By the late 1760s, eight extraordinary men, living in the Midlands but outside British élite circles, had formed themselves into a society for the promotion of science and technology.
The magnificent eight who made up the Lunar Society of Birmingham were the Rousseauist writer Thomas Day, the inventor Richard Edgeworth (father of Maria), the chemist James Keir, the clockmaker John Whitehurst, the scientist William Small, the engineer and toy-maker Matthew Boulton, the potter Josiah Wedgwood. As death thinned the ranks, more distinguished scientists and inventors became members, principally the chemist Joseph Priestley and James Watt of steam engine fame. Jenny Uglow handles the difficult art of multi-biography with great skill, effectively sketching all 10 lives,never allowing the narrative to sag, stall or implode.
Uglow shows that the Lunar Men were at the cutting edge of everything new in science,industry, agriculture and the arts. They pioneered turnpikes, canals, the new factory system, steam power and taxonomy in botany, as well as geology, mineralogy, cosmology and philosophy. But she is a careful historian, and rejects the cliché that the Lunar Society kick-started the Industrial Revolution: "no individual or group can be said to change a society in such a way, and time and again one can see that if they hadn't invented or discovered something, someone else would have done it". She is particularly good as a cultural historian, and pins down the various late 18th-century crazes: for canals, antiques (fuelled by the finds at Pompeii and Herculaneum), air balloons, ormolu and vases, for Derbyshire as the supposed "Italy in England", and for botany - this last overdetermined both by the exotic specimens Captain Cook brought back from Botany Bay and by royal patronage of the infant science.
One of Uglow's best assets is a keen sense of chronology, which allows her to pinpoint, for example, the exact decade (the 1780s) when real children's books started to be written. She demonstrates the many barriers to industrial take-off in Britain - not just the endemic anti-science bias of an élite trained in the classics, but the under-representation in parliament of the industrial heartland, the restrictive use of patents and even industrial espionage by foreign competitors.
She is alert to the importance of shopping in the late 18th century, to the rise of a consumer society and a mass market. There are learned sections on mineralogy, geology, steam combustion, the paintings of George Stubbs and the printing of money in the Royal Mint. Above all, it is an affectionate study. Uglow clearly loves her Lunar Men and no dark secrets or psychological hearts of darkness are discernible in her text.Her approach seems peculiarly in sympathy with the sensibility of the Enlightenment.
Clearly Jenny Uglow finds Erasmus Darwin the most fascinating character in her story. So fat that he had to have a semi-circle carved in his dining table to accommodate his stomach, the eccentric maverick Darwin once suggested that the Great Powers should all abandon their navies and instead use the ships to tow icebergs to the Equator, where they could cool the tropics. Darwin and his closest associate, Wedgwood, were like modern-day sales representatives, travelling at least 10,000 miles a year by horse and stagecoach, eating up the mileage on Britain's new turnpikes.Darwin was the first Englishman to fly a large hydrogen balloon (in 1783). He and Wedgwood promoted the Lunar Society also as an extended kinship system: "all the Lunar children stayed with each other, knew each other's parents and houses and interests".
Uglow never loses sight of the human beings behind the inventions, and underlines how each of the Lunar Men had his own Holy Grail: for Wedgwood it was the Portland Vase, for Boulton the new Soho Mint, for Darwin his long poem 'The Botanic Garden'.
The 20 years from the outbreak of the American War of Independence to the end of the French Revolution were ones of great political tension, and Uglow is good at the nuanced political positions taken up by the Lunar Men.With the exception of Priestley, a political radical, they were bourgeois capitalists who believed in scientific but not political innovation. They were all interested in politics, but were eventually silenced or scared off either by the intransigence of hard men like Pitt the Younger or by the practical consequences of some of their own half-baked ideas.
By the 1790s, there was a reaction in élite circles against the Lunar Men. Faced with the threat from France, Pitt and his acolytes branded all enlightened scientific thinking as "revolutionary".
It is a pity that a few bad historical errors occur in Uglow's generally excellent text. The Lisbon earthquake occurred in 1755, not 1750 as stated here (twice). And Bonnie Prince Charlie did not "dither" at Derby in December 1745. He wanted to march on to London; however, the clan leaders refused to go with him. But perhaps we should be charitable and forgive Uglow her Homeric nods, as she has been so entertaining elsewhere.
Frank McLynn's latest book, Wagons West - The Epic Story of America's Overland Trails was recently published by Jonathan Cape
The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future. By Jenny Uglow. Faber. 588 pp. £25 sterling