American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS)

The Affective Revolution in 1790s Britain

Author(s): Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Summer, 2001), pp. 491-521
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Sponsor: American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
(ASECS).
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Somatic Affects

THE

AFFECTIVEREVOLUTIONIN

1790s

BRITAIN

Lynn Hunt and MargaretJacob

In the year 1800, Gregory Watt received a remarkable set of scatological

and anal erotic letters.' Gregory was the youngest son of the then-famous perfecter of the steam engine, James Watt, and his second wife, Annie. The twentythree year old Gregory's naughty, irreverent exchange occurred with the engineer
William Creighton, employed by Boulton and Watt since 1795.2 Although young
men have probably composed scatological and erotic ditties at many times and
places throughout history, the correspondence between Watt and Creighton is
exceptional in many respects. The letters are unusually explicit and even on occasion illustrated, the erotic and scatological content is interwoven with scientific
and literary discussions, and the letter writers, in particular Watt, lead us into the
heart of British romantic and radical circles. We will argue here that these letters
afford a fascinating look at British male affect and sociability in the period of the
French Revolution and they refocus the discussion of male sexuality and sensibility in unexpected ways.
Lynn Hunt is Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at UCLA. In addition to
working with Margaret Jacob on British radicals of the 1790s, Professor Hunt is preparing a
book on the origins of human rights in the eighteenth century. She has just published with
Jack Censer, Liberty,Equality, Fraternity:Exploring the French Revolution, a textbook with
CD-ROM (Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 2001).
Margaret Jacob is Professor of History at UCLA and a past president of ASECS.Along with
Lynn Hunt, she is currently working on British radicals of the 1790s. With NSF funding (that
helped with this project), she is also working on a long-term project for the period after 1800
and the cultural elements in Western industrial development. Her most recent book is The
Enlightenment. A Brief History with Documents (Bedford).
Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 34, no. 4 (2001) Pp. 491-521.

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First, to the letters themselves. Creighton's letters to Watt-we have many

more from Creighton to Watt than the reverse-opened with playful and fantastic salutations. Creighton addressed Watt as "Adorable Centaur," "Most gracious Satan," "Resplendent Hellflames," "Beneficent Demon," "Armipotent
Chief," "Beautiful blooming Cherubocolos," "Most Enraged Saint," "Sawshawnis Leader, Knight of the Fourth hole," "Satanus Altissimus," and in reference to
their geological interests, "Lord Satan, Wonderful Wonder Work, Steinweisenschaftkunstiger etc etc etc etc, Divine Chieftain," and "Most Gracious leader Prince
of cubes." Creighton signed his missives only a little less colorfully: "I am thine in
the Rocks Chrononhautonthologus," "Peregrinatora Properiwinculum," "Chrononhautonthologus Satanicus," "Kreaunewnheanthownthoughllogloss," and "Thy
carbonaceous slave Chrono. . . ."3
Parody, diablerie, and a kind of carnivalesque male bonding mix together
in these greetings. Although it is impossible to track down every one of the possible allusions intended by the two letter writers, Creighton and Watt did speak of
some shared literary tastes. In October 1800, Creighton reported toWatt that he
had "bought les oeuvres de Rabelais and the Holy Bible at a shop-a most wicked compounding of articles."4 Eight months later Creighton closed an especially
salacious missive by asking Watt if he would like to receive any of Robert Burns's
bawdy songs.5 The fanciful appellations might derive even more directly from
eighteenth-century English burlesque theater, for Henry Carey wrote a play titled
Chrononhotonthologos that was first performed in 1734. Chrononhotonthologos is the king of Queerumania and his courtiers have such tongue-twisting names
as Aldiborontiphoscophornio and Rigdum Funnidos. The plot is too bizarre to
recount, but the play does include some lines that must have appealed to young
men such as Creighton and Watt. In one expulsive scene, for example, the Captain of the Guards announces:
Th'AntipodeanPow'rs,fromRealmsbelow,
Have burstthe solid Entrailsof the Earth.
Gushing such Cataracts of Forces forth.

And in a scene even more typical of burlesque humor and its lowly associations,
Aldiborontiphoscophornio tells the king that the queen is indisposed because
A sudden Diarrhoea's rapid Force,
So stimulates the Peristtaltic [sic] Motion
That all conclude her Royal Life in danger.6

The burlesque and the traditionally carnivalesque came together in parodic celebration of all that was low, whether in the netherworlds of scripture,geology, or the
human body. Above all else, the burlesque took as its targets the sententious and the
pompous. We do not know if Creighton or Watt saw or read Carey'splay, but it was
published repeatedly throughout the eighteenth century.7 We do know, however,
that in the same decade the equally youthful poet Robert Southey and his friend
Grosvenor Charles Bedford sent to their student companion, Charles Collins, playful verses that celebrated the gross and the bodily.8 Southey would gravitate into
the same political and intellectual circles habituated by the young Watt and, in
precisely the period of Watt's naughty correspondence, both Watt and Southey
experimented with nitrous oxide at the Bristol laboratory of Humphry Davy.9

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493

In between his opening salutations and closing signatures, Creighton offered scatological ditties and ribald accounts of his drinking exploits alongside
news of his extensive geological travels, complemented by detailed topographical
drawings of mineral deposits. Creighton and Watt shared an enduring interest in
geology. In 1803, according to Watt's unpublished biography, he and Creighton
toured Scotland and prepared a tentative geological map of much of the land.10
At the time they called their funds for books and equipment the "Satanic account." When Watt replied to Creighton's letters, he often used similar terms of
bawdy endearment ("Carissimus Sawthawnus") and on one occasion jestingly
pleaded: "Do not fail to initiate the great Hairy saint into all the mysteries of filth
and abomination in the North-let him be gorged with polution [sic] & supersaturated with brutality and uncleanliness let him be by a louse bitten & if possible
infected with the Itch."11We do not know the identity of "the great Hairy saint,"
presumably a mutual friend. As might be expected, given the Rabelaisian and
burlesque inspiration of the correspondents, the references to filth and pollution
often focused on the anus. Creighton frequently alluded, for example, to DWdB
(Don Whiskerandos de Brechos), marquis de Torchecul. (In French, torche-cul
translates roughly as "ass wipe.") DWdB might have been an imaginary interlocutor or might refer to Watt himself.
The letters suggest that other men shared in the scatological merriment.
In his letters to Watt, Creighton refers repeatedly to their club of "zealous disciples." The club apparently delighted in a Rabelaisian world that aligned caves
and anuses, gunpowder explosions and defecation, genital sexuality and geological hammers. A few excerpts from Creighton's letters demonstrate the linkages:
Your most divine epistle has been perused times innumerable with
exquisit delight discomposing the gravity of my visage in a most
outrageous manner. The excellent Satanism reflects immortal honour on
the Club-in praise of the ingenious authors of the exploit and triumph
over the Mag: Beshit I will roar an ode of exultation in the Devil's asse
and inscribe their names in the deep Caverns of the Earth-I have
nothing to offer in competition some unlucky fiend seems to pursue me
on any exploit that can be attended with disgrace when detected-the
commentaries shall be suspended and the Acts of the Apostle detailed
since the last Satanic gazette-15 April laboured some hours in a
rubbish heap at Anglezark and met with a considerable number of Gods
in clusters, cavities full of shining Crystals fresh and clean as from the
hand of the maker. ...12
A satanic experiment. . . . Take a closed box full of gunpowder and sink
this in the water of Hockley pool a foot or two with a tube and drain to
the top set fire to a slow burning match and get away as fast as
possible-I understand the explosion of nature truly hellish. Therefore
that the above be put in execution-Guy Faux will be in a situation
suited to his name. Pray are these dispates of the description you
mentioned Don Whiskerandos de Brechos! I exhort thee by the last 12
miles of the beard of Methuselam by the sanctity of thy own posteriors
and the ancient fundamental music of Apollo to compose a descriptive
lyric upon they own divine person and an heroic epistolary account of
the success of the experiment aforesaid.13

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How will the mineher-ological toast for the ladies "the double headed
hammer" sound in the mouths of fair geologists? another for their
benefit I have invented but most like they are old to the learned-the
dart of cupid or the inflexible spear of cupid-have you got in your list
"toes up and toes down."'14

The anal erotic fixation of Creighton and Watt can be found everywhere.
It takes visual form in a letter from Creighton dated 1 April 1800, in which he
provides a diagram of "the Centrifugal Purge" (fig. 1) on the same page with a
drawing of the "zealous disciples" as youthful geologists carrying hammers and
gin bottles. Alongside discussion of their shared geological interests, Creighton
sent the following forthright ditties in December 1802:
Oh that I was a Turd a Turd
Laid in some shitting place
Where I might see my true loves arse
and the shit in my face
I wish his face was in that place
Where Turds & piss do fall
Who with his fingers wipes his arse
and daubs it... on the wall
In a certain great house
That governs this land
When a motion is made
The members must stand
But in this little house
It is quite the reverse
When a motion is made
You sit on your arse
Un et une font deux
Un nombre fort heureux
-En galanterie
Mais quand une fois
Ces deux font trois
C'est la diablerie5

Sometimes the genital sexual meaning was more explicit, even if still infused with
an anal suggestiveness:
Old Caledonia's hills are bare
And Barren are her plains
Barelegged are her charming fair
And bare arsed are her swains.
Can you so cruel & inconstant prove
Unto the raging torments of my love
Not to permit me at your feet to kneel
The first four letters of these lines to feel.

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495

FIGURE 1. Letter from Creighton to Watt, 1 April 1800. Reproduced with permission of the Birmingham City Archives, Birmingham Central Library, Birmingham, U.K.

The "first four letters" of the lines of the stanza spell "cunt." The signature given
was "The first will suit the greater DWdB."16
Why would two young British men write such letters around 1800? It is
not our intention to infer the individual sexual identities of Watt and Creighton
from this combustible combination of carnivalesque and burlesque themes.17 Indeed, the letters do not fit the platonic mood commonplace in passionate letters
between men of the period.18 Yet, neither are we content to dismiss these lines as
the idle jottings of bored and frustrated youths, examples of "perennial" masculine joking about filth, farting, and explosions. Instead, we construe these letters
as ripples of a strong underlying current of affective experimentation in Great
Britain in the 1790s. Like their better-known friends among the circles of scientific

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investigators, political radicals, and romantic poets, Watt and Creighton probed
and tested their emotional lives much as they explored their geological veins. This
affective experimentation is the center of our interest and we trace it outward
from Gregory Watt to his wider circle of friends and acquaintances. We build our
case for an "affective revolution" on the foundation provided by overlapping
exchanges of personal letters, which reveal both the individual interests of the
correspondents and their broader interpersonal linkages. Our argument therefore
rests on both epistolary and biographical evidence. Gregory Watt is our starting
point because his correspondence, not only with Creighton but also with other
young male friends, brings together in one hand, as it were, unusually explicit
scatological and anal erotic enthusiasms, political radicalism, and an abiding interest in the intoxications of both poetry and gases. Watt leads us from his closest
friends Humphry Davy, Thomas Campbell, and Tom Wedgwood right into the
overlapping circles of George Dyer, Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
and William Wordsworth. The zeal for affective experimentation was widely shared
in the circles defined by religious Dissent, scientific innovation, French revolutionary ideals, and romantic poetry.
We use the term "affective" with distinct intent. It conveys better than
any other the combination of internal (emotional) state and external (bodily) expression or disposition. Watt and Creighton-and radicals and romantics generally-explored and experimented in several domains at once. They expected emotional discovery to include some kind of bodily manifestation, whether crudely in
the "exquisit delight discomposing the gravity of my visage" in the act of writing
ditties (or poetry), or in the physical experience Watt and others enjoyed when
they sniffed the newly isolated nitrous oxide gas at Humphry Davy's laboratory.
And the experience could work both ways, with recently explored emotions finding new expressions, or new physical experiences producing new emotions. "Affective" conveys this all-of-a-piece approach toward life that we argue pervades
the circles of radicals and romantics in the 1790s.19
Much has been written of late about British sexuality in the age of the
French Revolution. Broadly sketched, two schools occupy the terrain. The first and
older, Whig or liberal version, associated most obviously with Lawrence Stone, saw
a progressive move throughout the eighteenth century toward "affective individualism" and consequently toward less authoritarian, more companionate relations between men and women and between parents and children.20 While such
settled domesticity may very well describe the lives of Joseph Priestley,James Watt,
and others of the generation of the 1770s, the young radicals of the 1790s wanted
more equality for themselves and much greater intensity in their personal relationships, which cut across all the usual expected family and gender boundaries.2l The
young radicals and romantics of the 1790s explicitly challenged authoritarianism
in politics and personal life and did not stop short of experimenting with outrageous forms of expression or even with their own bodies. The broad changes of
the eighteenth century help explain the eruption of this affective revolution in the
1790s, but cannot account for its specific timing, intensity, or eventual extinction.
The second and newer school of interpretation takes its inspiration, either explicitly or implicitly, from the work of Michel Foucault and offers what
amounts to an anti-Whig account of changes in sexuality.22 Some emphasize the

