In 1773, postmistress and silkworm experimenter Ann Williams published a volume of ninety-five poems, songs and riddles under the title Original poems and imitations. Oddly, not one piece dwelt on the topic of silkworms although the book itself was dedicated to the ‘Right Honourable H. F. Thynne, His Majesty’s Post-Master General’, underlining the author’s identification with her occupation.¹ The contents cover an eclectic range of subjects, including friendship, death, the structure of the human body, earthquakes and astronomy. They celebrate, among others, Shakespeare, Virgil and General James Wolfe.² Many poems take the form of an address to a gentleman on questions of womanhood, such as, ‘Familiar epistle to a gentleman who wrote a bitter satyr against women’ or ‘Impromptu, to a gentleman who railed against the ladies, particularly the married ones’.³ Williams’s cultural and scientific interests are on display here, alongside her thoughts about female intellect. Not only do some poems explain to a gentleman the value of female learning, but others consider the act of thought itself.⁴ Several poems respond to famous women writers who Williams clearly admired – for example, ‘On reading some lines in praise of Mrs. Macauly’ and ‘Impromptu, on reading Mrs. Rowe’s poems’, the latter occupying the last pages of the book.⁵

Williams describes the poet, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, as an inspiration, noting the deadening effect of some formal education upon creativity:

These sentiments speak to Williams’s own status as an autodidact. Whilst it is difficult to determine her experiences of formal education in childhood, the extant records show that she advanced her own understanding of a range of fields informally and in the context of her job. The poem implies that free of the ‘pedantic rules’ of school, the poet and intellectual could reach her full potential.

Next, Williams dwelt on a feature of her own publication – the imitation of other great writers’ work:

She positions herself as a student of Rowe’s poetic power, although unequal in her abilities. Nevertheless, in the many lines of her poetry, Williams maps the contours of her own existence as an enquiring mind. The absence of the chief subject of her letters to the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce only serves to emphasise the breadth of this postmistress’s interests. Williams’s writing returns repeatedly to the themes of female enquiry, the wonders of nature and the human condition. Her poems offer a rebuke to those who would seek to limit the possibilities of curiosity and praise writers who open new territory for the life of the mind. Her example inspires the question: who was imitating whom in eighteenth-century society?

Ann Williams may have seen herself as an imitator of others, but her letters to the Society articulate an alternative perspective.⁸ She offers historians an unusually detailed glimpse of the way science operated in the home for curious individuals who did not possess the traditional hallmarks of scholarly identity. In doing so, she revealed not only her own rigorous and encompassing enquiries into natural knowledge, but also the spatial, material and emotional dimensions of that project. Ann Williams realised and described an eighteenth-century culture of curiosity that has traditionally fallen below the radar, a culture embedded in the everyday and the home. Her example suggests that scientific methods and ideas were initiated, rather than imitated, by a wide variety of people in domestic surroundings.

There are very good reasons why it has been difficult for historians to identify, locate and examine this kind of knowledge-making and its protagonists, in all their diversity and obscurity. It hardly needs repeating that a dependence on textual survival is detrimental to the discovery of non-elite and non-textual occurrences. As discussed in Chapter 2, tacit knowledge of the kind developed at home and of crucial importance to science is not only rarely written down, it is genuinely difficult to write down. For many domestic workers, with little formal literacy, it was exactly this kind of expertise that guided their daily work. It was in the unwritten, often unspoken, exercise of technique that their specialism lay. Of course, oral cultures are commonplace in all societies, but they are of special importance where writing things down is not the primary objective of a given role. Conversation, demonstration and verbal instruction were clearly the most usual methods by which knowledge and skill were transferred person to person, especially for those who laboured by hand and, certainly, for most forms of domestic work. Between the demands of tacit knowledge and the conditions of partial literacy, many kinds of knowledge-making were rarely captured in ink or print. On this basis, it seems possible to conclude that the collection of textual fragments that comprise this volume hint at a much larger picture.⁹

In stark contrast to the silences around oral culture and tacit knowledge, a great deal has been written about writing. Unsurprisingly, this is yet another realm riddled with intellectual hierarchies that obscure the value and influence of some textual forms. A canon of published works sits atop a pyramid comprised of lesser writers, the periodical press, cheap print and ephemera. Manuscript survival nestles somewhere underneath in a period primarily known for its exponentially expanding print culture. Nevertheless, the record-keeping of house and home represents a vast body of work, although one largely devoid of literary merit. Whilst the majority of these eclectic materials were functional in purpose, evocative glimpses of personhood are visible. Lists abound – lists of servants’ wages, lists of furniture, lists of plants, lists of purchases, lists of treasured objects. This ubiquitous process of accumulation and documentation structured householders’ worlds – offering the promise of control in the present, a self-expression of sorts and the prospect of an archival afterlife.

