HUMPHRY DAVY’S SEXUAL CHEMISTRY

By Jan Golinski.

Published in Configurations 7 (1999), 15-41
© The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

The "scientist," as archetype, has always been a male figure. In popular culture, the convention has been reinforced countless times, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the blockbuster films of Steven Spielberg.{1} The stereotypical scientist is invariably male and also associated with distinctly masculine character traits, whether he is man of action or cool rationalist, benevolent patriarch or glamorous young hero, saint or devil. Nor is this cliché confined to popular culture. Myths of masculine accomplishment, or what Sharon Traweek has called "male tales," are told also within scientific communities to socialize aspirants and to make boys into men.{2} The counterpart to this masculine ethos is the exclusion of women from the professional scientific world, almost universally maintained until recent decades and frequently justified as "natural." Scientific traditions have sanctioned accounts of the superiority of the male intellect and the inherent weaknesses of the female mind, attempting to enlist the authority of nature to explain why men are better at science. Social behavior that largely excludes women has evidently been closely linked with the discursive construction of a strongly gendered sense of identity among scientists themselves.

Historically, a critical moment in the development of this formation came around the turn of the nineteenth century, the period sometimes called the "second scientific revolution." This period saw a comprehensive reorganization of scientific disciplines and institutions, with the emergence of new specializations and innovative methods of training and research. The identity of the scientific practitioner was profoundly transformed at this time, in a significant step toward the formation of a modern professional persona—a change encapsulated by the coining of the word "scientist" in 1833. The year before William Whewell contributed his terminological innovation at a meeting of the new British Association for the Advancement of Science, the geologist William Buckland wrote to a colleague about the necessity of excluding women from meetings of the same association if an appropriately serious atmosphere were to be sustained: "[I]f the meeting is to be of scientific utility, ladies ought not to attend the reading of papers … as it would overturn the thing into a sort of Albemarle dilettanti meeting instead of a serious philosophical union of working men."{3} Although women, including Buckland’s own wife Mary, succeeded in gaining entry to public sessions at BAAS meetings, they were firmly excluded from its governance. The leading "gentlemen of science" took it for granted that women could not be expected to make original contributions to science, would form only a peripheral section of its audience, and should be excluded altogether from discussion of certain subjects.

The deliberations among the gentlemen pioneers of the BAAS reflect the bearing of assumptions about gender upon the emergence of the "scientist" as a social actor in the modern world. Women who demanded a place at meetings of the association challenged certain values and expectations of the men involved in forging this persona. It is in light of incidents like this that we can begin to perceive the connections between the changing social arrangements within which men and women interacted and the formation of a distinctly masculine scientific identity. Londa Schiebinger has argued that women were excluded with renewed vigor from almost all the new scientific institutions of the early nineteenth century, and that the general movement toward professionalization in the sciences denied women the recognition that a few of them had been able to earn in the rather less stratified world of Enlightenment science.{4} Ann B. Shteir has made a similar argument with specific reference to botany, pointing out how certain male specialists in the 1830s sought to define their expertise in opposition to a supposedly less rigorous version of the science practiced by women.{5} Neither author is suggesting that women had ever been made welcome among male practitioners of the sciences, but they both discern changes in the tactics of exclusion as the persona of the specialist scientist was forged. The previous age of Enlightenment was no egalitarian utopia, but the early nineteenth century saw the deployment of new tactics of demarcation of male from female realms, bound up with the creation of the scientist as a masculine ideal.

These arguments connect temptingly with the accounts of social historians who have perceived a strengthening, at this time, of the boundaries between the "separate spheres" of male public activity and female domestic life.{6} The gender-boundaries around specialist scientific activity did not, however, exactly correspond with those separating public from private life. Women remained important to the economy of fact-gathering in such sciences as geology and natural history, though their efforts were poorly recognized when results were published. They were also able to contribute to scientific work in certain households, usually in partnership with a male spouse or relative. Recent studies of scientifically active couples in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have begun to reveal how important such partnerships sometimes were, and how little they were acknowledged.{7} Public recognition remained far from women’s grasp. The struggle for equality in education and status within scientific institutions was a long and bitter one. Male professional identity remained closely bound up with maintaining social barriers against female participation.

Exactly how the identity of the scientist was shaped by assumptions concerning gender remains, however, in many respects, unclear. A number of scholars have pointed to the ways in which institutional segregation of the sexes was justified in terms of images of the different mental characters of men and women. Demeaning notions of the female mind were sometimes invoked to legitimate the exclusion of women from the serious work of science. Schiebinger, Thomas Laqueur, and Ludmilla Jordanova, have all referred to the gendered mental pathology of this time, which provided resources for men seeking to secure their professional or specialist identities by defining themselves in opposition to what were seen as feminine psychological weaknesses.{8} Male ideologues deployed characterizations of the female intellect that could be traced back to Aristotle, their application strengthened by a new understanding of the bearing of "nature" upon human social arrangements. The "natural" attributes of male and female minds were said to have profound implications for the kind of intellectual accomplishments men and women could be expected to attain.{9} Jordanova has particularly emphasized, however, that gender-coded polarities were never entirely stable. Opinions tended to shift as to which mental attributes were typically male and which female, and how absolute the distinction was between them.

