This chapter examines individuals who observed and experimented at home and wrote about these experiences in letters to institutions or friends. As discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, personal experience of natural phenomena formed an important and recognised component of knowledge creation in this period. The qualitative detail offered by these correspondents enables analysis of the way knowledge-makers understood their own practices, contributions and selves. The detailed descriptions of their activities and lives are used to consider the relationship between personal experience and knowledge.

In the 1990s, Steven Shapin’s A social history of truth heavily influenced understandings of the basis of knowledge-making in seventeenth-century England, placing emphasis on gentlemanly standing and conduct.¹ However, recent scholarship has argued convincingly for a re-evaluation of the authority that can be derived from the knowledge of experience and therefore the kinds of people who can be considered ‘scientists’.² An inclusive model of knowledge-making is borne out by the evidence that follows. As this chapter will show, eighteenth-century knowledge-makers of a variety of stripes communicated a confidence in their own expertise, regardless of the absence of traditional markers of high intellectual or social standing.

Eighteenth-century society was open to the idea that the skills and understanding of working people could contribute to the nation’s collective stock of intelligence. In July 1794, the Gentleman’s Magazine printed an ‘Account of a Method of curing Burns and Scalds By Mr David Cleghorn, Brewer in Edinburgh’. The method had originally been ‘Communicated in three Letters’ by Cleghorn to the famous surgeon, John Hunter (1728–93).³ The editor commented that this was ‘evidently the production of a plain, sensible, well-informed man, who candidly gives us the result of his experience, and who communicates it to the publick from the most benevolent of motives’.⁴ In Cleghorn’s second letter, he appealed to ‘an eminent physician in Edinburgh’, Dr Hay, whose ‘liberality of sentiment’ would ensure that ‘a valuable discovery in the healing art should [not] be disregarded … merely because it happens to be stumbled upon by a person not of the medical profession’.⁵ Considerable magazine space had been allocated to share this information, which was printed in full and ran to four pages. Thus, the medical insights of a brewer were offered to the Magazine’s readership in detail and alongside a bid for the value of the experience of a plain and sensible working man.

In taking the perspective of the individual, non-elite investigator, this chapter engages with wider debates about selfhood and affect. Here, the act of enquiry is understood as a commitment that had a strong and sometimes fraught relationship with the sense of self. The decision to enquire could be an emotional one. For the seemingly atypical investigators discussed here, negotiations around issues of social status, role and responsibilities were of crucial importance not only to their ability to pursue scientific activity but also for the value they placed upon that activity both for themselves and wider society.

Knowledge made at home

When knowledge is described as ‘know-how’ it loses some esteem. Nevertheless, knowing how to conduct a range of complex material processes was a prerequisite for running an orderly and productive home. For lower-status people, as much as for the new industrialists of this period, the urge to solve problems and to create new and better ways of doing useful things was a powerful driver of enquiry.

Here, letters written to institutions form the basis of an exploration of the motivations and justifications of home experimenters. What follows considers the question of problem-solving – revealing how everyday, domestic issues prompted individuals to experiment with materials and techniques in the hope of sharing productive innovation with wider society. These examples incorporate those who sought knowledge about the natural world for its own sake and those who were mainly concerned with the potential for commercial gain. Many were motivated by a combination of the two. The examples are drawn from a diverse social pool, including barely literate workers alongside the professions and landed classes. This discussion connects with debates about the terms used to describe knowledge developed in different contexts and the hierarchies or dichotomies these terms can evoke, which will be discussed further in this book’s Chapter 7.⁶

As discussed in Chapter 5, the archives of the Royal Society of Arts, formerly the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, hold important insights into the investigative practices of a wide range of eighteenth-century men and women. The Society wished to encourage creative thinking that could be put to public use with a view to fostering beneficial social progress. Amongst the letters submitted to the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce and the American Philosophical Society describing efforts to innovate for the ‘public good’, there is weighty evidence that the home was the key site for this activity. Sometimes the ingenious new observation, adaptation or product was even prompted by a domestic problem. This is mirrored in other kinds of archival records; for example, in the household papers of the O’Hara family of Annaghmore, Co. Sligo, note was made of a technique of using powders, including ‘Chrystals of Sulphate of Soda’, placed in a ‘Tin bottle holder’ with cold water to chill a bottle of wine in twenty to thirty minutes.⁷ In an era before the technology of refrigeration and when making, keeping and transporting ice was logistically challenging, no doubt this technique provided a welcome shortcut. Even when an innovation was not directly motivated by a domestic problem, the experimental practice of these letter-writers clearly displayed the knowledge and skills honed by work in the home, garden or field.

