http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3864-7382
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Sharon Ruston is Professor of Romanticism at Lancaster University. She is the author of Shelley and Vitality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005; paperback 2012), Romanticism: An Introduction (Continuum, 2010), and Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science and Medicine of the 1790s (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and the co-editor of The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy, 4 vols (Oxford University Press, 2020).
ORCID
Sharon Ruston http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3864-7382
Notes
1 The allocation of priority of discovery in this case was contentious; see Chang Citation2012 and Miller Citation2004.
2 Humphry Davy to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 26 November 1800. Davy Letters Project: http://www.davy-letters.org.uk. This will be superseded by The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy, edited by Tim Fulford and Sharon Ruston, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
3 Shelley wrote eighteen pages of notes from the second (1814) edition of this book. See P. B. Shelley Citation1997, 155 rev.-172 rev. For differences between Shelley’s notes and Davy’s text, which show Shelley’s specific interest in and interpretation of the original, see Ruston Citation2005a, 95–101.
4 Priestley was awarded the Copley Medal in 1773 for his discovery that vegetables produced oxygen. Shelley noted this process in his notes on Davy’s Elements of Agricultural Chemistry: see P. B. Shelley Citation1997, 170 rev.-171 rev.
5 Davy offers a distinctly vitalist reading of this process:
[t]he laws of dead and living nature appear to be perfectly distinct: material powers are made subservient to the purposes of life, and the elements of matter are newly arranged in living organs; but they are merely the instruments of a superior principle (Citation1812, 175).
6 Natural philosophers also drew attention to the cycle of life and death. For example, William Smellie in The Philosophy of Nature:
[i]t is a law of Nature, that all organized bodies should be decomposed, and gradually transformed into earth. While undergoing this species of dissolution, their more volatile particles pass into the air, and are diffused through the atmosphere. Thus animals, at least portions of them, are buried in the air, as well as in the earth, or in water. These floating particles soon enter into the composition of organized beings, who are themselves destined to undergo the same revolutions (Citation1790, 307–308).
7 Moods are described as fluctuating; see, for example, M. Shelley Citation1994, 7, 16; 163.
8 See Wilson Citation2003. An argument could be made that despite possessing the worldview of a chemist, Frankenstein is, for the most part of the novel, passive and static, while the Creature shows himself best able to adapt to a new climate and new circumstances. When travelling with Clerval in England, Frankenstein comments upon his inability to recover from the shocks he has encountered, likening himself to a tree blasted by lightning; he says that sublime scenes now fail to “communicate elasticity to [his] spirits” as they once had (M. Shelley Citation1994, 133).
9 M. Shelley Citation1994, 55, 173, 68, 122, 75, 74; Howard Citation1803, 16: 102, 17: 10, 16: 102–103.
10 See Ruston Citation2005a; 91–95.
11 See Jacobus Citation2012, 11: “[c]louds […] make us think not only about form and vacancy, mobility and change, but also about the peculiar realm of affectivity that we call ‘mood’”.
12 Dissipation is part of the process of entropy described in the second law of thermodynamics; while this was discovered later in the nineteenth century it does describe a similarly closed system to that imagined by early nineteenth-century chemists.
