He found he was strangely struck by Herr Dettela’s fifteen-year-old daughter Josephine, a cheerful and sweet-natured girl with bright blue eyes, a high rosy complexion and ‘long nut-brown hair’ who waited at table and helped with the housekeeping.122 Davy felt that she constantly reminded him of some woman he had once met long ago, though he could not say whom or where. This erotic echo was strangely upsetting to him, but he finally explained it to himself as relating to the sort of hallucination or feverish ‘vision’ he had had when very ill during his second series of Bakerian Lectures in 1808. Initially he dismissed it as insignificant, and probably did not mention it to Jane. ‘Ten years after I had recovered from the fever, and when I had almost lost the recollection of the vision, it was recalled to my memory by a very blooming and graceful maiden fourteen or fifteen years old, that I accidentally met during my travels in Illyria; but I cannot say that the impression made upon my mind by this female was very strong.’123 Jane may have noticed it all the same, and perhaps she was used to such things. At all events Lady Davy was relieved when autumn came and they moved south to visit Lord Byron in Ravenna, and then to settle in Naples for the winter. They arrived there at approximately the same time as Percy Bysshe Shelley and his family.
Unrolling the papyri from Herculaneum was not a success. But they made expeditions to Vesuvius and Paestum, and Davy theorised about volcanoes and eruptions. He would later write about these wild landscapes, and other odd encounters, in lightly disguised fictional form in Consolations in Travel. In spring 1819 they rode restlessly north again into the Apennines, where Davy wrote a striking series of poems, under the general heading ‘Fireflies’, at the Bagni di Lucca. Officially he was testing the mineral waters for their peroxide and iron-oxide content, but the setting of most of these pieces is night-time and moonlight, suggesting perhaps the long and probably solitary after-dinner walks he was taking along the banks of the river Serchio.
Not all is melancholy in these meditations. Indeed the fireflies dancing over the dark water, though ephemeral, filled him with delight and even perhaps reminded him of his own safety lamps.
Ye moving stars that flit along the glade!
Ye animated lamps that ‘midst the shade
Of ancient chestnut, and the lofty hills
Of Lusignana, by the foaming rills
That clothe the Serchio in the evening play!
So bright your light, that in the unbroken ray
Of the meridian moon it lovely shines!
How gaily do you pass beneath the vines
Which clothe the nearest slopes! How through the groves
Of Lucca do ye dance! …
This thrilling ‘animation’ of the fireflies he describes, like Erasmus Darwin, as commanded by ‘the voice of Love’, to which he can still respond. He presents his own heart as lonely, ‘by sickness weakened and by sorrow chilled’, but not yet ‘broken or subdued’. Most of all he confides in the moon herself, and longs for her to prolong his sense of youth and hope, and hasten the birth of ‘new creative faculties and powers’.
Davy was now forty, and like every man of science and every poet, he hoped against hope that original work and ‘powers of inspiration’ still lay ahead in his maturity. His description of these longings was nakedly Romantic, and surely recalled his moonlit walks along the banks of the Avon some twenty years before.
Though many chequered years have passed away
Since first the sense of Beauty thrilled my nerves,
Yet still my heart is sensible to Thee,
As when it first received the flood of life
In youth’s full spring-tide; and to me it seems
As if thou wert a sister to my soul,
An animated Being, carrying on
An intercourse of sweet and lofty thoughts,
Wakening the slumbering powers of inspiration
In their most sacred founts of feeling high.124
It is intriguing to compare these clumsy but curiously expressive poems with those written by Shelley at almost exactly the same period at Naples, Pisa and the Bagni di Lucca. Shelley was a permanent exile, without anything like the public recognition that Davy had achieved, and his moods were much more extreme, yet he responded to the same Italian landscapes and the same inner tides of hope and despair. These writings include some of his most beautiful short lyrics, such as the ‘Stanzas Written in Dejection in the Bay of Naples’, ‘To the Moon’ and ‘The Aziola’. There are also striking similarities of phrase between Davy’s poems and Shelley’s confessional outpourings about love, beauty and sexual longing in ‘Epipsychidion’:
There was a Being whom my spirit oft
Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft,
In the clear golden prime of my youth’s dawn …
Then, from the caverns of my dreamy youth
I sprang, as one sandalled with plumes of fire,
And towards the lodestone of my one desire,
I flitted, like a dizzy moth, whose flight
Is as a dead leaf’s in the owlet light …125
But as far as is known, Davy and Shelley never met. It was a pity, perhaps.
