The wonders of Romantic science

Abstract

Richard Holmes is best known for his biographies of the Romantic poets of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, notably Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley. In The Age of Wonder he turns his attention to a group of men (and one woman) whom to 21st-century eyes would seem initially very far removed from these poets: explorers, adventurers, and scientists—although the latter word had not yet been invented. But as his account proceeds, the affinities between this seemingly disparate group and the poets becomes clearer. It isn't only that the intellectual world of Georgian Britain was much smaller than today's, so that fashionable and successful people of all sorts were more likely to know one another and share common interests. But more than just propinquity, the world of intellectual enquiry itself was smaller, more accessible, and not yet partitioned up into separate cultures, peering anxiously at one another across the Snow-line. Coleridge and the chemist Humphry Davy were close friends and mutual admirers through much of their lives. George Gordon Byron too was friendly with Davy and visited the brother and sister astronomers William and Caroline Herschel in Slough to peer at comets through their telescope. Erasmus Darwin, Charles' polymath grandfather, was a medical doctor, an inveterate inventor, and a much published poet. These were not one-way relationships. When “scientists” were perforce amateurs rather than professionals, their interests could be wider. What today would be called popular science writing and lecturing was almost a taken-for-granted activity for Holmes' subjects. And where scientific and technological developments seemed less potentially threatening, their findings could be a source of untroubled wonder to others. Well, not quite. Holmes quotes the gothic novelist Horace Walpole's jaundiced view of the early aeronauts—the balloonists: “Well I hope these new mechanic meteors will prove only playthings for the learned and idle, and not be converted into new engines of destruction to the human race—as is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in Science. The wicked wit of man always studies to apply the results of his talents to enslaving, destroying or cheating his fellow creatures. Could we reach the moon, we should think of reducing it to a province of some European kingdom.” Walpole may have been a couple of centuries premature, but he knew whereof he spoke: the Janus face of science and technology was already apparent. Holmes' group biography follows on naturally from Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men, the late 18th-century generation of inventors and engineers who kick-started Britain's industrial revolution. Half a generation later come Holmes' subjects, researchers rather than inventors. He begins with the scientific fixer supreme Joseph Banks, explorer and later long-serving President of the Royal Society, his successor Humphry Davy, and the Herschels, discoverers of the planet Uranus. Also tossed in for good measure are Mungo Park, inveterate traveller in central Africa, and a handful of early balloonists. It is a somewhat eclectic mix, held loosely together by the central figure of Banks who during his long service as President of the Royal Society had an important role in sponsoring the careers of the others. Banks himself was originally a botanist who began his career with an Admiralty-sponsored journey with Captain Cook, to Tahiti, then in its Edenic state before European diseases, alcohol, and missionaries reduced it to misery. Having apparently sown enough wild oats in the Pacific, he settled down to a respectability, even failing, despite many promises, to publish his Tahitian memoirs. Two features stand out for those interested in the social structure of early-modern science. Like Uglow's Lunar Men, Holmes' subjects are predominately self-made, coming mainly from lower-middle-class or upper-working-class families. Because of this, and unlike their more aristocratic forebears, they are in constant need of finance, both as income and to support their research. The Herschels had one surprising sponsor, George III, perhaps partly because like him they came to England from Hanover, but also because of William's shrewdness in calling the newly discovered planet for the king: Georgium Sidus. (It wasn't until the mid-19th century that the consensus name Uranus was finally agreed). But money above all was beginning to come from the state, via the Royal Society and the Admiralty, which urgently needed coastlines mapped and accurate ways of determining longitude. In some ways the British Admiralty could be seen as a precursor of the notorious DARPA, the US Defence Advanced Projects Research Agency. The first sprouts of modern scientific organisation have begun to appear. Not that this is primarily what interests Holmes. His concern is in the interactions between these scientists and explorers of the natural world and the Romantic poets. Coleridge and Shelley, of course, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, and Byron. For them science was revealing ever new wonders, from fiery comets to the explosive new elements sodium and potassium that Davy identified. Balloons gave an aerial view of the world never before observed. New chemicals offered novel experiences too: Davy's laughing gas (nitrous oxide) could take its place alongside opium as the bringer of extreme sensations. Holmes offers many examples of the poetic responses to these novelties, some, like Keats' sonnets, still part of the established canon; others, like Erasmus Darwin's earnest The Botanic Garden, now no more than a historic curiosity. Pride of place however goes unsurprisingly to that haunting product of a summer evening in 1816 in the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva. The ghost stories that Byron and his companions constructed have no modern resonance—bar one; the young Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, whose impact continues to be felt. She had heard Davy lecture on electricity, and responded to the then lively debates about vitalism, materialism, and the nature of life with a story of a creature created and animated by science but made monstrous by the lack of love. The age of wonder could breed terror as well as admiration. Holmes is well aware of the parallels between these literary reflections on early-modern science and today's rather tense relations. His footnotes are a set of careful asides, noting Richard Dawkins' somewhat complex response to Keats' poetry, and Ian McEwan's fascination with evolutionary psychology and neurosurgery. The Gulbenkian Foundation's fostering of “Sci-Art” makes artists and writers somewhat more deferential to science than their 18th and 19th-century forebears, but the agenda is similar: to take science out of its box and insist that what we do as researchers is part of what should be an undivided culture. Approaching, as we are, the 50th anniversary of C P Snow's unfortunate division of the world into Two Cultures, one can only welcome attempts to bridge the divide. In The Age of Wonder, Holmes performs a valuable service in charting an earlier era's efforts to grapple with the same issues.