INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION: A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY
Series Four: Sources from Record Offices in the United Kingdom

Part 3: The Papers of James Watt (1736-1819) and James Watt, jnr (1769-1848) from the James Patrick Muirhead Collection, at Glasgow University Library

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION

Engineering James Watt’s Reputation: An Introduction to the James Patrick Muirhead Papers, Special Collections, Glasgow University Library

When James Watt Jr (1769-1848) died unmarried and childless on 2 June in the year of revolutions, the direct male line from his beloved father, the great engineer James Watt (1736–1819), came to an end. Watt Jr’s estates passed into the Gibson family, whilst Watt Jr’s will named James Patrick Muirhead (1813–1898) as his literary executor [1]. This legacy recognised, and had significant implications for, Muirhead’s contribution to our understanding of the life and work of one of the progenitors of the industrial revolution. It laid the foundations for the creation of Watt’s reputation and his mythology [2].

Muirhead translated, edited and authored several important works on the life of Watt beginning with his translation in 1839 of the éloge of Watt written by the prominent French scientist François Arago, continuing with his edition of Watt’s correspondence on the composition of water (1846) and a detailed account of Watt’s mechanical inventions (1854), and culminating with his biography of Watt (1858) [3]. Until Watt Jr’s death Muirhead worked as part of what we might call a ‘filial project’ to do justice to the memory of his friend’s father, and as literary executor Muirhead saw this task through [4].

The Muirhead Collection (MS Gen 1354) was presented to Glasgow University Library by Sir Patrick Muirhead Thomas (1914-1990). Sir Patrick was J.P. Muirhead’s great-grandson, his mother Charis Elizabeth Fosca Thomas (née Muirhead) being the daughter of Lionel Boulton Campbell Lockhart Muirhead (1845–1925), the eldest son of Watt’s biographer [5]. Presumably the papers were passed down through the family until Sir Patrick decided to make them publicly available.

At the core of the collection is a sequence of 904 letters (265–1169) exchanged between Watt Jr and Muirhead between 1834 and 1847. These are concerned substantially with the filial project — the protracted process through which Watt Jr set about documenting his father’s life and achievements, publishing about them and seeking to disseminate those publications widely. Other letters in the collection document exchanges with informants, publishers, printers, booksellers, engravers, reviewers, editors, and also with recipients of presentation copies. Apart from their interest for those concerned with the Watt legacy, these papers also make a fascinating case study of early Victorian publishing and literary life.

James Watt Jr and James Patrick Muirhead

The correspondence between Watt Jr and Muirhead collected here begins in 1834. Watt Jr was by that time in his mid-60s whilst Muirhead was just attaining his majority. Watt Jr had worked for almost 40 years in the business derived from his father’s famous partnership with Matthew Boulton. That business, which Watt Jr regarded as a kind of sacred trust, had evolved to specialise in the manufacture of marine steam engines. In his youth Watt Jr had associated with Manchester radicals who allied themselves with the stirring revolutionary forces in France, and had almost been arrested in Paris at the height of the French Revolution. The errant, frightened and sobered young man who had escaped the terror and returned gratefully to a place in his father’s business world, had by the 1830s become a conservative businessman and country squire, leasing a large Elizabethan mansion, Aston Hall, near Birmingham. Apart from the promotion and protection of his father’s reputation, nothing gave him more pleasure than the improvement of his Welsh estates surrounding Doldowlod house, near Rhayadar [6]. Some of Watt Jr’s letters to Muirhead are written from there.

Muirhead was related to Watt Jr, his maternal grandmother being a first cousin to the elder Watt [7]. Muirhead’s father, Lockhart Muirhead was Regius Professor of Natural History at Glasgow College. Educated there and at Balliol College, Oxford, young Muirhead pursued a legal career, being admitted advocate in Edinburgh in 1838. He practiced law in that city for eight years. In 1844 Muirhead made another connection with Watt circles when he married Katharine Elizabeth Boulton, daughter of Watt Jr’s business partner Matthew Robinson Boulton, of Tew Park, and granddaughter of the great Matthew Boulton of Soho. When Muirhead abandoned the law in 1846 (a move made possible no doubt in part by his good marriage) he settled at Haseley Court in Oxfordshire. There he saw through his literary obligations to the Watt family and also pursued other literary and antiquarian interests to the end of his long life. He was a prominent member of the Maitland and Bannatyne Clubs, through which he promoted Scottish history and letters. Even in the 1850s, when he remained busy with the filial project, his literary enthusiasm was being diverted to other ventures, notably a highly contrived publication in which eminent contributors commemorated in verse a fabled feat of Francis Chantrey, the sculptor, who once famously killed two woodcocks with one shot [8]! Even this, though, was not entirely unconnected with the commemoration of Watt since Chantrey’s unerring professional eye and skills had been applied to a number of sculptures of the great engineer, including that which stood in Westminster Abbey [9].

