![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/davynotebooks\/files\/2024\/01\/13i_10-scaled.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nRI MS HD\/13\/I, pp. 10 and 11 (click to enlarge)<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Notebook 13I opens with seventeen pages of poetry signed \u2018Fidelissima\u2019:<\/p>\n Thou to whom heaven its noblest gifts assigned By now our reading group is accustomed to seeing poetry and science in the same notebook, but we were particularly struck by the poetry at the beginning of 13I, both in respect of the handwriting, which was new to us, and by the subject matter, point of view, and tone of the poetry, none of which suggested that it was written by Davy himself. The first two poems were signed, \u2018Fidelissima\u2019, i.e. \u2018most faithful\u2019. The poetry seems to be about Davy, written from a female subject position. We already knew that Fidelissima had written poetry for Davy, but could we identify her from her hand and the nature of her poetry?<\/p>\n We excluded Jane Davy and Anna Beddoes on the grounds of the handwriting, which matched neither of theirs. We also agreed that the poetry was not love poetry in the conventional sense, but rather written to admire Davy\u2019s scientific knowledge, his depth of feeling, and love of nature. In the poems the author is saying goodbye to the Elect of Science and wishing him well on his journey.<\/p>\n Our search for poetry that matched Fidelissima\u2019s tone and style led us to discover Catherine Maria Fanshawe, mentioned in Davy\u2019s Collected Letters<\/em>.[1]<\/a> She is described in the edition\u2019s footnotes as a poet and Davy\u2019s friend: someone to whom he gave poems that he had written. We followed up this promising lead by comparing the lines in 13I with scans of a manuscript poem by Fanshawe, \u2018A Riddle on the Letter H\u2019, which we found online at the New York Public Library.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n Catherine Maria Fanshawe, ‘A Riddle on the Letter H’, New York Public Library (click to enlarge)<\/strong><\/p>\n RI MS HD\/13\/I, p. 5 (click to enlarge)<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n The most telling feature of Fanshawe\u2019s hand is her style of writing the letter \u2018W\u2019, which is identical between the two manuscripts. We were soon convinced that the hand in Fanshawe\u2019s poem matched that in the notebook.<\/p>\n During our session, we found that Fanshawe had attended and written about a dinner party at Davy\u2019s house.[3]<\/a> We also established that she had written an ode to the Reverend Sydney Smith about his lectures at the Royal Institution in the early 1800s.[4]<\/a> All of this led us to have confidence in our reading group discovery that Catherine Maria Fanshawe was indeed Fidelissima, and that she had copied out her poems to Davy in his own notebook.<\/p>\n Some Davy ‘fan mail’ held by the Royal Institution (RI MS 26\/H\/13) (click to enlarge)<\/strong><\/p>\n The attribution of the pseudonym \u2018Fidelissima\u2019 to Catherine Maria Fanshawe also gave a satisfying answer to some other mysteries long investigated by our team, such as a collection of \u2018fan mail\u2019 held by the Royal Institution, which can also now be traced to Fanshawe.[5]<\/a><\/p>\n Looking further into her life and work, it appeared that Fanshawe perfectly embodied a lost world of manuscript sociability that thrived in the early nineteenth century. While very few of her poems were published in her lifetime, they were cherished by a wide variety of readers who encountered them in manuscript form. For example, her manuscript poems were read by Sir Walter Scott, who found them \u2018quite beautiful\u2019.[6]<\/a> Fanshawe\u2019s poems clearly enjoyed appreciation both during and after her life, as seen in publications that printed substantial selections of her poems including Joanna Baillie\u2019s Collection of Poems <\/em>(1823) and Mary Mitford\u2019s Recollections of a Literary Life <\/em>(1852).[7]<\/a><\/p>\n Given their widespread readership, it is likely that Fanshawe\u2019s poems were both written for and read in social situations such as salons and dinner parties. They may also have been composed through instances of personal collaboration, which we may have discovered an example of through her writing in Davy\u2019s own notebook.<\/p>\n This type of collaborative working is evident in a further example of Fanshawe\u2019s writing that we recently discovered in another Davy notebook, 13J. Dating from 1803-09, the notebook contains a mix of poetry and scientific notes. When encountering the notebook in our reading group, we quickly decided that several poems were also written in the hand of \u2018Fidelissima\u2019. One poem shows a clear example this. On p. 16, three lines of a poem are written out in Davy\u2019s hand:<\/p>\n Think not that I forget the days. RI MD HD\/13\/J, pp. 16 and 17 (click to enlarge)<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n On the next page, p. 17, there appears a lengthier version of the same poem, written in Fanshawe\u2019s hand, with a title, \u2018To A[unclear]xxx[\/unclear]\u2019, and several lines added below. This implies that perhaps the pair worked side by side, or that Fanshawe may have served as Davy\u2019s amanuensis on this occasion. Notebook 13J includes multiple poems written in Fanshawe\u2019s hand, implying that they may have both worked with the notebook on several occasions. This type of collaborative working recalls the social writing practices of other Romantic period writers, such as the members of the Wordsworth family circle, who often worked together on manuscripts, using the handwritten pages they produced for shared reading and writing.