- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- List of Plates
- Preamble: ‘Who are these people?’
- 1 Usual and Unusual in 1790s Britain
- 2 Before and After Lives
- 3 ‘Dr Phlogiston’
- 4 The Radical Moravian
- 5 ‘Frend of Jesus, friend of the Devil’
- 6 No Laughing Matter
- Part IV Other Voices, Other Places
- 7 Our Paris Correspondent
- Suspect Nations
- 8 ‘Let Irishmen remain sulky, grave, prudent and watchful’
- Generic Suspicions
- 9 The Novelist Who Was Not
- 10 The End of Controversy
- 11 The Great Apostate: Judas, Brutus, or Thomas?
- Part VI The Romantic Poets, the Police, and the State of Alarm
- 12 ‘A gang of disaffected Englishmen’
- 13 ‘Whispering tongues can poison truth’
- 14 Wordsworth, <i>The Prelude</i>, and Posterity
- 15 More Radical than Thou
- 16 Radical in a Lamb’s Cloak
- 17 ‘A Man for a’ That’
- 18 Blake’s <i>America</i>, the Prophecy that Failed
- Coda
- Appendix 1 Trials for Sedition and Treason, 1792–1798
- Appendix 2 Wakefield’s Juvenal (1800)
- Bibliography
- Index
- Plates
‘Dr Phlogiston’
‘Dr Phlogiston’
Joseph Priestley (1733–1804)
- Chapter:
- (p.46) (p.47) 3 ‘Dr Phlogiston’
- Source:
- Unusual Suspects
- Author(s):
Kenneth R. Johnston
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
The 1791 riots in Birmingham destroyed the home and laboratory of Joseph Priestley, isolator of oxygen and several other elemental gases. Priestley was the leading British scientist of his day, a national figure among English Dissenters (or Independents), and a political liberal who supported the rights of the American colonists and led the fight against the 17th-century Test and Corporation Acts that limited the religious, political, and educational rights of non-Anglicans. Careful examination of several scholarly studies of the 1791 riots reveals high degrees of collusion between some Birmingham magistrates and the riotous mob which burned and looted the homes of nearly three dozen prosperous Dissenting merchants, bankers, and clergymen over the course of an entire weekend before army troops arrived. Priestley, the intended victim of this arson-terrorism, was lucky to escape with his life. Unable to work unimpeded in England, he and his family migrated to Pennsylvania in 1794.
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- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- List of Plates
- Preamble: ‘Who are these people?’
- 1 Usual and Unusual in 1790s Britain
- 2 Before and After Lives
- 3 ‘Dr Phlogiston’
- 4 The Radical Moravian
- 5 ‘Frend of Jesus, friend of the Devil’
- 6 No Laughing Matter
- Part IV Other Voices, Other Places
- 7 Our Paris Correspondent
- Suspect Nations
- 8 ‘Let Irishmen remain sulky, grave, prudent and watchful’
- Generic Suspicions
- 9 The Novelist Who Was Not
- 10 The End of Controversy
- 11 The Great Apostate: Judas, Brutus, or Thomas?
- Part VI The Romantic Poets, the Police, and the State of Alarm
- 12 ‘A gang of disaffected Englishmen’
- 13 ‘Whispering tongues can poison truth’
- 14 Wordsworth, <i>The Prelude</i>, and Posterity
- 15 More Radical than Thou
- 16 Radical in a Lamb’s Cloak
- 17 ‘A Man for a’ That’
- 18 Blake’s <i>America</i>, the Prophecy that Failed
- Coda
- Appendix 1 Trials for Sedition and Treason, 1792–1798
- Appendix 2 Wakefield’s Juvenal (1800)
- Bibliography
- Index
- Plates
