The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

by Richard Holmes

The Age of Wonder is a colorful and utterly absorbing 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 in search of new worlds. Other voyages of discovery—astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical—swiftly follow in Richard Holmes's thrilling evocation of the second scientific revolution. Through the lives of William Herschel and his sister Caroline, who forever changed the public conception of the solar system; of Humphry Davy, whose near-suicidal gas experiments revolutionized chemistry; and of the great Romantic writers, from Mary Shelley to Coleridge and Keats, who were inspired by the scientific breakthroughs of their day, Holmes brings to life the era in which we first realized both the awe-inspiring and the frightening possibilities of science—an era whose consequences are with us still.

Genres: History, Science, Nonfiction, Biography, History Of Science, Philosophy, Audiobook

608 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2008

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
See this thread for more information.

Biographer Richard Holmes was born in London, England on 5 November 1945 and educated at Downside School and Churchill College, Cambridge. His first book, Shelley:The Pursuit, was published in 1974 and won a Somerset Maugham Award. The first volume of his biography of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge: Early Visions, was published in 1989 and won the Whitbread Book of the Year award. Dr Johnson & Mr Savage (1993), an account of Johnson's undocumented friendship with the notorious poet Richard Savage, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for biography) in 1993. The second volume of his study of Coleridge, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, was published in 1998. It won the Duff Cooper Prize, the Heinemann Award and was shortlisted for the first Samuel Johnson Prize awarded in 1999.

Richard Holmes writes and reviews regularly for various journals and newspapers, including the New York Review of Books. His most recent book, Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (2000), continues the exploration of his own highly original biographical method that he first wrote about in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985). He is also editor of a new series of editions of classic English biographies that includes work by Samuel Johnson, Daniel Defoe and William Godwin.

His latest book, The Age of Wonder (2008), is an examination of the life and work of the scientists of the Romantic age who laid the foundations of modern science. It was shortlisted for the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the British Academy and was awarded an OBE in 1992. He was awarded an honorary Litt.D. in 2000 by the University of East Anglia, where he was appointed Professor of Biographical Studies in September 2001.

Reviews

[Will Byrnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whereas Newton, Hooke, Locke and Descartes were pop stars of the first scientific revolution in the 17th century, Richard Holmes looks at what Coleridge called a “second scientific revolution,” the era of scientific breakthrough between Captain Cook’s first circumnavigation in 1768 and Darwin’s journey on the Beagle in 1831. He does this by a sort of relay, beginning with Joseph Banks, a botanist on Cook's ship, Endeavor, connecting him to William Herschel, an astronomer who with his sister, Caroline, revolutionized how we look at the heavens, building the first huge telescopes, including a 40 foot reflecting telescope. He discovered Uranus (insert jejune joke here) which had another, less entertaining, name before the final one was universally agreed upon. He and his sister mapped a host of comets, planetary moons and other astronomical phenomena. From the Herschels we ascend to the world of ballooning, quite a big deal at the time, and mortally dangerous. The Montgolfier Brothers put in an appearance as do other daredevils of both scientific and adventuresome bents. Mungo Park was a world class explorer who combined a daring spirit with a medical degree and an interest in exploring unknown Africa. He sought the origins of the Congo and Niger rivers with encouragement from Banks, by then head of the Royal Society. Humphrey Davy figures large in this tale, sharing most of the real estate here with the Herschels. Davy experimented (on himself as often as not) for years with gases of various sorts. He was successful in the short term in creating a lovely form of intoxication, but in the long run, had hit on a safe way to anesthetize medical patients. Later, as a sort of superstar science stud of his day, Davy was asked to come up with a way to make mining safer. He designed the first safe-to-use miner’s lamp. It cut down on fatalities dramatically, and earned him the gratitude of the nation.


Richard Holmes - image from BBC

Not only do we have scientific advances, we have the arts of the time. These scientists were not lab-bound nerds. Herschel was a working musician, head of a band, a fellow who dashed off 24 symphonies. Caroline sang at a professional level in addition to becoming the first woman to be a paid, professional scientist. The scientists, portrayed here in mini-biographies for the primary characters, also wrote and often sold poetry. This combination of interests and the personal passion to persist against sometimes daunting odds gave the era its character. It is from this time that we get the notion of a Doctor Frankenstein (based on a real person, who was attempting reanimation) the mad, obsessed scientist, alone in his castle. Could one revive dead tissue? If one did would it have a soul?

There was animated discussion going on about what makes us human. Is man merely a product of chemical interactions or is there some vital force, some chi that exists outside the scientifically observable plane, that makes us human, a soul maybe? It became a major political acid test at the time, probably equivalent to the abortion issue today.

These are all fascinating people, with great accomplishments and plenty of quirks to their credit. The period is dazzling in the mixing of art with science, artists with scientists and the renaissance character of many of the figures portrayed here. It makes you want to know more about them and about the era, as well as providing a contrast to our current age of hyper-differentiation.

Holmes writes with great affection for his subjects and with a charming sense of humor. The golden age of ballooning certainly did include the first members of the Mile High Club. It is a fun read with new information around every turn, and offers us an appreciation for what an amazing age that was. It won the National Book Critics Circle award for 2009, among other awards. It deserved to win a lot more. There is only one word that can sum up this book, wonderful.

==============================EXTRA STUFF

For a good review of this book, you should read this one.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/boo...

Or this one
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/boo...

Bringing home mass quantities from storage, in the hopes of becoming unburdened by that obscene cost, I opened a box of National Geographics. And being the sort I am, could not help but skim through. Came across an article from the November 1996 issue, by T. H. Watkins about Joseph Banks, a significant person in the story told in The Age of Wonder. The article is titled The Greening of the Empire. Sadly, the available on-line archive from NatGeo extends only back to 2005. But I did find a smaller version of the article, at the website StrangeScience.net. It is a quick and fascinating read. And if you have boxes of National Geographics tucked away in a garage or attic, you might want to go exploring and dig this one out. Your journey will be well rewarded.

It is impossible for me to pass any mention of the Montgolfier Brothers without succumbing to this bit of silliness from the pythons.

[Kemper · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's nothing like reading a book about really smart and energetic people back in ye olden days to make you feel like a lazy piece of crap. I'm sitting here in front of a magic box where I could type in the words 'Hubble telescope' in an image search and instantly see pictures of distant planets and galaxies but it seems like too much effort. William Herschel had to invent his own telescopes just to get a decent view of the moon. I'm sure Sir William would like nothing better than to crawl out of his grave and beat me senseless.

Just as the title promises, the book explores the scientific revolution that occurred from the late 1700s through the early 1800s by focusing on several key figures and examining the impact their work had in science and on the Romantic movement going on at the same time.

There's some really interesting people and stories in this book that show how wild and wide open the different sciences were at this time. A gentleman like Joseph Banks could sail with Captain Cook to Tahiti, collect a wealth of data, and have a pretty good time in the process. (Apparently in the 18th century, what happened in Tahiti, stayed in Tahiti.)

