Adelene Buckland is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at King’s College London, and a member of the Davy Notebooks Project Advisory Board

I first encountered Humphry Davy while reading Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-33), one of the most important books in the history of a science which in 1830 was still new and – to many – shocking. Early in that book, Lyell attacks the idea of progress in the history of the earth – the idea that life has progressed from relatively simple to more complex forms through time. He does so by quoting at length from the ‘Unknown’, a quasi-mystical philosopher who expounds upon the theory of progress in Davy’s Consolations in Travel (1830). As the Unknown puts it, ‘there seems, as it were, a gradual approach to the present system of things, and a succession of destructions and creations preparatory to the existence of man’ (p. 149).

Detail from title-page of Davy, Consolations (3rd edn, 1831)

Davy’s account of the idea of geological progress is succinct and beautifully written, and it summarises an idea that was quite widely accepted among geologists in this period. But the text was a strange one for Lyell to engage with. Consolations in Travel isn’t a geological book in any straightforward way, and it is not typical of Davy’s work. Davy was not primarily known as a geologist. In fact, Davy wrote Consolations when he knew he was dying, and the book is perhaps best read as a last-ditch attempt to synthesise a vast body of knowledge from across a range of disciplines – from art, religion, architecture, and history to geology, biology, and astronomy. It is modelled on a dizzying array of other texts, from the Roman philosopher Boethius’s sixth-century Consolation of Philosophy to more radical and contemporary French philosophical texts which argued for the death of kings and gods. And it patches together a multitude of other genres and literary forms: it is part Byronic travelogue, part pilgrimage, part Socratic dialogue (in which a series of hypotheses are debated and eliminated by gentlemen who work out their contradictions through conversation), part medieval dream vision, with debts to the ‘philosophical romance’ (a form of heavily footnoted scientific poetry) and to The Arabian Nights. Lyell was seeking to give the new science of geology a rigorous methodological underpinning. There were plenty of more established geological writings with which he could have engaged. Why did he choose to quote at length from this strange, often supernatural text?

Lithograph of Lyell by Thomas Herbert Maguire, 1849 (National Portrait Gallery, NPG D38030. Reproduced under the terms of CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

The answer, I think, is (at least) twofold. First, and most obviously, Lyell was speaking to the educated public in his work – not just a handful of geologists. Davy’s fame helped Lyell to reach a wider audience. But the second reason is the most interesting, and my students helped me see it. Shortly after reading Consolations, I decided to teach it in the first week of an undergraduate course on nineteenth-century literature and science. I thought it might be too complex and too weird to teach in a single lecture and seminar. But they loved it. And what they loved – and what I love, and what I think was so important to Lyell – was that Davy is constantly interested in the relationship between scientific knowledge and the problems of human consciousness, imagination, and perception. As he put it, ‘human intellectual powers are so feeble that they can with difficulty embrace a single series of phenomena, and they consequently must fail when extended to the whole of nature’ (Consolations, p. 131). ‘The Unknown’ who tells the story of the history of the earth in Consolations is an echo of another figure, the ‘Genius’, who appears in Consolations in a vision and guides Davy’s protagonist through the solar system, revealing celestial beings each of whom has more refined sensory knowledge of the universe than the last. Human beings have sight, Davy argues, but vision is another matter. The imagination, used rightly, was a tool for understanding the deep secrets of the universe that the frail evidence of the senses (not to mention the rocks and fossils) could not be relied upon to detect. After my students helped me pick up on this idea, I elaborated on it in two essays partly on Davy – for The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science, and another essay in Time Travelers: Victorian Perspectives on the Past. There is still so much to be explored about Davy’s ideas about imagination, vision, and genius in scientific work.

In these ways, I think, Davy’s greatest contribution to geology was not that he named or classified a new species, or a new series of strata, or a new geological epoch. It was that he understood the challenge this new science represented to the imagination, and to quotidian notions of the human in relation to the grandeur of the earth and the universe. He understood geology as a set of imaginative problems. Lyell did, too, as he compelled his readers to reimagine earth history taking place over millions and millions of years. Though Lyell and Davy came to different conclusions, they were both preoccupied underneath it all with a similar set of questions: what did it mean to be human in a world so much older than human beings? What did it mean to be human when great ancient lizards (we now call them dinosaurs) had once walked the earth? What did it mean to be human when it was so impossible to reconstruct this history with any certainty, when so much of the evidence was locked deep underground in areas of the earth to which humans had no access? To what extent were these inaccessible layers of the earth to be understood as metaphors for layers of knowledge, or of consciousness, inaccessible to fragile human minds? These ideas – that human beings just don’t know themselves or the world they live in, and perhaps can never know – would be influential in so many subsequent fields of study. Freud’s sense of the mind as mineable layers of strata, hidden from itself, is just one.

RI MS HD/15/F, front endpaper and p. 1 (click to enlarge)

The notebooks offer a brilliant way for us to test these ideas about Davy, and to examine in more fine-grained detail the specific imaginative and philosophical contributions he made to science in tandem with his observational and experimental work. Wahida Amin has already begun to explore the ways in which notebook poems like ‘Mont Blanc’ and ‘The Canigou’ offer meditations on the power and limitations of the human mind. I am particularly taken by a passage in notebook 15F, in which Davy describes the man of Genius:

[h]is eloquence is a species of enchantment. You are captivated with the majesty of his diction, with the polish of his periods; & with the splendour & pomp of his description. You forget things in words, reasoning is absorbed in feeling; you cease to regard the philosopher & you consider only the poet. (RI MS HD/15/F, pp. 11-12)

Elsewhere in the same notebook, geological sketches sit side by side with meditations on the decay of the mind and the immortality of Reason. For Davy, the almost-unimaginably vast history of the earth, with its unknown species and its dark and distant days, presented both a challenge to the human imagination and a metaphor for its powers. Exploring the notebooks, I think, offers a really exciting chance to explore the ways in which – from its outset – geology could both offer an imaginative challenge to ideas about what it meant to be ‘human’ (both in the long history of the earth, and in relation to ideas about the power and status of the human ‘mind’). And in showing a singular human mind (Davy’s) working across disciplines and ideas in this fertile way, they offer us a perhaps uniquely rich record of the emotional, aesthetic, and imaginative challenges posed by new scientific knowledge, and of the ways in which science and imagination have so often been intertwined.

This is the second in a new mini-series of posts about our lovely volunteers on Zooniverse. The spotlight pieces will focus on individual volunteers; they will allow us to learn a bit more about what motivates individuals to volunteer to transcribe Davy’s notebooks and what people’s particular interests in Davy might be.

Volunteer in the spotlight: @PurpleH

1. What interests you about the project?

I’m a retired bank manager, living in the Midlands of England, who really always wanted to work with words rather than numbers. One of the best jobs I had in the bank was carrying out forensic investigations – delving into the recesses of files (paper and computer) to uncover missing information or discover the truth behind disputed activities.

