The History of Science Society

Vol. 39, No. 1, January 2010
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Adventures in Romantic Science: Richard Holmes on passion, teamwork, and the neglected art of biography.

An interview by Michael Bycroft

Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes When Age of Wonder won the prestigious Royal Society Prize for Science Books in September last year, it was a victory not just for good writing and for the author Richard Holmes, but also for the history of science. Age of Wonder, a series of portraits of the men and women of science in the Romantic era, is only the fourth book on history to win the 22-year old prize. [1] This is a step in a new direction for Holmes, a literary biographer known more for his work on Shelley and Coleridge than on Davy and Herschel. But we should not be surprised to see those four Romantic figures in the same book, says Holmes. And there is plenty more to write about this daring and bountiful period for science, and plenty of ways to write about it.

The dark and wonderful world of Romantic scientists

Q: You have said that your “books on Shelley and Coleridge are all about people who had hope in the world. Now come [in Age of Wonder] the scientists and the discovery of a new kind of hope." [2] Is it this—the sense of hope shared by Romantic scientists and artists—that prompted you to shift from literary biography to history of science? Are there other reasons for the shift?

A: Yes, one of the glories of the Romantic period for me is its sense of hope and energy, of wider possibilities, of a better world. I also hate the stultifying idea of the Two Cultures—arts and sciences—supposedly dividing us. The Romantics didn’t believe in such a division. In fact the specific thing that set me off was the friendship between the poet Coleridge (whose biography I had written) and the chemist Humphry Davy. It is a fascinating story, ranging from their inhaling of nitrous oxide gas together, to discussing the hardest metaphysical questions about the nature of scientific knowledge and its role in society. As Coleridge said, “Science being necessarily performed with the passion of Hope, it is Poetical.” I was also usefully provoked after a lecture I gave at the British Academy in 1999, when Professor Lewis Wolpert sprang up from the front row and said that Coleridge’s great poem “The Ancient Mariner” had nothing whatsoever to do with science. He was wrong, as it happens, but it set me thinking—for ten years.

Q: There is a darker, less hopeful side to Romantic poets. Is there also a darker, less hopeful side to Romantic scientists that you wanted to explore in this book?

A: Yes, there certainly is. William Herschel’s astronomy first raised the question of a huge, meaningless universe, with no cosmic Creator, and in which every galaxy was destined to “wither and die.” Davy’s chemistry showed that a great discovery like anaesthetics could be lost for a generation, at immense cost in human suffering; and that a great technical invention like the miner's safety lamp could finally end up being used to exploit the very men it was designed to safeguard. (They were sent deeper into the mines). The advances in medicine and surgery began to challenge the notion of human individuality or spirit, and produced that parable of scientific hubris and menace still universally known by the name of Dr Frankenstein. (Mary Shelley’s great novel of 1818 was actually entitled: Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, and initially it only sold 500 copies). You can find the same questions being asked in the poetry of Byron, Keats, and Shelley. For example in Byron’s haunting poem “Darkness.”

Q: You write in Age of Wonder that you aim to "present scientific passion, so much of which is summed up in that child-like, but infinitely complex word, wonder." [3] Did you aim to present the methods of scientists as well as "passion" behind their work?

A: Yes, and these methods are not at all childlike. They were original, daring and often highly dangerous. To start with, the principles of close observation, accurate measurement, and precise experiment pioneered by the scientists—incidentally not defined as “scientists” until 1831—are intellectually gripping in themselves. But there’s the physical equipment they used, and often invented—like Herschel’s homemade reflectors, or Davy’s voltaic batteries, or Banks’s exquisite anthropological (as well as botanical) drawings, or Blanchard’s balloon canopies and barometers. Then there’s the story of their actual experiments, explorations and discoveries, which make thrilling narratives in themselves, and are as riveting to write about as detective stories (or indeed as love stories, which they often are in their own way). Mungo Park’s heroic solo exploration of the river Niger, his psychological (or spiritual) survival when he was robbed and left to die, abandoned and alone, is as moving as any Romantic poem. (Indeed Robert Southey tried to turn it into one, but it’s better in Park’s own prose Travels.)

