Author Archives: Sharon Ruston

About Sharon Ruston

My main research interests are in the relations between the literature, science and medicine of the Romantic period, 1780-1820. My first book, Shelley and Vitality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), explored the medical and scientific contexts which inform Shelley's concept of vitality in his major poetry. Since then, I have been working on Mary Wollstonecraft's interest in natural history, William Godwin's interest in mesmerism, and Humphry Davy's writings on the sublime; these form chapters in my most recent book, Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science, and Medicine of the 1790s (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). I am currently co-editing the Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy and his Circle (www.davy-letters.org.uk).

North-West Long C19th Seminar Series and other stuff

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Dear blog,

We held the north-west long nineteenth century seminar yesterday, with a paper from a LitSciMedder, Rachel Russell, which went extremely well. Rachel had lots of questions and clearly her topic fascinated the audience. The seminars have been going for over a year now; we have one every four months on the first of that month (the next one is January 5th 2011). There are always two academic speakers and two postgraduate papers (usually but not limited to staff /students working in Universities in the north west). We try to have two papers broadly on a topic concerned with the beginning of the nineteenth century and the other two on the later part. Where the ‘long nineteenth century’ starts and finishes though is up for grabs! The seminars have always been well attended, both with academics and members of the public, and we’re financially supported by Manchester Central Library, the University of Salford, BARS (www.bars.ac.uk) and BAVS (www.bavsuk.org). All are welcome!

Tomorrow we have the Northern Modernism Seminar at the University of Salford, and I’m looking forward to that very much. There are some interesting looking papers to be given. I’ve had a cultured week – A Streetcar Named Desire at the Bolton Octogon on Tuesday, John Simm in Hamlet last Saturday, and I went to see Dave Haslam interview Jonathan Franzen on Sunday. I’ve set up a Shelley Reading Group at work because there are now so many Phd students working on Shelley (plus others working more generally in the Romantic period) and two undergraduates writing dissertations on him. I’m really pleased that there’s such interest in Shelley and I’m looking forward to taking a back seat in the reading group and hearing what others think of his poetry.

Finally, I’ve had the date of my inaugural lecture confirmed (Tuesday 22nd February 2011) and will post on this blog the link that is needed to book tickets. I shall be terrified but it’ll be lovely to see lots of friendly faces in the audience.

More soon,

Sharon

New First Years and Horror Films

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Dear blog,

It’s Welcome Week this week so on Wednesday I met my fresh-faced first-year personal tutees. They were all very enthusiastic and raring to go. Next week teaching starts properly and I have a semester of the third-year module ‘Green Writing’ and second year core module ‘The Romantic Period’ lined up.

There’s lots more going on though. I’ve offered a public lecture and workshop as part of the Manchester Science Festival (http://www.manchestersciencefestival.com/) on ‘The Science of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’. If enough people are interested, it’ll take place at Manchester Science Library on the 27th October, from 6-8pm (http://www.manchestersciencefestival.com/whatson/frankenstein). Then, a few days later, I’ve agreed to take part in a panel organised by Grimm Up North, a horror and sci-fi festival that is happening at the same time in Manchester (http://www.grimmfest.com/) to debate humanity’s attempts through time to ‘Make a Monster’ (http://www.manchestersciencefestival.com/whatson/makeamonster). The panel will be followed by a film screening though I’m not sure yet what it will be. All good stuff, and very exciting; I just hope that the theme of my lecture captures people’s attention enough to sign up. I guess it’s a test to see how interested folk are in such things as Shelley’s novel and the history of early nineteenth-century science.

Other than that I’m going to the opening of the new exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery tomorrow, The Land Between Us (http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/whatson/exhibitions/thelandbetweenus/), which looks great.

Plans are coming along well for event 4 of the LitSciMed training programme. We’ve decided upon a hotel to book for all participants in Manchester (the Ibis again I’m afraid!), and a provisional programme is coming together nicely.

All best,

Sharon

Coleridge in the countryside

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Dear Blog,

I had a lovely weekend last weekend in Kilve, Somerset at the Coleridge Study Weekend. The the theme for the weekend was ‘Coleridge, Science and Poetry’ and the speakers gathered together were a kin of fantasy football team for me – David Fairer from Leeds, Tim Fulford from NTU, Neil Vickers from King’s, and Richard Holmes, author of the hugely influential book Age of Wonder. 

