The British Enlightenment and
Scientific Culture
Mark Knights
The Legacy of the Enlightenment
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Liberalism
Free market
Natural rights
Science
Ideas about the league of nations
Questioning the enlightenment
– Romanticism
– Conservatism
– gender
Is Enlightenment a useful term?
• Ignores earlier change (Renaissance and Reformation)
• Never monolithic
• Tensions within ranks of the enlightened, across time,
space and class
• Can appear very abstract
• J.C.D.Clark emphasises continuity of older attitudes
• Is it revolutionary? Does GB Enlightenment validate or
subvert the established order? Compatible with, even
generated by, Whig culture?
• We have already examined some of its dimensions –
politics, religion, ideological division over rights and
revolution, wealth creation, print culture
The Enlightenment message
• Reason and experiment
• Progress towards the good life
• Reassessment of relationships between
– Man and God: superstition; prejudice; toleration; deism (Toland)
and atheism; Bible (Thomas Woolston, Six Discourses 1727-30);
Calvinism; rational religion; priestcraft; miracles
– People and rulers; slavery and liberty, the role of the public;
balanced constitution; the revolution of 1689; censorship
– Wealth and luxury
– Men and women; sexual morality
– Man and man: how to talk to each other?
– Europe and the wider world
The pursuit of knowledge
• The dissemination of knowledge: print,
coffee houses, museums and collections,
libraries, conversation
• Understanding the natural world – the
body, the natural world, the planetary
system.
The British Enlightenment
• Earlier than other European countries?
– 1689 revolution
– John Locke:
– John Toland
– Isaac Newton
Scottish and/or English Enlightenment?
Edinburgh [David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, Adam
Smith]; London; or the provinces?
Voltaire’s Lettres Philosophique ou Lettres Anglaises
(1733) looked to GB; The Enclyclopédie originated in
scheme to translate Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopedia
(1728)
Paine and the debate about enlightenment
A sociable, provincial and practical
enlightenment
– 2000 clubs in early C18th,
– Whole variety of different reasons: social; artistic
(Society of Dilletante; Dr Johnson’s Literary Club);
debating (Robin Hood Society); politics (eg Sons of
Freedom; the Antigallicans); science
– Radical clubs
– Masonic societies. Freemasonry as GB invention,
modelled as microcosm of commonwealth fostering
brotherhood, benevolence, conviviality, liberty, a
measure of egalitarianism; aimed at artisans. 1717
formation of the Grand Lodge of England; 52 lodges
in GB alone by 1725, nearly 300 by 1768
Spalding Gentlemen’s society 1712 – scientific and literary
society
• Proposals for establishing a Society of Gentlemen for the supporting
mutual benevolence, and their improvements in the liberal sciences
and polite learning.
• That the persons who sign these proposals, and none other be
esteemed of the Society.
• That they choose a president monthly, to moderate in all disputes,
and read all papers whatsoever aloud.
• That they meet every Monday at Mr. Younger’s coffee-house in
Spalding, at two in the afternoon, from September to May, and in
other months at four, unless detained by business of moment or
indisposition, under pain of forfeiting twopence a time for a fund for
books etc., except those who live three miles off from Spalding.
• That he who is absent four Mondays together shall on the fifth
communicate to the Society something new or curious, with an
excuse for absenting himself, upon pain of being struck out of this
establishment, if the majority of gentlemen then present vote it so; or
pay sixpence, to be put to a fund to buy books etc.
• November 3 1712. We do approve of these proposals and agree to
observe them as members of this society
The Lunar Society in Birmingham
• Group of friends;
began to meet
formally 1775 every
month on Sunday
nearest full moon
• Joseph Priestley
• Josiah Wedgwood
• Erasmus Darwin
• Matthew Boulton
• James Watt
• http://www.revolution
aryplayers.org.uk/ho
me.stm
Soho House, venue of the Lunar Society
Erasmus Darwin 1731-1802
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Physician, poet, botanist and campaigner
Fellow of the Royal Society 1757; formed
one of the first formal theories of evolution in
Zoonomia (1794-6), and versified them in
the Temple of Nature (posthumous); motto
‘everything from shells’; described
photosynthesis;
‘A fool, you know, is a man who never tried
an experiment in his life’
Deist: ‘That there exists a superior Ens
Entium, which formed these wonderful
creatures is mathematical demonstration.
