Another characteristic is remarkable.Though the growth of manufactures and commerce meant the growth of great towns,it did not mean the growth of municipal institutions.On the contrary,as I shall presently have to notice,the municipalities were sinking to their lowest ebb.Manufactures,in the first instance,spread along the streams into country districts:and to the great manufacturer,working for his own hand,his neighbours were competitors as much as allies.The great towns,however,which were growing up,showed the general tendencies of the class.They were centres not only of manufacturing but of intellectual progress.The population of Birmingham,containing the famous Soho works of Boulton and Watt,had increased between 1740and 1780from 24,000to 74,000inhabitants.Watt's partner Boulton started the 'Lunar Society'at Birmingham.(4)Its most prominent member was Erasmus Darwin,famous then for poetry which is chiefly remembered by the parody in the Anti-Jacobin;and now more famous as the advocate of a theory of evolution eclipsed by the teaching of his more famous grandson,and,in any case,a man of remarkable intellectual power.Among those who joined in the proceedings was Edgeworth,who in 1768was speculating upon moving carriages by steam,and Thomas Day,whose Sandford and Merton helped to spread in England the educational theories of Rousseau.Priestley,who settled at Birmingham in 1780,became a member,and was helped in his investigations by Watt's counsels and Wedgwood's pecuniary help.Among occasional visitors were Smeaton,Sir Joseph Banks,Solander,and Herschel of scientific celebrity;while the literary magnate,Dr Parr,who lived between Warwick and Birmingham,occasionally joined the circle.Wedgwood,though too far off to be a member,was intimate with Darwin and associated in various enterprises with Boulton.Wedgwood's congenial partner,Thomas Bentley (1731-1780),had been in business at Manchester and at Liverpool.He had taken part in founding the Warrington 'Academy,'the dissenting seminary (afterwards moved to Manchester)of which Priestley was tutor (1761-1767),and had lectured upon art at the academy founded at Liverpool in 1773.Another member of the academy was William Roscoe (1753-1831),whose literary taste was shown by his lives of Lorenzo de Medici and Leo X,and who distinguished himself by opposing the slave trade,then the infamy of his native town.Allied with him in this movement were William Rathbone and James Currie (1756-1805)the biographer of Burns,a friend of Darwin and an intelligent physician.At Manchester Thomas Perceval (1740-1804)founded the 'Literary and Philosophical Society,in 1780.He was a pupil of the Warrington Academy,which he afterwards joined on removing to Manchester,and he formed the scheme afterwards realised by Owens College.He was an early advocate of sanitary measures and factory legislation,and a man of scientific reputation.
Other members of the society were:John Ferriar (1761-1815),best known by his Illustrations of Sterne,but also a man of literary and scientific reputation;the great chemist,John Dalton (1766-1844),who contributed many papers to its transactions;and,for a short time,the Socialist Robert Owen,then a rising manufacturer.At Norwich,then important as a manufacturing centre,was a similar circle.William Taylor,an eminent Unitarian divine,who died at the Warrington Academy in 1761,had lived at Norwich.One of his daughters married David Martineau and became the mother of Harriet Martineau,who has described the Norwich of her early years.John Taylor,grandson of William,was father of Mrs Austin,wife of the jurist.He was a man of literary tastes,and his wife was known as the Madame Roland of Norwich.Mrs Opie (1765-1853)was daughter of James Alderson,a physician of Norwich,and passed most of her life there.William Taylor (1761-1836),another Norwich manufacturer,was among the earliest English students of German literature.Norwich had afterwards the unique distinction of being the home of a provincial school of artists.John Crome (1788-1821),son of a poor weaver,and John Sell Cotman (1782-1842)were its leaders;they formed a kind of provincial academy,and exhibited pictures which have been more appreciated since their death.At Bristol,towards the end of the century,were similar indications of intellectual activity.Coleridge and Southey found there a society ready to listen to their early lectures,and both admired Thomas Beddoes (1760-1808),a physician,a chemist,a student of German,an imitator of Darwin in poetry,and an assailant of Pitt in pamphlets.He had married one of Edgeworth's daughters.With the help and advice of Wedgwood and Watt,he founded the 'Pneumatic Institute'at Clifton in 1798,and obtained the help of Humphry Davy,who there made some of his first discoveries.Davy was soon transported to the Royal Institution,founded at the suggestion of Count Rumford in 1799,which represented the growth of a popular interest in the scientific discoveries.
The general tone of these little societies represents,of course,the tendency of the upper stratum of the industrial classes.In their own eyes they naturally represented the progressive element of society.They were Whigs --for 'radicalism'was not yet invented --but Whigs of the left wing;accepting the aristocratic precedency,but looking askance at the aristocratic prejudices.They were rationalists,too,in principle,but again within limits:openly avowing the doctrines which in the Established church had still to be sheltered by ostensible conformity to the traditional dogmas.Many of them professed the Unitarianism to which the old dissenting bodies inclined.