Richard Holmes

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Ramona Koval: Richard Holmes is regarded by many as Britain's greatest living biographer. His biography of Shelley won the Somerset Maugham Prize. Footsteps, which was the first book I read of his in 1985, revolutionised the way biography was done. The first part of his biography of Coleridge won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year prize. He's written about the friendship between Dr Johnson and Mr Savage in a long night walk they took one day. Anyway, you're convinced, aren't you? He's fantastic and he's won a lot of prizes. And he joins us on The Book Show right here in our studio. Welcome to The Book Show, Richard.

Richard Holmes: Great to be here.

Ramona Koval: We do associate you with writing about writers and poets and not so much about scientists or perhaps what they were at the time which was natural philosophers. Can we begin by asking about your own biography and where science made its first appearance?

Richard Holmes: Well, you always look back as a biographer, you're interested in how things began, the origins of things. I went to Cambridge but I went to a new scientific college, Churchill College, it had just been founded, so most of my fellow students were nuclear physicists or astronomers. So that set something going in me. Then one book often leads to another, and I'd written about Samuel Taylor Coleridge, you know, Kubla Khan and so on, but early in his career when he was down in the English west country, Bristol, he met a young Cornish chemist called Humphrey Davy. Humphrey Davy was in the first of the modern chemical labs, and he was exploring what you could do with nitrous oxide, which is what we know as laughing gas, and some of you, if you're old enough, will remember the dentist using nitrous oxide on you, it's a form of anaesthetic. But it's also a euphoric...

Ramona Koval: But they didn't know that then for a very long time, which is very alarming.

Richard Holmes: Exactly, thereby hangs a story. But Coleridge was one of the subjects who took this gas and then had to report on what effects it had.

Ramona Koval: Because he was taking a lot of other things.

Richard Holmes: He was taking a lot of other substances. So he was rather expert, particularly in the opium field, as you will probably recall. So you have this rather extraordinary thing, the poet is taken into the laboratory and tests out this material. I gave a lecture on this at the Royal Institution, and I suddenly thought, wait a minute, there's a much, much bigger subject here which is nothing to do with the two cultures, there's no split here between artists, writers and men and women of science, they're all talking to each other, they all know each other. So I thought, okay, I'm going to explore this, so the result was this book.

Ramona Koval: When you were in Churchill College, why were you there amongst all these scientists?

Richard Holmes: I was going to go to one of the most traditional colleges, Trinity, but I heard that there was a young teacher called George Steiner, who is now known throughout the world, and he was just starting, and I thought let's go there, let's be taught by this guy. And the fact that he'd also chose a scientific college to go, I thought he knows something that I don't know, and he certainly did. So that's how it all began, but in a curious way that, while I was indeed reading the Romantic poets and the Victorian novelists, what I was doing outside that was tinkering with motorcycle engines, going up to the observatory, looking through these fabulous telescopes they had there. So there was this double life going on. It's been sitting there inside me, this other thing, and now (kind of late in the day) I suddenly want to explore the science side.

Ramona Koval: What we learned about Sir Joseph Banks at school made him a very deeply boring man, and maybe I wasn't paying attention, it's quite possible, but reading your work makes me want very badly to meet him or at least the man in his early exploration days. We saw this stolid portrait, and here was the man who collected plants, and I was particularly un-attracted to plants, even as a science student, but the picture you paint of this young man who opens this book is in so many ways not the man that I knew. Tell me about why you allowed Sir Joseph Banks to take your hand through this story.

Richard Holmes: Probably anybody who studied Joseph Banks in school you'll have that portrait, this block-like...he looks like a pale version of Ayres Rock, as it used to be called, sitting there with an Order of Bath across his chest, and there he'd been for 40 years, he been president of the Royal Society. When he spoke you imagined this terrible growl coming from him. My book opens with him 25 years old, the opening shot (as you'd say in a film) is him, one of the first Europeans, jumping down on the beach of Tahiti, and he's open to everything. They're there for actually three months, and one of the themes of this book is suddenly the kind of notion of a superior enlightenment European civilisation begins to melt down as they find this other civilisation, which is immensely attractive. And there are a whole series of events that happen to him. Maybe we could talk about his first sight of the Tahitians surfing.

Ramona Koval: Lets, because you're going to read that bit. We should also say that he was quite an achieved young man at that age.

Richard Holmes: Yes, he'd had a very expensive education at Oxford and so on, and he's inherited a lot of money. So normally he would have been doing the grand tour with a lot of servants, trotting around Rome and so on. He said famously, 'Any blockhead can do that. I'm going to go round the world.' He literally said that. And of course he goes with Captain Cook, it's the Endeavour voyage, and he collects lots of botanical specimens, but he's interested in everything.

