The Age Of Wonder – Richard Holmes

It is an enchanting whole, the biography of an age perhaps – Alison Bashford smh.com.au October 4 2008

This book tells the story of three remarkable scientific friendships during the Romantic Age in Britain. The astronomers William and Caroline Herschel, the chemists Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday and the medical scientists, John Abernethy and William Lawrence all challenged traditional ideas about human identity, morality and religious belief. They were pioneers in a time where distinctions between poetry, art and science were yet to take hold.

Holmes captures an age on the cusp of modernity, when science and faith in God were mutually incompatible, and shows through the vivid dramas of his central relationships how ideas are nurtured, scientific discoveries made, and how religious faith and scientific truth collide.

This book seeks to answer questions that are as relevant to us as they were to Coleridge’s generation: What are the sources of creativity? In what sense is there a human soul? Is it a fundamental mistake to regard science as a purely rational pursuit, or must we also recognise it as an imaginative and emotional one? With Holmes’s customary sense of place, personality, past and period, his ability to get to the heart of what drives a person, his sensitivity to human failings and desires, and his immense authority, this accessible and hugely readable book is breathtaking in its originality and its intellectual importance.

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