The chemist and the poet: Sir Humphry Davy and the preface to Lyrical Ballads

Abstract

It has long been known that Sir Humphry Davy, the greatest chemist of his age, became intimate during his stay in Bristol with Coleridge the poet-philosopher, and through him met and became friendly with Wordsworth, the greatest poet of the romantic epoch, (i) Davy had come to Bristol as an assistant to Thomas Beddoes in his Pneumatic Institution, an institute for exploring the use of gases in the treatment of disease. Though without any formal training in chemistry he was, at twenty-one years old, in the flower of his genius; in 1799, the year after his move to Bristol, he carried out his first important investigation, into the properties of nitrous oxide and its effects on the blood; a little later he was to explore the possibilities of the galvanic pile (‘the pile of Volta’). At this time Wordsworth, nearly ten years older, had just published, in collaboration with Coleridge but anonymously, the first edition of Lyrical Ballads , and in Germany in the severe winter of 1798-9 he had begun serious work on the poem on his own mind which we now know as The Prelude . By 1800 both Wordsworth and Coleridge had moved to the Lakes, and in March 1801 Davy left Bristol to take up his appointment as assistant lecturer in chemistry at the Royal Institution. Before leaving Bristol, Davy had corrected the proofs of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads , receiving them in batches from Wordsworth with his directions.