The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

Richard Holmes, an acclaimed biographer of the Romantic poets, argues in this work that Romanticism and science were not always opposed. He traces what he calls the second scientific revolution in Britain, spanning roughly from Captain James Cook's first voyage aboard the Endeavour in 1768 to Charles Darwin's departure on the Beagle in 1831. During this era, researchers brought imaginative intensity and personal daring to scientific work, producing breakthroughs in astronomy, chemistry, exploration, and medicine that transformed both knowledge and the public's sense of wonder. The book is organized as interconnected biographical narratives, unified by Sir Joseph Banks, the botanist and long-serving President of the Royal Society, Britain's leading scientific institution, who acts as patron and guide throughout.

The narrative opens with Banks as a twenty-six-year-old naturalist sailing with Cook to Tahiti in 1769. While helping to observe the Transit of Venus, Banks immersed himself in Tahitian society, learning the language, studying local customs, and forming intimate relationships with islanders. His three-month stay produced what Holmes presents as an early anthropological study, encompassing surfing, tattooing, religious rituals, and infanticide. The voyage's later stages brought catastrophe: At Batavia (modern Jakarta), malarial fever and dysentery killed nearly half the crew, including Banks's artist Sydney Parkinson and the Tahitian priest Tupia, whom Banks had taken aboard as guide. Banks returned to London celebrated but shaken, broke off an unofficial engagement, and gradually settled into the role of a powerful behind-the-scenes patron of British science. Elected President of the Royal Society at thirty-five, he transformed Kew Gardens into a scientific repository, maintained a vast international correspondence, and encouraged expeditions across the globe, even as gout increasingly confined him to a wheelchair.

The book's first central scientific life is that of William Herschel, a German émigré musician working in Bath who taught himself astronomy and built his own reflecting telescopes. On the night of 13 March 1781, while systematically surveying the sky, he spotted an unidentified object in the constellation Gemini. Over the following weeks, with confirmation from the Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne, the object proved to be a new planet, the first discovered since antiquity. Herschel named it Georgium Sidus after King George III; it later became known as Uranus. Banks awarded Herschel the Copley Medal and secured him a royal appointment as the King's Personal Astronomer. Herschel's sister Caroline, whom he had rescued from domestic servitude in Hanover, served as his tireless observational assistant and eventually became a distinguished astronomer in her own right, discovering comets and earning the first professional salary ever paid to a woman scientist in Britain. Holmes traces their intense partnership through decades of observation, the construction of a giant forty-foot telescope funded by George III, and Herschel's revolutionary papers proposing that nebulae are distant galaxies, that the universe is constantly evolving, and that the Milky Way itself will eventually dissolve. In his late work, Herschel proposed that looking into deep space is also looking into "deep time," since light from remote nebulae had taken almost two million years to reach earth. Caroline's devotion was tested when Herschel married the widow Mary Pitt in 1788, displacing Caroline as mistress of the household. She destroyed a decade of personal journals but continued her astronomical work, eventually returning to Hanover after William's death in 1822.

Holmes interrupts the astronomical narrative with a chapter on the balloon craze of the 1780s. Beginning with the Montgolfier brothers' hot-air demonstrations in France and Dr. Alexandre Charles's pioneering hydrogen balloon, manned flight rapidly crossed the Channel to England. The American physician Dr. John Jeffries and the French aeronaut Jean-Pierre Blanchard achieved the first balloon crossing of the English Channel in January 1785, in a perilous flight during which they jettisoned nearly everything to stay aloft. The chapter also records the first aeronautical death, when the pilot Pilâtre de Rozier was killed attempting a Channel crossing from France. Holmes argues that ballooning advanced meteorology, produced the first aerial views of the earth's surface, and became a powerful symbol of Romantic aspiration.

