Dear blog,

It’s been a funny few weeks. Last week was mainly good: I really enjoyed going to John Goodridge’s seminar on the Wednesday and hearing about his new book, John Clare and Community (out in January  http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item6933563/John%20Clare%20and%20Community/?site_locale=en_GB). I also enjoyed the Keats-Shelley Awards Ceremony on Thursday night, particularly finding out who had won the essay prizes that Prof Simon Bainbridge and I had judged: congratulations to Ruth Scobie, Adam White, and Catherine Redford. But, by then, I already had a sore throat and was properly ill from Friday through to Thursday of this week. I’ve only had two days in the archive this week, which makes me nervous of getting everything done in time; there are only six weeks left of my time here in London and lots of travelling to take me away from the archive over the next few weeks.

That said, the letters I have looked over the last two days have been a real pleasure. They are all love letters, from Humphry Davy to his soon-to-be wife Jane (then, the widowed Mrs Apreece). Much has been written about their relationship; they chose to live apart later in life and she did not accompany him on his later travels. It is generally thought that the marriage was a bad one and that they did not get along. Here though, in the first flush of their romance, they really do seem to be in love, and it is so odd to get a glimpse of Davy as a real person, with his anxieties, pettish annoyances, and full-throated passionate declarations. These letters, which I have now checked against the originals, can be read online on our website (http://www.davy-letters.org.uk/); just use the advanced search function, to search by recipient name and enter ‘Apreece’. These early letters, written when Davy goes to Dublin in 1811, are lovely. We get lengthy descriptions of Ireland’s landscape; often patronizing descriptions of Irish people and the society over there; descriptions of a visit to Edgeworthstown and of Maria Edgeworth (‘the perfect model of a Woman of great powers & literary habits’). Meanwhile, Jane is staying with the Ladies of Llangollen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladies_of_Llangollen), two upper-class women who eloped from Ireland to live together causing great scandal. Jane is apparently also learning chemistry, in an attempt to please Davy, no doubt. Davy uses a wonderful metaphor from Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia on sight to describe his feelings on her absence. Presumably, showing how much the Edinburgh Review periodical had entered public consciousness as a source of criticism, Davy writes in one letter dated 20 November 1811: ‘You have attacked me a little in the style of the Edinburgh School’. Anna Beddoes is still around at this date too, now no longer competing for Davy’s heart I assume; he escorts her from Ireland when he visits Llangollen himself.

There are some hilarious bits too, signing off one letter, dated 14th October, Davy writes ‘Adieu My charming friend my dear grandmama or by whatever tender or kind name you will permit me to call you’. This clearly doesn’t go down well (and I’m not surprised!), since the next letter opens with an apology: ‘Grandmama was a style & title applied by yourself, & not one that I was bold enough to invent; & notwithstanding all your dignity & all your indulgence, I do not think I could ever bring myself to consider you with any of the feelings of a grandchild’ (1 November 1811). After this letter, he doesn’t receive a letter for some time and writes in the utmost abjection (‘I am not conscious of having written any thing that ought to have offended you’) on 17th November. It all seems to turn out well, but I’m interested to find out how the relationship, as lived through these letters, continues and develops. In the letters of late November, Davy reports that he has a cold (‘I have a dreadful cold which makes me very stupid‘), which given my own dreadful cold, makes me feel that we have something in common.
Finally, I’m giving a lecture for the Manchester Science Festival  on the subject of Literature and Drugs: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater this coming Tuesday at the City Library on Deansgate. It’s now fully booked, so I hope that you were able to get a ticket if you wanted one.

Best,

Sharon

Dear Blog,

Well, it has been an exciting week and a bit. I went back to Manchester for one night, for the North-West Long Nineteenth-Century seminar last week, which was excellent and it was nice to be at home even for one night. I go back again this week for a weekend of Manchester Literature Festival events (http://www.manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk/). I’m seeing Iain M. Banks, Richard Ford, Pat Barker, and chairing Gaynor Arnold’s session at the Dickens Reader’s Day event. I’ve really enjoyed Arnold’s book Girl in a Blue Dress (http://www.tindalstreet.co.uk/authors/gaynor-arnold) , a novel about Dickens’s marriage and am looking forward to hearing more about it. I also have tickets for the Bio Punk event (http://www.manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk/events/13th-october/bio-punk), which launches a short story collection on the theme of bio-med research.

I’ve really enjoyed my days in the Royal Institution. Everyone in the Heritage office here is lovely; they have been so welcoming and helpful, and sitting next to Frank James (Head of Collections at the RI) is brilliant. Frank is a font of knowledge on everything to do with the early nineteenth century and having now finished editing Michael Faraday’s letters (http://eandt.theiet.org/magazine/2011/12/faraday-a-man-of-contradictions.cfm) , he’s extremely useful for the issues I’m coming up against with Davy’s Letters.

There was an interesting discovery last week concerning a poem that Davy first wrote, initially called ‘The Spinosist’ and written before 1800, which S. T. Coleridge comments upon in a letter dated 9 October 1800, and which Davy continues to rewrite, such as in 1807 after a serious bout of illness perhaps contracted from his work at Newgate prison, and which he finally publishes anonymously in 1823 in a collection put together by Joanna Baillie. The poem changes and develops as he continues to revise it: its potentially radical Spinosist associations are lost (Coleridge objected to the materialism in the poem in 1800) and the far lengthier poem is much more conventional and orthodox. Significantly, its title is changed simply to ‘Life’. Last Friday, as I was looking through Faraday’s copy of an early biography of Davy into which some of Davy’s letters to Faraday have been interleaved, I find, also bound into the book, a printed version of this poem. It seems to have been published on its own; it seems to be an early incarnation of the poem (only four printed pages long); and the printers are Savage and Easingwood (Savage was printer to the Royal Institution). It was already clear that this was a poem of which Davy was very proud: it was a poem he would read out to people and had circulated in manuscript. For example, John Lockhart writes of this poem: ‘for who that has read his sublime quatrains on the doctrine of Spinoza can doubt that he might have united, if he had pleased, in some great didactic poem, the vigorous ratiocination of Dryden and the moral majesty of Wordsworth?’ Now we know that he did have a copy printed, probably so that he could send it to his friends, and this reminds us that Davy took pride in his poetry and was keen that it be known – at least among some circles  – that he wrote poetry.

I’m working hard here (10-6 in the archive, after going to the gym or swimming first thing in the morning) and I have a frightening amount to get done over the next six weeks: an article to finish, two PhDs to read and report on, a book proposal to comment upon, a book review to do for the THES, a short piece to write for the Lancet, a grant application reference to write, a paper to give in Oxford, and another  to give in Valencia, PhD viva. All of this has to be done in the evenings and weekends because of the time that I’m in the archive concentrating on the main task of my leave: the letters. Still, it is exciting living in London; I’m enjoying the buzz of the place and seeing plays (Jumpy last night at the Duke of York) and exhibitions (the Tanks in the Tate Modern were excellent).

More soon,

Sharon