Excitement was in the air in the British spa town of Bath in March 1780. In a dark room outfitted with an electrical machine, members of the Bath Philosophical Society (hereafter BPS) gathered to discuss ‘phosp[h]orial light and…electricity’. Minutes show the experiments were so absorbing that the meeting lasted four hours. The topic was proposed by William Herschel (1738–1822), the astronomer, who was soon to discover the planet, Uranus. A former shopkeeper, Edmund Rack (1735/36–87), the society’s secretary and driving force, set up a committee ‘to resolve problems in electricity as…pointed out personally by Dr Priestley’. Rack’s reference was to the scientist, Joseph Priestley, who was a frequent visitor to Bath (see Figure 1).Footnote 1
Portrait of Edmund Rack, founder of the Bath & West Agricultural Society, by Lewis Vaslet (1781). See Footnote n. 24 for current research about Rack’s birth date.
The participants found ‘that divers kinds of bodies being exposed…to the sun’s rays and instantly drawn into the dark room would retain their light near a minute’. When Rack wrote on a sheet of paper and ‘pressd it with a hot smoothing iron’, its light ‘appeard near a minute all on fire & the writing was very legible’. Other substances were exposed to light and ‘exactly minuted by a stop watch’: live fish, mosses, funguses, bread, lump sugar, leeks, dried wood, red herring, silk handkerchiefs, alum, garden roots, fossils, spar and minerals.Footnote 2
Why, one may ask, was Rack’s society founded in a spa town dedicated to pleasure? Why was its meeting led by an unschooled Quaker, and why was he respected by well-known scientists?Footnote 3 Rack had settled in Bath five years earlier in 1775, at age 40. Yet, why he chose Bath has been unexplained and his early life has been a mystery. All we know is that he was born in rural Norfolk to humble parents and lacked formal schooling. Yet, his love of learning led him to educate himself and write poetry and prose.Footnote 4
This article uses Rack’s intellectual activities in Bath to make two important arguments about urban and social history in eighteenth-century Britain. First, the city was far more than a scandalous spa. It was an urban crucible for the sophisticated visitors and global ideas that were drawn into the whirling vortex of its society. Into this melting pot came cultural trespassers and aspiring mediators, who found ways to expand knowledge in a city ripe for change. By enlisting serious people, who craved meaningful pursuits, cultural brokers like Rack fostered social and economic improvement. They also laid early foundations for British provincial science, which have been hidden from view.Footnote 5
Secondly, these intermediaries transformed the city by developing diverse social networks that flourished in the spa’s welcoming environment. Naturally, Bath’s role as the premiere international and national resort shaped all of its cultural institutions. Indeed, the constant inflow and outflow of anonymous people created the perfect milieu for the social mobility of urban non-elites. A study of the founding members of the Bath Society (1779–87) shows how Rack’s social networks functioned: who was in them, what interests they pursued and how members worked together. It also reveals surprising results about the status and occupations of the founders. Physicians, dissenters and men with a range of marginal backgrounds soon dominated the society. Hence, the BPS offered a pathway to social mobility and created a distinct scientific culture. It also offers a fresh look at the intellectual development and social alliances of eighteenth-century urban society.
Rack’s achievements are an ideal lens through which to view these claims. He was one of numerous cultural brokers or go-betweens who strove to increase scientific knowledge in their native and host locales.Footnote 6 Indeed, his passion for knowledge governed every aspect of his life, and he longed to circulate information for the public good. In our age, he claimed, we ‘are favourd with more excellent communications of knowledge; and have access to those sources of information from which the purest principles of science are drawn and the sublimest human happiness is derivd’.Footnote 7 When ill health struck, he refused to become depressed for ‘the treasures of true science & learning remain when every other enjoyment vanishes as a vapour’.Footnote 8
Among Rack’s many achievements were the foundation of two enlightened societies based on scientific experiments that exist today and the publication of at least 20 books and pamphlets, along with large quantities of poetry and prose. His global networks including evangelicals and abolitionists, as well as economic and social reformers, further enhanced his reputation as a passionate propagator of ideas. Before the pre-Bath and international stages of Rack’s life were revealed in this article, he appeared to be an ambiguous, minor figure, striving for acceptance.Footnote 9 New information positions him as a transnational man of letters, whose friends, like Priestley and Herschel, supported his vision and held him in high esteem.
The next section outlines the methodologies used in this article. Then, Rack’s early years in Essex and London are reconstructed by following clues left by authors and publishers in the capital’s books, newspapers and periodicals. Next, we see how Rack became the leader of Bath’s intellectual community by founding two societies and achieving literary success. The conclusion assesses his role as a cultural broker.Footnote 10
Microhistory and the history of knowledge
This article looks anew at Bath in its local, national and global contexts at a time when a widely diffused culture, based on science and empiricism, heightened hopes of living in a new enlightened age, albeit one that caused destabilizing change.Footnote 11 The techniques of Italian microhistorians are used to fill in the gaps of Rack’s pre-Bath life, explain why he chose to live there and understand how he met his goal to circulate knowledge through a strategic plan.