A shorter chapter follows the Scottish physician Mungo Park on two expeditions into West Africa, both sponsored by Banks and the Africa Association, a society dedicated to British exploration of the African interior. Park's first journey (1794–97) took him through captivity, robbery, and near-starvation before he reached the Niger River. At his lowest point, stripped of all possessions, Park's attention was caught by a tiny flowering moss at his feet, and this moment of scientific wonder restored his determination to survive. His published Travels became a bestseller, partly due to a scene in which an African woman took him in, fed him, and sang him a lullaby pitying "the poor white man," a passage that challenged prevailing European prejudices and moved many readers. Park's second expedition (1805), militarized and commercially motivated, ended in catastrophe: Nearly all the party died of disease before reaching the Niger, and Park drowned or was killed at the rapids of Boussa, his body never recovered.

The book's second central figure is the Cornish chemist Humphry Davy, who arrived in Bristol in 1798 to work at Dr. Thomas Beddoes's Pneumatic Institute, a clinic experimenting with inhaled gases as medical treatments. Davy conducted systematic experiments with nitrous oxide, testing it on himself, on animals, and on literary volunteers including Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He discovered that the gas suppressed physical pain and could potentially serve as a surgical anaesthetic, but neither he nor Beddoes pursued this insight, and surgical anaesthesia was not achieved for another forty-five years. Coleridge became a crucial friend, defending chemistry as inherently "poetical" because it was performed with "the passion of Hope."

Recruited by Banks to the Royal Institution, a London research and lecture organization, in 1801, Davy became Britain's first scientific celebrity, delivering electrifying public lectures that attracted fashionable crowds. Between 1806 and 1810, his Bakerian Lectures at the Royal Society demonstrated electrochemical analysis, and he discovered the elements potassium and sodium by decomposing common alkalis with a voltaic battery. Holmes devotes a chapter to the Vitalism debate of 1816–19, in which the surgeon William Lawrence publicly attacked his mentor John Abernethy's claim that a mysterious "Life Force" is "super-added" to the body, arguing instead that human life is purely physical organization. The controversy became the first scientific dispute to seize the broader British public. Holmes traces its most significant literary consequence through Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), which he presents as the most singular response to the Vitalism controversy, inspired by Davy's lectures on the power of chemistry and the famous ghost-story competition at the Villa Diodati in 1816.

Davy's greatest public achievement came in the winter of 1815–16, when he developed a safety lamp for coal miners by discovering that fine iron gauze prevents flame from passing through it. He refused to patent the invention but became embroiled in a priority dispute with the engineer George Stephenson. His marriage to the Scottish heiress Jane Apreece in 1812 deteriorated into well-publicized quarreling, and his treatment of his brilliant protégé Michael Faraday, whom he alternately championed and undermined, revealed a troubling combination of generosity and jealousy. After Banks's death in 1820, Davy was elected President of the Royal Society but struggled with declining health. Following a series of strokes in 1826, he spent his final years wandering the Continent, fishing and composing his visionary final work, Consolations in Travel, which mixes autobiography, science fiction, and speculation about evolution and extraterrestrial intelligence. He died in Geneva on 29 May 1829.

The book closes with the debates of the early 1830s about the future of British science. The mathematician Charles Babbage attacked the Royal Society's complacency, while William Herschel's son John Herschel, himself a leading astronomer, published a widely influential treatise on scientific method. The British Association for the Advancement of Science was founded in 1831. At its Cambridge meeting in 1833, the aging Coleridge participated in a debate in which the Cambridge scholar William Whewell coined the word "scientist." Meanwhile, the young naturalist Charles Darwin, inspired by the explorer-writer Alexander von Humboldt and by John Herschel, set sail aboard HMS Beagle, directly following in Banks's footsteps. The great forty-foot telescope at Slough was dismantled on New Year's Eve, 1840. Holmes concludes by arguing that the hopes and anxieties of the Romantic generation remain essential to understanding contemporary scientific debates, and that what a scientific culture can sustain is "the sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid but questing belief in a future for the globe."