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

Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal and leading cosmological light of the Royal Society, was more than a little outraged by these apparently absurd claims. He had himself established that the moon had no life-sustaining atmosphere, based on the sharpness with which it occults starlight at its edge.6 But he was intrigued by the minute detail of Herschel’s observational sketches of the moon’s surface, and the apparently fantastic power of his reflector telescope. He wrote a challenging letter to Watson in Bath, questioning the seriousness of Herschel’s work, and his views on the moon. It was now that Joseph Banks, always on the lookout for new and unusual scientific talent, began to pay attention.

Watson forwarded what he tactfully called ‘Dr Maskelyne’s extremely obliging letter’ to Herschel. Clearly anxious that Herschel might take offence at the implied criticism, he urged a diplomatic response in a covering note of 5 June 1780: ‘I think you would do right (pardon my giving you advice) either to add the desired improvements, or to write over again the Paper, and send it to Dr Maskelyne, who, as he is Astronomer Royal, will be pleased, I believe, with the compliment paid him, and he will present it anew to the Society.’7

To his relief, Herschel wrote back to the Astronomer Royal with apparent modesty on 12 June: ‘I beg leave to observe Sir, that my saying that there is an absolute certainty of the Moon’s being inhabited, may perhaps be ascribed to a certain Enthusiasm which an observer, but young in the Science of Astronomy, can hardly divest himself of when he sees such Wonders before him. And if you promise not to call me a Lunatic I will transcribe a passage from some observations begun 18 months ago, which will show my real sentiments on the subject.’8

The views that Herschel now expressed must have taken Maskelyne aback. Far from retracting his opinions, he emphasised his belief that ‘from analogy’ with the earth, and its likely conditions of heat, light and soil, the moon was ‘beyond doubt’ inhabited by life ‘of some kind or other’. Even more provocatively, he thought that the terrestrial view of matters gave undue importance to the earth. ‘When we call the Earth by way of distinction a planet and the Moon a satellite, we should consider whether we do not, in a certain sense, mistake the matter. Perhaps-and not unlikely-the Moon is the planet and the Earth the satellite! Are we not a larger moon to the Moon, than she is to us?…What a glorious view of the heavens from the Moon! How beautifully diversified with [her] hills and valleys!…Do not all the elements seem at war here, when we compare the earth with the Moon?’

That Herschel was writing somewhat mischievously to the Astronomer Royal becomes clear towards the end of his letter. Poetry gently creeps up on astronomy: ‘The Earth acts the part of a Carriage, a heavenly waggon to carry about the more delicate Moon, to whom it is destined to give a glorious light in the absence of the Sun. Whereas we, as it were, travel on foot and have but a small lamp to give us light in our dark nights, and that too often extinguished by clouds.’ The teasing wit in Herschel’s final sally was unmistakeable: ‘For my part, were I to choose between the Earth and the Moon, I should not hesitate a moment to fix upon the Moon for my habitation!’9

Maskelyne could not overlook this, and promptly visited Herschel in Bath, accompanied by Banks’s new Secretary and confidant at the Royal Society, Dr Charles Blagden. The visit seems to have been somewhat stormy. They cross-questioned Herschel in a challenging manner, but reported back to Banks that they were strangely impressed, especially by Herschel’s beautiful home-made telescopes, of which there were several. There was also the unusual matter of the sister, a small, shy, tongue-tied young woman who seemed as mad about astronomy as her brother. Her name was Caroline. There was however no reason to believe that the Herschels would achieve anything particularly original in astronomy. They were provincials, émigrés, and poor self-taught enthusiasts.

Unknown to Maskelyne, the tongue-tied Caroline Herschel had made her own brief note of this visitation from the great men of the metropolis. The ‘long conversation’ which Dr Maskelyne held with her brother William got nowhere, and to her ‘sounded more like quarrelling’. Immediately Dr Maskelyne left the house her brother burst out laughing and exclaimed: ‘That is a devil of a fellow!’10

Less than a year later, in March 1781, Banks was amazed to hear that William Herschel was about to revolutionise the entire world of Western astronomy. He had achieved-or possibly achieved-something that had not been done since the days of Pythagoras and the Ancient Greek astronomers. Herschel had discovered what was perhaps a new planet. If so, he had changed not only the solar system, but revolutionised the way men of science thought about its stability and creation.