Thus, this article answers Francesca Trivellato’s question: ‘Is there a future for Italian microhistory in the age of global history?’ with a resounding ‘yes’.Footnote 12 It places urban change, social mobility and the history of knowledge into a deeper, wider canvas and permits the combining of micro- and macro-scales of analysis. It also confirms Giovanni Levi’s belief that ‘history must be the science of generalized questions and localized answers’, which are found by close readings for clues.Footnote 13
As in previous work on younger son and Levant Company merchant, John Verney, in 1993Footnote 14 and William Hutton, an unschooled prolific author, in 2018,Footnote 15 answers are found by analysing documents of ordinary people, which do not contain predictable narratives or fit into standard categories. In 1977, Edoardo Grendi called these documents ‘exceptionally normal’. He believed historians could use them to uncover hidden cultural meanings, social structures and lives of people who seemed exceptional, but were considered normal in their own settings. Moreover, the unique behaviours found in these texts triggered numerous bursts of record-making that allow readers to observe both deviance and social norms.Footnote 16
The phrase ‘normal exceptions’ is now used widely, but it means different things to different scholars and is often reinterpreted to apply to ordinary people. Indeed, Grendi’s article reveals concepts that apply directly to Edmund Rack. In ‘Micro-analisi e storia sociale’, he points to a pattern of group divergence in the form of brokers, who mediate between the community and the larger society.Footnote 17 Edmund Rack’s epistolary journal provides exactly that data, as it describes Rack’s role as a cultural intermediary. It contains a detailed account of Rack’s greatest success: the founding, impact and relationships of members of the BPS. Since it is the only surviving fragment of a much larger manuscript, Rack may have saved it for posterity. As it records the ‘normal discontinuities, contradictions, and fragmentations of the historical fabric’, it fits the definition of an exceptionally normal document.Footnote 18
Through a wide range of other sources, I follow Grendi’s instructions and map the members of Rack’s social networks, who spanned the globe in many walks of life.Footnote 19 Additional analysis of BPS founding members enables the creation of connected histories that fan out and back, to and from East Anglia, London, Bath, Philadelphia and the Atlantic trading world, Europe, Africa and the East Indies.Footnote 20 As Rack communicated with people from many nations, his membership in a Quaker community steeped in disseminating knowledge truly mattered. It offered information networks and literary activities, but also erected religious tensions that simmered beneath the surface throughout the century.
The methods of microhistory confirm that Rack’s urban universe was far larger than the polite world of a spa. In fact, his unlikely choice of a town of pleasure was an ideal place for his scientific societies. By 1700, Bath had shifted from a declining textile town to a rising spa of 3,000 people that drew visitors to drink the waters and doctors to treat them. Queen Anne’s four visits, ending in 1703, stimulated the rebuilding of the city. New assembly and pump rooms were followed by upgrades to streets, sanitation, housing and visitor amenities. In the 1720s, John Wood Sr’s building plans set new Palladian standards, as seen in his classical Queen Square.
By the 1720s, Bath also became a magnet for scientific lecturers, who were keen to teach people about Newtonian gravitation, optics, mechanics and electricity. J.T. Desaguliers (1705–82), later Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), gave lessons using prisms, air pumps and model engines. Benjamin Martin (c. 1704–82) offered courses at his ‘experimental room’ and James Ferguson’s (1710–76) astronomical classes made an impact on William Herschel.Footnote 21 Gradually, circulating libraries, theatres, gardens and public walks replaced rough country venues and pursuits. Like all spas, its newness and potential for economic gain bred a competitive service-based economy that welcomed private investment.Footnote 22
This renewal of an aging infrastructure was enhanced by the arrival of Richard ‘Beau’ Nash, as master of ceremonies in 1705. His creation of ‘the company’ as the basic unit of social interaction required loyalty to Nash as master of ceremonies and adherence to the rituals he invented. It also brought some order to a town marked by scandal, drink and gambling.Footnote 23 As dates, events and characteristics of Nash’s earlier rise to power are compared with Rack’s own trajectory, it will become clear that Nash became an instructive role model for Rack, as he chose to move to Bath. But first, clues must be followed in order to lift the veil hiding Rack’s pre-Bath years.
