The Age of Wonder

  The rival claims of poetry and science became a passionate topic between them. Davy tentatively showed Southey his poems, scattered through his laboratory notebooks, many still in draft, and Southey promised to select the best and publish them. On 4 May 1799 he wrote to Davy constructively criticising his poem ‘Mount’s Bay’ and urging him to continue writing.76 Poetry, he argued, would be good for Davy’s science. He also promised to introduce his extraordinary friend Coleridge, who was due (indeed overdue as usual) to return from Germany, full of Blumenbach’s scientific lectures at Göttingen University and wild tales of the witches of Walpurgisnacht in the Hartz mountains. Coleridge was proposing to translate Blumenbach’s Manual of Natural History, though he should also have been finishing his poem ‘Christabel’. Among other wonders Southey also described the strange Valley of the Rocks near Lynmouth, and asked Davy whether a scientific explanation (sea erosion) or a mythological one (giants’ abandoned castle) would be more satisfactory.

  In this way Southey gently encouraged Davy not to abandon his vision as a poet, amidst all the excitement of the gas experiments. ‘I must not press the subject of poetry upon you, only do not lose the feeling and habit of seeing all things with a poet’s eye: at Bristol you have a good society, but not a man who knows anything of poetry. Dr Beddoes’s taste is very pessimism.’77

  Southey wrote again in August, proposing that he and Davy collaborate on an epic poem set in Peru. (The only other writer with whom Southey had previously collaborated was Coleridge.) This would develop Davy’s poet’s eye, and be ‘a relaxation from more important studies’. The 1799 Annual Anthology, which included Davy’s five poems, was nearly ready for publication. ‘You still, I suppose, go on working with your gaseous oxide, which according to my notions of celestial enjoyment, must certainly constitute the atmosphere of the highest of all possible heavens. I wish I was at the Pneumatic Institution, something to gratify my appetite for that delectable air, and something for the sake of seeing you.’78

  Nevertheless, when Davy proudly sent a copy of the Annual Anthology to his mother in Penzance, he felt the need to reassure her. ‘Do not suppose I am turned poet. Philosophy, Chemistry and Medicine are my profession. I had often described Mount’s Bay to my friends here. They desired me to describe it poetically.’79

  It was to be a memorable autumn. On 11 October Gregory Watt wrote to Davy: ‘get an air holder of gas prepared for I am determined to ascend the heavens’.80 A new round of nitrous oxide experiments had begun, and these brought Davy’s first meeting with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, still full of his trip to Germany and just celebrating his twenty-seventh birthday. It took place at Dowry Square on 22 October 1799. Coleridge was only in Bristol for a fortnight before hurrying off to join Wordsworth and Dorothy in the Lake District. Nevertheless he spent several evenings talking excitedly with Davy, and had repeated inhalation sessions at the Dowry Square laboratory. He must have compared the gas with his already extensive and overpowering experience of opium.81

  In fact Coleridge’s accounts of his reactions to the gas seem oddly prosaic. His heart thumped ‘violently’, he involuntarily ‘beat the ground’ with his feet, and he watched some trees in the garden becoming ‘dimmer and dimmer’, as if seen through tears. Nitrous oxide seemed strangely reassuring to Coleridge, even homely: ‘an highly pleasurable sensation of warmth over my whole frame, resembling what I remember once to have experienced after returning from a walk in the snow into a warm room’.82 He used only one descriptive phrase which is reminiscent of a line from his great opium poem of 1797, ‘Kubla Khan’: he spoke of ‘more unmingled pleasure than I had ever before experienced’.

  Yet Coleridge was evidently intrigued by the whole phenomenon of nitrous oxide and its ‘psychosomatic’ (a word he coined) implications, and would return to it in a dazzling series of letters written to Davy the following year. Altogether Coleridge was much struck by the young chemist (‘an admirable young man’), but he still hurried away to visit Wordsworth in the Lake District. It was only when Davy travelled up to London for the first time in his life, in late November 1799, that the friendship was truly formed.

