The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes

  A rather unusual honeymoon followed in Scotland that summer. They were joined by Davy’s younger brother John, now twenty-two years old, the only member of her husband’s family that Jane ever met. He was fresh from medical studies in Edinburgh, and very much on his best behaviour. Jane approved. They embarked on a tour of misty lochs and highland castles. Davy frequently leapt from the open carriage and abruptly disappeared with his fishing tackle to explore a river, while John was left to manage the horses and amuse Jane. This arrangement worked well, and there was much hilarity, some at Davy’s expense. Jane would recall it regretfully the following year, while touring in different circumstances.

  The official holiday business was salmon-fishing and grouse-shooting. But the Davys were a celebrity party, the most eminent scientific family in the land, and they stayed in succession with the Marquis of Stafford, the Duke of Gordon, the Duke of Atholl and Lord Mansfield. This was delightful and natural for Jane, but also appealed to Davy, who had a growing relish for aristocratic company. Their triumphal progress was finally cut short in September by Jane twisting her foot, and Davy achieving his ambition of shooting a stag.36

  They were much in love, but there was no talk of children, and no visit to Davy’s beloved childhood haunts in Cornwall. Instead, he wrote to his mother praising John’s behaviour during the trip, and generously offering to pay his student allowance of £60 per annum. Perhaps on Jane’s promptings, he was also tactful towards his younger brother: ‘Lest it should injure John’s feelings of independence, it may appear to come from you.’ As to Jane: ‘She desires her kind remembrances to all my family. We are as happy and well-suited as I believe it is possible for people to be; we have nothing to regret in our past lives, and everything to hope for.’37

  Perhaps there was something wistful in that last phrase. Yet all was well, and the prospects for the glamorous young couple were glowing. Davy was soon happily back at work in the laboratory, and a further tour – perhaps even to Jane’s beloved Italy — was planned for the following spring.

  2

  Davy now began his life as an independent man of science. His first project, with the blessing of the Royal Society, was a patriotic one: he intended to contribute to the British war effort. He began to investigate explosives, using a formula communicated to him by the French physicist André Ampère. This was not at the Royal Institution, but at a secret commercial manufactory at Tunbridge in Kent. The plan was to produce improved high explosives for the Royal Engineers. They were to be used against Napoleon’s troops in Spain, for the mining of besieged cities and the blowing up of fortifications during the Peninsular War. The scheme had the unofficial encouragement of Joseph Banks, although it was dangerous work. Ampère warned Davy that one French chemist had lost an eye and a finger.

  In November 1812 Davy was nearly blinded by a test tube explosion while mixing chlorine and ammonium nitrate. Slivers of glass punctured his cornea, and cut his cheek. He informed Banks at the Royal Society that he had discovered a substance so powerful that a quantity as small as ‘a grain of mustard seed’ had caused the damage. He did not remark on the more sinister slant this gave to the principle of scientific progress, or on the paradox that French science was being turned against the French. He tried to hide the seriousness of the ‘slight accident’ from Jane, telling her on 2 November, ‘there is no evil without a good, always excepting the toothache’. But his vision was seriously impaired for many weeks, and he sought for an amanuensis to help him write up his report for the Royal Society.38

  Some odd rumours went around about this accident. William Ward, the future Lord Dudley and a prize London gossip, wrote speculatively to a friend in December: ‘I have been to see Sir Humphry Davy Kt, who has hurt one of his eyes. Some say it happened when he was composing a new fulminating oil, and this I presume is the story that the Royal Society and the Institut Imperial [in Paris] are expected to believe; others that it was occasioned by the blowing up of one of his own powder mills at Tunbridge; others again that Lady D scratched it in a moment of jealousy — and this account is chiefly credited in domestic circles.’39

  But other gossips gave an idyllic impression of the couple. Henry Crabb Robinson, garrulous friend of the Lake Poets and one-time foreign correspondent for The Times, came across the them at a London literary dinner given for Wordsworth a few months later, in May 1813. He noted in his diary: ‘Sir Humphry and Lady Davy there. She and Sir H seem hardly to have finished their honeymoon. Miss Joanna Baillie [the Scottish playwright] said to Wordsworth, “We have witnessed a picturesque happiness!”’40 Not the least picturesque thing was the way in which the Davys effortlessly united the worlds of literature, science and high society.

