Dear Blog,<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve 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\u2019ll share with you here.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m still reading the letters from Davy to his wife-to-be Jane (then Mrs Apreece). The letters are lovely; they\u2019re often written when he\u2019s 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\u2019ll find the cold formality that I had been led to expect, but for now, Davy\u2019s letters are full of anxious solicitude and concern. There are some questions raised by the letters, which I can\u2019t answer, such as in his letter of New Year\u2019s Day 1812, when he writes: \u2018Indeed 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\u00a0should feel any thing long painful <\/em>that I\u00a0thought would promote your happiness, even though it should require from me the greatest of all sacrifices.\u00a0You know what this is &\u00a0I trust you will never oblige me to make it.\u2019 I wonder what is referred to here; what would be considered \u2018the greatest of all sacrifices\u2019? 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.<\/p>\n These are letters that are personal and intimate: they have never been published before. Jane gave them to John Davy but still most weren\u2019t published in his Fragmentary Remain<\/em> (1858) whether on her orders or due to his sensitivity, we\u2019ll 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<\/sup> 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n Davy\u2019s penchant for self-experimentation is still present in 1812, well after the nitrous oxide experiments early in the century. On 1st<\/sup> November 1812, Davy writes to Jane, worried that she\u2019ll hear this story from some other source: \u2018Yesterday I\u00a0began some new experiments to which a very interesting discovery & a slight accident put an end.\u00a0I 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\u2019.<\/p>\n I go this week coming to Valencia, to give a plenary lecture to the Literature and Science Symposium of the Societat Catalana d’Hist\u00f2ria de la Ci\u00e8ncia i de la T\u00e8cnica (SCHCT) conference. Then I have three, final weeks in the Royal Institution to finish transcribing the letters there and then it\u2019s back to Manchester.<\/p>\n More soon,<\/p>\n Sharon<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dear Blog, I\u2019ve 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. … Continue reading