Abstract
By April 1812 Humphry Davy had become the poster boy of the Regency. On the eighth of that month, the Prince Regent personally knighted him, the title sealing the rise of a poor boy from remote Cornwall, a boy who had never attended university, to a gentleman accepted by the London establishment. Davy promptly married a wealthy socialite with many connections among the nobility, completing his personal transformation from rustic Cornishman to metropolitan figure.
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Notes
Monthly Review 1:3 (March 1831): 364–85 (371).
Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Reminiscences of a Literary Life, London: Major, 1836, 226.
Letter of Banks to Davy, October 30, 1815, The Letters of Sir Joseph Banks: A Selection, 1768–1820, ed. Neil Chambers, London: Imperial College Press, 2000, 317.
Quoted in David Knight, Humphry Davy Science and Power, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, 112.
Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Smyser, 3 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, 1: 128.
John Ayrton Paris, The Life of Sir Humphry Davy, 2 vols, London: Colburn and Bentley, 1831, 2: 25. Henceforth cited as Paris.
Davy and Faraday followed in the footsteps of Sir William Hamilton who, a long-time resident near Vesuvius, had studied vulcanism in the area, making many observations of activity and commissioning many illustrations. Davy, as an experimental chemist and mineralogist, had an expertise about the processes involved that Hamilton, a connoisseur, lacked. On Hamilton’s pioneering studies, see David Constantine, Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001; Joachim von der Thüsen, “Painting and the Rise of Volcanology: Sir William Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei,” Endeavour 23 (1999): 106–09; Karen Wood, “Making and Circulating Knowledge through Sir William Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei” British Journal for the History of Science, 39 (2006): 67–96.
John Davy, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Humphry Davy, Bart, 2 vols, London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1836, 2: 116–117.
Consolations in Travel, or, the Last Days of a Philosopher, London: Murray, 1830, 62.
Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, London: HarperPress, 2009.
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© 2016 Tim Fulford
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Fulford, T. (2016). The Volcanic Humphry Davy. In: Fulford, T., Sinatra, M.E. (eds) The Regency Revisited. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137504494_10
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