That HE influences things by a particular
providence is not so evident. The probability,
according to my notion, is against it, since
general laws seem sufficient for that end’
(1754)
Designer of carriages to take him on medical
rounds; designed a ‘speaking machine’ with
a wooden mouth and leather lips, capable of
producing sounds p, b, m and a so well ‘as
to deceive all who heard it unseen, when it
pronounced the words mama, papa, map
and pam’; mechanical copier of hand-writing
Anti-slavery
Joseph Priestley
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experimenter with electricity
(friend of Benjamin Franklin;
author of work on electricity in
1767) and then with air and gases
(Discoverer of carbonisation 1773
and identifier of oxygen in 1774
and amonia)
Dissenting minister, having
studied at Nonconformist
academy at Daventry; Unitarian
(anti-trinitarian); ‘natural
philosophy’
Political radical – anti-slavery (part
of deputation welcoming Equiano
when he came to speak in Bham
in 1789; founding member of the
Constitutional Society. His house
(Fair Hill, in Bham) was burnt in
‘Church and King’ riot 1791 and
emigrated to Pennsylvania
Josiah Wedgwood 1730-1795
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Born into family of potters; 1769
opened his own factory at Etruria, near
Stoke on Trent
Experimenter and refiner and esp
interested in properties of minerals
and combustion processes eg Barium
Sulphate produced Jasper in 1773
(Jasperware: durable, unglazed,
usually blue – though here a yellow);
1783 Fellow of the Royal Society –
invented pyrometer to measure oven
temperatures
Keen interest in improving transport
(canal and roads)
I776 pro-American; involved in antislavery movement: committee member
of Society for the Suppression of the
Slave Trade. ‘This will be an epoch
before unknown to the World, and
…the subject of freedom will be more
canvassed and better understood in
the enlightened nations’ [letter to
Franklin, 1787]
Daughter married son of Erasmus
Darwin, and was mother of Charles.
Matthew Boulton 1728-1809
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Son of Birmingham metal toy
manufacturer
1762 established Soho factory
with partner John Fothergill
producing steel buttons and
reproductions of oil paintings;
1767 met Watt, when needing
more power, and Watt used Soho
for experiments with steamengine; 1775 partnership;
Arkwright pioneered its use in
cotton mills; 1788 began coining
for East India Company and Sierra
Leone;
Factory, specialised labour; but
also introduced early social
insurance scheme for his workers
More conservative politics; antiAmerican; but greeted Equiano
James Watt 1736-1819
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Scot with little formal education;
instrument maker
Asked to repair early steam
engine; experimented with
improving it by adding separate
condenser; used initially in
Cornish tin and copper mines to
pump water; then spinning.
1766 surveyor of canal route from
Forth to Clyde; went to London to
lobby for it and stopped in
Birmingham on return, staying
with Darwin and went round Soho.
Fellow of the Royal Society and
interested, like Priestley, in
composition of water – Priestley
mixed Hydrogen and Oxygen; the
identification was in part the result
of the exchange between them
(Darwin had started the
discussion)
Medicine: institutions
• Foundation of hospitals: Westminster 1720,
Guy’s 1724, St George’s 1733, The London
1740, the Middlesex 1743
• Priestley founded Leeds Infirmary. 1784 the
generosity of donors proved that ‘the charity of
Mankind … has been progressive and reflects
peculiar Lustre on the present period’
• Specialist ones. The Foundling Hospital.
Fundraising via art and music (Hogarth and
Handel).
Inoculation and vacination
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762):
In 1717 Lady Montague arrived with her husband, the British ambassador, at the court of the Ottoman Empire. she noted that the local practice
of deliberately stimulating a mild form of the disease through inoculation conferred immunity. She had the procedure performed on both her
children. By the end of the eighteenth century, the English physician Edward Jenner was able to cultivate a serum in cattle, which, when used in
human vaccination, eventually led to the worldwide eradication of the illness
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A consultation – 1762 Hoare’s picture shows Bath’s (1738) Royal
National Hospital for Rheumatic Disease’s two physicians and patients
with arthritis, palsy and skin disease
Medical developments
• Understanding the human body: illness as
integral to the body or external? The mechanical
body
• The medical market and drugs
• Print culture and self-help books: Cheyne, The
English Malady (1733); Buchan Domestic
Medicine (1769); Beddoes, Consideration on the
Medical Use of Factitious Airs (1794)
• The danger of hypochondria
Understanding the mind and
personality
• The study of man and mind
• Locke’s tabula rasa; the self created by senses; no
integral self? Disguise and masquerade.
• Mandeville: man’s appetites and vices, man as selfinterested; but all that was beneficial – greed, lust, vanity
and ambition could produce public good
• Hume: ‘mankind are so much the same, in all times and
places’ – constant principles of human nature that were
discoverable; but the self was not a constant unity and
was highly contingent
• Romantic sincerity?
• Madness
Public lectures
• In 1739 the following advertisement was placed in the Norfolk
Gazette by John Barker, surgeon and brewer:
• And for the further diversion of the gentlemen and ladies [attending
the race meeting at New Buckenham, Norfolk], between the hours of
three and four a clock in the afternoon, will be performed many of
the philosophical experiments that were performed in Gresham
College in the Time of the famous MR BOYLE; and likewise will be
shewn many experiments that are now performed by the ingenious
Mons. Desaguiliers. The next day, at the Assembly, will be shewn
the same Experiments'.
• In 1819 John Griscom noted that 'there is scarcely a town of
considerable note in Great Britain, which is not sometimes visited by
these travelling lecturers, who, by means of portable apparatus, and
a facility in communicating instruction, impart the benefits of useful
knowledge to hundreds and thousands who might otherwise remain
destitute of its advantages. The multiplication of the means of
gaining information, even in those branches of instruction which a
few years ago were confined to colleges and universities, is a
conspicuous feature of the present day'.
Public Lectures (1809)
Chemical lectures 1810