Banks went home to England where he served for decades as the president of the Royal Society and championed guys like Herschel, who was a German immigrant and a professional musician who taught himself astronomy and came up with telescopes superior to anything else at the time. In addition to discovering Uranus (stop snickering in the back), he made numerous other discoveries. His sister worked as his assistant and was an accomplished astronomer in her own right. Humphry Davy was another person with little scientific education who started doing experiments with gas, primarily huffing nitrous oxide, and went on to become one of the pioneers in the field of chemistry.

Crazy balloonists kill themselves in the earliest flights. Bold African explorers vanish into the uncharted regions never to be heard from again. Periodic clashes about faith versus science make everyone uneasy and political. Some of the Romantic writers embrace the bold advances and some mock or fear them. Rivals clash over ideas and credit, and eventually a split among the English researchers leads to the invention of the word 'scientist'.

There's a lot of ground covered here, and the first half of the book flew by with the tales of Banks in Tahiti and his career afterwards, along with the story of Herschel and his sister, Mungo Park and his exploration of Africa, and the daredevil balloonists. However, the book gets bogged down with more philosphy and poetry in the second half once Humphry Davey and his chemistry revolution is introduced.

The author does a nice job of conveying how utterly amazing it must have been to be one of these curious people at this time just as new technology was leading to whole new realms of study, but he also doesn't make excuses for some of the imperalism, racism, or sexism that was inherent to the people and time.

Interesting read, but the second half was a bit of a struggle.

[Sean Barrs · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Age of Wonder is a book I have savoured over many months. I worked my way slowly through it, enjoying every word and every miracle the author captured here.

Excitement, newness and possibly drove the brightest minds of the age to discover wonderous things. And there is a pervading presence of the unknown, of possibility, of fantastic discoveries that are to be found and ideas that are about to be born. There is an optimism and a sense of intrigue that I feel our current era lacks. There’s energy and there’s passion; there’s power and there’s hope: there is the quest for knowledge and for greatness and the betterment of humankind. There is something truly special about this time.

One thing that feels exceedingly potent in the Romantic era is the intertwining of science and art, of poetry and experimentation. Mary Shelley’s phenomenal Frankenstein is the absolute touchtone of this idea. There were many fantastic works that came out of the time, but for me her novel feels like the defining novel of the era; the one that shapes it and helps create it: the one that evokes everything about the time, the concerns and the hopes, the dreams and the reality: it is simply the romantic novel that was born during the age of wonder that Holmes captures here ever so eloquently.

I wish I could have been alive then, to walk the streets and see the world through the eyes of the poets that understood that eternity can be found in a daffodil and that utopia can be formed once we ourselves learn to transform our habits and become the men we were supposed to be before we fell into darkness, decay, and corruption. And it's ideas like this, that were directly influenced by the developing scientific thoughts of the age.

This is Richard Holmes' most ambitious work. He does not focus on a singular figure or a famous poet. He instead writes a biography about the scientific discoveries of an era and in doing so captures much of its energy and electric optimism and desire for learning and knowledge.

This book is an erudite and scholarly exploration of a truly fantastic time.

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[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think the time has come for me to admit that I am either not going to finish this, or at least that I will finish it in very slow chunks over a much longer period than I had planned.

Holmes' book purports to put forth a unifying thesis about how science influenced the Romantic generation. All the new discoveries in science are meant to have communicated to this generation endless new possibilities, which goes a long way to explaining the reputation this bunch has gone down with for credulity, extremes of emotion, hilarious mistakes, and pose-striking. And Holmes is sure to talk about this towards the end of each chapter, with several paragraphs detailing the interests that the famous poets, writers and political leaders of this generation took in science, how imagery inspired by astrological discoveries or explores' voyages could be found in the public imagination.

But the bulk of the book is the story of the individual scientists. We get mini-biographies and blow-by-blow recountings of the processes and thinking that lead to each scientists' discovery, as well as entertaining bons mots and anecdotes to keep the good times rolling on the way. Unfortunately, however, this ends up making the unifying theme seem rather forced. To be honest, this felt like a pile of research notes reworked into pleasing long essay form for appearance in high-brow periodicals. It reads like a survey of the most exciting things going on in science in the period, chosen for the outsize personalities behind them as much as concrete achievements they put forth. Therefore the thesis that prefaces the book seems forced by the book format, rather than an organic result of research. I've seen this particular academic disease once too often. In order to sell books and create interest, somebody somewhere along the line wants to create the sense that this book is making a grand statement rather than simply being honest about it was.

It doesn't prove much to me. Well, other than that the English ruling class was small-everybody could introduce you to everybody- and poets looking for radical causes and inspiration are going to embrace radical things they read about. And it doesn't need to. It is a series of individual tales of scientific adventures and individuals that are mostly well told, in that Oxbridge old boy sort of way that I happen to find charming. I'm not sure why we needed to tack on Byron and Shelley at the end of the chapters, other than to give this book the broadest possible appeal to people interested in this period. But honestly, these people are interesting enough on their own without them. If the tales sometimes veer off into salacious side stories and irrelevant personality examinations, well, I never oppose books that counteract the idea that history is dry and boring. If nothing else, Holmes gets that part right, which is why I will probably return to finish it in bits and pieces later.

[zed · Rating 3 out of 5]

The idea of reading history is to hopefully learn from one's curiosity on the subject at hand, and I was lucky to learn about the Romantic Generation in the Age of wonder.

Author Richard Holmes has dominated the telling of this story with the lives of outstanding astronomer William Herschell, Humphry Davy of the miner’s lamp fame and to a lesser degree Sir Joseph Banks, famous for his journey to Tahiti in 1769 and a long life as president of the Royal Society. A few others come into the story told, such as African explorer Mungo Park, Herschel’s incredibly talented younger sister Caroline and Mary Shelley.

Interweaving each of the individuals mentioned above into an Age of Wonder narrative is on paper a grand idea and could be perfect for anyone that enjoys popular history. The first chapter, on Banks, was magnificent and should have set the tone. Unfortunately, at about the halfway point I thought the author became bogged down by spending far too much time on the literacy pretensions of some protagonists and as time went on I began to wonder the point of the short Mungo Park chapter and with that the one on Mary Shelly.

Be that as it may this is a good read and will have been enjoyed by many, it just may not be my style of delivery. The footnote, end notes, the bibliography and the plates are excellent. Holmes is a very good writer at his best and as I said above I learnt a lot. In fact, I am curious for more. One can’t want much more than that, can they?

Recommended to anyone that likes popular history.

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holmes profiles prominent British scientists of the Romantic Era - botanist Joseph Banks, astronomer William Herschel and chemist Humphrey Davy. We meet their friends and acquaintances including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy and Mary Shelly, James Watt, Michael Faraday and many more. Holmes focuses on their cultural impact. He shows how new ideas such as deep time, deep space, a universe in motion, invisible wavelengths of light, and electricity from chemicals influenced the writings of Erasmus Darwin, Keats, Wordsworth and other thinkers and poets. New concepts about nature and the cosmos confronted established religious teachings and deeply held personal beliefs. Science began to shape societies values. At the same time, the public’s imagination was stoked by Mungo Park’s exploration of mysterious Africa and the balloonists’ exploration of the skies

Holmes starts with Joseph Banks, who sailed around the world with Captain Cook from 1768 to 1771 documenting the flora and fauna and even becoming an early ethnographer. Holmes focuses on Banks three months in Tahiti, visited so Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne could observe the transit of Venus across the sun. Banks spent his time collecting plant and animal specimens as well as artifacts. He documented the islanders’ culture taking a personal interest in the young females. Upon his return he became the President of the Royal Society, embraced the rapid developments in science, and advised King George III on scientific matters. His massive plantings transformed Kew Gardens into a grand setting.

