The Age of Wonder

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The Age of Wonder Page 70

by Richard Holmes


  153 Maria Edgeworth, letter, 8 October 1802; from Lamont-Brown, p59

  154 HD Archive Mss Box 13c p32; and Golinski, pp194-7

  155 Coleridge to Southey, 17 February 1803, Collected Letters, vol 2, p490

  156 Davy to Coleridge, March 1804; see Holmes, p360

  157 Paris, vol 2, pp198-9

  158 Ibid., p199

  159 See Nicholas Roe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life, 2001, pp142-4

  160 Partly reprinted in HD Works 5 and 8; lucidly discussed in Harold Hartley, Humphry Davy, Open University, 1966, pp50-74; and Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten

  161 JD Memoirs, pp116-17

  162 ‘Introduction to Electro-Chemical Science’, originally delivered March 1808, HD Works 8, pp274-305

  163 HD Works 8, p281

  164 HD Works 8; see Hartley, pp50-4

  165 Treneer, p111

  166 HD Works 5, pp59-61

  167 Hartley, p56

  168 Beddoes, 17 November 1808, from Stansfield, p239

  169 Henry Brougham, ‘Three essays on Humphry Davy’, Edinburgh Review, 1808, vol 11: first pp390-8; second pp394-401; third pp483-90

  170 Coleridge to Tom Poole, 24 November 1807

  171 Treneer, p104

  172 JD Memoirs, p117; HD Works 8, p355

  173 HD Archive, quoted in Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, p119

  174 Written after Recovery from a Dangerous Illness’, printed in JD Memoirs, pp114-16

  175 Consolations in Travel, 1830, Dialogue II, HD Works 9, pp254-5

  176 Ibid., p255

  177 JD Memoirs, pp394, 397

  178 Consolations, Dialogue II, HD Works 9, pp254-5. The story of Josephine Dettela, 1827-29, will be continued in my Chapter 9

  179 Stansfield, pp194-5

  180 Davy to Coleridge, December 2008, Collected Letters, vol 3, pp170-1; Treneer, p113

  181 Stansfield, p247

  182 HD Archive Mss Box 14 (i), note dated February 1829, Rome. See also Stansfield, p249

  183 British Public Characters, 1804-5 (1809), British Library catalogue 10818.d. 1

  184 Anna Barbauld, ‘The Year 1811’ (1812)

  185 Coleridge’s note, 1809, in Notebooks, vol 2, entry no. 1855

  186 HD Works 8, p354

  Chapter 7: Dr Frankenstein and the Soul

  1 Fanny Burney, A Mastectomy’, 30 September 1811, in the The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame d’Arblay), vol 6, edited by Joyce Hemlow, Oxford, 1975, pp596-616

  2 Ibid., p600, footnote

  3 Druin Burch, Digging up the Dead: The Life and Times of Astley Cooper, Chatto & Windus, 2007, p179. Besides much else, Burch has a chastening section on concepts of pain endurance, anaesthesia and surgery at this period, pp172-82

  4 JB Correspondence 5, no. 1616

  5 Sharon Ruston, Shelley and Vitality, Palgrave, 2005, p39

  6 See Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1998

  7 John Hunter, 1794, from Ruston, p40

  8 John Abernethy, Enquiry into Mr Hunter’s Theory of Life: Two Lectures, 1814 and 1815, p38; and Ruston, p43

  9 Abernethy, Enquiry, pp48-50

  10 Ruston, p45

  11 Gascoigne, Banks and the English Enlightenment, pp157-9

  12 See Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee and Peter J. Kitson, ‘Exploration, Headhunting and Race Theory’, in Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era, CUP, 2004

