A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery, in which a Lamp is put in place of the Sun, byJoseph Wright of Derby
TheMidlands Enlightenment, also known as theWest Midlands Enlightenment[1] or theBirmingham Enlightenment,[2] was a scientific, economic, political, cultural and legal manifestation of theAge of Enlightenment that developed inBirmingham and the widerEnglish Midlands during the second half of the eighteenth century.
Although the Midlands Enlightenment has attracted less study as an intellectual movement than the European Enlightenment of thinkers such asJean-Jacques Rousseau andVoltaire, or theScottish Enlightenment ofDavid Hume andAdam Smith, it dominated the experience of the Enlightenment withinEngland[3] and its leading thinkers had international influence.[1] In particular the Midlands Enlightenment formed a pivotal link between the earlierScientific Revolution and the laterIndustrial 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,Susanna Wright, Watt and Keir were fully integrated into the exchange of scientific and philosophical ideas among the intellectual elites of Europe, the British American colonies and the new United States, but were simultaneously engaged in solving the practical problems of technology, economics and manufacture.[11] They thus formed a natural bridge across the science-technology divide, where the "abstract knowledge" ofchemistry andNewtonian 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 theMason–Dixon line; she was born in 1697 inWarrington inLancashire 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.[14] The ideas of the Midlands Enlightenment were to be highly influential in the birth of Britishromanticism[15] with the poetsPercy Shelley,[16]William Wordsworth,[17]Samuel Taylor Coleridge,[18] andWilliam Blake[19] all having intellectual connections to its leading thinkers, and Midlands Enlightenment thought was also influential in the spheres ofeducation,[20]evolutionary biology,[21]botany, andmedicine.[22]
^Ruston, Sharon (2007), "Shelley's Links to the Midlands Enlightenment: James Lind and Adam Walker",Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies,30 (2):227–241,doi:10.1111/j.1754-0208.2007.tb00334.x
^Budge, Gavin (2007b), "Erasmus Darwin and the Poetics of William Wordsworth: 'Excitement without the Application of Gross and Violent Stimulants'",Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies,30 (2):279–308,doi:10.1111/j.1754-0208.2007.tb00337.x,hdl:2299/9287
^Barnes, Alan (2007), "Coleridge, Tom Wedgwood and the Relationship between Time and Space in Midlands Enlightenment Thought",Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies,30 (2):243–260,doi:10.1111/j.1754-0208.2007.tb00335.x
^Green, Matthew (2007), "Blake, Darwin and the Promiscuity of Knowing: Rethinking Blake's Relationship to the Midlands Enlightenment",Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies,30 (2):193–208,doi:10.1111/j.1754-0208.2007.tb00332.x
^Elliott, Paul (2003), "Erasmus Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and the Origins of the Evolutionary Worldview in British Provincial Scientific Culture, 1770-1850",Isis,94 (1):1–29,doi:10.1086/376097,JSTOR3653341,PMID12725102,S2CID25850944
^Levere, Trevor H. (2007), "Dr Thomas Beddoes (1760-1808) and the Lunar Society of Birmingham: Collaborations in Medicine and Science",Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies,30 (2):209–226,doi:10.1111/j.1754-0208.2007.tb00333.x
^Jones, Peter M. (March 1999), "Living the Enlightenment and the French Revolution: James Watt, Matthew Boulton, and their Sons",The Historical Journal,42 (1):157–182,doi:10.1017/s0018246x98008139,JSTOR3020899
Budge, Gavin (2007), "Science and Soul in the Midlands Enlightenment",Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies,30 (2):157–160,doi:10.1111/j.1754-0208.2007.tb00330.x
Dick, Malcolm (2008), "Discourses for the new industrial world: industrialisation and the education of the public in late eighteenth-century Britain",History of Education,37 (4):567–584,doi:10.1080/00467600802101918,S2CID144045552
Jones, Peter M. (2009),Industrial Enlightenment: Science, technology and culture in Birmingham and the West Midlands, 1760-1820, Manchester: Manchester University Press,ISBN978-0-7190-7770-8
Porter, Roy (2000),Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World, London: Penguin Books (published 2001),ISBN0-14-025028-X
Uglow, Jenny (2002),The Lunar Men: The Friends who made the Future, 1730-1810, London: Faber & Faber,ISBN978-0-571-19647-0
