The Age of Wonder (48 page)

Davy also referred frequently in his later lectures to comparisons between the poetic and the scientific imagination. In 1807 he wrote in terms that would be echoed both by Coleridge and by Keats: ‘The perception of truth is almost as simple a feeling as the perception of beauty; and the genius of Newton, of Shakespeare, of Michael Angelo, and of Handel, are not very remote in character from each other.
Imagination, as well as the reason, is necessary to perfection in the philosophic mind. A rapidity of combination, a power of perceiving analogies, and of comparing them by facts, is the creative source of discovery.
Discrimination and delicacy of sensation, so important in physical research, are other words for taste; and love of nature is the same passion, as the love of the magnificent, the sublime, and the beautiful.’
¹¹¹

7

By the end of 1800 Davy’s
Researches,
and his early papers on galvanism in
Nicholson’s Journal,
were rousing serious interest in London. He began receiving unofficial approaches from Sir Joseph Banks and Benjamin Thompson, and there was talk of a professorship in chemistry. In February 1801 he again visited London, and was officially interviewed by the Committee of the Royal Institution-Banks, Thompson and Henry Cavendish-who had been considering offering him an initial post as Assistant Chemical Lecturer, with a possible professorship to follow. He then had the decisive Soho breakfast with Banks, who quickly determined to poach him from Beddoes, and capture him for the Institution. His first shrewd move was to send him on to have informal drinks with Benjamin Thompson, an altogether different kind of patron.
¹¹²

Thompson (1753-1814) was a strange and remarkable man, with none of Sir Joseph’s diplomatic bonhomie, but with equal energy and an even more ruthless drive. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he was an American citizen from Boston, but had been knighted by the British government and then appointed Count Rumford by the Elector of Bavaria, an unusual combination of honours. In the course of his extraordinary, picaresque life, Rumford was variously a professional soldier, an inventor and man of science, a Minister of State, a philanthropist and a philanderer. His tall, thin, imposing figure, permanently stooped, combined with large, bright, attentive eyes and a spectacular Roman nose, gave him the appearance of some powerfully beaked and faintly sinister bird of prey about to pounce-an appearance much loved by cartoonists such as James Gillray. As the inventor of various heating and lighting appliances, and propounder of a correct theory of heat (proving Lavoisier’s ‘caloric’ to be a product of friction), Thompson instantly recognised young Davy’s potential-and duly pounced.

Attractive terms of employment were mooted (though not agreed), and Davy was already writing to Davies Giddy on 8 March 1801 about the wonderful prospects held out by Banks and Thompson, his imminent move to London, and the promise of fresh funding for his work on galvanism. He acknowledged Beddoes’s plans at Clifton for ‘a great popular physiological work’ on therapeutic gases, but this, he had to admit, was a work on which he would not be collaborating after all. It might, in fact, be a dead end. At all events, science now called him elsewhere.

8

There may also have been non-scientific reasons for Davy’s departure from Bristol. Amidst the youthful and enthusiastic circle of the Pneumatic Institute, it was his friendship with Anna Beddoes that had developed the most unexpectedly.
¹¹³
He had gradually discovered that her sunny directness disguised deep unhappiness within the marriage.
¹¹⁴
Thomas Beddoes was not a tender or communicative husband, and suffered from bouts of deep depression, what he himself called his ‘Hamlet complaint’. In June 1801 he would become so depressed about his debilitating asthma attacks that he allegedly asked Anna’s permission to commit suicide, or so she later told Davy.
¹¹⁵

In consequence, Anna was a young woman secretly desperate for affection, and the early romantic walks along the Avon with Davy had soon turned into tearful confessions and declarations. Both had begun sending each other poems. One of Davy’s started unguardedly:

Anna thou art lovely ever
Lovely in tears
In tears of sorrow bright
Brighter in joy…

In return she sent him unsigned verses addressed to ‘Mr Davy, Pneumatic Institution, Dowry Square, Hotwells’. She apologised for troubling him with her frustrations and miseries, but suggested moments of precious intimacy:

When to thy trembling hand I silent gave
My bloodless arm, impatient for the grave…

Davy’s poems are simple and fragmentary, sometimes trying out his elementary Greek in short epigrams:

The beautiful girl
Is not mine,
Not mine the beautiful…

He also covered his notebook with repeated pencil drawings of Anna’s profile and blonde, windswept hair.
¹¹⁶

Anna’s poems, some copied into Davy’s notebook, are longer and more melodramatic than his. They seem to play with the idea of suicide, and with the guilty sense that she is making impossible emotional demands on Davy. In one she imagines (or perhaps repeats) his angry refusal of these poignant advances. Here she appears to write accusingly about herself in Davy’s own voice, or perhaps quoting him:

Am I then called to minister relief
To her who rudely plunged me into grief,
Who dropped my infant errors into day
And tore the veil of secrecy away…?
¹¹⁷

It is not clear what Davy’s ‘infant errors’ might be, unless memories of Mademoiselle Nancy at Penzance. Davy also kept other poems signed ‘Fidelissima’ (’your most faithful lady’) from a slightly later date, which may be a continuation of Anna’s, or from another woman entirely.
¹¹⁸
Perhaps there was some more tangled history of deception and betrayal at Bristol, among the young ladies who appear only as initials in his published
Researches.
Certainly Davy later wrote to his confidant Dr John King of indulging in ‘physical sympathies’ at Bristol of which he was subsequently ashamed. A little more light is thrown on this flirtation or frustrated love affair (or whatever it was) with Anna by several fragments of later correspondence.

Shortly after Davy left Bristol, his friend Dr King sent him news that Anna and Dr Beddoes were expecting a baby. Davy was clearly pleased, and wrote back on 4 November 1801. He thought motherhood would greatly improve what he now regarded as Anna’s unstable state of mind. ‘How delightful a thing it would be to see that woman of Genius, of feeling, of candour, of idleness, of caprice, instructing and nourishing an infant, losing in one deep sympathy many trifling hopes and many trifling fears.’
¹¹⁹

In spring 1802, Anna Beddoes gave birth to a baby girl, christened Anna Maria, to whom Davy addressed several poems over the next few years, calling her ‘Nature’s fairest child/A flower of springtime, rude and wild’. In 1804 he wrote the child a nine-stanza birthday poem, dedicated ‘To A.B-2 years old’ and again describing her fondly as ‘a sweet blossom of the early spring of life’.
¹²⁰

At the same time he continued sending occasional poems to Anna herself, carefully annotating one, ‘Written in the coach December 25 1803, passing from Bath to Bristol’. In these simple, sentimental lyrics he looked back nostalgically to what he described as ‘Life’s golden morn’, and the ‘anguish and the joys’ of the early Bristol days.

Its love was wild its friendship free
Its passion changeful as the light
That on an April day you see
Changeful and yet ever bright.
¹²¹

In the event, Anna was not in fact made any happier or more fulfilled by motherhood. Soon after her daughter’s birth she abandoned her husband and ran off for several months with Davy’s wealthy Penzance friend and patron Davies Giddy.
¹²²
Yet this did not break the marriage to the long-suffering Dr Beddoes, nor the confidential friendship with Davy. Five years later, in 1806, she and Davy met again in London, and she congratulated him on his lectures and asked him to send her his portrait, a characteristically provocative request. Davy sent it with a copy of his poem ‘Glenarm by Moonlight’, with further nostalgic memories of their Avon riverside walks together.

