and as geniuses. Herschel's success came in his ability to build telescopes, including a forty-foot-long one that was used for several years, and his painstaking visual sweeps of the heavens. He bristled when others suggested his spotting of Uranus was just luck. One learns though that Herschel was not always right--he was convinced both the moon and sun were inhabited by life.

Davy, who grew up in a poor family in Cornwall, was a daring scientist (incidentally, Holmes notes that the word "scientist" was not coined until much later in the nineteenth century) and a poet as well, who experimented on himself, most notably in breathing nitrous oxide, which he seemed to like a great deal. He was not immodest though. Holmes writes, "Here was a chance for Davy to fulfil his greatest ambition: to show that a man of science could serve humanity--and be a genius."

Holmes takes a sidetrack from these men with an adventure-filled chapter about the ballooning craze, which began in France. It's easy to get caught up in the excitement of what those days must have been like, when man for the first time was able to go into the clouds and look down and see what the Earth looked like from a bird's eye view.

In the latter part of the book we learn how the Romantic poets fit in. Percy Shelley, who was kicked out of Oxford for circulating a pamphlet promoting atheism, found Herschel's discoveries supported his view--with so many stars in the firmament, there must be other planets around them, and how could God be a deity over all of them? Lord Byron, in his poem Don Juan, made reference to many of the scientists and discoverers of the day:

This is the patent Age of new inventions
For killing bodies, and for saving souls,
All propagated with the best intentions:

Sir Humphry Davy's lantern, by which coals
Are safely mined for (in the mode he mentions);
Timbuctoo travels; voyages to the Poles;
Are always to benefit mankind: -- as true,
Perhaps, as shooting them at Waterloo.

The most notable meeting of Romantic science and Romantic literature was Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, which demonizes science as playing with God's powers to bad effect. She was inspired by the surgeon John Hunter and Davy's experiments with galvanism (a word that is derived from the Italian scientist Galvani, who was able to make dead frogs move when touched with electricity) and Vitalism: "Ever since the 1790s the new developments in Romantic medical science and theory had begun to raise fundamental questions about the nature of life itself. What distinguishes organic from inorganic ('dead') matter, or vegetable from animal life?"

Of course, Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein finds out the answers to these questions the hard way (the end of the book, a chase to the Arctic, certainly was inspired by polar expeditions of the time).

Holmes continues: "What is less clear is where she gathered her ideas and materials from, and how she created her two unforgettable protagonists: Dr. Frankenstein and his Creature. One is tempted to say that the Creature--who is paradoxically the most articulate person in the whole novel--was a pure invention of Mary's genius. But in Victor Frankenstein of Ingolstadt she had created a composite figure who in many ways was typical of a whole generation of scientific men."

Holmes writes that the history of science is like a relay race, with one generation handing off the baton to the next, and he brilliantly shows the through-line from the Romantic scientists to those who came after them, in this case culminating with Charles Darwin. He also, blessedly, takes it easy on those of who are not scientifically-geared--there was little in the book that zoomed way over my head. This is a book for both those who love the history of science, as well as those who understandably enjoy the rich tapestry of the lives of the Romantic poets.