The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes

  Davy was also optimistic about the state of the war against France. ‘Buonaparte seems to have abandoned the idea of invasion, and if our government is active, we have little to dread from a maritime war … The wealth of our island may be diminished, but the strength of the people cannot easily pass away; and our literature, our science, and our arts, and the dignity of our nature, depend little upon external relations. When we had fewer colonies than Genoa, we had Bacons and Shakespeares.’ In fact, for Davy, science was becoming increasingly patriotic.165

  On 19 November 1807 Davy gave his second Bakerian Lecture at the Royal Society. He dramatically described how he had just isolated two wholly new elements, potassium and sodium, by ‘electrolysis’. By ingenious use of the Institution’s voltaic batteries he had over several hours charged and decomposed the common alkalis soda and potash in a vacuum flask, and found the unknown chemicals forming in a crust at the positive and negative poles of the battery. When he extracted the globules of potassium from the crust of potash, they burst spontaneously into an astonishing, bright lilac-coloured flame. Sodium reacted similarly when plunged into water, producing an equally vivid orange flame. Here matter itself seemed to be breaking into life from a previously secret and hidden world, at the chemist’s sole command.

  Davy had left these experiments perilously late, only a few weeks before the second Bakerian Lecture was due. Almost deliberately, like a journalist working to a deadline, he put himself under extraordinary pressure, and had to work with hectic speed. But that was what he liked. On 6 October 1807 his laboratory notebook records in huge, triumphant letters: ‘CAPITAL EXPERIMENT PROVING THE DECOMPOSITION OF POTASH’.

  The description of this historic discovery is given dramatically enough in Davy’s final lecture text: ‘The potash began to fuse at both its points of electrization. There was a violent effervescence at the upper [positive] surface; and at the lower, or negative surface, there was no liberation of elastic fluid; but small globules having a high metallic lustre, and being precisely similar in visible characters to quick silver, appeared, some of which burnt with explosion and bright flame … These globules, numerous experiments soon showed to be the substance I was in search of.’166

  But Davy’s real excitement and relief is only revealed in his assistant’s account of that day. The twenty-eight-year-old Professor of Chemistry became a schoolboy again. ‘When he saw the minute globules of potassium burst through the crust of potash, and take fire as they entered the atmosphere, he could not contain his joy — he actually danced about the room in ecstatic delight; some little time was required for him to compose himself to continue the experiment.’167 Davy had discovered the principle of ‘electro-chemical’ analysis, a term that he coined, and opened up the vast field for experiment that he had promised.♣

  The lectures were greeted with universal excitement and praise. Banks was deeply impressed. When he had his official portrait painted in the Royal Society’s presidential chair the following year, wearing all his insignias and honours, he was shown holding a transcript of Davy’s Bakerian Lectures. In Bristol, his old patron Beddoes recorded proudly: ‘Davy has just solved one of the greatest problems in chemistry by decomposing the fixed alkalis.’168 The newly founded Edinburgh Review ran a series of long articles on the Bakerian Lectures, written by its rising young intellectual star Henry Brougham.169 Coleridge wrote to praise Davy’s ‘march of glory’.170

  Even Davy’s acknowledged rivals saluted him. The renowned Scandinavian chemist Jacob Berzelius described it as one of the finest of all modern chemical experiments. The French Académie des Sciences, partly through the good offices of Gay-Lussac, awarded Davy the new Prix Napoléon, worth the enormous sum of 60,000 francs. The Académie issued a formal invitation that Davy come to Paris to collect it. It was a fine and challenging gesture at a time of bitter war between the two nations, but diplomatically there were difficulties from the start. Davy assumed he had won the total sum donated by Napoleon, but the actual prize consisted of the annual interest from that capital, a rather more modest 3,000 francs.171

  For all his success, Davy was overworked and exhausted. Immediately after his lecture he had undertaken to oversee a ventilation scheme for Newgate Prison, and he fell dangerously ill with a form of jail fever in December 1807. He was near death for several weeks, and an invalid for several months. His patient physician, Dr Thomas Babington, a fellow fly-fisherman, became a friend for life. He did not return to his laboratory until 19 April 1808.

  This brush with death at the age of twenty-nine only increased Davy’s celebrity, and raised his reputation in scientific circles. The Royal Institution issued daily public reports about his health, and gave a special lecture examining the significance of his work and comparing him to Bacon, Boyle and Cavendish. It also voted funds for a huge new voltaic battery to be constructed for his future use, a trough of ‘600 double plates of four inches square’, said to be four times as powerful as any in England. The following year, after the fourth Bakerian Lecture, a private subscription provided a 2,000-plate battery, now said patriotically to be more powerful than any in Europe — including, of course, France.172

  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.174

  The first balloon crossing of the English Channel, 7 January 1785

  A dramatic retrospective image of the hydrogen balloon flown by Blanchard and Jeffries leaving the coast of Dover in Kent and heading southwards into the lowering skies over Calais. Detail from an oil painting by E.W. Cocks, c.1840.

