Category Archives: Uncategorized

some things to think about

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Dear blog,

I’m off on holiday for two weeks tomorrow (yippee!) but before I go wanted to say thanks to everyone who was involved in LitSciMed event 5. I particularly enjoyed the second day at Birkbeck College where it really was a privilege to sit as a student and listen to the excellent talks given by Steven Connor, Isobel Armstrong and Esther Leslie. I’m a card-carrying historicist in my research and it was such a treat to think outside the box about such matters as ‘thing theory’, glass in nineteenth-century literature, and liquid crystals. In fact it was fascinating. I feel fired up to go away and read more Hegel and Benjamin so that I could properly engage with the discussions that were going on. The other events we have had have, I think, been dominated by historicist methods and it was a really interesting departure to think about ‘things’ in new ways.

Last weekend was the British Society for Literature and Science conference at Cambridge, which a number of LitSciMedders attended. I heard some great papers and really felt that the sub-field, or sub-discipline, or whatever it is that we are and we do, is thriving. The day before the conference I went to the Fitzwilliam Museum and the University Library, Cambridge to read the Davy letters there. This was fun but there were some crucial words in these few letters that I couldn’t read. I therefore asked the Fitzwilliam for copies of two of these letters and have just been told that it will cost £248 plus VAT for this service. Of course, I’ve said no thanks.

On 6th April I went to take a look at Richard Badnall’s ‘Undulating Railway’ material that we house in the University of Salford archive (http://www.library.salford.ac.uk/resources/special/badnall.xml) in the august company of two of my colleagues: Professor Alison Adam (who began her research career as a Historian of Science) and Professor Richard Knowles, a Professor of Transport Geography. It was such a pleasure to look at the material there, which includes the original, beautifully ornate patent for the railway. It turns out too that Richard Badnall wrote poetry. I need to take a look at this to see whether it’s any good, but certainly he seems like a figure who is worth spending some time with.

On 5th April I went to Leicester for a planning meeting for Event 6 of LitSciMed – our last event! Application forms and programmes for this event (to be held at Leicester and Keele) should go online on 3rd May at http://www.litscimed.org.uk/. I’m trying to think of ways to make this last event really special – we’ve already planned a reception – let me know if you have any ideas.

All best,

Sharon

A paper, a meeting, and a brilliant play

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Dear blog,

It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog entry and lots has happened in that time. There’s been some activity on the Davy project: on 9th March I gave a paper on ‘The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry and his Circle’ at the University of Northumbria, which was a great opportunity to reflect on the project and see how much we’d done. So far we’ve transcribed 183 new letters and have visited something like 31 archives. We must have checked hundreds of letters against the transcripts that we had from June Fullmer. There have been some real discoveries so far and the paper I gave at Northumbria mentioned some of these and argued that Davy was a far more central figure to British Romanticism than he has been thought previously. We had a meeting of the editorial group on the Davy Letters project a week later, on the 15th March. It was good for all five of us to meet up (Tim Fulford, Jan Golinski, Frank James, David Knight and myself) and we made a few decisions. One is that we are only going to include letters written by John (Davy’s brother) and Jane (Davy’s wife) where these pertain to Davy himself. We also decided that the website will carry the text of letters (http://www.davy-letters.org.uk/) with the disclaimer (on the home page) that the texts given here are in various states of editorial completeness: some have been checked against the originals and some haven’t yet. There are also footnote references but not yet any footnotes. I think this is a good decision, since it makes the full text of these important letters accessible to all, but readers need to remember that we are still in the early stages with this edition and that these are not necessarily reliable texts yet. We also decided to continue with the checking and transcription for a further year; there are many more archives to visit and the grants we had have been used up. It’s time for some more bid writing I think…

In other news, I have done a podcast! (http://soundingoutaeolus.wordpress.com/category/podcast/). This is for the Aeolus project (a joint project between the Universities of Salford and Southampton and the artist Luke Jerram). A huge sound sculpture (an Aeolian harp in effect!) is being built and it will move around Britain, making music from the natural landscape. The Romantic poets were fascinated by the Aeolian harp and it features in a number of poems; this project is such a great idea, particularly as it brings together art and science.

I saw Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein as part of the NT live series on 17th March and it was really very good indeed. Though it bore little resemblance in its plot and detail to Mary Shelley’s novel I really thought that the production demonstrated a real understanding of the novel, of its issues and characters. The dialogue was steeped in the language of the book, but nothing was quoted verbatim; instead words and phrases kept bubbling up, often used in a way that expressed the ethical issues of the book far more explicitly that the novel itself does. Benedict Cumberbatch was magnificent as the Creature; his performance made me think again about the character he plays, particularly about the way that he moves, as a body relearning how to walk and act.