  13 Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, p290

  14 See Shelley’s Prose, edited by David Lee Clark

  15 Holmes, Shelley, pp286-90; also Ruston, pp91-100

  16 Ruston, p193

  17 William Lawrence, Natural History of Man, 1819, pp6-7

  18 William Lawrence, Introduction to Comparative Anatomy, 1816, pp169-70; and Ruston, p50

  19 William Lawrence: The Natural History of Man (Lectures on Physiology and Zoology), 1819, p106

  20 Ibid., p8; and Ruston, pp15-16

  21 Lawrence, Introduction to Comparative Anatomy, p174; and Ruston, p16

  22 In his letters of 1797-98, and later Notebooks. See Holmes, ‘Kubla Coleridge’, in Coleridge: Early Visions

  23 Hermione de Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats, OUP, 1991, pp66-73

  24 Holmes, ‘The Coleridge Experiment’, Proceedings of the Royal Institution, vol 69, 1998, p312

  25 Nicholas Roe, ‘John Thelwall’s Essay on Animal Vitality’, in The Politics of Nature, Palgrave, 2002, p89

  26 Burch, Digging up the Dead, 2007

  27 Thelwall, ‘Essay towards a Definition of Animal Vitality’, 1793, quoted in Nicholas Roe, The Politics of Nature, pp89-91

  28 Blagden to Banks, 27 December 1802, JB Correspondence 5, no. 1704

  29 G Aldini, An Account of the Late Improvements in Galvanism … Containing the Author’s Experiments on the Body of a Malefactor Executed at Newgate, London, 1803; see Fred Botting (editor), New Casebooks: Frankenstein, Palgrave, 1995, p125

  30 Quarterly Review, 1819, from Frankenstein, Oxford World Classics, pp243-50

  31 B.R. Haydon, Diary, 1817; Penelope Hughes-Hallett, The Immortal Dinner, 2000; Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry, pp50-5

  32 Quoted by Burch, pp154-5. For a darker view of dissection see Helen MacDonald, Human Remains: Dissection and its Histories, Yale UP, 2006

  33 Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, pp360–1

  34 ‘Theory of Life’ (1816), in Coleridge: Shorter Works and Fragments, edited by H.J. and J.R. Jackson, vol 1, Princeton, 1995, p502

  35 Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1998, p479

  36 Hermione de Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats, p102

  37 Coleridge to Wordsworth, 30 May 1815, Coleridge Collected Letters 4, pp574-5

  38 Richard Burton quoted in Andrew Motion, Keats, p430

  39 John Keats, ‘Lamia’ (1820), lines 229-38

  40 Ibid., lines 47-60

  41 Ibid., lines 249-53

  42 Ibid., lines 146-60

  43 Davy’s ‘Discourse Introductory to Lectures on Chemistry, 1802, HD Works 2, pp311-26

  44 Frankenstein, 1818, Chapter 2, Penguin Classics

  45 Mary Shelley’s Journal, 25 August-5 September 1814

  46 In September 1815 at Great Marlow; see Holmes, Shelley, p296

  47 Mary Shelley, ‘Introduction’ to Frankenstein 1831 text

  48 Frankenstein, 1818, Chapter 1, Penguin Classics

  49 JB Correspondence 5, no. 1804

  50 J.H. Ritter as featured in www.CorrosionDoctors

  51 Walter Wetzels, ‘Ritter and Romantic Physics’, in Romanticism and the Sciences, edited by Cunningham and Jardine, 1990. The best account of the extraordinary writer Novalis appears in Penelope Fitzgerald’s inspired novel The Blue Flower, 1995

  52 JB Correspondence 5, no. 1748, pp316-17

  53 Ibid., no. 1790, p368

  54 Ibid., no. 1799, p387

  55 For a wider perspective see ‘Death, Dying and Resurrection’, in Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment, California UP, 2005, pp171-6

  56 Frankenstein, 1818, vol 1, Chapter 5, Penguin Classics, p56

  57 These connections are further traced by Ruston, pp86-95

  58 Lawrence, Lectures, 1817, pp6-7

  59 Frankenstein, 1818, vol 2, Chapter 3, Penguin Classics, pp99-100

  60 Ibid., Chapter 8, p132

  61 Ibid., Chapter 9, pp140-1

  62 Ibid., Chapter 9, p141

  63 Ibid., vol 3, Chapter 2, p160

  64 Ibid., Chapter 3, p160

  65 Ibid., pp164-5

  66 Frankenstein, 1831 text, pp178, 180, 186. My italics

  67 Ibid., p189

  68 Text from 1823 leaflet about Presumption; see Fred Botting (editor), New Casebooks: Frankenstein, Palgrave, 1995. The evolution and impact of the novel is brilliantly disclosed by William St Clair in The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, OUP, 2004

