8
John Herschel’s marriage of 1829, according to his aunt Caroline’s prescription, had given him both emotional stability and independence, but did not cramp his scientific ambitions. While Margaret produced a large family, Herschel continued to plan the astronomical expedition to the southern hemisphere, now including his wife and children as an essential part of the scheme. In 1832 he turned down repeated offers of government sponsorship, determined to avoid any imperial implications of the kind that had been so fatal to Mungo Park’s second expedition.
He also briskly rejected a proposal from the Royal Society to underwrite part of his expenses. He wished to make himself ‘responsible to no one for the results of my expedition’, and to retain ‘the unconditional power of prosecuting it or abandoning it at any moment that it may suit my caprice’. He would not even consider sailing in a Royal Navy ship, except in the unlikely event of a declaration of war with another maritime power. ‘But on the other hand, in that event, the King’s ships would have other fish to fry than landing stargazers at the world’s end.’69
Like Banks before him, John Herschel had the freedom of action that belonged to a wealthy man. He had inherited £25,000 under his father’s Will ten years before, and further lands and property were now left him by his mother, Lady Herschel, on her death in 1832.70 So he confidently committed all his own resources to the project. After considering the peripatetic possibilities of South America, with thoughts of Banks and Humboldt in mind, he finally decided to set up a full-scale observatory and scientific station in South Africa.
On 13 November 1833 John and his family left Portsmouth for passage to Cape Town. The dismantled twenty-foot telescope was put aboard in a series of padded packing cases, and his declared intention was a major astronomical expedition to observe and map all the stars of the southern hemisphere, just as his father Sir William had done for the northern. Perhaps it was no coincidence that this was the very scheme that Sir Joseph Banks had been dreaming about in the last months before his death.
The Herschels remained at Cape Town for four years, mapping and cataloguing the stars and nebulae, and botanising in the hills above Cape Town. Their packed notebooks show a ceaseless family activity: daily meteorological observations, zoological and botanical notes, and hundreds of beautiful plant drawings made, with infinite care, using a camera lucida.71 Throughout this time their correspondence with Caroline was never discontinued, and John confided to her that these were the happiest years of his whole life. The young and vivacious Lady Herschel also wrote frequently to her ‘aunt’. She acted as hostess to numerous scientific visitors, and often proudly recalled her father-in-law Sir William Herschel, and ‘his tough little German sister’.72
One of their most notable visitors was young Charles Darwin, on his way back from the Galapagos islands in June 1836. He wrote to his sister as the Beagle docked at the Cape of Good Hope: ‘I have heard so much about [Herschel’s] eccentric but very amiable manners, that I have a high curiosity to see the Great Man.’73 He was not disappointed. Always on the lookout for fine specimens, Darwin tracked Sir John to his ‘most retired charming situation’ six miles up country from the main settlement, in a remote clearing surrounded by fir and oak trees, with the twenty-foot installed like some heathen totem pole at the centre.