The situation is particularly complicated on the male side of the picture, since the changes I have mentioned corresponded with significant shifts in the prevailing images of masculinity in Western culture. The years around the turn of the nineteenth century brought to prominence models of male creativity that stressed imagination and the emotions, rather than classical rationality. The influence of these "Romantic" notions of genius called into question the prior association between masculinity and reason, affecting the public images of male poets and scientific practitioners.{10} This is also the period in which one can trace the emergence of the "scientific hero," whose contributions to knowledge were stamped by their origin in strenuous physical exertion. The scientific hero had its archetype in the figure of Alexander von Humboldt, a man whose wanderings and bodily sufferings were widely viewed as exemplary for the seeker after knowledge in such fields as geology and natural history. The appeal of Humboldt’s writings, however, was evidently connected with a Romantic sensibility toward the natural world, which licensed men’s expression of emotional responses to its grandeur and wonders. Humboldt’s own masculinity has been judged so problematic (by modern commentators, at least) as to raise questions about his sexual orientation.{11} Further exploration of the ways in which notions of manliness were changing at this time may enable us to tell a more complex story than hitherto of the formation of the male scientific persona.

In this paper, I offer some reflections upon these issues in connection with another ambivalent scientific hero, Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829). While Davy was not an explorer on Humboldt’s heroic scale, he played a significant part in creating the modern image of the scientist. Institutionally, he traveled from obscure provincial origins to a central position in the London scientific establishment. The critical move was made in 1801, when he left the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, run by the physician and political radical Thomas Beddoes, to take up a position at the newly-founded Royal Institution in London. There, he proved his worth to the aristocratic patrons of the institution by researching problems of practical chemistry and by building up a substantial middle-class audience for his public lectures. His scientific achievements culminated in the discoveries of several new elements, including sodium and potassium, the determination that chlorine and iodine are also elements, and the development of the miners’ safety lamp. Socially, his career climaxed in award of a knighthood in 1812, marriage at about the same time to a wealthy widow, Jane Apreece, which freed him from the necessity of paid employment, and finally seven years as President of the Royal Society in the 1820s. Like the amphibian creature to which he devoted a chapter in his strange final work, Consolations in Travel (1830), Davy was a "proteus." His protean self-fashioning enabled him to rescue his career from the opprobrium attached to his early experiments on breathing nitrous oxide at Bristol, when he and Beddoes were held up to vituperative public ridicule. The Tory satirical magazine, the Anti-Jacobin Review, had published a poetic attack on the "Pneumatic Revellers" of Bristol in 1800, rebuking them for orgiastic indulgence in the mind-altering gas. Beddoes’s reputation never recovered from the indignity of the nitrous oxide capers, but Davy became a lion of the London scientific establishment, though he was never able entirely to shake off the taint of rusticity which surrounded his origins.{12}

I shall discuss certain features of Davy’s career that are highlighted by a focus on questions of gender. In regard to these issues also, we shall see that Davy was a protean figure. He created his persona as a scientist by demonstrating mastery of the instruments of experimental research, displaying their power in public lectures to audiences containing a significant number of women. In the context of politicized arguments about female education, this led to some critical appraisals of Davy’s personal character, indicating ambiguities and dangers inherent in his mode of self-fashioning. Thus, Davy’s identity, as it was represented and commented upon by his contemporaries, was complexly and ambivalently linked to images of gender. On the one hand, his deportment as a lecturer at the Royal Institution made use of conventions of masculine display before an audience that was, to a significant degree, female. The command of his audience that Davy accrued was a significant resource for him in making his reputation as a discoverer. On the other hand, however, a number of features of Davy’s public persona undercut this image of masculine self-assertion. His submission to aristocratic patronage in pursuit of career advancement was sometimes described by Whigs as unmanly. Furthermore, his interest in self-display in the lecture theater and at elite social gatherings was frequently thought to be effeminate, or at least emasculating. These notions were crystallized by right-wing press satirists in the figure of Davy as a "fop" or "dandy," a label connected with his showmanship before women and his encouragement of their intellectual pretensions. Gossip and insinuation related to this image surrounded his marriage, which contemporaries seem to have regarded as lacking the normal bonds of affection or sexual relations, and as exhibiting an inappropriate subordination of man to wife. Davy was represented by conservative satirists as a vain man, idolized by the women who attended his lectures, but unable to assume the male role with his own wife; in these respects he personified the stereotype dandy or fop.

The application of these ambivalently gendered descriptive terms to Davy reveals how his culture decoded his attempts to construct his own identity as a scientist in a context of shifting social roles. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, gender-loaded images may be expressive of various kinds of relations of power.{13} Thus, to portray Davy as a dandy was a way of ridiculing his encouragement of women’s scientific studies, a controversial stance in this period. Davy was also vulnerable to caricature of his clothing, gestures, and speech, which were represented either as vulgar or as pretentious attempts to transcend his lowly social origins. He never won complete acceptance from the London social elite and his early association with a coterie of provincial radicals was always liable to be invoked against him. The echoes of the satire directed against Davy lingered even after his death. When Buckland referred to "a sort of Albemarle dilettanti meeting" it may well have been Davy’s lectures at the Royal Institution (in Albemarle Street) that he intended to invoke. The image of a mixed-sex audience at a scientific event signaled the dilettantism and indecorum that Buckland wanted to avoid at the BAAS. In contrast to the workmanlike atmosphere the gentlemen of science sought to create, Davy’s mode of public self-presentation was judged frivolous, unprofessional, and—most tellingly—unmasculine.

Before going any further, I want to emphasize at this point that my focus is on representations of Davy’s character. I am not concerned with how accurate the representations are as reflections of his real personality, to which I do not claim privileged access. This is not, in other words, an attempt to engage in historical psychoanalysis, or indeed to specify anything about Davy’s real personality or sexual identity. My concern, rather, is with how Davy himself, and others around him, described his character, because it was in doing so that they used the language and motifs of their culture. I do not mean, by saying this, to discount the importance of individual personality. Davy’s unique personal attributes were unquestionably crucial in giving his public character the profile it assumed; he was not simply a creature of his times. However, in order to make connections with the values and assumptions of his culture, it is upon the public images of his personality that we have to fix our attention. Only then can we hope to show how the ambiguities of his public persona reflected more widespread cultural tensions concerning the identity of the male scientist and his relations with a female audience.

