Midlands Enlightenment

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English Midlands
during the second half of the eighteenth century.

At the core of the movement were the members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, who included Erasmus Darwin, Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Joseph Priestley, Josiah Wedgwood, James Keir and Thomas Day.[3] Other notable figures included the author Anna Seward,[4] the painter Joseph Wright of Derby,[5] the American colonist, botanist and poet Susanna Wright, the lexicographer Samuel Johnson,[6] the typographer John Baskerville,[7] the poet and landscape gardener William Shenstone[8] and the architects James Wyatt and Samuel Wyatt.[9]

Although the Midlands Enlightenment has attracted less study as an intellectual movement than the European Enlightenment of thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire, or the Scottish Enlightenment of David Hume and Adam Smith, it dominated the experience of the Enlightenment within England[3] and its leading thinkers had international influence.[1] In particular the Midlands Enlightenment formed a pivotal link between the earlier Scientific Revolution and the later Industrial Revolution, facilitating the exchange of ideas between experimental science, polite culture and practical technology that enabled the technological preconditions for rapid economic growth to be attained.[10]

Its participants such as Boulton,

Newtonian mechanics could become the "useful knowledge" of technological development, the results of which could in turn feed back into the wider scientific knowledge-base,[12] creating a "chain-reaction of innovation".[13] Susanna Wright was involved in analogous thinking in the biological sciences and law in the American colonies and early United States, particularly in the Mid-Atlantic, north of the Mason–Dixon line; she was born in 1697 in Warrington in Lancashire
and moved to colonial Pennsylvania in her late teens in 1718 (following her parents four years earlier) after being educated in the Midlands.

The thinkers of the Midlands Enlightenment did not limit themselves to practical matters of utilitarian value, however, and their influence was not confined to their significance in the development of modern industrial society.

Percy Shelley,[16] William Wordsworth,[17] Samuel Taylor Coleridge,[18] and William Blake[19] all having intellectual connections to its leading thinkers, and Midlands Enlightenment thought was also influential in the spheres of education,[20] evolutionary biology,[21] botany, and medicine.[22]

The Midlands Enlightenment was connected to earlier Midlands radical religious reform of establishment of

English Bill of Rights in 1689.[23]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Valsania & Dick 2004, p. 1
  2. ^ Rees-Mogg, William (3 October 2005), "A bit of the old Adam", The Times, London: Times Newspapers Ltd., retrieved 7 November 2009
  3. ^ a b Budge 2007, p. 157
  4. ^ Dick 2008, pp. 567, 577–578
  5. ^ Baird, Olga; Dick, Malcolm (2004), "Joseph Wright of Derby: Art, the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution", Revolutionary Players, Museums, Libraries and Archives - West Midlands, retrieved 21 November 2009
  6. ^ Ritchie, Stefka; Dick, Malcolm (2004), ""The occurrences of common life": Samuel Johnson, Practical Science and Industry in the Midlands", Revolutionary Players, Museums, Libraries and Archives - West Midlands, retrieved 21 November 2009
  7. ^ Ritchie, Stefka; Dick, Malcolm (2004), "John Baskerville and Benjamin Franklin: A Trans-Atlantic Friendship", Revolutionary Players, Museums, Libraries and Archives - West Midlands, retrieved 21 November 2009
  8. ^ Anon (2004), "William Shenstone, The Leasowes, and Landscape Gardening", Revolutionary Players, Museums, Libraries and Archives - West Midlands, retrieved 21 November 2009
  9. ^ Baird, Olga (2004), "The Wyatts, Architects of the Age of Enlightenment", Revolutionary Players, Museums, Libraries and Archives - West Midlands, retrieved 21 November 2009
  10. ^ Jones 2009, p. 232
  11. ^ Jones 2009, p. 17
  12. ^ Jones 2009, pp. 14, 232
  13. ^ Jones 2009, p. 231
  14. ^ Jones 2009, p. 230
  15. ^ Budge 2007, pp. 158, 159; Valsania & Dick 2004, pp. 2–3
  16. doi:10.1111/j.1754-0208.2007.tb00334.x
  17. hdl:2299/9287
  18. doi:10.1111/j.1754-0208.2007.tb00335.x
  19. doi:10.1111/j.1754-0208.2007.tb00332.x
  20. ^ Dick 2008, pp. 569–570
  21. S2CID 25850944
  22. doi:10.1111/j.1754-0208.2007.tb00333.x
  23. JSTOR 3020899

Bibliography

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