The Early Word: New Books for the Week of July 13, 2009

It's alive - more than you know! The Age of Romance and a Frankenstein in Every Pot...

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
by Richard Holmes

In an impressive synthesis of history, art, science, philosophy and biography, Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science helps elucidate the low-profile fact that, while Romanticism in Great Britain is known chiefly as an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement, swift and innovative scientific discoveries were an also a major impulse of the era. It was a period when prominent British scientists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries made major contributions to knowledge, as Holmes chronicles such wonders, choosing to focus on a few of the pertinent lives lived and careers conquered.

Joseph Banks, with a romantic notion to find Paradise, was a botanist whose experiences in Tahiti in 1769 were life-changing, while the astronomer William Herschel, who was assisted by his accomplished sister Caroline, discovered the planet Uranus in 1781, started his career as a musician. That led to an interest in mathematics and then astronomy, which Herschel passionately pursued with the same zeal as any classical music piece – even at time with the skill required to play Handel's fugues.

With two contradictory forces coexisting and flourishing within, Humphry Davy determined, among other discoveries, that chlorine and iodine were elements, but while possessing a brilliant scientific brain, he had the heart and soul of a poet, too. Early on he wrote poetry, one of his poems celebrating "science, whose delicious water flows / From Nature's bosom." Davy's enthusiasm led to some self-destructive behavior when he often inhaled strange chemical gases as experiments, a custom that nearly killed him. While partaking of nitrous oxide with acquaintances, he praised the splendors of science: "I dream of Science restoring to Nature what Luxury, what Civilization have stolen from her - pure hearts, the forms of angels, bosoms beautiful, and panting with Joy & Hope." If that isn’t Romance applied to Science, together in an Age of Wonder, I don’t know what is.

Article Author: Gordon Hauptfleisch

Gordon Hauptfleisch is a Blogcritics Books Editor, freelance writer, and book reviewer for San Diego Union Tribune Books (R.I.P.). For many years he worked in and managed bookstores and record stores, when not engaged in serious lollygagging. …

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