When Lewis Nicola wrote to the American Society in 1769, he described ‘An easy Method of preserving Subjects in Spirits’.⁸ This was an explicitly scientific project, as Nicola designed to maintain natural history specimens. He sought to guide his readers in strategies that avoided the disappointment of spirits evaporating from the container and leaving specimens vulnerable to decomposition. The advice was informed by methods formerly published by the famous naturalist, R. A. F. de Réaumur; however, in Nicola’s version, the use of common domestic equipment was described and the similarities between recipe book instruction on food preservation and natural historical preservation become clear.⁹ For example, after acquiring some specialised stoppered glass containers for the specimens, Nicola advises that the glass vessel be ‘secured by a piece of bladder or leather tied around it and the neck of the bottle’.¹⁰ This strategy recalls the technique described in Mrs Baker’s 1810 cookery book for the purpose of pickling walnuts, in which the ‘pot’ is double-sealed ‘first with a Bladder, and outside that with Leather, that no air may get to them’.¹¹ For specimen preservation, an airtight seal was especially important and Nicola shares an innovation of his own making involving the use of ‘some thin putty, the consistence of a soft ointment’ to help form the seal.¹² Whilst mercury was also proposed as an appropriate chemical to enclose in the seal to further reduce spirit leakage, Nicola followed Réaumur’s suggestion that ‘nut oil, thickened to the consistence of honey’ could act as a substitute ‘by a long exposure to the air which will give it weight sufficient to sink in a weak spirit’.¹³ For those naturalists who could not acquire a vessel with a glass stopper, two layers of bladder would suffice – secured tightly around the top. However, to get the seal to properly set, it was advised that the glass bottle should be turned upside down, and in recognition that ‘many bottles will not stand on their mouths’, ‘wooden cups, turned with a broad bottom and a hollow’ could be used to balance the upturned bottle within.¹⁴ Nicola further suggested that the wooden cup could be filled with ‘melted tallow, or tallow mixed with wax, until all the bladder or leather cover is buried in it’.¹⁵ Tallow was rendered animal fat, commonly used in the home for making both soap and candles. Thus, from typical preserving seals made from leather and bladder to wooden cups and melted tallow, the everyday techniques, materials and objects of domestic life appear in this description of specimen preservation.

Nicola stated that his suggested adaptations of Réaumur’s advice were intended to reduce the cost and ensure the ‘easiness’ of procuring the materials. Besides the glass vessel or bottle, these were all common domestic materials and things. Nicola’s instructions also assumed that his reader would have these domestic articles to hand. Moreover, this example strongly echoes the instructions provided by recipe books and the materials and objects listed in account books and inventories explored in Chapters 1 and 2.

Many other submissions to these societies not only used the material culture of domestic life but were also inspired by everyday household challenges. One such example was A. Curteen of Haverhill in Suffolk who wrote to the London-based Society in June 1756. Keen to establish his knowledgeability on the chosen subject, Curteen stressed that he had made ‘manifold and repeated experiments’ over the course of ‘fourteen or fifteen years together’ but understood that there were some obstructions to ‘this great discovery … becomeing an universall good’.¹⁶ The topic was preserving the flesh of animals, with a view to the product provisioning sailors during long voyages at sea. Following a critique of the common practice of salting the ‘flesh of sheep’, Curteen proposed an alternative method: drying meats ‘under a covered roof but laid open on every side to the wind’, which he felt both reduced the likelihood of flies getting to the meat and also reduced the ‘smell and taste of putrefaction’ present in some salted products.¹⁷

In a similar vein, ‘A. B.’ wrote in 1761 about his ‘Observations on the process of manufacturing oils’ with a procedure that would improve the quality of ‘any kind of fish or seal oil, that pitrifid & stinking’ and ‘the drain oil called vitious oil’.¹⁸ In the case of the former:

But for ‘vitious’ oil that was even ‘more putrid & foul’, this process would remove the bad smell ‘however stinking it may be’ and adjust ‘the brown colour … to a very light amber’.²⁰ The innovator referred to domestic practices when he commented that these oils might be used in lamps and referenced a kind of oil commonly known as ‘Kitchen stuff’. However, the potential to use these methods in a manufacturing context was the object, thereby not only attending to the needs of the frugal housekeeper but also contributing to the prosperity of the nation.

Sadly, it seems that ‘A. B.’ did not receive the response he required from the Society; he would write a further three times about oil (including a letter on 10 May 1761 running to thirteen large sides). He also sent specimens, which he worried about: ‘I am apprehensive that the specimen sent is not purified equally to what my process can effect, & that as it may probably if kept in a warm room be less perfected than when it was sent.’ The letter-writer was anxious that he had not heard back from the Society and presumed ‘nothing is hitherto decided with respect to’ the proposal. In hopes of improving his standing with the Society, he ‘sent another sample of crude & purified oil, which I fancy will be found more different from each other than the first’.²¹ Thus, highly practical home experiments with useful household materials found themselves lodged with the Society, samples sent for inspection and lengthy persuasive explanations written out in pen and ink over many leaves of paper. The hope of recognition is tangible on the page, as is the apprehension of rejection.