We’re a few weeks away now from event 5 of the LitSciMed training programme (14-15 April) and I’d like to start the discussion off using the discussion group facility on the social space (http://litscimed.org/). Anyone can join in but I’d especially like to hear from people who are coming to Event 5. You can find the discussion group that I’ve started up if you click on ‘Newest’ (to the right-hand side below the word ‘Groups’); it’s called ‘Science, Art, and Film’. Please post your comments on the questions I’ve already asked and feel free to pose new questions too.

All best,

Sharon

The Davy Letters website is online!

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Dear Blog,

We’ve had just the right number of applications for event 5 so everyone who applied will be getting a place. Confirmation letters will go out on Tuesday 8th March. Cristina da Costa is working hard on the resources page of event 4 too – there’s already some of the films that Paul Craddock took for us on the day including the vox pop interviews with LitSciMed students. See http://www.litscimed.org.uk/page/learning. I was really pleased with the evaluations for this event. Let’s hope we can replicate this experience for the next event!

I can announce, too, the publication of our Davy Letters website: http://www.davy-letters.org.uk/ created by the University of Salford’s Graeme Draper and Alex Fenton. This site allows you to search the Davy letters database, which currently holds information on 922 letters but which is growing daily. The database can be searched according to a number of fields (recipient name, where the original is held, etc etc), and constitutes the first stage in our project to publish Davy’s complete correspondence.

I’ve had a hectic few weeks. I gave my inaugural lecture on Tuesday 22nd February, an event I think I shall always remember. It was the loveliest thing; there were 160 people there, my friends, family, Romanticists, colleagues and some students. Thanks to the LitSciMed folk who came along. It was the most wonderful audience, full of well-wishers, and I felt very loved. The party afterwards was fun too!
Since then there’s been much culture, starting with seeing Simon Rattle conduct the Berlin Symphony Orchestra for Mahler’s fifth at the Royal Festival Hall; going to watch The Red Shoes with Secret Cinema in an old Tobacco Warehouse in Wapping (http://www.secretcinema.org/); watching Made in Dagenham as part of the 100th International Women’s Day celebrations with the TUC; and yesterday I went to see Nam June Paik’s exhibition at the Tate in Liverpoool.

One of the best things I did last week was to see David Peace (authors of the Red Riding Trilogy, Damned United, GB84, and other books). He was brilliant, really thoughtful and interesting. When he read from his novels it was very much like hearing poetry and in questions he told us that he was in fact thinking of writing a book-length poem at some point in the future. He was fascinating, really very inspiring. I urge people to read his books, though they are not for the faint of heart…

Tomorrow I give my Frankenstein lecture to the second year students and then have a series of one-to-one sessions offering help with their forthcoming essay before a session at 5pm run by our wonderful subject librarian Jen Earl to help the same students find relevant, quality material for the essay. How’s that for a good service? Wednesday I’m off to the University of Northumbria to give a paper in their research seminar series; I’m talking about the Davy letters project and it’s good to take a moment to reflect on what we’ve done so far and how much there still is to do.

More soon,

Sharon

Northumberland, a mine, and the lamp

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Dear blog,

The programme and application form for Event 5 of the LitSciMed training programme is now online at http://www.litscimed.org.uk/page/event5. The deadline for applications is Tuesday 1st March.

I’ve been in Woodhorn Museum (http://www.experiencewoodhorn.com/) since Tuesday, working in the Northumberland archives where there are 54 letters from Humphry Davy to the Reverend John Hodgson. These letters have never been published before, which is very exciting, though they have been read and used in articles and books (including Frank James’s excellent article on the Davy lamp in the Transaction of the Newcomen Society in 2005).

The museum is an odd place; it’s on the site of, and retains many of the buildings of, the coal mine at Woodhorn, which once employed 2000 miners but stopped working in 1981. A new building on the site now houses exhibitions relating to this and the Northumberland archives, which were, as with those at Newcastle, busy with people searching for their family histories when I was there.

One of the Davy letters was in an autograph book (I looked at one of these in Durham University archives too, but that had a lock and key!). This one held letters by Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli (it was organised alphabetically), a certificate for a course of lectures on surgery signed by Matthew Baillie; a letter from Lord Eldon (the Chancellor), Pierce Egan (the journalist), the Duchess of Devonshire; lawyers, politicians, naval officers, artists, and aristocracy. It was interesting to see how many of these figures I knew, who had been considered worth collecting at the time and who was still well-known now.

