The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes

  When John was found climbing in the scaffolding of the forty-foot, or secretly having tea with the workmen, or cutting geometrical shapes in the panelling of the drawing room with a chisel, it was Caroline who always leaped to his defence.114 It was also she who gave him several workshop tools for his birthdays, including the small wood-plane, proudly incised with the name ‘John’ on the handle, which he kept for the rest of his life.115

  When John was sent to Eton at the age of eight, it was Caroline who saw how unhappy he was there, and tried to persuade William and Mary to choose a different mode of education from John’s extrovert stepbrother Paul, who had flourished at the school. Mary was reluctant to make the change until she saw John knocked down in a boxing match with an older boy, after which she summarily withdrew him and employed a private tutor, much to Caroline’s delight.116 A portrait of John at this time shows a small, delicate, wide-eyed boy, wistfully holding a wooden hoop, with the towers of Windsor Castle and Eton distantly on the horizon.

  In an extraordinary way the relationship between Caroline and her young nephew began to heal whatever suppressed strains and rivalries there were within the Herschel household. Caroline and Mary were increasingly united in their concern for John’s welfare, while Caroline knew how to interpret emotionally — as well as scientifically — between father and son. Later, this mentoring relationship would take on unusual importance.♣

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  As he grew older, Herschel was becoming a remoter figure in the household. His mind was ranging through the universe. His later papers for the Royal Society had begun to show an increasing awareness of the philosophical significance of astronomy. This was something urged upon him by his old supporter William Watson, who looked forward to conversations ‘on Kant’s metaphysics’, and wished to know how far Herschel agreed with the ‘ground and sources’ of Kant’s philosophy of knowledge.117

  Already in a paper of 1802 Herschel considered the idea that ‘deep space’ must also imply ‘deep time’. He wrote in his Preface: A telescope with a power of penetrating into space, like my 40 foot one, has also, as it may be called, a power of penetrating into time past … [from a remote nebula] the rays of light which convey its image to the eye, must have been more than 19 hundred and 10 thousand — that is — almost two million years on their way.’ The universe was therefore almost unimaginably older than people had previously thought. This idea of deep time was one which required a great deal of explanation to the layman.118

  Other papers were unsettling in different ways. Observations tending to investigate the Nature of the Sun’ (1801) proposed that sun-spot activity could be related to the price of wheat, because it affected the mildness or severity of terrestrial seasons, and hence the fertility of global harvests. Thus the sun, rather than the stars or comets, could bring about political revolutions on earth.119 Another paper, ‘On the Proper Motion of the Solar System’, showed that not only did the planets revolve round the sun, but that the entire solar system itself moved through stellar space, orbiting round an unidentified centre in the Milky Way, which was itself moving relative to other galaxies.120

  Herschel continued to reach carefully towards the idea of an evolving universe, a concept as radical in its eventual implications as Erasmus Darwin’s notion of evolution within plants and animals. In a late paper published in 1811, ‘Astronomical Observations relating to the Construction of the Heavens’, Herschel further developed the idea, already explored in ‘On the Construction of the Heavens’(1785) and ‘Catalogue of Second Thousand Nebulae with Remarks on the Construction of the Heavens’ (1789), that all nebulae and large star clusters were at particular points in their sidereal life-cycles, which could be visually identified and catalogued almost in a Linnaean manner. Their characteristic shapes suggested distinct moments of youth, maturing and ageing.

