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

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

Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and winner of the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, Richard Holmes’s dazzling portrait of the most exciting period in British history is a groundbreaking achievement.The book opens with Joseph Banks, botanist on Captain Cook’s first Endeavour voyage, who stepped onto a Tahitian beach in 1769 fully expecting to have located Paradise. Back in Britain, the same Romantic revolution that had inspired Banks was spurring other great thinkers on to their own voyages of discovery – astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical – which together made up this ‘age of wonder’. In this compelling group biography, Richard Holmes tells the stories of the Romantic period’s celebrated innovators and their great scientific discoveries: from telescopic sight to the miner’s lamp, and from the first balloon flight to African exploration.Breathtaking in its originality and storytelling energy, this is a radical vision of the meeting places of science and art, and an extraordinary evocation of an era of exploration and wonder.

The Age of

Wonder

How the Romantic Generation discoveredthe Beauty and Terror of Science

Richard Holmes

Copyright (#ulink_b90c7c49-642e-551a-8f44-b87a27e90864)

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

First published by HarperPress in 2008

Copyright © Richard Holmes 2008

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007149537

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007349883

Version: 2017-08-14

To Jon Cook at Radio Flatlands

Two things fill my mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more

often and persistently I reflect upon them: the starry heaven above me and the

moral law within me…I see them in front of me and unite them immediately

with the consciousness of my own existence.

IMMANUEL KANT, Critique of Practical Reason (1788)

He thought about himself, and the whole Earth,

Of Man the wonderful, and of the Stars,

And how the deuce they ever could have birth;

And then he thought of Earthquakes, and of Wars,

How many miles the Moon might have in girth,

Of Air-balloons, and of the many bars

To perfect Knowledge of the boundless Skies;

And then he thought of Donna Julia’s eyes.

BYRON, Don Juan (1819), Canto 1, stanza 92

Those to whom the harmonious doors

Of Science have unbarred celestial stores…

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, ‘Lines Additional to an Evening Walk’ (1794)

Nothing is so fatal to the progress of the human mind as to suppose our views of

science are ultimate; that there are no mysteries in nature; that our triumphs are

complete; and that there are no new worlds to conquer.

HUMPHRY DAVY, lecture (1810)

I shall attack Chemistry, like a Shark.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, letter (1800)

…Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with wond’ring eyes

He stared at the Pacific…

JOHN KEATS, ms of sonnet (1816)

To the natural philosopher there is no natural object unimportant or trifling…

a soap bubble…an apple…a pebble…He walks in the midst of wonders.