As a young man from humble provincial origins, Davy built his career in the metropolitan scientific world upon his success as a public lecturer at the Royal Institution in the first decade of the nineteenth century. He attracted large audiences of elite men and women, earning considerable press attention, and making attendance at one of his lectures de rigueur for fashionable visitors to the capital. Davy’s achievements in the lecture theater relied, to a significant degree, upon mobilizing the conventions of male authority and female passivity. He drew upon the work of Enlightenment writers, such as Bernard de Fontenelle, and lecturers, such as Adam Walker and Jean-Antoine Nollet, who had addressed themselves to women in their presentations of experimental philosophy.{14} To the Enlightenment repertoire, Davy added dramatic new experimental phenomena and expressions of a new sensibility regarding nature and its powers. He crafted his performances with care, rehearsing his rhetorical flourishes and spectacular experimental demonstrations. He made use of the voltaic pile (an electrical battery) to demonstrate shocks, sparks ("of a dazzling brightness"), and loud noises. Different metal electrodes were used to produce sparks of different colors. Electricity could also be used to ignite a little gunpowder and mercury fulminate, or to draw figures on gold-plated sheets by burning off the metal.{15}

Davy made much of these "new instruments and powers of investigation" in his Discourse Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry, published a few months after it was delivered at the Royal Institution in January 1802. He emphasized how unprecedented instrumental powers were now available for "man" to command. The lightning had been taken from the clouds, he said, and galvanism had enabled men to reanimate the organs of dead animals. These godlike forces were to enhance man’s status, allowing him, "to interrogate nature with power, not simply as a scholar, passive and seeking only to understand her operations, but rather as a master, active with his own instruments."{16} Displaying the effects of such forces as electricity, Davy was simultaneously displaying his command of them through his instruments. Possession of apparatus like the voltaic pile, by which natural forces could be controlled, was projected as an integral part of the identity of the experimental philosopher.

Davy’s self-representation in the Discourse played a critical role in his building of a scientific career. Cultivation of an elite audience at the Royal Institution enabled him to secure patronage for his research program in the laboratory there. An especially large and powerful voltaic pile, displayed to prospective patrons in the lecture theater and in the basement laboratory, was put to use in the series of discoveries of new elements by which Davy made his name. The isolation of sodium and potassium depended upon his establishment of an unrivaled mastery of the pile as an instrument of analysis, in the Bakerian Lecture of 1806. Similarly, victory in the prolonged controversy by which the elementary status of chlorine was demonstrated in the 1810s followed from recognition that Davy had a unique command of the instruments of chemical analysis. These experimental accomplishments had their social and rhetorical dimensions, founded upon the relationship with his audience and his patrons that Davy forged in his lectures at the Royal Institution.{17}

In view of this, the use in those lectures of the masculine gender to characterize the experimenter’s mastery of instrumental powers seems important. Some contemporary observers commented that Davy’s rhetoric and experimental displays appealed particularly to the women who comprised a significant proportion of his audience. The French traveler Louis Simond recorded, after a visit to the Royal Institution in 1810:

The resources of chemistry, to recal or keep up the attention of a mixt audience, are infinite. A small bit of potassium thrown in a glass of water, or upon a piece of ice, never fails to excite a gentle murmur of applause. More than one half of the audience is female, and it is the most attentive portion. I often observe these fair disciples of science taking notes timidly, and as by stealth, on small bits of paper; no man does that,—they know already the things taught, or care little about them!{18}

Other commentators echoed the observation that Davy’s female auditors were more attentive than their male companions, hanging upon the lecturer’s every word and taking careful notes of what was shown and said.{19} They also agreed that Davy was noticeably appreciative of their applause. He was unequaled among his contemporaries in his ability to attract a female audience, which he seems to have deliberately cultivated, believing that participation by women in public scientific education was a token of a civilized society.{20} Nonetheless, Davy accepted the conventions of his time, according to which women were accorded a quite circumscribed role in the scientific world. They were allowed to aspire to a general knowledge of chemistry and other sciences as part of polite learning, but were not expected to try to grasp the details of the subject that would be necessary for professional participation. A male contemporary remarked that, "Your chemists and metaphysicians in petticoats are altogether out of nature—that is, when they make a trade or distinction of such pursuits—but when they take a little general learning as an accomplishment they keep it in very tolerable order."{21}

This restriction on the limits of women’s learning was apparently accepted by Jane Marcet, wife of a prominent London physician, who assumed the role of Davy’s most renowned female disciple by publishing Conversations on Chemistry in 1806. Marcet published the work anonymously, but disclosed her sex in the introduction, where she explained that her project was inspired by attendance at Davy’s lectures. She announced that her intention was to provide women who heard the lectures with the further information they would need to understand them more fully. She admitted that she could not claim the title of a chemist, but insisted nonetheless that the subject was a proper one for women to learn as part of polite culture. Her book adopted the form of a series of conversations, in which an instructor, "Mrs. B.," led her girl students, "Emily" and "Caroline," through the basics of the science.

