The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes

  Scenting a good story, Charles Dickens launched a satirical series in Bentley’s Miscellany in 1838, entitled ‘The Full report of the First Meeting of the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything’. It was supplied with mocking cartoons by his gifted illustrator George Cruikshank, who had achieved such a success with Sketches by Boz. In it Dickens invented some early fictional scientists: Professor Snore, Professor Doze and Dr Wheezy, though all of them were more benign and ineffectual than Dr Victor Frankenstein.47

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  While these public battles raged, Michael Faraday quietly continued his experiments at the Royal Institution. He was now released from Davy’s oppressive shadow, yet still clearly inspired by his memory. He worked immensely hard, giving his first Bakerian Lecture to the Royal Society in 1829, and also accepting a simultaneous post as Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. He expanded his work on electro-magnetism, and began the construction of the first electrical generators, by producing an ‘alternating’ electrical current. This would lead to electrical dynamos that would ultimately revolutionise industry as much as James Watt’s steam engine. His experiment with magnetic coils and a galvanometer (which was made to move without physical contact), carried out at the Institution’s laboratory on 29 August 1831, was said to have ended ‘the Age of Steam’ at a stroke, and begun the new Age of Electricity’.48

  Faraday also took on from Davy the great task of educating the public in scientific matters. In 1826 he began his series of Friday Evening Discourses, in which a whole range of scientific topics were carefully presented and vividly explained to a general audience. From this grew perhaps his greatest innovation, his Christmas Lectures for Children, which are still given annually (and now televised). The classic example became his brilliantly clear and inventive series ‘The Chemical History of a Candle’. This started with the simple notion of flame and combustion, the very process that had so entranced the young Davy. It was beautifully followed out, step by step, into an entire panorama of natural processes: human and animal respiration, plant growth, and the entire global carbon cycle. Faraday would talk and explain with quiet, gentle authority, occasionally bursting out with some delighted exclamation. ‘Wonderful is it to find that the change produced by respiration, which seems so injurious to us — for we cannot breathe air twice over! — is the very life and support of plants and vegetables that grow upon the surface of the earth.’49

  These lectures were perhaps Faraday’s best tribute to his great and difficult patron, and one of the last great documents of Romantic science. ‘The Chemical History of a Candle’ was eventually adapted by Dickens, without any satirical intent, for his family magazine Household Words in 1850.

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  Other important things had been stirring in the world of science writing. David Brewster had begun to work on the first ever biography of Isaac Newton, designed not only to explain the work, but to draw an analytical portrait (within certain limits of propriety) of the great man’s mind and temperament. Mary Somerville, wife of a Royal Society Fellow, had also set herself to become a science-populariser, starting with an English translation and adaptation (1831) of Laplace’s Mécanique Céleste, and with general essays and reviews of the different scientific disciplines.

  The geologist Charles Lyell began in 1830 to bring out his classic work Principles of Geology, which would finally use scientific evidence to reject the Biblical account of short-scale creation of the earth, as maintained by every authority from Cuvier and Paley to Buffon and Buckland. Lyell’s proposal of a ‘deep time’ corresponded to the ‘deep space’ cosmology of William Herschel. It would ultimately provide the supportive authority for Charles Darwin, his great friend, to accept the deep time necessary for evolution by natural selection to take place.

  But during these five years of intense controversy from 1829 to 1834, it was the publication of four literary works that contributed most powerfully to the debate about what ‘a scientist’ really was, or should be. They were all published in popular series aimed at the general public, such as Murray’s Family Library. Such collections were intended to put contemporary ideas into general circulation and to reach the public at large. They reflected democratic stirrings, and the sense that ordinary people should be aware of what was being done in their name. These works helped to form the first public image of science, and the ambiguous feelings about scientists themselves.

  Humphry Davy’s influential Consolations in Travel, or The Last Days of a Philosopher had already sharpened these discussions. The expanded posthumous edition issued in Murray’s Family Library in 1831 brought it to a much wider general readership, and made it one of the first popular works of scientific autobiography and speculation. It was regarded as a stimulating and eccentric book, which revealed the unexpected inner workings of a scientist’s imagination. Writing from aboard the Beagle, off the Río de la Plata in May 1833, Charles Darwin begged his sister to send it, alongside Hutton on geology, Scoresby on Arctic regions, and Paul.50

  Davy’s strange and unforeseen speculations about the nature of social evolution, and the ‘planetary’ future of the human species, deeply impressed some, while they shocked others. When an American edition was issued, it was carefully edited with pious footnotes pointing out where Davy’s views were theologically unorthodox, and suggesting proper corrections. The work was referred to extensively by Charles Babbage and John Herschel in their own books. In his Preface to his Principles of Geology, Lyell mentioned Davy’s scientific speculations, but argued that the geology of ‘the great chemist’ was already fatally out of date, so swiftly was science now developing.51 Later, a copy appeared in Chapter 15 of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), where it lies on the drawing-room table like a guarantee of serious intent in the household.