2. Why are you enjoying it?

The most satisfying part of the work, for me, is figuring out (from Davy’s often wayward handwriting and spelling) the correct transcription of the place names, authors, chemicals, etc. by researching on the internet; and discovering the current meaning of archaic terms. I like the fact that we are uncovering information which may not have been seen for ages and which may add to the sum of our knowledge of the history of science.

3. Do you have any particular interest in Davy?

I first encountered Zooniverse during the first lockdown when the Rainfall Rescue project was mentioned on the BBC News website. I first worked on the transcription of old handwritten rainfall readings, and then helped trace the precise location of rain gauges from often scant information. I’ve since dabbled in several other projects, but Davy has had me hooked.

4. Are sciences and arts ‘separate’?

In my view, definitely not! At school I was torn between English, which I loved, and science. In my view arts and sciences should not be ‘separate’ but the way education is currently structured forces students to choose. I was originally accepted for a joint degree in English and Zoology – but when I got to university it turned out to be impossible, as the lectures overlapped and were at opposite ends of the campus. In the end science won and my degree was in Combined Sciences which included Biology, Geology, Astronomy, and Logic & Scientific Method. Several of these also interested Davy, who clearly didn’t put a barrier between art and science.

5. What have you learned about Davy since joining the project?

I must confess that, before the project, all I knew about Davy was that he invented the safety lamp that bears his name. I had no idea that Davy had worked on geology, or that he sketched and wrote poetry (though I must confess that, as far as his poetry goes, I think he should have stuck to science!).

6. Do you have any favourite pages of Davy’s notebooks?

My favourite notebooks have been those with the geology sketches – and I was particularly pleased to have spotted and transcribed ‘Carricarede from Kinbane’ (and to have identified that Davy was referring to Carrick-a-rede rope bridge, now a famous National Trust site, just north of Kinbane, up the coast towards the Giant’s Causeway), and hence the drawing of the tiny rope bridge in a number of the sketches.

RI MS HD/15/D, p. 75 (click to enlarge)

RI MS HD/15/A, p. 24 (click to enlarge)

RI MS HD/15/A, p. 25 (click to enlarge)

Thank you, @PurpleH!

If you’re a Zooniverse volunteer who’d like to be featured, please let us know on Talk, or by e-mail.

Dia dhaoibh agus fáilte romhaibh go léir!

In 1805 and 1806, Humphry Davy was lucky enough to visit one of the most beautiful places on earth: Ireland. Davy documented his Irish tours in four notebooks (15A, 15B, 15D, and 15G) but his focus throughout is firmly upon images rather than words. Photographic technology was still very much in its infancy – Davy and his friend Thomas Wedgwood had found no way to stabilize the images they had captured and prevent them from continuing to react with daylight, and it would be twenty years before Joseph Nicéphore Niépce took the world’s first surviving photograph – so the only way that Davy could record the views he saw and the landscape he travelled through was with paper and pencil or ink.[1] The sketches in Davy’s notebooks record his journey around the Irish coast, telling the story not just of his tour but also of his passion for geology and for understanding the composition and structure of the landscape.

For his excursion to Ireland in the summer of 1806, Davy was accompanied by William Payne, his laboratory assistant at the Royal Institution and (at least for part of the trip) by the geologist George Bellas Greenough (1778-1855). Davy had probably first met Greenough in Penzance in August 1801, and the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was their mutual friend.[2] In 1807, Davy and Greenough were among the founder members of the Geological Society of London, and the drawings and commentary in Davy’s notebooks from his Irish tour capture his growing enthusiasm for this branch of science. From Davy’s images, we know that he travelled around County Antrim, visiting Cushendall and Lurigethan, Fairhead, the Giant’s Causeway, the coast around Kinbane and Ballycastle, Carrick-a-rede, Dunluce, the Skerries, and Rathlin Island. Some of the sketches may have been consulted by Thomas Webster (1772-1844) when he completed an illustration of geological strata for inclusion in Davy’s Elements of Agricultural Chemistry (1813); although the engraving depicts an imaginary landscape designed to showcase as many rock types as possible, a basalt cliff similar to those Davy drew in County Antrim is included near the centre of the image.[3] As volunteers on Zooniverse transcribed these notebooks it also became clear that notebook 15D contains sketches of many of the same views illustrated in notebook 15A, but in a much freer and less defined style. For example, this pair of sketches of Carrick-a-rede, both of which feature the famous rope bridge first created by fishermen in 1755:

RI MS HD/15/D, p. 75 (click to enlarge)

RI MS HD/15/A, p. 25 (click to enlarge)

Another pair of sketches feature Dunluce Castle, perched upon the edge of an outcrop of basalt and, more recently, used as the model for the exterior of Pyke castle, the seat of House Greyjoy, in Game of Thrones:

RI MS HD/15/A, p. 11 (click to enlarge)

RI MS HD/15/D, p. 15 (click to enlarge)

The hazy sketch of the castle on the page in 15A is easily lost in the shading of the cliffs until we compare it to the similar image in 15D. Both sketches contain some geological labelling of rock types, chalk, basalt, etc., but the sketch in 15A features more extensive labelling and more careful delineation of the rock formations.

There are also at least two attempts at representing the distinctive outline of Lurigethan in 15D (RI MS HD/15/D, pp. 28, 29), both of which are from the same location and perspective as the more elaborate drawing of the mountain in 15A:

RI MS HD/15/A, p. 45 (click to enlarge)

RI MS HD/15/D, p. 29 (click to enlarge)

But the precise relationship between these sets of paired images remains unclear, and there are some intriguing dissimilarities between the drawings too. In the paired views of Lurigethan, for example, there is a noticeable difference in the configuration of the cottages that border the small bridge and in the arrangement of the foreground foliage as neat trees rather than spiky shrubs. Ideas about landscape art in the early nineteenth-century were strongly influenced by William Gilpin (1724-1804), who defined the popular aesthetic of the ‘picturesque’ as a form ‘that requires a mixture of smooth and rugged surfaces and objects for variety’.[4] Just as Gilpin ‘is not concerned with botanical accuracy’ in art, so to do the trees in Davy’s detailed sketch of Lurigethan appear a little idealistic, framing the scene with a pruned precision.[5] Once again, art and science go hand in hand here as, despite Davy’s geological focus, the scene itself seems to be being recorded in line with an artistic philosophy.