Some of delegates of Kilve had been attending the study weekends since they began, over 20 years ago. It was lovely to meet people from different walks of life who had a real, passionate interest in the Romantic poets and who weren’t part of the academy. 

The ‘study’ part of the weekend was interspersed with walks in the quantock hills and we visited the Wordsworths’ Alfoxden House and Coleridge’s house in Nether Stowey. We saw a read-through of ‘A Box of Frogs’, a play that recreates the pneumatic institute in Bristol and features Davy, Beddoes, Coleridge and Roger. The latter is imagined to be a spy for the Home Office reporting on the radical politics and gases that are being discussed. 

I’m now off for one final week of holiday – and am turning my email off this time! – before the madness of the new academic year begins. 

Best,

Sharon 

Davy, Herculaneam Papyri, and gossip from Rome, 1819

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Dear blog,

I’ve been working in the British Library this week, with a day spent at the Science Museum archives in Wroughton, near Swindon. The latter was fascinating, apparently only 6% of the Science Museum’s objects are on show at any one time and so the aircraft hangers at Wroughton are used to house all their big items. I was told that one hanger contained solely tractors, another the first ever hovercraft, and then of course there are the printed materials and manuscripts of the Science Museum’s library and archive.

I’ve been reading a number of letters previously not published, which is very exciting. Some of those I’ve read over the past few days concern Davy’s attempts to unroll the Herculaneam papyri in 1819, an attempt clearly alluded to in the following Wordsworth poem of the same year:

O ye who patiently explore

The wreck of Herculanean lore,

What rapture could ye seize

Some Theban fragment, or unroll

One precious, tender-hearted scroll

Of pure Simonides!

That were, indeed, a genuine birth

Of poesy; a bursting forth

Of genius from the dust:

What Horace gloried to behold,

What Maro loved, shall we enfold?

Can haughty Time be just!

‘XXVIII. Upon the Same Occasion’, ll. 49-60 [from The Poetical Works (1849-1850)]

I’ve also found out (thanks to the speedy research of PhD student, Alison Morgan), that Shelley was definitely in Rome when Davy was there in April 1819 (Shelley arrived in Rome on 5th March 1819 and left Rome on 10th June). I shall have to investigate this further, but there was a particularly juicy piece of gossip given in one of Davy’s letter, which can’t refer to Shelley but to a female subject of scandal:

‘I can write to you nothing interesting from Rome. The exalted personage whose conduct has been so much the subject of discussion at home & abroad lives here in perfect retirement, has never once been out of doors & has seen nobody but Misss Mills and Dodwill amongst the English. The Italians who visit her say she talks of going to England & of dismissing her “braves gens” [ie. decent people] I suppose including the Barones upon pensions.’ (Davy to Sir William A’Court, 20 March 1820)

I’d love to know who is being spoken of here, if anyone has any ideas? There are lots of bits like this in the letters, which will take me some time to work out the detail of (if I ever do!).

I hadn’t realized too that Davy’s brother, John, was in the middle of war during 1815; in Paris in August: ‘– I have not heard from John for a fortnight but He was quite well when He wrote & in the neighbourhood of Paris at St Denis very glad that He embarked in the service in time to be useful to the Heroes who gained ummortal glory at Waterloo. –‘ (Davy to Boase, 27 August 1815)

It seems as though the letters I’m reading currently to John G. Children in the British Library have been numbered by Davy’s early (and unfair) biographer, John Ayrton Paris, which is useful to know but also unnerving. I’m still finding moments in Davy’s accounts of scientific experiments where  I think he expresses himself in an interesting, possibly poetic manner, such as ‘I hope on Thursday to show you Nitrogene a complete wreck, torn to pieces in different ways.’ (HD to JGC, 30 June 1809).

It’s all fascinating though also quite painstaking, particularly when I have to transcribe a letter from scratch. It’s fun though too!

All best,

Sharon

The Davy Family

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Dear blog,

I’m in London now for a month to visit various archives, checking transcriptions of Humphry Davy letters against the originals and transcribing newly found letters. So far I’ve been to the Institution of Engineering and Technology (http://www.theiet.org/) and the Science Museum Library, which is in Imperial College Library.

