Constructing Humphry Davy's Biographical Image

This paper, which is also a contribution to the somewhat understudied area of the history of biography, discusses a couple of short accounts of the life of the English chemist Humphry Davy (1778-1829) and the three major biographies published in the years following his death. These latter were an ‘anti-biography’ by John Ayrton Paris (1831) and two admiring biographies by Davy’s younger brother John Davy (1836, 1858). By examining the processes surrounding their writing and publication, including the involvement (or rather lack thereof) by his widow, Jane Davy, this paper will illustrate how Davy’s biographical reputation was constructed. Furthermore, this approach reveals how his surviving manuscripts and related documents came to be collected and preserved and so help us understand the effects they continue to exert on our understanding of Davy in particular and nineteenth-century science in general.