THE AGE OF WONDER
How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
By Richard Holmes,
Harper Press, 554pp
Reviewed: 20 September 2008
As a lonely teenager, Richard Holmes trekked through the Cévennes mountains of southern France. His only companion was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey, recounting the same journey a century earlier. “[Stevenson] became incredibly real to me,” Holmes says. “It was a completely different way of getting to know a person, not like a classroom, but by being in those places and reading what he had written.
“The magic of biography is that it actually constructs a story, not as a historian or a critical essayist would, but with a beginning, a middle and an end. Biography tries to take you inside someone’s experience.”
Regarded as the foremost biographer of the English Romantic poets he has written prize-winning biographies of Shelley and Coleridge among others Holmes recently retired after seven years as Professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia.
In The Age of Wonder, his latest book, he turns a brass spyglass on a range of those “natural philosophers” who, through often extraordinary effort and courage, established foundations for modern science. He interweaves biographies of a number of these key British figures who were discovering “the beauty and terror of science” during the so-called Romantic period. This lies roughly between Captain Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific and the emergence, around 1840, of the first generation of researchers to call themselves “scientists”. His account of these interlocking lives has well demonstrated his conviction that biography can be a powerful art.
Holmes says of that age that the Romantics, whether poets, explorers or natural philosophers, “had such intensity, both the men and the women”. His characters were pioneers, moving their intellectual world from belief-based examination of a universe that was assumed to be a fixed creation, towards broad recognition that the scientific method of rigorous observation, hypothesis and testing provided the only reliable basis for continual expansion of knowledge. Some found this incompatible with their religion, but others did not. The “wonder” they shared was the intellectual excitement of a generation which realised that the process of discovery has no natural limit, so long as humans continue to speculate, to observe, and to test.
The first manned balloon ascents took place in Paris and England (not long before the First Fleet set out for Australia), and suddenly people could seriously contemplate living in three-dimensional space. Improvements in astronomical telescopes and in observational technique (funded personally by King George III) were revealing multitudes of galaxies that proved the Earth to be a speck in a universe of inconceivable scale.
Their enthusiasm often led these explorers or experimenters to put their own lives in mortal peril, taking risks no modern astronaut or chemist would contemplate. Some found beauty and some found terror in the loss of certainties and the reduced significance of mankind within the enlarged universe.
Sir Joseph Banks looms over much of this book, from his early role as a self-funded naturalist with Captain Cook’s Pacific voyage (1768-9), through 40 years as president of the Royal Society, the principal sponsor of British science and exploration. The grandiose portrait of Sir Joseph Banks that Australians associate with his influence over the developing colony of New South Wales takes on a new twinkle with Holmes’s account of Banks’s younger days.
Banks was only in his mid-20s during the Cook voyage, but his financial patronage and establishment connections made him an effective counter-balance to the meticulous, by-the-book style of Cook’s expeditionary command. Banks’s journals detail how his anthropological research in Tahiti included spending most of his nights ashore observing, and practising, the Tahitian customs of sexual freedom. His intimate relations went far beyond sheer personal indulgence and deeply challenged his cultural assumptions. One aspect of the free-love system for young Tahitians was systematic infanticide, which Banks duly noted could be a source of grief to the young mothers who had been pressured, by the males, to stay in circulation on the “singles” scene. Several times, Banks’s personal connections within the Tahitian host community got Cook and his men out of potentially fatal situations.
Years later, after he had founded the British Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, Banks shows up as a reliable supplier of good-quality Indian hemp to the poet (and natural philosopher) William Taylor Coleridge.
Coleridge would also write ecstatically of the psychedelic effects of inhaling laughing gas (nitrous oxide) as the guest of Sir Humphrey Davy, who succeeded Banks at the Royal Society. Davy had many willing establishment figures aristocrats, poets, holders of government office participate in his sometimes uproarious laughing-gas sessions. The euphoric effects of laughing gas were scrupulously recorded as research, and they were also celebrated in Romantic poems. While never abandoning his determination to work by science, Davy became part of the circle including Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth whose Romantic quest was for new ways of thinking, seeing and feeling. But Davy never realised that nitrous oxide would later become a standard surgical anaesthetic.