The rest of the Davy letters were collected within a single book; they were often long and complex and all concerned the miner’s safety lamp that Davy devised and his subsequent battle to persuade people that he had invented it and not George Stephenson. It ranged, then, much the same ground as those that I had read in Newcastle to John Buddle. It was great to be immersed in similar topics and feel like I was getting a handle on at least this one episode in Davy’s life.

I think one of the letters has been mis-ordered and that it is January rather than June 1816. The evidence is that the postmark looks more to me like a JA than a JU plus there’s a superscript ‘y’ in the date given by Davy at the top of his letter. Also, it fits in terms of subject matter, the letter promised in a note of 15th Jan. If so, this is the first reference to Stevenson’s lamp. This was potentially a big discovery for me and it doesn’t appear to have been picked up by others.

Here are some nuggets from these letters that give you a sense of how Davy felt about Stevenson; on the 8 Feb 1816 [which really was 1817!], Davy writes: ‘His present lamp is clearly pilfered directly from wire gauze safe lamp which He has seen.’; ‘He is so ignorant that I doubt if now he has made a safe lamp.’; ‘Depend upon it Stevenson is not a man whose testimony is worth any thing. — The persons who have read his pamphlet here vote him a thief & not a clever thief. —‘; ‘I never heard of Stevenson till sometime in Jan y 1816 when one morning Sir Jos: Banks referred me to a paper in the Monthly Magazine (Mr Ws account of Stevenson’s lamp) & said “Here’s a fellow who has stolen your lamp.”’ Stevenson is always just called Stevenson (very rarely even Stephenson); he gets no title, unlike the others who get called Mr. The only others who get no title are instrument makers.

I was amused and intrigued to see that in the corrections he requested for a newspaper article on the subject Davy wrote (Sept 1816): ‘I think two or three expressions may be altered as rather too poetical for the society’ ‘“with flickering and roaring” should be altered to with violence and noise.’ In the end, the ‘poetical’ expressions went in as they were but it’s interesting to see that Davy, who is usually thought of as writing science in rather a poetical manner, was trying to remove this.

I’ve had a thoroughly enjoyable week; back to work and teaching tomorrow though I’ve been thinking up ideas for training sessions where the examples would be Davy letters. It would be good to keep moving ahead with the letters.

All best,

Sharon

North-East archives and Davy lamp controversy

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Dear blog,

This week I’ve been working in Tyne and Wear Archive Services, Durham County Record Office and Durham University Library. All three places were hugely busy: the first two with people looking up their family histories and the latter with academics. The business made me more determined to try to increase accessibility to the University of Salford’s archives. It would be so brilliant to have a vibrant, busy reading room in which to read the unique materials we have.

I’ve mainly been reading letters from Davy to a mining engineer in Wallsend called John Buddle about the controversy over the so-called ‘Davy lamp’. George Stephenson claimed to have invented a miner’s safety lamp first (I’ve found out that this was nick-named the ‘Geordie’), before Davy. Explosions in mines were a huge problem at the beginning of the nineteenth century and Davy had been asked to take a look into what could be done because by then he had secured his reputation as one of the foremost chemists of the day.

Our letters edition will make many of these letters available for the first time to the public, though they have been read by some scholars, notably the Head of Collections at the Royal Institutions, Frank James, who was kind enough to lend me his notes. My time at the Tyne and Wear Archive was remarkably stress-free because the Davy letters had been copied in a fair hand, meaning that I didn’t have to squint and sweat over Davy’s often very difficult to read handwriting.

In an early letter, John Buddle speaks of the ‘nibbling envy and mischievous insinuations of the philosophical Empirics’ to Davy (15/6/1816). Davy himself is far less subtle in his condemnation of those who favoured Stephenson’s claim to the invention. He speaks of their conduct as being ‘marked by indelicacy as well as impropriety’ in a letter of 31/10/1816. His anger rises as the letters and months pass by until I read in a letter from Davy to Buddle dated 10/11/1817: ‘It is even said by them that no hostile measure is intended towards me; but that the object is to raise a fund for a poor ingenious man (or a thief and a liar) —— whose reward ought to be the Pillory.’ This is pretty strong stuff; Stephenson is denounced an impostor by Davy and the full force of Davy’s institutional influence is brought to bear on proving that Stephenson’s early models for the lamp would not have worked.