  When Davy had returned to London, half-blinded in a patriotic cause, he urgently sought help to continue his experiments. In his absence he found an increasing chaos had overtaken the Royal Institution laboratory. The most basic materials were neglected — pens, ink, towels, soap, the servicing of the huge voltaic battery. ‘The laboratory is constantly in a state of dirt and confusion … I am now writing with a pen and ink such as was never used in any other place.’41 Although no longer officially on the staff, Davy peremptorily dismissed the drunken laboratory assistant William Payne, and began to search for a replacement. On 1 March he interviewed a young bookbinder for the post of Chemical Assistant at the Royal Institution. The young man’s father had been a London blacksmith. His chief recommendations were punctuality, neatness and sobriety. His name was Michael Faraday, aged twenty-one.

  Faraday had read Jane Marcet’s Conversations in Chemistry, Mainly intended for Young Females, which particularly singled out Davy’s contribution. Her book was a new kind of science popularisation, aimed at opening ‘young minds’ to scientific methods and the wonders of the natural universe.42 The first edition (1806) had cautiously recounted Davy’s experiments with ‘nitrous oxide or exhilarating gas’ (‘some people become violent, even outrageous … I would not run any risk of that kind’). In the new edition (1811) Marcet gave a heroic assessment of Davy’s Bakerian Lectures. ‘In the course of two years, by the unparalleled exertions of a single individual, chemical science has assumed a new aspect. Bodies have been brought to light which the human eye never before beheld, and which might have remained eternally concealed under their impenetrable disguise.’43

  Thus inspired, Faraday had begun attending Davy’s lectures in 1812, having been given free tickets. He had taken detailed notes, immaculately written out and illustrated in his neat hand. He then bound them in his spare time at the bookbindery where he worked off Oxford Street. When interviewed by Davy, he submitted the bound book as his curriculum vitae and proof of his dedication. He was given lodgings in the attic of the Royal Institution, coal and candles and an evening meal, and a tiny salary of twenty-five shillings a week. Davy described him as ‘active and cheerful, and his manner intelligent’.44

  His new employer immediately departed on a recuperative fishing expedition, writing to Jane from Launceston in Devon on 9 March 1813: ‘The weather my dear love has been delightful. We have traced one of the Devonshire streams to its rocky source (the Dart). It is a river clear, blue and bright.’45 If he used this expedition to make a swift visit to his mother at Penzance, he did not mention it.

  The following month Davy went off on another fishing trip, this time to Hampshire, where the sight of flies dancing above the river in the evening light, and fish sporting on the surface of the water, was simply ‘irresistible’. Writing to Jane from Whitechurch on 14 April, he tried to construct a humorous mythology of his escapes: ‘I flirt with the water nymphs, but you are my constant goddess. I make you the personification of the spirit of the woods, and the waters, and the hills, and the clouds … This is the earliest form of religion.’ He slightly jeopardised this sylvan vision, by then competitively informing his wife in a postscript that he had caught five trout, while his friends had only caught one between them all.46 He wrote again more reassuringly the followi
ng day. ‘I breathe a sigh upon my paper from the thought of being apart from you for only two days. My dear, dear Love creates a void which no interest or amusement can fill … The longer I live, the more I shall love you, my dearest Jane.’47

  For all his protestations, a pattern in Davy’s flights to the riverbank was becoming clearer. Jane was often ‘indisposed’ in London, or else embarked on a vigorous round of tea parties and receptions. Davy, exhausted by laboratory work, became ‘irritable’ and sought the open air. As he wrote from the banks of the Avon near Fordingbridge, he was soothed by the simple fact of ‘the moving water and changing sky’.

  Sometimes he hoped Jane would join him. On the riverbank ‘one learns as it were to become a part of nature; the world and its cares & business are forgotten, all passions are laid asleep … We live a life of simplicity and innocence according to the primary laws of nature, losing all trifling and uneasy thoughts, keeping only what constitutes the vitality of our being, the noble affections. Of mine, you know the highest and constant object.’48 But, understandably, Jane may have had her reservations about the ‘primary laws of nature’, for they could also mean the sporty masculine life of competitive fly-fishing, interminable tall stories and riverside taverns.

