{"id":283,"date":"2017-07-31T20:27:23","date_gmt":"2017-07-31T20:27:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sharon-ruston\/?p=283"},"modified":"2017-07-31T21:20:53","modified_gmt":"2017-07-31T21:20:53","slug":"where-are-the-portraits-of-jane-davy-and-other-mysteries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sharon-ruston\/2017\/07\/31\/where-are-the-portraits-of-jane-davy-and-other-mysteries\/","title":{"rendered":"Where are the portraits of Jane Davy and other mysteries?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear blog,
\nI have just \u2013 like, just this second \u2013 written what may be the final note to The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy. Fittingly, it was a note identifying a daughter of the railway engineer, Robert Benson Dockray, to whom John Davy (Humph\u2019s brother) was sending his regards; she turns out to be the mother of the Lancaster-born poet Laurence Binyon (1869-1943). That has a nice circular feel to it. Mind, when I began this project in 2008 I hadn\u2019t even started work at Salford University let alone Lancaster. As ever, this last file \u2013 letters written by Jane (the wife) and John (the brother) about Humph, his legacy, and his publications, has taken longer than I expected, and I still need to read it through once again before sending to my eagle-eyed associates for their help with some niggling things I haven\u2019t been able to identify\/read etc etc.
\nIt\u2019s been a good fortnight, nonetheless, with a number of various satisfying discoveries. For example, I have been astonished and amazed by a discovery made by Sam Illingworth at Manchester Metropolitan University. Sam has found out that in 1806 Davy published a revised version of his \u2018Spinosist\u2019 poem in the Gentleman\u2019s Magazine.<\/a> This is the same version that Davy published separately with the Royal Institution publisher Richard Savage (and there survives a copy of this tipped into Faraday\u2019s copy of his Life of Humphry Davy) in the RI. I know now (because I have finished these later letters) that John Davy used this version \u2013 sent to him by Humph\u2019s cousin, Edmund Davy \u2013 in his Memoirs (1836) and it seems increasingly likely that John gave it the title by which it is now often referred, \u2018Written After Recovery from a Dangerous Illness\u2019. What Sam\u2019s discovery proves is that the revised poem has nothing to do with Davy\u2019s illness of 1807 and that Davy was publishing his work (with his name attached!) at this period in his life.
\nI\u2019ve enjoyed reading some of John Davy\u2019s works these last few weeks, including a discussion of that famous bit in Wordsworth\u2019s \u2018Preface\u2019 to the Lyrical Ballads on the difference between the poet and the man of science, published in John Davy\u2019s Lectures on the Study of Chemistry (1849), p. xxi. I\u2019ve also needed to establish who John Davy\u2019s family are; his later letters refer to the death of a daughter and other family members. It\u2019s been surprisingly difficult to get any authoritative statement on this: the internet tells me that John Davy had anything between one and eight children. In fact, he had three, one of whom died in her early twenties; of the other two, Grace went on to marry George Rolleston, a regius professor of medicine in Oxford (and have a famous son, Sir Humphry Davy Rolleston!), and Archibald, who went into the church, lived in near Lancaster and thereabouts (with a connection to the mother of Binyon, above), and whose daughter, Helen Mary I haven\u2019t yet been able to follow after 1871.
\nFinally, it is clear that there are still mysteries to be solved. One such is that we haven\u2019t been able to find a painting of Lady Jane Davy, which has always seemed odd. In a letter to the still elusive \u2018Miss Talbot\u2019 in 1837, Jane Davy writes: \u2018My precious physiognomy has for my inconvenience often been painted; but luckily for the beau ideal these portraits have never been engraved, & therefore your M.S. must forego in this instance the positive representation of me.\u2019 So, there may well (surely?) be paintings of Jane Davy out there, but where are they???<\/p>\n

Best,<\/p>\n

Sharon<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear blog, I have just \u2013 like, just this second \u2013 written what may be the final note to The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy. Fittingly, it was a note identifying a daughter of the railway engineer, Robert Benson … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sharon-ruston\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sharon-ruston\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sharon-ruston\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sharon-ruston\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sharon-ruston\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sharon-ruston\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":289,"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sharon-ruston\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283\/revisions\/289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sharon-ruston\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sharon-ruston\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sharon-ruston\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}