Next Holmes describes William Herschel, a self-educated amateur astronomer who came to England from Germany. By trade a musician his approach to observing the heavens was unique, reading the stars almost like sheet music. One night looking at the stars through his homemade telescope an intrigued passerby stopped to find out more. The passerby was a member of the Royal Society who was impressed with Herschel’s knowledge of the night sky and his beautifully crafted telescopes. Herschel’s papers and craftsmanship gained him recognition from Banks, Maskelyne and even King George III, a fellow Hanoverian.

Herschel became a Fellow of the Royal Society and was appointed the King’s astronomer. He became a premier builder of fine telescopes. With his sister Caroline, Herschel regularly scanned the sky discovering numerous comets and nebulae which his superior telescopes enabled him to recognize often to be configurations of stars. Perhaps most importantly he offered a picture of a universe in constant motion confronting the conventional assumption of a static universe as a backdrop to the solar system. He posited that all the stars had solar systems of their own which were teeming with life. He discovered Uranus, the first new planet found since antiquity. Herschel explored the nature of light and discovered infrared radiation. His sister Caroline made history as one of the first women to be recognized for her scientific achievements.

We move on to the balloon craze starting with the first manned flight on November 21, 1783 in Paris with the launch of a hot air balloon. Hydrogen, just discovered by Henry Cavendish in 1766, was also used to fill balloons. Some even tried hybrid hydrogen and hot air balloons, a dangerous combination. Primarily exploited for entertainment and adventure, launchings drew huge crowds. However, some scientists used balloons to understand the weather and to assess the ground below. For the first time they could gauge the impact of cities, the distribution of cultivated fields, pasture and forests.

Holmes takes us to Africa to follow the explorations of Mungo Park. Banks wanted Park to find the fabled Timbuktu and trace the course of the Niger River. Starting in Gambia in 1795 he headed east to find the Niger. He was captured and imprisoned by Moors somehow escaping and wandering for hundreds of miles on his own to find his way back a year later. Unfazed he returned in 1805, this time with troops. They succumbed to disease or attacks by hostile residents. Boating down the Niger Park was last seen only 300 miles from its mouth in a final assault by natives. Accounts of his journey fed the British fascination with Africa. People believed almost any type of strange creature or society could be found there.

Finally we turn to Humphrey Davy who learned chemistry in his hometown of Penzance working in the pharmacy of a local surgeon. Davy took a position at the Pneumatic Institute in Bristol where he became intrigued with nitrous oxide (laughing gas). He and his friends, inventor James Watt, poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey all became regular users. Davy tried many different gases on himself and others but preferred nitrous oxide for the euphoria and altered consciousness. He was accused of using it for sexual exploitation. Although he recognized and noted its use as an anesthetic, for which there was great need, this use was never developed.

In 1801 Davy received an appointment to the Royal Institute in London. Always the showman, his lectures were very popular. Davy was fascinated by Volta’s new battery and used electrolysis to isolate the elements potassium and sodium. He used the latter for dramatic demonstrations. Young girls flocked to his lectures; including Mary Shelly whose Professor Waldman gives similar lectures to Frankenstein. Vitalism, the idea that some innate force differentiated humans from other animals, was hotly debated. This concept was at the heart of Mary Shelly’s plot. With the advent of Volta’s battery, bizarre experiments were conducted to see if electricity could be the vital force. Victor Frankenstein may have been inspired by German scientist Johann Ritter who tested the effects of electricity on himself, on live animals, and to revive dead animals and possibly human cadavers.

Davy achieved even greater recognition with the Davy safety lamp, an invention that saved the lives of countless miners who were continually getting blown away by methane explosions. He was knighted and became President of the Royal Society. Success made him increasingly contentious, particularly towards his assistant, Michael Faraday, whose later study of electromagnetism would lead him to develop the electric motor and eclipse the fame of his mentor. Late in life Davy wrote Consolations in Travel a strange mix of philosophy and science fiction which influenced many in the upcoming generation of scientists including Charles Babbage and Charles Darwin.

Holmes shows us how new ideas entered the public perception. We see the seeds of change. Reliance on faith and mysterious forces is challenged by scientific reason. The romantic poets were quick to react to the mechanistic explanations of science. Did science destroy mystery and beauty? If one sees a rainbow as distinct wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation what does that mean for the rainbow as a source of wonder and inspiration? Does it lose its magical promise? Are human feelings merely the result of chemical processes? Whatever our opinion, today we are used to such questions, but in the Romantic Era these thoughts were new and startling. Holmes’ engaging book gives us a unique look into this era of dramatic discovery.

[Tyler McGaughey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was a little upset at this book for having to end. Holmes writes with a palpable compassion for his subjects. The book's major players are so fully animated that I couldn't help but feel a sadness at parting with these historical figures, most of whom I had never heard of before and all of whom, of course, had been dead for more than a century before I was born. I think that the way Holmes structured the book, with the same kind of intricate plot architecture as a good 19th century novel, really contributed to this feeling; the people introduced in the opening chapters are still there, growing old and being swept aside by the inevitable tides of the decades, in the final ones. He is a master at seamlessly weaving in excerpts from his primary sources - letters, diaries, scientific log books - and also not afraid to throw in some scatological references, of a academic bent.

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Description: 'The Age of Wonder' is Richard Holmes' first major work of biography for a decade. It has been inspired by the scientific ferment that swept through Britain at the end of the 18th century, and which Holmes now radically redefines as 'the revolution of Romantic Science'.

Never has a book left me feeling so completely inadequate, however it is highly probable that I am not alone in this sentiment. So whilst none of the information could be deemed as original, this book is put together to engender a true scientific lust in those younguns on whose shoulders the future lies. Truly engrossing and highly recommended.

I must own up to be the owner of an un pc mind because I was tickled to tickledum with 'Fawaday'. Mea culpa.



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[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent account of "the second scientific revolution" led by astronomy and chemistry at the end of the 18th century. The period Holmes covers with his engaging biographical focus on the careers of a handful of individuals is between Cook's voyage of 1768 and Darwin's of 1831. In this epoch of "Romantic" science, leading figures tended to see no conflict between what they did as scientists and as poets and philosophers. In fact, the term "science" was not widely adopted until 1834. Holmes account delves into Joseph Bank's early study of the Tahitians' "Edenic" state, William Herschel and his sister Caroline's astronomical revelations of the Milky Way as one among countless other evolving galaxies, Humphry Davy's elucidation of the carbon cycle, and the close attention paid by major figures in poetry and philosophy in such advances. As an example of the pleasurable range of this delightful quilt of a book, the craze in ballooning and the origins of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein each get chapters. Holmes succeeds is his intentions not just to cover "science versus religion, sicence versus the arts, science versus traditional ethics": "We need a wider, more generous, more imaginative perspective. Above all, perhaps, we need the three things that a scientific culture can sustain: the sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid but questing belief in a future for the globe.

