Symbolic Elements and Generic Solutions: Humphry Davy’s Consolations in Travel

Time: 12:00 to 1:00pm

Location: Chemical Heritage Foundation

Nineteenth-century English chemist Humphry Davy is best known for his electrochemical work at London’s Royal Institution, which included the discovery of numerous chemical elements, among them potassium, sodium, and chlorine. Davy’s experiments called into question then prevalent ideas about how the elements make up a given substance. Davy eventually inferred that perhaps chemical properties did not arise from single elements at all but from their peculiar combinations in more complex substances. By extension, despite the promise of unitary simplicity they offered, elements could only be conceived as inextricably bound to one another.

This lecture considers this chemical development in light of Davy’s posthumously published work Consolations in Travel (1830), noted for its composite genres, disjointed narrative, overt mysticism, and complex theoretical and ideological positions. Kurtis Hessel will explore the ways in which the text’s fragmentation—which has perplexed critics and scholars since its publication—should be understood as a response to the period’s growing divide between scientific and humanistic discourses. Much as elementary unity was composite, Davy’s mixing of genres seems to offer a literary solution to the problem of divisions forming in human knowledge.