Dear blog,
There’s a week to go till my book is due in. I’m in London at the moment after spending the day checking a few last minute references (confusion between Coleridge’s Notebooks and Works now averted) and am now settling in for the final read-through. It’s disconcerting to still be finding silly typos and errors, which makes you worry that there must be loads of them that you’re not finding but still, it’s nearly ready to go.
After the deadline I have some much-needed holiday and then I need to crack on with the essay I’m writing on drugs and literature for the Oxford Handbook of Romanticism. I’m going to incorporate some stuff on Davy and nitrous oxide – the happiness drug of the 1790s, which is still sold in festivals in the UK. From 1st September I shall be on research leave and dedicate myself again to the Davy Letters project, which has been much neglected while I’ve been writing the book.
From 10th September I shall be in London (cat and house sitting for friends) and will work in the Royal Institution for about two months, transcribing and checking transcriptions of the 200 letters held in the RI’s archive. These are the single biggest collection but I shall also in my final month in London do the same for the 50-odd letters held in the Lambton archive in West London.
There’s a blue sky here in London and I hear that the weather’s going to improve. Here goes for my final week of 12-hour days without caffeine or alcohol. Wish me luck…
Best,
Sharon