[Karen· · Rating 5 out of 5]

AWE: "an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, etc., produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful, or the like."

I would like to put in an official plea to wrest the word AWE back from the frantically freaked-out readers of teen romance who squawk "epic awesomeness", sorry, that should be "EPIC AWESOMENESS" and then a spasm with the shift-1 key, because words just cannot express the eloquence they feel at an author's ability to re-hash perennial adolescent angst at balancing individuality with conformity, magi-mixed with an awakening interest in sex.

Howzabout this for a catalogue of the truly awe-inspiring: Herschel, who had the intellectual audacity to conceive of deep space (in the 1780's this is!), and to realise that a Newtonian reflector telescope would be better suited to plumbing its depths than the refractor type. And since large reflector telescopes were unavailable, designed and made his own, innovating the use of exquisitely fine reflective specula cast in metal rather than glass. Or the story of the 18th century space race between France and Britain. What must it have been like to take off from the ground suspended from a cloud in a paper bag? Intrepid might be a word specifically invented for those early aeronauts. Then there is Humphrey Davy, yes, he of the safety lamp, who nearly killed himself inhaling carbon monoxide. Deliberately. To find out about its properties. The real tragedy is that he discovered the euphoria-without-risk that could be induced by nitrous oxide (laughing gas), but unfortunately didn't recognize how it might be used as an anaesthetic. The world had to wait for ether and chloroform, too late for poor Fanny Burney who underwent excruciating surgery for breast cancer in 1811. (And survived!). Or restless Mungo Park, who could not settle to life as a doctor in the cold wet climate of Peebles, and set off on a second, fatal voyage (ah! the error was to allow imperial interference!) to try to find the legendary city of Timbuktu.

Richard Holmes is the opposite of a serial killer, he is a serial bringer-to-life of the huge personalities, these lions of society at a time when there was still no concept of different disciplines. Both poet and 'natural philosopher', these men (and occasionally women too - Caroline Herschel for example) were engaged in examining the wonder of nature and in expressing their sense of awe in verse. There was an exchange of ideas between the likes of Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and the men who became the first professional 'scientists'. Added into this heady mixture there is also the history of the venerable institutions that funded and promoted research and ideas: the Royal Society, and what later, in 1831, would become the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Holmes has an ease and elegance of expression that kept this science-challenged reader hooked like a fish on a line. He can even explain Schelling's Naturphilosophie in understandable terms, a feat for which he deserves the five stars alone.

[David Rubenstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book about science during the Romantic era. The first few chapters are best for understanding the development of science. The last few chapters are best for understanding the interactions between science and culture, mostly prose and poetry. At the beginning of the story, the English word "scientist" did not even exist. Scientists were called "philosophers", and many of the greatest works of scientists during this era, were philosophical speculations. This is a beautiful book, in all senses of the word.

[Elaine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! I finished this yesterday, and I'm still reeling. Who knew that Balloonists soaring across the skies fomented the French Revolution? Or that poets like Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth--all the Romantic greats--thought they were akin to the great scientists of the age, and the scientists themselves were poets. Actually, scientist was not yet a word when Herschel was exploding European mindsets with his discoveries of the infinity of the stars. Discoverers like Herschel, Faraday, Davy, and their contemporaries were thought of as philosophers or clergymen or physicians. Yet the foundations of modern science like impartial observations, inductive reasoning, avoiding conclusions based upon what God supposedly set up, blind studies, all had their origins in the Age of Romanticism.

Science was not yet compartmentalized, nor was it separate from what we today lump together as "the Humanities," as if uncovering the laws of nature and the cosmos itself were not human endeavors.

Holmes includes in his history poems about scientic discoveries by poets still revered today, as well as poems by the great innovators like Joseph Banks and Humphrey Davy. Banks, who went to Tahiti in the late 18th century, a Briton of the ruling class, went native. The descriptions of him doing the Tahitian version of "dirty dancing" are so vivid I could see them as in a movie. Did I mention that he, in effect, founded anthroplology?

Women? Well, as usual, they were either witty and beautiful, like Lady Davy, or serious and knowledgeable while enabling their menfolk to sweep the skies, like Caroline Herschel. There seems to have been an unwritten law that spinsters lived only to serve. Caroline Herschel was a faithful dog to her famous brother, but, on her own, she, too, discovered comets. Like a talking dog, she was a curiosity in society, a woman who actually innovated. Oh, her brother did manage to get a lifetime Royal stipend for her stargazing, making her the first female in England to get a salary Her brother arranged for this stipend when he finally got married, and his wife didn't want Caroline hanging around the the house.

Maybe I'm being too harsh. Holmes certainly doesn't put it in these terms. He is way too polite. For instance, although he chronicles Davy's arrogance (my term) and his damaging treatment of his faithful protoge and lab assistant, Holmes is careful not to come right out and say that he was a nasty man. Part of Holmes's genius as a historian is his ability to portray people objectively, but give the reader enough to form his or her opinion. What he does is to objectively state what Davy, for instance, did, and how his peers felt about Davy's heading the Royal Society.

This is a 600 page book. To illustrate its sweep and scope would make a review of far greater length and breadth than appropriate for Goodreads. Unless you hate history and biography, and only read torrid romances or improbable action novels, this is a wonderful, engrossing read.

One caveat: in a book this long with portrayals of so many people, an eBook is more than helpful. If someone appears on a page, and you don't recall who it is, you touch his or her name, and, on the Nook Tablets, up pops "Find." You touch it, and it gives you every sentence in the book with that person's name. "Oh, that person!" This has the added benefit of helping you remember events better. The repetition alone aids long term memory . But then again, I'm an old lady. Maybe you don't need such jogs to recall what Holmes wrote so winningly of.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Without wishing to over-generalize, in the modern world many of those involved in the arts seem to regard science with at best indifference and at worst outright hostility. Richard Holmes' book features the period of "Romantic Science" when he argues that science and the arts were united in a sense of wonder at new discoveries. Primarily the book is framed around the scientific lives of perhaps the two leading "Romantic Scientists", the German born but British based astronomer William Herschel, who started adult life as a professional musician; and the Cornish born chemist Humphrey Davy, he of the miners' safety lamp, who wrote poetry and might have become a noted poet had he not devoted his life to chemistry. Holmes attributes the beginnings of Romantic Science to Captain Cook's first Pacific voyage and especially to the presence of Joseph Banks, whose description of Tahiti caused a sensation on his return to the UK and who became the dominant figure in British science for nearly 50 years afterwards. There is also a short chapter about the Scottish explorer Mungo Park, whose two journeys into the interior of Africa were the subject of novels, poems (one by Wordsworth) and whose second, epic, and ultimately fatal journey down the Niger may well have influenced books and films such as "Heart of Darkness", "Apocalypse Now", and "Aguirre, Wrath of God."

