But Jane was also clever and independent-minded. After she was widowed in 1809, she established an intellectual salon in Heriot Row, and cut a swathe through the Scottish academics. She was particularly drawn to scientific men. The mathematician Professor John Playfair, who had superbly interpreted Hutton’s geology to the world, was said to have once knelt submissively in Princes Street to resolve the complicated stratifications of her laced boots. The wit Sydney Smith — who was also lecturing at the Royal Institution — was enchanted by her, and throughout his life retold endless suggestive anecdotes about her encounters. Everyone agreed that beneath a certain flamboyance and affectation, Jane had ‘an excellent heart’.
Evidently Jane Apreece was a vivid personality, and someone who attracted gossip all her life. Yet her story is not well-documented, compared to Davy’s, and it is strange for such a beauty that no portrait exists in a public collection.4 Little of her early correspondence is known to have survived, though it is remarkable that she eventually kept more than ninety of Davy’s letters to her.5 He began writing them in August 1811, after they had been briefly together in a sailing party on the Wye. He was still fishing at Denham and preparing his autumn lectures, while she had returned to Scotland. From the start his letters were a dreamy combination of science and sensibility: ‘The clear and rapid Colne which moves over a green bed, living with beautiful aquatic plants the flowers of which glisten on its surface, is immediately beneath the window at which I am writing … I have scarcely a wish beyond the present moment except that I might see you as the Naiad of this stream, but you are now a mountain Nymph & scorn our low and quiet pastoral scenery.’6 Receiving letters from her gave him ‘a higher sensation than even exhilatory gas. I may be permitted a chemical allusion as we are both now pursuing the same science.’7
Rather surprisingly, Davy consulted his old flame Anna Beddoes about Jane Apreece. Anna had met Jane socially through the Edgeworth family in Ireland, and Davy innocently passed on her barbed compliments. ‘Mrs Beddoes says “I do admire Mrs Apreece, I think her very pleasing, feel her abilities and almost believe if I knew her I should love her — more I suppose than she should love me.”’8
That autumn, Jane left Edinburgh and moved to London, taking up residence in an elegant house at 16 Berkeley Square, strategically placed within ten minutes’ walk of the Royal Institution.9 Davy began sending her books — Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler, of course, but also Anacreon and other classical love poets. Then came copies of his Chemical Lectures ‘decyphered’ into plain English; and then — his own sonnets. She in turn began to attend his autumn lectures, announced that she was ‘of the true faith of the genuine Angler’, and gallantly set herself to undertake a private course of ‘chemical studies’.
It was now Jane’s turn to send verses to Davy, though these have not survived. He responded gravely: ‘Your mind is “of poetical frame” for there is no mind in which so much feeling is blended with so much thought.’ The man who had once seen the poems of Southey and Wordsworth through the press risked the mild criticism that perhaps her verses were a little artificial by Romantic standards: ‘You want only the habit of connecting pictures from natural imagery with moods of human passion to become a genuine poet.’10 Jane took this well.
Throughout that autumn Davy assiduously introduced Jane to the lions of the scientific world. She was escorted to his lectures by the distinguished chemist Professor Charles Hatchett (‘we shall both be proud to be in your train’), and dined in a party with William Herschel, when they discussed the distance of the furthest stars.11 He was also able to introduce her to Robert Southey, and share literary gossip about the quarrel between Coleridge and Wordsworth.
