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

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Caroline remembered their return, one freezing winter evening in December 1756.

(#litres_trial_promo) Her mother Anna was preparing a welcome-home dinner, and the six-year-old Caroline was sent to collect her father and brothers from the parade ground. But she missed them in the dark and confusion, and the frightened little girl had to make her own way home. ‘I continued my search till I was spent with cold and fatigue, and on coming home I found them all at table, nobody greeting me but my brother.’ As she remembered it, no one had even noticed her absence except William. She never forgot his reaction. ‘My dear brother William threw down his knife and fork, and ran to welcome and crouched down to me, which made me forget all my grievances.’

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Jacob now obtained a timely discharge, but William and his father took part in the disastrous battle of Hastenbeck, which was fought against the French invaders twenty-five miles outside the city of Hanover, on 26 July 1757. The surrounding countryside was overrun by a French army of 60,000 troops under Marshal d’Estrées. The allied general, the Duke of Cumberland, beat a strategic retreat westwards towards Flanders. Hanover was occupied, and the Herschels’ building had sixteen French infantrymen billeted on it.

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After a hasty family conference it was decided to smuggle William-still only eighteen-out of Germany altogether. Caroline recalled a fleeting, romantic glimpse of her brother’s surreptitious departure as she stood anxiously by the street door, told not to call out or give him away: ‘he glided like a shadow along, wrapped in a great coat, followed by my mother with a parcel containing his accoutrements’.

(#litres_trial_promo) William slipped past the last sentinel at Herrenhausen, and made his way to Hamburg, where he took ship again for England. At the last moment he was joined by Jacob, and together the two brothers arrived, penniless refugees, in London. They supported themselves by copying musical scores, giving oboe lessons, and playing as freelance musicians in local orchestras. They gave a successful concert in Tunbridge Wells. In the evenings William read voraciously: English novels, books on mathematics and musical harmony, Robert Smith’s Harmonics (1749) and James Ferguson’s recently published and immensely popular Astronomy Explained (1756).

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By the autumn of 1759 Jacob was finding the life too hard, and slipped back to Hanover with his and William’s combined savings, eventually finding employment as a court musician.

(#litres_trial_promo) Now, for the first time in his life, William Herschel, aged twenty-one, was alone-but free, talented, and in the country of his choice. And with a secret gift, his genius for astronomy, hidden even from himself-but awaiting the opportunity to unfold. For the next five years he virtually disappeared from the family history.

Caroline was devastated when William went abroad. In retrospect, she realised that it was he alone who had cared for her, and in his long absence he became a sort of legendary figure. At home her misery deepened. Hanover remained occupied, and food supplies were short. She continued going to the garrison school, but was not allowed to learn arithmetic or languages, and was increasingly treated as a maidservant by the family. She remembered sewing immensely long woollen stockings, scrubbing laundry, and writing her mother’s letters to her father on campaign. In fact her unusual literary ability was a rare source of pride, as she later recalled. ‘My pen was taken frequently in requisition for writing not only my Mother’s letters to my Father, but to many a poor soldier’s Wife in our Neighbourhood to her Husband in the Camp; for it ought to be remembered that in the beginning of the last century very few women left country schools with having been taught to write.’

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Her father had been made a prisoner of war, and for some months her brother Jacob became effective head of the family. He ‘woefully disarranged’ the household, demanded larger rooms, and bullied his little sister. ‘Poor I got many a whipping for being too awkward at supplying the place of footman or waiter.’

(#litres_trial_promo) When her father finally returned from the wars in summer 1760, aged fifty-three, he was a broken man, his health permanently damaged by many months of imprisonment, asthmatic and with a heart condition.

(#litres_trial_promo) He gave some private music lessons, smoked his pipe, and was largely ruled by his wife and his eldest son. He did however manage to regularise William’s situation as a soldier absent without leave. On 29 March 1762 General A.F. von Sporcken signed a formal document of discharge.

