I have been reading a lot about the Romantic period (1750-1830) and am intrigued with the connections between science and the arts, especially literature. it is the time of Sir Joseph Banks, Humphrey Davy, William Herschel and Michael Faraday on the one hand and the famous "bad boys" of poetry on the other, like Byron, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth. It was a time of celebrity, except that you had to have done something to be famous for, not just have a pretty face and lots of money. The really interesting thing is that despite the growing complexity of science a wide range of people were deeply interested in it and were not only invited to contribute, but spent time considering it carefully and then making either a scientific contribution or a social one. Coleridge (Rime of the Ancient mariner) took a great interest in Astronomy and had face to face discussions with Herschel. Herschel mused on the possibilities of infinite space and the evolution of the universe and these ideas were commented on in poems and essays by others. Byron visited the observatory and was a well regarded commentator on the social aspects of science. Both Herschel and Davy wrote poems, none well known today and mostly unpublished but illustrating the emotions they felt about their work and the world about them.
Davy knew most of the poets and authors of his day and spent a number of summers mountain climbing or fishing with Wordsworth and Scott as well as socialising with Coleridge and Keats. Keats began his poetic career while still at university, writing a poem to Newton, whose statue was outside his study window and later was a medical student at Guy's hospital. Coleridge attended all of Davy's early Royal Institution lectures and wrote long critiques of them, as did Faraday. Davy's younger brother was a doctor and later became Wordsworth's GP. Coleridge later attended early meetings of the British Assoc for the Advancement of Science and was a valued adviser. At the time discussions were rife about the human soul, creation, evolution (even before Darwin) and whether pain was a purely human emotion. Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" was written with these discussion in mind. She had either witnessed dissection of bodies or had been told about them by friends. Electricity and its possible uses was very much a "hot topic".
Byron, Keats and Shelley were more or less atheists and used a lot of ideas collected from the contemporary men of science to justify their position. The Establishment was stoutly Anglican and scientists had to be careful how they phrased their cosmological and medical theories as their funding was increasingly necessary and was controlled by Royal institutions which could not upset the Kings public position on religion.
Amongst all this there was the growing fashion of experimenting with drugs. Davy produced huge quantities of "laughing gas", initially for research reasons , but quickly began using it for fun and became something of an addict. Later he became addicted to morphia. Most of the other celebs were also into some type of drugs; Coleridge was a heavy user of opium and is possibly the first celeb to undergo "rehab" to try to cure the habit. Almost all the others used it to some extent and of course in the period which followed the Victorians were ready to throw in laudanum or other opium products when they had a "bad day" or need at lift.
