LITFEST: Sharon Ruston (On-Line)

This is an on-line version of the live event. Stream the event live, or catch-up for thirty days afterwards!

Did you know that the brilliant 19th-century chemist, Sir Humphry Davy – inventor of the life-saving miners’ friend the ‘Davy lamp’ and discoverer of nitrous oxide (‘laughing gas’) as well as many key elements – was also a poet? His multiple notebooks, in which he developed his scientific ideas, also contain the poetry he wrote throughout his life, even while in his laboratory working on his experiments. 

A contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge, for whom he proof-read the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, and of fellow scientists like Michael Faraday and John Dalton, Davy inspired the public with his exciting and sometimes dangerous lectures at the Royal Institution in London, establishing chemistry as a professional science in Europe. His notebooks show an extraordinary mind at work. 

This event officially launches the Davy Notebooks Project (https://digitalcollections.lancaster.ac.uk/) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), which has been running for the past four years. More than 100 of Davy’s notebooks have now been published on the Lancaster Digital Collections website thanks to the work of 3,500 volunteers from around the world who helped transcribe them. 

The talk will be illustrated with images from the notebooks. 

Professor Sharon Ruston holds the Chair in Romanticism in the English Literature and Creative Writing Department at Lancaster University. She is the Principal Investigator for the Davy Notebooks Project and the author of several books including most recently The Science of Life and Death in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (2021).

Dr Rachel Platel is a Lecturer in Chemistry at Lancaster University.