  Herschel accompanied this paper with numerous drawings of the nebulae he had observed over thirty years in these different phases: some globular, some spiral, some flattened, some mere blots of incoherent light or chaotic milky spillages. Many, such as the beautiful and characteristic whorl of Andromeda, are now instantly recognisable because of the modern Hubble photographs. These shapes, Herschel argued, were not different because they had been created differently, like different species. They were different simply because their stages of development in what he called ‘sidereal time’ (meaning stellar time) had reached different points. He was suggesting the inescapable idea of evolutionary youth and age in the universe.121

  This presentation was radically different from anything seen in any previous astronomical papers anywhere in Europe, except in the broadest philosophical speculations of Kant, the French cosmologist the Comte de Buffon, or Laplace. It presented the universe as a living, growing, organic entity, with all nebulae belonging to one enormous extended family: ‘There is not so much difference between them, if I may use the comparison, as there would be in an annual description of the human figure, were it given from the birth of a child till he comes to be a man in his prime.’ This comparison is an intriguing premonition of ‘time-lapse’ photography, now one of the most powerful illustrative tools of modern natural history.122

  Above all, Herschel’s studies of nebulae and the general ‘construction of the Heavens’ demonstrated how Copernicus’ rejection of an earth-centred universe had long been superseded by contemporary science. Not only a sun-centred galaxy, but even a cosmos centred on the Milky Way itself, had to be rejected. This implied an enormous psychological, even spiritual, shift in outlook: seeing our entire solar system as something very small, very far out, on the very edge of the edge of things. As Herschel had written: ‘We inhabit the planet of a star belonging to a Compound Nebula [the Milky Way] of the third form …’123 ♣

  Over the next decade Herschel’s work began to be widely known by the younger generation of Romantic writers. Byron visited him at Slough in 1811, and viewed the stars through his telescope, which gave him an alarmingly religious experience: ‘The Night is also a religious concern; and even more so, when I viewed the Moon and Stars through Herschel’s telescope, and saw that they were worlds.’124 Later Byron defended himself against accusations of atheism. ‘I did not expect that, because I doubted the immortality of Man, I could be charged with denying the existence of a God. It was the comparative insignificance of ourselves and our world, when placed in competition with the mighty whole, of which it is an atom, that first led me to imagine that our pretensions to eternity might be … over-rated.’125

  John Bonnycastle’s highly successful Introduction to Astronomy in Letters to his Pupil was reissued in an enlarged edition in 1811, with an expanded chapter dedicated to Herschel’s work and other ‘new discoveries’. This was the edition given to John Keats at his Enfield school, and later taken to his lodgings near Guy’s Hospital. Bonnycastle continued to include passages of poetry with his scientific explanations, and his work encouraged reflection on the imaginative as much as the philosophical impact of the new astronomy. In theological matters, however, Bonnycastle remained strictly orthodox.

  Bonnycastle became apologetic about including poetry, too. In the Preface to his 1811 edition he warned his readers: ‘The frequent allusions to the Poets, and the various quotations interspersed throughout the work, were intended as an agreeable relief to minds accustomed to the regular deduction of facts, by mathematical reasoning … Poetical descriptions, though they may not be strictly conformable to the rigid principles of the Science they are meant to elucidate, generally leave a stronger impression on the mind, and are far more captivating than simple unadorned language.’126

  Keats wrote his sonnet ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ very early one autumn morning in October 1816. It celebrates a deeply Romantic idea of exploration and discovery. Without actually naming Herschel, it picks out the finding of Uranus, thirty-five years before, as one of the defining moments of the age. Although combining many sources of inspiration (it is possible that Keats may have attended
Charles Babbage’s 1815 ‘Lectures on Astronomy’ at the Royal Institution), the poem itself was written in less than four hours.

  Keats was twenty, and attending a full-time medical course at Guy’s Hospital. He had stayed out all night with his friend and mentor Charles Cowden Clarke at his house in Clerkenwell, drinking and discussing poetry. Clarke had acquired an old 1616 folio edition of Chapman’s verse translation of Homer’s Iliad, and they had taken turns to recite passages aloud. At particular passages Keats ‘sometimes shouted’ with delight. A favourite was the gloriously extended simile of shining light from Book Five. This compares the golden glow of the Greek warrior Diomed’s helmet to the glow of the planet Jupiter rising above the sea in autumn.

  Like rich Autumnus’ golden lampe, whose brightness men admire,

  Past all the other host of Starres, when with his cheerful face,

  Fresh washt in lofty Ocean waves, he doth his Skies enchase.