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broad changes in masculinity over the period 1750-1850; others refer to a more
specific sexual or gender panic in the 1790s.23 But all of these studies insist on a
newly rigid enforcement of gender and sexual identity. It is not our aim to contest
either the general import or even the chronology of these groundbreaking investigations. Rather, we hope to show that the forms of expression between men involved much more negotiation between individual affects and collective prescriptions than is customarily granted in the anti-Whig account. Sexual and gender
attitudes left much more leeway for experimentation and affective expression than
is sometimes imagined. If the 1790s witnessed a gender or sexual panic, they did
so because so much that happened challenged the smooth operation of cultural or
discursive prescription. Although the letters of Watt and his circle tell us virtually
nothing about who fondled whom, they do speak volumes about the willingness
of young men in the 1790s to scoff at the rules just for the sheer pleasure of it.
Personal identity is only partially shaped, moreover, by sexual prescriptions. Following the lead of E. P. Thompson and James A. Epstein, we want to
make the case that Watt and Creighton and their friends, the poets and the natural philosophers, were deeply influenced by their youthful commitment to the
radicalism associated with the French Revolution; they refracted their experiences, including many emotional and sexual ones, through that prism.24 When they
slid off the ledge of radicalism and embraced order and even Toryism (think only
of Southey and Davy) they had nonetheless said (if not done) things that could
remain markers for others. Ultimately, in the history of sexuality broadly conceived, the search for affective styles may prove more fruitful than the quest to
know who did what with whose body.
The French Revolution released a kind of seismic affective energy, not
only among those who witnessed it firsthand, but also further away from its epicenter. While in Paris in 1790, Helen Maria Williams experienced the electric
atmosphere at the Champ de Mars and, like so many other British eyewitnesses,
she vowed that she would "never forget the sensations of that day."25As late as
1795, William Wordsworth could write in barely disguised acceptance of regicide: "Ye kings, in wisdom, sense and power, supreme, / These freaks are worse
than any sick man's dreame. ... Heavens! Who sees majesty in George's face?"26
In the words of the poet Robert Southey, "what a visionary world seemed to open
upon [us] ... nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race."27
The "orgasm of the Revolution," as Southey described it to Coleridge, was perhaps not just metaphorical.28 Radicals and romantics developed new kinds of
intensity in their personal relationships, explored the prospects of democracy,
sniffed newly discovered hallucinogenic gases, and wrote poetry, good and bad.
The language used in these circles for describing political, poetic, and
bodily experiences was strikingly similar. In his laboratory notebook, Humphry
Davy detailed his experience of breathing nitrous oxide; it gave him "a thrilling in
the chest and extremities highly pleasurable impressions were perceived at the
same time with vivid ideas, hearing was more acute; & general pleasurable feeling
seemed to absorb existence. .."29 In February 1801, Watt wrote to Davy to say
that he was sending Davy a copy of Burns's life and performances to smooth
"your brow by the pleasing magic of its contents." Watt also recounted for him
the "beguiling" and "exquisitely insidious" effects of true poetry:

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STUDIES 34 / 4
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
The unwary victim opens the potent volume ... as he proceeds the spell
commences its imperceptible operation as he advances the charmed
numbers acquire more force-The magical letters embrace him more
closely and he unconsciously exists in a circle of enchantment-his
senses are gradually bewildered in a delightful maze unable to retreat he
eagerly advances deeper and deeper till he is only delivered from his
fascinating entanglement by-the end of the performance and he is left
with the indistinct recollections of pleasure.30

The "spell" of poetry, male friendship, and inhaling nitrous oxide all had similar
somatic, and for a time political, effects.
Watt's family background may not explain his zeal for poetry, but it certainly showed him the connection between science, religious Dissent, and radical
politics. James and Annie Watt gave Gregory and his half-brother James Jr. direct
access to leading Dissenters and to scientific experimentation, especially as represented in the Lunar Society of Birmingham. The influence of the scientific and
Dissenting, even secularist, outlook of Gregory's parents is not easy to pin down
but nonetheless all-pervasive. They sent him first to a Dissenting academy in Birmingham and then to Glasgow, places where the young learned to distinguish
themselves from establishment England. For all the conservatism rapidly discovered by the senior Watts when faced with threats to their property and future
livelihood in the 1790s, they and their Lunar Society compatriots clearly sent
their children into the world girded with ideas of Enlightenment, scientific progress,
and political reform.
Even James Sr. could appreciate the bawdy on occasion. James Hutton,
his distinguished geological colleague in the Lunar Society, sent him the following
in 1774:
I wish you all a happy new year.... I have been working upon ...
varnishes ... if a manufacture of beads pinkumbobs and little Jesuses
required this stuff I think blocks might be made of which a faber of this
kind might be incertus camnum faceritne Priapum but our holy religion
in a crucifix admits of both a god and bench in the same piece, and I
think it is possible to make a block for that too . . . your friends are
trying to do something for you what success will attend their endeavours time only with show . . . the honestest endeavour must to succeed
put on the face of roguery . .. come and lick some great mans arse and
be damn'd to you; what signifies blowing wind in the arse of a hot
barrel, or making soap bubbles in another ... Compliments to Madam
Bolton-set all the Bells and hammers of Birmingham a ringing. .. .31
By "Bells and hammers," Hutton refers to the women and men of their Birmingham circle. Hutton could be even more outrageous and funny in his repartee:
my dear philosopher ... I write this to desire something to fill my
vacuum which nature you know abhors-this is the reason that
philosophers whose business it is to turn nature upside down have
invented cylinders full of steam with condensers at their arse which is ...
whipping and spurring nature to work out her ordinary course that
these bougres may sit idle on their arse ... a modern gentleman is not
satisfied with simple action & reaction but when he goes to bed must

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have elasticity forsooth to work for him. .... a smith here has been

consultingme abouttakinga patentfor some improvementof a bed;

I'mthinkingof addingto it a machinewhichshallbe calledthe
muscularmotionwherebyall the severalpartsshallbe performedof
erection,intrusion,reciprocationand injection;this will become
absolutelynecessaryin christiancountriesthat do not allow the eating
of childrenand wherepeoplewill havepleasureat the easiestrate.32
The irreverent and mildly pornographic play about masturbation attests to the
humor allowed among worldly men who at least on these occasions-without
any assistance from the French Revolution-wore their piety lightly. The senior
Watts were wired into an international network of liberal and Dissenting intellectuals that included the Wedgwoods, Priestley, Thomas Beddoes, Erasmus Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, and the Edgeworths in Ireland.33 Its religious cast was
almost entirely Unitarian, when not materialist or deist, and its championing of
commerce and industry included a love of comfort, an abhorrence of the African
slave trade, and a penchant for philanthropy. Their children effortlessly picked up
and expanded upon these ties and values, but they did so within the distinctive
context created by the French Revolution.
The Dissenters of the era were also heirs of a radical tradition that stretched
back to the Revolution of the 1640s and 50s. Some imagined an even longer
lineage. Southey thought that it went back to the medieval uprising of Wat Tyler.34
In the family papers carefully preserved by the Watts rests the notebook of an
uncle dated 1682. It is full of the astrological predictions of John Pordage.35 He
was no run-of-the-mill astrologer, but rather a thorn in the side of royalists during the 1650s who regularly predicted sorry ends for kings and potentates, even
for bankers and clergymen. An acquaintance with anti-royalism complete with its
millenarian associations could be found within the immediate ancestry of the
Watts. Yet even Dissenters who did not fit under the mantle of radicalism were
being told that they wore it by Anglican clergy who never ceased to remind the
nation of who had been responsible for the regicide of Charles I in 1649. And it
would be hard to deny the fit that did exist between the zeal of the "old cause"
Puritans and the millenarian expectations that the French Revolution unleashed
in the thinking and Birmingham sermonizing of Priestley.36For radicals and romantics alike, Priestley was something of a pied piper and the Unitarian tradition
was common to the Watts and the Wedgwoods just as it was to Coleridge and
George Dyer.
The imagery and humor beloved by Watt and his friends was also derived
from the addition of enlightened freethinking to English radicalism. By mid-century, John Cleland's Fanny Hill had given a new meaning to freethinking: rather
than being stoic, it could be both humorous and outrageous. The linkage between
political subversion-the denuding of the high and the mighty-and the obscene
then made its debut with John Wilkes, who used the bawdy and the phallic to
ridicule his opponents. Wilkes's obscene Essay on Woman (1764) gave radical
politics and its coteries a new lascivious pedigree.37 However much Wilkes protested his innocence of its authorship, an unprecedented dimension had been added to the oppositional, anti-corruption stance: the priapic and ribald could be
seen to be allied with reform.38

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The association of the Wilkesite movement with the immoral could, and
did, easily backfire. By the 1770s, an aggrieved public turned on the mores of
those who, above all others, partook in private of the joys associated with freeliving. Voters and publicists sought to lay blame on a profligate aristocracy whose
immorality could be held accountable for disorder at home and failure in the
American colonies. As Phyllis Deutsch argues, in that decade the personal started
to become overtly political. In the moral climate fueled by the ascendant religiosity of the Dissenters, Fox, gamester and ladies man, and by association the Foxite
Whigs, lost the election of 1784 in part because of Fox's perceived moral turpitude.39 A prudery associated with Dissent, and perhaps best articulated by Wilberforce (of antislavery fame), tried to shake off the yoke of godless libertinism by
labeling it as the pastime of the upper classes.
But after Wilkes, the libertine, the bawdy, the irreligious, and the subversive never lost their radical associations, nor the coverall of "blasphemy." In the
mid-1780s, the political temperature rose markedly. John Oswald's British Mercury of 1787 registered its outrage at the attempt by the House of Orange, backed
by the British government, to destroy the republic in The Netherlands. In the
same year, George III issued a proclamation against vice, against "drinking, blasphemy, . . . lewdness ... or other dissolute, immoral, or disorderly practices."40
The opposition press, led by Oswald's British Mercury, probably published by
James Ridgway, responded with lascivious and phallic engravings, most likely by
the then far more liberal James Gillray. The stage was set for the sexualized discourse of the 1790s, for the anti-Jacobin imagery that sought to link subversion
of the social order with sodomy. The French Revolution may have prompted the
genteel classes to embrace civility, but they did so within a context where both left
and right proved more than willing to trample on the mores of genteel discourse,
and elements of the left were willing to abandon many of its affective constraints.41
When in 1791 the Watt family's close friend, the scientist and Unitarian
minister Joseph Priestley, was burned out of his home and laboratory in Birmingham by a Tory-inspired mob, James and Annie were horrified-and worried for
themselves.42Their anxieties did not deter James Jr., however, who was denounced
by Edmund Burke on the floor of Parliament in April 1792 after he and his friend
Thomas Cooper paraded the bust of Algernon Sidney in a march in Paris with the
Jacobins.43 For a time James Jr. contemplated joining Priestley in his attempt to
set up a utopian community in Pennsylvania.44 While residing temporarily in
London between 1791 and 1794, Priestley became a magnet for the rising generation of Cambridge and London radicals. George Dyer, the Hays sisters (Mary
and Elizabeth), William Frend, and by association, Anne Plumptre and Ann Cristall, can all be traced to the circle that met regularly for tea at the Priestley
home.45 By this time in London radicals and romantics had come to inhabit essentially the same social universe.46 A few years later and now finished with university, young Gregory Watt, the next generation of Wedgwoods, and the then
unknown Sydney Smith frequented liberal and left political circles meeting at the
"King of Clubs."47

