The Age of Wonder (66 page)

2

If it was obvious to Banks what a young man should do at five and twenty, it was not so clear to John Herschel. In November 1813, at the age of twenty-one, John had the most serious disagreement of his life with his old father, Sir William. It was over his choice of profession.

John’s career at Cambridge had been a meteoric success. As his aunt Caroline put it dotingly in her journal: ‘from the time he entered the University till his leaving he had gained all the first Prizes without exception’.
²¹
Caroline had remained in his confidence. She was eagerly introduced to his glittering Cambridge friends, among them the mathematician Charles Babbage, future Lucasian Professor, and the Lancashire geologist William Whewell, future Master of Trinity. She had been a guest of honour at his twenty-first birthday dinner, when John presented her with a ‘very handsome’ silver necklace. Typically, she almost immediately gave it away to a niece, ‘I being too old for wearing such ornaments,’ as she remarked coquettishly.
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She was particularly impressed when John and Babbage formed the Analytical Society in 1812. It was dedicated to replacing Newton’s fluxions with the Continental calculus. This was the very subject that she remembered William and his brother Jacob arguing over all those years ago in the little house in Hanover. Now her nephew was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in her view he had the world at his feet.

But being the only child, the prodigy, the apple of his father’s eye, John found it very difficult to speak his mind to either parent. He wrote confidentially to Babbage: ‘God knows how ardently I wish I had ten lives, or that capacity, that enviable capacity, of husbanding every
atom
of time, which some possess, and which enables them to do ten times as much in one life.’
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Finally, shortly before the Christmas vacation of 1813, John plucked up courage and wrote a long letter from Cambridge to his father in Slough. In it he made it clear that he wished either to remain permanently as a Fellow at Cambridge, doing research in pure mathematics, or else to support himself as a lawyer in London. Here he thought he would have ample time to pursue more practical science-notably chemistry and geology-in the evenings and during law vacations. He knew that he was probably heir to a considerable fortune, from both his mother’s and his father’s side. But he believed that it was his duty to acquire an independent livelihood, and that ‘a man should have some ostensible means of getting his bread, by the labour of his head or hand’.

William Herschel was dismayed by this outburst, and wrote back reproachfully. His son was ungrateful, and did not have ‘a just idea’ of his privileged situation. William could approve of neither of John’s proposed careers. He was scathing about the law: ‘It is crooked, tortuous and precarious…Your studies have been of a superior kind.’ The idea that the mere routine of the law would allow ‘unbounded scope’ for science was ‘a most egregious error’. Herschel was also subtly undermining about Cambridge. ‘You say that Cambridge affords you the society of persons of your own age, and your own way of thinking; but know my dear son, that the company and conversation of older, experienced men, of sound judgement, whose way of thinking will often be different from your own, would be much more instructive, and ought to be carefully frequented.’

Finally he urged his son to become-of all things-a clergyman. John must have been astonished to receive a long, passionate letter in support of a career in the Church. But perhaps he also saw the unconscious humour of this recommendation. The real advantages, as his father solemnly enumerated them, emerged in a list of ever ascending and increasingly secular importance: ‘A clergyman…has time for the attainment of the more elegant branches of literature, for poetry, for music, for drawing, for natural history, for short and pleasant excursions of travelling, for being acquainted with the spirit of the law of his country, for history, for political economy, for mathematics, for astronomy, for metaphysics, and for being an author upon any one subject in which…[he is] qualified to excell.’
²⁴

John quickly replied, explaining frankly that he could not believe in Anglican doctrine. But Herschel was quite equal to this apparently insuperable objection. ‘You say the church requires the necessity of keeping up a perpetual system of self-deception, or something worse for the purpose of supporting theological tenets of any set of men. The most conscientious clergyman may preach a sermon full of sound morality, and no one will enquire into theological subtleties.’

This attitude infuriated John, and he remonstrated with his father, coming close to accusing him of hypocrisy. Herschel’s dismay now turned to anger. ‘You say [you] cannot help regarding the source of church emolument with an evil eye. The miserable tendency of such a sentiment, the injustice and the arrogance it expresses, are beyond my conception.’ There was now a grave risk of a serious breach between father and son, as there would be so frequently among a whole later generation of Victorian families over exactly such matters.

After four days’ reflection, the old astronomer-William Herschel was now aged seventy-five, and increasingly fragile-suddenly recognised the fatal gleam of filial disaffection, the risk of a real rupture. Perhaps he remembered the arguments with his own family years ago in Hanover; or perhaps Caroline reminded him of them. At all events, he wrote again to John in a chastened and forgiving mood. Nothing he had said was intended ‘to breathe the spirit of bitterness’ against his son. He simply wished to hear ‘everything you have to say on the subject’. He loved him unconditionally. ‘I can as little doubt your sincere attachment to your old philosophical father, as he does of your perfect returning affection.’ His mother added soothing postscripts to Herschel’s letters, assuring John that his father was not ‘really angry’, and adding pathetically: ‘Cannot you dine on Xmas day? You would make us all happy.’
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In the end John consented to come down from Cambridge and have a long, frank discussion with his father about the future. Herschel reassured him that there need be no profound disagreement, carefully pointing out in one of his letters that he had deliberately never previously discussed religion with his son: ‘I wished to leave you at liberty to follow your own sentiments.’ He did not believe they could possibly disagree on that subject, being ‘two unprejudiced persons with natural good sense’. In effect, he had no more belief in Anglican doctrines than his son had.

