Alex: What do smart girls get?
Phil: Cats, mostly.
That exchange leaped out at me while watching Modern Family (ep. Mother Tucker) the other day on Hulu. I adore that show, but I don’t love the smart sister/dumb sister routine.
Today on my way into the coffee shop I picked up Age of Wonders from the backseat of my car, where it’s been lurking balefully for months. Result? I haven’t touched any of the grading that needs to be finished before I sleep tonight, and I only made a small dent into writing a personal statement.
Although you may deny it, I’m pretty sure this book was written mostly for me. I’m pretty sure I may be the only person to do a tiny fist pump of joy when I saw the review – Sir Joseph Banks! Mungo Park! Those two names alone made my heart beat like a tiny sparrow, because I knew it means a John Ledyard reference somewhere (yup- pg. 212).
I read a few chapters only – I’m about halfway through the book – but came across some of the delightful sort of gems that I love.
Here are two anecdotes that I loved:
1. One of the more prominent balloonists during the hot-air balloon mania that swept France and England in the 18th century was a baker in the town of Oxford named James Sadler. He was a quiet, married guy with kids but at age 31 became swept up with a passion for aerostation and turned the backroom of his bakery into a workshop. He lost many of his scientific instruments in a treacherous flight, but Samuel Johnson -at the very end of his life – gave him a hugely expensive baromenter. Sadler kept it and used it for decades. Evidently Samuel Johnson was not a big proponent of hot-air balloons, which were once a huge mania in France and England. I love the idea of the quiet baker beginning a wild venture in his thirties, but the gift from Johnson is especially wonderful because he didn’t care for ballooning at all – he thought it was all show and no science.
2. In reading about astronomer William Herschel and his famed forty-foot goliath of a telescope, I loved to see that among the many luminaries who traipsed out to see it during construction was our own John Adams. He came unannounced and had an intense debate with the scientist on the theological implications of the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Do such intellectually engaged politicians exist anymore?
What really caught my interest, though, was talk of Teh Ladies.
First, ladies prominent in the life of Sir Joseph Banks, and second, Caroline Herschel. If I was the fiction writing sort, I know exactly who I’d write a novel about.
To begin with, Banks. He first came to my attention years ago when I read Caroline Alexander’s excellent Bounty. That was a pivotal book for me in a couple of ways – it simultaneous capped a lifelong fascination that begin with my first reading of Mutiny on the Bounty, and opened the door to the flood of naval exploration books I read in the Unemployment Time, which culminated in the Summer of John Ledyard. Alexander put him on my radar, but it turns out that if you read anything at all about science or exploration during the mid 1700s to the early 1800s, his name is inevitable.
Banks sailed on the first great voyage of Captain Cook as a young man. That voyage, and especially the time he spent in Tahiti, fundamentally changed his outlook on life and pointed his life on a much different path than might have been expected for a moneyed young country gentleman. He would go on to transform Kew Gardens and become the president of the Royal Society. He was especially good at spotting talented, and cultivated innumerable scientific projects and expeditions. It was he who sent Lt. Bligh on his ill-fated breadfruit voyage to Tahiti, and who sent Ledyard to his ill-fated voyage of discovery to Africa. (sidenote#1: Banks, Bligh and Ledyard all sailed with Cpt. Cook, but none of them on the same voyage) . (sidenote#2: that makes it sound like he sent everyone to ignominious fates, but it really was just those two. and maybe a few others. *sigh*).
Anyway, before his voyage with Cook, when Banks was still a young man, he had an unofficial understanding with a young woman named Harriet Blosset.
Yeeeeesh.
I spent so much time on sidenotes that my coffee shop is closing. Will continue later.
Is that what the kids where calling it, then-a-days?