When I think of Humphry Davy, I think of a scientist, someone who became a star attraction during the early days of the Royal Institution and inventor of the eponymous Davy Lamp (although at the time others accused him of plagiarising earlier designs). Of course, the word scientist did not exist in his day and, as Jan Golinski’s book The Experimental Self makes clear, Davy had a range of personae during his lifetime which reflected different aspects of himself and which he played up to different extents at different periods. (Undoubtedly he also thought of himself as a poet and someone who knew a thing or two about fishing.)
Don’t we all have such multiple personae? Golinski indicates how, in Davy’s lifetime, the concept of a ‘man of science’ was only just emerging. Part philosopher, part ‘enthusiast’ – which was verging on a term of abuse at that time, as overdoing things a bit and potentially dangerously radical – part discoverer (and also, part dandy and part traveller to complete Golinski’s list, although these are less relevant to a scientist). A fair degree of issues of class crept in too when people contemporaneously passed judgement on Davy: he came from a poor family in Cornwall but made a very advantageous marriage to a rich widow. (Incidentally, on Radio 3 a local Cornish group sang an amusing folksong about him as I was writing this post.)
The various epithets that might be tossed in the direction of a scientist these days might be different, although philosopher/philosophical might still be directed at some of us, but the fact that we exhibit different personae in different groupings is as true today as then. Take impostor and impostor syndrome. Many of us suffer from this, but many of us equally know how to cover it up and may come across as confident, even overly so by way of compensation, so that the underlying condition is hidden from view. I was amused to hear a mutual (scientific) male friend described to me by a woman as typically male-confident, when he was someone I knew perfectly well hid his own insecurities under an effective mask. Don’t we all? (Or nearly all.) This woman herself I’m sure would come across to the external world – and she is very much visible to the world through her writing and interviews – as confident, but she knew internally how different she was. The same mistaken belief, no doubt, could be applied to me.
When I wrote about impostor syndrome in the early days of this blog, implying women suffered from it more than men, one of the people who publicly responded over Twitter to my post, suggesting that men too, himself included, were very prone to it, was David Spiegelhalter. The pandemic has been full of his writings and pronouncements about the statistics of death, vaccination etc, all so beautifully clearly set out. He seems on the surface to be confident and willing to speak up in extremely public fora, despite his admission to feeling a fraud, an impostor. Equally he is willing to admit to his failures. I was amused by a recent tweet of his
I often say that I make every mistake when dealing with the media. Just to prove it, just done a live interview on Zoom for Sky News in which I forgot to unmute myself…
— David Spiegelhalter (@d_spiegel) November 8, 2021
indicating how he’d failed to unmute during a live interview – something else we are all liable to do in different situations. I did it very obviously in a meeting with the last Minister of Science, Amanda Solloway; it’s always the stress of a high-profile moment when these things go wrong. It would seem to be a natural tendency to feel a fraud, but then to put on a different external persona; those people you think are arrogant may indeed be quaking inside. I would suspect that Davy himself suffered from impostor syndrome, and hence he ‘invented’ these different personae to mask what he no doubt felt to be inadequacy, not least because of his humble roots.
David Spiegelhalter is a colleague of mine, on the Fellowship at Churchill College (not that I knew he’d become a colleague back in 2012 when I wrote that particular blogpost; I didn’t join until 2014). But the College perhaps has surprisingly strong links to Davy himself, or at least to a current AHRC-funded project on the Davy Notebooks, on whose Advisory Board I sit. This is a fascinating project aimed at transcribing all his notebooks via Zooniverse, a crowd-sourcing platform (or citizen science if you’d prefer). They are, incidentally, always looking for new people to join in the transcription project, no previous experience required!
I learned a lot of what I know about Humphry Davy from the wonderful Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes, an alumnus and Honorary Fellow of Churchill (again long before I joined the College). He too is on the Advisory Board. I have written previously about the past and present meanings of ‘impact’ in science as discussed in an earlier book by Jan Golinski, a Professor in the History Department at the University of New Hampshire who held a postdoctoral fellowship at the College; he is also on the Advisory Board. The fourth member of the Board associated with Churchill is Alice Jenkins, Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Glasgow who is an alumna. For a college so heavily associated with STEM subjects I find this grouping of the four of us on an AHRC-funded project fascinating. I hope it illustrates that, despite being also the College of CP Snow (he was a Founding Fellow) we absolutely don’t believe in the two cultures being distinct and never speaking to each other. I am proud of that.