Herschel himself was never still, an intense, animated figure obsessively bustling about with innumerable projects and observations — in fact just like his father. He appeared ‘to find time for everything’, even collecting rare Cape bulbs and carpentering bits of furniture. Darwin, who always valued a tranquil and ruminative lifestyle, initially found Herschel’s ceaseless activity intimidating and ‘rather awful’. But gradually he saw that the Great Man was ‘exceedingly good natured’, that his wife Lady Herschel was kindness itself, and that the whole Cape project was truly astonishing. He counted this meeting with Sir J. at this early moment in his career ‘a memorable piece of good fortune’.74
Herschel’s expedition to the Cape came to represent for Darwin the important ideal of the independent working scientist, which inspired the rest of his life. On his return to London, his friend Charles Lyell wrote to Darwin: ‘Don’t accept any official scientific place, if you can avoid it, and tell no one that I gave you this advice … My question is, whether the time annihilated by learned bodies is balanced by the good they do? Fancy exchanging Herschel at the Cape for Herschel as President of the Royal Society — which he so narrowly escaped being! … Work exclusively for yourself and for science … Do not prematurely incur the honour or penalty of official dignities.’75
9
Several times Caroline Herschel — by then in her eighties — imagined sailing out to join John’s family with her seven-foot telescope, hoping she might ‘shake off some 30 years from my shoulders that I might accompany you on your voyage’. It would be like reviving the old days with her brother at Bath. Her sense of frustration expressed itself in a deliberate, comic return to the broken English of her first years in England. ‘Ja! If I was 30 or 40 years junger and could go too? In Gottes namen!’76
Caroline did discover, however, a startling new skill in the art of public relations. She learned to feed the local Hanover newspapers with scientific tales from the Cape, in such a way that they were soon being picked up by the international press. Thus Herschel’s work had a following right across Europe. Perhaps she had learned the importance of good publicity from her old friend Sir Joseph Banks in Soho Square. One of her earliest coups appeared in The Times for 27 June 1834.
The Hamburg Correspondent … has the following from Hanover. The friends of astronomy will be pleased to learn that Sir John Herschel has written from the Cape of Good Hope to his aunt, Miss Caroline Herschel, resident here. He has already fixed his Astronomical instruments, especially his 20 foot telescope, and ere now has begun his observations … He resides in the country, about five miles from Cape-Town, near the Table Mountain, in an enchanting valley; lofty trees, rare and beautiful shrubs and flowering plants surround his dwelling; his eye gazes upon clear and cloudless skies, studded with those innumerable stars that are the objects of his elevated pursuits. He is sanguine in his hopes of making important discoveries.77
Sometimes these news stories moved slightly beyond Caroline’s control. The following year, on 25 August 1835, the New York Sun ran a huge splash scoop that Sir John Herschel had finally proved one of his father’s most daring astronomical speculations to be true. Herschel had discovered life on the moon! The highly dramatic story held the front page of the newspaper for four days, doubled its circulation, and set off a frenzy of excitement from the east coast to the west. Each day the New York Sun gave more and more details of Herschel’s observations: mighty forests growing in the lunar craters, strange plants, fishes, beaver-like animals (all enormous because of the low lunar gravity), and finally, small apelike creatures with highly intelligent faces and convenient bat-like wings, flitting through the tenuous lunar atmosphere.78
Before the Great Moon Discovery story was blown, a mid-West preacher was collecting subscriptions to send a crate of Bibles to the poor benighted lunar men, and Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore was considering the possibilities of a whole new genre of fiction: the science fiction hoax (he would launch it with a vivid — but entirely fictitious — account of the first balloon crossing of the Atlantic the following year).79 Herschel privately dismissed the whole affair as ‘incoherent ravings’, and calmly refuted it in an Olympian open letter to the Parisian astronomer François Arago, published in the Athenaeum.80
But Margaret Herschel was more amused. She called the story ‘a very clever piece of imagination’, and wrote appreciatively to Caroline. ‘The whole description is so well clenched with minute details of workmanship … that the New Yorkists were not to be blamed for actually believing it as they did for 48 hours. — It is only a pity that it is not true: but if grandsons stride on as grandfathers have done, as wonderful things may yet be accomplished.’81
> John Herschel’s time in South Africa, as significant in its own way as Charles Darwin’s Beagle voyage, confirmed him as the greatest astronomer and general scientist of his generation. On his return to England in May 1838 he was made a baronet in time to attend Queen Victoria’s coronation in Westminster Abbey. Sir John Herschel was elected President of the Royal Society, awarded a second Copley Medal, and by the 1850s was recognised as the leading public scientist of mid-Victorian England. His kindly face, encircled by a sunlike corona of white hair, was famously photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron, using a process that he himself had partly invented.♣
10
The great forty-foot was eventually dismantled at Slough on New Year’s Eve, 1840. It had become the relic of a past age, and besides, it shook dangerously and moaned as the winter wind blew through its ancient timbers and rigging, like a ship heading out into a stormy sea.
