The Age of Wonder (70 page)

When John visited her in Hanover he found Caroline to be more energetic than ever. After all those years of stellar observation, she was still essentially a night bird. ‘She runs about town with me, and skips up her two flights of stairs. In the morning until eleven or twelve she is dull and weary, but as the day advances she gains life, and is quite
fresh and funny
at ten o’clock pm, and sings old rhymes, nay even dances! to the great delight of all who see her.’
⁸²

It was Caroline who worried about
his
health, and urged him not to let science drive him too hard. He must not become obsessive about his work, or allow himself to become remote or unfeeling. Here she was clearly looking back on her brother William’s career: ‘I wish often that I could see what you were doing, that I might give you a caution (if necessary) not to overwork yourself like your dear father did. I long to hear that the Forty Foot instrument is safely got down…I know how wretched and feverish one feels after two or three nights waking, and I fear you have been too eager at your Twenty-Foot…I should be very sorry on your account, for if I should not live long enough to know you comfortably married…if you can meet with a good-natured, handsome and sensible young lady, pray think of it, and do not wait till you are old and cross.’
⁸³

7

In 1823, pursuing his idea of raising the national profile of science, Davy had accepted a commission from the Royal Navy to solve a major problem with their new steam-powered warships. This was the rapid corrosion of their copper hulls in sea water, which also encouraged their fouling with weed and barnacles. After a relatively short period at sea, the combined effect could drastically reduce the ships’ speed through the water and manoeuvrability in action. The commission was widely publicised in the press, and Davy threw himself into the task, hoping to achieve a public success comparable to his invention of the safety lamp in the winter of 1815.

For this work he no longer asked for Faraday’s help. He solved the corrosion problem quickly and brilliantly, by analysing the corroding (oxidising) effect of salts on copper, and through a series of experiments finding that it could be neutralised with the use of small cast-iron plates placed along the length of the ship’s hull. The more rapid oxidising of the iron produced a charge of ‘negative electricity’ along the hull, which prevented the oxidising of the copper. He wrote excitedly to his brother John of his ‘most beautiful and unequivocal’ results.
⁸⁴
He read a paper on this discovery to the Royal Society in January 1824, and went on naval trials aboard HMS
Comet,
one of the Navy’s latest steam paddle-ships, to Scandinavia to demonstrate the results. The work was greeted by a fanfare of approval in the newspapers when he got home.

To crown his achievement, Davy announced with a flourish that, as with the safety lamp, he would refuse to take out a patent. ‘I might have made an immense fortune by a patent for this discovery; but I have given it to my country, for in everything connected with interest, I am resolved to live and die at least
sans tache,
’
⁸⁵
If not the Napoleon of science, he would be the Nelson.

But Davy’s claims for the new process were premature. Within months it was found that the unoxidised copper hulls attracted weeds and barnacles far more quickly and heavily than before. By October accusing paragraphs were appearing in the Portsmouth papers, and sarcastic letters in
The Times.
The navy was disgruntled, the Royal Society was embarrassed, and the press was derisive. Davy’s reputation was tarnished, not to say barnacled, by this episode, and his unpopularity at the Royal Society increased.
⁸⁶
It was also noted that while he was touring Scandinavia, his wife was altogether elsewhere on the Continent, travelling through Germany and charming the aged Goethe at Weimar, in a party organised by one of her aristocratic friends, the gossiping Lord Dudley.

Ironically, Davy’s science was perfectly correct, only the practical application was faulty. After several years of further sea-trials an adaptation of his iron-plate techniques did keep the Royal Navy’s copper hulls perfectly clean. It was largely his impetuosity, his premature publication of results and his increasing hunger for glory that had betrayed him. Moreover, pure science was not the same as applied science. Successful laboratory experiments did not always transfer smoothly to actual conditions in the field. He wrote touching letters to his mother trying to explain all this, and insisting he was right. ‘Do not mind any of the lies you may see in the newspapers…about the failure of one of my experiments. All the experiments
are successful,
more even than I could have hoped.’
⁸⁷

But Davy’s reputation was now increasingly vulnerable. Robert Harrington had again mocked him in a widely circulated pamphlet as ‘a self-styled Hercules…seated on the shoulders of Sir Joseph Banks’.
⁸⁸
In 1824 he was attacked by the new magazine
John Bull
in its satirical series ‘Humbugs of the Age’. He was pilloried not as a scientist, but as a snob and a socialite (No. 1 was De Quincey, No. 2 was a worldly prelate, and No. 3 was Davy). ‘The poor fellow fancies himself irresistible among the girls, and is evidently pluming himself while conversing with them…about the last new novel, or the set of china, or the pattern of a lace, or the cut of a gown-not at all about chemistry.
O! he is a universal genius. You never, my dear, would take him for a great philosopher.
’
⁸⁹

Davy was still attempting to secure his position with the younger Fellows of the Royal Society. He had John Herschel appointed as one of the two Society Secretaries in 1824, but then undermined the reformist implications of this by refusing to have Charles Babbage elected as the other. The irascible Babbage accused Davy of temporising and trimming, while Davy let it be known that the combination of two Cambridge University mathematicians in two such key appointments would, in his opinion, unbalance the Royal Society’s traditional composition. Unbalancing the traditional composition, with its predominance of ‘slumbering’ gentlemen amateurs, was of course exactly what Herschel and Babbage had intended.

