The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes

  The sixth and last Dialogue (‘Pola, or Time’) ends on a mystical note, with an almost Blakean speculation about angelic intelligences. This bursts out on the final pages with a salute to Herschel’s views of a dynamic and ever-evolving universe: ‘There is much reason to infer, from astronomical observations, that great changes take place in the system of the fixed stars; Sir William Herschel, indeed, seems to have believed that he saw nebulous or luminous matter in the process of forming suns … It is, perhaps, rather a poetical than a philosophical idea, yet I cannot help forming the opinion, that genii or seraphic intelligences may inhabit these systems, and may be the ministers of the eternal mind.’137 With characteristic precision, Davy refused to add capital letters to those last two words.

  This strange book, part philosophy and part science fiction, was to have a surprising hold on the younger generation of Victorian scientists. What it suggested was that chemistry was the most awe-inspiring and visionary of the sciences, and that ‘to study it was to catch the ultimate forces of nature itself’ at work.138 It was frequently referred to by Charles Babbage, John Herschel and Charles Darwin. Though clearly fitting into a recognisable pattern, in which a highly rational man develops intense mystical longings towards the end of his life, it carried a true sense of humanity and hope. In a later éloge, Georges Cuvier called it, with pardonable exaggeration, ‘in some respects the last words of a dying Plato’.139

  Consolations in Travel was timely in emphasising the progressive nature of science as an expression of man’s ‘immortal’ spirit, and the particular qualities required by a scientist, both by training and by temperament. It did not reveal much about Davy’s personal relations – there is nothing specifically about his childhood, his family, his wife, or the problematic subject of Michael Faraday. But it carried a haunting sense of his career, so marked by both exceptional achievement and bitter disappointment. It could perhaps claim to be the first ever scientific autobiography in English. It certainly belongs to the new Romantic genre of memoir, that includes in various ways Wordsworth’s Prelude (1805-50), Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1816) and Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821).

  Though he was solitary during this whole period (apart from his dogs), Davy had the support of a servant, whom he refers to with mournful humour as his Caliban. There was also his godson, a young medical student, John Tobin, son of his Bristol friend James Tobin, who had once tried laughing gas. Young Tobin’s main employment seems to have been reading to the great man in the evenings. These could be demanding sessions, covering contemporary novels, much poetry (especially Byron), the Arabian Nights, and on one occasion a Shakespeare reading that Tobin claimed lasted for nine hours on end.

  Though he was useful for valeting and taking dictation, young Tobin was no Faraday; though like Faraday he found it difficult to maintain equable relations with his moody, reclusive employer: ‘Sir Humphry … frequently preferred being left alone at his meals; and in his rides, or fishing and shooting excursions, to be attended only by his servant. Sometimes he would pass hours together, when travelling, without exchanging a word, and often appeared exhausted by his mental exertions.’140

  It is noticeable that in Lady Davy’s absence, Davy gradually seemed much softened towards her, and began writing a stream of increasingly tender letters, of which she kept at least forty-eight carefully done up in ribbons.141 In one he writes: ‘I think you will find me altered in many things — with a heart still alive to value and reply to kindness, and a disposition to recur to the brighter moments of my existence of fifteen years ago, and with a feeling that though the burnt-out flame can never be rekindled, a smothered one may be. God bless you! From your affectionate, H Davy.’142

  Davy was now less inclined to boast of his achievements, but sadly lamented how little they had been recognised: ‘I have been used so ill by the public when I have laboured most to serve them, and injured my body and mind in exertions for their good (witness safety lamp, copper bottoms, Royal Society …).’143

  Vitalism still held his intense interest. He stubbornly sent off another scientific paper to the Royal Society, on the ‘animal battery’ contained in the body of the torpedo or electric eel. It was published on 20 November 1828. He had now submitted forty-six papers to the Society, his first on the voltaic battery long ago in June 1801, and his most famous one on the safety lamp in 1816. He did not want the torpedo to be his last, and he continued to investigate the mystery of ‘animal electricity’ and its possible connection with the universal principle of life. John Herschel would be particularly struck by this paper, which compared the electric eel to a voltaic battery, asked whether the eel could exert this ‘most wonderful power’ at will, and speculated whether the human brain itself might be ‘an electric pile, constantly in action’.144

