I’m working on the 1828 letters again now (after far too long a break doing other things) and I’m right back in the swing of it. It hasn’t been easy – I’ve had to tell work that I’m only answering emails after the working day has ended because I need to get on with the Davy letters work while I’m here in this library.
Davy is at the end of his life – he’s going to die in June 1829 but for the moment, June 1828, he seems quite happy, travelling in Slovenia and making experiments on eels and the salmon found in the Danube and theorising on their reproduction and migration. It’s been really difficult to find the lakes and rivers that he fishes in near Ljubljana, which he calls Laybach; he often uses the German or Italian names for these Slovenian places. He often writes the word phonetically, making a stab at how it’s spelled; you can imagine what that’s like for me to work out.
I’ve also found out almost exactly when Davy started his last – very weird, philosophical book – Consolations in Travel (between 9 and 12th July 1828 in case anyone’s interested). He writes this about it in a letter to his wife on 12th July: ‘I amuse myself as much as I can by literary composition [I have] just finished a ‘vision on the history of human existence’ of which the scene is laid in the Colliseum [sic] & in which I endeavour to establish the progressive nature of intellect & the infinite possibility of spiritual natures. My dream is as good as another & happy are those that dream most in life & most agreably.’ On the 20th July, he writes to his wife again: ‘I think you will be amused by my Vision which is philosophical poetry though not in metre.’
In other news I found a new letter when I went to the New York Public Library in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle and it’s to the playwright Joanna Baillie! It’s the only letter we have to her though I knew that they were friends. It’s only dated ‘Thursday evening’ but it talks about consoling her sister in law so I think it’s written following the death of the physician Matthew Baillie on 23 September 1823. Amazing eh?

So, I’m going to try to keep this blog up every two weeks, in the way that I used to when I was working on the Davy letters full time some years ago. It’s my first week as a short-term fellow in the Chemical Heritage Foundation, in Philadelphia, which is has a beautiful library in the historic part of the city. I’m going to be here for 12 weeks and I have a lot to do! I’ve got off to a good start today. I found a word that my co-editor hadn’t managed to work out in a letter held here and the work that I did two weeks ago in the June Fullmer archive continues to bear fruit. We’ve found about 20 new letters as a result and we’re still checking out more.

I’ve just arranged to go to the Morgan Library in New York too and I’ve started now to be a bit more free in my searching for Davy material and to call up letters and diaries that mention him too. These kinds of sources have started to be valuable for working out where he was when and a number of persistent questions have been resolved over the past few weeks of this nature. I’ve also determined to spend an hour or so a day reading from cover to cover a few key texts that I may have read years ago or that I’ve just selected from for specific bits of information, such as the key Davy biographies. The library here is an excellent resource for all things Davy and it’s also very comfortable and conducive to work. Being near the end of the project is quite a different experience: you know a bit more what you should be on the look-out for, and I’m better, I think, at sifting through information to find exactly what I need (if it’s there). Wish me luck! I’ve got a lot to do here…