As a student at Glasgow University between 1792 and 1796, Watt was

too young to accompany his brother to Paris and too far away to know much
firsthand about either Priestley's utopian scheme or its close cousin, "pantisocra-

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cy," the thought experiment dreamed up in 1794 by Coleridge and Southey, with
assistance from George Dyer. One of the main purposes of pantisocracy was to
glorify egalitarian and polymorphous affection.48 But Watt no doubt knew of the
intense political struggle in Scotland between radical and artisanal clubs modeled
on the example of the French Revolution and a British government intent on
suppressing them. In 1793 and 1794 leading Scottish radicals were convicted of
sedition and given harsh sentences of transportation. Two were sentenced to death
for high treason (although only one was executed).49 Their proclamation had
invoked the time-honored imagery of the Norman yoke laid upon the free born
and called for "annual parliaments, and universal suffrage."s0 Most of the professors at Glasgow University opposed the French Revolution, but Watt studied
with the minority who supported it, among them Robert Cleghorn in chemistry,
George Jardine in logic, Archibald Arthur in moral philosophy, Thomas Reid and
John Millar.51 His tutor Thomas Jackson was blocked from gaining an appointment as professor of natural philosophy in 1796 because of his political opinions.s2 Radical students and teachers in the university and militant artisans in the
street may have shared common ideological commitments, yet a wide class gulf
separated them and only promoted the internalization and emotional transubstantiation of these sentiments among young men en route to gentility and the
professions.
In Glasgow Watt also came into contact with the Burnsian form of romanticism that celebrated the bawdy, irreligious, and subversive.5s3Watt's correspondence, moreover, provides concrete evidence for the circulation of the bawdy
Burns songs to at least a limited public. Burns devoted a special notebook to his
collection of bawdy folksongs (a notebook never found), but they long had an
uncomfortable-and usually nonexistent-place in his collected works. The only
known version of them is an anonymous 1800 edition titled The Merry Muses,
published most likely in Edinburghfour years after the poet's death-and coinciding
nicely with the dates of the correspondence between Watt and Creighton. Scholars surmise that Burns put his collection together for a drinking club of which he
was a member, the Crochallan Fencibles of Edinburgh.54 In 1789 he sent one of
his songs to Provost Robert Maxwell of Lochmaben with this prefatory note:
I shallbetakemyselfto a subjecteverfertileof themes,a Subject,the
turtle-feastof the Sonsof Satan,and the delicious,secretSugar-plumb
of the Babesof Grace;a Subject,sparklingwith all the jewelsthat Wit
can find in the minesof Genius,and pregnantwith all the storesof
Learning,fromMoses & Confuciusto Franklin& Priestly-in short,
mayit pleaseYourLordship,I intendto writeBAUDY!
" which in the conThe song that followed had eleven stanzas ending with "text could only stand for "cunt," a word he used explicitly on occasion.ss
Burns connected some of his bawdy songs to the French Revolution. In
the song "Why Should Na Poor People Mow" (for which there is a manuscript
version in his own hand dated 12 December 1792 with "Mow" crossed through),
Burns contrasted the high and mighty with the lowborn in a burlesque fashion.
All engage in mowing, that is, in sexual intercourse. In the second stanza, for
instance, he writes:

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WhenBrunswick'sgreatPrincecam a cruisingto France,

Republicanbilliesto cowe,
Bauld Brunswick's great prince wad hae shawn better sense,
At hame wi' his Princess to mow.

The chorus ran:

And why shouldnapoor peoplemow,mow,mow,
Andwhy shouldnapoor peoplemow:
The Greatfolk hae siller,& houses& lands,
Poor bodieshae naethingbut mow.s6
On occasion Burns could wax scatological. He described "There was Twa Wives"
in January 1792 as "an old Cloaciniad song":
Therewas twa wives, and twa witty wives,
As e'erplay'dhoughmagandie,
And they coost out, upon a time,

Out o'er a drinko' brandy;

Up Maggyrose, and forthshe goes,
And she leavesauldMaryflytin,
And she f-rted by the byre-en'
For she was gaun a sh-ten."7

After his premature death in 1796, Burns's reputation was highly controversial.s8
Thus from him and perhaps as well from a more general Scottish connection
between the bawdy, the drinking club, and the revolutionary, Watt and his friends
daringly got many of the elements of their own merry-making: the young men's
club enjoying off-color songs and ditties, the shared delight in "satanic" and political transgression, even the geological/anal/genital link to jewels and mines
(though Burns'stransgressive humor was always resolutely heterosexual and much
less anal erotic in focus than the Creighton-Watt fantasies). Within this context
lay the possibility for young men like Watt and Creighton to breach old barriers
and to explore the bawdy and the scatological that-if lived-could produce lives
breathtakingly modern in their style and affect.
Most educated young men carried on correspondence with their male
friends, but hardly in the same vein mined by Watt and his closest friends.59 The
"triumvirate" (as they called themselves) of William Pattisson, Thomas Amyot,
and Henry Crabb Robinson, for example, exchanged many letters at just about
the same time (1794-99). Just two years older than Watt (they were all born in
1775), two of them came from similar circles of religious Dissent, all three took a
passionate interest in the French Revolution, and Robinson became at least briefly a follower of William Godwin. Yet despite an occasional moment of tension or
jealousy and much discussion of poetry, the correspondents always took a "resolutely high-minded and non-erotic" tone, according to the editors of the letters.
"Dear Pattisson" occasionally gave way to "Dear Friend," but that was as far as
explicit emotional expression went. When Amyot defined poetry to Pattisson, he
used none of the romantic language Watt employed with Davy: "Poetry," Amyot
opined, "is an Imitation of the works of nature either visible and substantial or
invisible & ideal... Measure I must insist on as a necessary adjunct of Poetry."60
Religious Dissent, political radicalism, and an interest in poetry did not guarantee

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participation in what we are calling the affective revolution, yet the eruption of
experimentation in affect did clearly have its sources deep within those circles.
Indeed, of the many forms of sociable gathering we have studied-from Jacobin
clubs, masonic lodges, and literary-philosophical societies-nothing prepared us
for the content of these and other letters found amid the Watt papers.
Before Creighton, Watt had a somewhat similar, but more emotionally
charged, relationship with a boyhood friend, whose father was also a key figure
among the "lunatics" in the Lunar Society. William Withering, with a father of
the same name, enjoyed a friendship with Watt that dated from their Birmingham
years. He too came from an intellectually distinctive family. Withering Sr. discovered and published new uses for digitalis, while having close connections to Thomas Beddoes (who was married to the sister of Maria Edgeworth) and Joseph
Priestley.61Like their talented fathers, young Gregory and William shared an interest in matters scientific.62 The youths also shared a penchant for the scatological and had formed some sort of club.63 Gregory entertained William with a
sketch he claimed replicated carvings found in a church: "when the seats are
turned up they display a number of curious groups carved on the underside of
them. One of the most ludicrous is two fellows injecting a blyster into another by
means of a pair of bellows ... Yours G. Watt." The accompanying naughty poem
and drawing of two men holding down another revels in the penetration scene:
In vainwith horridyells the sufferercries
Invokesthe gods and rolls his ardenteyes
The ruffiansply theircruelwork nor hear
His humbleprayersnor heedhis tricklingtear
G. Wattinventet64
Shared political interests are evident in the letter of March 1793 in which
the fourteen year old Gregory sends his own drawing of the assassination of the
French republican hero Le Pelletier de Saint Fargeau, dedicated to Withering. Le
Pelletier was killed on the day of the king's execution in January for having voted
for the death sentence. In the same letter, Watt announces that he has started
reading the Greek odes of Anacreon, a poet reputed, then and now, to be a lover
of boys.65 In June 1794, the letters grew more emotional. Watt's sister, Jessy, had
become seriously ill and within days succumbed to the tuberculosis that would
likewise claim Watt's life in 1804. Watt told of her illness and sends William
poetry.66 In 1795 Annie Watt complained to her son that he kept his love for
poetry secret from her, sharing it only with friends such as William.67
A love of poetry also linked Watt to Thomas Campbell, the eventual, if
very minor, successor to Burns and perhaps the most aggressively republican of
Watt's friends. When fourteen years old and already a university student at Glasgow-a not uncommon pattern-Campbell wrote that "real sympathy lays aside
all distinctions of rank, or circumstances, and bids us be the general friends of
mankind."68 In 1793 Campbell joined the debating society to which Watt belonged. Campbell saw a great deal of Watt and later described him as "literally
the most beautiful youth I ever saw,"''69while Watt for his part delighted in his
friend, "an eccentric animal" as he described him to William.70 In Edinburgh,
amid the drama of the 1794 political trials, Campbell "became a democrat" and

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began to obsess about politics, his studies, and his future.71 In that same year he
dedicated a manuscript volume of poems to Gregory Watt that included poetic
responses from Gregory, both expressing themes inspired by events in France.72
Campbell also became intimate friends with James Thomson, another classmate.
In 1795 Campbell wrote to Thomson in London: "Gregory is still among us-He
and I are at present very intimate, but as different souls as ever God created ... G
is all volubility & solution of copper-for me you would take me for a Spaniard-as sober as a Socrates."73 At about the same time, Campbell wrote to Thomson more ambivalently: "Gregory Watt is in town at present. He has got seven
coats of brass upon his face, swears like an Irish dragoon, and grows no longer
purple and blue at meeting the professors, but chatters to them with great confidence."74
The Glasgow debating society may be the origin of, or the model for,
Watt's 1800 club of zealous disciples. Campbell said later that the debating society was called the "Discursive" and was composed "almost entirely of boys as
young as myself," with Watt playing a prominent role because he was "a youth
unparalleled in his early talent for eloquence."75 Campbell seems to have been
much taken with Watt: he dedicated poems to him, composed a witty satire on
Watt's tutor Thomas Jackson ("Leave, leave for once the toilsome tutor / Tom
humbly begs, a suppliant suitor"), and in 1799 sent Watt a personally dedicated
copy of his newly published collection of poems, The Pleasures of Hope. Watt left
Campbell, like Creighton, a small legacy in his will.76 Campbell recalled later:
"never did my affection form a stronger regard than that friendship which made
us inseparable companions for some of the happiest years of my life."77
Two slightly older men were also especially close to Watt: his tutor Jackson and Francis Jeffrey. Over time Jackson and Watt had become intimate friends
and Watt imagined that "Now we are hand to hand, and you have squeezed my
fingers so hard that you have made the tears come into my eyes-but in those
tears there is more Pleasure than of Pain."78 In a long and heartfelt letter written
to James Watt Jr. on hearing of the death of Gregory, Jackson called him "my
favourite pupil and most esteemed friend." Jackson mentioned the weekly meetings of the debating society and described with affection the many hours he and
Watt spent together in Jackson's lodgings after the day's tuition was finished. He
recounted receiving many letters from Watt during the summer recess. Watt, he
said, used the "most unreserved and confidential freedom" and "assumed all variety of styles and often indulged himself in a playfully ludicrous phraseology."79
(We can only wonder what this might have been.) Jeffrey was three years Watt's
senior and did not overlap with him during his own studies at Glasgow, but they
met soon after and became lifelong friends. Jeffrey had been radicalized by witnessing the state trials in 1794 and retained an interest in politics that he discussed with Watt.80 Within the context of this entirely male-centered universe
that Watt occupied, it is worth noting that he was known for his standoffish
reaction to women.81
Watt's infatuations ran a predictably tumultuous course. In the autumn
1795,
William Withering had intended to join Watt in Glasgow.82 Yet at about
of
this time Watt wrote to him about their friendship in the past tense: "there was a
time Sir when you and I were considered as friends, nay more when we consid-