Holmes notes that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein legend epitomises themes discussed so passionately by these Romantic thinkers, infatuated and confused with new knowledge the nature of life itself, what makes us human, and why humans behave as they do. The decades toward 1840 trace a transition from the gentlemanly practice of natural philosophy for its own sake, towards recognition of the new profession of “scientist” as a person applying scientific method to a practical economic or social purpose. The term “scientist” was in fact coined by the poet Coleridge (as was the term “psychosomatic”).
Sir Humphrey Davy is now remembered less for his psychedelic laughing-gas experiments than for the methane-safe coalminers’ lamp he developed at the request of mine owners and their workers.
Holmes originally intended to study history at Cambridge, but soon switched over to English, determined to be a writer. He did not see his first biographies as a form of history. “It was much the more the imaginative idea how could you reconstruct someone, bring someone back, by reading their letters, their journals?”
In the 1970s, Holmes judged that academic writing had no place for narrative. Academic history was very “sociological”. It had lost all sense of grand narrative or personal history. Literary writing was no better: “All that wretched theory had come up, with all that jargon that, in my view, just stops students writing proper paragraphs. I didn’t want anything to do with that.” He senses that the tide has changed, and historians once more are interested in narrative.
“Narrative can be used properly, technically and truthfully, but to bring something alive.” Holmes was never interested in writing technically for an academic audience. His target was “the common reader” as praised by Dr Johnson and by Virginia Woolf.
“A problem for young academic writers is that they are forced to publish in technical editions at prices that nobody can afford. That seems to me a complete contradiction of what writing is about. You should be able to open a book at any page and the story will get you. That’s the test I apply to my own writing. I’m writing for a general reader, at any age.”
Readers experience biography differently from historical fiction. “We are fascinated by the truth about somebody’s life not the myth, not the fiction, but what actually happened. And it’s actually quite difficult to find out. If you’re writing somebody’s life 200 years ago, you’ve got to build up from the clothes they wore, the conditions in which they travelled coaches, horses or whatever and the way they talked. And there are ways of reconstructing this.”
Reading biography should be “a kind of imaginative holiday you go away with someone else, somewhere else, and in another time, and you spend that time sharing their experiences. So when you come back, you see your own life somewhat differently.”
In the Romantic period there was no sense of the “two cultures” opposition between science and the humanities that divided intellectuals of the Victorian age and echoes down to our own time. The Romantics shared a sense of wonder at the development of new knowledge, whatever its source or its subject. Holmes quotes from Lord Byron’s Don Juan (1819) how the famous lecher’s mind wanders over questions raised by recent scientific discoveries:
..and then he thought of Earthquakes, and of Wars,
How many miles the Moon might have in girth,
Of Air-balloons, and of the many bars
To perfect knowledge of the boundless skies;
And then he thought of Donna Julia’s eyes.
Holmes feels our present age is overcoming the “two cultures” problem, partly through popular science-writing and television. “One of the reasons I wrote this book is that it is possible now to bring writers and poets, and also men and women of science, together again.
“There is an awareness of planetary crisis, of climate change and the only way to understand it is the scientific way. At the same time there is a sort of crisis of trust in rational science. That’s all the more reason to know the history of badas well as good science.
“The furious debates about religion – where is God; what is life; what is human consciousness – all those were happening in the Romantic age. We recognise those debates, and we are having them now, so that’s the role of biography.
“There’s a kind of missionary aspect to this book. We need a critical perspective on science. The general public needs to know, and to ask these questions.”
Sometimes over-generous in its detail, The Age of Wonder makes a highly readable, informative and stimulating narrative of individuals making history, and made by their time a time with many parallels to our own.
Richard Thwaites is a Canberra reviewer who is still wondering.