The argument made here is that the home and the individuals working within that space were integral to the development of natural knowledge, certainly in terms of its motivations, practices and techniques but also in respect of its insights. This approach owes a debt to science studies and the notion that separating science from culture is unproductive and, therefore, that a defined model of production, dissemination and consumption of scientific ideas not only obscures the realities of knowledge-making but also imposes a false division between science proper and the rest.¹⁰ Whilst the evidence of some elite lives has formed a part of the analysis here, the focus has been on the non-elite and the far-reaching significance of their demonstrable intellectual agency. It is important to emphasise that almost everyone learned much of what they knew about the world around them from home – even Fellows of the Royal Society – and this book has made the case for the home as a site of emergence in terms of scientific knowledge in this period.

Gender, status, labour and the home

Social, cultural and economic historians have reached relative consensus in characterising the eighteenth century as a period of change, notwithstanding underlying continuities.¹¹ One facet of this change was an increase in the quantity and diversity of materials and material culture available to individuals across society, although more generously for some. With the availability of new or rare ingredients, including expensive imported luxuries and a proliferating variety of domestic objects, it is possible to see the expansive, experimental potential of the home.¹²

Likewise, historians of science recognise this period as one of frenetic activity, with considerable developments made in fields such as natural historical taxonomy, magnetism and electricity and chemistry.¹³ The eighteenth century is particularly associated with codification and the disembedding of knowledge from ‘the matrix of experience it seeks to explain’, as Michael McKeon has described.¹⁴ As submissions to institutions like the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce demonstrate, the drive for systematisation could not entirely eradicate the particular and the local in all their messy abundance.¹⁵ Whilst debate continues, the old certainties of ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘industrial revolution’, looking inevitably towards the horizon of ‘modernity’, are now firmly contested. For historians of all stripes, a ‘trickle down’ or social emulation model of change over time has lost its allure.¹⁶

Whilst historians share a recognition of the eighteenth century as a time of societal change, there are some realms that have resisted the sheen of the new. As Sara Pennell has argued, the eighteenth-century kitchen has traditionally been characterised as a place of relative stasis – the labour-saving technologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a good distance off.¹⁷ Contrary to the upsurge in scholarship of the 1990s and early 2000s that characterised the eighteenth-century domestic interior as a dynamic space of social, gender, material and economic relations, the productive sides of these households have retained their association with drudgery.¹⁸

In part, this lacuna can be explained by an overwhelming focus on the consumption of the middling sorts and new forms of commerce as drivers of change in the historiography of the turn of the twenty-first century. This preoccupation with the acquisition of domestic furnishings that conveyed good taste, fashion, comfort and personal identity in places such as the dining room, parlour or bedchamber has obscured other questions.¹⁹ As Jane Hamlett has summarised, social and cultural research on the British domestic interior has focused its energies on nuancing histories of consumption, exploring the complexities of ‘public’ and ‘private’ in the context of home and considering power dynamics and the construction of gendered identities.²⁰ As Amanda Vickery puts it, studies have established the ‘determining role of house and home in power and emotion, status and choices’.²¹ In this way, histories of the home have ensured that gender is a fundamental category of analysis and one that illuminates power relations, household decision-making and the construction of identities.²² All of these themes contribute to the analysis offered here, but this book has positioned enquiry as a key facet of domestic work. This research thus applies the social and cultural historian’s attentiveness to material culture and gendered power dynamics to the investigation of the home as a site of enquiry.

This book also follows in what is now a several-decades-long tradition of researching women’s involvement in science. In the 1990s, Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton introduced their ground-breaking edited collection on early modern science and medicine with an assessment of how women were subsequently excluded from these fields of enquiry. They argued that the emergence of ‘modernity’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries demanded a new separation of knowledge from the everyday, one manifestation being the institutionalisation of knowledge. The timeframe for these major shifts depended on the type of science in question.²³

Whilst this is a compelling narrative, it relies heavily on the slippery concept of ‘modernity’ and a sense that it arrived at a particular time. The concept has framed twentieth-century understandings of what came before in powerful ways. For the arguments put forward here, the term is unhelpful – at best it ensures a reading of eighteenth-century domestic enquiry as something that was about to come to an abrupt end, with the institutionalisation of science and the development of new academic disciplines. Whilst the nineteenth century certainly saw seismic shifts in these realms, it seems likely that domestic activity in that ‘modern’ era was also overlooked for its intellectual potential.²⁴ If anything, the further development of institutions packed with affluent men signals the need to delve deeper into the spaces and places that did not fit that model and were delegitimised by its hegemony.