  David Brewster’s Life of Sir Isaac Newton, the first ever major scientific biography in Britain, was also issued in Murray’s Family Library in 1831. It deliberately set out to hold up a triumphant and inspiring image of British science to the nation at large, presenting Newton as a secular saint, ‘the high priest of science’ and a man of universal genius. It emphasised the creative importance of Newton’s boyhood, and the intense originality of his mind, although it carefully eschewed the wonderful story of the falling apple and universal gravity, as told originally by William Stukeley in 1727. Brewster had in fact visited the orchard at Woolthorpe in 1814, to him a sacred site, and inspected the legendary apple tree, and even attempted to take a graft from it. But he carefully restricted himself to mentioning this piece of unscientific idolatry in a footnote. Years later, however, in an expanded 1860 edition of his biography, he flamboyantly told the whole tale, which by now had become the most glorious and perhaps misleading Eureka story in British science.52

  Throughout, Brewster emphasised the cultural importance of science in society. In Chapter I he presented a survey of British scientific discoveries, ending with a summary of William Herschel’s work, showing how a brilliant mind — even if originating abroad — could flourish in England when properly recognised and properly funded. He also emphasised the importance of biography for understanding ‘the scientific process by which a mind of acknowledged power actually proceeds in the path of successful enquiry’. Brewer added significantly: ‘The history of science does not furnish us with much information on this head, and if it is to be found at all, it must be gleaned from the biographies of eminent men.’53

  Perhaps his greatest achievement was to popularise Newton’s most famous remark about the process of scientific discovery: ‘I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great Ocean of truth lay all before me.’ It was a modest and yet thrilling image, which would be carried by thousands of Victorian schoolchildren – and their parents — to the holiday beaches and sea-bathing that were just becoming popu
lar.54

  The delayed — but increasingly formidable — impact of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus had exactly the opposite effect. It clearly demonised science. The second edition was issued as a single pocket volume, in Bentley’s Standard Novels in 1831. It now had as its frontispiece an engraving of the ghastly Creature rearing up in the shadows of Dr Frankenstein’s laboratory, the gross limbs ill-fitted and distorted, the head bent forward and half-twisted from the shoulders, and the face carrying an expression of horror and disgust at its own monstrous existence.

  The epigraph, from Adam’s lament in Milton’s Paradise Lost, read:

  Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

  To mould Me man? Did I solicit thee

  From darkness to promote me …?55

  This edition first contained Mary’s memorable and haunting Introduction, which describes her conversations with Byron and Shelley about science at the Villa Diodati in 1816, the work of Erasmus Darwin, and the waking nightmare in which she first conceived the novel. Now, in this new Preface, she added her own retrospective commentary on the notorious passage in which the ‘hideous’ Creature comes to life. She presented this as a moment of terrible, blasphemous and irreversible scientific hubris.

  I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the Thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful Engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of Life which he had communicated would fade; that this Thing, which had received such imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter; that he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench forever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold! the horrid Thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.56 ♣

  Three years later a very different woman writer entered the field and took up the defence of science. Mary Somerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences appeared in 1834, and was published in Murray’s Family Library. Its frontispiece showed drawings of Herschel’s nebulae. Though more didactic and pious in tone than the other books, it was a significant attempt to bring together new developments in the fields of astronomy, physics, chemistry, botany and geology as a single, ongoing scientific project of discovery. ‘The progress of modern science,’ Somerville wrote, ‘especially within the last five years, has been remarkable for a tendency to simplify the laws of nature, and to unite detached branches by general principles.’57

  This search for unifying laws, as emphasised by John Herschel, is a central theme of Somerville’s study. So, for example, ‘Light, heat, sound and the waves of fluids, are all subject to the same laws of reflection, and indeed their undulatory theories are perfectly similar.’58 This allows her to discuss the action of sunshine, rain, frost, steam, clouds, steam engines, musical instruments and even ‘squeezing water out of a sponge’ in the same chapter, headed simply ‘Heat’.59

  Newton remains the presiding genius of the book, though there is extensive discussion of the works of the Herschels, Faraday and Davy. A few European scientists are also included in the ‘whole circle of the sciences’,60 notably Alexander von Humboldt and Laplace (as has been noted, Somerville had herself popularised his difficult Mécanique Céleste as The Mechanism of the Heavens in 1831). But great Continental names like Lavoisier, Lamarck, Berzelius, Linnaeus, Buffon and Cuvier do not appear at all, not even in her Index, a truly astonishing omission. There is a sense of a more exclusively British science emerging.

  In general Somerville is conventional in her piety, with many reverent references to the ‘conspicuous goodness of the First Cause’ and the ‘magnificence’ of divine creation which science reveals. Yet she has a number of passages which might alert the reader to a more sceptical and enquiring view. Her reflections on stellar astronomy are one such, clearly echoing William Herschel. She quietly suggests that ‘not only man, but the globe he inhabits — nay the whole system of which it forms so small a part — might be annihilated, and its extinction be unperceived in the immensity of creation’.61 The reader is left to ask — Unperceived by God? Or without any God to perceive it?