  The first manned ascent in a Montgolfier hot-air balloon, Paris, 21 November 1783 Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes stand on either side of the platform, balancing the giant aerostat and preparing to supply fuel to the six-foot brazier suspended (invisibly) within the canopy. Plate taken from Le Journal.

  ‘I want, I want’

  Willi
am Blake’s mocking view of scientific endeavour. Line engraving from For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise (1793).

  Historic early view of the earth from a balloon, 1786

  Beneath the small, puffy shapes of rain-carrying cumulo-nimbus clouds, the meanderings of rivers (depicted in red), the unmetalled roads curving through fields and the grid patterns of village streets clearly emerge. Coloured engraving from an actual sketch by Thomas Baldwin, Airopaidia (1786), made at an estimated height of 4–5,000 feet.

  The first manned ascent in a hydrogen balloon or Charlier, Paris, 1 December 1783

  Coloured print showing Dr Alexandre Charles and M. Robert ascending from the gardens of the Tuileries, with the old Louvre palace on each side and the Champs Élysées beyond. Note the circle of barrels containing acid and iron filings, which have been used to generate the hydrogen. In reality the crowd numbered a quarter of a million people.

  Jean-Pierre Blanchard

  A slightly caricatured miniature of the aeronaut Blanchard, the French prima donna of British ballooning. Engraving by J. Newton after an original work by R. Livesay, 1785.

  John Jeffries, American balloonist and physician

  Note the chamois-leather flying gloves, beaverskin flying helmet and large, expensive barometer (as altimeter) – Americans already had good kit. Engraving after an original by Tissandier, c.1780s.

  Vincent Lunardi, Italian aeronaut, with his crew

  The glamorous Lunardi made the first aerial voyage in Britain by hydrogen balloon on 15 September 1784. His cat abandoned the flight halfway Print published by E. Hedges, 1784.

  James Sadler

  The English aeronaut was supported by the students of Oxford University and Dr Johnson. By Edmund Scott, after James Roberts, 1785.

  Sadler plaque

  A patriotic plaque to James Sadler, ‘First English Aeronaut’, at Merton Field, Oxford.

  Mungo Park

  The young Scottish doctor and explorer shortly before setting out for West Africa. Miniature after Henry Edridge, c.1797.

  Mungo Park

  Cartoon by Thomas Rowlandson, vividly suggesting the sufferings endured during Park’s first African travels. Watercolour, c.1805.

  Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior of Africa (1799)

  Title page with vignette showing Park sitting under a tree, having been robbed, stripped and left to die during his first journey into the heart of Africa. Note the precious hat containing all his journals hidden in the crown. From the 1860 edition of his Travels.

  A sketch map of the northern part of Africa

  By Major John Rennell, 1790, based on reports brought back by various travellers before Mungo Park’s expedition. The Niger is a dotted line rising near Timbuctoo and apparently flowing eastwards across Africa towards Abyssinia.

  ‘The people began to attack him, throwing lances, pikes, arrows and stones’

  A Victorian image of the death of Mungo Park on the river Niger, during his second journey, 1805–06. From the 1860 edition of his Travels.

  Coleridge

  Portrait by Peter Vandyke, 1795, shortly before he met Davy at the Pneumatic Institute, Bristol.

  Byron

  Already famous, Byron was about to be introduced to Banks, Herschel and Davy. Portrait by Richard Westall, 1813.

  Keats

  Keats at Hampstead, where he studied stars and nightingales, and wrote his poem ‘Lamia’. Drawing by Charles Armitage Brown, 1819.

  Erasmus Darwin

  The polymath poet who championed the encyclopaedic science of the Lunar Society. After Joseph Wright of Derby, 1770.

  Shelley

  Shelley, atheist and scientific enthusiast, travelled abroad like Davy and Byron. Portrait by Amelia Curran, painted in Rome, 1819.

  Blake

  Blake mocked the pretensions of most scientific men, and particularly demonised Newton. Portrait by Thomas Phillips, 1807.

  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.’175

  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 brown-haired 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’.176 Finally he would meet her a third time, ten years later still, in 1827-28, when she was in her mid-twenties and he was stoically enduring what turned out to be his last illness.177

  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

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  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.181

  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