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505

ered ourselves as such ... Thomas Campbell was once attached to me & I had
some affection for him. These were the halcyon days [whose] return can never be
expected there everything was contemplated thru a deceitful medium, every thing
appeared lively. Nor were present objects alone delightful. ... ." The letter trails
off and its form of address tells of their breach: "Sir-for friend I dare not call
you." The next letter (also undated) is abject. Watt expresses his hope that Withering has not told his family of his conduct, that "it remains locked up in your
breast." Mournfully, he hopes only that "our literary partnership" survives. "My
conduct, Sir must have nipt in the bud the return of that affection which I once
believed I felt for you, and which you felt for me that affection which with unparalleled folly & brutality [I] have nearly destroyed and have now annihilated. You
are the second of my friends whom I have cut from me [the first was Campbell]But you are the first towards whom I have acted with dishonour."83 We cannot
ascertain the cause of these breaks. Watt vowed "to write a penetentiary letter to
Thomas Campbell. Bitter as this would once have been I trust I shall now perform
it without emotion." He further contemplates giving up the friendship of John
Douglas and his tutor, Jackson.84 In fact, however, Watt remained in attenuated
contact with Jackson, Campbell, and especially with Withering.85 The pattern of
intense relationship followed by a rupture that led either to a final break or more
usually a lower key rapport is common to many of the relationships in these
circles in the 1790s and early 1800s. In a far different emotional register, the
highly idealized and moralistic friendship of Coleridge and Wordsworth serves as
yet another example of this instability. It also characterizes-not coincidentallymany of these young people's reactions to the French Revolution.86 Disappointment was quick to follow on great attractions and enthusiasms.
After finishing the academic year 1795-96 in Glasgow, Watt went home
to Birmingham to join the family business, yet the intensity of his feelings for
other men continued and his involvement in romantic circles also deepened. An
attack of illness in May 1797 made business life problematic. Having already lost
a daughter to consumption, the Watt parents arranged to send Gregory south to
Penzance, where he boarded with a widow recommended to the Watts, Mrs. Davy.
Here Watt established another intense relationship with a young man almost exactly his age, Mrs. Davy's son, Humphry Davy (b. 1778). Watt supposedly "discovered" Davy as a budding scientist; they discussed mineralogy and chemistry
together and Watt spoke often to friends of Davy's "great promise" as a poet.87
Whatever Watt's own personal involvement in fostering Davy's subsequent scientific career, there is no doubt that they became fast friends and that the Watt
family connections, especially to Thomas Beddoes, gave Davy the start he needed.88
Watt spent several months in Penzance before returning home. During the same
time, both he and Davy became fast friendswith Tom Wedgwood, who also had been
sent to Penzance for his health.89 In October 1798 Davy accepted Beddoes's invitation to join him as his assistant at the Pneumatic Institution in Clifton, a suburb
of Bristol. By experimenting on himself, a common method at the time, Davy
isolated the pure form of nitrous oxide ("laughing gas") in April 1799. The publication of his research on the gas made him a scientific star at age twenty-one.90
Although Watt did not write to Davy the same kinds of letters that he
exchanged with Creighton (as least as far as we can determine), he did beseech his

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EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY

friend for communication.91 In a letter dated only 24 March (from the context,
1799 or 1800), Watt wrote to "My Dear Alchymist" with his complaints about
not receiving any news from Davy:
Whatin the nameof the Museshas so compleatlyabsorbedyou that
not one half hourcould be sparedfor yourcagealy[?]expectant
correspondent.... In perusingthe Anthology[in whicha poemof
Davy'sappeared]I with pleasurerenewedmy acquaintancewith some
of the poemsyou so obliginglygratifiedme with when at Penzanceand
was muchpleasedwith the ode to St. Michael'sMoundwhichyou
recollectendeavoringto reciteon that memorableday whenI had the
honourof beingyourMystagoguein yourinitiationinto the orgiesof
the mirthinspiringBacchus.
He went on to offer an arresting comparison between Davy's friendship and the
effects of inhaling gas: "Have mercy therefore on the sick and low in spirit and
favour me with a letter which coming from your hand will contain all the soul
awakening effects of the gaz..Ox..Az." A hint of a new kind of club appears when
he describes the "conversion" of Robinson Boulton, son of Matthew, and himself
to the gas: "we have been most zealous apostles."92
Watt started using nitrous oxide sometime in 1799. In exasperation, Watt
wrote Davy on 13 November 1799-in a postscript to a letter from his father to
Davy detailing his design for a breathing apparatus-and told him of his difficulty in repeating the gas experiments with Robinson Boulton. He begged Davy,
"inform us exactly by what process you generate sublime sensations and be the
ladder by which we may ascend to the Heaven of Heavens."93 In October 1800,
en route back to Bristol and Davy's laboratory, Watt wrote to his "Amiable Philosopher" in eager anticipation: "Get an air holder of gas [prepared?] for I am
determined to ascend heaven."94 For Watt, inhaling nitrous oxide aroused feelings not dissimilar to those he experienced in reading poetry, which by his own
account left his senses "gradually bewildered in a delightful maze."95
Watt was not alone in making the connections between taking in nitrous
oxide and an experience of the sublime. Davy described his own experiments
with the gas in great detail in his personal notebooks. On 26 December 1799,
after months of trying different methods of delivery and different mixtures, Davy
shut himself into an airtight box and breathed twenty quarts of the gas:
The sensationswere superiorto any I everexperienced.Inconceivably
pleasurable.Ideasweremorevivid & associatedtogethermuchmore
rapidly& so associatedwith wordsas to produce,perceptionsperfectly
novel.Theoriespassedrapidlythro the mindbelievedI may say
intensely.At the sametime that everythinggoing on in the roomwas
perceived,I seemedto be a sublimebeing,newlycreated& superiorto
othermortals.96
In a poem Davy wrote on the effects of taking the gas, he rhapsodized:
Not in the ideal dreamsof wild desire
Have I behelda rapturewakeningform
My bosomburnswith no hallowedfire
Yetis my cheekwith rosy blusheswarm

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Yetaremy eyeswith sparklinglustrefilled

Yetis my mouthcompletewith murmuringgases[?]
Yetaremy limbswith inwardtransportsthrilled
Andclad with new bornmightinessaround.97
Beddoes's and Davy's experiments drew a remarkable array of visitors to
Bristol who eagerly inhaled the gas out of a silk bag attached to a reaction vessel
invented by James Watt. Beddoes and the Bristol publisher Joseph Cottle brought
Davy into personal contact with Southey, Coleridge, and William Wordsworth.98
Southey and Coleridge both visited the laboratory, and Coleridge and Wordsworth
briefly contemplated setting up their own laboratory with Davy's help. Coleridge
wrote to Davy of his wish to include the scientist in some kind of utopian experiment.99 After Davy moved to London in 1801, Coleridge wrote to him lamenting
their separation and in 1801-02 he attended Davy's lectures at the Royal Institution in London.100 In nearly every letter to his friends in 1799, Southey waxed
lyrical about Davy's brilliance in science or about his poetry, some of which Southey
soon published.'01 Southey instantly latched on to "the new pleasure" he experienced with the gas Davy provided: "the last symptom is a feeling of strength & an
impulse to exert every muscle. For the remainder of the day it left me with increased hilarity & with my hearing, taste and smell certainly more acute. I conceive this gas to be the atmosphere of Mohammeds Paradise."102Experimentation in the new science of gases clearly enhanced the turn toward a new form of
enthusiasm that was personal, poetical, scientific, and ultimately also political.
Watt, Davy, Tom Wedgwood (who like Watt came to Bristol to try the
and
gas
whose family bankrolled the struggling Coleridge),103Southey and others
shared in this radicalism, if only for a time. Davy hinted at the political undertow
when he wrote: "Tomorrow a party of philosophers meet at the [Royal] Institution [where he moved in February 1801], to inhale the joy-inspiring gas. It has
produced a great sensation-ga ira."104The "ga ira" in Davy's letter, though perhaps inadvertent, evoked the French Revolution since it was one of the revolutionary watchwords-from a song of that title.'s0 Earlier, Davy's mentor Beddoes
had always linked pneumatic medicine with the cause of political and social reform, and he suffered the consequences of his position. Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, went out of his way to ostracize Beddoes. According to
James Watt Jr. writing in 1794, "Dr Banks will not subscribe [to the Pneumatic
Institution]; he thinks Beddoes a Jacobin and opposes all Jacobin innovations.
Even the purity of my father's principles does not help Beddoes with the contagion of the connection. I apprehend the secret committee of the Royal Society
regarded him as a lost sheep."'06 Beddoes's financial support came from Boulton
and Watt, the Wedgwoods, other members of the Lunar Society, and various physicians and professors in Edinburgh. In 1797 the Beddoes circle still warranted
the attention of a Home Office spy.l07
Davy too was influenced by the freethinking attitudes common in the
Lunar Society circle. At the time of his nitrous oxide experiments, Davy espoused
a radical and heretical materialist philosophy. As Jan Golinski asserts, Davy "interpreted the effects of the gas in a way that connected him directly with the
tradition of Enlightenment materialism."08 So too did Beddoes-at least that is
what Coleridge told the fellow radical, John Thelwall.'09 By 1798 The Anti-Ja-

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cobin had linked the materialism found in Davy's scientific circle with ribaldry
and revolutionary upheaval, portraying the "pneumatic revellers" as enthusiasts
enjoying orgies of intoxication and sexual license.110Davy was hardly alone in
his youthful atheism. In the mid-1790s the feminist and revolutionary Mary Hays
defended the materialism of Helvetius and used it to argue that men and women
do not possess different "natural powers, aptitudes and dispositions.""' A few
years earlier, William Frend had seen her as a Unitarian, but it is likely that she
retreated even further away from her original theism or deism. George Dyer wrote
to her sometime in the mid-90s and passed along "my respects to any of yr friends,
who enquire after me, whether they are disciples of Helvetius, or like your good
mother, continue true and faithful to Jesus Christ."112He does not imply that Mrs
Hays's daughter remains a follower of Christ. If young women left the faith of
their mothers, then young men like Watt and Creighton-whose letters evince not
a scintilla of piety-might have had more to hide than the bawdy.
A rabidly anti-Jacobin literature, distinctive to the 1790s, claimed detailed knowledge of "Infidel Society" wherein reigns a "degeneracy of principle
and practice" and men drown "in the stagnant pool of French Atheism . .. like
the deadly lake of Sodom . .. mortal to the taste.""3 The radicals in their clubs,
according to the anti-Jacobin pundits, were "degraded mortals" who prided themselves on being nothing more than mere organizations of matter. Anglican preachers, armed with a physico-theology of Newtonian origin, argued that "the Democratic school would make us believe, that particles, of inert matter, from their
most chaotic state, could dance, into form and order."114The radicals embraced,
it was claimed, a "wild and unshackled freedom of thought.""5 The anti-Jacobins
postulated a clandestine genealogy of immorality where domestic vice or disappointment, or the fear of succumbing to secret and homosexual desire, fueled
political allegiances."16The pious among them imagined that the reading of the
classics, even Shakespeare, could lead to "saturnalian licentiousness . . . [that
could] pass to the loathsome orgies of Priapus."'117Put in the alarmist language of
the day, "the Revolution, which has shaken Europe to its centre. . . has worked,
and is working, changes in the moral world, no less dreadful than those which it
has effected in the political."'18 James Gillray's 1801 engraving, "Anacreonticks
in full song," seemed to capture these fears (fig. 2). We do not know if the Revolution activated a new licentiousness, but we do believe that it generated a new
affective intensity among men and possibly-although they are largely beyond
the scope of this essay-among women.
Even before the The Anti-Jacobin conjured up the linkage between degeneracy and French atheism, Tory propaganda of the 1790s reflected, as well as
sought to fuel, an unprecedented level of sexual innuendo-what some have called
a sexual panic."19In 1791 James Gillray produced engravings that suggested the
rape of George III by the radical Horne Tooke.120At the same time anti-Jacobin
and anti-Whig propaganda depicted Fox as defecating in his britches and ridiculed the Whigs in terms not dissimilar to those of the Creighton-Watt correspondence (e.g., diablerie and a lurid preoccupation with naked bums, though in this
case susceptible to flagellation rather than coprophilia):

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FIGURE 2. James Gillray, "Anacreonticks in full song," 1801, page 23 verso bottom. Reproduced
with permission of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Paul F. Walter, 1980, [1980.1104 (2)].