The whole episode left a rather nasty taste in my mouth, I suppose; with hindsight, Stephenson is such an important part of our national heritage and Davy in these letters often refers to him as illiterate and with the suggestion that he is beneath him in terms social class and scientific reputation. It’s been odd because I’ve walked past Stephenson’s statue in Newcastle every day that I’ve walked to the archive. Writing to Buddle on 3 March 1818, claiming that this is the last word on the subject, Davy write that: ‘In the scientific world [Stephenson’s] claims have met the most sovereign contempt’. This is an interesting choice of adjective.

Whatever the truth of the matter, and I need to find out more about what’s been written on this subject, there are many assertions of the life-saving properties of Davy’s lamp. I don’t know when the lamp first acquired its eponymous name but the lamps are referred to as ‘Davys’ in a letter of Buddle’s (1 Jan 1824), where he also describes how each pit has a ‘Davy Man’ to ‘keep the lamps clean and in good repair’.

The letters have been fascinating to read and I hope that when they’re published they will shine a new light on this debate and controversy, even if Davy doesn’t come off so well by these means. I’m nearly at the end of my British Academy grant now – only one archive trip left. It’s been hard work but immensely interesting and rewarding.

We are working hard on the programme for event five in the LitSciMed training programme at the moment too, and I’ll let you know when the application forms are available online.

Best,

Sharon

Event Four – a storming success!

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Dear blog,

The fourth event of the AHRC training programme was held last week and I have to say that I think it was my favourite so far. It was, of course, absolutely bang on target for my area of interest. It did dawn on me that this was an event set up to benefit English Literature students more than those of other disciplines, though the historians of medicine present assured me that there was still something there for them.

The first day, at CHSTM in Manchester, was a brilliant opportunity to fill in the many gaps in my knowledge of the history and philosophy of science. Hasok Chang (Cambridge) and James Sumner (Manchester) delivered accessible and fun talks and seminars that really explained how things fitted together, the genealogy of ideas I had read about already, and the consequences and implications of the new ways of thinking about scientific writing. I was glad that the examples Hasok used came from Nicholson’s Journal, a journal I need to read more of myself given William Godwin’s close friendship with Nicholson.

Day two, though, held at the University of Salford, for me, was nothing short of inspirational. I was so pleased to hear John Holmes justifying why poetry was important, as a space for imaginative thought and a place where contradictories can exist simultaneously, and for many other reasons. Michael Whitworth’s attempts to reach a set of questions that could be used for poetry that responds to science in various ways, was really very impressive and useful also. We used the questions and ideas prompted by both papers in our group discussion in the afternoon where students talked about the poems they had come prepared with, which ranged in our group from Anna Barbauld and Humphry Davy to James Clerk Maxwell and Adam Dickinson. There were some great poems and good discussion; I only wish that we’d had more time.

Soon we’ll have our resources page up for this event and this will have links to the filming that we did at the event and slides that speakers used, reading lists, etc. Event five is coming up soon too – it’s to be held on Thursday 14th and Friday 15th April on the subject of ‘Science and Film: the Material Culture of Science, Technology and Medicine’ (Blythe House, Science Museum) and ‘Image and Object in Art and Science’ (London Consortium). Watch out for application forms for this!

Finally, I’m giving my inaugural lecture on Tuesday 22nd February and if you’d like to come alone you need to register at http://www.salford.ac.uk/events/details/1380. Everyone is welcome!

More soon, all best,

Sharon

Edinburgh, snow, and Murray’s archive

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Dear Blog,

It’s nearly Christmas and I’ve managed to fit in one last research trip of 2010 at the National Library of Scotland. Edinburgh is looking very beautiful in the snow and I’ve found a cache of letters, some not previous known about, written by Humphry, Jane and John Davy to John Murray (snr and jnr) the of the famous publisher firm.

Among the finds I’ve come across this week is a letter from Humphry Davy to Francis Jeffrey, which gives us his views (in 1810 at least) on the Edinburgh Review:

‘I have been always interested in the important work which you conduct & being generally instructed & delighted with the liberality & soundness of the discussions that it contains in matters of taste & criticism & general Science’ (23 January [1810])

The Edinburgh was, of course very important in the Romantic period, and I’m interested to find Davy here ‘delighted with the liberality & soundness of the discussions’ he reads in the Whig-oriented journal. The Quarterly Review had been founded in 1809 to counter precisely these liberal views and opinions.

