The Age of Wonder: How the
Romantic Generation Discovered the
Beauty and Terror of Science by
Richard Holmes
Comments By Michael Calum Jacques, Author Of '1St Century Radical'.
Amazon Exclusive: Oliver Sacks on The Age of Wonder Oliver
Sacks is the author of Musicophilia, Awakenings,The Man Who Mistook
His Wife for a Hat, and many other books, for which he has received
numerous awards, including the Hawthornden Prize, a Polk Award, and a
Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a member of the American Academy of
Arts and Letters and lives in New York City, where he is a practicing
neurologist. Read his exclusive guest review of The Age of Wonder:
I am a Richard Holmes addict. He is an incomparable biographer, but
in The Age of Wonder, he rises to new heights and becomes the
biographer not of a single figure, but of an entire unique period, when artist

and scientist could share common aims and ambitions and a common
language--and together create a romantic, humanist science. We are once
again on the brink of such an age, when science and art will come together
in new and powerful ways. For this we could have no better model than the
lives of William and Caroline Herschel and Humphry Davy, whose
dedication and scientific inventiveness were combined with a deep sense
of wonder and poetry in the universe. Only Holmes, who is so deeply
versed in the people and culture of eighteenth-century science, could tell
their story with such verve and resonance for our own time.
(Photo © Elena Seibert)
Personal Review: The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic
Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by
Richard Holmes
This reviewer found this work to be an altogether fascinating book,
scanning and encompassing a myriad of topics and even ideas
"heterogeneously yoked by violence together", cemented through the
sheer quality and vivacity of the author's writing merits.
Holmes has been described as 'a literary traveller'. Best known for a
number of important works on the topic of War, Wellington et al, The Age
of Wonder is a different case altogether. To risk being oversimplistic, and
depending on one's own standpoint, it deals with the the embracing of
scientific principles by the Romantics or, for some, nearer to Johnson's
definition, the collision of the two value systems and a resultant synthesis
of sorts.
Like the Romantic poets themselves, the author also presents scientific
research as comprising of a world of opportunities, as a type of
challenging, new expedition. Holmes draws attention to William
Wordsworth's depiction of Isaac Newton as a lonesome explorer and,
indeed, Holmes goes actually on to label two huge expeditions as sorts of
watermarks. viz. Captain James Cook's first encircling of the world,
between 1768 and 1771, and Charles Darwin's celebrated voyage and
research conducted on the Beagle, between 1831 and 1836.
These selections concentrate Holmes attention on what is chronicled
elsewhere as having been an intensely noteworthy span of some s60
years when science became practised by 'professionals, not merely by
rich, at ease 'amateurs' who happened to have the luxury of time at their
disposal. Detailed examples from the book could fill the space and time
available for this review and many more. The book is quite compendious in
its stated field of interest but indulges in the study of particular subjects
(human and topical ones) to ensure its depth.

Of course, the impact of science in the Victorian age (and beyond) has
many more facets to it that one volume could ever hope to encompass.
The impact of science upon faith, for example, especially upon Christian
Faith, is a subject still yearning for greater definition and delineation.
The 550+, information and anecdote clad, pages to be found within 'The
Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and
Terror of Science' by Richard Holmes, come strongly commended by this
reviewer. It does 'all that it says on the cover' and far, far more besides.
Richard Holmes has never written better and, if you've enjoyed his
previous works, you'll find this an absorbing read.
Michael Calum Jacques (author of 1st Century Radical)
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