This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer. Richard Holmes
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will conduct him to the moon.
Byron was a little premature about journeys to the moon, though not about steam engines. But his remark about Newton constructing a ‘turnpike road’ of scientific knowledge through the stars with his law of gravity contained another hidden joke, and even a prophecy. For although turnpikes revolutionised coach travel in his day, they no longer provided free transport. All turnpikes charged road tolls to the traveller. Similarly, Byron implied, scientific knowledge might perhaps have to be paid for sometime in the near future.
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Byron was certainly right that the Romantic age was full of ‘mechanics’ – meaning technical inventions and discoveries. It is often not fully appreciated, especially by students and scholars of literature, that between 1770 and 1830, the high period of literary Romanticism, there was an explosion of new physical and scientific knowledge. This was not just a question of canals, turnpikes and steam pumps. Indeed, the catalogue of scientific discoveries and inventions at this time is truly astonishing.
The technological inventions, so often overlooked, include Thomas Harrison’s No. 1 Sea Watch or chronometer, which allowed the calculation of longitude at sea, and which was refined throughout the 1770s; high-powered reflector telescopes were also developed during the same period; and James Watt’s steam engine and condenser pump, based on the experiments of Joseph Black, were first put into full production in 1776. The first man-carrying balloons date from 1783; the first Ordnance Survey maps using contour lines from 1791; and the first flush water-closet from 1795. The systematic application of the new Voltaic battery pile, which revolutionised chemical analysis, and with it the early study of magnetic fields, both belong to the turn of the century; together with the detection of infra-red and ultra-violet ‘rays’, that is forms of electro-magnetic energy lying beyond the visible spectrum of sunlight. The first steam-powered ship, the Charlotte Dundas, was launched in1801; the first gas street-lighting was installed in 1807; the electric arc lamp was invented in 1810; and the miner’s safety lamp in 1816. The first polarised lighthouse lens was fitted in 1822; and the earliest successful photographic plates, using bitumen and then silver salts, began to appear from 1826.
In a more philosophical vein, there were the momentous strides in cosmology. These sprang from the discovery of the first new planet since the time of Ptolemy, Uranus, in March 1781; the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Saturn, and within it the planetoid Ceres, in 1801; and the gradual refinement of the ‘nebular hypothesis’, concerning the gravitational evolution of our entire solar system, and by implication of all star systems. From this arose the radical hypothesis of galaxies evolving outside our own Milky Way – for example, Andromeda – and thus the notion of a continuous ‘natural creation’, following an original cosmic Big Bang (specifically proposed by Erasmus Darwin). The delicate question of whether this was the direct handiwork of the Divine Intelligence, or of some more remote First Cause, or simply of Nature herself, was a debate that launched modern ‘cosmology’ as a truly independent scientific discipline, rather than as a branch of theology. One may date this from the published papers of William Herschel at the Royal Society in the 1780s, and of Pierre-Simon Laplace at the Académie des Sciences in the 1790s. The intellectual significance of these developments was considered in A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, by William Herschel’s brilliant son Sir John Herschel, in 1831.
In what was in effect the signature science of the age, there were fundamental advances in chemistry. These finally dispersed the lingering delusions of alchemy, and the ancient theory of the four irreducible ‘prime elements’ of earth, air, fire and water. The whole concept of ‘matter’ itself was revolutionised. Starting with the decomposition of water by ‘electrolysis’ (using the Voltaic battery), which revealed separately quantifiable components of oxygen and hydrogen, there swiftly followed the resolution of a host of new chemical elements such as sodium, potassium, chlorine, calcium, barium and magnesium, between 1808 and 1820. Parallel with this went the analysis of fire as the ‘combustion’ of oxygen, not as the production of mysterious ‘phlogiston’. Air itself was now further analysed, yielding alongside hydrogen and oxygen a whole range of previously unsuspected new ‘gases’ (‘artificial airs’), such as carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen and nitrous oxide (the famous laughing gas), and an early concept of anaesthesia by Humphry Davy in 1799. From all this arose early atomic theory, and the first published Periodic Tables by John Dalton, naming five elements in 1803, twenty elements in 1808, and thirty-six elements in 1827. Again, much of this work was summarised in the first ever ‘popular science’ classic of the Romantic age – written significantly enough by a woman, and a mathematician – Mary Somerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834).
This was also a great age of geographic exploration. Many men of science, who eventually became distinguished travel writers, pressed far beyond Europe, and especially to Africa, the Pacific and South America. Among these remarkable scientific and literary travellers were Antoine de Bougainville, James Cook, Johann and Georg Forster, and Joseph Banks, all of whom left vivid and gripping accounts of the Pacific and the South Seas. Similarly, Mungo Park wrote of West Africa, John Franklin of the Arctic, and Charles Waterton of South America.
Mungo Park, for example, a dauntless Scottish doctor from Selkirk, was sent out by the Africa Association to trace the course of the River Niger, and discover the legendary Timbuctoo. A strange and romantic figure, he made two epic trips, the first totally alone in 1794–97; and the second (with forty troops) in 1804–05 – from which no one returned alive. Having glimpsed (but not entered) the walls of Timbuctoo, he was killed by suspicious tribesmen on his return journey, ambushed in a defile of the river at Boussa, five hundred miles from the coast. But he left behind an extraordinary and haunting bestseller, Travels in the Interior of Africa (1799), later published with fragments of his last journal.
Joseph Banks is usually remembered as the august scientific President of the Royal Society, a landlocked position he occupied for forty-two years. Yet as a young man Banks accompanied Cook’s first circumnavigation of 1768–71, acting as HMS Endeavour’s official botanist, and quickly establishing himself as the expedition’s most reckless and romantic adventurer, notably in the three months spent on the isle of Tahiti (where he was the first to record the South Seas sport of surfing), and in the risky exploration of the east coast of Australia. The thousands of botanical specimens he brought back with him formed the basis of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, which under his superintendence became the most famous botanical collection in the world.
But of all the romantic science travellers, none was more influential than Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Born in Berlin, he befriended Goethe at Jena, and (like Coleridge ten years later) studied under Blumenbach at Göttingen University. He set out on his South American journey at the age of twenty-nine in 1799, effectively disappearing for the next five years. On his return he began work on his epic Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, which was published (in French) in three volumes between 1814 and 1825, and quickly translated into most European languages. It defined a new inclusive discipline that he called ‘la géographie générale’, which influenced all subsequent scientific explorations by Europeans, including those by Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.
Since the fine new Humboldt biography by Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature (2015), all this has become far better-known. But perhaps still underappreciated is the way Humboldt invented a new, intimate style of personal travel writing. Around the pure scientific data he can be vividly descriptive, conversational, rambling, even confessional. Darwin said he could recite whole passages of Humboldt by heart. The pains, and even the minor irritations, of the journey become equally informative as the epic high spots and delights, as in this passage from Chapter 23 of Humboldt’s Personal Narrative:
We left Turbaco on a fresh and very dark night, walking through a bamboo forest. Our muleteers had difficulty finding the track, which was narrow and very muddy. Swarms of phosphorescent insects lit up the tree-tops like moving clouds, giving off a soft bluish light … We waited nearly the whole day in the miserable village of Mahates for the animals carrying our forty crates of specimens to the landing stage on the Magdelena river. It