The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes

  Faraday himself wrote appreciatively to Herschel from the Royal Institution, in one of his breathless, enthusiastic screeds. ‘When your work on the study of Nat. Phil. came out, I read it as all others did with delight. I took it as a school book for philosophers and I feel it has made me a better reasoner and even experimenter and has altogether heightened my character and made me if I may be permitted to say so a better philosopher.’26

  Many others felt the same. For one undergraduate at Cambridge the book was like a summons to arms. ‘Humboldt’s Personal Narrative and Herschel’s On Natural Philosophy stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science. No one of a dozen other books influenced me nearly so much as these two.’ The undergraduate was twenty-two-year-old Charles Darwin, and his humble contribution was to be On the Origin of Species (1859).27

  4

  It was now the turn of David Brewster (1781-1868). Educated in Edinburgh, Brewster was a physicist who had contributed widely to scientific journals and encyclopaedias. His field was applied optics, such as lighthouse lenses, and he invented the kaleidoscope; but he was also inventing the new career of science journalism. A Calvinist who had abandoned the Church, he was a natural evangelist for science. He decided that a campaign rather than a book was needed, and now published specific proposals for a new national scientific association in a number of magazines, including the Quarterly Review. He wrote urgently to Babbage in February 1830: ‘I wish you could spare ten minutes to my equation … and would it not be useful to organize an Association for the purpose of protecting and promoting the secular interests of Science? A few influential noblemen and MP’s would give great help in forwarding such an object.’28

  Such an Association was to meet annually, as Babbage had suggested, on the German model, at different provincial cities — but not London, being the territory of the Royal Society. It was to draw its membership primarily from the universities, the House of Commons and the local ‘Literary and Philosophical’ societies in the great northern cities. There had been fewer than ten of these when Banks had begun at the Royal Society in the 1780s, among the earliest being Manchester, Derby and Newcastle upon Tyne. There were some thirty in existence by the time Davy was elected in 1820, and nearly seventy by the time Charles Darwin came back from the Galapagos islands in 1836. This was the beginning of the historic expansion of Victorian science.29

  There was much campaigning, recruiting and arguing throughout 1830-31. Babbage in London, Brewster in Edinburgh and Whewell in Cambridge led the drive. A typical missive from Whewell read: ‘I can see abundance of good things that such a Society may do: one matter which requires multiplied and extensive fagging is meteorology, which I hope Dalton may do … Sedgwick is still hammering in Wales. Darwin … is just on the point of setting out as a naturalist with Captain Fitzroy who is to complete the survey of the south end of America. I expect he will bring you home the tip of Cape Horn …’30

  Faraday still remained elusive, and Herschel — mindful of his position as Secretary to the Royal Society — tactfully explained in an immensely long letter that he could only send ‘sincere good wishes for its utility and consequent success’. He did however recognise ‘the want in this country and in the actual state of science, of a great, central and presiding power to give an impulse and direction to enquiry’.31 By autumn 1831 it was still hoped that a few other ‘scientific lions may be allowed to perambulate the country’.

  Finally, a somewhat depleted first meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science took place at York in October 1831. Undaunted, the members vigorously discussed comets, railways, geological strata, the Aurora Borealis, marsupial mating habits, and subversively drank Joseph Priestley’s health (a reproach to the Royal Society and a greeting to America).32 A combative keynote speech about the development of science in Britain was delivered by the first President, William Rowan Hamilton, but this was not felt to have quite the reach or impact of Humboldt in Vienna. There was some lively disagreement (which was to continue for many years) over the correct balance between dinners and lectures, or ‘feasting versus philosophy’. However, in the absence of figures like Faraday and Herschel, the whole thing slipped away almost entirely unreported in the press.