Some submissions included detailed descriptions, diagrams and even models of a particular innovation. When Richard A. Clare wrote from Clarendon in Jamaica on 21 April 1799, addressing himself to the secretary of the Society, Samuel More, he enclosed a diagram to which he referred in the text of his letter. His communication was concerned with a new design of ‘Still and Refrigeratory, calculated to save expence in the distillation and refrigeration of ardent spirits, at the same time that it renders these more pure than can be done by stills of the usual construction’.²² He felt sure that distillation on the principles that he described ‘may turn an advantage’ and noted that he would ‘esteem himself honoured’ should the Society approve his design.²³

The cross-referencing between the image and text pictured in Figure 6.1 allowed Clare to explain the design of his invention. He cautioned More that ‘Every part of the apparatus must be made air tight.’²⁴ Unfortunately, a year and three months later, Clare was forced to write to confess that the still of his invention had ‘By some accident … got leaky, admitting the air when the vacuum was made.’ For the time being, he was waylaid: ‘as I have little leisure from my business as a Surgeon &c, I have not as yet set myself to repair it; for you must know there are no workmen in this country to execute a thing of this kind’.²⁵ However, he fully intended, ‘when I have time’ to ‘resume the inquiry, respecting the advantages that may arise from distilling in vacuo, and the result of my experiments shall be laid before the Society’.²⁶ Such correspondences with the Society could, in some cases, span years with willing experimenters sending updates on their observations and new adaptations that might be of interest to the arbiters of commercial and artistic merit.

Figure 6.1 Richard A. Clare’s ‘Still and Refrigeratory’. Courtesy of Royal Society of Arts, London. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Whilst many of the submissions to the Society came from the aristocratic, well-to-do or professional classes, this was certainly not the whole story. In fact, just as women correspondents dominated in the category of polite arts, manufacturers and merchants represented the majority of entrants in the fields of manufactures, mechanics and colonies and trade.²⁷ On 26 May 1791, a joiner – Alexander Thomson – living on the Nutts River Estate in Jamaica wrote to the Society about a mathematical instrument he had designed and made:

Thomson assured the Society that he had ‘Already Proved the Instrument and in all Cases and Quest[i]ons above mentioned finds it Accurate Both By Geometrical and Trigonometrical proof’.²⁹ Submissions such as this give a snapshot of the domestic ingenuity of eighteenth-century householders. Some of their letters addressed the challenges of the domestic environment itself, the vast majority reported on experiments undertaken in that environment using materials and equipment close at hand. All of them made a claim to authority in their understanding, whether that was based on their extensive experience, the application of well-honed skills or merely the commitment to improve.

The societies in London and Philadelphia were not the only organisations that captured the investigative activities of curious individuals from across the social spectrum. A list of patents issued in Shropshire over the course of the eighteenth century details products designed by a ‘Gentleman’, ‘Yeoman’, ‘Clerk’, ‘Forgeman’, ‘Mathematician’, ‘Engraver’, ‘Ironmaster’, ‘Flax Dresser’, ‘Engineer’, ‘Clockmaker’ and ‘Coal Master’.³⁰ For the tradesmen in this cohort, innovations were often focused on improving the techniques of that trade; others used the specialised skills of their work to create something of use in an entirely different realm. For example, the yeoman Thomas Jackson of Wellington registered a ‘Tincture for curing wounds, burns &c’ in 1747.³¹ Meanwhile, a mathematician and an engraver (John Duncombe and Joseph Pokle of Ludlow) collaborated to design a new method of measuring timber and a mechanical turning spit to replace a jack.³² In these cases, the patents suggested a financial motivation alongside the more public-minded considerations often invoked in the societies’ transactions. Nevertheless, they further corroborate the idea that a wide range of people engaged with innovation in technique in this period.

The examples discussed here speak to themes covered in previous chapters. Using a different range of primary sources, the importance of tacit knowledge, technique and the materials, objects, demands and affordances of domestic space still shine through. However, they also reveal the synergy between the home and a wide range of enquiry and innovation and hint at the personal investment individuals made in their own experiments, especially when they committed their knowledge to paper and asked an institution to acknowledge its worth. For some, the act of writing was a challenging one but the evidence of a wide range of literacies in the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce’s archives is telling as to engagement from all classes. In the act of innovation, these home experimenters moved far beyond a narrow conception of know-how. The very fact that they were able to trial new methods showed their motivation to move beyond precepts learned through their trade or role and an urge to push the material limits of their surroundings. However, these testimonies largely focus on the invention or method itself and give fewer clues about the person behind the innovation. The home itself is most often implied rather than described. Next, the question of identity will be considered, including the ways intellectual authority was constructed by curious eighteenth-century experimenters.