Davy was now less intimate with Coleridge. In March 1809 Coleridge had come near to quarrelling with him, because Davy would not let the Royal Institution support his scheme to publish The Friend: ‘Davy’s conduct wounds me.’ Coleridge felt fame had gone to Davy’s head, and that his high-handed (or perhaps prudent) behaviour betrayed their friendship, even though they had been ‘intimate these nine years or more’. He claimed he had written a long poem — ‘the only verses I have made for years’ — praising Davy’s ‘Genius and great Services to mankind’. But now he had no thoughts of publishing it: Davy was too caught up in his own fame, exactly as Coleridge had once prophesied.12
But love, not fame, was on Davy’s mind. By 1 November he was writing to Jane with increasing intensity, the romantic fisherman now replaced by the romantic man of science. ‘There is a law of sensation which may be called the law of continuity & contrast of which you may read in Darwin’s Zoomania [sic]. An example is — look long on a spot of pink, & close your eyes, the impression will continue for some time & will then be succeeded by a green light. For some days after I quitted you I had the pink light in my eyes & the rosy feelings in my heart, but now the green hue & feelings — not of jealousy — but of regret are come.’13
When Davy left for his December lectures in Dublin, absence only deepened his feelings. His lectures were heaped with praise, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Trinity College, and was ‘overpowered’ by admirers at receptions and banquets. Yet despite all this, he could think of nothing but Jane Apreece. His courtship became more open and direct. Amidst his public triumph, Davy secretly gave way to the language of love. On 4 December 1811 he wrote from his rooms at the Dublin Society: ‘I have the power of dreaming and picture-making as strong as when I was fifteen. I call up the green woods and the gleams of sunshine darting through them, and the upland meadows where we took our long walk. I seem to hear, as then, the delightful sound of the nightingale interrupted by the more delightful sound of your voice. You will perhaps laugh at this visionary mood, and call it romance; but without such feelings life would be of little worth … Without this, its tones are like those of the Aeolian harp, broken, wild, and uncertain, fickle as the wind that produced them, beginning without order, ending without effect … To see you is the strongest wish of my heart.’14 The imagery of several of Coleridge’s poems rises opportunely through these letters.
On his return to the Royal Institution, Davy set himself to storm her with more scientific seductions. ‘You are my magnet (though you differ from a magnet in having no repulsive points) and direct my course.’ By March 1812 he was writing: ‘I no longer live for anything but you … Your felicity will be the pole star of my future course.’15 But he was intimidated by her aristocratic friends, and perhaps by her money. He may secretly have feared that Jane’s sparkling wit and love of socialising might interfere with the necessary routine and self-concentration of his laboratory work. He continued gallantly to insist that they would not; and what is more, so did she.
Jane, in turn, admired Davy’s brilliance, his handsome boyish figure, and the intellectual glamour that attached to him as celebrated lecturer. She had many other suitors at this point in her life, but none so intense or determined — or so serious. Perhaps that may have been a problem. In private she may have laughed at Davy’s didactic and over-earnest moments, the lecturer overcoming the suitor, as was sometimes revealed in the solemn longueurs of his love letters: ‘Your moral virtues always improved me & exalted my ideas of human nature.’ Jane was not impressed by her own moral virtues.
When she once teased him with being absurdly romantic about her, he was incapable of wittily turning the shaft, as Sydney Smith would certainly have done. Instead of a seductive epigram, he delivered a solemn oration. ‘If this be romantic, it is romantic to pursue one’s object in science; to attach the feelings strongly to any ideas; it is romantic to love the good, to admire the wise, to quit low and mean things and seek excellence.’16
Jane may also have been worried by his Cornish background, though in a way she was a social adventurer just like him. She shrewdly suspected that her only real rival was chemistry. Davy himself once unguardedly admitted that ‘the pleasure I derived from your conversation interfered with my scientific pursuits’, though hastily adding: ‘I
have gained much and lost but little.’17
On this score, both sets of friends predicted disaster. She was made for society, he was made for the laboratory. Sydney Smith, now clearly jealous, cattily used chemical imagery to beg Jane to reject Davy out of hand. On 29 December he wrote: ‘Pray remain single and marry nobody … you will be annihilated the moment you do, and instead of being an exciting alkali or acid, become a neutral salt. You may very likely be happier yourself, but you will be lost to your male friends.’18
So Jane Apreece prevaricated in a way that Jane Austen (just writing Pride and Prejudice) would have approved of. She twice refused Davy’s offers of marriage, took to her bed in Berkeley Square and announced she was ill and incommunicado. But she was astonished by the tender and unguarded declaration this released from Davy: ‘For the first time in my life I have wished to be a woman that I might watch by your bedside; I might wish that I had not given up the early pursuit of medicine for then I might have been admitted as a Physician. Though an untoward Beau, you would find no more devoted Nurse.’19 In the passionate declarations that followed, it seems that each was able to reassure the other. Davy agreed to the momentous step of giving up full-time lecturing at the Royal Institution (a thing he had secretly wanted to do for some time), while Jane assured him that her fortune would allow them to travel, while he continued his chemical researches independently. This was a tantalising prospect for both of them.
