Tag Archives: event 3

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

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