The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science review

Richard Holmes is a British literary biographer best known for his two-volume life of Shelley, and The Age of Wonder brings that literary sensibility to the history of science during the Romantic period — roughly 1769 to 1832. The book is organized around the lives and discoveries of several scientists, most prominently the astronomer William Herschel and the chemist Humphry Davy, and uses their stories to argue that the Romantic era represents a specific, largely unrecognized moment in the history of science: the first time scientists and artists inhabited the same emotional and intellectual territory.

Holmes opens with Joseph Banks's voyage to Tahiti on the Endeavour in 1769, tracing how that encounter with radical otherness shaped Banks's later role as the president of the Royal Society and a patron of the next generation of British science. From there, the book follows William Herschel's construction of ever-larger telescopes and his discovery of Uranus — the first new planet in recorded history — and his sister Caroline Herschel's parallel career as an astronomer in her own right, discovering eight comets. Humphry Davy's work on nitrous oxide and later on electrochemistry occupies the middle sections, with Holmes paying close attention to the way Davy understood his experiments as experiences, as encounters with a world that science was revealing to be far stranger than anyone had anticipated.