Dear Blog,

So, since my last post I have reduced the emails in my inbox from 105 to (currently) 18! This may seem daft but I can’t tell you how much of a relief it is to me. I once again feel some semblance of control over my life and as if there’s a chance I may get back on top of things. I’m also up to date with the reading of draft essays that have been submitted for the Ashgate Research Companion to C19th Literature and Science and have even managed to find some time to look at my own essay.

I do worry that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew for my essay which is on ‘Chemistry’. I really only know about the first 20 years of the C19th and in a 7000 word essay it would be impossible to give any kind of comprehensive sense of chemistry during the entire century. I have read some excellent essays for this collection that have done just that though — really impressive surveys of both the primary and the secondary materials on their subject. Instead, I’ve had to build parameters into my attempt to do justice to this. I’ve decided to expand the essay to take in Alchemy too since many of the literary responses to chemistry are couched as novels about alchemists rather than chemists it seems. And I’ve selected three main texts, written across the century (though, interestingly, they are all historical novels that are set much earlier than their date of publication): Frankenstein (1818), Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni (1842), and Balzac’s The Alkahest. My argument is that the link between alchemy and modern chemistry in these novels is that both are interested in the transformation of matter and that these disciplines study (and can effect) such transformations. I have managed to get today and Friday to work on this so I’ve turned off my email and am going to get on with it. Wish me luck.

I should mention that I went to London yesterday to see Prof Frank James’s inaugural lecture at UCL, which was just wonderful. He spoke about Davy and there was lots of good new stuff in there. Frank is one of the advisory editors on the Davy Letters project and he’s been finding new letters all over the place. See the news section of our website for details (http://www.davy-letters.org.uk/) or follow us on Twitter (@davyletters), though, we have yet to send our first tweet!

More soon,

Sharon