The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes

  Such attacks were still continuing four years later, when Robert Harrington published his polemic essay entitled ‘The Death Warrant of the French Theory of Chemistry’ (1804). The new chemistry was dismissed as charlatanism, and linked to the craze for ballooning. ‘This is supposed to be the age of airial philosophy; I wish it were the age of common-sense for at present it has taken an airial flight; and unfortunately, candour and justice have flown away with it!’ Beddoes and Davy were described as ‘aerial flying chemists’ pursuing ‘ecstatic, lunatic and Laputatic sensations’.98 The Anti-Jacobin magazine made a more general link between radical politics, inhaling gas, flying balloons and mesmerism. But eventually these attacks were to prove far more damaging to Beddoes in Bristol than to Davy once he was established professionally in London.99

  Davy was already growing restless with Beddoes’s regime of gas treatments. Secretly, he believed he had come to a dead end. He was becoming more and more interested in galvanism, and the experimental possibilities of the new electrical pile or ‘battery’ invented by Alessandro Volta of the University of Como. This had been described in a paper published by Banks in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions that summer of 1800. The voltaic battery could produce an electrical charge by purely chemical means, and hold it for many hours.

  The accounts of Davy’s first electrical experiments appear in a notebook headed ‘Clifton 1800, from August to November’.100 He had read a paper about the crucial experiment by Nicholson and Carlisle, who used a voltaic pile to ‘decompose’ water, and wrote breathlessly to Davies Giddy in Penzance: ‘an immense field of investigation seems opened by this discovery: may it be pursued so as to acquaint us with the laws of life!’101 To Beddoes’s dismay, troughs of voltaic batteries, with their rows of square metal plates and pungent smell of oxidising acids, began to replace the glass gas tanks and silken bags in the Institute’s laboratory.

  Davy wrote to Coleridge in November: ‘I have made some important galvanic discoveries which seem to lead to the door of the temple of life.’102 Extensive correspondence continued between them about the ‘hopeful’ and progressive nature of science, the theory of chemistry, and the physiology of pleasure and pain, throughout the rest of the year.103 Coleridge followed Davy’s publications eagerly, and wrote with delight when he saw the title of one of his new galvanic essays advertised in the Morning Post: ‘Upon my soul, I believe there is not a letter in those words, round which a world of imagery does not circumvolve: your room, the garden, the cold bath, the Moonlit Rocks … and dreams of wonderful Things attached to your name!’104

  Coleridge’s own notebooks began to show a new, scientific precision in the observation of plants, water and weather at this time. ‘River Greta near its fall into the Tees — Shootings of water threads down the slope of the huge green stone. — The white Eddy-rose that blossom’d up against the stream in the scollop, by fits and starts, obstinate in resurrection. — It is the Life that we live. Black round spots from 5 to 18 in the decaying leaf of the Sycamore.’105 He felt that the new poetry and the new science were so closely entwined that they must somehow merge, and invited Davy to move north and establish a chemistry laboratory in the Lake District. Coleridge announced: ‘I shall attack Chemistry, like a Shark.’106

  But could they really combine? Southey was one of the first of the Romantic poets to suggest that there might be a profound difference between the scientific and the artistic temperament. This was a subject he would pursue with Coleridge, who did not entirely agree. In February 1800 Southey was already writing to his friend William Taylor: ‘Davy is proceeding in his chemical career with the same giant strides as at its outset … Chemistry, I clearly see, will possess him wholly and too exclusively: he allows himself no time for acquiring other knowledge. In poetry he will do nothing more: he talks of it, and that is all; nor can I urge him to perform promises which are perhaps better broken than kept. In his own science he will be first, and the high places in poetry have long been occupied.’107

