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has been changed now but it was the incorrect date that made me think before I arrived here that there were new, unpublished Humphry Davy letters to transcribe.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