The Collected Letters of Humphry Davy ed. by Tim Fulford and Sharon Ruston (review)

I am fond of the idea that in death we live on through the memories that others have of us. Granted this, it surely follows that in life we are also in part what others take us to be; we are formed by how they characterize us, whether in public utterances or private exchanges in response to our presentation of self. Reading a volume of collected letters in which only one side of such character-forming conversations appears has a very partial feel to it. Even as we may sense our protagonist’s reactions to the missing mass, our imaginations are likely to mislead. Are there advantages in a “Collected Letters” over a “Collected Correspondence,” apart from the obvious issue of feasibility and consequences for the editors’ workload? In the case of a famous person, the flow of incoming material might dilute the outgoing to such a degree that the clamoring of others drowns out the voice of the star of the show. There is no such problem with this excellent collected letters: here we have Humphry Davy, as John Lennon might say, “in his own write.”

Davy (1778–1829) was arguably the most famous British natural philosopher of the Regency period.¹ Born in Cornwall in modest circumstances, Davy’s early philosophical ventures gained him a place as Assistant to Thomas Beddoes in the latter’s Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, where experiments on the medical value of breathing various gases included Davy’s famous self-experimentation with nitrous oxide (or laughing gas). In Bristol Davy formed close friendships, based on shared literary and philosophical interests, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, whose radical views he then also shared. Davy quickly secured a position in 1801 at the newly founded Royal Institution in London. His popular lectures and a startling sequence of, mainly electrochemical, discoveries (including of the elements sodium, potassium, calcium and magnesium) led him to prominence within the Royal Society and a Knighthood from the Prince Regent in 1812. These exploits, marriage to a wealthy widow, Jane Apreece (also in 1812), and his invention of the miner’s safety lamp in 1815 gave Davy status as an independent, public-minded natural philosopher, which helped bring him in turn to the Presidency of the Royal Society after the death of Sir Joseph Banks in 1820. In the following decade Davy tried to heal rifts within the Society’s Fellowship and, also without much success, to promote government support of scientific activity. Illness limited him from the mid–1820s, and he spent much of his final years travelling the Continent, producing reflective works on angling, Salmonia: or Days of Fly Fishing (1828) and his posthumously published Consolations in Travel (1830). He died in Geneva on 29 May 1829, attended by his wife and brother John.

So in these volumes we have an epistolary tracing of this remarkable journey mainly from Davy’s point of view. Of course, having Davy in his own write does not tell us whether what Davy pens is transparent or contrived for his correspondents. This is for the reader to judge. He was a chameleon-like character, difficult to pin down. We might well find in these pages the fluid Davy depicted by Jan Golinski—the multiple, experimental, irresolvable self, variously experimental-ist, genius, dandy, discoverer, philosopher, traveller. We might find instead a clear, constant image in the pool—Davy the narcissist as diagnosed recently by Geoffrey Cantor—or concur in Frank James’s feeling that “the only thing Davy was interested in was Davy.”² This would be no coincidence since all these key authors’ writings acknowledge their significant reliance upon the findings of the Davy Letters Project of which the Collected Letters is the culmination.

My encounter with the Collected Letters has been rather eccentric: I have read it entire, a luxury of retirement and COVID–19 lockdown. Most people will not do this...