His He Affective Revolution in 1790s

Hunt and Jacob / The Affective Revolution in 1790s Britain
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Somatic Affects
HE
AFFECTIVE REVOLUTION IN 1790S
BRITAIN
Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob
In the year 1800, Gregory Watt received a remarkable set of scatological

and anal erotic letters.1 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 Gregorys 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. 491521.
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Eighteenth-Century StudieS
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First, to the letters themselves. Creightons letters to Wattwe have many

more from Creighton to Watt than the reverseopened 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 shopa 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 Burnss
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:
ThAntipodean Powrs, from Realms below,
Have burst the solid Entrails of 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 Diarrhoeas 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 Careys play, 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 Watts naughty correspondence, both Watt and Southey
experimented with nitrous oxide at the Bristol laboratory of Humphry Davy.9
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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 Watts 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 Creightons 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 Northlet him be gorged with polution [sic] & supersaturated with brutality and uncleanliness let him be by a louse bitten & if possible
infected with the Itch.11 We 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 Creightons 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 Clubin praise of the ingenious authors of the exploit and triumph
over the Mag: Beshit I will roar an ode of exultation in the Devils asse
and inscribe their names in the deep Caverns of the EarthI have
nothing to offer in competition some unlucky fiend seems to pursue me
on any exploit that can be attended with disgrace when detectedthe
commentaries shall be suspended and the Acts of the Apostle detailed
since the last Satanic gazette15 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
possibleI understand the explosion of nature truly hellish. Therefore
that the above be put in executionGuy 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 learnedthe
dart of cupid or the inflexible spear of cupidhave 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
Cest la diablerie15
Sometimes the genital sexual meaning was more explicit, even if still infused with
an anal suggestiveness:
Old Caledonias 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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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 Creightonand radicals and romantics generallyexplored 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 Davys 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.21 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 17501850; 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.25 As 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 mans dreame. . . . Heavens! Who sees majesty in Georges 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 Burnss 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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The unwary victim opens the potent volume . . . as he proceeds the spell
commences its imperceptible operation as he advances the charmed
numbers acquire more forceThe magical letters embrace him more
closely and he unconsciously exists in a circle of enchantmenthis
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 bythe 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.
Watts 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 Gregorys 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 damnd to you; what signifies blowing wind in the arse of a hot
barrel, or making soap bubbles in another . . . Compliments to Madam
Boltonset 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 abhorsthis 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
consulting me about taking a patent for some improvement of a bed;
Im thinking of adding to it a machine which shall be called the
muscular motion whereby all the several parts shall be performed of
erection, intrusion, reciprocation and injection; this will become
absolutely necessary in christian countries that do not allow the eating
of children and where people will have pleasure at the easiest rate.32
The irreverent and mildly pornographic play about masturbation attests to the
humor allowed among worldly men who at least on these occasionswithout
any assistance from the French Revolutionwore 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.36 For 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 Clelands Fanny Hill had given a new meaning to freethinking: rather
than being stoic, it could be both humorous and outrageous. The linkage between
political subversionthe denuding of the high and the mightyand the obscene
then made its debut with John Wilkes, who used the bawdy and the phallic to
ridicule his opponents. Wilkess 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 Foxs 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 Oswalds 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 Oswalds 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 familys 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 horrifiedand worried for
themselves.42 Their 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 Priestleys 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.50 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.52 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.53 Watts 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
uncomfortableand usually nonexistentplace in his collected works. The only
known version of them is an anonymous 1800 edition titled The Merry Muses,
published most likely in Edinburgh four years after the poets deathand 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 shall betake myself to a subject ever fertile of themes, a Subject, the
turtle-feast of the Sons of Satan, and the delicious, secret Sugar-plumb
of the Babes of Grace; a Subject, sparkling with all the jewels that Wit
can find in the mines of Genius, and pregnant with all the stores of
Learning, from Moses & Confucius to Franklin & Priestlyin short,
may it please Your Lordship, I intend to write BAUDY!
The song that followed had eleven stanzas ending with which in the context could only stand for cunt, a word he used explicitly on occasion.55
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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When Brunswicks great Prince cam a cruising to France,