RI MS HD/15/D, p. 56 (click to enlarge)

Davy’s geology notebooks also contain more tactile traces of Davy’s journey. Some particularly messy handwriting in pencil on this page might suggest that Davy was travelling while writing in this notebook. One sketch of Keeper Hill in the Silvermine Mountains of County Tipperary is described as a view ‘in the carriage’ (RI MS HD/15/D, p. 7). It is possible that the carriage was static at the time, though, as it is a rather good picture. In another notebook used during the same trip (RI MS HD/15/B), Davy again appears to have been writing while on the move on pages 96 and 111:

RI MS HD/15/D, p. 7 (click to enlarge)

RI MS HD/15/B, p. 96 (click to enlarge)

RI MS HD/15/B, p. 111 (click to enlarge)

Davy first used notebooks 15A and 15D during his geological trip around Ireland in 1806, but he was evidently happy to recycle the pages of 15D when the notes were no longer of use to him: he later added details of his experiments with nitrogen and potassium over the top of his old pencil sketches, using ink this time so the new notes stood out. On page 18 of RI MS HD/15/D, for example, Davy jotted down his chemical notes alongside a sketch of the Skerries, a group of rocky islands off Portrush, County Antrim. There is some attempt to conserve the drawing – the original location has even been re-inscribed in ink – but it is clear that Davy’s focus has shifted. The chemical notes in 15D refer to ‘potassium’, an element first isolated by Davy in 1807 and that he originally termed ‘potagen’ and ‘potarchium’. The name ‘potassium’ was confirmed when Davy read his Bakerian Lecture before the Royal Society on 19 November 1807, which means that the later chemical notes must have been added to the notebook around or after this date.[6] Davy’s reuse of the paper in this notebook raises interesting questions about how he saw the sketches in this notebook: does it suggest that he no longer wanted these geological sketches or that he somehow valued them less than those in 15A? It is a reminder that Davy’s notebooks were not static objects but subject to change over time.

RI MS HD/15/D, p. 18 (click to enlarge)

We’re still in the process of examining the transcriptions of these notebooks, and many of our questions about Davy’s artistic practices and geological interests will hopefully find their answers as we study this new data. In the meantime, to all the volunteers who have helped us to find this information and who continue to contribute so much to this project, go raibh míle maith agaibh, agus slán libh!

—

[1] Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy, ‘An Account of a Method of Copying Paintings upon Glass, and of Making Profiles, by the Agency of Light upon Nitrate of Silver. Invented by T. Wedgwood, Esq. With Observations by H. Davy’, Journals of the Royal Institution of Great Britain (London: From the Press of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 1802), pp. 170-74, https://wellcomecollection.org/works/b2nxduz9.

[2] ‘Greenough, George Bellas’, in The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy, ed. by Tim Fulford and Sharon Ruston, advisory eds. Jan Golinski, Frank A. J. L. James, and David Knight, assisted by Andrew Lacey, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), i, cxxxi; Frank A. J. L. James, ‘Negative Geology: Humphry Davy and Forming the Royal Institution’s Mineral Collection, 1803-1806’, Earth Sciences History, 37 (2) (2018), 309-32 (p. 316), https://doi.org/10.17704/1944-6178-37.2.309.

[3] Thomas Webster, ‘Fig. 16’, in Humphry Davy, Elements of Agricultural Chemistry, in a Course of Lectures for the Board of Agriculture (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1813), p. 172, https://wellcomecollection.org/works/fy86gwtq.

[4] Anna Burton, Trees in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction: The Silvicultural Novel (Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 2-3.

[5] Burton, Trees, p. 38.

[6] Humphry Davy, ‘The Bakerian Lecture: On Some New Phenomena of Chemical Changes Produced by Electricity, Particularly the Decomposition of the Fixed Alkalies’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 98 (1808), 1-44 (read to the Royal Society on 19 November 1807), https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstl.1808.0001.

This is the first in what we hope will be a new mini-series of posts about our lovely volunteers on Zooniverse. The spotlight pieces will focus on individual volunteers; they will allow us to learn a bit more about what motivates individuals to volunteer to transcribe Davy’s notebooks and what people’s particular interests in Davy might be.

Volunteer in the spotlight: @deehar

@deehar is a retired physicist living in a village outside Eindhoven in the Netherlands.

1. What interests you about the project?

I used to design MRI machines for Philips Medical after graduating from Cambridge. I have been a volunteer with the Archaeology Dept of the Eindhoven city council for many years and gradually got hooked on background archive work for excavations. When that source began to dry up I moved online – first with the Zooniverse Operation War Diaries and now the Davy Diaries.

2. Why are you enjoying it?

I enjoy working with old documents so old scientific documents are doubly interesting! I discovered that learning to read old handwriting is just a question of practice whether it is English or a 17th-century Dutch notary’s jargon!

3. Do you have any particular interest in Davy?

I admire Davy’s detailed notes – I doubt if my lab notebooks could withstand the same scrutiny!

4. Are sciences and arts ‘separate’?

Yes – the sciences are restricted by logic while the arts often encourage the pursuit of creativity which follows no obvious rules.

5. What have you learned about Davy since joining the project?

He really puts in a lot of work into his research. He carries out many, many experiments – sometimes repeating the same one several times. He then allows himself time to mentally absorb the data and form patterns which he presents as theories. An experimentalist at heart.

Thank you, @deehar!

If you’re a Zooniverse volunteer who’d like to be featured, please let us know on Talk, or by e-mail.

All the different branches of knowledge have assisted each other. And like different instruments of music, the sounds of which combine in Harmony, they have all cooperated in enlightening the mind in extending its enjoyments and in exalting the state of social Life. (RI MS HD/19/E, p. 58)

When Davy lived and worked, the division between science and art was much less accentuated than it is today. In Davy’s ‘Introductory Lecture’ for courses offered by the Royal Institution in 1805, he actually began with a justification of the value of scientific inquiry via an explanation of the interdependency of all species of knowledge. Like the white light of Newton’s refracting prism, his text begins with ‘the love of Knowledge and of intellectual power’ before separating this knowledge out into the rainbow strands of the different specialisms of science and art. For Davy, this ‘love of Knowledge’ was a fundamental human characteristic and ‘one the most worthy of being cultivated and extended’ (RI MS HD/19/E, p. 81). For Davy, there was no need to justify the usefulness of any academic subject, it already naturally and implicitly held value.

It’s a point that’s worth thinking about when we consider our own relationship to academic knowledge today. In 2020, a coalition of the British Academy, the Arts Council England, and the London School of Economics established the acronym SHAPE (social sciences, humanities, and the arts for people and the economy) in order ‘to emulate the success of the educational term STEM – which stands for science, technology, engineering and maths – in emphasising the importance of the core subjects it represents’.[1] It was a bold plan that aimed to counter a rising societal dismissal of the arts as easy subjects lacking in value, and to encourage students ‘to view these subjects as positive steps towards a high-status career’.[2] Yet despite these worthy aims, the new acronym faced heavy criticism on social media, with one key problem identified as the apparent need for the new term to justify the existence of arts-based subjects by referencing their usefulness to ‘people and the economy’. Today, society has a tendency to ascribe intrinsic worth to scientific subjects – the STEM acronym features no such agenda – yet the worthiness of arts and humanities subjects must be continually explained and restated. Where funding is concerned, art is not valued for its own sake in the way that science is, but must continually justify its relevance in measurable, often financial, terms. Davy’s conviction of the value of all forms of intellectual inquiry would seem to have little place in our modern world – but why should this be the case?