Davy and Herschel were certainly men of genius. In fact, until I read this I hadn't appreciated just how far reaching Herschel's contribution to astronomy had been. I knew he had been the discoverer of the planet Uranus but he also fundamentally changed our understanding of the size and nature of the Universe. There was perhaps an element of good fortune though, in that Herschel and Davy worked in scientific fields that were in vogue. It was the "natural" sciences, rather than Newtonian physics, that caught the mood of the time. Davy even persuaded an opium-addled Samuel Coleridge to give lectures to the Royal Institution on the subject of "Poetry and the Imagination."

On the other hand, the author also highlights that it was Mary Shelley's 1816 novel "Frankenstein" that started a whole sub-genre of literature on the theme of scientific hubris leading to disaster. This image of the scientist meddling irresponsibly with forces he does not understand, portrayed in countless Hollywood films, has been immensely influential ever since.

The book has an interesting enough theme but at times it feels as if the author really just wanted to write biographies of Davy and Herschel. It would be exaggerating to describe the book as heavy going but neither did I find it a riveting read. Nevertheless, I am more knowledgeable about the main characters than I was. Ultimately the book is about how the artist and the scientist are both observers, seeing things that others don't. I shall leave the last word to William Herschel's son John, himself a noted scientist and quoted in the book:

"To the natural philosopher there is no natural object unimportant or trifling...Where the uninformed and unenquiring eye perceives neither novelty nor beauty, he walks in the midst of wonders."

[Charlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book a while ago and didn't take notes or write a review immediately following. That was a mistake because it would have been hard even then to do this book justice. The following will not be the review this book deserves, but it's better than nothing.

Holmes has written a truly exceptional book. It's been on my list for quite some time, but I never seemed to get around to reading it. Had I known how exquisite and often lesser known a science history it would turn out to be, I would have bumped it up to the top of my list long ago. Even though this book was published in 2009, the nature of it makes it timeless. Holmes included some of the following biographies for this book:

- Joseph Banks who sailed on Captain Cook's ship. Even though I had read about both Banks and Cook, Holmes' telling was superior to anything I had read before.

- The biography of Humphry Davy (his contributions to the field of chemistry, his obsession with inventing safety lamps for miners, and his personal life ) was my favorite part of the book. His letters to his future wife were *the* nerdiest letters any scientist has ever written. Parts of them deserve to be alongside of today's best nerdy Valentine's Day memes. In fact, I might have to make them myself. His letters were just too fabulous for words.

- The first mile high club participants who got it on in a hot air balloon

- William Herschel and his sister Caroline who helped us map, and indeed understand, the heavens with their revolutionary telescopes. I am not sure whether I more enjoyed the biography of their scientific contributions or the biography of their personal dynamics.

I used to love poetry, but as I read more non-fiction, I cannot seem to enjoy poetry quite as much. I am always wishing I were reading nonfiction instead. However, when Holmes wrote about Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, Coleridge, Byron, or Even Erasmus Darwin, I was captivated.

*This* is how to write a history of science book in this time period. Bravo!

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This rather odd book discusses the developments in the sciences in Great Britain during the Romantic period, focusing primarily on the lives of Joseph Banks, Wm Herschel and Humphrey Davy. Himself a literary man, his thesis involves demonstrating the close connections between these scientists and the prominent poets of the time. The text is filled with poetic extracts, many by the scientists themselves. Thus this book is also about specialization, about the 'two worlds' and their separation.

[Quirkyreader · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a good introduction to many of the famous figures in this book. If you are unfamiliar with many of the people mentioned this will give you a taste of their lives and maybe prompt you to read more about them.

This is my only caveat of the book. There was only a slight mention of Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter and innovator of modern computer language. This was in an appendix in the back giving a short blurb about Mary Somerville. And I mention this because there was plenty written about Charles Babbage.

An in depth book this is not, but it is a good starting point.

[Xander · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Age of Wonder (2008) is Richard Holmes' account of the lifes, trials and tribulations and scientific discoveries of a handful of late 18th century British scientists. Although to call them scientists is an anachronism - the term wasn't coined until later.

Holmes weaves his narrative around a handful of key characters: explorer-turned-president (of the Royal Society) Joseph Banks; musician and astronomer William Herschel and his sister Caroline; the unorthodox chemist Humphry Davy. These were people who played pivotal roles in the scientific discoveries and development of the era and all were important nodes in the scientific network (stretching across the Channel and including large parts of Europe, most notably France and Germany).

From the outset Holmes states his aims clearly: to disprove the Romantic myth of the scientist as the lonesome, otherworldy genius, waiting for his 'Erueka moment', and thus contributing to a pure, disinterested science. In effect, science is the work of networks of countless smart individuals, building on an already existing and ever-increasing body of knowledge; consistently progressing, step by step, and constantly adapting to new circumstances; most of time being grounded in the real world of politics, culture, technology and economics. Holmers brilliantly uses the (mostly British) scientists and philosophers of the 1780's - 1810's to illustrate his main thesis.

The book itself is almost 500 pages (excluding notes, etc.) and is divided in ten drawn-out chapters. Each chapter centres on a specific theme: from Banks and Parks explorations to Herschels astronomic works (especially his discovery of Uranus); from Davy's chemical experiments to the first balloon flights; and from the Mesmerism craze to the search for the soul (the Vitalism debate).

Holmes writes in a very entertaining style and is able to draw the reader to all nooks and crannies of a subject. To spice up the rather bland menu he sprinkles the dish he offers with lots and lots of personal details (sometimes juicy, more often rather uninteresting). The result is a very unbalanced meal, with some chapters being short and highly entertaining (for example, the chapters on Joseph Bank's adventures in Tahiti and Mungo Park's travels in Africa) and many other chapters being really long and uninteresting (for example both chapters on the Herschells discoveries and the chapter on Davy). In these moments, the book seems to drone on and on about how Herschel is looking for funding to build his 40 foot telescope or about how Davy writes poem after poem on his scientific explorations. This fails to catch my attention and it doesn't spark my interest - at all.

As said, some chapters are brilliant and others are real let downs. In all, Holmes seems to shy away from a more personal biographical account for the general public and lean more towards a dry academic enumeration of facts and events. This is too bad, since it would have made a boring and distant subject come alive much better then is the case now. This is why I decided to put the book down after reading two thirds...

Nonetheless, the book contains excellent chapters and in general is well researched and outstanding in its detailed descriptions of events. Also, the Folio Society edition is truly a work of art. So I'll definitely recommend it to anyone interested in 18th century science.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating, page turning, fact-filled history of late 18th and early 19th Century science, known as Romantic science due to the epoch it is set in. I know my Romantic poets and authors as I studied a lot of this era, the era being the first phase of the Industrial Revolution in Britain and the earth moving event that was the French Revolution. The era is marked with great social, economic and political change, combined with a major flourishing of culture and the arts right across Europe. What I never really studied however, or at least only briefly read around, were the major transformative discoveries and inventions that were occurring within the field of natural philosophy, otherwise known as science. We all know the Romantic poets, such as Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge et al, but are we just as familiar with their scientific counterparts, such as Davy, Herschel, Faraday, Mungo Park, etc? Equally as important if not more so due to their discoveries and inventions, hence known as the Romantic scientists.

