Dear blog,

I’ve had an interesting day today mostly writing my chapter on Davy (there was an initial hour and a half spent fielding emails of course). Things I have found out today: according to Joseph Cottle (Bristol publisher of the Lyrical Ballads), Davy gave him a copy of James Currie’s Life of Burns before he left for the Royal Institution. This is an interesting text and it’s no real surprise to know that Davy knew of it, though I’m not sure how to read the significance of his giving it as a gift. Nigel Leask, Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, and Jane Darcy have all individually written really great essays about this book, which presents Burns as an archetype of the medical theories of surgeon John Brown and the philosophy of David Hume, and which have been explored for their influence upon Wordsworth’s ‘Advertisement’ and ‘Preface’ in the Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge even went to visit James Currie in July 1800 and Davy’s gift of the book reasserts its importance to this circle. I need to mull this over some more.

I’ve also thought again about the fact that some of Davy’s books are published by the radical dissenter Joseph Johnson. This places him in a politically radical circle when he moved to London; there’s nothing new in that, but William Godwin’s diaries show that he continues to attend Johnson’s dinners (perhaps only sporadically) into the 1800s. Davy dines there even in the year of Johnson’s death in 1809. You can see this and lots of brilliantly interesting detail about who William Godwin saw, dined with and read during his life, as well as information about his various medical ailments and treatments online now at: http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

Tantalizingly, there’s evidence in a letter dated 1 January 1800 that Coleridge undertook some negotiation on Davy’s behalf for the publication of ‘a Volume’ with Longman, though it is impossible to tell whether this might be a volume of poems. He tells Davy ‘you may of course begin printing when you like. All the tradesman part of the Business Longman will settle with Biggs and Cottle’ (Letters, i, 556). This follows the pattern of other books produced by this circle, including the Lyrical Ballads, which was printed by Biggs and Cottle in Bristol for Longman. Thomas Longman began buying Cottle’s copyright in 1800 after he had retired from business (DNB).

So, it’s been a day of research and footnotes, which I quite enjoy to be honest. I also have a larger argument for the whole chapter now, which I’m trying out to see whether it works.

In other news, I was pleased to hear that my paper has been accepted for the British Society for Literature and Science conference (http://www.bsls.ac.uk/). The conference is in Oxford in April. I’m getting a bit nervous now about the coming semester, where on top of my teaching, I’m giving no less than six research papers (two in Oxford, also in York, Leeds, Edge Hill, and Sheffield). At least I have had a bit of time before term started to develop the ideas that I’m planning to present.

All best,

Sharon