lay down on the ground in the main square. My barometer had broken and it was the last one I had … Lucky are those who travel without instruments that break, without dried plants that get wet, without animal collections that rot; lucky are those who travel the world to see it with their own eyes, trying to understand it, and recollecting the sweet emotions that nature inspires!
4
To write a book of the kind I intended also raised problems of chronology and structure. I wanted it to be a group biography, but one spaced over some sixty years, covering several disciplines, many locations in Britain (as well as some in France and Germany), and linking several diverse sets of friends and colleagues. I wanted the driving effect of a single narrative – the creation of Romantic science – but built out of diverse biographies, with strong local colour and rich in digressions. Above all, I wanted to include the lives of the scientists themselves, their emotional and subjective experiences, their own hopes and beliefs, within the objective achievement of the science they were making. One immediate and important consequence of this was that the book became concerned with scientific error and failure as much as with success. It became a book about science as a human endeavour.
It was important to show, for example, that William Herschel – who first discovered Uranus, the seventh planet in the solar system – also believed that there was life on the moon, and very probably on the sun; or that Jean-Pierre Blanchard, who first crossed the English Channel in a hydrogen balloon – also believed that balloons could be steered with silken wings or bamboo oars; or that Humphry Davy – who invented the life-saving miner’s safety lamp – also missed the chance of preventing untold suffering by making surgical anaesthesia available during the terrible butchery of the Napoleonic Wars.
So I wanted to tell a complex human story, with a strong sense of both comedy and tragedy, within the progressive advance of cumulative scientific knowledge. Great discoveries were passed on from hand to hand (the central collaborative triumph of science), but often at great cost and suffering and despair. I came to think of this unity in diversity as taking the form of a ‘relay race’ of scientific stories.
But the question of ‘telling stories’ was itself problematic. This had been first explored in a brilliant but little-known collection of essays, Telling Lives in Science (1996), edited by Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo. The notion of any scientific discovery taking the neat, closed form of a literary story, with a precise beginning, a progressive middle, and a definite triumphant end, seemed misleading. I associated this traditional type of ‘eureka’ story with the improving genre of Victorian science writing, often for children – as for example in Henry Mayhew’s The Wonders of Science, or Young Humphry Davy (1856). The actual work of scientific discovery rarely followed this pattern, as even Mayhew admitted in his Foreword:
I have found some difficulty in developing my object, which was to show youths how one of the greatest natural philosophers had, when a lad, like themselves, made himself acquainted with the principles of science … I found it was impossible to follow literally the scientific history of Davy’s mind, since he had begun by adopting the most flighty theories. To have evolved all his visionary notions when a lad, in a work that was meant to have an educational tendency, would have been merely to have taught error …
Hesitations, misconceptions, dead ends, rivalries and collaborations, long-drawn-out trials over years, and sudden chance breakthroughs over days, were nearer the truth. Nevertheless, this contingent nature of discovery could well be caught in narrative form. By going back to original sources – diaries, laboratory notebooks, contemporary letters, and early or rejected drafts of scientific papers and lectures – a vivid picture of the actual processes of science could be obtained. And equally important, the feelings and imaginative struggles of the scientists involved.
For example, I explored a technique that I came to think of as the ‘vertical footnote’. This worked as follows. While my main narrative moved forward in a largely conventional chronological form, a ‘horizontal’ progress as it were, the footnotes provide sudden ‘vertical’ or vertiginous plunges down into past history, or back up into contemporary science. For example, when describing the Herschels’ prolonged nights of star-gazing in the 1780s, I wanted to bring home to the reader what this might really have felt like. I described contemporary conditions – the ink freezing on the nib of Caroline’s pen, the layers of woollen undergarments – and then tried to surprise the reader with the same experience as viewed by quite different people at quite different times.
I 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