The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

When he came to write an autobiographic sketch for his friend Dr Hutton in 1809, Herschel was more insistent than ever: ‘It has generally been supposed that it was a lucky accident which brought this star to my view; this is an evident mistake. In the regular manner I examined every star of the heavens, not only of that magnitude but many far inferior, it was that night its turn to be discovered. I had gradually perused the great Volume of the Author of Nature and was now come to the seventh Planet. Had business prevented me that evening, I must have found it the next, and the goodness of my telescope was such that I perceived its planetary disk as soon as I looked at it; and by application of my micrometer, I determined its motion in a few hours.’133

This claim is not entirely borne out by his original Observation Journal. His first sweep or ‘review’ of double stars, begun in 1779, had not revealed the Georgium Sidus, so discovery on the second was not inevitable. Nor was recognition instant when it came. The journal reveals no precise Eureka ‘first moment’ on 13 March, only the hardening suspicion drawn out over five days to Saturday, 17 March that the strange body had ‘proper motion’, but was neither a ‘nebulous star’ nor a ‘comet’, and so was very probably a new planet. But it was Nevil Maskelyne who was the first to say so explicitly in writing, in April.

Nevertheless, Herschel’s discovery was an astonishing feat. It became his professional signature, and a historic moment for cosmology. It is hardly surprising that over the years he continued romantically to refine the story, and compressed his discovery into a single wondrous night, the inspired work of a glorious ‘few hours’. Caroline never commented on this, although it seems clear that she was present during the critical nights of measuring between 21 March and 6 April 1781. The effect of this account was to present an engagingly romantic image of science at work: the solitary man of genius pursuing the mysterious moment of revelation.

Joseph Banks’s presentation speech, when awarding the prestigious Copley Gold Medal for the best work in any scientific field during the year 1781, in front of the assembled Fellows of the Royal Society, was unreservedly complimentary to Herschel. The discovery of the new planet was the first great success of Banks’s new presidency. In his most expansive and jovial mood, he accordingly projected a visionary future for Herschel’s astronomy: ‘Your attention to the improvement of telescopes has already amply repaid the labour which you bestowed upon them; but the treasures of heaven are well known to be inexhaustible. Who can say but your new star, which exceeds Saturn in its distance from the sun, may exceed him as much in magnificence of attendance? Who can say what new rings, new satellites, or what other nameless and numberless phenomena remain behind, waiting to reward future industry?’134

The award set the seal on Herschel’s reputation, and reignited the general fascination with astronomy. The discovery of the seventh planet began a revolution in the popular conception of cosmology. It was widely reported in the gazettes, journals and year books published in London, Paris and Berlin at the end of 1782. Yet although all orreries were instantly out of date, it took some time for Uranus to enter into the popular imagery and iconography of the solar system.

One of the best of the new wave of popular astronomy books was John Bonnycastle’s Introduction to Astronomy in Letters to his Pupil, which first appeared in 1786 (and went on to new expanded editions in 1788, 1811 and 1822). Bonnycastle gave the discovery of Uranus its own chapter: ‘Of all the discoveries in this science, none will be thought more singular than that which has lately been made by Dr Herschell…This is a Primary Planet belonging to the solar system, which till 13th of March 1781, when it was first seen by Dr Herschell, had escaped the observation of every other astronomer, both ancient and modern…’ Yet he still treated it as a puzzling novelty, its significance yet to be developed. ‘This discovery, which at first appears more curious than useful, may yet be of great service to astronomy…and may produce many new discoveries in the celestial regions, by which our knowledge of the heavenly bodies, and of the immutable laws that govern the universe, will become much more extended: which is the great object of the science…‘135