It’s been lots of fun – I’ve read collections of letters, so letters to Michael Faraday in the IET and letters to Davy’s family (his mother, Grace, and sisters Betsy, Kitty, and Grace, and brother John). I’ve learned of his love of potatoes and salty fish from Penzance (he’s often asking his mother to send them to him), and it’s odd and slightly unnerving to read letters that cover a person’s whole life, from his initial excitable letters sent from the Pneumatic Institute to his rather more grumpy and stately letters as President of the Royal Institution. These letters do humanise Davy too; he clearly loves his family dearly, is hugely proud of his brother’s achievements, and misses his birthplace.

There’s an intriguing incident referred to in the letters that I would like to get to the bottom of concerning a Mr Millet, who has caused Davy some trouble in previous years because he married Davy’s sister Betsy though he had not a permanent situation (which Davy repeatedly tries to procure for him). Mr Millet (I think he is Mr John Baulderson Millet) is involved in some incident and is to be tried by the Admiralty (he has some position with them) early in 1826. Davy gives reassurance in his letters, convinced that Mr Millet will be acquitted and that there will be a verdict of accidental death. The story is that a pistol went off when Mr Millet fell but I don’t yet know the identity of the victim . This is all very exciting and none of these letters have been published before.

Plans are coming on well for event 4, which promises to be lots of fun, and the LitSciMed programme will feature in an article for the British Society for the History of Science newsletter, Viewpoint. Watch out for that.

I hope everyone is enjoying the summer.

All best,

Sharon

Godwin, prizes, and PhDs

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Dear blog,

I’m just returned from the Godwin diaries conference in Oxford and am about to go on leave for two weeks, so I thought I should update my blog before my holiday.

I really enjoyed the conference – the project has, over the last three years, made an electronic, fully searchable, and annotated version of William Godwin’s diaries, 1788-1836. You can read about it here: http://godwindiary.politics.ox.ac.uk/. Now nearing the end of the project the team asked individuals to talk at the conference about various aspects of the diary and I concentrated on the scientific and medical aspects. The diary has an awful lot to say on these matters. Godwin was very sociable and seems to have been friends with a great number of surgeons, physicians, natural historians, and chemists, including Humphry Davy, Anthony Carlisle, William Nicholson, John Aikin, and William Lawrence. His diary is also a fascinating account of an individual’s health throughout out his life and the treatments he received from the various doctors he consulted. It seems that Godwin also took the internal temperature of his house every single day for years! The diaries are a rich resource and when the electronic version is made public I urge everyone to take a look. There is a lot there for LitSciMeders.

Earlier this week we appointed someone to the AHRC-funded collaborative PhD that will be co-supervised by the Working Class Movement Library (http://www.wcml.org.uk/) and I’m really excited about that. I also read over the essays submitted to the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association prize competition (http://www.keats-shelley.co.uk/ksma%20awards.html), and there were some really very good ones. It’s a tough job being one of the two judges for the prize.

Finally, can I encourage everyone to take a look at the resources page that Cris da Costa has put together for event three: http://www.litscimed.org.uk/page/learning. On this page, you can see Paul Craddock’s excellent filming from the two days, plus reading lists, slides used in presentations, and much more. The website will act as a resource once the face-to-face teaching on the programme has faded into the dim and distant past, and I do hope people find it useful.

All best,

Sharon

Joanna Baillie and Jane Davy

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Dear blog,

I’ve been in the Mitchell Library, in Glasgow, for the past few days reading Joanna Baillie’s letters to Lady Davy. There are 29 letters and they cover a lengthy period, from 1815 to 1851, when Joanna Baillie died. Given that Sir Humphry Davy dies in 1829, many of the letters (22 I think?) are from the later period in his wife’s life. In many ways, these aren’t important letters for our Collected Letters edition; while we are presently including Jane Davy in the edition, these are letters written to rather than from her. They have also already been transcribed in Judith Slagles’ edition of Baillie’s Collected Letters.