2

William Herschel was born in Hanover on 15 November 1738, and his younger sister Caroline twelve years later, on 16 March 1750. Their passion for observational astronomy came absolutely to rule both their lives, although in very different ways. At its height, in the 1780s, brother and sister spent night after night, month after month, summer and especially winter, alone but together in the open air, under a changing canopy of stars and planets. Their minutely recorded telescope observations, published in over a hundred papers by the Royal Society, would change not only the public conception of the solar system, but of the whole Milky Way galaxy and the structure and meaning of the universe itself.

Herschel and his sister were deeply attached from childhood, and most of what is known about William’s life is drawn from Caroline’s affectionate but troubled journal or day book, which she later turned into a memoir. She once wrote: ‘If I should leave off making memorandums of such events as affect, or are interesting to me, I should feel like-what I am, namely, a person that has nothing more to do in this world.’11 ♣

William was well into his thirties when astronomy began to take over his existence. The Herschel family concern over several generations had been music, not stargazing. In mid-eighteenth-century Germany-then a series of city states-the profession of music-playing, singing, composing, and teaching-was as socially important as those of the law, the army or the Church. Each city court and most military regiments had their own orchestras, and those of Hanover had some of the most renowned in Europe. Their fame spread especially after the Elector of Hanover became George I of England in 1715, and composers such as Handel achieved Europe-wide status.

William and Caroline’s father, Isaac, was a military bandsman with the Hanover Foot Guards. His own father had been a landscape gardener near Magdeburg in Saxony who had an amateur interest in the oboe, but who died when Isaac was only eleven. Isaac, virtually an orphan, and without proper education, also began life as a gardener on various aristocratic Prussian estates. But at twenty-one, in his own words, he ‘lost all interest in horticulture’, found he had a natural ear for music, and ‘worked day and night to become an oboe player’. Despite advice from his elder brother to stick to gardening, he could ‘no longer resist the desire to make music and to travel’, and drifted first to Potsdam, then to Brunswick (’too Prussian for me’), and finally to Hanover, where the atmosphere was more liberal.12 The Elector of Hanover was now George II of England, and more easy-going English manners were acceptable. In August 1831 Isaac joined the Hanover military band, a happy career choice which allowed him considerable freedom, until he was caught up in the Anglo-German campaigns against the French which swept mid-eighteenth-century Europe.13

At twenty-five Isaac fell in love with a local girl, Anna Moritzen, who came from a village just outside Hanover. She was a beautiful creature, but completely illiterate. They might not have married except that Anna got pregnant, and Isaac proved himself a man of honour. Anna later said prettily that Isaac dropped into her life ‘as if from a cloud’.14 They steadily produced one child every two years for the next twenty years-but though ten children were born only six survived, a cause of much grief. Anna adored her first-born, Jacob, above all else, and indulged him extravagantly; she also loved her first daughter, Sophie, the beauty of the family. With the remaining children she was more severe, especially with her youngest and least promising daughter, Caroline.

Anna always seemed to be struggling to control the large, unruly family during Isaac’s frequent absences with his regiment. She tried to inculcate traditional German virtues: discipline, craftsmanship, thrift and family loyalty. She had no patience with ‘book-learning’, especially as far as her daughters were concerned. However, she accepted Isaac’s ambition ‘to make all his sons complete musicians’, which she saw as a path to fame and money. One of William’s earliest memories was of being given a tiny violin which his father had made for him, and being taught to play almost before he could hold it to his shoulder.15

Jacob was quickly established as ‘the genius’ of the family: a superb solo musician from childhood, handsome but vain and volatile, having the true ‘artistic temperament’. William was quieter and steadier, more determined in his lessons, thoughtful and genial, a great reader. Caroline mostly remembered her mother’s severity, and how her eldest brother and sister, Jacob and Sophie, were by contrast petted and indulged.