In the development of human knowledge, art and science have always gone hand in hand. A study of the Chauvet cave paintings in France in 2012 determined that the 30,000 year old artwork was created not as a static frieze, but as a pattern of flat animations that only come to life when seen by the flickering light of a torch – a symbiotic harmony between art and the early technology of fire.[3] During the Jonathan Swift 350 conference at Trinity College Dublin in 2017, delegates were taken on a sensitively arranged visit to St Patrick’s Hospital, a mental health hospital that owes its original existence to a generous bequest from Swift. Today St Patrick’s provides a range of treatments, both medicinal and therapeutic, and its walls are decorated with the most beautiful, often poignant, paintings and collages created by patients as part of a programme of art therapy. It served as a powerful reminder that humans are not simply organic robots – science alone can neither establish a civilization nor enable it to flourish.

Museum replica of part of the Chauvet cave paintings (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Creative self-expression and the stimulation of the mind through the arts is a vital component of our humanity. When Davy wrote verse about his experiments with and experience of inhaling nitrous oxide gas, he was not simply indulging in a flight of fancy. He was exploring other ways of interpreting and understanding his intellectual inquiries. In the same lecture in which he wrote of the ‘love of Knowledge’, he also noted that ‘all truths in nature… are worthy of our study for their own sake rather than with any idea of profit or interest’ (RI MS HD/19/E, p. 54) – powerful words coming from someone who at the time did not have a personal fortune to fund his research, but who was instead still earning his own income as a professor and lecturer. ‘All the different branches of knowledge have assisted each other’, Davy writes, and ‘they have all cooperated in enlightening the mind’ (RI MS HD/19/E, p. 58). The message is clear: all knowledge has value, if only we have the wisdom to see it.

—

[1] Vanessa Thorpe, ‘University and Arts Council in drive to re-brand ‘soft’ academic subjects’, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jun/21/university-and-arts-council-in-drive-to-re-brand-soft-academic-subjects [accessed 27/08/2021].

[2] Ibid.

[3] Marc Azema and Florent Rivere, ‘Animation in Palaeolithic art: a pre-echo of cinema / L’animation dans l’art paléolithique: un pré-écho au cinéma’, Antiquity, 86 (2012), 316-24.

RI MS HD/13/F, p. 127 (click to enlarge)

Our volunteers are helping us to transcribe all seventy-five of Humphry Davy’s notebooks and this is bringing new things about Davy to light. One of the things that has been discovered is that some of the notebooks contain expressions of Davy’s racial politics. In doing so, Davy does not speak into a vacuum, but writes about varieties of human difference and their causes, which at the time of his writing were ‘a preoccupation of intellectual inquiry’ and several paradigms were used to account for these constructed differences.[1] The discovery of Davy’s racial politics in his notebooks makes it especially critical that we confront head-on his connections to transatlantic slavery.

The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy, published last year, contains short biographies of three individuals who were key in Davy’s connections to transatlantic slavery: his wife Jane Davy; her father Charles Kerr; and her stepfather, Robert Farquhar. Jane and Humphry married in 1812. Jane’s wealth, rumoured to be an income of £4000 annually and a capital of £60,000, enabled Davy to pursue his chemical research and retire from the Royal Institution professorship. Recent research by Professor Frank James has shown that Jane Davy’s money was largely inherited from her father Charles Kerr. Kerr had been a merchant and prize agent for the Royal Navy and a provider of credit, and held forty people in slavery and leased them to labour at the Royal Navy’s dockyard, the English Harbour (now the UNESCO World Heritage Site, Nelson’s Dockyard).[2]

Following the death of Charles Kerr in 1795, Jane’s mother remarried in January 1798. Jane’s stepfather Robert Farquhar of 13 Portland Place in London was an absentee slave-owner in Antigua and Grenada, who received almost £18,000 compensation from the British government.[3] Research into the connections between the Davy and Farquhar families is ongoing, but the cultural and financial links are suggested by records of ceremonies relating to births, marriages, and deaths, which show members of both families attending each other’s key life moments. While this does not mark them out as different to what we might expect of many families, it reminds us that they were members of a family. They weren’t just known to each other, but were closely interconnected on personal and social levels, and these events would have been ideal locations for intimate discussions about each other’s affairs. These sources are important given the curious absence of other source materials like letters sent between Robert, Jane, and (Jane Davy’s half-sister) Eliza Farquhar, and Humphry.

13F is dated 1795-6 and is one of the earliest notebooks belonging to Davy that we have, along with RI MS HD/21/A, which dates from 1795-7. Davy started 13F in August 1795 when he was just sixteen-and-a-half. There is also evidence that he went back to this material in summer 1798, when he was nineteen-and-a-half, and, looking at his early materialist views, observes: ‘What a revolution in my opinions since / that time, now 19 years & ½’ (13F, p. 6). The notebook is a mixture of a narrative set in Devon and Cornwall featuring Druids, with the main protagonist contemplating suicide by throwing himself into the sea; essays such as one touting materialist arguments about the dependence of the thinking powers on the organisation of the body; draft poems on happiness; an essay about the Creation, which takes a female point-of-view in arguments for creating Eve; and an essay on friendship.

In his manuscript essay, 39 pages long and titled ‘An Essay on the Influence of Climate on National Manners and Character’, Davy engages with the arguments of David Hume in his essay ‘Of National Characters’. Hume argued that national difference was due to moral causes such as the nature of the government and ecclesiastical government, the situation of a nation in relation to its neighbours, the desires of the people, and modes of education, rather than physical causes such as the qualities of the air and climate. Davy argues that there were differences that characterised the manners and appearances of individuals within nations and provinces, and that philosophers had neglected the role that the climate, rather than customs and laws, played in influencing this difference; he argues that the ‘Difference of Climat’ is the key reason for the manners of man (p. 118).