To this end, recent scholarship has convincingly argued for extra-institutional knowledge-making as a constant from the early modern through to the contemporary. Whilst it is worth acknowledging that Hunter and Hutton were explicitly interested in female participation in science, Donald Opitz et al. emphasise the particular role of domesticity in science from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries.²⁵ Domestic science is certainly worthy of greater consideration as a continuity over the longue durée, not just in terms of the household as a space in which underacknowledged and underestimated scientists worked, but also as a nursery for scientific techniques and ways of knowing. Trajectories of change over time in the field of technology, for example, often suggest that humankind moved from simple tools in the pre-modern period to complex machines in the modern era. As Timothy Ingold has argued, it might be more productive to see change over time in relation to the removal of the skilled producer from the centre to the periphery.²⁶ The findings outlined in this book suggest, further, that the lower-status individual was marginalised in the story of their own knowledge-making well before the development of the steam train.

A burgeoning field of scholarship has emerged on the home as a site of knowledge-making. Some studies make the case for the homes of well-known naturalists and natural philosophers, such as Elizabeth Yale’s analysis of John and Margaret Ray’s scientific household, which is described as ‘a site of mixed-gender natural inquiry and neighbourly conversation, linked to the wider world through letters and travel’.²⁷ Other scholars push this approach still further by positioning family life as an integral part of knowledge-making in a process that involves ‘bringing family history to bear on the history of ideas’ and ensuring that the life of the mind and the life of the family are ‘reconstructed together’.²⁸

Contrary to the notion that the 1800s brought a greater association between women and the home, John Randolph’s study of the Bakunin family and Russian idealism sees ‘home life’s function as a theatre of intellectual activity’ and examines ‘self-consciously “enlightened” noblemen’ choosing ‘to imagine the home itself as reason’s proper forum’.²⁹ This example takes famous male intellectuals as the starting point, again, but enlivens the domestic as a central dynamic of their work and scholarly culture. Here, the analysis corroborates the centrality of the home in intellectual culture but emphasises instead the way that households – in all their material fullness and social complexity – provided the conditions for science. Although the model of increasingly ‘separate spheres’ for men and women in this period has been largely rejected, it is still true that women’s agency has been routinely underestimated or outright erased and that the home was simultaneously a key site of female activity. By training the lens on the home, female action, agency and enquiry become much more fully apparent.

Whilst it is difficult to uphold categorical statements in terms of diverse populations of curious men and women in this period, some observations about gender can be made. For one, an examination of the records of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce reveals that male correspondents typically obscured the context and particularity of home in their narratives of enquiry and innovation. Clearly, most of these men’s experiments took place at home; had another space been available, it would likely have been mentioned to underline professional standing or access to specialised equipment. Nevertheless, the dynamics and material culture of home are rarely explicitly described. By contrast, some of the richest examples of domestic detail included in this study derived from women’s letters to the Society concerning their experiments with silkworms. Of course, much has been written about women’s domestic roles and, as studies have shown, large quantities of – often unacknowledged – female labour was poured into producing the necessaries for human sustenance, care and comfort.³⁰ Nevertheless, this distinction is telling in that it underlines the centrality of gender in shaping interactions with domestic space, personnel and equipment.

Not only were the use of space and the obligations of that space divergent for men and women, but the way hours in the day were divided and distributed differed too. Personal autonomy and the ability to choose how to spend time depended on gender, status and role. An individual’s mastery over their own time and its use had a direct relationship with their own personal power and freedom to impose upon the time of others. The Dublin apprentices discussed in Chapters 4 and 6 clearly delineated the time they had before and after their day’s work, because this was the time that was theirs to use as they pleased. Robert Jackson’s walk between his Meath Street residence and a preferred location for astronomy was measured down to the minute – revealing his attention to these slivers of time that could afford or deny his favourite pursuit. Likewise, Ann Williams fitted her enquiries into short bursts of time distributed across the day in a home that was located at her place of work – a post office. Both Thomas Chandlee and Ann Williams, interestingly, compared their working lives to those of enslaved people. These comments reveal their ignorance of the real experiences of the enslaved but also hint at the resentment that many curious individuals felt about the constraints on their time and attention.³¹

