Humphry Davy: Life Beyond the Lamp E-Book

Raymond Lamont-Brown

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2004

Seitenzahl: 365

Leseprobe

LIFE BEYOND THE LAMP

RAYMOND LAMONT-BROWN

First published in 2004 by Sutton Publishing

The History Press The Mill, Brimscombe Port Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved © Raymond Lamont-Brown, 2004, 2013

The right of Raymond Lamont-Brown, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9500 2

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Acknowledgements

Humphry Davy as Others Saw Him

Chronology

Contemporaries, Rivals and Colleagues

Prologue

One

The Reckless Experimenter

Two

Maturing Medic, Ripening Rhymer

Three

Erratic Genius

Four

At Grips with the Harsh Mistress

Five

Entry to the Abode of Vice

Six

Friendship Low, Honours High

Seven

The Mercurial Chemist and the Lion-Catcher

Eight

A Continental Adventure

Nine

Darkness into Light

Ten

Parnassus Scaled

Eleven

Twilight at Geneva

Epilogue

Family Tree

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

This volume has been greatly enhanced by a study of the biographical work done on Humphry Davy by Sir Harold Brewer Hartley, Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, James Pickering Kendall, Professor of Chemistry and Dean of the Faculty of Science in the University of Edinburgh, and Anne Treneer, who developed her paper ‘Sir Humphry Davy and the Poets’ into a biography which gave due emphasis to Davy’s Cornish background. To this has been added the more recent seminal work on Davy’s early life by the late chemist and historian Dr June Zimmerman Fullmer, latterly of Ohio State University, and a modern update on Davy’s scientific background by David Knight, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science in the University of Durham. Thanks are due, too, to Dr James Hamilton, curator, University of Birmingham, for answering questions on Michael Faraday and for references from his Faraday: The Life (2002). Similar thanks are offered to Dr Frank A.J.L. James, Reader in History of Science, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, London, editor of The Correspondence of Michael Faraday.

Each quotation is acknowledged in the Notes, and every effort has been made to trace copyright holders. In this matter particular thanks are accorded to the Royal Society, the Royal Institution and the Institution of Electrical Engineers. The essays ‘Lady Davy in her Letters’, by W.M. Parker MBE (Quarterly Review, January 1962) and Richard S. Ross’s ‘John Davy: Physician, Scientist, Author, Brother of Sir Humphry’ (Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1953) is also acknowledged, as is Roger Sharrock’s ‘The Chemist and the Poet: Sir Humphry Davy and the Preface to Lyrical Ballads’ (Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 1962), along with the data on Sir Humphry Davy’s association with the founding of London Zoo in Centenary History of the Zoological Society (1929) by Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell.

The text has also been enriched by the advice, wise words and information from the following:

In Cornwall

Mrs Jane Hay, for data on, and a reading of private letters and notebooks of Lady Davy; Mrs Gillian Green, for material on Dr John Tonkin and other Davy matters; Mrs Angela Stead; the Revd Dr David Phipps; Renée Jackman, Cornwall Record Office; Mrs Elizabeth Le Grice, Arts Information Officer, Penzance Branch Library; Annabelle Read, Librarian, Morrab Library, Penzance; Pat Wall, Cornwall Family History Society, Truro; Joanne Laing, Cornish Studies Library, Redruth; Roderick James, Headmaster, Humphry Davy School, Penzance; Mark Thackeray, County Reference Library, Truro; John Humphreys.

In Switzerland

Barbara Roth, Conservateur des manuscrits, Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire, Genève; Réjane Etter, archiviste-assistante, Genève; Anouck Dunant Gonzenbach, archiviste-assistante, Archives d’Etat, Genève; Julia Murray, British Pro-Consul, Geneva.

Elsewhere

John Birtwhistle; Milo Kerr; Dee Cook, Archivist of the Society of Apothecaries of London; John Wells, Department of Muniments and University of Archives, Cambridge University Library; Elizabeth Corrigan, General Register Office, Southport; Christine Reynolds, Assistant Keeper of Muniments, Westminster Abbey; David Engleheart; Miss Helen Burton, Keele Information Services, Keele University; Professor David M. Knight, University of Durham; Dr Frank A.J.L. James, Reader in History of Science, the Royal Institution; Dame Jean M. Scott; Alan Palmer; Michael Palmer, the Zoological Society of London; Clara Anderson, the Royal Society; Alice Ford-Smith, the Wellcome Trust; Canon David Weston, Carlisle; Alice Blackford, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; Gary Thom, Archivist, British Museum; John Coverdale; Andrew Bethune, Public Library, Edinburgh; Mrs Caroline Clifford, Local Studies Library, Huntingdon Library; Nicola Best, Library of the Royal Society of Chemistry; Dr F.H. Willmoth, Archivist, Jesus College, Cambridge; Ursula Mitchell, Manuscript Department, Trinity College Library, Dublin; Kay Walters, Librarian, the Athenaeum; and Sarah Dodgson.