Marcet took care to situate herself in a position that would appear respectable for a female author purporting to teach chemistry to female readers. She acknowledged that it was inappropriate for a woman to enter "into the minute details of practical chemistry." Her fictional female pupils were enjoined by their teacher to refrain from pedantically using chemical terms in everyday conversation and not to think of studying pharmacy, which "properly belongs to professional men." They were introduced to the world of science within a clearly delineated domestic setting, in which only small-scale experimentation was possible. They were invited to admire the laboratory with its powerful instrumental resources but not to expect to handle them. They were also led to reflect upon the sublime spectacle of the laboratory of nature, encouraged by the assurance that, "a woman may obtain such a knowledge of [chemistry], as will not only throw an interest on the common occurrences of life, but will enlarge the sphere of her ideas, and render the contemplation of nature a source of delightful instruction."{22}

In his lectures, Davy had encouraged just this notion that chemistry revealed the sublime spectacle of nature. Abandoning the materialistic outlook he had adopted privately in the 1790s, he articulated a link between chemistry and natural theology, two subjects previously connected only in a rather tenuous way. In his Discourse, Davy made much of the chemist’s perception, "in all the phenomena of the universe," of "the designs of a perfect intelligence." Thus, he proposed that the science "must be always more or less connected with the love of the beautiful and the sublime; ... [and] is eminently calculated to gratify and keep alive the more powerful passions and ambitions of the soul."{23} Apparently giving way to these passions in his lectures, Davy introduced florid rhetorical digressions on natural theology, to the great applause of his audiences. Simond even suggested that he should make more of his poetical inclinations in this respect, "abandon[ing] himself more naturally to his spontaneous feelings."{24}

Simond’s remark pointed to an opportunity and a danger for Davy; he acknowledged that many commentators had criticized or ridiculed the lecturer’s poetical digressions. Displays of emotion could strengthen the affective bond with an audience and consolidate the message about the sublime passions chemistry was capable of arousing; but they could also undercut the lecturer’s authority. An emotional lecturer might be viewed as one who had failed to master his own passions, hence tarnishing his image of masculine self-command. Davy’s exhibitions of his feelings, in other words, could be seen as bringing out a feminine side of his public persona. The situation was similar to that of the leading poets of the time, who claimed they had assimilated female powers of imagination and passion, while simultaneously asserting their undiminished manliness. Davy, by indulging his own poetic talents and inclinations, displayed the androgynous aspect of the Romantic genius.{25}

I shall return to this issue shortly. First, it is important to mention another reason why Davy’s masculinity could be seen as compromised, namely the quite deliberate refashioning of manners and demeanor he had undertaken in the course of his social climbing. When he left Bristol for London in 1801, Davy was taken to have turned his back on a network of provincial intellectuals, many of them political reformers or radicals, with whom he had previously been associated. In the metropolis, he accepted the patronage of Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society and focus of the aristocratic group that founded and managed the Royal Institution. Provincial Whigs, such as Henry Brougham in the Edinburgh Review, debated whether or not Davy’s "manly" independence had been compromised by his submission to the aristocratic interest and the corrupt ambiance of "fashionable philosophy." Acceptance of honors or patronage was generally seen, by radicals and independents, as diminishing a man’s masculinity. Thomas Paine wrote that, "it marks a sort of foppery in the human character, which degrades it. It reduces man into the diminutive of man in things which are great, and the counterfeit of woman in things which are little."{26}

From the other side of the political divide, however, Davy was never accepted as an equal by the Tory elite of the metropolis. Their objection was not to his seeking preferment but to his pretensions of having overcome lowly social origins. Even after his knighthood, in 1813, The Times denigrated him as "dirty finger gentry." As a social climber, Davy was routinely criticized for the artificiality of his deportment and his dress. Commentators snidely remarked on the banality of his clothing, gestures, and conversation, when he succeeded Banks as President of the Royal Society in the 1820s. Notwithstanding Davy’s clumsy attempts at elegance, The John Bull Magazine told its readers in 1824, "the clothes of a gentleman do not sit easily upon him ... He smells of the shop completely."{27} In trying to overcome this kind of prejudice, Davy ran the risk of appearing effeminate by devoting excessive attention to his dress or manners.

The problem was exhibited in a different way in the posthumous defense of Davy’s character mounted by his younger brother and biographer, John. John Davy was concerned to answer allegations by another biographer that his brother had presented a rustic and uncouth appearance on his first arrival at the Royal Institution. Arguing that Davy was in fact naturally elegant and well-mannered, John ended up making his brother sound quite feminine. He insisted that, "Though his manners were retreating and modest, he was generally thought naturally graceful; and the upper part of his face was beautiful. I remember when he first lectured at the Royal Institution, the ladies said, ‘Those eyes were made for something besides poring over crucibles’." In his brother’s attempts to defend his reputation, in fact, Davy’s physiognomy was described in consistently feminine terms:

I remember once a gentleman speaking to me about it [Davy’s hair], and expressing his admiration of its quality, very much in the manner he might use in speaking of a lady’s hair. His skin was delicate, and his complexion fair, with a good deal of colour. His countenance was very expressive, and responsive to the feelings of his mind; and when these were agreeable, it was eminently pleasing, I might say beautiful, for his smile was so.{28}

The issue of the political and moral compromises Davy made in the course of building his career has continued to be debated into the twentieth century, sometimes with reference still to his physical appearance. A character in C. P. Snow’s novel, The Search (1934), calls Davy, "the type of all the jumped-up second-raters of all time." Taking a more indulgent view, the Marxist journalist and historian J. G. Crowther remarked in 1935 that Davy was "more important sociologically than any of his contemporaries," because his social climbing made him "the chief prophet of the new class of applied scientists." Tellingly, Crowther reenacted the discursive move common among Davy’s contemporaries, whereby moral scrutiny was displaced onto inspection of the chemist’s body. Crowther reinscribed the detailed physiognomic descriptions given of Davy in his own time, repeating the very phrases used by contemporaries to depict his complexion, hair, eyes, and voice. The inappropriateness of his dress on occasion was noted, and related to his "coxcomb" behavior and "pursuit of snobbery." Crowther even added speculations of his own about the great chemist’s physiology. Davy, he suggested, had "lived swiftly," at a high metabolic rate, which would explain why his significant discoveries were punctuated by periodic illnesses and terminated by an early death.{29}

