Resolution and Repentance

Well, I break an unforgiveably long silence with a few updates and promises of more meaty future posts.

First, some notices:

- Horizon Review #3 launched a whole fleet of fascinating content, including my review of Richard Bronk's 'The Romantic Economist'.

- Our Poetry in Grasmere season has finished for 2009, but the Winter is packed full of things to do, see and make at The Wordsworth Trust.

- Lear has left us, but we are all already feeling more at home with our new exhibition 'Romantic Poets, Romantic Places'.

- You can now enjoy Romantic and contemporary poetry, including audio clips of the performances this year, in our poetry archive.

- And, last but most importantly, applications are now open for the 2010 internship programme. This is one of the few internships in the world of museums and arts administration that offers financial support and a properly defined programme of professional development. The range of experience is broad, the opportunities unique and the setting glorious; remote - yes, wet - almost interminably, but nevertheless the most beautiful place, wonderful people and for me the happiest and most influential year of my life. Other intern's experiences are recorded here.


And so, a hectic summer has finished and I should have slightly more time to bore you all with my thoughts. Posts should appear - and you may berate me if they do not - on:

- Lyrical Ballads
- Mary and Charles Lamb
- Resolution and Independence
- Our new exhibition, and the multitude of events going on here in the vale.

Also, any ideas for posts or topics you'd like to know more about would be welcomed.

Humphry Davy

Humphry Davy is best known for inventing the miner's lamp. Inventing it and then declining to patent the design. Here, I present a few notes, rather than a comprehensive guide to or even an overview of one of the most interesting figures of this historical period.

Born in Penzance in 1778, Davy went from provincial origins to become one of the most celebrated chemists of all time. He isolated many elements, including potassium and sodium, and the latter discovery made him the first ever subject of a clerihew:

Sir Humphry Davy
Was not fond of gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.

I have not been able to discover anywhere what Davy's true feelings toward gravy were, but of poetry Davy was decidedly fond. He not only read, but wrote poetry. A few of his early pieces were anthologised by Southey in Bristol. It was in Bristol, while he was studying at the Pneumatic Institute with Thomas Beddoes, that Davy met both Southey and Coleridge. Experiments for Davy were not constrained by health and safety, or a sense of distance and objectivity. He would smell and taste chemicals, make himself part of an electric circuit and in examining the effects of laughing gas, Davy, Beddoes and Coleridge had a rather jolly time, supposedly spouting poetry as they danced about the laboratory.

Davy found it hard to shake the reputation created by his provincial origins and the early accounts of the unconventional methods he used. He is also portrayed as a fop and a dandy, especially as he adopted 'a green velvet jacket with gold spangles'. This makes me intensely fond of him. He was ridiculed because rather than banning women from his lectures he actively played to this part of his audience, making a theatrical display of the bangs and puffs of smoke side of chemistry.

In 1804, Davy visited Dove Cottage to meet Wordsworth, along with Coleridge and Walter Scott. Coleridge sends the manuscript of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads to Davy to edit, and while many biographers have sniggered at Davy's attempts at poesy or suffered them as briefly as possible, it seems the circle of writers he socialised with rated his abilities very highly. Coleridge writes in very warm terms about Davy, and their correspondence suggests a sincere and profound attachment. Coleridge wishes to learn about chemistry, and goes to scientific lectures to 'increase [his] stock of metaphors'. Later in life, Davy also befriended the second generation Romantics, including Byron and Shelley.

The current relationship between science and poetry has been at the forefront of debates this year, but the Romantic period offers a great example of the complex interweaving of the disciplines. The idea that the spheres of knowledge in the Romantic period are polarised is ridiculous, when we have so much evidence of the arts and sciences overlapping. Davy's approach to chemistry is a contrast to his poetic pursuits, but they inform one another. And for the Romantics more generally, even where the two disciplines appear in opposition, it is because they in dialogue, not because they are separate, uncommunicating camps.

Davy continued writing all his life, mostly in laboratory notebooks stained and burnt by his experiments.

Grasmere! The Lake District!! Summer!!!

My dear reader,

I hope you will forgive my recent shortfall of correspondence. It is not for lack of goings-on here worth noting, but from the abundance of activity. All Cumbria is confused as the weather turns manic-depressive and poor tourists require first aid after becoming dangerously entangled in their Ordance Survey maps.

