The Age of Wonder (52 page)

From his sickbed, Davy succeeded in organising Coleridge’s first set of lectures on ‘Poetry and the Imagination’, which finally took place-after many dramatic interruptions-at the Royal Institution in spring 1808. Brilliant but intermittent, they have been called Davy’s most dangerous experiment, and he wrote his own long private reflections on Coleridge’s mixture of genius and ‘ruined’ sensibility. He adopted the view of the man of science looking down dispassionately on an artist, though in terms so florid that he seemed somehow to entangle himself in Coleridge’s own situation: ‘[Coleridge] has suffered greatly from Excessive Sensibility-the disease of genius. His mind is a wilderness in which the cedar & oak which might aspire to the skies are stunted in their growth by underwood, thorns, briars and parasitical plants. With the most exalted genius, enlarged views, sensitive heart & enlightened mind, he will be the victim of want of order, precision and regularity. I cannot think of him without experiencing mingled feelings of admiration, regard & pity.’
¹⁷³

Poetry, genius and eternity were much on Davy’s mind during his convalescence. Perhaps the break in his punishing laboratory routine allowed suppressed emotions to surface. As he was slowly recovering, he celebrated by writing a striking, hymn-like poem, ‘Lo! O’er the earth the kindling spirits pour’. It was filled with pantheistic visions of change and transformation, of godlike forces energising the whole earth; and with images that seem to refer to Coleridge’s view of intelligent Creativity active in the universe, and playing upon matter like an Aeolian harp:

All speaks of change: the renovated forms
Of long-forgotten things arise again;
The light of suns, the breath of angry storms,
The everlasting motions of the main.

These are but engines of the eternal will,
The One intelligence, whose potent sway
Has ever acted, and is acting still
While stars, and worlds and systems all obey.

Without whose power, the whole of mortal things
Were dull, inert, an unharmonious band.
Silent as are the harp’s untuned strings
Without the touches of the poet’s hand.
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Other, perhaps forbidden, emotions also surfaced. During his fever Davy later said that he had a repeated hallucination of a beautiful, tender, unknown woman who nursed him, held him and had ‘intellectual conversations’ with him. ‘[When] I contracted that terrible form of typhus fever known by the name of jail fever…there was always before me the form of a beautiful woman…This spirit of my vision had brown hair, blue eyes, and a bright rosy complexion, and was, as far as I can recollect, unlike any of the amatory forms which in early youth had so often haunted my imagination…Her figure was so distinct in my mind as to form almost a visual image…[but] as I gained strength the visits of my good angel, for so I called it, became less frequent.’
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Davy was fascinated by this hallucinatory experience, which may have recalled some of his earlier nitrous oxide visions. Yet it obviously touched some much deeper chord. He added, revealingly, that he was ‘passionately in love at the time’. From the fragmentary notes and Valentine poems he preserved (probably by mistake) in his notebooks, there were a number of young women who may have set their caps at him during his lectures of 1807. But this visionary woman, he insisted, was someone quite different, someone utterly unknown to him.

He was strangely precise on the matter. His vision was not the ‘lady with black hair, dark eyes, and pale complexion’ who was currently the object of his ‘admiration’. She was a younger woman, almost a girl, and of a different physical type: a glowing, youthful brownhaired girl, ‘a living angel’. Stranger still, Davy would claim that he actually met this ‘visionary female’ ten years later, in 1818, ‘during my travels in Illyria’. She was then ‘a very blooming and graceful maiden of fourteen or fifteen years old’.
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Finally he would meet her a third time, ten years later still, in 1827-28, when she was in her midtwenties and he was stoically enduring what turned out to be his last illness.
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Later Davy would remark on the mysterious ten-year pattern of this amorous cycle, each recurrence apparently taking place at the beginning of his own new decade: at thirty, at forty, at fifty. If there had been an earlier one, it would have been in 1798, when he turned twenty, and had just met Anna Beddoes. It suggests an area of private emotion and turmoil that would only be hinted at in confidential letters to his brother John, and in his later poetry.
¹⁷⁸

12

On 24 December 1808 Dr Thomas Beddoes died in Bristol, aged only forty-eight. He had been suffering from chronic heart disease, and had been faithfully nursed by his erring wife Anna, who had returned to him in his time of need. It seems he had written a number of letters to friends, including Davy, but received few replies, and felt forgotten. Neither Davy nor Coleridge had been in touch with their old mentor for several years.