Clearly, temporal patterns of labour depended on the specific kind of work at hand and the dramatic seasonal shifts of agriculture differed from the monthly or yearly rhythm of work in an urban workshop. The temporality of one sphere might also influence activity in another. The cycle of seasons strongly informed the calendar of religious days and these, in turn, influenced aspects of state bureaucracy such as tax collecting or the regularity of court sessions.³² The way people’s lives were structured by time owed a debt to a confluence of different factors. Furthermore, time and the way it was regulated and measured were contested in the eighteenth century. For many, the almanac set out the calendars of natural and man-made occurrences but, increasingly, people used clocks and watches to organise their days. Major calendar reform in 1752 brought its own conflicts and the uniformity and universality of clock time remained some decades in the future.³³ Thus, the way individuals like Williams, Rhodes, Jackson and Chandlee understood the organisation and use of their time varied and operated with considerable mutability as compared with subsequent centuries.

Differences in terms of domestic roles clearly also had consequences for identity and how people understood and communicated the basis for their intellectual authority, as discussed in Chapter 6. Whilst histories and geographies of science have rightly emphasised place and space as crucial facets of intellectual work in this era, and this book focuses on one such space, time is an overlooked dimension in analyses of enquiry, especially as it took place among the competing demands of home.

In one sense, this book represents an intellectual history from below. However, the findings suggest that lower-status scientists were not just ignored, but their work was also misunderstood, with consequences for how knowledge-making is characterised more generally. These findings fit models of indigenous knowledge much better than they do standard histories of western enquiry.³⁴ Here, people were doing things in a space that was associated with low-status work, but which was in fact highly complex and dynamic. The scientists in this book made their enquiries by responding to that space, its material and spatial facets, its social and emotional draws and its temporal patterns. Their doing and thinking were impossible to imagine without the conditions and actors (human and non-human) of that place.³⁵ These scientists did not pursue singular questions in ways that ignored all of their other concerns and objectives; they investigated amidst and through the myriad of materials, tasks and schedules that were inherent to their place of enquiry. They did their work with their environment, not in spite of it.

The everyday

This book has placed the home at the heart of the action in terms of scientific practices and understanding, precisely because of its foundational role in social relations. The research thereby replaces a framework of centre and periphery with ‘patterns of mutual interdependence’ and responds to James Secord’s call to see science as ‘a form of communicative action’.³⁶ Here, this communication takes place between people and things.³⁷ The research has aimed to unsettle dichotomous categories by focusing on what people did at home, day to day and seeing the full range of activities as worthy of attention. This approach draws on Ingold’s understanding of a person as ‘a singular locus of creative growth within a continually unfolding field of relationships’.³⁸ His rejection of the separation of fields of enquiry leads to a proposal in favour of looking at ‘skilled practices of socially situated agents’ to better understand ways of knowing.³⁹ This book attempts to do just that for eighteenth-century knowledge-making.

The analysis also takes inspiration from Michel de Certeau’s articulation of the ‘clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and make-shift creativity of groups or individuals’.⁴⁰ Of course, the activity of the obscure scientists discussed here might appear more clandestine than it perhaps was because of how subsequent generations have taken to preserving, understanding and explaining the past. Nevertheless, science as conducted at home was often dispersed, tactical and makeshift in character, whether it was conducted by famous scientists or others.⁴¹ The extent to which this science of the home should be mainly viewed as the unacknowledged work of the many (claimed by the few) or the subversive activity of the marginalised, leveraging daily practice to make their mark on the socioeconomic regime, remains to be seen. What is very clear is that science was embedded in practices of (family) life and work and inseparable from them and, as Lorraine Daston has stated, there is no way ‘of excising science cleanly from other ways of knowing and doing’.⁴² In this appraisal, all knowledge-making is ‘everyday’, perhaps relieving historians of the responsibility to demarcate it as such.