Rack’s early life in Essex and London
Rack was born in central Norfolk to observant Quaker parents in Ellingham in 1736.Footnote 24 His father, Edmund, was ‘a labouring weaver’, whilst his mother, Elizabeth (1700–84) was ‘well-known for…preaching’. In 1739, after the death of her three children and husband, she left her remaining son, Edmund, at age four, ‘in the care of friends’ and became ‘a lively & acceptable minister’ for the rest her life. Yet, Rack’s supportive Quaker community and his interests in nature, science and self-education helped him become an independent youth.Footnote 25 He was apprenticed to a shopkeeper in nearby Wymondham, knowing little more than arithmetic. Then he found employment 51 miles from London in a shop in Great Bardfield, Essex, owned by the widow, Agnes Smith. They soon married and Rack became a provincial shopkeeper at a time when agricultural reform was improving East Anglian farming, a knowledge Rack would use to start the Bath & West of England Society (hereafter BWS).Footnote 26
Great Bardfield supported a growing Quaker congregation. Known for dissent, it was also home to Methodists. More than a century had passed since George Fox founded the Quaker movement. It expanded in the 1650s after the Civil War. But Quaker rejection of the established church and unpopular traits in dress and speech led to persecution and imprisonment after the Restoration. The Toleration Act of 1689 allowed only conditional worship and barred Quakers from universities, public office and juries. Thus, a period of more passive Quietism followed after the 1690s.Footnote 27
Still, though some Quakers wished to live separately, the reality was more diverse. During the eighteenth century, Quakers expanded geographically, became influential in commerce and industry and developed a range of positions on war, slavery and social reform. As Rack’s life reveals, the urge for quiet self-transformation rising from Christ’s ‘inner light’ conflicted with the urge to transform the world through humanitarian action.Footnote 28
When Rack moved to Essex, he developed his first network of Quaker friends, who were also members of London’s literary world during the 1760s and 1770s. It was easy to get transport from Essex to the capital, and easier to get published. Over 100 new monthly magazines appeared between 1760 and 1779, expanding the number of successful authors, who produced poetry and prose.Footnote 29 ‘There is scarcely a wretch’, wrote the Scribbler, ‘upon the surface of the earth, but who…thinks himself qualified to be a Poet.’ One of them, who published anonymously, was Edmund Rack.Footnote 30
Because we lack details of autodidacts’ methods, we must piece together fragments of how Rack’s self-education prepared him to be an author. From the Quaker community. he received literacy, reading materials and a love of learning. In his Mentor’s Letters Addressed to Youth, written while he was still in London, he described his own regimen of self-improvement through reading, writing, conversation and moral training. His literary pursuits reveal why so many people longed to become authors. For most, the answer was self-improvement based on knowledge of the arts and sciences. Writing poetry was also a highly regarded way of expressing deep emotions in a flowing metered manner. For all, imitating the style of well-known poets was a popular exercise that stirred the intellect.Footnote 31
For Rack, literary and social life amongst like-minded Quakers were tightly linked together. As a practising Quaker, Rack automatically acquired another network of London merchants, who traded with Britain’s colonies, became early abolitionists and later supported his Bath societies. He was often found in the Quaker corner of London’s Carolina Coffeehouse on Birchin Lane, with his ‘little flock’ of merchants, printers, booksellers and self-styled philosophers. They published poems in The Monthly Ledger, shared an interest in North America and soon became prominent in Quakerism’s liberal wing.Footnote 32
As these London merchants prospered, they gained international contacts. In 1783, Rack’s closest Quaker friends set up the first London Abolition Committee and later convinced Thomas Clarkson (1780–1846) and William Wilberforce (1759–1833) to join them in their opposition to the slave trade.Footnote 33 Indeed, London and Philadelphia Quakers functioned as a transatlantic community with families, ministers and publications flowing in both directions.
Rack’s unknown ties explain why, in 1779, he asked the former slave, Ignatius Sancho, for permission to print his letters to the East Indies and Philadelphia ‘in a collection of Letters of Friendship’. Rack hoped the letters ‘might convince proud Europeans, that the noblest gifts of God…are not confined to any nations of people’. As a member of a transnational network, Rack saw himself as an agent, who spread knowledge across the world.Footnote 34
In the same year, Rack published an anonymous essay on William Penn. It was appended to the second edition of Caspipina’s Letters (a code name for American independence). Caspipina’s author, Reverend Jacob Duché of Philadelphia, was a board member of Benjamin Franklin’s Library Company and ordered its books from Joseph Woods, a lifelong friend of Rack.Footnote 35 Woods sold Rack’s writings, sent him books and criticized his poetry as too effusive.Footnote 36 Another close friend, James Phillips, printed the Friends Society’s official publications and anti-slavery tracts.Footnote 37 ‘However low we rank’, wrote Woods, ‘as Merchants or Philosophers, we are desirous to be esteemed.’Footnote 38
Both Woods and Rack esteemed another lifetime member of the ‘flock’, the preacher, William Matthews (1747–1816) of Coggeshall, Essex. In 1770, Rack and Matthews joined their London friends at a wedding, where Matthews had the honour of reading a toast in verse. Matthews, the son of an Oxford shoemaker, kept a Quaker boarding school in Essex. Though too poor to attend school himself, he soon became a charismatic London preacher and a member of Rack’s growing network of Quaker ministers.Footnote 39
From 1773 to 1775, Woods, Matthews and Rack sent anonymous poetry and prose to a new journal, The Monthly Ledger. Rack, alone, wrote a staggering 103 entries with the support of its publisher Thomas Letchworth (1738–84), who was also a Quaker minister. Matthews’ many publications, which include a life of Letchworth, reveal the deep faith of many Quakers, who questioned London’s disciplinary control and wished to integrate into society.Footnote 40 Both Matthews and Rack were influenced by the Enlightenment and adopted a moderate form of Quietism that historians might call rational religion. Claiming roots in George Fox’s stress on ethics and education, rational Quakers functioned successfully after 1750 between the poles of reason and revelation.Footnote 41
