The Age of Wonder (59 page)

Davy had one further scientific seduction to offer. He confided to Jane that the Prince Regent was about to confer a knighthood upon him, for services to chemistry, in the forthcoming Birthday Honours. It would be the first scientific knighthood of the Regency, indeed the first since Sir Isaac Newton. She need no longer feel ashamed of him at the dinner tables of Mayfair. At the third time of asking, Davy’s proposal of marriage to Jane Apreece was at last accepted. He reacted with genuine rapture. T have passed a night sleepless from excess of happiness. It seems to me as if I began to live only a few hours ago…The great future object of my life will be your happiness…My happiness will be entirely in your will.’
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Congratulations were now in order, and Sir Joseph Banks was pleased and rather amused that one of his young scientific protégés had made such a fine-and wealthy-match: ‘She has fallen in love with Science and marries him in order to obtain a footing in the Academic Groves…It will give to Science a new kind of
eclat
; we want nothing so much as the countenance of the ladies to increase our popularity.’
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Banks evidently teased the bridegroom in a worldly way. ‘Davy is on the point of being married to the gentle Dame Apreece who has at least £4,000 a year, the half of it her own. He swears he will never desert Science. I tell him she will bring him into Parliament and make a fool of him. We shall see how this matter will end.’

Davy had no such political ambitions, and believed that Jane fully accepted his passionate commitment to science. In fact Banks was quite handsome about Jane, and saw her as a valuable, if probably bossy, addition to the social life of the Royal Society: ‘If she is satisfied with being installed as the Queen of Literature we shall all be ready to put ourselves under her Dominion, and I think she is Quick and Clever enough to reign over us and keep us all in very Good Order.’ Coming from Banks, who had no high opinion of bluestockings, this was handsome indeed.
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Davy wrote delightedly to his mother in Penzance, proudly and rather grandly announcing the news. He said that but for Jane, he had never expected to marry. His letter to his younger brother John of March 1812 has a touching nobility and simplicity.

My dear John,

Many thanks for your last letter. I have been very miserable. The lady whom I love best of any human being, has been very ill. She is now well and I am happy.

Mrs Apreece has consented to marry me, and when this event takes place, I shall not envy kings, princes, or potentates.

Do not fall in love. It is very dangerous!…

Ever most affectionately yours

H. Davy.
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The romantic dénouement was carefully orchestrated. In April Davy delivered what was agreed would be his final lectures at the Royal Institution. He was awarded an emeritus professorship, and granted the continuing use of all research facilities. On 8 April he was knighted by the Prince Regent, and three days later, on 11 April, he married Mrs Apreece, who thereupon became Lady Davy.

