Dear blog,
I have just – like, just this second – written what may be the final note to The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy. Fittingly, it was a note identifying a daughter of the railway engineer, Robert Benson Dockray, to whom John Davy (Humph’s brother) was sending his regards; she turns out to be the mother of the Lancaster-born poet Laurence Binyon (1869-1943). That has a nice circular feel to it. Mind, when I began this project in 2008 I hadn’t even started work at Salford University let alone Lancaster. As ever, this last file – letters written by Jane (the wife) and John (the brother) about Humph, his legacy, and his publications, has taken longer than I expected, and I still need to read it through once again before sending to my eagle-eyed associates for their help with some niggling things I haven’t been able to identify/read etc etc.
It’s been a good fortnight, nonetheless, with a number of various satisfying discoveries. For example, I have been astonished and amazed by a discovery made by Sam Illingworth at Manchester Metropolitan University. Sam has found out that in 1806 Davy published a revised version of his ‘Spinosist’ poem in the Gentleman’s Magazine. This is the same version that Davy published separately with the Royal Institution publisher Richard Savage (and there survives a copy of this tipped into Faraday’s copy of his Life of Humphry Davy) in the RI. I know now (because I have finished these later letters) that John Davy used this version – sent to him by Humph’s cousin, Edmund Davy – in his Memoirs (1836) and it seems increasingly likely that John gave it the title by which it is now often referred, ‘Written After Recovery from a Dangerous Illness’. What Sam’s discovery proves is that the revised poem has nothing to do with Davy’s illness of 1807 and that Davy was publishing his work (with his name attached!) at this period in his life.
I’ve enjoyed reading some of John Davy’s works these last few weeks, including a discussion of that famous bit in Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads on the difference between the poet and the man of science, published in John Davy’s Lectures on the Study of Chemistry (1849), p. xxi. I’ve also needed to establish who John Davy’s family are; his later letters refer to the death of a daughter and other family members. It’s been surprisingly difficult to get any authoritative statement on this: the internet tells me that John Davy had anything between one and eight children. In fact, he had three, one of whom died in her early twenties; of the other two, Grace went on to marry George Rolleston, a regius professor of medicine in Oxford (and have a famous son, Sir Humphry Davy Rolleston!), and Archibald, who went into the church, lived in near Lancaster and thereabouts (with a connection to the mother of Binyon, above), and whose daughter, Helen Mary I haven’t yet been able to follow after 1871.
Finally, it is clear that there are still mysteries to be solved. One such is that we haven’t been able to find a painting of Lady Jane Davy, which has always seemed odd. In a letter to the still elusive ‘Miss Talbot’ in 1837, Jane Davy writes: ‘My precious physiognomy has for my inconvenience often been painted; but luckily for the beau ideal these portraits have never been engraved, & therefore your M.S. must forego in this instance the positive representation of me.’ So, there may well (surely?) be paintings of Jane Davy out there, but where are they???

Best,

Sharon