Illustrations

Each is identified in situ for ownership. The following have been helpful in tracing and identifying images: Matthew Bailey, National Portrait Gallery; Christine Woollett, the Royal Society; William Schupbach, Wellcome Library; Sheena Stoddard, Curator of Fine Art, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery; and in Penzance, Jan Ruhrmund, the Morrab Library, and Mrs Gillian Green.

Humphry Davy as Others Saw Him

He is a very agreeable and intelligent young man; and we have interesting conversations in the evening. The principal failing in his character is that he does not smoke.

John Dalton (1766–1844), chemist

I found in him a genius of extraordinary grasp and clearness of perception and generally accepted ideas, who was hindered by no difficulties when breaking new paths.

Jöns Jakob Berzelius (1779–1848), Swedish chemist

Humphry Davy possesses the most miraculous talents I ever met with or heard of, and will I think do more for medicine than any person who has ever gone before him.

Robert Southey (1774–1843) to C.W. William Wynn, 30 March 1799

Davy’s style of lecturing is much in favour of himself, though not perhaps entirely suited to the place [the Royal Institution]; it has rather a little awkwardness, but it is that air which bespeaks real modesty and good sense: he is only a little awkward because he cannot condescend to assume that theatrical quackery of manner which might have a more imposing effect.

Francis Horner (1778–1817), MP for St Ives

He was a man of powerful imagination; if he had not been a great philosopher he would have been a great poet. He loved knowledge for its own sake. If he had been cast on a desert island, I believe he would have been happy and busied himself in experiments. He loved knowledge intensely for its own sake; but he loved praise even more.

Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie (1783–1862), royal physician

[Humphry Davy was] the individual who would have distinguished himself in the first rank of England’s living poets, if the genius of our country had not decreed that he should rather be in the first rank of its philosophers and scientific benefactors.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), poet

Sir Humphry Davy Abominated gravy. He lived in the odium Of having discovered sodium.

Clerihew by E.C. Bentley, Biography for Beginners, 1905

Chronology

1778

17 December Humphry Davy born at Market Jew Street, Penzance.

1787

Davy family moves to the farm of Varfell, at Ludgvan.

1790

Birth of John Davy, Humphry Davy’s only brother and later important biographer.

1795

10 February Davy apprenticed to Dr John Bingham Borlase, apothecary, Penzance.

1798

20 December Davy leaves Penzance for Clifton, Bristol.

1799

11 April Davy successfully obtains pure nitrous oxide, laughing gas.

1800

July Corrects proofs for Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads.

1801

January Receives offer from Count von Rumford to join the staff of the Royal Institution, London.

11 February Joins the Royal Institution as Assistant Lecturer in Chemistry and other duties. First lecture a great public success.

1 June Appointed Lecturer in Chemistry, the Royal Institution.

1802

21 January Davy gives introductory lectures on chemistry at the Royal Institution.

21 May Davy styled Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution.

1803

17 November Davy elected Fellow of the Royal Society.

1804

3 July Admitted Fellow-Commoner at Jesus College, Cambridge.

1805

February Appointed Director of the Royal Institution laboratory.

15 March Lectures at the Royal Society and receives the Copley medal.

1806

20 November Begins lectures on galvanic electricity at the Royal Society as First Bakerian Lecture.

Joint Secretary of the Royal Society; serves until 1812.

1807

Awarded Prix Napoleon by the Institut de France.

6 December Discovers potassium.

19 November Second Bakerian Lecture on decomposition of potassium.

1808

15 December Third Bakerian Lecture.

1809

16 November Fourth Bakerian Lecture.

1810

15 October Fifth Bakerian Lecture.

1812

8 April Davy knighted at St James’s Palace by the Prince Regent.

11 April Humphry Davy marries Jane Apreece.

1813

1 March Michael Faraday appointed Davy’s assistant.

13 October Commences first continental tour.

2 November Davy receives medal at the Institut de France.

1815

Invention of the safety lamp.

1818

26 May Second continental tour.

20 October Davy’s knighthood advanced to baronetcy.

Receives Rumford Medal from the Royal Society.

1820

Elected President of the Royal Society.

Becomes Trustee of the British Museum.

1824

Tour of Norway and Sweden.

1825

Davy a founder of the London Athenaeum Club.

1826

26 February Davy co-founder of London Zoological Society.

8 June Sixth Bakerian Lecture.

1827

22 January Tour of Italy with John Davy.

1828

29 March Continental tour with John Tobin.

1829

28 May Arrives at Geneva.

29 May Sir Humphry Davy dies.

Contemporaries, Rivals and Colleagues

André-Marie ampére, 1775–1836 French mathematician and physicist, laid the foundations of the science of electrodynamics; name given to basic SI unit of electric current (the ampere, amp).

Amedeo avogadro, 1776–1856 Professor of Physics at Turin. Formulated Avogadro’s Law.

