Sharon Ruston

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 Miss^s 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 S^t 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

Dear blog,

I’m in London now for a month to visit various archives, checking transcriptions of Humphry Davy letters against the originals and transcribing newly found letters. So far I’ve been to the Institution of Engineering and Technology (http://www.theiet.org/) and the Science Museum Library, which is in Imperial College Library.

It’s been lots of fun – I’ve read collections of letters, so letters to Michael Faraday in the IET and letters to Davy’s family (his mother, Grace, and sisters Betsy, Kitty, and Grace, and brother John). I’ve learned of his love of potatoes and salty fish from Penzance (he’s often asking his mother to send them to him), and it’s odd and slightly unnerving to read letters that cover a person’s whole life, from his initial excitable letters sent from the Pneumatic Institute to his rather more grumpy and stately letters as President of the Royal Institution. These letters do humanise Davy too; he clearly loves his family dearly, is hugely proud of his brother’s achievements, and misses his birthplace.

There’s an intriguing incident referred to in the letters that I would like to get to the bottom of concerning a Mr Millet, who has caused Davy some trouble in previous years because he married Davy’s sister Betsy though he had not a permanent situation (which Davy repeatedly tries to procure for him). Mr Millet (I think he is Mr John Baulderson Millet) is involved in some incident and is to be tried by the Admiralty (he has some position with them) early in 1826. Davy gives reassurance in his letters, convinced that Mr Millet will be acquitted and that there will be a verdict of accidental death. The story is that a pistol went off when Mr Millet fell but I don’t yet know the identity of the victim . This is all very exciting and none of these letters have been published before.

Plans are coming on well for event 4, which promises to be lots of fun, and the LitSciMed programme will feature in an article for the British Society for the History of Science newsletter, Viewpoint. Watch out for that.

I hope everyone is enjoying the summer.

All best,

Sharon

Dear blog,

I’m just returned from the Godwin diaries conference in Oxford and am about to go on leave for two weeks, so I thought I should update my blog before my holiday.

I really enjoyed the conference – the project has, over the last three years, made an electronic, fully searchable, and annotated version of William Godwin’s diaries, 1788-1836. You can read about it here: http://godwindiary.politics.ox.ac.uk/. Now nearing the end of the project the team asked individuals to talk at the conference about various aspects of the diary and I concentrated on the scientific and medical aspects. The diary has an awful lot to say on these matters. Godwin was very sociable and seems to have been friends with a great number of surgeons, physicians, natural historians, and chemists, including Humphry Davy, Anthony Carlisle, William Nicholson, John Aikin, and William Lawrence. His diary is also a fascinating account of an individual’s health throughout out his life and the treatments he received from the various doctors he consulted. It seems that Godwin also took the internal temperature of his house every single day for years! The diaries are a rich resource and when the electronic version is made public I urge everyone to take a look. There is a lot there for LitSciMeders.

Earlier this week we appointed someone to the AHRC-funded collaborative PhD that will be co-supervised by the Working Class Movement Library (http://www.wcml.org.uk/) and I’m really excited about that. I also read over the essays submitted to the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association prize competition (http://www.keats-shelley.co.uk/ksma%20awards.html), and there were some really very good ones. It’s a tough job being one of the two judges for the prize.

Finally, can I encourage everyone to take a look at the resources page that Cris da Costa has put together for event three: http://www.litscimed.org.uk/page/learning. On this page, you can see Paul Craddock’s excellent filming from the two days, plus reading lists, slides used in presentations, and much more. The website will act as a resource once the face-to-face teaching on the programme has faded into the dim and distant past, and I do hope people find it useful.

All best,

Sharon

Dear blog,

I’ve been in the Mitchell Library, in Glasgow, for the past few days reading Joanna Baillie’s letters to Lady Davy. There are 29 letters and they cover a lengthy period, from 1815 to 1851, when Joanna Baillie died. Given that Sir Humphry Davy dies in 1829, many of the letters (22 I think?) are from the later period in his wife’s life. In many ways, these aren’t important letters for our Collected Letters edition; while we are presently including Jane Davy in the edition, these are letters written to rather than from her. They have also already been transcribed in Judith Slagles’ edition of Baillie’s Collected Letters.

All of this aside, they are still very interesting letters, written by an important writer (Baillie was a poet and dramatist) and contain a number of interesting bits and pieces. Joanna Baillie portrays herself as a bit of a hermit, ever grateful for the attention that Lady Davy pays her (she always uses her title). She portrays Jane as constantly in a whirl of social engagements, in the country and in town, and as someone who enjoys travelling abroad. In 1816 Baillie goes to Geneva (I wonder whether this was her only trip outside the UK?) utilising the introduction that her friend has given her to a scientific acquaintance, Pictet. Baillie writes of her disappointment in seeing Mont Blanc: ‘I wish Mont Blanc had been as gracious to me as he way to Sir Humphry, tho’ I do not pretent to be so worthy of his favours.’ This makes me wonder whether she had seen Davy’s poem on this mountain, particularly since she certainly had seen others. The letters are often homely, full of news of mutual friends, family and Baillie’s and her sister’s health. But it’s clear that Jane Davy is a far more at ease in certain social circles; Baillie talks tantalisingly of the diaries that she must have kept of her travels, writing that her views of Turkey must be as important as Mary Wortley’s.

