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

Richard Holmes is the author of Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer; Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer; Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage; Shelley: The Pursuit (for which he received the Somerset Maugham Award); Coleridge: Early Visions; and Coleridge: Darker Reflections (a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist). He lives in England.

A riveting 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 on his first Endeavour voyage in search of new worlds. Other voyages of discovery—astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical—swiftly follow in Richard Holmes’s original evocation of what truly emerges as an Age of Wonder.

Brilliantly conceived as a relay of scientific stories, The Age of Wonder investigates the earliest ideas of deep time and space, and the explorers of “dynamic science,” of an infinite, mysterious Nature waiting to be discovered. Three lives dominate the book: William Herschel and his sister Caroline, whose dedication to the study of the stars forever changed the public conception of the solar system, the Milky Way, and the meaning of the universe; and Humphry Davy, who, with only a grammar school education stunned the scientific community with his near-suicidal gas experiments that led to the invention of the miners’ lamp and established British chemistry as the leading professional science in Europe. This age of exploration extended to great writers and poets as well as scientists, all creators relishing in moments of high exhilaration, boundary-pushing and discovery.

Holmes’s extraordinary evocation of this age of wonder shows how great ideas and experiments—both successes and failures—were born of singular and oftenlonely dedication, and how religious faith and scientific truth collide. He has written a book breathtaking in its originality, its storytelling energy, and its intellectual significance.

The Barnes & Noble Review

I'll admit I was stunned to learn that the chemist Sir Humphry Davy was so well acquainted with the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth -- and furthermore to find them all collegially botanizing, geologizing, analyzing, and versifying through that yeasty interdisciplinary era that Richard Holmes calls the "Age of Wonder." It was a time defined by two great voyages: James Cook's passage to Tahiti aboard the Endeavour to observe the 1769 transit of Venus, and the surveying mission of the Beagle, which set out in 1831, carrying the young Charles Darwin to the Galápagos Islands. Within those Romantic six decades, the universe opened wider as William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus and the first balloonists realized the dreams of Icarus.

List of illustrations

1 Joseph Banks in Paradise 1

2 Herschel on the Moon 60

3 Balloonists in Heaven 125

4 Herschel Among the Stars 163

5 Mungo Park in Africa 211

6 Davy on the Gas 235

7 Dr. Frankenstein and the Soul 305

8 Davy and the Lamp 337

9 Sorcerer and Apprentice 381

10 Young Scientists 435

Cast List 471

Bibliography 485

References 497

Index 531