Babbage began to reflect angrily on the minatory phrase from Davy’s inaugural address, the potential ‘decline of British science’. Here was a possible line of attack. But how could ‘decline’ be
inductively
demonstrated? For example, how many scientific papers or lectures, he wondered, had each Fellow
actually published
? No one had ever considered something so ungentlemanly as gathering such data from the
Philosophical Transactions.
But it might be a good empirical question to ask. He and Herschel had, after all, already published well over fifty papers between them.
⁹⁰

Over the next three years Davy spent most of his summers travelling outside London-usually to go shooting or fishing-in Wales, the Lake District, Ireland and Scotland. He joined the house parties of aristocratic acquaintances, but was rarely accompanied by Jane. Older friends like Wordsworth and Scott noted that his health was weakened. He walked less (though he still climbed Helvellyn), and he drank and talked more.

In September 1826 his mother Grace died in Penzance after a short illness. This had a profoundly upsetting and undermining effect on Davy, from which he never entirely recovered. It was Grace who had sustained him from the earliest days in Borlase’s pharmacy, and followed all his triumphs so faithfully. It was now that the hollowness of his marriage left him emotionally unsupported. He attended his mother’s funeral in Penzance with his sisters and his brother John, who had returned swiftly from Corfu. But he was not accompanied by Jane, who remained in London. Friends and family thought she was unbelievably callous; but Davy had almost certainly asked her not to come. It had long been agreed between them that his Penzance life was his own.

From this time Davy began to suffer from feelings of exhaustion, pains in his shoulder and right arm which he attributed to rheumatism, and palpitations in his throat. In fact he was suffering from progressive heart disease, which had prematurely killed many on the male side of his family. In October, during his final Bakerian Lecture, he had to admit that his work on the copper sheathing of ships had not been immediately successful.
⁹¹
At the annual general meeting of the Royal Society he barely got through his official address, sweating profusely, and returned home to Park Street without attending the official dinner.

In December 1826, while on a shooting party in Sussex with Lord Gale, Davy suffered a series of strokes, and to his horror found himself partially paralysed down his right side. He was taken back to Park Street, where Jane (who had as usual spent Christmas in London) proved herself efficient and kindly in organising nurses and doctors. Davy was only forty-eight, and could not forget his father’s premature death at the same age. His friend and physician Dr Babington recommended exercise and diet, and gradually he began to recover the use of his arm, and some rather stiff movement in his leg. By January 1827 he was able to write again, and he found to his immense relief that he could still cast a fishing line and shoot tolerably well. But he tired easily, and became deeply depressed and irritable. Babington suggested a long holiday on the Continent.

Fitting out his carriage with books and hunting gear, Davy set out with his dogs and his brother John in January. For Jane this must have been a decisive moment, but the old intimacies of the Highlands could not be recovered on either side, even in this extremity. She decided she could not travel happily with her husband, and so would remain in London, looking after his affairs at Park Street, entertaining the more sympathetic Royal Society Fellows, and keeping up her wide circle of aristocratic correspondence. It was John alone who travelled with him over the snowbound Alps, and remained with him at Ravenna until recalled to his post as military doctor on Corfu in late spring. It was a painful farewell for both of them.

From now on the whole tenor of Davy’s life would profoundly and permanently change. He became much more like the solitary boy who had roamed the wilds of Cornwall in his youth. He was aware of his fatal illness, and knew that he could drop dead at any moment, and that no medication existed that could help him: a terrifying prospect. He was also aware of insidious psychological enemies: chronic depression, alcoholism, morphine addiction, or simply spiritual despair. He had little to cling to but his belief in science.

John later wrote movingly of his brother’s predicament: ‘The natural strength of his mind was very clearly manifested under these circumstances. Dependent entirely on his own resources; no friend to converse with; no one with him to rely on for aid, and in a foreign country, without even a medical advisor; destitute of all the amusements of society; without any of the comforts of home-month after month, he kept his course, wandering from river to river, from one mountain lake and valley to another, in search of favourable climate; amusing himself with gun and rod, when sufficiently strong to use them, with
“speranza”
[hope] for his rallying word.’
⁹²

In July Davy wrote stoically from the shores of Lake Constance: ‘My only chance of recovery is in entire repose, and I have even given up angling, and amuse myself by dreaming and writing a very little, and studying the natural history of fishes. Though alone, I am not melancholy…I now use green spectacles, and have given up my glass of wine per day.’
⁹³

At Ravenna he wrote a series of short meditative poems, simply entitled ‘Thoughts’. He was anxious not to fall into easy, consoling delusions; and in this the man of science came to the aid of the poet. Often the literary effect is severe, sceptical and coldly metaphysical. There is none of the showy confidence, or the assertive music, of his earlier hymn ‘The Massy Pillars of the Earth’. Yet Davy’s own voice remains clear.

We trace analogies; as if it were
A joy to blend all contrarieties,
And to discover
In things the most unlike some qualities
Having relationship and family ties.

Thus life we term a spark, a fire, a flame;
And then we call that fire, that flame, immortal,
Although the nature of all fiery things
Belonging to the earth is perishable.

But sometimes he allowed himself a great outburst of feeling, an uprush of longing for survival and consolation and love.

Oh couldst thou be with me, daughter of heaven,
Urania! I have no other love;
For time has withered all the beauteous flowers
That once adorned my youthful coronet.

With thee I still may live a little space,
And hope for better, intellectual light;
With thee I may e’en still in vernal times
Look upon nature with a poet’s eye,

Nursing those lofty thoughts that in the mind
Spontaneous rise, blending their sacred powers
With images from mountain and from flood,
From chestnut groves amid the broken rocks

Where the blue Lima pours to meet the wave
Of foaming Serchio…
⁹⁴

Many of these poems led him back to one of his consoling rivers. As a distraction in the evenings, Davy decided to begin writing a book about fishing. It would recount a series of piscatorial adventures and conversations, in the spirit of Izaak Walton, but adding a good deal of natural history and fishing folklore. He entitled it
Salmonia, or Days of Fly-Fishing.