Dear Blog,
Well, it has been an exciting week and a bit. I went back to Manchester for one night, for the North-West Long Nineteenth-Century seminar last week, which was excellent and it was nice to be at home even for one night. I go back again this week for a weekend of Manchester Literature Festival events (http://www.manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk/). I’m seeing Iain M. Banks, Richard Ford, Pat Barker, and chairing Gaynor Arnold’s session at the Dickens Reader’s Day event. I’ve really enjoyed Arnold’s book Girl in a Blue Dress (http://www.tindalstreet.co.uk/authors/gaynor-arnold) , a novel about Dickens’s marriage and am looking forward to hearing more about it. I also have tickets for the Bio Punk event (http://www.manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk/events/13th-october/bio-punk), which launches a short story collection on the theme of bio-med research.
I’ve really enjoyed my days in the Royal Institution. Everyone in the Heritage office here is lovely; they have been so welcoming and helpful, and sitting next to Frank James (Head of Collections at the RI) is brilliant. Frank is a font of knowledge on everything to do with the early nineteenth century and having now finished editing Michael Faraday’s letters (http://eandt.theiet.org/magazine/2011/12/faraday-a-man-of-contradictions.cfm) , he’s extremely useful for the issues I’m coming up against with Davy’s Letters.
There was an interesting discovery last week concerning a poem that Davy first wrote, initially called ‘The Spinosist’ and written before 1800, which S. T. Coleridge comments upon in a letter dated 9 October 1800, and which Davy continues to rewrite, such as in 1807 after a serious bout of illness perhaps contracted from his work at Newgate prison, and which he finally publishes anonymously in 1823 in a collection put together by Joanna Baillie. The poem changes and develops as he continues to revise it: its potentially radical Spinosist associations are lost (Coleridge objected to the materialism in the poem in 1800) and the far lengthier poem is much more conventional and orthodox. Significantly, its title is changed simply to ‘Life’. Last Friday, as I was looking through Faraday’s copy of an early biography of Davy into which some of Davy’s letters to Faraday have been interleaved, I find, also bound into the book, a printed version of this poem. It seems to have been published on its own; it seems to be an early incarnation of the poem (only four printed pages long); and the printers are Savage and Easingwood (Savage was printer to the Royal Institution). It was already clear that this was a poem of which Davy was very proud: it was a poem he would read out to people and had circulated in manuscript. For example, John Lockhart writes of this poem: ‘for who that has read his sublime quatrains on the doctrine of Spinoza can doubt that he might have united, if he had pleased, in some great didactic poem, the vigorous ratiocination of Dryden and the moral majesty of Wordsworth?’ Now we know that he did have a copy printed, probably so that he could send it to his friends, and this reminds us that Davy took pride in his poetry and was keen that it be known – at least among some circles – that he wrote poetry.
I’m working hard here (10-6 in the archive, after going to the gym or swimming first thing in the morning) and I have a frightening amount to get done over the next six weeks: an article to finish, two PhDs to read and report on, a book proposal to comment upon, a book review to do for the THES, a short piece to write for the Lancet, a grant application reference to write, a paper to give in Oxford, and another to give in Valencia, PhD viva. All of this has to be done in the evenings and weekends because of the time that I’m in the archive concentrating on the main task of my leave: the letters. Still, it is exciting living in London; I’m enjoying the buzz of the place and seeing plays (Jumpy last night at the Duke of York) and exhibitions (the Tanks in the Tate Modern were excellent).
More soon,
Sharon