Volume 49, Number 20 · December 19, 2002
Men in the Moon
By P.N. Furbank
The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World
by Jenny Uglow
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,588 pp., $30.00
The 'five friends' of Jenny Uglow's title are the manufacturer of metal goods Matthew Boulton (1728–1809); the potter Josiah Wedgwood (1730– 1795); the physician Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), grandfather of the author of On the Origin of Species; Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), the Unitarian preacher, experimental chemist, and political radical; and James Watt (1736–1819), the great advancer of the steam engine. The scene of their friendship was Birmingham and its environs. In the mid-eighteenth century Birmingham was a fast-expanding city of traders and manufacturers, helped in this by the fact that it had no city charter or ancient craft guilds with their restrictive rules: there was a saying that 'any fool can make money in Birmingham.' The first three of the friends made their entire careers there and were joined by Watt (upon the death of his wife) in 1774 and by Priestley in 1780; and so important to them was this friendship that in 1775, with some others, they formed themselves into a 'Lunar Society,' meeting every month on the Sunday nearest the full moon, to give them light to ride home by.
Review, 2990 words
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