Republican billies to cowe,
Bauld Brunswicks great prince wad hae shawn better sense,
At hame wi his Princess to mow.
The chorus ran:

And why shouldna poor people mow, mow, mow,
And why shouldna poor people mow:
The Great folk hae siller, & houses & lands,
Poor bodies hae naething but mow.56
On occasion Burns could wax scatological. He described There was Twa Wives
in January 1792 as an old Cloaciniad song:
There was twa wives, and twa witty wives,
As eer playd houghmagandie,
And they coost out, upon a time,
Out oer a drink o brandy;
Up Maggy rose, and forth she goes,
And she leaves auld Mary flytin,
And she frted by the byre-en
For she was gaun a shten.57
After his premature death in 1796, Burnss reputation was highly controversial.58
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 mens
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 Burnss transgressive 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 thatif livedcould 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 (179499). 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
503
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 studiedfrom Jacobin
clubs, masonic lodges, and literary-philosophical societiesnothing 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.61 Like 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 vain with horrid yells the sufferer cries
Invokes the gods and rolls his ardent eyes
The ruffians ply their cruel work nor hear
His humble prayers nor heed his trickling tear
G. Watt inventet64
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 kings 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. Watts sister, Jessy, had
become seriously ill and within days succumbed to the tuberculosis that would
likewise claim Watts 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
Watts friends. When fourteen years old and already a university student at Glasgowa not uncommon patternCampbell 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,69 while 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 usHe
and I are at present very intimate, but as different souls as ever God created . . . G
is all volubility & solution of copperfor me you would take me for a Spaniardas 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,
Watts 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
Watts 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 eyesbut 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 Jacksons lodgings after the days 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 Watts
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
Watts infatuations ran a predictably tumultuous course. In the autumn
of 1795, William Withering had intended to join Watt in Glasgow.82 Yet at about
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-
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: Sirfor 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 characterizesnot coincidentally
many of these young peoples reactions to the French Revolution.86 Disappointment was quick to follow on great attractions and enthusiasms.
After finishing the academic year 179596 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. Davys 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 Davys great promise as a poet.87
Whatever Watts own personal involvement in fostering Davys 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 friends with Tom Wedgwood, who also had been
sent to Penzance for his health.89 In October 1798 Davy accepted Beddoess 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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34 / 4
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:
What in the name of the Muses has so compleatly absorbed you that
not one half hour could be spared for your cagealy [?] expectant
correspondent. . . . In perusing the Anthology [in which a poem of
Davys appeared] I with pleasure renewed my acquaintance with some
of the poems you so obligingly gratified me with when at Penzance and
was much pleased with the ode to St. Michaels Mound which you
recollect endeavoring to recite on that memorable day when I had the
honour of being your Mystagogue in your initiation into the orgies of
the mirth inspiring Bacchus.
He went on to offer an arresting comparison between Davys 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 1799in a postscript to a letter from his father to
Davy detailing his design for a breathing apparatusand 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 Davys 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 sensations were superior to any I ever experienced. Inconceivably
pleasurable. Ideas were more vivid & associated together much more
rapidly & so associated with words as to produce, perceptions perfectly
novel. Theories passed rapidly thro the mind believed I may say
intensely. At the same time that every thing going on in the room was
perceived, I seemed to be a sublime being, newly created & superior to
other mortals.96
In a poem Davy wrote on the effects of taking the gas, he rhapsodized:

Not in the ideal dreams of wild desire
Have I beheld a rapture wakening form
My bosom burns with no hallowed fire
Yet is my cheek with rosy blushes warm
507
Yet are my eyes with sparkling lustre filled

