There is no shortage of biographies of Humphry Davy (1778–1829). The physician John A. Paris produced the first one in 1831. Davy's younger brother, John, published Memoirs of the Life of Sir Humphry Davy in 1836. Subsequent biographies kept appearing throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including accounts by Thomas E. Thorpe (1896), Anne Treneer (1963), Harold Hartley (1972), David Knight (1992), June Z. Fullmer (2000) and Raymond Lamont-Brown (2004). In his entry on Davy in the New Dictionary of Scientific Biography (2008), introduced as an update to David Knight's original DSB article from the 1970s, Frank James reflected on contributions to Davy scholarship in recent decades, including the important scientific biographies by Knight and Fullmer, cultural analyses linking him to English Romanticism, examinations of his presidency of the Royal Society and so on. James concluded that ‘an underlying theme of all these studies has been to provide a unity to Davy's life and career that might, at first glance, appear disjointed’ (NDSB, vol. 20, p. 250).
In this sensitive and insightful book, Golinski makes no such attempt, instead mobilizing this apparent disunity to provide a richly contextual, non-traditional, biographical portrait of Davy. Instead of the conventional cradle-to-grave linear type of approach, Golinski's narrative is arranged around six ‘personae’, each functioning as a composite of personal and public manifestations arising from the interactions between Davy's ‘experimental self’ – his lifelong complex self-fashioning attempts – and his shifting cultural, social and institutional surroundings. Golinski accordingly carves Davy's biography along semi-fluid coordinates, representing six broadly chronological periods in his life and professional development. Through the lens of these partly discrete, partly overlapping, identities we see Davy as ‘enthusiast’, ‘genius’, ‘dandy’, ‘discoverer’, ‘philosopher’ and ‘traveler’. Some of these labels Davy ascribed to himself; others came from more or less sympathetic contemporaries.
Throughout his career, Davy held prominent research and teaching positions at some of the foremost scientific institutions of his day and country, from the short-lived Pneumatic Institution in Bristol to the Royal Institution and the Royal Society of London. He was a sensational lecturer, a gifted electrochemical experimenter, and the discoverer–isolator of an extensive list of elements, which included potassium, sodium, magnesium and calcium, among others. He famously self-experimented with nitrous oxide (laughing gas), delivered several of the Royal Society's prestigious Bakerian Lectures, and was awarded the society's Copley Medal for scientific achievements. He rejected central aspects of Lavoisier's chemical system; was intensely interested in the nature of heat, light and life; and published Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812), a somewhat idiosyncratic chemical textbook of questionable pedagogical merit.
Given this list of accomplishments and range of interests, it is unsurprising that Davy has widely been recognized, rather straightforwardly, as a scientist – a canonical figure in the chronicles of modern science. Historians of science know that since the term ‘scientist’ was born shortly after Davy's death, it would be patently anachronistic to brand him a scientist. But the issue runs deeper, beyond factoids and semantics. What is implied by Golinski's subtitle, and borne out by its cleverly argued and admirably written account, is his ambitious attempt to link the tension at the core of this anachronism – epitomized by the opening line of the Introduction, ‘How did someone become a scientist before there was such a thing?’ (p. 1) – to the specific ways through which ‘Davy, like many of his contemporaries, was engaged in a project of making himself up … fashioning his identity while living his life, without any obvious model to follow and without knowing what shape the future would take’ (p. 8). While such an existential predicament may strike many present-day readers as eerily familiar, this was not the case in Davy's time, a period that spanned the final decades of the Enlightenment and the height of the Industrial Revolution.
Before science became fully professionalized towards the second half of the nineteenth century, Davy's attempts to fashion himself as a ‘man of science’ had to be unique and personal. Yet ‘his project was more than a superficial matter of putting on an appearance or staging a performance … [it] resonated with introspective reflection, of which the evidence survives in his letters and notebooks’ (p. 10). Deftly analysing this repository of previously underexplored evidence, Golinski probes the intricate connections between the private and public dimensions of these endeavours, ‘offering a study of Davy's self-fashioning as it was viewed by himself and others in his milieu’ (p. 14). Golinski's Davy experimented extensively and deeply, looking both outward and inward. Using the voltaic pile, he decomposed and recomposed matter in the laboratory and the lecture hall. But he also created and re-created his own sense of identity. Whether by ingesting psychoactive substances, digesting and composing various literary forms, or pondering the ultimate principles of nature, he relentlessly explored the boundaries separating body and soul, mundane and sublime, reason and emotion, constant and protean. He was a late natural philosopher, an early professional man of science who believed in the fundamental status of chemistry, and a Romantic philosopher of nature.