Constructing female authority

Here the discussion moves to consider the way curious individuals might have viewed their own activities in a period of stark social and intellectual hierarchies. Whilst the Dublin Society was open to the idea of idle ‘spinsters’ putting their hands to work in the service of the nation, on the whole women were not expected to participate meaningfully in the more elevated projects of refining technique and producing knowledge. Moreover, as Ludmilla Jordanova has argued, ‘as fields with a privileged relationship to nature’, the natural sciences ‘play a major role in explaining and disseminating gender as a naturalized category’.³³ For eighteenth-century women who had an interest in these subjects, the terms of engagement and the perceptions of their activity were necessarily filtered in specific and often prejudicial ways. Nevertheless, women did involve themselves in the natural sciences and navigated their own paths through the prescriptions of science and society, often co-opting or adapting gendered discourse to serve their own purposes.³⁴

As discussed in Chapter 5, Ann Williams and Henrietta Rhodes evidenced their expertise by providing detailed reports of their observations and experiments with silkworms – bringing to bear the ‘evidentiary weight of observation’ in their submissions to the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.³⁵ So did Elizabeth ‘Wyndham’, the mistress of an Earl. Whilst women remained excluded from roles within the learned societies and universities of eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland, the century did offer other inroads to scientific enquiry and writing. Building on activity undertaken by largely aristocratic women of the 1600s in the fields of experimental science, medicine and technical writing,³⁶ in the 1700s a more diverse range of women were engaging with science in public fora, whether that was through periodicals or poetry.³⁷ Prevailing pessimism about women’s abilities to participate in intellectual life did not deter many women from entering this arena, either as a private domestic practice or as a documented – even published – scholarly pursuit.

When writing to the Society about their silkworm colonies, both Ann Williams and Henrietta Rhodes took care to present their findings as authoritative using a range of justifications for the conduct and conclusions of their work. Williams was particularly keen to offer a transparent account of her decision-making process: ‘As to Cocoons, I have none, for after my first essay of reeling off about a dozen, I observed the silk, the nearer it came to the cocoons, grew finer, stronger, and better coloured. It immediately occurred why might not the whole cocoon be reeled off.’³⁸ To this end, she tried ‘the experiment in water, so hot I could scarce keep my hand in’, and it lived up to her hopes: ‘The strong glutinous matter, which forms the contexture of the cocoon, immediately gave way, and I reeled off every single thread.’³⁹ However, the women positioned their activities very differently from one another and their language reflected distinct constructions of female authority in relation to knowledge and skill.

Williams situated her enquiry as partly a natural historical one, commenting that she believed ‘that half the benefit arising from this minute part of the grand Creator’s works are not yet unravelled’.⁴⁰ In a long letter dated 19 October 1777, Williams described the worms as they were about to produce silk, noting that the first indication was ‘a transparency all over them, with a visible circulation of the blood, or glutinous matter’.⁴¹ Williams ‘humbly’ inferred that this action ‘forms the silk, and assists the spinning’, adding that the substance ‘is visibly seen circulating down the middle of the back’.⁴² Next, she observed that

This passage of close observation is concluded with a mention of the silkworms moving ‘in a circular manner from side to side of the box’ and the more practical assertion that ‘at this moment they are to be put in papers or all the labour will prove abortive’.⁴⁴

By delivering such detailed anatomical descriptions, Williams was contributing to a broader culture of women both collecting and documenting flora and fauna in this period. Famous examples included the exceptional naturalist and illustrator, Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717), and aristocratic collectors such as Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, Duchess of Portland, discussed in Chapter 3, but these were modes that could be adopted by lower-profile and lower-status individuals.⁴⁵ Whilst Williams did not lay claim to the title of naturalist herself, she saw her work as making a solid contribution to this realm of scholarly activity. She upheld the importance of her own domestic observations: ‘but this I know, which is well worth the while of naturalists to investigate, that the female Aurelia is full of eggs before she changes her state to that of a Chrysalis’.⁴⁶

By contrast, Henrietta Rhodes emphasised the wider significance of her work in terms of the economic potential of large-scale manufacturing:

She argued that ‘from the recital I have given’, it is clear that thirty thousand silkworms would be required to produce five pounds of silk. She further reasoned that as twelve large mulberry bushes ‘were scarcely adequate to the support of ten thousand’ in her possession, ‘any means to stimulate the spirit of making Mulberry plantations’ would be critical to success.⁴⁸ She herself had managed ten thousand ‘with ease and success’, but she advised that if others were to follow in her steps and on a larger scale, ‘the expence of erecting a place for them would be very trifling’ but they would need two people to attend the enterprise.⁴⁹ These concerns were echoed in the Dublin Society’s records, as three women explicitly referred to their need to take on extra help with their silkworm colonies, whether that was through training other women like themselves or by employing children from ‘the Public Schools’ as apprentices.⁵⁰

Rhodes also emphasised the ways in which her investigation responded very closely to the Society’s objective of developing practical knowledge. Whilst her letters occasionally evoked regimes of domestic care, her discourse emphasised problem-solving over nurture.⁵¹ Rhodes’s original motivation had been to produce ‘the quantity of Silk necessary for a dress’ and, whilst the subsequent years of experimentation allowed her to draw far broader conclusions, this interest in manufacture sat at the heart of her project.⁵²