  A second meeting of the fledgling Association took place at Oxford in 1832. A fine theatrical performance from Professor William Buckland on the subject of geology and the courtship of primitive reptiles received some praise. This time The Times deigned to notice the occasion, but loftily dismissed it as ‘a mere unexplained display of philosophical toys’, and pointed out that Buckland sometimes seemed to forget that he lectured ‘in the presence of ladies’.33

  But with the third meeting in June 1833 the British Association really began to make a national impact. It was held at Cambridge, itself considered a major coup, and the capture of the heartland of progressive rational thought in Britain. Cambridge was also Newton’s shrine, and the base of the powerful ‘Trinity and John’s’ group of scientific academics. This time the list of those attending included almost all those who would soon become the rising stars in the firmament of early Victorian science: Michael Faraday, Sir John Herschel, John Dalton, Charles Babbage, Sir David Brewster, Adam Sedgwick, William Whewell, Thomas Chalmers, Thomas Malthus and William Somerville. The only notable absentee was Charles Darwin, just then botanising in Uruguay during the Beagle’s voyage.34

  Some of ‘the ladies’ were also pressing for admittance, including several powerful scientific wives, like Margaret Herschel and Mary Somerville. They pretended to be fully engaged in hosting receptions and choosing the menus, while unofficially they listened at the back of the lecture halls, took notes, and critically judged the quality (and appearance) of the speakers. The major debate was on the nature of the Aurora Borealis, which symbolically called upon a wide range of scientific interests including meteorology, optics, electricity, magnetism, polar exploration and solar astronomy. It was held at the heart of the university, in the Cambridge Senate House, on King’s Parade. The main luncheon, a cold collation for 600 members, was staged at Trinity, with guests drifting across Great Court to toast the statue of Newton. Then came fireworks, and a ‘botanical barge’ energetically punted up the Cam. One other noticeable participant, now ill and frail, but still intellectually formidable, was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, aged sixty.

  Coleridge was put up in a friend’s rooms at Trinity itself, and remarked appreciatively that his bed was ‘as near as I can describe it a couple of sacks full of potatoes tied together … Truly I lay down at night a man, and arose in the morning a bruise.’ This, rather than opium, might explain why he was never able to rise till the afternoon, though he always had ‘a crowded levee’ at his bedside. Nevertheless he stayed for three days, attended many of the meetings, and always found undergraduates and professors crowding round to talk to him. He certainly was one of the lions, though from a disappearing age.

  All his old enthusiasm for scientific matters came sweeping back, and he was soon in the thick of it, boldly announcing that ‘Lyell’s system of geology is half truth — but not more’; while Descartes’ vortices ‘were not a hypothesis: they rested on no facts at all … Your subtle fluid etc is pure gratuitous assumption.’ Then he delighted everyone by suddenly saying: ‘That fine old Quaker philosopher Dalton’s face was like — like All Soul’s College.’ This was a very Oxford joke in Cambridge.35

  He was up to the minute with Herschel’s Natural Philosophy, and gave an impressively Coleridgean account of the role of ‘hypothesis or theory’ in the inductive philosophy. ‘The use of a Theory in the real sciences is to help the investigator to a complete view of all the hitherto discovered parts relating to it; it is a Collected View, θεωρια [Theoria], of all he yet knows in one. Of course whilst any facts remain unknown, no theory can be exactly true, because every new part must necessarily displace the relation of all the others. A theory therefore only helps investigation
: it cannot invent or discover.’36

  Memories of Humphry Davy must have come flooding back, in all the glow of his Bristol youth, for Coleridge got on particularly well with the young Michael Faraday. Unlike Lady Davy, he was favourably impressed by Faraday’s fine open face, with its mop of curling hair and gazing wide-apart eyes, and his modest manner, with its peculiar directness and intensity. ‘I was exceedingly pleased with Faraday, he seemed to me to have the true temperament of Genius — that of carrying on the spring and freshness of youthful, nay boyish, feelings into the mature strength of manhood.’