Thus Satan lead, as artfully, his Clan,

As F[o]x, not Guy Faux, but as dark a man,
Leads his thin'd pack, whipp'd in by Sh [e]r[ida]nA Clan, so naked, that 'twas apt enough,
E'en then to've stiled the corps-not Blue-but Buff;
For tho' the Diaboliads cou'd make Speeches,
They, doubtless, had of old-not any Breeches.
How soon our MODERN DIABOLIADS' STATE

May lit'rally be in buff, is known to Fate; 121

Sexual innuendo was by no means the exclusive property of the political

right. The earnest among the radicals thought that the libertine and the homoerotic resided solely amid the ranks of the court and aristocracy. At least, so said
the Sheffield Corresponding Society in letters sent to Edinburgh and seized by the
state. It thought that "male prostitutes" worked the crowd of venal place seekers
and sycophants.122 In the propaganda war that erupted after 1789 in Britain,
everyone could be morally suspect.123Revolutions experienced even vicariously
can excite suspicions and energize efforts at repression, as well as actually elicit
new and experimental affects and emotions; "Democratic Liberty,Personal Equality, and Universal Fraternity are figures of speech that impress the imagination
very forcibly . . . and make a direct appeal to our passions."1'24
Yet, even when indulging in political fantasy, the anti-Jacobins correctly
sensed that something fundamental was afoot. As one otherwise silly tract from
early in the 1790s opined:

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At a period when the Kingdoms of the earth are shook upon their
settled foundations-when Kings are humbled to the dust by those they
are born to govern ... it is not very wonderful that the physical

economyand organizationof the humanbody should,in manyinstances, experience something of sympathetic and similar revolutions.125

The Watt-Creighton correspondence and the threads linking Gregory Watt to scientific experimentation, political radicalism, and romantic poetry show that in
Britain the French Revolution did have a somatic effect that resonated outward
into many of life's domains.126
Yet, as the Watt-Withering and Watt-Campbell interaction illustrates,
moths drawn to an emotional flame, experimenters in friendship, flirts who played
with the erotic could get burnt. There is a timbre in the emotional lives of these
minor figures that resonates with the griefs and disappointments-also with the
erotic overtones-that so famously beset the Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth
circle. In 1794 Southey pushed Coleridge to marry Sara Fricker so that all would
have their companion of the opposite sex. Both men married Fricker sisters who
would be their companions in the pantisocratic utopia. Almost immediately Coleridge knew that his mistake had been a dire one and then, to make matters
worse, quarreling erupted about how expenses and the sharing of private property would be arranged once they got to their Pennsylvania paradise. For a year the
two men's friendship lay on the rocks and when it resumed, at the least for Coleridge, it was never the same. It did continue, but in a lower emotional register.127
Southey may have taken many years to cool his ardor for Coleridge.28 The connection among Coleridge and Dorothy and William Wordsworth was also an
intense one, subject to well-known epiphanies, ruptures, and renewals.129Josiah
Wedgwood Jr. thought that Wordsworth and Coleridge should remain separate
and believed that Coleridge would benefit from "mixed company."130The same
intensities of relationship, enthusiasm and falling out, can be seen everywhere
among the radicals and the romantics.
The pattern of affective experimentation, of intense infatuation, and in
the case of Watt and Creighton, of outright transgression past polite boundariesat the very least verbal-disrupts any supposed lockstep progression of rigidly
prescribed gender norms, of enforced heterosexuality, or of feeble retreat when
faced with the social implications of democratic politics. The supporters of the
crown who opposed every revolution from Boston to Amsterdam and Paris may
have fashioned a new rigidity in their thinking about gender and the appropriately masculine. But were the young rebels of the 1790s listening to their starchy
elders? We are suggesting that the rigidity about what men and women could
become, articulated perhaps first in response to the American Revolution, may
have taken a long time to make its way into the lives of young men and women
fired up after 1789 by events across the Channel.131
The signs of gender instability, of a failure to assume the appropriately
masculine roles, are evident most famously in the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle,
but can also be found in many "lesser" lives.132An editor of the letters of Thomas
Campbell, his personal physician, altered a letter that Campbell wrote to his intimate friend, John Richardson, because it made the editor uncomfortable.33
Humphry Davy faced rumors and published ridicule when he abruptly married a

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511

widowed bluestockingat age thirty-five.The childlesscouple becameknown for

public quarrelingand in his last years,Davy traveledto the continentwithout his
wife. His companion on his last journey was John James Tobin, his godson and

son of his friendJohn Tobin, a physicianand playwright.134

None of these men
and their friendships are easily classified, then or now, and they may be as strange
to us as they were to their parents.13s All the evidence suggests that they were
experimenting with emotions or affections they themselves could not readily label. Men who lived in the intense heat of the moment that was the 1790s experienced an opening up of affect rather than a shutting down. Their zeal for experimentation, with politics, poetry, gas, and emotional expression, makes them seem
harbingers of an affective revolution whose consequences are still with us.

NOTES
1. Our work was facilitated by the suggestions of several friends and colleagues, especially Felicity Nussbaum, Larry Stewart, Richard Sher, Ellen Dubois, and Nicholas Roe.
2. The letters between Watt (1777-1804) and Creighton only became available to the public in
1995 when the Birmingham Central Library purchased a large number of manuscripts from a descendant of the Watts. Birmingham Central Library, Birmingham, U.K. (hereafter BCL). Boulton and
Watt MS, Parcel B/1, Matthew Robinson Boulton to James Watt Jr., 15 January 1795, "Mr Creighton waits to carry this letter to the box." Boulton and Watt MS, Box 19/2, letters from Boulton and
Watt assistants in Soho including one letter from Creighton dated 20 July 1795. In a memorandum
of agreement dated July 1800, Creighton is described as a "Manchester engineer." Boulton and Watt
MS, Box 39/42, 12 July 1800, signed by James Watt Jr., Gregory Watt (although his name is crossed
out) and the Boultons, father and son. Boulton and Watt MS, Box 33/2 on his contract renewals; Box
39/51 on his death. The firm employed Creighton until his death in 1831 when, having never married, he was survived by a sister. During his last year with the firm his salary was 300 per annum.
3. The Creighton-Gregory Watt material comes from BCL, James Watt MS (hereafter JWP), C2/
14 and 6/10; 6/22 for letters from Watt to Creighton. All acquired in 1995 from Doldowlod House.
Quotations here from JWP, C2/14, 1796-1804, letters from W. Creighton to G. Watt, ranging from
May 1800 to May 1801.
4. JWP, C2/14. Letter from Creighton dated Glasgow, 23 October 1800.
5. JWP, C2/14. Letter from Creighton dated 23 June 1801, signed "Chrononhautonthologus
Satanicus."
6. Quotes from The Tragedy of Chrononhotonthologos, repr. in Simon Trussler, ed., Burlesque
Plays of the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), 220 and 224.
7. The English Short Title Catalogue lists 19 different publication dates between 1734 and 1800.
Two later versions, from 1777 and 1800, found at the Indiana University Library, do not vary in any
significant way from the 1734 version reprinted by Trussler (see note 6). It may have been true, as
Mikhail Bakhtin argued, that Rabelais fell out of favor in the eighteenth century-"in no other time
was Rabelais so little understood and appreciated as during that era"-but Rabelaisian humor had
clearly not disappeared. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, tr. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1968), 116. On the burlesque in general and Carey in particular, see V. C. ClintonBaddeley, The Burlesque Tradition in the English Theatre after 1660 (London: Methuen, 1952).
8. Huntington Library, California, MSS HM 44803 (hereafter HM). Letter dated 16 September
1793 to Collins, "The blisterbroke-what cam away / Is far too foul for us to say / Suffice that bolt
into our faces / It flew & left its nasty traces / And then we'd nothing else to do / But wipe ourselves
and then-wipe you." Southey was three years older than Watt.
9. See John Ayrton Paris, The Life of Sir Humphry Davy, 2 vols. (London: Colburn and Bentley,
1831), 1:59-62, 198-200; Royal Institution, London, Davy MSS (hereafter Davy MSS), HD 20b, f.
111, on Southey taking the gas in March 1799.

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10. BCL, Matthew Boulton Papers, 357/50. "Memoir of Gregory Watt. Son of the Great Engineer, By James Patrick Muirhead, M.A. Author of the Life of James Watt" (hereafter "Muirhead
Memoir"). The Memoir is not paginated.
11. JWP, 6/22. G. Watt to "carissimus sawthawnus," i.e., W. Creighton, in Glasgow, 9 Nov 1803.
They are also discussing Watt's scientific quarrel with the Huttonians. On 3 November, Creighton
was simply "Dear Sawthawn" and, on 20 March 1803, "Sawthawn!"
12. JWP, C2/14. Letter from Creighton dated Manchester, 7 May 1800.
13. JWP, C2/14. Letter from Creighton dated Manchester, 19 Feb 1800.
14. JWP, C2/14. Letter from Creighton dated Manchester, 21 May 1801.
15. JWP, C2/14. Letter from Creighton dated Glasgow, 16 December 1802. In it, amid chatter
about rocks, Creighton remarks that he "sent in my last dispatches from Manchester some elegant
plates of Satanic amusements for the club-& composed a few more designs lately where I stopt all
night illustrative of Scotch manners, etc. .... The last subject is 2 highlanders travelling in a storm
blowing furiously-with an inscription fragment translated from the arse Language." One plate in
particular is "formed on the subject 'beeking in the sun' from Nature." Beeking consisted in exposing oneself. Then follows some doggerel verse on the comforts of having "the bum warm and snugly
cover'd parts" and another on "rubbing himself on a post."
16. JWP, C2/14. Letter from Creighton dated 23 June 1801, signed "Chrononhautonthologus
Satanicus."
17. It is nonetheless worthy of note that in this period the slang used to describe sodomy included

"breeches-cladbawds," "penchantfor breeches,""whiskereddalliance,"and "diabolism,"expressions that resonate with those employed by Creighton and Watt, especially the cryptic allusions to
Don Whiskerandos de Brechos, marquis de Torchecul. For slang of the period, see [Robert Holloway], The Phoenix of Sodom, or the Vere Street Coterie. Being an Exhibition of the Gambols Practised by the Ancient Lechers of Sodom and Gomorrah, embellished and improved with the Modern
Refinements in Sodomitical Practices (London: J. Cook, 1813), 15, 29, 44, and 48.
18. See, for example, Robert L. Mack, Thomas Gray. A Life (New Haven and London: Yale
Univ. Press, 2000), 644-52; cf. Robert F. Gleckner, Gray Agonistes. Thomas Gray and Masculine
Friendship (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997).
19. Our analysis complements, though it concerns different sources, Claudia Johnson, Equivocal
Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), esp. 1 on "egregious affectivity."
20. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, (New York: Harper
and Row, 1979).
21. On pater Watt and his wife Annie, see Margaret C. Jacob, Scientific Culture and the Making
of the Industrial West (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), 111-30.
22. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, tr. Robert Hurley (New
York: Pantheon, 1978). See, for example, Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700-1800 (New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1997).
23. John Tosh, "The Old Adam and the New Man," in Tim Hitchcock and Michle Cohen, eds.,
English Masculinities, 1660-1800 (New York: Longman, 1999). Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the
Gender Revolution. Vol. 1: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998). Katherine Binhammer, "The Sex Panic of the 1790s," Journal of
the History of Sexuality 6 (1996): 409-35.
24. In emphasizing the impact of the French Revolution, we echo E. P. Thompson's analysis of the
romantics. He focused on "this transmutation of the political claims of 6galit into the interior life."
The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age (New York: The New Press, 1997), 13. See also
James A. Epstein, Radical Expression. Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 17901850 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), 6-16.