The contemporary who most acutely and passionately commented on the moral quandaries of Davy’s self-fashioning, and vividly linked the dilemmas to the chemist’s bodily condition, was the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge befriended Davy at Beddoes’s Pneumatic Institution, where the two participated in the hallucinogenic pleasures of breathing nitrous oxide in the late 1790s. The poet developed an intense affection for the young chemist, following his research interests by trying to teach himself chemistry, and confidently prophesying that Davy would make great discoveries in the science. When Davy moved to London, Coleridge wrote to him frequently from his residence in the Lake District, bemoaning their separation and urging him to visit. In 1801-1802, he attended a course of Davy’s lectures at the Royal Institution.{30}

In his letters, Coleridge emphasized the strength of his emotional bond of "sympathy" and "love" for Davy. In February 1801, he explained his plan to learn chemistry, "both for it’s [sic.] own sake, and in no small degree likewise, my beloved friend!—that I may be able to sympathize with all, that you do and think." Coleridge hoped his blind sympathy, "from the very middle of my heart’s heart," would be illuminated by the light of shared knowledge, if only he knew more about the science. Speculating about the great discoveries the young chemist was destined to make, he asked, "To whom shall a young man utter his Pride, if not to a young man whom he loves?" His intense devotion to Davy led Coleridge to agonize about the moral temptations confronting the young chemist in London. There, Davy was said to be placed in "a perilous Desart of good things," like an anchorite surrounded by alluring visions of sin. Threatening him were two "serpents," Coleridge suggested: "Dissipation with a perpetual increase of acquaintances, and the constant presence of Inferiors and Devotees, with that too great facility of attaining admiration, which degrades Ambition into Vanity."{31}

In January 1804, Coleridge’s anxieties about Davy’s ability to withstand the corrupting influences of dissipation and flattery found expression in a shocking dream. He imagined that the ominous forces with which Davy was threatened had inflicted appalling mutilations on the young chemist’s body. He described the vision in a letter to the poet Robert Southey, who had also partaken of the pleasures of nitrous oxide and whose attraction to Davy rivaled Coleridge’s own:

I dreamt among other wild melancholy Things, all steeped in a deep dejection but not wholly unmingled with pleasure, that I came up into one of our [Christ’s] Hospital Wards, & sitting by a bed was told that it was Davy in it, who in attempts to enlighten mankind had inflicted ghastly wounds on himself, & must henceforward live bed-ridden. The image before my Eyes instead of Davy was a wretched Dwarf with only three fingers; which however produced, as always in Dreams, no Surprize. I however burst at once into loud & vehement Weeping, which at length, but after a considerable continuance, awakened me.{32}

Coleridge’s dream descriptions pose notorious problems of interpretation. Both psychological and literary skills seem to be called for to plumb their meanings. I cite this passage here only to point out how it reflects and concentrates concerns voiced also by others in Davy’s milieu. In this ghastly dream image, Coleridge condensed anxieties, expressed also by other contemporaries of Davy, that the chemical hero was menaced by sinister moral dangers. These forces were perceived as threatening physical decay or mutilation of the hero’s body—a body that was glamorized and fetishized in the commentary on his personal attractiveness. Coleridge was not the only person to derive a horrified pleasure from contemplation of assaults on Davy’s body, or to see them as symbolic of the moral dangers assailing the young chemist. In 1807, when Davy succumbed to a real, apparently life-threatening, illness, many of his female admirers clamored for news and sent their anxious good wishes. Coleridge reflected on the irony that this sickness should have followed upon Davy’s "attempts to enlighten mankind," just as in his dream.{33} In this respect, the 1804 dream had initiated a pattern of literary representation of Davy’s bodily sufferings that was subsequently reproduced around real incidents from the chemist’s life. As his life drew to its premature end, the motif was reiterated in Davy’s own Consolations, and in the book by his traveling companion on his final journey, J. J. Tobin’s Journal of a Tour Made in the Years 1828-1829 (1832). Tobin represented Davy as the fey valetudinarian, whose spirit longed for release from his decaying body. But, the enfeebled body was still the object of attraction, as when Davy drew the stares of churchgoers in Antwerp, where he appeared in a white fur-lined mantle, or was cared for by a beautiful innkeeper’s daughter in Slovenia.{34}

Coleridge also reflected more general traits of the commentary on Davy when he deliberated on less tangible physical threats that stemmed from the chemist’s dedication to the general good. He mused about how Davy’s devotion to the good of mankind could diminish his potential for personal emotional fulfillment. Clearly referring to Davy, he wrote to Southey in October 1801 that a chemist’s investment of his affective energies in inanimate objects and in distant prospects of human benefit could damage his capacity for an emotional bond with another person:

Yet I do agree with you that chemistry tends in it’s present state to turn it’s Priests into Sacrifices. One way, in which it does it ... is this—it prevents or tends to prevent a young man from falling in love. We all have obscure feelings that must be connected with some thing or other—the Miser with a guinea—Lord Nelson with a blue Ribbon—Wordsworth’s old Molly with her washing Tub—Wordsworth with the Hills, Lakes, & Trees—all men are poets in their way, tho’ for the most part their ways are damned bad ones. Now Chemistry makes a young man associate these feelings with inanimate objects—& that without any moral revulsion, but on the contrary with complete self-approbation—and his distant views of Benevolence, or his sense of immediate beneficence, attach themselves either to Man as the whole human Race, or to Man, as a sick man, as a painter, as a manufacturer, &c—and in no way to man, as a Husband, Son, Brother, Daughter, Wife, Friend, &c &c.{35}

Love, Coleridge went on to explain, was not invariably directed toward another human being. The miser could be said to be "in love" with his guinea in just the sense that a man might be said to love a woman. The chemist, then, could be seduced into directing his emotions toward inappropriate goals, investing his hopes for universal benefit in an intimate acquaintance with material objects, at the cost of his prospects for personal happiness. Thus, the priest of science was turned into a sacrifice to his god. The only "salvation" was for the "young chemist ... [to fall] downright romantically in Love" with an appropriate (human) object.