The Wordsworth Trust has opened it's Edward Lear the Landscape Artist exhibition, which brings together for the first time Lear's sketches and watercolours of his tours in Ireland and the Lakes from 1835-6. I love Lear. I love that he got famous drawing parrots. I love the poems, the stories and the recipes. I love that he was the twentieth of twenty-one children, and that he called Kendal a 'slop-basin'. The exhibition contains letters from the tours. In these, Lear is so charming he makes the world around him - including his own travels, the rain that besieges him, and his illness and disappointments - into marvellous prose descriptions through humour and irreverence. This creates a wonderful contrast with the level of professionalism and obsession that he shows in his landscape drawings. The pictures are ridiculously topographically accurate, as demonstrated by a 3D digital map that makes you feel as though you're having an out-of-body experience.

Invigilating the gallery is also a little like having an out-of-body experience. I love everything I do here at the Trust, and it's all necessary, worthwhile work, but after an hour and half of patrolling a room (trying to tread the fine line between vigilant and stalkerish) I had lost all concept of space and time and thought my brain was in my knees. So, if you do visit, please give the people with walkie-talkies a kind smile, and possibly a lollipop - the exhibition couldn't be put on without us.

List of the Celebrated Invigilantes

who descend into nonsense but keep on walking

Heather Anderson, Lucy Clarke,

Amy Concannon, Jane Connolly,
Jeff Cowton, John 'Visitor Services' Coombe,

Helen Donald, Tomoko Egiuchi,

Catherine Harland, Emily 'me' Hasler,

Molly Heal, Catherine Kay,

Matty O'Neill, Rie, Esther Rutter,
Carrie Taylor,Rebecca Turner,

Victoria Weaver, Wendy Woodhead

Back in the vale

I have been safely couched back in the vale for over a week now. Blog posting is becoming increasingly difficult as we enter the busy season, so apologies for the long silences. We have just opened the temporary exhibition here about Wordsworth and Tennyson; The Prelude and In Memoriam were published in 1850 and the exhibition explores that moment. The poetry season is also in full swing. So, in short, busy-busy - however, posts soon I hope.

In the meantime, save Salt publishing by buying a book...

Flatland

So I've made my first visit back to Suffolk - my county of origin - since I moved to the Lakes. All is summer hot, Constable country of greens and yellows. The soil is more dirt than soil, baked hard and purple-brown already. There's something unsettling about the sudden lack of hills that I'd never noticed before. And there's an eeriness to what is on the skyline; giraffic cranes, circular watertowers, pylons. But it's beautiful too, not just the At the Fishhouses parts and rivers that barely move with flitting white scalene sails, but the perennial bulbs along the seafront at Felixstowe (the town I come from) all hardy colours: blue, cerise and what passes for gold. And it's a port town, so there's always the sense of being about to move on.

Free Poetry

A great online edition called Poets on Poets with audio of modern poets reading various Romantic works. From the site Romantic Circles who have a number of fantastic resources. Interesting to see the Romantics that these poets have chosen to read and the ways they adapt them to their style of performance.

The Wordsworth Effect

Either I'm becoming increasingly sensitive to a real conspiracy or I'm going mad. Wordsworth is everywhere. Places you'd expect to find him, of course. My place of work obviously. And many pieces of writing about poetry. But recently it's been becoming a worrying trend that I can't get past the first paragraph of something without finding him there. The editorial of the latest Poetry Review isn't that much of a shocker, but escaping the confines of Town End for a stand up gig in Warrington with a few work mates, I opened the program to find a reference there again. First paragraph. Mixed feelings of validation and of being stalked by my day job on a night out. Then there was a reference to Keats and Shelley within the first fifteen minutes of the act.

Now, I'm well aware the above proves little more than that I am attracted to comedy with literary appeal and spend far too much time reading. I also know that we're liable to see what we want to or are trained to in things, or to pluck at them when they are only a thread of the whole fabric. But Wordsworth and his contemporaries are woven into a good deal of things so that we quote them without realising or date ideas back to their time. Then there's the relatives. The literary relatives. The things, the places, and the words words words.

It's wonderful. It makes me very happy. It gives me a job to do. It means I never leave work.