Dear Blog,
I’ve had a week away from the Royal Institution archive, travelling around for a PhD viva in Newcastle University (congratulations Leanne Stokoe!) and then giving a paper at the Literature and Science seminar in the University of Oxford. The week before that I made some fabulous finds in the archive though, some of which I’ll share with you here.
I’m still reading the letters from Davy to his wife-to-be Jane (then Mrs Apreece). The letters are lovely; they’re often written when he’s away from home and he very clearly misses her, which is not what most critics think of this relationship. Perhaps as I read on, I’ll find the cold formality that I had been led to expect, but for now, Davy’s letters are full of anxious solicitude and concern. There are some questions raised by the letters, which I can’t answer, such as in his letter of New Year’s Day 1812, when he writes: ‘Indeed I never in the whole course of our social converse ever intended to offend you or give you a moment of uneasiness & I do not think I should feel any thing long painful that I thought would promote your happiness, even though it should require from me the greatest of all sacrifices. You know what this is & I trust you will never oblige me to make it.’ I wonder what is referred to here; what would be considered ‘the greatest of all sacrifices’? It might be chemistry of course, that would make some sense. On questions like this I guess we will never know the truth for certain.
These are letters that are personal and intimate: they have never been published before. Jane gave them to John Davy but still most weren’t published in his Fragmentary Remain (1858) whether on her orders or due to his sensitivity, we’ll probably never know. Though this all happened such a long time ago, and ethical approval is not needed in such cases, it still remains a fact that these were real people with real lives. The subject of a note sent to Jane on their wedding day (2nd March 1812) remains obscure but it strongly suggests that they may have slept together the night before and this raises these issues. This is salacious stuff and I know that Davy and Jane wouldn’t have wanted such matters aired in public but also, they illuminate their relationship as well as giving us some sense perhaps of how such relationships developed between people of their class and position.
Davy’s penchant for self-experimentation is still present in 1812, well after the nitrous oxide experiments early in the century. On 1st November 1812, Davy writes to Jane, worried that she’ll hear this story from some other source: ‘Yesterday I began some new experiments to which a very interesting discovery & a slight accident put an end. I made one of those compounds more powerful than gunpowder destined perhaps at some time to change the nature of war & influence the state of Society, an explosion took place which has done me no other harm than that of preventing me from working this day & the effects of which will be gone tomorrow & which I should not mention at all, except that you may hear some foolish exaggerated account of it for it really is not worth mentioning’.
I go this week coming to Valencia, to give a plenary lecture to the Literature and Science Symposium of the Societat Catalana d’Història de la Ciència i de la Tècnica (SCHCT) conference. Then I have three, final weeks in the Royal Institution to finish transcribing the letters there and then it’s back to Manchester.
More soon,
Sharon