At the same time, there was a central drive to restore Quaker purity relating to business practices, intermarriage and non-payment of tithes. Quaker letters show that the London Meeting grew more rigid, and cases of disownment rose dramatically. ‘Only the ESSENTIAL parts of religion can be dictated’, stated Matthews. ‘Otherwise, there is “PERSECUTION”. I…HAVE DETERMINED TO BE FREE.’ Unsurprisingly, he was expelled from the Society of Friends for heterodox opinions in 1783. Luckily, unnoticed by biographers, he had already followed Rack to Bath, where he opened a brewery and coal yard, and succeeded him as secretary of the BWS.Footnote 42
References reveal that Matthews was the second member of Rack’s hidden trio, who met in London, worked together in Bath and served as executors at their deaths. The third member was a publisher of London’s Monthly Miscellany, Richard Cruttwell (1747–99) of Bath. He was also the new owner of the Bath Chronicle. In 1761, at age 14, Cruttwell was apprenticed to a London printer, John Carnan.Footnote 43 In 1768, he invested a small inheritance in William Archer’s Bath Chronicle; then he bought him out during a political crisis in 1769. This early intimacy between Cruttwell and Rack sheds new light on Rack’s undetected ties to Bath. So, it is crucial to grasp how they helped each other in London and Somerset. Though historians assume Rack knew few people in Bath, his intimate friend would become the most powerful publisher in south-west England.Footnote 44
By 1774, Rack was contributing to the Monthly Miscellany and won two of its prizes for ‘On the unchangeableness of the deity’, signed Eusodorus and the ‘Treatise of ghosts and apparitions’, signed XYZ.Footnote 45 An analysis of the journal’s index shows it published articles that were later recycled in the Bath Chronicle and Rack’s writings. There were, thus, essays about agricultural reform, tensions in American colonies and even Quaker history,Footnote 46 authored not only by Quaker friends, but future founding members of Rack’s Bath societies. As he formed yet another network with London publishers, editors, staff writers, contributors and the public, Rack received a practical printing-house education.
If we compare the dates of Cruttwell’s entry into London publishing with events in Bath, we start to glimpse why Rack moved to Somerset in 1775. Cruttwell’s London apprenticeship in 1761 was followed by the deaths of Beau Nash in 1762 and his unpopular successor Samuel Derrick in 1769. The resulting vacuum of Nash’s absence set off a long political conflict over who should elect a new master of ceremonies. By 1768, when Cruttwell invested in Archer’s Bath Chronicle, two warring sides were spreading scandalous news about their rival candidates. Sensing a rare opportunity to publicize a political crisis, Cruttwell bought out Archer in 1769.Footnote 47
His first act was to publish the lurid Bath Contest, compiled from previous Chronicle articles about the violent campaign. These illustrated reports led to rising sales and tempers. ‘Never was such a Scene of Anarchy and Confusion remembered in this City’, the Bath Contest declared. ‘The Mayor was sent for to appease the tumult [and] the Riot-Act read 3 times.’ A print showed a shouting woman praising her choice: ‘He shall be King, or I’ll poison ye all.’Footnote 48
In London, Rack watched the crisis and saw a gap in Bath’s leadership. Oliver Goldsmith’s popular Life of Nash had just been published. Read together with Cruttwell’s pamphlets, they presented a playbook about how power in Bath had been won and lost by a newcomer like Nash. There were similarities between Nash’s and Rack’s characters and situations. Both emerged anonymously at critical junctures. Both had ambiguous backgrounds and needed to live off their position, but their self-assurance won the day. Both found capable allies and advanced themselves socially by exploiting economic change. Bath’s acceptance of dissenters and newcomers also attracted Rack.Footnote 49
By the late 1760s, Bath’s population of 10,000 was developing new cultural institutions, experiments in science and technology and ties to global empires. John Wood’s son was transforming Bath into a Palladian community on an unprecedented scale. Its circuses and crescents were filled with professional and middle-class residents, scientific lecturers, physicians and international men of science. Their conversations about fossils, planets, medical treatments and inventions were staples of Bath’s broad integrated culture. There was ‘no place in the world’, it was claimed, ‘where a person might introduce himself, on such easy terms, to the first people of Europe’.Footnote 50 In 1790, there were at least 25,000 visitors.Footnote 51
By 1774, Cruttwell thought the spa was entering a glorious new stage and Rack saw the chance to start a new life. In 1775, he swiftly recycled his unsigned verse into a volume of published poems.Footnote 52 He arrived in Bath as an author, whose networks were filled with printers, preachers, abolitionists, future scientists, global traders and ties to international societies. With help from Cruttwell and Matthews, Rack would fulfil his mission to become Bath’s first master of knowledge.Footnote 53
The Bath & West of England Society (BWS)
Once hidden links between both halves of Rack’s life are revealed, it is clear that he arrived in Bath with key skills and contacts. As his journal is read in the context of his Quaker, London and transnational backgrounds, familiar people and activities emerge. It is now possible to draw a map of Rack’s personal networks. They show how once he settled in Bath he developed a step-by-step pragmatic plan. The following narrative is based on evidence that unveils Rack’s strategy to establish the BWS and improve society by circulating knowledge.Footnote 54
Earlier, Nash’s ascent to power gave Rack a blueprint for his own rise to fame – this time by founding his societies and becoming a leader of Bath’s intellectual community. In 1777, he established the BWS, which gave him entrée into the enlightened residential leadership needed to establish his own authority. Its success led to the creation in 1779 of the more select BPS that attracted scientists like Priestley and Herschel and drew international attention.