Rhodes used comparisons with her predecessor, Williams, to prove the pre-eminence of her practice. In defending the lower yields of her silkworms, she accused Williams of taking ‘waste or carding silk into the account’, a habit that Rhodes regarded as ‘incompatible with my ideas of truth and candour’ and out of line with the intentions of the Society when they offered their premiums.⁵³ Rhodes’s criticisms of her predecessor’s reports offered an implicit contrast with her own work. This was important because Rhodes was asking the fellows of the Society to trust the integrity of her practices and observations thereof. She also referred to measuring the silk from a cone ‘with the most critical exactness’.⁵⁴ Accuracy of practice played an important role in both women’s efforts to present their accounts as authoritative. Many more criticisms of Williams’s work exist in Rhodes’s letters, as she weighed up the range of evidence she had read in the Society’s Transactions against her own experience. By demonstrating a marked improvement on a prize-worthy submission by another female applicant, Rhodes sought to concretise her own achievements in the eyes of the Society.

The language used by the women is also telling. Like Moses Bartram, they anthropomorphised the silkworms. For example, both referred to their silkworm colonies as ‘families’ and Rhodes described her silkworms as ‘industrious little animals who depend on me solely’.⁵⁵ Overall, however, it is Williams’s letters that most commonly deploy anthropomorphic references. For example, she stressed the importance of treating the silkworms with kindness and drew connections between her care for them and their productivity:

Whilst she had clearly learned from published guides on the cultivation of silkworms, in the final analysis, she trusted her own direct experience. She sometimes referenced her own embodied knowledge to make her point, for example when reporting that she ‘only used milk warm water, in the first process’.⁵⁷ In this way, Williams built the case for her own success through language that evoked female regimes of care.

Williams’s approach corresponded with trends in science writing of this era, not least – as Londa Schiebinger has argued – the use of ‘explicitly anthropomorphic thinking’ in relation to botany ‘ascribing to plants human form, function, and even emotion’.⁵⁸ More than once, Williams referred to her silkworms as ‘my little family’; she inferred from their behaviours that the silkworms were ‘innocent’, ‘satisfied’ or in ‘pain’; she noted when she thought they seemed to ‘play’ and when they reacted with ‘horror’. She witnessed them seem ‘satisfied’ with their food and ‘nestle into the pipes and repose themselves’.⁵⁹ Her language finds a reflection in the writings of the poet Anna Barbauld. In the 1770s, Barbauld (1743–1825, and at this time Aikin) commented on her friend and natural philosopher Joseph Priestly’s experiments with mice, writing ‘The Mouse’s Petition’.⁶⁰ This poem was written in the voice of the mouse and made a plea to Priestley to release him. As Mary Ellen Bellanca argues, the poem ‘does not simply inscribe a showdown between scientific patriarchy and feminine sensibility’ as Barbauld fully supported scientific experiment and advance, but it does reveal her interest in promoting compassion towards animals – a cause that attracted support in her own era as well as later.⁶¹ Barbauld’s wider work took up a position that, all at once, promoted scientific knowledge for both men and women, aimed to ‘reinforce cultural boundaries between the sexes’ intellectual territories’ and cautioned against the ‘excessive ambition of male scientists’.⁶² Whilst Williams’s narrative assumes the legitimacy of her activities, the combination of authoritative observation and anthropomorphic allusion is striking. By engaging with the pain or comfort of her silkworms, emotion and empathy formed a part of her scientific narrative.

First-hand accounts of silkworm rearing took centre stage in both these women’s letters, but occasional comments reveal that each of them discussed their venture with others and had read published accounts of the process. Local people, friends and experts were all referenced for the purpose of corroborating the efficacy of their approach. As discussed in Chapter 5, Rhodes was particularly well networked amongst the wealthy who could support her intellectual endeavours.⁶³ She had also read widely on this topic, mentioning on 24 August 1785 a ‘Treatise’ she had digested concerning plans to establish a silk manufactory in Georgia, the ‘ingenious hint’ of the ‘Honourable Daines Barrington’ on collecting leaves, which she had probably found in the Society’s own Transactions, and her disagreement with the French Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s judgement that noise was ‘prejudicial to the Silk-worm’.⁶⁴

Williams occasionally mentioned other people in her acquaintance, noting on 14 October 1777, ‘Every person here, those who have kept them, as well as others, will have it that I have performed a miracle.’⁶⁵ Whilst it seems that Williams lived alone after the death of her father, she had clearly discussed her project with neighbours or friends, some of whom had tried silkworm rearing for themselves. Five days later, she reported, ‘A Gentleman has been at my office, who lived three years in Italy [where silkworms were commercially reared], he declared though he had seen many thousands spin there, he never saw finer Worms than mine, and expressed his astonishment at their spinning at this season [October].’⁶⁶ This comment points to the community of interest that had cohered around the subject of silkworms and the access Williams had to information about silkworm rearing in other parts of the world. It also suggests that she had developed enough of a reputation for her work in this field that visitors to the area might drop by to examine her colony and approach.