Sir Joseph banks, 1744–1820 Botanist. President of the Royal Society for forty-one years.

Comte Claude-Louis berthollet, 1748–1822 French chemist; colleague of Lavoisier.

Jöns Jakob berzelius, 1779–1848 Swedish chemist; discovered various elements; Royal Society gold medallist.

Joseph black, 1728–99 Scottish physician and chemist; Professor of Anatomy and Chemistry, Glasgow; Professor of Medicine and Chemistry, Edinburgh.

Henry cavendish, 1731–1810 Natural philosopher and chemist. Formulated Cavendish Experiment.

Jean Antoine Claude chaptal, 1756–1832, Comte de Chantaloupe French chemist and Napoleonic statesman.

Nicholas Clement French chemist.

Baron George Leopold cuvier, 1769–1832 French anatomist, Assistant Professor of Comparative Anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes, Paris; Professor of Natural History at the College de France.

John dalton, 1766–1844 Chemist. Formulated Dalton’s Law, and described Daltonism (colour blindness).

Erasmus darwin, 1731–1802 Physician and poet (grandfather of Charles Darwin).

Charles Bernard desormes French chemist.

Michael faraday, 1791–1867 Chemist and physicist.

Luigi galvani, 1737–98 Italian physiologist; discovered animal electricity.

Karl Friedrich gauss, 1777–1855 German mathematician, astronomer and physicist, Director of the Göttingen Observatory.

Joseph Louis gay-lussac, 1778–1850 French chemist and physicist.

Sir William herschel, 1738–1822 German-born British astronomer; private astronomer to George III; discovered planet Uranus and several satellites.

Baron Alexander von humboldt, 1769–1859 German naturalist; chemical experiments with Gay-Lussac.

Pierre Simon, Marquess de laplace, 1749–1827 French mathematician and astronomer.

Antoine Laurent lavoisier, 1743–94 French chemist; founder of modern chemistry.

Guyton de morveau French chemist.

William nicholson, 1753–1815 Physicist; constructed the first voltaic pile in England.

Hans Christian öersted, 1777–1851 Danish physicist; professor at the University of Copenhagen; discovered, 1820, magnetic effect of electric current.

Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias olbers, 1758–1840 German physician and astronomer; discovered comets and minor planets.

Joseph priestley, 1733–1804 Pioneer chemist, one of the discoverers of oxygen, and a prominent member of the Lunar Society.

Carl Wilhelm scheele, 1742–86 Swedish chemist.

Baron Louis Jacques thénard, 1777–1857 French chemist, discoverer of sodium and potassium peroxides. Thénard’s Blue named for him. Professor of the College de France, Chancellor of the University of Paris.

Louis Nicolas vauquelin, 1763–1829 French analytical chemist, Professor of Chemistry at Paris, 1809, discovered such materials as chromium and beryllium.

Prologue

Humphry Davy left no children. Yet he was the father of many a scientific process now a part of chemical history. There are some, too, who think that he was the father of a curious literary phenomenon.

During the dark December days of 1799, Humphry Davy and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge dined with the novelist and philosopher William Godwin. Davy’s senior by two decades, Godwin was a Whig atheist whose Enquiry Concerning Political Justice of 1793 had made him a leader of English radicalism. Two years before Davy met Godwin, the philosopher had married author Mary Wollstonecraft, who died of septicaemia shortly after the birth of her daughter Mary in 1797. That child was to be the vital link between Davy’s genius and the literary phenomenon. Godwin was much taken with Davy and described him to Coleridge as ‘the most extraordinary human-being’ he had ever met.

In the summer of 1816, when still the eighteen-year-old mistress of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, with whom she had notoriously eloped to the Continent in 1814, Mary Godwin conceived the tale of Victor Frankenstein. This ‘pale student of unhallowed arts’, as she was to call him, was a foul and terrifying creature who would become one of the most famous characters in literature. Mary Godwin – who became Shelley’s second wife in December 1816 – met up with her step-sister Clair Clairmont and her lover Lord Byron at the Villa Diodate, Geneva. One evening over dinner they fell to discussing ghost stories and the latest theories of the chemists and natural philosophers. This was an age when intellectuals sought answers to the fundamental questions of human existence and explored the new ideas in natural science to do so. Already chemists had written about how oxygen was necessary for the respiration of living creatures; Luigi Galvani (1737–98) had shown how electrical impulses could stimulate muscle tissue; and Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) had given publicity to the electrical basis of lightning.

Shelley was fascinated by these phenomena, collecting apparatus for experimenting with electrical and gaseous substances; together the quartet speculated on how dead tissue might be animated. Through her family connections Mary Godwin was acquainted with the views of Humphry Davy on electricity and how the force occurred in nature; she had also read Davy’s Elements of Chemical Philosophy of 1812 and her father’s library contained copies of Davy’s published lectures.