Davy had one further scientific seduction to offer. He confided to Jane that the Prince Regent was about to confer a knighthood upon him, for services to chemistry, in the forthcoming Birthday Honours. It would be the first scientific knighthood of the Regency, indeed the first since Sir Isaac Newton. She need no longer feel ashamed of him at the dinner tables of Mayfair. At the third time of asking, Davy’s proposal of marriage to Jane Apreece was at last accepted. He reacted with genuine rapture. ‘I have passed a night sleepless from excess of happiness. It seems to me as if I began to live only a few hours ago … The great future object of my life will be your happiness … My happiness will be entirely in your will.’20
Congratulations were now in order, and Sir Joseph Banks was pleased and rather amused that one of his young scientific protégés had made such a fine — and wealthy — match: ‘She has fallen in love with Science and marries him in order to obtain a footing in the Academic Groves … It will give to Science a new kind of eclat; we want nothing so much as the countenance of the ladies to increase our popularity.’21 Banks evidently teased the bridegroom in a worldly way. ‘Davy is on the point of being married to the gentle Dame Apreece who has at least £4,000 a year, the half of it her own. He swears he will never desert Science. I tell him she will bring him into Parliament and make a fool of him. We shall see how this matter will end.’
Davy had no such political ambitions, and believed that Jane fully accepted his passionate commitment to science. In fact Banks was quite handsome about Jane, and saw her as a valuable, if probably bossy, addition to the social life of the Royal Society: ‘If she is satisfied with being installed as the Queen of Literature we shall all be ready to put ourselves under her Dominion, and I think she is Quick and Clever enough to reign over us and keep us all in very Good Order.’ Coming from Banks, who had no high opinion of bluestockings, this was handsome indeed.22
Davy wrote delightedly to his mother in Penzance, proudly and rather grandly announcing the news. He said that but for Jane, he had never expected to marry. His letter to his younger brother John of March 1812 has a touching nobility and simplicity.
My dear John,
Many thanks for your last letter. I have been very miserable. The lady whom I love best of any human being, has been very ill. She is now well and I am happy.
Mrs Apreece has consented to marry me, and when this event takes place, I shall not envy kings, princes, or potentates.
Do not fall in love. It is very dangerous!…
Ever most affectionately yours
H. Davy.23
The romantic dénouement was carefully orchestrated. In April Davy delivered what was agreed would be his final lectures at the Royal Institution. He was awarded an emeritus professorship, and granted the continuing use of all research facilities. On 8 April he was knighted by the Prince Regent, and three days later, on 11 April, he married Mrs Apreece, who thereupon became Lady Davy.
Among much expensive jewellery, he gave her a symbolic wedding present. He had collected a decade of his Royal Institution lectures, and now edited and assembled them as his Elements of Chemical Philosophy. This book was the cornerstone of his early scientific career, and proclaimed the progressive value of science and its power to ‘investigate and master’ nature. On 1 June it was published with a formal dedication to Lady Jane Davy.24
Chemical Philosophy was too technical to achieve a wide general readership, but it contained a powerful historical ‘Introduction’, which placed chemistry at the forefront of all contemporary scientific research. By contrast, his more popular Agricultural Chemistry, published simultaneously, ran to many editions over the next decade. With these two publications, for which he was paid 1,000 guineas (a sum which compares well with what Walter Scott received for his poems), Davy had made chemistry as popular as astronomy.25 He himself seemed to symbolise the hopes and ambitions of Romantic science to produce a better world for all mankind. Among others, the young poet Percy Shelley began to incorporate Davy’s ideas into his work, beginning with his visionary materialist poem Queen Mab of 1812, with its long scientific prose notes.26