Back in Venice, the Davys again called on Lord Byron, this time in his rented palazzo on the Grand Canal. They were introduced to his new Venetian mistress, the beautiful, bosomy Teresa Guiccioli. Byron later gave an amusing account of trying to explain to Teresa the exact nature of Davy’s experimental genius. ‘I explained as well as an oracle his skill in gases, safety lamps, and in ungluing the Pompeian MSS. “But what do you call him?” said she. “A great chemist” quoth I. “What can he do?” repeated the lady. “Almost anything” said I. “Oh, then, mio caro, do pray beg him to give me something to dye my eyebrows black.”’ Byron added that this was at least better than the reaction of the average ‘English blue-stocking’.126
Byron was fascinated by Davy’s enthusiastic conversation, and his unrestrained boasting about the safety lamp. He put him — with Mungo Park and the polar explorer William Parry — into the first canto of his satirical new poem, Don Juan, as one of the signs of the times:
This is the patent Age of new inventions
For killing bodies, and for saving souls,
All propagated with the best intentions:
Sir Humphry Davy’s lantern, by which coals
Are safely mined for (in the mode he mentions);
Timbuctoo travels; voyages to the Poles;
Are always to benefit mankind: — as true,
Perhaps, as shooting them at Waterloo.127
Davy, in turn, began reading all Byron’s poetry, and found its elegance and worldly irony now rather more to his taste than the Coleridge and Wordsworth of his youth. But his poetical reflections were cut short when Jane announced that she was ill and exhausted after so much travelling. She insisted that she would have to convalesce in Paris. Davy accompanied her there, but then heard of another illness, that of Sir Joseph Banks.
♣ Detailed accounts of the Felling colliery disaster of 1812 can be found in the remarkable archives of the Durham Mining Museum, Northumberland, and on its website. These include the names and ages of every one of the ninety-two mine-workers killed, of whom it emerges that more than twenty were fourteen or younger — the youngest being eight years old. The names are collected under the heading ‘IN MEMORIAM’, and their places of burial are also given where known: a tribute to the lasting loyalties and strength of feeling among the mining communities to this day.
♣ Not the least fact that may have impressed Davy was the amazing scientific accuracy of the Roman engineering. In carrying the water by canal and six main aqueducts from Uzès to Nîmes, a distance of over fifty kilometres, they exploited the very small fall in land levels — required to make the water flow smoothly southwards — by consistently achieving gradients of between ten and twenty centimetres over one kilometre: a fantastic feat of both measurement and construction. The canal successfully delivered 50,000 cubic metres of fresh water to Nîmes ever
y day for 300 years. Though the canal was built in less than a generation under the Emperor Augustus, and renowned throughout Europe, the names of the individual Roman engineers were by Davy’s time unknown. This too must have struck him in his reflective mood.
♣ Some impression of what early-nineteenth-century mines were like can still be gained from a visit to the National Coal Mining Museum, near Wakefield in Yorkshire, which offers access to 400 metres of restored underground mineshaft (not to be undertaken by those with claustrophobia). The harshness of the conditions, the crude simplicity of the available mining equipment, and the lethal effect on the general health and life expectation of miners — who would often begin work as children — are sobering. More than this, Sir Humphry Davy’s visit to such a mining community as Walls End (now a peaceful suburb of Newcastle) would have produced an extraordinary clash of social cultures, behaviour and even language (all potentially hostile), so that the trust he established there – and particularly the friendship he achieved with John Buddle — must count as one of the most remarkable achievements of his career.