  Despite Southey’s doubts about Davy’s literary interests, Davy did see through the press both the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, and Southey’s Thalaba, in 1800, and agreed to help edit a third volume of the Annual Anthology. He also privately continued writing poetry about Anna Beddoes, and his own memories and visions. Eighteen months later, in August 1801, Southey was confidently informing Coleridge: ‘I wish it were not true, but it unfortunately is, that experimental philosophy always deadens the feelings; and these men who “botanize upon their mothers’ graves,” may retort and say, that cherished feelings deaden our usefulness; — and so we are all well in our way.’ Here Southey was quoting from a poem by Wordsworth, ‘The Tables Turned’. But Coleridge still had different ideas on the matter.108

  Not all Davy’s Bristol friends agreed that a great poet had been lost. Gregory Watt was glad Davy had not gone on contributing to the Annual Anthology. He later mocked poetry as an ‘exquisitely insidious’ form of delusion, and described most poets as ‘sporters with the feelings of the world’, whose effusions deserved to be burnt by the public hangman. ‘You, my dear philosopher,’ he reassured Davy, ‘have wisely relinquished the stormy Parnassus, where transient sunshine only contrasts the cloudy sky, for the mild and unvarying temperature of the central grotto of science.’ Then, serious for a moment, he urged Davy to remain in his calm laboratory and be ‘guided by the light of your own creation’.109

  But Davy had not relinquished Parnassus, though he chose never to publish his poems after 1800. For the rest of his life he filled his lab oratory notebooks with drafts and fragments of poetry, which were afterwards faithfully collected by his brother John, and scattered posthumously throughout his Memoirs of Sir Humphry Davy. Most of these would be travel pieces (‘Fontainbleau’, ‘Mont Blanc’, ‘Athens’, ‘Canigou’), loose forms of descriptive verse-diary, which show great sensitivity to seasons and landscape — especially rivers and mountains. They are exactly what you would expect of a meditative fisherman who had read Coleridge and Wordsworth, and also Izaak Walton. Yet they are surprisingly conventional in language and feeling.

  However, there are a number of striking confessional pieces, of much greater intensity, in which Davy tried to work through some of his strange metaphysical ideas about death, fame and hope. The style is plain, often rather awkward, but here the thought is often highly original.♣ It is difficult to imagine what other writer of the period (except perhaps Caroline Herschel) would have imagined the dead Lord Byron touring the universe on a comet, saluted by extraterrestrial beings, and accelerating towards the speed of light.

  Of some great comet he might well have been

  The habitant, that thro’ the mighty space

  Of kindling ether rolls; now visiting

  Our glorious sun, by wondering myriads seen

  Of planetary beings; then in a race

  Vying with light in swiftness, like a king

  Of void and chaos, rising up on high

  Above the stars in awful majesty.110

  Davy also referred frequently in his later lectures to comparisons between the poetic and the scientific imagination. In 1807 he wrote in terms that would be echoed both by Coleridge and by Keats: ‘The perception of truth is almost as simple a feeling as the perception of beauty; and the genius of Newton, of Shakespeare, of Michael Angelo, and of Handel, are not very remote in character from each other. Imagination, as well as the reason, is necessary to perfection in the philosophic mind. A rapidity of combination, a power of perceiving analogies, and of comparing them by facts, is the creative source of discovery. Discrimination and delicacy of sensation, so important in physical research, are other words for taste; and love of nature is the same passion, as the love of the magnificent, the sublime, and the beautiful.’111

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  By the end of 1800 Davy’s Researches, and his early papers on galvanism in Nicholson’s Journal, were rousing serious interest in London. He began receiving unofficial approaches fr
om Sir Joseph Banks and Benjamin Thompson, and there was talk of a professorship in chemistry. In February 1801 he again visited London, and was officially interviewed by the Committee of the Royal Institution — Banks, Thompson and Henry Cavendish — who had been considering offering him an initial post as Assistant Chemical Lecturer, with a possible professorship to follow. He then had the decisive Soho breakfast with Banks, who quickly determined to poach him from Beddoes, and capture him for the Institution. His first shrewd move was to send him on to have informal drinks with Benjamin Thompson, an altogether different kind of patron.112

