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?