Possibly Isaac also found his wife Anna a little ‘too Prussian’. There was something dreamy, almost unworldly, about Isaac Herschel. Alongside his music-making, it is evident that he had a certain metaphysical approach to the world. He had little formal education, but for that very reason his interests were wide and passionately pursued: they included instrument-making, reading philosophy and practising amateur astronomy. It was a combination very characteristic of the culture of Enlightenment Germany, at a time when its greatest philosopher, the young Immanuel Kant, was also a craftsman and lens-grinder. Isaac was a natural teacher, patient and good-humoured; while Anna was quick-tempered, opinionated and scornful of what she regarded as bookishness.

Caroline remembered her father taking her out into the street to see the winter stars on a clear, frosty night, ‘to make me acquainted with the most beautiful constellations, after we had been gazing at a comet which was then visible’.16 Perhaps this stayed in her mind, because finding comets would later become her particular passion. She also recalled being shown an eclipse of the sun, safely viewing it reflected in a bucket of water.17 She added admiringly that her father loved helping William with his studies, and was particularly delighted with his ‘various contrivances’-by which she meant his scientific models. (Her phrasing, like her accent, remained pleasingly Germanic to the end of her life.) Among these she particularly remembered a shining, neatly turned four-inch brass globe, ‘upon which the equator and ecliptic were engraved by my brother’, an object of childish wonder and admiration to her. This was an early sign of William’s extraordinary manual skills, which she came to worship.18 Her own secret desire was to become a concert singer, but she dared tell no one about this except William.

3

Perhaps the moments of paternal care were remembered because they were rare. Isaac was often away on campaign, and Anna ran the noisy, chaotic household as the growing family moved from apartment to apartment in Hanover, depending on their financial circumstances. There was great sibling rivalry. The bond between William and Caroline was strengthened by their vain and bullying brother Jacob, who as his mother’s darling had become spoilt and domineering. There was also the unhappy elder sister Sophie, whose beauty led to an early marriage with a ‘cruel and extravagant’ husband which turned out to be a disaster.19 Caroline-who was small and impish-claimed she was frequently whipped for disobedience both by her mother and by Jacob, starved for food, and treated as a scullion. Similarly, she said William had been endlessly teased by Jacob for his outstanding work at the garrison school in Latin, Greek, French and mathematics. He also mocked his model-making abilities. Jacob took nothing seriously but ‘the science of music’, in which he already considered himself (rightly) a virtuoso.20

At fourteen William joined the Hanover regimental band, alongside Jacob and his father. He soon learned to turn his hand to an astonishing array of instruments-the oboe, the violin, the harpsichord, the guitar and, a little later, the organ. He was also starting to compose, and had an early fascination with musical notation and the theory of harmony. Both he and Jacob appeared as young solo performers at the court of the Elector of Hanover, and their names were not forgotten.♣

Caroline also remembered long philosophical arguments at home in the evenings, when the brothers returned after concerts. She would lie awake in her bedroom, trying not to fall asleep and secretly delighting in William’s quiet, calm voice steadily contradicting Jacob’s furious outbursts. According to her the names of ‘Leibniz and Newton’ were shouted from the parlour ‘with such warmth that my Mother’s interference became necessary’.21 When their father was at home these conversations on philosophical subjects became even more rowdy, and would frequently last till dawn. The combination of Leibniz and Newton suggests that William and Jacob were arguing about the rival virtues of calculus (a mathematical system invented by Leibniz) and fluxions (a similar system invented-but jealously guarded-by Newton). Both systems produced the new mathematics of curves and gradients, essential to the astronomical calculation of planetary orbits and the elongated ellipses of comets. It was an unusual household.22