Bonnycastle’s book was a thoroughly Romantic production, which included a good deal of ‘illustrative’ cosmological poetry from Milton, Dryden and Young. It also sported an engraved frontispiece by Henry Fuseli. This showed the goddess of astronomy, Urania, in a diaphanous observation-dress, pointing seductively to her new star while instructing a youthful male pupil. The publisher was Joseph Johnson of St Paul’s Churchyard, also the publisher of William Blake, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft; and later of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Bonnycastle was a great friend of the philosopher Godwin, and besides including poetry to illustrate his astronomical explanations, he considered the imaginative impact of the new astronomy. The ‘Babylonian’ writers of Egypt had increased the Biblical estimate of the earth’s age from 6,000 to 400,000 years, but Bonnycastle pointed out that ‘the best modern astronomers’ had increased this to ‘not less than 2 million years’. He thought that viewing the stars through a telescope both liberated the imagination and produced a certain kind of wonder, mixed with disabling awe or terror: ‘Astronomy has enlarged the sphere of our conceptions, and opened to us a universe without bounds, where the human Imagination is lost. Surrounded by infinite space, and swallowed up in an immensity of being, man seems but as a drop of water in the ocean, mixed and confounded with the general mass. But from this situation, perplexing as it is, he endeavours to extricate himself; and by looking abroad into Nature, employs the powers she has bestowed upon him in investigating her works.’136

Uranus slowly became a symbol of the new, pioneering discoveries of Romantic science. An unfathomably larger universe was steadily opening up, and this gradually transformed popular notions of the size and mystery of the world ‘beyond the heavens’. Indeed, the very terms ‘world’, ‘heaven’ and ‘universe’ began to change their meanings. It was the psychological breakthrough that Kant had predicted in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens back in 1755: ‘We may cherish the hope that new planets will perhaps yet be discovered beyond Saturn.’137

Erasmus Darwin would eventually celebrate Herschel’s new astronomy in his poem The Botanic Garden (1791), notably in the spectacular opening section of Canto 1. The discovery of Uranus inspired Darwin to evoke many other possible ‘solar systems’, each with its own sun and planetary family, spontaneously exploding into being after an initial ‘big bang’. Here Darwin was using Newton’s celestial mechanics (based on Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion), but dramatising the new notion of an endless sequential creation as implied by Herschel. The creative cosmic force is ‘Love’ (as in the classical cosmology of Lucretius), while the Biblical God now seems content simply to initiate what is, in effect, a vast cosmological experiment, and then sit back as a passive observer.

When Love Divine, with brooding wings unfurl’d,

Call’d from the rude abyss the living World,

‘Let there be Light!’, proclaimed the Almighty Lord,

Astonish’d Chaos heard the potent word;

Through all his realms the kindling ether runs

And the mass starts into a million Suns.

Earths round each Sun with quick explosions burst,

And second Planets issue from the first;

Bend as they journey with projectile force,

In bright ellipses their reluctant course;

Orbs wheel in orbs, round centres centres roll,

And form, self-balanced, one revolving whole.

-Onward they move, amid their bright abode,

Space without bound, the bosom of their God!

To this shimmering and kinetic passage, which seems to anticipate in language the music of Haydn’s Creation (1796-98), Darwin added a long, admiring Note on ‘Mr Herschel’s sublime and curious account of the construction of the heavens’.138♣

Astronomers from all over Europe (especially France, Germany and Sweden) began to write to Herschel in Bath, asking for details about his metal specula, his high-magnification eyepieces and his observational techniques. In England there continued to be much scepticism about both his abilities and his telescopes. His replies tended to be formal, but occasionally he relaxed a little with astronomers whom he trusted, and whose skills he admired. He light-heartedly described the pains he took to set up, tune and even ‘humour’ his telescopes. He gave them a life of their own, and implied that he treated them like so many concert prima donnas (perhaps remembering La Farinelli, who had saved him at the Pump Room). To Alexander Aubert in London he wrote one of his most whimsical accounts on 9 January 1782, when enclosing his new catalogue of double stars. ‘These instruments have played me so many tricks that I have at last found them out in many of their humours, and have made them confess to me what they would have concealed, if I had not with such perseverance and patience, courted them. I have tortured them with powers, flattered them with attendance to find out the critical moments when they would act, tried them with Specula of a short and long focus, a large aperture and a narrow one. It would be hard if they had not proved kind to me at last!’139

It is striking how frequently he now compared the art of astronomical observation to learning and playing a musical instrument. To Aubert he wrote of the need to adjust each telescope individually and ‘to screw an instrument up to its utmost pitch. (As you are an Harmonist you will pardon the musical phrase.)’

