We need to understand how science is actually made; how scientists themselves think and feel and speculate. We need to explore what makes scientists creative, as well as poets or painters, or musicians. That is how this book began.
The old, rigid debates and boundaries -- science versus religion, science versus the arts, science versus traditional ethics -- are no longer enough. We should be impatient with them. 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. And that is how this book might possibly end.
The Age of Wonder isn't quite the book I expected it to be: I was looking forward to a lot of science, which I find intriguing, but I found this work to be laden down with a lot of biographical information, which I find to be less so. The Romantic Period must have been an astonishing time to be alive, indeed an Age of Wonder; a time when any amateur, even a foreign musician like William Herschel, with enough curiosity and funds could literally point out new discoveries in the self-same night sky humans had been regarding for millennia. A privileged young man, like Joseph Banks, could buy himself passage on a voyage of discovery under Captain Cook and, in the process of collecting botanical specimens from Tahiti, invent the new field of Anthropology. Science, at the beginning of this period, was accessible and democratic: a barely educated young man, like Humphrey Davy, was able to wrest the study of the elements from the grip of the Alchemists and properly begin the discipline of Chemistry -- no longer searching for how to transmute the impossible, Davy (et al) did simple experiments to discover whatdoes happen. Imagine a time when that was revolutionary thinking. Imagine if there were still basic discoveries to be made in nature; discoveries waiting to be plucked like low hanging fruit.
I was delighted by the intersections between Science and Literature and Philosophy; how each informed the others; how so many of these early Scientists not only rubbed elbows with the likes of Coleridge and Wordsworth and Byron, but also expressed their own amazement in well-regarded verse. This also worked in reverse, with the great poets of the age attending scientific lectures in order to learn the terminology, the great metaphors of the day -- could this possibly be happening today?
This book is exhaustive, and ultimately, I found that to be…exhausting. The following is more for my own memory than part of a proper review.
I was charmed by Banks in Tahiti, and appreciated all of the primary source materials that were provided (the personal letters and journals and articles that filled in the big picture, that made the age come alive), but in some later sections these additions felt gossipy and a bit pointless. My favourite part from Tahiti:
On their last day they discovered an enormous stone 'marai' or funeral monument, shaped like a pyramid, some forty-four feet high and nearly 300 feet wide, with steps of superbly polished white coral down both sides. This, the 'masterpiece' of Tahitian architecture on the island, was unsettling to Banks because its construction seemed technically inexplicable. 'It is beyond belief that Indians could raise so large a structure without the assistance of Iron tools to shape their stones or mortar to join them.'
Not far away was another mystery: a huge wicker man constructed of basketwork, evidently for some obscure sacrificial rite. 'The whole was neatly covered with feathers, white to represent skin and black to represent hair and tattow.'
I love stuff like that, and yes, I watch Ancient Aliens: not because I believe extraterrestrials built this curious 'marai', but because I revel in the mystery of these sorts of ancient structures and monuments and that show has a new one for me every week. Because of the noted intersections with literature, I was jotting down the books I was reminded of as I was reading. For this section, it was : Jamrach's Menagerie, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Unfamiliar Fishes (and how sad to note the evolution of Captain Cook from his empathetic treatment of the Tahitians to his brutality towards the Hawaiins), Parrot and Olivier in America, Moby Dick.
I enjoyed the first section on William Herschel, but again, the biographical information was simply overwhelming -- I would have much preferred a general overview of his life in Hanover before emigrating to England and found no benefit at all in the biographies of his family members other than Caroline. When the book revisited the Herchels later -- more of the same and more of the same plus the details of his marriage and family -- I was seriously bored. I suppose the fact that his son, John, went on to become a leading figure in the Victorian Age of Science explains why we must follow William to the grave, but that wasn't what I wanted from this book (which I understand is a fault of my own, not the author). Since Caroline was profoundly affected by the Lisbon earthquake, I was put in mind of Candide and also of Frankenstein (not realising this book would be quoted at great length later).
I was amused by the section on ballooning, and appreciate how at the time it must have seemed like the dawn of the Jetsons with their flying cars, but since in the end it was dismissed as a fad, more suited to carnivals than scientific study, I don't know that it belonged in this book. I did like this part:
Benjamin Franklin, American Ambassador in Paris, watched the launch (of the first manned balloon flight) through a telescope from the window of his carriage. Afterwards he remarked: 'Someone asked me -- what's the use of a balloon? I replied - what's the use of a newborn baby?'
Obvious choices, but I was reminded of Around the World in Eighty Days and The Wizard of Oz.
Age of Wonder picked up (after another dull visit with the Herchels) when it told the thrilling story of Mongo Park and his two expeditions to find the source of the Niger in Africa. While the first trip was pure adventurism, the second smacked of imperialism, and it was probably due to his own self-important beliefs that he failed to pay due respect to the local tribes and was never seen again. Literary tie-ins: Heart of Darkness (for which Park was likely the inspiration for Kurtz), and because so much of this book takes place during the Napoleonic years and the war between France and Britain, A Tale of Two Cities.
Humphrey Davy was a Poet and Chemist who experimented on himself with Nitrous Oxide, like a Timothy Leary for his time, without making the leap to its use in surgery. (A later section on the mastectomy that Fanny Burney endured without benefit of anesthetic made for a harrowing reading experience, but it was one more event that I wasn't certain belonged in what I thought this book was meant to be). Davy then made the leap to the study of Galvinism, and this sparked the great debates about Vitalism and "is there an animating principle" -- a soul? -- in humans, the great parlour discussion topic of the time, and that led to the first inklings of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. This was interesting, but the very lengthy quoting from the book and its reception by the public and the stage play that came later -- all of this seemed beside the point to me. As was Davy's disintegrating marriage and political dealings with the Royal Academy of Science and his "little nurse in Illyria" -- so much biography, so little actual science. I did, however, appreciate when Davy put his mind to creating a safety-lamp for miners -- his great effort to demonstrate that science was for the benefit of mankind; theory that may be put into practise. The literary tie-ins at this point were all poetry: Rime of the Ancient Mariner or Prometheus Unbound.
Okay, so after that long stretch of what was interesting and not so interesting to me, I return to Richard Holme's quote that I started with, the bit he actually ended with, and specifically: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. How many of us have this hope and wonder? I don't know that I believe the scientists of today are imbued with hope and wonder; that they are philosophical about their work; that they have the creative souls of artists. But perhaps I'm wrong and I thank Age of Wonder for forcing me to think of Science in this way.
I wanted to love this book, but it was ultimately brought down by the immensity of the information it contained -- had it left out the society news and letters from home, I might have enjoyed it much more.