All of this aside, they are still very interesting letters, written by an important writer (Baillie was a poet and dramatist) and contain a number of interesting bits and pieces. Joanna Baillie portrays herself as a bit of a hermit, ever grateful for the attention that Lady Davy pays her (she always uses her title). She portrays Jane as constantly in a whirl of social engagements, in the country and in town, and as someone who enjoys travelling abroad. In 1816 Baillie goes to Geneva (I wonder whether this was her only trip outside the UK?) utilising the introduction that her friend has given her to a scientific acquaintance, Pictet. Baillie writes of her disappointment in seeing Mont Blanc: ‘I wish Mont Blanc had been as gracious to me as he way to Sir Humphry, tho’ I do not pretent to be so worthy of his favours.’ This makes me wonder whether she had seen Davy’s poem on this mountain, particularly since she certainly had seen others. The letters are often homely, full of news of mutual friends, family and Baillie’s and her sister’s health. But it’s clear that Jane Davy is a far more at ease in certain social circles; Baillie talks tantalisingly of the diaries that she must have kept of her travels, writing that her views of Turkey must be as important as Mary Wortley’s.

There’s so much that I’d like to follow up from this, such as their mutual friendships with Mary Edgeworth, Lady Byron, and Mary Someville (described as doing ‘so much honour in those matters in which we are most supposed to be incapable & deficient that all her sex are in duty bound to bid her God speed! in whatever she writes.’) For now, though, I need to finish my paper for the Godwin Diaries conference due to take place in Oxford next week (http://godwindiary.politics.ox.ac.uk/conference/)!

All best,

Sharon

Event Four

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Dear blog,

I had a great time at the third event, and so from what I’ve read on students’ evaluations, did everyone else it seems. We had twenty students at this event from a real range of institutions and disciplines, many of which had not been represented at any of the previous events.

The first day (as hot and sweaty as a day in London in July can be) was at the Royal Institution, starting with a lecture by David Knight, Emeritus Professor at the University of Durham and the author of countless books on the history of science. This was followed by a very nice lunch indeed, and then a hands-on manuscript exercise, where students transcribed pages from original texts such as James Watson’s ‘Double Helix’ and Humphry Davy’s notebooks. The activity led to lots of discussion, which I hope will continue in the discussion group set up to accompany it on the social space, where most people argued for diplomatic transcriptions of manuscript sources. Professor Michael Hunter rounded off the first day with a vigorously argued paper that instead saw merit in non-diplomatic transcriptions for printed editions. To give one example, which was I thought very persuasive, if in a handwritten manuscript, the author abbreviates a word, it is not the case that s/he intended for this abbreviation to pass into the printed version. The abbreviation (particularly ‘ye’ in Michael’s talk) can affect the way that the text is read. It was all highly interested for someone who’s spending more and more time in the company of Davy’s manuscript letters and beginning to think about how we might publish them…

Day two was spent in the gorgeous greenery of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. We had a series of fascinating and challenging talks and discussions, concerning the issues of trust in Conrad’s short stories, the social constructivisim of cartography, how different historiographies can change the way that we look at an object, and we spent some time with the paintings of William Hodges as a particular case study. Richard Dunn in the final session ran through a multitude of different ways of looking at a particular object, a sextant, from thinking of it as a status symbol to thinking about its (machine) production and marketing (it claims to be made ‘by hand’). This led into the final task where, in groups, students had to select from images owned by Greenwich to present on any topic they chose. The presentations were brilliant, especially considering the amount of time people had. I especially liked the one that concentrated on food – using the image of a dried soup cube and a ship’s biscuit – which asked us to think about ephemera and how things survive over time. This was something that chimed with the manuscripts day I thought; where we had talked about how extant manuscript sources can give a skewed sense of the past.

It was all great and lots of fun. I enjoyed meeting all the new people and finding out about some fascinating projects and am looking forward to event four in Manchester and Salford in January 2011. Over the next few weeks we’ll be updating the resources pages for event 3 and adding slides and films (courtesy of Paul Craddock!) and much, much more.

All best,

Sharon

Letters and Life Writing

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Dear blog,

As planning gears up a notch for event 3 of LitSciMed, I’ve instigated a new discussion group ‘Using Manuscripts in LitSciMed Research’, which I hope lots of people will join and contribute to.

