Dear blog,<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve 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<\/em>), Davy gave him a copy of James Currie\u2019s Life of Burns<\/em> before he left for the Royal Institution. This is an interesting text and it\u2019s no real surprise to know that Davy knew of it, though I\u2019m 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\u2019s \u2018Advertisement\u2019 and \u2018Preface\u2019 in the Lyrical Ballads<\/em>. Coleridge even went to visit James Currie in July 1800 and Davy\u2019s gift of the book reasserts its importance to this circle. I need to mull this over some more.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve also thought again about the fact that some of Davy\u2019s books are published by the radical dissenter Joseph Johnson. This places him in a politically radical circle when he moved to London; there\u2019s nothing new in that, but William Godwin\u2019s diaries show that he continues to attend Johnson\u2019s dinners (perhaps only sporadically) into the 1800s. Davy dines there even in the year of Johnson\u2019s 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n Tantalizingly, there\u2019s evidence in a letter dated 1 January 1800 that Coleridge undertook some negotiation on Davy\u2019s behalf for the publication of \u2018a<\/em> Volume<\/em>\u2019 with Longman, though it is impossible to tell whether this might be a volume of poems. He tells Davy \u2018you may of course begin printing when you like. All the tradesman part of the Business Longman will settle with Biggs and Cottle\u2019 (Letters<\/em>, i, 556). This follows the pattern of other books produced by this circle, including the Lyrical<\/em> Ballads<\/em>, which was printed by Biggs and Cottle in Bristol for Longman. Thomas Longman began buying Cottle\u2019s copyright in 1800 after he had retired from business (DNB<\/em>).<\/p>\n So, it\u2019s 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\u2019m trying out to see whether it works.<\/p>\n 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\/<\/a>). The conference is in Oxford in April. I\u2019m getting a bit nervous now about the coming semester, where on top of my teaching, I\u2019m 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\u2019m planning to present.<\/p>\n All best,<\/p>\n Sharon<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dear blog, I\u2019ve 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 … Continue reading