Overview
This letter to James Watt, Jr (1769-1848) illustrates the campaign to establish a Pneumatic Institution in its early stages. Beddoes had been called in to treat Watt Jr’s sister, Jessy, then in the later stages of consumption, in 1794. He had not been able to save her, but had recruited James Watt Sr (1736-1819), the bereaved father, to his project of treating consumptive patients with the gases that Watt Sr had helped Joseph Priestley to isolate. Watt Sr, determined to find a treatment for the disease that had killed his daughter (and that later killed his son Gregory), designed an apparatus for manufacturing and breathing gases, and had the Boulton and Watt firm build and sell it at cost price. His description of this machine and instructions for its use were published in Beddoes’s Considerations on the Medicinal Use of Factitious Airs (London: printed by Bulgin and Rosser, for J. Johnson, 1794 [later editions 1795 and 1796]). Watt also used his connections in the scientific and medical worlds to promote the campaign to gain subscriptions. James Watt Jr also became involved in this effort, as this letter shows. Watt Jr was in London in 1795, passing on the respects of the radical John Horne Tooke, recently acquitted in his treason trial, and discovering that Beddoes’s democratic politics hindered the subscription there. In 1797, depressed, Watt Jr made an extended stay in Clifton for treatment by Beddoes of what was probably a venereal disease. There, he enjoyed the company of Anna Beddoes and took a tour of Wales with Beddoes and Thomas Wedgwood.

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Thomas Beddoes to James Watt Jr, 8 January 1795

8 Jan^y 1795

Dear Sir

In considering what you say, it strikes me that my coming to Birmingham will for the present answer every purpose as to the proposal & subscription — It w^d be much less inconvenient to me to return hither & go to London at some future time than be away so long at once.¹ At this particular moment & for several days to come I shall be detained here by necessary attendance on patients. I will come as soon as possible, giving your father notice beforehand — The first Edition² is now as good as gone — the London booksellers wrote pressingly for 200 copies — I have not ten — Your father will no doubt allow me to reprint his improved description — I hope he will not insist on the omission of his speculations; let him new model them, if he has leisure & welcome³ —

I have rec^d for Mr Gladwell’s machine Mr Coates will pay for L^d Daer’s⁴ the moment it arrives — & I will then remit or bring the amount of these two & my own — Mr Tobyn⁵ & Mr Acland did not propose paying me — In this mist of speculation, it is pleasant to discern one fact clearly & oxygene air has so repeatedly & distinctly removed Mr Gladwell’s sickness that I do not doubt of its power — I brought on sickness by digitalis & it took this off —

Believe me Dear Sir

Yours

T. Beddoes

I am only sorry for the delay you mention as inevitable on acc^t of the bad prospect of the times. This opinion led me to publish the proposal⁶ at the time I did in hopes of raising the sum before the day of great & general national distress.⁷

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Notes

1. On 2 January, Watt Jr had suggested that Beddoes come to Soho to discuss the promotion of the Pneumatic Institution and then go to London where ‘applications must be made to sundry great aristocrats’ (LoB MS 3219/6/7/23). But he thought the London campaign might be left until spring when the session of parliament was over and political men had time to attend to other matters. A personal campaign in London was needed because subscriptions had been scarce there, the attempts by the Duchess of Devonshire and James Watt Sr in December 1794 to gain the imprimatur of Sir Joseph Banks having failed. Watt Jr told Beddoes of this failure in a letter of 20 December (LoB MS 3219/6/7/21-3). Banks has ‘traced your cloven Jacobin foot and does not choose to patronize any new fangled innovations’.

2. Considerations on the Medicinal Use of Factitious Airs (London: printed by Bulgin and Rosser, for J. Johnson, 1794).

3. The 2^nd edn of Considerations (London: printed by Bulgin and Rosser, for J. Johnson, 1795) did contain an amended text of the discussions of airs that Watt had made in the 1794 edition. It was shorn of some of the indiscreet commentary by Beddoes to which Watt had objected (notably, Beddoes’s comment that Watt’s speculations were ‘jocular’ (1794, p. 46) was removed). For Watt’s objection and Beddoes’s self-justification, see Beddoes to James Watt, late October 1794.

4. The Watt air apparatus that had been sent to Lord Daer and left unused was to have been transferred to Gladwell after Daer’s death (see Beddoes to Watt Jr, 12 December 1794). Evidently, the delay by Daer’s family in sending the apparatus meant that Gladwell had instead been sent a new machine and Daer’s old apparatus was now to go to Coates (either William Coates (dates untraced) or his brother Matthew (d. 1819), neighbours of Beddoes in Clifton; William was a subscriber to the Pneumatic Institution).

5. James Webbe Tobin. See Thomas Beddoes to James Watt Jr, 12 December 1794.

6. A Proposal towards the Improvement of Medicine had been printed by July 1794 and circulated from September.

7. Bad harvests and war with France had pushed grain prices up; recession and food shortages became widespread.