  69 Mary Shelley, The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, vol 1, edited by Betty T Bennett, Johns Hopkins UP, 1988, pp369, 378<
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  70 Frankenstein, 1818, vol 2, Chapter 5, Penguin Classics, pp116-17

  71 Lawrence, On the Natural History of Man, 1819, p150

  72 Ruston, p71

  73 Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Medicine in Radical London, Chicago, 1989, p112

  Chapter 8: Davy and the Lamp

  1 Jane Apreece to Walter Scott, 4 March 1811, in ‘Lady Davy’s Letters’, edited by James Parker, The Quarterly Review, January 1962; also Lamont-Brown, p94

  2 For example: ‘Whene’er you speak, Heaven! how the listening throng/ Dwell on the melting music of your tongue! …’ (Valentine’s Day 1805), HD Archive Box 26 File H II

  3 Treneer, p119

  4 See ‘iconography’ for Lady Davy (Jane Apreece) in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. At the time of going to press I am still searching for a portrait, having exhausted all leads kindly provided by the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh; and Christie’s, London

  5 HD Archive Mss Box 25, containing ninety letters from Lady Davy 1811-22

  6 HD Archive Mss Box 25/1

  7 HD Archive Mss Box 25/3

  8 HD Archive Mss Box 25/2

  9 Raymond Lamont-Brown, Humphry Davy: Life Beyond the Lamp, Sutton, 2004, p94

  10 HD Archive Mss Box 25/3; 13; 18; 20

  11 HD Archive Mss Box 25/6

  12 Coleridge letter of 28 May 1809; also Treneer, p113

  13 HD Archive Mss Box 25/5 (1 November 1811)

  14 HD Archive Mss Box 25/11; and Treneer, p124

  15 HD Archive Mss Box 25/25 (March 1812)

  16 HD Archive Mss Box 25/4; also Lamont-Brown, pp96-7

  17 HD Archive Mss Box 25/4

  18 ‘Lady Davy’s Letters’, edited by James Parker, The Quarterly Review, January 1962, p81

  19 HD Archive Mss Box 25/26

  20 HD Archive Mss Box 25/24; further details Lamont-Brown, pp90-105

  21 Thorpe, p162

  22 Banks to John Lloyd FRS, 31 March 1812; from June Z. Fullmer, ‘The Poetry of Sir Humphry Davy’, in Chymia, 6, 1960, p114

  23 Treneer, p126

  24 HD Works 2

  25 JD Fragments, p158

  26 Holmes, Shelley, p153

  27 Thomas De Quincey, ‘The Poetry of Pope’, 1848. He gave Newton’s Principia as an example of Knowledge, and Milton’s Paradise Lost as example of Power. De Quincey also published a number of essays on scientific subjects, notably ‘Animal Magnetism’ (1833), ‘Kant and Dr Herschel’ (1819) and ‘The Planet Mars’ (1819)

  28 HD Works 4, pp1-40

  29 Ibid., p20

  30 Ibid., pp1-2

  31 Golinski, p262

  32 Consolations, Dialogue V, ‘The Chemical Philosopher’, HD Works 9

  33 Coleridge in Notebook 23 (1812), quoted by Trevor H. Levere, Chemists in Society 1770-1878, 1994, pp363-4

  34 Coleridge’s Marginalia on Jakob Boehme (c.1810-11), from ibid., p357

  35 See Coleridge’s letter to Lord Liverpool, 28 July 1817, discussing Davy versus Dalton (‘atomist’), Collected Letters, vol 4, p760

