of Coleridge, I continued to wonder about scientific discovery during the period of his lifetime, between 1772 and 1834. This was the high-water mark of British Romanticism, one of the best-known and best-loved periods in the whole of English literature. So why was so little known about the science, and the scientists, of this same era? Was the divisive influence of C.P. Snow’s 1959 lecture ‘The Two Cultures’ still at work? In 1999 I gave a speculative lecture at the British Academy entitled ‘Coleridge Among the Scientists’. It had a mixed reception.
Most people could quote the names of at least a dozen poets and writers of this period. Yet the only scientific name popularly known between Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin was – probably – that notorious and fictional bio-engineer Victor Frankenstein. Was science – were scientists – so entirely irrelevant to the huge imaginative achievement of Romanticism? After all, one of Coleridge’s greatest friends was the chemist Sir Humphry Davy, who eventually became President of the Royal Society. Coleridge had once promised Davy, in a memorable moment of scientific enthusiasm, that he would ‘attack Chemistry like a shark’. Later he suggested that he and Davy – together with Wordsworth – should set up a chemical laboratory together in the Lake District. Finally he wrote to Davy that most brilliant, seminal and provoking remark which had so struck me, that the passion of Hope made Science ‘Poetical’.
Nevertheless, it was still traditionally assumed that all the poets – like William Blake – hated and distrusted science; while all the scientists – like Isaac Newton – despised and disdained to talk to the poets. The antagonism, so to speak, was mutual. As Blake famously exclaimed: ‘Bacon and Newton, sheathed in Dismal Steel’.
This position was vividly illustrated by Blake’s powerful picture of Newton, drawn in 1795, a demonic figure bent grimly over his measuring compasses, reducing the entire world to geometry and mathematics. Here, it was argued, began the fatal division between Imagination and Reason, between Arts and Sciences. Indeed, two hundred years later a modern version of this figure, an enormous bronze statue of Blake’s Newton by Eduardo Paolozzi (1995), but now with explicit suggestions of Frankenstein’s monster, was solemnly placed in the courtyard of the new British Library in Euston Road, London, thus guarding Cerberus-like the entrance to one of the great centres of learning in the Western world.
So fifteen years ago I became increasingly fascinated by what we now call ‘the public understanding of science’. I began to ask, what was the real impact of science on poets and writers of the British Romantic period? Who were the scientists that influenced them, and what sort of science were they doing? I aimed to look at a period of roughly sixty years, or two generations (1770–1830). This was exactly the ‘lost period’ of British science, between Newton and Darwin, when European figures (like Cuvier, Lavoisier and Laplace) seemed to dominate the field. I found that there were two historic British voyages of exploration that framed almost exactly this time span: Captain James Cook’s first circumnavigation through the Pacific, starting out in 1768, and young Charles Darwin’s voyage to the Galapagos, starting in 1831. These became my points of departure and arrival, and set the experimental ambitions of the whole book.
One of the first things I learned was that at this time there was no such word as ‘scientist’. It was only coined in 1833, at a historic meeting of the newly founded British Association for the Advancement of Science, held that year in Cambridge. Nevertheless, I came up with a main cast list of over sixty scientists and writers. Among the former were Joseph Banks, explorer, botanist and anthropologist; William and Caroline Herschel, astronomers; Jean-Pierre Blanchard and Laetitia Sage, balloonists; Mungo Park, African explorer; Humphry Davy, chemist; William Lawrence, surgeon; and several young pre-Victorian scientists, Michael Faraday, Mary Somerville and Charles Lyell, for example. Among the poets and writers were Erasmus Darwin, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Mary Shelley, Anna Barbauld and Lord Byron.
The women had an important role in the story. I felt that conventional science historians had rather ignored them. But they help us to look at the development of science in a different, and often surprising, way. For example, Anna Barbauld was Dr Joseph Priestley’s assistant during his great experiments on the nature of air in Birmingham in the 1770s. He was testing the effect of lack of oxygen on laboratory animals, like birds and mice. One evening, when she was clearing up the laboratory for the next day’s work, Anna left a long poem on a piece of paper stuck between the animals’ cages, which she entitled ‘The Mouse’s Petition to Dr Priestley, Found in the Cage where he had been Confined all Night’ (1773). It is written from the point of view of the mouse, and here is an extract:
For here forlorn and sad I sit,
Within the wiry grate,
And tremble at th’ approaching morn
Which brings impending fate.
The cheerful light, the vital air,
Are blessings widely given;
Let nature’s commoners enjoy
The common gifts of Heaven.
The well-taught philosophic mind
To all compassion gives;
Casts round the world an equal eye,
And feels for all that lives.
Barbauld describes the laboratory animal as a ‘freeborn mouse’, so this becomes arguably the first ever animal-rights poem. One could compare it with the subsequent opening of Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’: ‘A robin redbreast in a cage, Puts all heaven in a rage …’
Taking my cue from Coleridge, the book began to explore the hope and wonder of science, but also its fearfulness and menace, a double-edged sword that we are all more than conscious of today. The constant ambiguity was finally expressed in my polarised subtitle: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. These two terms – beauty and terror – are also central to the underlying Romantic theory of ‘the Sublime’, as developed in the famous 1757 essay by Edmund Burke, ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful’. I was arguing that not only literature, but also science, could be ‘sublime’ in this technical, philosophical sense, and would lead to a new perception of ‘the Sublime’ in nature.
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Above all, it was the story of Newton’s apple that haunted the Romantics with a notion of science as poetic revelation. Perhaps the earliest account of this symbolic, and possibly legendary, Newtonian ‘thought experiment’ appears in the memoir by the young William Stukeley FRS, when he took tea with the ageing Newton in 1724, and recorded their conversation:
After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden, & drank tea under the shade of some apple trees, only he, & myself. Amidst other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind.
‘Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground,’ thought he to himself: occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood. ‘Why should it not go sideways, or upwards? But constantly to the earths centre? Assuredly, the reason is, that the earth draws it. There must be a drawing power in matter, & the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the earth must be in the earths centre, not in any side of the earth. Therefore does this apple fall perpendicularly, or toward the centre. If matter thus draws matter; it must be in proportion of its quantity. Therefore the apple draws the earth, as well as the earth draws the apple.’
Thus by degrees he began to apply this property of gravitation to the motion of the Earth, and of the heavenly bodies; to