For now, however, it remains important to describe and explain the everyday quality of knowledge-making because academic disciplines are still shaped by hierarchies and dichotomies that serve to divide the cerebral from the rest. Whilst scholars have recognised the fundamental importance of the everyday, its precise characteristics in varied contexts are worthy of further analysis. If knowledge-making emerges from the everyday, then how does it do so and what difference does that make? In some ways, the shift in thinking here seems to rest on the re-categorisation of the rare and exclusive as mundane and accessible. However, Christel Avendal has identified the concept of ‘heightened everydayness’ or ‘the extraordinariness in the ordinary’ as it relates to the ‘unnoticed knowledge’ of daily existence.⁴³ Chandra Mukerji takes the argument further. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’, she suggests that these socialised norms of everyday existence ‘may silently reproduce relations of power most of the time, but … can also turn trickster, using tacit knowledge to pursue dreams and hone aspirations’.⁴⁴ When men wrote to the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce about their home experiments without explicitly mentioning the home, they attempted to disguise the mundane in the telling of the extraordinary. They considered the everyday ill-suited to the new and the highly prized. Nonetheless, it was out of these circumstances and through practice that leaps of imagination materialised.

In demonstrating the lack of any clear division between activities that are categorised as mundane and those that are considered to be exploratory, this book deliberately blurs distinctions between extraordinary and ordinary. Whilst specific strands of domestic knowledge-making have been examined by scholars, the full spectrum of interactions between the quotidian and the enquiring is underexplored.⁴⁵ This book has captured examples of domestically situated knowledge-making that emerge from the particulars of that environment, rather than being imposed upon it.

One way to grasp the complexity of the everyday is to focus attention on specific practices within a larger ecology of activity, whether that is in the home or another multi-purpose space. Some practices, such as producing and consuming sustenance, are intrinsically linked with the home, whereas others are much more loosely associated with that location. This book began with a discussion of practices, such as cooking, that are inseparable from home and moved through to practices that have explicitly scientific connotations. As others have shown, science was conducted at home by the most famous scientists of this era; nonetheless, most histories of the household have little to say about observation and experiment. Collecting sits somewhere in between, strongly associated with the homes of a few affluent and dedicated collectors, such as Hans Sloane or the Duchess of Portland, but much less clearly related to the homes of ordinary people.

The practice of collecting points to an important issue across the board – the question of extent. Clearly, a person could collect a few artefacts or specimens without being considered a ‘collector’ in the rather grander sense of the word. Similarly, someone could record many details about household expenses without being the kind of record-keeper who attended to the weather, the stars or their local flora and fauna. Observation is entirely invisible to the historian’s eye if the observer had no urge to record the details of what they saw. The same is true for experiment, and the lengths an enquiring mind went to in this regard varied widely. However, if scholarly understanding of science is structured around a threshold of achievement (however that is chosen) it will result in the exclusion of those individuals who did not make that pre-determined level or did not leave clear evidence that they did so. This approach also individualises the issue, driving the analysis towards particular, extraordinary people rather than the culture that enabled their enquiry. By switching attention to the context of enquiry, its enabling and disabling characteristics and the actual things that people did day to day, a much more interesting scene is visible.

The language of enquiry

Despite major developments in the definition of what counts as science, the urge to measure agency and action against something dichotomously powerless and inactive is still strong. As such, language – as many theorists have described – actively limits the shape and scope of a given enquiry, not least concerning the subject of this book.⁴⁶ As Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey notably argued, ‘a binary logic’ pervaded twentieth-century historical accounts of early modern science, reducing the terms of debate to rational science versus magic and superstition with the attendant ramifications for narratives of change over time.⁴⁷ In general terms, binaries are almost never comprised of equal partners and thinking in dualistic terms not only diminishes one-half of the pair but distorts both parties.⁴⁸ Of course, many scholars have analysed this issue, but it is worth naming some of these troublesome binaries and considering how to move beyond them.

In terms of the question of knowledge-making, hand and mind is the over-arching and ancient dichotomy and the hand has certainly been the poor relation to the mind in traditional accounts of learning. Of course, that privileging of mind over body has extremely long roots and the question has been dealt with extensively by historians of science, especially those who examine the changes taking place in the early modern period. As a result of this rich vein of scholarship, the influence of artisanal knowledge in the history of science is now taken as read. Besides the scholar/artisan dichotomy, other combinations can be equally unhelpful, for example, science/technology, pure/applied, theory/practice, experimental/mathematical or art/nature.⁴⁹ The list could be extended still further and the influence of the structures these dichotomies create is difficult to over-estimate.

