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