Richard Holmes, prize winning biographer of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, on the scientific
ferment that swept across Britain at the end of 18th century. 'The Age of Wonder' is Richard
Holmes's first major work of biography for a decade. It has been inspired by the scientific
ferment that swept through Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, and which Holmes
now radically redefines as 'the revolution of Romantic Science'. The book opens with Joseph
Banks, botanist on Captain Cook's first Endeavour voyage, stepping onto a Tahitian beach in
1769, hoping to discover Paradise. Many other voyages of discovery swiftly follow, while
Banks, now President of the Royal Society in London, becomes our narrative guide to what
truly emerges as an Age of Wonder. Banks introduces us to the two scientific figures that
dominate the book: astronomer William Herschel and chemist Humphry Davy. Herschel's
tireless dedication to the stars, assisted (and perhaps rivalled) by his comet-finding sister
Caroline, changed forever the public conception of the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy
and the meaning of the universe itself.Davy first shocked the scientific community with his
near-suicidal gas experiments in Bristol, then went on to save thousands of lives with his
Safety Lamp and established British chemistry as the leading professional science in
Europe. But at the cost, perhaps, of his own heart. Holmes proposes a radical vision of
science before Darwin, exploring the earliest ideas of deep time and deep space, the
creative rivalry with the French scientific establishment, and the startling impact of discovery
on great writers and poets such as Mary Shelley, Coleridge, Byron and Keats. With his
trademark sense of the human drama, he shows how great ideas and experiments are born
out of lonely passion, how scientific discoveries (and errors) are made, how intense
relationships are forged and broken by research, and how religious faith and scientific truth
collide. The result is breathtaking in its originality, its story-telling energy, and not least, in
its intellectual significance for the contemporary reader.