  36 JD Fragments, p174

  37 Ibid., p175

  38 HD Archive Mss Box 25/31

  39 Treneer, p134

  40 Ibid., p133

  41 Ibid., p137

  42 Hamilton, pp119, 207

  43 Jane Marcet, Conversations in Chemistry, 2 vols, 1813, vol 1, p342

  44 Treneer, p138

  45 HD Archive Mss Box 25/33

  46 HD Archive Mss Box 25/27

  47 HD Archive Mss Box 25/28

  48 HD Archive Mss Box 25/36

  49 Kerrow Hill, The Brontë Sisters and Sir Humphry Davy, Penzance, 1994, p16

  50 HD Archive Mss Box 25/34

  51 Paris, vol 2, pp59-72

  52 JD Memoirs, p163

  53 Michael Faraday, ‘Observations on Mental Education’, 1859; quoted in James Hamilton, Faraday: The Life, HarperCollins, 2002, p1. See also striking portraits and photographs of Faraday dated 1829, 1831 and c.1850 (National Portrait Gallery)

  54 Lamont-Brown, pp110-26

  55 Paris, vol 1, p261

  56 Leigh Hunt, Examiner, 24 October 1813

  57 JD Fragments, p190

  58 Michael Faraday, Correspondence 1811-1831, vol 1, edited Frank A.L.J. James, Institute of Electrical Engineers, 1991, p127

  59 Maurice Crosland, ‘Davy and Gay Lussac’, in Sophie Forgan (editor), Science and the Sons of Genius (essays), 1980, pp103-8

  60 Faraday, Correspondence, p124

  61 JD Memoirs, pp172-7; and Hartley, p107

  62 Hartley, pp107-8

  63 Faraday, Correspondence, p101

  64 HD Works 1, p218

  65 Ibid., p217

  66 Ibid., p220

  67 Faraday, Correspondence, p117

  68 Ibid., 23 February 1815, p126

  69 Treneer, p175; from Ticknor, Memoirs

  70 HD Works 1, p235

  71 Paris, vol 2, p79

  72 J.H. Holmes, Accidents in Coal Mines, London, 1816, pp141-2

  73 ‘Report of the Select Committee on Accidents in Mines’, in Parliamentary Papers, 1835, vol 5, September 1835

  74 Faraday, Correspondence, p136

  75 Bence Jones, Life and Letters of Faraday, vol 1, p361

  76 Paris, vol 2, p95

  77 Ibid., p82

  78 JB Letters, p317

  79 Paris, vol 2, p97

  80 Letter to John Hodgson, 29 December 1815, Northumberland Record Office; from Frank A.J.L. James, ‘How Big is a Hole? The Problems of the Practical Application of Science in the Invention of the Miners’ Safety Lamp by Humphry Davy and George Stephenson in Late Regency England’, in Transactions of the Newcomen Society, 75, 2005, p197

  81 Frank James, pp185-93

  82 HD, On the Safety Lamp, with Some Researches into Flame, 1818; and HD Works 6, pp12-14

  83 HD Works 6, p4

  84 Coleridge, The Friend (1818 edition), in The Friend, vol 1, edited by Barbara E. Rooke, Routledge, 1969, pp 530-1

  85 Coleridge, The Friend (1809 edition), no. 19, 1809; in The Friend, vol 2, edited by Barbara E. Rooke, Routledge, 1969, pp251-2

  86 Frank James, p197

  87 John Buddle’s evidence (2nd day), Report of the Select Committee, 1835, pp153-4

  88 HD Works 6, pp116-17

  89 Lamont-Brown, p112

  90 Thorpe, p203

  91 Paris, vol 2, p111

  92 ‘Igna Constructo Securitas…’ Davy’s coat of arms illustrated in The Gentleman’s Magazine, 1829

