Lunar Society

by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1770 (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery)]] The origins of the Lunar Society lie in a pattern of friendships that emerged in the late 1750s. Matthew Boulton and Erasmus Darwin met at some time during 1757 or 1758, possibly through family connections, as Boulton's mother's family were patients of Darwin; or possibly though shared friendships, as both were admirers of the printer John Baskerville and friends of the astronomer and geologist John Michell, a regular visitor to Darwin's house in Lichfield. Darwin was a physician and poet who had studied at Cambridge and Edinburgh; Boulton had left school at fourteen and started work in his father's business making metal…

]]The nature of the group was to change significantly with the move to Birmingham in 1765 of the Scottish physician William Small, who had been Professor of Natural Philosophy at The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. There he had taught and been a major influence over Thomas Jefferson, and had formed the focus of a local group of intellectuals. His arrival with a letter of introduction to Matthew Boulton from Benjamin Franklin was to have a galvanising effect on the existing circle, which began to explicitly identify itself as a group and actively started to attract new members. The first of these was Josiah Wedgwood, who became a close friend of Darwin in 1765 while…