RI MS HD/13/F, p. 118 (click to enlarge)

Within this worldview, Davy argues for white European superiority, and particularly the English and French nations as pinnacles of excellence. According to Davy, English people benefit from changeable weather and atmosphere, meaning that they are ‘constantly receiving new / Sensations’, and the English person’s ‘active’ and ‘agitated’ mind, reflecting the weather, protects him from ‘Torpor’, and he is ‘proud Honest / & hospitable’ (p. 115). Davy argues that Africans near the torrid zone had to breathe ‘unhealthy air’ and endure the scorching ‘Meridian sun’, with the result that their ‘Fibre is relaxed’ (p. 116). Davy argues later in his essay that constancy of heat or cold lead to ‘always the same dull round of Perceptions’, that were unstimulated by ‘curiosity’ (p. 95); Davy associates the progress of ‘Civilisation’ and ‘Science’ with European countries, where new ideas are continually excited in the minds of those living there. Discussing man’s capacity for perception, Davy argues that the mind is capable of removing or continuing these sensations (coming from the action of external objects on an individual’s organs of sense) depending on whether they are accompanied with pleasure or pain; he argues that the climate shapes how the mind filters these sensations and that those in excessively hot or cold climates are more likely to experience painful sensations, which the mind acts to remove.

RI MS HD/13/F, p. 96 (click to enlarge)

Despite arguing that emigration leads to relatively quick changes in individual character, and that there could be differences in character within nations, and that individual men could experience changes in temperament due to minute changes in degrees of hot and cold and the atmosphere, Davy undermines that sense of complexity and changeability (which works to an extent to undermine the hard and fixed boundaries of national difference) in his descriptions of nations between the northern and southern hemisphere ‘between the tropics’:

The Nations between the tropics are not only distinguished
from others by their brutal <peculiar> Physiognomy, but as well
for [?xxx] Indolence & Barbar<a>ous Manners. They have
never made the least efforts towards Civilization
& seem almost incapable of Improvement. (p. 98)

Davy’s racist ideas about the superiority of white Europeans jar with our modern sensibilities, and it is tempting to read them as being incongruous to the poetry, experiments, narratives, and diary-like entries that fill the pages of 13F and Davy’s other notebooks, and to see these racial constructions as the antithesis to Davy’s meticulously and carefully recorded chemical experiments. However, his racist thinking and ideas in 13F were part of the same material and physical object of the notebook as his writing about women, materialist arguments, and writing on friendship, and ideas circulate across different pieces of his writing. Perhaps the challenge is for us to unthink our assumptions about who Davy was and to create a more expansive vision of the man that includes crude racist stereotypes and ideas about climatic difference shaping character, and to see them as rooted within his chemical philosophy and poetic visions. We don’t know yet whether Davy’s racial politics are part of his early juvenile writing or appear in his later notebooks. As the project continues, we leave open the possibility that we might find and need to confront more examples of Davy’s racial politics. We are not sure of what we will find, but these insights will help us as we move to a more rounded sense of Davy and his reputation today.

—

[1] Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 38, p. 37.

[2] Frank A. J. L. James, ‘Making Money from the Royal Navy in the Late Eighteenth Century: Charles Kerr on Antigua ‘breathing the True Spirit of a West India agent’, The Mariner’s Mirror 17.4 (2021), 402-19.

[3] An excellent starting point for this research is provided by UCL’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery Database.

As I write, our 1450-strong volunteer transcriber community on Zooniverse has transcribed nineteen full Davy notebooks, with the twentieth to soon follow. This is a tremendous achievement, for which the Davy Notebooks Project team are very grateful. We’ll soon be releasing the third (of nine) tranche of notebooks, which contain notes and sketches from Davy’s geological tour of Ireland (c. 1805-6), material relating to Davy’s highly influential chemical work on the decomposition of the fixed alkalis, and the draft essays ‘On the species of matter’ and ‘Of magnetic action’, interspersed with poetry, philosophy, and fragments of various other kinds.

So far, we’ve encountered textual challenges of different types: difficult or even entirely illegible words (which we’ll take to our next project Advisory Board meeting, to see if any of the experts we’ve assembled to help guide the project can help us to decipher them); densely packed text and text with heavy (usually ink) deletion, making reading difficult or, in some cases, practically impossible; and complex tables of figures and mathematical notation, especially in notebook RI MS HD/21/A, the presence of which has obviously considerably slowed the transcription process for this particular notebook. To every volunteer transcriber who has stuck with this most difficult of notebooks, we send special thanks!

While many of the comments on Talk focus on the textual challenges of working with Davy’s notebooks, there are also a distinct set of material challenges – material as in relating to the physical characteristics of the notebooks – that have emerged since we began the pilot phase of the Davy Notebooks Project in 2019. Working in the way that we are – largely online or otherwise digitally and in relative isolation since the coming of the pandemic – distances us from the material experience of working with manuscripts. As such, I thought it would be fitting to focus on some of the physical aspects of manuscript study, in the hope of better days to come. As there’s nothing quite like sitting down in the archive and attempting to make sense of an especially difficult manuscript page, my specific focus here will be on some of the material challenges we’ve encountered so far.[1]

Torn pages, such as this page of notebook 13C, always present something of a puzzle:

RI MS HD/13/C, p. 43 (click to enlarge)

There are two substantial tears on this notebook page, and it’s fair to assume that, as the text is interrupted, both tears happened after Davy entered his text in the notebook. The tears on this page leave us with this text:

M M. has [MS torn] infor[MS torn]
of the reason of my not writing
you. it has been only the
fear of troubling you My letters
would not be interesting to you
for they would only express one
feeling which I should find
it difficult to diffuse through
many words, namely that I
can never look to my present
state without feeling the strongest
emotions of gratitude towards
my first protector & earliest
friend. –
If you do no[?t] write to me
before the fifteenth [MS torn]
month you [MS torn]
to [MS torn]

If we were to approach this page without contextual knowledge (when was this notebook used? Was it Davy’s usual practice to draft what appears to be a letter in his notebooks? Who might Davy’s ‘first protector & earliest friend’ be?), we’d be at something of a loss. As it happens, the phrase ‘first protector & earliest friend’ is key here: Davy uses the same phrase in a letter to John Tonkin, ‘effectively a surrogate father of the Davy family’,[2] dated 12 January 1801, first published in John Davy’s Memoirs of the Life of Sir Humphry Davy in 1836.[3] So, the text above, in Davy’s notebook, is likely an early draft of the letter he eventually sent to Tonkin (which is substantively different in other ways; the manuscript of the later letter is now lost). We can surmise that the text at the top of the page, interrupted by the shorter tear, would have read something like ‘M M. has [?already/?lately/?hopefully] informed you of the reason of my not writing you’; the longer tear at the bottom of the page serves as a stark reminder that other crucial details – which, without other draft material to use as corroboration, we cannot even hope to reconstruct with any degree of confidence – are lost forever.[4]

Notebook 15E offers something different – and unusual in Davy’s oeuvre – in terms of the order of text entry and page tearing:

RI MS HD/15/E, p. 47 (click to enlarge)

The text above is entirely legible, and it appears that nothing has been lost as a result of the tear:

in all cases to
claim the attention
both of those who
study with the
hope of inventing
something new
& of those who
wish to make
themselves acquain[te]d
with the knowledge
already acquired

We may therefore safely assume that Davy has written his text on the notebook page after tearing – we can say, with a very high degree of confidence, that he’s working around the tear. This presents much less of a challenge than the previous example, where degrees of speculative reconstruction and cross-referencing were necessary, but still raises a new set of similarly intriguing questions: did Davy tear out the missing part? If so, why might he have done so? Might it be elsewhere, as a fragment, either in the same archive or another archive? I’ll be interested to see whether we encounter any other instances of ‘tearing before writing’ in any of the Davy notebooks we have coming up.