Sir John Herschel did not forget all the hopes it had symbolised, the great names it had attracted, and the celebrations it had inspired. Having had the scaffolding safely removed, he laid the huge, battered old tube out on the frosty grass, and held a last party inside it, with drinks and toasts and candlelight.82
He marked its departure not with an elegant mathematical calculation, but with a boisterous chant, ‘Elegy for the Old Forty-Foot’:
In the old Telescope’s Tube we sit
And the shades of the Past around us flit!
His Requiem sing we with shout and din
While the Old Year goes out and the New comes in.
Merrily, merrily, let us all sing
And make the Old Telescope rattle and ring!
♣ The troubling image of a shy, reluctant, persecuted female Nature who is crudely questioned and even physically assaulted by an exclusively male Science now begins to appear. It slowly replaces the older Romantic image of a mysterious and seductive Nature, at least a goddess, who is infinitely more powerful than her merely human petitioners and questioners. The rhetoric of assault, molestation, penetration and even rape of Nature by ‘Science’ develops, though partly unconsciously, throughout the nineteenth century, and was keenly identified by twentieth-century feminist criticism. See for example Anne K. Mellor, ‘A Feminist Critique of Science’ (1988). It was also popularised, as well as vulgarised, in various other art forms, as for example in the sculpture of the fin-de-siècle French artist Louis Ernest Barrias. His pair of metre-high bronze statues, Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science (1890), one partly shrouded and the other completely nude, won the Grand Prix at the Exposition Universelle for 1905.
♣ Unlike Harrison’s chronometer, Herschel’s telescope or Davy’s voltaic battery, Babbage’s ‘computer’ had no immediate application that officialdom could see or even imagine, though Babbage claimed correctly that it would transform the calculations for logarithms, astronomical tables, engineering construction models, map-making and marine data. Coleridge once said that radically new poetry ‘must create the taste whereby it is appreciated’. Perhaps Babbage believed the equivalent of radically new science. See Jenny Uglow and Francis Spufford, Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention (1996).
♣ The identification of Joseph Fraunhofer’s lines — similar to a supermarket barcode — was the first stage towards spectography, the method by which astrophysicists would eventually analyse the chemical composition of the stars. Particular elements — e.g. hydrogen – occupy particular places in the spectrum of starlight, and can thereby be identified across enormous distances in space; in fact across the entire visible universe. The implications of spectography are beautifully explored in the ‘Barcodes in the Stars’ chapter of Richard Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow (1998), which ends with a long quotation from James Thomson’s poem ‘To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton’ (1727).
♣ Goethe’s Treatise on Colour (1810), which criticised Newton’s ‘mechanical’ analysis of the rainbow spectrum, remained a totem of German Naturphilosophie, though it caused increasing irritation in empirical British scientific circles. Yet Goethe explored such suggestive ideas as ‘the sensory-moral effects of colour’, the ‘spiral tendency in vegetation’, and the effect of weather (clouds, sunlight, changing barometric pressure) on mental states and moods. Goethe was wonderfully perceptive about what he insisted was the unity of the scientific and artistic sensibility. He wrote an outstanding short essay on the delicate balance between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ observation of data: ‘Empirical Observation and Science’ (1798). ‘The observer never sees the pure phenomenon with his own eyes; rather, much depends on his mood, the state of his senses, the light, the air, the weather, the physical object, how it is handled, and a thousand other circumstances.’ See Goethe, Collected Works, vol 12: Scientific Studies (1988). Humboldt also praised him: ‘Goethe, whom the great creations of the poetic Fancy have not prevented from penetrating the arcana of Nature’ (Berlin Academy conference, 1828).
