The Book of Wonder

It took me two weeks to read Richard Holmes’ brilliant The Age of Wonder. How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. Not because it’s hard to read, nor that the concepts discussed are difficult for someone like me without a decent scientific background. No, it’s that the book is so dense, so packed with ideas that I had to take a break half way through and read three other books before returning to it. ‘Romantic science’ seems like an oxymoron, but Holmes is writing of an age (the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) when it was possible for clever people like Dr Johnson, Samuel Coleridge and Shelley to be men of letters yet able to understand and appreciate scientific advances. (Was this the last time such a thing was possible, before the age of ‘two cultures’?) Johnson, for instance, at the end of his life, advised someone to visit William Herschel because ‘he can show you in the night sky what no man before has ever seen, by some wonderful improvements he has made in the telescope. What he has to show is indeed a long way off, and perhaps concerns us a little, but all truth is valuable and all knowledge pleasing in its first effects, and may subsequently be useful,’
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