  Coleridge was now living with Charles and Mary Lamb in the Middle Temple, translating Schiller’s play Wallenstein (not Blumenbach after all) and writing articles for the Morning Post. He saw Davy frequently over a ten-day period, and took him to dine with the anarchist philosopher William Godwin. They were joined by Lamb, the poet Charlotte Smith and the portrait painter James Northcote. This was a memorable dinner, and Davy talked brilliantly about the future of science to his artistic listeners. Godwin, at the height of his philosophical fame, having just published his notorious Memoir of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, was hugely impressed with Davy, although he thought he would ‘degrade his vast Talents’ by limiting them to chemistry. Yet everyone was agreed: Davy was ‘extraordinary’.

  Coleridge immediately began to fantasise about setting up a ‘little colony’ with Davy and Wordsworth (though they had not even met) — ‘Precious stuff for Dreams’. After Davy returned to Bristol, Coleridge wrote a long letter in January 1800, opening with a characteristic suggestion: ‘I wish in your researches that you and Beddoes would give a compact compressed History of the Human Mind for the last century …’ As to Godwin’s criticism of chemistry, Coleridge described his robust defence to Davy. ‘Why, quoth I, “how Godwin! Can you thus talk of science, of which neither you nor I understand an iota” etc, and I defended Chemistry as knowingly at least as Godwin attacked it — affirmed that it united the opposite advantages of immaterialising the mind without destroying the definiteness of the Ideas — nay even while it gave clearness to them.’

  Here Coleridge was defending the intellectual discipline of science as a force for clarity and good. He then added one of his most inspired perceptions. He thought that science, as a human activity, ‘being necessarily performed with the passion of Hope, it was poetical’. Science, like poetry, was not merely ‘progressive’. It directed a particular kind of moral energy and imaginative longing into the future. It enshrined the implicit belief that mankind could achieve a better, happier world. This is what Davy believed too, and ‘Hope’ became one of his watchwords.83

  6

  Throughout the momentous year 1799 Davy continued to fill his notebooks with visionary essays and poems. But he did not forget Cornwall. In October, to Grace Davy’s delight, the prodigal son had returned home to Penzance for a month. He brought her fashionable jewellery from Bristol, and an impressively large case of chemical apparatus. Davy later described how an entire portable chemical laboratory, including air pump, electrical apparatus and ‘a small forge’, could be fitted into a single trunk. He visited Davies Giddy and other old friends, walked up to his father’s tomb at Ludgvan church, went fishing, shooting and geologising, and wrote some dreamy half-rhyming poems, distinctly inspired by Coleridge’s ‘conversation poems’ in the Lyrical Ballads.

  Many days have passed

  Beloved scene, since last I saw

  The moonbeams gild thy whitely-foaming waves …

  The dew of labour has oppressed my brow,

  On which the rose of pleasure never glowed;

  For I have tasted of that sacred stream

  Of science, whose delicious water flows

  From Nature’s bosom … 84

  In December, as promised, his five poems appeared in Southey’s Annual Anthology, including ‘The Sons of Genius’, ‘Saint Michael’s Mount’ and ‘The Tempest’.

  It was in this same month that Davy first used a portable gas chamber especially designed by James Watt. This device allowed a much longer total exposure to nitrous oxide, and also psychologically isolated the subject from his laboratory surroundings. It was a narrow, dark, boxed chamber ‘like a sedan chair’, about five feet high, completely sealed with stretched canvas and pasted paper to make it airtight. Air was pumped out from a two-inch vent above the subject’s head, while gas was introduced by another ‘about the height o
f the knee’. The subject was supplied with ‘a feather fan’ to mix the gas around him. ‘On each side and in front should be a pane of glass about twelve by eighteen inches, that you may see the patient during his confinement.’ The hermetic seal on the chamber allowed gas to be introduced under slightly higher than normal atmospheric pressure.85

  There is a vivid account of Davy’s first use of this faintly sinister machine, on 26 December 1799. Naturally he tried it himself first. He stripped to the waist, placed a large mercury thermometer under his armpit, took a stopwatch to time his pulse, and had himself sealed into the chamber by Kinglake. Over a precisely agreed time of seventy-five minutes, Kinglake pumped in (‘threw in’) exactly eighty quarts of nitrous oxide. Davy’s pulse rose to 124, his temperature to 106, and his cheeks went bright purple. But, amazingly, he remained conscious. Kinglake then released him, and gave him as planned a final twenty quarts of pure gas to inhale through a mouthpiece. It had been agreed that Davy (if he could still speak) would then try to describe his sensations as accurately as he could to Kinglake.