Coleridge’s perspective on Davy was a specially intimate one, dating from the shared experience of breathing nitrous oxide in Bristol. Some members of the coterie of poets and visionaries who inhaled the gas welcomed it as a means of strengthening the affective bonds between men.{36} Coleridge’s deep emotional identification with his friend was probably not widely known about at the time; it may not have been reciprocated to the same degree from Davy’s side. Coleridge was in a special position to feel acutely the moral dangers that surrounded his friend, and to elaborate upon them in striking language and imagery. Nonetheless, although expressed in uniquely vivid terms, Coleridge’s remarks were echoed in their main themes by other contemporaries. We have already seen how discussion of the social challenges Davy faced in his London milieu was reflected in observations about his physical appearance. Descriptions of his clothing and deportment were made to bear the weight of moral disapproval of his personal self-fashioning or of the rudeness of his origins. We shall also see that Coleridge’s focus upon the emotional displacements that followed from the chemist’s role was reproduced in other commentary. Portrayal of Davy as a "dandy" or "fop" suggested an excessive concern for personal appearance, especially as regards clothing, and an emotional dependence upon the admiring gaze of spectators. The characterization was linked to assertions about the relations between Davy and his audience, which insinuated that the chemist was surrounded by masculine women. Labeling Davy a "dandy" also invoked the belief that dependence upon the admiring gaze of spectators could be emotionally and sexually disabling. These suppositions seem to have been in the background of some of the comments on Davy’s marriage.

The most consistent critique of Davy from this point of view was that launched by The John Bull Magazine in 1824. By this time Davy was in his prime: retired from lecturing, married, knighted, and president of the Royal Society. The anonymous author of the John Bull article, however, knocked him down to size as number three in the series "Humbugs of the Age." While the author professed admiration for Davy’s chemical discoveries and scientific reputation, he was sternly critical of the chemist’s pretensions to gentility. The satire thus unfolded from the common Tory standpoint of condescension toward Davy’s lowly social origins and his all-too-obvious self-fashioning.

John Bull gave this critique a new twist, however, with its labeling of Davy as a "dandy." The chemist was said to have affected a "dandyish" dress—a green velvet waistcoat with gold spangles—that was quite unsuitable for a natural philosopher. He had adopted also the "dandyism" or "puppyism" of the intellectual who preens himself in mixed company: "The poor fellow fancies himself irresistible among the girls, and is evidently pluming himself, while conversing with them."{37} Far from contributing to a glamorous or amusing reputation, this behavior succeeded only in making him look a fool.

By designating Davy a "dandy," John Bull invoked the specific connotations of that term in the Regency period. Thomas Carlyle captured important features of the type in a famous chapter of his Sartor Resartus (1833-4). "A Dandy," Carlyle recorded, "is a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes."{38} As Ellen Moers showed in a classic study, the original dandy was somewhat more specific than the traditional "fop" or pretentious dresser. The archetypal dandy, Beau Brummell, sartorial and behavioral trend-setter of the Regency period, dressed very particularly but not extravagantly: starched high collar, meticulously tied brilliant white cravat, unadorned blue or green coat, and plain buff breeches or pantaloons.{39} This was very much the way, in fact, that Davy was portrayed in the painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence, now in the National Portrait Gallery. But, Davy could not, strictly speaking, be a dandy, insofar as he relied upon paid employment in what some regarded as a menial occupation. The application of the term to him was somewhat ironic, therefore, but not entirely inappropriate. As well as referring to ostentatious clothing, it invoked resonances other than the purely sartorial, for the dandy was recognized as a character type as well as a style of dress. As a personality, his defining feature was his dependence on the gaze of spectators for his sense of identity. Carlyle also caught this well. The dandy, he noted, sought only "that you would recognize his existence; would admit him to be a living object; or even failing this, a visual object, or thing that will reflect rays of light ... do but look at him, and he is contented." The dandy, as James Eli Adams has noted, represents the ideal of "the hero as spectacle."{40}

Such a characterization could obviously draw plentifully upon Davy’s self-presentation in the lecture theater. In his essay, "Signs of the Times" (1829), Carlyle seems to have had Davy in mind, though he didn’t name him, when he talked about the typical scientist of the age as one, "quite other than Newton [who] stands in his Museum, his Scientific Institution, and behind whole batteries of retorts, digesters and galvanic piles imperatively ‘interrogates Nature,’— who, however, shows no haste to answer."{41} The charge that Davy was a man whose vanity required him to display himself for the admiration of spectators was leveled, even after his retirement from lecturing, in criticism by The Examiner and The Times of his wartime trip to Napoleon’s court in Paris in 1813-14. The Examiner had no doubt as to Davy’s motivation for crossing to enemy territory: "he may talk about so many chemical intentions as he pleases, but he goes to see and to be seen ... to have it said, as he moves along through smiles of admiration and shrugs of obeisance,—‘Ah, there is the grand philosophe, Davie!’." Such conduct was particularly to be expected on a trip to France, which the English had long seen as the realm of effeminate courtliness. Napoleon’s establishment of a court in Paris had resurrected the English stereotype of the ancien régime. The report concluded that Davy’s behavior was both un-English and unphilosophical, and "such as goes hard to establish that charge of foppery which is made against Sir HUMPHREY’s character in general."{42}