Wisely, Herschel decided to give John his head, and bide his time. His son would not have to pursue the Church. Instead, he could go to London with Babbage, attend regular meetings of the Royal Society, and try out a legal career at Lincoln’s Inn. As Herschel suspected, the trial of London legal life did not last long, and was succeeded by a mathematical tutorship and then a full Fellowship back at St John’s, Cambridge. ‘I am determined,’ John wrote rather desperately to Babbage in March 1815, ‘as the profession is of my own choosing, much against the wish of my parents, that I will pursue it in good earnest.’
²⁶
But he was unhappy and drifting.

In the summer of 1816 John took a holiday with his father, now aged seventy-seven, to Dawlish on the idyllic Devon coast. For several evenings they sat out under the stars, with rebellious Queen Cassiopia very bright overhead, and gently talked things over. Eventually John submitted. With that extraordinary lifelong determination of his, William Herschel had once again quietly achieved his real objective: to have John come home, and pursue a full-time career in science. On this basis, Herschel agreed to provide his son with an immediate and generous private income, so that he would be free to pursue pure research in whatever field he chose. In return John found himself volunteering to assist his ageing father with his astronomical work, and take over the running of the forty-foot and the observatory at Slough.

Caroline had faithfully supported John throughout these discussions and waverings. Very often John’s afternoons would end in her lodgings at Slough, where he could take tea, let off steam and discuss the leading scientific questions of the day. Then at dusk they would all three-father, son and comet-hunting aunt-meet at the foot of the great telescope, and work would begin. In December 1819 John presented his first paper to the Royal Society, correcting Newton on the subject of polarised light. Joseph Banks observed that it caused a stir among the mathematicians, and ‘much interest among the Polarizers’. A new man of science was launched.
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3

William Herschel’s reputation was now spreading rapidly among other young men. Percy Bysshe Shelley, fascinated by science since his earliest days at Eton and Oxford, was driven to revolutionary thoughts. At the age of eighteen, Shelley had been expelled from university for publishing a pamphlet, ‘The Necessity of Atheism’. At twenty-one, he drew on Herschel’s work (as well as Godwin and several French
philosophes
) to write a series of free-thinking prose ‘Notes’ which he appended to his epic poem
Queen Mab,
published in 1813. This technique of adding long, discursive notes to the poetry was imitated from Erasmus Darwin’s
Botanic Garden,
though in Shelley’s case they were often angry and polemical.

Shelley used Herschel’s vision of an open-ended solar system, and an unimaginably expanded universe, to attack religious belief. His arguments went as follows. The cosmos as revealed by science must contain many thousands of different nebular systems, and therefore millions of habitable planets, so it was impossible to sustain a narrow, religious concept of one Almighty Christian Redeemer. Since there would be so many other ‘fallen’ worlds to redeem, the idea of God being born and crucified on each planet became absurd. As Shelley put it provokingly, ‘His Works have borne witness against Him.’ He wrote a particularly fierce note ‘On the Plurality of Worlds’ in
Queen Mab:

The indefinite immensity of the universe, is the most aweful subject of contemplation…It is impossible to believe that the Spirit that pervades this infinite machine begat a son upon the body of a Jewish woman…The works of His fingers have borne witness against him…Sirius is supposed to be 54 trillion miles from the Earth…Millions and millions of suns are ranged around us, all attended by innumerable worlds, yet calm, regular, and harmonious, all keeping the paths of immutable Necessity.
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Shelley’s later prose writings, still little-known, continue these materialist ideas, and explore the implications of contemporary scientific research with candour and ferocity. In his ‘Essay on a Future State’ (1819), he argued that the scientific and anecdotal evidence for the total cessation of all mental and bodily functions after death was definitive. There
was
no Future State.
²⁹

In his teasing ‘Essay on the Devil and Devils’, Shelley used the ideas of Herschel and Laplace to satirise beliefs in a geocentric cosmology. ‘Are Earthlings or Jupetrians more worthy of visitations by the Devil…?’ He was also amused to see that Herschel always believed that the sun was inhabited, and asks if this was, after all, the most sensible location for Hell.
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Many other scientific ideas also appeared in his poems of 1819-21, especially in
Prometheus Unbound,
which revels in Herschel’s new cosmology and Davy’s chemistry.

In Act I, the earth speaks of her own birth struggles, witnessed by the rest of the galaxy:

Then see those million worlds which burn and roll
Around us; their inhabitants beheld
My sphere’ed light wane in wide heaven…
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In Act II, Asia describes the earliest, painful emergence of human tribes upon the planet, in terms that recall Davy’s account of man before the advent of science and hope:

…and the unseasonable seasons drove
With alternating shafts of frost and fire,
Their shelterless, pale tribes to mountain caves:
And in their desert hearts fierce wants he sent…
Prometheus saw, and waked the legioned Hopes.
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In Act IV, Panthea describes electrical energy in terms that almost seem to anticipate the notion of an atomic nucleus surrounded by electrons:

A sphere, which is as many thousand spheres,
Solid as crystal, yet through all its mass
Flow, as through empty space, music and light:
Ten thousand orbs involving and involved,
Purple and azure, white, and green, and golden,
Sphere within sphere; and every space between
Peopled with unimaginable shapes…
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But perhaps most striking of all is the love song that Shelley gives to the moon to sing to planet earth. Though a pure, traditional love lyric, this elegantly includes scientific notions of gravitational orbit, tidal attractions and magnetic fields. Moreover, the moon’s lyric is given an extraordinary kind of hypnotic
humming
sound-the sound of spinning through space.

Thou art speeding round the sun
Brightest world of many a one;
Green and azure sphere which shinest
With a light which is divinest
Among all the lamps of Heaven
To whom light and life is given;
I, thy crystal paramour
Borne beside thee by a power
Like the polar Paradise,
Magnet-like of lovers’ eyes;
I, a most enamoured maiden
Whose weak brain is overladen
With the pleasure of her love,
Maniac-like around thee move
Gazing, an insensiate bride,
On thy form from every side…
^34
♣