  Nature held other analogies, too. A late autumn 1828 entry in Davy’s private journals reads: ‘Bees, wasps and various winged insects, which appeared to me to be of the Vesper or Apes families were feeding in almost every flower, their tongues searching the honey. They were all languid, it was a cold evening though the sun was bright, and some of them appeared to me actually to die whilst in the act of feeding on their last meal of ambrosia! Happy beings …’145 Perhaps he had hoped that something like that might have happened to him at Laibach.

  At last Davy reluctantly left the enchantments of Pappina and Illyria, and went to winter in Rome. He felt increasingly weak and ill, but continued to work spasmodically on the final sections of Consolations. In February 1829 he suffered another devastating stroke, and summoned his brother John. John was now working as a military surgeon in Malta, but instantly talked himself aboard a Royal Navy frigate, and rapidly made his way to Naples, and then by horse to Rome.

  Convinced that he was dying, Davy had also begged Jane to join him from London. She finally agreed to do so, hoping ‘to arrive not quite useless’, and having been detained for several days by her own doctors. She sent ahead a curiously formal letter, pledging to Davy ‘all the faith and love I have ever borne to you’, but searching in vain for that touch of intimacy or tenderness that had long eluded them both. Its last sentence read: ‘I cannot add more than that your fame is a deposit, and your memory a glory, your life still a hope.’146

  But when Jane finally arrived in Rome in early April, she did something which gave Davy immense pleasure. From her chaotic suite of trunks, bags and hatboxes she produced with a flourish the second, expanded and corrected, edition of Salmonia, hot off the press, and with beautiful new steel engravings added throughout. Nothing could have pleased him more, a sort of proof of his literary immortality. He immediately began rereading it.147

  Davy continued gallantly to dictate sections of the Consolations to John. Sometimes he was feverish, his pulse rate rising to 150. As in the old days, John took over the dissection of the torpedo fish, and they gently debated whether ‘animal electricity’ was the intrinsic source of its life, or a mere physiological mechanism for paralysing prey or for self-protection. ‘The greater part of the day I sat by his bedside, reading the “Dialogues,” stopping occasionally to discuss particular parts. His mind was wonderfully cheerful and tranquil, and clear, and in a very affectionate and most amiable disposition … He had lost all the irritable feeling to which he was very liable before … It was difficult to conceive such power of mind, when the body was near dissolution: medically it seemed incompatible.’148

  At the end of April Davy smelt the spring blowing in over the campagna. He announced that he wished to travel again before he died. John arranged for a slow coach journey northwards towards Switzerland, with many stops to admire the spring countryside and gaze at the rivers and waterfalls. Jane tactfully went ahead to arrange for accommodation in Geneva. On 28 May 1829 Davy arrived at the Hôtel de la Couronne, overlooking the tranquil lake where Byron and Shelley and young Dr Frankenstein had once sailed. He took tea, and gazed down from his window at the sunset. He carefully questioned the Swiss wait
er about the varied species of fish that the lake contained. To John, with a wistful smile, ‘he expressed a longing wish to throw a fly’. He took his evening dose of morphine, and John read him to sleep. That night at 3 a.m., Sir Humphry Davy had another stroke and died.

  Davy had no children, and left considerable wealth to a nephew, his sister’s boy, Humphry Millett, whom he barely knew. All his scientific papers went to his faithful brother John, though Lady Davy retained family letters and journals. John did not see eye to eye with his sister-in-law, and quickly disappeared back to his adventurous medical career with the army, which took him to the Ionian isles, Ceylon and the West Indies. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, married, and eventually settled at Ambleside in the Lake District, where he became the Wordsworths’ family doctor.