One night Mary Shelley found herself enthralled in a dream-like vision. In it she watched ‘a hideous phantasm’ brought to life ‘by some powerful engine’. Out of this vision she formed the plot of her novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus of 1818.1 Literary critics have detected the figure of Humphry Davy in the novel’s Professor Waldman of the University of Ingolstadt, and have traced some of the professor’s dialogue to Davy’s own opinions. The plot for the book is developed in the course of a series of letters from the Arctic by the main character Robert Walton to his sister Margaret Saville. At the North Pole Walton believes he will find secrets about nature’s electricity – Davy had averred that ‘electricity might be condensed light given off at the poles as auroras’.2

Davy’s connection with all this, despite the seriousness of his work, is not surprising. He latterly moved in literary as well as scientific circles, and had lived and studied alongside older men whose chemical scholarship was only a step away from alchemy.

Sir Walter Scott, kinsman of Lady Davy, caught the spirit of the age when he encouraged his friend and correspondent Sir David Brewster, Principal of the United Colleges of St Salvators and St Leonard, St Andrews, to bring to the public a wider knowledge of the esoteric world of science – or ‘natural magic’ as the romantic Scott and his circle dubbed it. Brewster was a leading scientific inventor of his day, with his Katadioptric Telescope, the Reflecting Goriometer and his popular Victorian parlour entertainment, the Kaleidoscope, enthralling the public and fostering an awareness of science in the popular imagination. And from his home of Allerly, near Gattonside, Melrose, in the Scottish Borders, on 24 April 1832 Brewster completed his Letters on Natural Magic Addressed to Sir Walter Scott, Bart., which was to race through several editions.3

Among the treats of ‘Maillardet’s Conjuror’ and the ‘Automaton Chess-player’, Brewster summoned up his then dead contemporary Sir Humphry Davy as discoverer of ‘the paradise or intoxicating gas’, that is nitrous oxide, the ‘laughing gas’ of popular parlance, with its ‘remarkable effects produced upon the human frame by . . . inhalation’.4

Brewster offered his readers a series of experimental examples of the effects of nitrous oxide on the human system, citing cases from the notebooks of such as Professor Silliman of Yale College, but left the last personal narrative to Davy:

Immediately after my return from a long journey, being fatigued, I respired nine quarts of nitrous oxide, having been precisely thirty-three days without breathing any. The feelings were different from those I had experienced on former experiments. After the first six or seven respirations, I gradually began to lose the perception of external things, and a vivid and intense recollection of some former experiments passed through my mind, so that I called out, ‘What an annoying concatenation of ideas!’5

Brewster, however, endeavoured at length to play down the natural magic of these phenomena and attribute them to divine will and divine power. After all, he said, ‘Knowledge, indeed, is at once the handmaid and the companion of true religion’.6

Davy was one of those scientists who with a ‘simple religious belief’, channelled his skills and enthusiasm into solving specific scientific problems within his own range of interests. All this was within the ‘general intellectual phenomena of the age’,7 wherein often amateur researchers promoted new ideas and beliefs to improve such areas as public health. From this basis too, there followed numerous scientific developments ranging from the inventions, say, in photography of David Octavius Hill and William Henry Fox Talbot, to the refinements that enabled the first transatlantic crossing by a steamship achieved by the US packet-boat Savannah in 1819.

In the light of such developments, historians such as Sir Ernest Llewellyn Woodward (1890–1971) were able to state that Davy’s Discourse Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry, based on his lectures at the Royal Institution in 1802, remains ‘one of the earliest and most remarkable examples of constructive belief in progress’.8 Woodward noted that Davy was drawing together important scientific ideas which had first surfaced in the seventeenth century, and which had been neither crushed by the impending horrors of the French Revolution nor diluted by the passage of time, to bring them afresh to an audience eager to learn how the modern world could be improved by science. What Davy was trying to do was to remove chemistry in particular from the realm of the supernatural, to give it a life based on reality linked to the powers of nature all around. He believed ‘that man was now able by his experiments to interrogate nature with the power, not simply as a scholar, passive and seeking only to understand her operations, but rather as a master, active with his own instruments’.9

By the time Davy began his experiments, the Theory of Phlogiston – the widespread belief that all combustible elements contained phlogiston (an imaginary element thought to be liberated when substances were heated) – was replaced by a new system promoted in 1789 by the ‘Founder of Modern Chemistry’, Paris-born Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743–94), who discovered oxygen by correctly interpreting the findings and hypotheses of Joseph Priestley. Lavoisier’s Traité élémentaire de Chimie became a masterpiece. For the first time it became clear to Davy that matter was composed of different elements.

Humphry Davy, then, began his researches at one of the most stimulating periods in the history of chemistry. The scientific spirit of the age helped to nurture his genius in an atmosphere of burgeoning new inventions and theories. Yet his was not the world of secluded laboratory starchiness, as his poetic out-pourings were to show. Davy was a social animal. His confident and forceful personality helped project the intellectual and cultural relevance of his work to the public. Although he was and is mostly remembered as the inventor of the miner’s safety lamp, his discoveries such as sodium and his connections with poets and writers, along with his social mobility, gave him a public acclaim in his own time which is not fully appreciated by the general public today.

