The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World

  • Jenny Uglow
Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 2002. 608 pp. $30, £25
Credit: DAVID NEWTON

Looking back to the second millennium ad from a great distance in time, the Industrial Revolution might be the only distinctively British feature visible. With a shorter perspective but after a generation of revisionist examination, it seems that something historically unique and world-changing did indeed happen first in Britain during the late eighteenth century. Just when Adam Smith was showing how specialization could lead to steady economic growth, massive technological change began to make possible a quite different kind of growth, transforming an agrarian into a manufacturing economy. There was also a consciousness that revolutionary changes were in the air, though what and which would be the most important in that era of American independence and French regicide remained unclear. This book takes the reader on a journey in that topsy-turvy time by following the details of a group of individual lives.

Your guide is not the universal historian, but history is a broad church, requiring the collaboration of people with many different skills. Some are remarkable analysts, some imaginative lateral thinkers. Others are expert weavers of tales from the fractured evidence of manuscripts and secondary accounts. Jenny Uglow is a brilliant weaver. She has brought a distinct and wonderful contribution to a subject that has been plentifully studied from other perspectives.

The tale of the Lunar Society of Birmingham is well known to the professional historian of eighteenth-century Britain. A loose club of remarkable pioneers living in the West Midlands (and meeting when the Moon was full, to make homeward journeys safer along unlit roads), it included Josiah Wedgwood, founder of the great pottery; Joseph Priestley, 'discoverer' of oxygen: and James Watt of steam-engine fame. It was among the first of that genre of Industrial Revolution associations, which included Benjamin Franklin's American Philosophical Society and the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society to which the atom-pioneer John Dalton belonged.

One reason for the plentiful studies of the Lunar Society is that its members were both prolific inventors of labour-saving devices and laborious writers of letters. Despite losses over 200 years, vast archives of their daily correspondence are still to be found, now carefully catalogued. The letters, not all of which are legible to modern readers, mix business news, gossip and all the elaborate dance of competitive men, conscious of their place in history, communicating with friends who are also rivals in the social world. Even if much of the core narrative already exists, Jenny Uglow is the first to draw so expertly on the texture of the correspondence to weave a picture of the relationships of these men and the world they inhabited.

The book draws not just on the manuscripts but also on two generations of scholarship, including the most current. Along with the sense of human relations there is also a judicious allocation of credit, taking account of recent judgements. The work is not a new analysis in the history of science and technology, but this is not exactly popular history either. When the author refers to 1759 as “that year of victories”, she presumes a level of cultural familiarity that may not now be universal. Who today can name Britain's victories against the French that year, never mind understand the significance of the battles of Quiberon Bay or Lagos Bay?

At one level the book can be read almost as a novel of the period, with its pointillist detail and telling social comment. But its ambitions are greater. At various points the reader is encouraged to observe the significance of the Lunar Men and their world to the reading of the Romantic writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The conclusion almost wistfully points to the end of an optimistic world and the onset of the romantic period that “spurned the arid insights of reason and the denial of innate instincts”. In a sense, therefore, Uglow, who is honorary professor of English and comparative literature at Warwick University, is in a specific dialogue with readers of the Romantics, urging them to look to the context of the Lunar Men and their concerns.

The specificity of the audience points perhaps to a weakness in the book. It will be enjoyed by many even if they do not pick up every allusion, but scientists may be surprised that the author does not put the Lunar Society into its context in scientific history. The Lunar Men were succeeded not just by the Romantic poets, but also by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1831 with such a diverse membership of enthusiasts that William Whewell felt compelled to invent a new name to describe them: “scientists”.

Moreover, although the technological meaning of science is well covered — one might even say exaggerated — its cultural function of aiding understanding of a new, complex, urban, multi-ethnic, multi-class world is neglected. What was the place of the Lunar Men as a group in the Industrial Revolution? Uglow will imply their centrality, but does not decisively address the point. So could the book be better? Certainly many of its readers will go away with unanswered questions and a wish to argue with the author. But that is to attest to achievement, not failure.