  That spring of 1813 in London, Jane in turn tried introducing Davy to a new sport of fashionable lionising. Young Lord Byron had recently returned from the Near East and published the first two cantos of Childe Harold (1812) and The Bride of Abydos (1813). He was taking the literary salons and ladies by storm, and proved an early capture. Jane wrote airily to a friend back in Edinburgh: ‘Lord Byron is still here, but talking of Greece with the feelings of a poet and the intentions of a Wanderer. He is to have a quiet breakfast here with the intention of an Introduction to Miss Edgeworth … I expect the sense of one, the imagination of the other, with the genius of my own Treasure [Davy] to afford a high intellectual banquet.’49 Unexpectedly, Byron and Davy hit it off rather well, and later when His Lordship was self-exiled in Italy, Davy remained one of the few Englishmen that he could stand to meet. He would even put him in his poem Don Juan (1819-24).

  Davy continued to compensate for London socialising with solitary fishing, sometimes slipping as far away as his beloved Cornwall. On 15 April 1813 he wrote Jane a long, tender letter from Bodmin, describing himself alone beside a remote river at sunset: About the time you were sitting down to dinner I was standing in the midst of a secluded valley upon a bridge above the fork of the [river] Allan, watching the last purple of the sky dying away upon the rapid water, and by its decay making visible a bright star.’ There is perhaps an undertone of reproach in this, yet also a kind of romantic understanding. As often as he could, Davy sent her propitiatory fish wrapped in ice on the overnight mail coach to London: gleaming trout and tender young grayling.50

  3

  In the north of England, far from the London salons, quite other events were unfolding. On 24 May 1812 the great Felling colliery mining disaster had shaken the population of Sunderland. Every miner in the coalpit, all ninety-two of them, was killed under horrific circumstances: some mutilated, some ‘scorched dry like mummies’, and some blown headless out of the mineshaft ‘like bird-shot’. An underground fire raged for many days, and it took more than six weeks before the bodies could be recovered.51 Hitherto Felling had been a model pit, with a clean accident record. The disaster shook the whole mining community of the North-East. Ever deeper mineshafts were bringing increasing fatalities, and it was calculated that over 300 miners had been killed in the past five years, almost all by explosion of ‘fire-damp’. This was a lethal gas released by newly opened coal seams. It was believed to be some form of hydrogen, which when mixed with air could be ignited by a single miner’s candle flame.♣

  A Safety Committee led by the Duke of Northumberland and the Bishop of Durham was formed to find a practical solution. Campaigns were launched by the vicar of Jarrow, the Rev. John Hodgson, and by Dr Robert Gray, a future Bishop of Bristol. Mining experts put forward various ideas, including ventilation schemes and several prototype safety lamps, one manufactured by Dr William Clanny, a Sunderland physician, and another by a local mining engineer, George Stephenson. But none was considered sufficiently effective or reliable, and the Committee dithered. A second explosion shook the Felling colliery in December 1813, and a further twenty-two men died. Matters now became urgent. After several meetings it was decided that a professional scientific opinion should be sought at a national level, and an official approach by Dr Gray to Sir Humphry Davy in London was decided upon. But by the time a letter was sent to the Royal Institution in the winter of 1813, Davy and Jane were already on the Continent.52

  On 13 October 1813 Sir Humphry and Lady Davy (very conscious of both their rank and their nationality) embarked in their own carriage on an eighteen-month Continental tour. With them went the young Michael Faraday as their travelling companion: awkward, socially naïve, but very anxious to please. He belonged to a rare sect of Biblical fundamentalists, the Sandemanians, puritan and unworldly in outlook, though with a strong sense of public duty and service. Davy treated him easily, as he had done in the laboratory: as a scientific assistant and promising young protégé. Jane, with her happy memories of travelling with John Davy in Scotland, was less patient. Faraday had never travelled outside London, spoke no French or Italian, was shy and uncouth, and probably embarrassed by Jane’s high style and evident sexuality.

