Tag Archives: letters

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

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

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

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