Dear Blog,

Research leave has been amazing so far. I love working in the Royal Institution and really getting back into the Davy letters project.

It has been really interesting to read John Davy’s notes on the letters he was collecting for his Memoirs (two volumes, 1836). He writes (presumably to himself) on copies of letters – ‘how vague are recollections’ and you can really see the workings of his mind. One letter incorrectly dated 1813 instead of 1815 seems at first to suggest that Davy was working on the safety lamp far earlier than had been thought, but when he reflects upon this he realises it could not be and must be a mistake on the recipient’s part.

The letters I’m looking at now clearly date from the period when John is gathering together the materials for the Memoirs. They include long letters to him from various folk who knew Davy including some interesting things I did not know. Walter Coulson, for example, a well-connected fellow himself, had married the daughter of Dr Borlase to whom Davy had been apprenticed (it seems such a small world sometimes). He recalls that the second work of chemistry that Davy read (the first was Lavoisier) was Nicholson’s Journal, and that Davy obtained this from a ‘book club’ to which he belonged. There are interesting letters too from Davy’s cousin Edmund Davy – one trashing at great length the biography that John Ayrton Paris had written in 1831, the faults of which decided John to begin his own. In this, Edmund takes particular umbrage and the idea that Davy was a philistine when it came to the arts: ‘I always thought your brother had cultivated and possessed a discriminating taste in the Fine Arts’ and indeed his appreciation of the arts in general (HD/26/D/ 21).

Yesterday I read the letters in the Royal Institution from Gregory Watt to Humphry Davy. Gregory Watt may well be part of why Davy went into chemistry originally. He came to lodge with Davy’s mother in Cornwall and they became good friends, with mutual interest in geology and other scientific pursuits. James Watt Jnr (Gregory’s brother) certainly thinks that Gregory was the person who introduced Humphry to Thomas Beddoes, who went on to appoint him to the Pneumatic Institute in Bristol. Gregory suffered from consumption and died at the age of 27 before he really had achieved hardly anything. Apparently he only saw preprints of his first publication before he died. In the letters, which really show the friendship between Gregory Watt and Davy, there is – enclosed in a letter from James Watt on the construction of a breathing apparatus for the inhalation of nitrous oxide, which would be ‘a chamber like a sedan chair’ – an account of a number of experiments on nitrous oxide that fail to have the desired effect. Gregory asks: ‘Do afford us some light on this mysterious subject[.] Inform us exactly by what process you generate sublime sensations and [?] the ladder by which we may ascend to the Heaven of Heavens.’

I also read the poems sent to Davy by Anna Beddoes, wife of Thomas Beddoes at the Pneumatic Institution. I wonder what really did happen there? I also read fan-mail poems sent in the post to Davy from admiring women who attended his lectures, one calling herself ‘Fidelissima’ who writes a few of these poems.
Today I’m giving one of the public lunchtime lectures at the Royal Society on Wollstonecraft and Natural History (http://royalsociety.org/events/2012/rights-of-woman/). Wish me luck!

Best,

Sharon

Dear Blog,

All is hectic today as I am leaving Manchester in an hour (!) to go to London for the next three months. I’ve been trying to clear stuff up and sort stuff out before leaving but can’t manage to do some of the things I still need to do. The universities IT system has been down which means I can’t do various of these tasks. I would have liked to have had a clean break and thought of nothing but research for this semester of research leave, but I guess that was always idealistic.

I have tried to get into the hang of this mind set over the past week, and have done some reading for the literature and drugs essay I’m writing for the Oxford Handbook of Romanticism. I’ve finally read Alethea Hayter’s 1968 book ‘Opium and the Romantic Imagination’, which is a real classic if now quite of its time. Hayter starts out with the premise that she is going to find out whether it is possible to tell the effects of opium on writing by those known to have taken the drug. She attempts a clinical approach, with appropriate limits and statements of what she will not be looking at or including, but is often left with speculation rather than certainty. This is as we would expect, I often wondered how Hayter could be sure that the metaphors, styles, content of writing examined was the direct product of opium addiction and not of the myriad of other influences upon the authors’ lives. Hayter was aware of this herself.

The book is great for giving a real sense of the ordinariness of opium use in the period. At one point Hayter offers a huge generalization ‘Every one, in fact, at that period took laudanum occasionally’ (p. 30). My every historical instinct heckled at this – how could she claim that ‘every one’ took it, and the ‘in fact’ in this sentence was an additional affront. But actually, after reading her book and reading about the many, many uses to which opium was put in medication (particularly, and heart-wrenchingly, in children’s medication), I wonder whether she was closer to being correct with this claim than not.

All of this work will be put to good use after my article has been written when I give the Manchester Science Festival talk on Tuesday 30^th October at Manchester City Library on ‘Literature and Drugs: Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’ (www.manchestersciencefestival.com/whatson/litanddrugs). All are welcome to this and please come along if you are around. The same goes for my talk about Mary Wollstonecraft (http://royalsociety.org/events/2012/rights-of-woman/).

Last but not least, I’ve set up Facebook (English Salford) and Twitter (@englishsalford) accounts for our undergrad and postgrad students as a way for us to keep in touch with them with news and events. If you are one of our students, please sign up for this!

Best,

Sharon