Ramona Koval: And he can do everything. He has these days where he does a bit of science, a bit of exercise, does a bit of botany, thinks about the structure of the whole world.

Richard Holmes: That's right, he observes the transit of Venus across the Sun. A wonderful moment there actually...they're observing the transit of Venus, that is literally the planet Venus, it goes across the face of the Sun, you measure it when it enters the circumference of the Sun and when it exists, and from that you can triangulate and they were working out distances in the solar system. But the amazing thing about Banks is that there were a couple of Tahitian chiefs there, and he takes them to the telescope, he explains what they're doing, he makes them look through the telescope, he squares up to...it's two equal parties talking here. And that, to me...there's so many incidents like that, and suddenly you see a different world, this very romantic approach to the world, where you're open, you drop away all those things about the age of reason and so on and you start again. Banks, as a young man, started again in the most extraordinary way.

Ramona Koval: Read me something.

Richard Holmes: Okay. The phrase I think you use, he's 'gone troppo'...is that right?

Ramona Koval: Yes, he 'went troppo', yes.

Richard Holmes: And he's making a lot of notes on it. He has a wonderful expedition, he goes upcountry with one of the Tahitian queens who obviously fancies him rather, and there's a bit of a steamy scene in a canoe at night. But (very typical) when Banks wakes up in the morning they've stolen all his kit except his trousers, virtually; his jacket, his pistols, everything. So he's rather humiliated. The queen has got one over him, which is very characteristic of this exchange. So they're heading back to the camp, Fort Venus, as they call it, on the shore, and then they round a corner of the bay, and this happens:

[reading from Rounding the top of the bay... to ...it was a complete paradise sport.]

And from that you can see...it was just one tiny incident, and Banks has been completely transformed by this, and of course he's just a representative of Europe. So this is a tiny segment of what I mean by the 'age of wonder'.

Ramona Koval: I think another bit of wonder is just a couple of pages later, I want you to read about what happens when he really goes troppo.

Richard Holmes: Again, a little moment. By mid June they'd been in Tahiti for about six to seven weeks.

[reading from Banks was increasingly prepared to abandon... to ...taking the part of ancestral ghosts.]

And suddenly that story changes around, and again the reader is learning, like Banks is learning, like I was learning when I studied that; don't assume anything. And continually that happens on the island, there are many, many incidents like this.

Ramona Koval: So, we could just talk about this for hours but I want to move on to ask you what Banks and his explorations and his books...in fact he wasn't known particularly just for plants, he did the first ethnography of Tahiti. What did that do for the European imagination?

Richard Holmes: Let me just also explain the role he has in the book because this is relevant to that. He's in the first chapter but he becomes a kind of chorus figure, and almost every chapter of the book opens with Banks, but also Banks getting older, which itself is a kind of...the man of science who gradually is grounded. As he becomes president of the Royal Society, this august institution in London, he gets less and less... But what he's doing, he's a wonderful patron sending out young explorers and encouraging them to bring back all kinds of...and not merely explorers but astronomers and Humphrey Davy, who we mentioned. So he becomes a man who launches all these explorers in all the different areas of science. So I think that he's seen that science had got to break out of its old Newtonian, rational, European...it's got to go much, much wider, and that's one of the big themes of the book. Maybe we could talk perhaps about one or two of the characters that he launches.

Ramona Koval: Just before we leave this part of Banks...this is the beginning of the people from the new world, the strange world, coming back to England and being presented, in a way, and you said before you saw him offering the telescope to his confreres, but in fact he had sort of mixed view of his friend that he was going to bring back.

Richard Holmes: Yes, that's exactly right. Again, there's an ambiguity here, and he wants to bring a Tahitian back to England, and in fact he has a volunteer who is one of the wise men who says he'd love to come, be very interested to come. And then there's this extraordinary entry Banks makes in his journal, saying 'Why shouldn't I bring him back? I can display him like my neighbours in Lincolnshire display tigers' and you suddenly think, whoa, what's going on here? Suddenly this double standard has...so nothing is straightforward here. On one level he is an ethnographer, he does completely recognise this other...and then there's this other level of response. Throughout the book it's very ambiguous what science does. It does wonderful and progressive things but it also does destructive and menacing things. So that's an early part of that theme.

