Humphry Davy’s lectures to the Royal Institution were hugely successful, attracting large audiences of women as well as men. Among the audience were literary figures, including William Godwin, Robert Southey, and Eleanor Anne Porden. S. T. Coleridge, who apparently attended an entire course of lectures in 1802, wrote copious and beautifully-written notes in these lectures, which give us a sense of which aspects were of interest to him and of the immediate experience of being in Davy’s audience. In turn, Davy persuaded Coleridge – after some delay and procrastination – to give lectures in 1807 on the subject of poetry. These were not the only lectures given on non-scientific subjects in R. I., Sydney Smith also lectured on moral philosophy; William Crotch lectured on music; William Crowe, Thomas Campbell, James Montgomery and others on poetry. The library of the Royal Institution, as can be seen in its catalogue of books, holds an extensive collection of literary as well as scientific texts. There is also extant poetry in the R. I. archives written on the subject of Davy’s lectures by admiring female fans. Coleridge in later lectures made the connection between his own and Davy’s lectures, pointing out that his were originally given ‘in the spring of the same year, in which Sir Humphry Davy, a fellow-lecturer, made his great revolutionary discoveries in chemistry’. In this paper I explore the role that the Royal Institution had in the literary culture of the time as well as the role that literature had on the scientific culture of the R.I.