Among much expensive jewellery, he gave her a symbolic wedding present. He had collected a decade of his Royal Institution lectures, and now edited and assembled them as his
Elements of Chemical Philosophy.
This book was the cornerstone of his early scientific career, and proclaimed the progressive value of science and its power to ‘investigate and master’ nature. On 1 June it was published with a formal dedication to Lady Jane Davy.
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Chemical Philosophy
was too technical to achieve a wide general readership, but it contained a powerful historical ‘Introduction’, which placed chemistry at the forefront of all contemporary scientific research. By contrast, his more popular
Agricultural Chemistry,
published simultaneously, ran to many editions over the next decade. With these two publications, for which he was paid 1,000 guineas (a sum which compares well with what Walter Scott received for his poems), Davy had made chemistry as popular as astronomy.
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He himself seemed to symbolise the hopes and ambitions of Romantic science to produce a better world for all mankind. Among others, the young poet Percy Shelley began to incorporate Davy’s ideas into his work, beginning with his visionary materialist poem
Queen Mab
of 1812, with its long scientific prose notes.
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Shelley’s book order for 29 July 1812, when he was beginning the poem at Lynmouth in Devon, included Mary Wollstonecraft’s
Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
David Hartley’s
Observations on Man
and Davy’s
Elements of Chemical Philosophy:
a characteristic mixture of radical politics, sceptical philosophy and the new science. The vogue for attaching explanatory prose notes, both historical and scientific, to epic poems had been popularised by Erasmus Darwin in
The Botanic Garden,
taken up by Southey in
Thalaba
(which Davy had edited for the press), and then admiringly imitated by the twenty-year-old Shelley in
Queen Mab.
Underlying it was the formal problem of how far scientific data could any longer be convincingly expressed in poetry (as Lucretius had done). De Quincey would later suggest that they had to be separated as the ‘Literature of Knowledge’ and the ‘Literature of Power’. Shelley’s
Prometheus Unbound
(1820) was to be arguably the last successful attempt to combine the two in a major English poem.
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Davy’s lectures in
Chemical Philosophy
opened with a brilliant short survey of the entire field: ‘An Historical View of the Progress of Chemistry’.
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Starting with the early Egyptians and the Greeks, continuing with the ‘delusions’ of medieval alchemists and the revolutionary discoveries of the early Royal Society in seventeenth-century London, he then celebrated the astonishing advance of Enlightenment chemistry throughout Europe over the past thirty years, culminating in the work of Priestley, Cavendish and Lavoisier, and his own discoveries in electrochemistry, which he emphasised were being rapidly developed by many other chemists on the Continent. Davy was notably generous to the French-Lavoisier, Berthollet and Gay-Lussac-and the Scandinavians; but he drew a convincing picture of an entire scientific community of minds at work across Europe. He made numerous unexpected asides: the importance of Arabic chemistry, the witty suggestion that Cleopatra might have been an ‘experimental’ chemist with her love potions, the crucial importance of ‘new instruments’ (such as the voltaic battery) in taking research forward, and the paradoxical fact that Newton’s genius in many ways hindered chemistry by turning attention to ‘optics, mechanics, and astronomy’.
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Most striking is Davy’s power to engage the reader in a direct, non-technical way. The essay opens with poetic simplicity: ‘The gradual and almost imperceptible decay of the leaves and branches of a fallen tree exposed to the atmosphere, and the rapid combustion of wood in our fires, are both chemical operations. The object of Chemical Philosophy is to ascertain the causes of all phenomena of this kind, and to discover the laws by which they are governed. The ends of this branch of knowledge are the applications of natural substances to new uses, for increasing the comforts and enjoyments of man; and for the demonstrating of the order, harmony, and intelligent design of the system of the earth.’
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From this time chemistry joined astronomy and botany as the most popular and accessible forms of modern science for amateurs, and as a new doorway into the ‘intelligent design’ of the universe. It was a sign of the times that ‘Portable Chemical Chests’ began to go on sale in Piccadilly, priced between six and twenty guineas.
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Davy would later emphasise how few pieces of equipment an experimental chemist needed.
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Chemistry guides and primers, besides Jane Marcet’s, began to be widely available. Coleridge reflected in one of his notebooks of this time: ‘Whoever attended a first Course of Chemical Lectures, or read for the first time a Compendium of modern Chemistry (Lavoisier, Parkinson, Thomson, or Brande) without experiencing, even as a
sensation,
a sudden
enlargement & emancipation
of his Intellect, when the conviction first flashed upon him that the Flame of the Gaslight, and the River Water were the very same things (= elements) and different only as AB
uniting
with B, and as AB united?’
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While annotating the visionary works of the German mystic Jakob Boehme, Coleridge added a further aside on the clarifying intellectual impact of the scientific approach: ‘Humphry Davy in his laboratory is probably doing more for the Science of Mind, than all the Metaphysicians have done from Aristotle to Hartley, inclusive.’
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Later he would fear, wrongly, that Davy was becoming a ‘mere Atomist’, but his recognition of the significance of Davy’s ‘chemical revolution’ and the ‘dynamic’ vision of nature that it revealed never faltered, despite their personal estrangement.
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In many ways spring 1812 was the climax of Davy’s early career. The unknown boy from Penzance had achieved a European reputation in science, an emeritus professorship and a knighthood, and a glamorous society marriage. Yet he was still only thirty-three. A formal visit to Cornwall by the new Lady Davy was promised at this moment of celebration, but never in fact materialised. It seems that Davy was still embarrassed by his humble roots.

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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.’
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