Just as Williams’s letters to the Society had no doubt prompted others to investigate, Henrietta Rhodes’s ‘elegant letters’ were referred to in a subsequent submission by a Mr Swaine of Puckleworth near Bristol. He mentioned that the ‘letters of that ingenious young lady’ had induced him to write to the Society not ‘in the light of rivalship; but merely to corroborate the testimony there adduced’.⁶⁷ It is worth also noting that Rhodes’s writings enjoyed a considerable afterlife, being re-printed into the nineteenth century.⁶⁸ In this way, Williams and Rhodes participated not only in local communities of experimenters but also in a growing and diverse network, not of friends and relations, but of investigators reporting their findings to an institution, with the hopes both of a prize and the honour of contributing to this public project. Their interventions influenced others for decades.

Mastery of print culture

The eighteenth century experienced an exponential growth in print culture, cheaper print products proving particularly successful, and a significant rise in literacy that reached women and working people.⁶⁹ Developments such as the circulating library also expanded access to knowledge in the form of print.⁷⁰ Whilst the aristocratic, private library was still a major advantage to enquiry, the lack of it was no complete barrier. As discussed in Chapter 4, working men with little spare time or resources to aid enquiry made good use of the periodical press to corroborate their own findings and compare those of others.

Many scientific subjects graced the pages of cheap print in this period, the Gentleman’s Magazine boasting in December 1808 that it was the premier publication for ‘literary and scientific men to obtain information, on any particular subject in which they may be interested’.⁷¹ Indeed, the Gentleman’s Magazine routinely advertised the premiums of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, presumably to ensure a broader audience than the Society’s own Transactions.⁷² The Magazine featured running topics, with submissions from multiple interested individuals, often responding to each other’s ideas over a period of months, and sometimes years.

For example, throughout 1740, submissions about optical experiments involving mirrors were printed. One ‘G. S.’ wrote that an ‘Optical Phenomenon is not yet taken notice of by the Writers on that Subject’, the author rationalising that ‘if propos’d in your Mag’ it might reach the notice of ‘Literati’ who could explain it ‘from their Principles’.⁷³ He or she had been surprised when ‘Looking at the Moon (by accident) in a common plain Mirror or Looking-Glass’, ‘to see her multiply’d into four distinct Spectrums, at some distance from each other’. G. S. tried the same experiment with the sun with a similar effect and wanted to know ‘How is this to be accounted for in a plain, polish’d Mirror, where other Objects appear only single, as daily Practice confirms?’⁷⁴ In June of the same year, G. S. returned to the same subject, referring to a Mr Martin and his ‘many curious Experiments … relating to the optical Phenomenon’.⁷⁵ This Mr Martin was most likely Benjamin Martin (1704–82) who was a schoolmaster, optician and instrument-maker who gave public lectures and published on his expertise.⁷⁶ On the question of the ‘Plurality of Spectrums’ visible ‘in the common Mirror’, G. S. bemoaned that ‘all the experimental Variety’ of Martin was not enough to ‘render a decisional Solution’ to this phenomenon.⁷⁷ G. S. elaborated a list of eighteen observations about these spectrums and a diagram, suggesting that this amounted to an explanation of the phenomenon and invited Martin or other ‘Proficients in that Science’ to concur or elaborate an alternative.⁷⁸

As it happened, on 1 August 1740, a P. Wood of Cheshire responded to this call with his or her own observations.⁷⁹ The submission was aimed at the ‘optical Readers’ of the Gentleman’s Magazine.⁸⁰ As with the former contributor, a list of numbered observations and a diagram followed and the piece concluded with a statement agreeing with ‘Mr Martin’ ‘that several Difficulties do attend the Nature of this question, which must be accounted for otherwise’; nonetheless P. Wood had hoped to contribute to the discussion and elaboration of this phenomenon, using the Magazine as a means of conversing with other people who were curious about optics, not least the famous instrument-maker.⁸¹

As discussed, astronomy was a subject that appeared regularly in the pages of the Gentleman’s Magazine, alongside a wide range of other periodicals of this period. Curious individuals wrote into the Magazine from a range of standpoints. One contributor described himself in March 1742 as ‘entirely a Novice in all Parts of mathematical Learning’ and enquired about the path of the moon. The following month, a direct response from a more experienced astronomer, calling themselves ‘Philalethes’ from County Durham, was printed.⁸² The diverse participation in this pursuit is exemplified by the fact that the observations of internationally known astronomers were listed beside the anonymous initials of interested individuals. For example, the solar eclipse of 4 August 1739 was reported in the September edition of the Magazine, which gave the observations of the first astronomer to the Empress of Russia, I. N. De L’Isle’s sighting, alongside ‘I. B.’ of Stoke Newington and ‘J. T.’ of Newcastle-on-Tyne.⁸³