When Humphry Davy was at the peak of his fame, Britain was the undisputed leader of Europe on land and sea. But by Davy’s death in 1829, the source of power for that leadership came from a very different direction than at the year of his birth in 1778. A new middle class was in the making and men such as Davy helped to define it. Thus in Britain in general and England in particular, a nation was emerging based on industry not land; on middle-class enterprise rather than aristocratic influence; on religion rather than the irreligious superficiality associated with such members of the beau monde as George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales. Interest in science and the arts grew apace, spreading from the galleries, libraries and private collections of the rich to provincial manufacturing towns with their newly established museums, reading rooms, workers’ institutes and municipal galleries. Davy was among those who exploited this growing climate of cultural development.

Davy lived during one of the most dramatic eras in the history of science, and he was to use science as the driving force behind his rise from modest circumstances to the highest echelons of society. It was a remarkable feat. In this age of scientific contention he became a controversial figure and made enemies and friends with equal gusto. Although Davy absorbed new ideas like a sponge, if he did not agree with them he could be cavalierly dismissive of them and their promoters.

One name, however, will always be associated with Davy, that of Michael Faraday (1791–1867) who went to work as an assistant to Davy and from whom he learned chemistry. Faraday’s life was to be entwined with Davy’s for many years and not always pleasantly; and Faraday’s relationship with Lady Davy was to be a rough road. Both Davy and Faraday played a role in the history of the Royal Society and the Royal Institution of which they were both professors but, unlike Davy, Faraday declined a knighthood.

A number of scholarly tomes have appeared on the work of Sir Humphry Davy. Some biographers have tried to put the young Humphry Davy into his Cornish-Penzance context. Perhaps the most successful were the late Anne Treneer (in 1963) and more recently the late Dr June Zimmerman Fullmer (in 2000). Yet the first real attempt to detail the boyhood of Humphry Davy, and one interlaced with scientific explanations of simple experiments which Davy conducted, was that by Henry Mayhew (1812–87).

One of three author brothers, Mayhew was a dramatist and originator of the publication Punch, and as a philanthropic journalist wrote his compassionate investigation London Labour and London Poor in 1851. In 1855 he tackled the early life of Humphry Davy published as The Wonders of Science: Or, Young Humphry Davy: The Life of a Wonderful Boy. It was written for young boys in a series aimed at promoting the boyhoods of great men. Davy’s boyhood was thus deemed to be a fine example of the Victorian tenet that anyone from a poor background could make good providing they worked hard. Mayhew dedicated the book to Michael Faraday, because Mayhew believed Davy was the ‘foster-father’ of Faraday’s ‘great genius’. Although the volume is a predominantly fictionalised account, Mayhew did draw together some of the anecdotes of Davy’s youth.

Much of the modern material on Davy dwells on his chemical background, or has been prepared as study material for a scientific audience. So this volume attempts to look more clearly at Davy the man; to bring him once more to the forefront of public recognition as a brilliant communicator of difficult science; and to dispel as many myths about him as possible. The book aims to offer a sense of Davy’s achievements as a man who was not only a star of the Royal Institution but someone who brought his science to the dinner tables of society and the parlours of the middle classes.

In these pages, too, will be found Davy the inventor . . . of the miner’s safety lamp; Davy the discover . . . of sodium and other elements; Davy the scientific promoter . . . of laughing gas; Davy the traveller . . . in enemy France, for instance; and Davy the remarkable human bridge between the worlds of science and literature. The book attempts to bring out of the shadows for the first time Jane, Lady Davy, the boisterous nature of whose marriage to Davy, in which she struggled to usurp the place of chemistry as the dominant influence in his life, was a talking point in society. Jane Davy, though, did much to promote her husband as a prominent figure in non-scientific society and her contacts opened many doors for him during his continental travels.

Author’s Note

Within the diaries and journals quoted in the book, to avoid heavy-handed editing, spelling and punctuation have largely been left as they appear in the originals.

ONE

The Reckless Experimenter

To the eighteenth-century fine folk of London, some 280 miles away, Cornwall was a somewhat far-flung location. Yet because of its topographical position, Cornwall was to win fame during the Napoleonic Wars as a key site in the naval campaigns. Falmouth developed as a port of call for scores of Royal Navy and merchant ships as well as the many packet-boats that brought news from the Continent days before the London newspapers caught up with international events. On such an occasion the schooner HMS Pickle brought intelligence to Cornwall of the glorious victory at the battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805. Hence, when Humphry Davy was riding high in London society, chronicler John Heard was able to remark, ‘the Western County of England is no longer that terra incognita, pregnant with everything horrific and marvellous, which the ignorance of untravelled eastern-writers have feigned’.1 Napoleon’s activities across the Channel also helped Cornwall develop as a resort for leisure and health as war came to restrict foreign travel.

