Stuart Clark
THE SUN KINGS
The unexpected tragedy of Richard Carrington and the tale of how modern
astronomy began
224pp. Princeton University Press. £15.95 (US $24.95).
978 0 691 12660 9
Reviewing A. C. Crombie’s popular work Augustine to Galileo more than fifty
years ago, Lynn Thorndike lamented its “somewhat sensational” title, while
conceding that it might perhaps be acceptable “as good bait to attract
Philistines, wayfarers, and those who stand idle at the eleventh hour, into
the vineyard of the history of science”. We can only guess at what Thorndike
would have said about our present ways of baiting titles. Guessing at their
intended meanings is often even harder. The nineteenth-century amateur
astronomer Richard Carrington is Stuart Clark’s Sun King. Clark’s title
tacitly admits others to that regal status, but the final boast of his
subtitle (“how modern astronomy began”) becomes more subdued in the text,
where he writes that “with the luxury of a century and a half’s hindsight,
we can now see that the Carrington flare was a tipping point in astronomy”.
There is such a thing as a quiet revolution, but the quieter the revolution,
the harder it is to justify calling it a revolution. One that has gone
unnoticed for a century and a half certainly needs much careful justifying,
but Clark never really tries. He concentrates instead on a colourful story,
its before and after, and only hints at grand conclusions.
The “Carrington flare” appeared on the morning of September 1, 1859. An
apparent explosion taking place above a group of sunspots, it lasted only a
few minutes. Carrington measured its position and calculated its speed,
which turned out to be around 420,000 miles per hour, something that was
astonishing in itself. It eventually emerged that the magnetic instruments
at Kew Observatory had been much disturbed on that day, and that a magnetic
storm had disrupted world telegraphic communication, even causing fires in
some telegraph offices and harm to operators. Spectacular blood-red aurorae
had begun to appear far outside their customary limits. It was already known
that the Earth’s magnetic field fluctuates periodically, and that sunspot
numbers do likewise. Edward Sabine, with the help of data obtained earlier
in Germany by Heinrich Schwabe, had speculated that the two phenomena were
in step, but Carrington was cautious. While it was slowly dawning on the
astronomical community that there must be some sort of physical link between
the Earth and Sun, over and above gravitational interaction and the passage
of radiant heat, we cannot honestly give the palm for this important
discovery to him, or even think of it as a single discovery. Carrington’s
achievement was to fill in the details with extraordinary thoroughness, by
means of long studies of the Sun’s surface.
A few modern astronomers will be aware of Carrington’s painstaking recording
of sunspots, though most are likely to know his name only in connection with
his way of numbering solar rotations. There are good historical reasons for
remembering him. He was one of several great Victorian amateurs whose wealth
gave them access to the upper echelons of the sciences. After reading
Mathematics at Cambridge, Carrington took a post for a time at the
observatory of the University of Durham. His love affair with solar
astronomy began in earnest in 1851, when he was in his mid-twenties. In that
year he financed his own expedition to Sweden to witness a total eclipse of
the Sun, and published a detailed account with illustrations of the strange
tongues of pink flame (prominences) he had seen at the Sun’s limb when the
eclipse was total. A year later, unhappy with his position and dissatisfied
with the Durham instruments, he left to build his own observatory at
Redhill, near Reigate, with a loan from his father, a wealthy brewer.
Clark dwells on the solar researches of Carrington and others, emphasizing the
contrast between theirs and the more mundane work of the old observatories.
The ghost of Sir George Biddell Airy, the resolute and conservative
Astronomer Royal, must by now be reconciled to the largely unmerited
opprobrium of modern historians. Carrington’s early work at Redhill,
resulting in an important catalogue of stars, was so little different in
general character from Airy’s that Airy criticized it for lacking
originality. Even so, published with Admiralty support in 1857 it brought
Carrington the Royal Astronomical Society’s gold medal and Fellowship of the
Royal Society.
Star positions notwithstanding, sunspots and solar phenomena were Carrington’s
forte, as Clark makes abundantly clear. Oddly enough for a historian, he
overlooks the importance of Carrington’s first serious studies of sunspots,
using archives of drawings of the solar disc done by earlier astronomers.