Ramona Koval: Let's get on to William Herschel who is the German astronomer who comes to settle in England with his sister Caroline, and he ends up discovering a planet, Uranus, but when you just think...you look at the night sky and you think of what they had to work out, all kinds of things...they knew a little bit from Copernicus and so on but they didn't know that much, and they had names for constellations. But imagine the brain power required to sit there night after night and work out something that's going on so far away.

Richard Holmes: It is extraordinary. He was German, so he was an immigrant in that long tradition of brilliant immigrants who'd come to England, and in fact they are supported, and Banks very early recognised...he was a musician, he was trained as a musician, he was a composer, he played the organ, but he was manually absolutely brilliant, and he started building, as a hobby, his own telescopes. Gradually the hobby totally overtook his profession, and he was brilliant at it. He built the best telescopes in the world in his kitchen.

Ramona Koval: And the grinding for 16 or 17 hours, and his sister popping food into his mouth.

Richard Holmes: He brought his young sister over, Caroline, who was being treated as a skivvy by their parents in Germany, he brought her over aged 21, and this is an amazing team that then developed. People who know the literary world know William and Dorothy Wordsworth, I think it's very, very similar to that, emotionally it's very close, and technically...Caroline becomes a brilliant astronomer herself, also a musician. So yes, in order to make these reflector telescopes (that is to say they have a big mirror at the base) you have to grind and polish them, and they did it by hand. Some of the big mirrors took 16 hours to grind, and you couldn't stop because the surface...they are in fact metal, not glass, and if you stop moving it, it begins to freeze up and you can't then get a fine surface to it.

Ramona Koval: At what point is it safe to stop?

Richard Holmes: Once you've got...because they've got a concave curve on them, so once you've got...that's a great difficulty because you have to measure them very finely. You know the great Hubble telescope, same principle, I forget how...it was some point, point, point of a millimetre out and it cost them millions of pounds to redo it. So he's doing this by hand, but he can't stop, so Caroline is gradually feeding him, and finally there are actually scenes where she's actually putting the food in his mouth. So this amazing scene in the kitchen with this grinding going on. And of course you then begin to ask also is she in fact his servant or is her own career developing, and she becomes a great comet observer. That becomes one of the interesting emotional questions about the book and how scientists work and what happens to their assistants.

Ramona Koval: And what happens when they marry when they have such a close relationship with their sister.

Richard Holmes: Yes. Herschel in 1781 suddenly discovered this new planet, Uranus, which is the seventh planet, and suddenly the solar system looked completely different, people realised there could be other ones, so that expanded. Also with Caroline he established (and almost more important) that our Milky Way is simply a single galaxy and there are other galaxies, like Andromeda, for example. And he came up with the concept of light years.

So we're in a universe unimaginably much bigger, and of course from that all kinds of religious questions came up; where is God in this universe et cetera. So all that is going on, he's sending in papers to the Royal Society, Caroline is working alongside him, he builds her beautiful telescopes for her comet hunting, the French are the great comet hunters, she gets even better than the French. So that's very dramatic. And this teamwork is going...every night they're out there from midnight to the morning, they stagger in and have coffee and then they go to bed.

But William Herschel falls in love with the neighbour, a rather sweet widow who just lost her husband, and he marries her. Caroline is absolutely devastated. She has kept a wonderful day-by-day journal of all their observations and also what's going on, very funny about William, how irritable he gets, how he's commanding her, and then he gets very depressed, but he never stops working, and so on. And suddenly he marries and she puts this in: 'I had to polish the telescopes because tomorrow my brother is getting married,' and then the journal is destroyed for the next ten years, total silence. So that was very interesting, to look at what was going on with that relationship, what were the position of women then. She was the first woman scientist (although that word wasn't used then) to receive a state salary anywhere in Europe. So that story...and there are ways of reconstructing what she did feel. I say at some point it's almost like a Jane Austen novel, the delicacy of this.

And it's not all disaster because something extraordinary happens and you could write a beautiful self-contained story about this, is that when William marries he has one son, little John, who he adores, but he's not very good as a father, as you can imagine; he's observing telescopes, he's not very articulate. And it's Caroline who forms this relationship with her little nephew from very early on when he's four years old, and she mediates between him and this difficult father, and it's a relationship that goes on right to the end of Caroline's life. There are wonderful letters between young John and he turns out to be an absolutely brilliant scientist as well. So in a way that emotional story, it comes around, very interesting. When I began this book I thought scientists had no emotional life, they were men and women in white coats. Let me tell you, the reverse is true, they leave the poets standing!

Ramona Koval: Talking of the poets, that was my next question; how did the concept of worlds beyond worlds affect the poets? What did they do with that?

