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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.
- Sales Rank: #359494 in Books
- Brand: Holmes, Richard
- Published on: 2009-07-14
- Released on: 2009-07-14
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.52" h x 1.45" w x 6.46" l, 2.11 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 576 pages
Amazon.com Review
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)
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The Romantic imagination was inspired, not alienated, by scientific advances, argues this captivating history. Holmes, author of a much-admired biography of Coleridge, focuses on prominent British scientists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, including the astronomer William Herschel and his accomplished assistant and sister, Caroline; Humphrey Davy, a leading chemist and amateur poet; and Joseph Banks, whose journal of a youthful voyage to Tahiti was a study in sexual libertinism. Holmes's biographical approach makes his obsessive protagonists (Davy's self-experimenting with laughing gas is an epic in itself) the prototypes of the Romantic genius absorbed in a Promethean quest for knowledge. Their discoveries, he argues, helped establish a new paradigm of Romantic science that saw the universe as vast, dynamic and full of marvels and celebrated mankind's power to not just describe but transform Nature. Holmes's treatment is sketchy on the actual science and heavy on the cultural impact, with wide-ranging discussions of the 1780s ballooning craze, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and scientific metaphors in Romantic poetry. It's an engrossing portrait of scientists as passionate adventurers, boldly laying claim to the intellectual leadership of society. Illus. (July 14)
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From The New Yorker
Known for his biographies of Romantic writers, Holmes turns his attention to the science of the Romantic Age, and demonstrates the extent to which the era’s scientific and literary endeavors enriched each other and were animated by common ideals. Holmes begins with Joseph Banks, the official botanist on Captain Cook’s 1768 voyage to Tahiti, whose diaries of this paradisiacal island made him a scientific celebrity. Elected to serve as the president of the Royal Society, Banks championed, among others, William Herschel, a composer and self-taught astronomer who discovered the planet Uranus; Mungo Park, a Scottish doctor who embarked on a perilous journey through Africa seeking the riches of Timbuktu; and Humphry Davy, a self-taught chemist and poet who invented a safety lamp for miners. Holmes shows the impact of such discoveries on writers like Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, whose responses, he contends, helped create a mythology of discovery that is still with us today.
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Most helpful customer reviews
120 of 126 people found the following review helpful.
Just Before the Golden Age of Victorian Science
By Ronald H. Clark
I have found the history of British science to be one of the best ways to study the intellectual history of the 19th century. This book, which focuses upon the period between Captain Cook's first voyage in 1768 and Darwin's Beagle journey in 1831,takes the story of British science back a bit earlier, and explains some of the important precursor developments to the later dazzling Victorian period. If that was all it did, that would be plenty for the author has written a fine scientific history. But the book is far richer than even this accomplishment for it seeks to establish ties between science and the British Romantics, surprisingly demonstrating that not only did Romantic poets and painters not run away from science, some of them embraced and even engaged in it. Along the way, the profession of scientific researcher emerged as well as some of our basic ideas about scientific progress.
The narrative is built around a series of significant individuals, for whom the author creates scientific biographies. The first is Joseph Banks (1743-1820) who became the godfather of British science during this period from his post as President of the Royal Society. One of the major sciences that underwent development during this period was astronomy; several chapters are devoted to the pathbreaking work of William Herschel (who discovered Uranus) and his sister Carolyn who pioneered new developments and telescopic designs. In the process their work turned the attention of artists to the skies and the evolutin of universe. A chapter catches the excitement of early balloonists and the Romantic wake they left behind as they explored the skies. Exploration was anordsother feature of the period, and was encouraged by Banks who had been on Cook's first voyage to the South Pacific. Mungo Park (1771-1806) anchors a chapter on this, and his tragic disappearance (as well as many other African explorers) reminds us how overwhelming a challenge African exploration presented during this period. Chemistry was another of the major sciences that took off during this period, as demonstrated in the fascinating activities of Humphry Davy (1778-1829), who pioneered in studying gases, electro-chemical analysis, agricultural chemistry, and became a great popularizer of scientific developments. The author frequently links up scientific developments with poetry, with Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, and Tennyson all making appearances, some supportive others not, and with painters whose portrayals of balloons and scientific breakthroughs conveyed the excitement of the period. Davy himself wrote poetry which he recorded in his lab books along with experimental data.
Many of these scientific developments seemed to challenge traditional religious views and raised new philosophical issues. I found the discussion of "Dr Frankenstein and the Soul" highly interesting. The "Vitalism debate" of 1816-22 centered on the issue of whether there was a life force at work, despite scientific scepticism. Naturphilosohie, a form of scientific mysticism, arose to challenge materialistic interpretations of life. The author does a fine job in explaining how Mary Shelley's novel pictured scientists as being potentially dangerous and raised fundamental issues about the human soul. By the 1830's the British Association for the Advancement of Science is launched and we are on the cusp of the "golden age of Victorian science."
The author seems equally at home in science or poetry and art, having written extensively on Coleridge. The book includes a large number of breathtaking color plates which help the reader grasp what the narrative is discussing. The research is impeccable, with 27 pages of notes, a 12-page cast list of mini-biographies of anyone mentioned in the text, and an 11-page bibliography broken down by topic. Poetry is not my thing. Nonetheless, i found this book to be incredibly rich in ideas and perceptive analysis. A rare bird to be sure.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Informative, Revealing, but too Lengthy
By Curious Guy
I bought this book based on a friend's recommendation. She found it endlessly fascinating. It is about developments in science in a significant era of change in the (western) world. Events and players of the period included both the American and French Revolutions, the first successful attempts at human flight in history, the development of a new sense of the solar system and universe, Benjamin Franklin, George III, and the significant scientific contributors of that time.
I enjoyed the book but was not enchantred with it. The opening sections about Joseph Banks, starting with his voyages with Captain Cook (especially to Tahiti) were fascinating and illuminating about a (generally less remebered) man of significant intelligence, integrity, curiosity, insight, social grace (especially for defusing hostile interactions and breeding harmony), as well social and political savvy involving scientific thinkers and British royalty. For decades of the 18th century he was an increasingly significant actor nd hub in championing and influencing the direction and development of British science. The rest of the book had similar - lengthy - accounts of other "thought leaders" in science who are better known, but repeatedly going to amazingly detailed accounts about far less interesting or significant details or insight.
22 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Chronicling the transition from natural philosophy to science
By James Donnelley
I loved this book. For me it captured some sense of the transition from "natural philosophy" (thinking about and speculating about nature) to science (making careful observations and weaving those observations into theories of nature). I loved how Richard Holmes brought some of the people involved in this transition to life. The role of Joseph Banks, the relationship between William and Caroline and John Herschel and many, many more delightful insights into the people who influenced the transition to scientific thought.
Here's a quote from John Herschel in the book that to me captures some of the sense of the Age of Wonder:
"To the natural philosopher there is no natural object unimportant or trifling...A mind that has once imbibed a taste for scientific enquiry has within itself an inexhaustible source of pure and exciting contemplations. One would think that Shakespeare had such a mind in view when he describes a contemplative man finding:
Tongues in trees - books in the running brooks
Sermons in stones - and good in everything
Where the uninformed and unenquiring eye perceives neither novelty nor beauty, he walks in the midst of wonders."
I know we all have our particular tastes, but this was for me the best book I've read - on any topic.
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