  This is the published version: ‘By degrees as the pleasurable sensations increased, I lost all connection with external things; trains of vivid visible Images rapidly passed through my mind and were connected with words in such a manner, as to produce perceptions perfectly novel. I existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas. I theorized; I imagined that I had made discoveries. When I was awakened from this semi-delirious trance by Dr Kinglake, who took the gas-bag from my mouth, Indignation and pride were my first feelings … My emotions were enthusiastic and sublime; and for a minute I walked round the room perfectly regardless of what was said to me … With the most intense belief and prophetic manner, I exclaimed to Dr Kinglake, — “Nothing exists, but Thoughts! — the Universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and pains!”’86

  The unpublished verbatim version from Davy’s 1799 laboratory notebook is rather more colourful: ‘I was now almost completely intoxicated … The sensations were superior to any I ever experienced. Inconceivably pleasurable … Theories passed rapidly thro the mind, believed I may say intensely, at the same time that every thing going on in the room was perceived. I seemed to be a sublime being, newly created and superior to other mortals, I was indignant at what they said of me and stalked majestically out of the laboratory to inform Dr Kinglake privately that nothing existed but thoughts.’87

  Other extreme experiments included the combination of nitrous oxide with alcohol. On one December night in the laboratory, Davy drank an entire bottle of wine ‘as fast as possible that it might produce its full effects’. The gas did not prevent ‘complete intoxication’ in less than an hour, but it helped his hangover the next morning. The experiment was repeated, with the same results. He noted: ‘On December 23 I breathed after a terrible drunken fit a larger quantity of gas, 2 bags and two bags of oxygen, it made me sick.’ The next day, ‘no headache came on, and my appetite was almost canine’.88 He wondered if his experiments were getting out of hand.

  With the completion of the intensive work on Researches, Davy gave himself up to further intellectual speculations. In his notebooks he scribbled extensive essays, often unfinished, on subjects such as the ‘Formation of the Intellect’ (starting in the womb, before birth); ‘The History of Passion’, ‘On Genius’ (‘what is this generating faculty of man, which acts through the immensity of ages?’); and ‘On Dreaming’.89

  Now besides the poetry, there were fictional fragments, erotic fantasies, and some unusual sections of self-analysis. Some clearly show Coleridge’s continuing influence, and touch again on the difference between the scientific and the poetic imagination: ‘Today, for the first time in my life, I have had a distinct sympathy with nature. I was lying on the top of a rock to leeward; the wind was high, and everything in motion … everything was alive, and myself part of the series of visible impressions; I should have felt pain in tearing a leaf from one of the trees … Deeply and intimately connected are all our ideas of motion and life, and this, probably, from very early association. How different is the idea of life in a physiologist and a poet!’90

  In June 1800 Davy published his first individual work, Researches Chemical and Philosophical chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide or Dephlogisticated Nitrous Air, and its Respiration. It was issued in London by Joseph Johnson, the radical publisher of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Coleridge and Wordsworth. Davy thus joined an author list which was largely literary and philosophical in character, and with a strong radical reputation.91

  ‘Ten months of incessant labour were employed in making them,’ he wrote of the Researches, ‘and three months in detailing them.’ Crisply divided into four ‘Research’ sections, the historic monograph described the entire range of his gas experiments, presenting the previous history of gases (Research 1); his own chemical analysis and decompositions of nitrous oxide (Research 2); his examination of the whole phenomenon of respiration (Research 3); and finally eighty pages of detailed accounts of the individual inhalation sessions (Researches 4). It was these that caused the sensation among general readers.