Yet for some months Herschel had to continue to defend his telescopes against sceptics in the Royal Society. To the accusation that his discovery was by chance, they now added the implication that the huge powers of magnification he claimed were illusory. Particular scepticism was directed at his lens of 6,000 power, since it was calculated that a star so highly magnified would move through the viewing field of his telescope in ‘less than a second’, owing to the earth’s rotation. Therefore it would be quite impossible to observe. Herschel replied crisply that it took all of three seconds, and he could follow such a star very well.140 But to William Watson he complained that his critics evidently intended to send him ‘to Bedlam’, and wrote defensively on 7 January 1782: ‘I do not suppose there are many persons who could even find a star with my [magnifying] power of 6,450; much less keep it if they had found it. Seeing is in some respects an art, which must be learnt. To make a person see with such a power is nearly the same as if I were asked to make him play one of Handel’s fugues upon the organ. Many a night have I been practising to see, and it would be strange if one did not acquire a certain dexterity by such constant practice.’141

Watson quietly kept Banks informed of the controversy, while Banks gently temporised, suggesting that perhaps the magnifications were slightly miscalculated, but supporting Herschel against his detractors. He sent smiling presidential greetings: ‘My best Compliments to Mr Herschell, with best wishes for the Sake of Science that his nights may be as Sleepless as he can wish them himself.’142

Alexander Aubert now firmly took Herschel’s side. Thanking him for the catalogue of double stars, he remarked appreciatively on all the trouble Herschel had taken: ‘but trouble is nothing to you, and the least thing we can do in return is to…convince the world that though your discoveries are wonderful, they are not imaginary…Your great power of 6450 continues to astonish, your micrometer also…Go on, my dear Sir, with courage, mind not a few barking, jealous puppies; a little time will clear up the matter and if it lays in my power you shall not be sent to Bedlam alone, for I am much inclined to be one of the party.’143

Herschel’s next destination, as it turned out, was not Bedlam but Windsor. King George III, advised by the Astronomer Royal and the President of the Royal Society, had chosen to ignore these controversies. He summoned Herschel to court to congratulate him, but asked Banks and Maskelyne to make an independent trial of the now celebrated sevenfoot telescope at the Greenwich Observatory. On 8 May Herschel left for London, his precious telescope and folding stand perilously packed into a mahogany travel-box (’to be screwed together on the spot where wanted’), accompanied by a hastily assembled trunk of equipment including his large Flamsteed atlas (marked up by Caroline), his new catalogue of double stars (similarly written up by Caroline), ‘micrometers, tables, etc’, and rather makeshift court dress.144

At Greenwich, Maskelyne was stunned by the superior quality and light-gathering power of Herschel’s ‘home made’ mirrors. He immediately recognised that they were far more powerful than any of the official observatory telescopes, and probably than any other telescope in Europe. Maskelyne, reputed to be a jealous and illiberal man because of his supposed ill-treatment of the watchmaker John Harrison, behaved with great forthrightness and generosity to Herschel.

On 3 June 1782 Herschel wrote exuberantly to Caroline, casting aside his usual circumspect tone: ‘Dear Lina…The last two nights I have been star-gazing at Greenwich with Dr Maskelyne & Mr Aubert. We have compared our telescopes together and mine was found very superior to any at the Royal Observatory. Double stars they could not see with their instruments I had the pleasure to show them very plainly, and my [folding stand] mechanism so much approved of that Dr Maskelyne has already ordered a model to be taken from mine; and a stand to be made by it for his reflector. He is however now so much out of love with his instrument [a six-foot Newtonian] that he begins to doubt whether it deserves a new stand.’145

