What is The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science about?

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.

The literary threads are woven throughout. Coleridge attended Davy's lectures and drew on them for his own thinking about imagination and nature. Shelley's enthusiasm for science, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, are read as responses to the specific discoveries and anxieties of the period. Holmes argues that the Romantic poets and the Romantic scientists were responding to the same fundamental experience: the sudden expansion of what was known, and the simultaneous expansion of what could be imagined.

The book is long and unhurried. Holmes writes biographically, which means he follows his subjects through personal as well as professional life, and the result is a portrait of a period rather than a thesis-driven argument. The Age of Wonder has been criticized for being too celebratory and for eliding some of the institutional exclusions of the period, particularly around women and class. Those criticisms have merit. But the core claim — that Romantic science and Romantic poetry drew from the same cultural well — is persuasively made, and Holmes's ability to place discoveries in human context is rarely equaled in the history of science.