Tag Archives: Davy

Berlin, the Royal Society, and Davy’s ‘Life’

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Dear blog,

I’m just back from a four-day break in Berlin, which was absolutely brilliant. I went to lots of tiny, contemporary art galleries as well as some of the larger national ones. There is so much going on there and it was very exciting to get a glimpse of a such a vibrant cultural world.

I’ve been asked to do one of the Royal Society’s lunchtime talks in the autumn, which are mostly attended by members of the public rather than academics. The organizer is particularly interested in the material I’ve been writing about Mary Wollstonecraft so I think I will do something on that. I’m on sabbatical next semester, which I’m looking forward to very much, so will have more time to think about how to give a paper that is accessible and interesting to the public.

I’ve also negotiated a book contract with Palgrave Macmillan for the publication of my next monograph, ‘Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science and Medicine of the 1790s’, which is brilliant. I enjoyed working with Palgrave Macmillan (and the Commissioning Editor, Paula Kennedy) very much for Shelley and Vitality and Teaching Romanticism. Now I just have to find the time to finally finish the book.

I’m working in the Portico today, a beautiful library, which has many of the books that I need for the chapter I’m writing on Davy at the moment. I’m currently grappling with his poem ‘Life’, which seems first to have been written in a notebook (now in the Royal Institution), was commented upon by Coleridge in a letter of 9 October 1800, and changed in consequence. John Davy published it in his Memoirs in 1836 under the title ‘Written after Recovery from a Dangerous Illness’ (referring to Davy’s illness of 1808). Last year, though, I found another version, which Davy published anonymously in a collection edited by Joanna Baillie, called ‘Life’, in 1823. I’m going to look at these poems for evidence of something Davy called the most ‘sublime’ idea of all: that matter changes into other states and other forms.

All best,

Sharon

Footnotes and Findings

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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

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

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

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

Davy in Sweden

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Dear blog,

It’s been two weeks since my last blog and now I’m writing from yet another country, Sweden, and am hoping that volcanic ash won’t interfere with my return trip home this time.

First though, I want to make sure that everyone knows that applications are now open for event 3. There’s a provisional programme online and applications can be downloaded at: http://www.litscimed.org.uk/page/event3. The event will take place on 1-2 July; the first day will be held at the Royal Institution and the second at the National Maritime Museum. Applications need to be submitted by the deadline of Tuesday 1st June and we hope to let people know that they’ve got a place by 8th June.

I’ve taken notice of the points made on the evaluation forms that have come in so far (only 16 out of 22), and we’ve made efforts to ensure that even where there are plenary speakers there will be plenty of time for questions. We’ve also built in more discussion and seminar time. Debbie Hughes, the administrator for the programme, has been trying to find low cost accommodation for the event in Greenwich; there will only be one night’s accommodation offered this time because we’re not starting till 12pm; the second day at the NMM in Greenwich will start at 10am. Our budget to the AHRC was for £120 per student to cover both travel and accommodation, based on the premise that those who lived within striking distance of the venues would not take up the offer of accommodation. I’m inclined with this event to ask students for budgets once they have been given a place and see how much is needed, but for students to book their own accommodation and dinner, hopefully within this £120 budget. I’d be interested to hear people’s views on this. It means that we won’t all be together for dinner, and won’t all be staying in the same place, but will mean that students have more freedom.

Last things on event 2, you’ll be pleased to hear that once again the filming I did isn’t good enough to put up on the website… so don’t worry about having to see yourself on the screen. We’re going to link the 500-word object narratives to the resources page instead. And, remember that the deadline is looming for the LitSciMed video competition, also 1st June.  

So, I’m in Stockholm to visit the Royal Academy of Sciences to see Humphry Davy’s letters to the Swedish chemist, Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779-1848). It was good to get into some proper work, and good to see Davy’s handwriting again. I had an easy job in many respects because I had Berzelius’s published letters to compare to the originals – it was still really worth my while to come to see them for themselves. Apart from changes made by the editor of Berzelius’s letters (eg. capitalisation, added punctuation), there were a number of important mistakes (‘proceeded’ should have read ‘preceded’, ‘expiration’ should have read ‘respiration’, that kind of thing). It was also fascinating to start to get a sense of Davy as a writer – he seems to use the end of the line as punctuation sometimes, and at other times it seems as though this symbol “ means a comma; I need to find out about all of these possibilities. It was also really interesting to see him grow in confidence as a chemist during the period of his correspondence with Berzelius, and to see proof of his outmoded (but perhaps peculiarly Romantic) understanding of matter as dynamic (‘the attraction of acid matter for alkaline…’), his repudiation of Dalton’s ‘mechanico-chemical theory’, and perhaps fancifully on my part, his occasionally poetic turn of phrase even when describing his chemical experiments (such as, ‘At the red heat the quicksilver rises from the amalgams & the bases remain free’). Davy visited Gothenburg among other places in Sweden and I’ve found letters in other archives in Stockholm, which makes me think that a comprehensive search will be necessary of the regional Swedish archives.

I intend to set up a discussion group on the use of manuscripts in LitSciMed work before the next event, one day of which is dedicated to this topic.

All best,

Sharon