In the process of researching this book, it has been a struggle to find language to describe the curious people visible in the archive without falling into the same kind of binary formulation, naturally denigrating one-half of the pair. For example, the individuals discussed here worked at home and largely outside of the membership of learned societies. The terms informal and formal might offer a way of describing the difference between the two, but the knowledge-making of a housewife does not seem especially informal as compared to the knowledge-making of a Fellow of the Royal Society – usually a leisured man with significant resources at his disposal.⁵⁰ Her knowledge was created within a knowable context while undertaking productive labour, it required time and dedication to bring about, it draws upon other widely accepted laws, rules or findings and it holds the potential to contribute to the shared well of human understanding. There is another discussion to be had about the influence this housewife’s work might have had on the print culture of eighteenth-century science, or the purchase it may or may not have had on the debates of well-known scholars, but there doesn’t seem to be anything intrinsically informal about what she does.

Further, in-depth discussion of observation and experiment usually relates to natural philosophers. In this context, these practices are described as narrow and specific; the scientific observer ‘trains and strains the senses, molds the body to unnatural postures, taxes patience, focuses … attention on a few chosen objects at the expense of all others’.⁵¹ These actions sound atypical; the distinction rests on the way these forms of attention contrast with the socially acceptable gestures of the rest of life. However, the unnatural pose of the brewer, atop a ladder, intent on the process of fermentation does not seem entirely dissimilar to the naturalist squinting at their object of interest – likewise for the cook’s precise, swift and responsive actions. The findings of this book suggest an interpretation of practices of attention as on a spectrum that includes the naturalist and the brewer; the chemist and the cook.

As Jane Whittle has argued in the field of pre-industrial economic history, work conducted at home was only given the diminishing prefix of ‘domestic’ when it was done by women and was, therefore, erroneously considered to be focused on care or subsistence and of low importance to the market economy. Male work done at home was categorised differently (often as agriculture or construction) regardless of its relationship with subsistence and deemed of intrinsic relevance to the wider economy.⁵² Here the distorting effects of the epithet ‘domestic’ and its gendered associations become abundantly clear. This is no less true for the domestic labour of enquiry, integrated as it was with the sustaining, productive and economic facets of household work.

Beyond descriptions of the people who enquired into nature’s secrets, descriptions of knowledge itself are similarly affected by dichotomous categories. There are a variety of common formulations – all of which seem to offer an alternative to what is usually called scholarship. This supposedly formal, professional, educated, elite scholarship is not often fully defined, but for those who are interested in looking at different kinds of intellectual actors, the urge to caveat the knowledge they have with words like ‘everyday’ or ‘useful’ is strong. Sometimes the term ‘knowledge’ is simply exchanged for ‘know-how’, suggesting that someone possesses skill and technique without understanding why they work. This was certainly the way that Bishop Edward Synge characterised the knowledge of his servant, Jane, in Chapter 2. It is unsurprising that he did so.

Clearly, eighteenth-century society also made distinctions between knowledge that helped people understand the workings of nature and knowledge that was useful, especially in terms of economic benefit. The Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce and the Dublin Society are key examples of this period’s interest in ‘applied knowledge’ as it is called today. Despite that distinction, this question of language and esteem remains, especially if twenty-first-century historians are to avoid the distorting influence of age-old intellectual hierarchies.⁵³ Sarah Easterby-Smith has stressed the importance of moving beyond hegemonic frameworks for understanding knowledge-making by using micro-historical approaches, but acknowledges the gravitational pull of ‘concepts based in western knowledge systems that might occlude other forms of knowing’.⁵⁴ The problem here is not that there is a lack of critical appraisal of these dichotomies and their influence on conceptions of knowledge-making but that, despite scholars’ protestations, histories still lean on them – absent-mindedly – precisely because understandings of the world, then and now, are so rooted in binary formulations.⁵⁵

Recent scholarship has used the prefixes ‘everyday’ and ‘useful’ to characterise the distinctive conditions and personnel of some knowledge-making.⁵⁶ The knowledge discussed here is not considered to be distinctively or exclusively useful or everyday, or at least no more so than the knowledge that emerged from other spaces in this period. Whyman, Leong and others’ articulation of specific cultural and class contexts for knowledge-making contributes greatly to diversity, regionality and specificity in histories of knowledge.⁵⁷ This developing plurality of knowledges and knowledge-makers is another important step in resisting false dichotomies and the flattening effect of mono-cultural explanations. Whilst the research presented here contributes to this project, the decision not to prefix the knowledges and knowledge-making described is a deliberate one. Taking inspiration from feminist scholars’ efforts to redirect attention away from discussions that emphasise ‘women’s issues’ or a female sphere, this book positions its discussion as part of the ‘mainstream’, thereby underlining the centrality of domestic activity in histories of knowledge, society, culture or the economy.⁵⁸