Beddoes’s last publication was ‘A Letter to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, on the Prevailing Discontents, Abuses and Imperfections in Medicine’ (1808). In it he advocated a five-year training course for all physicians, financed by public taxation, and a national policy of preventative medicine: the first remarkable glimmerings of a National Health Service. There were also glimpses of the old radical doctor. He suggested that family health would be universally improved if all wives were provided (free of charge) with anatomy lectures, washing machines (steam-powered), fresh vegetables and pressure cookers.
¹⁷⁹

His death caused uneasy stirrings among the scattered circle of the original Bristol Institute, and self-questioning about their own careers. Davy wrote to Coleridge: ‘my heart is heavy. I would talk to you of your own plans, which I shall endeavour in every way to promote; I would talk to you of my own labours which have been incessant since I saw you, and not without result; but I am interrupted by very melancholy feelings which, when you see this, I know you will partake of…Very affectionately yours.’
¹⁸⁰

Coleridge replied with a passionate, guilty letter about Beddoes’s selfless medical career and quixotic generosity. He said he had wept ‘convulsively’ at the news of his death. It emerged that Anna had been looking for someone to write Beddoes’s biography. She had successively approached Davy, then Southey, then Davies Giddy, and finally Coleridge. But all finally turned her down. A dull
Memoir
was written by Dr John Stock in 1811, but it was Peter Roget who eventually produced a fine article for the
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
though not until 1824. Meanwhile Davies Giddy became the guardian of Anna’s children, having first taken the precaution of marrying a Miss Gilbert, and changing his perilous surname accordingly to Davies Gilbert. Anna herself moved to Bath, then Italy, settling in Rome. Her son, the poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-49), would spend twenty-five years writing a strange, semi-dramatic poem entitled
Death’s Jest-Book,
replete with grotesque imagery from medical surgery and his father’s laboratory, which he could just remember. When he could write no more, Thomas committed suicide in Basle, at the age of forty-five.
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Davy wrote thoughtfully in his journal of Beddoes’s shyness, his apparent remoteness in conversation, and his ‘wild and active imagination’, which he judged was equal to Erasmus Darwin’s, but too often hidden. He added wistfully: ‘On his death he wrote to me a most affecting letter regretting his scientific aberrations. I remember one expression: “
like one who has scattered abroad the Avena Fatua of knowledge from which neither brand nor blossom nor fruit has resulted. I require the consolation of a friend.
” ’ That last phrase would come to haunt Davy himself.
¹⁸²

By 1809 Davy’s reputation was powerfully in the ascendant. He was included in Volume 7 of the influential series
Public Characters: Biographical Memoirs of Distinguished Subjects.
The long entry praised his modesty and genius, described his ‘galvanic experiments’ at the Royal Institution, and gave a long summary of the Bakerian Lectures. He was presented as an exemplary figure from the new world of British science, a dedicated researcher ‘bent over his retorts’, unworldly and ignoring public fame. There was no hint of his future reputation for arrogance, ambition and professional jealousies.
¹⁸³

A huge composite portrait,
Eminent Men of Science Living in 1807-8,
was painted to commemorate the historic expansion in British science at this moment. In fact it represents a retrospective view, as the artist William Walker actually painted it around 1820. In it he depicted a group of thirty figures, all male, standing and sitting with grave formality in some ideal clubland smoking room. They include in the front ranks Davy, Herschel, Banks, Dalton, Cavendish and Jenner. Dr Thomas Beddoes is nowhere to be found. He had been forgotten, just as he feared.
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The poet Anna Barbauld, who had previously written about Joseph Priestley’s epoch-making experiments, now singled out Davy’s scientific lectures as one of the glories of the age. Future historians would

Point where mute crowds on Davy’s lips reposed,
And Nature’s coyest secrets were disclosed.
¹⁸⁴

Her faintly mischievous image did not overlook the sexual frisson surrounding Davy’s popular performances, and naturally this aroused some jealousy. Some of Davy’s oldest friends worried about the effect on him of success and celebrity. Coleridge feared he was sacrificing himself to London fashion, ‘more and more determined to mould himself upon the age, in order to make the age mould itself upon him’.
¹⁸⁵
But perhaps this was the inevitable cost of such success.