Hewn out of the Hundred of Penwith, Penzance – ‘Holy Headland’ of the Cornish pen sans – was by Humphry Davy’s time the chief town of Mount’s Bay and of the Penwith Peninsula, 10 miles east of Land’s End; penwith is Cornish for ‘far end’. John Davy, Humphry Davy’s only brother, left a fine pen-portrait of what Penzance was like when he and Humphry were boys:

Cornwall was then without great roads. The roads which traversed the country were bridle-paths rather than carriage roads. Carriages were almost unknown, and carts even very little used. I have heard my mother relate that when she was a girl there was only one cart in the town of Penzance, and if a carriage appeared on the streets it attracted universal attention. Pack-horses were then in general use for conveying merchandise, and the prevailing manner of travelling was on horseback. In the same town, where the population was about 200 persons, there was only one carpet; the floors of rooms were sprinkled with sea sand, and there was not a silver fork. The only newspaper which then circulated in the West of England was the Sherborne Mercury, and it was carried through the county, not by the post, but by a man on horseback, specially employed to distribute it . . . Visiting was then conducted differently from what it is at present. Dinner-parties were almost unknown, excepting at the annual feast time. Christmas, too, was then a season of peculiar indulgence and conviviality, and a round of entertainments were given consisting of tea and supper. Excepting at these two periods, visiting was almost entirely confined to tea-parties, which assembled at three o’clock and broke up at nine, and the amusement of the evening was commonly some round game at cards, as Pope Joan or Commerce . . . Amongst the middle and higher classes there was little taste for literature, still less for science, and their pursuits were rarely of a dignified or intellectual kind. Hunting, shooting, wrestling, cock-fighting, generally ending in drunkenness, were what they most delighted in. Smuggling was carried on to a great extent, and drunkenness and a low scale of morals were naturally associated with it . . .2

By the time that Penzance was given the status of a borough on 9 May 1614 by the charter of James VI and I, the Davy bloodline had been established through yeoman Edmund Davy’s five children, all baptised in the Cornish parish of Ludgvan from the late 1560s. The tombstones of his ancestors, now ranged along the wall of Ludgvan church, inspired some of Humphry Davy’s earliest verses:

My eye is wet with tears For I see the white stones That are covered with names The stones of my forefathers graves

No grass grows upon them For deep in the earth In darkness and silence the organs of life

To their primitive atoms return Through ages the air Has been moist with their blood The ages the seeds of The thistle has fed On what was once motion and form

The white land that floats Through the heavens Is pregnant with that which was life And the moonbeams that whiten it came From the breath and spirit of man

Thoughts roll not beneath the dust No feeling is in the cold grave. They have leaped to other worlds They are far above the skies.

They kindle in the stars They dance in the light of suns Or they live in the comet’s white haze

These poor remains of frame Were the source of the organs of flesh That feel the control of my will That are active and mighty in me.

They gave to my body form Is nought in your dying limbs That gave to my spirit life The blood that rolled through their veins Was the germ of my bodily power.

Their spirit gave me no germ Of kindling energy . . .3

Humphry Davy came from farming stock and his father, Robert Davy (1746–94), was reared by a prosperous uncle – also called Robert Davy (1713–74) – who designated him heir. Robert Davy, however, was not initially inclined to agriculture and persuaded his uncle to apprentice him to a London woodcarver; later he was to win the soubriquet in Penzance of ‘the little carver’ as a skilled gilder and craftsman in wood whose carved chimney-pieces became popular works of art. Alas, the uncle’s will in Robert’s favour remained unsigned. So his ultimate sole inheritance was chattels and the small copyhold 79-acre small farm of Varfell, at Ludgvan, some three miles from Penzance.

Humphry Davy never forgot his Cornish roots; he returned when he could – albeit infrequently – to visit his family and was eager to receive their correspondence on Penzance gossip. Even so, Davy did not talk much about his Cornish childhood in later life; even his wife had to write to a remaining sister after Davy’s death to obtain some information about her husband’s infant years. His detractors claimed that as a prominent baronet Davy was ashamed of his humble background.4

Yet the flora and fauna of the West Country were integral parts of Davy’s search to understand nature. For Davy St Michael’s Mount, in Mount’s Bay, off Penzance, was a symbol of his native land. St Michael’s Mount, a great granite outcrop that rises majestically from the sea, is the ancestral home of the St Aubyn family who gave the property to the National Trust in the 1960s. Ictis to the Romans, St Michael’s Mount, which witnessed the Roman merchant vessels at anchor to take on local tin and minerals, is said to have obtained its name from a vision of St Michael, leader of the heavenly host, that allegedly appeared to a group of fishermen hereabouts in AD 495. It became a place of pilgrimage and a religious centre was established in the time of Edward the Confessor (c. 1044), from which foundation a Benedictine Priory was established; it had ceased to be a monastery by 1425 when it was recreated as a secular stronghold. The Mount was the subject of one of Davy’s early pieces of poetry:

Majestic steep! ah, yet I love, With many a lingering step to rove, Thy ivied rocks among; Thy ivied, wave-beat rocks recall The former pleasures of my soul,

When life was gay and young. Enthusiasm – Nature’s child – Here sung to me her wood-songs wild, All warm with native fire; I felt her soul-awakening flame, It bade my bosom burn for fame, It bade me strike the lyre.5

Since his early days Cornwall was a magic land for Davy, each of the thin white ribbons of road that stretched from horizon to horizon over the brown moorland, sodden with heavy rains, were another highway to adventure. Davy believed that the secrets of nature that he sought were betrayed by clues in the black hills, the moors, the seascapes and the high tors. Cornwall, then, inspired him to seek the answers he was looking for. In his Elements of Chemical Philosophy in 1812 he wrote: ‘We know nothing of the true elements belonging to nature . . .’, but from nature he believed he could discover ‘the relations of the properties of matter’.

Today, little of the Penzance Davy knew remains.6 The elegant row of Georgian houses in Clarence Street, said to be one of the oldest thoroughfares in the town, was built after Davy’s death, but the restored granite drinking chute at the top of the street would have been familiar to Davy, for in his time this was one of the few sources of drinking water for the town. The Cattle Market and the Green Market would be just recognisable by a returning Davy, as would the Union Hotel, Chapel Street, and the Dolphin Inn, set by the shore for over three hundred years. The harbour and docks have been entirely rebuilt since Davy’s day, but he would know the site of the small fort or barbican built by Henry VIII to protect the harbour. When Davy was young during the Napoleonic Wars, a new battery of 30 pounders was set up to protect the port. Davy may even have been present when the mayor caused a flagstaff to be erected on the battery in 1797 lest he need to give a warning signal of a French invasion. When Davy was a lad the shoreline from Battery Rocks to Newlyn was covered with ‘towans’ (windswept dunes), but from 1843 the Promenade was laid out here which witnessed Penzance’s development as a spa town, an event that marked the evolution of a new Victorian borough.

Where can Humphry Davy be found in modern Penzance? A school and public house bear his name, but his birthplace in Market Jew Street has now vanished, although its site at 4 The Terrace is marked by a small unobtrusive slate plaque. Nearby, in front of the eastern elevation of the Market House in 1836–8, is set the Humphry Davy Statue. The monument was erected in 1872, paid for by public subscription, and is the work of sculptors W. and T. Wills of London. The statue is on the site of Davy’s patron Dr John Tonkin’s Tudor house. Across the way too, at the junction of New Street and Market Jew Street are the premises of Peasgood’s Pharmacy on which site Humphry Davy started his apprenticeship with apothecary Bingham Borlase in 1794. For many years, Davy’s coat of arms hung in St John’s Hall (1864), Alverton Street, in the rooms occupied by the now defunct Cornwall Geological Museum. The Davy farm at Varfell is still in existence, as is Ludgvan church with its memorial slabs to Davy’s ancestors. In Ludgvan rectory (now a private house) is to be found a chimney-piece fashioned by Humphry Davy’s father.

On 16 September 1776 Robert Davy married Grace Millett (1750–1826), who came from an old Cornish family in the ‘wild, religious, mining parish’ of St Just-in-Penwith, which had seen better days. Grace’s parents, Humphry, who kept a mercer’s shop, and Grace had died within days of each other of malignant fever in 1758. Before her death Mrs Millett had implored her former lodger Dr John Tonkin (1719–1801) to care for her three small daughters Elizabeth, Grace and Jane. A prominent apothecary and surgeon, Tonkin agreed to care for the children as if they were his own and took them to live at his dwelling by Penzance Market House and, helped by a Millett maternal cousin Peggy Adams, ‘gave the children a happy, Christian childhood’.7

Tonkin was to play a significant part in Grace’s son Humphry Davy’s life, too: Davy’s brother John left us this description of the apothecary:

[Tonkin] will long be remembered in Penzance, both for excellences and peculiarities. The latter marked him as a person of the gone-by time, and attracted the notice even of the careless observer. He held in aversion modern changes of fashion, and in his old age wore the dress of his youth – the cocked hat, large powdered wig, hand-ruffles, upright collar; in brief, the professional dress of the beginning of the [eighteenth] century – and his manly form and countenance suited well this venerable costume . . . [he] held a distinguished place among his fellow-townsmen, being looked up to for his sterling worth and strength of judgement . . . [he was] quick of temper . . . but his anger was of short duration . . .

Well, too, do I remember the social meetings at his house, exclusively of the gentler sex, a certain number of whom regularly visited him, always drinking tea with him on a Sunday, all of whom he had known as children, and to whom and their children he was attached. Of these, two were sisters [Mrs Cornish and Miss Allen] both remarkable for their lady-like and pleasing manners, and one of them, unmarried, not less so for her perennial beauty. Such a little society could hardly fail to have an influence of a young mind . . .8

Although he was five times mayor of Penzance and was a prominent royalist and Tory, in the recorded history of eighteenth-century Cornwall Tonkin remains a shadowy character.

