In May 1800, the English writers and scientists William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle discovered the electrolysis of water by passing an electric current from a voltaic pile through water in London. They observed that hydrogen and oxygen gases were produced at the separate electrodes, demonstrating that water could be decomposed into its constituent elements by electrical force. This experiment, conducted at Nicholson's home in Soho, London, was the first demonstration that electricity could drive chemical decomposition and opened the field of electrochemistry alongside Davy's later work.

Both Nicholson and Carlisle were literary men as well as scientists. Nicholson was the founder and editor of "A Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and the Arts," one of the first scientific periodicals in England, and his journal helped create the medium through which scientific knowledge reached literary audiences. The decomposition of water into its elements by an invisible electrical current became a striking metaphor for the analytical power of the human mind, a theme that pervades Romantic poetry's treatment of imagination as a force capable of breaking down and recomposing the elements of experience.