  93 John Playfair, ‘Sir Humphry Davy’s Lamp’, in Edinburgh Review, no. LI, 1816, p233; also Thorpe, p204

  94 HD Works 6, pp6-7

  95 Ibid., p22, footnote

  96 Ibid., p4

  97 Hamilton, pp121-5; Lamont-Brown, pp128-33

  98 James Heaton demonstration at the Society of Arts, 1817, described in Report of the Select Committee, 1835, p213

  99 A Collection of all Letters in Newcastle papers relating to Safety Lamps, London, 1817. See British Library catalogue Tracts 8708.i.2

  100 Letter from George Stephenson, ibid., Tracts 8708.i.2(5)

  101 Treneer, p172

  102 Lettter to Lord Lambton, October 1816, in Paris, vol 2, p120

  103 Frank James, p203

  104 Paris, vol 2, p123

  105 See Hamilton, pp122-3

  106 Frank James, pp183-95

  107 HD Works 6

  108 Paris, vol 2, p122

  109 Ibid., p124-5; and from David Knight, Davy, p113

  110 HD Works 1, pp209-10

  111 Paris, vol 2, p129

  112 Treneer, pp173-4; Thorpe, p208

  113 Minute Book of Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society, December 1817, from Frank James, p211

  114 ‘Report of the Select Committee on Accidents in Mines’, in Parliamentary Papers, 1835, vol 5, September 1835

  115 Ibid., pviii

  116 Ibid.

  117 Davy boys described in ibid., pp97-108,
165-7. See also Samuel Smiles, Life of George Stephenson, 1859; and Newcastle Public Record Office

  118 Walter Scott, Journals 1, 1826, p109

  119 JD Fragments, pp141-3

  120 Sun Fire Office insurance document, 4 June 1818, found through internet UK Archives Network

  121 HD, On the Safety Lamp for Preventing Explosions, London, 1825, p151

  122 Consolations, Dialogue II, HD Works 9, pp254-5

  123 Ibid., p255

  124 JD Life 2, pp114-15; and JD Memoirs, pp251-3

  125 Shelley, Epipsychidion, 1820, lines 190-221 (extract)

  126 Byron, letter to John Murray, April 1820; see Treneer, p182

  127 Byron, Don Juan I (1819), stanza 132

  Chapter 9: Sorcerer and Apprentice

  1 JB Correspondence 6, p286

  2 JB, August 1816, ibid., pp208-9

  3 Ibid., p382

  4 JB, November 1814, ibid., p152

  5 Gunther Buttman, In the Shadow of the Telescope: A Biography of John Herschel, Lutterworth Press, 1974, p13

  6 JB Correspondence 6, p375

  7 Ibid.

  8 JB Correspondence 6, 1819

  9 Coleridge ‘Youth and Age’ (1825), in Selected Poems, Penguin Classics, p215

  10 November 1817, JB Correspondence 6, p252

  11 Byron, ‘Darkness’, written at the Villa Diodati, July 1816. See Fiona MacCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend, John Murray, 2002, p69; and discussed in New Penguin Romantic Poetry, edited by Jonathan and Jessica Wordsworth, Notes to Poems, p909

  12 JB Correspondence 6, September and November 1819, pp355, 367

  13 Gascoigne, p52

  14 JB Correspondence 6, March 1818, p276

  15 Ibid., November 1818, p325

  16 Ibid., September 1819, p359

  17 Byron, Don Juan (1821), Canto 10, lines 1-24. The ‘glass and vapour’ refer to telescopes and steamships, and also possibly balloons. The ringing phrase ‘In the Wind’s Eye’ was used by modern editors as the title of vol 6 of Byron’s Collected Letters

  18 JB Correspondence 6, August 1816, p209

  19 Gascoigne, p41

  20 Ibid.

  21 Buttman, p13

  22 CHM, pp119-21

  23 John Herschel to Babbage, October 1813, quoted in Buttman, p14

  24 William Herschel to John, 10 November 1813, WH Mss 6278 1/11

  25 Lady Herschel to John, 14 November 1813, ibid.

  26 John Herschel to Babbage, March 1815, quoted by Buttman, p16

  27 JB Correspondence 6, p375

  28 Shelley, ‘Notes to Queen Mab’ (1812)

 

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