Richard Holmes is an incredible biographer, and his book is a study of these famous people. Also, despite writing informative biographical studies in each chapter of figures such as Humphry Davy, William Herschel and his sister Caroline, he also puts these into an historical context, explaining their importance and details the philosophical debates regarding faith and reason which were occurring at the beginning of the 19th Century. There is a fascinating chapter about Dr Frankenstein and the soul, whereby vitalism is discussed that explains how Mary Shelly was influenced with the current scientific discoveries being made during this period, which were a cause of moral concern (such as public lectures using electrical currents to try and reanimate dead animals, sometimes recently hanged people too). Even 190 years later, we still really have similar debates about the nature of existence (minus the public lectures using dead corpses...) but these were the people that really were the forerunners of modern science and a new philosophical understanding of the world and the universe.

Humphry Davy is probably the man who did the most in his field and arguably became the most famous. I hope we all know about the safety lamp he designed to stop the methane explosions in the mines, an incredible invention which he never patented, but were you aware he also conducted a whole load of tests on Nitrous Oxide too, otherwise known today as 'laughing gas'? He was an incredible figure, also a very poetical person, knowing the famous people of the day such as Coleridge and Southey whom were his friends. Richard Holmes' study also has two chapters on William Herschel, the famous astronomer, the man who discovered Uranus and over 1000 nebulas with his home-built telescopes that he then turned into a mail order business. I never knew that his sister Caroline Herschel was equally highly regarded person as well, being her brothers assistant and discovered many comets.

Richard Holmes writes with a captivating style and excellent prose and found this book a page turner, nearly on every page there were interesting facts and information not only about the biographical studies of these early 19th Century inventors and artists, but also delving into the times they were living and the debates which were sweeping society at that time, making you feel as if you were taking part or at least living during those remarkable times. Towards the final few chapters, it was quite sad to read about these characters dying, leaving the Romantic period to slowly end. I do recommend this book highly.

[Graychin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagination, as well as reason, is necessary to perfection in the philosophic [i.e. scientific] mind. A rapidity of combination, a power of perceiving analogies, and of comparing them by facts, is the creative source of discovery.

~ Humphry Davy

The progress of science is to destroy Wonder...

~ Thomas Carlyle

To what degree are the aims of science aligned with those of art? When and why did they begin to diverge? These are some of the more fascinating questions explored in this wonderful book, a masterpiece of narrative history and biography. Richard Holmes returns us to the era of “romantic science,” when scientists were still “philosophers” and philosophers were artists, when discoveries were made (according to the myth) by flashes of insight and obscure inspiration, and when the possibility of scientific horror first began to suggest itself.

We start in 1769 with the young Joseph Banks in Tahiti, there in the capacity of gentleman naturalist assigned to Cook’s expedition to observe the transit of Venus. With his treasury of journals, specimens, and anthropological observations, he returns (just barely) to England and moves from notable disillusionment to notable accomplishment. As vigorous, long-lived president of the Royal Society, Banks becomes the patron spirit of the age, and the rest of the book.

In addition to Banks, Holmes spends a lot of his time with William Herschel, discoverer of Uranus; with his sister Caroline; with Mungo Park in Africa; and with Humphry Davy, who does for the science of chemistry what the Herschels do for astronomy. We’re also given glimpses of George III, Linnaeus, Benjamin Franklin, Erasmus Darwin, a whole host of balloonists, Dr Johnson, Horace Walpole, Gilbert White, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy and Mary Shelley, and – as the new scientific generation comes into its own – Michael Faraday, John Herschel, and the young Charles Darwin.

I’m not a specialist or historian of the period, but I loved every page of this book, and I learned something on every page. Richard Holmes has given us a gift, a history that all of us – especially those of us in the western world – are deeply invested in, whether we know it or not. Like a more beneficent, more successful Dr Frankenstein, he knits together a lost era, but reanimates it so convincingly and compellingly that its questioning spirit, its anxieties, and its sense of wonder become our own again.

[Cassandra Kay Silva · Rating 3 out of 5]

Joseph Banks in the beginning had me hooked. I have always enjoyed stories that involve Captain Cooks voyages, in some ways yes they are terribly romantic, but have always found this Banks figure fairly elusive. The opening chapters really spread his life out before me and I felt really connected to the character and his life struggles especially in Tahiti. I became less connected with him during the later chapters (as he was not the focus- and this seemed to bother me a bit). Perhaps it was because I could not get into the stories, Mongo Parks especially threw me off. Which was unfortunate because his should have been terribly interesting! I mean some of his adventures in Africa should have really gotten my tail feathers up! Herschel was good enough but Caroline really stole my heart, she was just a dear! The story where the other young woman had to undergo surgery without anesthetic especially sticks out in my mind and was very vivid. I guess my major beef was with Davy. I mean to be fair the author didn't really set him up to be a hero or anything but I really found a massive distaste for him and hated reading his chapters. The chapters on ballooning were delightful though. It was frankly a more cohesive sampling than my hodgepodge review is making it out to be it was fairly well woven together, I don't know what to rate this! It had some really good moments that I think were absolutely worth it, but man that Davy what a stinker!

[Kirsten · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an incredibly well written, thorough, and engaging work. It demonstrates a time when scientists weren't ridiculed, but respected. Not vilified, but lionized. (A time I wish we could go back to.) Many of these scientists were self taught (and some made some seriously ill-advised decisions). It wasn't just an age of wonder but a wonderful age!

Cannot recommend this book enough!

[Dave Cullen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I tried "Age of Wonder" a 2nd time, with high hopes, but just don't get any of that feeling of wonder from it.

I don't hate it, but it reads like a bio, because it is one, and just way too dry and I just don't care. Read 100 pages--jumping ahead at several points, hoping--and that's enough.

Obviously, this is not a formal "review," since I didn't read the whole book, and feel free to disregard. I wouldn't/won't post it as an actual review on places like Amazon or BN, and have often wondered if I should here, but Goodreads feels like a place to give my take on various books, including whether I gave up on them. My opinion might well change if I stuck it out, but I have too many enticing books calling my name to invest more time.

[Kate♡ · Rating 2 out of 5]

2/5stars

read for class - boring, kinda sexist, not worth the trudging read

[Kara Babcock · Rating 3 out of 5]

No matter how you slice it, the way we do science now is very different from the way we did science a few centuries ago, or even a single century ago. Or even a couple of decades ago. Just as the concept of science, itself a fairly recent term, has changed dramatically over the centuries, so too has the scientific method and the infrastructure through which we do science. Richard Holmes elects to analyze a significant era in the history of science, namely the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with a focus on Britain.

The Age of Wonder is not, however, a popular science book that retells and explains scientific discoveries through historical anecdote. There is plenty of mention of Faraday’s personal relationship with Sir Humphrey and Lady Davy, but there is nary a whisper about the electron. William Herschel’s tentative steps towards spectroscopy are only just alluded to in a brief aside about his experiments with thermometers and the spectrum. Rather, as the subtitle, How the Romantic Generations Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, implies, this book is an argument for the influence of Romanticism on early nineteenth-century science, as contrasted by the Victorian era’s influence on science. Holmes’ specialized knowledge of the era allows him to interweave biographies of prominent scientists with poetic allusions.