There’s so much that I’d like to follow up from this, such as their mutual friendships with Mary Edgeworth, Lady Byron, and Mary Someville (described as doing ‘so much honour in those matters in which we are most supposed to be incapable & deficient that all her sex are in duty bound to bid her God speed! in whatever she writes.’) For now, though, I need to finish my paper for the Godwin Diaries conference due to take place in Oxford next week (http://godwindiary.politics.ox.ac.uk/conference/)!

All best,

Sharon

Dear blog,

I had a great time at the third event, and so from what I’ve read on students’ evaluations, did everyone else it seems. We had twenty students at this event from a real range of institutions and disciplines, many of which had not been represented at any of the previous events.

The first day (as hot and sweaty as a day in London in July can be) was at the Royal Institution, starting with a lecture by David Knight, Emeritus Professor at the University of Durham and the author of countless books on the history of science. This was followed by a very nice lunch indeed, and then a hands-on manuscript exercise, where students transcribed pages from original texts such as James Watson’s ‘Double Helix’ and Humphry Davy’s notebooks. The activity led to lots of discussion, which I hope will continue in the discussion group set up to accompany it on the social space, where most people argued for diplomatic transcriptions of manuscript sources. Professor Michael Hunter rounded off the first day with a vigorously argued paper that instead saw merit in non-diplomatic transcriptions for printed editions. To give one example, which was I thought very persuasive, if in a handwritten manuscript, the author abbreviates a word, it is not the case that s/he intended for this abbreviation to pass into the printed version. The abbreviation (particularly ‘ye’ in Michael’s talk) can affect the way that the text is read. It was all highly interested for someone who’s spending more and more time in the company of Davy’s manuscript letters and beginning to think about how we might publish them…

Day two was spent in the gorgeous greenery of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. We had a series of fascinating and challenging talks and discussions, concerning the issues of trust in Conrad’s short stories, the social constructivisim of cartography, how different historiographies can change the way that we look at an object, and we spent some time with the paintings of William Hodges as a particular case study. Richard Dunn in the final session ran through a multitude of different ways of looking at a particular object, a sextant, from thinking of it as a status symbol to thinking about its (machine) production and marketing (it claims to be made ‘by hand’). This led into the final task where, in groups, students had to select from images owned by Greenwich to present on any topic they chose. The presentations were brilliant, especially considering the amount of time people had. I especially liked the one that concentrated on food – using the image of a dried soup cube and a ship’s biscuit – which asked us to think about ephemera and how things survive over time. This was something that chimed with the manuscripts day I thought; where we had talked about how extant manuscript sources can give a skewed sense of the past.

It was all great and lots of fun. I enjoyed meeting all the new people and finding out about some fascinating projects and am looking forward to event four in Manchester and Salford in January 2011. Over the next few weeks we’ll be updating the resources pages for event 3 and adding slides and films (courtesy of Paul Craddock!) and much, much more.

All best,

Sharon

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

Dear Blog,

I urge everyone to see the two brilliant entries in the LitSciMed Film competition: http://litscimedvideocompetition.litscimed.org/film-clips/ or you can watch them on Youtube. Please do watch them and post your comments online.

We’ve had another great round of applications for event 3, with a real variety (again) of PhD topics from students in many different Universities across Britain and the world. Successful students should hear by Tuesday 8^th June that they have a place and the reading list is being posted on the website as I write. Paul Craddock has already started off a discussion topic connected to event 3 on the social space – you need to click on ‘Newest’ in the Groups section of the social space and then you can join and comment.

I had a lovely time in Dove Cottage last week, with some real discoveries made on the final few days. It turns out that John Davy was the Wordsworth family doctor and there are lots of letters to and from William Wordsworth concerning the health of their daughter Dora. After Wordsworth’s death, John Davy was indefatigable in efforts to secure funds for the memorials in Grasmere and Ambleside Churches and there were lots of letters about this too. It seems that John Davy lived in Ambleside because his wife’s mother had links there and she settled there too. I need to find out lots more about his mother-in-law, Eliza Fletcher, who was an author in her own right (I need to read her 1875 Autobiography, which is clearly a text already known and studied by eighteenth-century scholars) and she was a close friend to the Wordsworths, Arnolds, and other literary families. I didn’t get through all of the material that the Wordsworth Centre have by these figures, but I guess that just means that I’ll have to go back!