Yet is my mouth complete with murmuring gases[?]
Yet are my limbs with inward transports thrilled
And clad with new born mightiness around.97
Beddoess and Davys 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 Davys 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 180102 he attended Davys lectures at the Royal Institution in London.100 In nearly every letter to his friends in 1799, Southey waxed
lyrical about Davys brilliance in science or about his poetry, some of which Southey
soon published.101 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.102 Experimentation 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
gas and whose family bankrolled the struggling Coleridge),103 Southey 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 sensationa ira.104 The a ira in Davys letter, though perhaps inadvertent, evoked the French Revolution since it was one of the revolutionary watchwordsfrom a song of that title.105 Earlier, Davys 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 fathers 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.106 Beddoess 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.107
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.108 So too did Beddoesat least that is
what Coleridge told the fellow radical, John Thelwall.109 By 1798 The Anti-Ja-
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cobin had linked the materialism found in Davys scientific circle with ribaldry
and revolutionary upheaval, portraying the pneumatic revellers as enthusiasts
enjoying orgies of intoxication and sexual license.110 Davy was hardly alone in
his youthful atheism. In the mid-1790s the feminist and revolutionary Mary Hays
defended the materialism of Helvtius and used it to argue that men and women
do not possess different natural powers, aptitudes and dispositions.111 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.112 He does not imply that Mrs
Hayss daughter remains a follower of Christ. If young women left the faith of
their mothers, then young men like Watt and Creightonwhose letters evince not
a scintilla of pietymight 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.113 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.114 The radicals embraced,
it was claimed, a wild and unshackled freedom of thought.115 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.116 The 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.117 Put 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.118 James Gillrays 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 possiblyalthough they are largely beyond
the scope of this essayamong 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 innuendowhat some have called
a sexual panic.119 In 1791 James Gillray produced engravings that suggested the
rape of George III by the radical Horne Tooke.120 At 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):
509
FPO=56%
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 thind pack, whippd in by Sh [e]r[ida]n
A Clan, so naked, that twas apt enough,
Een then tove stiled the corpsnot Bluebut Buff;
For tho the Diaboliads coud make Speeches,
They, doubtless, had of oldnot any Breeches.
How soon our MODERN DIABOLIADS STATE
May litrally 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.123 Revolutions 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.124
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 foundationswhen Kings are humbled to the dust by those they
are born to govern . . . it is not very wonderful that the physical
economy and organization of the human body should, in many instances, 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 lifes 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 disappointmentsalso with the
erotic overtonesthat 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 mens 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.128 The connection among Coleridge and Dorothy and William Wordsworth was also an
intense one, subject to well-known epiphanies, ruptures, and renewals.129 Josiah
Wedgwood Jr. thought that Wordsworth and Coleridge should remain separate
and believed that Coleridge would benefit from mixed company.130 The 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 boundaries
at the very least verbaldisrupts 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.132 An 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.133
Humphry Davy faced rumors and published ridicule when he abruptly married a
511
widowed bluestocking at age thirty-five. The childless couple became known for
public quarreling and in his last years, Davy traveled to the continent without his
wife. His companion on his last journey was John James Tobin, his godson and
son of his friend John Tobin, a physician and 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.135 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 (17771804) 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, 17961804, 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 centuryin no other time
was Rabelais so little understood and appreciated as during that erabut 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 blisterbrokewhat cam away / Is far too foul for us to say / Suffice that bolt
into our faces / It flew & left its nasty traces / And then wed nothing else to do / But wipe ourselves
and thenwipe 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), 1:5962, 198200; Royal Institution, London, Davy MSS (hereafter Davy MSS), HD 20b, f.
111, on Southey taking the gas in March 1799.
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34 / 4
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 Watts 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 furiouslywith 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
coverd 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-clad bawds, penchant for breeches, whiskered dalliance, 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), 64452; 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 15001800, (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), 11130.
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, 17001800 (New
York: St. Martins Press, 1997).
23. John Tosh, The Old Adam and the New Man, in Tim Hitchcock and Michle Cohen, eds.,
English Masculinities, 16601800 (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): 40935.
24. In emphasizing the impact of the French Revolution, we echo E. P. Thompsons analysis of the
romantics. He focused on this transmutation of the political claims of galit 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, 1790
1850 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), 616.
513
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 Roes 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 (17871805)
(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 Kings Death. Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793
96 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 1004.
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 seenand 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 Il 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. Martins 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. Barbaulds views on Marias 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 179495, History 84 (1999): 7481.
35. JWP, C4/B32, 1682 on the cover. On Pordage, see Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (London: Penguin, 1972), 2246.
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 Wilkess essay juxtaposed to Popes 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): 63756.
40. David V. Erdman, Commerce des Lumires. John Oswald and the British in Paris, 17901793
(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
514
34 / 4
Identified. Manners and Character 16501850 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 224. See also
Barrell, Imagining the Kings 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 1789January 1797. See BCL, MS 281, for songs like Church and King,
Our Church is built on Truths 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 of
the club of the Jacobins. The Parliamentary History of England, 29:1322. For a reply, see Thomas
Cooper, A Reply to Mr. Burkes 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 Watts 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
desireof going to America. It is clear that he has Priestleys 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 216471, [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. Priestleys; 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 Gregorys 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.
515
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 Priestleys 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): 1727. 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. Watts 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, 16901800, in The Glasgow Enlightenment, Andrew Hook and Richard B. Sher (Phantassie, East Linton, East Lothian, Scotland: The Tuckwell Press, 1995), 2139, esp.
323.
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 horses?] buttocks to
see if the fiery fangs of the fiend had left a permanent impression. In other words, the fragmentary
Gothic novel displayed Watts 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 Burnss 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 379.
56. Barke and Smith, eds., The Merry Muses, 43, gives a differentbowlderizedtitle than the
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 Burnss 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), 63346.
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 F. Gleckner, Gray Agonistes: Thomas Gray and
Masculine Friendship (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997), esp. 4269.
516
34 / 4
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, 1760
1820 (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 presidents 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. Watts 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 Watts exercise book, 1793. The reading of Anacreon as part of a boys education seems to have been fairly commonplace, see National Library, Ireland, MS 16685, juvenile poetry by Thomas Moore, A Paraphrase of Anacreons Ode, 1794, and
Anacreons 23rd Ode: Grant me, ye Gods! A brimming bowl / A friend and lap to share my soul;
/ Let my few fated moments move / Wingd 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 dont 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), 1:667.
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, 1:826. 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 Frances leaving her Confinement, Ode to Music that mentions
Thomson, another praising On the Glasgow Volunteers: Nought but the Patriots honest view /
Of Free-born valour ever fird. . . . And in Watts hand is Chorus From the Jepthes of Buchanan,
517
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 Campbells 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, 1:1501 (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 Jeffreys 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: Gregorys 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 (recd 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 (recd 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 Watts health were acute, offering to go to the Continent to fetch him. My influence over Gregory is, I flatter myself, greater than any other persons
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.s enthusiasm 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
518
34 / 4
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 CaliforniaLos Angeles, 1994).
87. Muirhead Memoir. See Wedgwood MSS, MS 33434, 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
179798. Davies Giddy (later Gilbert) was present at that time.
88. In 1805, after Watts 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 inlightend.
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 Davys 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 Watts
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 1804just four months before Watts 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, 8296.
93. Davy MSS, 26G/3, 13 November 1799.
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, 1:5567. 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
makeTobin, I am sure, wo[uld] goand Wordsworth& I& Southey. Precious stuff for Dreams.
. . . Hurra, my dear Southey!You, [& I], & Godwin, & Shakespeare, & Milton, with what an
athanasiophagous Grin we shall march togetherwe poets: Down with all the rest of the World!
By the word athanasiophagous I mean devouring Immortality by anticipation . . .
100. Jan Golinski, Humphry Davys Sexual Chemistry, Configurations 7 (1999): 1541, 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 feeblebut it was the production of eighteen. In the first volume of The
Annual Anthology of poetry that he edited in 1799, Southey published Davys Extract from an
Unfinished Poem on Mounts Bay and Passages by Dr. Beddoes, extracted from imitative Verses
on Alexanders Expedition down the Hydaspes and the Indus, to the Indian Ocean. (Bristol: Biggs
and Co., 1799), 2816 and 289300. He also included Sons of Genius (939), 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 familys 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 a 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 1791
1801, English Historical Review 94 (1979): 5334.
520
34 / 4
108. Golinski, Science as Public Culture, 1712.

