1 Introduction

Abstract

This is a book about the character of enquiry in the eighteenth century. It focuses on the years c. 1660 to 1830, an era synonymous with 'Enlightenment' and consolidation of the 'new science'. A vast body of scholarship has discussed the activities of this period's famous intellectuals: fellows of the Royal Society, university men, letter-writers in far-reaching networks of scholarly exchange or the new industrialists making connections between the art and science of manufacture. The individuals at the heart of this book are more difficult to categorise; their achievements were rarely proclaimed in print. They were members of a large and diverse population of the intellectually curious and they conducted their enquiries from home.The eighteenth-century home was a complex space, capable of providing its inhabitants with sustenance of a physical, social and emotional kind. As such, it was also an environment uniquely conducive to scientific work. The materials, equipment and skills of home produced the goods necessary to feed, clothe and heal a family. Households were sustaining and generative; they were simultaneously the sites of childbirth and cheese-making. Many aspects of domestic labour demanded in-depth material knowledge and techniques were honed through repetition. As Bathsua Makin observed in 1673, 'To buy wooll and Flax, to die scarlet and purple requires skill in natural philosophy.' 1 Thus, people worked busily and skilfully to achieve the necessary cycles of production and consumption. They cheated the deprivation of winter with preserved fruit and meat and they carefully recorded the results of their resourcefulness in pounds, shilling and pence. These domestic practices, in all their variety, equipped occupants with the tools of their intellectual