  With such images in his head, Keats left Clerkenwell at 6 a.m., shortly before autumn sunrise. The stars were still out as he crossed London Bridge making for his student lodgings at 8 Dean Street, Southwark, near Guy’s. He noticed the planet Jupiter, very bright, setting over the Thames. The moment he got to his lodgings, he sat down and began to write, starting with the inspired line, ‘Much have I travelled in the Realms of Gold …’. This perfectly introduced two linked ideas, of thrilling exploration and gleaming brightness, which orchestrate the whole poem.

  Keats wrote so quickly that he was able to send a clean copy of the poem straight round to Cowden Clarke that same morning. Clarke remembered opening it at his breakfast table in Clerkenwell by 10 a.m. (a credit also to the postal system). He noticed the historical error — it was Balboa, not Cortez, who reached the Pacific — but was thrilled by the beauty and originality of the sonnet. Among other things, Keats had combined science and poetry in a new and intensely exciting way.127

  Keats likens his own discovery of Homer’s poetry to the experience of the great astronomer and the great explorer finding new worlds.

  … Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

  When a new planet swims into his ken;

  Or like stout Cortez when with wond’ring eyes

  He stared at the Pacific — and all his men

  Looked at each other with a wild surmise –

  Silent upon a peak in Darien.

  Both comparisons turn on moments of physical vision — watching, staring, looking with ‘wondering eyes’. (This was the original manuscript reading, although Keats later changed it to the more conventional ‘eagle eyes’.) Physical vision — one might say scientific vision — brings about a metaphysical shift in the observer’s view of reality as a whole. The geography of the earth, or the structure of the solar system, are in an instant utterly changed, and forever. The explorer, the scientific observer, the literary reader, experience the Sublime: a moment of revelation into the idea of the unbounded, the infinite.

  In the case of Herschel’s sighting of Uranus, Keats’s word ‘swims’ is brilliantly evocative, because of its sense of new life and movement. The planet is like some unknown, luminous creature being born out of a mysterious ocean of stars. Keats may also have realised that convection currents in the atmosphere, or in the tube of the telescope itself, can give objects the appearance of being seen through a rippling water surface.128 Keats’s vivid idea of the Eureka moment of instant, astonished recognition celebrates the Romantic notion of scientific discovery. It is appropriate that this is expressed in the oddly anachronistic phrase ‘into his ken’ (grasp, knowledge), even though it may also be there for the rhyme. The efforts of Maskelyne, Messier and Lexell certainly took weeks, if not months, to confirm the identification of Herschel’s ‘comet’ in 1781. Yet it is also true that Herschel too, despite the evidence of his own Observation Journal, gradually convinced himself that precisely such a moment of instant, sublime discovery had occurred in the garden at New King Street. Herschel in the end may have remembered that night exactly as Keats imagined it.129

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  Journalists began to assess the current scientific views of such phenomena, ranging from the ‘deep time’ geological theories of James Hutton to the ‘deep space’ nebula theories of Herschel. An essayist in the Monthly Review for April 1816 noted archly that there was ‘a studious avoidance of any reference to God’ in any of these brave new theories. He presented them with a certain scepticism. A long dissertation is allotted to the Huttonian Theory of the Earth; but all these speculations, we suppose, must now give way to the “discovery” of Dr Herschel, that planets began their being in the form of nebulous matter, and consist at first of a vast egg of gas!’130

  Meanwhile Herschel was quietly publishing more extraordinary late papers of cosmological speculation, notably Astronomical Observations Relating to the Sidereal Part of the Heavens and the Connection with the Nebular Part: Arranged for the Purpose of a Central Examination’, a characteristically low-key title for a dramatic paper, dated 24 February 1814.131 Its final section was headed ‘The Breaking Up of the Milky Way’. In it he proposed that there was ‘a clustering power’ observable in many nebulae, that was producing a ‘progressive approaching’ within each star group. ‘We may be certain that from mere clustering stars they will be gradually compressed through successive stages of accumulation — till they come to what may be called the ripening period of the globular, and total insulation.’ So, as each star group was increasingly contracting in on itself, it would also be moving away from all the others into a state of greater and greater cosmic isolation.