Richard Holmes: This is a world in which, for instance, Lord Byron had gone down and looked through Herschel's telescope and there's some very interesting observations. He says things like 'it makes me feel dreadfully religious', which is not great from Byron, but I suppose the most interesting thing is of course the young Percy Bysshe Shelley, who right from a young student was always interested. He has microscopes, he has telescopes, he's fascinated by science, and he read the Herschel papers, and then in his first poem called 'Queen Mab', an unlikely title but it's a very interesting poem, and attached to it are these long prose notes. There is a note about the discovery of Uranus and then about the size of the universe, how much bigger...and the idea, for instance, that it was created 6,000 years ago, which a lot of people still believed at that time.

Ramona Koval: Some people still believe it now.

Richard Holmes: Right, fine, read the book! He began to think...let us take a Christian religion, first of all where is God? Possibly a very crude question. But much more interesting, if there are many other systems, galaxies, solar systems, there must be many other planets, if there are many other planets (what was called the plurality of worlds) there must be other civilisations. So did God come down and redeem every single planet through the universe? And Shelley says this is absurd. He uses an extraordinary phrase, he says his works have borne witness against him. So there we're having a beginning of a scientific atheism which we know is a hot subject still right now, and Shelley is only one of those who begin to ask questions because the size of the physical universe and indeed its astonishing beauty makes you think it's different. Where's the creator? Nature is operating differently.

Ramona Koval: Was it dangerous for them to make these assertions, or had all the trials been over by then?

Richard Holmes: No, you wouldn't get people being persecuted, but it was socially very difficult. Shelley was referred to as 'that damned atheist Shelley', and it's quite interesting that the leading scientists...I mean, Herschel avoids in any public statement anything about theology. But, for instance, in Caroline's journal there is not a single mention of God. God does not get in a look-in. Humphrey Davy is also very interesting because what we now call the default mode here was to say, well, God was the creator and science is simply revealing His works in their beauty and their strangeness and He wants us to make that discovery. 'Natural theology' that was called. That was what most scientists officially believed in, but Davy, who writes quite a lot of poetry...

Ramona Koval: Yes, I suppose we couldn't call them renaissance men now, what were they?

Richard Holmes: They were Romantics, they did everything.

Ramona Koval: They could do poetry, they could do science, they had political views, especially Shelley.

Richard Holmes: Very strongly. And a good example of this would be in his scientific lectures, and he was a brilliant lecturer...again, it's one of the themes of the book, it's the first time science is taken out to ordinary people, the public, and the role is to explain. We need to explain, we no longer publish in Latin, we need to explain...in those lectures Humphrey Davy always just refers to the creator, that's all you get, but in his private notebooks and above all in his poems, they're exactly about this, they are 'what is the power that organises this?'

Towards the end of this life he kind of burns out, in a way, he dies very young in his 50s and he knows he's dying, he's got heart disease. It's extraordinary, he disappears into the Austrian Alps with a horse and fishing rod, and he knows he's going to die, and he writes his journals and he writes poems, and he asks this question. My feeling is that his belief in God was no help to him, but belief in science was. He believed he was part of a progressive movement and he contributed, and I find that very, very moving and very modern.

Ramona Koval: He of course developed the Davy lamp which was important for miners, about methane in the mines, and of course we mentioned nitrous oxide for testing on himself and his friends. What a terrible thing that they spent 40 years not working out that this could be an anaesthetic and people were having their breasts off without anaesthetic.

Richard Holmes: Yes, one of those chapters opens with an extraordinary...Fanny Burney having a mastectomy without anaesthetic. The extraordinary courage of that woman. Incidentally, the operation worked, she lived for another 20 years. So Humphrey Davy realises nitrous oxide could be used in surgery but he never follows it up, for a very interesting reason, which is in the book, which is I think there was a love affair with his boss and he needed to go to London to get away from there. Anyway, a tragedy because the whole of the Napoleonic wars, for 40 years there's no anaesthesia, think of the pain.

Ramona Koval: But a lot of people are laughing in London with the laughing gas!

Richard Holmes: But on the other hand, his invention of the miners lamp...and he writes a wonderful thing, I call it one of the great Romantic texts, starting with what happens when a mine blows up and the extraordinary description of that. He'd gone down the mines, he'd seen what damage this caused. And then wonderfully logically he analyses the gas and then he works out how he can construct a very simple, cheap, robust lamp which won't blow up, he never takes out a patent on it. Within four months it's spreading right across England and then right across Europe, they're being used in Poland and Russia. So that's a wonderful example of progressive science. You've got those two stories together.