In 1834, when their correspondence preserved here begins, Muirhead began spending parts of his holidays from Oxford at Aston Hall. In its dark, panelled library Muirhead early slipped into a role as literary factotum to his elderly relative, procuring maps and books. When Muirhead became advocate in 1838 he dedicated his Latin dissertation to Watt Jr, a sign that he regarded him as his literary patron. Gradually Muirhead assumed a larger role, surfacing publicly as translator of Arago’s éloge of Watt in 1839. The many, detailed notes added to Muirhead’s translation were the result of a collaboration between Muirhead and Watt Jr, who in their correspondence egged each other on into a frenzy of annotation. This was intended, amongst other things, as a display of the deep scholarship that the promoters and defenders of the reputation of James Watt brought to their task.

This collaboration threw up numerous historical insights that remain of interest and value to the scholar today. For example, when Watt Jr and Muirhead discussed the fact (made much of by the republican Arago) that Watt was not honoured by a title, Watt Jr recalled that his father said he would accept a baronetcy (it was apparently offered to him through the President of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks) ‘if James will marry’. The ever-reluctant bridegroom further recalled of himself that ‘James however was not in a humour; and moreover did not approve of negociating [sic] such a matter’. Subsequently, Watt Jr felt that to accept a baronetage and be the head of an industrial firm (he professed himself unable to retire) would have been ‘eminently ridiculous’. (347) Another insight was prompted by a review of the éloge in ‘the Engineers’ Journal’. This gave Watt Jr cause to reminisce about the ‘Mongrel Engineers’ as he described the members of the Institution of Civil Engineers. He recalled that there had long been ‘a spirit of jealousy among this class against the whole race of the Soho Engineers, who in return have treated them with due contempt’. (405) Such statements are not necessarily to be believed —paranoia was no stranger in Watt Jr’s household— but they do suggest interesting and important new avenues of research. A final example of important reminiscence was prompted by a statement made by David Brewster about Watt’s attainments in mathematics. Watt Jr acknowledged that Watt had little training in mathematics but would have been well schooled in it by his father and grandfather. Watt always advocated the study of mathematics but he ‘paid little attention to fluxions, and never occupied himself with abstract mathematical questions, not leading to any immediate practical result’. (424) Also of much interest here are Watt Jr’s and Muirhead’s perceptions of those who challenged Arago’s claims about Watt’s reputation and achievements as a natural philosopher. The Reverend William Vernon Harcourt and other leaders of the British Association for the Advancement of Science came in for particular fire —‘the learned pigs assembled to feed at Birmingham’ Muirhead called them (380), referring to the 1839 meeting of the Association in that town [10].

The Watt Jr - Muirhead correspondence is thus full of insights into the construction of the biography and the reputation of James Watt, engineer. However, the richest vein it contains relates to their efforts to claim the mantle of natural philosopher for the great man by asserting his claim to one of the greatest chemical discoveries of all time —the compound nature of water.

The Water Controversy

Arago’s claim in the éloge that Watt, not Cavendish, deserved credit for discovery of the compound nature of water had been fed by Watt Jr, who had made such a claim himself (albeit anonymously) in the entry on his father that he wrote for the 1824 supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica [11] . When Harcourt and others of the scientific establishment took up the cudgels for Cavendish there began what was to be a protracted controversy (the ‘water controversy’ or the ‘water question’) that would generate a number of books and numerous articles in the reviews [12]. Watt Jr and Muirhead eventually produced The Correspondence (1846) as their definitive response to Watt’s critics. As with the translation of the éloge, the Muirhead collection, and the letters between Watt Jr and Muirhead in particular, allow us to trace in detail the making, publication and reponse to this work. There are also significant groups of letters from Arago and the Whig politician and lawyer, Henry Lord Brougham, who were both ongoing defenders of the Watt cause [13]. Muirhead increasingly took the lead in the collaboration. He wrote the long editorial introduction to the Correspondence. Apart from anything else Watt Jr’s eyesight was failing. A sign of this is that by the mid-1840s Muirhead’s letters to Watt Jr are written in a very large hand, adopted so that the tenant of Aston Hall would have a chance of reading them.

