Hello blog,

I managed to get two days in the British Library last week and spent some of those reading Joanna Baillie’s letters. There’s quite an extensive correspondence between her and Lady Jane Davy, Sir Humphry’s wife and I’ve come across a couple of really interesting things: in 1816 Joanna Baillie tells Jane Davy that she showed some of Humphry’s poetry to her brother Matthew Baillie, the surgeon, and ‘My brother, who does not read much poetry, has been delighted with Sir Humphrey’s [sic] verses’. In another letter, written to Sir Thomas Lawrence in 1822/3, Baillie writes that Sir Humphry has given her a poem for a collection she was putting together to raise money for a friend but the editor of Baillie’s letters notes that if Davy did in fact give Baillie a poem for the collection it must be an anonymous one. So I ordered this collection on Friday without much hope – and there’s a Davy poem in there! It’s called ‘Life’ but it’s a recognisable version of a poem that I’ve worked on before, which Coleridge suggests revisions for in a letter dated 1800. It was a poem he clearly continued to work on throughout his life, and it was published posthumously by his brother in his 1839-40 Memoirs under the title ‘Written after recovery from a dangerous illness’ (this version dated 1807). I wonder why his brother didn’t use the version Davy published in Baillie’s collection in 1823? I wonder what the impetus is behind Davy’s revisions of this poem? Why does he keep returning to it and what authority do the various versions have? In yet another version of the poem in one of Davy’s notebooks some of Coleridge’s suggested changes have clearly been made but these lines don’t make their way into the published versions.

Yesterday gave a paper at Bishop Grosseteste University College’s research seminar, and was able to use this poem as an example to illustrate points about ‘Science and Poetry in the Romantic Era’. In the coming months I’m going to have a think about the differences between them. It’s a real discovery because we didn’t think he had published anything beyond three poems in the Annual Anthology poems and the prologue to The Honeymoon. For those of you who know Wahida Amin, you’ll know that she’s writing a PhD on Humphry Davy’s poetry, the first study to look solely at his poetry, and this just shows that there is lots out there to find!

I was in London partly to have a planning meeting for event 3 (how quickly they are coming now!) with the Royal Institution and the National Maritime Museum. It’s going to be a great event and already we have some great sessions and speakers planned.

I hope that people will sign in to listen to me interview Peter Buse about his work on polaroid on Monday 8th March (see the blog post from LitSciMed for more details). It’ll be lovely to hear from you and have a virtual seminar before event 2.

Finally, I also heard on Friday that we have been successful in another grant application for the Davy letters project, this time £7,390 from the British Academy for travel to archives where we’ve found new material and to pay for a research assistant – which will really help with the work that we need to do! I’ll be writing the job spec soon and then we’ll be advertising the post.

All best,

Sharon

Dear Blog,

The week has been dominated by thinking about what the Calendar of Letters should look like for our Davy letters project. We’re at the stage where we are building the database and have to decide some tricky things – what should the fields be for the letters, how will people want to search them, how do we ensure that all eventualities (eg letters in French, letters using symbols, letters without a certain date) are accommodated by the database created for them? We’ve had some good discussions among the consultancy group (Tim Fulford, Jan Golinksi, Frank James, and David Knight) and there are more meetings planned. We are also regularly turning up new letters by Davy, this week David Knight noticed that the Linnaean Society has some and a few weeks ago a few turned up on Ebay of all places (thanks to David Fallon for pointing them out to me). We can’t afford to buy them unfortunately but I’m going to ask whether we can transcribe them for the edition.

I have a question about how to use the social space. We have recorded a number of the sessions at the Literature, Culture, and Science symposium held at the University of Salford and were thinking of posting them on the social space so that people could see/listen to them. Before Cristina begins editing these though, I’d like to know whether thsi would be of interest, and whether there are particular sessions people would like to see. The programme for the day can be seen at http://www.espach.salford.ac.uk/cms/news/article/?id=20. If people are particularly keen to see papers on eco-criticism, medical journals in the US, experiential theatre performances, or polaroid cameras, let me know and we’ll publish them.

Cristina also wondered about the following activity for the social space: ‘why not ask students to host their own discussions? Since most students will be participating in all the face to face events… Why not ask 2 -3 of them to host a small discussion about a topic related to their dissertation? This could be done in turns. Each week a new discussion moderated by a student. Then after the face to face event, other students would take that role, etc…’ I think this is a great idea but am interested to see what others think to. Let me know – you can leave comments at the bottom of the blog or send me a message.

Right, I’m off now to the John Ryland’s library at Deansgate in Manchester to read some letters by John Aikin (brother to Anna Barbauld) to someone called James Montgomery, whom I’m yet to identify. Am hoping this will help for an article I’m writing.

Best,

Sharon

Hello blog,

It was the first week of the new semester this week with all the chaos that that entails. The madness is sometimes fun too – we (me, Iain Vaughan and Naz) gave the first seminars of the new module ‘Monstrous Bodies’. Iain gave an excellent and really thought-provoking presentation on the idea of ‘monstrous politics’. Using James Gillray’s cartoon ‘New Morality’ (which can be seen here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/GillrayNewMorality.jpg), Iain noted the various types of monster represented, including Coleridge and Southey as half-men half-asses, and a crocodile with a corset on, which Iain suspected may have been meant to be Mary Wollstonecraft. Iain’s point was that Gillray, publishing this cartoon in a conservative anti-Jacobin magazine, was saying that this was the physical representation of people’s monstrous new republican politics. We took a look at the alarmingly wide definition of ‘Monsters’ given by the surgeon William Lawrence in Rees’ Cyclopedia from 1819, which included people with a hare-lip and many other very minor disfigurements. It’s an interesting module, which I’m trying to orient in a number of ways, using both contemporary medical texts and twentieth-century theoretical texts. Let’s hope that it works!

Just a quick note to make sure that everyone knows the resources are now online for event 1 at http://www.litscimed.org.uk/page/learning. Just click on the picture of Gladstone’s bust (thanks for that Paul!) and you’ll see the kinds of things that are available. You can also read the evaluations (anonymised of course) for that event there.

Yesterday I had a look at the AHRC funded network ‘Literature and Madness’ http://www.madnessandliterature.org/. They have a conference coming up, which looks very good, and on their website are featuring reviews of books that in some way reveal issues relevant to the topic. It’s called ‘revealing reads’ and there are a great range of novels reviewed from Conrad to Amis, to writers I don’t know.

Finally, I very much enjoyed the research and teaching colloquium seminar that Phoebe Moore and I took on Wednesday (with Naz and Abby present) on ‘Interdisciplinarity’. Postgrads there were working on many more subjects than literature and science (though I was very fascinated by a PhD student working on photography and biology). It was useful to think about the positives and negatives of interdisciplinary study, how possible it was in practice, what definitions of it were, and I thought (as I have done before) about how LitSciMed needs to have a rigourous methodology and approach if it is to exist as a sub- or inter-discipline. I’ve been asked to give a paper to the annual general meeting of CCUE (the Council for College and University English) in April and I have been mulling over these ideas for that too.

More on the second event soon, which is shaping up nicely.  

All best,

Sharon