Dear Blog,

I’m at the University of St Andrews archives for a week, which is ace, partly because 1) I’ve never been to St Andrews and this is a great opportunity to see a part of the world I don’t know (I’ve only really been to Glasgow and Edinburgh before), and 2) it gives me some time and space to get back to the Davy Letters project.

The archive here has 23 letters from John Davy to James D. Forbes (1809–1868), who was a brilliant young scientist by all accounts; his election to the Edinburgh Royal Society had to be delayed by a couple of years till 1831 when he had reached the minimum age of 21 (DNB). The letters are great so far, though one of them was eight pages long and took many hours and much head-scratching to transcribe. I’m mainly interested in John Davy’s account of his biography of his brother. At this stage (c. 1830) he’s compiling information and gathering materials. It’s hard not to make parallels with our own project, where we are similarly trying to find out whom Davy wrote to and where the letters are. John Davy, though, has more personal motivations perhaps; he describes the work as ‘a task which I consider a duty & it is to me of a very delightful kind & I trust the result will be useful to the world’ (letter to J. D. Forbes, 16 October 1830).

There’s already some tension it seems to me in the imminent publication of Dr John Ayrton Paris’s biography of Humphry Davy:

Dr Paris’ work I hope will be good — popular I have no doubt it will be — for he has always aimed at popularity in all his writings — but most of all I desire it may be accurate — I should be sorry to be under the necessity of coming forward in any way in opposition to him, — & this is the only way in which I should consider it a duty. (letter to J. D. Forbes, 4 February 1831)

Paris’s biography came out in two volumes in 1831 and John Davy did respond with his own biography, published in 1836. What I hadn’t known until this point though, was that John Davy was already writing a biography before the publication of Paris’s, and I think there are signs here that he suspected he would have problems with it.

I was in London for a few days last week and went to an excellent paper given by Simon Schaffer at the Royal Institution in honour of 75 years of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry and their journal Ambix (http://www.ambix.org/). The paper was great, much fun, but leaving me with some serious things to think about. Schaffer talked about the need for historians of chemistry to consider more closely the genre in which texts were written, as well as paying more attention to popular culture forms, particularly the vibrant periodical press in the early nineteenth century. He also spoke about the need for a history of plausibility, since what is plausible at any given moment changes. It was all fascinating.

Remember that if you’re going to apply for the next event of LitSciMed (http://www.litscimed.org.uk/page/event4) you need to do so by the end of the month. We’ve had 19 applications already.

All best,

Sharon