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 formation, growth and decay, not unlike plants. These new ‘organic’ theories of what was in effect an ‘evolving’ universe transformed contemporary notions of the cosmos.
Besides tracing the scientific relationship between William and Caroline Herschel, I also wanted to show the extraordinary imaginative impact of their work in several other fields. To do this I looked particularly at the reactions of the poets Shelley and Keats to the new discoveries, and also of the musician Joseph Haydn. One of the most remarkable things was the very different kinds of conclusions they each drew from it.
Shelley had been inspired to buy his own (extremely expensive) telescope while an undergraduate at Oxford University. He made astronomy, and an imaginary journey through the stars, a central theme of his first major poem, Queen Mab, published in 1813 (still within both Herschels’ lifetimes). Attached to it were a series of deliberately provoking prose notes on a variety of scientific and political subjects, including free love, vegetarianism and climate change. Inspired by William Herschel’s ‘deep space’ theories, he wrote a particularly fierce note ‘On the Plurality of Worlds’ – that is, the existence of extra-terrestrial life on what we would now call ‘exoplanets’. He drew from this an atheist conclusion which would have delighted Professor Richard Dawkins:
The indefinite immensity of the universe is the most awful subject of contemplation. He who rightly feels its mystery and grandeur is in no danger of seduction from the falsehoods of religious systems, or of deifying the principle of the universe. It is impossible to believe that the Spirit that pervades this infinite machine begat a son upon the body of a Jewish woman … All that miserable tale of the Devil and Eve and an Intercessor, is irreconcilable with the knowledge of the stars. The works of His fingers have borne witness against him … Millions and millions of suns are ranged around us, all attended by innumerable worlds, yet calm, regular, and harmonious, all keeping the paths of immutable Necessity.
Three years later, the reaction of the equally young John Keats was utterly different. Keats was twenty years old, and attending a full-time medical course at Guy’s Hospital in London. He wrote his sonnet ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ very early one autumn morning in October 1816. It celebrates a deeply Romantic idea of exploration and discovery. Without actually naming Herschel, it picks out the finding of Uranus, thirty-five years before, as one of the defining moments of the age. Although combining many sources of inspiration (it is possible that Keats may have attended Charles Babbage’s 1815 ‘Lectures on Astronomy’ at the Royal Institution), the poem itself was written in less than four hours. It ends:
… Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with wond’ring eyes
He stared at the Pacific – and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Keats’s vivid idea of the ‘eureka moment’ of instant, astonished recognition celebrates the Romantic notion of scientific discovery. But the efforts of other European astronomers, like Charles Messier (1730–1817) and Anders Johan Lexell (1740–84), in fact took weeks, if not months, to confirm the true planetary identification of Herschel’s ‘comet’ in 1781. Yet it is also true that Herschel too, despite the evidence of his own observation journal, gradually convinced himself that precisely such a moment of instant, sublime discovery had occurred in his garden at New King Street in Bath. So the paradox emerges that the scientist Herschel in the end may have remembered that night exactly as the poet Keats imagined it.
A third and much older artist who responded creatively to the Herschels’ work was the great composer Joseph Haydn (1732–1809). Once again his reaction was revealingly, even astonishingly, different. It has long been accepted that Haydn’s famous and beautiful oratorio The Creation was the religious work that crowned his career. Completed in 1798, when Haydn was sixty-six, it was based on a pious libretto obtained by the London-based musical impresario Johann Peter Salomon.
This libretto was inspired by the traditional scriptural words from the King James Bible, the opening of the Book of Genesis: