Pyruvate dehydrogenase E2 complex

Book review: The Age of Wonder

Frank Norman

This book is a multiple biography, about some key scientific figures of the late 18th and early 19th centuries: Joseph Banks, William Herschel, Mungo Park and Humphrey Davy. Many other men of science and men of letters also populate the book. One of the interesting things that Holmes highlights is the interconnection between science and letters in that period. He analyses the scientific imagery used by some poets of the time and includes poems written by some scientists. I confess that I was not really won over by his characterization of the era as a “transition from Enlightenment to Romantic science” and felt he rather laboured this point.

Nonetheless, I enjoyed the book because it is a fact-filled and vivid account of the lives of these men and their discoveries. They opened our eyes to new cultures, as Banks travelled with Captain Cook to the South Seas and Park explored in Africa; to the vastness of the heavens, as William Herschel and his sister Caroline built ever-larger telescopes and catalogued the stars they found in the skies; and they explored the new science of chemistry, as Davy unraveled its secrets. I began to realize the enormous imaginative and intellectual leaps that these pioneers made in challenging the state of knowledge (or we should perhaps say ignorance, or even prejudice) at that time. It really did give me a sense of wonder at their achievements.

I was also fascinated by the accounts given of some of our great UK scientific institutions: the Royal Society, the Royal Institution and the British Association. Joseph Banks was President of the Royal Society for much of his career, steering the nation’s scientific life wisely. William Herschel’s son John Herschel was later to become President, ushering in a new era of scientific professionalism. Humphrey Davy and his protégé Michael Faraday both had long associations with the Royal Institution. Towards the end of the period the birth of the British Association for the Advancement of Science saw a very different kind of institution arrive on the scene. It was interesting to see how some issues still alive today had their origins in controversies that date back to this period.

The book, like its title, is very interesting but it is rather wordy and a bit longer than I would have wished. It has extensive footnotes and bibliographies, and is perhaps more scholarly than truly popular, but the author’s eye for detail and lively style has won the book much praise. It won the Royal Society book prize in 2009, won the USA National Academies’ book prize in 2010 and has deservedly featured on many lists of best books for 2009.

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes is published by HarperPress, 2008.

This essay was published in the Mill Hill Essays 2010

ISBN: 978-0-9546302-8-9

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