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25. Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge. The Radical Years(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988),
21, quoting from her Letters Written in France, in the Summer 1790 (London, 1790), 14. We are
deeply indebted to Roe's book and to the approach it exemplifies. See also The John Rylands Library,
Deansgate, Manchester, MS 570, Helen Maria Williams to Mrs Piozzi, September 5, 1791.
26. Ernest de Selincourt, ed. The Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth (1787-1805)
(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1935), 143; from HM 22055, William Wordsworth to Rev. Francis Wrangham, Surrey, 20 November 1795. For other examples from the period of those who advocated regicide, see John Barrell, Imagining the King's Death. Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 179396 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 100-4.
27. As quoted in Mark Storey, Robert Southey. A Life (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), 9,
from a manuscript letter of 1 October 1997, now in the Bodleian.
28. Letter of 16 January 1800, Southey to Coleridge, in Kenneth Curry, ed., New Letters of Robert Southey (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965), 215. "Mary Wollstonecraft told me [Baboeuf]
was the most extraordinary [man] she had ever seen-and in the orgasm of the Revolution the
system of total equalization would have been wise."
29. Davy MSS, HD 20b, f. 114.
30. Davy MSS, 26G/7, 7 February 1801. The letter is signed "II Tenebroso."
31. JWP, 4/76. Hutton to Watt, 1774. On the importance of Huttonianism more generally, Marilyn Butler has argued, "those alive and aware in the age of Buffon and Hutton already had access to
a systematic totalising history of the universe as the site of perpetual change." "Revolving in Deep
Time: The French Revolution as Narrative," in Keith Hanley and Raman Selden, eds., Revolution
and English Romanticism. Politics and Rhetoric (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), 17.
32. JWP, 4/76. Hutton to Watt, 1774.
33. For one example of how these circles interweaved, see National Library, Ireland, MS 13176
(4), 23 April 1799, Frances Edgeworth to H. B. on a visit to Birmingham where she learned about
Mrs. Barbauld's views on Maria's novels and saw the Keir, Darwin, and Beddoes families; letter of 27
July 1799, Fanny Edgeworth to Miss Louisa Beaufort on letters from Mrs. Beddoes about Mrs.
Wedgwood and hoping to see the Watts and the Boultons. Note that the Edgeworths in Ireland were
terrified by the progress of democracy; see MS 13176 (2), 17 April 1797, Frances Edgeworth to Dr.
D. Beaufort, on the "progress of democracy" in Monaghan.
34. Michael T. Davis, "'That Odious Class of Men Called Democrat': Daniel Isaac Eaton and the
Romantics 1794-95," History 84 (1999): 74-81.
35. JWP, C4/B32, 1682 on the cover. On Pordage, see Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (London: Penguin, 1972), 224-6.
36. See Joseph Priestley, The present State of Europe compared with Antient Prophecies; A Sermon preached at the Gravel Pit Meeting in Hackney, February 28, 1794 (London: J. Johnson, 1794).
37. For a discussion of the libertine and Whig clubs of the period and a most useful facsimile
reprinting of Wilkes's essay juxtaposed to Pope's Essay on Man, see Adrian Hamilton, The Infamous
Essay on Woman, or John Wilkes Seated between Vice and Virtue (London: Deutsch, 1972).
38. The Wilkesite newspaper did first try to tar the opposition with the stain of being "perfideous,
mean and tricking" toward women; North Briton, no. 46, 12 November 1763, 161. For a recent
account of Wilkes, see Peter D. G. Thomas, John Wilkes. A Friend to Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1996).
39. Phyllis Deutsch, "Moral Trespass in Georgian London: Gaming, Gender, and Electoral Politics in the Age of George III," Historical Journal 39 (1996): 637-56.
40. David V. Erdman, Commerce des Lumieres. John Oswald and the British in Paris, 1790-1793
(Columbia, MO: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1986), 68.
41. Paul Langford argues that by 1800 the English had come to be seen by themselves and others
as creatures of order, patience, and a vigor devoted solely to industry. The letters between Creighton
and Watt show that this trend should not be taken for the whole reality. Paul Langford, Englishness

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Identified. Manners and Character 1650-1850 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 224. See also
Barrell, Imagining the King's Death, 653, for radical satirists using sexual innuendo against Pitt.
42. Only a few days before the riots in Birmingham, James wrote a draft of a letter to Priestley
about his hesitations in supporting any kind of oppositional cause. "However, while Great Britain
enjoys an unprecedented degree of prosperity it ought to be seriously considered whether it is prudent during the present effervescence in other countries to risk the raising a spirit in this country
[crossed out] that may in the end overturn all good government, & may not subside in the short
period of our lives." JWP, C1/20, 8 July 1791. After the riots, James wrote another draft of a letter to
Priestley full of his chagrin and worry for himself: "To express my abhorrence of the motives which
instigated the perpetrators of these atrocious insults to all laws, both divine & human seems unnecessary, especially as I had reason to believe that myself among your other friends was included in the
proscription." JWP, W/13, 21 October 1791. In a letter of 19 July 1791 to Dr. De Luc, Watt claimed:
"Though our principles which are well known as friends to the established government and enemies
to republican principles should have been our protection from a mob whose watch word was Church
and King yet our safety was principally owing to most of the dissenters living in the south of the
town, for after the first moments, they did not seem over nice in their discriminations of religion or
principles, I among others was pointed out as a presbyterian though I never was in a meetinghouse in
Birmingham and Mr B. is well known as a Churchman." Boulton was an Anglican. JWP, LB/2.
Private letter book, May 1789-January 1797. See BCL, MS 281, for songs like "Church and King,"
"Our Church is built on Truth's firm Rock / And mocks each sacrilegious hand; / In spite of each
electric shock / The heavens defended steeples stand."
43. On 30 April 1792, Burke specifically named Cooper and Watt in a speech against the French
Jacobins and their British supporters: "There were in this country men who scrupled not to enter
into an alliance with a set in France of the worst traitors and regicides that had ever been heard ofthe club of the Jacobins." The Parliamentary History of England, 29:1322. For a reply, see Thomas
Cooper, A Reply to Mr. Burke's Invective against Mr. Cooper, and Mr. Watt, in the House of Commons on the 30th of April, 1792 (London: J. Johnson, 1792). James Watt Sr. was vociferous in a
letter to De Luc of 27 May 1792: "You no doubt have heard that my son James has been foolish
enough to be a delegate from the focus of republicanism in England the Manchester constitutional
(or rather anti-constitutional) society to these Imps of Belial the Jacobins at Paris. It has given me
great pains & and I have written him my sentiments upon it very fully, though without effect, he is a
headstrong young man of considerable abilities, & has kept too much company with Cooper &
other incendiaries, who by administering incense to his society have led him astray. I was in hopes
that being upon the spot he might have seen enough of the evils they have caused to be cured, but he
seems to shut his eyes or to see only the fair side of their fallacious arguments." JWP, LB/2. Tom
Wedgwood was also there at that time; see Keele University, Wedgwood MSS, W/M 28, 11 July
1792, letter of James Watt Jr. to Wedgwood in Paris. In 1795 James Watt Jr. presented Horne Tooke
with one of Watt's copying machines (used for letters) as a precaution were he to be indicted again;
see Boulton and Watt MS, Letter Book 7, 25 April 1795. Note that Thomas Cooper migrated to the
United States and became a slave owner and apologist for the system.
44. JWP, W/6. James Watt Jr. writes to his father from Naples, 20 May 1793, of "my earnest
desire"of "going to America." It is clear that he has Priestley's settlement in Pennsylvania in mind
because he asks his father to help his old comrade-in-arms Thomas Cooper, who was the son-in-law
of Priestley and one of the few who joined Priestley in Pennsylvania.
45. New York Public Library, Misc. MSS 2164-71, [2164] Dyer cautioning Mary Hays "to say
nothing to anyone about Dr. P. answering Evanson."; 2 December 1792, Dyer to Mary Hayes with
regards sent to Miss Wollstonecraft "if you think proper"; Dyer is reading proofs for Hayes; n.d.[1793
or early '94], Dyer saying that Mary and Elizabeth Hayes will go with him to tea at Dr. Priestley's; 28
February 1794, Frend, Dyer, and the Hayes sisters at tea with the Priestleys who are packing to go to
the new world; n.d., Dyer to Hays, says he knows Plumptre by letter and thinks she will like Emma
Courtney; thinks Hays and A. Cristall "might be able jointly to fabricate an excellent poetical novel
... it would be good, good in its principles & good in its consequence."
46.

Davis, "'That Odious Class of Men.'"

47. For a list of members (without Gregory's name) see British Library, MSS ADD 37, 337, King
of Clubs instituted on 7 February 1798 (list is from 1799). The Works of the Rev. Sydney Smith, 3
vols. in one (New York: Appleton, 1871), preface. On the club, see R. B. Litchfield, Tom Wedgwood.

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The First Photographer (1903; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1973), 97. On conversations in this
circle, see Nowell C. Smith, ed., The Letters of Sydney Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1953), 1:63, letter of June 1801.
48. For the most complete account and the links between pantisocracy and Priestley's designs, see
J. R. MacGillivray, The Pantisocracy Scheme and its Immediate Background (Studies in English by
the Members of University College Toronto) (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1931). Cf. Nick Roe,
"Radical George: Dyer in the 1790s," The Charles Lamb Bulletin, n.s., no. 49 (1985): 17-27. Mary
Cathryne Park, Joseph Priestley and the Problem of Pantisocracy (Philadelphia: Reprint from Proceedings of the Delaware County Institute of Science, 1947). Also see British Library, MSS ADD 35,
345, George Burnett to Thomas Poole, December 1803 f. 69: "the enchantment of pantisocracy
threw a gorgrous light over the objects of life; but it soone disappeared and has left me in the darkness of ruin!"
49. The growth of the clubs and the trials of radicals are recounted in John D. Brims, The Scottish
Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution, 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Edinburgh,
1983).
50. [Anon.], Address of the British Convention assembled at Edinburgh, November 19, 1793 to
the People of Great Britain (London, 1793), 14.
51. Watt's studies are recounted in "Muirhead Memoir."
52. The politics of Glasgow University are very briefly discussed in Roger L. Emerson, "Politics
and the Glasgow Professors, 1690-1800," in The Glasgow Enlightenment, Andrew Hook and Richard B. Sher (Phantassie, East Linton, East Lothian, Scotland: The Tuckwell Press, 1995), 21-39, esp.
32-3.
53. Although his circle avidly wrote and read poetry, Watt also had an interest in the novel. Watt
began a novel in the style of Horace Walpole. In it, a penniless and wandering man of genius reads
from his MS, "Adventures of the Knight of Godbold of Sodbourne-le-Soken and the Lady Gertrude
Von-Vertengerstadt." The unfinished MS includes a few reminders of the Creighton correspondence.
There are abysses, satanic figures, and explosions and at one point in chapter 2, Godbold recovers to
find himself covered with soot, gets back on his horse, and "scrutinized his [the horse's?] buttocks to
see if the fiery fangs of the fiend had left a permanent impression." In other words, the fragmentary
Gothic novel displayed Watt's anal-erotic imagination too. JWP, 6/8. "Fragment of a novel by Gregory Watt in imitation of Sterne, Castle of Otranto and Sir Bertrand"; rough draft (104 pp.), never
corrected or completed (1 vol.), esp. 95.
54. A much more muted scatological interest among clubmen can be found in Robert Micklus,
ed., The Tuesday Club: A Shorter Edition of The History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday
Club by Alexander Hamilton [originally written between 1745 and 1756] (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1995), 15.
55. For a discussion of Burns's bawdy songs and their publication history, see James Barke and
Sydney Goodsir Smith, eds. (with J. DeLancey Ferguson), The Merry Muses of Caledonia (Edinburgh: M. Macdonald, 1959), quote on 37, song on 37-9.
than the
56. Barke and Smith, eds., The Merry Muses, 43, gives a different-bowlderized-title
one on the manuscript: "When Princes and Prelates," presumably from the printed edition. We have
reproduced the poem as it appears in the manuscript version in the Huntington Library (the only
known version in Burns's own hand). Robert Burns to Robert Cleghorn, 2 p. fol., 12 December
1792. In the note with the poem, Burns wrote to Cleghorn: "May the
[Devil?] follow with a
blessing." This is not the same Cleghorn who taught Watt at Glasgow.
57. Barke and Smith, eds., The Merry Muses, 54. However, this poem did not appear in the
printed version of 1800 or any subsequent editions.
58. See James Mackay, A Biography of Robert Burns (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1992), 633-46.
59. The correspondence between Thomas Gray and Richard West in the late 1730s and early 1740s
encoded feelings of homosexual love in excerpts from Horace rather than in explicit professions.
Their letters included no scatological references. Robert E Gleckner, Gray Agonistes: Thomas Gray and
Masculine Friendship (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997), esp. 42-69.