The use of pencil in manuscript notebooks causes no end of problems for the reader:

RI MS HD/14/I, front endpaper a (verso) (click to enlarge)

The front endpaper above bears legible text in ink on the top third of the page. Some faint pencil text follows on directly. The pencil text on the middle third of the page is so faint in parts that it’s barely legible. This is largely caused by the slight rubbing of pages together, while the notebook is closed: while ink makes a stain on the paper, pencil (used with normal pressure) only leaves a surface residue, which wears off over time as the notebook is handled and used. No matter how painstaking the curatorial care a notebook receives, the pencil will wear away and smudge over time: even handling the notebook only occasionally will cause minute rubbing of the pages, which will in turn cause the pencil text to deteriorate.

As a doctoral student, I was fortunate enough to spend several hours consulting Percy Bysshe Shelley’s so-called ‘Drowned Notebook’ (Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 20): the water-damaged notebook recovered after Shelley’s death from drowning in the Bay of Spezia in 1822. Photographs were taken of this notebook in the early twentieth century, and also deposited in the Bodleian Library; I had these alongside the manuscript notebook as I worked. Even though the notebook had been afforded the very highest level of curatorial care, the deterioration, in comparing the manuscript with the photographs, was marked – it’s simply time that does this, the fragile notebook representing the antithesis of Shelley’s ‘[t]ablets that never fade’ (Queen Mab, Canto vii, l. 53). Pencil, while having its advantages, such as ease of use outdoors, is notoriously unstable as a writing medium; one of the aims of the Davy Notebooks Project is to ensure that Davy’s valuable manuscripts are digitally preserved for future generations. Who knows what the page above will look like in a hundred years’ time?

Writing on materials other than paper also causes problems in terms of textual stability. Several of Davy’s notebooks, including RI MS HD/14/E, are bound in leather or calfskin:

RI MS HD/14/E, back cover (click to enlarge)

RI MS HD/14/E, back cover, detail, rotated (click to enlarge)

Notebook 14E, used towards the end of Davy’s life, in 1827, is covered in calfskin. In Davy’s oeuvre, this is fairly unusual: we currently know of only three notebooks with this covering. The text in this notebook is generally very legible; the same, of course, cannot be said for the ink on the covers (both front and back). Whether the ink persisted for a short while and rubbed off, owing to the interaction of this particular specimen of calfskin and the ink that Davy was using at the time, or whether the ink took well to the surface and has simply deteriorated over the years is a matter of conjecture; the end result is the same. We’ve encountered similar instances of difficult-to-decipher ink on leather covers too. Again, this makes the case for the importance of the digital preservation of the notebooks that the Davy Notebooks Project is undertaking.

Working with the notebooks of a chemist presents its own set of material challenges. Notebook 20C contains several pages with what appear to be chemical staining, such as this one:

RI MS HD/20/C, p. 50 (click to enlarge)

While, in this case, we’re fortunate in that we can still make out the text affected by the staining (is it a chemical reagent, or the product of a chemical experiment, perhaps?), the two spots of darker staining at the very bottom of the page threaten to obscure the text. In fact, we can only read the denominator in the first fraction with a moderate degree of confidence: it appears to be a ‘2’. If the staining was heavier, the text may well have been completely obscured. As we continue to transcribe Davy’s notebooks, several of which he had alongside him in the laboratory as he worked (as he apparently did notebook 20C), we might encounter more challenging cases than this.

All of the examples considered above serve as a reminder that manuscripts are fragile objects, in a state of slow, yet unremitting, decay. Their fragility is, in my view, one of the things that make manuscripts both beautiful and special as objects: the apprehension that these ‘tablets’, filled with compelling evidence of what Keats called a ‘living hand, […] warm and capable’, do ‘fade’, and are always fading in a variety of ways, reminds us of our obligation as Davy scholars to do our utmost to preserve, in the best ways we presently can, the materials therein for future generations.

—

[1] The Davy notebooks we’ve worked with so far are, on the whole, in generally good or very good physical condition. The examples I discuss below, from the work we’ve done to date, have been selected as being notable exceptions to this general rule.

[2] The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy, ed. by Tim Fulford and Sharon Ruston, advisory eds. Jan Golinski, Frank A. J. L. James, and David Knight, assisted by Andrew Lacey, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), i, cxci.

[3] John Davy, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Humphry Davy, 2 vols (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1836), i, 107-9.

[4] In the case of page stubs – pages cut closely to the binding, sometimes entirely blank, and sometimes with only initial letters or initial part-letters visible – some impressive reconstructive work has been done by the editors of the Cornell Wordsworth series. In several instances, the editors were able to establish, with a relatively high degree of confidence, which of Wordsworth’s draft poems stood on the excised pages left as stubs by collating legible and/or probable first letters on the stub with the first letters of lines in a working database of Wordsworth’s draft and published poems.

At the start of 1811, Humphry Davy was Professor of Chemistry to both the Royal Institution and the Board of Agriculture and a Secretary of the Royal Society of London. All of these were paid positions from which he derived his entire income, for Davy, the son of a bankrupt yeoman farmer, had very little family money to rely on. By the end of the following year, Davy, now knighted, had resigned all these paid roles. He had married, on 11 April 1812, a wealthy widow, Jane Apreece. Although the details of the marriage settlement have not (yet) been found, her money allowed Davy to effectively retire and pursue his career in whatever directions he wished without financial worries. At the time it was rumoured that she had an income of £4000 annually and a capital of £60,000. To put that in context, Mrs Bennet was very happy with Mr Bingley’s annual income of £5000. As Davy’s marriage had such a profound effect on the course of his life and career, I became curious about where Lady Davy’s money came from, little thinking that the question would lead me to explore how non-plantation owners made large fortunes in the late eighteenth-century British Caribbean, and provide yet another example of the legacies of slavery.

Until now the source of her fortune has not been known, though there exists an implication in much of the secondary literature relating to Davy that it came from her first husband, Shuckburgh Apreece, whom she married in 1798. He died in 1807 before he inherited his father’s baronetcy. Missing out on that title led Mrs Apreece to ensure that the Prince Regent knighted Davy two days before they married, so she immediately became Lady Davy. When I found, in the course of researching Lady Davy, that most of the Apreece estate was entailed and so he could only leave his widow a relatively small amount, I turned my attention to her father.