The BWS still exists today and Rack was confident it would succeed. As an Essex shopkeeper, he had observed the rise and fall of agricultural prices and profits. He saw East Anglian farmers thrive by using new methods, and he knew Somerset’s husbandry was outdated.Footnote 55 By 1777, his networks included agricultural reformers and European agricultural societies from Ireland to Russia. He used his knowledge of the publishing world to market his reforms. Historians have overlooked Rack’s genius in creating information in many print formats, all crucially printed by Cruttwell.Footnote 56
First, Rack wrote articles calling for agricultural reform. Then, a proposal for a formal society appeared in Cruttwell’s Farmer’s Magazine and the Bath Chronicle, along with the Bristol, Salisbury, Gloucester and Sherborne newspapers. In response, 39 people attended the first meeting in November, 1777, including a few grandees and numerous non-elites interested in agriculture. Rack read a supportive letter from Alexander Hunter of the York Agricultural Society, whilst the scientific lecturer, John Arden, offered instruments for experiments.Footnote 57
Members soon led trials on the society’s farm and studied Rack’s chart of local plants according to Linnaeus’ categories. To create regional statistics for his later survey of Somerset, Rack published a list of queries sent to sheriffs and local leaders in four counties. His aim was ‘to show the superiority of the Newly Improv’d…mode of Farming…from real facts and Experiments…This’, wrote Rack, ‘would be of more essential service to the public than whole volumes of theory.’Footnote 58 This crucial step enhanced his development as a reformer and creator of local knowledge.
Rack publicized the new society in annual lists of officers, committees and rules. After the first meeting, a powerful, unnoticed, subgroup drafted Rack’s future plan. Tellingly, four of its five members were Rack and Matthews, along with Cruttwell and his brother. As secretary, Rack controlled all communications and was paid £50 a year, plus £30 to use his house for exhibits and books.Footnote 59
Unlike other farming groups, Rack and Cruttwell published the first of 14 volumes of the society’s transactions from 1780 to 1816, based on Rack’s expanding international correspondence-book. This achievement set the BWS apart from other institutions and contributed to its longevity. The agricultural innovator, Arthur Young, offered public praise: ‘A society that does not publish its transactions may be of a partial, limited…utility, but can never diffuse the knowledge it rewards.’ Essays, prizes and reports of experiments sent from local contributors won an international reputation for the society. In 1780, Count Komhove, sent by Russia’s empress to study British agriculture, examined Rack’s exhibition of models and machines. The count joined Bath’s society as an honorary correspondent, and sent publications and seeds. Rack and Komhove represent a pattern of go-betweens, who knitted local and transnational societies into an interdependent global community.Footnote 60
The Bath Philosophical Society (BPS)
In 1779, after attending Arden’s lectures on Electricity, Air, Chemistry, Astronomy, Hydrostatics and Globes, Rack founded the BPS for ‘the Discovery of Truth; and to improve the Mind by reciprocal Communications of Knowledge’. It will be ‘quite select’, he wrote. ‘We admit none but men of…learning in the different branches of science – Myself and Matthews excepted. We join to learn wisdom.’ Though Rack’s journal shows he had well-developed plans for a new institution, he shrewdly gave credit to the wealthy, respected Thomas Curtis from Gloucestershire, whom he called ‘the Father of this Society’. Curtis had all the social trappings Rack lacked, including a country house, Bath townhouse, a governorship of the General Hospital and the Pauper Charity, as well as a shared interest in botany. Most important, Rack had groomed Curtis for leadership when he founded the BWS, where Curtis served as its vice president.Footnote 61
Figures 2 and 3 list 27 founding members from 1779 to 1787 with their status and occupations. The next section reveals what activities they undertook and how they worked together to create an innovative scientific culture.Footnote 62 Constantine Phipps, Lord Mulgrave (FRS and Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries) held the sole title. A close friend of Joseph Banks, an MP for Huntingdon and a naval commander, this capable man had explored the Arctic regions. A witty socialite and popular speaker, his scientific interests grew out of his explorations and concerns for the welfare of seamen.
Bath Philosophical Society – members 1779–87.
Source: A.J. Turner, Science and Music in Eighteenth-Century Bath, Catalogue of an Exhibition in the Holburne of Menstrie Museum, 22 September – 29 December 1977 (Bath, 1977), 86. A list established by H.S. Torrens.
Bath Philosophical Society – members 1779–87 – status and occupation.