(#litres_trial_promo) But there was no sign of their son coming home.

Caroline’s own health was bad. At the age of five she had caught smallpox, and now at eleven she caught typhus. While she was recovering her mother left her to crawl up and down stairs ‘on my hands and feet like an infant’ for several months.

(#litres_trial_promo) The worst result of this illness and neglect was that Caroline’s growth was permanently stunted. In a family of tall, lean children, she never grew much beyond five feet.

(#litres_trial_promo) Moreover, her face had been permanently scarred by the smallpox. The lively, enchanting pixie that William had once known had become a silent, resentful gnome. But she also became increasingly determined and self-sufficient. She said that from the time of her recovery, ‘I do not remember ever having spent a whole day in bed.’

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Isaac increasingly left the care of his surviving children largely in Jacob’s hands: Alexander aged seventeen, Caroline aged twelve, and the youngest, Dietrich, a sweet but sickly child, aged seven. Her father would indulge Caroline (‘and please himself’) with a short lesson on the violin, but he told her mournfully that as she was now ‘neither handsome nor rich’ she could never expect to marry, and should resign herself to helping her aged parents.

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Her brother Jacob refused to allow her to train as a milliner, although she was encouraged to learn just enough to be able to deal with the household clothes and linen. Her father had once hoped to give her ‘something like a polished education’, but her mother insisted that, given the family situation, it should be practical and ‘rough’; she would not even allow her to learn French, in case she developed ambitions to be a governess.

(#litres_trial_promo) Similarly, little Dietrich was denied a dancing master. Anna also observed that it was ‘her certain belief’ that had William read less, he would never have stayed away in England.

(#litres_trial_promo) When Jacob insisted that an extra servant girl be hired, she was given Caroline’s room and bed to share. For Caroline, ‘her destiny now seemed unalterable’. She was to be the family housekeeper, a spinster and permanent maidservant.

(#litres_trial_promo) She later decided to destroy all the journals referring to her private feelings during these years of misery. She did not want to write in the fashionable Romantic mode of the personal confession. ‘After reading over many pages,’ she wrote to Dietrich, ‘I thought it better to destroy them, and merely write down what I remember to have passed in our family at home, and abroad.’

In fact much remains of her inner life: as much perhaps as in the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. This dramatic rejection of the record of her childhood unhappiness was really a prelude to continuing revelations of frustrations in adulthood. ‘By what is to follow,’ she explained, ‘[Dietrich] may also see how vainly his poor Sister has been struggling through her whole life…wasting her time in the performance of such drudgeries and laborious works as her good Father never intended to see her grow up for.’ This was the ultimate cause, she came to think, of the ‘mortifications and disappointments which have attended me throughout a long life’. But all this was in retrospect, nearly sixty years later.

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In the summer of 1764, apparently without warning, to Caroline’s astonished delight her brother William-‘let me say my dearest brother’-reappeared in Hanover.

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4

What had happened to him in the interval? From his intermittent letters to Jacob, and things he subsequently told Caroline, it is possible to reconstruct the outline of his adventures, though with many gaps. Against all expectation, he had not remained in London, or gone back to his friends in Kent, but had boldly struck into the remote north of England. Surprisingly he used his military contacts to obtain the post of civilian music master to the Durham militia, which was stationed under the Earl of Darlington at Richmond in Yorkshire.

(#litres_trial_promo) This was as much a social engagement as a military one, and Herschel was soon completely independent, working as a freelance musician and music teacher in Leeds, Newcastle, Doncaster and Pontefract, and as an organist in Halifax. Little is known about these posts, except that he was constantly on the move, frequently lonely, and sometimes weeping with homesickness.

Every so often Jacob received letters from William with varied English postmarks, and written-with remarkable versatility-in German, French or English as the mood and subject took him. These letters were also covered in mechanical diagrams, and frequently shifted without a break from words to musical notation. They give a sense of Herschel’s mind switching with extraordinary agility between different modes of expression and zones of thought-literary, mechanical, musical, philosophical.