Only when the Redhill observatory was ready did he supplement these with his
own. A sadder lacuna is where Clark gives Galileo’s telescopic sunspot
observations pride of place, without even mentioning Thomas Harriot, whose
observations make a natural starting point for any historical account.
Harriot not only saw the spots first (December 8, 1610), but left a mass of
meticulous sunspot counts and other accurate data for the solar rotation
rates. Clark seems not to be aware that Carrington himself made copies of
Harriot’s records in 1857, giving one to J. R. Wolf and another to the Royal
Astronomical Society.
The death of Carrington’s father committed him to running their Brentford
brewery. Depressed, he sold up at Redhill in 1861, after his hopes to obtain
posts at Oxford and Cambridge had been dashed. He was supported in his
applications by some very distinguished astronomers – though not by “the
founder of the scouting movement”. (The Baden Powell in question –
theologian, astronomer and Oxford Professor of Geometry – died when his more
famous son was only three.) Fate decreed that the Radcliffe Observatory at
Oxford should acquire Carrington’s transit circle, having passed over the
man himself for a much inferior candidate. His behaviour became increasingly
cantankerous, and at the Royal Astronomical Society he quarrelled bitterly
with Charles Pritchard as well as Airy, who was probably not far from the
mark in describing Carrington as “truly insane”.
Not entirely abandoning his old ambitions, Carrington soon established another
observatory, of unusual design, at Churt, near Farnham. He lived the life of
a semi-recluse there, though he used the observatory relatively little. And
then came the “unexpected tragedy” of Clark’s title. In 1868, at the age of
forty-two, Carrington picked up a strikingly beautiful but illiterate woman
of little more than half his age, in London’s Regent Street. Rosa Helen
Jeffries was then living as the common-law wife of a former dragoon called
Rodway, whom she described as her brother. In August of the following year,
she married the astronomer, while continuing to live with her dragoon. Two
years later, she moved to Churt, but Rodway was not to be cast aside so
easily. With witnesses in plenty, he pursued her there and stabbed her –
seriously, but not fatally. In a widely reported trial, he was sentenced to
twenty years for assault, but died in prison. Rosa died in 1875, seemingly
from an overdose of chloral, to which both she and Carrington were addicted;
and he was found dead within a fortnight, with empty chloral bottles for
company. This resulted in the improbable rumour that his death was a case of
suicide, after the murder of an adored but unfaithful wife.
Clark’s spirited telling of this human story highlights, rather than obscures,
his central narrative, in which he well describes the extraordinary
scientific perseverance of his main characters. He is fond of unsupported
references to what “modern historians” think, but these are irritating only
in proportion to one’s disbelief. Was the Indian Meteorological Department
that was established in 1875 (it was at Calcutta, not Pune) really meant “to
show the Indians how to run their country properly”? Beginning in 1829,
meteorological work had been undertaken by Indians – notably the young and
much-appreciated mathematician Radhanath Sikdar – under the aegis of the
Surveyor General, George Everest. Putting aside Clark’s fondness for purple
adjectives and melodrama – did Carrington’s request that he be buried
unshaven really merit the suggestion that he was afraid that witches would
take possession of his soul? – he does include enough scientific detail for
the average reader to feel the scientific pulse of the age, and he enhances
his account with modern scientific insights. Carrington holds centre stage,
but Clark does not ignore the supporting cast. He tells, for example, of
William Herschel’s crucial recognition of a connection between wheat prices
and the sunspot cycle. He gives due attention to the work at Greenwich by
Walter Maunder – no amateur, but Airy’s downtrodden assistant. Accelerating
along the home straight, Clark brings his account down to the present day,
but always with an eye to enhancing the importance of nineteenth-century
solar studies. That this is often at the expense of many more fundamental
applications of physics to astronomy hardly matters. There is, after all,
merit in writing books for those who do not work all day in Lynn Thorndike’s
vineyard.
John North’s recent books include The Ambassadors’ Secret: Holbein and
the World of the Renaissance, 2001, and God’s Clockmaker: Richard
Wallingford and the invention of time, 2004.
