The Age of Wonder
by Richard Holmes
Summary
Holmes's subject is the generation the history of science had filed under prelude: the British science of the Romantic age, between Cook's voyages and Darwin's Beagle, and his argument is in the title. Romanticism and science were not opponents but siblings, sharing the same appetite for the sublime, and the age's discoveries were experienced, by scientists and poets alike, as wonder.
The book is a group biography built on three lives. Joseph Banks, aboard the Endeavour in Tahiti in 1769, the young botanist whose voyage sets the template of scientific adventure, and who spends the rest of the book as the Royal Society's president and impresario, dispatching younger men toward the horizon. William Herschel, the Hanoverian musician who ground his own mirrors in Bath and found, one night in 1781, the first new planet since antiquity, with his sister Caroline beside him at the eyepiece, comet hunter and the first salaried woman in British science, whose own story Holmes restores with particular care. And Humphry Davy, the Cornish apothecary's boy who inhaled his own nitrous oxide, isolated element after element, invented the miners' safety lamp and wrote poetry his friend Coleridge took seriously, the lecture hall showman in whom science and Romantic celebrity fused.
Around them: the balloonists rising over Paris and London, Mungo Park vanishing up the Niger, and Mary Shelley, listening to the vitalism debates, assembling Frankenstein from the age's anxieties.
Around five hundred and fifty pages, biography conducted as literature.
Best for readers who want the era when science last belonged to poetry, told by the great Romantic biographer.
Historical Context & Significance
The Age of Wonder won the Royal Society prize in 2009 and the National Book Critics Circle award for nonfiction in America, a transatlantic double almost no history of science had managed, and it stands as the crossover moment for its subject: the Romantic scientists moved from the specialist literature to the bestseller lists inside its covers.
Richard Holmes arrived as an outsider bearing exactly the right tools: the biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, the inventor, in Footsteps, of the pursuit school of biography, applying a lifetime's Romanticism to the laboratory. His coinage of a relay of scientific generations, each handing wonder forward, gave the book its shape and its afterlife: Falling Upwards followed on the balloonists.
The Herschel chapters did measurable work, helping to lift Caroline Herschel into the canon of remembered scientists. Historians quibbled over the wonder thesis's edges and adopted its cast list anyway.