She was born in the early 1780s on Antigua, a British sugar colony in the Caribbean. Her father Charles Kerr had arrived on the island sometime in the 1770s from his native Scotland. During the 1780s and early 1790s, he had made his fortune as a merchant, provider of credit and as a prize agent for the Royal Navy. In that role he withheld (illegally) large amounts of money which, despite prolonged legal actions, never reached those entitled to it. He also leased enslaved people to the Royal Navy’s dockyard, the English Harbour (now the UNESCO World Heritage Site, Nelson’s Dockyard), on the island’s southern coast. Following his death in 1795, around forty enslaved people were leased by his estate to the dockyard, and although the numbers reduced in the following five years, it was not until the early nineteenth century that the estate was completely wound up.

Kerr divided his estate equally between his widow and daughter making them both attractively wealthy. Now in London, both married in 1798, his widow to a rich Antiguan planter and his daughter to Apreece. Following Apreece’s death, his widow established a very successful salon in Edinburgh and then tried to do the same, somewhat less successfully, in London. But there she met Davy and after a fairly short courtship they married.

Quite what either of them knew about the precise means by which her father had acquired his money is not clear. Had Lady Davy been educated in Britain (which is not known, but was usual practice for children of British colonists born in the Caribbean), she may well have known very little about where her wealth came from. On the other hand, her mother was familiar with the legal actions taken against her husband. So far, no evidence has been found in which Lady Davy discussed any aspect of her origins whatsoever. Whether this lacuna was due to ignorance or to a deliberate determination not to refer to what would be highly embarrassing matters, has, for now, to be a matter for conjecture.

Professor James’s new article, looking at the life and career of Jane Davy’s father Charles Kerr, is available online here.

From June to August 2021, Alexander Theo Giesen joined the Davy Notebooks Project team as a UCL Department of Science and Technology Studies (STS) Summer Studentship holder, and edited the transcriptions of three additional notebooks (14E, 14I, and 20C) that volunteers transcribed during the pilot project. During the pilot, eight of Davy’s notebooks were transcribed by more than 500 contributors across the world, using Zooniverse. Alexander is an MSc student in History and Philosophy of Science at UCL.

Editing the transcriptions of the notebooks from the pilot project involved working with up to five versions of the same page transcribed by multiple volunteers. In its current version, three volunteers transcribe each line in Zooniverse and this is collated into an aggregated transcription in ALICE for collaborative review (you can read more about this here in Alexis Wolf’s recent post). However, for the pilot, amalgamating the transcriptions was a manual process. For each page of the notebook the process was to select one of the transcribed pages and then edit this page, using the others to fill the gaps.

The first day of editing was by far the most difficult. 14E, dating from 1827, is a fascinating notebook crammed from the outset with Davy’s weather reports, health updates, long lists of temperatures at various parts of the room and at different times of the day, and lots of fishing! It contains records of daily fishing trips, detailing the number and size of fish caught, the phenotypical features of the fish, and even the disappointment of not having seen any new fish at the fish market. It was a challenge at first to decipher the names of less familiar European cities and towns, and Davy’s reports of his experiences could at times feel a little uneventful. It took three hours to edit the first three pages of 14E!

Choosing which one transcription to use as a basis for editing each page was something that shifted over time. Initially, it seemed logical to pick the one with the fewest unclear words marked up by volunteers (which they mark up as ‘[unclear]xxxxx[/unclear]’). At the start, picking a page with the fewest unclear words, it took a long time to rearrange the lines to follow the ordering in the notebook. Over time it became apparent that picking a page with the correct ordering of the lines was the quickest way to edit each page. The best way to identify this was to pick the transcription that had the same first and last line as the notebooks. The first thing to do when selecting a new page to edit was to check if the first and last lines are the same as in the original, and the editing process became much quicker after this!

RI MS HD/14/E, p. 100, ‘Aug 1. Copenhagen 24’ (click to enlarge)

Editing the transcriptions of Davy’s poetry was a wonderful experience and it felt easier than editing Davy’s prose. Most of the latter half of 14E and 14I contained some stunning poems. For Davy, poetry appears to be a mode of synthesis. Here, we can understand how his actions relate to himself, his mind, and the universe. Also, there were imaginings that move beyond the scientific to formulate cosmological questions:

What if the stars themselves
Be but a different animated world
Of which our narrow intellect can form
No just conception. […]

RI MS HD/14/E, from p. 091 (click to enlarge)

Out of the three notebooks, 20C, an early notebook dating from 1800 and Davy’s time in Clifton in Bristol, contained the most reports by Davy of his scientific experiments and theories. As a non-chemist, it was tough to follow what was happening in the experiments, but now familiar with the editing process and Davy’s handwriting, there was time to reflect on the content of some of these pages while editing them. Davy uses the personal pronoun frequently – ‘I found/introduced/procured/connected’ – but regularly also drops these in his accounts of his chemical experiments. There is almost a conscious editing and removal of the self. This fits the narrative Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison give in Objectivity (2010). It is in the mid-nineteenth century that they trace the rise of ‘mechanical objectivity’, which resists the ‘temptation of the aesthetic’ to be ‘free of human interpretation’ (Daston and Galison 2010: 27, 120, 131). While Davy precedes this by a couple of decades, the formal contrast in his poetics and his scientific note-taking foreshadow this move in science.

Editing the transcriptions of Davy’s notebooks has been a fascinating experience. As well as developing skills in editing manuscripts and working with volunteer-produced transcriptions, it has been a pleasure to ponder on the content of Davy’s notebooks. What these examples of Davy’s notebooks show us is that science is not confined to a lab; it can happen on the sofa, on the train, or when fishing. Davy can teach that science and poetry – the act of his imagination – are deeply connected.

The Davy Notebooks Project team are very grateful to Alexander for his excellent work, and to UCL and STS for making it possible.

The 4th of September this year will mark precisely 200 years since continuous motion was first produced by the interaction of electricity and magnetism. In the basement laboratory of the Royal Institution that day Michael Faraday (1791-1867), just about to turn thirty, placed a permanent magnet vertically in a bowl of mercury as shown in his drawing of the experimental arrangement (fig. 1). Into the bowl he hung a piece of wire from a hook and when he passed an electric current through the mercury and the wire, the wire began to rotate around the magnet. Faraday called this novel phenomenon electro-magnetic rotations while others, with some exaggeration, have declared it to be the first electric motor.