The John Bull article went further, connecting Davy’s dandyism with the disruption of normal gender roles in his milieu. For this, Lady Davy (the former Jane Apreece) was said to be largely responsible. As a noted Edinburgh bluestocking, she had flourished in the salons that were copied from the Parisian model in the Scottish capital. Stories were told about the devotion paid to her by male intellectuals in her coterie, where she presided over de-gendered "old women, male and female." John Bull thundered: "This mixture of dandyism and science, which has always appeared to us one of the most disgusting things in the world, gave the ton to the Edinburgh society, and Mrs. Ap. was up to her eyes in blue."{43} By submitting to a woman with masculine intellectual ambitions, Davy was said to have confirmed a predisposition to subject himself to uppity women, which had been apparent already in his Royal Institution lectures. In his encouragement of a female audience for chemistry, he had already connived in a challenge to male dominance. As The Times expressed it in 1813, he had been "making women and children troublesome, by the affectation and babble of knowledge."{44}

The Times’s outburst reflected conservative anxiety about the destabilizing effects on gender roles of women’s education. Since the last decade of the eighteenth century, which saw the publication of Catherine Macaulay’s Letters on Education (1790) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the issue of what education was appropriate for women had been fiercely disputed against the background of wide-ranging political and social debate. Advocates of female education presented it as a contribution to programs of political and social reform. Conservative tracts such as Richard Polwhele’s The Unsex’d Females (1798) portrayed it as destructive of normal relations between the sexes by encouraging women to assume male roles and prerogatives.{45} Although Davy had in fact endorsed only a quite limited model of female education, his popularity with women and his marriage to a famous bluestocking exposed him to the charge of encouraging female insubordination. Men who allowed women to behave in a masculine way were themselves represented as emasculated, one of the connotations of the "dandy" label.

There was a further dimension to the characterization of Davy as a dandy. Consumed with narcissistic self-approbation, the dandy was taken to be incapable of intimate relations with another person. In this respect also Beau Brummell was the ideal type. The dandy flirted with women, but shunned involvement. Marriage and fatherhood were so antithetical to the dandy ideal that a gentleman who wished to adopt the role would have to conceal such attachments, if he was unfortunate enough to have them. The dandy was not typically identified as homosexual, but his masculinity was seen as compromised or diminished. Investment of affective energies in self-display had apparently left him unable to achieve fulfillment in the masculine sexual role.{46}

This assumption seems to resonate through contemporary comments about Davy’s marriage. John Bull suggested that money, rather than love, was the motivation for the rather abrupt alliance between the thirty-five-year-old Davy and the widowed bluestocking. The magazine could not resist pointing out how ridiculous was Sir Humphry’s dedication to his wife of his lectures on agricultural chemistry, a gesture that was symptomatic of his "nonsensical affectation of conjugality in the face of the public." The facade of conjugal affection was in fact rapidly dropped, as public indifference and quarreling began to characterize the childless couple. Toward the end of his life, Davy was regularly traveling to the continent without his wife, declaring himself a refugee from her harsh temper and domestic inhospitableness.{47}

Sydney Smith, a friend of the Davys, observed the breakdown of marital relations between them. In 1816, he summoned a series of chemical metaphors, in a letter to Lady Holland that hinted at impotence along with temperamental incompatibility:

The decomposition of Sir Humphry and Lady Davy is entertaining enough. I wonder what they quarrelled about. ... I cannot conceive any third body interposing to alter their affinities. Perhaps he vaunted above truth the powers of Chemistry and persuaded her it had secrets which it does not possess, hence her disappointment.{48}

Speculation about the infertility of the relationship was evidently strong enough that John Davy felt he had to address it in his Fragmentary Remains of his brother in 1858. He placed the blame on Lady Davy, invoking her "irritable frame and ailing body," though he failed to explain how such a weak physique could outlast her husband’s by twenty-six years. This factor, and the couple’s acceptance that it precluded children, was, John Davy insisted, "explanatory of much in the married life" of the Davys.{49}

By offering this explanation for the childlessness of Davy’s marriage, John Davy tacitly admitted the existence of gossip less flattering to his brother’s manly reputation. He did the best he could in the face of rumors of Davy’s henpecked subordination to a woman of masculine character and ambitions. In other respects also, John’s biographical works engaged in a rearguard action to rescue his brother’s good name. His Memoirs of the Life of Sir Humphry Davy (1836) entered a series of "corrections" to passages in the previous Life of Sir Humphry Davy (1831) by John Ayrton Paris. The disputes about Davy’s physiognomy and behavior may seem trivial, if one does not realize how Paris’s remarks echo the much more critical press coverage of his subject. One instance, to which John Davy voiced a strong objection, was Paris’s description of his brother’s behavior on a visit to the Louvre in October 1813:

The English philosopher walked with a rapid step along the gallery, and, to the great astonishment and mortification of his friend and cicerone, did not direct his attention to a single painting; the only exclamation of surprise that escaped him was—"What an extraordinary collection of fine frames!" ... They afterwards descended to a view of the statues in the lower apartments: here Davy displayed the same frigid indifference towards the higher works of art. ... The apathy, the total want of feeling he betrayed on having his attention directed to the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön, and the Venus de Medicis, was as inexplicable as it was provoking; but an exclamation of the most vivid surprise escaped him at the sight of an Antinous, treated in the Egyptian style, and sculptured in Alabaster.—"Gracious powers," said he, "what a beautiful stalactyte!"{50}