Only three gentry joined him at the table: Hugh Acland, the posthumous son of a baronet; James Collings, who attended London’s Club of Honest Whigs and whom Rack called ‘a walking library’; and Thomas Curtis.Footnote 63
The clergy supplied just two members: Anglican Samuel Rogers, a published poet with Cambridge degrees and the Unitarian, Joseph Priestley, whose scientific discoveries and religious activism were well known. Yet, dissenters comprised at least nine members, or a third of the BPS, including the expelled Quaker preacher, Matthews, who ran a coal yard and brewery, several Methodists and a Baptist. Tellingly, nine different chapels and meeting-houses bore witness to Bath’s religious diversity.Footnote 64
Nine energetic physicians dominated the group including Henry Atwood, Charles Blagden (honorary), William Falconer, John Coakley Lettsom (honorary), Caleb Hillier Parry, Samuel Pye, John Staker, John Symonds and William Watson. Several were dissenters, who had trained in Scotland and were open to social and religious reforms. As they conducted experiments with each other, some gained wealth, status and political office.Footnote 65
Falconer, for example, led trials at the General Hospital on the effects of spa waters by gender and condition and wrote about classics, natural history and cottage design for farmworkers. When Falconer joined Parry (FRS) in testing domestic rhubarb as a cheaper drug alternative, Rack published their results in the 1786 BWS proceedings. Parry, a dissenter, led experiments on Graves disease and observed angina with Edward Jenner. Several doctors held public office. The surgeon, Symonds and Watson became Bath’s mayor and were involved in town building speculations. Watson’s paper on the blue shark appeared in the Royal Society transactions.Footnote 66
A second medical cluster linked to London featured Charles Blagden, the Royal Society secretary, who accepted Curtis’ invitation to join. Blagden shared his ties to Joseph Banks and submitted papers that he likewise read to the Royal Society. Blagden recruited Quaker philanthropist, John Coakley Lettsom, founder of the Medical Society of London, who authored medical, biographical and historical works. BPS physicians had close ties with mainstream science, but were not dependent on metropolitan doctors. They co-existed in a mutually supportive relationship.Footnote 67
Three science lecturers contributed educational experience and far-flung networks throughout Britain. Science lecturing was finally reputable in light of new British discoveries in the sciences. The Welsh philosopher, John Lloyd (FRS), who taught astronomy, and Benjamin Smith, who sold scientific instruments, now joined the Protestant, John Arden, whose Catholic parents had disinherited him and forced him to earn a living. Arden’s comprehensive lectures were performed with instruments such as an ‘Electrical Orrery of his own invention’. His talks included a separate evening course to ‘accommodate People in Business’. Methodist John Henderson, another educator drawn to occult studies, also attended.Footnote 68
Though all members studied nature, Matthew Martin and John Walsh (both FRS) specialized in similar ground-breaking work as professionalization of naturalists took place. Each man published studies of electric fish, laying the foundation for electrophysiology. Bath’s ‘first geologist’, Methodist John Walcott, studied Bath’s geological strata filled with Jurassic rocks and fossils. As Walcott climbed peaks with Rack, he explained the origins of artefacts they collected. Walcott’s publications, aided by Mathew Martin, influenced future geologists.Footnote 69
A driving force of the BPS was the astronomer, William Herschel, who gave 32 papers from January 1780 to March 1781. His idea that the heavens’ chain of development was analogous to the biological system of growth, maturity and death was basically correct. Watson met the self-taught Hanoverian by chance in the street where he had set up a telescope. Herschel first reported his discovery of Uranus to the BPS. Later, Watson gave him access to his London house and introduced him to the royal family.Footnote 70 Herschel also relied on an aspiring soap maker with building skills, John B. Bryant, to help him construct instruments.Footnote 71
At the low end of the status spectrum lay Thomas Parsons, son of a Baptist stone cutter, who worked in the family business – a reminder of Nash’s rules of mixed social engagement, which lay hidden in other towns, but are revealed in Bath. Parsons studied the origins of fossils and had artistic ambitions. He was the likely author of letters to London journals on natural history topics.Footnote 72
At least 9 of the 25 members had to overcome social barriers: Arden, Bryant, Herschel, Lloyd, Martin, Matthews, Parsons, Smith and Rack. As the group’s cultural broker in charge of organization, Rack shaped the society’s dominant characteristic – its members’ diversity and often marginal backgrounds regarding wealth, social status and religion. It is thus useful to ask how this prosopological study fits into the marginality model espoused by Ian Inkster, John Morrell and Arnold Thackray regarding northern Philosophical and Literary Societies.
Their theory suggested that marginal groups such as dissenters, manufacturers and medical men often dominated urban societies in search of increased socio-economic status. BPS colleagues fitted this model in some respects. Yet, Bath’s context as a world-class resort that integrated global ideas and groups of people was different.Footnote 73 Naturally, a leading spa would produce a distinct intellectual environment.
Paul Elliott’s concept of the ‘creative class’ stressed these urban differences and applied the marginality model to Georgian scientific societies. He claimed that the unusual productivity of some disadvantaged social groups was due to their peripheral position in society and their need to express alternative values through cultural activity.Footnote 74
Elliott’s model makes sense when we look at a cluster of BPS members who had common interests, but widely different backgrounds. Indeed, three of the most powerful participants, Priestley, Herschel and Watson, worked closely with three members with lower social status, Bryant, Arden and Rack. The six men were brimming with new ideas and reinforced each other’s energy, as they built and used scientific instruments.