It’s been a week of transcribing difficult handwriting (I think Lady Davy’s is the most difficult) and I’ve had the online OED and DNB open at all times, as well as google book’s editions of Davy’s works, to try to check words that seem incorrect or unlikely. It’s amazing the things that you find out: for example, a ‘Firman’ is ‘An edict or order issued by an Oriental sovereign, esp. the Sultan of Turkey; a grant, licence, passport, permit’ (OED). Davy expressly asks the ambassador in Constantinople (now Istanbul) to get him one of these so that he can properly examine the many scientifically interesting objects in that country.

I was amused too to find Lady Davy correcting the younger John Murray’s (1808–1892), spelling of ‘Humphry’, which is without an ‘e’ in Davy’s case. Apparently Davy features in Murray’s Handbook of Devon and Cornwall but with his name spelled incorrectly. Lady Davy writes in November 1850: ‘Apropos in your Cornwall you spell Sir Humphry’s christian name wrong; & as he was tenacious about it (generally not tenacious at all) I am.’ It’s funny to find out that he was anxious that people get this right – it’s something I find myself correcting in others too!

Finally I hope people are excited about the fourth event of the LitSciMed training programme, due to take place on 13-14 January 2011 in Manchester and Salford. We had over 30 applications for the 20 places and choosing from these was difficult. Participants are being asked to contribute poems they have found that have some connection to science before the event itself with short reflections on those poems. They are being posted in the blog section of the ‘Poetry and Science’ discussion group and I urge everyone to have a read and post comments. Paul Craddock’s is already up there but all 20 of the participants’ poems will be there by 5th January. More material will go up after the event including resources (see the resources section of www.litscimed.org.uk) for what we have from other events.

Have a lovely lovely Christmas and New Year,

Sharon

St Andrews, archives, and history of chemistry

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Dear Blog,

I’m at the University of St Andrews archives for a week, which is ace, partly because 1) I’ve never been to St Andrews and this is a great opportunity to see a part of the world I don’t know (I’ve only really been to Glasgow and Edinburgh before), and 2) it gives me some time and space to get back to the Davy Letters project.

The archive here has 23 letters from John Davy to James D. Forbes (1809–1868), who was a brilliant young scientist by all accounts; his election to the Edinburgh Royal Society had to be delayed by a couple of years till 1831 when he had reached the minimum age of 21 (DNB). The letters are great so far, though one of them was eight pages long and took many hours and much head-scratching to transcribe. I’m mainly interested in John Davy’s account of his biography of his brother. At this stage (c. 1830) he’s compiling information and gathering materials. It’s hard not to make parallels with our own project, where we are similarly trying to find out whom Davy wrote to and where the letters are. John Davy, though, has more personal motivations perhaps; he describes the work as ‘a task which I consider a duty & it is to me of a very delightful kind & I trust the result will be useful to the world’ (letter to J. D. Forbes, 16 October 1830).

There’s already some tension it seems to me in the imminent publication of Dr John Ayrton Paris’s biography of Humphry Davy:

Dr Paris’ work I hope will be good — popular I have no doubt it will be — for he has always aimed at popularity in all his writings — but most of all I desire it may be accurate — I should be sorry to be under the necessity of coming forward in any way in opposition to him, — & this is the only way in which I should consider it a duty. (letter to J. D. Forbes, 4 February 1831)

Paris’s biography came out in two volumes in 1831 and John Davy did respond with his own biography, published in 1836. What I hadn’t known until this point though, was that John Davy was already writing a biography before the publication of Paris’s, and I think there are signs here that he suspected he would have problems with it.

I was in London for a few days last week and went to an excellent paper given by Simon Schaffer at the Royal Institution in honour of 75 years of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry and their journal Ambix (http://www.ambix.org/). The paper was great, much fun, but leaving me with some serious things to think about. Schaffer talked about the need for historians of chemistry to consider more closely the genre in which texts were written, as well as paying more attention to popular culture forms, particularly the vibrant periodical press in the early nineteenth century. He also spoke about the need for a history of plausibility, since what is plausible at any given moment changes. It was all fascinating.

Remember that if you’re going to apply for the next event of LitSciMed (http://www.litscimed.org.uk/page/event4) you need to do so by the end of the month. We’ve had 19 applications already.