One consequence of Davy’s celebrity was tempting offers to give public lectures outside London. In 1810 he accepted an invitation to Ireland to give his Chemical and Geological lectures for an exceptional fee of a thousand guineas. He lectured to packed theatres in Dublin in spring 1810, and again in spring 1811, when Trinity College conferred on him an honorary doctorate. In these lectures he particularly stressed the importance of scientific knowledge for women’s education, and for ‘the improvement of the female mind’. Milton was wrong on the subject, and Mary Wollstonecraft was right.
¹⁸⁶
Among his attentive and admiring audiences was a strikingly pretty and vivacious Scottish widow called Jane Apreece. At a glittering reception afterwards, Jane Apreece told Humphry Davy that she loved fishing.

^♣
These days there are several large, white Davy tombstones leant against the south-east corner of the church, shrouded in nettles and deadly nightshade. They commemorate in deeply-cut but blurred lettering earlier members of the family, dating from the seventeenth or even sixteenth century. Plain and monolithic, one reads simply: ‘Sac. Mem. D. Davy et G. Davy’, without dates. The Ludgvan parish register records a Davy in 1588. The churchyard looks out over a tiny pub, a wood, and then a wild, bleak landscape of gorse and stones and broken fields, tumbling down to the sea. It reminds one that the Cornish sculptor Barbara Hepworth used to speak of ‘the pagan triangle of landscape’ between St Ives, St Just and Penzance (Hepworth Museum, St Ives).

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Borlase’s chemist shop, now known as the Peasgood Pharmacy, still exists on the same site at the top of Penzance. The old ‘Instructions for Apprentices’ still hang framed in its back dispensary, indicating working hours from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., when ‘shutters are put up’. Discipline was strict-‘all joking and trifling are forbidden during hours of business in the shop’-and minute: ‘In order to avoid using the mouth to moisten labels it is requisite that the gum brush or label-damper be always used. Biting of corks, licking of labels, licking of fingers or thumb for the purpose of taking up paper, are all prohibited as unclean and unbecoming…It is extremely important that all counters are kept free from muddles…’ Davy was to remember these instructions when he tried to impose order on the Royal Institution assistants twenty years later.

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Priestley gave a vivid account of an experiment in 1775, in which a mouse struggled for life in his air pump for over half an hour, thus proving that de-phlogistated air (oxygen) was a supporter of animal respiration. See Jenny Uglow,
The Lunar Men
(2002). Perhaps it also proved something else, as deduced by Anna Barbauld. She wrote about this experiment from the mouse’s point of view, in a touching poem in which the ‘freeborn mouse’, cruelly imprisoned in its laboratory cage, appeals for its right to life, perhaps the first animal-rights manifesto ever written.

For here forlorn and sad I sit,
Within the wiry grate,
And tremble at the approaching morn
Which brings impending fate…

The cheerful light, the vital air,
Are blessings widely given;
Let Nature’s commoners enjoy
The common gifts of Heaven.

The well-taught philosophic mind
To all compassion gives;
Casts round the world an equal eye,
And feels for all that lives.

‘The Mouse’s Petition to Dr Priestley, Found in the Trap where he had been Confined all Night’ (1773).

^♣
Lavoisier’s 1789 Preface makes one wonder when people really did first begin to look at objects in nature carefully,
for their own sake.
The idea of exquisite, close observation of natural phenomena has its own literary history. Robert Hooke’s
Micrographia
of 1664, with its exquisite drawings of fleas and other tiny creatures, championed the idea of minute observation at scales smaller than normal human vision. But the precise, even reverent contemplation of nature is clearly associated with the Romantics, and can be seen arriving in private journals and letters from the 1760s onwards. The journals of Joseph Banks and his colleagues in the South Seas, of Gilbert White in Hampshire, of Coleridge in Somerset, of Dorothy Wordsworth in the Lake District, all demonstrate this (almost sacred) attention to things simply and precisely observed. William Herschel wrote a brilliant paper on the nature of objective observation, and its particular problems in astronomy. Goethe wrote another in 1798 on the general problems of subjectivity, ‘Empirical Observation and Science’. In 1788 Edward Jenner published a chilling paper in the Royal Society’s
Philosophical Transactions
on observing the murderous activity of a baby cuckoo in a sparrow’s nest. Jenner’s quiet, meticulous description of the baby cuckoo (while still blind) relentlessly wheelbarrowing its smaller ‘rival’ sparrow chick backwards, between its half-formed wings, up the side of the nest until it was thrown out, has all the power of a moral allegory, but remains completely objective in tone. ‘Observations on the Natural History of the Cuckoo, in a Letter to John Hunter FRA’ (1788). See Tim Fulford (ed.),
Romanticism and Science
(2002), vol 4.