It’s been ages since I wrote this blog, but today I find myself completely overexcited by the research I’m doing and I want a) to tell someone about it, and b) to record it for myself. I’m in the Ohio State University Archives this week looking at the archives of June Fullmer, who from the 1960s until her death in 2001 gathered materials for a two-volume letters edition of Sir Humphry Davy and his wife Jane. Does this sound familiar? In fact, John Burnham, another Ohio State professor of the History of Science, who died on 12th May this year, was her literary executor and in 2008 he gave the fledgling Davy Letters Project team a typescript of June Fullmer’s collection of 763 letters and this started us off.
Reading through these many boxes of archive material is an odd thing. It’s unusual for me to be reading the research notes and correspondence of a critic rather than, say, Davy himself. I had no idea how much work Fullmer had done on the letters edition and it is rather tragic that she never got to publish it herself. In fact, I’ve read that the print proofs of the first volume of her biography of Davy (the only one to appear) arrived just days after Fullmer had died. It is nice, therefore, that at our last meeting of the Davy Letters Project we decided to dedicate our edition to Fullmer.
There are some treasures in this archive, including a letter from Oliver Sacks to Fullmer. There are a number of leads with regard to letters that we may not have in our edition that Dr Andrew Lacey and I are starting to follow up. There’s an unpublished essay on Jane Davy, the much maligned wife, of whom Fullmer writes: ‘My guess is that when all the returns are in we will find a woman of great native intelligence handicapped by the educational opportunities open to women at the time, a woman who may have seemed silly and tasteless, but, a woman who was nonetheless fascinating to intelligent men.’ I discover in Fullmer’s archive, too, that Jane published poetry, or at least one poem, in the same volume as her husband had, A Collection of Poems: Chiefly Manuscript, and from Living Authors, edited by Joanna Baillie in 1823. Jane’s poem was ‘To Count —-, On the Death of his Wife’ and it can be read in google books. And I have also found that Fullmer wrote poetry! At least there’s some criticism (and appreciation) in a letter from friends about a poem that she had written.
I am sad that Fullmer didn’t get to see her letters edition to fruition. In one letter, written in 1968, she writes that she has been collecting Davy’s letters for 12 years! She says that she has written 7000 letters to libraries around the globe in search for them. In a letter to Andrew Kerr, dated 23/2/1970, Fullmer writes: ‘I have spent so much time reading the Regency literature, as well as letters and diaries of Italian expatriates, etc., for the period up to about 1850, that I know many of these people better than my own neighbors.’
At least I’m here now, reading her work and using it in the edition that will finally see the light of day sometime soon hopefully. It was very touching to read her letter to the Royal Institution, 21/5/71, in which she comments on Dame Kathleen Lonsdale’s death: ‘I do hope, though, that you have some sort of commitment to get her papers. Fifty years from now, or, perhaps, even sooner, historians will find them very interesting.’ I am definitely finding Fullmer’s papers absolutely fascinating. I’m so glad that they were collected and kept and pleased that her work will not have been in vain.