I’ve had a busy week, which began with my giving a paper at the Institute of Advanced Studies in London on a ‘Correspondence Projects’ panel. The panel consisted of Professor Lynda Pratt talking about The Collected Letters of Robert Southey (see http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/southey_letters/), Dr Paul White talking about the Darwin Correspondence Project (http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/home), and me talking about The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy and his Circle. Our Davy Letters project is very much in its infancy compared to the other two (the Darwin project was founded in 1974) and is a much smaller correspondence (Southey’s letters would run to an estimated 70 volumes if they were printed!). It was very interesting to hear about these other projects and start to think about the next questions we shall be mulling over – particularly the issue of whether we should try for an online or a print edition.

Today I spent the afternoon with the Manchester Feminist Network and thoroughly enjoyed Alison Light’s paper ‘Missing Persons: Writing a Family History of the English Poor’. Alison talked about perceptions that the past is a kind of mourning and history some kind of restitution; she noted that much family history or life writing begins with missing or missed persons. She wondered whether the proliferation of both family history and life writing suggest a morbid, deathly, museum culture – we keep going back to the past and to history in attempts to find out about ourselves. It was all fascinating and nothing at all to do with any of my research, and all the more interesting for that.

Over the next week I need to finish the special issue of Romanticism that I’m editing on Thomas de Quincey. I’ve just read Confessions of an Opium-Eater again and enjoyed it hugely. He presents himself as a kind of explorer: speaking of the alleys and passageways he discovered on his wanderings in London he writes: ‘I could almost have believed, at times, that I must be the first discoverer of some of these terræ incognitæ’. He presents himself too as an explorer in new realms of the imagination, investigating mind-altered states of consciousness, and describing them with great relish whilst rubbishing the medical accounts of the drug.

All best,

Sharon

Periodicals training

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Dear Blog,

I urge everyone to see the two brilliant entries in the LitSciMed Film competition: http://litscimedvideocompetition.litscimed.org/film-clips/ or you can watch them on Youtube. Please do watch them and post your comments online.

We’ve had another great round of applications for event 3, with a real variety (again) of PhD topics from students in many different Universities across Britain and the world. Successful students should hear by Tuesday 8th June that they have a place and the reading list is being posted on the website as I write. Paul Craddock has already started off a discussion topic connected to event 3 on the social space – you need to click on ‘Newest’ in the Groups section of the social space and then you can join and comment.

I had a lovely time in Dove Cottage last week, with some real discoveries made on the final few days. It turns out that John Davy was the Wordsworth family doctor and there are lots of letters to and from William Wordsworth concerning the health of their daughter Dora. After Wordsworth’s death, John Davy was indefatigable in efforts to secure funds for the memorials in Grasmere and Ambleside Churches and there were lots of letters about this too. It seems that John Davy lived in Ambleside because his wife’s mother had links there and she settled there too. I need to find out lots more about his mother-in-law, Eliza Fletcher, who was an author in her own right (I need to read her 1875 Autobiography, which is clearly a text already known and studied by eighteenth-century scholars) and she was a close friend to the Wordsworths, Arnolds, and other literary families. I didn’t get through all of the material that the Wordsworth Centre have by these figures, but I guess that just means that I’ll have to go back!

This week has mainly been dominated by exam marking (finished at 6pm last night!) but yesterday I did attend the excellent ‘Periodicals Research’ day organised by two of my colleagues in English at Salford, Peter Buse and Kristin Ewins. There were some really useful workshops where we looked at the artefacts themselves, periodicals ranging from The Idler to The Illustrated London News, Plays and Players and Our Time. We considered how to read illustrations, how to find out about readerships, distribution, how to evaluate content, discover the authors of anonymous articles, and much more, under the expert tutelage of Brian Maidment and Margaret Beetham. Amusingly, the final periodical I looked at, something called Good Words, from 1879, had a serial feature on Humphry Davy, complete with a page of pictures of him and a detailed biography!  The day was attended by people from all over the North-west and from many different disciplines; it was great to be the other side of the desk again and be taught lots that I didn’t know.

Finally, we’ve had lots of interest in the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award ‘Transmission and Reception of P.B. Shelley in Working-Class Journals’ but there’s still some time before the deadline (25th June). It’s being advertised on jobs.ac.uk and in the The Guardian next Tuesday. If you know anyone who might be interested, please encourage them to apply!

All best,

 

Sharon