leaped forward to a late-nineteenth-century British novel, and then forward again to one of the greatest twentieth-century American astronomers. I then broke my own rule about never using the personal pronoun, and added a memory from my researches at Cambridge, in order to emphasise the profound psychological impact of the night sky. After various tinkerings, this is the footnote I finally came up with:
Standing under a night sky observing the stars can be one of the most romantic and sublime of all experiences. It can also be oddly terrifying. A hundred years later, Thomas Hardy took up amateur astronomy for a new novel, and in his description of Swithin and Lady Constantine sharing a telescope in Two on a Tower (1882) he captured something of the metaphysical shock of the first experience of stellar observation. ‘At night … there is nothing to moderate the blow which the infinitely great, the stellar universe, strikes down upon the infinitely little, the mind of the beholder; and this was the case now. Having got closer to immensity than their fellow creatures, they saw at once its beauty and its frightfulness. They more and more felt the contrast between their own tiny magnitudes and those among which they had recklessly plunged, till they were oppressed with the presence of a vastness they could not cope with even as an idea, and which hung about them like a nightmare.’ My own first experience with a big telescope, the ‘Old Northumberland’ at Cambridge Observatory, an eleven-inch refractor built in 1839, left me stunned. We observed a globular star cluster in Hercules, a blue-gold double star, Beta Cygni, and a gas cloud nebula (whose name I forgot to record, since it appeared to me so beautiful and malignant, according to my shaky notes like ‘an enormous blue jellyfish rising out of a bottomless black ocean’). I think I suffered from a kind of cosmological vertigo, the strange sensation that I might fall down the telescope tube into the night and be drowned. Eventually this passed. The great Edmund Hubble used to describe an almost trance-like, Buddhist state of mind after a full night’s stellar observation at Mount Wilson in California in the 1930s. See Gale Christianson, Edwin Hubble (1995).
Finally, to unify the book I eventually chose four key figures, in the three dominant sciences of the period: botany, astronomy and chemistry (which then included the study of electricity). They were Banks, the two Herschels, and Davy. These were not only great scientists, but people who changed the perception of science itself for a general public, and especially for the writers of the period.
Shortly before publication, in autumn 2008, I was asked to present The Age of Wonder to the Royal Society, in front of an audience of two hundred scientists. (As W.H. Auden once wrote on a similar occasion, I felt like a provincial clergyman shuffling into a room full of dukes.) I wondered how to catch their attention. So I began like this: ‘This book is 485 pages long, weighs 0.598 kilograms, is five centimetres thick, and has seventy-two footnotes. It has four main protagonists, one of whom is a woman. It has a cast list of sixty characters, 30 per cent of whom are French, German, or American. It contains no mathematical formulae, but over 307 lines of quoted poetry.’
These unflinching statistics appeared to excite a first flicker of interest, and even of amusement. I then gave them what I thought would be the most paradoxical and unlikely combination: the poet Lord Byron waxing lyrical – itself a provoking phrase – on the subject of universal scientific knowledge. Again, the stanza comes from Byron’s epic poem of wanderlust and eroticism, Don Juan (1819). ‘Byronic science’ could be looked on as an oxymoron. But in fact, I assured my audience, this was actually a very good summary of the contents of my entire book:
He thought about himself, and the whole Earth,
Of Man the wonderful, and of the Stars,
And how the deuce they ever could have birth;
And then he thought of Earthquakes, and of Wars,
How many miles the Moon might have in girth,
Of Air-balloons, and of the many bars
To perfect Knowledge of the boundless Skies;
And then he thought of Donna Julia’s eyes.
So here was one of the leading poets of the Romantic age freely celebrating the sciences of astronomy, geology, physics, aeronautics, meteorology … and even possibly the ‘erotic chemistry’ of Donna Julia’s eyes. Indeed, did they know that Byron was himself elected a Fellow of the Royal Society? He even had strong views on vivisection … So I wanted them to think again about what science, in general, signified for Romantic writers and poets.
To my surprise the scientists were particularly delighted with Byron’s last line. It suggests, of course, the paradox that human love, the impact of a single heartbeat, might be as great as the impact of that entire body of universal scientific knowledge. I have to say the scientists were very indulgent. I survived the occasion, and the book eventually went on to win the Royal Society Science Books Prize for 2009.
5
It was the young botanist Joseph Banks who provided my unifying figure, in both a scientific and a literary sense. His story runs through the whole relay race of the book. After his great voyage with Captain Cook he was elected President of the Royal Society in 1778, when he was thirty-five, remaining in that office until his death in 1820, when he was in his late seventies. His career provided intellectual continuity, as well as a narrative gravity.
Banks’s adventures begin the book and take it through to its last decade. Each chapter starts with him inaugurating a new project. Each of my subjects walks in – either literally or metaphorically – to one of Banks’s famous planning breakfasts in Soho Square, London. Banks also grows old with the book; his views of the function of science, and its connection with empire and religious belief, change. So he became my presiding genius, or Virgilian guide.
The central scientific story emerged as that of William and Caroline Herschel. Born in 1738, William Herschel was a German émigré from Hanover who trained as a musician, and settled in Bath in 1766, where he became fascinated by the study of stars and planets, initially as an amateur hobby. In 1772 he brought his much younger sister Caroline (born in 1750) to join him, thereby releasing her from domestic bondage. Together they began the construction of home-made reflector telescopes, and their observations quickly opened a new chapter in astronomy.
William’s discovery of Uranus, the seventh planet in the solar system, on 13 March 1781, doubled the size of the observable solar system, and subsequently led to a whole new conception of the structure of the universe. Caroline was not present on the actual night of the first sighting of Uranus, but she helped with all of William’s subsequent observations over the next thirty years, and herself became one of the most renowned comet-hunters in Europe. She was also the first woman in British science to be granted an official salary, a £50 annuity from the Crown, which was enough to live on independently at that date. This was itself a notable watershed.
From 1782 the two Herschels continued their work at a new observatory outside Slough, close to the King’s country residence at Windsor Castle. Here they built a series of telescopes, ranging up from ten to twenty feet in length, and finally produced a forty-foot giant, with a metal speculum mirror weighing over a ton. This last became a local landmark and tourist attraction, even being recorded on one of the new Ordnance Survey maps.
Their observation established the idea of ‘deep space’, but also of ‘deep time’, and first identified the discus shape of our Milky Way. Herschel also proposed, in a series of revolutionary papers to the Royal Society, the existence of galaxies outside the Milky Way – such as Andromeda – and at previously unimagined distances. He called such galaxies ‘the laboratories of the universe’, in which new stars were constantly being formed, and described them not as static creations, in the Biblical sense, but as dynamic structures with identifiable patterns of stellar
