The Age of Wonder (60 page)

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!” ’
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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.’
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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 Femal
es, 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.
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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.’
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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’.
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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.’
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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.
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He wrote again more reassuringly the following day. T 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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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!
’
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In fact Davy carefully avoided an audience with Napoleon himself, and referred to him contemptuously as ‘the Corsican robber’.
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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.
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