♣ ‘Thus was set up, from the beginning,’ observes Frank James in his detailed study of the controversy, ‘the dynamic for a priority dispute between knight and worker, chemist and engineer, savant and artisan, theory and practice, metropolis and province.’ See Frank A.J.L. James, ‘How Big is a Hole?’, Transactions of the Newcomen Society (2005). Something similar had arisen during the controversy over the John Harrison chronometers. The whole question of ‘scientific priority’ has become a major preoccupation in modern science. See for example the race over the structure of DNA between Crick and Watson at Cambridge, and Rosalind Franklin at Imperial College, as described in James Watson’s classic The Double Helix (1968) and Brenda Maddox’s biography Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (2002). Carl Djerassi’s play Oxygen (2001) beautifully dramatises an earlier eighteenth-century priority dispute between Priestley, Scheele and Lavoisier.
9
Sorcerer and Apprentice
1
Sir Joseph Banks had been getting older and more infirm, and he hated it. After one particularly bad episode of gout in summer 1816, when he was seventy-three, he grumbled from his retreat at Spring Grove: ‘I fear its probable that I shall be obliged to spend the greater part of my Future Life in a Prostrate Posture … For these 12 or 14 years past my legs have Swelled towards evening … I am so effectually confined to my bed that I am not even allowed to be carried downstairs & placed on a Coach.’ Later he added with grim humour: ‘The name of Nestor seems likely to adhere to me.’1 Nevertheless, Lady Banks could rarely keep him away from his scientific breakfasts at Soho Square for more than a week at a time.2
His friends too were scattered, ailing or dead. John Jeffries the balloonist had settled back to earth in America. Mungo Park now existed only as a two-volume Memoir, published in 1815, although the Africa Association continued to send military explorers along the Niger on his trail. Sir Humphry Davy seemed to be more and more frequently abroad. In January 1820 Banks had received a long, rambling missive from him in Naples. Banks summarised its contents to Charles Blagden: ‘Vesuvius has been in Eruption ever since he arrived & has given him opportunity of trying many chemical experiments on the Liquid Lava.’ This could have been a sly reference to Lady Davy, though Banks added with all due gravity that Davy’s theories on the causes of volcanic fire ‘appear to favour the Plutonists’.3
Banks hardly ever saw William Herschel now, finding that the old astronomer preferred to stay close to his great forty-foot telescope at Slough, and lived there, thought Banks regretfully, ‘so much like an Hermit’.4 But there was good news of young John Herschel, winning all the prizes at Cambridge, and becoming Senior Wrangler (that is, the top mathematician in his year) in 1813. John had published a first paper ‘on analytical formulae’ in Nicholson’s Journal for October 1812 — like young Davy, just before his twenty-first birthday. Banks accordingly exercised his patronage, and had young Herschel elected to the Royal Society the following year.5 He promised great things for the future.
To other protégés, like the thirty-seven-year-old zoologist Charles Waterton, about to depart on yet another expedition to South America, Banks was more solicitous than of yore. ‘I cannot say that I felt the Satisfaction I used to do in hearing that you intend embarking for the Ninth time to encounter the dangers and privations of the Trackless forests of Guiana. You are not so young as you used to be … the old Saw tells us that the pitcher that goes often to the well is cracked at last. May heaven defend you from all Evil results is the sincere Prayer of your Old Friend!’6 This was not the way he used to cajole Mungo Park.
Banks urged Waterton to come home safely, settle down and write a book about his ‘numerous journeys’. Such a book would ‘extend materially’ the bounds of natural science, and ‘put the Public in possession of your discoveries’. More and more Banks saw this as one of the prime duties of the man of science: to collect and explain his findings, to publish them, and put them in the public domain. It is exactly what he himself had failed to do with his own Endeavour Journal, nearly fifty years before.7 In Waterton’s case Banks’s kindly advice would result in a popular masterpiece, Wanderings in South America (1825).
