The Darwin before Darwin: Erasmus Darwin, Visionary Science, and Romantic Poetry

Erasmus Darwin was at center of ideas and activities that drove industrial in late eighteenth century out of which scientific worldview developed. His friends and fellow members of Lunar Society make up what Francis Klingender called kind of general staff for industrial revolution (35). The core group consisted of Darwin, Dr. William Small, Matthew Boulton, John Whitehurst, Josiah Wedgwood, James Watt, James Keir, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and Thomas Day. In addition, as Desmond King-Hele suggests, although he rarely was in Birmingham area, Benjamin Franklin can be thought of as a symbolic founding father of group because of influence he had as inventor, scientific experimenter, and political radical (Life of Unequalled 80). Subsequent permanent Lunar Society members included Joseph Priestley, Samuel Galton, William Withering, John Baskerville, and William Murdock. Thus, most of leading minds of era were connected with society. According to King-Hele, the Lunar Society was one of those self-igniting groups whose illuminating ideas stimulate individual members, and professional scientists in Society benefited greatly from speculations of others (Erasmus Darwin 25). speculations and diverse observations energized many of practical industrialists like Boulton, Watt, Wedgwood, and Galton. Darwin and his friends were men with a vision of future in which change and development inevitably fueled ideas and innovation. (1) scientific thought was vital to this new scientific spirit. Because of way Darwin translated this new vision for a wider audience in his poems, it is no exaggeration to see him as prophet for scientific worldview that came to dominate nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Klingender notes, The importance of Erasmus Darwin for intellectual history of last decade of eighteenth century rests on his didactic poems. In them he transmitted to educated readers, wherever English language was understood, that enthusiasm for science and belief in perfectibility of human affairs which inspired members of Lunar Society. (35) As we will see, poetic panegyrics on his Lunar associates James Brindley and Joseph Priestly, and on incomparable Franklin, show how Darwin energized scientific zeitgeist. Furthermore, evolutionary theory, as developed in his poetry, begins scientific debate that dominates nineteenth century. Roy Porter contends that Darwin's vision of evolution had potent ideological implications. His writings amount to an early and full vindication of industrial society, rationalized through a social biology (444). As industrial society developed on into nineteenth century, Darwinian paradigm would be revamped by another Darwin (Charles) to justify even more fully machinations of industrialism. But as Porter further points out, Erasmus's theory was not wholly dreaded mechanistic version that reduced human beings to mere machines in a biological clockwork world: indeed, he was concerned to rescue man from aspersion of being nothing more than a machine. He stressed man's inner energies and drives, both capacity and need to learn, inventiveness and adaptiveness of homo faber, man who makes himself. Darwin offered a vision of man for machine age, but not of man machine. (445) Nevertheless, in celebrating accomplishments of his industrial friends, as we shall see, Darwin unwittingly laid groundwork for reductionistic views of those who would follow. evolutionary views are, however, broader in scope than those of his grandson's generation, even though they are not as comprehensively articulated, for he possesses not only a keen sense of biological process, but also a deep sense of cosmic, geological, social, and historical evolutionary processes. …