  This was a signal recognition by Coleridge, who had defined such ageless energy as a characteristic of literary genius some seventeen years before, in Chapter 4 of his Biographia Literaria (1816). In a passage describing the poetry of Wordsworth, he wrote: ‘To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar — with sun and moon and stars throughout the year, And man and woman – this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talent.’37 He was now applying these literary criteria to a man of science. In his last published work, On Church and State (1830), he had included men of science as an essential part of what he christened ‘the clerisy’: that is, the diffuse body of thinkers, writers, teachers and opinion-formers who made up the intelligentsia or informing culture of a nation.38

  At one meeting, chaired by William Whewell, Coleridge was drawn into a passionate discussion of semantics. It revolved around the question of what exactly someone who works ‘in the real sciences’ (as he had phrased it) should be called. This is how Whewell reported the British Association debate in the Quarterly Review of 1834:

  Formerly the ‘learned’ embraced in their wide grasp all the branches of the tree of knowledge, mathematicians as well as philologers, physical as well as antiquarian speculators. But these days are past … This difficulty was felt very oppressively by the members of the BAAS at Cambridge last summer. There was no general term by which these gentlemen could describe themselves with reference to their pursuits.

  ‘Philosophers’ was felt to be too wide and lofty a term, and was very properly forbidden them by Mr. Coleridge, both in his capacity as philologer and metaphysician. ‘Savans’ was rather assuming and besides too French; but some ingenious gentleman [in fact Whewell himself] proposed that, by analogy with ‘artist’, they might form ‘scientist’ — and added that there could be no scruple to this term since we already have such words as ‘economist’ and ‘atheist’ — but this was not generally palatable.39

  The analogy with ‘atheist’ was of course fatal. Adam Sedgwick exploded: ‘Better die of this want [of a term] than bestialize our tongue by such a barbarism.’ But in fact ‘scientist’ came rapidly into general use from this date, and was recognised in the OED by 1840. Sedgwick later reflected more calmly, and made up for his outburst by producing a memorable image. ‘Such a coinage has always taken place at the great epochs of discovery: like the medals that are struck at the beginning of a new reign.’40

  This argument over a single word — ‘scientists’ — gave a clue to the much larger debate that was steadily surfacing in Britain at this crucial period of transition 1830-34. Lurking beneath the semantics lay the whole question of whether the new generation of professional ‘scientists’ would promote safe religious belief or a dangerous secular materialism. Hitherto, either austere intellectual Deism, held for example by William Herschel, or else the rather more picturesque Natural Theology conveniently accepted by Davy (at least in his public lectures) had disguised this problem, whatever the revelations of astronomy or geology, or the inspired ragings of Shelley.

  For many Romantic scientists, with a robust intellectual belief in the ‘argument by Design’, there was no immediate contradiction between religion and science: rather the opposite. Science was a gift of God or Providence to mankind, and its purpose was to reveal the wonders of His design. This indeed was the essence of ‘natural’ religion, as promoted for example by William Paley in his Natural Theology (1802), with its famous analogy with the divine watchmaker. It was the faith that brought Mungo Park back alive from his first Niger expedition. It was the faith that inspired Michael Faraday to become a Deacon in the Sandemanian Church in July 1832.

  But public faith often differed from private beliefs. Whatever he said in his famous lectures, Davy’s poetry and his posthumous writings, such as Consolations in Travel, suggested a kind of science mysticism that certainly precluded a Christian God, and possibly even any kind of Creator at all. Others, like William Herschel, had been content to rely on an instinctive, perhaps deliberately unexamined, belief in a benign Creator somewhere distantly behind the great unfolding scheme of nature. Though in Herschel’s case, his own observations had shown how extremely — appallingly – distant, both in time and space, that Creator must be. Moreover, his sister Caroline never once mentioned God anywhere in her journals.41 As for Joseph Banks, his sister Sophia had had no high opinion of his natural piety.