  Jane made no attempt to publish anything of Davy’s, or about him, though she dined out for the next twenty years on her amusing tales of ‘dear, great Sir Humphry’. But John, partly encouraged by Wordsworth, worked doggedly on his brother’s papers for more than twenty-five years. He first published a two-volume Life in 1836, hurried out in reply to a hostile anecdotal biography assembled by the voluble J.A. Paris of the Penzance Geological Society (2 vols, 1831). Later John produced a nine-volume Collected Works in 1839-40, with a carefully rewritten Memoir of his brother’s life, attached as a Preface to Volume I. Finally, when settled in the Lakes, he issued a slim but revealing volume of Fragmentary Remains in 1858, which contains much of Davy’s poetry. No other major edition of his papers, letters or journals has so far been produced. Perhaps John’s most intimate tribute was his own book about fishing in the Lake District, The Angler and His Friend (1855).

  Sir Humphry Davy’s Will included endowments for a Davy Medal to be administered by the Royal Society; and for the maintenance of Penzance Grammar School, which celebrates a Davy Holiday to this day. The remainder of his estate was left to Jane, except for a bequest of ‘£100 or 1,000 florins’ for Josephine Dettela, daughter of the innkeeper of Laibach, Illyria, Austria. In March 1829, a few weeks before he died, Davy added a codicil leaving Pappina a further £50. Lady Davy was made the sole executor of this Will, a duty she carried out faithfully. Despite the urgings of Walter Scott, she never published her own memoirs, which might have described what it was really like to live with a man of science — who knew he was a genius.

  ♣ It might be too much to consider this as Shelley’s tribute to Herschel and his faithful, orbiting assistant Caroline. But it can be said that the view Shelley imagines of the ‘green and azure sphere’ seen from the moon is exactly that enshrined in the famous ‘Earthrise’ photograph of December 1968.

  ♣ Curiously, vague feelings against Lady Davy have always remained in the collective folk memory of Penzance, probably because she never deigned to visit this remote Cornish seaside town during her lifetime. I was told on several occasions that the large stone statue erected to Davy, dominating Market Jew Street, showed his frock-coat with a missing button ‘because Lady Davy was a bad wife and would never sew it back on’.

  ♣ The lively ambiguity of this relationship continues in modern research laboratories, where the line between assistant and collaborator remains easily blurred. A protocol has emerged in the joint signing of scientific papers for journals such as Nature; and in many British universities it is obligatory for a Director of Studies to allow his postgraduate assistants to co-sign research studies. But there are still many anomalies. It is currently the view that Edwin Hubble owed a great deal more to his assistant Milton Humason, a genius with stellar photography, than was originally recognised in his historic papers on red-shift. The examples of William Lawrence with Abernethy, Gay-Lussac with Berthollet, and most of all perhaps, Caroline Herschel with her brother, are even more subtle and complicated.

  ♣ The foundation of the Natural History Museum, in South Kensington, was achieved in 1881, and the Science Museum in 1885. The New British Library on Euston Road, opened in 1996, took over the King’s Library, which now forms the central architectural feature of the building, as a huge and dramatic glass bookcase, rising six storeys high through the central core of the building. Curiously, the New British Library fulfils much of Davy’s original vision, containing both science and humanities reading rooms, as well as rare books, maps and manuscripts, and two art galleries with changing displays. Near the main staircase is a bronze bust of Faraday; but none of Davy. In the courtyard is Eduardo Paolozzi’s gigantic statue of Newton (1995), an iron man seated on a plinth, leaning forward to take the measure of the world with his dividers. The image wonderfully combines several contradictory versions of science: a noble Enlightenment Newton, reminiscent of Rodin’s The Thinker; a satanic, calculating, anti-Romantic Newton, based on William Blake’s engraving of 1797; and finally, more than a hint of Dr Frankenstein’s outcast Creature of 1818.

  ♣‘Eventually we must sing of greater things.’ The book had run to nine editions by 1883. The French edition, edited by the great Parisian science writer Camille Flammarion, supplied a long and dramatically expressive title: Les derniers Jours d’un Philosophe. Entretiens sur la Nature, les Sciences, les Métamorphoses de la Terre et du Ciel, l’Humanité, l’Ame, et la Vie eternelle. That certainly covered it.