Holmes begins with Joseph Banks and his voyage with Captain Cook to Tahiti. Banks acts as a common thread throughout the subsequent chapters of the book; Holmes links the rise of many of his later subjects to Banks’ influence as the President of the Royal Society. Banks is the ur-scientist of Romantic bent: a man of independent means, pursuing knowledge for its own sake, adventuring in his early years and then settling down to a more stable, sociable life in his later ones. This is a tale that Holmes is to repeat several times as he examines the lives of William Herschel and Humphrey Davy. Others, like the ill-fated Mungo Park, become the mythical Romantic hero, lost in a foreign land. Of course, the point here is that our modern image of the “scientist” as a somewhat-eccentric loner genius pursuing an idea at great personal risk is a holdover from these Romantic sentiments. Likewise, he points out how Dr. Frankenstein’s transformation into a stereotypical “mad scientist” was populist corruption of Shelley’s purer, Romantic hero who was obsessed and passionate.

The Age of Wonder is valuable precisely because it isn’t trying to explain the science done by its scientists. I’ve read plenty of those and will happily read plenty more. But this is something different. It’s a semi-biographical examination of the zeitgeist of science at a particular time. Moreover, it’s a perfect way of learning about some of the most fascinating individuals from that time of British history without having to devote the time and energy to reading a full-blown biography of each.

For me, the breakout stars of this book are William and Caroline Herschel. Their chapters are some of the most interesting, both from the personal perspective of their lives as well as the chronicle of their contributions to astronomy. It’s remarkable what they accomplished. And it’s great to see the spotlight on an oft-forgotten woman scientist like Caroline. I didn’t know that she received such contemporary acclaim for her discoveries, and although it would be anachronistic to label Banks and the others as progressive in this sense, it’s nice to know that some contemporaries were willing to acknowledge that women could do science (even if that, for some reason, didn’t mean they could be elected to the Royal Society). Holmes spends a lot of time with the Herschels, but if anything, he just makes me want to know even more about them—and that’s exactly what I want a non-fiction book to do.

Holmes pits his Romantic analysis against a second force that drove British science at the same time: imperialism and nationalism. Cook’s voyages of “exploration” were in fact meant to stake a claim to the Polynesian islands for Britain. The tension between Britain the Continent during the Napoleonic era had a significant impact on how Britain funded science. In the chapter on ballooning, Holmes explains that the research into hot-air and hydrogen balloons was not just out of a romantic urge to ascend ever higher into the heavens—some people honestly thought that Napoleon might decide to invade Britain by balloon. And if that sounds silly, just imagine how silly a “drone strike” would sound to them.

If the book founders anywhere, it’s towards the end. The last three chapters chronicle the rise of imperialist, Victorian science as the Romantic generation ages and ossifies under people like Humphrey Davy. Holmes displays a penchant for mixing Romantic poetry into the book at regular intervals, and this tendency accelerates towards the end of the book. Soon he’s regularly quoting entire chunks of Coleridge and Keats. On one hand, I understand that Holmes is a Coleridge scholar. It’s neat that he is able to find these links between contemporary science and poetical metaphor; the English teacher in me is interested in it. On the other hand, I can see how one might think he is overdoing it.

Still, we don’t often get enough poetry in our science books, and that’s a problem. The Age of Wonder appeals to me because it reminds the reader that science and the humanities are not oppositional but complementary. Scientists like Davy were (bad) poets; Herschel was both an astronomer and a renowned musician. Artists like Coleridge were also avid subscribers to scientific discourse, going so far as to integrate the latest discoveries in their poetry and art. We can try to act like Science is some Platonic and objective ideal towards which we can all strive … except it isn’t. It’s an ever-changing, mutable concept, like everything else human beings do, and it’s fallible and subject to the same biases and prejudices that infect our other activities. To not acknowledge this is unscientific. Holmes’ argument is not just that Romanticism influenced science but that it actually makes science better by embracing the humanity that is going to be present in our science whether we like it or not.

This strikes a strong chord with me. I’m a math teacher. I’m also an English teacher. I can do both, yet when I explain this to people, the reaction is almost invariably one of surprise in a way that a math/science or English/history teacher does not get. Somewhere along the way we’ve created a myth that STEM and the humanities are disjoint pursuits. How many times do you hear the old chestnut about “left-brained” versus “right-brained” people/thinking? (It’s a myth, which is not surprising considering most people are good at more than one type of activity….) Let’s not even get started on all the jokes about socially-awkward scientists versus socially-successful (but vapid) liberal arts majors.

More damaging, however, at least in my humble opinion, is the pernicious phrase that comes out of many mouths when I introduce myself as a math teacher: “Oh, I can’t do math!” (Variously: “I don’t have a head for numbers”, “I was never good at math”, “I’m just not a math person!”) Can you imagine if you put a document in front of someone and they recoiled in fear and said, “Oh, I can’t read!” And I’m not talking, here, about people who are genuinely illiterate—illiteracy is a serious problem that should be addressed. But that’s just the point. We live in a society that disproportionately values functional literacy over functional numeracy—yet we increasingly punish humanities graduates and privilege STEM ones.

No wonder my generation is so confused about career prospects.

The dichotomization of science and the arts is a recent phenomenon, as The Age of Wonder attests. Hence, it’s possible for us to become polymaths again, to know the wonders of knowing science and the joys of writing poetry. It’s not only possible but desirable and—oh, I’ll go there—essential for the improvement of society. We need people who understand the technology on which we rely and empathize with each other. Neither science nor the humanities are the “most important” of human endeavours—both are. And it’s not possible to separate them into good little silos. Science and math are creative endeavours. Art can be rigorous, logical, and exacting. So why do we teach kids the opposite?

That’s what I took away from The Age of Wonder. It might just be my personal position with regards to doing science and doing art. Hopefully, though, there are enough people who feel like me that, as I age and become just as crotchety as Joseph Banks, I’ll see the world around me start to change for the better.

[Clif · Rating 5 out of 5]

The iPhone is a wondrous thing. People rave about it, but would anyone consider writing a poem about it? That's very unlikely. Poetry still exists, but it has been almost entirely subsumed into musical lyrics given to us by the relative few who write the songs we hear. Lyrics can speak to the heart but they do not come from one's own heart. The Age of Wonder continually cites poetry as it was a natural way for people of the time to question and address feeling toward an exciting, but bewildering and disconcerting world of discoveries. Poetry put wonder to words.

In ancient times, religion provided an authority that made people passive, accepting life as something to be endured. Then came the Enlightenment and the period this book is about, when anyone and everyone could explore and discover the world, even if only by looking at a flower, because things could be seen in a new way. In modern times, passivity has returned. Most people haven't a clue about the cutting edge of science/math and the production cornucopia presents us with new things effortlessly each day. Our minds are not aroused by mystery, as there are virtually no mysteries that someone, somewhere cannot explain - no need for us to try. You want an answer? No need to pause and consider, Google it.