Banks (who had learned much about royal decorum since Tahiti) now knew that it was the perfect moment to introduce Herschel formally to the King at Windsor in May 1782. The meeting between the two Hanoverians (commoner and king, but both firmly speaking English) was a great success. Members of the King’s Hanoverian entourage had already heard of the Herschel brothers as talented musicians, and His Majesty was intrigued by the change in métier.146 King George, not yet mad, was renowned for his aphoristic remarks to his more talented subjects. To Edward Gibbon, for example, still deep in his six-volume history The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he had observed archly: ‘Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr Gibbon?’ It was said that the King now murmured to Banks: ‘Herschel should not sacrifice his valuable time to crotchets and quavers.’147

Herschel wrote swiftly to Caroline, with a note of growing excitement that had never previously appeared in his letters. ‘Among Opticians and Astronomers nothing is now talked of but what they call my great discoveries. Alas! This shows how far they are behind, when such trifles as I have seen and done are called great. Let me but get at it again! I will make such telescopes & see such things-that is, I will endeavour to do so.’148 In a later note, again using her intimate diminutive name, he added: ‘You see Lina I tell you all these things, you know vanity is not my foible therefore I need not fear your Censure.’149 He would not have feared his sister’s censure a decade before.

Banks was determined to find his new astronomical protégé a salary, and if possible a suitable place. This required some diplomacy, as university professorships were for mathematicians, the post of Astronomer Royal was evidently taken, and the new post of Royal Astronomer at Kew Gardens had recently been promised to another-‘a devil of a pity’. With Banks’s diplomatic nudging, the King agreed that Herschel should give up teaching music in Bath, and move to a house near Windsor, to concentrate entirely on astronomy. To achieve this, His Majesty would be pleased to create a new official post, appointing Herschel as the King’s Personal Astronomer at Windsor on a salary of £200 per annum. (This was not particularly generous, but then the Astronomer Royal received only £300.) At the age of forty-three, Herschel’s second career had burst into life.

After the very briefest consultation, Herschel, Caroline and their brother Alexander moved on 31 July 1782 to a large, sprawling house in the village of Datchet, positioned deep in the countryside between Slough and Windsor, just south of the river Thames. The house had large grass plots suitable for erecting telescopes, and several stables and outbuildings for the furnaces and the grinding and polishing equipment. An old laundry could be converted into an observation building. But the house itself had not been inhabited for several years, and was cold and damp. Caroline set about the huge task of cleaning and repairing.150

Almost immediately Herschel was commanded to bring his famous seven-foot telescope to Windsor, where it was reassembled on the terrace for everyone to view the planets. Herschel was a particular success with the three teenaged royal princesses, Charlotte, Augusta and Elizabeth. On one cloudy evening (it being an English summer) when viewing was impossible, he had the inspired idea of constructing pasteboard models of Jupiter and its four moons, and Saturn and its rings, and hanging them-illuminated by candles-from a distant garden wall on the Windsor estate. These were meticulously prepared beforehand. By ingeniously focusing down the seven-foot, he was able to show these models to the three young girls through the telescope, an early form of outdoor planetarium.151

Many other children of the new generation also grew up understanding the cosmos in a new way. Discovering the stars became a particular and special moment of self-discovery. The poet Coleridge remembered being taken out at night into the fields by his beloved father, the vicar and schoolmaster of Ottery St Mary in Devon, in the winter of 1781 to be shown the night sky. Coleridge was only eight, but he never forgot it. Perhaps the Reverend John Coleridge, a great follower of the monthly magazines (to which he sometimes contributed learned articles on Latin grammar), had recently read of Georgium Sidus. At all events, Coleridge treasured the memory of his father’s eager demonstration of the stars and planets overhead, and the possibility of other worlds: ‘I remember, that at eight years old I walked with him one evening from a farmer’s house, a mile from Ottery-& he told me the names of the stars-and how Jupiter was a thousand times larger than our world-and that the other twinkling stars were Suns that had worlds rolling round them-& when I came home, he showed me how they rolled round. I heard him with profound delight & admiration; but without the least mixture of Wonder or incredulity. For from my early reading of Faery Tales, & Genii etc etc-my mind had been habituated to the Vast.’152

Such a huge, starlit prospect, inhabited by giant planets and remote classical gods, might have puzzled or alarmed a normal eight-year-old. But the striking thing is that Coleridge, who wrote many letters about his childhood and always remembered it acutely, said he felt no surprise or disbelief at all-‘not the least mixture of Wonder or incredulity’-about this revelation of the enormous scale of the universe. He felt himself already tuned to the size and mystery of the new cosmos. His Romantic sensibility-even at the age of eight-already inhabited the infinite and the inexplicable. Cosmological imagery, and especially the symbolic movement of the stars and the moon, entered deeply into his early poetry, and in a sense it came to rule the world of the Ancient Mariner and his ship.

