Monthly Archives: May 2010

Visit to Dove Cottage

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Dear Blog,

First things first, there is less than a week to go before the deadline for applications for event 3. I’m very much looking forward to the next event, to be hosted by the Royal Institution and National Martime Museum, and I know that lots of effort has gone into creating an excellent looking programme. More details can be found here: http://www.litscimed.org.uk/page/event3

I’ve been working in Dove Cottage http://www.wordsworth.org.uk/ since Monday and it’s been great. I’m again transcribing Humphry Davy letters; there are a few here to Coleridge and a couple of fragments, such as an account of mixtures to produce artificial cold, and an analysis of some Cobalt Ore. The letters to Coleridge are really interesting though it seems as though they were already known about since there are partial transcriptions in Griggs’s edition of Coleridge’s Letters and John Davy’s Fragmentary Remains. My one real discovery so far is that a letter had been catalogued incorrectly – I knew that it had to be 1808 rather than 1805 because in it Davy announces the death of Thomas Beddoes, his mentor at the Royal Institution in Bristol. The catalogue has been changed now but it was the incorrect date that made me think before I arrived here that there were new, unpublished Humphry Davy letters to transcribe. The affection between Davy and Coleridge is very real I think, at least on the evidence that I have read while here. Before Coleridge leaves for Malta in March 1804, Davy writes to him: ‘I shall expect the time, when your spirit bursting through the clouds of ill health will appear to all men not as an uncertain & brilliant flame; but as a fair & permanent light, fixed, though constantly in motion; as a sun which gives its fire not only to its attendant Planets; but which sends beams from all its parts into all worlds.’ In a letter written when Davy was enjoying success, on 24 November 1807, after Davy had given his second Bakerian Lecture to the Royal Society Coleridge writes the very suggestive: ‘Davy supposes that there is only one power in the world of the senses; which in particles acts as chemical attractions, in specific masses as electricity, & on matter in general, as planetary Gravitation’.

For the final two days of my visit I’ll be transcribing John Davy letter. He was Davy’s brother (1790-1868) and was also hugely successful, eventually becoming inspector-general of army hospitals, though his fame was eclipsed by his brother’s. He also lived in Ambleside so it makes sense that there’s material of his here. None of this has been published and his handwriting is easier to read than his elder brother’s!

Finally, a request from Cris de Costa, who asks that the students who have published their 500-word posts from event 2 online add a common tag to the posting, so that if becomes easier to identify those texts within the social network, something like Object_Narratives. She encourages LitSciMed bloggers always to categorise and tag all their posts with LitSciMed so that everything becomes easier to identify.

Very finally, good luck in the last days of the Wellcome Film Competition!

All best,

Sharon

Davy in Sweden

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Dear blog,

It’s been two weeks since my last blog and now I’m writing from yet another country, Sweden, and am hoping that volcanic ash won’t interfere with my return trip home this time.

First though, I want to make sure that everyone knows that applications are now open for event 3. There’s a provisional programme online and applications can be downloaded at: http://www.litscimed.org.uk/page/event3. The event will take place on 1-2 July; the first day will be held at the Royal Institution and the second at the National Maritime Museum. Applications need to be submitted by the deadline of Tuesday 1st June and we hope to let people know that they’ve got a place by 8th June.

I’ve taken notice of the points made on the evaluation forms that have come in so far (only 16 out of 22), and we’ve made efforts to ensure that even where there are plenary speakers there will be plenty of time for questions. We’ve also built in more discussion and seminar time. Debbie Hughes, the administrator for the programme, has been trying to find low cost accommodation for the event in Greenwich; there will only be one night’s accommodation offered this time because we’re not starting till 12pm; the second day at the NMM in Greenwich will start at 10am. Our budget to the AHRC was for £120 per student to cover both travel and accommodation, based on the premise that those who lived within striking distance of the venues would not take up the offer of accommodation. I’m inclined with this event to ask students for budgets once they have been given a place and see how much is needed, but for students to book their own accommodation and dinner, hopefully within this £120 budget. I’d be interested to hear people’s views on this. It means that we won’t all be together for dinner, and won’t all be staying in the same place, but will mean that students have more freedom.

Last things on event 2, you’ll be pleased to hear that once again the filming I did isn’t good enough to put up on the website… so don’t worry about having to see yourself on the screen. We’re going to link the 500-word object narratives to the resources page instead. And, remember that the deadline is looming for the LitSciMed video competition, also 1st June.  

So, I’m in Stockholm to visit the Royal Academy of Sciences to see Humphry Davy’s letters to the Swedish chemist, Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779-1848). It was good to get into some proper work, and good to see Davy’s handwriting again. I had an easy job in many respects because I had Berzelius’s published letters to compare to the originals – it was still really worth my while to come to see them for themselves. Apart from changes made by the editor of Berzelius’s letters (eg. capitalisation, added punctuation), there were a number of important mistakes (‘proceeded’ should have read ‘preceded’, ‘expiration’ should have read ‘respiration’, that kind of thing). It was also fascinating to start to get a sense of Davy as a writer – he seems to use the end of the line as punctuation sometimes, and at other times it seems as though this symbol “ means a comma; I need to find out about all of these possibilities. It was also really interesting to see him grow in confidence as a chemist during the period of his correspondence with Berzelius, and to see proof of his outmoded (but perhaps peculiarly Romantic) understanding of matter as dynamic (‘the attraction of acid matter for alkaline…’), his repudiation of Dalton’s ‘mechanico-chemical theory’, and perhaps fancifully on my part, his occasionally poetic turn of phrase even when describing his chemical experiments (such as, ‘At the red heat the quicksilver rises from the amalgams & the bases remain free’). Davy visited Gothenburg among other places in Sweden and I’ve found letters in other archives in Stockholm, which makes me think that a comprehensive search will be necessary of the regional Swedish archives.

I intend to set up a discussion group on the use of manuscripts in LitSciMed work before the next event, one day of which is dedicated to this topic.

All best,

Sharon