Dear blog,

It’s been a busy fortnight, trying to get sign-ups for the free, online course on Humphry Davy. The course starts on 30 October but you can register your interest in it now: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/humphry-davy/1. We’ve also put one of the films on youtube as a taster of the course: https://youtu.be/nxRHQ1xfnWc – it features Peter Wothers demonstrating one of Davy’s experiments! I do hope that you sign up and tell all your friends and family to sign up too.
During the last week I also sent off the undated letters to my co-editor – these will be the final letters in the edition, so it’s been quite a moment for reflecting on just how far we’ve come. The project started in 2008! These are letters where we just can’t narrow it down to one year because there isn’t sufficient evidence to do so. There aren’t many of these though and I did manage to put a couple into particular dates and years when I looked through them again (and realise that the recipient ‘Miss Berger’ was actually the novelist and biographer Elizabeth Benger!).
There are also – sadly – some letters that won’t be going in the edition. Obviously none that are written by Davy himself; these are all in there. But, we have also been collecting letters by his wife and brother and other letters have come to my notice during this process and there are some corkers. For example, there is a letter from Sydney Smith (who once proposed to Lady Davy) to Georgina Grey, April 1839, held at the Borthwick Institute for Archives, York, where he writes: ‘I dine on Wednesday with Jenny Davy – the Laura and Corinne of her age.’ Was she ever really called ‘Jenny’? I’m not sure. I was also really pleased by a letter from John Davy to the Philosophical Magazine, published in 1856, where he writes that Humph used to collect the letters of a famous Swedish chemist, Torbern Bergman (1735-84). As John says in his letter, this is particularly interesting because Davy ‘was little in the habit of keeping letters’. This is why we only usually have one side of the correspondence in our edition. I though it was a nice idea that Davy saw the merits in keeping letters from a previous age, given our efforts for him.
I have only the remainder of this week left here at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. It’s been a fantastically productive time for me though I’m sad that I didn’t get to write my part of the introduction to the edition as I had hoped. Next week I go to Boston and New Hampshire and to other archives and then two week’s holiday! My sabbatical ended today and I’ve now spent three hours emailing work rather than working on the edition. Hey ho.

More soon,

Sharon