Overview
This letter comes from early in one of the most significant relationships that Beddoes formed significant, not just for his projects, but for those of the younger intellectuals who congregated around him: Coleridge, Wordsworth, Humphry Davy, Maria Edgeworth, James Mackintosh and others. Thomas Wedgwood (1771-1805), the youngest son of the wealthy industrialist potter Josiah Wedgwood, was an intellectual with an interest in geology (he experimented at his father’s works on the effect of heat on rocks). He was, however, plagued by ill-health and in 1793 largely withdrew from the pottery firm for this reason. Enriched by his father’s death in 1795, Thomas began travelling in pursuit of both health and enquiry. He compiled extensive manuscript notes on philosophical questions concerning the nature of perception and cognition, modifying the associationist theories of David Hartley and Erasmus Darwin. Childhood experience and adult recollection were at the centre of these, and this led Wedgwood to develop both a theory and a practical scheme of education.

Beddoes was recruited to offer Wedgwood medical advice; he recommended inhalation of gases and, recognising a funding opportunity, assiduously sought Wedgwood’s support for a Pneumatic Institution. This letter shows Wedgwood encouraging the plan with suggestions for advertising and by making financial contributions. He played a key role: it was his offer of £500 that allowed Beddoes, after nearly five years of fundraising, finally to open the Institution in 1799. By then, Wedgwood had come to know others in Beddoes’s circle. In September 1797 he visited Wordsworth at Alfoxden with a view to having him try out his practical education scheme; some scholars attribute Wordsworth’s turn to writing poetry on the influence of childhood experience and adult recollection — the central theme of The Prelude, his greatest poem — to this encounter. Beddoes’s friend Coleridge may have been present during this visit; he aimed to launch a practical education scheme along Wedgwood’s lines just three months later. Shortly afterwards, Wedgwood and his brother settled a lifetime annuity of £150 upon him. Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’, one of his finest poems, tracing the effects of childhood experience on the grown man, was written shortly after this, just after Coleridge had stayed with Wedgwood. Meanwhile, Wedgwood’s manuscripts on childhood experience and learning were circulating within the group; Beddoes’s own writings were in dialogue with them, as was 1798 Practical Education, the pioneering work composed by Beddoes’s sister-in-law and father-in-law Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth. In 1799 Humphry Davy, whom Wedgwood had met in Cornwall and recommended to Beddoes as an assistant, also became involved as an experimentalist in testing the theory of knowledge-acquisition that Wedgwood, Beddoes and Coleridge had developed. The Pneumatic Institution thus came to have a philosophical as well as medical side to its research programme. In 1801 Wedgwood collaborated with Davy in experiments on photography, resulting in the paper 'An account of a method of copying paintings upon glass, and of making profiles by the agency of light upon nitrate of silver, invented by T. Wedgwood, esq., with observations by H. Davy' (Journal of the Royal Institution (1802), 170–74). But by this time Wedgwood’s health was declining further: Coleridge and James Mackintosh were hired to bring his philosophical manuscripts to publication, an enterprise that set Coleridge on a course of philosophical reading and reasoning that would last for the rest of his life. Beddoes continued to treat Wedgwood and to seek funding from him: Wedgwood remained a stalwart supporter of his enterprises until his death in 1805.

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Thomas Beddoes to Thomas Wedgwood, 31 October 1794

Clifton 31 Oct^r 1794

Dear Sir

In some districts I have the satisfaction to inform you that the business on which I lately wrote to you is going on with great activity with what success is not yet known. Dr White of St Edmondsbury proposed an abstract as on the next leaf for country newspapers & handbills.¹ I think this a good idea. If you think so too, you will, I doubt not, bestow a few shillings in carrying it into execution; either by insertion in a newspaper or separate publication.

Mrs Abram of Bath (the Mrs A of Dr Ewart²) is still mending so rapidly that I fully expect a compleat cure & if in her case, in almost every case of cancer, for here there were no circumstances to perplex one’s judgment & I sh^d apply the remedy to other cases with full confidence of removing the pain & much hope of effecting a compleat cure — I know from observation & communication that in every species of bad ulcer & abscess, the same effects have been produced — On the other hand, I have great trust, & not merely from hypothesis, in oxygen — Have you seen Mr Watt’s apparatus: perhaps you can suggest some improvement.

If I knew how to transmit a paper on flints to you through some MP, I have one at your service.³ It will not, I know, be well received by you philosophers of the Wernerian school. I shall desire a no. of proposals⁴ to be sent to you from Shropshire:

I am Dr Sir

Yours with true regard

Tho^s Beddoes

The attention of the liberal and humane is just called to a project <subject>⁵ of high importance. Incontestable proof has been given that the application of airs or gasses to the purposes of medicine is both practicable & promising. There is, for instance, the best reason for hoping that cancer <& consumption>⁶ the most dreadful of human maladies, may by some of these substances be disarmed both of it terror & danger. With the approbation therefore of persons of the highest respectability both in the medical profession & out of it; a proposal is brought forward for forming a Pneumatic Institution; of which the object is to ascertain the effects of elastic fluids in many dangerous & hitherto incurable diseases. In some cases rooms filled with modified air will be requisite to a compleat [xxxx] trial which is one principal reason for a temporary establishment. The Institution will be conducted with the utmost publicity. The expence is estimated at 3 or 4000 pounds; which when properly applied, will <hardly fail to> afford some decisive result. Individuals & the public may take measures in consequence so that no further second donation need be solicited for the present purpose. A paper by Dr Beddoes of Bristol Hotwells describing the plan, mentioning the Trustees, the London bankers & stating further particulars is left with [blank space] where persons disposed to contribute are desired to give in their names & subscriptions.

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Notes

1. Robert White. See Beddoes’s letter to James Watt Jr of 30 October 1794.

2. Her treatment with carbon dioxide is described in John Ewart, The History of Two Cases of Ulcerated Cancer of the Mamma One of Which Has Been Cured, the Other Much Relieved, by a New Method of Applying Carbonic Acid Air (1794), pp. 28-37. See Beddoes’s letter to James Watt, 4 October 1794.

3. Posting under a cover franked by an MP saved paying postage costs, which were high for items of more than a single sheet and were usually paid by the addressee. Here, Beddoes is planning to send Wedgwood, who was interested in theories of the earth and had performed experiments on the effects of heat on rocks, his geological paper on the origin and position of flints —a contentious question between supporters of Neptunist accounts of the origin and position of rocks (Wernerians) and supporters of the Plutonist theories of James Hutton, which argued that subterranean heat was responsible for the metamorphosis and injection of many rocks. The paper was ‘Some Observations on the Flints of Chalk-Beds’, read on 29 November 1793 to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society (published in Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, 4 (1796), 303-10).

4. Copies of A Proposal toward the Improvement of Medicine.

5. An emendation in Thomas Wedgwood’s hand.

6. An emendation in Thomas Wedgwood’s hand.

7. The Wedgwood Hiring Book (E39-23409), which covers records of apprentices employed between 1783 and 1790, shows that Hamlet Wood, son of William, of Etruria was employed in the counting house from 1789.

8. Thomas Pearson and Myles Swinney: see Beddoes’s letter to James Watt Jr of 30 October 1794.

9. The Wedgwood company regularly transported goods by the Caldon canal. This linked Etruria and Basford.