Historians and Romantic science

Q: Did you use any other writers on the history of science, or works in the field, as models for this book? Is so, what/who were they?

A: Not really, I felt I was trying to do something quite new in this form of group biography. Indeed it was a long and lonely business. Nonetheless there were books which deeply encouraged me, and which I admire greatly: James Gleick on Newton, Lisa Jardine on 17th century science in Ingenious Pursuits, and Jenny Uglow on the 18th century Lunar Men. There were also certain radio and television programs which inspired me by the way complex ideas could be discussed and clarified: Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time, and Sir David Attenborough’s revelatory nature and environment programs, for instance. By contrast, there were many biographical films or biopics—about Darwin or Stephen Hawking, for example—which warned me how not to do it.

Q: You write in Age of Wonder that "We need not only a new history of science, but a more enlarged and imaginative biographical writing about individual scientists." [4] Do you have some individual scientists in mind who deserve more biographical attention?

A: I think the biography of scientists is only just starting. For example, Mike Jay’s biography of the 18th century doctor Thomas Beddoes, or Graham Farmelo’s of the physicist Paul Dirac, or Georgina Ferry’s of the molecular biologist Max Perutz . Or from a different angle, the biography of a scientific idea (which is a different kind of group biography) like Simon Singh’s Fermat’s Last Theorem or Manjit Kumar’s Quantum. Most of all there is the need for fuller biographies of women in science, especially during the early modern period: the Duchess of Newcastle, Emilie du Chatelet, Mary Anning, Mary Somerville, Caroline Herschel, Jane Marcet, for example.

Q: Did you think that science during the Romantic period has been given insufficient attention by historians? If so, why might this be?

A: First, because many scientists still believe that Romantic writers all hated and distrusted science like William Blake: “Newton and Locke, sheathed in dismal Steel” etc. See for example Richard Dawkins’s Unweaving the Rainbow, which appears to make this mistaken assumption. Second, because there’s been an historic gap, a sort of intellectual black hole, between the death of Newton (1724) and the departure of the young Charles Darwin aboard the Beagle, bound for the Galapagos (1831). And third, because this is the period of the German naturphilosophie, a powerful and attractive kind of popular science mysticism, which spread across Europe and is still the source of much contemporary “alternative” science and some glorious mumbo-jumbo too. Science historians are nervous of that.

Scientific biography: Sidetracks, footsteps, lateral stories and vertical footnotes

Q: You have described biography as a union of fiction and fact, "without benefit of clergy.” [5] Did your previous experience of marrying fact and fiction (in your works of literary biography) make it easier for you to marry Romantic science with Romantic art (in this book)?

A: No, I felt I was starting from scratch. It’s not so much “marrying” fact and fiction, as using fictional techniques to get across facts and present them in a revealing way. I’ve written a whole paper on this, but I will give you just two examples, and in highly compressed form. One is the use of Joseph Banks as a kind of Greek chorus throughout the book. The second is the method of starting each scientific life in the middle, when something significant has already happened, and only going back to the childhood later—to see how he or she got to that significant place. If you look in the book, you will see how these work. A third would be the use of “vertical footnotes” to open up “lateral stories,” but you’ll have to work that one out for yourself.

Q: "Empathy is the most powerful, the most necessary, and the most deceptive, of all biographical emotions." [6] As a writer, did you find it harder to empathize with the scientists in this history than with the writers? If this was a problem for you, how did you overcome it?

A: I’m not sure about this. The question of “empathy”—and in what sense it really exists, as opposed to “sympathy”—is a difficult one for all biographers. (I hedged my bets there in Sidetracks by calling it an “emotion,” but I now find that someone has written a whole MA Dissertation on “empathy” in my books, starting with Footsteps.) I suppose there can be a problem about understanding the inner life of scientists, who may not be so naturally inclined to confide their thoughts to letters, journals or diaries as professional writers. (They may not have the time, apart from anything else.) Biographers might call this “a lack of interiority.” On the other hand, scientists tend to have a natural gift for explaining things, including they way they have approached and solved (or failed to solve, potentially just as interesting) particular scientific problems. There is a great and growing interest in the informal Notebooks of scientists—for example the Notebooks of Leonardo, Newton and Charles Darwin have all been published and are classics—just like the Notebooks of Coleridge. I found the Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, the laboratory Notebooks of Humphry Davy, and the astronomical Journals of Caroline Herschel, extraordinarily vivid and revealing.

