The Age of Wonder

Last updated
The Age of Wonder
The Age of Wonder (book cover).jpg
Hardcover edition
Author Richard Holmes
LanguageEnglish
Subject History of Science
Genre Non-fiction
Publisher HarperCollins
Publication date
2008
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint, e-book
Pages554 pp
ISBN 978-0-00-714952-0

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science is a 2008 popular biography book about the history of science written by Richard Holmes. In it, the author describes the scientific discoveries of the polymaths of the late eighteenth century and how this period formed the basis for modern scientific discoveries. [1] Holmes, a literary biographer, also looks at the influence of science on the arts in the Romantic era. The book won the 2009 Royal Society Prize for Science Books, [2] the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction, and the 2010 National Academies Communication Award.

Contents

Overview

Holmes focuses particularly on the lives and works of Sir Joseph Banks, the astronomers William and Caroline Herschel, and chemist Humphry Davy. Other profiles include African explorer Mungo Park. There is a chapter on the early history of ballooning including pioneers Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, Vincent Lunardi, Jean-Pierre Blanchard and James Sadler.

He also describes the relationships between the scientists of that time, and the early days of the Royal Society. [3] A recurring theme of the book is the relation between science and poetry in the Romantic era. John Keats, in “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, compares his first encounter with Homer’s poetry to Herschel’s discovery of Uranus: “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/ When a new planet swims into his ken.” Holmes writes that “Among other things, Keats had combined science and poetry in a new and intensely exciting way.” (207) Keats would express negative feelings about science in “Lamia”, where he accused Newton, by “unweav[ing] the rainbow”, of reducing it “to the dull catalogue of common things.” Another Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, said he attended Humphry Davy’s lectures “to enlarge my stock of metaphors.” Davy, Mungo Park and the Arctic explorer William Parry are alluded to by Byron in his satiric epic Don Juan as emblems of the age.

Holmes looks at how the debates around Vitalism contributed to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein : “Mary’s brilliance was to see that these weighty and often alarming ideas could be given highly suggestive, imaginative and even playful form... She would develop exactly what William Lawrence had dismissed in his lectures as a ‘hypothesis or fiction.’ Indeed, it was to be an utterly new form of fiction – the science fiction novel.” (327)

Holmes bookends his narrative with voyages of discovery. It opens in 1769, with Joseph Banks traveling to Tahiti on HMS Endeavour. In the last chapter, he describes John Herschel's establishment of an observatory in Cape Town to catalogue the stars of the southern hemisphere in 1833. In 1836, Herschel was visited by a young Charles Darwin, returning from the Galápagos on HMS Beagle.

The book was published by HarperCollins in 2008 in the UK, and by Pantheon in the US in 2009. [4]

Reception

The book received very good reviews, and made several Best Books of 2009 lists, including the New York Times' Ten Best list. [5] On The Omnivore , in an aggregation of British critic reviews, the book received a score of 4.5 out of 5. [6] On Bookmarks Magazine Sep/Oct 2009 issue, a magazine that aggregates critic reviews of books, the book received a Star full.svgStar full.svgStar full.svgStar full.svgStar empty.svg (4.0 out of 5) based on critic reviews with the critical summary stating, "Critics described Age of Wonder, a synthesis of history, science, philosophy, and biography, as "intoxicating," "gripping," and "juicy". [7]

Mike Jay of the Daily Telegraph wrote: "Scientists, like poets, need a sense of wonder, a sense of humility and a sense of humour. Holmes has all three in abundance". [8] Peter Forbes of The Independent wrote of the book:

"Its heart – the linked stories of Banks, Herschel and Davy – is thrilling: a portrait of bold adventure among the stars, across the oceans, deep into matter, poetry and the human psyche" [9]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Humphry Davy</span> British chemist and inventor (1778–1829)

Sir Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet, was a British chemist and inventor who invented the Davy lamp and a very early form of arc lamp. He is also remembered for isolating, by using electricity, several elements for the first time: potassium and sodium in 1807 and calcium, strontium, barium, magnesium and boron the following year, as well as for discovering the elemental nature of chlorine and iodine. Davy also studied the forces involved in these separations, inventing the new field of electrochemistry. Davy is also credited with discovering clathrate hydrates.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Keats</span> English Romantic poet (1795–1821)

John Keats was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. They were indifferently received in his lifetime, but his fame grew rapidly after his death. By the end of the century, he was placed in the canon of English literature, strongly influencing many writers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1888 called one ode "one of the final masterpieces".