The moving Moon went up the sky,

And nowhere did abide;

Softly she was going up,

And a star or two beside.

Her beams bemocked the sultry main,

Like April hoar-frost spread,

But where the ship’s huge shadow lay,

The charmed water burnt alway

A still and awful red.153

The prose gloss that Coleridge added to this passage almost twenty years later (1817) takes on a new resonance when compared with what we now know of Herschel’s long nights of lunar observation:

In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as Lords that are certainly expected and yet there is silent joy at their arrival.♣

The young John Keats remembered an organised game at his school in Enfield, in which all the boys whirled round the playground in a huge choreographed dance, trying to imitate the entire solar system, including all the known moons (to which Herschel had by then added considerably). Unlike Newton’s perfect brassy clockwork mechanism, this schoolboy universe-complete with straying comets-was a gloriously chaotic ‘human orrery’.

Keats did not recall the exact details, but one may imagine seven senior boy-planets running round the central sun, while themselves being circled by smaller sprinting moons (perhaps girls), and the whole frequently disrupted by rebel comets and meteors flying across their orbits. Keats was later awarded Bonnycastle’s Introduction to Astronomy as a senior school prize in 1811. Reading of Herschel, he enshrined the discovery of Uranus five years later in his great sonnet of 1816, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’.154

8

Once they had moved to Datchet, Herschel and his brother Alexander started an exclusive business in the manufacture of high-quality reflector telescopes. The first five of them, all seven-foot reflectors, were ordered by King George as royal gifts, and although never fully paid for by the Crown office (they were priced at a hundred guineas each), they had the invaluable effect of making Herschel the royal telescope-maker, ‘By Appointment’. All telescopes, whatever their size, were individually constructed to order, took three or four weeks to make, and had an individual price, usually quoted in guineas. Herschel would supply them either in kit form or fully assembled in beautiful mahogany cases, with spare mirrors and a selection of eyepieces. Although every one was handcrafted, his immense energy achieved something like mass-production. Over the next decade he made 200 mirrors for the popular seven-foot telescope, 150 for the ten-foot, and eighty for the big twenty-five-foot, although not all of these were sold.155

Prices rose steadily. The renowned seven-foot telescope was usually sold in kit form for thirty guineas, but Herschel gradually raised even the kit price to a hundred guineas, the figure he quoted to the German astronomer Johann Bode in Berlin.156 Eventually a twenty-foot in kit form sold for 600 guineas. The luxury ten-foot reflector, complete with polished mahogany case, patent adjustable stand, a selection of eyepieces and a spare mirror, cost a princely 1,500 guineas.157 Indeed the more expensive models were sold mostly to German princes, and models also went to Lucien Bonaparte (Napoleon’s brother) and the Emperor of Austria.158 Probably the most expensive commercial telescope that Herschel ever made was commissioned by the King of Spain for £3,500, and delivered to the Madrid Observatory in 1806.159 Scores of Herschel’s telescopes were eventually sent all over England and Europe, and he personally delivered one on behalf of King George to the state observatory at Göttingen in 1786.160

Gradually more and more visitors began to descend on the observatory at Datchet. Caroline started to keep a neat, double-columned visitors’ book, rather as if she were recording star observations, which in a sense she was. In spring 1784 the dying Dr Johnson sent the young Susannah Thrale (Mrs Thrale’s third daughter) on a visit, advising her to cultivate an acquaintance with Herschel: ‘He can show you in the night sky what no man before has ever seen, by some wonderful improvements he has made in the telescope. What he has to show is indeed a long way off, and perhaps concerns us little, but all truth is valuable and all knowledge pleasing in its first effects, and may subsequently be useful.’161