nebular hypothesis’ and published them in his own massive study of astronomy in 1796, Exposition du Système du Monde.
Laplace argued that there were millions of other solar systems besides our own. Other suns had spun out clusters of individual planets which circled around them, again through the force of universal gravity. There must be innumerable such ‘solar systems’ even in our own Milky Way. So the whole universe was a laboratory. Clearly, these ideas of Herschel and Laplace moved away from the traditional six-day Creation ‘myth’ of Genesis, and came much closer to modern ideas of evolutionary cosmology. They were also supported by the ‘deep time’ ideas of the British geologist James Hutton (1726–97).
It seems likely that the early sections of Haydn’s oratorio reflect something of such revolutionary speculations. This was emphasised by his giving such unusual and inventive attention to the idea of ‘chaos’ at the opening of the work. Nothing that he – or indeed Handel – had ever previously written is remotely like these extraordinary passages. Haydn’s use of unresolved musical phrases, unsettling shifts from major to minor chords, sudden bursts of melody broken off by unexpected dissonance, all seem to suggest the vision of a highly active, explosive, cosmological chaos: the whirling, colliding and condensing of truly vast nebulae. It does not seem anything like the passive ‘brooding’ darkness of the Book of Genesis. What it so vividly summons up are the luminous celestial ‘laboratories’ of Herschel and Laplace.
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There are many other subjects that I attempted to explore in The Age of Wonder – for example, the speculative impact of Davy’s chemical lectures on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; the idea of flight launched by the early ballooning experiments of Blanchard and the American John Jeffries; or the heroic concept of geographical exploration pioneered by the expeditions of Mungo Park. All of them seemed to offer a fascinating new way of looking at the dynamic interface between the arts and the sciences in the Romantic period, and radically to call in question the old, tired idea of the ‘Two Cultures’ division.
Essentially, I wanted to experiment: to take risks and break conventions. First, by exploring the possibilities of ‘group biography’, especially as it can explain and illuminate the particular nature of teamwork in science. Next, to use literary narrative, accurate and vivid storytelling, to demonstrate the step-by-step (and often step-by-misstep) of the actual process of scientific discovery. In doing this, I wanted to discover the human face of science, the hearts and minds behind the ‘white coats’. My real subject was always scientific passion in all its manifestations. It was not only the poets, I found, who have the passion. Beyond all this, I wanted to prove that late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century European history is still important for understanding the twenty-first century, and not only in the West. One of my proudest reflections is that The Age of Wonder has recently been translated into popular Arabic, Russian and Chinese editions. Now that really is an experiment, and I do not yet know the result.
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As he set out to wreak havoc on his four Eminent Victorians in 1918, Lytton Strachey tenderly suggested that English biography might eventually rediscover its true calling as ‘the most delicate and most humane of all the branches of the art of writing’. Some three generations later, the form has certainly expanded out of all recognition, gained a broad new readership, and achieved considerable (though not unchallenged) intellectual authority. At its best, I think, biography can indeed now call itself a true ‘art of writing’, and also perhaps a humanist discipline. It is ‘the proper study of mankind’ – and womankind too. But is it an art and a discipline that can also be taught? Is it a proper subject for an academic course?
It has always seemed to me that the essential spirit of biography – of English biography at least – has been a maverick and unacademic one. (The French, German and American traditions are different, for interesting historical and institutional reasons.) For some three hundred years, from John Aubrey and James Boswell onwards, much of its most exciting and innovative work – among which I would now include certain books by Michael Holroyd, Claire Tomalin, Peter Ackroyd, Hilary Spurling, Frances Wilson and Alexander Masters – has been done outside the established institutes of learning, and beyond the groves of academe. It has retained an uncloistered and anarchic spirit. As Somerset Maugham once remarked: ‘There are three rules for writing biography, but fortunately no one knows what they are.’
In a letter of June 1680, Aubrey mischievously teased the Oxford historian Anthony à Wood with the essentially improper and extracurricular nature of his biographical researches for Brief Lives: ‘I here lay downe to you (out of the conjunct friendship between us) the Trueth, the naked and plain trueth … which is here exposed so bare, that the very pudenda are not covered.’ Wood donnishly retaliated by calling Aubrey ‘a shiftless person, roving and maggotie-headed, and sometimes little better than crazed’.
Yet even Aubrey regretted not being able to continue his studies at Oxford. This is one of the themes of his own perceptive, third-person entry in Brief Lives: ‘When a boy, he did ever love to converse with old men, as Living Histories.’ Here he quotes Horace on what he had missed by being forced to leave the university: ‘Atque inter sylvas Academi quarere verum/Dura sed amovere loco me tempora grato’ (And so among the groves of Academe to seek the Truth/But harsh times drove me from that pleasant spot).
So I began to ask whether the moment had come for biography formally to return to ‘that pleasant spot’, the Academy? And if so, on what terms? For me, this question took on a peculiar autobiographical twist. If I were writing my own Brief Life, I would record that for thirty-five years I worked outside academia. I had been freelance and footloose, and revelled in it. But in autumn 2000, out of the blue, I was unexpectedly invited to pioneer and teach a postgraduate university course in ‘Biographical Studies’. Should I accept the invitation?
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Frankly, for a long time I really did not know. Could my beloved biography, which I thought of as a vocation rather than a profession, really be turned into a university subject, based on an organised series of book lists, seminars, lectures, and of course a body of theory? What would be its content, what would be its aims, what would be its benefits to the student? Was I being asked to do something quite humble, like teaching the basic methods of sound biographical research – working with archives, public records, letter collections – and carefully constructing life chronologies, character portraits and social contexts? Or something more ambitious, as in the now fashionable Creative Writing courses, to launch a new generation of young biographical practitioners who were really committed to biography as a profession, as well as an ‘art of writing’?
I returned to these questions more urgently: on what grounds could one claim biography as – at least potentially – a genuine humanist discipline? It is certainly a recognisable literary genre, although that is not quite the same thing. Yet its intellectual independence was proclaimed at least as early as Plutarch, writing in Greece around AD 110, and thus at roughly the same period as the later Gospel writers (who had very different ambitions). In the opening of his Life of Alexander, Plutarch distinguished Biography convincingly from History, and gave it both an ethical and a psychological dimension:
It must be borne in mind that my design is not to write Histories, but Lives. And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a
