The explorer, the scientific observer, the literary reader, experience the Sublime: a moment of revelation into the idea of the unbounded, the infinite.

In such an environment, then, it is little wonder that scientific publications were devoured by the public and their authors aspired to a high style. Holmes shows that some of the neglected classics of romantic writing were in fact written by those whom we would call scientists.

But perhaps the most famous pieces of writing from this time are attacks on science for its materialism and atheism; for crudely stripping mystery and wonder from the world. Yet as Holmes shows, much of the serious criticism did not come from wishy-washy anxiety or wilful ignorance, but from intimacy with science. Frankenstein, for example, is not anti-science, but an informed fictional account of a debate within science. It is this point, more than anything else, which dramatises the danger of living in a society where the sciences and humanities have split into ‘two cultures’: popular culture has inherited much of the ‘terror’ of the romantic period, less of its curiosity.

The Age of Wonder is fascinating in its own right; but more than that it serves as a model of how science should be taught and explained to a large audience, whatever the period and whatever the subject. We are reminded daily of the terror of science; innocent wonder is no longer possible when we have seen the alliance of barbarism and technology. Recovering and communicating the beauties and truths of modern science, uniting the two cultures, awaits its genius. This book provides the inspiration.

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