Among the fascinating elements of the water story documented in their exchanges are the efforts of Watt Jr and Muirhead to keep the notoriously volatile and changeable Brougham in line with their plans. More generally, the correspondence provides an intriguing ‘outsider’ view of scientific elites in London, Cambridge and Edinburgh. Watt Jr and Muirhead’s attempts to manage reviews of the éloge and of The Correspondence represent one of many revelations about their literary world.

Publishing and the World of Reviews

The exchanges between Watt Jr and Muirhead, as well as other material in the collection, afford intriguing insights into the worlds of publishing and the literary reviews.

The intense competition over promising subjects is evident. Thus we learn of competition between a number of translations and publications of Arago’s éloge, in particular between Muirhead’s and that published by Robert Jameson (318). There is also a brief but revealingly tense exchange between Muirhead and Samuel Smiles (91) when Smiles approached Muirhead for access to Watt manuscripts with a view to a biography of Watt, just as Muirhead was approaching publication of the Life [14] .

John Murray was the publisher of most of Muirhead’s output, and correspondence with him is revealing of the decision-making processes about many matters including the form and format of the books, the supply and prosecution of engravings and the like. Muirhead reports to Watt Jr an exchange with the publisher in which Murray states that ‘when an Author picks out his publisher, he should consider him as his intellectual Physician’ (305). Murray was not sparing with his advice. Other publishers and printers who feature in the collection include: W. Clowes and Sons; Blackwoods; Thomas Constable and Oxford University Press. There are accounts of sales and stocks, and an offer for remainders from Willis & Sotheran.

In the case of the translation of Arago’s éloge and the Correspondence the number of presentation copies distributed by Watt Jr accounted for a very significant proportion of ‘sales’. Muirhead remarked on Watt Jr’s ‘patronage of Murray, and liberality to your numerous friends’, suggesting that ‘you are a complete public in yourself’ (450). Watt Jr was certainly more interested in spreading the gospel concerning his father than selling books for profit. Presentation copies of the Correspondence were very widely distributed in Britain and overseas. Many of the single letters in the collection are letters of thanks for these. They include expressions of gratitude from notables such as Robert Peel, William Wordsworth (who had travelled in France with Watt Jr in their youth), Michael Faraday, Charles Babbage, Sir John Barrow and numerous lesser-known figures.

In the mid-nineteenth century the literary reviews were the best way to reach the upper echelons of influence in society. Watt Jr and Muirhead went to considerable lengths to have their works reviewed, to engineer favourable reviewers and reviews, and to neutralise unfavourable notices. Henry, Lord Brougham was an influential, if erratic, part of the Watt lobby whose long association with the Edinburgh Review and latterly with the Quarterly Review was mobilised. Lord Francis Jeffrey was also a recruit to the Watt cause, being of course a founder and former editor of the Edinburgh, and enormously influential still in the 1840s [15]. The collection affords (via the main Watt Jr-Muirhead correspondence but also via significant clutches of Muirhead-Wilson (211-247) and Muirhead-Jeffrey correspondence) a close look at the saga of Dr George Wilson’s abortive review of the Correspondence for the Edinburgh Review. Both Muirhead and Jeffrey were involved in trying to coach Wilson, a fiercely independent chemist and writer, into a pro-Watt view of the water controversy. Wilson’s review was eventually ‘spiked’ after much to-and-froing, and Jeffrey came out of retirement to take on the job himself [16]. The affair was an object lesson in the tentacles that the filial project put out and the lengths to which Watt Jr and his agents would go to present James Watt as a natural philosopher as well as an engineer.

Read as a whole the correspondence helps to bring to life the rather shadowy figure of Watt Jr. Though his almost pathological concern with his father’s reputation is the most obvious thing brought to light here, other aspects of his life are also filled in —his trips to Paris in the 1830s, his work on the Radnorshire estates, the dissolution of his partnership with Matthew Robinson Boulton and subsequent reconstitution of Boulton, Watt & Co., his views on the political and economic affairs of the day, including the unwelcome intrusions of railways! Muirhead’s unusual position is also highlighted. In a long life he spent about twenty-five years yoked to the filial project. He gave that project his all and, though a lawyer by training and a man of letters by temperament, his extensive dealings with Watt’s engineering and chemical exploits rendered him something of an expert in such matters, willing to take on figures from the scientific establishment. However, by the time the Life appeared (which he once described to a correspondent as a ‘rifacimento’) Muirhead was clearly tiring of his literary executorship, repeating and quoting himself, and anxious to move onto other things. A substantial sequence of letters (1295–1401) from Muirhead to the Reverend Henry Alfred Napier [17], covering the period 1855–1871, offers a window onto this phase of Muirhead’s literary career when the literary interests of his later years, signalled by the woodcocks project, were already apparent. The letters to Napier include detailed accounts of family life, especially the activities of Muirhead’s sons, Francis and Lionel (who it will be recalled was to be Sir Patrick Muirhead Thomas’s grandfather). They also recount Muirhead’s travels and residences abroad in France, Switzerland and Italy. Muirhead’s literary production continued in his later years. In 1875 he published an edition and translation of The Vaux de Vire of Maistre Jean le Houx and in the 1880s he contributed original and translated poems to Blackwood’s Magazine. However, it was his work on Watt that was to last.