In November 1755 the five-year-old Caroline witnessed a strange portent of disruption in the after-shock of the Lisbon earthquake, which amazingly travelled as far as Germany. As she remembered it, the whole barracks shook. ‘I saw both my parents standing aghast and speechless…my brothers came running in…all [the family] being panic-struck by the earth quake.’23 This earthquake, which killed over 30,000 people in Lisbon and shook cities throughout Europe, seemed to many to call into question the idea of God (or Nature) as a benevolent Providence, and to be a sign that a new kind of scientific knowledge was required. Among many speculative works, it inspired Voltaire’s Candide. Caroline always retained a superstitious horror of earthquakes, and said she felt one years later when she stood by her father’s deathbed.24

In the spring of 1756, when William was seventeen and Caroline was six, the Hanover Foot Guards were posted to England, to serve under their ally the Hanoverian King George II. It was the outbreak of a long, desultory and financially draining conflict with the French that would become the Seven Years War, and would radically affect the fortunes of the Herschel family. Jacob tried to obtain a home posting with the court orchestra, but failed, and all the men of the family were conscripted. Caroline remembered the grim, silent bustle in the house. ‘My dear father was thin and pale, and my brother William almost equally so, for he was of a delicate constitution and just then growing very fast. Of my brother Jacob I only remember his [making] difficulties at everything that was done for him.’ The rest of the family, the three younger children including the baby Dietrich, were abruptly left on their own as the men departed.

Caroline’s sense of this human drama is well caught in her Memoir. ‘The troops hallooed and roared in the streets, the drums beat louder…and in a moment they were all gone. I found myself now with my Mother alone in a room all in confusion, in one corner of which my little brother Dietrich lay in his cradle; my tears flowed like my Mother’s but neither of us could speak.’ Then Caroline made a touching gesture towards the mother she feared. She ran and found one of her father’s large cambric handkerchiefs, unfolded it, and carefully placed one corner in her weeping mother’s hand, while holding onto the opposite corner herself. They were united, at least, in grief. ‘This little action actually grew a momentary smile into her face.’25

The Hanover Regiment were stationed at Maidstone, in Kent. Jacob spent his pay on fashionable English clothes, William on English books, and Isaac on an allowance for Anna and the children. William fell in love with the country, began to learn the language, and made a small circle of English friends. For the first time there are hints that he was secretly beginning to dream of an entirely different, freer kind of life in the land of Newton, which had been adopted by his fellow German Handel. When the Hanover Guards were posted back to Germany the following spring to fight the invading French armies, Jacob packed a beautifully tailored English suit, and William a copy of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding.26

Caroline remembered their return, one freezing winter evening in December 1756.27 Her mother Anna was preparing a welcome-home dinner, and the six-year-old Caroline was sent to collect her father and brothers from the parade ground. But she missed them in the dark and confusion, and the frightened little girl had to make her own way home. ‘I continued my search till I was spent with cold and fatigue, and on coming home I found them all at table, nobody greeting me but my brother.’ As she remembered it, no one had even noticed her absence except William. She never forgot his reaction. ‘My dear brother William threw down his knife and fork, and ran to welcome and crouched down to me, which made me forget all my grievances.’28

Jacob now obtained a timely discharge, but William and his father took part in the disastrous battle of Hastenbeck, which was fought against the French invaders twenty-five miles outside the city of Hanover, on 26 July 1757. The surrounding countryside was overrun by a French army of 60,000 troops under Marshal d’Estrées. The allied general, the Duke of Cumberland, beat a strategic retreat westwards towards Flanders. Hanover was occupied, and the Herschels’ building had sixteen French infantrymen billeted on it.29

After a hasty family conference it was decided to smuggle William-still only eighteen-out of Germany altogether. Caroline recalled a fleeting, romantic glimpse of her brother’s surreptitious departure as she stood anxiously by the street door, told not to call out or give him away: ‘he glided like a shadow along, wrapped in a great coat, followed by my mother with a parcel containing his accoutrements’.30 William slipped past the last sentinel at Herrenhausen, and made his way to Hamburg, where he took ship again for England. At the last moment he was joined by Jacob, and together the two brothers arrived, penniless refugees, in London. They supported themselves by copying musical scores, giving oboe lessons, and playing as freelance musicians in local orchestras. They gave a successful concert in Tunbridge Wells. In the evenings William read voraciously: English novels, books on mathematics and musical harmony, Robert Smith’s Harmonics (1749) and James Ferguson’s recently published and immensely popular Astronomy Explained (1756).31

By the autumn of 1759 Jacob was finding the life too hard, and slipped back to Hanover with his and William’s combined savings, eventually finding employment as a court musician.32 Now, for the first time in his life, William Herschel, aged twenty-one, was alone-but free, talented, and in the country of his choice. And with a secret gift, his genius for astronomy, hidden even from himself-but awaiting the opportunity to unfold. For the next five years he virtually disappeared from the family history.