Fig. 1: Faraday’s experimental arrangement

At one level this can be, and has been, read as a straight-forward experimental discovery in the physical sciences. But all scientific research, experimental, theoretical, observational, takes place in a plethora of intersecting, sometimes conflicting, contexts. This experiment of Faraday’s was no exception and tracing its history through publications, paper drafts, letters, and notebooks (alas in this case not those of the former Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution Humphry Davy (1778-1829)) reveals a story of scientific jealousy and rivalry. Davy had appointed Faraday as the Royal Institution’s laboratory assistant early in 1813, but, as we shall see, by the 1820s had developed feelings of jealousy about Faraday’s increasing success, probably on both psychological grounds and on the complex political situation in the scientific community.

In scientific terms the discovery led quickly in 1822 and 1823 to a major row between Faraday and André-Marie Ampère (1775-1836) about the interpretation of the phenomenon. Their argument was instrumental in confirming Faraday’s view of the limited usefulness of mathematics in science and in moving him away from a Newtonian conception of the world to eventually formulating his field theory, one of the cornerstones of modern physics. But the controversy also prevented Ampère realising that he had observed electro-magnetic induction in 1822 and although he tried to retrospectively claim credit after Faraday discovered it in 1831, he did not convince anyone and indeed by then had forgotten the original circumstances that prevented him then from appreciating the significance of what he had seen.

So how did Faraday come to make this significant discovery? At the end of September 1820, the Annals of Philosophy provided a translation (from Latin) of the paper published earlier in the year by the Danish savant Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851) in which he announced his discovery of electro-magnetism. All over Europe chemists and natural philosophers turned their attention to this wonderful new phenomenon. Davy was in the North of England when the paper was published, so probably didn’t read it until he returned to London around 10 October. However, he immediately set to work and Faraday recorded his presence in the Royal Institution’s basement laboratory in the ensuing week. On the 19th Davy wrote to his brother telling him that he was working so much on electro-magnetism he was postponing his intended trip to Penzance to see their mother. To his wife (in Paris) he mentioned his researches requesting that she not tell any Frenchman about them. For the rest of the month Davy continued his experimentation in both the Royal Institution and the London Institution which had a powerful new battery; Faraday was present on many of these occasions and took notes.

Just under a month later Davy sent a paper to his friend and acting President of the Royal Society of London, William Hyde Wollaston (1766-1828) describing his results. In the form of a letter (in Faraday’s hand illustrating the power that Davy still wielded at the Royal Institution), Davy announced his findings that metal could be magnetised by passing an electric current in a nearby wire and that the polarisation of the magnet produced depended on its relative position to the wire. This arrangement was illustrated in the report published in the Philosophical Magazine (fig. 2), but not in Davy’s Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London paper. He concluded by conjecturing that the earth’s magnetism was caused by electric currents as were the aurora.

Fig. 2: From the Philosophical Magazine

Davy succeeded Wollaston as President of the Royal Society of London on 30 November 1820 and quickly realised the enormous amount of work the position entailed about which he complained. So, it was not until February 1821 and again in May that he was able to resume work on electro-magnetism once again at the Royal and London Institutions with Faraday and Wollaston occasionally present. At some point during the summer Faraday accepted the invitation from the newly appointed editor of the Annals of Philosophy and old friend Richard Phillips (1778-1851) to write a review article discussing the now considerable literature on electro-magnetism. The first two parts published in September and October were anonymous which may suggest a degree of nervousness on Faraday’s part about what Davy (away in the North again) might think.

To understand what had been written about electro-magnetism Faraday decided to repeat (insofar as the descriptions permitted) the experiments that had been made by savants such as Oersted, Ampère, François Arago (1786-1853), etc., as well as Davy and Wollaston. It was in this context of making such experiments in a series commenced on 3 September 1821 that the following day Faraday discovered electro-magnetic rotations. He was fully conscious that this was a major discovery needing publication as quickly as possible. The Quarterly Journal of Science edited by Davy’s successor at the Royal Institution, William Thomas Brande (1788-1866), published by John Murray (at the other end of Albemarle Street), had a semi-detached connection with the Institution. In Brande’s absence Faraday had been left to look after the Journal and so took advantage to publish his paper on electro-magnetic rotations in the October issue.

Faraday then went on holiday to Ramsgate with his new wife at roughly the same time as Davy returned to London with toothache and marital problems, so it may be reasonably adduced that he was not in the best frame of mind to appreciate Faraday’s actions. On his return to London, Faraday found that rumours were circulating that he had not properly acknowledged the electro-magnetic work of Davy and Wollaston and specifically of plagiarizing the latter. Alarmed, Faraday sought a meeting with Wollaston who told him loftily he had no strong feelings on the matter but invited him to call. Whether that meeting happened or not is not clear, but things seem to have calmed down.

However, at a meeting eighteen months later of the Royal Society of London on 6 March 1823, during the reading of another of his papers on electro-magnetism, Davy from the President’s chair,

thought it right to state a circumstance, which, though known to many Fellows of the Royal Society [of London], was not generally understood: this was, that we owe to the sagacity of Dr. Wollaston, the first suggestion of electro-magnetic rotation; and that, had not an experiment on the subject, made by Dr. W. in the laboratory of the Royal Institution, and witnessed by Sir Humphry, failed, merely through an accident which happened to the apparatus, he would have been the discoverer of that phenomenon.

Although in his published paper he softened this, slightly, the damage had been done. Presumably as a response Phillips immediately set about organising Faraday’s election to Fellowship of the Royal Society of London which was publicly, though unsuccessfully, opposed by Davy, leading to a complete breakdown in their personal relations. Davy turned to exploiting Faraday’s undoubted scientific and administrative skills by, for example, getting him to be the first (unpaid) Secretary of the Athenaeum Club and working for most of the second half of the 1820s on the project to improve optical glass. At the time Faraday regarded this as a complete failure and waste of his time, but modified that view following his using a piece of glass he had made then to discover in 1845 the magneto-optical effect, allowing him to finally formulate his field theory.

When Faraday had first been in contact with Davy about pursuing a career in science, he claimed he had been full of idealism ‘of the superior moral feelings of philosophic men’ to which Davy responded that ‘the experience of a few years … [would] set me right on that matter’. This was written after Davy’s death, so might well reflect the experience that Faraday had undergone of working for Davy and observing at close hand his problematic career trajectory, rather than anything said in 1812 or 1813. That Faraday regretted what had happened with the outcome of electro-magnetic rotations, his election to the Royal Society of London, and a few other matters, is clear from his comment in 1838 to the Chancellor of the Exchequer that of all his honours ‘One title, namely that of F.R.S.[L.] was sought and paid for’.

—

Notes

Davy’s letter to his brother of 19 October 1820 and that to Wollaston (in Faraday’s hand) of 12 November 1820 are respectively Letters 743 and 747 in volume three of Davy’s Collected Letters.

Davy’s comments to the Royal Society of London on 6 March 1823 were reported in Annals of Philosophy, xxi (1823), 303-4.