Joseph Priestley

In the autumn of 1780 one of the most famous scientists in Europe arrived in Birmingham with his family, his books and his apparatus. Joseph Priestley was 47. He had already done the work that made his name. Now he wanted a place to think, preach and experiment in peace.

He got eleven years. Then the town turned on him.

Why Birmingham?

Priestley had just left the service of Lord Shelburne at Calne in Wiltshire. He chose Birmingham, he said, because his brother-in-law, the ironmaster John Wilkinson, “wished to have us nearer to him”, and Wilkinson “soon provided a house for me”. That house was Fair Hill, in Sparkbrook, then out in the fields beyond the town.

Within about three months the New Meeting, one of Birmingham’s two main congregations of Protestant Dissenters, invited him to be its minister alongside Mr Blyth. Priestley drove a hard bargain. He would preach and teach on Sundays only, and leave baptisms and sick visits to his colleague. The rest of the week belonged to his writing and his laboratory.

He was delighted. Writing his memoirs in Birmingham in 1787, he described “my settlement at Birmingham as the happiest event in my life”.

Dining by the full moon

What made Birmingham so good? Partly, he wrote, “the convenience of good workmen of every kind”: a town full of people who could make whatever a chemist dreamed up. Partly it was the company.

Priestley joined a remarkable group of friends: James Watt, James Keir, William Withering, Matthew Boulton, Dr Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Galton and others. In his own words, they “dined together every month, calling ourselves the lunar society, because the time of our meeting was near the full moon”. The moonlight lit their way home along unlit roads.

His friends also paid for his science. His salary at the New Meeting was modest, so experiments ran on subscriptions. Priestley records that Samuel Galton senior took one over, that his son Samuel Galton junior did the same, and that the potter Josiah Wedgwood “was very zealous to serve me, and urged me to accept of a much larger allowance than I chose”.

The science: what Birmingham did and did not see

A myth needs clearing up first. Priestley did not discover oxygen in Birmingham. He isolated what he called “dephlogisticated air” in 1774, at Calne, six years before he arrived. His soda water, the fizzy drink that conquered the world, came even earlier, from his Leeds years in the early 1770s.

In Birmingham he kept working on gases, or “airs”. He published two more volumes of experiments and a stream of papers in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions. He passed his friend Withering’s mineral analyses on to Sir Joseph Banks at the Royal Society.

He also spent much of the decade on the losing side of a great argument. In Paris, Antoine Lavoisier was building a new chemistry that did away with “phlogiston”, the supposed substance of burning. Priestley defended the old theory to the end, and the Lunar men largely stood with him. “My friends … of the lunar society”, he wrote in 1795, “were never satisfied with the Anti-phlogistic doctrine.”

A dangerous preacher

Most of what Priestley wrote in Birmingham was not chemistry but theology: books such as History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782) and History of Early Opinions concerning Jesus Christ (1786). He was a Unitarian. He denied the Trinity and attacked the privileges of the Church of England.

And he could not resist a vivid phrase. In a sermon of 1785 he said that Dissenters were “laying gunpowder, grain by grain, under the old building of error and superstition”. He meant ideas. His enemies chose to hear explosives. The nickname “Gunpowder Joe” stuck.

He backed the campaign of 1787–90 to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts, which shut Dissenters out of public office. He welcomed the French Revolution. In a town where Church and King loyalism ran hot, he had become a target.

“The greatest, and most crying evil”

In 1788 Priestley turned the New Meeting pulpit against the slave trade. His Sermon on the Subject of the Slave Trade, printed in Birmingham that year, called slavery “perhaps the greatest, and most crying evil under the sun”. It came as the town prepared its own petition to Parliament for abolition.

He knew his audience. Birmingham made guns and hardware that were shipped to Africa. So he told them that if the trade ended and honest commerce with Africa grew, “the manufacturers of this country in general would find a great benefit from a change of the system, and not one of them would be a loser”. In 1790 he was among the Birmingham subscribers publicly thanked by the formerly enslaved writer Olaudah Equiano.

Fourteenth of July, 1791

On 14 July 1791, supporters of the French Revolution sat down to dinner at the Royal Hotel in Temple Row to mark the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. Priestley was not there.

It made no difference. A crowd gathered and attacked the departing guests. Then it went looking for Dissenters. It burned the New Meeting, Priestley’s chapel, and the Old Meeting. Then it marched on Fair Hill.

Priestley and his wife fled. His son William and others stayed but could not hold the house. The mob ransacked and burned it, with the laboratory, the apparatus, the library and the manuscripts of a lifetime. An eyewitness letter of the time describes the road “for half a mile … strewn with your books”, and the floor “covered, two or three inches deep with torn leaves, chiefly manuscript”.

For days the violence spread across the town and the villages around it. Rioters attacked Dissenters’ houses, among them Baskerville House at Easy Hill, and threatened his friend Withering’s Edgbaston Hall, until troops restored order around 17 July.

Exile

Priestley went to London and never returned to Birmingham. He wrote his Appeal to the Public on the riots from there, lived in Hackney from 1791 and in 1794 sailed for America. He died at Northumberland, Pennsylvania, on 6 February 1804, and he is buried there, an ocean away from the town he had called the happiest choice of his life.