Shelley’s book order for 29 July 1812, when he was beginning the poem at Lynmouth in Devon, included Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, David Hartley’s Observations on Man and Davy’s Elements of Chemical Philosophy: a characteristic mixture of radical politics, sceptical philosophy and the new science. The vogue for attaching explanatory prose notes, both historical and scientific, to epic poems had been popularised by Erasmus Darwin in The Botanic Garden, taken up by Southey in Thalaba (which Davy had edited for the press), and then admiringly imitated by the twenty-year-old Shelley in Queen Mab. Underlying it was the formal problem of how far scientific data could any longer be convincingly expressed in poetry (as Lucretius had done). De Quincey would later suggest that they had to be separated as the ‘Literature of Knowledge’ and the ‘Literature of Power’. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820) was to be arguably the last successful attempt to combine the two in a major English poem.27
Davy’s lectures in Chemical Philosophy opened with a brilliant short survey of the entire field: ‘An Historical View of the Progress of Chemistry’.28 Starting with the early Egyptians and the Greeks, continuing with the ‘delusions’ of medieval alchemists and the revolutionary discoveries of the early Royal Society in seventeenth-century London, he then celebrated the astonishing advance of Enlightenment chemistry throughout Europe over the past thirty years, culminating in the work of Priestley, Cavendish and Lavoisier, and his own discoveries in electrochemistry, which he emphasised were being rapidly developed by many other chemists on the Continent. Davy was notably generous to the French — Lavoisier, Berthollet and Gay-Lussac — and the Scandinavians; but he drew a convincing picture of an entire scientific community of minds at work across Europe. He made numerous unexpected asides: the importance of Arabic chemistry, the witty suggestion that Cleopatra might have been an ‘experimental’ chemist with her love potions, the crucial importance of ‘new instruments’ (such as the voltaic battery) in taking research forward, and the paradoxical fact that Newton’s genius in many ways hindered chemistry by turning attention to ‘optics, mechanics, and astronomy’.29
Most striking is Davy’s power to engage the reader in a direct, non-technical way. The essay opens with poetic simplicity: ‘The gradual and almost imperceptible decay of the leaves and branches of a fallen tree exposed to the atmosphere, and the rapid combustion of wood in our fires, are both chemical operations. The object of Chemical Philosophy is to ascer
tain the causes of all phenomena of this kind, and to discover the laws by which they are governed. The ends of this branch of knowledge are the applications of natural substances to new uses, for increasing the comforts and enjoyments of man; and for the demonstrating of the order, harmony, and intelligent design of the system of the earth.’30
From this time chemistry joined astronomy and botany as the most popular and accessible forms of modern science for amateurs, and as a new doorway into the ‘intelligent design’ of the universe. It was a sign of the times that ‘Portable Chemical Chests’ began to go on sale in Piccadilly, priced between six and twenty guineas.31 Davy would later emphasise how few pieces of equipment an experimental chemist needed.32 Chemistry guides and primers, besides Jane Marcet’s, began to be widely available. Coleridge reflected in one of his notebooks of this time: ‘Whoever attended a first Course of Chemical Lectures, or read for the first time a Compendium of modern Chemistry (Lavoisier, Parkinson, Thomson, or Brande) without experiencing, even as a sensation, a sudden enlargement & emancipation of his Intellect, when the conviction first flashed upon him that the Flame of the Gaslight, and the River Water were the very same things (= elements) and different only as AB uniting with B, and as AB united?’33
While annotating the visionary works of the German mystic Jakob Boehme, Coleridge added a further aside on the clarifying intellectual impact of the scientific approach: ‘Humphry Davy in his laboratory is probably doing more for the Science of Mind, than all the Metaphysicians have done from Aristotle to Hartley, inclusive.’34 Later he would fear, wrongly, that Davy was becoming a ‘mere Atomist’, but his recognition of the significance of Davy’s ‘chemical revolution’ and the ‘dynamic’ vision of nature that it revealed never faltered, despite their personal estrangement.35
In many ways spring 1812 was the climax of Davy’s early career. The unknown boy from Penzance had achieved a European reputation in science, an emeritus professorship and a knighthood, and a glamorous society marriage. Yet he was still only thirty-three. A formal visit to Cornwall by the new Lady Davy was promised at this moment of celebration, but never in fact materialised. It seems that Davy was still embarrassed by his humble roots.
The Age of Wonder Page 47