With the arrival of peace in Europe in 1815, international communications had improved, and scientific reports were now pouring in on Soho Square. There was a new emphasis on technology and applied science. Coal-gas pipes now snaked (above ground) through the London streets, so that Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament were illuminated with the new gaslights, ‘most Brilliant’, Banks noted approvingly8 There were paddle ships powered by steam engines, which could ply the Thames against the tide, and make all-weather crossings to France.
These began to appear in Turner’s pictures, and even in one of Coleridge’s late poems, plangently entitled ‘Youth and Age’, expressing sentiments that Banks would certainly have recognised:
This breathing house not built with hands,
This body that does me grievous wrong,
O’er aery cliffs and glittering sands
How lightly then it flashed along:-
Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore,
On winding lakes and rivers wide,
That ask no aid of sail or oar
That fear no spite of wind or tide!
Nought cared this body for wind or weather
When Youth and I lived in it together.9
From further afield, there came reports of climate change: huge sheets of thawing pack ice were sighted off Greenland, melting snowcaps seen in Alpine mountains, and unprecedented river spates and flooding were recorded throughout Europe. Banks was not disposed to panic at these strange phenomena. ‘Some of us flatter ourselves that our Climate will be improved & may be restored to its ancient state, when grapes ripened in Vineyards here.’10
In fact much of this was the spreading global consequence of the eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia in April 1815. By releasing a mass of ash into the circulation of the upper atmosphere, it brought the ‘sunless summer’ of 1816 throughout Europe, with a sinister red haze in the sky at midday, and blood-red apocalyptic sunsets. This delighted the Plutonists, but also brought a renewed awareness of nature’s power and mystery, just as had happened after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, when Caroline Herschel remembered being so frightened in Germany.
Pink snow fell in Italy, and the harvest failed in France, Germany and England. Byron, exiled from Britain and passing this summer on Lac Leman with Shelley, wrote his poem ‘Darkness’, reflecting on the possibilities of a future cosmological catastrophe, as hinted at by Herschel’s late papers.
I had a dream which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air … 11
Banks continued
to send out his regular, encyclopaedic scientific correspondence throughout the globe. His letters might concern planting crops in South Australia, collecting antiquities in Egypt, surveying the ice pack towards the North Pole, breeding dogs in Newfoundland, or even capturing giant sea snakes off Scandinavia (later to appear in Tennyson’s poem ‘The Kraken’). But he also found time for some delicate gestures, such as sending packets of strawberry seedlings by the night coach to Paris for the former Madame Lavoisier, in her new incarnation as the ex-Countess Rumford. ‘They are Roseberry Strawberries, the kind I most approve of for Quantity of produce & for Flavour.’ On another occasion Madame Lavoisier — a great favourite — got a beautifully scented ‘climbing Ayrshire rose’ which Banks had ‘well-rooted in a basket’.12
Banks had always admired clever women. He had been instrumental in obtaining the royal salary for Caroline Herschel. He adored his own unconventional sister Sophia (with her collections of coins, cards and balloon memorabilia), and was devastated when she died after a coach accident, aged seventy-four, in 1818. Even now the old Tahitian libertine occasionally resurfaced, as when he upbraided the elegant socialite the Duchess of Somerset for mocking a woman friend who was carrying on an affair. Banks — then a respectable seventy-year-old — exploded in a private letter. ‘Tremendous is the punishment inflicted by the Class of Virtuous Women on those who err & stray from the paths of Propriety … It is surely a more severe destiny than that of immediate death.’13 Perhaps he was remembering the free-spirited Sarah Wells, who had given such lively dinner parties in the old days.
Yet, perhaps inevitably, his own views had become increasingly conservative. He would never consider having women elected to the Royal Society. He now tended to growl at all bluestockings (including Lady Davy). His attitude to young Lord Byron and his amorous adventures was indicative. Banks naturally admired Byron, as an aristocrat and an independent spirit. He had been much struck when Byron once attended an open meeting of the Royal Society and listened to a physiological paper based on extensive use of vivisection.
The Age of Wonder Page 52