Q: "My urge was to go directly to the original materials—and most especially to the places—for myself." [7] What were the "original materials" that shed light on the inner lives of the scientists in this book?

A: See the long answer above. I would also include places and objects, like Davy’s laboratory equipment at the Royal Institution, Herschel’s house in Bath (now a museum) and his telescopes (at the Whipple Museum), the John Hunter collection at the Royal College of Surgeons, or Montgolfier’s balloons at the Museé de l’Air at Le Bourget.

Q: There is a fashion, in history of science writing, for biographies about non-human subjects, whether equations (E = mc²) or entities (quarks, flies, electrons). Can you imagine writing this kind of biography, or is the human element indispensable for you?

A: No, the human heart is indispensable. Samuel Johnson said he could “write the life of a broomstick,” but I couldn’t.; Mind you Shelley wrote the life of a single cloud in a long poem of that name, and it is scientifically impressive (the evaporation cycle) as well as biographically beautiful.

Q: Since writing this book you have hinted at the importance of team-work and co-operation in science. One theme of Age of Wonder is the Romantic enthusiasm for the "solitary scientific 'genius'": would this enthusiasm make it difficult to re-write Romantic science as a story of teamwork?

A: In the Preface, I called the book “a relay race of scientific stories.” I hope there is the sense of “a great collaborative project” running throughout it. Yet these men and women were indeed people of “solitary genius,” and more important, lived in a culture that encouraged them to think of themselves as such. (Nowadays, one might hazard the suggestion that scientists are encouraged by the culture to think of themselves as “popular celebrities,” though blessedly many of them refuse to do so.) Nonetheless there are great partnerships and rivalries (rivalry producing a different form of teamwork, see James Watson’s The Double Helix) at this time. Difficult to think of William Herschel without his sister Caroline Herschel, Davy without his young assistant Michael Faraday, Banks without the faithful Daniel Solander, or rebellious William Lawrence without his surgical patron John Abernethy (or either without…Dr Frankenstein).

Present success and future plans

Q: The Age of Wonder has reached a much larger readership than typical histories of science. Why do you think this is? Is it because of the history of science in the book, or in spite of it?

A: Yes, it’s surprising, and also a larger readership than my literary biographies—and even more so in America. (I was particularly amazed to get a fan letter from NASA.) I think we are probably entering a golden age of popular science writing, anyway, for quite complex reasons…. But it has struck me that in lectures, and in the signing queue afterwards, my readers seem more evenly balanced between men and women, and definitely younger than before. But then that’s probably because I’m definitely older than before.

Q: Do you have plans for another book? If so, do you plan to write again on the Romantic period? On science?

A: In a word—Aha!

References

The number of winning history books depends on how one counts, of course. I count David Bodanis’ Electric Universe: How Electricity Switched on the Modern World (2006 winner), Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel (1998), and Arno Karlen’s Plague’s Progress (1996) as the only winning books that focus mainly on history.
Nicholas Wroe. (2008). “Following his footsteps.” Guardian, Sep 27 08. Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/27/biography1.
Holmes, R. (2009). Age of Wonder. London: Harper Press, p. 15.
Ibid., p. 468.
Holmes, R. (2003). Biography: Inventing the Truth, in The Art of Literary Biography, John Batchelor (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 15.
Holmes, R. (2001). Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer. Vintage, p. 136.
Holmes, R. (1996). Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer. Vintage, p. 136.

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Adventures in Romantic Science: Richard Holmes on passion, teamwork, and the neglected art of biography.

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The dark and wonderful world of Romantic scientists

Historians and Romantic science

Scientific biography: Sidetracks, footsteps, lateral stories and vertical footnotes

Present success and future plans

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