These sensibilities are reflected, if not evenly well, in Davy's six personae as identified by Golinski. Blasting onto the scientific scene at the close of the eighteenth century, Davy appears as a pneumatic experimenter who subjected himself and others to the effects of various gases, most famously the mind-altering nitrous oxide. This line of medico-psychic research invoked mixed feelings as Davy's ‘enthusiastic’ and imaginary meanderings were viewed as destabilizing rivals to measured reason and disengaged objectivity. The period from 1801, when he took up a lectureship at the Royal Institution, to 1812, when he published Elements of Chemical Philosophy, marks Davy's most fruitful and celebrated years of scientific activity. It was during those years that he assumed the next three identities – ‘genius’, ‘dandy’ and ‘discoverer’ (all culturally loaded tags) – most closely. Davy's lectures, which included a strong element of showmanship, blending chemical and electrical effects, drew tremendous crowds and earned him considerable fame. With his experimental and rhetorical skills routinely put on prominent display, his status as a rising ‘genius’ also helped buoy the public image of the Royal Institution and of science and chemistry in general. But Davy's talents extended far beyond the mere facade of attractive and seducing display. Masterfully employing the voltaic pile, Davy the ‘discoverer’ isolated numerous chemical elements. On the other hand, some of his detractors pointed out that ‘someone who was so heavily invested in self-display might easily be judged superficial or vain. He could be regarded as morally defective or lacking in substance’. So Davy was ‘satirized as a “dandy”, a self-preening man whose identity was dependent on women's regard … [which] was symptomatic of the anxieties and uncertainties produced by shifting gender roles at the time’ (pp. 74–75).
As Golinski convincingly demonstrates, while Davy would have resented being dubbed a dandy, he would have welcomed (even aspired to) the stamp of genius and discoverer, and would have likely admitted to being somewhat of an enthusiast. But he mainly saw himself as a chemist, and on his view of chemistry as the ultimate science of matter and life he saw himself as a philosopher – a chemical philosopher. Like other Romantics and contemporaries, Davy was preoccupied by nature's harmony and its underlying unifying principles, and he was drawn to considerations we would identify as vitalistic (but which were more anti- or non-mechanistic). Even Davy's contributions to applied science – like his successful Elements of Agricultural Chemistry (1813) and the development of the safety lamp for miners in 1815 – were undergirded by ‘philosophical’ concerns. In the former, he was espousing a ‘model of the gentleman farmer who was open to enlightened scientific improvement’ (p. 136); in the design of the latter, he emphasized having been ‘guided by scientific knowledge and an elevated philosophical viewpoint’ (p. 143). The last chapter is dedicated to Davy the ‘traveler’. It is centred on a contextual reading of his Consolations in Travel, which he composed towards the end of his life and which appeared in 1830, a year after his death. In this highly personal blend of autobiography, philosophy, travel literature and science, Golinski finds further (perhaps final) support for his thesis: ‘Davy's lifelong trials of identities, his multiple experiments in selfhood, reach their culmination – but not their resolution – in this extraordinary and mysterious work’ (p. 158).
Golinski's Davy is wonderfully and frustratingly elusive. Golinski dives deep, plunging into Davy's subtle reflections about matter and life, nature and selfhood. The result is a multilayered biography that reads like fiction, and is teeming with surprising insights. The tone is well modulated, knowledgeable yet adequately intimate. Examining Davy and the science of his day through a group portrait of his shifting identities is a potent idea but the account is more evocative than indicative. It may subsequently carry important historiographical lessons about the limits of contextual historical reading and the historian's capacity to bridge the private and the public, the individual actor and the sociocultural circumstances in which they are embedded. This book should be of interest to historians of science, students of Romanticism, and scholars of literary studies and British history more generally.