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60. Penelope J. Corfield and Chris Evans, eds., Youth and Revolution in the 1790s. Letters of
William Pattisson, Thomas Amyot and Henry Crabb Robinson (Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton, 1996),
quotes on 17, 108.
61. See Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture. Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 17601820 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), esp. 54, 110. On the link to Beddoes, see Yale
University, Beinecke Library, Department of MSS, Beddoes to Dr. Withering in Birmingham, Bristol,
4 August 1793; the few letters between them run from 1789 to 1799.
62. BCL, Withering Family Letters (hereafter WFL), vol. 2, no. 263548, f. 64, G. Watt to W.
Withering, September 1792, to "my dear friend" about a family trip to see his grandfather and a
fungus found in a tree, complete with a drawing of fungus and tree. He sends his love to his school
fellows.
63. BCL, WFL, G. Watt to W. Withering, 17 September 1795, sending verses on the Lake District
to Gregory and asking "how does the Society go on ... fair member and compliments to the president"; and f. 69, September 1795, "nothing worthy of record occurred after the memorable period
when the society separated about half way between the president's and the palace ...." Watt has
returned to Glasgow to find that Campbell, Douglas, and Mr. Jackson are away: "I am solitary,
melancholy and cursedly ill-natured."
64. BCL, WFL, f. 66, G. Watt to W. Withering, October 1793, from Heathfield (the Watt family
home).
65. BCL, WFL, f. 65, March 1793. Watt's student notebook from 1793 shows that teaching at
Glasgow must have been contentious for it followed Enlightenment and even pro-revolutionary lines.
Watt apparently followed his teachers in registering his approval of regicide: "The haughty Tyrant
seated on his gorgeous Throne ... dreaded and obeyed by an abject people is for the time considered
... at the Zenith of human glory. The hand of Death cuts him short in his career, he perished in the
midst of his splendor." JWP, C4/C18A. Gregory Watt's exercise book, 1793. The reading of Anacreon as part of a boy's education seems to have been fairly commonplace, see National Library, Ireland, MS 16685, juvenile poetry by Thomas Moore, "A Paraphrase of Anacreon's Ode," 1794, and
"Anacreon's 23rd Ode": "Grant me, ye Gods! A brimming bowl / A friend and lap to share my soul;
/ Let my few fated moments move / Wing'd with friendship, wine and love."
66. BCL, WFL, vol. 2, no. 263548, f. 66, 4 June 1794. Jessy Watt died two days later.
67. JWP, 6/14. Letter of Annie Watt to G.Watt, 10 November 1795: "Lately I have discovered you
have a turn for poetry I don't think it kind that you should have a so long deprived me of the pleasure
of seeing some of your performance which some of your friends have long enjoyed. . . . favor me as
one of your chosen few who are indulged with a secret view of your muse. By the account you gave
of your ramble on the hills of Cathbirn with your friend William the scene must have been truely
sublime." She went on, however, to warn Watt about the risks of taking long walks in the snow and
cold.
68. William Beattie, ed., Life and Letters of Thomas Campbell, 2 vols. (London: Hall, Virtue, and
Co., 1850), 1:66-7.
69. Beattie, ed., Life and Letters of Thomas Campbell, quote on 1:82 from a later recollection,
source not cited.
70. BCL, WFL, vol. 2, Glasgow, May 1795, with a difficult to follow discussion of "Philobesto"
claimed to be "the short petticoat used in place of breeches." A long translation from Orestes is
enclosed.
71. Beattie, ed., Life and Letters of Thomas Campbell, 1:82-6. Cf. Mitchell Library, Glasgow,
MS 73, "Poems of Thomas Campbell" (largely undated), where he remains strong on the horror of
slavery, but he has become increasingly nationalist.
72. JWP, 6/13. "Poems Executed at Glasgow ... to Mr Greg.y Watt . .. these pieces are respectfully dedicated by Tho.s Campbell, Glasgow, May 17, 1794" and including by Campbell a sympathetic "Ode. On the Queen of France's leaving her Confinement," "Ode to Music" that mentions
Thomson, another praising "On the Glasgow Volunteers": "Nought but the Patriot's honest view /
Of Free-born valour ever fir'd. .. ." And in Watt's hand is "Chorus From the Jepthes of Buchanan,"

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stanza 4: "When shall Freedom holy charmer / Cheer my [?] knighted soul / When shall Israel proud
in Armour / Burst the Tyrants base controul." Other subjects come from translations of the Greek
classics and in Campbell's case a long poem indebted to physico-theology.
73. HM 31502, Glasgow, 17 April 1795, Campbell to Thomson.
74. Beattie, ed., Life and Letters of Thomas Campbell, 1:150-1 (letter undated, but appearing
just after one of 14 November 1795). The original at the Huntington Library reads differently: "G.
W. as Palmer informed you is in town at present. He has got seven coats of brass upon his face.
Swears like an Irish dragoon & laughs so loud in the open street that you would be ashamed to walk
beside him. In short he grows now no longer purple and blue at meeting a professor but chatters to
them with great confidence." HM 31481, Glasgow, "but I am ashamed to put a date to it." For the
earliest reference to the friendship between Watt, Campbell, and Thomson, see HM 31499, 12 June
1794, Campbell to Thomson. Since Beattie, by his own admission, doctored the presentation of the
letters, we have chosen to follow the originals where possible.
75. Beattie, ed., Life and Letters of Thomas Campbell, 1:81.
76. "Muirhead Memoir." Cf. Campbell to James Watt Jr., JWP, 6/5, 17 November 1804, acknowledging receipt of 100.
77. Beattie, ed., Life and Letters of Thomas Campbell, 1:81.
78. JWP, 3/17. To Jackson at Ayr, undated. The previous two sentences read: "It is true you are
not quite near enough to touch the tips of my fingers which I tender to you to make the Connection
perfect. Bad as the conductor is, the electric shock would pass, and shall the Emanations of the soul
be less subtle than electricity?"
79. From a letter of 24 December 1804 transcribed in "Muirhead Memoir."
80. On Jeffrey's politics see the entry for him in the Dictionary of National Biography. Cf. JWP, 6/
5. Letters from G. Watt to Francis Jeffrey, July 1803; F.Jeffrey to G. Watt, 15 December 1803, on the
writings of Thelwall; G. Watt to F. Jeffrey, 14 February 1804; G. Watt to F. Jeffrey, 28 February
1804; G. Watt to F Jeffrey, 18 March 1804, on Davy.
81. One woman recounted: "Gregory's salutation to his sister and me often was, 'Girls are insufferable bores.'" As his biographer confesses, these "rather ungallant sentiments . . . suffered, we
regret to say, little modification in the subsequent years of his brief career." "Muirhead Memoir."
82. BCL, WFL, William Withering (Sr.) to James Watt, 30 September 1795: if Gregory "passes the
next winter in Glasgow, I think that my Son will be much pleased to do the same."
83. BCL, WFL, G. Watt to W. Withering Jr., n.d., f. 70, labeled "No. 18 Circus Heath." The
fallout extended to other friends including a Miss Hamilton; its cause has been lost from the historical record.
84. BCL, WFL, G. Watt to W. Withering Jr., f. 71 (rec'd 21 July 1796): "Perhaps my last which
tho not intended as apologetic but merely as explanatory & confessional has offended you still more
& added fresh fuel to the resentment which my conduct must have excited ... I would not hurt your
feelings but I judged it as a duty I owed you to ... give what account I could give of my former
conduct which must have appeared inexplicable to you & enigmatical to myself"; BCL, WFL, f. 72,
G. Watt to W. Withering (rec'd 26 July 1796). He reports that a Miss Hamilton wrote and forgave
him; other friendships were also in jeopardy: "I have hesitated whether to give up Douglas and
Jackson and still remain undecided."
85. In 1798 Watt made a study of the mineralogy of Cornwall with the intention of passing on the
information to Withering; "Muirhead Memoir." Cf. JWP 4/27/25, W. Withering wrote to Josiah
Wedgwood Jr., 21 August 1802, when fears for Watt's health were acute, offering to go to the Continent to fetch him. "My influence over Gregory is, I flatter myself, greater than any other person's
besides his nearest relatives." In 1807 W. Withering wrote to James Watt Jr. to ask advice about the
kind of settlement he should arrange with the father of his bride to be; JWP 4/85/80, 19 November
1807.
86. By 1793 James Watt Jr.'senthusiasm for the French Revolution was fast waning. On 3 December 1793, he wrote to his father that he could not go to Spain: "I have not the smallest ambition to

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swell the lists of captive jacobins. The less so, as I no longer hold any opinions in common with the
villains who now bear that name and indeed never did hold any which bore resemblance to theirs.
My friends in France, the friends of rational liberty have most of them passed the fatal guillotine and
the reigning party were always the objects of my hatred as well as of Mr Coopers." JWP, W/6. On the
relationship and rhetoric used between Wordsworth and Coleridge, see Berkeley Stevenson Blatz,
Romanticism and the Rhetoric of Friendship (Ph.D. Diss., Univ. of California-Los Angeles, 1994).
87. "Muirhead Memoir." See Wedgwood MSS, MS 3343-4, 14 December 1829, by Josiah Wedgwood Jr., written at the request of James Watt Jr. on the first meeting of Gregory Watt and Davy in
1797-98. Davies Giddy (later Gilbert) was present at that time.
88. In 1805, after Watt's death, Davy referred to him in his notebook as "one of the earliest of my
friends." John Davy [brother], Fragmentary Remains, Literary and Scientific, of Sir Humphry Davy,
Bart., Late President of the Royal Society, etc. with a Sketch of His Life and Selections from his
Correspondence (London: John Churchill, 1858), 16. James Watt Sr. collaborated closely with Beddoes from 1794 on (after his daughter died of tuberculosis); he invented a breathing apparatus for
delivering the gases isolated by Beddoes for the relief of various illnesses, especially respiratory. They
published a book on their research in 1794. The Watts tried to help Beddoes raise money for his
pneumatic institution. Annie Watt wrote to Gregory on 30 March 1795 that it was not possible at
the moment to raise a subscription for a pneumatic hospital. "I do not wonder at their being slow to
give to what they do not very well understand. Dr Beddoes democratic principals [sic] have prevented many at least it is said so that was able and willing if it had been any other man that had stood at
the head of it. It is hard that the cause of humanity should suffer from the political or religious
principals [sic] of any set of men and it ought to be a lesson to us all not be to violent on any subject
there to obtrude our opinion upon others." JWP, 6/14.
89. The Wedgwood and Watt children became friends as early as 1789 and they shared an interest
in experimentation as well as in liberal, if not radical politics. Tom Wedgwood sojourned in Paris at
the same time as James Watt Jr. See the extensive correspondence from Josiah Wedgwood Jr. to James
Watt Jr. in the Boulton and Watt MSS, beginning largely in 1790. On 15 May 1791, Josiah Wedgwood Jr. wrote to James Watt Jr.: "For my part I do not believe that any of our leading men in the H.
of Commons have pure notions of liberty, at least if they have they dare not avow them for both
parties are under influence, one of the crown and the other of a powerful aristocracy. There are no
hopes of reform in this country but from the people and they are far from being sufficiently inlighten'd.
I believe that John Bull who has so long been proud of his liberty has possessed only the shadow, and
he has so long been content with that, that he has no desire for and does not wish to know the
substance.-I hope however our french neighbours affairs will go on prosperously and that John
having their example always before him will at length mark the difference between their situation
and his own." He sends regards to Mr. Cooper. On 9 April 1794, Josiah Wedgwood Jr. wrote to
James Watt Jr.: "France would have been the country, but Dame Guillotine has been so busy there
that no one will venture to settle there until time shall have cooled the passions of the people and
demonstrated the safety of a residence among them."
90. For the basic facts of Davy's career, see David Knight, Humphry Davy: Science and Power
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992).
91. Watt and Davy shared a friend in William Clayfield of Bristol. On hearing the news of Watt's
death in 1804, Davy wrote to Clayfield: "He ought not to have died. I could not persuade myself that
he would die." As quoted in Knight, Humphry Davy, 51. We have found one suggestive letter from
Clayfield to Watt dated 14 June 1804-just four months before Watt's death on 16 October. In it, he
calls Watt "his Satanic Majesty" and teases him that "one need not wonder that Brimstone proves so
very efficatious [sic] a medicine and that you are so ready to recommend it to others." At the end of
the long and playful letter, Clayfield offers to nurse Watt. JWP, C2/14. Letter from Clayfield dated
Bristol, 14 June 1804.
92. Davy MSS, 26G/1. On 13 April 1799, Watt wrote to Davy about their common interests in
minerals (reporting that he had sent Davy a shipment for his collection) and suggested that he did not
agree with everything Davy had published on his recent researches. Davy MSS, 26G/4, 13 April
1799. See also Paris, The Life of Sir Humphry Davy, 82-96.
93. Davy MSS, 26G/3, 13 November 1799.