All knowledge-making is essentially a product of the ‘everyday’ and to describe the home as especially quotidian in character wrongly implies that it is inherently more habitual and routine than other environments. Furthermore, the ordinariness of this environment seems inevitably and dichotomously contrasted with the extraordinary potential of other spaces. Whilst it has not been possible to pursue a deep comparison between the household and an alternative site of knowledge-making to assess their relative qualities, this book argues that the remarkable nestles, at ease, in the contours of the everyday, domestic or otherwise.

As the ecofeminist and philosopher Val Plumwood has argued, there are a number of routes out of dualism.⁵⁹ To begin, a thorough examination of the less valued half of the binary construction is needed – one that does not ask questions structured by dualist assumption. For example, just as this book has argued that Fellows of the Royal Society are not the only scientists worthy of notice, it does not contend that lower-status, domestic experimenters were the only ‘real’ intellectuals at work in this period, thereby inverting the binary power dynamic. As Plumwood advises, this book has understood the dualism of mind and hand as serving to distort the features of both mind and hand or, equally, man and woman; master and servant; coloniser and colonised.⁶⁰ By enacting this distortion, the dualism has overlooked the domestically rooted nature of science, insisting on seeing the elite, male scientist’s intellectual work as both remarkable and in direct contradistinction to everyday work and the ‘female’ spaces, skill and knowledge through which it was conducted. However, whilst describing the less well described, this research has also included the wealthy and the privileged in order to see the similarities and disparities that emerge and to make visible the connections between making bread and collecting expensive objects. By affirming the unacknowledged, redefining it in relation to the hegemonic and reconstructing a sense of the whole, dualistic thinking can be circumvented. This approach aims to upend some core assumptions about enquiry concerning where it took place, who did it and the actions that catalysed leaps in thinking in this period – thinking that, of course, was borne out of human and non-human collaboration.

From individual knowing to societal knowing; or, knowledge trickles upwards

When ‘attention is paid to gender and geographies, and when hierarchies of knowledge production are rejected’ a different kind of ‘knowledge society’ emerges.⁶¹ However, detractors might caution against the danger of attributing ‘the same status to the growing of cucumbers as to the practice of particle physics’.⁶² Clearly, for many of those engaged with the history of knowledge, the knowledge itself – its quality and character – will always matter. Whilst cucumbers are admittedly a subject covered, briefly, by this book, the objective here has been to illuminate the conditions that generated knowledge-making rather than assess the products of that process.

The qualitative detail available about the activities of curious individuals is revealing as to the communicative nature of their scientific practices. In those cases where there are multiple letters describing engagements with science, it becomes obvious that men and women commonly operated as part of communities of learning – communities that encompassed their family, friends, fellow workers and neighbours but extended to communities forged through letter-writing, print culture and reading. In these ways, the curious operated at several levels and scales – perhaps rooted in a particular location but moving through diffuse networks of association and information sharing. Institutions and the periodical press were instrumental in promoting these networks of connection between interested individuals and the possibility of exchange, but – of course – people also developed their own social and intellectual communities independently of such infrastructure, correspondence being a powerful technology of the curious.⁶³ Moreover, the significance of many institutions and publications could be attributed more fairly to the hordes of willing contributors than the founders and editors of such outlets. Without a highly willing public, eighteenth-century print culture would not have generated the volume of lively exchange for which it is now famed.

In addition, as Chapter 2 illuminated, oral culture must have been even more important to localised information-sharing and the acquisition of technique and tacit knowledge than text. When Bishop Synge took pen in hand to describe the process of learning how to bake bread from his servant, Jane, he enacted an unusual thing – the textual articulation of learning through doing. His prose struggled with that task as words find embodied, material practices particularly hard to wrap themselves around. Moreover, his account revealed the different words that a landed gentleman and a domestic servant used to describe material processes. Each party had an oral culture, but they differed in distinct ways. Synge’s letters document these disparities and gaps in language and understanding as he attempted to concretise and codify the tacit knowledge of home provisioning. However faulty the relaying of tacit knowledge in textual form, this evidence provides a glimpse of a crucial layer of knowledge-making and sharing in eighteenth-century society. When it came to manipulating materials to make useful products, oral culture was the medium for learning and improving. Whilst this book relies on textual survivals, it aims to acknowledge this largely invisible layer of scientific exchange. Oral culture provided a large part of the talkativeness of scientific activity in this period and contributes to the view of enquiry as an inherently social pursuit.