  She in turn may also have found Faraday physically awkward, and even irritating. He was small and stocky — not more than five foot four — with a large head that always seemed slightly too big for his body. His broad, open face was surrounded by an unruly mass of curling hair parted rather punctiliously in the middle (a style he never abandoned). His large, dark, wide-apart eyes gave him a curious air of animal innocence. He spoke all his life with a flat London accent (no match for Jane’s elegant Morningside), and had difficulty in pronouncing his ‘r’s, so that as he himself said, he was always destined to introduce himself as ‘Michael Fawaday’. In fact none of this prevented him from eventually becoming one of the greatest public lecturers of his generation. But it evidently did not appeal to Jane.53

  There was no meeting of minds, and Jane simply started to treat Faraday as a valet. She insisted that he travel on the outside of the coach with the luggage and her husband’s chemical equipment. A difficult trip followed, despite Davy’s pleasing lionisation by French and Italian scientists. Perhaps as a technique of personal survival, Faraday immediately started to keep a daily journal of his adventures (which has survived), and began an extensive and surprisingly humorous correspondence with his friend Benjamin Abbott of the City Philosophical Society back in London.54

  On 2 November Davy received the Prix Napoléon (worth 6,000 livres) from the Institut de France in Paris. He knew that accepting the award might be unpopular in wartime England, but followed Banks’s line at the Royal Society that science should be above national conflicts. He told Tom Poole: ‘Some people say I ought not to accept this prize; and there have been foolish paragraphs in the papers to that effect; but if the two countries or governments are at war, the men of science are not. That would, indeed, be a civil war of the worst description: we should rather, through the instrumentality of men of science, soften the asperities of national hostility.’55

  This attitude was unpopular at home, and The Times attacked Davy’s journey as unpatriotic in a time of war. Even the liberal-minded Leigh Hunt wrote a long editorial in the Examiner for 24 October 1813, defending the international dignity of science, but also criticising Davy for indulging in ‘paltry vanity’ among French admirers in Paris. Hunt wittily imagined his triumphal progress down the Parisian boulevards: ‘Ah, there is the grande philosophe, Davie!’ – ‘See here the interesting Chevalier Humphrey!’56

  In fact Davy carefully avoided an audience with Napoleon himself, and referred to him contemptuously as ‘the Corsican robber’.57 Jane refused to adopt Parisian fashions, and was
once jeered at by a crowd in the Tuileries for her small English hat. They were both appalled by all the looted works of art in the Louvre (then renamed the Musée Napoléon), and pretended to admire only ‘the splendid picture-frames’. But Davy was deeply impressed by the Jardin des Plantes and the Bibliothèque Nationale, fully aware that there was still no equivalent in London.

  He was warmly received by Cuvier, Ampère and Berthollet, but got into an awkward priority dispute with the gifted young chemist Joseph Gay-Lussac. Gay-Lussac, Davy’s exact contemporary, had made a popular name in France with his intrepid ballooning exploits, and had been hard on Davy’s heels with potassium and sodium experiments. Both were now given by the Académie des Sciences a newly isolated substance to analyse: a strange violet crystal recently found as a byproduct of gunpowder manufacture. The competitive nature of this gesture was unmistakeable. Davy had only his small trunk of portable chemical apparatus to work with, but accepted the challenge with alacrity. He delayed his departure from Paris for a month, closeting himself with Faraday, filling his hotel rooms with acrid fumes and ‘very bright greenest yellow’ gas, much to Faraday’s delight, Jane’s irritation and the management’s alarm.58

  The rival analytic papers were submitted to the Académie almost simultaneously in December. Both identified the crystals as a new element, which could also be extracted from seaweed. Gay-Lussac’s short paper was actually presented and published first, on 12 December. Davy, taken by surprise, presented his to the Académie on 13 December, but unblushingly antedated it to 11 December, and had it published as such in the Journal de Physique. He claimed, perhaps justly, that he had previously shared his key ideas with Gay-Lussac.59 He also wrote to Banks claiming the entire discovery for himself, and had a full account swiftly published by the Royal Society. In consequence his analysis and naming of the unknown substance as ‘iodine’ was generally accepted, although the priority remains disputed by the French to this day.