Those who wrote to the Gentleman’s Magazine were not all working with the same tools at hand. For example, ‘J. B.’ made ‘Observations of the Occult action of Jupiter by the Moon’ from Fleet Street, London on 27 October 1740 with ‘an excellent reflecting Telescope which magnify’d 120 Times’.⁸⁴ By contrast, on 26 February 1742, Thomas Wright of St James’s in London thanked the Magazine for an account of a comet, which Wright had sighted himself at three o’clock in the morning. However, ‘for Want of proper Instruments to observe it’, he used a length of thread to determine the position of the comet in relation to longitude and latitude, a technique he helpfully shared with other readers. This inexpensive method, he assured them, would allow ‘the Place of the Comet’ to be ‘very easily found’.⁸⁵ On the same page of the Magazine, a G. Smith of Boothby, near Carlisle, similarly professed to spot the comet despite having ‘no Instrument to make proper Observations’.⁸⁶ This form of positional astronomy was clearly open to very many, without the need for expensive instruments, and formed a mainstay of astronomical discussion between the Dublin apprentices, Jackson and Chandlee, discussed in detail in Chapter 4.

As Jackson and Chandlee’s letters reveal, the periodical press provided important information and Jackson habitually annotated copies with his own observations. Via his father’s print shop, he had a broad range of print culture within his reach. This was a resource he often shared with his friend, although one he maintained an exacting control over, writing on 7 May 1769, ‘Thine receiv’d, which informs one that thou art very covetous of reading Magazines – but there is one material thing that thou hast not yet considered viz. that a Bookseller above all people hate to lend Books, except he makes a trade of it.’⁸⁷ Of course, as a trainee bookseller, Jackson was satirising his own attitude to lending his reading material, but the letters regularly refer either to the loan of a particular item or the reasons why it could not be borrowed, often in a tongue-in-cheek style. For example, Jackson offered Chandlee a ‘view of the Cambridge Magazine’, but elaborated,

However, on occasion, the apprentice to a linen-draper Chandlee was able to lend Jackson a magazine. For example, Jackson asked his friend ‘Wilt thy have thy old piece of a Lady’s Almanack?’, complaining that ‘It helps encumber my desk; and I don’t want it.’⁸⁹ Despite the off-hand mode of expression, this shows that Jackson and Chandlee also read publications explicitly marketed at women; however, such periodicals could easily have featured subjects of key interest as mathematical problems were a mainstay for publications such as The Ladies’ Diary, also known as the Woman’s Almanack.⁹⁰ Both men were clearly familiar with a wide range of periodicals and Jackson also sourced publications from beyond Ireland’s shores, noting on 23 April 1769, ‘The long time we have to wait sometimes and the Extraordinary loss of shoe leather are great discouragements to taking the English Magazines.’⁹¹

Whilst the apprentices’ scientific interests drove some of their engagement with print culture, Jackson’s training to become a printer and publisher was also influential and this topic sometimes interrupted the flow of astronomical exchange. In August 1769, he wrote a postscript to his letter commenting, ‘This year hast been a very remarkable year, for the breaking of Printers, 3 have had their good sold by Auction &c.’⁹² Each had their own financial vices; one was also ‘a stage player’ who ‘went in debt to some of the Playhouse folks’, another was too fond of ‘taking in new expensive household furniture, than he was at paying for them’ and the third was experienced in the trade but ‘so unwise as to practise Gaming’.⁹³ Jackson was also critical of some common practices among booksellers, reporting ‘piratical depredations … committed in the Almanacks way’.⁹⁴ Noting one outlet’s ‘annually stolen sheet almanac which is no new piracy’, Jackson bemoaned another ‘which appears to be almost entirely copied from Watson’, meanwhile ‘B. Corcoran published a base and servile Imitation of Smith’s sheet almanac under the title of the Royal Dublin Sheet Almanack’.⁹⁵ Jackson ended his letter with the comment ‘Some folks it seems do not so much consider what is fair and just, and agreeable to the Royal Law, as what will bring Profit.’⁹⁶ In this way, Jackson – and increasingly Chandlee – were very well acquainted with the contents of the periodical press, both local publications and English imports, but also knowledgeable about the business and the poor habits of some printers in reproducing content wholesale from one almanac to the next.⁹⁷ This insider knowledge and ability to secure diverse publications gave these young men a real mastery when it came to assessing the value and reliability of information sourced from cheap print.