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 17901827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993),
108, citing her articles in the Monthly Magazine 1 (June 1796): 3867. Cf. David Wootton, Helvtius. From Radical Enlightenment to Revolution Political Theory 28 (2000): 30736.
112. A. F. Wedd, ed., The Love-Letters of Mary Hays (177980) (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), 134.
118. The Anti-Jacobin, 20 November 1797.
119. Binhammer, The Sex Panic of the 1790s.
120. See Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture, 17901822 (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), 167.
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, 212.
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), 67
88, 91, 945, 98100, 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
521
of sharp disillusion. Cf. Steven M. Weissman, His Brothers Keeper. A Psychobiography of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1989), 6971, 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), 2825.
130. British Library, MS 35345, 1 February 1799, Josiah Wedgwood Jr. to Tom Poole.
131. Dror Wahrman, Percys Prologue: From Gender Play to Gender Panic in Eighteenth-Century
England, Past and Present 159 (1998): 11360, and Gender in Translation: How the English
Wrote their Juvenal, 16441815, Representations 65 (1999): 141.
132. From a literary perspective, a similar argument is made in William Stafford, Narratives of
Women: English Feminists of the 1790s, History 82 (1997): 2443.
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 Davys
being ridiculed as a dandy of compromised masculinity, see Golinski, Humphry Davys Sexual Chemistry. Davys 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 cheekWe 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 Toms 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 . . .