Ramona Koval: He really discovers electrochemical analysis, which is fantastic, which sort of leads to ideas of animation of the living form, leads to ideas that led to Frankenstein.

Richard Holmes: Yes, electricity, in a way, was both the great discovery of that period, voltaic batteries, big chemical batteries that produce very steady currents. First of all, Davy was using electrolysis really. So he was what's called de-composing. So, chemicals that they knew their nature, they put electric current through them and got totally other chemicals, like potassium, and very vivid explosions and things occurred...so they suddenly opened up the nature of matter.

But also they were saying is this electricity somehow connected with what brings life to animals and to human beings, the spark of life, is it literally a spark? There were a whole series of actual experiments attempting to revive criminals who'd been executed in London and using these big batteries, and the person of course who learns about this is the Shelley family. I've been able to establish that Shelley...it was thought he had tuberculosis, the doctor they consulted was one of the experts looking into...very young, radical French-trained doctor who was very interested in what the life principle was.

Ramona Koval: And when you found that out, that that was the doctor that they consulted, what was the feeling as the biographer?

Richard Holmes: Good, because it fed into...why did Mary Shelley (she was 17, 18 at the time) come to write Frankenstein? Because books don't come out of nowhere, she herself said, and it partly came out of the great discussions with Shelley and Byron, but also out of discussion with William Lawrence. She's discussed this with them all and she's the one who turns it, first of all, into a story, and then into a whole novel, which Shelley her husband edits for her but no more than that. I know there's a controversy about saying that that young woman could never have written that. The manuscript exists, she certainly did write it.

And she gave a particular spin to it because she turned it from being this rather technical question about life into this extraordinary gothic, rather German based drama...it's quite like opera. Also it's quite funny, some of it. I've also been able to find the German scientist that she based this on, a crazed scientist in Munich called Johann Ritter who did exactly this and they knew about him. So that is very interesting, and also this is a woman's take on science, and she brings to it things that other people hadn't thought about. What would happen emotionally to Dr Frankenstein? And also the wonderful creature (not called a monster, the creature) is the most articulate person in her book and has these great...they are arias, about his loneliness.

Ramona Koval: And love.

Richard Holmes: And he needs love, and does he have a soul, which brings us back to the spark of life. He's been reconstructed by the scientist but has he got a human soul? The creature realises that he hasn't got a soul, and only if he can fall in love, if he has someone he can love that's constructed for him will he gain a soul. So that feeds right back into the quite theological questions.

Ramona Koval: I wanted to mention balloons because there are some completely mad ballooning events in this book, and it was sort of an arms race build-up between France and the UK as well. And Shelley is so good about balloons because he sees the possibility.

Richard Holmes: Yes, and he writes poems about them. It comes out of the chemistry, they discovered another kind of gas, hydrogen, which is lighter than air and so on, and they suddenly realised it has huge weight-carrying capacities. The French start this off and they're absolutely brilliant at it because they're so daring and so on, and then the Brits slowly get there. Then there's a race; who can first cross the Channel? It's such a modern thing.

The team is a Brit, a wonderful American who brings all the money (nothing has changed), and also incidentally he has the most brilliant flying kit, the most expensive, these wonderful gloves and helmet and so on, and then with him a French man. Over the other side there's another French guy who is financed by the French government, and they have this race. I won't go into it, but it's a mixture of comedy and tragedy.

Ramona Koval: And what about the combination...somebody's smart idea; let's have a lighter-than-air balloon with hydrogen, and then we can have a hot air balloon just underneath it. And you say it's a devastating combination.

Richard Holmes: It is the most lethal combination. I'm afraid that was the French government guy, who was actually a wonderful man, but he mounted a hydrogen balloon on the top of a hot air balloon, and he took off from Calais and of course it ignited, and he and he co-pilot were killed. It was very tragic actually, and it had a terrible effect; suddenly people saw it was very dangerous, they didn't want to experiment with it anymore.

But I argue that in fact it was one of these things, again, that changed the whole perspective because you suddenly look down on the Earth and you saw it in a different way. Remember, no one had ever done this, and you saw the way rivers and roads...the way towns were spreading out, the way forests were being cut down. Very modern. Suddenly you see the Earth as an organism, and I draw the parallel with the first time the astronauts on the Moon photograph the Blue Planet.

Ramona Koval: Yes, and we all know what happened from that. Richard Holmes' book The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science is published by HarperCollins.

Publications

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

Author: Richard Holmes O.B.E.

Publisher: HarperCollins

Description: ISBN-13 9780 0071 4952 0