  From these vast movements within the observable universe, Herschel concluded that as some galaxies were being born, others were withering and dying. He had previously touched on this general idea. But he now put forward the apocalyptic proposition that our own galaxy was on the wane, and that there would inevitably be ‘a gradual dissolution of the Milky Way’. The progress of this observable dissolution would provide ‘a kind of chronometer that may be used to measure the time of its past and future existence’.

  At all events, it was clear that the Milky Way ‘cannot last forever’; and equally that ‘its past duration cannot be admitted to be infinite’. It followed that neither the earth, nor even the solar system, was a separate creation, but merely an infinitesimal part of a galactic evolution. Our galaxy had a physical beginning, and would have a physical conclusion. Our solar system, our planet, and hence our whole civilisation would have an ultimate and unavoidable end.132

  In 1817 Thomas Chalmers would publish his best-selling Discourses on Astronomy. He reflected on the atheistical implications of Herschel’s new cosmology, piously attempted to re-establish God’s role in the creation, but also raised intriguing questions about extraterrestrial life in the further planets of the solar system, and beyond. The book touched a public nerve, and sold 20,000 copies in its first year, although it was sceptically reviewed by William Hazlitt, one of his rare forays into the physical sciences. But the idea of a dramatically enlarged universe, which surely contained other civilisations apart from our own, was widely accepted among progressive thinkers of the next generation. William Whewell, the future Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, for exampled published an uplifting monograph, On the Plurality of Worlds, in 1850.133

  Despite these apocalyptic conclusions, Herschel was beginning to be regarded as a kindly, silver-haired old sage. For all his remote speculations, there was said to be something disarmingly boyish about him. The poet Thomas Campbell was surprised to find him, with his son John, on holiday in Brighton in September 1813. John, incidentally, was ‘a prodigy in science and fond of poetry, but very unassuming’. Campbell was completely captured by the ‘great, simple, good old man’, as he called Herschel: ‘Now for the old astronomer himself: his simplicity, his kindness, his anecdotes, his readiness to explain — and make perfectly perspicuous too — his own sublime conceptions of the universe are indescribably charming. He is 76 [actually Herschel was then sevent
y-four], but fresh and stout, smiling at a joke … Anything you ask, he labours with a sort of boyish earnestness to explain … I asked him if he thought the system of Laplace to be quite certain, with regard to the total security of the planetary system, from the effects of gravity losing its present balance? He said, “No”.’

  Campbell overlooked the startling bluntness of this reply, and its implication that the solar system could easily fly apart (or else implode). Instead he went on to record amiable chat about the newly discovered ‘asteroid’ belt between Mars and Jupiter. Herschel had actually named ‘asteroids’ himself in an earlier letter to Banks,134 and murmured, ‘remember there will be thousands more — perhaps 30 thousand– not yet discovered’. Herschel also mentioned applying Newton’s theories for measuring the speed of solar light to ‘inconceivably distant bodies’ in the stellar system, with unimaginable results. ‘Then speaking of himself, he said with a modesty of manner that quite overcame me, when taken with the greatness of the assertion: “I have looked further into space than ever human being did before me. I have observed stars of which the light, it can be proved, must have taken millions of years to reach the earth.”’

  Campbell recalled that he felt he had been ‘conversing with a supernatural intelligence’. Finally, Herschel completely perplexed the poet by remarking that many distant stars had probably ‘ceased to exist’ millions of years ago, and that looking up into the night sky we were seeing a stellar landscape that was not really there at all. The sky was full of ghosts. ‘The light did travel after the body was gone.’ After leaving Herschel, Campbell walked onto the shingle of Brighton beach, gazing out to sea, feeling ‘elevated and overcome’.135 He was reminded of Newton’s observation that he was just a child picking up shells on the seashore, while the great ocean of truth lay all before him.136