  Again, the question of the traditional Biblical age of the earth is gently passed over with the observation that geologists (notably Lyell) were now regularly producing ‘traces of extreme antiquity’, which contradicted the idea of any special creation, and simply made the formation of the earth ‘contemporaneous with that of the rest of the planets’. Presumably this was because the Creator made no difference between ‘one day and a thousand years’.62

  In one remarkable passage, entitled ‘Errors of the Senses’, Somerville confronts the counter-intuitive nature of science. She even seems to suggest that science underwrites philosophical scepticism, by suggesting that none of man’s physical perceptions is ultimately capable of yielding any objective account of the surrounding universe at all: ‘A consciousness of the fallacy of our senses is one of the most important consequences of the study of nature. This study teaches us that no object is seen by us in its true place, owing to aberration; that the colours of substances are solely the effects of the action of matter upon light; and that light itself, as well as heat and sound, are not real beings, but modes of action communicated to our perceptions by the nerves. The human frame may therefore be regarded as an elastic system, the different parts of which are capable of … vibrating in unison with any number of superposed undulations, all of which have their perfect and independent effect. Here our knowledge ends; the mysterious influence of matter on mind will in all probability be for ever hid from man.’63

  Again, the coming crisis in Victorian religious beliefs, a new kind of wonder born out of radical doubt, seems obscurely glimpsed in such passages. Nonetheless, the book was respectfully reviewed by the highly orthodox William Whewell, and went into numerous editions. It was notable because it was written by a woman, but not particularly addressed to women readers — let alone children. This pointed up the paradox that women were not yet accepted as equals by the male scientific community, although in the crucial field of interpretation and explanation to a general public, they were already the pioneers.

  The first official woman member of the BAAS was not accepted until 1853, though this was not entirely through want of trying. Charles Babbage wrote archly, before the Oxford meeting of 1832: ‘I think that ladies ought to be admitted at some kind of assembly: remember the dark eyes and fair faces you saw at York and pray remember we absent philosophers sigh over the eloquent descriptions we have heard of their enchanting smiles … If you will only get up an evening converzazione for them at Oxford, I will try and start a ball for them at Cambridge.’64 ♣

  In October 1834 it was a sign of the times that Coleridge’s obituary appeared in the same edition of the Gentleman’s Magazine as its first full report of the highly successful fourth BAAS meeting in Edinburgh. As many as 1,200 members attended, including 400 women, though these were still only permitted at suitably selected sessions. The geologist Professor Adam Sedgwick gave the plenary address on the future role of science, which was fully quoted in the Gentleman’s Magazines summary. The open seminars, embracing the main scientific disciplines (astronomy, geology, chemistry, physics, botany and statistics) lasted for a week. It was not dull, but it was becoming professional Victorian science. There were concerts, balls, steam-train rides and fireworks. David Brewster talked about his latest scientific toy, the kaleidoscope. Professor Buckland, the geologist, gave another admirable lecture on Fossil Reptiles, and called attention to God’s sense of humo
ur in his grotesque creations: ‘He convulsed his audience with laughter … with his numerous comical hits.’65

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  Erasmus Darwin’s grandson, Charles Darwin, had gone up as an undergraduate to St John’s College, Cambridge, in autumn 1827. Initially he seemed bumbling and directionless, struggling to escape from the oppressive shadow of his grandfather. But he was soon inspired by his tutor, the kindly Professor of Botany, John Henslow, and began a microscopic study of pollen grains. He steadily came under the influence of the young science group based at Trinity and St John’s, was befriended by the Lancashire polymath William Whewell, and taken on a vigorous geological expedition to North Wales by the muscular Christian Adam Sedgwick (a disciple of Wordsworth’s).

  ‘No opinion can be heretical but that which is not true,’ declared Sedgwick stoutly at the Geological Society. ‘Conflicting falsehood we can comprehend; but truths can never war against each other. I affirm, therefore that we have nothing to fear from the results of our enquiries, provided they be followed in the laborious but secure road of honest induction.’66 Darwin would never forget that declaration as, for thirty years, he struggled with the implication of evolution by natural selection.

  With Henslow he read and discussed the papers of Charles Babbage and John Herschel, becoming aware of the subtle implications of the inductive philosophy, and also of the rumbling dissatisfactions with the Royal Society. Inspired by Herschel’s Natural Philosophy, he heavily underlined a passage beginning: ‘To what, then, may we not look forward … what may we not expect from the exertions of powerful minds … building on the acquired knowledge of past generations?’67

  But above all Darwin had begun to dream of a great tropical sea expedition. He studied the voyages of Bougainville, Cook and Banks, along with the Personal Narrative of Alexander von Humboldt. By April 1831, the end of his third and final year at Cambridge, he was dreaming of escape, as he confided to his sister Caroline. All the while I am writing now my head is running about the Tropics; in the morning I go and gaze at Palm trees in the hothouse and come home and read von Humboldt: my enthusiasm is so great that I can hardly sit still on my chair … I never will be easy till I see the peak of Tenerife and the great Dragon tree; sandy dazzling plains, and gloomy silent forest are alternately uppermost in my mind.’68 At the age of twenty-two, and in the shining wake of Joseph Banks, Charles Darwin had departed aboard HMS Beagle in December 1831.