Humphry Davy was born at four in the morning on 17 December 1778 at 4 The Terrace, now Market Jew Street, Penzance. In those days, before the later configuration roadway of 1825 was laid out, The Terrace was a broad thoroughfare and sported five huge plane trees. The actual birthplace has now vanished and is occupied by a shopping complex but marked by a plaque. Humphry was the first of five children, who included Katherine or Kitty (b. 1780), Grace (b. 1784), Elizabeth or Betsy (b. 1786) and John (b. 1790). On 22 January 1779 Humphry was baptised into the Anglican faith at old St Mary’s, a chapel of ease to Madron Parish Church, the mother church of Penzance in the Diocese of Exeter.9 This chapel was on the site of St Mary’s Church built in 1832 and dedicated in 1835 and which became the parish church of Penzance in 1871. Near here it is said that the Davys were in the crowd listening to John Wesley (1703–91) preach, and Humphry received a personal blessing from the cleric as he passed by. Wesley visited Penzance on a number of occasions in the 1780s.

Davy had a rural childhood spent along the Cornish coast, whose natural beauty would in time inspire him to commit what his contemporary Robert Burns (1759–96) called ‘the sin of rhyme’ – Burns’s work was introduced to Davy by Gregory Watt, son of engineer James Watt. Of his childhood Humphry Davy was later to say little, so historians rely on an ingenuous memoir written in 1831 by his elder sister Kitty, who recorded that he was walking by his ninth month and talking fluently before he was two.10 Henry Mayhew described the lad:

. . . of diminutive stature, while the roundness of his shoulders gave him a somewhat – as it has been termed – of a ‘Bucolic aspect’. His hair was chestnut brown, and hung in neglected curls about his brow; his eyes were dark and piercing, but the rest of his features were anything but finely chiselled. His complexion appeared paler than ordinary, from the contrast of the suit of black in which he was habited, and the dejected air and wet-looking eye gave a melancholy tone to his appearance that immediately enlisted the heart towards the boy.11

Throughout his life Humphry Davy would remain gauche.

Within a population of some three and a half thousand in Davy’s youth, and a society where there was much intermarriage, the Davys were a well-known family. Their neighbours were Prices and Hichens, Beards and Battens and one neighbouring family in Chapel Street was to help found a literary brood who became as universally known as Humphry Davy.

Thomas Branwell (d. 1808) was a Penzance corn merchant and maltster who married Anne Carne (d. 1809), whose kinsman William Carne had opened the first bank in Chapel Street in 1797 with John Batten and Richard Oxnam. By marriage the Branwells were related to the Davys, through Humphry’s aunt, his mother’s sister Mrs Sampson. The Branwells had eleven children of whom four daughters and one son survived and lived at 25 Chapel Street. Two of the daughters, Elizabeth and Maria, were to become involved with some of the greatest names in British literary history.

Some time in the spring of 1812, Maria Branwell, then twenty-nine, visited her uncle John Fennell, headmaster of the new Wesleyan academy at Woodhouse Grove, near Guiseley, Yorkshire. There she met the handsome clergyman from County Down, the Revd Patrick Brontë, who had been invited by Fennell to be an examiner at the school. Maria and Patrick were married at St Oswald’s Church, Guiseley, on 29 December 1812. The couple were to have six children, four of whom – Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell – would become world famous authors.

When Maria Branwell died of cancer in September 1821 her sister Elizabeth (1776–1841) journeyed from Penzance to take over the household of her brother-in-law the Revd Brontë. With her she brought to the Yorkshire parsonage the redoubtable Wesleyan traits she had acquired at the Methodist chapel in Chapel Street, where the congregation were friends and neighbours of the Davys.

Charlotte Brontë averred that at Howarth parsonage Aunt Branwell’s preferred pastime was to sit by the fireside recalling her Penzance days. As Davy and the surviving Branwell siblings were teenagers together, and as Humphry was a schoolfellow of the Branwell son Benjamin Carne Branwell, who became Mayor of Penzance in 1809–10, Humphry’s name would recur in Aunt Branwell’s conversation. It was not surprising, then, that Davy was mentioned in a Brontë novel:

Rachel admitted me into the Parlour and went to call her mistress . . . There was her desk left open . . . with a book laid upon it. Her limited but choice collection of books was almost as familiar to me as my own, but this volume I had not see before . . . I took it up. It was Sir Humphry Davy’s [Consolations in Travel, or] Last Days of a Philosopher. I closed the book but kept it in my hand and stood facing the door with my back to the fireplace calmly waiting her arrival. [The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 1848 edn, at chap. 15.]

It shows that the Brontës, as voracious readers, were familiar with Humphry’s writings; Humphry’s Consolations in Travel