Hyperion, a Fragment is an abandoned epic poem by 19th-century English Romantic poet John Keats. It was published in Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820). It is based on the Titanomachia, and tells of the despair of the Titans after their fall to the Olympians. Keats wrote the poem from late 1818 until the spring of 1819. The poem stops abruptly in the middle of the third book, with close to 900 lines having been completed. He gave it up as having "too many Miltonic inversions." He was also nursing his younger brother Tom, who died on 1 December 1818 of tuberculosis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Caroline Herschel</span> German-British astronomer (1750–1848)

Caroline Lucretia Herschel was a German-born British astronomer, whose most significant contributions to astronomy were the discoveries of several comets, including the periodic comet 35P/Herschel–Rigollet, which bears her name. She was the younger sister of astronomer William Herschel, with whom she worked throughout her career.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">To Autumn</span> Poem by English Romantic poet John Keats

"To Autumn" is a poem by English Romantic poet John Keats. The work was composed on 19 September 1819 and published in 1820 in a volume of Keats's poetry that included Lamia and The Eve of St. Agnes. "To Autumn" is the final work in a group of poems known as Keats's "1819 odes". Although personal problems left him little time to devote to poetry in 1819, he composed "To Autumn" after a walk near Winchester one autumnal evening. The work marks the end of his poetic career, as he needed to earn money and could no longer devote himself to the lifestyle of a poet. A little over a year after the publication of "To Autumn", Keats died in Rome.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ode to a Nightingale</span> 1819 poem by John Keats

"Ode to a Nightingale" is a poem by John Keats written either in the garden of the Spaniards Inn, Hampstead, London or, according to Keats' friend Charles Armitage Brown, under a plum tree in the garden of Keats' house at Wentworth Place, also in Hampstead. According to Brown, a nightingale had built its nest near the house that he shared with Keats in the spring of 1819. Inspired by the bird's song, Keats composed the poem in one day. It soon became one of his 1819 odes and was first published in Annals of the Fine Arts the following July. The poem is one of the most frequently anthologized in the English language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ode on a Grecian Urn</span> 1819 poem by John Keats

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a poem written by the English Romantic poet John Keats in May 1819, first published anonymously in Annals of the Fine Arts for 1819.

<i>Unweaving the Rainbow</i> Book by Richard Dawkins

Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder is a 1998 book by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, in which the author discusses the relationship between science and the arts from the perspective of a scientist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">On First Looking into Chapman's Homer</span> Sonnet by John Keats

"On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" is a sonnet written by the English Romantic poet John Keats (1795–1821) in October 1816. It tells of the author's astonishment while he was reading the works of the ancient Greek poet Homer as translated by the Elizabethan playwright George Chapman.

"Lamia" is a narrative poem written by the English poet John Keats, which first appeared in the volume Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems, published in July 1820. The poem was written in 1819, during the famously productive period that produced his 1819 odes. It was composed soon after his "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and his odes on Melancholy, on Indolence, on a Grecian Urn and to a Nightingale and just before "To Autumn".

Lynda Hull was an American poet. She had published two collections of poetry when she died in a car accident in 1994. A third, The Only World, was published posthumously by her husband, the poet David Wojahn, and was a finalist for the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award. Collected Poems By Lynda Hull, was published in 2006.

Water gas is a kind of fuel gas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. It is produced by "alternately hot blowing a fuel layer [coke] with air and gasifying it with steam". The caloric yield of the fuel produced by this method is about 10% of the yield from a modern syngas plant. The coke needed to produce water gas also costs significantly more than the precursors for syngas, making water gas technology an even less attractive business proposition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Omai</span> Pacific Islander that visited Europe

Mai, known as Omai in Europe, was a young Ra'iatean man who became the second Pacific Islander to visit Europe, after Ahutoru who was brought to Paris by Bougainville in 1768.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Romanticism in science</span> Intellectual attitude toward science influenced by Romanticism

19th-century science was greatly influenced by Romanticism, an intellectual movement that originated in Western Europe as a counter-movement to the late-18th-century Enlightenment. Romanticism incorporated many fields of study, including politics, the arts, and the humanities.

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Holmes (biographer)</span> British author and academic

Richard Gordon Heath Holmes, OBE, FRSL, FBA is a British author and academic best known for his biographical studies of major figures of British and French Romanticism.

Richard Marggraf Turley is a British literary critic, poet and novelist. He specialises in Romanticism and the poetry of John Keats, surveillance studies and ecocriticism. He is professor of English Literature at Aberystwyth University, and between 2013 and 2018 was that institution's Professor of Engagement with the Public Imagination.

<i>Bright Star</i> (film) 2009 British film

Bright Star is a 2009 biographical romantic drama film, written and directed by Jane Campion. It is based on the last three years of the life of poet John Keats and his romantic relationship with Fanny Brawne. Campion's screenplay was inspired by a 1997 biography of Keats by Andrew Motion, who served as a script consultant.

Sir William Watson (1744–1824) was an English physician and naturalist, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1767 and knighted in 1796. He was mayor of Bath in 1801.

Age of Wonder may refer to:

References

  1. Harper Collins:The Age of Wonder
  2. New Scientist: The Age of Wonder wins Royal Society science books prize
  3. "Review: The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes". The Daily Telegraph . Archived from the original on 2023-05-04.
  4. Benfey, Christopher (2009-07-16). "Book Review | 'The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science,' by Richard Holmes". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2019-11-26.
  5. "The 10 Best Books of 2009 - The New York Times". archive.nytimes.com. Retrieved 2019-11-26.
  6. "The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science". The Omnivore . Archived from the original on 4 Mar 2021. Retrieved 12 July 2024.
  7. "The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science By Richard Holmes". Bookmarks Magazine . Archived from the original on 2 Aug 2016. Retrieved 14 January 2023.
  8. "Review: The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes". The Daily Telegraph . Archived from the original on 2023-05-04.
  9. Review by The Independent