Holmes focuses particularly on the lives and works of
Sir Joseph Banks, the astronomers
William and
Caroline Herschel, and chemist
Humphry Davy. Other profiles include African explorer
Mungo Park. There is a chapter on the early
history of ballooning including pioneers
Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier,
Vincent Lunardi,
Jean-Pierre Blanchard and
James Sadler. He also describes the relationships between the scientists of that time, and the early days of the
Royal Society. A recurring theme of the book is the relation between science and poetry in the Romantic era.
John Keats, in “
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, compares his first encounter with Homer’s poetry to Herschel’s
discovery of Uranus: “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/ When a new planet swims into his ken.” Holmes writes that “Among other things, Keats had combined science and poetry in a new and intensely exciting way.” (207) Keats would express negative feelings about science in “
Lamia”, where he accused
Newton, by “unweav[ing] the rainbow”, of reducing it “to the dull catalogue of common things.” Another Romantic poet,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, said he attended Humphry Davy’s lectures “to enlarge my stock of metaphors.” Davy, Mungo Park and the Arctic explorer
William Parry are alluded to by
Byron in his satiric epic
Don Juan as emblems of the age. Holmes looks at how the debates around
Vitalism contributed to
Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein: “Mary’s brilliance was to see that these weighty and often alarming ideas could be given highly suggestive, imaginative and even playful form... She would develop exactly what
William Lawrence had dismissed in his lectures as a ‘hypothesis or fiction.’ Indeed, it was to be an utterly new form of fiction – the
science fiction novel.” (327) Holmes bookends his narrative with voyages of discovery. It opens in 1769, with Joseph Banks traveling to
Tahiti on
HMS Endeavour. In the last chapter, he describes
John Herschel's establishment of an observatory in
Cape Town to catalogue the stars of the southern hemisphere in 1833. In 1836, Herschel was visited by a young
Charles Darwin, returning from the
Galápagos on
HMS Beagle. The book was published by HarperCollins in 2008 in the UK, and by Pantheon in the US in 2009. ==Reception==