  Thompson (1753-1814) was a strange and remarkable man, with none of Sir Joseph’s diplomatic bonhomie, but with equal energy and an even more ruthless drive. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he was an American citizen from Boston, but had been knighted by the British government and then appointed Count Rumford by the Elector of Bavaria, an unusual combination of honours. In the course of his extraordinary, picaresque life, Rumford was variously a professional soldier, an inventor and man of science, a Minister of State, a philanthropist and a philanderer. His tall, thin, imposing figure, permanently stooped, combined with large, bright, attentive eyes and a spectacular Roman nose, gave him the appearance of some powerfully beaked and faintly sinister bird of prey about to pounce — an appearance much loved by cartoonists such as James Gillray. As the inventor of various heating and lighting appliances, and propounder of a correct theory of heat (proving Lavoisier’s ‘caloric’ to be a product of friction), Thompson instantly recognised young Davy’s potential — and duly pounced.

  Attractive terms of employment were mooted (though not agreed), and Davy was already writing to Davies Giddy on 8 March 1801 about the wonderful prospects held out by Banks and Thompson, his imminent move to London, and the promise of fresh funding for his work on galvanism. He acknowledged Beddoes’s plans at Clifton for ‘a great popular physiological work’ on therapeutic gases, but this, he had to admit, was a work on which he would not be collaborating after all. It might, in fact, be a dead end. At all events, science now called him elsewhere.

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  There may also have been non-scientific reasons for Davy’s departure from Bristol. Amidst the youthful and enthusiastic circle of the Pneumatic Institute, it was his friendship with Anna Beddoes that had developed the most unexpectedly.113 He had gradually discovered that her sunny directness disguised deep unhappiness within the marriage.114 Thomas Beddoes was not a tender or communicative husband, and suffered from bouts of deep depression, what he himself called his ‘Hamlet complaint’. In June 1801 he would become so depressed about his debilitating asthma attacks that he allegedly asked Anna’s permission to commit suicide, or so she later told Davy.115

  In consequence, Anna was a young woman secretly desperate for affection, and the early romantic walks along the Avon with Davy had soon turned into tearful confessions and declarations. Both had begun sending each other poems. One of Davy’s started unguardedly:

  Anna thou art lovely ever

  Lovely in tears

  In tears of sorrow bright

  Brighter in joy …

  In return she sent him unsigned verses addressed to ‘Mr Davy, Pneumatic Institution, Dowry Square, Hotwells’. She apologised for troubling him with her frustrations and miseries, but suggested moments of precious intimacy:

  When to thy trembling hand I silent gave

  My bloodless arm, impatient for the grave …

  Davy’s poems are simple and fragmentary, sometimes trying out his elementary Greek in short epigrams:

  The beautiful girl

  Is not mine,

  Not mine the beautiful …

  He also covered his notebook with repeated pencil drawings of Anna’s profile and blonde, windswept hair.116

  Anna’s poems, some copied into Davy’s notebook, are longer and more melodramatic than his. They seem to play with the idea of suicide, and with the guilty sense that she is making impossible emotional demands on Davy. In one she imagines (or perhaps repeats) his angry refusal of these poignant advances. Here she appears to write accusingly about herself in Davy’s own voice, or perhaps quoting him:

  Am I then called to minister relief

  To her who rudely plunged me into grief,

  Who dropped my infant errors into day

  And tore the veil of secrecy away …?117

  It is not clear what Davy’s ‘infant errors’ might be, unless memories of Mademoiselle Nancy at Penzance. Davy also kept other poems signed ‘Fidelissima’ (‘your most faithful lady’) from a slightly later date, which may be a continuation of Anna’s, or from another woman entirely.118 Perhaps there was some more tangled history of deception and betrayal at Bristol, among the young ladies who appear only as initials in his published Researches. Certainly Davy later wrote to his confidant Dr John King of indulging in ‘physical sympathies’ at Bristol of which he was subsequently ashamed. A little more light is thrown on this flirtation or frustrated love affair (or whatever it was) with Anna by several fragments of later correspondence.

