Dear Blog,

I have unfortunately not managed to do much to the 1818 letters since I last wrote my blog. Instead I’ve been working on my plenary for the British Society for Literature and Science conference, which is coming up in Birmingham (http://www.bsls.ac.uk/conference/) in April. It’s a huge honour for me to be asked to talk at this. I’ve attended every single annual conference of this society (this is the 11th!) and organised the third one myself at Keele University. I’ve decided to talk about the use of letters in literature and science studies and have been thinking hard about what, precisely, letters can bring to our subdiscipline. I have an essay club with two brilliant colleagues at work; we met yesterday and that was hugely helpful. I still have a fair bit of work to do on the paper though.
Last Wednesday, I did a public talk as part of the Wonder Women series (http://www.creativetourist.com/articles/festivals-and-events/manchester/wonder-women-2016-full-events-listings/) on Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. It was sold out and the audience was great, some A-level students who are studying Frankenstein and then some Portico members too. I had great questions and really enjoyed the whole event.
Other than that I thought I’d share a couple of my favourite Davy letter moments. For example, in a letter dated April 1812 to Jane Apreece (who will become Lady Jane Davy, his wife) after she has been ill, Davy writes: ‘For the first time in my life I have wished to be a woman that I might watch by your bed side’ (!). I saw an 1818 letter where Davy for the first (and perhaps only) time abbreviated his name to ‘Sir Humpy’, which makes me want only to refer to him in this way from now on. There’s also an intriguing fragment in the Royal Institution that has been cut off for his signature – there are lots of letters that have had this done to them by people collecting the autographs of celebrities. We are left with only a tiny bit at the end of the letter but it is quite mysterious:

some false statement or absurd exaggeration
Do not send what I mentioned, I hope I may be able to escape without notice. –
yours very sincerely
H. Davy

This is tantalising enough but on the back of this fragment there is a postmark so that I can date the letter to 26 March 1818: ‘D | 26 MR 26 | 1818’. Unfortunately we have no letter dated on this date and so I can’t find out what he is referring to here. It’s probably something to do with the safety lamp controversy since this rumbled on through the beginning of 1818.
Anyway, more soon. I’m off to Tokyo (via Lancaster and London) tomorrow to give a paper. How exciting is that!

Best,

Sharon