Bryant, a local soap maker, who was also called an electrician and astronomer, helped Herschel find double stars. He soon became an instrument maker, who created and sold optical devices. Bryant donated his electrical machine that threw out zig-zag streams of lightning from the end of the conductor and cost over £100.Footnote 75
On 31 December 1779, Rack attended Bryant’s demonstration of his machine assisted by Herschel, Watson and Arden. A week later, Bryant presented his ‘new & very curious experiments’ at the society’s meeting. Rack thought ‘some of them were quite new & astonishing, such as firing pistols, ca[r]tridges, &c, & lighting candles by electrical sparks’. Astronomy and electricity thus drew members together and gave marginal men status.Footnote 76 Arden also grew in stature as he lectured on the value of experiments as ‘the most effectual Means speedily to improve all arts and sciences’.Footnote 77
Behind every discussion lay the manager, Rack, who bound the sub-group into a collaborative unit. As a marginal man himself, in regard to religion and socio-economic status, Rack fostered interactions between creative members with complementary viewpoints. Their presence suited his Quaker tolerance and access to social networks of men with unconventional backgrounds. The result was a group who built social relationships through scientific experiments.
BPS founders also boldly networked with outsiders. In 1782, Collings and Watson undertook industrial espionage of a rival steam engine in Radstock, near Bath on behalf of Matthew Boulton and James Watt. Collings attended a Lunar Society meeting, whilst Watson sponsored Watt’s election to the Royal Society. The latter, Rack crowed publicly, had only five members at its start ‘and those five not superior in learning and genius to most of our members’.Footnote 78 Thus, Rack used the society to foster pride in Bath and its educated citizens.
Rack’s pivotal role as a cultural broker cannot be ignored. As secretary, he was literally at the centre of Bath’s cultural networks, receiving mail, guests and ‘sealed papers drop’t in a Box for discussion’.Footnote 79 ‘Original Essays’ were encouraged, as well as ‘candid Criticisms on new scientific and philosophical Publications and new translations from Foreign Authors’. Rack controlled content by suggesting topics he knew well. He did this openly and secretly through anonymous letters or dropping hints to friends. Hence, Herschel’s first talk was about measuring the growth of corallines, not astronomy. Rack’s journal reveals that he had asked Herschel to present it after gaining access to a book on the topic, so he appeared to be an expert at the meeting.Footnote 80
Rack’s literary achievements
By the 1780s, Rack had become a respected author. At least 20 publications covered subjects from turnips to personal salvation. Rack’s Mentor’s Letters had sold 3,000 copies in four editions by 1785.Footnote 81 His Essays, Letters and Poems of 1781 recycled his anonymous London writings and had several hundred subscribers.Footnote 82 Rack’s editorship of the agricultural society’s transactions established him as an author with transnational influence.
In 1788, Rack’s ‘Essay on the origin and progress of agriculture’ was a crowning achievement. It included current research reports from foreign societies including the Dublin society, 15 French societies and their 20 allied groups, the societies of Russia, Sweden, Italy, Spain and Germany and visitors studying agriculture from Sardinia, Poland, Denmark and the duchy of Wirtemberg. Finally, Rack’s annual lists of honorary and corresponding members proclaimed his transnational networks.Footnote 83
Rack’s literary reputation also spread to America. From 1786 to 1789, his essays were reprinted in the American Herald, making him its most frequently published author. Rack’s involvement with Cruttwell’s publications gave him constant access to international news. For example, the Bath Chronicle discussed the Declaration of Independence soon after its appearance.Footnote 84
Rack’s role as an innovator of local knowledge practices is best seen in his survey of Somerset made in the 1780s for inclusion in Joseph Collinson’s History and Antiquities of the County of Somerset (1791). Reverend Collinson (1757–93), an antiquarian from Cirencester, had attended Oxford, but knew little about publishing. He depended on Rack’s local knowledge and networks, whilst Rack needed to earn money after a financial loss in 1781.Footnote 85
Rack based his survey on what he deemed scientific methods. In order to obtain onsite data, he visited 451 parishes on horseback over a five-year period, despite debilitating asthma. He also sent questionnaires to landholders and interviewed people of all ranks. Then, he recorded data in a set order of subject heads on to portable paper slips. Perhaps, he knew that Linnaeus used paper slips for his classification scheme, for Rack was a member of London’s Natural History Society, the forerunner of the Linnaean Society.Footnote 86
With Cruttwell’s help, Rack chose the production team using his local and London networks of farmers, landowners, artisans, artists, engravers, printers and publishers. Rack also gained hundreds of subscribers for Collinson’s book.Footnote 87 In writing history, Rack wrote Collinson, ‘we wish not to be content with mediocrity, when excellence can be attained’.Footnote 88
Rack paid a high price for distinction. He died at age 51, worn out by travel, before Collinson’s country history was published. Sadly, Collinson omitted most of Rack’s information in his scholarly tome, a sign of lingering tension between antiquarians and practitioners. Collinson had a traditional view of what constituted local knowledge, and who had the right to spread it. He praised Rack’s abilities in the Bath section of his History, but also cited his humble parentage and ‘the servilities of his station’.Footnote 89 Though Rack was respected by Bath’s scientific community, Collinson was resistant to Rack’s new research methods. This fact makes Rack’s achievements even more remarkable. His original ‘Survey’ was finally published for the first time in 2011 by dedicated Somerset historians. Happily, his paper slips still survive.Footnote 90
Rack’s role as cultural broker in Bath
Scientists like Priestley knew Rack was creating an innovative scientific community. Their respect for his leadership sends a signal that though we may find an unschooled Quaker an odd master of knowledge, they did not. And though we may find Bath an unlikely place for learning, they viewed it as an ideal time and place in which to implement Rack’s vision of creating the BPS. For decades, Bath had welcomed social and economic change.Footnote 91 Rack’s self-education, outsider status and a political crisis helped him appreciate the spa’s readiness for a scientific society. Thus, he was able to see the town anew from fresh angles.