<\/p>\n The discovery of Fanshawe\u2019s presence changes how we might interpret Davy\u2019s notebooks, proving that they were shared and social objects used by multiple authors. It also allows us to recover the story of a largely forgotten women author who left her mark on the literary world in the early nineteenth century. More than that, this discovery underlines the important role that women writers play in the notebooks\u2019 pages, and in the formation of Davy\u2019s literary identity. As we\u2019re also discovering, this continued after Davy\u2019s death in 1829, when his sister-in-law Margaret Davy and brother John used his notebooks, letters, and published works to construct his posthumous reputation.[8]<\/a> Fanshawe\u2019s proven readership, despite not seeking publication, may also say something about how Davy circulated his own poems in manuscript.<\/p>\n \u2014<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy<\/em>, 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).<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, The New York Public Library, \u2018A Riddle on the Letter H\u2019, (1820-1831) <https:\/\/digitalcollections.nypl.org\/items\/c1d43830-44c2-0135-67df-799aec126ddb><\/a>.<\/p>\n This poem by Fanshawe was long incorrectly attributed to Lord Byron, a fact that is clarified along with a printing of the poem in the posthumous The Literary Remains of Catherine Maria Fanshawe<\/em> (London: Basil Montague Pickering, 1876).<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Literary Remains of Catherine Maria Fanshawe<\/em> also contains \u2018Fragment of a Letter\u2019, which gives an account of dining at Davy\u2019s alongside Madame de Sta\u00ebl and Lord Byron in a small party (pp. 56-59).<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Literary Remains of Catherine Maria Fanshawe, <\/em>\u2018Ode\u2019, pp. 45-49.<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> RI MS 26\/H\/13; Sharon Ruston wrote about these letters in a blog post<\/a> in 2012.<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> Courtney, W. P., and Rebecca Mills. \u2018Fanshawe, Catherine Maria (1765\u20131834), poet.\u2019 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography<\/em> (Oxford University Press, 2004) <https:\/\/www.oxforddnb.com\/display\/10.1093\/ref:odnb\/9780198614128.001.0001\/odnb-9780198614128-e-9147><\/a>.<\/p>\n [7]<\/a> Joanna Baillie, A Collection of Poems: Chiefly Manuscript, and From Living Authors. Edited for the Benefit of a Friend<\/em>\u00a0(London: 1823), pp. 65-77, pp. 167-85; Mary Russell Mitford, Recollection of a Literary Life, or, Books, Places and People<\/em> (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1852), i, pp. 249-65.<\/p>\n [8]<\/a> Ellie Bird was awarded the Women\u2019s Studies Group 1558-1837<\/a> Bursary in 2023 to examine Margaret\u2019s notebooks at Keele University Special Collections and Archives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over the course of the Davy Notebooks Project, our team has come together for monthly online sessions during which we read and discuss one of Davy\u2019s notebooks. Our reading group is always a refreshing opportunity to share knowledge and develop… Continue Reading Sara Cole and Alexis Wolf on Fidelissima: Women\u2019s literary contributions in the pages of the Davy notebooks<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":456,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dnp-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/davynotebooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/davynotebooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/davynotebooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/davynotebooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/456"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/davynotebooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1068"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/davynotebooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1088,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/davynotebooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068\/revisions\/1088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/davynotebooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/davynotebooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/davynotebooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\n
\nBlest Friend of Man, the darling of mankind,
\nElect of Science on whose infant head
\nTruth\u2019s angel power the full orb\u2019d Halo spread,
\nAwhile farewell[<\/em>.]<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n
\nWhen first through rough unhaunted ways
\nWe moved along the mountains side<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n