All best,

Sharon

Frankenfest

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Dear Blog,

Well, it was quite a week last week. It was the Manchester Science Festival and as part of that on Wednesday 27th October from 6-8pm I gave a talk and seminar workshop on ‘The Science of Frankenstein’, hosted by Manchester City Library at Eliot House on Deansgate. There was a disappointing turnout – even more so because we had turned people away but in the event only half of those registered turned up! (I know next time to allow twice as many to register.) But, it went well I think. I put the novel in context, and used research from my book Shelley and Vitality on the John Abernethy and William Lawrence debate as well as research into the Humane Society’s methods of reviving drowned persons from an article published in the Keats-Shelley Review a few years ago. It was good to give this material an airing in a public forum and from the feedback it seemed as though people enjoyed hearing about the scientific experiments at the time. The seminar was enjoyable too; we focused on the particular chapters that were most relevant to my talk and people spoke and had things to say about the novel.

I had questions though on what is happening today – someone asked about the cuts to the Human Fertilisation and Embyrology Authority (http://www.hfea.gov.uk/) headed up by Lisa Jardine, and someone else about advances in embryology. These were supposed to be the subjects of another public event that I was involved with last week. It was also part of the Manchester Science Festival but also on the programme of another festival Grimm up North, a festival of horror (http://grimmfest.com/). So, on Friday last week I went to the Dancehouse, Oxford Road, to take part in a panel discussion with two other academics, Lucy Burke and Joan Ormerod from MMU. The organisers had put together a series of film clips, beginning with the creation scene in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, and the seminar was called ‘Make a Monster’. Discussion began with Frankenstein but moved on to discuss genetic engineering.

Today the application form has gone online for event four to be held 13-14 January 2011 in the Universities of Manchester and Salford. The programme can be found at: http://www.litscimed.org.uk/page/event4 There are only 20 places and applications must be submitted by 1st December. We’ve already booked 20 rooms at the Ibis Hotel in Manchester for the successful students and I’m planning to have a party on the first night at my flat to celebrate being more than half way through the programme – this is the fourth event of six and the programme will be over by the end of next summer.

I’m in Dublin now, currently at the National Library of Ireland reading Davy letters. More soon.

Best,

Sharon

Keats, Shelley, and Prizes

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Dear Blog,
It’s been a busy and exciting week. After spending the first two days at Salford, I came down to London for the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association Prize ceremony (http://www.keats-shelley.co.uk/ksma%20awards.html). I’m one of two judges for the essay prize. The other judge, Professor Simon Bainbridge (Lancaster University) and myself, read 45 anonymously-submitted entries, and whittled these down to a shortlist of five. These were sent to the Chair of the Judges, this year the prestigious Malawian poet Jack Mapanje, who decided upon the top three. First prize went to a University of Newcastle PhD student, Andrew Lacey for his essay ‘Wings of Poesy: Keats’s Birds’. Second prize went to Stacey McDowell a University of Bristol PhD student a LitSciMedder (http://litscimed.org/members/staceymcdowell/) who works on William Hazlitt and others and ideas of taste. Stacey’s essay was called ‘Full of Air: Inspiration and Air-Eating Poets’. Third prize went to Professor Paul Keen at Carleton University in Ottawa, for ‘Shelley on the Assembly Line.’

There is also a poetry prize given by the Association, which this year was won by Simon Armitage. The theme was ‘ice’ and the winning poem was called ‘The Present’; it told the story of Simon’s attempt to find icicles in West Yorkshire to cheer up his daughter when she was ill. The ceremony is a very grand affair; this year it was held at the British Academy in Carlton House Terrace, London, and the dinner was at the Athenaeum Club, where there was a portrait of Davy on the ground floor. The prize is in its fourteenth year now and it’s wonderful that so many people care so much about Keats, Shelley and the younger Romantics more generally. I’m very proud to be a judge of the prize and hope that it grows from strength to strength. The Association also maintains the Keats House in Rome, and after a funding drive they have managed to raise enough money to make substantial improvements to the museum and its educational areas.

From London I went to Oxford and read the Davy letters in the Bodleian, one of which was a note from Davy to Godwin, which makes me rethink their relationship. The usual line is that there was a cooling of their relationship after a few years of Davy’s role in the Royal Institution. In fact this note, asking Godwin to come to dinner, expressed the ‘unfeigned’ wish that Davy had been able to spend more time in Godwin’s company.

I also had lunch with two of the tutors for the fourth event of LitSciMed, Michael Whitworth (Merton College, Oxford) and John Holmes (University of Reading) who are currently planning the sessions they will offer on the ‘Poetry and Science’ day of the event at the University of Salford. The programme will be finalised in the next few weeks and go online at www.litscimed.org.uk/events by 1st November with the application form on the same page.

All best,

Sharon