  Yet with the growing public knowledge of geology and astronomy, and the recognition of ‘deep space’ and ‘deep time’, fewer and fewer men or women of education can have believed in a literal, Biblical six days of creation. However, science itself had yet to produce its own theory (or myth) of creation, and there was no alternative Newtonian Book of Genesis — as yet. That is why Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared so devastating when it was finally published in 1859. It was not that it reduced the six days of Biblical creation to myth: this had already been largely done by Lyell and the geologists. What it demonstrated was that there was no need for a divine creation at all. There was no divine creation of species, no miraculous invention of butterflies’ wings or cats’ eyes or birds’ song. The process of evolution by ‘natural selection’ replaced any need for ‘intelligent design’ in nature. Darwin had indeed written a new Book of Genesis.♣

  Over the following five years, the well-meaning 8th Earl of Bridgewater would commission a whole series of booklets by the leading men of science, intended to show how British scientific research and discovery unfailingly underpinned Christian — and specifically Anglican – belief. They were to illustrate what might have been called an unproven hypothesis: ‘The Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation’. The thankless task of composing these Bridgewater Treatises (1830-36) was piously or sportively undertaken by Chalmers (on astronomy), the humorous Professor Buckland (on geology), Whewell (on mathematics), Charles Bell (on anatomy) and several others of lesser note. Thanks to the Duke of Bridgewater’s bequest, they were all outstandingly remunerated at £1,000 each, plus all profits.42

  Reading Buckland on geology, Mary Somerville mournfully observed: ‘facts are such stubborn things’. Faraday, a lifelong Sandemanian, refused to make any comment. Charles Babbage threatened to write a ninth and scathing last treatise, but he never finished it.43

  On a more whimsical note, William Sotheby, Coleridge’s old friend and the translator of Dante, celebrated this third conference with a long, prismatic piece of light verse, ‘Lines on the 3rd Meeting of the BAAS at Cambridge, 1833’. He set out a new tradition, the roll-call of the great ‘scientists’. Among others he saluted Bacon, Newton, William Herschel, Wollaston, Davy, Faraday, Dalton, John Herschel, Babbage, Roget, Hutton, Playfair and Lyell. But he only mentioned one woman: not Caroline Herschel, but Mary Somerville; and she was noticed, ironically, for her official absence.

  Why wert thou absent? Thou whose cultured mind,

  Smoothing the path of knowledge to mankind

  Adorn’st thy page deep stored with thought profound …

  While Cambridge — glorying in her Newton’s fame –

  Records with his, thy woman’s honoured name,

  High-gifted Somerville! … 44

  Later meetings of the British Association took place, as planned, rotating roun
d the great provincial capitals, but studiously avoiding London. There was now increasing competition to be the host metropolis, as it was realised that the Association was beginning to attract both international recognition and a considerable local boost to city finances. Edinburgh was chosen in 1834, followed by Dublin in 1835, Bristol in 1836, Liverpool in 1837, Newcastle in 1838, Birmingham in 1839 and Glasgow in 1840. By this time over 2,000 people were attending each year, the press coverage was huge, and the official membership had risen to over 1,000.

  But the early press reception — now increasingly important in British science — was surprisingly rough, and revealed all sorts of class and cultural anxieties. The Times leaders thundered out disapproval annually from 1832 to 1835: ‘It is the necessary consequence of the Spirit of the Age … The principle of humbug, the principle of Penny Magazines, and Mechanics Institutes, the principle of spreading the waters of knowledge over a large surface without caring how shallow they may be — The Association, we prophesy, will soon see its end.’45 To emphasise its unimpeachable accuracy, The Times consistently spelt Michael Faraday as ‘Farraday’.

  The magazine John Bull added to the chorus in 1835: Amongst the extensive Humbugs which so eminently distinguish this very extraordinarily enlightened Age, none perhaps is more glaring than the Meeting of what is called the British Association for the Advancement of Science … With the aid of concerts and dancing, fireworks and fine women, sound claret and strong whisky, the Sages make out remarkably well.’46