  ♣ What Coleridge actually wrote was this. ‘My opinion is this — that deep Thinking is only attainable by a man of deep Feeling, and that all Truth is a species of Revelation. The more I understand of Sir Isaac Newton’s works, the more boldly I dare utter to my own mind … that I believe the Souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton … Mind in his system is always passive — a lazy Looker-on on an external World. If the mind be not passive, if indeed it be made in God’s Image, and that too in the sublimest sense — the image of the Creator — there is ground for suspicion, that any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a system’ (23 March 1801, Letters, Vol. 2, p.709). This saying of Coleridge’s has a peculiar power to outrage men of science, even modern ones. In November 2000 there was a special day-long seminar organised at the Royal Society by the then President Sir Aaron Klug, on the subject of ‘The Idea of Creativity in the Sciences and the Humanities’. Among its twenty distinguished participants were Richard Dawkins, Matt Ridley, Carl Djerassi, George Steiner, Lisa Jardine and Ian McEwan. This citation from Coleridge proved more contentious than any other single proposition, and eventually goaded an eminent scientist (none of the above) to cry out in exasperation: ‘That is complete and utter balls … We don’t have to put up with such rubbish.’ Equilibrium was restored when it was pointed out that the idea of computing the contents of ‘500 souls’ was possibly Coleridge’s idea of a mathematical joke.

  10

  Young Scientists

  1

  By the end of the 1820s British science had lost its three international stars, the three scientific knights whose names had been renowned throughout Europe. The deaths of Joseph Banks in 1820, William Herschel in 1822, and finally of Humphry Davy in 1829, marked the passing of an age. The idea that they had between them created a distinctively British science was itself part of Banks’s great bequest to the nation. But with these departures its future seemed uncertain, and its reputation undefended. Who among the younger generation would take British science forward? And who would fund it? It was a time of great uncertainty. The Times helpfully announced that an age of scientific giants had passed away.1

  The questions became more insistent. Was the Royal Society fulfilling its role? Was British science itself in decline, compared to France and Germany? Did science have a recognised social and moral role in society? Ever since the Vitalism debate, such questions were no longer limited to a small circle of experts and academics. Public concern about the role of science in society was now widespread. The thirty-four-year-old Thomas Carlyle, newly arrived in Edinburgh and freshly bearded for the fight, was just beginning to make his name as a polemical essayist and an aggressive social commentator. His first in
fluential tract, Signs of the Times, dominated almost an entire issue of the Edinburgh Review in spring 1829. Here Carlyle announced the demise of Romanticism and the relentless arrival of ‘the Age of Machinery’.

  Carlyle made the problematic role of the man of modern science a central issue. He attacked the dehumanising effects of utilitarianism, statistics and the ‘science of mechanics’, and opposed the world of the laboratory to those of art, poetry and religion. Though he did not name the Royal Society or the Royal Institution, he came very close to it. ‘No Newton, by silent meditation, now discovers the system of the world from the falling of an apple: but some quite other than Newton stands in his Museum, his Scientific Institution, and behind whole batteries of retorts, digesters and galvanic piles imperatively “interrogates Nature” – who, however, shows no haste to answer.’2 Four years later, warming to his theme, Carlyle would announce definitively: ‘The Progress of Science … is to destroy Wonder, and in its stead substitute Mensuration and Numeration.’3 ♣

  In the Royal Society’s presidential election of 1829, John Herschel became the natural candidate of the young scientists, despite his own deep personal misgivings. At thirty-seven he was recognised as a polymath at the height of his powers. He had been Secretary of the Society for five years, and had published over a hundred papers on subjects ranging from astronomy to zoology. He was known to be developing a philosophy of ‘pure inductive science’, heralded as the true heir to Baconian thought. Moreover, he was wealthy and settled. In March 1829 he had heeded his aunt Caroline’s advice and married a very beautiful and gifted Scottish girl, Margaret Brodie Stewart. Above all, he was the son of his father, Sir William.