Historians, too, can revise the way they write about Bath without relying on the well-worn framework of politeness. Like Grendi, they can use normal exceptions to discover local answers to big questions posed by Rack’s achievements. How and why does knowledge circulate in eighteenth-century towns? How does it cease to be the exclusive property of elite individuals and become the possession of wider groups of people?Footnote 92 What roles do cultural brokers play in creating local knowledge?
Rack would agree that ‘enlightened science…would not have been possible without intellectual actors at the geopolitical peripheries, who were clever enough to be able to carve out roles as mediators and cultural interlopers, who…made possible the expansion of knowledge…on a scale that would have been inconceivable without them’. Clearly, Rack was a cultural broker, who bridged the tensions among three different cultures – East Anglian Quakerism, London’s literary and print worlds and a transformed Bath seeking an enlightened society. He saw knowledge as a form of communication to be produced locally and then transferred to and from the wider world. The result was a global marketplace, where Bath was copied at home and abroad. At the same time, Bath absorbed and adapted French fashions, Italian music and ideas from its global visitors.Footnote 93
Rack’s engagement with this marketplace reveals hidden links between his pre-Bath and later lives, as well as the rise of dissent, including rational Quakerism. These ties have become visible by using micro- and macro-analysis to explore Rack’s religious, London and transnational contexts. With this added information, a new description of Rack’s character emerges. No longer seen as a friendless stranger, who drifted into Bath by chance, anxious to fit into polite norms, he arrived as a man of letters with a mission. Once in town, he moved quickly to bring philosophical debate, economic improvement and social reform to Bath. Colonial affairs, including slavery, were also primary concerns.
New sources reveal how Rack developed his strategic plan. In fact, Rack spread knowledge in every stage of his life: first by absorbing Quaker habits of serial meetings, writings and networks; then by making knowledge in London’s print world to recycle later in Bath. Rack’s societies created spaces for intellectual discussion, public demonstrations and scientific experiments, which he advertised in the media. Finally, both parts of his life fused together as he surveyed his county, using skills and contacts gained in London.
Like Nash, Rack knew the spa was a perfect location for the social integration of exciting new forms of leisure, His societies included medical men interested in research, geologists searching for fossils, naturalists collecting flora and instrument makers, who sold telescopes. In fact, ‘the town which…drew the largest audiences for science lectures…was not Birmingham, or Manchester, but Bath’. Members of Rack’s societies ranged from a titled man to an artisan. Hence, Mr Thomas Parsons, a Baptist stone cutter, was invited to join the BPS.Footnote 94 My work thus challenges the trickledown theory of knowledge. As Rack functioned as a cultural broker, knowledge flowed in all directions.
In keeping with the diversity that was key to eighteenth-century urbanism, Bath enjoyed a unique scientific culture. Its cultural institutions were stimulated by its exclusive role as the premiere international and national resort. Bath was also a magnet for consumption, including scientific knowledge, which was seen as a way to improve society. People with money and leisure lived in a world-class townscape in an electrifying atmosphere that threw off zig-zag sparks and excitement, just like Bryant’s machine.
Bryant’s transformation from a soap maker to an inventor of optical instruments confirms that science was a pathway to social mobility in Bath. Members with a range of peripheral backgrounds, who started as minor participants, became major assets to men like Herschel and Priestley, likely throughout Britain. They slip into view in Bath because Rack encouraged interactions between men with different backgrounds and skills.
As they shared their creativity, former marginal men gained respect and their intellectual interests over-rode socio-economic differences. The result was a group who forged social relations through science and were welded into a scientific community. It was, therefore, possible for Rack to attract 27 talented colleagues, who wished to create local knowledge and send it across the globe.Footnote 95
The BPS laid foundations for later scientific groups based on enlightened debate. Four societies and a mechanics’ institute existed before the 1820s, and both of Rack’s societies still survive. Herschel’s discovery of Uranus was reported first to the Bath Society. Then his paper was read by Watson to the Royal Society and won a Copley medal. At least 11 founders of the Bath Society were later elected to London’s Royal Society or helped create new ones.Footnote 96
This article has claimed that eighteenth-century Bath was an ideal time and place for Rack to launch the BPS. It has also suggested that in the process of its founding, the knowledge the society generated was no longer the sole property of elites, but was created and consumed by valued colleagues, who had once been considered as marginal men. Rack’s societies show the strength of Britain’s provincial science. Before the Manchester and Newcastle societies even met, Rack had discussed electricity with Herschel and Priestley. He joins the global phenomenon of entrepreneurial go-betweens who became masters of knowledge over time and space.
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