Richard Holmes gives us a masterful account of the period centered on the end of the 18th century by taking the remarkable life of Joseph Banks to frame it. Banks, who became the president of the Royal Society (dedicated to the promotion of scientific exploration), led a life of investigation of the natural world. Most significantly, as a young man he traveled to Tahiti with Captain Cook and lived the life of fully expressed and uninhibited sexual passion that could not have been more in contrast to English life. The impact upon him was so great that it took some time after his return to Europe for him to be able to readjust. A marriage that was considered a done deal before he had left was called off. The shock of his personal experience is the perfect introduction to the shocks of science that were to come to society as a whole. Even the term "scientist" had yet to be coined.

William Herschel (1738-1822), a man who, all by himself, was able to craft telescopes that surpassed all others of the time is the next to be brought to our attention. His dedication to surveying the universe with the assistance of his sister, Catherine, through countless frigid English winter nights, brought revelations such as the planet Uranus, and informed speculations on his part that impressively foreshadow our current knowledge about the size and shape of our own galaxy and the distribution of matter in space.

Then, we meet Humphry Davy (1778-1829) who was to chemistry what Herschel was to astronomy - a man who without hesitation attacked a subject to follow wherever his discoveries led. Davy's life is the most poignant account of the book, the most fascinating personality in it. The Age of Wonder would be well worth reading if Davy had been the only subject.

Banks, Herschel and Davy were all swept up in and driven by wonder. Each day was greeted with expectation. As mentioned, in keeping with the times, poetry, either their own or that of the great poets (Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, etc.) is continually brought into play as humanity struggled to make sense of, to integrate, the new science with the old, received wisdom.

The status of women and the relationship of races are fully explored as within the three lives they come into play. Richard Holmes proves to us how any age is an inexhaustible mine of treasures, if only the author knows how to expose them.

[Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an entertaining and informative, if selective, group biography of several Enlightenment scientists, as well as a broader cultural history of science, art and adventure. It begins in the 1760s, with the voyage of wealthy naturalist Joseph Banks to Tahiti with Captain Cook; continues with brother and sister astronomers William and Caroline Hershel, who emigrated from Hanover to England; and in the later sections is largely focused on chemist and general polymath Humphrey Davy. Overall it covers scientific developments and the art they inspired through the end of the 1820s, more or less chronologically and overwhelmingly focused on England. More self-contained chapters explore the rise and fall of hot-air ballooning, explorer Mungo Park’s expeditions to West Africa, and the views of science espoused in Frankenstein, both Mary Shelley’s novel and its theater adaptations.

So: the book is wide-ranging, it draws together multiple disciplines, it’s intelligent and detailed as well as readable and entertaining. It draws complex and sympathetic portraits of its principal subjects, detailed enough that one gets a real sense of their personalities and forms opinions of them accordingly. (I liked Caroline Herschel, though she sounded a bit difficult in person. The charismatic and showy Davy turned me off a bit.) It’s much more history and biography than science text, but the author is certainly interested in the science and in the process of scientific discovery itself: when did people realize they’d made a groundbreaking discovery? Why did some potentially groundbreaking discoveries languish for years without seeing their potential realized? For instance, Davy had a lot of fun experimenting with laughing gas – getting himself and his friends and patients high (or knocking them right out) with variable quantities of it and recording their experiences – but never made the conceptual leap to the idea of using it for surgery; instead, the whole concept of anesthesia had to wait another two generations.

I was left with some questions about how Holmes chose his subjects. Histories of science (and everything else) available in English tend to be overwhelmingly Anglocentric, which is frustrating when many of the most important and influential scientists of the time (such as Lavoisier and Linnaeus) were not English and therefore don’t seem to feature in any popular histories. Even within England, I was sometimes a little confused about why we were reading about certain people and not others: Henry Cavendish is mentioned over and over for his importance to chemistry, but we don’t learn about him at all. Obviously an author has to draw the line somewhere to keep the book from being overpopulated – and Holmes does provide satisfyingly detailed biographies of Banks, the Herschels, and Davy, as well as shorter accounts of numerous other people. He seems to romanticize the explorers a bit much given the subsequent history of colonialism, though, and I wished he’d written a bit more about women in science at the time. In some ways Caroline Herschel seems to have had it very easy, as she was entering a field already dominated by her brother; no one seems to have discounted her abilities or discoveries on account of her gender, though she didn’t get much remuneration either.

At any rate, this is a somewhat time-consuming read, but also a compelling one. You’ll learn a lot on some fairly narrow subjects and come away with a new appreciation for a very different kind of science – much more ad hoc, free-flowing and accessible – than we see today.

[Nichole Cianci · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me *forever* to finish this book although I enjoyed it every time I picked it up. My poor dust jacket is in sad condition. In the meantime I read a bunch of related books:
-bios of Livingston and Herschel
-nature notes/nature journals from Joseph banks and other
-Jonathan strange and mr Norwel
-Darwin’s account on the Beagle
-north and south by Gaskell
-range (broad education)

And I’ve been so surprised by how often all this and more ties in. I’ve missed a lot i know but I do think this book was vastly filled out by the extras.
I was amazed by how often the scientists were poets also or at the very least expressed their discoveries in poetry or included references.

[Becky · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an incredible book! Holmes is a biographer and the book is more like a biography, or several biographies, than a science book - as it should be.

Isaac Newton died in 1727 and Darwin didn’t make his voyage until 1831. Science was not dead between those years. Holmes uses those years to identify the years of what he calls the age of Romantic science - the Age of Wonder.

The big names were Joseph Banks, William Herschel and Humphrey Davy. Banks explored and wrote about Tahiti, Herschel, with his sister Caroline, studied the stars and Davy was a chemist. These men of science were also men of the arts, Herschel being a musician and Davy a poet.

Scientists (and that word was not used yet) n the days of the great men were described as loners who had moments of “aha!” The book shows this is not totally the case, there was much collaboration going on. And what with the advent of electricity and a free press, the common man was interested and often involved.

Holmes’ account reads like a novel -or maybe several novels. The narrative is told like an adventure story (which much of it is) with a bit of foreshadowing, tension, character analysis and so on.

The chapters include the stories of Joseph Banks’ adventures in Tahiti, William Herschel and Caroline Herschel, the one-mistake sport of balloonists and what they learned, Mongo Park in Africa, Humphrey Davy’s chemical experiments and Mary Shelley’s indictment of science (Frankenstein).
It strikes me that we have these kinds of people today to and maybe we always have. During the space age we had science fiction. In the computer age we have geek love and William Gibson. These are artists who find inspiration from the science of the day. We'll see if Holmes makes this point.

Meanwhile the stories are told in a pretty straightforward fashion although two of them, the chapters on ballooning and Mary Shelly's Frankenstein are respectively funny and chilling. I'd be really hard pressed to say which of the sections I enjoyed most - they’re all delicious.

My only criticism of the book might be the length - were all those poems by Davy necessary?

[Jaylia3 · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Moonglum · Rating 4 out of 5]

I adored this book. It is filled with great mini-biographies-- I especially liked the parts of William and Caroline Hershel (I knew nothing about Caroline before reading this). But to me one of the most relevant things about the book is that one of the things its about is the creation of the genre of science fiction. There is a chapter about Frankenstein, which is often thought of as the first real science fiction novel, but also it lets you see that the western European world is, even 200 years ago, becoming science fictional. Herschel and Davies both make forays into science fictional speculation. The book gave me a neat historical perspective into one of my favorite fiction genres.