Davy’s rooms on the second floor of the Royal Institution lacked any kind of personal touch in the furniture and furnishings. He had merely moved into them as his predecessor as Professor of Chemistry at the Institution, Thomas Young, had left them, and he fitted himself in around the furniture. He did, however, make the rooms his own in the way he spread his papers about. Tables, chairs and the floor were littered with papers. Open a cupboard and more tumbled out. Open a side door, and there was a pile there too. The only visible object that was truly elegant and certainly Davy’s own was a little porcelain figure of Venus, made and given to him by his friend and early collaborator Thomas Wedgwood. Although he was a prolific letter writer, Davy tended to receive more letters than he wrote, and he could not stop them coming. He received compliments, invitations and dedicated verses, one coming with a gift of a fob for his watch chain from an admirer who asked him to wear it at the next lecture as a sign that he had received her poem.11 The considered female view was that ‘those eyes were made for something besides poring over crucibles’.12
His brother John, twelve years his junior, who idolised Humphry and studied chemistry with him, lived at the Royal Institution from 1808 to 1811. There he remembered lying in bed listening through the thin partition to Humphry settling down for the night, rustling and shifting, and ‘in a loud voice, reciting favourite passages in prose or verse, or declaiming some composition of his own, or humming some angler’s song’.13
To Davy, as to the Romantics of his generation, science, literature and art were intertwined, part of a creative whole which enveloped the universe. He practised what he believed, and wrote poetry which drew heavily on landscape imagery and romantic travel for its subject matter and inspiration, and echoed in form and ambition the poems of his friends William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was a passionate, even obsessive, fisherman, and made his own tackle and sets of hooks, with thread and bits of highly coloured feather as flies for trout fishing. Hanging in one of his cupboards was the bizarre green cloth fisherman’s suit he designed for himself, ‘with pockets everywhere for tackle, caoutchouc boots reaching to the knees. A coal heaver’s hat dyed green, and studded with artificial flies. He looked not like an inhabitant of the earth, and yet he was on’t.’14 He was a keen shot too: ‘For shooting he wore a hat covered in scarlet cloth so he wouldn’t be shot at.’15
It was not long before Davy, always attracted by the highly-coloured feather, became caught on a hook himself. During the course of 1810 he met Mrs Jane Apreece, a Scottish widow two years younger than him. Jane Apreece was ambitious, sharp-witted, imperious, grand, but sparkling and mysterious, with a hint of a past. There was an unfounded rumour that she was the model for the heroine of Madame de Staël’s novel Corinne (1807), an allegorical tale of nationalism and female creativity centred on the liberated Corinne, poet, artist and symbol of a united Italy. The book had been an immediate sensation, and upset the comfortable notion of woman as a retiring, domestic creature. Although Jane had met Madame de Staël when she travelled on the continent with her late husband, Shuckburgh Apreece, the connection is unlikely; but Mrs Apreece will have taken the compliment. Apreece was the heir to a baronetcy, but he had died in 1807 before attaining the title that he and his wife had anticipated. Jane, however, took that in her stride. She had plenty of money of her own. She was an only child, and the heiress of her father Charles Kerr, a merchant in Antigua, dealing in sugar and spices, who had himself died in 1796.
Shuckburgh Apreece’s death gave his widow a new release. She moved to Edinburgh, where she set up a salon for the intellectual society of the Scottish enlightenment. She was much more widely travelled than her Edinburgh contemporaries, and dazzled them with her sophistication and gossip. Sir Henry Holland, the fashionable doctor, became light-headed at her memory, mysteriously saying that she ‘vivified [her circle] with certain usages new to the habits of Edinburgh life … The story was current of a venerable professor seen stooping in the street to adjust the lacing of her boot.’16
Jane Apreece also kept abreast of London society. Farington discovered that she had an income ‘reported to be 3 or £4000 a year’,17 a piece of gossip he had heard from the watercolour painter William Wells, who had himself picked it up at dinner one evening in March 1812 from his host William Blake of Portland Place.18 Blake’s neighbour was Jane Apreece’s mother, Mrs Jane Kerr, and the two ladies were fellow guests that evening; also of the party was Humphry Davy. The roundabout of chit-chat gave another turn when Farington added that Davy ‘pays much attention to Mrs Apreece who is proud to have him in her train … it is not believed that she will marry him’.19 The relationship gave much amusement. Sydney Smith spoke of a new chemical salt, ‘Davite of Apreece’, and an anonymous verse, quoted by a gossip who had spent three weeks in Herefordshire with Jane, included the lines:
To the Institution then she came,
And set her cap at little Davy;
He in an instant caught the flame
Before Sir Harry said an Ave;
Then, quick as turmeric or litmus paper
An acid takes, begins to vapour;
And, fast as sparks of fire and tinder,
Was burned, poor fellow, to a cinder.20
Whether or nor Jane Apreece had any effect on it, Humphry Davy’s creativity reached new heights in autumn 1811 when he began to set out a history of chemistry, and its progress from ancient Egypt to his own day. This sped on into a full survey of what chemistry is, what the elements are, and how they can be brought into being and manipulated. In a sentence Davy was able to evoke the vast and minuscule, diverse and unified, teeming and vacant, interdependent, entire and bubbling thing that is the planet we live on.
The forms and appearances of the beings and substances of the external world are almost infinitely various, and they are in a state of continued alteration: the whole surface of the earth even undergoes modifications: acted on by moisture and air, it affords the food of plants; an immense number of vegetable productions arise from apparently the same materials; one species of animal matter is converted into another; the most perfect and beautiful of the forms of organised life ultimately decay, and are resolved into inorganic aggregates; and the same elementary substances, differently arranged, are contained in the inert soil, or bloom and emit fragrance in the flower, or become in animals the active organs of mind and intelligence.21
This was the language of Davy’s lectures, and the language, as it was now flooding out, of his writing. As each chapter was completed he sent it to the printer, who typeset it for publication in days.22 There was no fair copy, no revision; it was a stream out of the rock. On Saturday, 25 January 1812, to great public acclaim, Davy began a new series of lectures, straight out of this new writing, billed as ‘The Elements of Chemical Philosophy’. This was to be his final series at the Royal Institution, and his life was about to change. He had decided that his teaching phase was over, that he would resign as Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, and that from now on he would devote himself to travel, research, fishing, reflective writing, poetry and life as an influential figurehead in the development of science in London.
The first lecture considered the history of chemistry; the second the forms of matter. The audiences crammed into the theatre as word of the lectures spread, and as it became known by talk in coffee houses and drawing rooms that this was to be Humphry Davy’s final series. Davy would have been able to recognise people despite the crush, and where they sat as the lectures progressed – George Dance, for example, had a regular seat in the gallery over the clock23 – and perhaps Jane, smiling at him and slowly waving her fan, was in the ladies’ section in the gallery.
By the time he had reached the sixth lecture, on Radiant Matter, 29 February, Leap Year’s Day, the audience had become an old friend, a familiar pattern of faces