♣ There was a premonition in an anonymous ‘evolutionary’ book, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which caused a sensation in 1844. But Darwin had worked by John Herschel’s rules of pure induction: assembling a mass of precise data (e.g. the evolution of finches’ beaks) until the simplest and most convincing hypothesis emerged. Consequently the great mainstay of so many scientists — Natural Theology and the Argument by Design — was worse than untrue: it was unnecessary. The spiritual upheavals this caused devout Victorian scientists were famously described by Edmund Gosse in Father and Son (1908). But it was the earlier, preliminary impact of geology, on ordinary thinking men and women, which was recorded by Tennyson in several sections (56 and 102) of In Memoriam (1833-50). The subject and inspiration of this poem was his Cambridge friend Arthur Hallam, who died in exactly this year of the third BAAS meeting.
‘So careful of the type?’ but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go …’
(In Memoriam, Section 56)
♣ Entire books have been dedicated to following through the minatory influence of Frankenstein’s Creature over the last 190 years, especially through films and popular journalism. We may expect a minor earthquake on the bicentenary of publication in 2018. Suffice it to note here that the current discussion of GM crops — undoubtedly vital to sustain global harvests and reduce dependency on crop-spraying — often refers to them as ‘Frankenstein foods’ (for example, the leading article from Country Life, April 2008); and that the Guardians excellent column ‘Bad Science’ has an image of Frankenstein’s Monster as its logo.
♣ The romantic tale of Paulina Jermyn, the beautiful seventeen-year-old botanist who fell in love at the 1832 British Association meeting at Oxford, perhaps deserves wider currency. See David Wooster, Paula Trevelyan (1879).
♣ This benign and eccentric image defined the Victorian ideal of the scientist, just as the later faintly surreal images of Albert Einstein — riding a bicycle or putting his tongue out — defined the twentieth-century one. The current images of Stephen Hawking, brilliant but paralysed and gargoyle-like in his wheelchair, perhaps better express the uncertainty of contemporary attitudes to science. The wheelchair itself takes us back to Dr Strangelove, but also eventually returns us to Sir Joseph Banks, rolling briskly into one of his scientific breakfasts in Soho Square, keen to meet his next young protégé and launch a new project ‘for the Benefit of all mankind’.
Epilogue
I was fifty-four when I gave my first lecture at the Royal Institution, Albemarle Street. It was a formal Friday Night Discourse, with an invited audience in evening dress, and I was asked to put on an unaccustomed dinner jacket and bow tie. My announced subject was ‘The Coleridge Experiment’. The aim was to explore that particularly controversial meeting between science and poetry when Humphry Davy, shortly after starting the Bakerian Lectures in 1808, had gallantly risked his reputation by bringing Coleridge — then in the depth of opium addiction and
a fierce marital crisis — to give an extended series of fourteen lectures on the Imagination, before a distinguished invited scientific audience at the Royal Institution. My own lecture was intended to describe the utter chaos that had ensued, but also the few wonderful visionary moments that had been sparked by Coleridge, and which had subsequently shaped much of the modern concept of creativity, and the notion of the imaginative leap.♣
Just before starting, I stood behind the closed double doors to the historic lecture theatre, trembling slightly as I heard the solemn growl of the audience on the other side. I was very conscious that I was about to step out onto the very dais where Davy, Faraday and Coleridge himself had once lectured. The Director, standing quietly by my elbow, whispered encouragingly to me. He also wondered, in passing, if I had been told about the atomic clock? No, I had not been told about the atomic clock.
The Director explained that there was an atomic clock which buzzed loudly in the lecture theatre after exactly fifty minutes. Lecturers were expected to end their talks on this signal. With the first stirrings of real panic, I murmured that this could presumably be treated as a sort of early-warning system for prolix speakers. Well, yes, indeed it could; but it was rather more a question of desirable scientific precision. Indeed, the tradition was that the speaker should fit his lecture to exactly fifty minutes, no longer and no shorter, and should immediately wind up his talk when the buzzer sounded.