This week has mainly been dominated by exam marking (finished at 6pm last night!) but yesterday I did attend the excellent ‘Periodicals Research’ day organised by two of my colleagues in English at Salford, Peter Buse and Kristin Ewins. There were some really useful workshops where we looked at the artefacts themselves, periodicals ranging from The Idler to The Illustrated London News, Plays and Players and Our Time. We considered how to read illustrations, how to find out about readerships, distribution, how to evaluate content, discover the authors of anonymous articles, and much more, under the expert tutelage of Brian Maidment and Margaret Beetham. Amusingly, the final periodical I looked at, something called Good Words, from 1879, had a serial feature on Humphry Davy, complete with a page of pictures of him and a detailed biography!  The day was attended by people from all over the North-west and from many different disciplines; it was great to be the other side of the desk again and be taught lots that I didn’t know.

Finally, we’ve had lots of interest in the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award ‘Transmission and Reception of P.B. Shelley in Working-Class Journals’ but there’s still some time before the deadline (25^th June). It’s being advertised on jobs.ac.uk and in the The Guardian next Tuesday. If you know anyone who might be interested, please encourage them to apply!

All best,

Sharon

Dear Blog,

First things first, there is less than a week to go before the deadline for applications for event 3. I’m very much looking forward to the next event, to be hosted by the Royal Institution and National Martime Museum, and I know that lots of effort has gone into creating an excellent looking programme. More details can be found here: http://www.litscimed.org.uk/page/event3

I’ve been working in Dove Cottage http://www.wordsworth.org.uk/ since Monday and it’s been great. I’m again transcribing Humphry Davy letters; there are a few here to Coleridge and a couple of fragments, such as an account of mixtures to produce artificial cold, and an analysis of some Cobalt Ore. The letters to Coleridge are really interesting though it seems as though they were already known about since there are partial transcriptions in Griggs’s edition of Coleridge’s Letters and John Davy’s Fragmentary Remains. My one real discovery so far is that a letter had been catalogued incorrectly – I knew that it had to be 1808 rather than 1805 because in it Davy announces the death of Thomas Beddoes, his mentor at the Royal Institution in Bristol. The catalogue has been changed now but it was the incorrect date that made me think before I arrived here that there were new, unpublished Humphry Davy letters to transcribe. The affection between Davy and Coleridge is very real I think, at least on the evidence that I have read while here. Before Coleridge leaves for Malta in March 1804, Davy writes to him: ‘I shall expect the time, when your spirit bursting through the clouds of ill health will appear to all men not as an uncertain & brilliant flame; but as a fair & permanent light, fixed, though constantly in motion; as a sun which gives its fire not only to its attendant Planets; but which sends beams from all its parts into all worlds.’ In a letter written when Davy was enjoying success, on 24 November 1807, after Davy had given his second Bakerian Lecture to the Royal Society Coleridge writes the very suggestive: ‘Davy supposes that there is only one power in the world of the senses; which in particles acts as chemical attractions, in specific masses as electricity, & on matter in general, as planetary Gravitation’.

For the final two days of my visit I’ll be transcribing John Davy letter. He was Davy’s brother (1790-1868) and was also hugely successful, eventually becoming inspector-general of army hospitals, though his fame was eclipsed by his brother’s. He also lived in Ambleside so it makes sense that there’s material of his here. None of this has been published and his handwriting is easier to read than his elder brother’s!

Finally, a request from Cris de Costa, who asks that the students who have published their 500-word posts from event 2 online add a common tag to the posting, so that if becomes easier to identify those texts within the social network, something like Object_Narratives. She encourages LitSciMed bloggers always to categorise and tag all their posts with LitSciMed so that everything becomes easier to identify.

Very finally, good luck in the last days of the Wellcome Film Competition!

All best,

Sharon

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 1^st June and we hope to let people know that they’ve got a place by 8^th 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 1^st 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

Dear blog,

For those of you who don’t already know I’m stranded in Pisa. My flight was cancelled again today and now I’m booked on a new flight on Saturday. Fingers crossed… It’s very difficult to know what to do but the train will take three days (Pisa to Milan, Milan to Paris, Paris to London (or Paris to Calais then Dover then London) and then London to Manchester) and there are no available tickets online till Sunday. Of course if my Saturday flight is cancelled there will be no available train tickets till mid week next week so it was a tough decision trying to work out whether it was best to sit tight and try (again) for a flight or to start the long journey back.

One reason for deciding to stay in Pisa and go for the Saturday flight is that the University of Pisa’s English Deparment (thank you Prof Carla Dente!) have very kindly set me up with a computer and internet access. In fact I’ve been merrily working here since Saturday so that’s all good. I’ve even been able to buy English-language versions of the two books that I need to read for teaching (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and the Portrait of Dorian Gray) because this is a great University town with a good English dept.

I have though missed a couple of important things now – one was the paper that I was due to give on Friday to the Council for College and University English AGM in Oxford (http://www.ccue.ac.uk/). I feel very sorry about that but it has been rearranged now for their December meeting.

As the days go by more important things will be missed, but there’s not much that I can do. It’s heartening though that the University system works to the extent that colleagues in different countries have helped me and I really am very grateful for that.

All best,

Sharon