As discussed in Chapter 4, Robert Jackson did not always trust the astronomical content of almanacs. On 24 December 1769, he disagreed with ‘Two of our Irish almanack writers’ who were predicting a visible eclipse in 1770. As much as Jackson ‘should like to see it as well as any of them’ he had ‘good and sufficient reason to believe’ that this would not come to pass.⁹⁸ In a long letter, Jackson included a final section entitled ‘Intelligence’ in which he imparted his criticism of a new almanac printed in Cork by a ‘John Scanlon of Cloyne’. Issues included Scanlon’s ‘shameful still-continued Blunder in the Tides’, his neglecting to record ‘the invisible Eclipse in 1st mo. [January]’ and the accusation that he ‘hath laid violent hands on the Transit of Venus, and instead of placing it on the 3rd of June partly visible (till the sun setting deprives us of it)’, he had printed the date as 4 June ‘and the greatest part of it visible, after the sun’s rising; which I have reason to apprehend is quite false’.⁹⁹ After some further comparisons between printed astronomical details, Jackson concluded by admitting ‘I am not yet ready to take a Critical review of the Eclipsio-graphers and transitographers for 1769’, suggesting he might do so in five or six weeks’ time.¹⁰⁰ The ‘Eclisio-graphers’ most likely referred to those who produced the Nautical Almanac, or ‘eclipsiography’, because longitude could be calculated by comparing the local time of a lunar eclipse at two distant places.¹⁰¹ Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, worked on a new Nautical Almanac and Astronomical Ephemeris for the year 1767 and published it in 1766.¹⁰² This process of reading, comparing and – often – critiquing and disputing the published details of eclipses, transits and other astronomical phenomena was a mainstay in these letters and demonstrates the active and analytical quality of these young men’s reading practices.

Jackson and Chandlee’s letters illuminate a readership for the periodical press with both expertise in the published subject and the genre itself. This calls into question the notion that periodicals were merely channels for ‘diffusing a taste for those useful sciences over the nation at large’ as the Irish Magazine for Neglected Biography of 1810 described it.¹⁰³ This book argues that there is much more agency in the so-called ‘lower orders’ than that traditional characterisation of information flow would account for. As Jackson himself was engaged in the process of printing and selling print culture, he perhaps felt a greater authority to produce, consume and challenge its content but – more than anything else – his letters reveal that the information disseminated in these almanacs was seized upon by a selection of working people in the city who could form their own views on the validity of what they read. With this knowledge came a power over print and an authority in the critique of it. Like the individuals who contributed letters, observations and experiments to the Gentleman’s Magazine discussed above, these working men were not passive consumers, but active participants in a diffuse intellectual culture, a culture of the curious in eighteenth-century urban life.

Conclusion

The domestic experimenters discussed here presented their personal experiences as authoritative in the framework of scientific observation and as useful to commercial innovation, but they articulated their authority in different ways. Cognition is an emotional act and emotional worlds not only motivate but also constitute knowledge-making.¹⁰⁴ The affective resonance of home and the common childhood experience of learning at a carer’s side create the conditions for first understanding the world. Whilst the individuals discussed here rarely foregrounded the emotional, in case it detracted from the rational, they did betray the importance of their scientific work to their sense of self, sometimes in heartfelt terms.

Ann Williams and Henrietta Rhodes were women of the middling sort and gentry who considered their own domestic experience of breeding silkworms and harvesting their crops as valid evidence on account of the ‘truth and candour’ of their testimony. Williams’s testimony drew strongly on concepts of nurture and domesticity, extending the discourse of familial care to encompass this task and simultaneously developing a vocabulary for describing and interpreting her findings. Whilst Rhodes chose to prioritise the language of production over that of care, like Williams, she conducted her activities at home and transferred materials, equipment and technique from one domestic task to the next. Ultimately, the cultivation of these living creatures formed one part of the material and social life of the home, which included the care of family members and the careful stewardship of domestic resources.

Robert Jackson and Thomas Chandlee filled their correspondence with the details of their shared enquiry, in the process revealing their close engagement with a prevalent form of eighteenth-century print culture. Jackson’s use of the playful pseudonym ‘Philalithes Astronomus’ indicates both identification with his chosen pursuit but also the humour of shared endeavour that runs through this correspondence. Using such pseudonyms was a mainstay for correspondents with the periodical press and, in doing so, Jackson underlined his place in that culture. As Chandlee’s tutor, Jackson often assumed a didactic tone and wrote with assured confidence about a range of astronomical questions, methods and phenomena. However, it is in the encompassing command of periodical output that Jackson’s authoritative persona really takes flight – marrying as it does his burgeoning professional identity with his subject specialism.

Active participation in print culture, both as critical readers and knowledgeable or curious contributors, formed a bedrock for independent observation and experiment. Whilst some correspondents with formal societies clearly feared rejection of their proposal, many others had a firm confidence in the value of their innovation, underpinned by personal expertise honed through experience. They often articulated this self-confidence. In many submissions to societies, the particulars of the home and the correspondent’s own sense of self have to be read between the lines. However, examples such as Williams and Rhodes and Jackson and Chandlee give an authoritative voice to the variegated expertise that could be sharpened at home. Their confidence was bolstered by membership in multiple communities of enquiry, in ink, print and person. Taken together, their testimonies indicate widespread participation in scientific knowledge-making by a diverse population of individuals. The next chapter argues that a culture of curiosity prevailed in the eighteenth century and, in doing so, re-examines the ways historians characterise intellectual life in this era of ‘Enlightenment’.