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519

94. Davy MSS, 26G/6, 11 October 1800.

95. Davy MSS, 26G/7, 7 February 1801.
96. Davy MSS, 20B, 26 December 1799, quote on folio 133.
97. Davy MSS, 13C, [c.1800] 5.
98. Coleridge knew Beddoes from at least April 1796 onward. See Earl Leslie Griggs, ed., Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 1:201 (letter to
Joseph Cottle dated early April 1796). When Davy visited London in December 1799, his intimates
included Coleridge, Southey, Gregory Watt, the Tobins, and his assistant Clayfield. See Paris, The
Life of Sir Humphry Davy, 62. Davy also visited the Watt family in Birmingham; see 78. William
Wordsworth wrote to Davy in July 1800 asking him to pass along a revised edition of Lyrical Ballads
to his publishers Biggs and Cottle after reading them over for punctuation. In July 1804 and again in
August 1805, Davy visited the Wordsworths in Grasmere. Ernest de Selincourt, ed., The Letters of
William and Dorothy Wordsworth, rev. Chester L. Shaver, 8 vols., 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1967), 1:289, 492, 615. On Wordsworth and Coleridge and the French Revolution, see Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge.
99. Griggs, ed., Collected Letters, 1:556-7. Letter of 1 January 1800: "Davy! Davy! if the public
Good did not iron & adamant you to England and Bristol, what a little colony might we [no]t
make-Tobin, I am sure, wo[uld] go-and Wordsworth-& I-& Southey.- Precious stuff for Dreams.
... Hurra, my dear Southey!-You, [& I], & Godwin, & Shakespeare, & Milton, with what an
athanasiophagous Grin we shall march together-we poets: Down with all the rest of the World!By the word athanasiophagous I mean devouring Immortality by anticipation ..."
100. Jan Golinski, "Humphry Davy's Sexual Chemistry," Configurations 7 (1999): 15-41, esp. 29.
101. HM 4817, Southey to Taylor, 24 Feb 1799: Davy was "an extraordinary man" settled here
and "not yet 21"; he had studied chemistry about 18 months and would also show Southey his
verses; HM 4823, Southey to Taylor, 5 September 1799 and 1 November 1799: Davy possessed an
"ardor regulated by cool judgement." "He is a miraculous young man whose Talents I can only
wonder at," "a surprising young man," and his poem, "Sons of Genius," has "some fine stanzas as
a whole it is tedious and feeble-but it was the production of eighteen." In the first volume of The
Annual Anthology of poetry that he edited in 1799, Southey published Davy's "Extract from an
Unfinished Poem on Mount's Bay" and "Passages" by Dr. Beddoes, extracted from imitative "Verses
on Alexander's Expedition down the Hydaspes and the Indus, to the Indian Ocean." (Bristol: Biggs
and Co., 1799), 281-6 and 289-300. He also included "Sons of Genius" (93-9), but with no attribution of author.
102. HM 4821, Southey to Taylor, 15 April 1799.
103. On the links between the young Wedgwoods, Tom, Josiah Jr., and Gregory Watt, see Litchfield, Tom Wedgwood, 87, citing a letter from Josiah Jr. to Tom. In 1800 and into the opening years
of the new century, Tom Wedgwood used the family's London properties to entertain a circle of
young men that included Gregory Watt, James Mackintosh (after 1803, Sir James), the Smith brothers, and Thomas Campbell. Among the members of this loose club, many like Mackintosh became
celebrated Whigs, while the Rev. Sydney Smith sealed his credentials by being one of the founders of
the Edinburgh Review and a major contributor to it. He too had been deeply influenced by the
principles of the French Revolution about which he learned, he said, while in 1798 accompanying
the son of his parish patron who had gone to study at the University of Edinburgh. See The Works of
the Rev. Sydney Smith, preface. On the club, see Litchfield, Tom Wedgwood, 97, and for conversations in this circle see Nowell C. Smith, ed., The Letters of Sydney Smith, 1:63, letter of June 1801.
104. Quoted in Golinski, Science as Public Culture, 201, from a letter probably of 1801.
105. The delegates to the British Convention in 1793 had adorned their reports with ga ira. Brims,
The Scottish Democratic Movement, 2:506.
106. JWP, LB/7. Letter of 19 Dec 1794 from James Watt Jr.
107. Clive Emsley, "The Home Office and Its Sources of Information and Investigation 17911801," English Historical Review 94 (1979): 533-4.

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108. Golinski, Science as Public Culture, 171-2.

109. H. J. Jackson, ed., Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Selected Letters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987),
50; Coleridge also included Erasmus Darwin as a materialist.
110. Golinski, Science as Public Culture, 173.
111. Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution 1790-1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993),
108, citing her articles in the Monthly Magazine 1 (June 1796): 386-7. Cf. David Wootton, "Helvtius. From Radical Enlightenment to Revolution" Political Theory 28 (2000): 307-36.
112. A. F. Wedd, ed., The Love-Letters of Mary Hays (1779-80) (London: Methuen, 1925), 238,
undated, but in the letter Dyer says that he knows Anne Plumptre only by correspondence that we
can date to 1795. Despite the title of this collection, there are important letters in it from the 1790s.
113. William Hamilton Reid, The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in this Metropolis ...
(1800; repr. Victor E. Neuburg, ed., Literacy and Society [London: The Woburn Press, 1971]), quotations on 39 and 79.
114. Thomas Whiting, Mathematical, Geometrical, and Philosophical Delights ... A Eulogium on
the Newtonian Philosophy (London, 1798), 19.
115. Prospectus of The Anti-Jacobin; or Weekly Examiner (London: J. Wright, 1797).
116. The Anti-Jacobin, 1 January 1798, 61, a letter from a "batchelor" who recounts: "One little
friend of mine, married to a pretty widow, and who used to declaim much on the infamy of the times,
and the great evil of a standing army, I found, secretly feared in a certain weak quarter, the advances
of an Irish Cornet of Horse." A cornet holds the standard for a horse company.
117. [Anon.], The Progress of Delusion; or, An Address to All Parties ...

(London, 1798), 13-4.

118. The Anti-Jacobin, 20 November 1797.

119. Binhammer, "The Sex Panic of the 1790s."
120. See Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790-1822 (Oxford, Clarendon Press,
1994), 61.
121. [Anon.], Secession; or True Blue separated from Buff. A Political-Satirical-Panegyrical Poem.
Humbly inscribed to his Royal Highness The Prince of Wales. By Churchill-minor (London, 1793),
17; HM 315362. On Fox and defecation, see [Anon.] The Whig Club: or, a Sketch of Modern Patriotism (London, 1794), 16-7.
122. On 27 May 1793, the Sheffield society wrote to its counterpart in Edinburgh praising their
efforts and claiming that "male prostitutes" and "venal hirelings, the sychophants of courts, these
political Esaus who would fell their country and its liberties for a mess of potage. .... have gone nigh
to sap and destroy every prop and pillar by which the constitution itself in in reality supported." The
First and Second Report from the Committee of Secrecy: Together with their Appendix to the Second
Report .... (London, 1794?), 166; HM 287835.
123. Radical antigovernment propaganda could also take on the puritanical discourse of the righteous. See Philip Harling, "The Duke of York Affair (1809) and the Complexities of War-Time Patriotism," The Historical Journal 39 (1996): 970.
124. [Anon.], The Progress of Delusion, 21-2.
125. Modern Propensities; or, an essay on the Art of Strangling, etc ... with Memoirs of Susannah
Hill and A Summary of her Trial at the Old-Bailey . .. 1791, On the Charge of Hanging Francis
Kotzwarra ... (London, c.1791); Lewis Walpole Library of Yale University, MS 791 0 22.
126. It is interesting to note that at precisely this moment the Dutch associated the French Revolution with sexual licence. See Theo van der Meer, Sodom zaad in Nederland. Het ontstaan van homoseksualiteit in de vroegmoderne tijd (Nijmegen: SUN, 1995), 401.
127. See Richard Holmes, Coleridge. Early Visions (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989), 6788, 91, 94-5, 98-100, and esp. 99n. "The real question with Coleridge is why his friendships were so
unstable: characteristically producing among his followers a period of hero-worship followed by one

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521

of sharp disillusion." Cf. Steven M. Weissman, His Brother's Keeper. A Psychobiography of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1989), 69-71, on the falling out
between Southey and Coleridge.
128. HM 4829, 27 July 1800, Southey to a friend about to see Coleridge: "the man, to whom, in
all the ups and downs of six years, my heart has clung with most affection, despite even its own
efforts."
129. Our analysis of this triangle, if we had the space here to offer one, would be more somatic
than rhetorical. For the rhetorical version, see Alan Liu, Wordworth: The Sense of History (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1989), 282-5.
130. British Library, MS 35345, 1 February 1799, Josiah Wedgwood Jr. to Tom Poole.
131. Dror Wahrman, "Percy's Prologue: From Gender Play to Gender Panic in Eighteenth-Century
England," Past and Present 159 (1998): 113-60, and "Gender in Translation: How the English
Wrote their Juvenal, 1644-1815," Representations 65 (1999): 1-41.
132. From a literary perspective, a similar argument is made in William Stafford, "Narratives of
Women: English Feminists of the 1790s," History 82 (1997): 24-43.
133. HM 31482, 1 June 1800, Campbell to John Richardson, was edited with word substitutions,
punctuation, omissions, etc. to tone down the emotional intimacy suggested by the letter.
134. John Tobin was one of those Coleridge hoped to include in a utopian scheme. On Davy's
being ridiculed as a dandy of compromised masculinity, see Golinski, "Humphry Davy's Sexual Chemistry." Davy's personal notebooks include at least one suggestive passage in which he seems to be
trying out a prose poem of some kind. It reads: "Aiga was lying on his couch his cheeks were pale &
thin; his nose pointed; but his dark eyes glistened with all their original fire, a transient flush of
rapture passed over his cheek as he saw me approach his bed & whilst I felt the hard grasp of his
moist hand, I saw tears trickle down his cheek-We were silent [.] it was with difficulty that I could
repress my tears, the pure sympathies of friendship are perhaps infinitely stranger than any there not
only direct association tends to give them strength: but a thousand nameless sympathies of analogy,
organs similarity of mind, of character all continue to give them strength & energy." Davy MSS, 13d,
[c.1800] 13.
135. The children clearly sensed the distance from their parents and attributed it to affective differences. See Wedgwood MSS, W/M 1112, Sarah Wedgwood to her brother Tom, 3 July 1804, ascribed
"her unworthy letter" to him "to the inveterate bad habit of not expressing our feelings which so
many of our family have & I amongst the rest . . my taciturnity has really been owing partly to the
family infirmity." See this entire folder for Tom's intense depression, bouts with opium, and his
travels to many parts of the world to escape his unhappiness; 5 November 1804, "I have an excessive
desire to see Mme Stael ... I feel as if I could taste in her society for the first time in my life, some
kinds of spiritual enjoyment. I mean, that she would call into being in me some energies which have
yet life for want of sympathy and reaction ..."