Alice Jenkins

Humphry Davy: Poetry, Science and the Love of Light

Shortly after the death of Humphry Davy in Geneva in 1829, his younger brother John wrote a biography of the eminent chemist. Both volumes of John Davy’s biography begin with two epigraphs. John Davy evidently felt strongly about the choice of epigraphs: these two quotations appear again for the single-volume reworking of the biography, published as the opening volume of his brother’s Collected Works. The first quotation is from Cicero’s Philippics, but the second is from Wordsworth’s first ‘Essay upon Epitaphs’: The affections are their own justification. The Light of Love in our Hearts is a satisfactory evidence that there is a body of worth in the minds of our friends or kindred, whence that Light has proceeded.1

Literature: Wonders and ologies

In the week of the Dickens bicentennial, Alice Jenkins explores the literary giants conflicted take on science.

Michael Faraday's Mental Exercises: an Artisan Essay-Circle in Regency London

In 1818 Michael Faraday and a handful of London artisans formed a self-help group with the aim of teaching themselves how to write like gentleman. For a year and a half, this essay circle met regularly to read and critique one another’s writings and the “Mental Exercises” they produced are a record of life, literary tastes, and the social and political ideas of dissenting artisans in Regency London. This volume is the first to publish the essays and poems produced by Faraday’s circle and it includes not only the complete corpus of the group’s writings, but detailed annotations, extracts from key sources, a full-length biographical, historical, and a literary introduction as well. Valuable not only for Romantic and early-Victorian historians, but for literary scholars and the general reader as well, this collection sheds considerable light on the developing mind of one our greatest scientists.

Mathematics and mental health in early nineteenth-century England

‘ N othing is less applicable to the conduct of life than mathematical reasoning’, wrote Mme de Staël (1813, I, 177). In her view, a person whose education has been primarily mathematical is accustomed to clarity and lucidity, and so cannot cope with the murky choices of everyday life. ‘That which is most important for our conduct in life is to understand our fellow creatures’, she insists, but the mathematician cannot do this: his training has made him deficient in sympathy and intolerant of difference. He seeks the certainty of mathematical demonstration in all aspects of life, but ‘primitive truths, those which are seized by feeling and genius, are not susceptible of demonstration’ (De Staël 1813, I, 178). Mme de Staël’s pessimistic assessment of the effects on the character of an education in which mathematics is dominant was to be echoed many times during the nineteenth century by British writers impatient with the traditional and patrician respect for mathematics in the curriculum and in wider culture. But in the context of emerging Romantic models of the proper relationship of feeling to thinking, critiques of mathematics’ unbalancing effect on the mental faculties became especially powerful. In contrast to classicizing eighteenth-century psychological models, which typically advocated subordinating feeling to reason, Romantic-era writers often argued that emotion and rationality should be seen as two equally important parts of a single process. In aesthetics, in criticism of all kinds of art, and in psychological writing, the complete union of thought and emotion was increasingly represented as a mark of genius; but even for non-geniuses, the natural state of the healthy mind was thought to be characterized by thinking and feeling interacting as equals. As the highly influential German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schlegel put it in his lectures on the Philosophy of life: ‘thought and feeling stand reciprocally in need of each other. As thought gains new life and animation from the rich feeling, [. . .] even so the feelings are not unfrequently first awakened, and very often strengthened and elevated, by the lofty flight of thought’ (Schlegel 1847, 374). It is hardly too much to say that a new ideal of selfhood was generated by this model in which thinking and feeling invigorated and intensified one another. Along with this new ideal, new models of outstanding humanity were generated to celebrate those whose balance seemed much more finely tuned than normal, and equally, new pathologies were produced to classify individuals in whom the thinking and feeling faculties failed to balance or to unite. In a cultural climate that admired emotional thought and thoughtful emotion, branches of knowledge which appeared to emphasize reason almost to the exclusion of feeling provoked considerable anxiety.