The Lunar Men (2002)

 

This is where it happened: Matthew Boulton’s dining room at Soho House, Birmingham, where the Lunar Society used to meet. Looks like there aren't enough chairs to go round, but perhaps not everyone joined every dinner.

The history of science genre is quite a growth industry in publishing.  Forty years ago, you wouldn't see many science titles in a bookshop. Today, books on popular science aren’t confined to the specialist shelves, but appear in the mainstream new title displays. But has the history of science progressed from a dreary niche to the mainstream? Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men, confidently subtitled “The friends who made the future”, is worth appraising in that context. My verdict? It certainly attempts to be popular, has a great subject, but compared with the earlier Robert Schofield’s The Lunar Society of Birmingham (1963) it sets out to be more enjoyable to read, but maddeningly, turns out often to be less clear.

Infantile

Uglow writes as if the reader has to be entertained like a child. Every statement has to be illustrated by metaphor and simile: "In these early years the lives of the Lunar men crossed like cotton threaded between pins on a map." [p35]. The book has many sweeping generalisations that, on reflection, should never have appeared: “Children learned from the world around them just as much as from books.” [p9]. All children? More than today? What proof? “Mechanical wonders entranced many children.” [p10]. Well, that’s true today as well. Frequently, the author tries to make the facts become more entertaining, by throwing in anecdotes that turn out to be less than relevant. For example,  Uglow describes how Erasmus Darwin goes to school in Chesterfield, but we have a paragraph about Derby on page 9. Derby was 25 miles from Chesterfield, and it is unlikely Darwin will have gone there while at school.

Part of the attempt to turn this book into something more entertaining, is the used of an image with a woman in the cover illustration of the paperback edition, but none of the Lunar Men (note the title) were women. In fact, the cover shows none of the Lunar Men. There is a cumbersome attempt to justify the cover picture in the text, but could Uglow not have found a more relevant illustration for the cover?

Too many words

Sheer number of words is not necessarily a problem: the book has over 500 pages of text , and around 210,000 words, and a leisurely pace (chapter 1 is essentially “Erasmus Darwin went to school”), but the anecdotal style and lack of signposting makes it difficult to keep track of the major figures in the Lunar Society. There is a list of “The Principal Lunar Men in order of age”, but a paragraph on each would be welcome. As we jump across characters, it is challenging to keep track of who we are reading about, especially since Uglow seems to believe that she can only engage the reader by adding anecdotes, relevant or otherwise, to keep our interest. Frequently, that involves adding more names, resulting in a general mish-mash of people that no reader can follow. For example:

In 1766, Edgeworth was 22 – a good twelve years younger than Darwin – a tall, dark-haired, talkative, arm-waving Irishman. His conjuring was a side interest, taken up with the rake Sir Francis Delaval with whom he put on entertainments based on his working out of the magnets and mechanisms used by the great French conjuror Comus.

Comus is not mentioned further, but we then proceed to an anecdote about Delaval sabotaging a show by another magician. But we have moved away from the Lunar Society completely! The story is complicated enough without this meandering for effect.

I learned, incidentally, from Schofield’s much shorter account, that the Lunar Society left no records of its meetings. That makes it more difficult for us to assess how the Society worked in practice. Paradoxically, this gives Uglow more opportunity to write in a more discursive way, at times maddeningly so.

Too much striving for effect

I don’t mind each character’s appearance and behaviour being described, but the author is in the habit of using many terms used that would not be understood by the general reader, so why not gloss them? For example, “Bohea Tea”, p5, which was common at the time, but not today.

Uglow seems to be on a mission to point out any intersection between the Lunar Men, to the point of irrelevance. When Watt and his friend John Marr travel to London in 1755, we read “Finally, after crossing the Trent at Newark, near Erasmus Darwin’s home, they reached London” [p29] But Watt had no connection with Darwin at that time!

Non-sequiturs

Despite the book’s length, there are many throwaway references that don’t make sense: “As a student at Trinity College, Dublin, he lived at such a drunken pace that his alarmed father sent him to Oxford” – does that make any sense? Would Oxford in the 1760s have been any more sober than Trinity College Dublin?

Argument not backed up

After all the above, this reader feels it is something of a struggle to isolate Uglow’s argument from the text, but there are some attempts to link the Lunar Society with larger themes. However, I would want much more corroboration for me to be convinced. For example, in chapter11, Uglow writes “Even though they were down-to-earth companions of reason, a part of the delight was to feel they were unlocking esoteric secrets, exploring transmutations like alchemists of old.” But after visiting the Erasmus Darwin house, I feel the opposite was the case. Darwin was fascinated by all kinds of natural phenomena, but it was always to search for a rational cause behind them. It’s an unnecessary and unwarranted romanticisation of the Lunar Men to suggest this kind of angle. 

Frequently, major claims have no citation, e.g. [p6] “Yet for all the future Lunar men, as for so many of the coming generation, the [Jacobite 45] Rebellion was a key point in the forging of a stout, Protestant, Hanoverian nationalism, whose patriotic rhetoric would ring loud in future projects.” Says who? You could argue, and some did, that Thatcher’s invasion of the Falkland Islands forged a kind of nationalism in Britain. But I’d want a citation or two to demonstrate it.

Another statement without citation is “Progressive-minded Whigs championing the demonstrators [of electrical effects], and High-Church Tories claiming it was blasphemy to expose God’s secrets to an ignorant populace.” Was all scientific innovation Whig? This could be an interesting angle, but it is not developed further. William Withering, for example, was a Tory.

Some of Uglow’s statements appear to be sweeping generalisation: “Darwin, Boulton and Wedgewood were […] all descended from ‘yeomen’” – perhaps, but Darwin was from a wealthy family. Uglow herself states “the Darwin family were … brought up on the collected volumes of the Tatler and Spectator.”

I’m not always convinced that Uglow communicates the science well. For example, the discussion of static electricity states “it was thought that you had to insulate it [the Leyden jar] as a precaution against it being ‘leaked’. Well, a static electricity generator does have to be insulated, otherwise the charge will be dissipated. That can be described as leaking.

Summary

The Lunar Society is, for me, a fascinating phenomenon. Uglow’s book is a major achievement, with much quotation from primary unpublished sources, but I feel there is still an opportunity for placing the group in the context of Enlightenment Britain and Europe.