Dear Blog,
Research leave has been amazing so far. I love working in the Royal Institution and really getting back into the Davy letters project.
It has been really interesting to read John Davy’s notes on the letters he was collecting for his Memoirs (two volumes, 1836). He writes (presumably to himself) on copies of letters – ‘how vague are recollections’ and you can really see the workings of his mind. One letter incorrectly dated 1813 instead of 1815 seems at first to suggest that Davy was working on the safety lamp far earlier than had been thought, but when he reflects upon this he realises it could not be and must be a mistake on the recipient’s part.
The letters I’m looking at now clearly date from the period when John is gathering together the materials for the Memoirs. They include long letters to him from various folk who knew Davy including some interesting things I did not know. Walter Coulson, for example, a well-connected fellow himself, had married the daughter of Dr Borlase to whom Davy had been apprenticed (it seems such a small world sometimes). He recalls that the second work of chemistry that Davy read (the first was Lavoisier) was Nicholson’s Journal, and that Davy obtained this from a ‘book club’ to which he belonged. There are interesting letters too from Davy’s cousin Edmund Davy – one trashing at great length the biography that John Ayrton Paris had written in 1831, the faults of which decided John to begin his own. In this, Edmund takes particular umbrage and the idea that Davy was a philistine when it came to the arts: ‘I always thought your brother had cultivated and possessed a discriminating taste in the Fine Arts’ and indeed his appreciation of the arts in general (HD/26/D/ 21).
Yesterday I read the letters in the Royal Institution from Gregory Watt to Humphry Davy. Gregory Watt may well be part of why Davy went into chemistry originally. He came to lodge with Davy’s mother in Cornwall and they became good friends, with mutual interest in geology and other scientific pursuits. James Watt Jnr (Gregory’s brother) certainly thinks that Gregory was the person who introduced Humphry to Thomas Beddoes, who went on to appoint him to the Pneumatic Institute in Bristol. Gregory suffered from consumption and died at the age of 27 before he really had achieved hardly anything. Apparently he only saw preprints of his first publication before he died. In the letters, which really show the friendship between Gregory Watt and Davy, there is – enclosed in a letter from James Watt on the construction of a breathing apparatus for the inhalation of nitrous oxide, which would be ‘a chamber like a sedan chair’ – an account of a number of experiments on nitrous oxide that fail to have the desired effect. Gregory asks: ‘Do afford us some light on this mysterious subject[.] Inform us exactly by what process you generate sublime sensations and [?] the ladder by which we may ascend to the Heaven of Heavens.’
I also read the poems sent to Davy by Anna Beddoes, wife of Thomas Beddoes at the Pneumatic Institution. I wonder what really did happen there? I also read fan-mail poems sent in the post to Davy from admiring women who attended his lectures, one calling herself ‘Fidelissima’ who writes a few of these poems.
Today I’m giving one of the public lunchtime lectures at the Royal Society on Wollstonecraft and Natural History (http://royalsociety.org/events/2012/rights-of-woman/). Wish me luck!
Best,
Sharon