The Muirhead Collection is invaluable to understanding how the multifarious activities and achievements of James Watt — so thoroughly documented in other parts of the Adam Matthew Industrial Revolution microfilm collections — were interpreted to the wider world by those who most immediately guarded Watt’s literary estate and his reputation. Muirhead did perhaps more than any other man, then or since, to preserve in public, if decidedly partisan, form, numerous records of the life and works of one of the greatest figures of the industrial age.

David Philip Miller
School of History and Philosophy of Science
The University of New South Wales

NOTES

I would like to thank Sarah Hepworth, Special Collections Department, Glasgow University Library, for valuable assistance.

[1] ‘Will of James Watt of Aston Hall, Warwickshire’, 26 July 1848, PROB 11/2078, can be accessed online via the National Archives (see this link)

[2] Recent biographies of Watt are Ben Marsden, Watt’s Perfect Engine. Steam and the Age of Invention (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2002) which provides a brief, but accurate and lively, overview of the life and reputation of the great engineer, and the monumental, three volume, biography Richard L. Hills, James Watt. Volume 1: His Time in Scotland, 1736-1774 (Ashbourne: Landmark Publishing Ltd, 2002); James Watt. Volume 2: The Years of Toil 1775-1785 (Ashbourne: Landmark, 2005); James Watt. Volume 3: Triumph through Adversity, 1785-1819 (Ashbourne: Landmark, 2006).
For treatments of Watt’s reputation and mythology see: Christine MacLeod, ‘James Watt, Heroic Invention and the Idea of the Industrial Revolution’, in M. Berg and K. Bruland (eds), Technological Revolutions in Europe. Historical Perspectives (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1998), pp. 96–116; David Philip Miller, ‘”Puffing Jamie”: The Commercial and Ideological Importance of being a “Philosopher” in the Case of the Reputation of James Watt (1736–1819)’, History of Science 38 (2000): 1–24; idem, ‘True Myths: James Watt’s Kettle, his Condenser and his Chemistry’, History of Science 42 (2004): 333–360.

[3] D.F.J. Arago, Historical Eloge of James Watt by M. Arago … Translated from the French with Additional Notes and an Appendix by James Patrick Muirhead (London: John Murray, 1839); James Patrick Muirhead (ed.), The Correspondence of the late James Watt on his Discovery of the Theory of the Composition of Water (London: John Murray, 1846); idem, The Origins and Progress of the Mechanical Inventions of James Watt, 3 volumes (London: John Murray, 1854); idem, The Life of James Watt with Selections from his Correspondence (London: John Murray, 1858).

[4] The ‘filial project’ is examined in detail in David Philip Miller, Discovering Water: James Watt, Henry Cavendish and the Nineteenth-Century ‘Water Controversy’ (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 83–104.

[5] This genealogy was constructed from: ‘Sir Patrick Muirhead Thomas’, Who’s Who (London: A. & C. Black, 1989), p.1773; ‘Herbert James Thomas’, Who’s Who (London: A. & C. Black, 1955), p.2929; ‘Mr. H.J. Thomas and Miss Muirhead’ [Marriage Notice], The Times, 5 August 1909, p.9b; ‘Lionel B.C.L. Muirhead’ [Death Notice], The Times, 26 January 1925, p. 1a.

[6] On the early life of Watt Jr see Eric Robinson, ‘An English Jacobin: James Watt Junior, 1769–1848’, Cambridge Historical Journal 11 (1854–55): 349–355; idem, ‘Training Captains of Industry: The Education of Matthew Robinson Boulton (1770-1842) and the younger James Watt (1769–1848)’, Annals of Science 10 (1954): 301–313; Peter M. Jones, ‘Living the Enlightenment and the French Revolution: James Watt, Matthew Boulton, and their Sons’, The Historical Journal 42 (1999): 157–182. Watt Jr’s later years have received comparatively little attention but see Miller, Discovering Water, passim, and the following important studies throwing light on the role of Boulton, Watt & Co. in steamboat development: Christine MacLeod, Jennifer Tann, Jeremy Stein and James Andrew, ‘The Trials of Innovation: Boulton, Watt & Company and the Introduction of Direct-acting Marine Engines (1840–1850)’, in Natacha Coquery, Liliane Hilaire-Pérez, Line Sallman, Catherine Verna (eds), Artisans, Industrie: Nouvelles Révolutions du Moyen Age à Nos Jours (Paris: ENS Editions, 2004), pp. 173–185 and idem, ‘Making Waves: The Royal Navy’s Management of Invention and Innovation in Steam Shipping, 1815–1832’, History and Technology 16 (2000): 307–333.