Think not that I forget the days,
When first, through rough unhaunted ways,
We moved along the mountain side,
Where Avon meets the Severn tide;
When in the spring of youthful thought
The hours of confidence we caught…
¹²³

Perhaps he did not realise what emotions these lines would stir up. But either then, or shortly after, he gently tried to disentangle himself from the correspondence, and asked Anna to forget him. This produced an agonised, and not entirely coherent reply, written on 26 December 1806. It gives the best glimpse of what might have happened between them at Bristol. ‘I suppose from the experience you have had of my conduct-but you cannot tell how much pain your last observation gave me-
that I should forget you, and think no more about you!
Yet I must certainly deserve it for I have in former days treated you with unkindness that you have the generosity to forgive…Of all those who know you best I have most reason to value the qualities of your heart, and I believe at this moment you have not a more sincere admirer, no, not even amongst the young and beautiful, than she who has treated you with such ungentleness.’

Anna went on to say that the last time she saw Davy in London, he appeared ‘so vividly alive’ that it roused the ‘almost expiring spark of ambition’ in her bosom. Ambition for what, she does not explain. The letter tails off in ill-defined sadness, indeed perhaps exactly the kind of ill-defined sadness that originally captured young Davy’s heart and sympathies. ‘I know not for what reason it is but I cannot write or think of you without the most melancholy sensations. Adieu…I am almost ashamed to send this letter…
destroy it.
’
¹²⁴

Clearly some powerful emotions existed between them during these years. A decade later Davy would confide to another woman: ‘You can have no idea at all of what [Anna] was…She possessed a fancy almost
poetical
in the highest sense of the word, great warmth of affection, and disinterestedness of feeling; and under favourable circumstances, she would have been, even in talents, a rival of [her half-sister] Maria.’
¹²⁵

If there was attraction, even seduction, it would be hard to tell who initiated it. But it may be wrong to consider Davy as emotionally naïve, or exploited, at Bristol. Coleridge later remarked enigmatically: ‘a young poet may do without being in love with a woman-it is enough if he loves-but to a young chemist it would be salvation to be downright romantically in love’.
¹²⁶
Davy’s later bawdy remarks about women to his friend Dr King suggest a certain worldliness, while Tom Wedgwood gave him, as a suitable parting present to take to London, an exquisite porcelain statuette of a naked Venus.
¹²⁷

9

Bristol also saw the end of a scientific love affair. After some eighteen months of extensive experiments on nitrous oxide in the Dowry Square laboratory, Davy had been forced to conclude that the gas, remarkable as it was, could not be used for therapeutic purposes. This was his private opinion, although no such explicit statement was published in
Researches.
For Thomas Beddoes this was a crushing disappointment, particularly as it was exactly what Joseph Banks had always predicted. Banks had written to James Watt: ‘in the case of Dr Beddoes’s project-I do not fully understand it, &…I do not expect any beneficial consequences will be derived from its being carried into execution.’
¹²⁸
It looked as if Beddoes’s young protégé had inadvertently undermined the entire
raison d’être
of the Pneumatic Institute.

Yet there was one major scientific discovery which hovered tantalisingly close to Davy’s grasp. Had he fully seized it, he would have made himself, Beddoes and the Pneumatic Institute famous forever. Though nitrous oxide could not cure physical disease, it could do something just as valuable: it could temporarily suspend physical pain, or at least the sensation of pain. The gas provided the key to an entirely new science, that of
anaesthetics:
literally, ‘the negation or blocking of feelings’.

Characteristically, Davy pounced upon the new concept, asserting in his laboratory notebook that the gas could certainly be used for suppressing even ‘intense physical pain’.
¹²⁹
He speculated on the physiological mechanism: ‘Sensible pain is not perceived after the powerful action of nitrous oxide because it produces for the time a momentary condition of other parts of the nerve connected with pleasure.’
¹³⁰
He successfully tried treating his own toothache from impacted wisdom teeth with nitrous oxide. ‘The pain diminished after the first four or five inspirations.’ But the effect did not last, and he did not take the next logical step of having the offending teeth removed while under the influence of nitrous oxide. The gas was seen as blotting out the consciousness of pain with pleasure, rather than suspending consciousness itself. Yet in many of his extreme experiments Davy had deliberately pushed himself into unconsciousness, and he knew this could be done without harm.