  Humans were not Davy’s only subjects. The section ‘Research 3’ contains multiple gas experiments (nitrous oxide, hydrogen and carbon monoxide) on live animals, including dogs, cats, birds and rabbits. He also immersed fish in de-oxygenated water; and butterflies, bees and house flies in mixtures of the gases. Many of these subjects died in convulsions, and were calmly dissected. None of his scientific reviewers remarked on the problematic nature of this research, but Davy became more and more uneasy at the pain he was causing, and Coleridge would later call his attention to pain as a phenomenon in itself.

  Davy’s style is plain, discursive and never sensational. He presents himself throughout as the objective narrator of each experiment, the calm man of science who can observe an animal asphyxiating without emotion, and can still take his own pulse when he thinks he himself is dying. In this sense the book invents a scientific persona, the unflinching teller of true tales. The Researches were dedicated to Dr Thomas Beddoes, as ‘pledges of more important labours’. Yet Davy carefully avoided drawing any general conclusions, and in particular made no medical claims at all about the therapeutic value of gas treatments at the Pneumatic Institute.

  In an important Preface Davy described how his new, empirical approach to scientific investigation had altered over the last eighteen months.92 As a result of the critical reception of his highly speculative early essay ‘On Light and Heat’, he had begun an extensive reappraisal of his own scientific methods at Bristol. In his notebooks of late 1799 there are humiliating confessions critical of his own premature ‘pursuit of speculations and theories’, and of the ‘dangers of false generalization’. He now believed, not entirely convincingly, that ‘the true philosopher’ avoided ‘theories’ altogether. He upbraided himself fiercely: ‘It is more laborious to accumulate facts than to reason concerning them; but one good experiment is of more value than the ingenuity of a brain like Newton’s.’93

  In the published Preface, these self-criticisms are only slightly modulated. Self-criticism itself was now becoming an effective part of Davy’s scientific style: ‘I have endeavoured to guard against sources of error; but I cannot flatter myself that I have altogether avoided them. The physical sciences are almost wholly dependent on the minute observation and comparison of properties of things not immediately obvious to the senses … I have seldom entered into theoretical discussion, particularly concerning light, heat and other agents … Early experience has taught me the folly of hasty generalization. We are ignorant of the laws of corpuscular motion … Chemistry in its present state, is simply a partial history of phenomena, consisting of many series more or less extensive of accurately connected facts.’94

  Here was, apparently, the sobered scientific empiricist who would appeal to Banks and the Committee of the Royal Institution.

  It was vital to Davy how his first publication would be received. In J
uly 1800, anxiously awaiting news, he took himself off on a long summer walking tour into Wales with the painter Thomas Underwood, a rich and bohemian young man who had scientific interests. Underwood also happened to be one of the proprietors of the newly formed Royal Institution in London, but they restricted their conversation to the benefits of sunlight, starlight and fishing.

  First reactions to the book were very mixed. Preliminary accounts of the experiments had already been unguardedly described by Beddoes in a pamphlet, Observations made at the Medical Pneumatic Institution, published at the end of 1799. Though circulated in Bristol, this unwittingly prepared the way for scandal in London.95 The polemicist Richard Polwhele quickly published a nimble poem, ‘The Pneumatic Revellers’ (1800), a satirical attack on the nitrous oxide experiments which used suggestive dialogue and innuendo to imply that the Bristol laboratory witnessed scenes of intoxication, hysteria and even sexual debauchery.96 The experimenters and their subjects were mocked with glee:

  And they cried, everyone, ’twas a pleasure ecstatic

  To drink deeper drafts of the mighty Pneumatic!

  Davy and Beddoes were also attacked, as Banks had feared, in an anonymous pamphlet, The Sceptic (1800). They were described as a pair of ‘Bladder conjurors and newfangled Doctors pimping for Caloric’. In a word, they had used gas to seduce their female subjects when unconscious. By putting female subjects ‘in a state of gas’, they insidiously ‘gained admittance to their lovely persons’. In a fantasy sequence, the pamphlet describes how the dastardly Dr Caloric ‘warms their snowy bosoms; blows up the latent spark of soft desire; explores each hidden source of human bliss; and unsuspected riots in their Charms!’ One ‘fair patient’ was even rumoured to have been made pregnant under nitrous oxide.97