Caroline was devastated when William went abroad. In retrospect, she realised that it was he alone who had cared for her, and in his long absence he became a sort of legendary figure. At home her misery deepened. Hanover remained occupied, and food supplies were short. She continued going to the garrison school, but was not allowed to learn arithmetic or languages, and was increasingly treated as a maidservant by the family. She remembered sewing immensely long woollen stockings, scrubbing laundry, and writing her mother’s letters to her father on campaign. In fact her unusual literary ability was a rare source of pride, as she later recalled. ‘My pen was taken frequently in requisition for writing not only my Mother’s letters to my Father, but to many a poor soldier’s Wife in our Neighbourhood to her Husband in the Camp; for it ought to be remembered that in the beginning of the last century very few women left country schools with having been taught to write.’33

Her father had been made a prisoner of war, and for some months her brother Jacob became effective head of the family. He ‘woefully disarranged’ the household, demanded larger rooms, and bullied his little sister. ‘Poor I got many a whipping for being too awkward at supplying the place of footman or waiter.’34 When her father finally returned from the wars in summer 1760, aged fifty-three, he was a broken man, his health permanently damaged by many months of imprisonment, asthmatic and with a heart condition.35 He gave some private music lessons, smoked his pipe, and was largely ruled by his wife and his eldest son. He did however manage to regularise William’s situation as a soldier absent without leave. On 29 March 1762 General A.F. von Sporcken signed a formal document of discharge.36 But there was no sign of their son coming home.

Caroline’s own health was bad. At the age of five she had caught smallpox, and now at eleven she caught typhus. While she was recovering her mother left her to crawl up and down stairs ‘on my hands and feet like an infant’ for several months.37 The worst result of this illness and neglect was that Caroline’s growth was permanently stunted. In a family of tall, lean children, she never grew much beyond five feet.38 Moreover, her face had been permanently scarred by the smallpox. The lively, enchanting pixie that William had once known had become a silent, resentful gnome. But she also became increasingly determined and self-sufficient. She said that from the time of her recovery, ‘I do not remember ever having spent a whole day in bed.’39

Isaac increasingly left the care of his surviving children largely in Jacob’s hands: Alexander aged seventeen, Caroline aged twelve, and the youngest, Dietrich, a sweet but sickly child, aged seven. Her father would indulge Caroline (‘and please himself’) with a short lesson on the violin, but he told her mournfully that as she was now ‘neither handsome nor rich’ she could never expect to marry, and should resign herself to helping her aged parents.40

Her brother Jacob refused to allow her to train as a milliner, although she was encouraged to learn just enough to be able to deal with the household clothes and linen. Her father had once hoped to give her ‘something like a polished education’, but her mother insisted that, given the family situation, it should be practical and ‘rough’; she would not even allow her to learn French, in case she developed ambitions to be a governess.41 Similarly, little Dietrich was denied a dancing master. Anna also observed that it was ‘her certain belief’ that had William read less, he would never have stayed away in England.42 When Jacob insisted that an extra servant girl be hired, she was given Caroline’s room and bed to share. For Caroline, ‘her destiny now seemed unalterable’. She was to be the family housekeeper, a spinster and permanent maidservant.43 She later decided to destroy all the journals referring to her private feelings during these years of misery. She did not want to write in the fashionable Romantic mode of the personal confession. ‘After reading over many pages,’ she wrote to Dietrich, ‘I thought it better to destroy them, and merely write down what I remember to have passed in our family at home, and abroad.’