Books: The Age of Wonder

IN 1778 JOSEPH BANKS WAS elected President of the Royal Society at the early age of 35.

The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes

HarperPress, 380pp, £25

Review by MARC LAMBERT

He had made his name as a botanist and explorer on James Cook's famous voyage to the South Seas ten years earlier, returning with tales of Tahiti that fascinated London society and seemed to affirm Rousseau's thesis of the noble savage. Confirmation arrived in 1770, when one of Cook's commanders brought back Omai, a singularly beautiful and graceful man. Becoming Bank's protégé, he was dressed up as an Englishman and presented to George III. Bowing low, the Tahitian leapt forward, grasped the royal hand and exclaimed, "How do, King Tosh!"

But if London was titillated by Banks's account of a society that lived in a state of natural grace, and which seemed to enjoy considerable sexual freedom, the scientists of the day took a more sober view. As the great French naturalist Georges Cuvier stated, Banks's methods had prefigured those of modern science: "not simply by seeing, but by actively observing, he showed his true scientific character".

The arts of seeing and observing, whether by scientist or poet, run like a leitmotif through Holmes's wonderfully engaging account of the era of Romantic Science, opened by Banks's voyage on The Endeavour and brought to a close by Darwin's departure on The Beagle in 1831. In telling the story of some of the central figures of the age, among them the astronomer William Herschel, the explorer Mungo Park and the chemist Humphry Davy, Holmes brilliantly illuminates the human and subjective aspects of science-making, showing how this existed not in opposition, but as handmaiden to the discovery of objective truth. Here, poets and scientists of the age were in perfect accord, Davy asserting that in science "imagination, as well as the reason, is necessary", echoing the opinion of his friend Coleridge that science "being necessarily performed with the passion of hope … was poetical".

In rooting the achievements of Herschel and Davy in vivid accounts of their lives, Holmes picks away at the "two culture" opposition of art and science. Arguing that we need to better understand how science is actually made, how scientists think, feel and are creative, Holmes is closer to the attitudes of Richard Feynman than to Richard Dawkins. The Romantic age prefigured the unravelling of natural philosophy into discrete areas of scientific specialisation, but the rich commerce between science and art was central to its achievements.

Here Holmes's intimacy with the intellectual life of the age, culled from his masterly studies of Shelley, Coleridge and others, enable him to draw a fascinating picture of the symbiosis between scientific discovery and the artistic revolutions of romanticism. This was expressed by Wordsworth and Coleridge in the preface to Lyrical Ballads when they wrote that the poet will be ready "to follow the steps of the Man of science … carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of science itself". Coleridge joked that he attended Davy's lectures to enlarge his stock of metaphors. What this meant is that the successive paradigm shifts in understanding, wrought by the discoveries of science, played themselves out in the cultural expressions that shaped the sensibilities of the age.

Frankenstein is the most famous case in point. The Shelleys first became acquainted with vitalism through their doctor, and the book dramatises several key ideas which apply both to the artist and the scientist, the original and solitary genius engaged in a neo-Faustian pact with nature or the muse. More entertainingly, Holmes demonstrates how the ballooning craze which swept Britain and France further transformed the era's vision of itself. A memorable image is that of the daredevil balloonist Lunardi trying to steer his craft mid-air with a pair of oars, yet Holmes shows how these experiments led to a better understanding of man's impact on nature as the earth was seen for the first time from above. Ballooning inspired Howard's classifications of the clouds, which in turn informed the poems of Shelley and Byron, and the paintings of Constable and Turner.

But it was Herschel's discoveries among the stars, made possible by his brilliant, dogged development of Newton's reflector telescope, which provided the greatest shift. Aided by his comet-finding sister Caroline, Herschel discovered Uranus and mapped over a thousand nebulae. What he was able to see with his superior technology, while claiming that seeing was an art, overturned the very perception of the universe and Man's place in it. Space was dynamic, not fixed, and it was enormous. In a series of seminal papers to the Royal Society, Herschel pioneered the ideas of deep space and time, revising the Newtonian model into one concerned with the evolution of stars and the origins of the universe.

But the era of Romantic science was drawing to a close. The time of the quasi-professional was gone. Herschel's gifted son John chafed at the monopoly of the Royal Society and saw Joseph Banks as a dilettante. In his book The Study of Natural Philosophy, he heralded the birth of professional, specialised science, informed by the rigorous discipline of inductive method. Darwin read it as a student, "like a summons to arms". Just ahead lay The Beagle, and the bombshell of natural selection.