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Hunt and Jacob / The Affective Revolution in 1790s Britain

AFFECTIVE REVOLUTION IN 1790S

Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob

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

First, to the letters themselves. Creightons letters to Wattwe have many

Hunt and Jacob / The Affective Revolution in 1790s Britain

Hunt and Jacob / The Affective Revolution in 1790s Britain

Hunt and Jacob / The Affective Revolution in 1790s Britain

Hunt and Jacob / The Affective Revolution in 1790s Britain

Hunt and Jacob / The Affective Revolution in 1790s Britain

When Brunswicks great Prince cam a cruising to France,

The chorus ran:

Hunt and Jacob / The Affective Revolution in 1790s Britain

Hunt and Jacob / The Affective Revolution in 1790s Britain

He went on to offer an arresting comparison between Davys friendship and the

In a poem Davy wrote on the effects of taking the gas, he rhapsodized:

Hunt and Jacob / The Affective Revolution in 1790s Britain

Yet are my eyes with sparkling lustre filled

Beddoess and Davys experiments drew a remarkable array of visitors to

Hunt and Jacob / The Affective Revolution in 1790s Britain

Thus Satan lead, as artfully, his Clan,

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

Hunt and Jacob / The Affective Revolution in 1790s Britain

Hunt and Jacob / The Affective Revolution in 1790s Britain

Davis, That Odious Class of Men.

Hunt and Jacob / The Affective Revolution in 1790s Britain

Hunt and Jacob / The Affective Revolution in 1790s Britain

Hunt and Jacob / The Affective Revolution in 1790s Britain

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

108. Golinski, Science as Public Culture, 1712.

Hunt and Jacob / The Affective Revolution in 1790s Britain

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