  Shortly after Davy left Bristol, his friend Dr King sent him news that Anna and Dr Beddoes were expecting a baby. Davy was clearly pleased, and wrote back on 4 November 1801. He thought motherhood would greatly improve what he now regarded as Anna’s unstable state of mind. ‘How delightful a thing it would be to see that woman of Genius, of feeling, of candour, of idleness, of caprice, instructing and nourishing an infant, losing in one deep sympathy many trifling hopes and many trifling fears.’119

  In spring 1802, Anna Beddoes gave birth to a baby girl, christened Anna Maria, to whom Davy addressed several poems over the next few years, calling her ‘Nature’s fairest child/A flower of springtime, rude and wild’. In 1804 he wrote the child a nine-stanza birthday poem, dedicated ‘To A.B — 2 years old’ and again describing her fondly as ‘a sweet blossom of the early spring of life’.120

  At the same time he continued sending occasional poems to Anna herself, carefully annotating one, ‘Written in the coach December 25 1803, passing from Bath to Bristol’. In these simple, sentimental lyrics he looked back nostalgically to what he described as ‘Life’s golden morn’, and the ‘anguish and the joys’ of the early Bristol days.

  Its love was wild its friendship free

  Its passion changeful as the light

  That on an April day you see

  Changeful and yet ever bright.121

  In the event, Anna was not in fact made any happier or more fulfilled by motherhood. Soon after her daughter’s birth she abandoned her husband and ran off for several months with Davy’s wealthy Penzance friend and patron Davies Giddy.122 Yet this did not break the marriage to the long-suffering Dr Beddoes, nor the confidential friendship with Davy. Five years later, in 1806, she and Davy met again in London, and she congratulated him on his lectures and asked him to send her his portrait, a characteristically provocative request. Davy sent it with a copy of his poem ‘Glenarm by Moonlight’, with further nostalgic memories of their Avon riverside walks together.

  Think not that I forget the days,

  When first, through rough unhaunted ways,

  We moved along the mountain side,

  Where Avon meets the Severn tide;

  When in the spring of youthful thought

  The hours of confidence we caught … 123

  Perhaps he did not realise what emotions these lines would stir up. But either then, or shortly after, he gently tried to disentangle himself from the correspondence, and asked Anna to forget him. This produced an agonised, and not entirely coherent reply, written on 26 December 1806. It gives the best glimpse of what might have happened between them at Bristol. ‘I suppose from the experience you have had of my conduct – but you cannot tell how much pain your last observation gave me — that I should forget you, and think no more about you! Yet I must certainly deserve it for I have in former days treated you with unkindness that you have the generosity to forgive … Of all those who know you best I have
most reason to value the qualities of your heart, and I believe at this moment you have not a more sincere admirer, no, not even amongst the young and beautiful, than she who has treated you with such ungentleness.’

  Anna went on to say that the last time she saw Davy in London, he appeared ‘so vividly alive’ that it roused the ‘almost expiring spark of ambition’ in her bosom. Ambition for what, she does not explain. The letter tails off in ill-defined sadness, indeed perhaps exactly the kind of ill-defined sadness that originally captured young Davy’s heart and sympathies. ‘I know not for what reason it is but I cannot write or think of you without the most melancholy sensations. Adieu … I am almost ashamed to send this letter … destroy it.’124

  Clearly some powerful emotions existed between them during these years. A decade later Davy would confide to another woman: ‘You can have no idea at all of what [Anna] was … She possessed a fancy almost poetical in the highest sense of the word, great warmth of affection, and disinterestedness of feeling; and under favourable circumstances, she would have been, even in talents, a rival of [her half-sister] Maria.’125

  If there was attraction, even seduction, it would be hard to tell who initiated it. But it may be wrong to consider Davy as emotionally naïve, or exploited, at Bristol. Coleridge later remarked enigmatically: ‘a young poet may do without being in love with a woman — it is enough if he loves — but to a young chemist it would be salvation to be downright romantically in love’.126 Davy’s later bawdy remarks about women to his friend Dr King suggest a certain worldliness, while Tom Wedgwood gave him, as a suitable parting present to take to London, an exquisite porcelain statuette of a naked Venus.127