[7] On Muirhead see B.M. Sturt, ‘Muirhead, James Patrick (1813–1898)’, rev. Richard L. Hills, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/19507, accessed 24 Sept 2006]

[8] James Patrick Muirhead, Winged Words on Chantrey’s Woodcocks with Etchings (London: John Murray, 1857).

[9] On the Westminster Abbey statue see MacLeod, ‘James Watt, Heroic Invention’, pp.96–97; Miller ‘”Puffing Jamie”’, pp. 1–2. Engineering commemorations more generally are treated in Christine MacLeod, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Engineer as Cultural Hero’, in Andrew Kelly and Melanie Kelly (eds), Brunel: In Love with the Impossible (Bristol: Bristol Cultural Development Partnership, 2006), pp. 60–79.

[10] See Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), and for the BAAS leadership’s role in the water controversy see Miller, Discovering Water, pp. 129–168.

[11] [James Watt Jr], ‘Watt, James’, Supplement to the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica 6 (1824): 778–785.

[12] Some of the key publications in the controversy (apart from the Eloge of James Watt and The Correspondence and items noticed elsewhere in this introduction) are: David Brewster, ‘Life and Discoveries of James Watt’, Edinburgh Review 70 (1840): 466–502; idem, ‘Watt and Cavendish – Controversy Respecting the Composition of Water’, North British Review 6 (1846): 474–508; William Vernon Harcourt, ‘Address’, Report of the Ninth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held at Birmingham in August 1839 (1840), pp. 3–69; George Peacock, ‘Arago and Brougham on Black, Cavendish, Priestley and Watt’, Quarterly Review 77 (1845): 105–139; George Wilson, ‘Lord Brougham’s Men of Letters and Science’, British Quarterly Review 2 (1845): 197–263; idem, The Life of the Honble Henry Cavendish (London: The Cavendish Society, 1851).

[13] Brougham’s published contributions included a ‘Historical Note’ on the water question appended to Muirhead’s edition of Arago’s éloge of Watt, and also the lives of Watt, Cavendish and Lavoisier in Henry Brougham, Lives of Men of Letters and Science, who Flourished in the Time of George III (London: Charles Knight & Co., 1845).

[14] Smiles did, of course, publish on Watt in a slightly different format, see Samuel Smiles, Lives of Boulton and Watt (London: John Murray, 1865). Smiles promoted the image of Watt as craftsman rather than as natural philosopher. On this see Miller, Discovering Water, pp. 247–248. The craftsman image of Watt had become standard by the early twentieth century.

[15] On Jeffrey see Lord Cockburn, Life of Lord Jeffrey with a Selection from his Correspondence, 2 volumes (Edinburgh: A. & C. Black, 1852); Michael Fry, ‘Jeffrey, Francis, Lord Jeffrey (1773–1850), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/14698, accessed 17 Oct 2006].

[16] On George Wilson, see: Jesse Aitken Wilson, Memoir of George Wilson, MD, FRSE (Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, 1860); Marinell Ash, ‘New Frontiers: George and Daniel Wilson’, in J. Calder (ed.), The Enterprising Scot: Scottish Adventure and Achievement (Edinburgh: HMSO, 1986), pp. 40–51; P.J. Hartog, ‘Wilson, George (1818-1859)’, rev. R.G.W. Anderson, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29651, accessed 18 Oct 2006]. The saga of Wilson’s aborted Edinburgh Review piece is recounted in Miller, Discovering Water, pp. 232–241. The review eventually published was [Francis Jeffrey], ‘The Discoverer of the Composition of Water; Watt or Cavendish?’, Edinburgh Review 87 (1848): 67–137.

[17] Napier (1797–1871) was, at the time of his death, Rector of Swyncombe, Oxfordshire. The third son of Francis Napier, 8th Lord of Merchiston, he was an antiquary and author of Historical Notices of the Parishes of Swyncombe and Ewelme in the County of Oxford (Oxford: Privately printed, 1858).