Silkworm experimenters, Williams and Rhodes, found people within their locale to share their interests and admire their work, but likewise courted attention from people further afield who had heard of their endeavours.⁶⁴ Both women engaged with a range of printed material on their favoured subject, perhaps directly from the Society’s Transactions but likely also as reproduced cheaply in the periodical press. Similarly, Dublin apprentices Jackson and Chandlee marshalled a city-based community of star-gazers who they met with in person in public spaces such as St Stephen’s Green. However, whilst they established a traffic of exchange between, mainly, working men of this city, Jackson and Chandlee found a much wider horizon through the coverage of astronomy in magazines and almanacs. They were masters of the genre – using Jackson’s access through the print trade and insider knowledge to trawl a great variety of domestic and imported publications, comparing, contrasting and critiquing the information contained. For men whose best hours of the day were absorbed with the demands of an exacting master, their communicative and communal approach served them well.

By taking the home as a vantage point, it is still possible to see the gravitational pull of institutions, as they actively enticed individuals from across the world to share their observations and describe their experiments and to do so in conversation with one another. Conversely, those who wrote into various societies, or for that matter the Gentleman’s Magazine, were also engaged in other profound and demanding networks of association: family, neighbourhood and occupation.⁶⁵ Ann Williams’s foray into the world of publication precluded any mention of silkworms, although – of course – her lines of ink on that subject were subsequently reproduced in print by the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. It would seem extremely likely that an ‘A. W.’ or ‘A postmistress, Gravesend’ penned an occasional letter to a magazine about a subject of public interest. In these ways, Williams operated in multiple ‘spaces’ of exchange but her contributions were based on the bedrock of her experience gained through the conditions of her labour and life. The people discussed here may occasionally have been eccentric, but they were not unusual in terms of the activities they engaged in. They just happened to be the ones who put their words onto the page and whose pages were fortunate enough to be preserved.

Conclusion

Homes were spaces of emergence, in terms of the drivers, practices and techniques of science, but they were also places where insight and innovation could gain traction. The variegated demands, affordances and schedules of domestic and familial life provided not only the conditions for enquiry but also, often, the motivation. Intellectual labour was just one facet of household work and scientific activity that operated within and around the rhythms of provisioning, oeconomy, sociability and care. To recognise scientific enquiry as household labour alters its complexion, but this book has sought to demonstrate the historical insight made possible by that shift. The research recognises that other spaces were also crucial to the development of natural knowledge but has focused on a place that was not only multifunctional, but also freighted in terms of its meanings in ways that have served to obscure its intellectual significance. Here, the eighteenth-century home is viewed as a dynamic, creative, communicative and connected place and the analysis has striven to escape the diminishing connotations of ‘domestic’, based as they are on hierarchies that historians have long rejected.

Most scientific projects were necessarily collective endeavours, relying on the collation and comparison of data from a number of quarters. The examples explored here also point towards the synergies between processes of categorising and organising present in both natural history and home ‘oeconomy’ – the search for order amidst the clutter of accumulation and the trial and error of experiment.⁶⁶ Many of the curious people discussed in this book saw their endeavours in this light, as contributing a small part to the growing bedrock of human understanding. They often considered it natural for the British, wherever they were across the globe, to take the lead in knowledge-making and to apply new insights to further national and imperial objectives. Where manipulation of the natural world was perceived as more successful abroad, steps were taken to acquire and apply that knowledge to advantage at home.

The observers and experimenters that have left the deepest mark on this book are those who wrote eagerly to one another or an institution to report their findings, in the process explaining in lively detail the content and meaning of their endeavours. Some of the more voluble individuals were those who worked for their living, making their commitment to enquiry seemingly remarkable as compared with those leisured few who had the freedom to make it their vocation. However, the analysis here has sought to dislodge an oversimplified association between curiosity and leisure. By focusing on the generative conditions of the home, the domestic worker’s understanding can be seen as an advantage rather than a detriment. In the gentry’s efforts to appropriate such knowledge, the very real value it held for them at this time becomes clear.⁶⁷ Collectively, they represent a deep-rooted culture of curiosity. The curiosity of these people forged and animated the search for natural knowledge in this period and they quietly conducted this complex project from the comfort of their very many different homes.