The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
ISBN:9780375422225 read summary

I read many books about math and science. It is rare, however, that a book on science gives me the kind of pleasure that this book does. It stands close to unique among books in the field: more than history or biography, it is a microscope on an era told through the biographies of some of the important scientists of the period.

This story spans a time period from roughly the late 1760's through the mid 1830's. It starts with a beautiful chapter on the exploration of Tahiti by Joseph Banks. Soon after his return, Banks becomes president of the Royal Society. From this powerful position, Banks drives the development of British science for the next forty years so we see him continually pop-up as the rest of the book progresses.

After Tahiti, the main scientists we follow are the great astronomer, William Herschel, and his sister, Caroline (a great astronomer is her own right), as well as the chemist, Humphrey Davy. We learn about their great scientific discoveries, of course (Herschel is famous for the discovery of the planet Uranus while Davy launched the field of electrochemistry and invented the miners' lamp that bears his name). We also get some great information of the importance of ballooning which developed during this time. Still, Holmes gives us so much more. He shows how this science flowed from the Romantic culture of the time and how these scientists were reflections of it.

For example, though I have read many other works about these two men, I never really gave much thought to Herschel as a musician. His training and early working life was that of a musician. Astronomy was a "hobby" at which he happened to excel and which he melded into his life. Davy, for his part, is often considered the inheritor of Bacon in his respect for inductive reasoning and experiment; however, I never realized the important of his friendships with key poets of the period (Coleridge, in particular), and his own attempts at writing verse. It gives quite a different perspective on the man. In fact, Holmes gives us a wealth of information about the impact of Romantic authors on the acceptance of science by the public at large (Mary Shelly's Frankenstein being the prime example). Davy's famous public lectures on science are another example of this relationship.

As the book draws to a close, Holmes also does a great job of showing how the generally positive view of science during this period began to give way to darker musings. Romantic spiritualism begins to give way to atheism, which creates ripples in the wider culture with which we continue to deal. The unity of "natural philosophy" gives way to specialization (physicist, chemist, botanist, etc.) which puts up walls between the branches of science. The groundwork of the modern age is being laid.

Even a book as wonderful as this has some flaws. I found the brief chapter on Mungo Park to be sort of a strange aside to the general flow of the narrative. Holmes also assumes some knowledge on the part of the reader that may not be generally known to the non-scientific reader. (For example, he often mentions the strained relationship between Davy and Michael Faraday, but never really explains it. Anyone familiar with science of the period would know about this but others may not.)

That being said, I got the sense while reading this book that it would have great appeal to many non-scientists. I plan on suggesting it to a number of English teachers I know whose lessons on Romantic poets may benefit from Holmes' insights. This is definitely not a book for scientists alone. It deserves a wide readership.

What is the hullabaloo about this book? What does it add to our knowledge of either nineteenth century science or Romantic literature? In order not to scare off the litcrit crowd, Holmes skims very lightly over the science, which is (presumably) the reason why we are interested in these people in the first place. Speaking as a litcrit/humanities emigré, I could have used slightly more enlightenment about the science underlying Davys's experiments with nitrous oxide or the preceding context of chemistry under Lavoisier and Priestly. However, we are spared these weighty subjects like children who are told about sexual reproduction only in vague or allegorical terms ("You want the truth? You can't handle..." etc.). OK, the Romantics were not as averse to science as high-school texts claim. Surely any English major should know that. Oh well, the book contains a decent bibliography at the end for the reader interested in expanding his horizons.

Growing up, I was never really fond of history or science, not to mention history about science, and I think mainly it was because of the way these subjects were introduced and taught to me in school, which was by rote memory and for the purpose of good performance in standardized tests. For me, it was a sad case of high scores without true, or lasting lessons or interests. On the contrary, a book like this, to me, makes history and science come alive and exciting and relevant to our everday life, it shows the continuity, and the close connections between literature, music, art, science, philosophy etc. It is amazing and refreshing to learn about the incredible versatility of the scientists--Banks, Herschel, Davy, Brewster--who were not the stereotypical modern day "geeky" engineers/scientists, these scientists actually wrote music and poetry, and were explorers and philosophers! And the writers and poets of that time went to science lectures and incorporated science into their arts! Painters and writers had dinner parties and discussed philosophies in scientific discoveries! (We are not talking about old,white hair sages here, we are talking about relatively young people. I guess when you don't have to tweet every hour about the food you ate or how many hours you excercised or what Lidsey Lohan was wearing, you can actually think about more profound things.) As the author writes in his epilogue, the rigid boundaries between science vs art, or religion or traditional ethics are no longer enough. We need "the sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid and QUESTING belief in a future for the globe." Take it from Newton, "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great Ocean of truth lay all before me." This book is educational and informative, but not in a dry textbook way. It was FUN!

This book is a fascinating voyage back to the Romantic Age in Europe when there were still far flung parts of the globe to explore, most of the chemical elements awaited discovery, and time and space were found to be much vaster than anyone had expected. Even more wonderfully, scientists and artists were not naturally at odds--chemist Humphry Davy and poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge were friends, Percy Bysshe Shelley attended science lectures at the Royal Society and a musician, William Herschel, became the leading astronomer of England. Poets looked to the brave new world of science for inspiration, and many scientists--including Davy and Charles Darwin's grandfather Erasmus--wrote poetry. While scientists were perfecting the inductive reasoning of Newton and Francis Bacon they also used poetic devices like analogies to advance their understanding and inspire their research. It was an exciting and unsettling time and that makes for a great reading experience.

I recommend this book highly. The chapters on Joseph Banks's voyage to Tahiti, William and Caroline Herschel's incredible achievements in astronomy, Mungo Park's breath-taking expeditions to Africa deserve ten stars not five. I cannot recommend them too highly. They will be of interest to people of all ages and are told brilliantly.

I also admired how the author connects the scientific advances in English society to the contemporary poetry of Byron, Shelley, Keats and Coleridge. That said, I feel the book does not achieve the kind of grand synthesis of arts, science and other disciplines, as some of the blurbs seem to claim.

Finally, in the chapters on the Herschels, and especially in the last third of the book which mainly centers on Humphrey Davy, there was too much, in my opinion, recitation of marital and similarly domestic matters that seemed far too quotidian. They fall far short of the wonder that appears elsewhere in "The Age of Wonder". I wish they had been edited out.