Midlands Enlightenment

[3] Other notable figures included the author Anna Seward,[4] the painter Joseph Wright of Derby,[5] the American colonist, botanist and poet Susanna Wright, the lexicographer Samuel Johnson,[6] the typographer John Baskerville,[7] the poet and landscape gardener William Shenstone[8] and the architects James Wyatt and Samuel Wyatt.

[10] Its participants such as Boulton, Susanna Wright, Watt and Keir were fully integrated into the exchange of scientific and philosophical ideas among the intellectual elites of Europe, the British American colonies and the new United States, but were simultaneously engaged in solving the practical problems of technology, economics and manufacture.

[13] Susanna Wright was involved in analogous thinking in the biological sciences and law in the American colonies and early United States, particularly in the Mid-Atlantic, north of the Mason–Dixon line; she was born in 1697 in Warrington in Lancashire and moved to colonial Pennsylvania in her late teens in 1718 (following her parents four years earlier) after being educated in the Midlands.

The thinkers of the Midlands Enlightenment did not limit themselves to practical matters of utilitarian value, however, and their influence was not confined to their significance in the development of modern industrial society.

[14] The ideas of the Midlands Enlightenment were to be highly influential in the birth of British romanticism[15] with the poets Percy Shelley,[16] William Wordsworth,[17] Samuel Taylor Coleridge,[18] and William Blake[19] all having intellectual connections to its leading thinkers, and Midlands Enlightenment thought was also influential in the spheres of education,[20] evolutionary biology,[21] botany, and medicine.