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From Yorkshire on 11 March 1761 he wrote in a fit of melancholy for which he chose slightly faltering English: ‘I must tell you a certain anxiety attends a vagrant life. I do daily meet with vexations and trouble and live only by hope. Many a restless night have I had; many a sigh and-I will not be ashamed to say it-many a tear.’ But a fortnight later he was writing from Sunderland in sprightly French about two pretty girls he had just met-one of them ‘la plus belle du monde, la Beauté elle-meme personnifée’-whose accomplishments included excessive blushing, flirting and playing the guitar. Sadly they only met once, though Herschel later confessed that they corresponded for over a year-another indication of his loneliness, perhaps.

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He chose German for his philosophical reflections. All of these were thoughtful, but many of them gloomy: the stoic doctrines of Epictetus, the optimism of Leibniz (’not the least credible nor feasible’), the origins of evil, the nature of sin, the ethical (rather than the intellectual) necessity for Christian religion in European society. ‘In all ages there have been philosophers who have had thoughts above their religion, and have been true Deists’-but it was ‘impossible’ in the present state of education for ‘a whole nation to be true Deists’. William himself described God memorably, in German, as ‘the unknowable, must-exist Being’.

(#litres_trial_promo) With this formula he was able to set aside, for the time being at least, the problem of a personal Creator.

He had thought often about the ‘immortality of the soul’, but said (to Jacob at least) that he preferred not to draw any conclusions. His unchar-acteristically pious explanation seems to disguise a scientific reservation that there was no ‘intelligible’ data on the matter: ‘My feeble understanding is not capable of pushing so far into the secrets of the Almighty; and as all those propositions have something unintelligible about them, I think it better to remain content with my ignorance till it pleases the Creator of all things to call me to Himself and to draw away the thick curtain which now hangs before our eyes.’ In fact ‘pushing far into secrets’ was always Herschel’s natural instinct and delight.

(#litres_trial_promo) Perhaps music provided a way of pondering these questions, and at this time he composed an oratorio based on Milton’s Paradise Lost, though the manuscript score has not survived.

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Another way would be astronomy. For the glowing exception to these dark truths about human life was always the life of Nature, already an endless source of clarity and consolation for Herschel. ‘If one observes the whole Natural World as one, one finds everything in the most Beautiful Order; it is my favourite maxim: Tout est dans l’ordre!’

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Riding between musical engagements, from one remote provincial northern town to another, often crossing over the moors alone at night, he found himself studying the panoply of stars overhead as he had done as a boy. He became well acquainted with the moon, and would later write that at this time he had intended ‘to fix upon the moon for my habitation’.

(#litres_trial_promo) He also later told several tales about these lonely rides, one being how on one occasion he was reading so intently that when his horse stumbled and threw him, he somersaulted over its head and landed upright still holding his book in his hand, a perfect demonstration of the Newtonian law of ‘circular motion’.

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Herschel now began to explore further the work of James Ferguson (1710-76), a man after his own heart who had started life as an illiterate Highland farm-labourer, and had become one of the most distinguished practical astronomers and demonstrators. His Astronomy Explained (1756) ran to numerous popular editions, and he later vividly described in his Autobiography (1773) how he fell in love with astronomy. He would take a blanket out into the fields after work, and lie on his back measuring star distances and patterns with beads on a string held up over his head. He then transferred these, by the light of a stub of candle on a stone, to his first paper star-maps, spread out beside him on the grass. He said he imagined the ecliptic (the sun’s curving path through the heavens) like a high road running through the stars. Gradually he taught himself astronomy and built his own telescopes. He later invented various devices for projecting constellations during his lectures, and his ‘Eclipseon’ for showing the various movements of the solar system.

Living in lonely bachelor lodgings, Herschel spent more and more time reading about stellar theory. He followed Robert Smith’s Harmonics (1749) with his Compleat System of Opticks (1738), which contained illustrated sections on astronomical observations.