Knowing something about the tenor of contemporary commentary on Davy’s character, we can surmise what it was in this passage to which his brother John took exception: a telling instance of Davy’s dandyism. Walking through the Louvre, Davy is there not to see but to be seen. As a dandy, his emotional satisfaction comes from self-display; he is unable to focus his affective energies on any external object, and hence is incapable of genuine aesthetic appreciation. In Davy’s case, this is expressed through a boorish concentration on the technological (the frames) and the geological (the stalactite), rather than on the central aesthetic attributes of the objects he confronts. It could be significant that it is a statue of Antinous, the deified male lover of the Emperor Hadrian, which is said to have caught Davy’s eye. The innuendo perhaps reflected public awareness that some men had been strongly attracted to Davy, though I know of no other contemporary suggestion that Davy himself had homosexual inclinations.{51}

Davy was, on the other hand, quite regularly portrayed as a dandy in public discourse. Figured as a dandy, Davy appeared as a labile or "transgressive" character with respect to categories of gender. The dandy was an emasculated male, whose erotic energies had been displaced into promiscuous display and whose identity depended upon being seen. Attachment of this label to Davy clearly stemmed, in part, from the particularities of his individual background, talents, and physical appearance. But it was also, as I have tried to show, symptomatic of more general concerns in his culture. To apply this term to Davy was to signal one’s attitude to broader relations of authority and to the ways they appeared to be changing; it was to register a satirical response to what might seem ominous or threatening cultural changes.

At least two such sets of shifting relationships appear to be at stake in the image of Davy as a dandy. First, those of social class. The affectedness of Davy’s deportment and costume was taken to signal his deliberate self-fashioning as a country lad from the lower-middle class trying to pass in a metropolitan, genteel and aristocratic, milieu. A twentieth-century Marxist like Crowther might hail Davy’s success as a bold advance on behalf of a "new class of applied scientists," but his elite contemporaries had more reason to worry about the social changes of which his rise appeared symptomatic. These tensions found expression in commentary about Davy’s body—about his physiognomy, gestures, and clothing. To portray these attributes in a negative light was to repudiate the laudatory regard of Davy’s admirers, who had made his body an object of fascination and attraction. To the critics, Davy’s rustic physiognomy was unsightly, his gestures crude, and his attempts at elegant clothing preposterous. Conservative satire exhibited Davy as an upstart who had made himself ridiculous by claiming a social standing higher than he was entitled to.

Second, relations between the sexes were also in question, particularly as regards the composition of a public audience for science. Davy’s cultivation of a female audience in his public lectures and in other gatherings was central to his representation as a "puppy," fop, or dandy. His willingness to encourage women’s scientific ambitions was seen as the self-gratification of one who thrives on displaying himself to the admiring gaze of spectators. A correspondent in The Times in October 1813 attempted to address these criticisms, defending Davy’s "powerful and manly mind": "Sir HUMPHREY DAVEY [sic.] is not one of those vain and empty Charlatans, who must go all lengths to obtain the incense of popular flattery."{52} What was denied here was, of course, precisely what was asserted elsewhere. Davy’s susceptibility to female adulation was said to have unmanned him.

In this respect, also, most of the satire directed against Davy came from a conservative direction. During the eighteenth century, admission of women to the audiences for science had developed as part of the Enlightenment. The refinement of manners, the growth of a culture of sensibility and politeness, also involved men embracing what had previously been considered more feminine modes of behavior. They learned to pride themselves on their cultivation of the arts and learning, to identify themselves by their elegant clothing and luxury consumer goods, and to forswear rougher kinds of masculine conduct. Socialization of men with women in public places and in the course of cultural activities went along with what has been called a "feminization of manners."{53} At the end of the eighteenth century, however, in the era in which the values of the Enlightenment came under attack, conservative critics targeted this behavior as effeminate. A man who encouraged women to participate in the world of learning could be identified as unmanly, as having sacrificed his own masculinity in submission to female domination.

This, I suggest, is the most productive way to read the caricatures of Davy as a dandy. Of course, there were quite particular reasons why he was satirized in this way. His humble provincial background, and his known association with the Bristol radical coterie, were continuing liabilities as he made his career in the metropolis. As an attractive young man, he generated considerable commentary on his physical appearance. But, the gendered language applied to Davy has a broader historical significance in relation to the gendering of science itself in this context. Davy was taken to have provided a model of how women could be included in the audience for science, one best exemplified by the stance of Jane Marcet. While the model might seem to us to accord only a rather restricted role to women—recruiting them to admire the powerful instruments of the laboratory while making it clear that they would not themselves have any occasion to use them—it was seen by some contemporaries as placing the male experimenter too much under the influence of women admirers. The negative example of Davy’s vanity and dandyism suggested, per contra, the desirability of a more rigorous segregation between men and women.

In the decades following Davy’s career, the alternative model gained ground among the leading men of science, as the remarks of Buckland, quoted at the beginning of this paper, imply. The masculine scientific identity was seen to be bound up with the exclusion of women from any significant participation in the institutions of science and their restriction to a very marginal position among its audience. Male scientists would henceforth seek to establish the potency of their instruments and the authority of their methods in exclusively male circles, confining women to attendance at occasions of popularization or to the role of domestic support. Excesses of rhetoric and display before female audiences were seen as symptomatic of dilettantism and decadence. Davy, the dandy of the lecture theater who so notoriously failed to establish a proper subordination of women in his own domestic life, came to be seen as a bad example to follow.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

I am grateful to Margaret Jacob, Greg Myers, and Julianne Tuttle for sharing their work with me and for helpful advice on a previous draft of this paper. I also thank all those who commented on its presentation in the workshop on "Nature and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe," at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles, in December 1996. James Bono and two anonymous referees gave valuable suggestions to help me revise the paper for Configurations. The responsibility for the general tenor of the argument, and for any shortcomings that remain, is mine.

REFERENCES: