ABSTRACT
Industrialism figured largely in the landscape of Beddoes’ Britain. He was born in Shifnal, Shropshire, the son of Ann (née Whitehall) and Richard, a tanner who was part of a wealthy and politically liberal commercial network.1 Like other eighteenth-century trades, tanning was closely allied to chemistry, and regularly featured as such in dictionaries of chemistry and in lectures on applied chemistry, then known as the “chemistry of the arts”. Beddoes’ principal chemical discovery was Humphry Davy, who lectured on chemistry, included tanning, in his course of lectures at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 1802. Indeed, his work on tanning seems to have been a significant part of the reasons for appointing him to the Royal Institution, and his Copley Medal, awarded to him by the Royal Society in 1805, was largely because of his lectures and paper on tanning.2 Another West Country tanner was Tom Poole of Nether Stowey, a political radical, and friend of Davy, Coleridge, and the Wedgwoods; Davy dedicated his last, posthumously published work to Poole, “in remembrance of thirty years of continued and faithful friendship”.3 Richard Beddoes, well off and well connected, was wealthy enough to send his son to Oxford. Beddoes was a student at Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1776 to 1779. William Adams, the Master of Pembroke from 1775 to 1779, was keen on chemistry, “probably because of his close friendship with Samuel Johnson who was an enthusiastic amateur chemist”.4 Besides Beddoes, three other chemists – William Higgins, James Smithson, and Davies Gilbert – matriculated at Pembroke in these years.
