The Lunar Men by Jenny Uglow
The Friends Who Made the Future
Jenny Uglow must be one of the hardest working biographers in Britain at the moment having produced bestselling biographies of notable 18th and 19th century characters such as Hogarth, Mrs Gaskell and Thomas Bewick. She is also no stranger to literary awards having won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Hessell-Tiltman Prize in 2003 for The Lunar Men, her excellent biography of the scientists, philosophers, artists and writers that made up the Lunar Society of Birmingham.
The Lunar Society
The Lunar Society of Birmingham was a dinner club and informal learned society of prominent Midlands industrialists, scientists, natural philosophers, artists and intellectuals who met together regularly between 1765 and 1813. The name of the society arose because the group would meet each month during the full moon when the extra light would make the journey home easier and safer.
The members of the Lunar Society were all prominent in British society. Amongst those who regularly attended the meetings were Matthew Boulton, Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles), Josiah Wedgwood, James Watt and James Keir. Less regular attendees and correspondents of the Society included Sir Richard Arkwright, James Wyatt, John Smeaton, Thomas Jefferson and even Benjamin Franklin.
Over time, as prominent members grew older and died, the Society ceased to meet regularly and was officially closed in 1813.
The Friends Who Made the Future
Although clearly a meeting of friends, the Lunar Society was no mere social club. As Uglow explains, the group was comprised of highly gifted individuals who each, in their own way, nudged their whole society and culture towards the modern world.
Seeing no distinction between science and the humanities, the Lunar Men considered themselves to be natural philosophers and accomplished momentous things during their time in the Society: building factories and canals, discovering new minerals, medicines and gases, creating fabulous porcelain, advanced the study of botany, coined new words and wrote popular poetry.
Jenny Uglow
As with all of Uglow’s other biographies, The Lunar Men is a fabulous read; a vivid, detailed recreation of the time and place in which the members of the Lunar Society lived. The Lunar Society was made up of a lot of individuals and it would have been easy for their lives to jumble together in a single biography of the whole group but Uglow’s great skill as a biographer and talent for hunting out an epic range of quotable materials means that the individual characters are thoroughly explored while the ties that bind them and The Lunar Men together are highlighted and detailed.
The achievements of the group of heavyweight intellectuals and businessmen who made up the Lunar Society of Birmingham are truly extraordinary, both on an individual basis and taken as a group, and Uglow fleshes out their lives and accomplishments with obvious enthusiasm.
An excellent read for those interested in British history and the scientific developments of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future by Jenny Uglow
ISBN 979-0571216109, Faber and Faber, 2003, pp 608, £9.99
The Lunar Men
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